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“I worry a bit about you being dead, dear. You’re so young. You should be resting easy or enjoying your afterlife, not spending all your time keeping my granddaughter’s total lack of self-preservation from sending her into the grave with you.”

—Enid Healy

Appearing out of the afterlife into an unknown location, following the sound of one of my kids calling for me

O NE SECOND I WAS IN a living room, and the next I was outside under a honey-mild afternoon sky so blue that it could have been a painting, trees to my back and a long, tangled field in front of me. If the trees hadn’t been enough to tell me where I was, a ramshackle house painted the color of mold growing on bone stood on the other side of the field, with windows that seemed to stare at me like furious, mindless eyes. The Old Parrish Place had a way of looming while still being completely inanimate. It was a nice trick.

So far as anyone’s been able to tell, the house isn’t haunted. It just doesn’t like most people, and how it manages to be hostile while not alive, intelligent, or possessed is anybody’s guess. But it liked Thomas Price well enough, and it liked Alice enough that when she and Thomas got married, she was able to live there without too many nightmares, and most importantly, it liked me enough to let me come in to babysit.

Any house that allows the babysitter past the threshold can’t be all bad.

I looked around and, finding no sign of Sarah, sighed. I paused for the first time since my reappearance to take stock of my clothing. I was wearing faded blue jeans and a white peasant blouse with little white asphodel flowers and red pomegranates stitched around the cuffs in the sort of decorative pattern that had fallen out of favor in the late seventies. Old-fashioned, but not synchronized to any of my current kids.

At least I was decent, and should still be recognizably myself, even with the highway absent from my eyes. Before the explosion, I would have just popped myself into the house, away from the trees, which had never liked me half as much as the house did. Now, though, I didn’t want to take the chance that it wasn’t going to work. Instead, I took a deep, unnecessary breath and started walking.

The field wasn’t that wide, but it had been so long since I actually needed to walk anywhere that I was bored before I was halfway there. Each step was a chore, and it was difficult not to think of this as a punishment rather than what the anima mundi said it was: a necessary rebalancing of the way things worked. I’d been improperly restrained for too long, and it was time I started behaving like a civilized ghost who didn’t think the rules were for other people.

The back door slammed open when I was almost to the house. Alice appeared in the doorway, short and blonde and dressed in the sort of casual clothing she’d favored since her teens. At least these days, no one judged her for her fondness for shorts and tank tops. Both were easy to move in, and since she preferred guns over knives, unlike most of her descendants, the lack of places to hide thirty knives didn’t really impact her much. Back when she’d been a teenager, she used to get called all sorts of name by the people in town. The good old days only were for the people who naturally lived up to society’s expectations. For the rest of us, the present was a lot more pleasant. Not perfect, sure, but at least now speaking to an unmarried man without a chaperone wasn’t enough to ruin a girl’s reputation forever.

She stared at me for several beats before shouting my name and throwing herself down the porch steps at top speed. As she ran toward me, a tall, lanky man appeared in the door where she had been, sunlight glinting off his glasses. I thought I saw Thomas smile before all my attention had to be focused on Alice, who was pelting toward me as fast as her legs could carry her, hair streaming backward in the breeze and throat working hard as she fought not to hyperventilate.

Please stay solid for this, I thought sternly, and opened my arms.

A moment later, Alice slammed into them, and I held her close, and thought that maybe everything was going to be all right after all. She squeezed tightly, just as Kevin had, but let go a second later, stepping back.

“Are you really Mary Dunlavy?” she demanded.

“I am.”

“Prove it.”

I sighed. “Anything I can say as proof would have been overheard by the mice, meaning it’s all circumstantial at best. You have a living Greek chorus. That makes it pretty difficult to keep secrets. Oh, how’s this—you didn’t speak to me for almost a year after you caught me kissing Tommy, since you thought I’d been poaching behind your back and didn’t want to give me a chance to explain.”

Alice paled. “Mary?”

“Yeah, kiddo,” I said. “It’s me.”

“Sarah said it was you, but I didn’t want to—I was afraid that if I hoped she was telling the truth, I’d just get disappointed again. I don’t think my heart could handle it, not after everybody we’ve lost this year. I thought you were on that list. Your clergy is going to be so relieved.”

I’d been with the family for long enough to have been adopted as an honorary part of the Aeslin pantheon. They called me the Phantom Priestess, and most of their chthonic rites included me one way or another. I frowned.

“If you thought I was dead, shouldn’t most of them have shifted to another branch of the faith?” I asked delicately. It was “most” because the central clergy of any given god or priestess usually didn’t outlive them by terribly long. If they didn’t actively take their own lives, grief would do it for them, refusing to let them keep living in a world that didn’t include their divinities.

“Rules are different for your clergy, because they started worshipping you after you were already dead.”

It made exactly the sort of sideways sense I had learned to expect from the Aeslin mice, and so I nodded, stepping closer to her and offering my hand. “Well, then, I’m sure they’ll be thrilled when their faith is rewarded.”

“Are you kidding? They’re going to throw the kind of festival that means no one in the house gets any sleep for a week.” She took my hand firmly in hers. “Welcome home, Mary. We missed you.”

I couldn’t exactly say the same, since the past six months were a gaping void for me, and so I just smiled at her and squeezed her hand, letting her lead me toward the house.

Inside, Thomas had gone back into the kitchen, and I could hear Sarah and Sally talking in the other room. Alice let go of my hand and moved to the side, letting Thomas step forward and embrace me. It was getting a little weird. I’ve never been the huggiest person, not even where my kids are concerned, and they generally respected that. Having everyone I knew suddenly want to hug me was jarring.

“I told Alice you weren’t dead,” he said, then paused, catch ing himself. “Well, no, I didn’t say that, as it would have been patently untrue and she would have been well within her rights to laugh at me had I tried to convince her of something so ridiculous. I told her you weren’t gone for good, that no matter what had happened, you’d find your way back to your family.”

“That includes you, you know,” I said.

He grinned in answer. “And don’t think for a moment that I don’t appreciate that. Welcome back, Mary. We missed you.”

“I’m getting that impression,” I said. I nodded toward the living room. “That Sally I hear? She still comfortable with signing herself up for this circus?”

“We’re a carnival family,” said Alice primly. “I thought you’d know that by now.”

“Oh, very funny,” I said. “That joke certainly didn’t get old thirty years ago.”

“I mean, I didn’t, so why would my jokes?” countered Alice.

That time, I had to groan.

“What happened, Mary?” asked Thomas.

So that was how this was going to go: I was going to visit all the members of my family one by one, and they were each going to expect me to explain myself, repeating the story of the past six months over and over again until it became just so much nonsense, the words blending together to form a tapestry of sound that didn’t make any sense at all. I took a deep breath, preparing to explain. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do.

Instead, a small voice at the edge of my awareness said Mary, come back. We need you .

I held up a hand. “Sorry,” I said. “Sarah can fill you in. Right now, the anima mundi needs me. I’ll ask them to drop me back here when they’re done.”

Then I closed my eyes, and I was gone.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in the middle of a field of wheat under a beautiful twilight sky, painted in a dozen shades of blue, black, and purple. That was one of the biggest changes to have come to this in-between domain since the anima mundi took it over from the crossroads: the corn was gone, taking its ergot and its whispering leaves with it. Instead, the fields grew gold with grain, and the anima mundi moved through them, reaping as she needed to reap, scattering seeds where she walked.

This was a more balanced place now than it had ever been before, and that balance was echoed in everything around me, even the sweetness of the wind and the glitter of the stars above. The anima mundi’s domain was adjacent to the rest of the afterlife, not necessarily connected, but I felt like it was probably closet to the starlight, if that mattered at all.

There are three levels of the afterlife accessible to Earth’s dead, even if very few ghosts can travel through them all. The twilight is the closest to the lands of the living, and most human ghosts will be found there. It’s rich in road ghosts and household hauntings, specters and haints and all manner of the restless dead. Few of them linger for long, and those that do are either very powerful or very dangerous or sometimes both. My sort-of friend, Rose Marshall, is both, and she calls the twilight her home.

The twilight has never been super friendly toward the crossroads, since they used to exploit the routewitches to get their victims to them. Their servants and playthings always dwelt a layer down, in the starlight. The starlight is primarily a place for nonhuman dead to exist without needing to worry about unpleasant encounters with monster hunters. A dead monster hunter can’t kill a dead dragon a second time, but they can make things unpleasant, and nobody needs that sort of thing. If I was existing in the afterlife, I was generally down in the starlight.

Below that, where no sensible ghost goes, is the midnight. That’s the deepest part of the afterlife that a human ghost can hope to access, and I’ve never gone there voluntarily. A few times under duress, yes, but if I never have to go that deep again, I won’t be mad about it.

The anima mundi’s patch of the afterlife—if this was the afterlife; she was the living spirit of the collective world, she could just as easily have been sowing her crops on the pneuma itself—was brighter and less oppressive than the midnight, and felt comfortingly like home. It would have been easy to stay here forever, if not for the fact that my family needed me.

I turned slowly, looking around. The anima mundi themself was a short distance away in the wheat, a scythe in their hands, frowning as they studied a particularly thick clump of stalks. As always, they looked like a tall, feminine human, a composite of every woman in the world. Their skin was a brown averaged out from every skin tone among the living, and their hair was a glorious riot of curls comprised of strands in every possible color, natural or unnatural. They generally looked human, because I was looking at them with human eyes, but sometimes they would turn their head just so and I would see a streak of scales on one cheek, or the delicate tip of a horn poking upward through their hair. They were the ideas and ideals of every living, intelligent thing that lived within their slice of the universe, and sometimes I was glad they tended to wear long, voluminous skirts. I didn’t really want to see what they looked like from the waist down.

They turned their head in my direction, and I raised one hand in a careful wave, staying where I was. They weren’t a predator the way the crossroads had been, but they were close enough that I tried to be careful around them, when I wasn’t smarting off to their face. Self-preservation has never been one of my strong suits, a tendency that’s only been exacerbated by decades as an untouchable phantom. If you want to teach somebody not to be a mouthy brat, it’s a good idea not to render them immune to most forms of harm.

They smiled, slight and sweet, and swung their scythe in a careless arc, much like a cheerleader might swing a baton. As soon as that gesture was complete, they were standing directly in front of me, skipping over the space between us like a bad film splice.

“Mary Dunlavy,” they said, their voice a harmonic choral blend of a million voices all speaking at the same time, in virtually perfect synchronization. “We had hoped you would listen the first time we called you. We didn’t want to call again.”

“I try not to ignore cosmic forces when I have a choice in the matter,” I said. “You rang?”

“We have need of you, Mary Dunlavy.”

“I got that part. What do you need?”

The anima mundi blinked, looking momentarily taken aback. “The one who freed and restored us is one of yours, is she not?”

“Antimony? Yeah, she’s one of mine.”

“We thought she was the most disrespectful, impertinent child this world could ever have created, and while we were impressed by her acts and deeds, we were… less than charmed by her manner of speaking.”

“She’s always been a blunt one, our Annie. I’m sorry if she offended you. I’m sure she didn’t mean it.”

“No, she didn’t. She asked us questions no one else had ever bothered with, and she restored us to our primacy, as we always should have been.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“No problem. We just see now where she gets it.” The anima mundi smiled briefly. “Walk with us, Mary Dunlavy.”

They turned then, and started back into the wheat at a more human pace, one foot in front of the other, the individual stalks swaying behind them with every step they took. I hesitated. Following cosmic figures into fields is rarely a good idea, and this was one that I knew had the power to hurt me. She controlled the power that kept me stable as a haunting, and all the new limitations I was trying to learn how to live with had been handed down by her.

Still, ignoring the requests of cosmic powers isn’t a good idea either. I trotted after her into the grain, letting her set the pace and lead the way.

For some time, we just walked, silent, through the endless field of wheat. Finally, the anima mundi looked at me.

“What am I going to do with you, Mary Dunlavy?” they asked.

“I thought you’d already figured out what you were going to do with me, when you let me go home,” I said. “I haven’t pushed any boundaries or broken any rules, and you said I’m allowed to go to my family when they call for me.”

“Yes. We didn’t anticipate the mathematician.” They sigh. “Most of them are gone now, but the ones that remain will remain an issue. They don’t draw upon my pneuma, precisely, not as you or the sorcerers do—they pull their power from concepts outside my control, and I have no way to limit them, no means by which to prevent them from running rampant over the way things are meant to be. You’ve broken none of the new rules we set for you, Mary Dunlavy. When your family comes, you may go. You will simply stop expanding that family whenever it suits you.”

“Verity’s pregnant,” I objected. “That baby is going to be a part of my family, and I’m going to need to be able to take care of him.”

“Yes,” agreed the anima mundi. “Your family will expand, in the natural ways. Birth and acquisition, bonds of affection. But you won’t go looking for people to add to the family on your own, and you won’t volunteer your services to anyone.”

“As long as I still get to take care of the babies,” I said.

They nodded. “You have a purpose, expensive as you are, and we won’t forbid you to fulfill it. Given time, with you operative in the world, more caretakers may arise. There were so many of them once. They kept the world of the living more forgiving of the lands of the dead, and they served a vital purpose in the health of all things.”

“So we took care of you by taking care of our charges?”

“Something like that.” They kept walking. “We called you here because we have a problem, Mary Dunlavy.”

I was getting a little tired of hearing my full name. “What kind of a problem is that?”

“The Covenant should never have been allowed to flourish as they did. Had we been in our proper place, I would have stopped them long before they could come to such dominance.” The anima mundi looked, briefly, tired. “The part of us that is human rejoices to see our children rising to such heights of power and influence. The rest of us is appalled. Parts of us are missing, spaces that were once filled with voices and ideals, unique and glorious, now silenced forever. This cannot be permitted to endure.”

“Hey, I discorporated myself hauling explosives across the world to make them stop, and my reward was six months of nonexistence and you putting a hard cap on how much power I can draw from you at one time. That was my big attack. I don’t really have a better rock to throw at the Covenant, so if you were going to say that what you need me to do is wipe them out, well, you’re pretty much out of luck there.”

The anima mundi stopped walking and gave me a hard look. “We are the living spirit of this world,” they said. “The afterlife to which you cling is the shadow we cast. Your gods are the fragments of our will made manifest. You should be overjoyed to have us asking anything at all of you.”

I put my hands up, palms toward the anima mundi. “I’m not trying to be a negative Nancy here, I swear. I just know my limits. Or rather, I know what my limits were, and I know they’re more extensive now than they were before Penton Hall. If you’re going to threaten to discorporate me again if I refuse to do whatever it is you want me to do, then I guess I’m going to double-die after all. Please just remember that Annie is the reason you get to exist again, and let me go back long enough to say goodbye. My family deserves that much.”

The anima mundi gave me a withering look, then paused and sighed. “You are correct, Mary Dunlavy. We shouldn’t even seem to threaten you; it’s not fair, and you’ve done nothing to earn such treatment from us. But we do need to ask for your help with the Covenant.”

“Okay,” I said. “What help?”

“The blow you helped to deliver hurt them direly, but it didn’t stop them. If anything, it drove them to fight harder, and to find more innovative means of striking back. They aren’t as bold as they were, but they continue to chip away at the parts of me they disapprove of, and it hurts, most dearly and direly.”

“Yeah. We didn’t think it would destroy the Covenant.” Logically, what we’d done—setting up a bomb in the basement of their largest training facility—couldn’t have wiped out a global organization. They were too widespread for that. What we’d been hoping for was slowing them down and breaking some of their pipelines. Penton Hall was where they trained their new recruits, and where they kept the majority of their recordings. Depending on how much of it had been destroyed, we could have set them back years. Not forever.

“They know you were there.” The anima mundi sounded sad about that, almost resigned. “They have sensors and detectors you didn’t anticipate in your scouting, and that may explain some of the weariness which dogged your steps between transits. They know they were the victims of an active haunting.”

I bristled a little. It stung to think of the Covenant as victims of anything. We’d been fighting back, not opening hostilities. “And?”

“And they have been fighting things they consider ‘unnatural’ for centuries. They know how to capture and destroy ghosts.”

I blinked, trying to understand what this would mean for me. Finally, after a long pause punctuated only by the rustling of the grain, I asked, “Do they have a method of summoning ghosts they want to destroy?”

“Yes,” said the anima mundi. “You’re in no danger. The channels they would use to summon you are stopped up by your family, but ties that strong to the living are less common now than once they were, and they can reach so very many of your peers. The Covenant is slaughtering the ghosts they call, the unliving, silent memory of the world. This needs to stop.”

“And how am I supposed to stop it, if you can’t?”

The anima mundi sighed. “We don’t know. But you’re quite innovative, Mary Dunlavy, you and that family of yours. We understand that you once used the spirit of a dead serpent to kill a woman who had wronged you. That shows both inventiveness and a certain core of essential cruelty. We believe you can do this.”

“I can barely decide whether or not to stay solid right now!”

“We are aware.”

“If you want me to work for you, I need to be less limited.” I glared at them. “I need to be able to move between my family members without being called, and I need to do it with the sort of precision that I had before the crossroads went away. And I need to be solid when I want to be, and intangible when I want to be.”

“Would you also like to be restored to the world of the living?”

“Given that everything I just asked you for falls under the umbrella of ‘wacky ghost powers,’ no, I would not like to be restored the world of the living,” I said. “I’ve been dead so much longer than I was alive that at this point, I’m a lot more comfortable this way. Can you give me what I’m asking for or not?”

“Will you stop the Covenant from killing our ghosts?”

I paused. “I thought you said hauntings were expensive. The older a ghost is, the more predictable they tend to be, and the easier they’d be to hunt down. Those should also be the costliest ghosts to maintain. Isn’t the Covenant doing you a favor?”

“If only it were that simple,” said the anima mundi. “How nice it would be, for things to be simple for once in a long, long lifetime. But no. They do hunt and destroy the oldest ghosts, finding them easier to catch and more powerful on average, which means their goal of preventing another Penton Hall seems better served. And those old ghosts are more expensive, so removing them frees up our power for other things.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“It would be, if we had decided to dismiss those ghosts of our own accord and in our own time. We didn’t. Without them, that power is feeding back into all the other ghosts nearby, unpredictably and without proper controls.”

I blinked, processing this. “Meaning they’re juicing up a bunch of immature ghosts without any warning, and leaving those ghosts on the loose.”

“Yes.”

That would just make it easier for the Covenant to create a situation where they could dramatically unveil the existence of ghosts to the world in some irrefutable way, and get funding and support for eradication efforts. For every person who’d be overjoyed at the idea that they might be able to see Grandma again, there would be two people who wanted the foul phantoms exorcised. The first time an amateur ghost hunter managed to suck a domesticate into a jar, we’d get to see war break out across the human race. Sure, to you, it’s just a ghost dog, but to the kid who was walking beside it, it’s Bruno, most beloved creature the world has ever known.

“This is bad,” I said.

“Yes,” agreed the anima mundi, blandly.

“This is really, really bad.” I turned away. “We need to stop this. Do you know where these ghost hunters are?”

“Most of them seem to be operating on the East Coast.”

“New York again?”

“No. That nest was well and truly eliminated. These are further up the coast, in Boston and in Portland.”

“Want a good haunting, aim for New England, I guess,” I said grimly. “All right, that makes a certain amount of sense. Lots of old hauntings in that area, and not that many of my kids. What do you want me to do about it?”

“We want you to find the Covenant killers who are behind this, and eliminate them,” said the anima mundi. “We don’t care particularly how you achieve it. None of them will linger in our afterlife. The twilight is closed to them.”

That was grim. Most people don’t linger after death—it’s not a super fun state to find yourself in, unless you have such strong ties to the world that you don’t have any other choice, and even those of us who have jobs waiting for us don’t tend to enjoy it. Happy ghosts are rare ghosts. Even so, most of the dead people I’ve met have been happy to know that they had a choice. They could linger, like I had, or they could move straight into the next stage of existence, but they got to decide, to some degree.

Even the ones who linger aren’t cut and dried. Most dead folks don’t have the strength to stick around for more than a few days if they don’t fall easily and immediately into some sort of defined haunting, like the drag racers who die and become Phantom Riders, or the kids who die and become ever-lasters, eternally returning to the classrooms where they studied in life, never reaching graduation.

There are a lot of sad stories in the afterlife. I mean, it’s where the dead people live, with a few terrifying exceptions, and death is pretty sad for most living things. Even if you linger, you’re not the same. See also “the anima mundi can set the rules of my existence without giving me a vote” and “that same anima mundi can apparently just decide that no one from the Covenant is going to become a ghost.” There’s no discussion, no negotiation. There’s just the anima mundi, and whatever they decide.

“I can go wherever my kids are,” I said slowly. “That was your rule, right?”

“Our rule was that you could go wherever they called you,” said the anima mundi. “For now, at your request, we will widen that to allow you to move between them according to your whim. You may have what you’ve requested. But this enhancement of your restrictions cannot last forever.”

“But for now, it’s like old times, and I can go wherever my kids are.”

The anima mundi nodded, looking intensely put-upon.

“I can work with that,” I said. Already, the outline of a plan was starting to form. “What resources can we have?”

“Excuse us?”

“You heard me. We’re going ghost hunter–hunting for you, we’re going to need some resources. Some sort of fancy map or something.”

“Oh, for…” The anima mundi pinched the bridge of their nose, then waved their hands in the air like they were protesting the entire conversation. Which, I’ll note, they started. “Before the Great Disruption, ghosts feared us properly. We’re the living spirit of this world, and your individual existence after death is purely upon our sufferance! You should be bowing down before us, not making insolent demands!”

“I’m pretty sure this is why gods are supposed to keep their distance,” I said. “You get a pantheon where the gods never show up at the village meetings, you get respect and mystery. Start showing up to discuss local politics and you get the Greeks in pretty short order.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning familiarity breeds contempt, or at least comfort, which starts with the same letter for a good reason. I can’t bow down and quake in fear. If I did that, I wouldn’t be able to look you in the eye and ask you what you need. You want me to go to Boston and figure out who’s killing your ghosts? Fine, I can do that. I even know how I’m going to do it. But it’s going to take me a little while to get there, because I can’t do it alone.”

The anima mundi frowned. “Then you agree?”

“I agree,” I said. “For now, though, can you put me back where you found me? I need to talk to my family.”

The anima mundi nodded. “It is done,” they said, and it was, and I was gone. Again.