Page 17

“We’re not our parents. We’re ourselves, and if that means we’re the sum of our own choices, well, there are worse things we could be.”

—Jane Harrington-Price

Worcester, Massachusetts, the basement of a strip mall of some kind, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it from outside the basement

I REAPPEARED IN THE BASEMENT where Jonah’s bricks had been lain, standing in the strange, shadowy space and trying to convince my memory of a body that my chest didn’t hurt, my heart wasn’t beating too hard. My heart wasn’t beating at all. I’d been prone to mimicking basic functions of the living ever since I’d died, but it had been getting worse since the crossroads were destroyed, like my spirit was remembering all the things it should have finished working through decades ago.

It was honestly annoying, and even if it hadn’t been, there was no room in my schedule for having a heart attack. What was it going to do, anyway? Kill me?

The pain subsided. I exhaled and straightened, looking around. There was no one there. I was alone in the basement, which would normally have been a good thing. Normally I was trying to avoid the living. Here, I’d been hoping to catch the local dead, and the fact that they weren’t here was a little worrisome.

I looked around to make sure I hadn’t somehow missed a cluster of ghosts in my hurry to get away from Heitor, then started for the door on the far wall, heading toward it with the slow, uneasy steps of an ingenue in a horror movie. Whether the ghosts were in hiding from the Covenant or had already been captured, there was nothing good waiting for me on the other side of that door. But there was nothing good waiting for me on this side of it, either, and all I’d do by putting it off was give it more time to get really bad.

The door was locked. That didn’t matter. I walked through it, into the dim concrete hallway on the other side. Bare bulbs lit the space, illuminating every crack and cobweb and making it look dauntingly like the backstage area of a carnival haunted house. Multiple metal staircases led down from the floor above me, presumably connecting the various street-level stores in this strip mall. This was the underground passthrough for maintenance and stock transport, and no one was ever going to find me down here. Fun.

It was still the golden period between midnight and morning, when the living were largely asleep in their beds, not thinking of ghosts trying to get around their places of business. There might be cameras, but I could handle those if I needed to. I cautiously approached the first set of stairs, squinting upward.

The problem with the whole “ghosts can generally pick up on the presence of other ghosts” thing is that it doesn’t have a very clean proximity cutoff. I knew there were ghosts nearby. That just meant they were probably within a mile of me. Maybe they were upstairs in the shops, and maybe they were down the street haunting the local Denny’s equivalent.

Only one way to find out.

I climbed the stair to find myself in a pet store, the independent kind with close-set, overstuffed shelves and the omnipresent smell of sawdust from both rodent bedding and accident clean ups. I paused, then smiled, feeling for the first time like something had broken in my favor.

Modern chain pet stores don’t usually stock puppies and kittens, except during the day when they’re brought in by reputable rescue organizations and placed in sunlit temporary shelters to serve as the animal equivalent of impulse shopping. Older pet stores, on the other hand, will often have a close relationship with the local backyard breeders, leaving them with cages and cages of puppies and kittens slowly marching toward “no longer cute enough” to sell to every child who comes through the doors.

It’s not a good thing. I would never call it a good thing. But where there are puppies and kittens, there will be children. I started for the back of the store.

And there was Jonah, kneeling next to the pen of sleeping puppies. They were fluffy golden things, all ears and tail, piled up together like they didn’t have a care in the world. And maybe they didn’t. They were puppies. They didn’t know they were in a shabby, potentially predatory pet store, or that they’d age out of adorableness soon. They just knew they were puppies, and they were together, and they had full bellies and a warm place to sleep.

There’s something to be said for being a dog. I walked up behind Jonah. He didn’t look at me.

“Hey,” I said. “You know where Benedita is?”

“She’s all grown up, and people can see her when she’s in a nightclub or at a party, so she went to a party as soon as it was late enough for things to start,” he said, voice dull and almost monotone. “I didn’t think you were going to come back. Why did you come back? Did you find Martha and Agnes?”

“Maybe,” I said, hedging. How was I supposed to tell this child that his friends were probably lost forever, driven past their breaking point by petty bastards who thought we were the real monsters? “Did the others go with her?”

“Aoi did. They can be visible to the living when they want to. I can’t, unless you’re standing right near the pieces that used to be my house, and even then, people can generally see right through me. Makes it hard to make friends.”

I needed to introduce this kid to the local ever-lasters. There had to be some, unless Heitor had taken the Cunninghams to an elementary school. If he’d done that, I was going to kill him. I might have to do that anyway—a rogue umbramancer is nothing to sneeze at, especially not one who’s willing to sell their services to the highest bidder. But if he’d intentionally taken the Covenant to target kids, rather than just stumbling over them while targeting random hauntings, there was no way I could let him live.

“All right,” I said. “Is the club one of the places you can go?”

He shook his head, then resumed looking at the puppies. “I wish I could pet them,” he said wistfully.

“I’m sorry you can’t,” I said.

“They die sometimes, and I can’t even pet them when that happens. Why?”

“Because they’re too young, and they haven’t had the chance to be truly loved yet,” I said. “Is there a shelter around here that you can go to? A place with lots of grownup dogs and cats?”

Jonah frowned. “I know there is one, but it doesn’t use any of my bricks. I can’t go there.”

“Maybe there’s a way we can fix that.” I looked at him, small and translucent and alone, and I hated the Covenant just a little more. As if I needed the encouragement. “All right. I’m going to go looking for nightclubs now. You can stay here or go back to City Hall; the Covenant team’s gone to bed for the night, and I don’t think you need to worry about them until tomorrow.”

“Okay,” he said. Then, with a sigh: “If you can’t get Martha and Agnes back, do you think you can show me how to move on?”

I’m not a psychopomp. Never have been. Even the members of my family who’ve died have moved on without my help, by and large, and I don’t know how I’d guide someone to whatever comes next. It’s just not part of my skill set. I shook my head. “Sorry, kid. I think moving on is something you have to figure out on your own, not something I can help you with. but if you really want to go when all this is finished, I’ll do what I can to help you.”

Maybe the anima mundi could help us. They had to understand how ghosts moved from this reality to the next, didn’t they? They were in charge of the afterlife as we know it, after all.

I took a step back and vanished, throwing myself into the ether. Now came the hard part. When I’d served the crossroads, I had sometimes been expected to find the greatest local density of living people, because that was where petitioners who’d changed their minds thought they could hide. Sometimes people hid from the crossroads when they realized what their wishes were actually going to cost. When that happened, it had been my job to find them and bring them back again.

I couldn’t locate people who weren’t family members with the precision I brought to my duties, but I could at least make an effort. So I hung in the emptiness between manifestation and silence, and I reached out across the town, looking for ghosts, looking for celebrations, looking for anything that might get me where I needed to go.

One by one, traces of haunting flared into being behind my eyelids. Some of them felt hollowed-out and ancient, like the ghosts that had occupied them were long since gone; others felt recent and bright, sizzling with afterlife. Only one felt like it contained more than a single ghost, and I pulled myself in that direction, dropping back into the world of the living on the sidewalk outside of a nightclub drenched in neon. Music thudded from inside, heavy with bass and electronic shriek.

A living bouncer, human, looked at me without interest as I pulled myself together. I flinched, preparing to vanish again if he started screaming. I didn’t normally appear in front of the living. Then I saw that his eyes were somehow managing to be bright and empty at the very same time, filled with the swirling shadows that only come from certain pharmaceuticals.

“Hi?” I ventured.

“No cover charge for dames, but there’s a dress code,” he said. “You’re wearing too much clothing.”

I looked down at myself. I was back in the black-sweater-and-skirt combination I’d been wearing during my discussion with the still-nameless information tech in the Covenant van. I flickered, and I was in a tarnished silver minidress that gleamed like liquid metal as it ran down my hips to stop barely past the top of my thighs, the neckline so plunging that anyone who looked in my direction could tell that I wasn’t wearing a bra. If my ankles had been flesh and bone, I would have worried about breaking them in my towering stiletto heels.

I felt more exposed than I would have if I’d been completely naked, and had to swallow the urge to cover myself with my hands as I lifted my chin and looked challengingly at the bouncer. “Better?” I asked.

“Better,” he agreed, and unclipped the rope blocking the front of the club. “You have a nice time, and maybe come see me when I come down from this trip. I wanna know if your hair is really that white.”

“You got it,” I said, and walked inside. He was still doing his job, even if he was drugged to high heaven, and while he hadn’t carded me, he was doing everything else correctly, which was damned impressive however you wanted to look at it.

Thoughts of the bouncer flickered and died as the club reached out and swallowed me, dim, glittering lights and pounding bass brushing my thoughts aside like they were barely more than nothing. Everywhere I looked was a teeming throng of bodies, all dancing to a beat that bore very little resemblance to the music. Verity would have loved this place. She would have taken one look at the crowd and decided that she’d died and gone to heaven, then hit the dance floor already synchronized to the beat.

I had never been a dancer. I was more Sunday school than sock hop when I was alive, and short of toddler dance parties in various living rooms, I’d never seen the point. So I eeled myself awkwardly into the crowd, trying not to bump into people, failing utterly, and replacing the effort with the slightly more successful attempt to not wind up wearing too many random drinks. Sure, they fell through me and landed on the floor shortly after they hit my dress, but I had to stay at least partially solid whenever I was touching someone. I couldn’t count on the whole club being drugged to the point of accepting ghosts.

And there, in the middle of the dance floor, I found her: Benedita in a red dress that made mine look conservative, wearing heels so high they seemed unrealistic, dancing with a brown-haired college boy who looked like he couldn’t believe he could ever be this lucky. He had his hands around her waist, and she was clearly using them for balance as she flung her head back and pranced and slithered all around his body.

She looked like she was having the time of her life, and so did he, and part of me wanted to leave them alone to dance. She wouldn’t hurt him: midnight beauties almost never do. They want to dance and drink and remember what it was like to be alive, not harm their partners. A surprising number of types of ghost are entirely harmless to the living. They just don’t tend to get as much attention as their scarier cousins do.

Sadly, leaving them to their dance wasn’t an option. I threw myself into the crowd, pushing and sidestepping until I was right beside them, then grabbed hold of Benedita’s shoulder as she swung toward me.

“Benny, it’s me,” I said, trying to sound breathless and a little tipsy. The first was easy. The second, not so much. “Did you forget we have a biochem final tomorrow? Sorry, mister.” I turned my attention on the man she was dancing with, who just looked even more wide-eyed at the sudden bonus girl in his orbit. “I know you’re having an awesome time—Benny’s always an awesome time—but I have to steal her. I promised not to let her fail any classes this semester.”

Clearly regretful, he released her waist, and Benedita turned fully toward me. “Oh, hey, Mary,” she said, concealing her own flicker of surprise. “I thought you were busy tonight.”

“I was. Am. I found what I was looking for, and figured I’d come and check in on you, see how you were doing. Glad I did, since it seems like you forgot all the way about your homework, and that’s no way to get a passing grade.”

“Are you here to nag me about homework or a test? Get your story straight,” she said, a thin line of hostility creeping into her tone.

Midnight beauties aren’t just drawn to party: they have to party if they want to stay coherent. Keep them away from the dance floor for too long and they start coming undone at the seams, which is great. For Benedita, I was getting in the way of what might have been her first solid meal of the week.

And I couldn’t worry too much about that right now, because I needed to get her someplace where we could have a reasonable conversation. That wasn’t here.

“Both,” I said, and took a step back, tugging her with me. “Come on, you’re the one who made me promise.”

“Right. Sorry, Chuck. See you tomorrow night?”

“If I’m here, I’m yours,” he said, with what sounded like true sincerity.

He seemed like a nice guy. I hoped she wasn’t going to break his heart. But if she did, it would be after my kids and I were long gone, and they were what mattered right now, not some frat boy I didn’t know, no matter how nice he seemed.

Switching my grip to Benedita’s wrist, I pulled her off the dance floor and through the crowd to the door, where we were able to exit for the street. The dull-eyed bouncer was still on duty. He blinked, looking at the pair of us.

“Hey, it’s optical-illusion girl and… a friend?” He squinted. “I hope you brought better shoes, lady, or you’re going to hurt yourself.”

“I’ll be fine,” said Benedita. Then she frowned, looking closer. “You might not be, though. Do you know what you took?”

The bouncer shrugged.

Benedita stepped closer. “May I?” she asked, reaching out with one hand, like she was about to touch something precious.

The bouncer looked bemused but nodded, and she leaned closer, caressing his cheek. The blurriness cleared from his eyes and he staggered back, catching himself against the wall.

“What the hell just…?”

“Let’s go.” Benedita turned back to me and then kept walking, motioning for me to follow her down the street. She didn’t pause or look back.

I scurried after her. “What was that?”

“What was what?”

“What did you do to that man?”

“Purged his system. What?” She looked amused. “You thought the clubs in Brazil encouraged the midnight beauties because we look cute on the dance floor? We do, but we don’t drink, and that means we pull down the club’s profit margin. We make up for it by protecting the people we party with from the worst effects of excess. No hangovers, no overdoses. A club haunted by a midnight beauty is a safer place for everyone. And before you ask, no, we don’t advertise what we can do for the living, because we don’t want to be jarred and sold as panaceas to rich bastards without scruples.”

I wanted to tell her that wouldn’t happen. I wanted to tell her not enough people believed in ghosts.

I couldn’t do that. Since Verity’s appearance on Dance or Die, and the subsequent disappearance of an entire university in Iowa, people had been paying more attention to the world around them. I’m not saying the supernatural and preternatural aspects of the universe were in danger of full unveiling, but they were definitely under more scrutiny than they’d been not all that long ago. With as much as some humans wanted to live forever without ever facing the consequences of their choices, I could absolutely see a black market in midnight beauties springing up, and the poor, beautiful ghosts finding themselves tethered to new masters, with no way of ever breaking free.

We turned a corner, moving into a dark alley, where Benedita stopped, folding her arms, and looked at me. “Well?”

“Well, what?” I allowed myself to flicker, exchanging my too-short dress for the sweater and skirt I’d been wearing on and off all night. All my clothes were illusions, pieces of the twilight snatched and asked to behave like fabric for a little while, but I felt better with less skin on display.

“Well, why did you come and pull me away from Chuck? He’s very young and enthusiastic, and I’m worried he’ll get hurt if I leave him to dance with the living.” She raised an eyebrow. “Also, did you just change your clothes because you’re calling me a skank, or is that a convenient side effect?”

“What? No!” I shook my head in hard negation. “I’m more comfortable like this, that’s all. You wear whatever you want. I think your shoes should qualify you for some kind of physics degree, just because you know how to walk in them.”

“My shoes?” Benedita glanced down. “I was wearing higher heels than this the night I died.”

“How did you die?”

“Oh, it’s story time? Fine. I was out clubbing, I met a guy. He was tall and handsome and sweet and about as clever as a brick. Turned out that was because he’d been dead for about a decade. He was a haunt—the classic kind, not the generic term for ghosts. He thought I was beautiful, and he courted me for months before he kissed me, and my heart stopped.”

I winced. “Bad luck.”

Haunts are sort of a fifty-fifty case when it comes to them interacting with the living. Half the time, they can heal any wound, cure any illness, and bring people back from the very verge of death. It’s impressive as hell. The other half, they kill with a kiss, stopping hearts instantly. It’s not a gamble most people are really looking to take, and that’s pretty reasonable, if you ask me.

“Yeah,” she said. “I died, and I rose up three days later in the same club, where the owner—he’d been a friend of mine when I was alive, thank God—hurried to get me off into a private room, so I wouldn’t start a riot. He told me I was gone, and that my brother had collected my body and set ghost traps all around the club to catch the haunt that killed me. I wasn’t thinking straight. One minute I was fine, the next I was being told my favorite club was a trap for people like I’d suddenly become, and my hot new maybe-boyfriend had been a monster. Only he wasn’t a monster. He was a sweet guy who probably hadn’t remembered his kiss could kill, and he didn’t deserve whatever my brother was going to do to him.” She paused, and looked at me levelly. “You’ve met Heitor, haven’t you?”

“I— How could you tell?”

“You’re looking at me differently, like I might be dangerous, like I might be something more than another eternal party girl looking for her next dance partner. That means you know who I used to be when I was alive. I thought death was supposed to be the big release for people like us, huh? We die, we get all our sins forgiven, and the twilight makes us over into what we were always meant to be. I’m the life of the party. I’m just dead at the same time.”

“I think some things carry over.”

Benedita exhaled, half-laughing. “I hope not. Because the way Heitor acted when he saw me, I lost everything as soon as my heart stopped. No brother. No purpose. No place in the Covenant. He looked at me like I was a monster, and he tried to jar me. I got away because I spent so much of my life training with him that I don’t think he could get the drop on me if he tried. And he tried. Oh, how he tried. I had to run, and I kept running until I got to Orlando, where I thought I’d be safe. But he found me there, and I started running again, following the coast, trying to get far enough away that he’d leave me alone.”

I managed, barely, not to groan. “The Covenant’s been following you, and using your presence as a bellwether for local hauntings. They’ve been sweeping up the ghosts in your wake.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“I know. But you did it, and now that it’s done, we have to deal with it.” I huffed. “Your brother said that if I bring you to him, he’ll walk away. He’ll stop working with the Covenant. Without an umbramancer, they won’t be able to do half as much damage as they’re doing right now.”

“He’ll hurt me.”

“They’ve already hurt so many people, living and dead. I can’t force you, but I can ask, and I’m asking you to make the right decision. If not for me, for Jonah. That poor kid’s on the cusp of losing everything.”

“That poor kid lost everything two hundred years ago,” said Benedita. “Shouldn’t I get a longer afterlife?”

I just looked at her. She glared back, hands flexing like she was thinking about hitting me. That would be an interesting choice on her part. Physical fights between ghosts can happen, but all I’d need to do is blink away and she’d be fighting nothing. Not the most productive use of her time.

“Look, I’m not the boss of you; I can’t force you to go to your brother,” I said. “But I can, and will, tell the other ghosts that you’re the reason the Covenant is hunting here instead of somewhere else, and I bet they’ll find that fascinating.”

“You wouldn’t dare. ”

“Wouldn’t I? You’re putting us all at risk. You’re putting my family at risk, because you’re so busy running away from your own. Your brother is looking for you. I’m not asking you to stop the Covenant. Just to take away one of their tools, and slow them down.”

Benedita sighed, looking briefly cowed. “I miss my brother,” she said. “Heitor and I were always inseparable, until I went and got myself killed like an amateur. I should have picked up on the signs before I let him kiss me. But it was nice to have someone want me that much, you know? Every club I went to, he was there. Every party. And it wasn’t creepy, somehow, it was just—nice.”

I didn’t say anything. She was convincing herself at this point, working through what she needed to do without involving me. I wasn’t going to interrupt, not when there was a chance she could end all this.

“When I was with the Covenant, I had a purpose. I was part of something larger than myself. I think, sometimes, that I miss that even more than I miss Heitor.”

“I understand,” I said, and I did. There were moments when I missed the steady, selfish presence of the crossroads. There’s something nice about having a greater force telling you what to do.

Benedita looked at me, and it was suddenly obvious how young she was, under the phantom makeup that came with her place in the afterlife. She’d lived longer than I had, but only by a few years. “Did Heitor say what he was going to do with me?”

“No,” I said. “Just that he missed you. And you’ve just said that you miss him. Don’t you think it’s time we brought this to some kind of an ending?”

I held out my hand. After a moment, she took it, and I took her, both of us, into the other side of the twilight.

We appeared, not in the living room where I’d left Heitor to wait for me, but in the shadows of an unfamiliar orchard. The trees around us were more like extremely ambitious bushes, reminding me of some blueberry farms I had visited, but instead of dusky blue sprigs of fruit, they had long stalks growing off the branches, each covered in clusters of small, bright red fruits that I didn’t recognize.

Benedita clearly did. She blinked, then turned on me and asked, sharply, “What kind of joke is this?”

“It’s not a joke,” I said. “I just… don’t know where we are.”

“It’s a fazenda,” said Benedita. “And frankly, I’m insulted that you’d assume I was a farmer just because I’m Brazilian.”

“She didn’t,” said a new voice, familiar only in that it was uniquely unfamiliar, shifting on every syllable, so that it could never be truly recognizable. “We didn’t either, to be clear; we brought you to us to find out what you know, but the space selects the shape. Only it’s always growing, and always ready for the harvest, because the reaper loves the crop, or what’s the point in planting?”

Grateful, I turned, and there was the anima mundi, standing between two of the strange trees with a basket over their arm and a small pair of shears in their hand. The basket was half-full of the little red fruits. Despite their unfamiliar surroundings, the anima mundi was as beautiful as ever. It was impossible to label or define their beauty, which changed constantly, but it was equally impossible to deny it.

“’S’up?” I said, with forced nonchalance.

Benedita blinked, looking between the two of us, before step ping away from me and demanding, stridently, “What the fuck is going on?”

“Um,” I said. “You know how I used to work for the crossroads?”

She turned to stare at me, then bolted into the trees, running as hard as she could. The anima mundi sighed.

“Mary, that was poorly handled,” they said.

“What? I didn’t expect to wind up here! I wasn’t prepared,” I objected. “I’ve been being very careful about how much energy I use, and I’m really not in the mood for a lecture.”

“This isn’t a lecture, this is a congratulations,” they said. “You’ve done quite well by finding the midnight beauty and bringing her so neatly to heel. Once this is all concluded, you should be able to return to your family, and not darken my door again any time soon. Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless you wanted to serve me as you once served the crossroads. I won’t force you. A service forced is barely a service at all.”

I blinked at them. “I just got free to spend more time with my family—a family, by the way, that’s having kids again, which means they’re going to need me more than they have in years. Why would I come to work for you when that’s going on?”

“Because I could keep your restrictions lightened if you did,” they said. “And because you’ve been very insular for a very long time, Mary. You’ve served two masters, and spent as little time among the dead as possible, lest they envy or reject you. But the crossroads did no curation of my lost children. Ghosts like the boy are more common than you may care to know. He never got to become what he should have been, and he lingers without place or purpose. You could help him, either to move on or to find ghosts like him, to form a more secure haunting. If you agreed.”

That did sound appealing. There were too many ghosts like Jonah, stranded and unable to move on with their afterlives, because there was no one explaining the rules to them, no one making sure they understood what they were supposed to be becoming. “Do I need to answer right away? We’re still kind of in the middle of the last job you gave me.”

“No,” they said. “You can have a bit of time to consider our offer.”

“What, exactly, are you offering me?”

“What you have now, in terms of movement and flexibility. What the crossroads offered you once, before me—the freedom to put your family first, to choose them whenever a choice must be made, without censure or blame. And all the afterlife as your playground.”

I frowned. That sounded real appealing, which meant there was bound to be a catch somewhere that I couldn’t see just yet.

Before I could answer them, Benedita came running out of the trees, looking back over her shoulder as she came, which made me suspect that the anima mundi had bent space around her, causing her to run in a loop. She hooked one high-heeled foot over a rock and went sprawling. The anima mundi looked at this and sighed.

“You needn’t be afraid, child,” they said. “I’m not going to hurt you, and if I were, there would be nothing you could do to stop me. Fear serves no useful purpose, only wearies you when there is no cause.”

Benedita scrambled to her feet again, turning to glare at the anima mundi. “You can’t trick me,” she snapped. “I was trained by the Covenant of St. George. I’m smarter than your games!”

“How did that work out for you?” I asked sharply. “Did you enjoy your time with the monster hunters? Are you enjoying the fruits of your labors?”

“To be honest, it kind of sucked,” she said. “I did it because I needed to do something, and they said they would pay us. And for a long time, the money was good enough that I didn’t really care all that much what they had us doing. But then I died and my own brother said I was a monster, just like all the ones we’d hunted through the years, so I started really looking at the monsters. And you know what? Most of them weren’t. Most of them were perfectly normal people who just wanted to be left alone so they could get on with their lives. Why were we hunting them? Why were we hurting them? And why was my brother, who said he loved me, why was he suddenly hunting me ? It wasn’t right.”

“If you came back to life right now, does that mean you wouldn’t rejoin the Covenant?” I asked.

Benedita shook her head. “I wouldn’t. I swear, I wouldn’t.”

“Well, then, you’ve learned something from being dead. Too bad it’s not Halloween.” Under the right circumstances, ghosts can use Halloween night to come back to life. I know people who’ve done it. I’ve never really been tempted. My world faded into history a long time ago, and I don’t really feel like becoming a fish out of water for the sake of growing up.

The anima mundi sighed. “I called you here to tell Mary she had done well so far, and was on the verge of discharging her duties to me, and to tell you that you’re not at fault for your brother’s actions. There was no way you could have predicted how he would handle your death. Umbramancers never leave ghosts behind. Their close kin almost always do. It’s like they’re such black holes for the dead that they can’t conceive of coming back once their time is done, but that same position bathes the people around them in the power they channel. It suffuses them, and when the time comes, they rise. They always, always rise.”

“You saying it’s my brother’s fault I’m like this?” demanded Benedita. “I would have been normal if not for him?”

“Ghosts are normal,” said the anima mundi. “You’re a part of the cycle of sapient life. But yes, if he’d been other than he is, the chances are very good that you would never have risen, for you would have been less tied to the lands of the dead.”

“And you brought me to a coffee estate to tell me that?”

“I brought you here because Mary was in transit, and that made it easier for me to redirect her.”

Benedita looked bemused. That was fine. I wasn’t feeling all that much more sure of what was happening around me, and I’d at least been here before. Although in my defense, it was normally a field of wheat.

“I’ll think about your offer,” I said, to the anima mundi. “I’m not saying yes or no just yet. I’m also not finished with the job you already assigned to me. I’m willing to discuss new limits on where I can go, as long as you’re willing to listen when I tell you what my family needs. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said the anima mundi. They offered me their hand. I took it, and the world turned gray as fog around me. Benedita grabbed for my other hand, holding on tight, and then the coffee farm dropped away, and we were nowhere.