#Review - Silver and Lead by Seanan McGuire #Urban #Fantasy

Series: October Daye # 19
Format: Hardcover, 400 pages
Release Date: September 30, 2025
Publisher: Tor Books
Source: Publisher
Genre: Urban Fantasy

Seanan McGuire’s New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-nominated October Daye series continues as Toby Daye is thrust once again into danger... and this time she has more than ever to protect.

Something is rotten in Faerie. In the aftermath of Titania's reality-warping enchantment, things are returning to what passes for normal in the Kingdom in the Mists—until it's discovered that the royal vaults have been looted, and several powerful magical artifacts are missing. None are things that can be safely left unsecured, and some have the potential to do almost as much damage as Titania did, and having them in the wrong hands could prove just as disastrous.

At least the theft means that Sir October "Toby" Daye, Knight errant and Hero of the Realm, finally has an excuse to get out of the house. Sure, she's eight and a half months pregnant, but that doesn't mean she can’t take care of herself. But with the sea witch offering to stand godmother to Toby's child, maybe there are greater dangers ahead for Toby and her family than it appears....

Old enemies will resurface, new enemies will disguise themselves as friends, and Queen Windermere must try to keep her Hero on the case without getting herself gutted by the increasingly irritated local King of Cats. Sometimes, what's been lost can be the most dangerous threat of all.

Silver and Lead is the 19th installment in author Seanan McGuire's October Daye series. There is also a short novella called Seas and Shores featuring Simon Torquill, Saltmist, and characters who have been around since the author first introduced the world of Saltmist. McGuire's October Daye series has long been a cornerstone of urban fantasy, blending the gritty realism of modern San Francisco with the treacherous, enchanting politics of Faerie even as it navigates the unique challenges of late-stage pregnancy for its indomitable protagonist, October "Toby" Daye. 

In the aftermath of Titania's reality-warping enchantment, the Kingdom in the Mists is clawing its way back to "normal"—until a brazen theft from the royal vaults exposes a gaping vulnerability. Powerful magical artifacts, each capable of unleashing chaos on par with Titania's illusions, have vanished into the ether. For Toby, the half-fae knight errant and Hero of the Realm, this isn't just a crisis; it's a golden ticket out of the suffocating domesticity of her eighth-and-a-half-month pregnancy. 

The artifact heist unfolds with McGuire's signature blend of action and deduction: chases through fog-shrouded alleys, tense interrogations in glittering fae courts, and betrayals that hit like silver bullets. The sense of menace builds chapter by chapter, from a seemingly straightforward recovery op to a powder keg threatening Toby's unborn child and the fragile peace of the Mists. But as old enemies slither back into the shadows and new threats masquerade as allies, Toby's quest becomes a labyrinth of deception, with Queen Windermere pulling strings and the irascible King of Cats sharpening his claws. 

What makes this premise sing is how McGuire grounds it in Toby's personal stakes. No longer the lone-wolf PI from the early books, Toby is now a reluctant matriarch, her body a battleground between fae resilience and human vulnerability. The theft investigation starts small—a courtroom testimony against a notorious villain—but spirals into a web of betrayals that tests loyalties forged over nineteen volumes. McGuire masterfully avoids info-dumps, trusting longtime readers to recall the fallout from Titania's meddling while sprinkling enough context for newcomers (though, as the author herself notes in interviews, this is very much a series best savored from book one). 

Toby has always been a force of nature—reckless, loyal, and unapologetically stabby—but here, her condition forces a rare vulnerability. She chafes against the overprotectiveness of her husband, Tybalt (the roguish King of Cats), and her ragtag found family, who treat her like fragile porcelain. Lines like Toby's exasperated quip about having "more fretting" to endure than imaginable capture the humor and heart of these dynamics, turning what could be a contrived plot device into a poignant exploration of agency and interdependence. Toby's propensity for capture, her reliance on knowes (fae magic hotspots) for dramatic rescues, and the ever-present specter of body horror in fae violence.

Excerpt

ONE

February 21, 2016

Therefore the lottery,

that he hath devised in these three chests of gold,

silver and lead, whereof who chooses his meaning

chooses you, will, no doubt, never be chosen by any

rightly but one who shall rightly love.

—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

I SAT ON THE living room couch with my feet propped up on a pile of pillows and a version of Much Ado About Nothing I’d already seen a dozen times playing on the television, and all I could think was that if I didn’t get to do something—pretty much anything—soon, I was going to start screaming, and I might never stop.

My name is October Christine Daye. I am a trained knight, a private detective, and a named and known Hero of the Realm. I can take care of myself. And yet none of the people in my family seemed to believe that just now, as they were intent on keeping me locked in the house while I went slowly out of my mind from boredom.

Oh, yeah. Being back in the real world was definitely better than being trapped in Titania’s toxically idealized version of what Faerie should have been. But honestly, both of them sucked.

I could hear people rattling around in the kitchen, and knew that if I tried to get off the couch or made any sort of noise, someone would immediately head into the living room to make sure I was okay and take care of anything I might need. That was why I was holding as still as I possibly could, barely even breathing. I did not want another supportive round of “what can I do for you, October? How can I make things better? How can I convince you to keep acting like a houseplant instead of a person?”

It’s rude to throw things at your family, and I didn’t want to start, except for the part where I absolutely did.

Important piece of information I may have omitted before: everything I said about who I am is true. I just happen to also be a little over eight months pregnant, and married to a man whose first wife died due to complications in childbirth. I should probably have considered what that was going to mean during my own pregnancy before I agreed to have kids with him. I didn’t. That’s my bad.

Not my bad, exactly, is the fact that almost as soon as we’d realized I was pregnant, Titania, the Summer Queen of Faerie, had decided to throw a Kingdom-spanning enchantment over everything I knew and loved, transforming us into alternate versions of ourselves and locking us into her ideas of what Faerie should have been from the beginning. I’d been trapped there for four months, unaware that I was pregnant—unaware that I’d ever done anything that could have made me pregnant—while my husband searched for me, coming up with endless nightmare scenarios of things that could have gone wrong while I was enchanted and barely aware of them.

Lots of things went wrong while we were all Titania’s captives. Titania is kind of the worst. But nothing terrible happened to the baby, and after tearing her enchantment down, we’d finally been free to return home and get back to our lives. I’d been excited about that, right up until I discovered that “getting back to my life” meant effectively going into lockdown. I’d been trying to deal with the transition from “surprise, you’re pregnant” to “you’re four months along and your normally reasonable husband looks like he wants to vomit every time you mention leaving his line of sight,” while he’d been trying to deal with the fact that I was still me, no matter what I’d been living through for the previous four months without him, and he was going to have serious trouble keeping me completely stationary.

I’d actually said as much to him, during one of the brief quiet moments after our return home, when our collection of random teenagers had been sleeping and my Fetch, May, had been upstairs with her girlfriend. His response had been that the Luidaeg could probably turn me into a tree of some sort without harming the baby, and then remaining stationary would be easy.

To make matters worse, he’d repeated this suggestion to the Luidaeg when she’d dropped by a few days later, and she had not only laughed, but agreed that it was wholly possible. I’d reminded them both that I don’t care for involuntary transformation, and the Luidaeg, looking me dead in the eye, had answered, “If you force the issue, I won’t regard it as involuntary.”

The Luidaeg can’t lie. I’d changed the subject quickly after that, and spent the next few months doing my level best to take it easy. I was allowed out for short walks around the park, but never unaccompanied, and never if it looked like there might be anything remotely dangerous going on—a list which included “light rain,” “large dogs,” and “human teenagers being too rowdy while they played games of Frisbee.”

Tybalt and the Luidaeg were the loudest voices encouraging me to stay safe at home, but they weren’t the only ones. I am not a patient woman. What I am is a woman who desperately loves her husband and family, and doesn’t want to hurt them when I don’t have to. Tybalt’s concern was clear enough, and obviously rooted in his own past traumas, and so I did my best. But I’d come home not just to Tybalt, but to a collection of heavily traumatized teens who all seemed to be convinced that I would disappear again if they let me out of their sight. I couldn’t entirely blame them for that: I’d spent the last six years of my life mostly trying to stay alive, not get transformed into anything unpleasant, and not overthrow any monarchies that didn’t already deserve it. That didn’t mean I was enjoying my time as a functional prisoner in my own home.

Still, if it had just been Tybalt, and if he hadn’t been reeling from the effects of a major trauma, I could probably have found a way to talk him into the idea that I at least needed to be allowed to go to the grocery store and visit my liege. Sylvester and I hadn’t been on the best terms for quite a while, but we had been close when under Titania’s enchantment, and the twisted life she’d created for him had to have reminded him how much he needed his family. As long as he and I were semi-estranged, he wouldn’t have his brother, or either of his nieces. The immediate aftermath of breaking the spell would have been the perfect time to start rebuilding some bridges.

And yet, while I’m not always the most emotionally intelligent person in the room, I knew that forcing the issue while Tybalt was barely sleeping out of sheer anxiety would make what he was already going through much worse than it already is, and I loved him far too much to hurt him like that. I just needed to keep trying to make him understand that at a certain point, his concern had started hurting me.

The rattling from the kitchen was getting louder. I decided to risk swinging my feet around to the floor and sitting up, only slightly hampered by the size of my midsection. I wasn’t as large as I’d been with Gillian, but I was large enough to be inconvenienced by my own body. That was only fair. I inconvenience my body enough, after all.

I’ve mentioned Faerie a lot, so here’s the brief: it’s real, the fae are real, and they live alongside humanity, hidden by illusions and veils of otherworldly distance. I’m what’s called a changeling—fae mother, human father. My first child, Gillian, was born a thin-blooded changeling: her own father, Cliff, was fully human. For most of her life, she lived with him and his wife, Miranda, who was perfectly human, but under an unbreakable enchantment spun by Maeve. She’s actually my maternal grandmother, Janet Carter of the old ballad. Because once you add magic and curses that can extend people’s lives by centuries, nothing gets to stay simple.

Not that things are particularly simple for humans, either. Gillian thought she was one, but when Faerie came calling for her, she lost her humanity and became one of the skin-shifting Selkies, only to lose that as well and become a shapeshifting Roane. She had barely spoken to me since then, and I couldn’t entirely blame her.

I wrapped one arm around the sphere of my belly, addressing my next words to the child inside. “I’ll do better by you,” I promised. An unkeepable pledge, maybe, but in the moment, I more than meant it. Carefully, I pushed myself off the couch, grunting slightly, and started toward the living room door.

For a moment, I thought I was going to get away with it. Then I opened the door to find Raj already waiting there, a perkily helpful expression on his face. I groaned.

“Oak and ash, Raj, aren’t you supposed to be running the Court of Cats right now?” I asked.

“Tybalt’s there, checking in with Ginevra,” he said brightly. “Which means I get to be on Toby duty. Why are you up? What do you need?”

“I’m pregnant, not an invalid,” I snapped. And as pregnant women go, I was in remarkably good health, as long as you ignored the constant hunger and all the vomiting. My size was a problem, and my knees—which had never quite recovered from the way I treated them when I was younger—sometimes complained, but that was about it.

My type of faerie heals like it’s our job. I can literally slice my hand open and be healed less than ten seconds later. My knees would probably fix themselves if I was willing to start hacking at them and giving the tendons and cartilage an opportunity to self-repair. So yeah, I was more than a little tired of people acting like being pregnant meant that I was suddenly breakable. It wasn’t even like it was my first time.

“Yeah, but your husband is still my uncle, and that makes him the boss of me until he fully steps down,” said Raj. “Can I get you anything?”

“I am going to the kitchen,” I snarled, pushing past him.

One small advantage to the way everyone was treating me: he couldn’t stop me without touching me, and so he let me pass, following me to the kitchen.

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#Review - Installment Immortality by Seanan McGuire #Urban #Fantasy

Series: InCryptid (#14)
Format: Paperback, 432 pages
Release Date: March 11, 2025
Publisher: Tor Books
Source: Publisher
Genre: Urban Fantasy

After four generations of caring for the Price family, Mary Dunlavy has more than earned a break from the ongoing war with the Covenant of St. George. Instead, what she's getting is a new employer in the form of the anima mundi, Earth's living soul made manifest, and a new assignment: to hunt down the Covenant agents on the East Coast and make them stop imprisoning America's ghosts.

All in a day's work for a phantom nanny, even one who'd really rather be teaching her youngest charges how to read.

One ghost can't take on the entire Covenant without backup, which is how she winds up on a road trip with the still-mourning Elsie and the slowly collapsing Arthur, both of whom are reeling in their own way from the loss of their mother. New allies and new enemies await in Worcester, Massachusetts, where the path of the haunting leads.

With the anima mundi demanding results and Mary's newfound freedom at stake, it's down to Mary to make sure that everyone gets out of this adventure alive.

It's been a long afterlife, but Mary Dunlavy's not ready to be exorcised quite yet.

Installment Immortality is the 14th installment in author Seanan McGuire's InCrypid series. You should definitely read Aftermarket Afterlife before jumping into this story. Events in Aftermarket have caused a huge turmoil in the family, and what happens is a cause-and-effect of that turmoil. This installment shifts the spotlight back to Mary Dunlavy, the ghostly babysitter who’s been haunting the Price-Healy clan for four generations. If you’ve followed the series this far, you know McGuire excels at juggling humor, heart, and high stakes—and this book is no exception. 

The plot picks up after the emotional gut-punch of Aftermarket Afterlife, where the destruction of the Crossroads left Mary untethered and the Price-Healy family reeling from the loss. Now, Mary’s got a new gig: working for the anima mundi, Earth’s living soul, with a mission to stop Covenant of St. George agents from imprisoning America’s ghosts along the East Coast. She’s not alone on this spectral road trip—she’s joined by Elsie and Arthur Harrington, both grappling with their mother’s death in their own messy, human ways. 

What unfolds is a tale of grief, ghostly vengeance, and the kind of chaotic camaraderie that defines the InCryptid universe. Elsie and Arthur bring their own flavors of dysfunction—Elsie’s thirst for revenge against the Covenant is palpable, while Arthur’s slow unraveling adds a poignant edge. The ghosts they encounter along the way are a highlight, each a unique reflection of how identity lingers after death, from spectral librarians to vengeful spirits with unfinished business.

At the end of the book, the author has left a short novella called Mourner's Waltz featuring a very pregnant Verity who is living in Manhattan thanks to the good graces of the Dragons. Also, the author spends a whole lot of time summarizing events going back to Mary's time as a 16-year-old babysitter who had the misfortune of dying and then working for the Crossroads. She, unlike Rose, hasn't been given a raise, as it were, so she is still considered to be the Price-Harrington family babysitter. I believe it is time for Sarah and Arthur to find time to reconcile what happened to him and to see if there's any hope of him going forward. One could honestly call this book a loose ends tie-up a book since that is what it does while making the Covenant the boogeyman that once again needed to be crushed.

One


“With the cost of childcare these days, I’m surprised more people aren’t trying to get their houses haunted. Who cares if the walls bleed, as long as someone’s got the kid.”

—Jane Harrington-Price

A small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon

Now

ALL RIGHT, THIS IS WHERE I recap. Because we’re dealing with five generations of family history here, and that’s a lot, even when you’ve been there from the beginning. I can’t count on anyone having been here from the beginning anymore, myself included, so I’ll give you the basic shape of things and hope that will be enough to ground you in this glorious ghost story already in progress:

My name is Mary Dunlavy and I’m a perfectly human, perfectly ordinary teenager. I was sixteen in 1939 and I’m still sixteen today, which would be impossible if not for the small and slightly unsettling fact that I was sixteen when I died. Ghosts don’t age the way the living do. We can change and grow as people, if we’re willing to make the effort, but whatever age we are when our clocks get stopped is the age we’re going to be forever. Sixteen then, sixteen now, sixteen in another hundred years, assuming I’m still haunting my preferred patch of humanity.

Oh, yeah—ghosts are real. Hope that’s not too much of a shock, since you’re here, but it’s surprising what people can and can’t accept. I’ve met folks who were fine with the idea of shapeshifting shark-people living in the waters off Hawaii, but flipped their lids when they found out that some people treat the various laws of physics as negotiable. People who were cool with sorcerers but got big upset about the psychic ambush predator wasps from another dimension. And plenty of people who accepted everything they learned about the cryptid world, but didn’t want to admit that hauntings were real. The human mind needs a few limits it can believe are absolute if it wants to stay stable, and “ghosts” is a surprisingly frequent barrier. Which isn’t one that can really linger long if we’re going to have a productive relationship.

So: I died when I was sixteen, in a hit-and-run accident involving someone who never even realized what had happened. By the time I realized I could go looking for the guy, it was too late; he had shuffled off his own mortal coil, blissfully unaware that he’d committed vehicular manslaughter, and he didn’t hang around to haunt the joint. I never got to confront him. Even “him” is a big assumption, since women could drive even back when I died: it’s just that I know it was a truck that did me in, and in the 1930s, in rural Michigan, most trucks were driven by men. Sexism can help you narrow the field, when you know how to apply it.

I died, and was immediately recruited into the service of an eldritch entity that we knew as “the crossroads,” an invader from outside this version of reality that had replaced Earth’s natural anima mundi and was happily playing parasite, making deals with people who asked for them and gradually destroying the magical skin of the world. It was my job to advocate for the people who came to the crossroads looking to make a deal, whether it be for fame, fortune, eternal youth, or something even less pleasant. I was never the best, which suited the crossroads well; they didn’t want their petitioners to be discouraged. Hard to chew people up and spit them out when a meddling ghost can convince them not to deal with you in the first place.

Most crossroads ghosts gradually lost their humanity, fading more and more into the sort of amoral unpleasantness made manifest in the crossroads themselves. It was part of why they didn’t last. Once a ghost had been too reduced to their nastier impulses, they couldn’t do their job anymore, and the crossroads would devour them. I got lucky.

I got a babysitting gig.

I had posted the flyers while I was still alive, little advertisements offering my services to anyone who needed them. “Give your kid to an unlicensed teenager and I promise to give them back alive in exchange for money when you’re done doing whatever it is you needed to do!” Leaving children alone with someone who’s barely more than a child themselves sounds like a criminal activity, but is actually an essential part of keeping those kids alive while also holding a job, or doing the grocery shopping, or just not losing your goddamn mind in small-town Michigan. And it worked! I’d been on my way home from a babysitting job when I had my fatal run-in with the truck that killed me.

Because the crossroads had claimed me before anyone knew that I was dead and let me go home to my father with nothing to indicate that I no longer had a heartbeat, my flyers were all still up even after my body had cooled.

Enter Frances Healy.

To explain Fran, I have to explain the Healys. They were come-latelies, a family of immigrants from far-off, exotic England, their accents strange to Michigander ears and their traditions even stranger. Like voluntarily entering the Galway Woods, which every child of Buckley knew not to do. There were monsters in those woods, creatures hidden among the trees, which seemed to shift positions in the night, roots appearing in the middle of previously smooth trails while clearings vanished and the shadows grew beyond control. Enid and Alexander had been the first to arrive, and their son Jonathan had come not long after, born in the town hospital, screaming and wrinkled and already a stranger. He would spend his entire life in Buckley, and he would always be viewed as an intruder of sorts, someone who had come in from the outside.

He’d been a reasonably good-looking man, and his parents were well-liked in the town, for all of their oddities; there was a time when a lot of the local girls had hoped he might decide to solidify his family’s ties to the township by marrying one of them. Instead, he’d gone on a trip out west and come home with a loudmouthed blonde who liked to wear trousers, throw knives, and ride her horse in the Galway Woods. Somehow, even though no other horse would even go near the edge of the trees, Fran’s Rabbit had always been willing to trust her to protect him. He never threw her. Not even once.

Fran had been the one to spot my advertisement on the library bulletin board, and she was the one who came to ring the bell and ask if I’d consider watching her baby daughter. I’d been playing alive in those days, and a living teenager would have been happy for the easy job and extra spending money, so I said yes, of course. Yes, I’d be happy to watch her, and yes, I loved babies, and yes, I had a list of names she could call to check my references.

I’d love to be able to say that I felt something change the first time she handed me her daughter, and maybe I did, but I suspect it was like a crack in a dam: so small and so slight that it was invisible and imperceptible. The damage was done, whether it could be seen or not, and the crossroads had given me permission to care for my family when they claimed me as their own.

Alice was a year old when I met her, pretty as a picture, all golden curls and huge blue eyes and a curiosity strong enough to change the world. She was just a job like any other in the beginning, and then …

Then everything changed.

* * *

Once Fran learned that I was dead, babysitting for Alice had become paradoxically easier. The family was strange in some ways even the town’s biggest gossips had never guessed, and their relationship with the woods went a lot deeper than just walking in the trees. As a normal local sitter, I’d been too likely to turn on them to be trusted with their secrets or allowed inside their house. Once they knew I had secrets of my own to keep, everything changed.

For one thing, I’d started watching Alice at her own house, which was substantially better childproofed and equipped with things to keep her occupied. Including a colony of talking mice that had immediately deified me and worked me into their complicated religious rituals, and if that’s a sentence that has ever existed before, I don’t think I want to know about it.

Johnny and Fran had been out of town, visiting a family of gorgons in Chicago, while Alexander and Enid were enjoying a well-deserved date night at the Red Angel, our local hangout for people who weren’t exactly ordinary. And I had been sitting on the couch in the Healy family living room, watching Alice drag her favorite stuffed jackalope around by one antler. Two of the mice were following her, their eyes bright with doting adoration. An ordinary night, all things considered.

I’d been starting to think about getting up and fixing Alice her dinner when I heard the crossroads calling for me. It wasn’t a sound, exactly, more like a sensation, a prickling itch along the edge of my consciousness, discomfort in a place that shouldn’t have been uncomfortable. I did my best to ignore it, even as it got louder and louder before finally cutting off, replaced by relief. I sat down next to Alice on the floor, wrapping my arms around her and letting her tell me all about the mice in her short, half-coherent sentences.

I’d had just enough time to relax and think that it was over before the crossroads called again—and this time, when I ignored them, they yanked.

There are rules to the way the dead can move. In my heyday, I could go from one side of the country to the other in the blink of an eye, answering the call of the crossroads. Distance didn’t matter to them, and I was one of them, free to go wherever I pleased by tunneling through the top levels of the lands of the dead. But I couldn’t carry the living with me. That was outside my power even when I was at my strongest. Holding on to Alice should have been a sufficient anchor to keep me where I was.

Instead, the world had warped around us, and I’d abruptly been sitting on warm concrete under a twilight-stained sky, empty fields all around us, power lines buzzing overhead. Alice was still pressed against my chest, and my brief throb of fear didn’t have time to fully form before she was pushing against me, saying peevishly, “Mary, let go.”

Shocked, I let her go, and she rose and toddled several feet away before plopping down and beginning to roll a rounded rock back and forth, apparently viewing it as a sufficient substitute for her jackalope, which was still back in Buckley.

“Adorable child,” said a buzzing voice from behind me.

I jerked around, eyes narrowing as I took in the empty outline cut into the air behind me. “Stay the hell away from her.”

“Oh, don’t worry. She’s too young to understand any bargain we might try to make with her, which means she’s off-limits until she gets a little older. Now, once she does, we’ll thank you for keeping her safe long enough to come to us. She smells of something we haven’t tasted in a very long time.”

“Alice is off-limits.”

“Is she?” The voice of the crossroads turned sharp. “We worry that you’re forgetting who you belong to, Mary Dunlavy. That you’re getting distracted by these frivolous duties you perform among the living.”

“You agreed that my family comes first,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “If you call when I’m with them, I don’t have to come immediately. I can fulfill my duties to them first. Well, Alice is my family, and I couldn’t safely leave her alone in the house. That means you broke the rules of our agreement by forcing me to come here.”

“You have no relation to this child.”

“I didn’t ask you for my relatives, I asked you for my family. A husband isn’t related to his wife—or shouldn’t be. An adopted child isn’t related to any of the people they call kin. Alice is my family. She belongs to me, and I belong to her, and you agreed when you claimed me that my family would come before anything else, even you.”

The crossroads hissed, a low, angry sound like a teakettle boiling over. “Semantics.”

“Everything you are is built on semantics. Those deals you take so much pleasure in making, they’re all semantics. You’re the one who taught me to look for the loopholes. You broke the rules by bringing us here, not me.”

“Do not test our patience, child,” said the crossroads, voice gone cold and dangerous.

“I don’t have anything else to test,” I said, and moved to scoop Alice off the concrete. She came willingly, holding her rock in both hands like it was some sort of treasure.

“I keep this?” she asked me, hopefully.

Her parents let her play with taxidermy and sticks. They weren’t going to object to a rock. “You can keep it,” I said.

She beamed. “Thanks, Mary!” she declared, and waved her rock like a tiny orchestra conductor before squirming and saying imperiously, “Down.”

I released her again, and again she ran off to examine the wonders of our surroundings. She had almost fifty reliable words at that point, and it was a matter of pride for me that “Mary” had been among her first. I was her family as much as she was mine.

“Well?” I turned back to the shape cut out of nothing. “You wanted me to negotiate something for you?”

“The child makes you less imposing and thus less effective,” complained the crossroads.

“You brought me here against my will while I was babysitting,” I said.

“We could command you to stop.”

“You could try. I know you don’t have a boss as such, but I’ve always gotten the impression that you have to follow the rules. What’s the point of making a deal if you don’t adhere to the terms? If you punish me for keeping to the rules you negotiated, you’re breaking our deal, and word will get out. You want that to happen?”

Alice had found a stick and was poking it into a hole by the side of the road. I itched to swoop over and grab her before she could find some unfriendly local wildlife. Instead, I forced myself to stay where I was and scowl at the crossroads, which didn’t have a face but still managed to give the impression of scowling back.

“Our rules are our rules,” they said. “You aren’t meant to use them against us.”

“Oops.”

“Perhaps we were … hasty in demanding your attention.”

“Looks that way to me.” I shrugged broadly, looking around. “I don’t see anyone looking to make a deal.”

“Our petitioner is on the way.”

“Great. You have time to get another interlocutor on the scene.”

“We will agree that the girl is your family,” said the crossroads, sounding surprisingly sullen for an untouchable force of the universe. “We will extend that agreement to her blood relations. But that is the end, do you understand? We will acknowledge no others in such a way.”

“Works for me.” And it did—I’d been taking fewer and fewer jobs the longer I’d been dead. My hair had already gone from pale blonde to a bleached-out bone white that would have looked artificial if not for the fact that my eyebrows and lashes had paled to match, and my eyes were something unspeakable. Most of me could still have belonged to the living, but not my eyes. They were filled with cemeteries and screams. Adults mostly didn’t notice, or didn’t look closely enough to understand what about me they found unnerving, but children—I always wound up feeling bad when I met new kids. They had a tendency to meet my eyes and start wailing like they’d just seen the shadow of their own mortality and didn’t quite understand what it meant.

I crossed the intersection to Alice and picked her up for a second time, resting her on my hip as I turned to face the nothingness. “You can send us back now.”

“Perhaps we’d prefer it if you took her home the ordinary way.”

“All right.” I shrugged. “Just keep in mind that I’m a teenage girl, on foot, and I can’t take any shortcuts. I don’t have any money, and you’ve just promised not to pull me away from her when she needs me, you could be without an interlocutor for a while. You’ll have to call in one of your backups. Maybe Carlton would be good for the job?”

Carlton was another crossroads ghost, based out of Wisconsin. He was a lot more experienced than I was and argued a lot harder for his petitioners. Rumor was that he’d actually won a few times, convincing them to leave without taking a deal. The crossroads didn’t like that.

“… fine,” said the crossroads, sullenly. “We’ll call next time you’re free.”

And then I was back in the Healy family living room, Alice in my arms, her new rock still clutched firmly in one hand. The mice cheered as I put her down and she ran off down the hall, presumably to do something unfathomably inappropriate with her rock.

I sagged. The mice knew we’d been gone. That meant they were going to tell Fran and Jonathan, and that meant there was no way I could get out of explaining the situation. Oh, well. It had been fun while it lasted.

Resigned to my impending doom, I followed the sound of Alice’s laughter down the hall.

* * *

Only I hadn’t been met with doom. I’d been met with surprising understanding and a new gig as Alice’s exclusive babysitter, which had suited everyone involved. More importantly, that was the moment the crossroads had come to accept Alice as my family and, through her, each and every one of her descendants. From Kevin to Olivia, they were mine, and I was theirs, and nothing was going to split us up.

Not even Alice growing up and falling in love with a man who made a deal with the crossroads to save her life after she’d been bitten by a dangerous cryptid whose venom went ripping through her body, shredding cells like they were nothing of any consequence. His name was Thomas Price, and he’d paid dearly for her life, finding himself locked in to a world growing steadily smaller while she thought he didn’t care. Until finally, explosively, they’d figured out how much each of them cared, and gotten down to the business of making more kids for me to babysit.

Kevin had come first, followed by Jane, and I’d been a major part of their upbringing. The family babysitter who never had other clients, or conflicting appointments, or caught a cold. Who never got any older. I was the cool older kid when they were little, and then I was a peer, and when they looked at me and saw a child, they would graduate from my care.

The years between Kevin and Jane being too old to need a babysitter and them having kids of their own had been among the most unpleasant I’d known since I died. The fact that they were family enough to call me away from the crossroads was a source of constant irritation for my real owner-employers, and there had been a brief period when I’d been afraid that the crossroads were going to find a way to kill them both, stopping the family line in its tracks and taking away my one excuse to hold on to my humanity.

But Kevin and Jane had been born with the same bizarrely coincidence-based luck as their mother, and more importantly, their living guardian had been a woman named Laura Campbell, Alice’s childhood best friend and—most importantly of all—an umbramancer doing her best to masquerade as an ambulomancer.

Both umbramancers and ambulomancers are types of road witch, close cousins to the routewitches. Ambulomancers are about half as common as routewitches, unusual enough to be worth remarking on, but not so rare as to be intimidating. Umbramancers, though …

There’s a lot of confusion about where umbramancers get their power. This much is absolutely certain, though: they’re living humans who can traverse the twilight for short distances without dying, they can see the future in limited ways, and they can speak to the dead, even the dead who are too weak and distanced from their origins to manifest visually or audibly. They’re good at wards and seals. Most umbramancers will spend their whole lives trying not to be noticed. I know Laura did. She wanted to be taken for a walking witch, to be left alone and ignored.

And then she’d found herself the custodian of Alice and Thomas Price’s two children, which meant she had the attention of the crossroads from the very beginning, and would have the attention of the Covenant if she wasn’t careful. (We haven’t reached the Covenant of St. George yet. Be patient, I’m getting there.) She’d needed to do some things she really didn’t want to in order to protect herself and the children, and the whole time, Alice had been slipping in and out of our lives on her endless search for Thomas, never staying long enough for her children to know her, never slowing down enough to let herself ask what was going to happen if she failed.

It had been a dark period for all of us. Laura had been spending more and more time trying to perceive an ever-shifting future, reaching deeper into the midnight, the deepest layer of the afterlife, with every reading. And then one day she’d pulled me aside, and told me, in a voice as empty as an unfinished tomb, that she knew what had to happen next.

“There will be children,” she’d said. “They’re coming, sooner than you think, if not as soon as I’d like. I’ll see the first born to each of them, and no more than that.”

“What’s going to happen to you?”

“I’ll be going away. I can’t tell you where, only that it’s for everyone’s safety, and that they’ll be able to have me back someday. I’m not going as far as Tommy went, or Alice.” She’d smiled at me then, and her eyes had been older than even my own. “Don’t worry so much, Mary. It’s bad for your heart.”

“I’m dead,” I’d replied. “The only good part about it is not needing to worry about my blood pressure. Where are you going?”

I would remember her sigh for as long as I lived. “Away. Somewhere you can’t follow. Somewhere none of you can follow. And I’ll see you when the time comes, when you have to come and find me, but if I’m still here, the future changes in some ways that it’s better we avoid.”

“Jane’s not going to like this.”

With Alice gone, Laura was more her mother than her biological mom had ever been. She even called Laura “Mom” sometimes, although Laura tried to dissuade her. Jane and Alice were never going to have a very traditional relationship, but Laura felt it was important for Jane to remember where she came from, and Laura was normally right about that sort of thing.

True to Laura’s word, both Kevin and Jane had gone off to college, met the loves of their lives, and gotten married. The children had followed a respectable time later. The first, Alex, had been welcomed with a smile and a kiss on the forehead. The second, Elsie, had been met with the same, and with a slim book of predictions that related to the kids. Laura had handed it off to Kevin and returned to her trailer.

Two days later, she’d been gone, wherever it was she’d vanished to had been too far away for even me to reach. Not that there’d been a lot of time to look for her—after being abandoned by their own mother, neither Kevin nor Jane had been willing to leave their kids alone while they went on a wild goose chase. The trail, such as it was, had been given years to go cold, and by the time we started searching, it was far too late.

I had no doubt that Laura had planned it like that. She was always good at covering her bases. But there had been children to focus on and worry about—first Alex and Elsie, and then Verity, Artie, Antimony, and finally Sarah, who was older than Verity but didn’t become a proper part of our family until three years after Antimony was born. Bringing her into the family had been enough to confirm that adopted children were exactly the same as biological ones in the eyes of whatever cosmic law managed my debt to the crossroads, because I’d been able to hear her calling me from the beginning.

One child in the first generation I was responsible for, two in the second, six in the third. It seemed like I would have a place and a purpose forever. The crossroads saw it too, and they didn’t approve; they wanted me away from my family, fully under their control. But when they tried to press the issue by targeting the youngest of my charges, Antimony, she’d responded by tapping in to the same sort of power the routewitches used to control distance and turned time against them, going back to the point where the crossroads had entered our world and driving them away before they could take root.

Thanks to her, the crossroads had never existed. Thanks to the tangled web of reality refusing to be undone outside of the metaphysical side of things, I continued to exist. I was just defined as a full-time babysitter rather than a part-time servant to an unspeakable force infinitely greater than myself.

And the timing had been pretty good, since that was also right about when the family started acquiring kids again, both through the “make your own” method and via the “if you can’t make your own, store-bought is fine” route. Antimony adopted another brother, James. Alex’s girlfriend got pregnant. Verity got pregnant. Sarah’s parents—who were also Evelyn’s parents—adopted a little boy, and Alice and Thomas came home from the abyss with a new daughter in tow. The family had never been larger, I had never been busier, and everything would have been perfect, if not for the Covenant.

Which means it’s time to explain the Covenant, because as I said, this is the recap to make sure we’re all on the same page. Not easy, sometimes necessary.

* * *

Just about all the legends from all around the world are true, or based on truth. True enough to chew your face off if you get too close. Ghosts are real, obviously. Exhibit A: yours truly. The latest name for all the legendary creatures and spectacular monsters is “cryptid,” meaning a thing which is currently unknown to science. Dragons are cryptids. So are finfolk, and tailypo, and gorgons, and all sorts of other things that officially don’t exist. Most of them are as harmless as anything that wants to stay alive—no, you probably don’t want to get cuddly with a questing beast, but you don’t want to get cuddly with a bear, either. That doesn’t make the questing beast bad, just not domesticated or friendly toward humanity.

But some people didn’t see it that way. Some people saw it as humans vs. cryptids for control of the world, and viewed the fact that not all cryptids wanted to slink off and surrender their territory to humanity as inherently evil, like protecting their homes and families was wrong just because the creatures doing it weren’t the right species. And in those days, there were a lot more of the big flashy cryptids around, the ones you couldn’t exactly pretend didn’t exist when you were looking right at them. This was way before my time, of course, but I’ve heard the stories. There’s a reason “dragon slayer” used to be a reasonable profession.

So the people who thought humans shouldn’t have to share the world with cryptids got together, and they formed an organization called the Covenant of St. George. Now, in the beginning, maybe they were more reasonable than they sound now. Back then, dragons really did burn down villages and attack people for their gold. They were a problem. The Covenant was the solution.

Only after they solved the issue of the dragon in their own backyard, they decided to push the issue. They started solving the issue of the dragon in the mountains, far away from humans. And then they started solving the issue of the dragon that had been coexisting peacefully with the local humans, and then they started solving the issue of dragons existing at all. From there, they started on a campaign of solving the issue of literally anything they didn’t think had a right to exist. Ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that went bump in the night. People like Alice, with her preternaturally good luck. People like Thomas, who didn’t want to follow their rules.

The Covenant had the best intentions when they got started, and they turned into the villains in their own story a long time ago. If they’d been content to stay there, we could have gone our merry way, but they wanted to be the villains in our story, too, and they kept pushing the issue. To them, my family is made up of monsters, traitors, and monstrous traitors, people who have no right to exist in their perfect, human-dominated world. We’re a threat to be exterminated. Worst of all, we’ve been collectively keeping them from getting the kind of stranglehold over North America that they enjoy over Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. So after Verity accidentally revealed us to the Covenant on national television, they pretty much declared war.

The first big battle was six months ago. It ended with two members of my family dead, the rest traumatized to one degree or another, and me discorporated in a way we had all genuinely believed was going to be the end of me.

But the anima mundi, the living spirit of the Earth that had existed before the crossroads and was now reasserting its authority over the world, had gathered the motes of me that remained and reassembled them bit by bit into the spirit I’d been all along. She didn’t bring me back to life or anything. She just put me back together, with a few more limitations on what I could do—which was fair, really, since there hadn’t been a ghost like me before, and with the crossroads gone, there was never going to be one again.

I woke up from my six months of nothingness about an hour ago, and the first thing I wanted to do once I existed again was go home, a request the anima mundi had been kind enough to grant. Unlike the crossroads, they had no interest in forcing me into anything I didn’t want to do.

And that’s where we pick this back up as a “things that are happening” rather than a “things that have happened”: with me following Sarah, one of my charges, into the house in Portland, finally home, finally back where I belong. Sure, we still had a war to fight, but for the moment, I had never been happier.

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