“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.”
“We also got snacks for the road trip you’re about to leave on, since groceries would be pointless right now.” Cynthia put the cake on the coffee table before setting her share of the bags down on the floor. “We swung through McDonald’s on the way home. Your girl can put away some chicken nuggets. I think she’s half honey mustard by weight.”
“Did you bring us any fries?” I asked.
“No,” said Sally. “They’re no good cold, and they would have been cold by the time we got home.”
“Fair enough. Want to see a magic trick?”
“Sure,” said Sally dubiously.
“That’s my cue to get out of here,” said Cynthia. “Alice, I’m keeping the change. I’ll apply it to your grocery bill. If you call the Angel when you’re on the way back, I’ll make sure everything’s stocked up and ready before you get here.”
“Appreciate it,” I said, and watched as she walked quickly to the door and let herself out. Cynthia had seen this before. She was smart to get clear before things got loud.
Turning back to the living room, I clapped my hands. “The Holy Bargain of For God’s Sake, Alex, Make Those Damn Mice Stop Yelling While I Have A Hangover is still in effect,” I said, loudly and sternly. “But as always within the bounds of this bargain, offerings must be made. You are invited for cake, in the living room, providing you keep the cheering to a minimum and take your portion away with haste. Is the bargain satisfactory?”
There was a long pause, long enough to make me think maybe they were sulking and I was talking to the walls for no real reason. Then, from all sides, came a resounding cry of “HAIL!”
Sally winced. “I thought you told them to keep the cheering to the minimum.”
“That was the minimum,” I said, as mice streamed out of the baseboards and swarmed the cake like locusts covering a farmer’s field, ripping off chunks of sponge and frosting and racing away with them, vanishing into the baseboards. I watched with a small, indulgent smile. A full colony of Aeslin mice gathering food is an impressive sight. “Cake is a literal religious experience, and they’re very excited about it. The fact that they’re not singing a song in honor of the cake, the baker, the farmers who grew the ingredients, that’s them showing restraint.”
Sally blinked. “They worship . . . cake.”
“No, they worship us. The cake is just a fulfillment of the promise made to them by Great-Great-Grandma Beth when she found them in her chicken coop.”
Sally’s expression turned dubious. “How many generations of your family am I going to be expected to memorize? Ballpark figure, if you could.”
“Your family too now, Sally,” said Thomas with amusement. He had been watching the Ceremony of Cake without getting involved, perhaps not wanting to test the bounds of the Holy Bargain that was keeping him from being swarmed like a sheet cake himself. Now that more than half the mice were gone, it must have felt a little safer to speak. “We’ll be presenting you to the town as a cousin, and I do believe those new identities Alice mentioned arranging in Las Vegas would list you as a relation.”
“With your permission,” I said, as Sally shot me a sharp look. “I mean, we’ve already established that you don’t want to go back to Maine, and Thomas seems pretty set on keeping you; if we can make that true on paper, we make things a lot easier on all of us in the future. So I guess you’re experiencing the adoption equivalent of getting drafted, if that makes sense.”
“I guess I am,” said Sally. She didn’t look displeased about it. “I guess you weren’t kidding.”
“How could we be kidding?” I asked, and picked up a few of the bags. “The mice adore you. Thomas adores you. I mostly don’t want to push you down a well. That means you’re on a par with how I feel about most of the rest of the family, and we’re keeping you as long as you want to be kept.”
“And if you want to go to college, or go off somewhere and start a life with fewer talking rodents and random assaults by monster-hunters, we can help with that,” said Thomas. “Alice tells me the family accounts are still intact. We don’t want for money.”
“This is so weird,” muttered Sally. She looked at me. “There a reason you’re stealing my underwear?”
“I figured I’d put it in your room,” I said. “Unless you really wanted to haul it all yourself?”
“. . . you can help,” Sally allowed, sounding only slightly overwhelmed. I picked up two more bags. She did the same, and we began the process of getting everything upstairs while Thomas continued to watch the mice denude their offering of cake.
Sally set to unpacking her things, and then Thomas joined me upstairs so we could do the reverse, packing clothes and weapons for the trip ahead. He discouraged me from bringing too many grenades, saying mildly that while he was not averse to some recreational violence, he would prefer I not blow my own limbs off while I was recovering from my delusions of indestructibility. I encouraged him to bring more shirts than he thought he’d need, glad once again that I had never thrown anything away; he might be out of style, but at least he wouldn’t have to wear anything that was actively bloodstained for very long.
All in all, it was a soothing process, and we finished and went to bed shortly before midnight, home, safe, and back in a world we almost understood.
That night, Thomas and I slept in our own room, together, with no refugee camp outside for us to defend and a closed door between us and his adopted adult daughter, who had still been sorting through her purchases in her room, which she seemed to be starting to believe was actually hers, when we went to bed. The mice had whisked away our dinner leftovers along with their cake, carrying them off to feed the parts of the colony who weren’t as free to scavenge on their own—the infants and the elders. The bones had been given to the tailypo. Our house was an ecosystem, as it had always been before, and while the exact balance of residents might have changed, it felt like home for the first time in decades.
To my mild surprise, neither of us felt like being any more intimate than the inherent closeness of curling up against each other in a space that had always belonged to just the two of us, where the rest of the world had somehow managed never to truly intrude. I slept the deep, cleansing sleep that normally followed a fever, the kind of sleep that had been so common when I was a kid that I had barely noticed it slipping away.
I woke up to early-morning light streaming around the edges of the curtains and the feeling of a hand stroking my hair. I lifted my head, which had been resting on Thomas’s chest, and looked up to find him half-propped on the pillows, smiling at me.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Hey,” I said, and smiled drowsily back. “Sun’s up and we’re still here.”
“Not for long,” he said. “I believe what woke me was the sound of someone honking a horn outside. You were far too deeply asleep to notice.”
“I felt safe,” I said, and stretched, scooting slightly away from him to do so. “Not the most common thing, so when it happens, I tend to just let myself have it.”
“I intend to make you feel safe a great deal more often,” he said solemnly. I smiled at him. He leaned over and kissed me. “We’re home now. We’ll be safe from now on.”
“After we go drive your former co-workers out of New York,” I said. “Not thrilled about that part. I was excited about having time and privacy.”
“We have both right now,” he said, and reached for me. My smile grew as I let him gather me close, and for a little while, the urgency of everything else didn’t matter. We were here. We were home, and we still had each other, despite the impossibility of that fact.
We won.
When we finally pulled apart, I kissed him before rolling over to get my feet on the floor, stretching again in the process. “I could definitely get used to that as a way to start the morning.”
“I intend to see to it that you do,” said Thomas, sitting up on his side of the bed. He paused then, a quizzical look on his face. “I thought the bed I had in the bottle dimension was a reasonable approximation of this one; it seems I was wrong.”
“Wait until we get one that’s less than fifty years old,” I said.
He smiled at me. “Temptress.”
“Temptress calls first shower,” I said. “You can go wake Sally. Or ask the mice to do it, but realize that if you do, they may decide they’re allowed to start badgering you.”
He was still laughing when I left the room and made my way down the hall to lock myself in the bathroom. There would be time for shared showers later, when an unfamiliar routewitch wasn’t about to be honking outside the house. We didn’t have any neighbors for them to bother, but still, if we were going to get on the road before lunch, we couldn’t get too distracted.
It normally takes about thirteen hours to drive from Buckley to Manhattan, depending on traffic and stops. With a routewitch behind the wheel, it could take six or sixteen, depending on their current relationship to the road. Since the Ocean Lady wanted us to get our butts over there and take care of the Covenant, I was willing to bet this was going to be an unreasonably swift trip, one marked with an absence of construction zones or speed traps. But I’ve been wrong before.
Sally was in the front room when we came downstairs, a mouse on her open palm. Her attention was focused on the tiny creature, which was earnestly reciting one of the rituals associated with Mary. There were plenty of those. “Ready to go?” I asked.
Sally looked up, almost startled, before giving a single sharp nod and setting the mouse down on the couch. “All packed,” she said, standing. “You expect we’re coming back here?”
“We always do,” I said, reaching back to put a hand on Thomas’s arm.
The words felt hollow. We’d just managed to get here; leaving already felt like an admission of some kind of failure, like we should have been able to find a way to stay put at least long enough to cook a proper dinner and start falling into a routine. Sadly, the world has never been that accommodating. We’d be back. We always came back.
We had to.
Thomas took my hand in his, clearly seeing my discomfort, and asked, “Has either of you called the mice?”
Sally blinked. “I was just talking to one . . .”
“Yeah, but did you tell them we were leaving?” I asked. She shook her head, and I snorted. “Right. Clergy! Mine, and those representing the Conscripted Priestess and the God of Inconvenient Timing!”
As I’d expected, there wasn’t even a pause before several small heads poked out of a hole in the wall. The mice might be constrained by the Holy Bargain, but they were still going to be stalking us through the house as long as we were here, soaking up every scrap of liturgy they could get.
“We’re leaving,” I informed the mice. “Not for very long, hopefully, but we should see the Arboreal Priestess while we’re away. Please choose representatives from the appropriate clergies to accompany us.”
The mice popped back into the wall, their disappearance followed by the sound of violent squeaking. I waited patiently, and less than thirty seconds later, five mice emerged: representatives of our four branches of the faith, and one of the senior members of the local branch of Verity’s clergy. They ran across the room and up my leg, grabbing onto my backpack and getting themselves settled.
“To the rest of you, stay safe, and please don’t pick any fights with the tailypo before we get back,” I said.
There was no immediate reply, but the air in the room shifted slightly as more mice ran down the walls, coming to watch us go.
“That Holy Bargain packs a punch,” said Thomas, voice low.
“It does, which is part of why we only invoke it when we absolutely have to,” I agreed, and made for the front door, Sally and Thomas close behind.
I opened it to reveal a green sedan parked in the driveway. The driver was waiting inside, assuming there was a driver, and the Ocean Lady hadn’t sent us some sort of phantom coach or something. Sally and Thomas filed out behind me, and I locked the door, tucking the key into my pocket.
“We’ll get you keys of your own cut as soon as we get home,” I promised them, and started down the steps toward the car.
It felt odd to be taking the key with me rather than hiding it or giving it back to the tailypo. One more brick in the wall of “we are home, we are staying” that I was trying to build. I’d given up on carrying a key through adjoining dimensions after I lost the tenth one, preferring to trust that I’d be able to get inside when I got home.
The car window rolled down as we approached, and the driver—a broad-shouldered Black man in a red flannel shirt over a white tank top, leaned over to address our group.
“That depends on who sent you and where you think we’re going,” I replied.
“Lady sent me, says you lot need to be tossed out in Manhattan, near the Meatpacking District,” he said, accent a blend of New Jersey twang and something broader and less defined. He’d been driving a while, then, long enough to blunt the edges of whatever he’d originally sounded like. “Sound about right?”
“Right name, right city, although I didn’t know the neighborhood,” I said. “I thought Rose was going to be coming with you?”
“Lady sent her on a job.”
Which, if what she’d said before was accurate, meant she couldn’t say no. right. I leaned over to extend my hand through the open window. “Alice Price-Healy.”
The routewitch’s eyes widened as he took my hand and shook, respectfully. “Lady said I’d be driving friends, but didn’t say she meant dangerous friends,” he said. “I’m Darius. I serve the Queen of the Routewitches in the shadow of the Ocean Lady. I’ll get you where you’re going.”
“Good. I appreciate it.” I reclaimed my hand and straightened as Thomas stepped forward.
“Thomas Price,” he said, then at me. “Did you want . . . ?”
“No, sweetie,” I said. “You take the front.” He hadn’t been in a car in fifty years. If he wanted to ride shotgun, I wasn’t going to argue with him about it. It wasn’t like I could help the driver with directions or anything like that.
Looking almost giddy, Thomas moved past me to open the front passenger door and slide into the car, settling his valise between his feet. None of us were carrying enough clothing for any sort of long stay, but we were armed, and I’ve learned that if I have the weapons I need, everything else is pretty much negotiable.
“And you are, miss?” asked Darius, looking to Sally, who was frowning as she worked something over in her head. Sally looked back at him, a line between her eyebrows as she kept working at whatever was distracting her. Then she smiled, bright as the sun that was still inching upward in the sky.
“Sally Price,” she said.
Darius nodded, obviously taking this in stride. I glanced at Sally and smiled as she blushed and looked away. Too late now; she’d said it out loud. She had been acquired.
We piled into the back, arranging our bags and road snacks between us, my pack on top to avoid squashing the mice. They were keeping low and quiet in the presence of a stranger, but that wouldn’t last once they realized he was a routewitch; the Aeslin had a tendency to reveal themselves at inopportune times when they felt like it was safe to do so.
“We’ll need to stop for breakfast, if you don’t mind,” Thomas said apologetically to Darius. “There isn’t much food in the house as yet, and our dinner leftovers didn’t survive their encounter with the local wildlife.”
“No trouble,” said Darius. He tilted his head back, smiling at me and Sally in the rearview mirror. “You ladies all right back there?”
“We fit,” I said. “Sally hasn’t been in a car for about ten years, and Thomas hasn’t been in one for fifty.”
“He looks good for his age, then,” said Darius, and laughed, a rich, rolling laugh that filled the car almost as pervasively as the smell of the pine tree air freshener hanging from the mirror. “Well, then, here we go. McDonalds all right with you?”
“I would do crimes for a McMuffin,” said Sally, almost reverently.
“Luckily, you won’t have to,” said Darius, and started the car.
Sally didn’t have to do crimes for a McMuffin, but she put four of them away so quickly that I thought she might have done crimes to a McMuffin by the time she was done. Sadly for her and fortunately for my sanity, the milkshake machine was broken. The mice had yet to show themselves, but Darius only looked at me curiously in the rearview mirror as I tucked three hash browns and two Sausage McMuffins into my bag, settling to eat my own breakfast while the mice silently devoured theirs.
Thomas, meanwhile, had an expression of almost orgasmic relief on his face as he sipped his first cup of coffee in fifty years. It was probably a good thing it was crappy fast-food coffee; if we’d managed to get him the quality stuff, he might have expired on the spot. I hadn’t spent half a century hunting for him to lose him to a pot of Kona.
Darius turned off the highway once we’d all been fed, sliding easily onto a frontage road, and that was where the fun of riding with a routewitch really began. He drove like he’d been following these specific roads every day of his life, steering around potholes and avoiding construction areas with a local’s learned ease. He never slowed, save for when he approached a red light or a stop sign, and he never broke any traffic laws I could see. And even with all that being true, we were halfway across Pennsylvania before it even approached lunchtime.
Sally leaned forward. “Fun as this tour of the backroads of America has been, are we going to stop for lunch?” she asked. “I thought we’d have stopped to get gas by now.”
“You need the bathroom?” Darius asked. “We can stop if you need the bathroom. Seemed like you had enough snacks back there, didn’t need to hit a service station. This sweet girl can run another three days on the fuel she’s got in her tank, and I don’t really feel like having steak for dinner tonight.”
He caressed his dashboard with a proprietary hand, and the timbre of the engine’s purring changed for a moment, like an animal being stroked by a beloved human. I put a hand on Sally’s arm before she could ask what he meant about the steak, giving her a small but pointed shake of my head. She didn’t want to know. Not while we were still in the car.
Maybe it’s the result of spending so much of my youth around Cynthia, but I know a sanguivore when I see one, and I didn’t think Sally was quite ready to deal with the idea that she’d been riding around inside of a vehicular vampire.
“Yes, I need the bathroom,” said Sally sourly.
Darius smiled. “Of course,” he said, and turned at the next intersection, pulling into a neon-decked truck stop parking lot. Sally was out of the car almost before it stopped rolling, flipping a wave over her shoulder at us as she booked for the main building. Darius leaned back in his seat, turning off the engine.
“Either of you needs to go, you should,” he said. “I don’t plan to stop again before we hit the city.”
“That’ll make this a what, four-hour drive?” I asked.
“About that.” His smiled was radiant. “I don’t believe in wasting time when the Lady asks me to do something.”
I wanted to ask a lot of questions about how a highway could ask him to do anything, much less ask him to hop in his vampire car and drive a bunch of strangers to what seemed like a remarkably specific location. Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem quite politic. I undid my seatbelt.
“I’m going to head in and hit the ladies’ room,” I said. “You two have fun out here.” I shifted my attention to my bag. “And you be good while I’m inside.”
My bag didn’t respond. The mice were still in hiding mode, then. Darius gave me an odd look but didn’t say anything. I guess when you’re a witch of the living road serving a goddess who’s also a highway, you learn not to ask too many questions.
The air was cool and crisp and smelled of diesel and frying potatoes, that particular mix that screams “truck stop” all over the country. I stretched my arms up over my head as I walked away, enjoying the late-morning sun, the cool air on my skin, and the fact that I was walking away from Thomas, not running frantically toward him, trying to keep convincing myself over and over again that I wasn’t wasting my life on a fruitless quest for something I’d never find. It was weird not to be scared all the time. We were heading into what Rose called a war, but compared to the last fifty years of my life, it felt like a vacation.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever had one of those. The doors slid open at my approach, and I stepped inside, scanning for the bathrooms. They were on the other side of the wide, open room, set up as a sort of pseudo-food court, with the usual assortment of halfhearted options hawking their wares in direct visual and olfactory competition with each other. Sally was standing in front of the Sbarro, staring at the glass case of cheap, over-cheesed pizza like she hadn’t seen food in years. I drifted over toward her.
“Bathroom’s this way,” I said.
“Pizza,” she said, sounding distracted. I wasn’t entirely sure she was responding to me, so much as just . . . talking when she thought someone might be able to hear her. “I forgot about pizza.”
“Well, we’re going to New York, and they have some of the best pizza in the country,” I said. “Every kind of pizza you can think of.”
Sally turned to look at me, shaking her head a little, like she was coming out of a daze. “I’m lactose intolerant,” she said.
“Vegan cheese exists, if that’s what floats your boat,” I said. “And Lactaid. Did you make it to the bathroom before you got caught in the siren song of the pepperoni?”
She shook her head. I smiled.
“It’s always hard to reintegrate once I’ve been on the road for a while,” I said. “After my first long trip, I ate my body weight in chocolate, threw up, and then did it again, because I’d forgotten how much I loved the stuff until it was in front of me again. It’s gonna be okay.”
“Really?”
“Really-really. You’re a Price now, and we take care of our own. And we do not allow our own to eat lousy fast-food pizza after going without for ten years.”
Sally laughed, and kept laughing as we walked to the bathroom. There were a lot of adjustments ahead, for all of us, but I was increasingly sure that we were going to weather them just fine.
Darius started the car as soon as Sally and I got back in and fastened our belts, and we pulled out of the truck-stop parking lot a little faster than we’d pulled in.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“We’re on a timetable, and I don’t want to be late,” he said.
I blinked. Thomas, however, got there first. “A timetable? For what?” he asked.
“The Lady didn’t say. She just wants you in New York before three, and I do what she tells me.”
“Wait,” said Sally. “I know my geography pretty well. That’s not possible.”
Darius laughed. “First time?”
“Sally didn’t know what a routewitch was before yesterday,” I said. “Let’s play nice with the new kid.”
“Ah,” he said, in sudden understanding. “Well, Sally, is there anything you need to know? We’ve got a few hours yet before we get where we’re going.”
“I still don’t know what a routewitch is,” said Sally sourly. “I asked, and you all kept talking and ignored me.”
Thomas winced. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking stung. “I didn’t mean to ignore your question.”
“A routewitch is a human person with a natural connection to the road,” said Darius. “If someone’s connection is strong enough, they may be able to use it to do magic, mostly associated with travel. I’m one of the best there is at subtly bending distance. I can cover a hundred miles of real space in three miles of road space if I’m in the zone and have my baby with me.” He caressed the car again.
“Okay, what is with the car?” I asked.
“She doesn’t run on gas, if that’s what you’re asking. She’s a special model. Rolled off the assembly line and straight onto the Ocean Lady, where we made a few modifications. She won’t even start for anyone but me, and for me, she’ll drive until she falls apart.” Darius leaned back in his seat, taking his hands off the wheel. The car didn’t swerve even a little, just kept rolling straight and easy down the center of the lane. “I’m honestly extraneous here, except that she wouldn’t be able to go as far, as fast without me here to act as a sort of bonus battery. We boost each other.”
“But how is that possible?” asked Sally. “The laws of physics aren’t negotiable.”
Darius laughed, and the sound was loud and joyous as he set his hands back on the wheel. “Sure they are. There’s no law that’s not negotiable, if you know how to get your shoulder against it and push. Speed limits only apply if you respect them. Try telling a sylph about conservation of mass, or a jink about probability.”
“She doesn’t know what those things are yet,” said Thomas. “I don’t know how much the Ocean Lady told you about my situation . . . ?”
“Not much. You’re not her problem, except right now, when your people are bothering her routewitches. We have a lot of folks in the New York area, and even if we didn’t, those Covenant assholes are like mold. Once they take root, they spread until they’ve covered everything. This is her place, her continent. She’s a new god, but she’s big on the idea that she has to protect what’s hers if she wants to be worthy of the title. So she wants them gone.” Darius glanced at Thomas. “So she just told me I’d be picking you up, and it would be doing her a favor, and would also keep that little Fury she’s gone and helped to empower off my back for a while. Anything that gets me in good with the divine is cool by me. Apple, though. Apple told me more than that.”
“Wait.” I leaned forward, straining against the limits of my seatbelt as I put as much of myself as possible into the front seat. “Apple is still in charge?”
“Queen of the North American Routewitches, from Utqiagvik to Florida City. All our roads are hers to have and protect, and will be until she passes her crown.”
“She was queen fifty years ago,” I said. “And she was like twelve.”
“She’s seventeen,” said Darius. “She didn’t have access to good food for over a year before she found her way to the Lady, and it stunted her growth. She’s been Queen since 1944, and she’s not going to step down until the road is kinder. The Lady loves her. I’m not as old as she is, but I can’t imagine a better Queen. And she told me that you, Mr. Price, had made a bargain with the crossroads.”
“I did,” Thomas allowed. “It seemed like the best choice remaining to me when it happened, and I still don’t regret it. Not even after everything that followed.”
“You’re close to unique that way,” said Darius. “Not just in that—the Queen doesn’t speak well of petitioners. Says they’re greedy and shortsighted, and deserve whatever punishment they receive. She speaks well of you.”
Sally, who had made a bargain of her own, for reasons just as good as Thomas’s, squirmed in her seat, but didn’t say anything. Sometimes there’s nothing you can say.
“Queen says your granddaughter wouldn’t exist if you hadn’t made that deal, and she’s the one who untangled the crossroads from our arteries, kicked them out of this reality. The Ocean Lady owes your family a debt of gratitude for what you did for us.”
I blinked. The idea of a god owing us a favor was daunting, if reasonable enough.
“Regardless of the divinities in play,” said Thomas firmly, “I made my bargain and was sent into exile for my trouble. Sally did much the same. She’s been fighting by my side for the last decade, and while her bargain was as compassionately made as my own, she had less idea of what she was doing. I had the benefits of a Covenant education and a long acquaintance with a crossroads ghost. She had an untrained sorcerer reading from his mother’s journals and trying to make sense of a world he was barely brushing up against. This is her first true encounter with the forces humanity shares this world with. Try not to invoke things she knows only as children’s stories. We don’t want to overwhelm her.”
“I’m not a child,” snapped Sally. “I won’t get overwhelmed.”
“If we tried to tell you everything at once, yes, you would,” said Thomas. “Any rational person would. Covenant training begins when children are young and malleable enough to accept whatever they’re told, and it includes breaks for them to stare at the walls and panic when needed as they begin to understand how complicated the world really is. We’ll tell you everything as it becomes relevant, I promise. It may just take some time.”
“That’s the most rational thing I’ve ever heard a sorcerer say,” said Darius. Glancing at Sally in the rearview mirror, he explained, “My kind don’t care much for his kind. Our magic is sort of like a house that’s run off solar power. We generate it and we draw it from a willing source. It’s very self-contained and self-renewing. His kind, they take it from the world around them without asking.”
“But that’s an ethical debate for another time,” said Thomas.
“What do you know about the Covenant in New York?” I asked.
“I know they announced themselves by burning down a burlesque club that had the bad luck to be owned by a bogeyman,” he said.
“I heard about that,” I said. “My oldest granddaughter worked there, and she was helping the locals recover from the fire when I left to find Thomas.”
“That’s a start,” he said. “Things have gotten worse since then.”
“Worse” was something of an understatement. After burning down the Freakshow, the Covenant had started hunting the cryptids of New York, beginning with the ones who, like the bogeymen, had been hiding in plain sight. Bakeries, dry cleaners, nail salons, all targeted and destroyed. People died. The Freakshow had been lucky: the waheela they had on staff had smelled the accelerant and been able to evacuate the place before it went up. There had been no casualties.
None of the other businesses had gotten off so lightly, and after several years of unrelenting attacks, people had started abandoning their homes, moving away from everything they’d always known. And that was when the Covenant had expanded their attacks further outside the city, to New Jersey and other neighboring states. They were sending regular patrols into the Pine Barrens, tormenting and slaughtering the cryptids who lived there, and chasing the sasquatch and boo hag populations toward the Canadian border.
And through all of this, the human population had been kept in peaceful ignorance. The Covenant’s desire to go unseen was probably saving more lives than we could count. As long as they were trying to stay under the radar, they’d restrict themselves to small fires and the occasional abduction. If things came out in the open, all bets would be off. They’d love the chance to reestablish themselves as a vital line of defense for the human race, protecting humanity from the “monsters” that lurked in every shadow. They just needed the right opportunity to come forward. Which meant Verity’s television appearance had probably done more damage than any of us had known at the time.
According to Darius, people were still debating whether her final fight had been CGI or practical effects, and since the latter was winning, the argument had begun to pivot toward whether it had been faked at all. If enough people came down on the side of “a giant snake really came through the stage and ate some dancers, giant snakes are real, we’re all in a lot of trouble,” the Covenant would have their opening.
For the moment, most of the cryptids remaining in the city were staying as out of sight as possible while still keeping their jobs and roofs over their heads. The cryptid hospital in Manhattan, St. Giles, had also managed to stay open thus far, thanks to being literally underground and protected by basically every intelligent cryptid in the area. None of them wanted to see their only chance for species-appropriate treatment go away. The real issue was the dragons.
The dragons who kept their Nest in Manhattan couldn’t evacuate with the rest of the cryptids. Literally couldn’t, since the last known adult male of their species was under the city. I blinked when Darius reminded me of that fact, unsure when it had become common-enough knowledge that a random routewitch would know about it. Adult male dragons were bigger than buses, and while they could move under their own power, they mostly preferred not to, building themselves large lairs and surrounding themselves with wives who would happily feed them and keep them company.
That may seem lazy by human standards, but it’s really more like the queen bee of a hive trading freedom for a life of pampering and luxury. Even the oldest, largest male dragon could still protect his wives, and would do so with force, fire, and fury. They were the reason the Covenant had been founded in the first place, in part due to an unpleasant cultural misunderstanding: female dragons looked exactly like human women. It was a great piece of mimicry when what you wanted was to blend into the population of the fast-breeding mammals near you, but it was a terrible one when you didn’t want those same mammals to fall in love with you and try to spirit you away to be their brides.
Basically, a lot of medieval assholes couldn’t take “no” for an answer, and spun stories about dragons kidnapping princesses to encourage populations to rise up against them. Not every dragon was a nice person. According to the histories, a lot of them were assholes in their own right, and were perfectly happy to lay waste to the local human settlements. It didn’t really matter that they couldn’t fly. When a giant fire-breathing reptile storms down from the mountains and torches your house, you don’t stop to say “that would have been more impressive if you’d been in the air.” You scream, you char, and you die. So the Covenant had come together to make the dragons stop.
They didn’t know there was a male dragon in Manhattan, but they were starting to suspect. People had been careless with the news, spreading it to dragon enclaves around the world, letting the women know there was a male in the world again, and more, the female dragons of Manhattan—called “princesses” by people who hadn’t known any better—weren’t leaving, implying that they had something to protect. The Covenant had apparently started focusing their attention on suspected dragon princesses, snatching them whenever they could, trying to confirm the rumors, trying to find their way to the ultimate prize for an organization of dragon-hunters that had long since run out of dragons to fight.
Things could have been worse, but they could have been a hell of a lot better, and they were on the cusp of turning even uglier.
We were silent as Darius finished his explanation and turned off his latest frontage road, suddenly, impossibly driving onto the Queensboro Bridge. “Almost there,” he said, more subdued than he’d been before he started telling us what was actually going on. The Covenant wasn’t targeting routewitches yet, but that would come soon enough. When they ran out of “monsters” to destroy, they would move on to the humans who had the audacity to tangle with powers the Covenant thought should be reserved for them alone. A witch was fine when they were working for the “forces of good.” Not so when they were just trying to live their lives and not be told what to do by monster-hunting bigots.
I patted my bag reassuringly, trying to comfort the still-silent Aeslin mice. The Covenant is much of why my family’s colonies are among the last in the world, if not the last. They didn’t like talking rodents so blatantly harmless that no one could quite figure out why they were considered unnatural, and they disliked the fact that Aeslin generally refused to lie even more. If an Aeslin mouse saw you kill someone, they told people about it. If they saw you commit a crime, they told people about that, too.
Really, it was a miracle I got away with as much as I did when I was younger, given the combination of my father’s paranoia and the resident colony of Aeslin mice.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
“Wish you hadn’t needed it. I wouldn’t be anywhere near New York if the Lady hadn’t asked, and I’ll probably wind up taking a few of the locals out of town when I go. Call it a fare for the favor of the road. The Lady doesn’t want the world to lose any more backroads or byways than it already has.”
Sally was goggling out the windows, staring at a city she might or might not have seen as a kid, when she’d been growing up in Maine, but that she’d definitely seen on television and in movies. Something familiar and human that was absolutely still here. Thomas was doing something similar, although a bit more discreetly. They were reentering the world like comets plummeting toward the ground. I just hoped we’d have slightly more survivors.
Manhattan looked largely like I remembered it. The stores that were still open were different ones, and there were more “For Rent” signs in the windows than I would have expected, but the city itself, the bones of it, were the same as they had always been. It was reassuring, in its urbanized way, and I clung to that impression of familiarity as Darius pulled up to the curb.
“You’re here,” he said.
“‘Here’ being?”
“Don’t ask me. This is where the Lady said I needed to take you, and I don’t know anything more than that. Other than this is where you get out of my car, since I’m not taking you back and risking pissing her off.”
“Fair enough.” I shrugged and unbuckled my belt, reaching for the door.
Sally caught my wrist. I turned to look at her.
“Yeah?”
“What do you mean, ‘fair enough’?” she demanded. “He wants to dump us out on a random street corner, and you’re okay with that?”
“He’s doing what a god told him to do. I don’t think arguing gets us very far.” I shook off her grasp and got out of the car, taking my first breath of Manhattan air.
As always, it smelled of frying onions and cooling asphalt, the construction and cooking that were always happening in the city coming to greet yet another tourist. I snagged my bag and slung it over my shoulder, stepping up onto the sidewalk to wait for the others. Thomas followed a moment later, his own bag in one hand, and came to stand beside me. Sally looked sullen as she emerged from the car, shooting a sour glance back at Darius.
He rolled his window down, nodding to us. “If you need a ride back, I’m sure the Lady will let me know,” he said. “I’m one of the best she has for this kind of distance. You folks stay safe, all right?”
“We’ll do our best,” I said, looking around. The street wasn’t particularly crowded; not too unusual for this time of day. Workers on their lunch break and other fast-walking people went about their business, along with a few hustlers, and a small gaggle of what I presumed were tourists, but that was all. We were here. Time to start blending in. Which might be something of a challenge when we were just standing here looking like scruffy backpackers getting ready to spend a year wandering around Europe, but I’ve done stranger.
Darius nodded, rolled up his window, and pulled away from the curb, vanishing down the street faster than should have been possible, leaving us alone.