Page 7

“Life is a tragedy and death is a comedy, and the reverse is also true.”

—Apple Tanaka

The bedroom of Elsinore Harrington-Price, trying to deal with the fact that I’ve just been decapitated

I BLINKED AS I WATCHED my body pitch forward, landing on the bedroom floor in a heap. At least it wasn’t doing that cliched “grope around, looking for your own severed head” routine. That was funny in like, one zombie movie, all the way back in the 1970s. Fifty years later it’s just tired, and I would have been ashamed to be a part of it.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even roll, which made sense: most of the muscles the head uses to move around are located in the neck, and Elsie’s machete had caught me right at the base of the skull, leaving me neatly decapitated and without enough musculature to do more than lay where I was and stare at my own fallen body.

Elsie wasn’t screaming anymore. That was a good start toward opening a reasonable discussion—I hoped. “Hey, Elsie,” I said, my voice coming out a little strained and barely recognizable, due to my lack of vocal cords. Still, I could force air through my remaining esophagus and out my mouth, which still shaped words the way it always had. Accent is a surprising amount of vocal familiarity. “New way of saying hello, huh?”

She looked at me and screamed again. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she hit the floor with a thump, dropping her machete in the process. Luckily for both of us, it fell harmlessly to one side rather than impaling her.

“Elsie?” I said. “Elsie? You all right over there?”

She didn’t respond, not even to groan. Right. I’d never been decapitated before, and was a little surprised that it had worked, given that I’d only been semi-tangible when I was leaning through the door, but it was neither the worst nor the weirdest thing that had ever happened to me. I tried to think of what might solve the problem, beyond Elsie and a big roll of duct tape, closed my eyes, and dropped myself down into the twilight.

As always, the twilight was the manifestation of the most-loved and treasured aspects of the living area it mirrored. For this part of Portland, that meant it was largely a forest, with a few buildings dotted here and there among the towering trees. There were more buildings in the downtown area, where most of the local ghosts “lived” for lack of a better word: they spent their time and did their business there. It was a large-enough metro area, as cities in the twilight went, to have attracted a Dullahan: Declan Mark, a practicing doctor and dissector of corpses.

Dullahan are strange. They’re not dead, because they were never alive. They arise from somewhere deeper than the twilight. Most people think they’re from the starlight, since they’re nonhuman intelligences. I think they’re from all the way down in the midnight, arising from the level that gives birth to so many human nightmares. I’ve never been friendly enough with one of them to get away with asking.

As I had hoped, I appeared in the twilight back in one piece, although I was now flat on my stomach in the ghost of the loam that had existed here before the house’s foundations were poured. I pushed myself back to my feet and dusted the debris off my stomach before reaching up to cautiously feel my throat. There was no seam in my flesh or other sign that I had just done my best Anne Boleyn impression, which was a pleasant thing to have confirmed. Having never been decapitated before, I hadn’t been sure.

I crossed my arms and firmly nodded my head in my best impression of the titular character from I Dream of Jeannie, a sitcom almost as old as I am but substantially more dated, and the twilight fell away, leaving me once more standing in Elsie’s bedroom. Where Elsie was still flat on the floor in a dead faint. I checked her pulse. She had one, and she was breathing; both of those were good things, given the alternatives.

Signs of life verified, I picked up her machete and put it gently on the bed, where she wouldn’t flail around and hurt herself as she woke up. With this accomplished, I sat down cross-legged on the floor to wait for her to open her eyes.

It took a while. I had time to mentally review the events of the day, then the events at Penton Hall, and then a full circuit of “Rattlin’ Bog,” from the tree in the bog all the way to the sub-molecular parallel dimension contained in the mote of dust on the feather on a little bird’s wing. I was getting ready to loop the song back in on itself when Elsie groaned and began to stir.

I stopped my silent recitation and held perfectly still, giving her the time to finish waking and sit up. When she did, I raised one hand in a small wave. “Hi,” I said.

Elsie screamed again.

“Catch a bubble, please,” I said, in my most authoritative voice. I was quietly gratified when she promptly snapped her mouth shut, cutting off the scream, and just stared at me. Somehow, despite multiple screams, neither her father nor her brother had come rushing to see what was going on. That was oddly less surprising than the absence of the mice. I would have expected at least part of Elsie’s congregation to come charging in by now.

“It’s time to be calm, friend, and stop yelling,” I said. “Can you do that for me?”

Eyes still wide and glossy with shock, Elsie nodded. I smiled.

“Good girl,” I said. “You can pop your bubble now.”

Elsie exhaled, then asked, quickly, before I could tell her to be quiet again, “Are you really Mary? If you’re not Mary, you need to tell me.”

“I don’t think that’s a rule a hostile spirit is going to listen to, Elsie,” I said patiently. “But yes, I’m really Mary. I’m sorry I was gone for so long. I didn’t mean to be.”

Her mouth dropped open as she stared at me. “I thought you were… Antimony and Sarah took you away, and then they came back without you, and I thought… Don’t you ever do that again, do you understand me? You’re not allowed to scare me like that!”

“I didn’t mean to scare anyone,” I said. “I was doing what I could to help the family. We needed to stop the Covenant.”

“We still need to stop the Covenant,” she said, grimly. “They’re still out there hurting people. The man who killed my mother is still out there. Blowing up Penton Hall didn’t stop him.”

“No, it wouldn’t have,” I said, quietly. “Elsie, I never told you how sorry I was about what happened.”

“Did you see her at all? After she died? You said she wasn’t coming back, but did you see her, or did you just guess that she was gone when you couldn’t find her?”

“I saw her,” I said, keeping my voice soft. “She didn’t have any unfinished business.”

“She had me, ” said Elsie stridently. “She had her daughter. Or was I not important enough to stick around for?”

“We’ve talked about the rules that govern ghosts enough that you know that isn’t how any of this works, Elsie,” I said. “If children were enough to bind unquiet spirits to the world, no parents would ever move on to whatever comes next. She didn’t have the kind of unfinished business that would define a haunting, and so she chose to go, rather than staying and fading into a whisper on the wind and a cold patch in the hall.”

“But I wasn’t ready for her to leave me.”

“No one ever is, baby. I’m dead, and I wasn’t ready for her to leave me, either.”

Elsie sniffled, and the first tears rolled down her cheeks, fat and round and obviously too long in coming. “I hate this. I hate it so much. Why do I have to lose my mother? I already lost my brother, and Dad may as well not be here with Mom gone. He’s just… It’s like he’s gone inside himself and slammed the door.”

“He’s Lilu, and she was a remarkable woman,” I said. “I don’t think he ever had to question whether or not she was with him because of his pheromones. You know how rare that is.”

“I do,” Elsie admitted, sniffling. “I wish I didn’t, but I do. Sometimes I wish she hadn’t been willing to marry an incubus.”

“But if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have you, and I’d be so much poorer for your absence,” I said.

Elsie mustered a wan smile. “You have to say that. You’re my babysitter.”

“Your babysitter who you decapitated, ” I said. “Since when are you in the habit of assaulting anyone who knocks?”

“Since my mother died and my brother started unraveling like a badly programmed chatbot, and my babysitter—the dead woman, who was supposed to be indestructible and never, ever leave me for any reason, ever—went and got herself blown up on a mission with the same woman who broke my brother,” said Elsie. “I felt like I needed to get a little more aggressive about self-defense, and I still haven’t seen anything to indicate that I was wrong. I’m sorry about the whole head thing. You startled me.”

“And I guess if you thought I was gone, no one would be sticking their head through your door on a regular basis,” I allowed. “Rose maybe.”

“Not so much. Since she’s gone and gotten herself promoted to Fury, she doesn’t have as much time to just drop by and bother us. Even if she did, she’s solid by default a lot more when she’s interacting with the land of the living, and she tries not to be an asshole. Pretending to be you when she knows I’m grieving your loss would qualify.”

“You knew I wasn’t Rose because acting like me would have made her an asshole, and she isn’t an asshole, got it,” I said.

Elsie shrugged. “So Rose isn’t going to be imitating your voice and coming into my room without an invitation.”

“In that case, you can stop apologizing,” I said. “Just please don’t cut my head off again. That was very startling, and I didn’t like it.”

“Deal.” Elsie looked at me, eyes wide and bright with unshed tears. “Are you really here?”

“Really-really,” I said. I shifted position to kneel rather than sitting flat on the floor, and opened my arms, inviting her in for a hug. “I was injured about as badly as a ghost can be injured, but not so badly that the anima mundi couldn’t put me together again, and now I’m back, and I’m not leaving my family any time soon.”

Elsie all but threw herself into my embrace, wrapping her arms tightly around me. I was suddenly, painfully grateful that the anima mundi had returned my control over my solidity. I could tell from the way she shook as she clung to me just how desperately she had needed this hug, and I was glad to be able to oblige.

When she finally let me go, her eyes were still bright, but her cheeks were wet, the tears she’d been threatening having finally managed to fall. She wiped her face with one hand as she sat back, and laughed unsteadily. “Sorry,” she said. “Not very cool of me.”

“Who told you I cared if you were ‘cool’?” I asked. “I don’t need you to be ‘cool.’ Never have, never will.”

“But…” She caught herself, stopping.

“But what?” I asked.

“Antimony’s cool.”

“Annie’s more than moderately terrifying,” I said. “She’s probably the culmination of all the traits the Covenant was breeding for when they introduced your grandmother’s grandparents.” That was easier than trying to get the number of “greats” correct, and it got my point across all the same.

Elsie laughed, but I wasn’t kidding. The Covenant of St. George has many appalling qualities, and one of them is the tendency to treat their members like show dogs, pairing them according to a vast and complicated breeding program that’s supposed to eventually get them the best possible field operatives. Annie was smart, ruthless, physically skilled, and a sorcerer—all things that made her absolutely deadly in the field, and would have made her an incredible asset for the other side if she hadn’t been so dedicated to the family cause. And then she’d gone and fallen in love with a cryptid, a therianthropic shapeshifter who spent as little time passing for human as he could get away with.

The Covenant was never going to lure her away from us now, not with Sam in the picture, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t grateful for that.

“She’s still cool,” said Elsie stubbornly.

“And this matters why?”

“You spent so much more time with her than you did with me when we were kids.” She shrugged. “I always just figured you liked her better because she was cool, and if I could be cool, you’d choose me instead.”

I blinked. “Oh, sweetheart, no. It was never about her being cooler than you. It was always down to age. I’m the babysitter. I focus on the youngest children because they need me more. That’s the only reason.”

“But you stayed focused on her even after she was as grown up as the rest of us.”

“Because reaching adulthood didn’t change the fact that she was the youngest in your generation, and I needed to keep babysitting if I didn’t want the crossroads to start pulling me away even more than they already did. Besides, I thought you liked it when I gave you space. Weren’t you the one who was always trying to chase me away when I tried to babysit?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t, I didn’t mean it!” she said, almost in a wail.

“Oh, Elsie, ” I said. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m here now.”

“But there are babies who need you now, and that means you’re just going to leave me again. You always, always leave me again.”

“I guess that’s true,” I allowed. “I do need to focus on raising the new generation of chaos generators, as soon as I’m done with this little job the anima mundi assigned to me.”

Elsie perked up. “Little job? What do you need to do?”

“I’m supposed to head for the East Coast and make the Covenant stop hunting ghosts.”

Elsie’s smile was neither gentle nor kind. “That sounds like my sort of party. You looking for backup?”

I paused. “I came here to see if I could find someone who’d drive with me. I could ghost-blip myself over there like that, but I wouldn’t be able to carry any equipment or do any prep. You have a car, right?”

“I sure do,” affirmed Elsie. “I’m a pretty good driver, too. No accidents since I got my license. You really want me, not Annie or Uncle Kevin or something?”

“I want the Ghostbusters, but I don’t think they really exist, and real-life ghost hunters aren’t usually inclined to work with my sort of person,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting you to volunteer. I’d be happy to have you. You have to do me two favors, though.”

“What?”

“You have to tell your father, and you have to tell your brother.”

Elsie frowned. “Why are those separate favors?”

“Because I don’t think you’re going to be able to get them into the same room.”

Elsie considered this for a moment, and then nodded. “All right,” she said, bouncing back to her feet. “Dad’s up in his room. I’ll go tell him now.”

Then she was off, bustling out of the room. I waited until she was gone, then cocked my head and vanished in turn, off to update my current employer.

The anima mundi wasn’t in the grain for once. I looked around, finally spotting a low farmhouse in the distance. A porch wrapped around the outside, unscreened and open to the twilit air. There, in a rough-hewn rocking chair, was the anima mundi.

I flickered out and reappeared next to them on the porch. “Nice evening,” I said.

“They always are, when they’re not too hot,” they replied. “We’re guessing you’re here to give us an update on what you’ve been doing with yourself?”

“Something like that,” I agreed. “Elsie’s going to go to Boston with me. She’s Antimony’s cousin. You haven’t met her yet.”

“And you think she can help?”

“She’s field-trained like any other member of the family, she’s half-Lilu, and she’s one of the better social butterflies I know,” I said. “She can manage this. Her mother died recently, and she has a lot of aggression to work out.”

“Excellent. We look forward to hearing of your progress.”

“About that…” I looked up at the sky rather than directly at the anima mundi. “It’s going to take about a week for Elsie to drive from Portland to the East Coast, and longer after that for us to get wherever we’re supposed to be. Is there any chance you could send us a routewitch to make things go a little faster, maybe?”

“Are you too good to cross our distances at a normal rate?”

“Not at all. You just seemed to want this done quickly, and a week of driving before we can even get started isn’t ‘quickly.’”

“Can you not ask a family member closer to your destination?”

I paused to think about the family members who could fit that description. “No,” I said, after a moment’s contemplation. “I couldn’t. Verity’s not available for right now, and Alice and Thomas need to stay uninvolved in case she needs them. Sally isn’t doing fieldwork yet. And Alex and Shelby are taking care of two children under five. There’s really not anyone closer.”

The anima mundi gave me a measuring, narrow-eyed look. “I feel you might have allies you’re choosing not to call upon.”

“I might,” I agreed. “But they’re not family the way Elsie and the others are, which makes it harder for me to just go to where they are. Unless you want to broaden that restriction?”

“No,” they said, without hesitation. “You need to be restricted, Mary Dunlavy, and you need to adjust to the idea that you always will be, from this point forward. Begin your journey with the girl you say will aid you. We will send someone to assist you, when the time is right.”

That seemed to be as good as I was going to get right now. I nodded quickly, and blipped back to Elsie’s room—or tried to, anyway. Nothing happened.

I turned back to the anima mundi, hoping the look on my face would be sufficient to communicate my confusion. They looked calmly back at me.

“You cannot keep coming to us asking for favors, Mary Dunlavy,” they said. “We have extended you the greatest favor we are capable of granting, by allowing you to resume your frivolous ways. You are an expense we do not need, going forward, and you would do well to remember that.”

“I do,” I said, as sincerely as I could manage. “I know I’m not something vital to keeping the world turning. But I’m something vital to my family, and I hope you’ll remember that, while you’re making decisions about what to do with me.”

“We would say that the needs of a single family are insufficiently strong to stay our hand, were it not for the one who saved us,” said the anima mundi gravely. “If you see Antimony, be sure to give her our regards, and remember, it is only out of our debt to her that we are willing to fund your ongoing existence.”

I was abruptly back in Elsie’s room, which was still oddly devoid of mice. I frowned and went snooping while Elsie was off notifying her father of our plan.

The mouseholes behind the bed had been stopped up with plaster and caulk. It was an inexpert repair, but it was sufficient to make the barrier obvious. At some point in the past six months, she’d decided to hang the “keep out” signs on her private space. That was unsettling. In all my time dealing with the Prices, I had never known one of them to shut the mice out so completely. Get frustrated by them, yes. Exile them, no. Never in a million years.

I tapped the plaster. It made a dull thunk sound, clearly thick enough that the mice weren’t going to break through by mistake. The fact that they hadn’t broken through already meant she must have negotiated some sort of temporary restriction on their presence. That, too, was unprecedented, and I didn’t entirely like it.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, then flopped over backward, folding my hands behind my head. This wasn’t the outcome I’d been expecting when I popped over to Portland—if anything, I’d come by the house as a courtesy, so Elsie and Artie could honestly say that they’d been invited and chosen to stay home before I went and got some of the more action-oriented cousins. I hadn’t anticipated that Elsie would be this eager to get payback for her mother, or how much having her come along would complicate things.

I couldn’t invite Annie to join us—not when she’d been there to witness Jane’s death without being able to stop it, and not when Elsie so clearly resented her for it. This wasn’t going to be easier if my backup was fighting the whole time, and depending on how much of the drive we had to make according to normal physics, there might be a long time for things to be harder than I wanted them to be.

The door banged open and Elsie came bounding back into the room, hauling a mid-sized suitcase with her. “He’s not thrilled, but he’s not going to try to stop me,” she announced, tossing the suitcase onto the bed. She flipped it open and bounced across the room to start yanking out dresser drawers and throwing fistfuls of clothing, toiletries, and weapons into the open case. It was a ridiculous jumble. I sat up to watch her.

“How many knives do you think you’re going to need ?”

“Either one more than I have, or all of them,” she said. “I’m aiming for the option where I’m not caught under-armed in the middle of a fight.” She produced a handgun from the bottom of the drawer and placed it in the suitcase, then moved to unlock the safe in the wall next to it and start pulling out boxes of bullets. “Are we going to be fighting any ghosts?”

“I hope not, but right now, I can’t say for sure what we’re going to be up against,” I said. “Covenant operatives, definitely. What else, I have no real idea.”

“Check,” she said, and tossed what looked like a spirit jar into the suitcase.

“Elsie.”

“Yeah?”

“Why do you have a spirit jar?”

She must have caught the unhappiness in my tone, because she paused and looked at me. “You said the Covenant’s been hunting these ghosts on the East Coast.”

“Yes.”

“And could these ghosts have had friends?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” If I was being completely honest, I’d never spent all that much time with more-ordinary hauntings. They didn’t tend to like crossroads ghosts very much for some reason—probably related to the fact that “can you let me talk to my dead relative of choice” was one of the more common requests the crossroads asked me to arbitrate, which could result in more hauntings as the person who’d made the bargain withered and died or committed suicide—and when I was doing my other job, I didn’t have a lot of time for a social death. Maybe stationary haunts had friends and communities, and maybe they didn’t. Her guess was as good as mine.

“If they did, they might not be too happy right now, which means I want to be at least minimally armed against grumpy ghosts who have no good reason to like the living very much, if that’s cool by you.” She added a pair of brass knuckles and a skin care kit that looked to have been modified to include a tiny hammer to her suitcase, then started stuffing things down and adjusting them to guarantee that it would zip. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to bottle you up for later consumption.”

“Ha ha,” I said, still uncomfortable. “See how chill you are when I start painting sigils to contain succubi on everything.”

“We both know those don’t work.”

“Yeah, but spirit jars do. And don’t think I didn’t notice how you danced around telling me why you had the thing to begin with.” This seemed like as good a time as any. “Hey, Elsie—why are the mice locked out of your room? And why did they think you were at roller derby practice when you were in your room?”

It was her turn to look deeply, profoundly uncomfortable. “Can we not talk about that right now?” She hoisted her suitcase, then moved toward the door. “It’s bad enough that there were a couple in Dad’s room, so they know I’m leaving.”

“Elsie, did something happen with the mice?”

“No.” She paused with her hand on the bedroom door. “Yes. I don’t know. They’re just being the mice, I guess, and I can’t be too mad at them for that—they are the way they are, always have been, and it’s silly of me to expect them to change.”

“This is about them not letting your mother’s theology go into the archives, isn’t it?”

Elsie nodded, not looking at me. “She’s dead. She’s gone. If I can’t have her back, they sure as hell can’t keep her, and I wish they’d just let her go. Does that make sense?”

“It does, sweetheart,” I said. “You want to grieve, and they keep acting like she’s still alive.”

“That’s exactly it. How am I supposed to start moving on when they keep acting like she’s going to come home tomorrow and tell them all the things they’ve missed? It sucks. I don’t want them coming around me telling me what my mother would want me to do. She was my mother, not theirs. They need to get over themselves and let us all have a little peace.”

“Sounds like getting out of here will be good for you.”

She laughed, bitterly. “Honestly, you have no idea.”

She left the room then, and I followed her downstairs and through the kitchen to the garage, where she popped the trunk of her car and loaded her suitcase inside, one-handed. Elsie had always been good about doing her upper-body workouts. Something about how all the girls she found attractive appreciated a well-toned bicep.

Then she walked around to the driver’s side door, opened it, and froze.

“No,” she said, in a voice that had gone suddenly stony and cold. “You were not invited. Get out.”

“I was invited,” said Artie—sorry, Arthur—from the back seat. He sounded utterly reasonable, like he’d been working on this argument for a while. “Mary came to see me first, and told me she had to go to the East Coast to fight the Covenant. I’m a Price, too. I should get to fight the Covenant before I come apart at the seams.”

Elsie shot me a pleading look. “And see, he says shit like this, like, all the time,” she said. “It’s almost as bad as the damn mice.”

“Arthur.” I bent down and stuck my head inside the car. “What do you think you’re doing? This is a serious mission, buddy.”

“And I’m serious about coming with you.” He looked at me placidly. “I’m not a child, you know. I’m a legal adult. And this is something the mice told me Artie never did. He didn’t like fieldwork. He never went voluntarily. The only time he did anything remotely dangerous was when he was trying to save Sarah.” His voice cracked on her name, longing and anger intermixed.

“We’re not saving Sarah this trip,” said Elsie. “We’re not going anywhere near her, so if this is some messed-up way of getting a look at her, it’s not going to work.”

“ No, ” snapped Arthur. “I’m coming with you because I’m a Price, and this is my heritage. And because I can feel myself crumbling away, a little bit more every day. I wasn’t built to last. I want to do something before there isn’t anything left of me.”

“Where do you think you’re going, buddy?” I asked, gently.

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m just… dissolving, like cotton candy in water. It’s the weirdest sensation. I don’t dream anymore.” Arthur looked at me and shrugged. “I’m hoping if I go and do something I don’t share with Artie, that he doesn’t taint for me, it’ll give me something I can hold onto. A memory I know for sure belongs to me, and wasn’t originally a memory of him.”

“You’d need clothes,” said Elsie. I could tell from her tone that it was a pro forma objection, one last attempt to keep him off of our road trip.

Arthur responded by hoisting the duffel bag he’d placed on the seat beside himself, and flashing her a wide, toothy grin. “Way ahead of you,” he said.

Elsie sighed and slid into the car, getting herself situated in the driver’s seat. “You better not make me regret this,” she said sternly.

“I’ll do my best,” said Arthur.

I vanished, reappearing in the passenger seat, where I fastened my seatbelt and leaned back. “Time to hit the road,” I said.

Elsie started the car and we were off.