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“Home is where you go to lick your wounds, set your bones, and find the strength to wade back out into the fray. You can survive anything this world has to throw at you, long as you have your home.”

—Frances Brown

Walking into the living room of a small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon

S ARAH KEPT SHOOTING SMALL , ANXIOUS glances at me as we walked, like she expected me to disappear at any moment. That, or my newly blue eyes were disturbing her more than I’d realized at first. Coming back together and no longer belonging to the crossroads had removed the empty highway from my eyes, and left me looking closer to the living than I had in a very long time.

If that was the case, it was a little hypocritical. Sarah isn’t human. She’s a cuckoo, a member of an extradimensional predator species that’s closer to wasps, biologically, than they are to anything that evolved on Earth. She’s also telepathic, and when she uses her abilities, her eyes glow a remarkably bright white. You’d think she of all people might understand that eyes change colors sometimes.

Oh, well. Stepping into the house was like waking up on Christmas morning. It was warm, and the air smelled of popcorn, coffee, and something freshly baked that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was probably an offering to the mice. Every member of the family learned how to bake at least a few simple things as soon as it was safe for them to operate the stove, because the mice demanded baked goods on a regular basis. You could virtually set your watch by their raucous cries of “cheese and cake,” and failure to provide what they were asking for could lead to disaster.

Even Verity, who could burn water if asked to boil it, knew how to turn boxed cake mix into something edible. At this point, the smell of baked goods was the smell of coming back to normalcy. I stuck close to Sarah, trying to smile every time she looked in my direction, and focused on not walking through the furniture. It was easier than it should have been.

The anima mundi had told me that I was going to be more limited now than I’d been before I toted several explosive devices to the other side of the world and blew myself up in the process of using them to demolish a major Covenant stronghold. I could tell I wasn’t somehow alive again; when I focused, I didn’t have a heartbeat, and when I stopped breathing, I didn’t have any particular desire to restart. I was just… solid, unusually so.

There would probably be some sort of downside to that, but for right now, it was just nice not to worry about finding myself standing in the middle of a coffee table. I’m usually pretty good about interacting with my environment. It’s just that sometimes, I forget.

“You missed the funerals,” said Sarah, in a very small voice.

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Where have you been ?”

“It’s a long story.” It wasn’t, not really, but it was a complicated, confusing one, and I didn’t want to tell it more than once if I didn’t have to. “I’ll explain once we’re with the others.”

She nodded minutely, irises seeming to frost over around the edges. It wasn’t true frost, of course, but the delicate fractal pattern was similar enough, little spirals of white eating into the blue.

“Yes, reading my mind to get the full story would probably be faster, but counterpoint, I’d rather you didn’t do that right now,” I said, calmly. She jerked back, the white disappearing as quickly as it had come, and looked at me with wide, guilty eyes.

I sighed. “I’m not mad, sweetheart. I understand the impulse, and I know how frustrating it is when someone doesn’t want to explain what’s going on. I just want to get to the rest of the family. Who all’s home right now?”

“Evie and Uncle Kevin, Annie and Sam, James, and Olive,” said Sarah dutifully.

“And everyone else?”

“Alex and Shelby are in Ohio with Lottie and Isaac; Elsie and Arthur are in Portland, with Uncle Ted; and Grandma and Grandpa are in Michigan with Sally.”

For a moment, it felt like I had swallowed a sharp rock. “Where’s Verity?”

Verity hadn’t been my primary charge for very long. As the family babysitter, all the kids are my responsibility, but the majority of my focus is always on the youngest. It’s not fair, since it reduces all children to ages rather than individuals, but the younger a child is, the more likely they are to need constant supervision, and the little compass in my head that tells me where my family is had always seized on that need as a form of guide. Verity had been born only a little while before her cousin Arthur, and so I’d been pulled away from taking constant care of her before we’d been able to make much of an impression on each other.

To me, she’d always been one more child in a swarm of children I knew better, and to her, I’d always been something she’d been denied by the order of her birth. It wasn’t fair, but it was the way it was. I still cared about her desperately, and I always would.

Sarah sighed. “She’s still in New York,” she said. “After we… after…”

“It’s all right,” I said gently. “I know what happened.” Verity’s husband, Dominic, had been one of the casualties of the early days of our war against the Covenant. They’d set an ambush, and Dom and Verity ran right into it. His death was quick and traumatic, and his ghost hadn’t lingered, or if it had, it hadn’t manifested yet by the time I got discorporated.

Sarah nodded. “She said it was better if Livvy stayed here with us until she felt a little bit more like herself, and nothing in her thoughts sounded like following Dominic into the afterlife, so we let her go. She calls every night so she can tell Liv a bedtime story, and Uncle Mike is there with her.”

“All right. As long as she’s not alone.” If she didn’t want to be here with her family, New York was a good place for Verity. She had friends there, good ones, the kind who would make sure she ate and showered and didn’t jump off too many buildings. It would still have been better for her to be in Portland with her daughter, but I could understand why she wouldn’t want to be. If I knew Verity at all, she was going to be struggling with her own culpability in this entire situation. She’d been the one to set the Covenant off this time, and she was the reason Dominic had been anywhere near the battlefield.

That didn’t make this her fault. If there was any fault to be handed out, it belonged to the people who’d decided they had the holy right to assault us because we weren’t all perfectly, impeccably human. But we’d all played our part in things getting as bad as they had, and Verity had always been remarkably good at dodging the consequences of her own actions. She wasn’t used to things having permanent costs.

Sarah nodded again.

“Do you ever go there to see her?”

“Sometimes,” she said, and looked away.

Sarah could move through space as easily as the dead did, bending the innate math of distance to wind up wherever she felt she needed to be. It had been a relatively new skill of hers the last time I’d seen her, but she’d been getting steadily better. She referred to it as spatial tunneling, and while it had its limitations, some of the things she’d said made me suspect that those limits weren’t going to exist forever.

Her steadily increasing power was honestly a little frightening, even to me—and I was already dead. I didn’t have anything left to lose, not in the traditional manner. She was the most sophisticated example of her species we’d ever found ourselves dealing with, and no one knew what she was going to be capable of in the end.

Whatever it was, she’d still be our Sarah, and our ally. That was enough to keep me from getting too worked up about it.

We walked through the empty living room to the hallway beyond, from which various parts of the house could be accessed—most importantly the kitchen and the main living room. People could usually be found in one of those places, if not both of them. My family liked their coffee and their cushions when they weren’t traveling, and those things could be found in the living room/kitchen area with reasonable reliability.

As we got closer, I heard voices, and Sarah’s hand closed around my wrist like a vise, stopping me before I could go any farther. I tried to go insubstantial and pull through her fingers, but nothing happened. I blinked down at my arm, staring at the place where she held me. Nothing changed.

I was as solid as a living girl, and as trapped.

Sarah’s eyes flashed white, and her voice filled my head.

You weren’t here. We buried Jane and Dominic, and you weren’t here. If you’re planning to just run off on us again, you’d better think twice, because I don’t think Uncle Kevin will be okay if you do that.

I blinked at her, and thought back, as clearly as I could, I’m not planning to go anywhere unless someone needs me. Livvy is still technically the youngest.

The anima mundi had said that I’d still be able to be there for my family. But she could be expecting me to be there on a bus. We’d find out when someone younger than Livvy came along.

Sarah glanced guiltily away. I blinked.

“What don’t I know?” I asked, aloud.

Sarah didn’t look back.

“What don’t I know?” I repeated, slightly louder. If she wanted to keep me quiet, this wasn’t the way to go about it. “I’m warning you, Sarah, I will start yelling if you don’t—”

“Verity was pregnant when Dominic died,” she blurted. I stared in shock as she turned back to me, her pale cheeks wan in the interior light. Cuckoos aren’t mammals, and they don’t have hemoglobin the way humans do. Their blood is clear and viscous, like mucus. No matter how distressed Sarah was, she would never redden or blush. “She’s about eight months along now. Evie’s been trying to convince her to come home for the birth, but she says she wants to stay in New York, that she feels closer to Dominic there, even though he was buried here. I’ve been attending all her prenatal visits and holding her hands. It’s a boy.”

Now that I knew what I was listening for, I could hear a faint hum in the distance, like a note from a tuning fork. It would get stronger once the baby was born, and start becoming unique to him almost immediately, distinguishing itself from the rest of the family.

Hearing it was a relief. It meant my connections were still open, even if my intangibility was on the fritz. Honestly, being unable to pass through Sarah’s grip reminded me of my first days among the dead, back when I’d been reasonably recently deceased and still trying to figure out how to control my various ghostly abilities. Being solid had been hard back then. Being intangible had been even harder. It was like having to focus on every aspect of my existence.

The thought was followed by another: maybe I was recently deceased, in a way. The blast in the basement of Penton Hall had blown me apart, scattered me across the starlight like a phantasmal glitter bomb. The anima mundi had gathered all my parts back together and sort of glued them together to give me the time to heal.

And something about that process had shaken the cemetery sky straight out of my eyes. I was a different kind of ghost now, no longer a hybrid of crossroads and babysitter, but a caretaker from one end to the other. So maybe I needed to behave like someone who had only just died, who was still figuring things out. Maybe I needed to relax.

As if on cue, my wrist passed through Sarah’s fingers, and I was free. I raised it to my chest, rubbing it with the opposite hand, and was pleased to find that both halves of me seemed to be equally solid. The last thing I needed was to be halfway walking through things and halfway not, like some sort of conscious transitory state.

“I didn’t run off last time, Sarah,” I said, quietly. “I tried to get out of that basement, and I couldn’t do it. It was like the world didn’t want me to. I’d pulled all the strength I had into getting those bombs where we needed them to be, and nothing I did would let me leave. Hasn’t the math ever failed you? Hasn’t it ever left you somewhere that you didn’t want to be?”

She flinched, and that was more than enough of an answer for me. Of course she understood what that was like. Her own abilities were new and still evolving; there was no way they could work perfectly every time she asked them to. That didn’t mean people wouldn’t blame her when they failed. That didn’t mean people weren’t going to blame me.

I leaned over and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, giving her a quick hug. “Come on, Sarah. Let’s stop standing here and playing ‘what if they get upset,’ and go upset them instead, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, voice surprisingly thick, and didn’t resist as I started forward, pulling her along with me.

The Portland compound was designed and constructed by Kevin, intended to serve as a permanent place big enough for his whole family to live if they wanted to. “Constructed by” is a pretty generous way to describe it, since he’s not particularly handy, but he was the one who’d organized the crews, mostly sasquatch and bogeymen, who’d cleared the land and put the physical buildings up. Over two dozen groups of workers had been responsible for getting everything put together, with Kevin rotating them regularly to make sure no one knew all the details of the security system. Paranoid? Yes. Unreasonable? When we already knew that the Covenant was out there looking for us, no. Not unreasonable in the least.

Although maybe the idea that the whole family would ever come and live happily under one roof had been more than a little unreasonable. Jane never forgave her mother for missing most of her childhood, and she’d taken that resentment with her to the grave. When Alice was in the house, Jane did her best not to be, and since Kevin had always insisted that his mother would be welcome in any home of his, the happy fantasy he’d been trying to build had never come to pass.

The house was nice, though.

We followed the hallway to the living room, a well-lit, airy space with a ceiling so high that I had sometimes suspected Evelyn had managed to train songbirds to do the dusting in the corners and light fixtures. These days, she probably just has Sam do it. Couches and comfortable chairs were scattered around the space, and the lack of too many shelves kept it from feeling claustrophobic, even as a few low bookshelves stuffed with popular novels and foraging guides made sure that no one was going to forget who lived here. Family photos covered the walls.

Several had been added since my last visit. One showed Alice and Thomas sitting on the porch swing of their house in Buckley, grinning like fools with a banner on the wall behind them that said “IT’S A GIRL!” Sally was sandwiched between them, a resigned look on her face and a tailypo in her lap.

The others were less cheerful. They looked like they’d been taken at the recent funerals, and I had little doubt that they’d be moved to an office or parlor by the end of the year, replaced by fresh baby pictures and other, more optimistic images.

Kevin and Evelyn were sitting on one of the couches, clearly deep in some sort of serious discussion. For maybe the first time since he’d first brought her home, the sight of them together didn’t cause me to do a double take. Kevin looked so much like his father, and Evelyn, for all that she didn’t look exactly like Alice, was still a girl just like the girl who’d married dear old Dad.

It was mildly unsettling to see them together while Thomas was still missing. It would have been worse, if not for the fact that I’d never seen anything in their actual relationship to imply that Kevin had been trying to replace his mother. They fought and lived and loved like any couple, and they’d raised three reasonably well-adjusted children. Although I took part of the credit for that.

Evelyn was the one with a direct eyeline on the hallway door; she raised her head when she heard us enter, and froze, eyes going wide and suspiciously bright, like she was on the verge of tears. She raised one shaking hand to her mouth, and otherwise didn’t move.

Kevin stiffened, head coming up before he turned. Then he joined his wife in staring, both of them focused on me in a way that might have been gratifying if it hadn’t been silent and accompanied by tears. Evelyn’s were the first to fall, but Kevin’s, when they came, were copious and steady, running down his cheeks unhindered as both his hands were still resting on the couch between them.

“Hi,” I said, with a little wave. “Miss me?”

Kevin finally made a sound—a choked gargle that sounded like it couldn’t make up its mind between a laugh and a bark—and lunged to his feet before rushing over to sweep me into a hug. Or to try to, anyway. He definitely made the gesture, but when his arms closed, they passed right through me, leaving me unhugged.

“Er,” I said. “Sorry about that. I’m having a little trouble with the whole ‘solid, not-solid’ thing right now. I probably shouldn’t try to do the grocery shopping until we know what’s going on.”

“Mary,” said Evelyn. “It’s really you.”

“Mary Dunlavy, at your service,” I said.

“We thought you were dead,” said Kevin. “Again.”

“Can you be double-dead?” asked Evelyn.

“Absolutely,” I said. “Ghosts can be destroyed. It’s easier than we want people to think. I mean, it’s still hard, but there are a lot of methods that will do it if someone is determined enough. Most of them wouldn’t work on me when I worked for the crossroads, because they were a bigger, meaner boss than your average ghost hunter was expecting.”

“And now?” she asked, with clear anxiety in her expression.

“Now I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I’m technically a caretaker—a form of nanny ghost—and we know most of what those are capable of, but I’m a caretaker who’s answering directly to the anima mundi, and that could change things. It’s hard to say. I’m not really in a hurry to find out, though. Six months of nonexistence was enough for me.”

Kevin tried again to hug me. This time, I stayed solid as he wrapped his arms around my shoulders and pulled me against him, and I responded by turning to make the hug easier, patting his shoulder with one hand. He clung, shaking, and pressed his face against my neck.

“I know, buddy,” I said. “I’m sorry I was gone for so long. I didn’t mean to be.”

“What happened? ” asked Evelyn.

“When the charges went off at Penton Hall, I was already exhausted from the effort of transporting the explosive devices, and I couldn’t shift myself out in time. I tried, really I tried, but it didn’t work.” I’d been crying blood by the time I picked up the last of the bombs—and no matter how much I wanted to call them “explosive devices” or other polite, bloodless phrases, they were bombs. They’d been designed to kill people, and that was what we’d used them to do. “One more thing to thank the crossroads for, I guess: they never bothered to tell me I was supposed to have limits, and so once I reached them, I didn’t know what to do.”

“So you were still there when the blast went off,” said Evelyn, sounding horrified.

“I thought she was, but everything was so chaotic and there were so many minds in play that I wasn’t fully certain,” said Sarah. “I’m sorry, Mary. I should have found a way to get you out of there.”

“Don’t even start that,” I said firmly. “I was intangible and incapacitated. All you could have done was put yourself and Annie in harm’s way, and I’m the babysitter here. I’m the one who takes care of you. You follow me?”

“Yes,” said Sarah.

“Good.” I looked back to Evelyn. “The explosion was big enough to blow me out like a candle. Bombs don’t normally hit ghosts that hard. I guess me transporting them through the twilight made them a little more effective against phantom targets.”

Evelyn sat up straighter on the couch, eyes going bright with curiosity. “Do you think that would work with all sorts of weaponry?” she asked. “Could we enhance our bullets that way?”

“Are you planning to fight an army of the dead?” I countered. “Maybe it would work and maybe it wouldn’t, but I think if I started becoming an anti-ghost arms dealer, the rest of the af terlife would get pissed at me, and I have enough problems right now without adding more to the pile.”

“No,” Evelyn admitted. “Sorry. That’s just not an area where we know as much as I’d like, even though you’ve been around for all this time.”

Until the anima mundi had taken over as my employer, there had been active rules against my telling my family anything the crossroads didn’t want them to know—which was virtually everything. Most of what they knew about the laws that bind the dead had come from other hauntings, and it had been a bone of contention for years that I refused to confirm or deny all the details. Not pissing off the crossroads had been a full-time job in its own right, which left me with three jobs, total, and the constant desire to smack my head against the nearest wall.

The anima mundi didn’t have any such rules, but looking at the thinly veiled eagerness in Evelyn’s face, I wasn’t sure I was going to tell them that. Evie may have married into the family, but she’s still a Price, with their unending need to know everything about the world around them, even the things she would be better off not knowing. Even the things I didn’t want to explain.

“You know why that is,” I said gently.

She sighed, some of her excitement dimming as she slumped back into the couch.

“The blast shattered me into pieces and scattered me across the layers of the afterlife,” I said. “Under normal circumstances, I would have dissipated completely, but the anima mundi pulled me back together and held me that way until I could heal on my own. It took the last six months. When I woke up, she told me I could move on if I wanted to. The crossroads are gone. Any claim they had over my soul went with them. She doesn’t want to own people the way they did.”

“I’m guessing from the fact that you’re here that you said you weren’t ready?” said Evelyn.

I stroked Kevin’s hair with one hand. “I thought my family might still need me,” I said.

He made a hiccupping sound and squeezed me briefly tighter.

“We just got Mom and Dad back, and then Jane and Dominic died, and you were gone, and I’d never had to consider a world without you haunting the house,” he said, raising his head and looking at me.

I offered him a small smile. “Hey, kiddo. No one who’s currently alive in this house has the authority to fire me. You’re stuck with me. I’m just sorry I missed the funerals.”

“They were unpleasant,” said Sarah. “Everyone was trying their best not to blame anyone else, and not to project their grief too loudly, but most people aren’t sufficiently practiced at controlling their minds, and it was like standing in an amphitheater full of people shouting about how unhappy they were. Uncle Ted had to leave Aunt Jane’s funeral before the service was done. Everyone else’s misery was too heavy, and it was smothering him. Arthur lasted longer, but in the end, he was unable to understand too many of the feelings around him, and he had to excuse himself. I managed to stay.”

“I’m not surprised.” I’ve never met anyone as good at punishing herself as Sarah is. For her, staying in a room full of people who were devastated and grieving would have been like immersing herself in a vat of lemon juice right after rubbing her whole body with sandpaper. And that meant there was no way she would have left until she’d finished soaking in every bit of blame and recrimination she could hold.

It wasn’t her best attribute. It was one she’d developed to keep herself from turning into a monster, from becoming the kind of cuckoo who shrugged off other people’s pain as a necessary side effect of living her life the way she wanted to. The people she cared about wished she’d stop hurting herself, but she never did. I wasn’t sure she even could anymore.

“And now I’m back, and I didn’t miss the baby, so we can just move forward from here, yeah?”

Kevin finally let go of me and stepped back a bit, toward the couch where Evelyn was sitting. “Sarah told you about the baby?”

“Yeah, and now that I know what I’m looking for, I can feel him. He’s already family.” I paused. Better to tell them now, I suppose. “Speaking of which, I can still feel you all, so I know that part of the caretaker’s connection is still intact, but I don’t know what I can do right now, or how any of it works. I don’t seem to choose whether or not I’m solid, not really, and while the anima mundi said I’d be able to answer my family when they called for me, I don’t know how voluntary that’s going to be, and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to move between you when you’re not calling. They wanted me to chill out a little with the popping all over the place.”

It was a reasonable request, especially with the anima mundi trying to rebuild Earth’s pneuma. The pneuma was the living soul of the world, the source of all magic—and all hauntings. As a caretaker, I was well defined and easy for the pneuma to maintain. As a crossroads ghost, though, I had been a nebulously described creature and a constant power sink. The crossroads had probably liked it that way. Let their servants weaken the world just by existing, make it less likely that the anima mundi would ever be able to re-manifest and challenge their domination.

Then the anima mundi had returned, and found themself with custody of the strange hybrid creature that I was. They’d already been taking steps to limit what I was capable of before I’d gotten myself exploded and given them the opportunity to tinker with me. Whatever I was now, I had little doubt that it was less expensive for them to fuel.

“I can test this,” said Sarah, sounding relieved. Her eyes flashed white, and then she was gone, pulling space around her like a shroud and using it to transport herself somewhere else.

I blinked. “She’s getting better at that.”

“She is,” said Kevin. “It still makes me nervous when she does that. Living people shouldn’t do that sort of thing.”

“Neither should dead ones,” said Evelyn. “Begging your pardon, Mary, you’ve always been very respectful of our privacy, and you being able to go through doors was a lifesaver when Verity was in her locking phase.”

I smiled nostalgically. “That was a fun year.”

When she was six, Verity had decided the best thing to do with doors was to lock them at every opportunity she had, both when she was on the other side and—in the case of doors that could be locked, then closed without unlocking them—when she wasn’t. I’d been tapped to walk through doors and unlock them more often that summer than I had ever thought possible.

“You say ‘fun,’ I say ‘periodically terrifying and definitely an incentive to handcuff my eldest daughter to things.’”

“Yes, but all that did was encourage her to get better at picking locks.”

“Which has served her well in her adult life,” said Kevin.

It was hard to argue with that. All three of Kevin and Evelyn’s kids had gone willingly into the field once they were old enough, and they thrived there. They liked the practical side of cryptozoology far more than they enjoyed the theoretical—even Alex, who never met a research paper he didn’t want to commit to memory, liked getting his hands dirty.

Kevin shot me another look, seeming like he couldn’t really believe I was here and real and negotiably solid. He hadn’t lost another member of his family after all.

But before he could say anything, I heard Sarah calling my name, distant but insistent, like an alarm clock pulling me up out of sleep. I blinked and turned toward the sound, which was more of a sound than the calling of my family had ever been. The calling didn’t stop, but I was still in the living room, which answered one question: I wasn’t going to find myself moving involuntarily like I had in my early days with the crossroads. I got to keep that much control.

“I need to go,” I said, and I was gone.