I’d be safe until then.

  With that thought firmly in mind, I started walking across the barn, heading for a mound of half-rotten straw on the other side. If it wasn’t full of rats, it would be someplace to sit for a while.

  I was almost there when the floor gave way beneath me with a rotten cracking sound and dumped me into the darkness.

  * * *

  The impact of the fall knocked me out cold. I came to in the basement of the barn with a ringing head and only the faintest traces of sunset filtering through the hole above me. I’d been unconscious for hours, and getting out of the hole was going to be a challenge, especially since it wasn’t like I’d stopped to grab a flashlight when I fled the house.

  “Fuck,” I muttered, pushing to my feet. The wood around the edge of the hole was as rotten as the rest; jumping and pulling myself up wasn’t going to work. Well, if there was a basement, there had to be a door somewhere. I turned to start looking for it, and kicked a piece of wood. The clatter it made as it rolled across the floor caught my attention. I looked down.

  I was in the middle of a summoning circle. One that I recognized, if only vaguely. I froze, trying to sort through the fragments of memory clouding my mind. They came with the distant taste of chocolate, for some reason, and the feeling of having escaped some terrible trap. I blinked, still trying to make them come together, until, with a snap, they all fell into place.

  Of course. This was where I’d been taken when the snake cultists kidnapped me as a sacrifice to the god they were intending to summon, the god who had turned out to be my adopted Uncle Naga. Which meant . . .

  I squinted through the gloom. This summoning circle had been drawn specifically to reach Naga’s dimension. He’d been able to come through several times since then, opening the doorways himself, but every time I’d contacted him, it had been with the aid of either Thomas or Laura’s mother, my Aunt Juniper. I didn’t have the magic to do it on my own.

  These cultists somehow had.

  I pulled a knife without even really thinking about it, reopening the wound in my arm and bleeding onto the circle. Rather than wiping the ancient lines away, it seemed to feed them. They swelled and strengthened, beginning to glow, and I cut myself again, releasing even more blood.

  Blood loss is not good for humans, and I was starting to feel dizzy by the time the glow in the lines brightened to the point where I could actually see the filthy basement around me. I sank to the floor, bowing my head.

  “Naga, I don’t know if you can hear me, but they summoned you this way once, and I’m hoping I can use it to reach you again,” I said. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth. “It’s Alice. I’m alone and I’m scared, and the crossroads took Thomas. Please. I have to find him. I have to bring him home. I’ll do anything you ask me to. Please, if you can hear me, please come and get me. Please, I have to find my husband so I can put my family back together. Our children need their father. Please.”

  I closed my eyes, and passed out before my head hit the ground.

  Eleven

  “Everything wants to survive. Even dead things. We enjoy existing as much as anybody else does.”

  —Mary Dunlavy

  The old Parrish place, Buckley Township, Michigan, back in the present

  —AND WHEN I WOKE up, I was in Empusa,” I said. “Naga had heard me calling, and sent some of his grad students to fetch me before I could die of blood loss. They put me back together, and he agreed to help me look for you. I don’t know he was lying. Maybe he wasn’t; maybe he really intended to help, in the beginning, before he realized how much money he could make by letting me search fruitlessly forever.”

  “Alice . . .” Thomas sat down next to me on the bed, reaching over to take my hand in his. “You could have died.”

  “Sure. The Covenant could have shot me, or I could have bled out in the barn.” I shrugged. “But I didn’t. I got lucky. Mary chucked a couple of my grenades out the front door, took out about half the Covenant team, and then screamed real big and stopped moving. When the survivors came in, they found the bodies in the living room, and the wards kept them from going any deeper into the house. And they decided, pragmatically enough, that they’d killed us all. I think it helped that the Galway did not want them here, and you know how creepy my forest can be when it gets cranky.”

  “To my eternal chagrin, I am aware,” he said.

  “So they set fire to the place and went back to England to tell the people in charge that the Price vaults were locked forever, and we’d probably be having this conversation in a different house if Laura hadn’t carried the kids to the Red Angel and told Cynthia what was going on. Cynthia mobilized the clientele who’d been hiding from the Covenant there with her, and they were able to put out the fire before it did much damage. This old place didn’t want to burn.”

  Thomas stared at me. “So you woke up in a different dimension while the Covenant was trying to burn down the house, and Laura was running around with our children, and you kept going?”

  I blinked at him. “I mean, yeah. I was already in a different dimension, and I finally had someone who was willing and able to help me start looking for you properly. I wasn’t going to turn back before I had what I was looking for.”

  Thomas started to laugh, slowly leaning forward until his forehead was pressed against mine. He squeezed my fingers, hard.

  “I am never, never letting you out of my sight again,” he said.

  “That’s good, because I didn’t spend fifty years looking for you to get ditched.”

  “I mean it. I’m not supposed to follow you around all the time—and eventually it’s going to start getting on your nerves—but clearly, when I leave, you do some of the most incredibly self-destructive things I’ve ever heard suggested.” He closed his eyes, not pulling away, and I took that moment to just look at him.

  Maybe it’s because I loved him for so long before I was allowed to do it openly, or maybe I became a giant sap once I found someone who was actually willing to love me back, but I’ve always loved just looking at him, and fifty years had given my memory plenty of time to slip. I needed to fill all the little details back in, all the tiny pieces of him that I’d been losing this without even realizing it. Bit by bit, the erosion of time had been wearing him smooth in my mind, turning him into some sort of polished ideal that I could adore but couldn’t really love, not like this. Not like it was a stone in my stomach, something I’d swallowed but could never digest, something that was nonetheless a part of me forever.

  He took a deep, shaking breath, opened his eyes, and pulled back enough to look at me gravely. “Promise me,” he said. “Promise me if something happens to me in New York, if things go badly, you won’t do this to yourself again.”

  “How could I?” I shrugged. “It’s not like you can make another deal with the crossroads, since our lovely granddaughter went and killed them so dead they never existed in the first place.”

  “Yes, but if I died, you have far too many routes by which to access the afterlife.”

  I snorted. “Mary wouldn’t help me before, what makes you think she’d help me now?”

  “She’s right, I wouldn’t,” said Mary, from the other side of the room. I grimaced. She must have seen it, because I could hear the smirk in her voice as she continued. “You really thought you could tell a long-ass story, mention me by name a dozen times, and not have me hear you eventually?”

  “No.” I reclaimed my hands and leaned back, using them to prop myself up as I shot a smile at my former babysitter and permanent personal haunting. “Hi, Mary.”

  “Hi,” she said, barely looking at me at all. Her eyes—as always, the color of a winter sky above a hundred miles of empty highway, impossible and sepulchral—stayed fixed on Thomas. The ghost looked like she was seeing a ghost, and the irony of that was almost enough to distract me from how disconcertingly modern her clothing was, jeans and a T-shirt with the logo of a band I’d never heard of splashed across the front. She wasn’t my babysitter anymore. She hadn’t been for a long, long time.

  Even the dead will grow and change, if you give them enough time.

  Thomas twisted around and stared back for several seconds, before a slow grin split his features and he stood, taking a step toward her. “Mary Dunlavy,” he said. “It’s been too damn long.”

  “Tommy,” she said, with a little hiccup. “You actually . . . I mean, she actually . . . You didn’t die.” She blinked, and her eyes were very bright. Could the dead cry? I couldn’t remember ever having seen it happen, but maybe it was possible. I no longer put anything past our resident ghosts. “You didn’t die.”

  “No, Mary, I didn’t.” Thomas kept smiling at her. “Sometimes I wished I had, but I didn’t, and Alice found me, because she’s still the most stubborn creature in creation, and that’s partly down to you. So thank you.”

  “That girl was stubborn from the moment she was born,” said Mary. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.” Then she stepped forward, very quickly, and threw her arms around his chest, hugging him hard.

  I barely heard her whisper, “I thought I’d killed you.”

  Thomas didn’t miss it either. He wrapped his arms around her in return, smile fading into an expression of regretful understanding, and just held her.

  I slid off the bed, moving to stand beside them, and didn’t say anything. Mary had been carrying her guilt for a long time, and I hadn’t exactly helped with that, since I’d blamed her with everything I had in the immediate wake of his disappearance. Sure, she’d been doing her job, and sure, I’d always known the crossroads came first where she was concerned. It was her tie to them that allowed her to emulate the living so well, with none of the rules about how and when she could appear that controlled Rose, and without them, she would have faded into whatever came for ghosts when their hauntings ended.

  And none of that had mattered to me, because when she’d come to collect him, she’d done it in the middle of the night. She hadn’t given me the chance to say goodbye. And so I’d blamed her, and kept on blaming her even as she’d moved away from me to take care of my children, and my grandchildren, and all the sprawling offshoots of a family that had been doing perfectly well without me.

  I’d almost forgotten she’d been his friend almost as long as I had. I’d introduced them when Thomas was worried his new house might be haunted—and if I was being honest, I’d introduced him because I was already developing a crush on the man, and Mary had been the only authority figure in my world who I’d trusted to give him a halfway fair shake. She didn’t care that he was Covenant. She only cared that he was too old for me, and that my father hated him, which would have been a problem even if she hadn’t been reasonably sure it was at the root of my attraction.

  But they’d been friends even without me, forming their own strange sort of fellowship, one that centered around surviving the strangeness of Buckley, even if “surviving” wasn’t quite the word where Mary was concerned, and trying to make sure I did the same. There had even been a time, which I wasn’t particularly proud of now, when I’d been afraid the two of them were going to fall in love and leave me behind.

  Instead, we’d all left each other, Thomas by being thrown into another dimension against his will, me by running away, Mary by continuing to be the person she’d always been and taking care of the children when their parents couldn’t.

  Thomas held her tightly until she started trying to disengage, and then he let her go, watching as she stepped back to a reasonable distance.

  “I want to know everything,” she said. “Not right now, but . . . everything.”

  “I can say the same to you,” he said. “The crossroads are gone. How are you still here?”

  “Alice,” said Mary, rolling her shoulders in an easy shrug. “And the kids. I mean, really, I should be blaming Fran for being willing to hand her daughter to a dead girl, but I think the blame is shared.”

  Thomas and I both looked at her blankly. Mary smiled.

  “I had two jobs, where most crossroads ghosts only get one,” she said. “I served the crossroads, and I took care of the Healys. Fran got in early enough and wrapped me tight enough in Alice’s life that the metaphysics shifted somewhere along the way, and when Annie got rid of the crossroads, I still had a job to do. I’m a Phantom Babysitter now. I haunt the family. That’s what my afterlife looks like. Just you assholes, from here until eternity.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Mary eyed me.

  “Something funny?”

  “We get to keep you,” I said. “Forever. That’s amazing.”

  Her smile grew slowly. “Yeah. It kinda is. Now, do you two want to tell me what the hell is going on here?”

  “I found him,” I said. “Alive.”

  “That much is pretty obvious, Alice.”

  “Yeah, but everyone told me it wasn’t possible, so I’m going to be smug about it for a while,” I said. “I found him, I brought him home, and now we’re going to live happily ever after. With a little stop-off in New York to deal with the Covenant incursion Rose says is going on.”

  Mary looked at me oddly. “You’re going to New York?” she asked. “You know Kevin and Jane aren’t there, right?”

  “We do,” said Thomas. “While I am very eager for that reunion and introduction, and am quite sure Sally would rather be reunited with James than do much of anything else, it seems rather more pressing that we contend with my former associates.”

  “Plus Rose says her bosses want us there,” I interjected.

  Mary nodded, her focus still mostly on Thomas. “Wow, fifty years wherever the hell the crossroads put you haven’t changed you one little bit, have they?” she asked, almost amused. “And cool. Just wanted to be sure. We could use the help, honestly. We’ve been sheltering in place there for weeks, and—” She stopped, cocking her head sharply to the side like she was listening to something the rest of us couldn’t hear. “And I have to get back. Tommy, welcome home. You have no idea how happy I am to see you. Alice, I hope you’re staying put this time, since you don’t have anything left to look for.” She finished with a stern look that made it clear what the answer she wanted was.

  Fortunately, it was the one I was prepared to give. “I’m staying in this dimension for the foreseeable future,” I assured her. “Thomas is here. That’s all I’ve ever needed for a place to feel like home.”

  “You’re both going to have a lot of work to do, but I’m genuinely glad you’re finally going to start doing it,” she said, and disappeared, as abruptly as a light switch flipping off.

  I turned to Thomas, a small smile on my face. “Well, Verity will know we’re coming, at least,” I said. “Think Cynthia will be back soon with Sally and Sally’s new wardrobe?”

  “And the cake, one hopes, since otherwise we’re likely to cause a riot when we inform the colony that we’re already planning to depart.”

  I made a sour face, and he laughed. Normal was never going to be what it had been before he disappeared. We were fifty years too late for that. But we were going to find out what normal meant for us now, and we were going to be happy there.

  I had faith.

  * * *

  Cynthia’s peach cobbler was just as good cold as it had been hot, if somewhat texturally different. I leaned against Thomas on the couch, my feet tucked underneath me, and munched my way steadily through the sweet mixture of pastry crumble, fruit, and sugar while he did much the same with a plate of ribs. Neither of us had bothered reheating the food. The luxury of fresh food from a dimension where everything had evolved to be complementary to our biology, if not always compatible, was more than enough. If the food had been hot, it might have been overwhelming.

  On some level, I was almost glad we were plunging straight into another crisis. Sure, I said I wanted time for us to take things easy and get to know each other as people again, but I was also afraid of it. We’d both changed so much over the course of the last fifty years. The people we’d been were gone, casualties of the passage of time, and we couldn’t get back to them if we tried. It wasn’t possible.

  And I was a little bit afraid that if we had nothing external to fight against, we’d wind up trying anyway. That was the last thing I wanted.

  Besides, he was going to need time to reacclimate to life on Earth, without constant life-threatening peril around every corner. Maybe a little light peril would help with that. And he needed to start meeting the grandkids, anyway. I was sure he was going to adore them—but it was probably a good idea to start with someone other than Antimony, who was likely to immediately tie him to a chair and demand he become her personal Merlin, which would create a certain amount of pressure before he was necessarily ready for it. She needed to learn. He needed to breathe.

  Family is complicated. Peach cobbler, on the other hand, is refreshingly simple, and I kept shoveling it into my mouth with the single-minded devotion of someone who has learned through long and painful experience that when you can eat, you should eat, always. A full stomach is a blessing not frequently afforded by a universe that’s more interested in chaos than it is in comfort.

  We were still eating when the front door swung open and Sally stepped inside, looking faintly stunned, her arms overloaded with bags. Cynthia was close behind her, carrying more bags, as well as a half-sheet cake with white icing and pink and yellow frosting roses in the corners.

  “Success?” inquired Thomas.

  “Little miss here had a panic attack in the candy aisle when she realized we were surrounded by honest-to- Iðunn humans, and had to be taken to the bathroom until she stopped shaking,” said Cynthia. “But yes, success. We got everything you asked us to get.”

  “Walmart is a corporate parasite that crushes small businesses and reduces commercial diversity by out-competing everything around it, but they sell socks,” said Sally. I could see the strain under her flippancy. I set my cobbler aside and uncurled from the couch, moving to take some of the bags. “And underwear, and bras, and jeans, and shoes. I don’t think I’ve ever owned this much clothing.”