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“Everyone has their part to play in the story of the world. Some of those parts are tragedies. I wish it didn’t have to be that way, but mine is not the hand that holds the pen.”

—Juniper Campbell

The kitchen of the Old Parrish Place, a crumbling farmhouse that (probably) isn’t haunted by evil spirits

T HE ANIMA MUNDI WAS AS good as their word: they put me back exactly where they’d found me, in the kitchen of the Old Parrish Place. They didn’t put me back exactly when they’d found me; I don’t know if even they had that sort of power. I appeared, and the sky outside the windows was dark. There was a casserole dish of something layered and tomato-based on the stove, several large portions already missing, and the whole kitchen smelled of meat and cheese.

It was a scene I’d seen play out hundreds of times, in multiple different households. This could have been the Healy family home on the other side of the tree line, with Fran or Enid building the layers of their lasagna one lovingly placed noodle at a time. Or it could have been Evie in Portland, or Jane, although her lasagna had always used ground turkey and half the recommended quantity of cheese. There had even been lasagna nights in this house, before Thomas vanished, and knowing that they were happening again was restorative in a way I had never considered.

There was a basket of bread on the counter, already sliced and smelling strongly of garlic and butter. I picked it up, tucking it under my arm, and started for the dining room.

The Old Parrish Place was originally built by a farmer who truly believed he was going to make his fortune on the edge of the Galway Wood, raising a large family and harvesting the riches of the land. He designed his home accordingly. It was one of the first houses in Buckley with a formal dining room, or as formal as you could get in rural Michigan. It had doorways to the kitchen and the family room. While I’d seen the family room itself undergo various transformations throughout the years, the dining room had always remained essentially the same, dominated by a massive oak table that pre-dated Thomas’s ownership of the house.

Sometimes papers and books would creep in to threaten the table’s dominion, but not tonight: tonight, the table had been cleared of everything except for dinner. Lasagna, a full bowl of salad, and large tumbler glasses of what looked like iced tea for Sally, milk for Alice and Thomas, and tomato juice for Sarah. A smaller table, sized for a dollhouse, had been set up where a centerpiece would normally go, with dollhouse-sized platters and serving dishes on it, each holding a portion of the night’s meal.

It was an impressive spread, especially for only four people. Thomas sat at the head of the table, with Alice at his right and Sally at his left, while Sarah sat at Alice’s right. Sarah was the first to notice me. She perked up as I stepped into the room, her expression brightening, but she didn’t turn my way.

There was probably a reason for that, and so I didn’t say anything as I finished walking over to the table and put the bread down in front of Alice. “You forgot this,” I said. “Also, you’re slowing down. You should have thrown a knife through my head before I cleared the doorway.”

“Sarah’s here,” said Alice serenely, taking a piece of bread and passing the basket to Thomas. She ripped the bread in half and leaned over to place part of it next to the tiny table. “If you were something hostile, she’d have picked up your thoughts and alerted us.”

“And if she couldn’t read my mind?”

“She’d still have been able to see you, and seeing you when she couldn’t read your mind would definitely have led to her alerting us.” Alice finally turned in my direction, smiling so widely and warmly that I felt suddenly terrible for having been called away, even though I knew it wasn’t even a little bit my fault. “Welcome back. How was the anima mundi?”

“Obfuscatory and confusing, as always. I was just telling them they can’t keep talking to me and expect me, or probably any member of my family, to address them with deference and respect. Hard to respect things you know too well.”

“The mice manage it,” said Sally.

I fixed her with a look. “The mice have a religious rite centered around Alice’s conception. They used to celebrate it in the kitchen, until Enid told them mice who insisted on recreating her son’s idea of foreplay where she’d have to see it were making her reconsider her decision not to get a cat. I’m not seeing a lot of respect there.”

“They respect. They just don’t have a lot of illusions,” said Sarah, taking a piece of bread as Sally passed her the basket. She smiled serenely at me, then dipped her bread into her tomato juice.

“You’re going to get crumbs in your glass,” I said automatically.

“I know,” said Sarah. “It’s like having bonus oatmeal if you do it enough.”

Sally stared at her. “That’s disgusting.”

“Everyone’s here now,” said Thomas. “We can alert the congregation.”

Which meant they’d invoked one of the various “bribery for a moment’s peace” rituals that could be used to keep the mice out from underfoot. I circled the table to settle quickly at Sally’s right, and Alice nodded, tilting her head back so that she was addressing the ceiling.

In her best “I spent my summers as a carnival barker” voice, she shouted, “For lo, did not the Patient Priestess say, It Is Lasagna Night, and You Had Better Get Your Butt to the Table Before It Gets Cold?” She managed to pronounce every single capital letter, a skill she’d picked up from the mice when she was still a child. She’d been adorable back then, this tiny girl with fluffy blonde curls making nonsensical religious commandments with all the fervor of a fire-and-brimstone preacher.

There’s nothing like a colony of talking mice for taking the gravity out of organized religion. Fortunately for me, my father had been dead by the time the Healys trusted me enough to let me meet the mice, or Sunday mornings at church would have become infinitely more awkward. The first time I yelled “HAIL!” at the end of a sermon, I would have been in serious trouble.

Summoned by Alice’s declaration, mice began to pour out of holes cut into the baseboards, flooding the floor and running up the legs of the table. The holes they emerged from were small enough that they’d been able to blend in to the general darkness of the hardwood floor and navy-blue wallpaper. It was semi-intentional camouflage; while not many people outside the family were allowed into the house, it was occasionally necessary to allow allies inside, and the dining room was usually the location for any important strategy meetings that needed to happen. Keeping people from realizing just how thoroughly infested the place was by rodents was a good idea.

The Aeslin mice swarming onto the table ran first for the smaller version of the meal that had been set up for them, then stopped one by one as they noticed me. It was pretty funny, especially because it didn’t happen all at the same time. One mouse would stop, another mouse would run into them, and then both mice would stare at me, becoming a rock for the rest of the wave to break against.

In the end, not a mouse reached the lasagna, and not a sound was made. It was unnerving, having so many little rodent eyes fixed on me, not a one of them blinking, all of them shining with a brilliance that had nothing to do with the overhead lights.

Thomas sipped his iced tea. “This one’s your problem, Mary. I’ve already done my version of the presentation.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t go missing for fifty years,” I protested.

The mice kept staring.

I suppose it would have been too much to ask for the family to wait and be sure I was actually dead before they told the mice about it. Even if they’d wanted to, Annie had gone to Penton Hall with the stated intention of rescuing the colony of Aeslin mice living there, the descendants of the splinter colony that accompanied Charles and Ava when they chose not to go with their parents into exile. (If that doesn’t make any sense, don’t worry about it. I’ve been with this family for something like seventy years now, and sometimes I still get confused. Feed the children, comfort the babies, and love them, and it all works out in the end.)

Aeslin mice are capable of many things. They can even keep secrets when they have good reason. But there’s no force in this world that will compel them to keep secrets from family, or from another clergy when that clergy is impacted by the secrets in question. The mice who’d seen me lost would have gone straight to my congregation and told them everything they knew. Not out of malice: out of mercy.

When your gods can be destroyed, there’s good reason to stay committed to knowing exactly where they are and what they’re doing. When your gods have absolutely no sense of self-preservation—when your gods are Price-Healys, in other words—there’s not just good reason, there’s an obligation. Some of these mice were no doubt mine, having chosen the path of the Phantom Priestess when they grew old enough in mouse terms to pledge themselves to a specific liturgical branch of their church. I’d been dead before they pledged themselves to me, but there’s dead and then there’s gone, and I’d never been gone.

“Um, hi,” I said, offering the mice a little wave. “Reports of my destruction have been greatly exaggerated.”

“HAIL!” shouted one of the mice, whiskers pushed forward in ecstasy. “HAIL THE RETURN OF THE PHANTOM PRIESTESS!”

Slowly at first, but with growing enthusiasm, the rest of the congregation picked up the chant, all of them shouting and swaying and staring at me. I grimaced.

“I’m sure glad I don’t eat anymore,” I said. “This would be enough to make me lose my appetite.”

“We’re used to it,” said Sarah, dipping her bread in her tomato juice again.

Sally snickered.

Alice glanced at me, smiled, and took pity. Pushing her chair back, she stood and clapped her hands together. The mice quieted and focused on her, absolutely attentive. They used to respond to Enid that way, paying absolute attendance to the oldest priestess in the room.

Thoughts of Enid still ached a little, as they probably always would. She’d died badly, and for a while I’d hoped that meant she might stick around for a while, even if it was as one of the types of ghost who never manifested in the lands of the living. I could have kept her a secret if it had meant she was there for me to lean on and turn to.

But she didn’t linger after she died. In my experience, Healy women never did. I’d buried two of them now—three if we counted Jane—and none of them chose to stay.

“Rejoice, rejoice, for the Phantom Priestess is returned to us, having defeated death a second time to come home to her family and her faithful,” she said. The mice cheered, but cut themselves off quickly, recognizing that Alice wasn’t done.

“She will tell you the story of her absence, that it might be added to the liturgy— later. Now is the time of feasting, and did not the Violent Priestess say Lasagna Is Essentially Cake, For It Has Noodles Made of Dough and Layers of Cheese? Eat and be glad that she has been returned, no longer to fade into the silence that awaits for the divine once they walk no more among us.”

The mice cheered again, and this time they swarmed the tiny table, picking it clean in a matter of seconds. Thomas responded by shoving a full-sized plate substantially more laden-down with food in their direction, and Alice tossed half the basket of garlic bread into the middle of the teeming mass of mice.

With much cheering and chatter, the mice ran down the table legs, now clutching their offerings. They would carry them back to the central colony—located in the attic in Portland and at the Healy house, located in the disused sun room here at the Old Parrish Place—and share them with the rest of the mice, making sure children and elders were able to eat even if they weren’t physically suited to scavenging for their food. It was a tidy system, and one they’d been practicing for so long that it ran without a hitch in the present day. In a matter of seconds, the only sign that the mice had ever been there was the perfectly cleaned tiny table, which didn’t look like it had been used for anything.

Sally took a drink of her iced tea.

I turned to eye Alice. “You set me up,” I accused. “You knew the mice would be happy to see me, and you waited to call them for dinner until they could all come and stare at me.”

“Never met a bandage I didn’t think would be better served by pulling it off,” said Alice cheerfully. “They were going to find out sooner or later, and this way it happened all at once, with a promise that you’ll tell them what happened, which puts in on your own time, rather than sending a constant stream of mice to sniff around looking for the missing scripture.”

It was difficult to argue with her logic. No one had more experience with the mice than Alice did, and if she said something was the right way to handle them, she was probably right. That didn’t make it any less annoying.

“They do not need an excuse for another liturgical scavenger hunt,” said Sally, putting more lasagna on her plate. “When we got back from New York, they spent a solid week following the boss around the house and stealing his toenail clippings.”

“You still call Thomas ‘boss’?” I asked, halfway amused.

She shrugged. “What? You’d prefer ‘Daddy’?”

Alice wrinkled her nose. Sarah snorted with amusement, then resumed dipping her bread in her juice. Thomas just kept placidly eating, like a man who’d figured out when it was in his best interests to keep his mouth shut.

I turned my focus on Sarah. “So where are you living right now, kiddo?”

She shrugged, looking down at her plate. “The variable changes,” she said. “It shifts with needs.”

“You came to me pretty late,” I said. “Not as late as Sally and James, maybe, but still, you were seven before I babysat you for the first time. So maybe you don’t realize this, but pretending you don’t understand what I’m asking enough to answer using your words instead of math terms isn’t going to work with me. I don’t want to pressure you, but you can’t deflect me either.”

Sarah glanced up again, focusing on my face for a moment. I always wondered what she saw when she did that. Her species is fully face-blind: telepathy means never needing to say “who are you?” when you’re talking to somebody unfamiliar. She still sees expressions, but most people don’t register with her as individuals, and she doesn’t pick up on a lot of nuance. The world must be fascinating through her eyes.

“I meant what I said, even if I said it that way to be confusing,” she said. “Where am I living? Around. Sometimes I’m here, with Grandma and Grandpa. Greg likes the woods, and there’s enough room out there for him to exhibit a lot of natural behaviors that he can’t get away with when he’s in less-rural places.”

“And the woods don’t mind that?” I asked delicately, shooting a glance at Alice.

The Galway Woods are alive. Oh, all forest biomes are alive —they wouldn’t be biomes if they weren’t alive—but the Galway is special. Whatever it is, I don’t know, but something about that forest is alive, aware, and capable of having opinions. And it loves Alice. It’s loved her since she was a child, and it loved her mother before her. Maybe it’s a Kairos thing; it’s probably easier to arrange the world to coincidentally go your way when the local ecosystem is actively in love with you. But I don’t really know. No one does. Except for hybrids like Alice and her side of the family, there aren’t any Kairos left.

Alice shrugged. “They’re not thrilled, but they’ve been dealing with a population explosion among the deer for the last few years, and having something that likes to snack on them is good for the whole ecology.”

“And there’s only one of him,” added Sarah. “I think the woods would probably be a lot less friendly about it if we had a whole bunch of him. Sometimes I think about trying to figure out the math to put him back where I found him, or to go over myself and find him a girlfriend. But I don’t actually know what their home groups are like, and if he’s from a species where the female eats the male after mating, I’d be really upset.”

Her voice started to shake toward the end there. To my surprise, it was Sally who leaned over to pat Sarah gently on the wrist. “It’s cool, bird-girl,” she said. “No one’s going to take your horrifying giant emotional support spider away. You can unclench.”

Sarah offered her a weak smile. “Sorry,” she said.

“Eat your tomato pudding,” said Sally, gesturing toward Sarah’s sodden garlic bread. “You’ll feel better.”

Sarah did as she was told. I caught my breath, refocusing on Alice and Thomas.

Greg was Sarah’s emotional support animal, and having him around really did help to keep her stable. Poor kid, she’d been through a lot in the past few years, but then, we all had. And it wasn’t Greg’s fault that he was a jumping spider the size of a Clydesdale horse. He just limited the places where Sarah could easily spend her time, since he needed an immense amount of space to hunt, and no one really wanted to find out what would happen if somebody spotted him. Nothing good, that was for sure.

“It’s good to see you both, but I can’t stick around,” I said.

“We didn’t assume you’d be able to, really,” said Thomas. “Not with the anima mundi calling you away almost as soon as you got here. That’s new, isn’t it?”

“We’re currently renegotiating the terms of my haunting,” I said. “Things are still up in the air with the crossroads gone, and I need to figure out how I fit into this new spiritual ecosystem. The anima mundi is helping me with that.” Putting things into conservationist terms would make them easier for my family to understand, even if they weren’t exactly accurate.

“What does that mean?” asked Alice.

“It means that a long time ago, caretakers—which you may have heard referred to as ‘nanny ghosts’—were common, but they fell out of favor as infant mortality dropped and people got more diligent about making sure their babysitters weren’t dead,” I said. “I guess they had less bandwidth to worry about the babysitter’s health when they were spending all their time worrying about the baby’s. Anyway, when there were a lot of them, they had well-defined rules and restrictions for their hauntings. And since most of the caretakers are gone, and that’s the closest category of ghost I can fit into, the anima mundi is having to try to adjust the terms of the haunting I had with the crossroads to keep me from being too much of a power sink. It’s not like they can compare me to all the other caretakers when there just aren’t many left. And it turns out the crossroads weren’t very interested in clarity or restraint when it came to defining their ghosts.”

“Aren’t there any other former crossroads ghosts you could talk to?” asked Alice.

I paused. “There’s one,” I said, after a momentary pause. “I don’t like her very much, and she’s sort of an asshole, but she still exists, and I could probably seek her out and talk to her. She didn’t have the same hybrid haunt that I did, though—she was alive, and then she was a crossroads ghost, no frills or fussing about, and now she’s a reaper.”

“How do you make that transition?” asked Thomas.

Sally shot him the look I had come to recognize as “what the actual hell is going on please explain,” and he smiled. I wondered if he understood how fondly he looked at her. I suspected he did. You don’t court Alice Healy without being very aware of your own emotions, because that woman has never met a feeling she couldn’t ignore for as long as humanly possible.

“A reaper is a type of ghost responsible for shepherding the souls of the recently dead into the next level of the afterlife, assuming they’re not going to hang about and become permanent residents like Miss Mary here,” he said. “We don’t know much about them, because they’re entirely disinterested in interacting with the living, or at least that’s what I understand.” He glanced at me.

“Reapers aren’t chatty, no,” I said. “Bethany probably fits right in.” That wasn’t fair. She’d been totally chatty when I’d met her. Unpleasant and unnecessarily catty, but conversational. I just liked the idea of her trying to deal with an eternity where she had no one to talk to. Call me petty, but I don’t like it when people try to hurt me, or my friends.

“And she’s the only one?” asked Alice.

“As far as I know,” I said. “All the other crossroads ghosts faded away when the crossroads were destroyed. I’m not sure the older ones really noticed what was happening to them. They had a tendency to lose their humanity over time, like rocks losing their sharp edges after years in running water.”

“But you held on to yours,” said Sally, clearly trying to keep up with conversation. “How?”

“Her.” I gestured toward Alice. “Taking care of this little hellion kept me tied to what I originally was, and I didn’t fade into something eldritch and uncaring like the rest of them. I got bitter and sarcastic instead.”

“I like you bitter and sarcastic,” said Sarah shyly.

I smiled at her. “That’s because it’s all you’ve ever known. I promise, I can be bracing to adults who meet me for the first time.”

“You talk like the boss,” said Sally. “I was honestly a lot more disconcerted by the whole ‘dead and still standing here talking to us’ thing than I was by the sarcasm. The sarcasm was comforting. It meant I was back in a world where people had the energy and the luxury to be sarcastic. Not a lot of space for sarcasm in the barren wasteland.”

“You really were in hell,” I said, looking straight at Thomas, who laughed.

“We were,” he agreed. “But it was worth it, in the end.”

I suppose it had been. So much had happened while he was gone—he’d missed the entire childhoods of his children, and almost the entirety of Jane’s life. He hadn’t even known her well enough to truly mourn her; he was missing the faint air of melancholy that I’d picked up around almost every member of the family I’d seen so far. Even Alice, whose relationship with Jane had been fraught at best, looked quietly heartbroken when she wasn’t focusing on something else.

And yet, for Thomas, he’d come back to a world where his family was flourishing, his wife was miraculously not only still alive but by his side, the crossroads were gone, and the healing of the anima mundi meant that sorcerers might return to the world. The Covenant was lashing out in desperation, and best of all, everyone who’d ever tried to hurt him was dead, meaning that for the first time in his life, he didn’t have to spend every waking hour looking over his shoulder. He was close to free. For him, all the losses really had been worth it.

I didn’t want to think of losing Jane as having been worth anything at all. I returned my attention to Alice. “The anima mundi needs to curtail the amount of energy I pull from the pneuma just to stay on this plane of existence,” I said. “That means the rules I operate by are going to be changing. They already are. Right now, I’m pretty flexible, but going forward, assume you’ll only see me if you call for me.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“Before, I could come to you whether you called for me or not. All you had to do was need me, and I could be there, assuming the crossroads didn’t have me off doing something horrible. Now, you’ll need to actively call for me. I can probably negotiate something less constrictive with the preverbal kids, because they can’t possibly call my name, but I won’t be able to just pop in and out the way I could before.”

Alice frowned, a line appearing between her eyebrows. It made her look so much like Fran that it would have taken my breath away, if I’d had any breath left to take. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“It is and it isn’t,” I said. “I’ll just be restricted like a living babysitter would be. The kids will be able to get into trouble when I’m not looking. Think back. Remember how I used to appear when you didn’t want me to? When you were absolutely sure you were on top of things? Maybe it’s better this way. I’d be tempted to hover now that the crossroads aren’t keeping me occupied all the time, and the new generation would never have the opportunity to make messes. You needed those messes if you were going to grow up ready to deal with the world the way you were supposed to.”

“That’s not enough of a limitation to explain the look on your face,” said Alice. “What else?”

“I can’t decide to adopt new family members anymore,” I said. Sally looked momentarily alarmed, and I shook my head. “No, honey, not you. Not Sarah either. Both of you were brought into the family by somebody else. But when that asshole from the Covenant snatched Annie’s friend Megan, we were able to find her by convincing her mother to hire me as her babysitter. As soon as I took the job, I could ‘hear’ Megan the way I can hear any of you, and that let me go to her. I can’t do that anymore. So I guess it’s less that I can’t adopt new family members, and more that I can’t take on more clients.” I could still “hear” Megan if I concentrated. That was going to be interesting. Was my position as her babysitter going to be hereditary the way it was with the Price-Healys? Did her already being a client mean she was grandfathered in somehow?

Well, if it did, that was fine, I’d just have to learn the proper techniques for taking care of baby gorgons. I could probably start earlier than I did with human babies, assuming they hatched from eggs the same way snakes did—a big assumption, and yet not too far out of line for some of the things I’d seen.

“All right,” said Alice. “That’s not too bad. Was that all the anima mundi needed?”

“No. The Covenant’s still in North America.”

“We knew that,” said Thomas. “They took grave losses at Penton Hall. Most of their trainers, and a huge portion of their archives. But they weren’t eliminated, and the ones who are behind this invasion can’t give up and back down. If they did, they’d be telling the rest of the Covenant that they’re weak, and open themselves to infighting.”

“I don’t like these people,” I said.

“None of us do,” said Alice.

“Well, the Covenant that’s here in North America is getting on the anima mundi’s nerves. They’ve started hunting ghosts. Someone saw me, and told the rest of the Covenant that you’d been able to attack them the way you did because you had a ghost with them.”

“That’s technically true,” said Sarah. “Without your assistance, we would have been unable to transport the explosive devices we used to demolish the building.”

“I have faith in Annie’s ability to make things explode,” I said. “You would have figured out another way. You’re creative people.” I even managed to sound like I meant what I was saying, which was possibly the most difficult part of what I was saying.

“Regardless,” said Sarah, and sipped her tomato juice.

“Because the Covenant thinks I was key to the attack plan, they’ve been harassing the dead. They’re posted up somewhere near Boston, where they can find the greatest density of older ghosts who might be powerful enough to help with something like the attack. I don’t know if they’re trying to catch them and mount a counterassault, or whether they’re just destroying them, but either way, the anima mundi doesn’t like it. Removing the ghosts releases all the energy that was being fed into their hauntings and sends it lashing around, messing with things.”

“That sounds… bad,” said Alice.

“The anima mundi sure seems to think so. The energy has to go somewhere, and apparently it can cause newer ghosts to get too strong and become problematic. I’m not entirely clear on how it works. All this metaphysical stuff goes right over my head most of the time. Just because I am this metaphysical stuff, that doesn’t make it one of my strong points. Anyway, they want me to head up there and stop all this nonsense. How, not really sure about that either. I told them I had a plan, because the best way to find a plan is to get moving and figure it out on the way.”

“How are you planning to accomplish this?” asked Thomas.

“Well, I figured I’d start by heading for New York,” I said. “I don’t expect Verity can be much help right now, between mourning for Dominic and being eight months pregnant.”

“She’s very angry,” said Sarah, eyes on her lasagna as she spoke. “She wants to hurt the Covenant more than she’s ever wanted just about anything, even to dance. Please don’t tell her about your mission. If you do, she’ll try to go with you. She’ll want to help. And she could get hurt, or the baby could get hurt, and I don’t think she could live with that once she recovered.”

“I won’t tell her, I promise,” I said.

Sarah glanced in my direction and mustered a very slight smile. I wasn’t sure she could actually, physically see me. Her eyes were unfocused and glowing very faintly. “Thank you,” she said. “How are you going to explain showing up there?”

“I’ll just tell her I wanted to check on her and the baby, and make sure she knows I’m back in the land of the living, even if it’s on a temporary visa.” I sighed. “I do need to pick up some physically manifest help, though, or I’m never going to pull this off.”

“What about Rose?” asked Alice.

“Also dead,” I said. “The anima mundi would have sent her if they wanted a two-ghost tag team to take on whatever the hell the Covenant is doing. I’m assuming they want to keep from losing two of their favorite toys in the same mission.”

She exchanged a look with Thomas, who grimaced but nodded. “We could help,” she said. “We’ll come back to New York with you, if you want us to.”

I paused to consider her offer. Thomas was an experienced, powerful sorcerer, and Alice was a nightmare in combat. Sally was no slouch herself. The three of them could be a great asset, and it was with extreme reluctance that I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “Even apart from the fact that I’m not sure I could bring you anywhere near your pregnant granddaughter without you deciding you needed to stay and help her, and deal with the ghost issue later—and that would be completely valid of you to do, ‘family first’ is the rule for a reason—any Covenant we ran into would stand too high a chance of recognizing you. The only one I’d feel halfway safe taking into the field is Sally, and neither of you is going to let me run off with her.”

“I’m supposed to fly to the West Coast next week to see James, anyway,” said Sally. “We didn’t really get a lot of time to catch up before, and we need it.”

James was Sally’s best friend, and had been since long before either one of them was involved with our carnival sideshow of a family. They grew up in the same small town in Maine, and she’d made the crossroads bargain that eventually threw her into Thomas’s path in order to set James free. They needed the time together more than I needed Sally in specific to help me.

“I can’t,” said Sarah. “When I’m around Covenant people, I do bad things.”

I nodded. “I know, sweetheart. I wasn’t going to ask you. And I can’t go to Ohio—Shelby and Alex are busy with Charlotte and Isaac, and I’m really trying not to orphan anybody if I can help it. We’ve dealt with enough parental abandonment in this family to last us a dozen lifetimes. I figure I’ll pop back to Portland and see if anyone there wants to go on a road trip. It’s only, what, a week to drive from Portland to New York? Less if we can flag down a passing routewitch and convince them to bend the distance for us.”

Sarah blinked at me, looking suddenly alarmed.

“Artie isn’t— You can’t ask— He might say yes just because he feels like he would have said yes before everything that happened, and then you’d have an unstable incubus in the field with you, and he could get hurt.”

“Sweetie, any of us can get hurt any time we’re in the field,” I said, patiently. “Even me, as Penton Hall so brutally reminded us. There’s no safety outside a controlled environment, and I’m not going to pretend he’s not still a member of this family just because he’s a little scrambled right now. But he doesn’t have the kind of experience I’m looking for. I’ll see whether Kevin’s up for a road trip, or maybe Annie and Sam. They’re pretty good at this sort of thing.” As if they had ever dealt with this sort of thing before.

As if this were a sort of thing any of us had ever had to deal with. We were striding quickly into uncharted territory, and I didn’t have much time to figure out how we were going to emerge from the other side. I looked to Alice. “How much trouble are you going to be in with the mice if I don’t stick around to tell them what happened to me right this second? I promise I’ll come back as soon as I can take the time.”

“I’ve heard that one before,” she said, with a slight roll of her eyes. Then she nodded. “It’s all right, Mary. If you need to go, you can go. I’ll placate the mice, and while they’re not going to forget that you owe them a liturgical recounting for their records, they’re usually easy to bribe with a chocolate layer cake, especially if I’m willing to put frosting roses on it. But you need to keep your promises. I buried my daughter and my son-in-law, but I couldn’t bury you.”

“Your mother did that a long time ago,” I murmured. “She took care of everything.”

They’d found my body in the ditch where it had been thrown by the truck that hit me, swallowed by roots and hidden by cornstalks, and they’d dug it up and carried it back to the old Healy place to bury in the back field, where I could be at rest in the presence of people who cared about me. Maybe that was part of why I’d been so easy to tie to the family, even with the crossroads pulling on me the way they had been. The crossroads may have owned my soul, but the rest of me was buried on Healy land.

“Yeah, well, I still thought I’d lost you, and having a dead babysitter means I’m never supposed to lose you. That’s the way this works. So be careful this time, and come back to us.”

Thomas shot her a sharp but distinctly fond look. “Are you telling someone else that they should be careful?” he asked. “Has one or more of the hells frozen over?”

“Quiet, you,” said Alice, and cuffed him in the shoulder.

Seeing them like this—comfortable and domestic, not running for their lives or struggling to claw what fragments of joy they could out of a world where the clock was rapidly running out on them—healed something in my heart that I hadn’t known was still wounded. I smiled.

“I promise,” I said, and blew Alice a kiss, and was gone.