Page 18

“Always take the win. No matter how strange or subjective it might seem, always take it.”

—Frances Brown

Worcester, Massachusetts, the living room of a house being rented by the Covenant of St. George, because that’s a great place for a ghost to be

W E POPPED BACK INTO EXISTENCE in the world of the living, in the middle of the living room where I’d last seen Heitor. That was the good part. The bad part was that Heitor was gone. The chair was empty, the cushions having long since returned to their original level of compression. Benedita dropped my hand. “Where is my brother?” she demanded, whirling on me.

“Oh, he’s a little busy,” said the voice of the man from the van. I turned. He was standing in the doorway to the hall, leaning up against the frame like he had nowhere better in the entire world to be. He smirked a little as he saw the recognition flood my face. “Oh, come off it. I’m the guy in the chair. You think I haven’t been over every frame of the security footage from Penton Hall with a fine-toothed comb?”

Well, crap. I crossed my arms, trying to look like his words didn’t send every nerve I didn’t have into a state of high, jangling alert. “So you looked at some old home movies. Big deal. Why should that worry me?”

“Because your face is in them, clear as day and larger than life. Which is pretty funny, since you’re not alive, are you?”

I tamped down the urge to recoil, looking at him calmly. “I don’t know. Do I look dead to you?”

“Before these two whacked-out British kids came to me asking about ghost hunts and whether I was any good at reviewing security footage, I would have said no, of course not. Now, though? Now I know ‘dead’ isn’t always as obvious as people want to make like it is. Still haven’t seen any vampires, though. I want to, but no matter how hard I look for them, they just don’t appear.”

“That’s because there’s no such thing,” I said, and I meant it. Sanguivores—creatures that live on blood—exist, and sometimes people call them vampires as a sort of catch-all term for people with a liquid diet, but the classic Bram Stoker vampire isn’t real. There’s no such thing as a dead person who has a physical body all the time, sleeps during the day, turns into a bat and flies around at night drinking blood. Manananggal and similar creatures exist, but they’re not the same, and trying to cram them under the umbrella of a myth is just colonialist thinking applied to biology. It’s basically a way of saying “Things like this exist over here, so naturally, Europe must have something bigger, better, and similar.”

“You’re one to talk,” he said with a sneer, and turned his attention to Benedita. “He said you were something called a ‘midnight beauty.’ You’re not that hot. Six out of ten, tops.”

Benedita shrugged. “The beauty is individual, and not for you to name. I am what I am, and I do not deny it. She’s not dead. She’s been hunting me on Heitor’s behalf, and now that she’s managed to find me and bring me here to him, you’re concealing him from me.”

“I saw you appear,” he blustered.

She shrugged again, more fluidly this time, like she was trying to draw attention to the elegant line of her neck, the grace of her arms. “A gift of the dance. I crossed the land of the dead, and I pulled her in my wake, safe as a duckling following its mother.”

“Really.”

“Really,” she agreed.

“Every ghost I’ve spoken to has said that wasn’t possible,” he said. “That the lands of the dead are sealed against the living.”

Benedita scoffed. “Oh, because the ghosts you’ve spoken with have had such cause to tell you truth over lies. Tell me, do you always assume the terrified and trapped are speaking truly? Is the Covenant teaching you to believe those without hope will forever betray themselves to their own ends?”

“Take me, then.” He stepped forward, toward her. “If you can carry people through the lands of the dead, take me.”

“They survive only when I wish it,” she cautioned. “My brother would survive the experience, for I would wish it. You would not. If you wish to see the lands of the dead, die. I promise you’ll see them clearly on that happy day.”

He swung his head around to look at me. I spread my hands. “I can’t take you anywhere,” I said.

“Right. But I know what you are. I know what you did. And I know that any moment now, Chloe and Nate will be back, and finished preparing to face you, and you’ll finally pay with everything you have to give.”

I stiffened, looking around. Heitor was still gone, and the chair where he’d been sitting wasn’t stained or damaged; if he’d been attacked, he hadn’t been sitting there when it happened. No one else seemed to be moving around. And yet…

We had an unaccounted-for umbramancer, and two Covenant operatives with good reason to hate the dead. And there’s no reason a Mesmer cage can’t cover an entire house.

There’s no point in maintaining a masquerade so hard that it gets you caught. I glanced to Benedita. “Where Aoi is,” I said, and vanished, hoping she would understand what I was saying.

I reappeared in front of the club a split second later, where the still-sober bouncer only blinked at me. “Change your clothes before I can let you in,” he said.

“Sorry,” I replied. “No time.” I rushed forward, passing through the still-clipped rope and into the club. The dance floor was alive with thrashing bodies and flashing lights, like a headache made manifest. I plunged into it, careful to stay solid, and pushed through the crowd, looking for a slender Japanese dancer of uncertain gender.

I found them toward the far edge, dancing with a pretty girl who had probably been legal for less than a month. Aoi was wearing the face of a handsome young Japanese man, their hair gelled back and their collar popped at a jaunty angle. I grabbed them by the elbow, stopping their gyrations, and they turned to look at me quizzically.

“Yes?” they asked.

“It’s me, Mary,” I said. “Benedita’s in trouble.”

“No she’s not,” they said. “She’s been here with me all night.”

“Yeah? Point her out to me.”

They turned to scan the dance floor while their erstwhile partner looked more and more annoyed at the intrusion, pretty cheeks going red as she crossed her arms and glowered at me. I blinked, then realized what this looked like: I was clearly younger than Aoi, and not dressed for the club at all, interrupting what must have seemed like a singularly pleasant night out.

Aoi finished their scan and turned back to me. “Where is she?” they asked.

“I took her to see her brother. He wasn’t there. I think something may have happened to him. The people he’s been working with aren’t good people.”

Aoi blanched. Too literally—the color drained from their cheeks, which then continued to pale, slipping fast toward a dead, bleached-out white. I elbowed them in the side, and they yelped, jumping as the color came flooding back.

“We need to go,” I said. “Jonah can’t help. He’s just a kid, and they’re not in a place his curfew allows.”

I paused for Aoi to take my meaning, then added, “I have a couple of people who might be able to lend us a hand. Can you come with me?”

Aoi nodded, turning to make apologies to their dance partner. She rolled her eyes and muttered something I couldn’t make out over the music, then turned and stomped off toward the bar, leaving Aoi staring helplessly after her. I grabbed their elbow, pulling them with me as I made for the exit.

Again, I didn’t bother to unhook the rope, and again, the bouncer looked at me with a flat lack of surprise.

“How long has this nightclub been haunted?” he asked.

I raised an eyebrow. “You really want us to answer that?”

“Not particularly, no.” He shook his head. “They don’t pay me enough to care about dead girls breaking dress code.”

“Not a girl,” said Aoi.

“Not breaking dress code, either.”

“Fair enough.” Aoi turned to me. “What was all that about?”

“Exactly what it sounded like. Now, I don’t know how your kind of ghost moves around the twilight, but I was able to haul Benedita with me by holding her hand. That work for you?”

“Why, Miss Mary, I had no idea you cared,” said Aoi, face morphing into my own as they batted their lashes at me.

I rolled my eyes and grabbed their hand, and we were gone, reappearing a moment later in the hallway of Phee’s boardinghouse.

The doors to Arthur and Elsie’s rooms were standing open. Panic flooded through me like bleach, sucking the color and substance out of everything, and I staggered, dropping Aoi’s hand as I braced myself against the wall. They couldn’t be in danger or distress; they weren’t calling for me. I’d hear them if they were calling for me, wouldn’t I? They were my family. I was supposed to hear them.

But I couldn’t feel them at all when I tried to reach out and locate them. I’d been so busy with everything else that I hadn’t noticed the absence. Now that I was feeling for it, though, I couldn’t pay attention to anything else. The absence was all. Elsie and Arthur were gone, and there was a hole in the world where they should have been.

“Seeing” that hole made me want, more than anything, to hurry and check on everyone else I cared about, rushing from place to place until I knew that they were all safe. The desire was almost overwhelming. I breathed slowly in and out through my nose, forcing it aside. I would know if they were dead. That was a certainty. They weren’t here, they weren’t dead, and they weren’t currently in active distress. That left very few options, and I wasn’t sure what most of them meant.

Aoi turned to give me a puzzled look, clearly not understanding why two open doors would upset me so much. “Are you okay?” they asked.

“No,” I managed. “The kids I babysit for are supposed to be here.”

Aoi blinked. “And they’re not?”

“No.”

Something moved farther down the hall. I vanished immediately, reappearing in front of Phee, who had been retreating toward the kitchen. “Going somewhere?” I asked, voice barely above a snarl.

“Hey, we’re all friends here,” she said, laughing a little as she raised her hands in surrender. “I was just getting a fresh cuppa, since it seemed you’d come back for the nonce. Who’s your friend?”

“You don’t get to know about my friends,” I said. “Where are they?”

“Who? The adults you made sure to stress could take care of themselves? That ‘they’? Because it seems to me a bit hypocritical of you to come here looking for them after you told me they’d be fine on their own.”

I ground my teeth together, stepping closer, and for a moment, allowed the pleasant masquerade of “virtually alive” to slip from my features. My eyes and cheeks sank inward, my flesh going waxen and slack as my bones strained to show themselves. I don’t enjoy looking like a corpse. Sometimes it’s the only way to get my point across.

“I’m a caretaker,” I said. “I always know where my family is. Always. Well, I can’t feel them right now. They’re gone. But they’re not dead, because I would know if they were dead. I last saw them in your house. Where are they?”

I hadn’t felt anything like this since Alice was in college and Laura was trying to ward off the spirits that constantly tried to get closer to her. She’d set up wards and runes and Mesmer cages, finally layering them together so tightly that she not only kept out the ghosts, she kept out my awareness of Alice. That had been a deeply unpleasant weekend, until we figured out what was going on and I managed to convince her to loosen her shields enough to let me through.

Heitor was an umbramancer who’d constructed at least one Mesmer cage for his Covenant allies. Could Elsie and Arthur be inside one of those, cut off from me but not dead, just outside my ability to detect?

Oh, I hoped so. I would have said there was no reason I’d ever hope for one of my kids to be taken into Covenant custody, but right now, it seemed like the best thing that could have possibly happened. If the Covenant had them, they were hostages against my eventual surrender, making them stuck but safe. They were just… shut away for a little bit, and when I managed to bust the doors open, they’d be there, waiting for me to bring them home.

Phee stared at my withered visage, her own face going pale—although not as pale as Aoi’s had been earlier. Nothing living could be that pale. “I don’t know,” she said. “I swear, I don’t know, and I didn’t know your ducklings were gone until I came to use the loo and found the doors standing open. I thought they’d decided to sneak out without paying, that you’d judged my hospitality insufficient and stolen them away. I know you wanted them kept safe, and I did nothing to go counter to that. I’m not a combatant. I’ve been staying out of trouble for too long at this point to go looking for it now.”

“Well, you found it,” I snapped. “Did you let a couple of humans into your house by any chance? Just open up the door and let them stroll on inside?”

“She didn’t,” said a voice from the end of the hall. “I did.”

Aoi whipped around, looking anxious as a rabbit in a field full of foxes. They didn’t disappear, though, which was more than I could have asked of them, under the circumstances.

I shot them a reassuring look as I turned, and there was Amelia, watching me coolly. Despite that, I could see the anxiety in her eyes. I flickered, vanishing from in front of Phee and reappearing in front of Amelia. “You what ?”

“The habitat of my species is in our name,” said Amelia, voice still cool. She looked untroubled by my corpselike appearance. “We don’t have a lot of options when it comes to hiding from people who know we exist, and when those Covenant freaks hit town, one of the first things they did was send a message to our village elders. Watch over the local cryptids for them, or they’d come and ‘watch over’ our entire population.”

“You could always start expanding your population,” said Phee, moving toward us at a more leisurely pace. Aoi walked with her, mouth shut and eyes wide. “Buy houses near the coast, send your kids to Chicago for college…”

“We can’t, ” said Amelia. “We get sick if we’re away from the swamp for too long, and we can’t reproduce, not even using IVF. Nothing we do gets us clear of the Hockomock. We evolved there, and we’ll go extinct there. I just wasn’t ready for it to be now.”

“What did you do?” I demanded.

“Nothing.” She looked at me, expression flat and resigned. “I just brought them a bedtime snack. Milk and cookies for the boy, cookies and a nightcap for the girl. Plenty of aconite for both.”

I managed, barely, to restrain myself from wrapping my hands around her thick neck and starting to squeeze. “Aconite is deadly to Lilu! And it’s not very good for humans, either.”

“I’m sorry, did I imply that I used pure aconite? My bad. I ground up purple-lined sallows and mixed them into the drinks. They’re a species of moth that feeds on aconite plants when they’re young, and when they’re powdered, they’re a classic defense against Lilu. They drug and disorient without killing.”

I already knew Elsie and Arthur weren’t dead, and that was enough to let her words work their way through the red fog of rage now threatening to overwhelm me. I swallowed hard, letting some of the life come back into my face as I took a half-step back. Aoi put a hand on my shoulder, bolstering me. “So you drugged them. Why? Why now?”

“The woman from the Covenant who’s been monitoring me called and said they thought the local ghosts were catching on to them. She asked if I knew of anything that had changed recently, anything that might have stirred up the spirits, and of course I thought of the three of you, the last caretaker and the two Price children. Oh, she was very excited to hear about your little friends. Excited to hear about you, too, but I didn’t exactly have a way to hand you over, so we had to put a pin in that for right now.”

“I am going to see you dead,” I said, coldly.

“Are you?” asked Amelia. “I thought you people were all about conservation. Well, there are thirty-eight of us left, and I’m the only girl in my generation with multiple possible sexual partners who aren’t siblings or first cousins. So if you kill me, you could be responsible for driving a species to extinction. But no big deal, I guess.”

“You could have told us years ago that you were having issues keeping your breeding population large enough to be meaningful,” I snapped.

“Could we? Really? Because I promise you, we’re not unique.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I only knew that my kids—my kids, no matter how old they were—were in trouble, and they needed me to save them before things got even worse. I flickered back down the hall, grabbing Aoi by the elbow, and turned a hard stare on Phee.

“If they die, I’ll be hosting a Price family reunion in your living room, and your homeowner’s insurance will not cover the result,” I said, and vanished, dragging Aoi with me. It was time to bring this whole messy affair to an end. Whatever that happened to entail.