Chapter 2
Unhappy Reunions
HE SETTLED ONTO THE STOOL next to me without a reply, grabbing a fork and sticking it into my grits without so much as a by-your-leave. Man was lucky I didn’t have my chicken yet. The grits were amazing, but I’d break the fingers of any man who tried to mess with my white-gravy chicken legs. I made a sour face and shoved the plate toward him.
“Why, thank you, Rosie,” he drawled. “I didn’t know you cared.”
“I just don’t want to find out if you have something contagious enough to pass along to the dead,” I snapped, turning to look at him.
Bobby Cross hasn’t aged a day since 1950, the year when he decided to drive out of the daylight and into the dark. He’s short by modern standards, five foot eight at most, with a compact dragster’s build that’s still as taut and sculpted as the studio trainers could make it. He’s a bug in amber, and nothing he does to his body changes it from what it was when he sold his soul. Lucky bastard. All the benefits of being alive, and none of the consequences.
Except for the part where it’s a conditional immortality, and one day he’ll die, and while he waits for that day to come, he gets to watch his legacy wilt and fade away. As Diamond Bobby, King of the Silver Screen, he’d been a panty-wetting playboy, draped in women any time he crooked his little finger. These days, the smart girls avoid him, and the ones who aren’t smart wise up damn fast. He’s rotting from the inside out.
But that’s opinion, and what I saw was a man with dark hair that hung loose and careless in a modern, tousled style. He’d slick it back into its customary duck’s ass as soon as he was behind the wheel where he belongs, but when he walks among the living, he makes an effort to blend in. It’s one of the few things I can’t fault him for, because I do it, too. No one wants to be an anachronism.
His eyes gave him away. His eyes always gave him away. They weren’t—they aren’t, god, I hate trying to use the past tense—remarkable, pale brown and plain, but something about them made the living shy from him. Mary’s eyes have the same effect. The crossroads have to leave their mark somewhere, and they left it in Bobby’s eyes. Now they were gone, but their bargain, and Bobby, remained.
He was simply dressed, white shirt and tight jeans. No jacket. I’ve never borrowed a coat from Bobby, but he’s alive, and I probably could if I wanted to—if he was willing to offer me one. I think he likes showing off his arms too much to cover them.
He smiled, lowering his lashes and watching me seductively as he slipped another bite of my grits between his red, red lips. I wrinkled my nose.
“You do realize that in this era, people don’t like it when men your age leer at girls my age, right?” I asked.
“Sugar, I’m ninety-six and you’re eighty-six,” he said, and took another bite of grits. “Me seeing you for the pretty thing you are is only natural.”
“What the fuck do you want, Bobby?” I don’t have a lot of patience under the best of circumstances. Having Bobby in the room dropped it to less than zero.
“That’s a harsh way to talk to your oldest friend,” he said. Breanna approached with my chicken and gravy. He turned his award-winning smile on her. “Hello, beautiful.”
“Um, hello,” she said, clearly dazzled and unnerved in equal measure. She put my plate down in front of me, pulling out her notepad. “What can I get for you?”
“I’ll have what she’s having, and I’ll cover both checks,” he said.
Breanna didn’t like that reply. Her glance at me carried a question I’d heard many times before: “Are you all right with this?”
And the answer was, of course, no. No, I was not all right with this. No, I was not happy to be apparently having dinner with Bobby Cross. But being the kind of man who felt like he was entitled to everything he wanted, no matter how many people got hurt along the way, meant it wasn’t safe for me to tell Bobby to go away. He couldn’t hurt me. He could come back tomorrow and burn this place to the ground with two generations locked inside the kitchen, and even as the thought formed, I caught a whiff of burning dust, like a car heater turning on for the first time after a summer of indolence. Death by fire.
The potential was here. Still forming, not yet fixed; still something we could easily avoid, if I played nice.
“Thank you, Bre,” I said, and gave her what I hoped would be a reassuring smile. As she walked away, I glanced back to Bobby. “The food here’s amazing. I’ve been coming since the seventies, when a trucker dropped me off on his way to Huntsville. What do you want, Bobby?”
“You,” he said, so bluntly that it was a shock, even though it was the only answer he could have given. “I want you, Rosie. You’ve been running from me for a long damn time, and I’m tired of it.”
“You’re scared,” I said, with slow wonder. “You’re scared right now. What the hell do you have to be afraid of? You still have your car. I assume the damn thing still puts itself back together when you wreck it, and you don’t look like you’re getting any older.”
Not that I’d be able to tell. It hadn’t been long enough yet.
I understand the fear of getting older. I was resurrected for a little while not all that long ago, thanks to Bobby, and I could feel myself rotting with every moment that passed. Finding a way to become dead again without actually dying had been a new and unpleasant challenge.
“I just need to keep my tank as full as possible until I’ve worked out everything that’s changed,” he said, with the slow, deliberate patience of a man who was barely holding himself together. “I thought you, being the altruistic sort that you are, might be willing to help a fellow out.”
I blinked, slow and deliberate. “What the hell makes you think I’d ever help you?”
“This place. All the other places like it.” He waved his hand expansively. “Because you never quite got over that little girl need for human connection. You want people to like you. And that means you wind up liking them in return . . . which makes you vulnerable.”
The perfume that swirled around him in that moment was indescribable, a horrific, rotting blend of every type of death I’ve ever been close enough to identify. Cherry syrup and lilies and honeyed mint candies and burning dust and wormwood, wormwood, wormwood over everything. His smile was a narrow blade, designed for slashing through the dark. He leaned forward, a fork laden with cheesy grits in his hand, and pointed it at me.
“You like to brag about how you’ve stayed clear of big bad Bobby for so long,” he said. “Like to say it makes you special. Well, it does, in one regard: it makes you high-octane. I stuff you in my tank, I keep rolling for a few years, while things in the twilight settle out and the new boss gets things under control. I don’t have to hunt. I don’t have to worry. It’s easy riding for ol’ Bobby.”
“You can’t touch me,” I managed. “Persephone—”
“Only protects the faithful.” He smirked, gesturing with the fork again. “Repudiate her and her works, and that little doodle on your back won’t mean anything at all. I can take you freely, the way I should have from the start.”
For a moment, I just stared at him. I was still staring at him when Breanna arrived with his grits and my chicken, placing them on the table. He favored her with another of those oily smiles, and pushed his plate of grits toward me, making it look like I’d given mine to him voluntarily. I mustered a weak smile of my own for Breanna, trying to convince her everything was all right.
It didn’t quite work—she looked uncertain as she turned and walked back to the kitchen—but she left, and that was good enough for me.
“Do it, and you’ll save a lot of lives,” said Bobby. “Not just the ones I’d be hunting normally, but the people you claim to care about. The ones I would never have noticed without you. Refuse me, and I’ll take them all—even that weird-ass family you share with sweet Mary. She was my first, you know. You could be my last.”
It wasn’t just what he was saying: it was the tone he was saying it in. I pushed the chicken and grits away. He smirked. “Lose your appetite, Rosie?”
“Fuck you,” I snapped and threw my coffee in his face.
And then I ran.
Bobby’s car was parked right out front, the color of moonlight glinting off a poisoned lake, black and silver and iridescent all at the same time, revolting and beautiful in equal measure. I gave it a wide berth, feet pounding down the dive’s rickety wooden porch, and leapt to the gravel parking lot, nearly losing my balance and going sprawling. I managed to recover and keep running.
Running’s something of a skill of mine these days.
There’s one simple, consistent rule for dealing with Bobby Cross: don’t ever, ever touch the car. Bobby’s the driver, but the car is its own entity, a creation of the crossroads that does whatever it wants to do, only nominally under his control. Persephone’s blessing should be enough to keep it from consuming me unless I break faith with her, but my faith isn’t faith, not exactly. I don’t believe in her divinity. I do believe in her. Hard not to believe in someone who’s saved your soul from burning eternally in the engine of a muscle car, after all.
But with the crossroads gone, who was to say the rules binding Bobby’s car were still the same? Better not to risk it. Bobby didn’t get any special powers out of his bargain, save for the ability to walk in the twilight without dying for his trespasses, and since any routewitch can do that, within limits, it’s not like that’s the kind of gift that could shift the balance of power between the living and the dead. For all that he’s my murderer and personal bogeyman, the important word in all of that is “man.” He’s still just a living man, albeit one with more access to the dead than he deserves. But the car . . .
Whatever it was to begin with, it never rolled off an assembly line. It wasn’t born in Detroit, no creation of American steel and human ingenuity. There’s nothing human about it, and if there’s one thing I have to thank the crossroads for, it’s that they didn’t steal some innocent car’s chassis, didn’t force their demon dragster into the shape of a good Chevrolet or Ford. They gave it the right lines to fool someone who doesn’t know their cars the way I do, gave it white-walled tires and sleek, shimmering tail fins, but they kept their design vague enough that I can still look at real cars without feeling my stomach turn over. Touching the car is a good way to get caught, and more importantly, to get fed into its eternally hungry engine. Ghosts who go into the car’s inner workings don’t come back out, not even in fragments.
Persephone’s blessing is supposed to keep me safe. But I didn’t survive more than fifty years in the twilight without it by being careless, and so I made sure I was well away from the car by the time Bobby came running after me, fury in his face and thunder in his eyes.
“Rose!” he hollered. “Rose Marshall, you come back here, or I’ll come after you!”
Well, I wasn’t going back there, so that left him with only one real choice in the matter. Instead, I kept running, feeling the coat I’d borrowed from my earlier ride drop through the suddenly insubstantial substance of my shoulders, leaving me a flickering outline of a girl whose clothes were already starting to unspool into a green silk prom gown, racing down the lonely road toward freedom.
Bobby followed. Of course he did, and that’s what brings us to where we started, which I’ll repeat for good measure:
Fuck Bobby Cross.
I don’t have a plan in the moment, except for getting Bobby as far away as possible from the people I care about. I’m not as attached to this particular family as he thinks I am—I’m not a beán sidhe—but they’re good people, and they don’t deserve to get hurt because they made the mistake of feeding me. Getting him away should be enough, at least for a while, because Bobby is a spoiled child. If I did all my growing up after I died, he never did his at all. He went from being a pretty, reasonably attractive teenage boy to a Hollywood star who got everything he ever wanted handed to him on a silver platter, and when that wasn’t enough, he managed to convince the universe itself to break the rules to give him his heart’s desire.
Bobby Cross was never going to be a good person. I could almost feel bad for him because of that if he hadn’t taken “spoiled and a little selfish” as an excuse to become a complete and utter monster. If I lead him away, he’ll follow, and while he might still torch the place if he winds up back here, he won’t necessarily take the time to come back of his own accord. As plans go, “get him to chase me and hope he forgets what isn’t right in front of him” isn’t a great one, but I’m a hitchhiker. Running away is sort of what I’m made to do.
So I run, and I keep running when his headlights flicker into life behind me, running as hard and as fast as my phantom legs allow. Every time my feet hit the road, they dip briefly below the surface of the daylight, little ghost girl skipping along the membrane around the twilight, and I can feel just how fucked up what’s beneath me really is. I can’t blame Annie for the chaos currently consuming my home. This is all on the crossroads. Fuck them, too. I don’t want to drop down here.
I’m not going to have a choice. On a straight run, a car will always beat a person. I could go off-road, run into the soybean fields spreading out to either side of the road, but Bobby’s car doesn’t follow normal rules, and I’m afraid he’d just follow me, tearing up some poor farmer’s crops, doing as much damage as he can before running me down.
I can keep running forever. Being dead will do that for a girl. But he’ll catch me before forever comes, and he’s gaining ground steadily enough that I already know how this will end. So I stop running. I plant my heels, turn around to face him, and raise both hands, middle fingers pointed toward the sky.
“You’re a fucking coward and a bully, Bobby Cross!” I shout. Then I smile, slow and mean, and add, “And your movies weren’t that good. Your pants were just extremely tight.”
I drop down into the twilight before I see his response, or even know that he heard me. It doesn’t matter either way. I’ll always know I finally said it where he could hear.
Some people think that it’s never daytime in the twilight. Those people have the right spirit but the wrong idea, like dogs barking up the tree next to the one where the squirrels have made their nests. Words have meanings, absolutely. That doesn’t mean they’re absolute, unbreakable laws. We have days in the twilight. Most of them are short, perfunctory things, sometimes lasting no more than a few hours, but they exist.
Homesteads and outfielders and cornfield ghosts can make those days last for years, stretching them out like bright banners, filled with blue skies and sunbeams and the golden dance of wheat chaff in the air. We have nights, too, and those are just as varied, just as variable, because there’s no version of reality that works for every possible kind of haunting. The world of the dead gets to be as complicated as the world of the living—maybe more complicated since we’re not devoting ourselves to the business of getting on with life.
But remember, the sun sets in the daylight. People see the night sky before they die, and that’s a good thing, because if every new ghost was also confronted with their first nighttime, there would be a lot more screaming. Finding out you’re dead is hard enough without adding a whole level of “oh and by the way, sometimes the sun goes away.” So the sun sets in the daylight and rises in the twilight, and that’s the way things are meant to be. Change is one of the only universal constants I know.
There are people who say the sun even rises all the way down in the midnight. I’m not sure I believe them. The midnight is chaos, chthonic and cruel, and it doesn’t feel the need to brighten up its terrifying corners. But what do I know? I’m just a road ghost, after all.
I’m pretty indifferent to the distinction between night and day. It’s easier for me to get rides when the sun is down—people worry about a teenage girl walking down the highway shoulder with her thumb cocked heavenward when the world is dark and cold and filled with wolves. Only some of those wolves are driving the cars. It’s easier to get safe rides during the day, rides where no one puts a hand on my thigh or produces a knife from inside their conservative camel hair jacket.
Do people even wear camel hair anymore? Ugh. Things change so quickly in the lands of the living. I think that’s the real reason most older ghosts choose to let go and move on. There’s only so much trying to keep up with the times that the mind can handle when everything is happening on what feels like fast-forward.
It was nighttime in the daylight when I released my hold on the lands of the living and dropped into the land of the dead, landing in what should have been the safety of the twilight, which isn’t currently living up to its name. The sun is a blazing orb overhead, and to make it worse, someone has equipped the damn thing with eyes and a mouth full of jagged teeth. That sounds like something out of a children’s cartoon, and—for an instant—my brain tries to interpret it that way, to make it something soft and sweet, and maybe it was, once, but now it’s monstrous and mean.
The sun narrows its eyes and hisses like a cat, flame licking from the corona of light around it, and the air grows hot enough that I feel my skin trying to remember how to burn. “Nope,” I say, and turn around, taking three long strides before I drop down to the next level of the twilight, which may still be in murder-chainsaw-maze-mode, but will hopefully not be occupied by a hostile celestial body.
The twilight is infinitely divided and subdivided. Each level has its own rules and laws, which are far from being the same thing. Some levels have hundreds of occupants, even thousands, spirits who have chosen to share their afterlives in a sort of communal dream. There are heavens and hells and from the outside, they can look exactly the same. Resting in peace is very much in the eye of the beholder.
Other levels have one, maybe two occupants, people who didn’t like company when they were alive and have found they enjoy it even less now that they’re dead. Finding those levels can be virtually impossible, and sometimes when an outsider stumbles into them, they’re already deserted, their creators having gone into the ground or the sky or whatever waits for us when the twilight no longer pulls hard enough to keep us here.
I barely have time to adjust to the change in temperature, which goes from “the sun is actively trying to kill you” to “pleasant summer evening” in an instant, before a little girl, maybe seven years old by time spent among the living, races out of the corn and slams into my side, throwing her arms around my waist.
Her hair is long and dark and tied with ribbons, and that’s the only reason I recognize her, because her face is buried against my side and her lacy white dress is gone, replaced by jeans and a shirt blazoned with the face of the latest Lowry princess.
“Corletta?” I ask.
She lifts her face and looks at me, and yes, it’s her; it’s the homestead I met last year, when I was struggling to regain Persephone’s blessing. The banked fire that always burns in the back of her eyes is only embers. She’s calm, for all that she’s crying.
I don’t understand how she’s here. Corletta’s a homestead, a ghost who loved her home so much that when she died, she kept it with her in the twilight, haunting the ashes after the fire had consumed them both. She can’t leave her own borders. She’s the polar opposite of a road ghost, immobile, fixed . . . and she was nowhere near Alabama when she died.
“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you so much, thank you, thank you.”
“For what, sweetie?” I don’t actually know her very well, certainly don’t harbor any misplaced affection for her, although I’m grateful that the last time we met, she didn’t try to keep me pinned on her property forever. And that’s where I am now. I can feel it in the soles of my feet. I just didn’t realize it before, because her farm was built and burned in Oklahoma, and I was in Alabama when I dropped out of the daylight.
Distance is always sort of funny in the twilight. I guess right now, with everything else that’s going on, it’s even worse than usual. This is the closest to normal anything’s been since Antimony pulled her little stunt, and there’s nothing I’ve ever seen among the living or the dead that could change a homestead when they didn’t want to be changed.
“You sent the ever-lasters,” she says, and her face is innocent and bright. She looks like the child she was when she died, not like the sullen spirit she’d become. “I have friends.”
In answer, eerie giggles come from the corn all around us, and I relax as much as I can when I’m standing on a homestead’s property, which admittedly isn’t all that much.
Ever-lasters are the spirits of dead children who can’t handle whatever happened to them, but don’t have something specific to haunt. They can’t cope with their new condition, and so they go back to school, to a familiar structure and rules they can understand. And sometimes, the rhymes they chant on the blacktop at recess tell the future.
They creep me out. They creep most adult ghosts out, though the ones who don’t find them unnerving tend to become their teachers, helping them get over the trauma of their deaths and move on. But I meet a lot of them on the road, and sometimes even dead kids need a summer vacation. I had told several of the larger schools about Corletta’s place after meeting her, after she’d said she wanted visitors.
Well, apparently, they listened, and they came, and now she’s beaming at me, bright as a summer sky.
“My friends say things are weird as weird gets out in the rest of the twilight,” she says. “But everything’s normal here, so they’ve been coming for campouts until it gets calm again. Their teachers came, too, and I’m learning my letters proper. I’ll be able to write you soon.”
“That’s nice.” It was, too. Homesteads are less likely to turn toxic when they have people to talk to. I glance around at the endless corn. “Are you playing hide-and-seek?”
“Some of my friends don’t like it when adults they don’t know see them,” she says, and pouts. “They look a little funny, I guess, but that doesn’t mean they have to hide.”
“They can come out. I don’t mind.”
The corn giggles again, but no children appear.
Corletta scowls, then focuses on me again. “They told me you were coming,” she says. “They tell the future sometimes.”
“I know. I’ve heard them.”
“But we told this future about you,” says a high, clear voice, and a little boy steps out of the corn, one end of a jump rope in his hands and a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. He looks like he was about Corletta’s age when he died; looking at him hurts my heart.
The little girl behind him, holding the other end of the rope, is covered in scabs that never had a chance to heal before the infection carried her away. Children are resilient, right up until they’re not, and too many of them wind up here.
“Corletta, will you skip?” asks the boy, and she nods eagerly, pulling away from me and running to the rope. It begins to turn, and I fight the urge to do the same, to turn and run into the corn, to escape whatever fate they’ve seen for me.
I don’t. Hitchers are made for running, but sometimes the right thing to do is stand and see.
“Better be careful, better stay calm, girl in green who missed her prom. Bobby’s on the corner, Bobby’s on the trail, Diamond Bobby’s out to chase your tail.” They spin the rope as they chant, and Corletta jumps, fleet and happy and ignorant of the chill that’s running through me. “Things are getting harder, things are getting strange, everything you think you know is gonna change. Ocean Lady’s counting apples, one two three, go and take your questions to Persephone.”
Corletta claps her hands as the chanting stops, and the boy turns to look at me, expression grave.
“I think it’s clear what you have to do,” he says. “I don’t think you have a choice.”
I bristle. “I always have a choice.”
“True,” says the girl. “You could choose not to listen.”
“You could choose to lose,” says the boy.
“You could choose to be foolish.”
“You could choose to let the twilight burn.”
Then they turn and walk into the corn, leaving me alone with Corletta, little homestead whose need for me to get this message yanked me here from Alabama, little girl who’ll never grow up.
She looks worried. “I don’t like fire,” she says, the ribbons in her hair beginning to blacken and curl. “I don’t want the twilight to burn.”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “It won’t. I’ll listen.” Because the ever-lasters are right, dammit: I really don’t have a choice.
No matter what level of reality I’m on, the sun rises and the sun sets, and I like that part best of all. The horizon is a blazing dance of colors when I step back into the daylight, reds and pinks and yellows and oranges, all trending into purple before they deepen into the bruised blue-black of the darkening night sky. I pause to blink at it for a moment. I wasn’t in the twilight for all that long, and it looks like I’ve lost an entire day.
Emma and Gary will be getting worried by now. Emma’s my best friend, the beán sidhe who currently owns and operates the Last Dance Diner. Gary’s my boyfriend.
He’s also my car. Things can get weird fast in the lands of the dead.
Well, if they’re going to worry, they’re worried already, and dwelling on it won’t change anything. My skin is tight and tingling, like I’ve just stepped out of the shower and drenched myself in something astringent, witch hazel and peppermint drawing my flesh taut as a bowstring. I rub my elbow with one hand as I start to walk down the road. It doesn’t help. The feeling persists and sharpens, seeming to run all the way down to the surface of my bones. I rub harder. It still doesn’t help.
Hitchers are like ferrymen and gather-grims: we’re a form of psychopomp. We move between the lands of the living and the lands of the dead with relative ease, and by doing so, we continually stitch those lands together, like a needle stabbing into stacked pieces of felt. It’s not good enough to stitch a permanent seam. It still makes a difference. Because I’m a ghost with a job, when I don’t do that job for too long, reality punishes me. It usually starts small. I lose focus, I lose the ability to control what I’m wearing, I lose my sense of time. It’s like being alive again and sleep-deprived at the same time, so everything begins to go fuzzy around the edges. If I keep refusing to rise into the daylight and cock my thumb out for the unwary, it gets worse. I’ll start slipping out of phase with the twilight, jumping forward by days or weeks or even months as I lose the right to be here.
If I stayed deep for too long without coming up for the metaphysical equivalent of air, I’d fade, becoming one of those indistinct, indescribable haints that haunt the long stretches of the ghostroads. They’re cold spots of air and patches in the grass where nothing grows, where everything is sere and withered even down here in the lands of the dead. They’re lost. I’ve never heard of anyone pulling a haint back into themselves after they’ve faded, and I’ve been rambling around for long enough to have heard just about everything.
Fading would mean Bobby Cross could never have me, and that’s a good thing. But everything else about it would be horrible. The haints are aware. On some level, they know what they’ve become, and they know it’s too late for them. They can’t go back to what they were. They can’t move on to whatever they were supposed to do or see or become next. They’re stuck.
Not me. Rambling roadside Rose doesn’t go out like that.
So I’m out of the twilight, and it’s still telling me I was deep for too long. Makes sense if I’m losing time. I would have thought the ride I caught in Alabama was enough to take the edge off, but apparently not. I sigh and start walking down the side of the road, thumb cocked high, gravel crunching under the soles of my shoes.
The sun keeps setting, casting everything around me into deeper darkness, but I know this is Ohio. I’d know these endless fields of rippling corn anywhere. If boats could sail on crops instead of water, the cornfields of Ohio would be an inland sea, carrying cargos back and forth on the cornsilk tide.
It’s a fun image. I play with it as I walk along the highway verge where I’ve found myself, hoping to catch the attention of any passing motorists willing to take a chance on me. People are less inclined to pick up hitchhikers than they used to be. I blame it on the horror movies, which have made every person walking across America seem like some sort of calculating serial killer, out to paint their name along the highways in the blood of nice suburban housewives.
Not that all hitchhikers are angels—far from it. Bad things can happen when you let a stranger into your car, whether or not that stranger’s alive. People have been assaulted, things have been stolen, drivers have found themselves dumped in the former hitcher’s place as their new “friend” roars away in their car. Living people are hungry people, and hungry people make mistakes.
The dead get hungry, too. It’s just that our appetites tend to be a little different.
Me, I hunger for rides, for the feeling of a borrowed coat or sweater settling on my shoulders and granting me the illusion of flesh for a few hours. I’m always cold when I’m in the world of the living, even when I’m walking down a country road in the middle of the day. The ice of the grave breeds in my bones where the marrow used to be, and I freeze, and I freeze, and I freeze. When I borrow a coat, I borrow a little of the warmth that comes with it. Sure, it’s all symbolic, and yeah, I’m always happy when the coat drops away and I drift back into the twilight, free from the chains of petty mortal flesh, but in the moment, the warmth of the living is my drug of choice.
That, and cheeseburgers. There’s some decent food in the twilight—Emma at the Last Dance Diner, especially, makes a mean chocolate cherry malt—but it’s not the same as what I can get in the daylight. Cheeseburgers in the twilight are always a little bit too perfect. There’s never any char on the onions, never any gristle in the meat. Ghosts eat the platonic ideal of a cheeseburger instead of eating the cheeseburger itself, and while I’m all for the platonic ideal now and then—where by “now and then” we understand that I mean “five nights a week, because I’m dead and don’t need to worry about clogging my arteries”—there’s nothing like the real thing.
That’s why I love Ohio. You can get a decent cheeseburger anywhere in America and almost anywhere in Canada, but there’s nowhere on the continent that does frozen custard the way Ohio does. I keep walking, daydreaming of pirates sailing on waves of corn, their holds filled to the bursting with sweet, creamy custard, and feel the weight of the living world settle more and more heavily on my shoulders, like a weighted blanket keeping me anchored to the ground. Yes. This is what I needed, what I went to Alabama looking for, before stupid Bobby came along and ruined everything, the way he always does. I needed to walk the world of the living, to fill my stomach with mortality and cover my feet in honest dirt.
Let the ever-lasters make their prophecies about me as much as they want, and yeah, I’m going to find a way to talk to Persephone, because I take ominous omens seriously. But I’m going to get that cheeseburger first.
A few cars flash by, not slowing down or stopping. I keep walking. The point for me isn’t always getting the ride: it’s asking for the ride, it’s being willing to climb into a stranger’s vehicle and put my destination, however briefly, in someone else’s hands. For a road ghost, this is the closest thing there is to prayer.
Except for actual prayer, I guess. But now that I know the gods are definitely real and definitely paying attention to me, I find that I’m not very fond of praying. It was a lot more appealing when I thought I would be safely ignored. These days . . .
The consequences of prayer could way too easily be worse than whatever situation I’m praying to get out of. I’ll take my chances with functional atheism, thanks.
I don’t know how long I walk. Time slips away, dulled into the pleasant background whistle of the wind blowing through the corn and the occasional hum of tires on the pavement, driver after driver passing me by. Eventually, I’ll have to come to a rest stop, someplace with bathrooms and soda machines, and it’s always easier to find someone to drive me from one of those. People feel more like they have to engage when they’re face-to-face with a lost girl like me. Or maybe I’ll come to a neon-and-chrome oasis in this verdant desert, a truck stop diner where I can convince some soft-hearted trucker to buy me a plate of fries. Doesn’t matter which it is, not really. Both have their charms, and both are somewhere up ahead of me in the great wide somewhere else, waiting for my arrival.
I’m so deep in my own thoughts that I don’t immediately notice when the red pickup truck pulls up next to me. It’s a relatively recent model, introduced to the roads in the last fifteen years; it has that dully generic look I’ve come to associate with pickups. They’re all individuals, of course, but it takes someone who really loves them to tell them apart. This one is the bright cherry red of arterial spray, a comparison that’s strengthened by the patches of rust the color of dried blood that dot its flanks and fenders.
The passenger side window rolls down. The driver leans across the cab so she can see me, so I can see her.
“Hey,” she says. “Going my way?”
Her hair is black and streaked with faded lilac, shoulder-length and somehow windswept even though the warm air escaping from the cab tells me she’s had her windows up for miles. She’s wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with silver foil printing on the front, so cracked and faded that it forms a runic scrawl instead of the name of the band it was originally intended to advertise. She looks like she’s about the age my mother was when she died, which means she’s so much younger than me that it’s ridiculous. Time is a toll road, and it never gives back as much as it takes.
Her accent is Irish, like my friend Emma’s, and her smile is sunshine on a country road, wrinkling her nose and exposing the gap between her front teeth.
“Bon,” I say, only half-surprised. I tend to attract routewitches when we’re in the same area. I would have been one, if I hadn’t died the way I did. Between that and their natural affinity for road ghosts, they’re well-inclined toward me. But the last time I saw this routewitch, she was standing sentry on the Ocean Lady, and we’re nowhere near that ancient, august thoroughfare. “What are you doing here?”
“Offering you a ride, of course,” she says. “Unless you’d like to turn me down?”
This smells like a trap, or like the next step in fulfilling the prophecy seen by the ever-lasters. Bon shouldn’t be here. I’m in the middle of nowhere, Ohio, and while a random routewitch would be an understandable coincidence, a routewitch I already know is a stretch. But oh, everything I am aches to get into that truck. I hitchhike. It’s what the twilight crafted me to do. That means I ask for rides, and it means I accept them when they’re offered. To do anything else is to say that I know better than the road.
“I guess I’m going your way,” I say, and open the door, climbing into the truck. Bon already has the jacket in her hand, a light windbreaker almost the exact green of my prom dress. I slip it on and feel the gravity settle over my bones, weighing me down.
“Next stop, adventure,” says Bon, and hits the gas, and—wow—do I hope she’s wrong.