Chapter 4

The Hard and the Easy

HER QUESTION RINGS IN THE DINER air like a bell, silver and dull and sweet and broken, all at the same time. I stare at her across the table, unable to find any words that would suffice to answer her. Finally, just as the silence turns truly awkward, I realize what they have to be.

“Fuck you,” I say, and pick up my cheeseburger again. It’s cooled a bit, but it’s still delicious. I focus on shoving as much of it as I possibly can into my face, interspersing bites with snorting slurps of milkshake, and it’s all amazing, and that’s a good thing, since I figure there’s a non-zero chance that this is going to be my literal last meal.

Routewitches can manipulate the twilight to a certain degree. It’s not their primary role in the universe, but since when has that stopped anybody? They’re still human, which makes them petty and vindictive and all those other awesome things people excel at being. A baby routewitch can control when and where I pop into the twilight, warding roadways and cities against me, making my afterlife a lot more difficult than it has to be. They generally don’t because it’s hard on them—it takes a lot of energy, and since most ghosts don’t go out of our way to cheese the routewitches off, we all sort of keep our professional distance from one another. I’ve been summoned a few times as well as warded out of a few homes that didn’t feel like they were in the market for a haunting, but on the whole, we’re big into staying out of each other’s way.

Of course, again, petty and vindictive, and I’ve met more than a few routewitches who would be happy to deny the dead access to the lands of the living if they had the power to do it. Some of them think they’d be doing the right thing, encouraging us to rest in peace instead of cropping up in truck stops and shopping malls and wherever else our phantasmal feet take us. Others don’t give a crap about the right thing. They just want the dead to remember who’s in charge here.

Apple has that kind of power.

Apple has the power of all the routewitches in North America and some of the routewitches elsewhere. She sizzles with strength. She can bend the world any way she wants, and when she does, it listens. She could have pulled me out of the twilight any time she wanted to. She could have sent living routewitches down roads the living are never supposed to see, all for the dubious pleasure of hauling me to her throne. I know what happens if I decide to tell her “no.”

Ghosts whose nature doesn’t require them to interact with the living in order to maintain themselves can deal with being cut off from the daylight. They may not enjoy it, but they’ll be fine. Me . . .

I’ll fade away. I’ll disappear into the haze of screaming spirits that haunts the path between the Underworld and the rest of reality, and I guess that’s a mercy because, while they’re aware of themselves, they don’t remember who they were, which means they can’t remember everything they’ve lost. I keep eating, mechanically, methodically, stuffing my face as fast as I can without choking. If this is the end of me, I want to go out the way I’ve always gone on: with a cheeseburger in my hands and a cynical expression on my face, daring the world to do its worst.

I don’t know why I keep doing that. The world is always happy to oblige.

“You don’t have to eat like a dog expecting to be kicked,” says Apple. “I’m not going to do anything to you.”

I cock an eyebrow as I swallow. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you,” I say. “It’s not like you hear the word ‘no’ very often.”

“Oh, I do, it’s just usually paired with ‘please,’ not ‘fuck you.’” Briefly, Apple looks amused. “Sometimes I wish you’d survived to come to the Ocean Lady on your own. We could have been really good friends in a world where we both had a heartbeat at the same time.”

“I doubt that.”

Apple waves a hand, like she can brush my doubts away. Hell, maybe she can. I don’t know what all comes with being a Queen in the sense she is, and I’ve never been overly interested in finding out. “We couldn’t be friends when you were suddenly alive again in this time period because you’ve traveled too far. You’re a threat to my dominion. But if you’d escaped the wreck and found your way to the Ocean Lady, like you were meant to do, we could have been teenagers together, forever. You could have been my most trusted adviser.”

“Yeah, and we would have done each other’s nails and gossiped about everyone we’d ever had a crush on, I know the drill,” I say. Maybe she’s right and maybe she’s wrong and maybe it doesn’t matter even a little because that world never got the chance to come to pass. I died. It’s as simple as that. Apple ran away from home—if a concentration camp set up by the United States government for its Japanese-American citizens can really be called “home”—and I died, and we were never teenagers together, even though that’s exactly what we look like to the people around us.

Daylight people. They may understand that they walk on a thin shell of normalcy above an endless well of weird, but if they’re lucky, they’ll never crack it, never fall into the dark places they spend their lives trying to avoid. To them, Apple and I are two kids sneaking out after curfew to get milkshakes, little hooligans in training but not really their problem. They don’t look at us and see a routewitch so powerful that she’s stepped outside the flow of time for personal reasons, or a ghost wearing borrowed flesh and filling her phantom stomach with offerings. They’re normal, so in their eyes we get to be normal, too, if only for a little while.

Then one of the men in the booth next to ours gets up, leaving a handful of crumpled bills on the table, and sneers at us as he heads for the door. “Dykes.” He spits the word like a stone, like it’s something he can throw.

I’m halfway to my feet before Apple grabs my arm, pulling me back, keeping me from going after him. It would be a pleasure. I know this kind of man, this kind of bigot; I know how to goad them into throwing the first punch even before they realize they’re going to make things physical. We have so many witnesses here. He could break my jaw, maybe, or my nose, beat me to the pulp his inner demons demand, and then by the time the police show up, I’m gone.

Bigotry is a weed that takes root wherever it finds fertile soil, and there’s no way this man is the only one here who thinks Apple and I are somehow violating the rules they keep in their heads, the rules that tell them how teenage girls are supposed to live and love and act and be. But this man was foolish enough to voice it, and they all want to think they’re better than he is. I’m young—forever young—and pretty and delicate, with the refined bone structure that only comes from childhood malnutrition. I’m white, too, and that’s a weapon that can be used in places like this one, however horrible that feels to admit. If he hits me, he loses.

“No,” says Apple, voice low and tight and wire-sharp with need. She needs me to stop, so I stop. She needs me to sit, so I sit. It’s not her power over the twilight. It’s not that she’s the Queen and I was supposed to be her subject. It’s that she sounds strained and sad and somehow lost, and while we’re never really going to be friends, that doesn’t mean I want to hear her suffer.

The man sneers one more time before he leaves, and then the waitress is coming to bus his table and ask whether we need anything else. Her eyes are hard. She heard what the man said, I realize, and while she might not have thought it before he spoke, she thinks it now; she’s holding the cloth he cut up to our outlines, and she doesn’t like the shapes it makes.

Apple digs money from her pocket while I smile at the waitress with all my cold psychopomp’s heart in my eyes.

“Local girl,” I say. “Thought you were going to be the first one in your family to get out, and then you found a job here, after school at first, only school ended and the job didn’t, the shoes fit your feet better every year, and the apron strings tied themselves so tight around your waist that you forgot how to take them off. The smell of coffee and grease is in your hair. You could have been a priestess, you know. These places, they’re temples to the gods of hard work and distance. Hermes loves diner waitresses, keeps them as safe as he can, protects them from the dark. Not you, though. Because Hermes also loves the transgressors of boundaries. He loves the outcasts. He loves me. He loves my friend. But love isn’t always enough. Even if he loves you—and he has a lot of love to give—he doesn’t like you. You are a disappointment to the god you have unwittingly served for your entire life, and I hope you remember that when you try to sleep. I hope you remember that when he comes to take you home. And if I were you, I’d pray he’s more forgiving than I am when it’s time to pay the ferryman’s fee.”

I stalk for the door, leaving the waitress gaping behind me, Apple close on my heels. Bon is long since gone; the parking spot where she’d briefly stopped her truck is open. Apple didn’t drive here. We exchange a wordless look and break into a run, crossing the narrow local highway without looking back. We’re not teenagers, even though we look the part, and sometimes form dictates function. Sometimes a teenage girl, faced with the disapproval of adult authority, just needs to run. Together we dive into the waving wheat on the other side of the road. It’s tall enough to brush our shoulders, and we run and run and run until we come to a trail cut through the growth, where we duck down, fully out of sight.

Apple claps her hands over her mouth to muffle the sound of her breathing, and I crouch, hands and head dangling between my knees, trying to remember how air is supposed to work. Being dead means I don’t actually improve my physical condition, no matter how much I run from danger, and when I’m draped in borrowed flesh, I tire easily. Some things about the spiritual condition suck.

Apple’s shoulders shake. I’m briefly afraid she’s crying, and then I realize it’s something else she’s trying to keep pinned behind her lips.

She’s laughing.

“Hey.” I jab her in the side with my elbow. I’ve been credibly assured that my elbows are unreasonably sharp. From the way she jumps, the people who told me that were being entirely truthful. “Don’t laugh at me. I was just defending your honor.” Another thought occurs to me. “And I left the rest of my milkshake back there. If you’re about to pin me in the twilight forever for disobeying you, that was probably my last milkshake. So a little gratitude would be nice.”

She lowers her hands, laughter fading as she gapes at me. “You thought I was going to . . . for the Lady’s sake, Rose, I’m not a monster.”

“You want me to go hunting for Bobby Cross. You called me here to ask me to kill a man.” I shrug, the borrowed coat heavy on my shoulders. “That feels pretty monstrous to me.”

“Yes, because you know him, and he’s your monster if he’s anybody’s. He’s mine, too, but I can’t hunt him.”

“Why not?” Her answer might change my mind.

Then again, it might not. I’ve put too much time and effort into keeping myself out of Bobby’s gas tank to go chasing him down now, not without a damn good reason.

“He can go as deep as he wants.” She looks at me, eyes solemn and clear. I’m pretty good at knowing when people are lying to me. She’s not lying to me now. “I’ve had reports of him from the midnight on up. I can’t go that deep.”

“You’re the—”

“Yes, and that’s why I can’t go that deep.” Apple shakes her head. “I’m the Queen of the Routewitches, I’m the chosen of the Ocean Lady, and I’ve promised to keep my post until there are no more Manzanars. That man, back there? The one who looked at us, hurting no one, doing nothing wrong, and decided he needed to turn a word into a knife so he could stab us with it? He’s the reason I can’t go down. I need to guide my people. I need to be able to know, absolutely, that no one can challenge me for my place and turn the Ocean Lady from a haven into a prison. She needs me. My people need me. I don’t risk myself until the world changes.”

I start to answer her. Then I pause, looking at her more carefully. “How many routewitches do you have watching us right now?”

Her smile is a small, tired thing. “The younger waitress back in the diner is one of mine. She’s very disappointed in her coworker right now. Where did you even get all that about Hermes?”

“Pulled it out of my ass,” I say cheerfully. “I have no idea whether he has opinions about diner waitresses. I bet he does, though. Persephone is way too interested in ghosts like me for Hermes to be sitting out the game entirely.”

“I see.” Apple smiles a little. “Two of the other patrons were mine, too. They’ll be somewhere in this field by now, giving us space but staying close enough to get here quickly if I call for them. I never get to go anywhere by myself. That’s not what a Queen does.”

I tilt my head. “I’ve never seen you in the daylight before.”

“This was a special situation.”

“Are you . . .” I can’t figure out how to ask this nicely. But I remember the feeling of my body defying me when I was brought back to life for just a little while, the knowledge that every cell of me was older than it had ever been before and was never going to take me back to what I’d been. I wave my hands in the air, indicating as much of her as I can encompass.

Apple looks at me with faint amusement. “If you talk, I can answer.”

“Are you aging? If you stayed out here long enough, would you grow up?”

“Ah.” She shakes her head. “The Ocean Lady is firm but fair. I came to her as a child. I promised her my future if she’d give me a place to belong. I wasn’t Queen then, but I think she knew I was going to be. Causality is negotiable when you’re a goddess. She took my adulthood. The woman I might have become, the people I might have loved when my hormones finished whirling around and tripping over themselves, all of it belongs to her. If we ever reach the point where I feel like I can walk away, she might be willing to give it back to me. Or she might not. Growing up, for me, might mean crumbling into dust and blowing away. Assuming it’s even an option.”

“Yeah,” I say glumly.

The past wasn’t perfect. People tend to don their rose-colored glasses when they’re talking about times before today, like the fact that something isn’t here anymore makes it somehow morally superior. But it was easier, when I was a kid, to pop up out of nowhere and make a life for yourself. Runaways happened. Orphans. Lots of things more terrible than that, too, but a teenager had a chance of showing up in town, making a few polite excuses, and putting down roots.

It’s not like that anymore. Apple would be in for a hard road if she left the Ocean Lady. She’s a girl out of time, the same as me only, unlike me, she still has needs. Food, and drink, and a safe place to sleep. She can’t just drop down into the twilight and know she’ll be taken care of.

Only maybe I can’t either, not if Bobby Cross is nearby. The smell of white asphodel tickles my nose, a reminder of Persephone’s blessing, which hangs around me like a shroud. As long as I belong to her, he can’t touch me.

Maybe I can do this after all.

“I belong to Persephone the same way you belong to the Ocean Lady,” I say. Apple quiets, looking at me attentively. I don’t meet her eyes. Instead, I look at the grain around us as I say, “If she doesn’t like this, if she threatens to withdraw her blessings, I can’t. Bobby isn’t my fault. He’s my problem, yeah, but I didn’t create him. The crossroads and routewitches did that. But the ever-lasters already told me I had to go and talk to her, and Bobby’s running desperate. He’s threatened to hurt what’s mine if I don’t go to him willingly.”

“I know he’s not your fault,” says Apple. “It’s why I came to you myself, instead of bringing you to me. This is our shame and our burden. I’m sorry we can’t survive the depths long enough to hunt him down. I’m sorry I have to ask you, as his victim, to be the one who cleans up the mess we’ve made. It isn’t fair. But I can tell you that if you give me a list of names, I’ll set my people to protect them for as long as I can.”

The idea of spending Apple’s foolish promise on protecting a hundred little diners and dives across the country is appealing. The idea of protecting the people I consider my own is even more so. “If you’ll protect them from him while I go hunting, then I’ll try.” I finally sit all the way down, nestling my butt into the hardpacked earth of the trail. “If Persephone says I’m allowed to do this—and I have no clue how I’m going to ask her, since it’s not like I got a manual for ‘how to be bound to a Greek goddess of the dead’ when I asked her to let me complete my katabasis—then I’ll at least try. I’ll go to the place where the crossroads used to be and follow their bones to Bobby Cross. But I need you to agree to do one more thing for me.”

“If it’s within my power, you know I’ll do it,” says Apple. “You have my word as Queen of the Routewitches.”

“Never been quite sure what that’s worth,” I say, tilting my head back, until I’m looking at the star-specked sky that stretches from one end of the horizon to the other, like a blanket drawn across this farming country, covering and comforting everything beneath it. I lived and died under skies like this one. It’s familiar and cold at the same time. This is not my home. Never really was, no matter how hard I once tried to pretend. Rosie Marshall was only ever here to go.

I take a breath, air cold in my borrowed lungs, and say, “Gary loves me. I mean, he really, really loves me. He would never have been able to pull off the stunt he pulled to slip into the twilight as my car if he didn’t love me all the way down to the bottom of his bones. But sometimes I wonder whether he loves the me I am now, after all these years in transit, or whether he still loves . . .” I trail off, not quite sure how to finish the thought.

“Whether he still loves a girl in a green silk gown standing by the side of the road, waiting for a hero to save her,” says Apple.

I glance at her, startled. She smiles, ever so slightly, as she shrugs.

“The thing about being connected to the road is you hear a lot of stories,” she says. “He featured pretty heavily in yours back when people were just starting to tell it. The helpless hitchhiking damsel, the handsome boy who saved her and took her home. He dropped away, though, around the time they started calling you the Girl in the Diner and the Phantom Prom Date. It was like once you had a name of your own, the people who told the stories didn’t feel like they needed him anymore.”

“Yeah,” I say, and look at the sky again. “It’s a lot like that. He grew up without me. He got old. He died. That’s the only thing we both got to do. We both got to die. And he . . . I want to say he looks at me like I’m still this lost, helpless kid, but he doesn’t look at me at all, because the road doesn’t want him unless he’s in a shape it understands. So he surrounds me. Sometimes it feels like he smothers me. Finding a way to stay in the ghostroads was a big, romantic gesture, but it’s not like he asked me first. He didn’t say, ‘Hey, Rose, I know you loved to drive when you were alive, and I know you’ve been a hitchhiker for more than fifty years now. Are you cool with me turning myself into a car?’ You know? My whole being is bound up in being the person who asks for a ride, and I don’t need to do that anymore.”

“He’s chipping away at your identity without even meaning to,” says Apple. “I get it, I honestly do. There was this whole wave of routewitches in the nineties who’d roll into town, find their way to the Ocean Lady, and then say things like ‘wow, it’s so great to see someone like you running the show,’ and when I asked for details, would get defensive and tell me they didn’t see color, they didn’t see me as a Japanese person, they just meant that it was cool to have something as big as the Ocean Lady speaking through me instead of another white guy.”

“White guys run fucking everything,” I say.

Apple smiles wryly. “Only in the lands of the living. Haven’t you noticed that by now? Once you’re dead, the old privileges fall away, and suddenly it’s not about money or connections, it’s about how much work you’re willing to do. That’s the way it’s always been.”

“I wonder if that’s why so few of the ghosts I know died happy, rich, and attended by their third wives,” I say.

“Probably,” says Apple. “Routewitches trend female, too. Men hear the road just as clearly, but they’re more likely to be happy where they are. They’re more likely to believe they can stay and see things get better. So women wind up slipping through the cracks in the world, leaving their daylight America behind. I’m pretty all right with that. It was always the men who said, ‘someone like you,’ and then quietly tried to take over, because I’m too young and too female and too not exactly like them. I asked one of them once if he could go and tell the United States government that he didn’t see color, and so he’d like them to restore all the lands and property seized from Japanese Americans during internment, since if color isn’t real, we were imprisoned for no fucking reason. He left pretty quickly after that.”

“You were imprisoned for no fucking reason,” I say.

“Preaching to the choir,” says Apple. “I am who I am because of the wounds the world inflicted on me before I turned my back on the things I was supposed to want. I traded my name for a crown, and I’m not sorry. But I didn’t sell my skin. I have my mother’s hands and my father’s eyes and I never saw Japan and I probably never will, but her dust is in my bones. Someone who ‘doesn’t see color’ is telling me that nothing my family has ever done counted for anything. It doesn’t matter if they’re trying to help. It doesn’t matter if they’re trying to be kind. They’re still chipping me away.”

I let my eyes drift from the sky to the waving wheat. “If I do this for you, if I go looking for Bobby Cross—even if I don’t succeed in getting him off the road—I want you to try and find a way for Gary to be a person in the twilight.”

“He’s not a road ghost.”

“I know. He didn’t die the right way for that.” Even dying in an accident wouldn’t have guaranteed him the ghostroads because he would have died with thoughts of me dancing behind his eyes. That’s the sort of thing that makes a homecomer, when the person they’re dreaming of is among the living. Since he’d have been dreaming of the dead . . .

An accident might well have slung him straight into the actual afterlife since, statistically, that was where I’d be. The me in his mind wouldn’t have been enough like the me who actually exists to tell the road what he wanted. He would have moved on.

“I’ll have to figure out a way to bend things, so he doesn’t just drift off to whatever anchor he should have had in the first place. You sure he wouldn’t be happy just staying on the Ocean Lady?”

As the most powerful highway in North America, the Ocean Lady sets her own rules. She’s part of the daylight, part of the twilight, and part of the midnight, all at the same time. When I walk there, I’m always in my green silk gown, and when Gary crosses her borders, he finds himself back on two legs, with hands to hold me and lips to kiss me and to be honest, it’s confusing as hell. It’s a lot easier to be angry with him for making my choices for me when he’s a car, silent and somehow managing to brood at the same time.

Regretfully, I shake my head. “Part of the problem is he wants to be with me, constantly. He sulks when I spend too much time in the Last Dance, and he can see me from the parking lot. He’s not going to agree to anything that puts us in different places full time. It’s just not . . . it’s not going to work. I need him to be a person again, all the time, so I can figure out whether he’s capable of loving me, not only the idea of me. So that’s what I want from you. I want you to find a way to make Gary human again, out on the ghostroads.”

Apple chuckles. “It’s poetic, in a way. Bobby took Gary away from you when he killed you. Now you’re going to try and stop him, and you want me to give Gary back.”

“Do we have a deal?”

She nods. “We do.”

“Then I’d better get started.” I shrug off the jacket Bon gave me and let go of the daylight, of the phantom force that lets me steal life and temporary vitality from the world of the living, of everything but the need to go, to go, to go.

The last thing I see before I drop into the twilight is Apple’s face, surprised but not displeased. Then I’m descending through layers of mist and infinite nothingness, and there’s nothing to hold onto but the cold.

I just hope I don’t wind up in another chainsaw murder maze.

---

Navigating the twilight is one of those things that never gets easier if you stop to think about it and is as effortless as blinking if you let go and allow your instincts to guide you. I fall, and I trust the sky to catch me. I fall, and I trust my heart to know the way.

There was this book I read back in elementary school, about a world where everything was flat. Two dimensions only. To the creatures that lived there, people were these weird, impossible monsters because we had a third dimension they couldn’t see or fully comprehend. Sometimes I feel like I’m a Flatlander and a normal person at the same time when I’m dropping into the twilight because everything around me is a world smashed flat and compressed for ease of passage. Every drop of mist, every scrap of fog holds its own level of the twilight. All of them are ready to be opened and explored, eager for a new potential citizen.

Come home, they whisper. I could be your home, come home, come home to me.

I shut out the clamor of their voices and keep dropping, moving farther and further from the daylight at the same time—farther in distance, further in spirit. I can’t quite reach it anymore. I would need to have something pulling me, or I would need to be on the ghostroads, ready to walk my way back into the light.

My destination is a deep one. I’m leaving the twilight behind me, and it doesn’t want to let me go because it knows me too well, and it misses me when I’m not there. The stretches of ghostroad that I travel the most frequently are tangled in the twilight, and their familiar ground is both anchor and burden to me, making it harder to move on. I do it anyway, focusing on the fall, letting the mist wisp by around me, dropping down, down, down, like Alice in her rabbit hole descending into the darkness.

I’m in my green silk gown, have been since the instant I left the daylight behind. It flutters around me, blown by the wind created by my fall. The air only a few inches away is deathly still, filled with swirling fog that moves in every direction at once, paying no attention to the laws of physics. Physics aren’t really spoken of here because they belong to the living; the dead have other constants by which to measure our existences. We don’t name them. We don’t need to. Also, it doesn’t work. Most of the dead I know personally were human once, and humans like to have names for things. Not the laws that govern our existence; when people try to pin them down; they twist and change and slip away.

Very few people try to name the laws more than once.

I fall, and I breathe in the fog of a thousand layers of the twilight, and I focus on the place I want to go, refusing to let my image of it waver. Under the twilight, above the midnight, lies the least understood of the layers of the transitory afterlife.

The starlight.

I drop through the fog. Everything is gray and misty one second, and the next, everything is light, dazzlingly bright without being blinding, twinkling and glimmering and glittering all around me. It’s like falling through a waterfall of broken glass, each piece sparkling for everything it’s worth, turning the world into a beacon. I close my eyes. This is the hard part.

In the twilight, I am familiar. In the twilight, I belong. Here in the starlight, I’m a tourist at best and a trespasser at worst, walking where I was never meant to be. I force myself to relax and let the brightness flow over and through me, until I feel ground beneath my feet again, until the air is sweet at the back of my throat. There’s a constant feeling of itchy wrongness from the world around me trying to cast me out. I push it aside.

I open my eyes.

I’m standing in the middle of what looks like a station on the London Underground—something I shouldn’t be able to do, since I never saw one when I was alive, and the starlight can be strangely strict about only showing people things they already know. But I’ve been alive twice, and the second time, I managed to travel all the way to Europe in order to use the marbles in the British Museum as a doorway to the Underworld. Capital U, as in “you better not do this if you have any other option.” I’ve been here before.

A train is pulling up. I step back, away from the doors, and wait. They slide open with a soft hiss, releasing a wave of heavily conditioned air. A single passenger steps out.

She’s shorter than I am, and heavier, with the kind of curves I used to dream about back when I was a starving beanpole of a high school student. Her waist-cinching corset only exaggerates them, giving her a silhouette that could sell a thousand hungry Goths on paying the door charge at a club they’ve never heard of before. The corset is black, like the ruffled shirt above it and the skin-tight miniskirt below it. Her fingerless gloves, her fishnets, her high-heeled shoes, everything about her is Goth chic, except for the choker around her throat. That’s pink, so pink it hurts my eyes, pink as a warning sign, as a “do not touch” writ clearer than nature ever managed, no matter how hard it tried.

Matching streaks striate her hair, which is otherwise dyed a flat, unrelenting matte black and cut in an old-fashioned style that neither matches nor clashes with everything else about her. She’s wearing too much makeup, black and pink and silver glitter. Her lips are the only exception, the color of fresh blood and so glossy that I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that she’s been slitting throats all day in order to get the look just right.

She stops dead in her tracks when she sees me, eyes going very wide in their rings of mascara and eyeliner and bubblegum baby-doll brightness. “What are you doing here?” she demands, accent as thick as Ulster peat.

She’d sound a lot more impressive if she could learn not to squeak when she’s surprised. I consider telling her so. I decide it would be a very bad idea.

“I need to get a message to Her Ladyship,” I say. “I figured I’d find you in the starlight and, hey presto, here you are.” I spread my hands, indicating the train station around us. “Why is this a train station?”

“Underground has lots of ghosts,” she says, watching me warily. Her hands twitch, like she’s resisting the urge to lock them around the handle of some sort of swingable weapon.

Dullahan have a reputation as reapers of souls. I’d really rather not find out the hard way that it’s been honestly earned.

“So this is what, a dead station?”

“Something like that. One that never got built. The funds were allocated, the plans were drawn, everything was designated and designed, and then the temper of the planning commission changed, and someone decided we didn’t need a station where this one would have gone and what the sweet, suffering fuck am I even on about right now? You’re not supposed to be here, ghost.” She pauses. “Ghost. You’re dead again. You did it. You actually did it.”

“I did,” I agree. I don’t really want to argue with her. I have no idea what kind of a timeline I’m working with here, but I know what’s riding on my success: Bethany’s existence, Gary’s freedom, the safety of the living people I love, and yeah, my vengeance. I do this and maybe Bobby Cross goes away forever. I do this and maybe I can get a little peace.

“How?”

“It’s a long story.”

She folds her arms, cocking one hip out with the insouciance of the arrogant and the attractive. In her case, I think it’s probably both. “I have time.”

I don’t, necessarily, but I still take a breath and say, “I went into the Underworld with Laura. We managed to navigate the traps between us and the garden, and I met Persephone.”

“You met the Lady?” Her eyes go wide, and her head seems to wobble slightly, although that could be the wind from the departing train stirring her heavily shellacked hair. “She let you go?”

“She did.”

Dullahan are better known as headless horsemen, although from what I understand, they don’t appreciate the nickname, especially since most of them don’t have horses. They’re like beán sidhe, creatures who were never alive, never human, no matter how much they resemble humanity. Beán sidhe are born in the midnight and thrive in the twilight, among the only living denizens of the human afterlife. Dullahan are born in the midnight, originating at depths I have no interest in exploring, and they mostly stay there. Hitchhiking ghosts have a reputation for curiosity, since the nature of our hauntings means we’re constantly coming into contact with new people and new ideas—not exactly the experience of your standard house-haunter. A homestead probably won’t see as much in a century as I see in a year. And I still have no interest in seeing the place where Dullahan are born. I enjoy my existence—and my sanity—way too much for that.

“Lucky little dead girl,” says Pippa, in a tone that’s equal parts proud and predatory. People don’t call Dullahan “the reapers” for nothing. Her fingers twitch again. If she pulls her scythe out of the ether, I’m going to run. I’ll find another way to speak to Persephone. “So why are you here, lucky little dead girl? You’re not alive anymore. No katabasis for you. The doors wouldn’t open, and even if they did, the dog wouldn’t let you by.”

“I know.” Cerberus is a good boy, but he’s a good boy with a job to do. He doesn’t let the dead pass. When we met before, I’d been one of the living, and he’d been willing to exchange petting for passage. Now . . .

He might exchange more petting for not eating me. Like I said, he’s a good boy.

“Then why come so deep? This place isn’t gentle with your kind.”

I wanted to ask her what she meant by that. I was direly afraid that she’d answer me if I did. “I need you to go to Persephone on my behalf. I need a favor.”

Pippa’s eyes went even wider than before, until a rim of red stood out around the white of her sclera. She looked surprisingly human when she did that. Only knowing that her entire head would fall off if I removed her choker kept me from lowering my guard.

Some people would argue that I’m not human anymore either, that humanity is a function of living, and whatever I am now, I don’t deserve the consideration or concern that would be offered to a human being. Maybe they’re right and maybe they’re wrong—it’s never been much of my concern—but Pippa has never been human. I at least used to be. I know how humans think. I know how I think. Pippa?

It’s anybody’s guess.

So maybe that’s why I’m not as surprised as I want to be when she pulls her hand through the mist that’s started to gather around her and produces a wicked-looking scythe straight out of a Victorian illustration about Old Man Death. She points it at me, blade-end first, and takes a step backward.

“Why shouldn’t I strike you down where you stand, for your disrespect and presumption, and let the carrion birds make mincemeat of your phantom remains?”

“Well, first, because carrion birds like dead stuff, but they don’t usually like dead stuff that turns into mist before they can eat it. I’m not wearing a coat. This is just me. I don’t think I’d linger long enough to be consumed.” I spread my hands, making sure my left is just a little in front of me, so the white asphodel corsage tied around my wrist catches both the light and Pippa’s eye. Persephone liked me enough to give me her blessing and send me on my way. I bet that means she wouldn’t be happy if her pet Dullahan chopped me up for birdseed.

I spare a brief thought that this day, oh, this day, this day has not been anything like I expected when I answered the call to leave the twilight and get my ass back on the road. Everything is happening very quickly, and that’s good because it means I don’t have time to stop and really let it all sink in. As long as I keep moving, I can’t get stuck.

Maybe that’s why I’m a hitchhiker. All I’ve ever done is keep on moving.

“Second, because I’ve shown no disrespect,” I continue. “I guess maybe I’ve shown some presumption, coming here looking for you like this, but I don’t think the starlight would have let me find you if I wasn’t supposed to. I don’t know the rules down here as well as I know them up in the twilight. I do know the starlight directs where people go once they’re past the city limits, so to speak. There was no good reason for me to land in your train station if you weren’t going to be willing to at least listen.”

“And you want me to go to the Lady for you. You want me to ask her . . . what, exactly?”

Here’s where it gets a little bit tricky. I take a deep breath. “The ever-lasters of the twilight found my name in their playground rhymes, and they said I had to take my questions to Persephone. The Queen of the Routewitches has left the Ocean Lady to ask me to perform a task for her. The Lady of the Dead must know, in her wisdom and her grace, that the crossroads have been killed. Their bonds are broken, their servants scattered. I have been asked if I would be willing to hunt down the man known as Bobby Cross and stop the damage he’s been doing in the name of the crossroads. I do not feel, given everything I’ve promised, that I can do this without the permission of our Lady. So I come to ask you to ask her for that permission.”

Pippa blinks. Very slowly, very deliberately. She looks at me in solemn silence for what feels like forever, her scythe dipping low in her surprise, before she says, in a voice that’s even slower than her blinking, “You expect me to believe that claptrap? You expect me to credit you with the death of the crossroads?”

“I didn’t kill them,” I say. “I don’t want to be credited with anything. I just want to find out whether Persephone would be cool with me going and hunting down Bobby Cross before he can hurt anybody else. He’s threatening to harm my people if I don’t repudiate the Lady and give myself over to him, and that seems like a far greater insult than coming here on a little errand.”

Pippa points her scythe at me again. The air around the blade glitters blue, like she’s slicing through light itself. Which is an absolutely terrifying thought that I should never have had. Good job, brain, thanks for that.

“Stay here,” she orders. “If you move, if you try to leave, I’ll take it as proof of your lying, and I’ll be the one doing the hunting. Do you understand?”

“Got it, boss,” I say. I consider saluting her. I decide she might not take it the right way. Never piss off the occasionally headless woman with the large farming implements, that’s what I always say. “Where are you going?”

“Not to bother the Lady, if that’s what you were hoping,” she says with a sneer. “I’ve other things to do with my time, and as soon as I return, we’ll have a little talk about why you shouldn’t try to trick a guardian of the gates.”

“No one’s told me what that means, so I don’t think I should be held responsible for doing— And you’re gone.” I frown at the open space where the Dullahan was a moment before. “Of course you’re gone.”

She doesn’t reappear. The tracks remain empty. She uses trains to get into the station, but—apparently—she can leave it at will. That’s . . . well, that’s not surprising, precisely. Most ghosts also have limitations on how we move, like pieces on a chessboard too big and complicated for formerly mortal minds to understand. I can cross incredible distances in the twilight, but always within North America. The oceans are forbidden to me. And when I rise into the daylight to do my spectral duty, I’m bound by the limits of my feet, traveling one step at a time until someone lets me into their vehicle and hits the gas. When I drop back down, the twilight puts me where the twilight wants me, but I’m always within a few days’ travel of the Last Dance, if not actually in the parking lot.

Still, it would have been nice of her to leave me something to read, at the very least. I glare at the place where the train isn’t. Nothing changes.

Nothing ever changes without good reason. I give the tracks one last sour look and begin pacing up and down the length of the station, the hem of my dress hitting against my ankles, trying to remain calm. It’s not as easy as I’d like it to be. With Pippa gone, I have something that’s been missing for a while now.

I have time to think.

Being dead is sort of like being an antelope. Stay with me here. Most of the time, I’m wandering peacefully through the taiga of my afterlife, looking for watering holes, enjoying the little things. I’m dead. There’s not much that can hurt me. I don’t need to worry about food or housing or how I’m going to pay for college. I don’t have to decorate for the holidays or update my look. I get to just be. It’s peaceful and it’s pleasant and it’s boring as hell, which is another reason people eventually either turn sour or move on. When everything’s the same, night after night after night for as long as you care to cling to the remnants of the person you used to be, something has to give.

For me, what gives has almost always taken the form of lions. Or lion, really, in the form of Bobby Cross, the man who refuses to let me rest. The afterlife’s never boring when there’s someone still trying to kill you, despite the seeming impossibility of that idea. I’ve been running since the night I died, never able to stay in one place for long, never able to stop. Like an antelope. I was a prey animal when Bobby killed me, and his continued existence means I’ve stayed a prey animal. I’ve stayed aware of time in a way that many ghosts aren’t.

The thought gives me pause. If I do what Apple’s asking of me, if I take down Bobby Cross—if I even can take down Bobby Cross, who’s just shy of being a literal force of nature as far as I’m concerned—no one’s going to be chasing me anymore. I’ll be able to drift, to doze, to haunt my way through an endless succession of days that never change.

How long will I be able to hold on if I no longer have to run?

It’s a selfish thought, but I’m a selfish spirit. I’ve had to be. Selfishness is what allows me to cling to the idea that I, Rose Marshall, am somehow more worthy of existence than all the people Bobby hunts when he doesn’t have me. I could fill his tank for years at this point. I’ve traveled so far and learned so much that I’m the high-octane fuel of his heart’s deepest desires, just like he said. Every time I evade him, someone else dies. That’s the simple, brutal truth of my existence. I survive and others die, run off the road and shoved into that infernal engine. What gives me the right to hesitate when given a chance to break the cycle? What even gives me the right to run? I’m not surviving anymore. I’m just . . . enduring. You can’t survive when you’re already dead.

And now he’s planning to target the people I care about, which is why I’m going along with Apple’s harebrained idea at all. I’m just a ghost. High-octane, sure, but one single solitary ghost who never asked for any of this.

But then, who among us asks for anything that happens to us? I would have sworn the crossroads would outlast the world. I can believe that Apple would meet me on neutral ground in order to ask me to do something that might end with me wiped entirely out of existence. If Bobby can catch me despite Persephone’s blessing, it’s game over for all the women I’ve become during my time among the dead. The Phantom Prom Date will stop haunting her high school targets; the Girl in the Diner won’t appear to truckers anymore. I’ll be finished. But Apple’s predecessor was the one who allowed Bobby’s passage to the crossroads, and she feels guilty, even after all these years. The living always privilege their guilt above the safety of the dead. Maybe that’s right and maybe that’s wrong. I’m certainly not qualified to say.

With the crossroads dead, Bobby has no one to protect him. They were never a nurturing master, but they were willing to intercede on his behalf where needed, willing to give him new ways to harry and hunt me—and most importantly, the fear of them was always enough to keep most of my allies at a distance. No one wanted to tangle with the crossroads.

With them gone, everything changes, for so many people—Mary and Bethany among them. Thinking of Mary sends a shiver of unease along my spine. Mary was newly dead and didn’t know any better when she brokered Bobby’s deal with the crossroads. She just wanted to get back to her father and the small, strange family she was already in the process of adopting. The Healys would have been okay without her if she’d disappeared back then; they just would have needed to find another babysitter. But now, she’s been with them for generations, wiping their noses, kissing their boo-boos, acting as the moral heart of a mortal bloodline. What’s going to happen if she disappears in the absence of the crossroads?

Maybe more importantly, what’s going to happen to the rest of us? The Healys—the Prices now, because time passes and people marry and sometimes they change their names when that happens—aren’t exactly the poster children for being chill. If they decide their ghost babysitter has been unfairly taken away, they’re likely to storm the gates of Heaven to get her back. Which hey, would answer the question of whether Heaven exists, but I’m not sure that’s a worthwhile trade for the amount of damage they’d do in the process.

Mary’s been around long enough and has enough ties to the lands of the living that she’ll probably be okay, and if she’s not, I have absolute faith her family will make us all pay until the universe gives her back out of the sheer, desperate need to have them stop shooting things. Bethany, though . . .

Bethany’s young and weak, and she doesn’t have much to bind her into the twilight. With the crossroads gone, she won’t have enough. That’s why Apple has her on the Ocean Lady. It’s not only a way to get me to play nicely with the routewitches: it’s a way to keep my niece from vanishing completely. I’d be fine with that—it’s not like we’re friends—except that crossroads ghosts are sort of like Gary. They’re special, for lack of a better way to describe it. They don’t linger in the twilight because of unfinished business. They linger because the crossroads somehow drove a spike into their souls and bound them to the places where they died, keeping them from moving on. Whether it’s a promise or a punishment doesn’t much matter.

But the things the crossroads ghosts do in the name of their masters aren’t always good. Some, like Mary, fight the crossroads. Others embrace them. For a new ghost like Bethany, who hasn’t had a lot of time to figure herself out . . . if she loses her grip on the twilight, is she going to go to Heaven? Or is she damned by her own choices, most made when she was still too young and too trapped to know any better? Or—third possibility and worst of all—will she disappear because she was never supposed to be a ghost in the first place, and she traded her chances for eternity for permission to stay here, where she didn’t really belong, for just a little while longer?

I don’t have the answers. I’m not sure I want to have the answers. I reach the end of the platform, turn, and start to walk back the way I came, only to draw up short as something grabs the trailing hem of my dress, jerking me to an unexpected, undesired halt.

“Um, what?” I ask.

The only answer is a growling, rasping noise, like something big and made almost entirely of teeth trying to breathe ominously. I’m suddenly glad I didn’t turn around. Things that growl like that almost never mean anything good, and all of them want to be seen. Being seen gives them permission to be way more menacing.

I hold up my left hand, shaking it slightly, so the corsage will dance. “Maybe not your best idea, sport. I already belong to someone way bigger and more dangerous than you.”

The growl comes again, this time so close that I feel hot breath on the back of my neck, making the tiny hairs there stand on end. Sometimes the way my body mimics being something alive and easily terrified is a little bit annoying. There should be some advantages to being dead.

“Really? You honestly want to do this?” My options are narrow, and none of them are good. I can run. I don’t know how big the thing is, or how fast it can move; it could be on me in an instant if I try to bolt. I’m dead. I can’t be killed by ordinary methods, and the dead are usually very bad at doing anything permanent to each other. But I still feel pain, and I don’t like it. I can also be ripped to shreds and scattered like confetti across the starlight, where it might take me years to come back together. This isn’t my home. It won’t help me.

Bethany doesn’t have years. Bethany might not even have weeks. I don’t know what happens to a ghost whose purpose and anchor is destroyed, and while I don’t like my niece much, I love her grandfather. When it’s time for me to lead my brother into the afterlife, I want to be able to tell him honestly that I did my best to save his granddaughter. I didn’t just leave her to fall alone into the dark.

The people I love, the ones Bobby is threatening to harm, don’t have years. They need me to get out of here in one piece, not a thousand.

I could rise into the twilight. It’s always an option. When I’m in the daylight, I can fall; when I’m in the starlight, I can rise—and unless I’m in a ghost trap or somewhere else that isolates me from the ghostroads, I can always find my way home. But if I do that now, Pippa is going to come back and assume I’ve decided to run. She’s going to think I asked her to bother the Lady of the Dead for my own selfish amusement, and she’ll hunt me down. Pippa isn’t technically dead. She can kill me, at least if the stories about the Dullahan are to be believed.

Getting myself killed—again—is not the goal for today.

Option three is the stupidest, on the surface, and maybe that’s the reason I go with it. I’ve always been stubborn. I take one more step, almost reaching the limit of what my prom gown can handle with something holding its hem. Then I whirl, as quickly as I can, to face my assailant.

It’s a whirling mass of specks, like a cloud made of flies the size of wads of chewing gum. Every part of their bodies is a fathomless black; I can only tell it’s looking at me from the glints of light bouncing off its multifaceted eyes. It has formed grasping hands with cutting claws from the fabric of the cloud. Two of them are clutching the hem of my gown. Another three are reaching for me, hooked and primed to slash.

Flies bounce off the outline of its body, making it waver like static in the motionless station air. None of them go past the edge of the platform. It’s like there’s something stopping them from crossing into the air above the tracks. Interesting. Not as interesting as the fact that I’m being menaced by a horrifying fly monster, but still, interesting.

“I don’t know what you are, and I don’t really care,” I say. “You want to let go of my dress?”

The cloud forms a hole in itself, like it’s trying to mimic a mouth. It moans. The sound is made up of a hundred different tones of buzzing wings. I’d wonder why I didn’t hear it before, but honestly, I’m not surprised, because this is ridiculous.

“No.” I fold my arms across my chest and glare at the cloud of flies. The hands that were reaching for me stop. I’m confusing it. Good. “I didn’t come here to be menaced by an advertisement for hiring a local exterminator. I don’t know if you’re a monster or a ghost story or a commuter waiting for your train, but I’m not here to be your snack.”

I can’t imagine this thing—these things? I hate hive entities, they’re so confusing—was ever alive, unless it’s a collective afterlife for horseflies. It’s probably native to the starlight, something called out of the cosmic ether by the weight of the people who have, through their collective haunting, forced a world to make itself real.

It can be hard to tell the difference between something that used to be alive and something that never was. For the most part, ghosts don’t prey on ghosts unless it’s part of a pattern set in life. I’ve seen ghost cats stalking and pouncing on ghost pigeons. The pigeons look confused and fly away; the cats try to look like they meant to do that. But they don’t hurt each other.

This thing looks like it wants to hurt me. It’s still moaning, and its hands are reaching for me again. Charming.

At least now I know running was never going to work. It would have been on me in an instant. I’m not sure it could actually dismember me, but I bet it could eat the phantom flesh from my spectral bones and leave me to heal at whatever rate the starlight deemed fit. I don’t have time for that right now.

“All right, then; if you’re going to do it, go ahead,” I say. “I don’t have all day to stand here being menaced.”

It howls again and pulls back its hands to strike. I hope I’m timing this correctly. If I’m not, I’m going to have some serious regrets.

It lashes out. I hit the floor and throw myself to the side at the same time, rolling toward the edge of the platform. Its claws slice through the fabric of my gown. There’s a wet ripping sound and I’m free, still rolling.

This is fine, I think, and I’m over the edge of the platform, the moaning of the hive monster ringing in my ears. If I’m right, if I’ve put the clues together correctly, this is what will save me. If I’m wrong—if I’m pinning my hopes on a coincidence, or worse, on a trap—I’m about to put myself in a way worse position, which shouldn’t be possible, really, but I’m gifted. When it comes to finding trouble, I’m like a dog looking for a rotting squirrel corpse to roll in.

The platform drops away and I’m falling. Not the weightless, almost serene fall from the daylight into the starlight: the fast, brutal drop of gravity working on the idea of my body. Here in the starlight I’m as solid as any of the living, and like the living, it hurts when I slam into the metal bar of the track, hitting hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs and leave me briefly reeling.

Above me, the hive monster moans and howls and buzzes in thwarted fury. I manage to lift my head and look up. I see light, and the curved ceiling of the station. I don’t see any flies. Whether because it’s a monster or because the starlight puts safety precautions in place for residents that it doesn’t bother with for visitors, it can’t cross the line.

I push myself into a sitting position, the rail still digging into my hip. Things look a lot less modern down here. There are no convertors or electrical relays. Just the two metal rails leading into the darkness in either direction, and the wooden slats below them, creating a classic, ancient railway form. The station is new. The rail line is old.

There’s a gap below the platform, a space barely bigger than the coffin my body was buried in. I barely have time for that thought to form before a new sound drowns out the buzzing.

There’s a train coming.

“Oh, come on.”

The train doesn’t hear, or care about, my protests: the train keeps coming, the sound of its approach howling along the tracks like the humming of a great and terrible bell. I have three choices. I can stay here and hope that a train will be less painful than the monster I came down here to escape; I can try to climb back up and take my chances; I can hide.

When in doubt, always go for the option that involves the least amount of screaming. I dive for the gap under the platform, compressing myself against the wall as tightly as I can, hugging the stone and squeezing my eyes closed so tight, so tight, as if what I can’t see can’t hurt me. The roar of the train gets closer. I tense.

Its arrival is marked by a hot gust of air, as withering as the wind off some vast and unseen desert. That wind buffets my body, sending my torn dress fluttering, and I silently hope the silk doesn’t get itself caught under the wheels. The last thing I need right now is to be dragged off into the starlight by some damn train.

There’s a musical about this, I swear there is, and if the train starts singing, I’m going to scream.

The train rumbles to a stop. I hear the doors open above me. They’re so modern, those doors. So relatively friendly. The train below the surface is nothing like those doors. It smells like molten iron and musk, organic and not at the same time, like some great beast birthed from a master’s forge and looking for fuel. I shiver uncontrollably, all the skin on my body drawing tight.

It smells like Bobby Cross’ car. This is where they found it, the crossroads; this is the place they grabbed it from, pulling it into the twilight so they could offer it to him like the worst prize on the carnival midway. This train runs on souls, or something like them, and I’m down here with no way to escape without fleeing the starlight entirely. I’m trapped.

Please, I think. Please let whoever does civic management down here keep their trains well-fed. They must, right? It would be bad for business if their trains went around gulping down commuters all the time.

Although I’ve only seen Pippa and the hive-thing on the platform. Maybe the trains only respect bigger, better predators.

Sometimes I hate my afterlife.

The train doesn’t send out tendrils to wrap around me and yank me from my hiding place, and I’ve been here just long enough to be grateful, to view this as a small mercy rather than a manifestation of the natural order of things. Instead, its engine rumbles back to life and it pulls away, roaring down the tracks, leaving me to collapse in grateful exhaustion. No one ever tells you how tiring terror is. That’s the sort of thing you have to discover for yourself.

It’s the sort of thing I never really wanted to know. Weary all the way to my bones, I roll out into the open and push myself, first to my hands and knees, and finally to my feet. When I stand, the top of my head barely crests the edge of the platform. It was a deeper drop than I realized, which makes sense, considering the train is as much indescribable terror as modern machine. They need to leave it room to breathe.

The modern part of the train must be a shell, something perched atop its true body. The thought isn’t a pleasant one. I’m suddenly grateful to have been facing the wall while the train was in the station.

By bouncing onto my toes, I can just barely see over the edge of the platform. The hive-thing is still there.

So is Pippa.

She has the scythe in her hands, and her chin is ducked toward her chest, protecting the choker that keeps her head attached to her body. She prowls toward the composite creature with casual grace, like she’s getting ready to swat a bug. I guess technically she is.

“Be gone with you, beastie,” she says, words old-fashioned and utterly at odds with her club kid aesthetic. “You know better than to trouble your betters, and everyone who travels here is better than you.”

She swings the scythe in a casual, sweeping motion, the blade slicing through the middle of the hive. It bursts, like she’s managed to pierce some unseen membrane, and for a moment, the air is absolutely full of flies. They’re less terrifying when they’re not all clustered together and pretending to be something bigger than they are. They’re still more than terrifying enough. I draw back slightly, choosing the dubious safety of the tracks over the obvious danger of the whirling, pincer-filled air.

Then they’re gone, whirling up to the ceiling and vanishing through an ornate ventilation grate. There’s a moment of silence before Pippa drops the scythe, which dissolves into mist, and turns, slowly, to look at me.

Her eyes aren’t empty. Her eyes are gone. They’re hollow holes in her face, pits leading into a world of infinite despair and unforgiving cold, and the only thing that stops me from screaming is that I’ve seen this trick before. It’s pretty popular with a certain class of haunt. I stick my hand out.

“Help me up,” I say. “I can’t climb out on my own.”

Pippa blinks and her eyes are back, although her expression is no warmer. “So you’re saying I could make this all very simple for myself, and leave you down there,” she says. “Not forever. Just until one of the trains realizes you’ve got no patron and takes you for a tasty treat.”

I hold up my other hand, showing her my corsage. “I have a patron.”

“Not to the trains. They pledge themselves to Hel, and they don’t give a damn what our Lady of the Dead thinks of them, because Hel loves them so. She polishes their carapaces and tells them they’re beautiful, strokes their bellies until they belch up the skulls they’ve stolen, and then charges the dead for the time they spend recovering in her halls. You don’t want to mess about with the trains. What made you jump down onto their hunting trails?”

“That thing you chased away was getting frisky, and you’d asked me not to leave until you got back from whatever you had to do that was more important than carrying my question to Persephone.” I keep my hands outstretched. “The trains don’t care about her, but you do. So come on. Help me out.”

Pippa heaves a sigh as loud as a bellows. “I regret everything I do in your company, Rose Marshall,” she says, as she bends to help me back onto the platform.

“The feeling’s mutual, I swear,” I say, and then the tile is solid beneath my feet, and whatever else happens today, at least I know I won’t be eaten by a train.

Then Pippa looks at me, as solemn as she’s ever been.

“Come with me,” she says. “We need to talk.”

Maybe the train would have been better after all.