“Take care of yourself, then your family, then the rest of the world. That’s the order that doesn’t break your heart.”
—Frances Brown
The old Parrish place, Buckley Township, Michigan
THE HOT WATER HELD out long enough for all three of us to shower—even though that shower lasted more than half an hour in Thomas’s case. I guess fifty years without running water leaves a man feeling pretty filthy. I dropped towels outside the door and kept myself busy changing the sheets on our bed and getting one of the guest rooms ready for Sally.
Cynthia and her people had kept the house clean enough to be livable, but there’s a gap between “livable” and “comfortable” that needed to be addressed. When the Covenant had been shopping for a place to shove their prodigal son, they’d been looking for something that fit a narrow list of requirements: location, affordability, and availability. They’d never looked at size, which was why a single bachelor had been shoved into a three-story house with seven bedrooms.
There was a time when I’d dreamt of filling them all, turning this house into the sort of vibrant, loving place I remembered from my early childhood, when Mama had been alive and Daddy had been brittle but unbroken. Those dreams were past, but the bedrooms remained. I left Kevin’s room untouched, and walked past the nursery we had prepared for Jane, opening the room we’d used for the Gucciards when they came to visit.
It was spotless if unwelcoming, with a queen-sized bed, a large wardrobe, and a window looking out on the Galway. Best view in Buckley. I stripped the bed, remade it with fresh sheets, and left the door open as an invitation.
Sally was still in the shower. I walked back to the bathroom and rapped lightly on the door.
“You drown in there?” I called.
“Shampoo is magic!” she yelled back.
Right. Not dead. I smiled. “Wait until you remember what conditioner is,” I said. “I’ve got a room ready for you; it’s the open door down the hall. Come out when you’re done.”
“Got it!” The water didn’t stop. Well, I did say the water heater was good, and if she wanted to risk getting frozen when the heat ran out, that was her decision. I couldn’t blame her. I’ve seen real magic, people pulling things out of thin air, doors between dimensions, things that should have been impossible. Very few of them have truly been able to compare to the miracle that is indoor plumbing.
I walked back down the hall to the bedroom I shared with Thomas, only feeling a little guilty about the fact that I had yet to call Mary and tell her we were home. She’d understand. Or she wouldn’t, and we’d deal with it. Either way.
I pushed open the door to find Thomas standing next to the remade bed, buttoning the cuffs of a shirt that still fit him as well as it had fifty years before. He looked up as I stepped inside, offering me a smile that made my heart drop toward my knees. I closed the door behind me.
“Hi,” I said.
“Alice, did you throw anything away?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Some dynamite that had gotten too unstable for me to think it was a good idea to carry it. Pretty much everything in the kitchen. You do not want to look in the fridge right now. But if it wasn’t perishable? No. You were coming home. You couldn’t give me permission to get rid of things, and I wasn’t going to mess around with them.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” He stepped toward me, reaching for my hands. I let him take them. “I was trying to save you when I sold myself to the crossroads. Not condemn you.”
“You didn’t,” I protested. “This has been awful, and I won’t pretend it’s the life I thought I was going to have, but I wouldn’t change it if you told me I could. We have a family. We have each other. And when I felt myself snapping under the strain, I ran. I didn’t stay where I was and turn into my father. I won. I kept not giving up on you, on us, I kept your things and I kept the lights on and I kept looking.”
Thomas nodded as he listened.
“I kept looking because I knew you had to be out there for me to find, and then I found you, I found you, I brought you home, and home’s still here. The woods are still here, the Angel’s still open, everything we need is here. The kids are adults now, so I can’t pretend nothing’s changed, but we made it. You saved me.”
“And now you’ve saved me as well.” He let go of one of my hands, reaching up to trace the outline of my mouth with his thumb. “Not for the first time, either. I begin to feel I may be behind on my salvations.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, and leaned in, and kissed him.
He let go of my other hand immediately, sliding his arms around my waist as I pressed against him. I slid my own arms around his shoulders, linking my hands together behind his neck, and we held each other up that way, two people standing together in their bedroom, in their own home, for the first time in fifty years.
His stomach growled.
I laughed as I stepped away, and he gave me a half-ashamed look. “My apologies,” he said. “I think I’ll be somewhat subject to the demands of the flesh for the next little while, as I adjust to the absence of constant danger.”
“Cynthia seems to think that’s not going to last,” I said. “Verity flicked the Covenant in the nose a few years back, and they’ve been a lot more active since then. We may have more danger to worry about soon.”
“Danger before dinner?”
“Hope not.”
“Then let’s go down.”
Sally was on the stairs, dressed in the same filthy clothes, rumpling her hair with one of the towels I’d left on her bed. I looked at her and nodded. “We’ll take you shopping as soon as we can,” I said. “Until then, I’ll loan you a nightgown after dinner, and we can put your things through the washer.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to handle having more than one pair of socks,” said Sally, looking critically at her currently bare feet. “What’s the normal number of pairs for someone my age?”
“Asking the wrong people,” I said amiably. “Come on. Ribs and beans in the kitchen.”
“Food,” breathed Sally, and sped up, Thomas and I following close behind.
The tailypo had ignored the foil tray of ribs and beans in favor of ripping open the paper bag Cynthia had brought in at the same time, stealing the cornbread and what looked like a half dozen or so hard-boiled eggs. They were perched atop the kitchen counters, munching happily away, shells and all. They chirped at us when we entered, and some of the younger ones shifted their postures defensively, blocking off our access to the food. I proceeded to the cabinet where the plates were kept.
“Thomas, spoons are where they’ve always been,” I said. “Think you can get out something to serve with?”
He didn’t respond. I turned, three plates in my hands, and blinked at him.
Tears were running down his cheeks, unhampered by any attempts to stop them. He sniffled when he saw me looking, swiping them ineffectively away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t remember where the spoons are kept. I’m . . . This is all happening, isn’t it? This is really where we are, in Buckley, and the mice are absent for some perfectly understandable, perfectly explicable reason, and we’re home. We’re actually home. I won’t have to leave you again. The crossroads are dead.”
“We’re home.” I put the plates on the counter and crossed to him, taking his shoulders while Sally watched in worried silence. “We’re really here, we’re really all together, and the mice are giving us some space because I asked them nicely and they have enough adjustments to make to the scripture that they’re probably relieved to have some time where they don’t need to worry about us. I promise you, this is happening. We’re all here. Even Sally.”
“Hi, boss,” said Sally, raising one hand in a small, anxious wave.
I let go of Thomas’s shoulders, moving to open the drawer where the silverware was kept. Like everything else, it was clean if unused, scrubbed free of tarnish by Cynthia’s helpful staffers. Asking her how much she’d charge to keep the place from crumbling into dust was officially one of the smarter things I’d ever done.
“Let’s eat,” I said. “We’ll all feel better after we eat.”
Tears still rolling down his cheeks, Thomas nodded and took the serving spoon from my hand, turning to the tray of ribs and beans. Sally followed, and in short order, we all had plates and were returning to the living room. True to my prediction, the couch was looking like the best place to eat, as it didn’t require me to reopen the dining room before I’d had a chance to go through the whole house. Most of the tailypo followed us, clutching the remains of their stolen cornbread as they fanned out and distributed themselves around the room.
It was comfortable, and oddly domestic. Everything about it was ordinary, the sort of night I could easily imagine us having a thousand times over, one meal after another, one quiet recovery from the previous day at a time. I could get used to this.
The doorbell rang.
All of us turned to look toward the door. Sally’s hands tensed, as if she had just realized she wasn’t carrying her spear. “Is it that Cynthia lady again?” she asked, voice low. “She rang the bell last time.”
“Unlikely.” I put my plate aside. “It’s not as late as it feels. She’s probably still at the bar. The dinner rush won’t even have hit yet.” Not that the Angel ever had anything as optimistic as a “rush.” Mostly it had a dinner trickle, as befit an establishment that intentionally didn’t court the business of the dominant species.
“Should we go to the kitchen while you answer that, since the locals are accustomed to you?” asked Thomas.
“No,” I said. “They’ll need to get used to both of you eventually.”
The bell rang again.
“I’m coming,” I snapped, and stood, heading for the door. I paused when I got there, looking back at the two of them. Something about this felt wrong, like it should have been impossible for anyone to interrupt our evening uninvited.
But then, how often does trouble wait for an invite?
I reached for the doorknob. I opened the door.
The girl on the porch had her hands shoved into the pockets of a denim jacket two sizes too large for her, swamping her relatively delicate frame. The rest of her clothes fit better—a white shirt under a buttoned red plaid flannel, denim jeans, and battered sneakers that looked like they’d seen a few hundred miles of road. Her hair was short, dark blonde and windswept, the kind of careless cut I’d seen on more than a few girls my granddaughter’s age. She looked modern and timeless all at once, a gawky Tinkerbell who had never left Neverland behind.
I blinked. Then, slowly, I smiled. “Took you long enough.”
“Had to find a ride,” she said, rolling her shoulders in a denim-clad shrug. “Also wasn’t completely sure what the message I got meant, so it took me a while to get a straight answer out of the boss.”
“Since when is anyone the boss of you?”
“Oh, a lot has changed around here, starting with the management.” She took her hands out of her pockets and spread her arms. “But you finally look like you’re older than I am, which I appreciate, and I can tell you haven’t called the babysitter. So can I claim my hug, as first dead girl on the scene?”
“Always,” I said, and stepped forward, wrapping my arms around her.
Hugging Rose Marshall is an experience. For one thing, even though Mary has always been a solid and predictable presence in my life, I knew Rose when she was alive, and so I know she’s dead in a way that doesn’t apply to most other ghosts. Part of me expects her to be insubstantial in some way. Which she never is, because she doesn’t instigate a hug unless she’s wearing a coat borrowed from one of the living; the rules of her specific kind of haunting mean that when she’s got a coat, she’s effectively alive until she takes it off or the sun comes up, whichever happens first. So she gives good, firm, lasting hugs.
She was wearing some sort of perfume that smelled like baby powder and lavender. I inhaled it as I let her go. “It’s good to see you, Rose. What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Oh, see, your granddaughter went and slaughtered the crossroads—sort of, it’s complicated and it kind of gives me a headache if I think about it for too long, but ‘killed’ is less confusing than ‘bent time so they never existed, even though we’re still dealing with the aftershocks of all their bullshit power plays’—and I got sucked into the power struggle that followed. Bobby’s gone, there’s a new boss running the twilight, and I’m not strictly a road ghost anymore, even though I can slum it when I want to.” She spread her arms again, displaying the coat. “I wanted to be off-duty tonight, so I did this the old-fashioned way. Cocked my thumb, flagged down a passing routewitch, talked them out of a coat and a ride, and now I’m here until dawn or the boss calls, whichever happens first. I’m hoping for dawn. It’s been a while since I had a night off, and I could use the break. Hey, do I smell ribs?”
“You do.” I stepped aside so she could go into the house. “Cynthia dropped off dinner, and we have a hamper of baked goods from Ithaca. Cyn’ll be by in a few hours with dessert. She always brings enough for the mice to eat, too, so you should be fine.”
“Cool.” Rose slipped past me into the living room, and I turned to watch her greet the others.
Sally was staring, a rib lifted halfway to her mouth. Seeing a teenage girl strolling in like she owned the place had to be disconcerting, and it was about to get worse.
Rose grinned, showing what felt like every tooth in her head. “Ey, Mr. Tommy in the house! I thought I felt more than one of you shoving your way through. Who’s the kid?”
Sally blinked, lowering her rib back to the plate. “I’m older than you.”
“That’d be a neat trick, since from where I’m standing you’re human, twilight all the way, not midnight or starlight or anything else, and that means you can’t be older than I am. Even Alice has cobwebs of things she was never meant to know clinging to her. Nothing wrong with being young. You only get the shot once, no matter what you look like.”
“Hello, Rose,” said Thomas, with a mild smile. “What are you doing here?”
“Like I told the lady, I came the old-fashioned way, one cocked thumb at a time. But I did have a little bit of an ulterior motive, I’ll admit that much. Alice, where’s the ribs?”
“Kitchen,” I said. “You want me to prep you a plate?” As a hitchhiking ghost, Rose could only taste food when one of the living gave it to her.
To my surprise, she waved her hand, brushing me off. “No, I’m good,” she said. “You can ritually give it to me when I get back. Bring the kid up to speed, and then I’ll get you the rest of the way once I have pig on a plate.”
She walked out of the living room, vanishing into the kitchen, where I heard her cheerfully greet the tailypo.
“I didn’t call her,” I said, shutting the door before I returned to the couch and retrieved my dinner. “I swear.”
“If you were going to call one of the family ghosts, it wouldn’t be this one,” said Thomas, eyes on the kitchen doorway. “Rose is pleasant, but she’s never been as useful as your sitter.”
We were both avoiding her name. With Mary, naming her could be construed as calling for her, and if Rose had managed to pick up on our arrival, odds were good Mary had done the same and was just giving us a chance to catch our breath. She’s always been the politer of the family ghosts.
Sally leaned over to prod me in the shoulder. “Hey,” she hissed. “You tell me what’s going on and you tell me right now.”
“Rose is a hitchhiking ghost,” I said. “She doesn’t technically haunt the family, but we were in high school together, and she took enough of a shine to me that she stuck around. At this point, she likes us, and she has a thing about keeping ties to the land of the living whenever possible.”
“Good footnote,” said Rose, emerging from the kitchen to offer me her plate. It was mostly rib, with some beans, and a piece of cornbread she had apparently managed to snatch back from the tailypo. “About as close to accurate as could be expected after everything you’ve missed, really. Hi. I’m Rose. I was originally what we call a road ghost—the ghost of someone who died on or around the road, and wound up bound to it in the afterlife. That’s changed a bit since the crossroads died, but there’s no point in getting into it now.”
“Oh,” said Sally. “You’re really a ghost?”
“Yup,” said Rose. “Also nope, anymore. Scoot over.” That was all the warning she gave before she dropped herself to the couch between me and Sally, forcing Sally to scoot or have a lapful of Rose. Thomas watched this with bland amusement, like he couldn’t think of any better way to spend his evening. “It is the very definition of long stories, but I’ll try to be brief about it, because everybody’s got shit to be doing right now. Antimony made a deal with the crossroads to save the life of her boyfriend, which seems to be a bit of a family tradition at this point, and when they came to collect, she didn’t want to do what they asked, so she went for ‘murder’ as the next best thing to obedience. She is so your granddaughter, Alice.”
“What did the crossroads ask her to do?” asked Thomas.
Rose smiled at him. “It’s good to see you again, Tommy. You always did cut right to the chase. The crossroads wanted Annie to play killer for hire. Take out this snotty little sorcerer in a town called New Gravesend, in Maine.”
“That’s where I’m from,” said Sally.
“Huh, funny coincidence.” Rose shot me a glance, making it clear that she didn’t think it was a coincidence at all. “Annie went to New Gravesend, met the sorcerer, decided she didn’t want to kill him, picked a fight with the crossroads instead. Like you do. Somehow, she found a way to bend time and stop them from ever existing, and I don’t understand it, it gives me a headache, so please don’t ask me to explain. If you really want to comprehend a massive metaphysical ‘fuck off and die,’ you can ask her yourself the next time you see her. My involvement has been more in the aftermath. Turns out the crossroads did a lot of passive regulation in the twilight, and when they went away, everything got all topsy-turvy and screwed-up for a while.”
“The twilight?” asked Sally, blankly.
“The place human ghosts go when they haven’t moved on but aren’t currently haunting anything,” said Rose. “It’s where we are most of the time. Only with the crossroads gone, being there was sort of like being in a low-budget horror movie from hell, and it took a while for the aftershocks to settle.”
Thomas frowned. “That sounds unsettling.”
“It was miserable. But we got through it, and I got to see Bobby go down for good.” Rose smiled a feral smile and seemed to remember her dinner in the same moment, turning to me and making a little ‘gimme’ gesture with her hands.
“I, the living, give this food to you, the dead, freely and without constraint,” I said, handing the plate to her.
“You always make that sound so dire,” said Rose. She picked up a rib, gesturing with it. “Asshole chased me for fifty years, and I saw him dragged to hell. Maybe not literally, but close enough for me. Guess it’s a season for people getting the things they’ve been wanting for fifty years.”
“Bobby?” asked Sally.
“The man who killed her,” said Thomas. “He’d made a much less altruistic bargain with the crossroads than either of us. Why do I feel like that isn’t the end of your ‘long story,’ Rose?”
“Because you’re smarter than your wife?” Rose suggested. I wrinkled my nose, and she grinned at me. “See, in the process of getting all this shit sorted out, I kinda attracted the attention of a few gods.”
“Gods?” asked Sally. Her voice was getting increasingly blank as she asked her questions, like we were trending deeper and deeper into ridiculousness.
“Yup,” said Rose. “Persephone, the Ocean Lady, and the anima mundi, to be specific.”
“I’ve only heard of one of those,” said Sally. “Persephone’s the Greek goddess of the dead, right?”
“Sort of,” said Rose. “She’s our Lady of the Dead, she’s consort to Hades, and she loves us. I’ve been under her protection for a while. The Ocean Lady is the twilight manifestation of the Old Atlantic Highway. She’s aware and intelligent—and very, very divine—but she doesn’t talk much, unless she does it through her routewitches. I would have been one of hers, if I’d lived. And the anima mundi is the living soul of the Earth. They’re what the crossroads displaced when everything first went wrong, and as soon as it became so that the crossroads had never existed, the anima mundi reasserted themselves.”
Thomas nodded, clearly following this better than the rest of us. “Divine intervention is never without its costs.”
“Yeah, well, it would have been nice if someone could have pointed that out while I was racking up what turned out to be a pretty hefty bill,” said Rose. “I’m a Fury now. I serve my triad, and they send me where things need to be set right.”
“Do we need ‘setting right,’ Rose?” asked Thomas.
“Only in that the anima mundi feels sorrow for all the people who were betrayed by crossroads bargains, and would see you settled and safe now that you’ve returned home, but would very much prefer you not go gallivanting for a while,” she said. “They’re still recovering from centuries of nonexistence. They’re weak. And having travelers punching holes in them all the time isn’t going to help them get stronger. So on that level, I guess I’m here on business, to ask you nicely not to hurt my boss. And on another level, I felt Alice come home, and it’s been a while, so I figured I should make sure she knows what’s what. And on a third level, it really felt like she wasn’t alone.”
“Yes, I’m home,” said Thomas. “You can tell your employers I have no intention of leaving again anytime soon; I left only because the crossroads gave me no choice in the matter, and now that I’m here, I feel that traveling again would be to invoke the wrath of my lovely wife. It’s been some time since we were together, but I remember her wrath as considerable.”
“That’s good,” said Rose. “Have you spoken to anyone human since you got back? Obviously you’ve been in touch with Cynthia, or she wouldn’t be feeding you, but have you called your kids?”
“No,” I admitted. “I wanted to give us a few hours to catch our breath before we started causing problems again.”
To my surprise, Rose nodded, expression implying that this was the smartest answer I could have given. “That’s good too,” she said. “Things have been hectic for the living, what with the war and all, but—”
“Hold on,” interjected Thomas. “The war?”
Rose blinked at him. “Of course,” she said. “You wouldn’t have heard. The Covenant has formally declared war on your family. They’re focusing on the coasts right now, looking for weaknesses, but they’ll be pushing inland soon, and sending more strike teams.”
I dropped the rib I’d been idly gnawing on. It landed in my baked beans, splattering them all over Rose’s denim-clad leg. She looked at the mess, raising her eyebrows.
“Well, now, that’s going to take forever to clean up,” she said, mildly. “Oh, wait, no, it’s not, because as soon as I leave here, I’m going to turn insubstantial and it’s going to fall right through pretty phantom me. You telling me you didn’t know we were at war either?”
I shook my head. “You know I’ve been otherwise occupied.”
“Please. You were there when Very-very, Quite Contrary, decided to go on national television and tell the Covenant to come at me, bro. You were in the building. You can’t honestly be surprised that they’ve decided to come at her.” Rose looked at me for a moment, then frowned. “Or maybe you can be. Maybe you’ve been out of the normal flow of things for so long that you’ve forgotten how cause and effect work.” She ducked her head, redirecting her attention to her plate, and to the process of shoveling as much of the food into her mouth as possible before we kicked her out.
“War,” I said, softly, and looked across Rose and Sally to Thomas, who was watching with quiet resignation. The Covenant had been sniffing around the edges of the continent when I left on my last trip, but it hadn’t been anywhere near actual war. “I swear we haven’t been at war the whole time you were gone,” I said. “Things have been pretty quiet here. I mean, there have been incidents—”
“Like the time the Covenant shot up your windows,” said Rose casually.
I shot her a venomous glare. “Yes, like that.”
“Excuse me?” said Thomas. “The Covenant did what to your what?”
Rose cackled. “Oh, Alice. You went and got the boy back, but you didn’t tell the boy what kind of naughtiness you’d been up to in the interim. You’re going to have a lot of explaining to do before you head off to do something stupid and heroic.”
“Is it always like this?” asked Sally plaintively.
“No, sometimes it gets weird,” said Rose.
The doorbell rang. I turned and glared at it. I was getting real tired of interruptions.
No one else was moving, so I sighed and said, “I’ll get it,” as I set my plate aside and pushed myself off the couch. Cynthia was waiting on the porch, a covered casserole dish in her hands. She looked past me into the house, then back to my face.
“House properly haunted?” she asked.
I stepped aside so she could enter. “Not the ghost I expected to start with, but the one I got. That dessert?”
“Yup. Groceries will be here in the morning.” She moved past me, smiling at the couch—but only the one end of it, I noted. She still wasn’t allowing her eyes to settle on Thomas. “Hey, Rose. Long time no irritate.”
“Don’t worry, I’m in town now, I can make up for it,” said Rose, and laughed. “Good beans.”
“Thanks.” Cynthia turned as I was closing the door, passing the cobbler into my hands. “There’s no ice cream. I’d apologize, but naughty cryptozoologists barely even deserve any dessert, much less ice cream. Can you get dishes?”
“They’re in the kitchen.” The cobbler smelled heavenly. For someone who didn’t eat much solid food, Cynthia was amazingly skilled at the sort of hearty, filling Americana that kept diners and roadside dives like hers in business. Even more impressive, most of her customers didn’t eat that sort of thing: she’d learned specifically for her rare human patrons, and to be able to convince the county health board that she was running a perfectly ordinary, if somewhat remote, dive bar.
I went to get plates and utensils. By the time I returned, Cynthia was settled in the armchair I’d been fighting the tailypo for all afternoon, her coat folded over her lap and her tail wrapped around her ankle. Sally was doing a remarkable job of trying not to stare. Not that she was going to succeed. Sure, we all agreed that Rose was a ghost, but she hadn’t done anything ghostly yet. Cynthia was the first visibly inhuman intelligent being Sally had encountered on Earth. It was understandable for her to be a little overwhelmed.
“Rose tells me she was getting you up to speed on recent events,” said Cynthia, without preamble. “You going to do your duty?”
I set the plates, silverware, and cobbler down on the coffee table, frowning at her. “What duty is that?”
“Get rid of the Covenant.”
I laughed. “I don’t know what kind of superpowers you think I have, but Thomas is the sorcerer here, not me,” I said. “There aren’t enough knives in the world to get rid of the Covenant. I should know. I’ve tried.”
“We’re not asking you to wipe them out, pleasant an outcome as that would be,” said Rose, scooping cobbler onto her plate. “Just get them out of North America, or at least away from the East Coast. They’ve been harassing the routewitches. The Ocean Lady doesn’t like it when things harass the routewitches.”
I frowned at her. “I thought you were here to check in on us, as a friend.”
“I am.”
“But the first thing you did was tell us not to go traveling, because the anima mundi doesn’t like having holes punched in the membrane between dimensions.”
“Mmm-hmmm.” Rose popped a bite of cobbler into her mouth, swallowing before she said, “This is amazing, as always, Cyn.”
“Always glad to delight the dead,” said Cynthia mildly.
“And now you’re telling me the Ocean Lady wants the Covenant gone, and I didn’t give you that cobbler, so how can you taste it?”
“Oh, that.” Rose looked at her plate like it had betrayed her, heaving a put-upon sigh. “I always forget. I’m a Fury now. Different rules. And I really did start your way because I wanted to see if you’d actually fetched Tommy home with you. I was halfway here when the anima mundi called, told me I had to make sure you were staying put for a while, and dropped me back into the daylight, where my next pickup was a routewitch with a message from the Lady. At which point this was very much a work visit.”
“If anyone’s going to get them out of New York, it’s the two greatest traitors of the last century showing up and providing a distraction,” said Cynthia. “Just don’t lead them back here. We have enough to worry about.”
“How are we supposed to get to New York?” I asked. “We don’t have a vehicle or legal identification for Thomas and Sally. We need to rest, recover, and head for Las Vegas, to make sure they exist on paper.”
“The Ocean Lady is asking you for a favor,” said Rose. “You really think she won’t supply you with transport to wherever it is you need to go? You say you’ll do this for her, you’ll have a car ready first thing in the morning.”
I looked to Thomas. He shrugged. It had been too long since he’d been a part of the playing field; he didn’t know whether this was the right thing to do or not.
Of course not. I looked back to Rose.
“Where is everyone?” I asked. “Right now. Our family. Where are they?”
Rose took another bite of cobbler. “Immediate or extended?”
“Immediate.”
“Let’s see. Kevin and Jane are in Portland, with Evie and Ted. Elsie’s home right now, and so’s her brother.”
“Artie being home is nothing new.”
“Did I say his name was Artie?” Rose managed to make the question ominous and mild at the same time. “He’s home, either way. Annie’s there with Sam and James. They want to stay out of the line of fire for right now, and Portland’s far enough from the current battlefield. Alex, Shelby, and Charlotte are in Ohio with Angela, Martin, and the flock of little cuckoos Angela’s trying to rehabilitate. And Verity, Dominic, and Olivia are in New York with Sarah and Mary, trying to hold off the Covenant. I’m pretty sure Mary’s hair would be going white, if it hadn’t turned white when she died. No one likes to be a babysitter in a war zone.”
I bit my lip, looking at Thomas again. Our family was scattered across the continent, and the ones in New York needed us most right now.
He met my eyes and nodded. “Well, then, Rose, I believe you can tell your Ocean Lady we’ll be heading for New York in the morning.”
“Does that mean no groceries?” asked Cynthia.
“Yeah, for now, but we’ll still need that cake, since the colony will be mostly staying here,” I said. “There’s one more thing you could do for me?”
Cynthia looked wary. “What’s that?”
I indicated Sally with a sweep of my hand. “She has no clothes she’s not currently wearing, and that’s going to get unpleasant fast. Is there anyone working at the bar right now who might be able to help her out?”
Cynthia’s wariness melted into an almost-feral grin, and Sally started to look nervous. I leaned over to scoop some cobbler onto a plate.
So much for taking some time to rest and recover. At least it wouldn’t be boring.