Chapter 3
Under the Cornfield Sky
I’LL GIVE BON ONE THING: she knows these roads as only a local or a routewitch can, finding an unmarked offramp that takes us through a farmer’s field on our way to a narrow frontage road lined with apple trees. They’re not fruiting right now, but we crack the windows to let the sweet smell of sap and apple blossoms work its way inside, until we’re bursting out of the orchard and onto a slightly wider, equally bumpy street that takes us into something that looks more like a time-slipped frontier outpost than an actual town.
There are ten buildings, maybe fifteen if I’m generous with the way I count garages and rickety farm stands. Two gas stations, a bait shop, a pawn shop . . . and a diner, grimed gray with road dust, neon sign not even bright enough to attract moths, barely clinging to fitful, flickering life.
I give Bon a dubious look. She laughs.
“Best Shaker lemon pie in the county, I swear,” she says. “Their cheeseburgers aren’t bad either.”
I want to be suspicious, but the promise of cheeseburgers and pie from someone I already know to be, if not a friend, then at least an ally, is too much for me. “Works,” I say, and open the door, sliding out of the truck.
The air changes when my feet hit the pavement. The smell of lilies and ashes drifts by on the wind, and even though I’m still draped in borrowed mortality, I feel a needle of cold lance through my bones. I look across the hood of the truck in open-mouthed dismay, radiating betrayal. Bon meets my eyes and shrugs.
“Sorry,” she says. “If it helps at all, I wasn’t kidding about the pie. It’s the best I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a lot of pie.”
Somehow, this time, pie doesn’t help. Pie feels frankly inconsequential, maybe even insulting, when compared to the weight of the storm I can feel bearing down on me. Whatever this is, whatever it means, I don’t like it.
“Shall we go inside?” asks Bon.
I want to say no. I want to strip off the coat she gave me and use the last of my corporeality to fling it at her as I drop into the twilight, getting myself the hell away from whatever this is and whatever it’s going to mean. I close my mouth, eyes narrowing.
The ever-lasters found me in their playground rhymes. Bobby Cross is desperate enough to threaten everyone I love. Whatever’s happening here, it’s something I have to see through to the finish line, whether I like the idea or not.
“Yeah, okay,” says Bon. “I guess we’re not chatty friends anymore. That’s fine, but I don’t get to move along until I’ve delivered you safely, so if you could go inside, I’d appreciate it. I can’t be standing around here all night long, not when I’ve things I need to be doing.”
She still looks utterly relaxed. Whatever dreadful doom is hanging over my head isn’t hanging over hers. Still, she might be able to give me a little more information before I walk into my own doom. “What’s in there?”
“Pie,” she says. “Cheeseburgers. And someone who wants to talk to you, badly enough to be willing to pick up the check. She said this felt like neutral ground to her. More so than that diner you’re usually haunting.”
The Last Dance Diner is a landmark of the twilight, and not only because it’s as mercurial as everything else you’ll find along the ghostroads. When true danger looms, it has a tendency to change its neon sign from green to red, and shift all of its menus from the Last Dance to the Last Chance.
The pie at the Last Chance is no good, but the cheeseburgers are to die for. Possibly literally.
The current owner of the diner, whatever face it’s wearing at the time, is my friend Emma—I’ve mentioned her before. The American ghostroads are a long, long way from the green hills of Ireland. That didn’t stop her from following the family she keened for across the ocean several generations ago, and when they died out, she stopped haunting the living in favor of feeding the dead. It’s something to occupy her time until she figures out what she’s doing next. People like Emma, they’re not ghosts. They’re not alive, either. They’re something else altogether, part of the strange ecosystem of the twilight, born deep in the midnight, and it’s best not to ask too many questions. There’s always a chance they’ll be answered, and that’s not going to work out well for anyone.
It’s not hard to see why someone would look at the Last Dance and see it as other than neutral territory. Emma and I have been through a lot together, and at this point, well. It’s hard to say “ride or die” when you’re already dead. “Ride or exorcism” might be closer. There’s not much she wouldn’t do for me. There’s not much I wouldn’t do for her.
Which makes this whole situation stink like old gym socks. “I’m not sure I want to talk to anyone who wouldn’t be welcome at the Last Dance,” I say.
Bon shakes her head, strolling closer so she’s not shouting across the hood of the truck. “It’s not that she wouldn’t be welcome. You’d be welcome in her places. It’s that she wants this meeting to happen in a place where neither of you is necessarily in a position of power over the other. It’s a mark of respect. Please, let her respect you, and let me get on my way. I’m supposed to be vending at a swap meet in Florida first thing in the morning, and it’s already going to take bending the rules of the road in some inadvisable ways for me to get there on time to set up.”
When a routewitch says she’s going to bend the rules of the road, she doesn’t mean breaking traffic laws. She means changing the way distance works, twisting it back on itself until she’s traveling in the sweet embrace of a tesseract, miles blurring into feet, feet becoming inches, delivering her to her destination in a fraction of the time it should have taken. It’s not cheap, warping the road like that. It’s not easy. I eye Bon with wary respect. If she can make it to Florida by morning, she’s stronger than I assumed she was, and a lot more dangerous.
She sees the change in my demeanor and sighs. “Is there any chance we could do this like civilized people?” she asks. “You keep company with a beán sidhe, and I’d rather not get on her bad side, which means avoiding yours.”
“How would civilized people do this?”
“They would agree that standing out here arguing doesn’t do any good.” She looks at me solemnly. “I didn’t lure you out of the twilight, you came on your own. Saints and angels know it’s possible to summon a hitcher to somewhere she doesn’t need or want to be, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. We know enough of how you operate to know that when the air clears, you tend to appear where you need to be. No interference, no magic, just plain and simple need put you into my path, close enough to the diner as to be a short and easy errand. I’ve done you neither ill nor evil, nor interfered in the natural way of things. So please do me the immense favor of getting your eternally underaged ass into this damn diner and letting me go on my way.”
I raise an eyebrow. “How long were you workshopping that?”
“A little while,” she admits. “I’m particularly proud of ‘eternally underaged ass.’”
“Poetic,” I agree. “All right. We could be here all night, so I’m going to just ask you: the person inside absolutely means me no harm, is not going to attempt to magically compel me, and is not secretly working either for or with Bobby Cross, correct?”
“Correct,” says Bon. “You’re a suspicious spirit, Rose Marshall.”
“I have good reason to be.”
She can’t argue with that. The last time I intentionally met someone in a diner, she turned out to be Bobby’s patsy. I don’t blame her anymore. Laura Moorhead had been mourning her boyfriend and blaming me for his death for decades by the time Bobby had approached her and offered her what must have seemed like the deal of a lifetime. And it was the deal of a lifetime, really, because trying to keep it—and seeing the light and breaking it—had been the end of her. She’d died in my arms, like so many others before her, and the last I’d seen her, she’d been tucked safe in Tommy’s passenger seat, his eyes on the horizon as he drove them both toward whatever waited on the other side of the ghostroads.
I hope they’re happy now, wherever they are, and if they’re not, I hope that they’re at least together. They deserve that much. Laura and I may have had our differences, but I never once doubted her love for Tommy, and they didn’t get the life they should have had with each other. They should get a gentle afterlife.
“I swear to you that the person you’re here to meet means you no harm, harbors no ill will toward you, and is absolutely not working with Bobby Cross in any capacity, willing or unwilling.” Bon raises one hand, fingers folded in a complicated pattern that’s something like a scout’s prayer and something like a Vulcan salute and something like an anatomical violation. They seem to waver where they cross over one another, as if they don’t want me looking at them.
So I stop looking at them. I mean, hey, I’m as curious about the world around me as the next dead teenager, but I’ve been on the ghostroads long enough to understand that when something doesn’t want to be seen, it’s not my place to try and force the issue. That’s the sort of behavior that gets people shoved into spirit jars and forgotten about for a couple of decades. Not my idea of a good time.
“Fine,” I say.
Bon blinks at my sudden capitulation. “Fine?” she echoes. “Just fine?”
“You’re clearly going to argue with me until I go in. I’m tired, I’m cold, you would not believe the day I’ve had, and I want a cheeseburger. So fine. I’m going inside, and you’re going to Florida.”
Bon smiles, sharp and sudden, and bends to embrace me before I have the chance to step away. She smells faintly of asphalt and lemon-lime soda, the cheap generic stuff they sell in truck stops around the country, the kind that tastes the way little kids think floor cleaner will taste, sweet and bitter and artificial and somehow addictive.
Lips close to my ear, she murmurs, “You should have been the best of us, Rose Marshall. You should have been the one who caught and kept the damn horizon.”
Then she’s letting me go and stepping away, heading back to her truck, back to her destination, back to whatever journey she was on before she was pulled loose and set on hitchhiking ghost duty. She doesn’t look back. Routewitches very rarely do. They learned their lessons from Orpheus.
When you look back, you lose your heart’s desire.
I shiver a little at the thought, remembering my own time in the Underworld, which is a very different place from the afterlife. Twilight, starlight, and all the levels in-between, they’re essentially mortal places. Not human—not all of us were human when we were alive, and even if we were, not all of us stay human after we die—but mortal. We know what it was to be alive. To walk in the light and breathe in the air and believe in our own immortality.
The Underworld is different. Oh, it houses the spirits of the dead, just like the twilight does, and it’s tied inextricably to the lands of the living, because it matters too much to ever be fully sundered, but the forces that craft it never belonged to anything mortal, and the Lord and Lady of the Dead . . . they’re like Emma. They were never alive. They’re ancient and terrible and beautiful and I would lay down my soul for them if they asked me. I wouldn’t have a choice in the matter. Which makes them terrifying.
I turn toward the diner. Diners aren’t terrifying. Terrible things can happen in diners—I’ve been present for some of those terrible things, have been witness and participant and unwilling psychopomp of the aftermath—but the diners themselves stay essentially the same. Solid and welcoming, way stations on the road between here and hereafter.
The door sticks a little when I push against it, scraping on linoleum too old and too worn to be slippery, to shine. The air is overly air-conditioned for the evening chill. It tastes stale against the back of my throat, but it smells like grease and fried potatoes, like butter and whipped cream from a can. All the best things the world of the living has to offer, all the things that would keep me coming back over and over again, even if the road didn’t demand it.
The bell over the door jingles as it swings back into position. I don’t move.
The waitress says something to me, a greeting, maybe, or an invitation to sit wherever I like, she’ll be with me in a moment. She’s wearing a uniform so perfect that it’s practically parody, belled sleeves and hairnet and a white apron just stained enough around the edges not to look like a prop. I don’t move.
Someone calls for a refill. I don’t move.
The reason for my stillness tilts her chin upward in invitation. The neon streaming weakly through the filthy windows sparks glints of gold and silver off her hair, like she’s dressed in all the riches the world has to offer. It throws a robe of dancing dust motes around her shoulders, haloing her in light, and she’s beautiful, and she’s terrible, and she’s not supposed to be here. She’s not supposed to be anywhere in the daylight because the daylight is dangerous. The daylight has death and time and all those other natural forces that she’s supposed to be exempt from, for as long as she keeps her place, for as long as she wears the crown.
I don’t move, until the Queen of the Routewitches—definitely of North America, maybe of the whole damn world, and how is this happening? This can’t be happening—raises her hand and beckons me forward, and maybe it’s the coat around my shoulders, the coat that belonged to a routewitch, that drapes my borrowed bones in phantom flesh, but I start walking. I don’t want to. It doesn’t matter. I was supposed to be a routewitch, would have been a routewitch if Bobby Cross hadn’t decided I looked like a girl he wanted to swallow whole, and right now I’m technically alive, and that means she’s the boss of me. I don’t have a choice. When she calls, I come. When she calls, I’ll always, always come.
“Hello, Rose,” says Apple once I’m close enough that she doesn’t have to raise her voice. “Care to join me?”
“Not really,” I say. I slide into the booth across from her anyway. The vinyl is cracked and flaking, as old as the diner around it, or maybe older. Some of these roadside dives are built from the bones of the diners that lived and died before they were conceived of by their owners. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to hear that all these booths were scavenged from somewhere else, that I’m sitting in an American graveyard, surrounded by the ghosts of a thousand late night cups of coffee and a couple hundred slices of pie.
Food doesn’t usually leave actual ghosts behind. I’d eat a lot better if it did.
“Sorry about that,” says Apple.
I eye her. “No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m not, but it seemed like the polite thing to say.” She picks up her milkshake. The glass is thick and heavy. That’s an old trick. It looks so much bigger than it is. It’s also about half empty, although I can see enough to know that it was chocolate, and that it was probably delicious.
Apple swirls the straw in the brownish sludge, ice cream streaked with whipped cream, and it looks amazing, and I’ve never wanted a milkshake less in my entire death.
“Sorry,” she says, glancing at me. Maybe she can see my discomfort in my eyes. Maybe she even cares. “I know you don’t want to be here, but this seemed better than, you know.” She makes a gesture with one hand. Presumably, it’s meant to indicate “having you kidnapped and dragged onto the Ocean Lady so we can have a talk.”
She’s done that before. Sent her goons to sweep me away from whatever I’m doing and haul me off to do what she thinks I should be doing, which is mostly whatever she wants. She feels responsible for Bobby Cross’ existence: she was there when he went to the crossroads, and she didn’t do anything to stop him. And that’s all well and good, and I would be one hell of a lot happier if she’d take her guilt somewhere else and leave me out of it.
“Right,” I say. “You know. What I don’t know is why I’m here. Why am I here, Apple? What can the Queen of the Routewitches possibly want from dead little ol’ me?”
She puts down her glass and looks at me solemnly, not saying a word.
This is Apple, Queen of the Routewitches, possibly the most powerful living person I’ve ever met: she’s tiny. She looks like she’s the same age I am, which is a neat trick, since she’s never died and we’re both decades older than the faces we wear. Apple’s been sixteen longer than I have, but not by all that much; she took her place on the Ocean Lady shortly after World War II. Before that, she’d been hitchhiking her way across America, gathering power with every mile she traveled, pulling it out of the air, out of the water . . . out of the road beneath her feet.
Routewitches get their power from distance. Apple started in California and ended up in Maine, trading one ocean for another, until the highway she walked along somehow slipped out of the daylight and into the twilight. Humans don’t belong on the ghostroads—not living humans, anyway—but the Ocean Lady makes her own rules and takes what she wants, and back then, she wanted Apple. Wanted her real, real bad. I’ve never been sure how a road can want things. Not that it matters, because the Ocean Lady isn’t only a road. She’s a goddess. Man-made, sure, weaker than Persephone, absolutely, and a goddess all the same.
It’s never a good idea to argue with the divine. The consequences can be pretty dire.
I don’t know what Apple’s name was before she took the name she wears now, but she’s lovely, Japanese American with brown eyes and black hair and lips that always look like they’re on the verge of smiling. She probably wasn’t that pretty when she stumbled into the twilight, not after all the miles she’d traveled, not after the travails of Manzanar, where she’d been imprisoned before she broke loose and ran away. And sometimes I look at the way the world of the living has gone since my death, and I wonder if maybe where she came from isn’t part of why the Ocean Lady wanted her so badly. Apple has already experienced some of the worst of what people can do to each other. There aren’t many surprises left on her side of the grave.
“All right, I’ll bite,” I say. “What was so important that you had to order Bon to track me down and bring me to you?”
“Don’t you want me to order something for you first?” she asks. “Anything you want. My treat.”
Food almost always tastes better in the lands of the living. It’s something about the air. Maybe it’s something about needing air. But there’s a catch to keep us hungry ghosts from devouring the world in our eagerness to fill what can never be filled: we only get to taste our food when someone gives it to us willingly and without being somehow forced. Bobby ruined my dinner. My stomach grumbles. My throat is dry. I could kill for a piece of pie and a cup of coffee, and I could kill time consuming them, stretch out the moment before she tells me what mattered this much until the idea of answers frightens me a little bit less.
Or I could say to hell with it and rip the bandage off.
“Tell me,” I say.
Apple sighs. It’s a deep, mournful sound. One of the truckers at the counter goes pale, his eyes raising from his eggs and bacon and fixing on a point somewhere outside the horizon, like he thinks he can see eternity from here. The waitress drops a coffee mug. It shatters when it hits the floor. It’s the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. Whatever’s coming, it’s not something I’m going to enjoy. But then, I knew that when I sat down.
“The crossroads are dead,” she says.
Silence falls across the diner like a shroud, muffling everything, wrapping me in a quiet so profound that it’s like returning to the grave. I frown at her, trying to figure out why she’s telling me something that’s patently obvious to anyone who’s set foot in virtually any layer of the twilight since Annie and her friends left Maine. I wasn’t sure up until now whether the crossroads were actually dead or just severely damaged—I’ll have to let Annie know she did the job right. She’d been asking herself the same thing the last time I saw her, but when you’re limping away from the monster’s lair to lick your wounds, you don’t necessarily want to go back in to poke the corpse.
So they’re dead. The balance of power in the twilight has shifted in a permanent, profound manner, and Bobby’s panic over how he’s going to keep paying his share of his devil’s bargain suddenly makes a lot more sense . . . as does the ever-lasters’ exhortation that I go and speak with Persephone.
Apple regards my lack of surprise with baffled concern, and neither of us says anything. The silence stretches out like a thread of pulled taffy until she leans to the side and flags down our waitress, who is probably twenty but looks forty, although she might be sixty—forty is the sweet spot for truck stop waitresses, and something about the place will age them either up or down at its whim, until it settles them in that eternal, somehow desirable degree of middle age. The ones who stay teens or age past forty are only ever here to go, on their way to some position of permanence, while the ones like ours seem to last just shy of forever.
Apple casts a sweet smile at the waitress, and says, “My friend would like a cheeseburger, rare, with fries and a vanilla malt. Please excuse her. She’s just had a bit of a shock.”
The waitress shoots me a sympathetic look and bustles off to place the order, which will be up in minutes if I’m right about the kind of place this is. Diners that look this rundown and still keep the lights on are very, very good at what they do.
Apple returns her attention to me. “You don’t seem as surprised as I thought you would,” she says.
“There’s a reason for that,” I reply. “Even if there weren’t a reason, have you seen the twilight recently? It’s like a fucked-up Halloween fun fair in there. The sun just tried to eat me. The actual sun. So no, I’m not surprised.”
“If you knew—”
“If I knew, then what? I don’t belong to you, Apple. Even when I’m wearing a coat, I’m still dead. And you made it very clear to me when I was alive that we could never be friends with the way things are.”
Routewitches pull power from distance. I’ve been hitchhiking for seventy years. You do the math. The way things stand right now, I’m the only person who potentially has the power to unseat Apple from the Ocean Lady, and she knows it. When I was rendered temporarily among the living by a plot of Bobby’s, Apple didn’t hesitate to assert her dominance and make sure I remembered who was really the one in charge. As Queen, she can spend the distance of others. She spent some of mine. I didn’t approve. I still don’t.
Apple frowns, worrying her lip between her teeth. She looks like she’s about to speak when the food arrives, picture-perfect cheeseburger and hot, crispy fries, along with a tall glass of vanilla malt and the metal cup that holds the overflow. Milkshakes and malts have gotten a lot bigger since I was alive. One of the few things I can absolutely and unreservedly say has improved about the world during my death.
Apple waits until the waitress walks away to solemnly say, “This food is for you, the honored dead, and the living have no claim over it,” which is the fanciest way of saying “you can have this” I’ve ever heard, but it works: the food is ritually ceded to me, and the smell of grease, melting cheese, and sweet vanilla snaps into focus. My stomach rumbles. Stupid, traitorous stomach.
I take a fry. It’s hot enough to almost burn my tongue, crisp exterior giving way to mealy interior, almost liquid in that way potatoes have when they’re fresh from the fryer and haven’t had time to remember that they came from the dirt, came from a place of stillness and solidity. They’ll be awful when they’re cold, all limp and soggy, but right now, they taste like what I assume the air is like in Heaven, if Heaven exists. Hot French fry wind and vanilla malt clouds, that’s paradise. If I knew for certain that I’d end up there, I might be willing to move on.
I swallow and reach for the cheeseburger. Apple is still worrying her lip between her teeth, expression torn between hurt and confusion.
Finally, the silence is too much for her. “What do you know?” she blurts.
Apple looks genuinely upset at this point. She’s not the boss of me, but she’s still the boss of the routewitches, and I’m a road ghost; she could make my existence fairly unpleasant if she wanted to. I grab my milkshake and take a fortifying gulp, malt and sweet ice cream running down my throat like a blessing. Malts are something Apple and I have in common. I’ll never understand how they were allowed to fall out of fashion.
“I didn’t know they were actually dead, so thanks for confirming that for me,” I say, and put the glass aside, grabbing another fry. “I was a little worried they’d just been seriously hurt and were going to come back pissed. Dead is better. Most of the time, dead is better.”
“I didn’t ask you what you don’t know, I asked you what you did,” she snaps, and winces, looking briefly, terribly weary. “I’m sorry, Rose. I’m so accustomed to dealing with routewitches who don’t question me that sometimes I forget other people might not be so understanding.”
“Forgiven,” I say. It doesn’t matter whether I mean it or not. What matters is moving forward, ploughing ahead down this strange, dark road, toward whatever unseen destination is waiting for me. “I really need you to explain what we’re doing here, though. I get that this is a big enough deal for you to be willing to leave the Ocean Lady, but why am I here? Why me?”
“Because where you go, chaos tends to follow,” says Apple. “You’re not an ordinary hitcher, Rose Marshall.”
“Never got the chance to be.” It’s hard to keep the bitterness out of my voice.
I don’t even know if I was supposed to be a hitcher, and I never will. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to linger at all. Was my unfinished business—a grieving but relieved mother, a heartbroken prom date, an untaken math test—really enough to keep me here? I should have been a routewitch. Should have been a wife, a mother, a whole lot of things . . . and if I became a ghost, I should have been the one to set the shape of my haunting.
Not Bobby when he ran me off the road, and not Gary when he slung his coat around my shoulders. Me. So many of my choices were stolen by men who should have known better, or who didn’t know any better themselves. And that’s never going to happen again.
Apple seems to realize she’s struck a nerve. She pauses, taking a breath, and says, “There a lot of ways to kill the dead. You’ve experienced some of them.”
She’s not wrong. I take another gulp of my milkshake to cover my annoyance. Once I’ve swallowed, I say, “I’m one person. Weird or not, I’m not even the most dangerous kind of ghost. Hell, a white lady or a gather-grim would be a lot harder to take down than one little hitchhiker. Killing me is easy. If you called me here because you think I killed the crossroads, you’re wrong. I’ve never had that kind of power.”
“And yet it happened,” says Apple. “We’re still trying to find out exactly how, both so we can thank whoever was responsible, and because if someone out there has figured out a way to kill ideas, we have to be sure they won’t be coming for the Ocean Lady.” Her expression hardens, becoming something much older than her apparent years. “Every routewitch in the world would answer to me if they allowed any harm to come to Her.”
So she doesn’t know that Antimony was the one who struck the killing blow, and I don’t think I want to tell her. The Prices are no blood kin of mine, but they’re deeply important to Mary, and I’ve had a few generations to grow fond of them. They call me “Aunt Rose,” and I feel responsible for their well-being. Not always the most comfortable position to be in as regards a family of monster hunters with no common sense or belief in their own mortality, but still, I’ll be damned if I’ll put Antimony in Apple’s crosshairs.
Especially because while the crossroads weren’t a god, they held similar levels of power. Big power, too big for the world as we know and understand it to easily contain. Something that could kill them could absolutely threaten the Lady. Even being moored in the twilight wouldn’t be enough to protect her, because the crossroads were never a part of the daylight. Reaching them, rendering them vulnerable . . . it took travel. I’ve led more than a few people to the crossroads in my time, when I didn’t have a way to tell them “no.”
The thought hits me like a rock striking a windshield. I sit up straighter, eyes going wide as I stare at Apple. “Bethany—”
“Your niece is on the Ocean Lady, being kept from dissipating until I’ve had the chance to talk to you.”
Of course she is. I scowl as I slump back in my seat. “You mean you’re planning to use her to blackmail me.”
Apple shrugs. “Only if you don’t leave me any other choice. I think you will, honestly. I think you’re enough of a routewitch to want to help.”
I don’t say anything.
I died at sixteen. My brothers didn’t. They grew up, they mourned me, and they moved on. They left our childhood home to molder—good riddance—and they had lives. They had big, tangled, wonderful, messy, human lives. They had children, and those children had children, and one of those descendants, my brother Arthur’s granddaughter, was a girl named Bethany. Bethany, who heard the call of the road the same way I did but didn’t have the power to reach for it. Bethany, who wanted. Every day of her life, that girl wanted. She wanted to be strong and she wanted to be free and she wanted to put Buckley Township behind her.
Poor, confused, terrible, sad Bethany.
Bobby Cross—see how he keeps popping up over and over again, like the world’s worst jack-in-the-box? My life would have been so much easier if he had never made his way to the crossroads—had been looking for a way to hurt me, and he’d stumbled across Bethany, little girl with a blood tie to the ghost who got away. He managed to convince her he could give her everything she’d ever wanted, if only she’d give him what he wanted most. Me. She offered him me and he offered her the world, and when she couldn’t deliver, he did what Bobby always does. He took the balance out of her soul.
Bethany was a stupid teenager when she ran afoul of Bobby Cross. He left her old before her time, ripping her youth away and feeding it into the engine of his damned car. He would have done worse if not for the fact that the very thing that attracted him to her—our blood relationship—insulated her from the worst of his assault. Persephone’s blessing travels down bloodlines, and it protected Bethany’s soul from his machinations. Not thoroughly enough, but it was something.
Not something Bethany could live with. She went to Apple and petitioned for an escort to the crossroads—a position that had, due to family relationship and a sliver of responsibility, fallen to me. I took Bethany to the crossroads. I did my duty as a psychopomp and her great-aunt.
I couldn’t protect her from the crossroads. I could never have protected her from the crossroads. They were bigger and stronger and more terrifying than me, and they took what they wanted. They took her life. They made her a teenager again, sure, but a teenage ghost, just like me, the aunt she hated, the aunt she betrayed, and they took her into their service, bound to them the same way Mary was, reshaped in their image, designed to test and broker the bargains made by desperate souls like she had been, like Bobby had been, like so many others still were.
I didn’t save her. I never had a chance.
“Bethany is our guest,” says Apple, snapping my attention back to her. She’s watching me, not wary, not exactly, but careful, like a lion tamer watches a lion. It’s anyone’s guess whether I could actually do her harm here, with the Ocean Lady miles and levels of reality away from us. I’d have to be a fool to try it.
On the Old Atlantic Highway, Apple’s power is effectively limitless. She doesn’t travel. That’s strange for a routewitch, but it’s necessary for their ruler, who is supposed to be accessible at all times, which means stationary. The other routewitches bring her offerings of distance, and she squirrels them away, growing in power, solidifying her position, capable of using them to do virtually anything. Given the right place to stand, Apple could break the world.
But she’s not from this world anymore. She’s a voluntary exile, and she doesn’t understand how things really work because she’s not a part of them. This is my world more than hers. She doesn’t belong here.
“What do you mean, ‘dissipating’?” I ask.
“Bethany is the newest crossroads ghost we’ve been able to find,” she says. “There may have been others her age, but I think she’s probably the newest to survive. She was unwinding around the edges when we stumbled across her. I know that must seem convenient to you, that your niece should be the sole survivor, but I swear on the interchanges that it wasn’t intentional. We felt the crossroads drop away. We felt something new rising up to fill their place. We went to investigate—we had no choice, given our relationship to the roads—and one of my people found her, clinging to the fabric of the twilight with fingers already beginning to fray. They wrapped her in a shell of offramps and wrong turns, hiding her from reality’s eyes, and they brought her to the Ocean Lady to ask what could be done.”
I want to call bullshit. I want to say there’s no way her people “just happened” to stumble over Bethany while they were out there investigating the enormous, unwanted question of where the crossroads had gone. I want to throw my milkshake in her face.
I don’t do any of those things. Because the fact of the matter is that the routewitches serve the road and the road serves the routewitches. It’s a perfect symbiosis that flows in both directions at the same time, and if Bethany, who was a potential routewitch when she was alive, didn’t want to vanish into the ether, the road would have done its best to help her hold on. It’s professional courtesy as much as anything else. As for the living routewitches, their relationship with the crossroads has always been strained at best, like people trying to live in a house occupied by a hostile wild beast that attacks anyone foolish enough to stumble into its path. They went looking because they had to. They found Bethany because the road wanted them to. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as that.
Apple sighs as she looks at me. “Because Bethany is so new, she doesn’t have anything else tying her to the ghostroads or to the twilight in general. She might be able to find a new calling. She might not. If she can’t, she’s going to move on. She doesn’t have a choice.”
Meaning my niece could find out real soon whether or not there’s anything beyond the afterlife where we’ve been existing since our respective deaths. “That sucks for her,” I say.
Apple blinks. “I thought you’d be more concerned.”
“Why? Because she’s family?” I don’t have to force my laugh. “She never gave a damn about me. The first time we met, she did her best to bind me to the daylight long enough for Bobby Cross to shove me into his gas tank. We’re not exactly friends.”
“She was his victim as surely as you were.”
“No.” I pick up the cheeseburger, turning it around in my hands, admiring the symmetry of it. No cheeseburger is perfect, but some of them come closer than others. This one is pretty close. The bun is lightly toasted and golden brown; the cheese is dripping seductively down the sides, already starting to solidify, not yet congealing. I take a bite. It tastes better than it looks. I chew, I swallow, and I look at Apple again.
“No,” I repeat, with more confidence this time. We’re not talking about the crossroads anymore. We’re talking about my family. “She made a choice. He hurt her, absolutely, but she wasn’t his victim like I was, because I never did anything. Not to him, not to her, not to the crossroads. I was innocent. I was a kid. Bethany brought this on her own head.”
“She was a kid, too,” says Apple. “She didn’t understand what she was doing.”
“That excuse has never worked on a natural disaster. The crossroads were a natural disaster. Bobby Cross is a natural disaster.”
“Unnatural disaster might be more accurate, but point taken.” Apple dips one of her own fries in her milkshake and sighs. “I thought this would be easier.”
“Because my love of Bethany is so well documented?”
“No. Because your hate of Bobby Cross is so well documented.” Apple looks at me across the table. “The crossroads are dead. Their ghosts are fading. Bobby Cross has no patron. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’ve had my routewitches watching for you for the last week.”
I stare in silence as she continues.
“Bobby Cross is vulnerable. Without the crossroads to protect him, I think he can be destroyed. So will you do it, Rose? I could call on the world’s expectations of the Phantom Prom Date, I could invoke the Walking Girl and see what wearing her story would do to you, but I’d rather go straight to the heart of the matter. I’d rather ask you, as kindly and as clearly as I can. I think I owe you that much.”
“Why?” I whisper.
“Because if anyone can do it, you can. So will you? Will you go to where the crossroads were, and find the trail, and finish the job? Will you kill Bobby Cross?”