I’M SPRAWLED IN THE MIDDLE of a gas station parking lot, gravel and chunks of broken glass digging into my skin. They’d be cutting me if not for the fact that my dress is bunched beneath my waist and hips in a way that’s uncomfortable as hell, but probably saved me from something a lot worse. I try to sit up, pulling my hair in the process and grinding the gravel and glass even deeper into my flesh. It hurts like hell. I wish being dead meant an end to pain. That would be a nice trade-off, considering how many other things end when you die. Instead, it just means pain is . . . muted, sometimes. Not even always. Not right now.
“Hey! Lady!” A young man who looks a few years older than I do, but is probably several decades younger, rushes across the parking lot to help me up. “What are you doing? You could have been seriously hurt!”
“I don’t know.” My head aches, too. I must have hit it when I fell. But I don’t remember falling. I was just talking to the anima mundi, and then they made everything go away. It feels like a cosmic force of reality could have put me down a little bit more gently, or at least not damaged me in the process of whisking me out of their presence, but who am I to judge? Just an ordinary ghost girl, with no more authority over the anima mundi than the living have over the dead.
“I don’t know how I got here,” I say, trying to address the clear confusion of the gas station attendant. I pull away from him, standing on my own two feet, and brush some of the gravel off of my skirt. My fingers come away slick with oil, and I wrinkle my nose. My dress is filthy. I can’t change it while I’m in front of this living man, and so I’m going to have to be dirty for a little while. Dandy.
To make things even worse, when the anima mundi put me down, they don’t seem to have activated my usual instinctive connection to the ghostroads. I have no idea where I am, and there’s a whole world out there, full of options. “Where am I?”
He blinks, alarm and disbelief in his eyes, and says, “Um, Warsaw.”
“Poland?”
“No. Indiana.”
Maine to Indiana is a pretty big jump. Distance isn’t as rigid in the twilight as it is in the daylight—for all that both can seem pretty infinite when you’re just a girl with a thumb and a fondness for walking, I’m pretty sure the twilight is smaller, meaning a mile traveled there can be ten miles or more traveled in the daylight, and that’s before accounting for the way the land can sometimes bend or compress itself when it wants to be helpful. And all that being true, it’s still a pretty impressive transition. I don’t like it.
“Better Indiana than Poland, since I left my passport in my other pants,” I joke, somewhat weakly, and brush my hands against my dress again. It’s not doing anything to help.
Why would the anima mundi drop me here? Did they even mean to drop me here? They’ve been out of commission for centuries. They may not have clear control over how they interact with the daylight. I look at the man in front of me, trying to predict how he would react to the knowledge that one of the old gods—because there’s nothing else to call the anima mundi that actually makes sense—has returned from an unplanned and involuntary absence.
Probably not well. The human world doesn’t like reminders that we’re not the head of the food chain. I’ve met people who called on Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior one moment, and then denied ghosts could possibly be real in the next. It’s like they’ve decided the world only has room for one deviation from their predetermined “norm,” and anything else is a step too far. The anima mundi would blow this kid’s mind.
I stop brushing at my dress and push my hair back instead, not bothering to check how clean my hands are. My hair is like my dress in that it doesn’t really hold onto dirt and grime from the living world. It’ll all disappear when I do. I’m not sure how the physics of it all can possibly work. When I eat, that disappears, too. There may be a pocket dimension somewhere filled with nothing but gravel, cheeseburgers, milkshakes, coffee, and pie. It’s Rose Marshall Land, and it has no inhabitants. Not even me.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” I say.
“I just don’t know how you got here. Did someone push you out of their car? Are you hurt? Should I be calling the authorities?”
For a moment—only a moment—I want to tell him to call the New Gravesend police department and ask to speak with Officer Smith. I don’t know how long it’s been since our little encounter, but I bet he’d be impressed that I’ve managed to hitchhike this far, even if I haven’t done it unrealistically fast. The moment passes. I shake my head.
“It was an accident,” I say. “My boyfriend and I are on our way to a costume party.”
“How do you know about a party when you don’t even know what state you’re in?” asks the boy. Then, a beat later: “That’s why you’re wearing a vintage-y dress, right? Because you’re in costume?”
“I’m the Phantom Prom Date,” I say, spreading my arms like I want to be admired. It’s a little weird to tell the truth like it’s a lie, but this isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last. The boy smiles at me like I’m not some weirdo he just pulled off the ground in his parking lot, like I’m a real person who actually matters to him for some reason. People like connections. They like commonalities. They like knowing that you’ve heard the same stories.
“I always loved that one,” he says. “Some of the kids at my school say she’s from around here.”
“Oh, yeah?” Almost every state except for, I guess, Alaska and Hawaii has tried to claim I was a student in one of their schools, that my body is buried in one of their graveyards. The price of fame, I suppose. It doesn’t bother me. I’m not one of those urban legends who inspires teenagers to hurt themselves—even the most malicious versions of my story make sure to point out that I didn’t start hitchhiking until after I was already dead—and it’s not like belief is going to shift my bones. They’ll keep resting easy in Buckley until and unless someone heads out there with a shovel and dredges them up.
“Yeah.” He’s warming up now. Intentionally or not, I’ve found something the two of us can talk about. “There’s this big hill that looks over the high school, and there used to be a trailer park on the other side, until it burned down back in the nineties. She lived there. She was driving over the hill when someone hit her from behind, and she took her big fall. They found her body in the weeds behind the bleachers. Her boyfriend was already in jail by that point.” He sounds almost sorry about that. Aw, that’s nice. Gary doesn’t get to appear in the story very often these days, and when he does, he’s almost always a villain.
“Do you know what her name was? Or where she’s buried?”
The boy shakes his head, cheeks briefly flaring red. “No. I wish I did. But I guess her parents got pissed when people told the story with her name in it, and they managed to stamp it out, since this all happened before the Internet.”
The rise of the Internet changed things for urban legends. They don’t arise in the same way. I recently had a dead kid try, very earnestly, to explain something he called “creepypasta” to me. “Creepypasta” seems to be basically what happens when the Internet attempts to recreate the heady, impossible-to-prove lies our friends used to tell us, always about a friend’s cousin’s sister. Forget that the sister would also have been the friend’s cousin. Somehow, she didn’t count, usually because she was dead, or had been infested with spiders, or was taking a little time away at a nice hospital for girls who’d seen unspeakable things and understandably didn’t really want to speak about them. We’d been able to spread our stories far and wide and with absolute conviction, leaving cries of “citation” and “fake news” for the future.
Well, the future’s here now, and while new ghosts still happen, their hauntings never seem to catch on the way ours did, largely, I think, because their legends never make it past the first stages of whisper and lie before they’re summarily shut down. Stories like mine are more believable, because all the participants lived and died before there was the Internet to fact-check everything. It’s weird. As someone for whom the last few decades have been basically the blinking of an eye, it’s like the invention of the toaster changed everything about the way the world worked, and not just the way people eat breakfast.
It must have been like this for ghosts who died in the early automotive age. A ghost like me would have been new-fangled and extraneous, upsetting systems that worked just fine, thank you, without adding combustion engines and spark plugs to the dance of life and death. Time always marches on, for the dead as much as for the living.
“Huh,” I say. Fun as it might be to track down my local doppelganger, who is probably a real hitchhiking ghost or homecomer whose story has somehow been conflated with my own, that’s not why I’m here. I have other things to worry about. “Have you seen my boyfriend? He’s driving a classic car, real sweet . . .” I don’t give make or model. Bobby’s car doesn’t appear in anyone’s blue book. She’s unique, or at least I hope she is, because the last thing we need is a whole fleet of soul-sucking demon cars.
“Young guy? Really fancy hairdo?”
Bobby defaults to his era-appropriate duck’s ass hairstyle when he’s not trying to convince the living that he’s one of them. I nod agreement, beaming. “He’s the other half of my costume.”
I’m gambling on the idea that I was dumped here because it’s close to Bobby, but at least I seem to be on the right track. I smile brightly at the attendant. “Did you see which way he was going?”
He did, and he’s approaching the end of his shift; if I’m willing to wait a few minutes, he can give me a ride. That’s an offer I can’t possibly turn down, especially not right now, with my skin tight and my nerves jangling and my feet aching with the need to press against the floorboard of a stranger’s car. I need a ride more than I have ever needed anything, more than an addict needs a needle, and if I can have one without the strain of looking for it, all the better. I take a seat around the side of the station while he goes back inside. The light here is dim. No one’s going to notice if I flicker a little on the security camera feed. I allow myself to dip just below the surface of the twilight and restore my green silk gown to showroom perfection. No need to run around dirty and covered in grease when I don’t have to.
I’m waiting patiently for my ride to come back out when the air grows cold and ashen around me, my mouth filling with the taste of wormwood and decay. Bobby Cross is nearby, and if he’s close enough for me to feel his approach, he’s close enough that he can probably feel me, too. I run my fingertips over the petals of my corsage, trying to hold onto the fact that Persephone’s blessing is greater than he is. I’m protected, I’m protected, I’m out here alone and with no means of making a quick escape unless I drop back into the twilight before he can catch hold of me, but I’m protected. He can’t touch me unless I let him.
He can’t touch me, and he’s still hunting. He doesn’t have a choice in the matter. The crossroads are gone, and his car is a punishment as much as a blessing. He has to keep feeding souls into its gas tank if he wants his hard-won youth to endure, and while I don’t know what happens if the tank runs dry—does he age to dust instantly? Does the bargain break, leaving him mortal, unprotected, and alone, back in a world he opted out of nearly seventy years ago? Or does the enchantment that allows his car to play ghost trap turn against him, and pull Bobby into the tank to be devoured? There are so many options, and none of them are great for Bobby, and none of them are all that great for the rest of the world, either. So he’s hunting. If I run away, someone else is going to be in his crosshairs.
Someone else is going to die.
I don’t have anyone in Warsaw, Indiana, but his next victim being a stranger doesn’t make me feel any better about the situation. I don’t believe the living are innately more important than the dead. I stopped believing that a long time ago. But I do believe that being driven down by a serial killer behind the wheel of a demon car is traumatic no matter when it happens, and if it ends in an untimely death, well, that’s a good way to make a ghost who’ll never be able to be okay with being dead. Not cool. Bobby Cross is a one-man PR disaster for the afterlife. If I can stop him, it’s my duty to do so.
I don’t like thinking of myself as someone who has a duty. I also don’t like the way the taste of wormwood is washing away the rest of the world, making it harder and harder to focus on anything else, even the nagging need to catch a ride. Given a choice between revenge and my ghostly duty, it’s like the twilight is trying to tell me that in this specific case, revenge matters more.
“I better not fade because of this,” I mutter, and stand, walking toward the parking lot. My skirt swishes around my ankles, soft, familiar, and reassuring. The rest of the world may be complicated and strange, but I still have my green silk gown. I still have the dress I died in.
A pair of headlights appears at the end of the short gravel road leading from the highway to the gas station. I look impassively at them, too aware of who’s probably behind the wheel. They’re big, round, and bright as the moon, and all of those things become more pronounced as they approach the place where I’m standing. I hope it really is Bobby, or the fact that I’m slightly transparent when the light hits me is probably going to give some poor local kid nightmares for the rest of their life.
The engine snarls as the car approaches, and it’s not a mechanical sound. It’s the growl of a chained, starving dog, so vital, so organic, that I know in an instant that I’m standing in the right place. The car slows to a creep, the driver’s-side window rolling down as Bobby leans casually against the door, one elbow protruding jauntily into the night.
“Rosie-my-girl,” he purrs, voice low and slick and sweet as liquid sex. There’s a reason they used to pay him the big bucks for some pretty substandard movies. That man could coax an erection out of an actual skeleton. He would have been one of the all-time greats if he’d just been willing to submit to the inevitable progress of time. He would have won every award in Hollywood and probably had a few more created in his name.
Boy has talent, is what I’m trying to say here. Boy has talent, and he threw that away for the sake of a crossroads promise that came with so many catches it was basically a poaching expedition.
“Bobby,” I reply coldly. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Now, is that any way to say hello to an old friend? Besides, I’m the one who drove here the honest way. You just popped in, same way you always do. No sense of propriety among the dead.”
“I’m so sorry I didn’t feel the need to be strictly linear for your sake,” I say, with a thin smile. “To be fair, though, I didn’t know you were going to be here. You move around so much, Bobby, it’s like you’re running from something. But, of course, you are running. You’re running from the people who might look at you and frown and say ‘doesn’t he look like’? From the great-grandmothers who remember your voice and the way it made their panties wet, back when they were young and plump and full of juices. They’re your demographic, Bobby-boy. They’re the ones who remember how to love you. Not the girls like me. We’re too young for you.”
I grew up watching him in the theaters. But he made his deal at the crossroads just as I was entering high school, and I never fell in love with him the way my mother did. I never had the opportunity.
Artists don’t owe the world their work. I know that. I still can’t help feeling like he stole something from the world when he chose to trade all the movies he had yet to make for the open road and a soul-sucking demon bride beside him. And from the look in his eyes right now, I’m not the only one who feels that way.
“I would just confuse them,” he says, sounding almost ashamed of himself.
I shrug. “Doesn’t change the part where you’re running away. Diamond Bobby, King of the Silver Screen, running away from a bunch of little old ladies who would probably be happy to have their hearts give out while you nail them up against some Vegas casino wall. Hey, what matters is that you kill people, right? Not exactly how they die? Because with the current age of your core demographic, I think you could make murder a real treat for some octogenarians. At least they’d get your jokes before they expired.”
He snarls at me, visibly snarls, but he stays in the car. I haven’t managed to really upset him yet.
“Why would I want a bunch of tired old great-grandmotherly types when I could have you, Rosie-my-love? You’re the one I’ve been chasing all these years. You’re the one who really understands me. We could be beautiful together.”
“Yeah, until you stuffed me into your gas tank, because my existence matters less to you than never needing to cover up the gray in your hair.”
He stops snarling, lips drawing tight across his screen-perfect teeth as he reaches up, seemingly unconsciously, and touches his left temple. It’s like he thinks he can feel the color of his hair. And maybe he can. I don’t know what gifts the crossroads gave him when they gave him his damned demonic car. The ability to feel every supposed imperfection in his physical form would be right in line with the kind of monkey’s paw they seem to have considered a good and sensible gift.
Really, I’m not sorry they’re dead. I’m just sorry that I never realized they could be killed. I’m sorry I wasn’t the one to kill them.
Bobby lowers his hand. “Get in the car, Rose,” he says, false flirtation gone. “We already talked about this. It’s you or everyone you think you love, and we both know the dead don’t love, not really. Be the good guy you pretend to be. Get in the goddamn car.”
“I don’t think I will.” I take a step backward, into the dirt and rocks alongside the driveway. “That car of yours wasn’t designed to off-road it much, was it? I think I’m a little more all-terrain, even in this dress. So no, I’m not going to deliver myself into your hands.” He’s just a menacing little man trapped inside a demon car. I don’t have to be afraid of him if I don’t want to. He can’t hurt me from here.
Bobby smiles, poisonous and slow, and I think of Laura, I think of a young routewitch with a slashed throat, and I remember that he’s only as trapped as he wants to be. It’s a mistake to discount how dangerous he can be, even for a second. He’s been doing this as long as I have—a few years longer, even—and he knows how to play the game with excellent precision.
“If you’re not planning to deliver yourself to me, I guess I can keep chasing you down,” he says. “I do love a challenge, and it would be so disappointing if you decided to stop being one now. If either of us is getting cocky, I think it’s you, my Rosie. Never taunt a dog unless you’re sure how long its chain is.”
I hold up my arm, showing him the corsage on my wrist. “I’m a little more protected than I used to be, you fucker.”
“You really think you can count on Persephone to save you from me? I’ve convinced her to turn her back on you once already.”
“Yes, but that was before we had the chance to talk.” Before I’d performed my katabasis and walked bodily into the underworld to meet her face-to-face. Before she’d decided I belonged to her and placed her claim upon me. I’m not always thrilled to belong to a goddess—I liked being a free agent—but this is Bobby’s fault, too. Everything is Bobby’s fault, or close enough to everything as to make no perceptible difference. “She’s not going to desert me again.”
Those are some pretty big words, but I believe them. Persephone keeps her word. If there’s one thing everyone I’ve ever met has agreed upon, it’s that. The Lady of the Dead doesn’t lie to us. She’s not always merciful, and she’s certainly not always kind, but she doesn’t lie to us, and when she says we’ll be protected, she means it. When she gave me her blessing, it was forever. I have a goddess on my side. Bobby has his cruelty, his cunning, and whatever gifts the crossroads left him before they died.
Would they have planned for this moment? I doubt it. Assuming they were as arrogant as the anima mundi, they probably never anticipated the possibility of their own destruction. They thought they were eternal, forgetting that nothing, not god, ghost, or mortal is eternal. The universe remakes itself whenever the whim strikes, and the rest of us are just passengers, along for the ride whether we like it or not.
“I’ve discussed you with greater powers than the one you used to serve, Robert Cross,” I say, in the coldest tone I can muster, and watch as he stiffens, as he stills. He doesn’t look surprised. All right: he already knew, or at least guessed, that the Lady of the Dead didn’t care for him. He just hoped I wasn’t going to check with her before giving myself over to him. More fool him.
“The crossroads are dead, and they can’t protect you anymore.” I stay where I am, off the road. If he wants me, he’ll have to come and get me. “Persephone knows what you’ve done in their name, and she will not forgive you for your transgressions. The Ocean Lady hates you for the damage you’ve done to her charges. You have no friends remaining, either here or in the twilight, and it’s all due to your own decisions, the choices you made of your own free will. You have threatened the people who belong to me, and by doing that, you’ve forced my hand. I’m going to stop you, and this time, the crossroads won’t be there to save you from the consequences of your own actions. What do you think about that?”
“I think you’ll have to catch me first, Rosie-my-love,” he says, and blows me a kiss before he slams his foot down on the gas and goes shooting away, racing toward the gas station with no consideration for what might be in his way. I run after him, releasing my grasp on the daylight just enough to lower the density of my material form. My feet pass through rocks and brambles in my path, skimming below the surface of the earth, and I have never run this fast in my life, and I don’t run fast enough. He reaches the station before I do. I hear the screech of brakes as he slows to avoid plowing into the pumps. There is no following thump, no sound of a human body bouncing off his bumper. I slow down, pulling myself fully back into the daylight, where the illusion of solidity waits for me. My foot hits the ground, finishing a step I had started while only half-solid, and a rock rolls under my heel, sending me stumbling to keep my balance. I let the momentum take me. I can’t play too many games with physics, especially not right now, when I’m shaky from going too long without a proper ride.
Bobby is gone.
The gas station lights are on, and my helpful savior from before is standing in front of the pumps, scratching his head as he looks in the direction Bobby must have driven, which is a dead end, marked off with a large dumpster and a small prefab equipment shed, the kind of place where mops and cleaning supplies go to die, one way or another. There’s no way a car got through there, especially not a car as big as Bobby’s, which was built to a gaudier scale than today’s sleek, modern cars. I approach slowly, my hands open by my sides. I don’t want to startle the poor kid. He’s already having one hell of a night.
“I thought I saw my boyfriend’s car, so I went down the driveway to see if it was him,” I say. “It wasn’t.”
“That guy just came racing through here like his tailpipe was on fire,” says the boy, scratching his head again. “I don’t know how he made it out the back without crashing.”
“People do weird shit sometimes,” I say, and don’t offer any more explanation than that. There aren’t any rules about telling the living about the twilight, but it’s not like there’s much I could do to prove it, and it wouldn’t make him feel any better about the situation. Honestly, it would probably make him feel worse. About essentially everything. Better for me to stand here looking innocent and like someone he can save. He seems to need someone to save.
A lot of people need someone to save. And sometimes, we wind up needing to save ourselves.
He shakes his head, apparently dismissing the mystery of the disappearing car, and finally turns to fully face me. “I went to get you and you weren’t there,” he says.
“I’d gone down the driveway, like I said.”
“What happened to your dress?”
It takes me a moment to realize he’s asking how I’m clean again, when I was filthy the last time he saw me. I force a smile, flicking my skirt in his direction. “Stain-resistant fabric spray,” I say. “Like greasing a pan. All the gross stuff just comes right off when I shake myself. Pretty cool, huh?”
“Yeah,” he says, sounding baffled. “Pretty cool. Anyway, do you still need that ride?”
“Yes, please.” Please, please, please. Every nerve I have is screaming fire with the need to be in someone’s passenger seat, letting someone else sit behind the wheel and get me where I want to go. It doesn’t matter who’s driving, as long as it isn’t me, and this kid seems harmless enough. He shouldn’t get in the habit of picking up hitchhikers, but I’m not going to be the one who tells him that. It’s not my job.
“Let’s go.” He produces a set of keys from his jacket pocket—his jacket, which looks like it’s going to fit me perfectly, ancient denim with grease ground into the cuffs, the sort of thing that was probably handed down to him from an older relative, or found at the back of a thrift store, on the clearance rack where it had lived for twenty years. When he starts across the parking lot, I follow, letting him lead me to a black Toyota no more than a decade old, probably already an antique in his eyes—and this is a functional, practical car that’s never going to age into a classic, no matter how much it might deserve to—but modern and beautiful in mine. He unlocks the doors. He opens mine for me. I couldn’t ask for a more perfect driver on a night like this.
“Your chariot awaits,” he says, cheesy line that’s so much older than he is, and oh, this kid, and oh, this night, and oh, the crossroads are dead and Bobby Cross is running out of options, and this is a good ride, yes, this is an excellent ride for a girl like me. I slide into the car and adjust my skirt so that it won’t get caught in the door when he slams it shut for me.
I wait until he’s getting in on the driver’s side before offering him a vibrant smile. “My mother always told me not to accept rides from strangers, so hi. My name’s Rose. What’s yours?”
“Timothy,” he says. “We’re not strangers now?”
“I guess we’re still a little strange, but no,” I say. “You can’t be strangers after you’ve been introduced. This is good enough to satisfy my mother, and she isn’t here anyway.” My mother never actually said anything about me getting into cars with strange men. She always assumed I had too much sense for that, and in a way, she was right. I didn’t accept a ride from someone I didn’t know until I was dead and they were the only way to scratch the itch that sometimes seems to consume my entire body. It’s not fair that I should be in the ground and still have to contend with the needs of the flesh, but there you go. The world isn’t fair.
Timothy reaches for his seat belt. I raise my hand.
“Wait,” I say, and he stops, the perfect gentleman. He’s giving a ride to someone dressed as one of the most famous hitchhiking ghosts of the modern world—he’s giving a ride to one of the most famous hitchhiking ghosts of the modern world, full stop—and he’s still minding his manners. I like this one.
“I’m cold,” I say.
“You want my coat?” he asks, already shrugging out of it, an almost lopsided smile on his face. “I guess it goes with the outfit,” he says. “I should have offered as soon as you sat down.”
“I’m not that much of a method actress,” I say. “I really am cold.” And that’s true because the dead are always cold. I sometimes think hitchers like me feel it more intensely than most other spirits, because I can be shivering so hard my bones rattle while they go happily about their hauntings, not seeming aware of the icy wind that wraps around my rib cage. It makes sense that I’d feel the cold more intensely since I’m one of the rare dead who gets a way to escape from it. Borrow a coat to borrow a body, borrow a body to be subject to the weather exactly like one of the living, nothing less and nothing more.
Timothy offers his coat across the cab. It’s still warm from his body, and there’s a simple intimacy in the action that makes me feel like I’m betraying Gary, like I should find a way to suppress this part of myself until the glitches in our relationship are hammered out more clearly. It’s a silly thought. I’m not cheating on my boyfriend by doing the things the twilight designed me to do. But I’ve been spending a lot of time around the living and the recently dead lately, and it’s hard not to fall back into some old ways of thinking.
I take the coat with a grateful smile and shrug it on, feeling more weight than just the fabric settle over me. Until I take it off or the sun comes up—whichever happens first—I am functionally alive. My stomach rumbles, reminding me that there are solutions to my endless, aching hunger. I press a hand against it, ducking my head in what I hope will look like embarrassment. I don’t have any money, and I wouldn’t bet on this gas station paying Timothy any more than minimum wage. He should be saving his money, not—
“When’s the last time you ate something?”
Well, if he wants to offer, there’s only so much I can do about it. I offer him a winning, winsome smile, and say, “It’s been a while.”
“There’s a really nice diner down on the main drag. ‘Nice’ meaning ‘the food is excellent,’ and not ‘it costs too much.’ My cousin works there, and he gives me a family discount on whatever I want to order. You want to grab a grilled cheese before we find your boyfriend?”
Now he’s speaking my language. The only thing that would make this better is the word “malt.” I buckle my belt, and say, “I have never in my life turned down hot, melted cheese when I had any choice in the matter. Lead on.”
“I think I have to lead, since I’m driving,” he says, and slides the key into the ignition. The car grumbles to life around us, and I get my first sense of her.
She’s had multiple owners, enough so that she no longer particularly cares about the humans who settle behind her wheel. She’ll do her best to keep Timothy alive, because it’s her job, but not because she gives a damn about him specifically. That’s all right. Not every vehicle has to be like Jolene was for Carl. True love is rare, and we don’t find it every time we turn ourselves toward the open road.
Have I ever actually known true love? I think yes, once, with a version of Gary. The Gary who existed when we had been on the same road for most of our lives, moving together toward the same distant, inevitable destination. But I’d gotten off that road too soon, and he’d missed every turn that would have kept him closer to me, moving steadily further and further into the misty hills of the future, where I would never be allowed to go. I’m not saying my high school boyfriend should have died as early as I did. I’m just saying that if he was going to live long enough to die of old age, maybe he should have figured out how to get over me.
Timothy is a careful but confident driver. He’ll be great if he gets to keep doing this long enough. He pulls out of the gas station and rolls slowly down the driveway to the road, where he speeds up and merges with the passing traffic, eyes on the road the whole time. “We’re about five minutes away from food,” he says.
“Cool,” I reply agreeably. “I like food.”
My stomach grumbles again, and Timothy laughs.
It would be nice if the afterlife were always like this: a warm coat, a warm car, and a friendly driver to see me to my next destination. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from being dead, it’s that all things are transitory, and that warm car can become a burnt-out husk in the time it takes to blink an eye. Timothy rolls around a corner, and the taste of wormwood is suddenly back, accompanied by the sound of sirens. None of my early warning systems are sound based; this is a real thing. Timothy tenses. He can hear it, too. Lights flash up ahead of us, on the other side of a stopped line of cars.
“Someone must have had an accident,” he says.
The taste of lilies overlays the wormwood, and I know he’s right. Someone had an accident, courtesy of Bobby Cross, and my own personal devil now has a full tank of soul that he can use to reach his next destination. Someone else is dead because I didn’t have the tools to stop him. I could have—
Could have what? Thrown myself through his open window and given him the fuel up he really wanted, instead of the one he was in the position to take? This is on him, not me. I may have Persephone’s blessing, but it didn’t come with claws or teeth or other forms of weaponry. I don’t know how to fight him yet, whether or not I have permission to try. Whatever Bobby did—and we all know what Bobby did, because he did what Bobby always, always does—it’s entirely on his shoulders, and not even remotely on mine. I am not responsible for any of the people he’s killed over the years.
Not even myself.
Timothy glances over at me, expression sympathetic. “I’m sorry,” he says. “This sort of thing never happens around here.”
“It’s all right,” I say numbly. It’s not all right! I scream inwardly, because it’s not, it’s not all right. Someone just died before their time, someone whose only crime was being in the wrong place when Bobby Cross went hunting, someone who should have been allowed to have what Gary had, to grow old and die peacefully in their bed at some assisted living facility somewhere, far from the reach of evil assholes and their demon cars. Bobby is a thief. He steals lives and he steals time and he steals souls. But there is no justice in the twilight. There are only gods, and monsters, and people like me, who do our best to make things fair, when we can. Whether we want to or not.
The traffic rolls slowly past the site of the accident. It’s a little red sedan, a starter car if I’ve ever seen one, the front completely smashed, as if it managed to lose an argument with a brick wall. There’s no brick wall in sight, which means Bobby Cross drove away with it. The driver is already gone, whisked away by emergency services. The lack of a body briefly makes me hope they might have survived. Then I see the EMTs. They’re standing around, looking dispirited, not cramming themselves into the back of the ambulance and blasting off down the street. They’re not doing their jobs because when they arrived on the scene, they had no jobs left to do. They’re deliverymen today, not superheroes, and this is a small enough town that they probably knew whoever they just lost.
Not just them. Timothy has gone pale. His hands are steady on the wheel, but his eyes aren’t on the road anymore. “That’s Christina’s car,” he says, in the wounded, wondering tone of a confused child. “She works at the 7-Eleven just up the street. We went to high school together. She’s going to be so mad. She loves that car.”
If she loved it enough, maybe it’ll still be with her when she wakes up in the twilight, or maybe she’ll never wake up at all, having already been grabbed and stuffed into the tank of Bobby’s terrible car. I put a comforting hand on Timothy’s arm, noting how warm his skin is, like panic is lighting a fire under his ribs. He keeps driving, until the snarl of people slowing down to see the accident for themselves has passed, and he’s able to return to his original speed.
“Right,” he mutters to himself. “Diner.”
“If you’re not hungry, we don’t have to—”
“No.” He cuts me off without hesitation, and it’s clear from the look on his face that he doesn’t fully realize he’s done it. I would normally say something about manners, but he just saw strong evidence that a friend of his is dead. He’s allowed to be a little rude if that helps him get through the shock.
Grief is a monster. As much of a monster as Bobby Cross, if not more. Bobby kills a dozen people every year, touches the lives of hundreds more, changing them for the worse. But grief touches millions. Grief touches everyone at some point or other, and unlike Bobby, grief can’t be stopped, or reasoned with, or asked to change its ways. Grief just keeps on going, and grief is clearly a dead thing, because grief is always and eternally hungry.
“No,” he says again. “I said I would take you for something to eat, and I keep my promises.”
“It’s really okay if you don’t want to.” I mean it, too. The ride has done wonders for my focus, and for my nerves, which are no longer jangling like windchimes in a hurricane. I’m a hitchhiking ghost. Sometimes I just need a ride to remind me how I’m supposed to function.
“Too late,” he says, with sudden, forced cheer, as he pulls up in front of a small strip mall. This doesn’t look like the sort of place where you’ll find a diner, at least not a diner as I’ve always understood them, but there’s a little white storefront with a neon sign in the window that flashes DAISY’S EATS in blazing red, with a smaller sign blinking “he loves me—he loves me not” underneath it in equally vivid green. The small dining room I can see through the window is about half-full, which is a good sign for a city this size on a weekday night.
Timothy turns off the engine and gets out of the car, walking around behind it to open my door for me. A gentleman, then; that’s reasonably rare in this day and age.
“After you,” he says.
I unfasten my seat belt and get out of the car, tugging my borrowed jacket a little tighter around myself as I do. “This the place?” I ask.
“It is,” he says. “It’s been here for more than fifty years.”
I’m not sure I believe that. Strip mall diners may be a thing now, but fifty years ago, the concept of the diner was still healthy enough to have freestanding buildings all over the United States. I enjoy a value meal hamburger as much as the next girl, but I may never forgive the fast-food industry for undercutting the diners the way it did.
There are a lot of gods and idols in the twilight, rising and falling as slowly as the ebb and flow of human commitment. Sometimes I wonder whether we could have had a god or goddess of diners if the rise of the drive-through had just taken a few more years. The existence of places like the Last Dance shows that the diners have made their mark on the collective human consciousness; they’re not going away, even if they’re not as important as they were at one time. Could we have had a goddess of malted milkshakes and egg creams doling out her soda fountain treats for the rest of eternity? How could we deny ourselves that kind of grace?
Timothy reaches the door to Daisy’s before I do, pulling it open with a jingle of tiny bells. I step through in front of him, admiring the delicate silver lace painted around the doorframe. Someone spent a lot of hours getting that exactly right. I love the things the living will decide to spend their limited time on. Cross stitch may be the most human concept ever invented.
The door swings closed behind me. The air seems to thin, filling with a tight, crystalline static that fizzes and buzzes against my skin like the bubbles in a glass of soda water. “Aunt Daisy, we have a guest,” calls Timothy, across the crowded diner. None of the patrons look at him, absorbed as they are in their meals and desserts. One woman is working on a sundae that looks like it has greater volume than her entire head. I respect someone who’s willing to skip over “brain freeze” and straight to “just replace your brain with ice cream.”
A woman who looks a little like Timothy with twenty years on him emerges from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a white dish cloth and smiling. The smile freezes when she sees me, becoming somehow shallow. “Oh,” she says. “I see. Well, show her to a table, boy. I know I taught you manners.”
“You said your cousin worked here, you didn’t say your aunt owned the place,” I say. The fizzy, effervescent quality of the air hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s getting stronger, smothering me in bubbles. “That seems like a big omission.”
“I get to omit as much as you do, and you’ve also made some pretty big omissions,” says Timothy, leading me across the floor to an open table. He pulls a chair out for me. He’s been a gentleman this whole time, which doesn’t help with the pit that’s starting to open in my stomach. Something is wrong here.
“You’re still planning to feed me, right?” I ask, as I sit. A girl has got to have priorities, and if this is some sort of trick, this might be the last meal I get for a while.
“I am,” he says. “This is easier if I don’t lie to you.” He sits across from me. His eyes are a remarkably clear, pale brown. It’s like he can see right through me, even though I know for a fact that I’m not currently transparent.
His smile is thin as a razor blade as he passes me a menu. “I recommend the scrambles. Aunt Daisy gets all her eggs from local farmers, and you’ve never tasted anything like them.”
He’s wrong, of course, but I don’t think that counts as lying to me, since there’s no way he knows what was on the menu back in Buckley, where the general store got their eggs from local farmers and sometimes you found blood clots in your omelets. It’s been long enough since I’ve had really fresh eggs that I’m still glad to have the information, and when his Aunt Daisy swings by to take our orders, I request the country scramble, a cup of coffee, and a vanilla malt. Good, honest diner food, the sort of thing that hasn’t really changed since I was alive. There are recipes that were close enough to perfection the first time and haven’t undergone any lasting changes. And that’s a good thing. Innovation is fine, but I don’t understand why everything needs to be new and improved all the time. Putting pineapple and bean sprouts and tofu slices on a cheeseburger doesn’t make it better, it just makes it weird. And don’t even get me started on what some of the people I know think it’s a good idea to put on pizza these days.
“So, Rose,” says Timothy, pulling my attention back to him. “Were you planning to tell me that you were dead, or were you just going to haunt me enough to check off whatever to-do list dropped you in my parking lot and then go back to the afterlife?”
I stare at him, open-mouthed and silent.
“Come on. It’s not like you were subtle. ‘Stain-resistant fabric’? Please. If I wasn’t pretty sure that you’re the real Phantom Prom Date, I’d think you’d been dead for less than a year.”
This is where I should laugh in his face, get up, and storm out. I do none of those things. Instead, I twist my napkin between my fingers, pulling it tight, and say, in a small, wounded voice, “I don’t understand why you’re saying these things. I’m right here. Shouldn’t that be enough to prove to you that I’m real?”
“You can be dead and still real, and I notice how you’re dodging the question,” he says. “Is ‘Rose’ your real name? It’s pretty, and old-fashioned enough to match up with the cut of that dress. Your whole era is cohesive. You might want to think about updating the shoes if that’s something you can control. And don’t even think about whisking yourself out of here. Those runes on the door? They’re a modified Mesmer cage. As long as you’re inside their lines, you’re trapped in physical form. None of your little poltergeist tricks will work in here.”
“I’m not a poltergeist,” I say sourly. If he has a Mesmer cage on the place, then he’s not blowing smoke; he knows ghosts are real, and at least part of our interaction has been him trying to lure me here. “Poltergeists are generally jerks. I guess being able to play hurricane whenever you want to chips away at your manners. Would I have been sprawled in the dirt if I were a poltergeist?”
“Depends on how committed you were to selling the bit,” says Timothy, and smiles at the waiter who brings us our drinks. Water and coffee for both of us and a Shirley Temple for him. I guess some people must enjoy the taste of grenadine or they’d stop making the stuff.
“It’s not a bit,” I protest.
“Please,” he says, with a snort. “You appeared out of nowhere and hit the ground. That’s a bit. What were you trying to sell? Was I the target?”
The anima mundi hadn’t given me time to catch myself before I was landing in my next destination. I wonder whether they knew they’d be putting me in a bad position. I decide not to dwell on it. I’m here now, and I don’t want to make an enemy of the soul of the living earth. That seems like a poor decision. “I manifested too quickly, and I lost my balance,” I say. “It was an amateur mistake. I didn’t mean to do it. I’m not selling anything, and I didn’t have a target.”
“What about the ‘boyfriend’ you say you’re trying to catch up with?” he presses. “I know he’s real. He drove his car right through a solid brick wall. One ghost is one ghost too many for me. I don’t need you bringing all your phantom friends around.”
“The man you saw isn’t my boyfriend, and he isn’t dead,” I say. “That was Bobby Cross, the old movie star. He’s the one who killed me. He’s probably the one who killed your friend. I’m trying to catch up with him so I can stop him before he kills anybody else.”
Timothy’s eyes narrow. “Is he here because of you?” he demands. “Don’t lie to me again. If you’re the reason Christina died . . .”
“You’ve got the order wrong. I’m here because of him,” I say firmly. The anima mundi dropped me where Bobby was so I could start hunting, and my relief when that didn’t mean landing on top of someone I cared about feels suddenly misplaced. “Not the other way around.”
Timothy studies my face for a long beat before he sags in his seat. “I believe you,” he says. “I don’t want to. Two ghosts in one night is too many. One ghost in a night is generally too many. Christina was my friend. I don’t want her to be dead. I don’t want you to be innocent.”
“I’m not innocent,” I say. “I don’t think anyone is innocent. Not once they’re old enough to use the bathroom without help. But I swear, on the Ocean Lady, that I am not the reason Bobby Cross came to your town, and if I were, I wouldn’t be sitting with you inside a Mesmer cage. I’d be doing everything within my power to get away and stop him from hurting anyone else.”
I should be doing that anyway. Bobby’s probably already on his way out of town with a tank full of Christina. That’s the only thing I’ll give him: he doesn’t usually kill for fun. He has the morals of a rattlesnake, but he only kills people when he stands to gain something from doing it. With a full tank, he can’t benefit from more murder. He’ll need to go at least a hundred miles before anyone else is in danger from him tonight.
“Was that really Bobby Cross?” asks Timothy.
I nod.
“Christina would probably appreciate the fact that someone famous killed her. She always said she was better than this middle-of-nowhere town. She blamed her parents for not getting her into tap or gymnastics or something else when she was little, so she’d have a skill she could monetize on YouTube.” Timothy looks at my expression and actually laughs. It’s a short, bitter sound. “Guess you didn’t have YouTube when you were alive.”
“No, and I don’t know what it is now, or how you’d monetize dancing, or really, what the hell you mean by monetize. Is that a real word?”
“It’s a real word,” says Timothy earnestly. “It means to make money for something that seems difficult to make money for. Like drawing, or dancing, or . . .”
“Or talking to ghosts,” I conclude, drawing my answer from the vaguely guilty expression on his face. “Are you a ghost hunter, Timothy?”
“Not really,” he says. “I’d have to be willing to travel, since we don’t have any permanent hauntings here in Warsaw. We never have. Or not that I’ve ever heard of, anyway. But I can see ghosts even when they’re less . . . obvious than you. And I know ghosts when they are as obvious as you. You’re a hitcher, right? That’s why you wanted my coat so badly?”
I don’t know that I’d describe the way I asked for his coat as “so badly.” I’d just been cold. I reach up and tug the collar into position. “Yes, I’m a hitchhiking ghost,” I say, the words slightly flat on my tongue. “I really am the Phantom Prom Date. I died in Michigan in 1952. I don’t know why I wound up becoming the dominant hitchhiking ghost story for the modern era. It’s a little frustrating, if you ask me, since so many of the regional variants have me getting all murderous and bloodthirsty once someone gives me a ride.”
“It would help if you didn’t run around in a vintage prom dress all the time,” says Timothy.
“I don’t. Like I said, I appeared in your parking lot sort of abruptly, and I didn’t have time to change before you were rushing out to help me up. Most of the time, I try to run around in jeans and a tank top. Way less obtrusive.”
“What about the weather?”
“What about it? Jeans and a tank top are totally appropriate for summer, and in the winter, people are more likely to give me a coat if they think I look cold.” I show him my teeth. I don’t even pretend to be smiling. “I’m all about the outerwear.”
“I got that,” he says, looking at me in my anachronistic jean jacket over a vintage silk gown. Fashion goes in cycles. I’m sure there will be some girls attending their proms this year in dresses that look surprisingly like mine, from the cut of the bodice to the length of the hem. But none of them will get it exactly. Modern reproductions are always cut with modern body shapes and modern undergarments in mind, while my dress was made for the kind of shapes that fell out of fashion decades ago.
“What did you mean by ‘regional variants’?” Timothy asks.
It feels weird to be sitting here rehashing my history while Bobby’s out there with a tank full of soul and murder, as always, on his mind. But Timothy’s the one who just lost a friend, and I’m trapped inside this Mesmer cage until someone with a pulse decides to let me out, so it’s not like I have any better choices. I’m happy to keep him engaged until his aunt shows up with food and answers.
“I mean there’s only one true story of how I died, and it’s the one I didn’t live through, but if you go around North America asking people for hitchhiking ghost stories, you’ll get a couple hundred versions of the way it all went down,” I say. “Most of them agree that I was in high school and on my way to some big dance, but I’ve heard ‘spring formal’ and I’ve heard ‘homecoming,’ and this dress is totally unsuitable for either of those events. So the only stories that have it partially right are the ones with the balls to come right out and say ‘prom.’ After the Harry Potter books got big, I even had a few people start telling variants where I died on the way to some nondenominational Winter Ball. I’m from Michigan! We were lucky if the school was open in the winter, much less throwing extracurricular parties for the students! We would all have frozen to death in the unheated gym, and my story would be bigger and weirder and less entertaining, since it would be about a few dozen stiff, popsicled teenagers.”
“You feel very strongly about this,” says Timothy.
“Of course I do! It’s my life. My death. It doesn’t matter which one it is, because it’s mine, and when something is mine, I’m allowed to want people to get it right.”
Timothy leans back in his seat, looking at me with the flat lack of expression that people only assume when they’re having extreme trouble processing whatever’s just been said to them.
Finally, in a neutral tone, he says, “What.”
“You don’t want people telling your life story like it’s a work of fiction, do you? Changing whatever details will suit them? Making you over into something that you’re really not?” He knew about the coat and he knows about Mesmer cages, but he clearly doesn’t know that I can’t taste anything that hasn’t been given to me freely, because while he’s happily guzzling his Shirley Temple, he hasn’t made any move to give me the coffee. I reach for my water. It never has any real flavor anywhere. Having it taste faintly of ash isn’t going to change anything. “Maybe trying to make you out to be a killer?”
Timothy frowns at me. “You mean you’re not? There are so many accounts of someone who looks just like you hitchhiking at a rest stop, right before there’s a massive accident—”
“Do I look like I have the power to cause accidents?” I demand. I hate this line of thinking. “Correlation is not the same as causation. The fact that I show up when someone’s going to crash doesn’t mean I somehow make them crash. I’m a psychopomp. I’m drawn to people who are about to have an accident. Sometimes I can help prevent it. My presence keeps them from falling asleep at the wheel or changes the course of events just enough that they’re not in the intersection when someone loses control of a bus. Sometimes I can’t do anything, but at least in those cases, the driver doesn’t die alone, and they have someone to help them make the first steps toward adjusting to existence in the twilight. I provide an essential service to the truckers and long-distance drivers whose need attracts me, and I don’t hurt them. I’d be happier if we could somehow magically make the roads completely safe, so no one would need me anymore. Psychopomps are forever walking the line between the living and the dead. That’s a lot of misery for us to be subjected to, whether we like it or not. We don’t get to get away.”
My second gulp of water tastes more strongly of ashes than my first one did. I wrinkle my nose and put the glass aside just as the waiter comes back with our dinner orders. If Timothy’s not going to enable me actually eating my food, I don’t entirely see the point in it. My country scramble looks perfect, a mound of golden, buttery eggs dripping with melted cheese and small, fatty drops of butter, chunks of ham embedded in the mess like diamonds in the walls of a cartoon mine. It comes with toast and a side of breakfast potatoes, in case I’m one of those people who likes carbohydrates with my carbohydrates. And I am. I like everything about this plate, except for the fact that if I try to eat any of it, all I’m going to taste is ash.
Timothy has one of those overly-fancy cheeseburgers, a teriyaki burger according to the menu, big slices of pineapple nestled between the two beef patties, and the whole thing oozing with salt-sweet teriyaki sauce. He picks it up with an expression of approval on his face, taking a massive bite before he notices that I haven’t moved to touch either my scramble or my malt.
“Somethin’ wrong?” he asks, as he swallows his half-chewed chunk of meat, cheese, and tropical fruit. There’s a smear of sauce on his chin. I don’t point it out.
“How is it you know so many of the rules for the dead, and you’re missing so many at the same time?” I gesture to my plate, careful not to touch it. “It has to be given to me, or I don’t get to taste it. It’ll be nothing but ashes and grave dirt in my mouth.”
“I’m paying for it,” he says, almost sullenly. “Doesn’t that make it enough of a gift?”
“No. Money is an illusion. Money is just the ghost of gold. I can’t profit from a haunting. You have to give it to me if it’s going to count.”
Timothy reaches over and sullenly pushes my scramble closer to me. “Here,” he says. “This is a gift, from me to you.”
“Thank you,” I say, as the smell of the belated breakfast snaps into focus, becoming suddenly as appealing as the appearance of it. I pick up my fork, giving the malt a pointed look.
Timothy’s a little weird, and I don’t know who’s been teaching him about ghosts and leaving such big holes in his education, but he pushes the malt toward me. “This is yours,” he says.
I plunge my fork into the scramble, loading it with eggs and ham and cheese. No breakfast potatoes, not yet; those will come later. “I appreciate you feeding me,” I say.
“Who makes all these stupid rules?”
“You’re the one who walked me into a Mesmer cage,” I say. “I think you should know that.”
“My Aunt Daisy painted the runes,” he says, confirming what I’d already suspected. “She said if I ever found any ghosts, I should bring them here, and the cage would keep them from hurting anyone.”
“That’s . . . that’s not what a Mesmer cage does,” I say. “If I were a poltergeist, or a white lady, or a gather-grim, I could kill everyone in this room. I couldn’t get out of the room once I was finished, not unless I’d managed to cover enough of the cage with their blood—obscuring a rune is as good as breaking it unless it’s made of some very specific materials that I would have been able to feel before we stepped inside here—but I could do whatever I wanted inside the cage. I still could. It’s just that my phantom parlor tricks are pretty well limited to ‘ask for a ride,’ ‘eat diner food,’ and ‘disappear back into the twilight.’ The only one of those that potentially does me any good right now is disappearing, but I want to know how your aunt knew to paint a Mesmer cage, and that means I stay here for right now.” Not that the Mesmer cage would let me disappear. But I don’t have to verify that for him.
Timothy has stopped eating his burger by the time I finish, getting paler and paler as he listens to me. When I finally stop and take another bite of my scramble—it tastes as good as it looks, which is nice; he was right about the farm fresh eggs—he puts his burger down and stares across the table at me.
“That’s not what Aunt Daisy said,” he says.
“Well, was she wrong, or did she lie to you?” I ask. “It sort of influences how I feel about her.”
“How you feel about her! I’m her nephew!”
“Blood is thicker than water, kiddo.” I take my first slurp of vanilla malt. The balance is perfect, not too heavy on the malt, not too light on it, either. I will never understand how milkshakes managed to eclipse malts in the hearts and stomachs of the nation.
“She didn’t lie to me. She wouldn’t.” Timothy rises, and I realize he’s going to go fetch his erstwhile aunt. I don’t try to wave him back. I want to talk to her, and if him losing his temper is what it takes to make that happen, I’m cool with it. I sip at my malt as he storms across the diner toward the woman who looks like his older, more weathered sister. She’s behind the counter, serving coffee and pie to the people on the vinyl stools, and she doesn’t look surprised by his approach.
If she has been lying to him about how all this works, she’s probably been expecting this conversation for a long time. Still, no amount of lying could give him the instincts to spot the dead the way he spotted me; he’s sensitive to hauntings, and she knows how to paint a Mesmer cage. Something’s going on here.
When it comes to catching the dead, people usually focus on the Seal of Solomon, that ancient biblical demon-catching trick. Well, I’ve never seen a demon, unless you want to be real generous with how much power you ascribe to the crossroads. I don’t think they were a demon. I just think the anima mundi was right and they were from somewhere terribly outside, someplace where the rules were different enough that once they ended up here, the anima mundi had no defense against them, and by extension, neither did the rest of us. If demons are real, they keep themselves busy in layers of reality that aren’t occupied by anything as easy and ordinary as ghosts. But Seals of Solomon still work on ghosts. We’re easily ensnared by the right combination of lines and angles, the runic folding of corners into curves.
Franz Mesmer was alive a lot more recently than King Solomon. We know for sure that Mesmer actually existed, that he’s not some story for ghost mothers to tell their faded phantom children. He was real, he walked in the world, and he only died about two hundred years ago. He did not, to the best of my knowledge, linger in the twilight after death; he was a man with no unfinished business to hold him in place.
Mesmer was one of the great leaders of the spiritualist movement. He researched or guessed a surprising number of truths about the twilight and the nature of the ghost roads, and one of his many innovations was a long, twisting rune designed to be painted into itself in an endless loop. It’s more flexible than a Seal, since the lines are harder to break. It’s also less powerful, since it lacks the absolute certainty of purpose that a proper Seal of Solomon possesses. Mesmer cages fell out of fashion around the turn of the century, when people figured out that they could mostly only be used to catch ghosts like me, who were more curious than hostile, but who might become hostile if we were held prisoner. I don’t know any among the dead who likes being pinned down without our consent. Being dead should mean a certain freedom of movement, and when it doesn’t, we get angry and bitter.
There’s only one group that really still holds to the Mesmer cage as the best way of handling pesky spirits, and that’s the umbramancers. They never met a means of freezing a haunting that they didn’t like. Timothy approaches with his aunt close behind him, and I put down my malt, standing to offer her my hand. If she shakes it, that means I’m wrong.
She doesn’t shake. She looks at my hand like it’s some sort of affront, like I have personally offended her by observing standard human courtesy, and I don’t know anything I didn’t know a minute ago. Shaking my hand would have meant I was wrong. Refusing to shake it doesn’t prove that I’m right. Sadly.
“My nephew tells me that you identified the Mesmer cage when he brought you inside, but you didn’t try to run,” she says. “Why?”
“Well, it holds me here, which is inconvenient and a little unfriendly, since I didn’t do anything to deserve being locked up without my permission,” I say. “Do you usually play roach motel for the unquiet dead, or did I just get lucky?” I know this answer. The cage around me is an old, settled one; she painted these runes years ago, if not decades. She’s been in the ghost-catching business for a long, long time.
“You should have tried to run,” she says, and reaches into her apron pocket, pulling out a saltshaker. I take a step backward, pausing when my thighs hit the table.
“You can’t banish me with salt, lady,” I say. “I’m as physical as you are.”
“Oh, yes,” she says. “Timothy told me you were a hitchhiker. There are ways of dealing with a hitcher if you know what to do. The dead are always dead, even when they walk in borrowed flesh.”
There’s a fanatic gleam in her eye. She sounds like she really means what she’s saying. This is not a woman who harbors a lot of love for the dead. Someone close to her probably died when she was young, and she’s been blaming the rest of us ever since. Still, Mesmer cages, going straight for the salt . . . her lack of a handshake may not have been the proof I needed, but I have all the evidence I could ask for now.
She’s an umbramancer. She walks the paths of the dead with her eyes wide open and sees far too much for any human heart to hold. Routewitches have strong ties to the twilight, and as a consequence, spend a lot of time working with and fighting against the dead. A lot of spirits choose to haunt the routewitches, on the theory that hanging around the one person who can reliably see you is better than wandering lost and unobserved for all of time. I’ve never quite understood the logic. People don’t like to be haunted, and no one likes to be told that they don’t have a choice in the matter. “I’m here because you can see me, and that means you’re obligated to listen when I talk” goes over like a lead balloon most of the time.
Umbramancers aren’t tied to the twilight. They go deeper. Their ties are to the midnight. They attract ghosts like a bug zapper attracts moths, and not all of those ghosts are human. Not even most of those ghosts are human. Most of the warding and capturing circles have been developed by umbramancers who just want to be left alone. The only thing that’s weird about this one is that it’s set into a diner. That’s road ghost territory, which means it’s routewitch territory, which means something is wrong here, and it’s not just the woman advancing on me with the saltshaker in her hand.
Why salt can banish ghosts when there are ghosts in the sea and ghosts, like me, who enjoy a nice, well-seasoned cheeseburger when we have the opportunity, I don’t know.
Some of the diners around us have turned to watch my retreat, but no one’s saying anything, or showing an excess of interest in the situation. One woman reaches for her water, and I see the outline of the glass through her hand. Timothy and Aunt Daisy may be the only living people in this diner. That’s a nice change from my usual status as only dead girl in the room, except that if they’re not all hitchhikers, they can’t escape.
I turn and bolt for the door, weaving between the tables as I go. Timothy rushes after me. Aunt Daisy, confident in the strength of her Mesmer cage, follows more slowly.
That’s what I was counting on, inasmuch as I’m currently counting on anything. “Reacting on instinct” is a little more of my plan right now than actual planning. Timothy knows more about ghosts than I expect from a living man. Explanation: his aunt’s an umbramancer, and since it runs in families, he might be one, too. With a ghost cage this size at their disposal, they’d be able to live relatively normal lives, rather than becoming itinerant to avoid attracting too many dead people. He knows about ghosts in general, but he was missing some of the major specifics for hitchers. Things I would expect anyone with his level of understanding to know. So maybe Aunt Daisy hasn’t been training him, or maybe whoever trained her was more interested in keeping ghosts away than they were in getting to know them. One way or another, certain essential details didn’t get passed along.
Like the fact that right now, with this coat across my shoulders, I’m as alive as Timothy or Daisy, and no simple Mesmer cage has the strength to hold me. That’s not how it works. If the runes had been a bit less obvious and Timothy had understood the need to keep me talking until dawn, maybe they would have stood a chance of adding me to their diner of the damned. Maybe not. I still have this corsage on my wrist, and it has to be good for something. It has to be enough to open doors that shouldn’t have been closed in the first place.
I run, and the umbramancers follow, Daisy’s arms pinwheeling when she hits a damp patch of floor, Timothy running with the single-minded dedication of a teenage boy who has never seen any reason to doubt the adults in his life. You don’t see that kind of bullheaded trust very often. People are too cynical. The Internet keeps them from thinking their parents hung the moon and the stars in the sky. That’s not entirely a bad thing: it’s harder to abuse your kids when they don’t think of you as a god. Harder, not impossible, and all this was beside the point, because I’m running, and they’re chasing me.
Humans evolved to prey on the world around them, and to compete with the predators who kept eating us. We know how to hunt, and we know how to be hunted. They’re intrinsic understandings, things we can’t help knowing. I jump over a chair that someone kicks into my path—and since almost all these people are as dead as I am, it’s a little obnoxious that they’d be helping the woman who has them captive, and not their fellow spirit—and then I’m finally at the door. I run past the limits of the Mesmer cage and stop in the little atrium formed by the shape of the restaurant, that tiny glassed-in box where patrons are supposed to stomp the mud and snow off their feet and remove their coats. Daisy and Timothy draw up short, Daisy glancing at the saltshaker still in her hand. They don’t know what to do with a ghost who runs.
“You can’t do that,” says Daisy mulishly. “The Mesmer cage will stop you.”
“I just did it,” I reply. “I’m on the other side of your Mesmer cage, unless you put something more subtle on the front door.” I turn and push it open, letting a gust of sweet Indiana air inside. Then I step out, into the night.
Nothing tries to stop me from passing through the door. There’s not even the scant resistance I would expect from a ghost trap intended for someone else. I turn a quick pirouette on the sidewalk, turning back to the diner to wave through the glass, as coy as any coquette, before I open the door and step back into the atrium.
“Established: I can come and go as I please,” I say. “Now what’s with the salt? And the Mesmer? I know you’re an umbramancer. Having a certain amount of protection against the dead makes perfect sense. Using it to play tea party with an entire diner full of ghosts is a little weird. Some of these people probably have shit they were hoping to accomplish before they move on to the next stage of their afterlife existence.”
A few of the diners in range of my voice look around and nod, like I’ve just said the most sensible thing they’ve ever heard. None of them say anything aloud. They’re either in Daisy’s thrall somehow, or the situation is more complicated than I understand. With my luck, it’s both, and I’m about to have to fight a phantom army. I hate fighting phantom armies.
“How are you getting past the Mesmer cage?” asks Daisy.
“The same way your nephew is,” I say. I don’t believe in toying with umbramancers. They don’t tend to have a sense of humor. “I’m alive.”
“You admitted to him that you were a specter,” she snaps. “You reek of the afterlife!”
“Hey,” I say, stung. “I bathe pretty regularly. I’m a clean person. I shouldn’t have to be a clean person once my body has, you know, dissolved into the earth, but I am, because some habits are difficult to break. I don’t reek of anything. And I’m not a specter. Specters follow some pretty strict rules that don’t apply to me. I’m a good, old-fashioned, hitchhiking ghost, which is why I’m currently alive. I borrow substance from the living.”
Timothy pales.
“Is that it?” asks Daisy. She drops her saltshaker onto a nearby table and picks up a chair. “I can solve that.” She pulls the chair back like she’s getting ready to hit her own nephew.
“Wait!” I take a step forward, hands raised, right to the edge of the Mesmer cage. “What are you doing?”
“If he’s not alive, there won’t be anything for you to borrow substance from. You’ll return to the teeming ectoplasm from whence you sprang, and the cage will work the way it’s supposed to. You’ll be trapped like the rest.”
Timothy, while he looks like he’s going to be sick, hasn’t moved out of her reach. I focus on him. “Are you really going to stand there and let her beat you to death with a chair? Because I don’t care how much you love your family, that’s a terrible idea. You understand that, don’t you? No one has the right to take your life away, no matter what they may have done for you in the past. Your life is yours. It belongs to you, here, now, and forever. Even after you’re dead, your life is your own, and no one gets to decide how you spend the rest of eternity. Which means you don’t let somebody kill you inside a Mesmer cage. You wouldn’t be able to reach the twilight if that happened. You wouldn’t know what kind of ghost you’re supposed to be, and you wouldn’t settle properly.” I glance at Daisy, who is watching me with fanatic loathing burning in her eyes.
None of this makes sense, and that’s what finally makes it all start making sense. I wince a little before giving her a sympathetic look and asking the only question that applies: “How did you die?”
If the Mesmer cage was already here when she collapsed or was killed, her spirit wouldn’t have been able to get out. That’s the danger of any of the warding systems, from Solomon’s Seal on down. Yes, they can be used to trap bad things, but they can also ensnare innocent things that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If she painted the Mesmer cage when she was young and healthy and breathing, it wouldn’t have cared enough to let her spirit go. It would have kept her the same way it kept anyone else. Relentlessly and without negotiation.
“Ten years ago,” says Daisy, voice rasping and cold. “I think it was a heart attack. I was doing inventory on the pantry, and there was this pain in my chest, pain bigger than I knew pain could be, and I fell down. I didn’t get back up for three days.”
That’s the traditional period for house ghosts. It takes time to realize that the place you’ve always lived isn’t home anymore; that the door of your body has been closed, and the structure has been condemned. Road ghosts bounce back faster because we have to. It’s that or stand in the middle of the street with cars crashing through the space where our bodies ought to be, unable to understand why everything has changed.
“Aunt Daisy?” says Timothy, in a small, scared voice. He sounds more frightened now than he did when she was threatening him with the chair. That’s interesting. “Interesting” is not the same thing as “good.” “What are you talking about? You’re not dead.”
“That must have been scary,” I say. “The Mesmer cage was already here?”
“Painted it with my daddy the summer I turned sixteen,” she says. “That’s when the ghosts who’d been bothering me off and on started getting really insistent. They wouldn’t leave me alone. No matter how much I asked them to. They knew I could hear them, and they were damn well determined to be listened to.”
“That sucks,” I say, agreeing with the complaint she didn’t make out loud. Not all ghosts can make themselves known to the living as easily as I can. In fact, most house ghosts can’t do it at all. Road ghosts tend to be more visible, maybe because we’re less fixed in place. We’re less at risk when people know we exist. By the time they fetch the ghost hunters, we’ve already moved on to another location.
The unrealistic thing about Ghostbusters isn’t the proton packs or the hot blonde lady not having a girlfriend. It’s the sheer number of visible hauntings they can find just by going to a few old houses. If house ghosts were that easy to find, the world would have stopped arguing about the possibility of life after death a long, long time ago.
“So we painted the cage,” she says, in the same plodding, resigned tone. “My father and me. The paint we used was hand mixed. It contained the ashes of my grandmother. The dead hounded her, too. When she died, we had to break every window in the house to free the spirits she had trapped during her life and stop them from pursuing us.”
“Did it work?” I don’t want to be here. This place is cold and unforgiving, founded on the idea that the dead have no rights. It’s a pitcher plant, and there’s a good chance I’m in Warsaw not because of Bobby’s presence, but because either the anima mundi or Persephone herself didn’t like the fact that so many of her subjects are trapped in a dead-end diner in a tiny town in Indiana.
I don’t want to be a Swiss Army Knife for fixing the problems of the gathered dead. It’s not my idea of a good time.
“I never saw any of those spirits again,” says Daisy. “My father was very good at being done with the dead.”
Not good enough to keep his own daughter from being trapped, but that’s another story. I nod as if this is the most enthralling thing I’ve ever heard. “So you painted a ward using a dead woman’s bones, and then you died inside it,” I say. “And now you can’t get out.”
“The cage is a solid wall for me,” she says. “When I try to exit the diner, it pushes me back into the kitchen, where the paramedics found my body.”
Timothy looks like he can’t decide whether to cry or be sick. “You can’t be dead,” he says, voice barely above a moan. “Someone would have told me if you were dead.”
“Would they, buddy?” she asks, and for the first time, she sounds warm, sincere, caring—like the kind of woman who would inspire such a fierce love that her nephew didn’t even flinch when she grabbed the chair. “None of us expected your parents to die. My brother didn’t inherit my connection to the dead, thankfully. The gift only comes to one per generation. He agreed to hide my condition from you. The diner is in a trust. The bills are paid, and no one thinks it’s strange that the doors stay open. We have enough living staff members that when someone comes in who shouldn’t see me, I can stay in the back and cook until they’re gone. And no one ever felt the need to tell you. It seemed cruel, everything being equal.”
That, and most people who did stumble across the knowledge that a dead woman had been somehow given custody of her living nephew would just quietly put it out of their minds and forget about it. That was the other effect of the Mesmer cage. Spirits left inside it would be forgotten by the world outside—all levels of the world. That kept the twilight from emptying out as spirits went hunting for their missing friends. Franz Mesmer was an umbramancer who didn’t think very highly of the rights of the dead: he probably hadn’t intended that little aspect of the cage. He’d just been trying to make it so that when he caught a particularly nasty haunt, the people it had been tormenting would be able to move on with their lives and forget about what they’d been through. The cage dulls and distorts memory. So when Timothy’s parents died and their will kicked in, Daisy had been able to claim him as her own thanks to the cage distorting the memory of her death. It was a fun little perversion of the way the legal system was supposed to work, and only the fact that it was an unlikely enough scenario that it would probably never come up again kept my stomach from churning. I’d barely eaten any of my truly excellent scramble. I didn’t exactly want to vomit it back up again so quickly.
“And all these people?” I ask.
“Timmy’s been luring the dead in for me for the last few years,” she says, with a casual wave of her hand. “They don’t pay, but they don’t all eat, either, and it’s better that they be confined than that they be running around making trouble for living folk.”
A few of the nearby diners wrinkle their noses and turn their faces away. Clearly, they don’t share their captor’s beliefs about the suitability of locking them in a ghost cage for the crime of being dead. None of them move to rise or stand with me. They’ve been in here too long, cut off from the twilight, unable to refresh the renewable aspects of their unlife.
“That’s not right,” I say. “You’re here voluntarily. You’re here because you want to be, or you would have asked Timothy to break the cage years ago. None of these people are here because they want to be.” The only good thing about this situation is that I know she hasn’t captured any homecomers or strigoi. They could have turned themselves solid and walked out of the cage, the same way I have. They would have torn this place down around her ears for what she’s done, and they would have been right to do so.
But Timothy deserves better. Yes, he’s been helping her, but he’s still a kid, doing what his parent figure tells him to do, trying to be good and be brave and navigate a world he doesn’t fully understand. Umbramancers are rare, rarer even than routewitches, and unlike routewitches, they don’t have a coherent system of government to keep them from getting into trouble. Most of them train their families in the same methods that they were trained in, and some of those methods are good and some are bad and some are merely skewed. They’re not necromancers from a fairy tale. They can’t raise the dead. They can only see us, only interact with us. For some of them, that’s more than enough. They want to live in a world populated only by the living, and they don’t think it’s fair that they don’t get that option.
No, none of this is Timothy’s fault. I can take him to Apple when I finish my business with Bobby. She isn’t an umbramancer, but she probably knows where to find a couple of the more well-adjusted ones, and she can help him get the education he needs to not be a threat to himself and others. If she can’t, she can at least smack him if he ever starts talking about Mesmer cages again.
Daisy is watching me with wary suspicion. I think she knows what has to happen next, that there’s no way I can allow things to continue as they have been. She can’t hold me until dawn comes or I take off this coat, whichever comes first, but my freedom should not come at the expense of leaving others in captivity. That’s a simple moral principle of the universe.
I lean past the frame to grab a butter knife off the nearest table. It’s an ordinary piece of diner cutlery, stainless steel and heavy, not weighted to be used as any sort of a weapon. It’s still a knife, flat and designed to cut and gouge things. Things like paint overlain on a door frame.
She could stop me. She could say something, order Timothy to do something. She doesn’t. I think she’s as tired as the ghosts she’s been holding captive, aware that this is wrong, and ready for it to be over. But it’s hard to admit when you’re in the wrong, and it’s easy to let a stranger smash the walls you’re too attached to to let go of.
Timothy holds out a hand and takes a step forward when I press the edge of the knife to one of the runes. “Wait!” he says.
I pause. Nothing’s forcing me to do it, but I want to know what he’s going to say. His aunt is still standing there silently, that expression of wary suspicion on her face. She’s trapped. They’re all trapped. This is unnatural and wrong. This is cruel.
This is dangerous. If Bobby had stumbled across this place . . .
Bobby, who is still a living man, despite everything he’s done, despite everything he’s been through. Bobby, who shoves ghosts into the tank of his car. He could drive for a decade using only the ghosts in this room. He could stop his killing, yes. But he’d be doing it because he’d have a bell jar full of innocents to use and abuse, and it wouldn’t be any more humane than what he’s already doing. There are limits to how far I’m willing to go to eliminate the threat he represents, and giving him this diner would be a delay, not a conclusion. I want a conclusion.
“What is it, Timothy?” I ask.
“What happens if you break the cage?” he asks in return.
I pause. Daisy is his guardian. “Are you eighteen?”
“Not for another three months,” he says. “I don’t want to go into foster care just because you don’t like the way we do things around here.” He looks at Daisy. “We’ve done pretty well for ourselves without the authorities getting involved.” He pauses, brow furrowing. “Why didn’t they get more involved? Dad was your brother, but I was just a kid. Shouldn’t the police have cared more about how you were taking care of me. Making sure I got my vaccinations and all, not like the McAllister kids. They all got whooping cough. The youngest girl died.”
“It’s the Mesmer cage,” I say. “It dampens memory for those outside.”
“You mean everyone forgot Aunt Daisy was dead,” he says querulously.
I’ve already reached this conclusion and moved on. I still nod with feigned enthusiasm, like this is the smartest thing anyone has ever said. “Exactly,” I say. “When the cage breaks, people will start remembering things.”
“But Aunt Daisy will still be here,” he says. “She can tell them everything’s fine. That they don’t need to worry about me. I have a job, and a place to live, and I’ve been vaccinated, and my grades are good, and everything’s . . . fine. It’s fine. Right, Aunt Daisy? You’re not going to leave me, are you?”
“I won’t have a choice once she breaks the cage,” says Daisy. Her voice is smaller, duller, lacking the anger it held before. I hate that most umbramancers wind up so angry with the dead. It’s not reasonable, and it’s not right. “I died inside the cage. I don’t know what kind of ghost I am, and it’s been so long that the twilight might not be willing to help me settle into a more predictable form. Or I might be a kind of ghost that wants to harm the living. I can’t have that be the last thing you remember about me. I can’t try to hurt my boy.”
There are tears in the corners of her eyes. She’s thought about this before, about what it would mean for Timothy if she found a way out of the diner where she died.
I could point out that she did just try to hurt her boy. Being hit with a chair hurts. It wouldn’t do any good. She’s grappling with a lot of changes all at once, and she’s not listening to me.
She shakes her head. “I want you to run. Don’t look back. This is where we say good-bye, my love.”
“No!” Timothy whirls to glare at me, moving to place himself subtly between me and his aunt. “What gives her the right to decide what happens to you? You’re my family. I love you. She doesn’t get to decide for me that it’s time for you to leave.”
“So why did the two of you get to decide for all these people that they weren’t going to be free anymore?” I may know some of them. The memory dampening attributes of the cage mean that I wouldn’t remember if I did. I know she hasn’t captured any hitchers, but phantom riders, roadworkers, cartographers, and even cyclists would all be vulnerable to her specific kind of charms.
Timothy swallows, throat working, and looks away. He can’t even meet my eyes as he says, “They were dead. You’re dead. It’s not like we’ve been hurting anyone.”
“By your logic, I should be able to open this cage without hurting anyone. It won’t affect you at all.”
“But you’ll hurt me by hurting my Aunt Daisy!”
It’s not as unusual as I wish it were for the living to only consider the dead in relation to the living. We don’t matter unless someone with a pulse is inconvenienced by whatever happens to us. Great. “Every one of these people could be someone else’s Aunt Daisy,” I snap, gesturing with my butter knife. “They may have friends, family, people who’ve been waiting for their personal haunts to come home. I have friends. I’m currently on a quest to save a member of my family from a situation she got herself into by being damn stupid. All of them would have been upset if I’d disappeared into this diner and never come back out. All of them have just as much right to want me to come home as you do to want your Aunt Daisy to stay with you. And you don’t know the histories of any of the people you’ve trapped. They had existences before you captured them. They deserve to go back to those existences.”
“Aunt Daisy?” For the first time, he sounds truly unsure. He looks to his aunt, who shakes her head. She has no comforting words to offer, it seems. She’s as trapped as he is, victim of her own logic.
If the dead have no rights, then that includes her, and she should be released back into the ether from which all spirits spring. She should go because she has no right to stay. If the dead do have rights, then he’s been helping his aunt violate the freedoms and liberties of dozens of spirits who deserved to be treated better, and who never volunteered for this situation.
He closes his eyes.
“If you have to do it, do it,” he says, in a voice that’s heavy with defeat. “I wish I hadn’t given you my coat.”
I can’t share his regrets, not right now. I turn and scrape the butter knife against the edge of the first rune. It’s a small disruption, a minute break in the pattern of the lines, but it’s enough. Mesmer cages are delicate things. They need to be cared for, maintained, and never, ever damaged. The change in the diner’s atmosphere is immediate and absolute. Patrons who had been ignoring us before look up from their dishes and drinks, eyes focusing as their gazes grow sharper, like they’re becoming aware of their surroundings for the first time in a long time. Years, for some of them. They begin leaving their seats and moving toward the door. All of them are still apparently solid, which is an interesting trick. With the Mesmer cage broken, they should be losing the ability to impact the physical world, unless they’re all poltergeists—which wouldn’t make sense. Timothy was too distressed by the idea that I might be able to cause that kind of damage.
A few of them stomp or bare their teeth at Aunt Daisy, but none of them pause long enough for her to grab hold of them. Even dead, she’s still an umbramancer, and they have enough sense to respect that. They keep moving toward the exit, growing thinner as they approach me, turning translucent.
When the first of them reaches me, she’s entirely see-through. She pauses long enough to smile, and I realize that I’ve seen her before, haunting a flower market in Illinois. How she wound up in Indiana, I may never know. Then she’s moving past me, disappearing into the night as if she’d never been there in the first place. More ghosts rush to take her place, until it’s a steady stream of phantoms vanishing into the evening air.
A man stops toward the end of their spirit parade, somewhat older-fashioned than many of the others, with hair cut in a feathered style that hasn’t been popular since the 1970s, and a battered, scratched-up leather jacket on his back. He wraps his arms around me without warning, lifting me off my feet and causing me to drop the butter knife I’m still holding. I squeak, recognition following on the heels of his action.
“Nate!”
“Rose! I should have known that when someone came along to get us the hell out of here, it would be you!”
I laugh. It’s an involuntary response, pulled out of me by what feels like a pair of tiny hands plunging into my chest. Nate’s a cartographer, a kind of walking ghost who maps the cracks and crevices of the twilight with his own two feet. Our world is constantly changing, just like the world of the living. We need people to make sure we don’t get lost. We don’t have GPS.
Nate disappeared eight years ago. At the time, I thought he might have walked until he was finished and decided to take some footpath to his equivalent of my final exit. Moving on waits for us all, and there’s no real way to decide it’s not going to happen. I touch his cheek as he puts me down.
“It’s good to see you,” I say. “Stay close, and I’ll take you back to the Last Dance with me.”
“Sounds good,” he says, and removes his arms from around my waist, stepping out of the flow of traffic as more and more spirits push by, returning to their interrupted afterlives as fast as they can. Aunt Daisy and Timothy aren’t moving. He’s grabbed her hand and is hanging on like he’s afraid she’s going to slip through his fingers, which, to be fair, she probably is.
She’s definitely not a road ghost. Very few house ghosts have the power to stay visible when the living are around. Even if she’s going to settle, he’s going to lose her. Unless . . .
“Will you promise to leave the dead alone?” I ask quickly.
“What?” says Timothy.
“We don’t have a lot of time here,” I say. “Answer the question.”
“After this, I never want to talk to another ghost for as long as I live,” he says, chin jutting out stubbornly.
“You won’t have a choice.” I feel almost sorry for him, baby umbramancer with no living relatives to teach him how to handle what he is. Even if there’s no way he’ll agree to go with me while Aunt Daisy’s still here, I can convince Apple to send him a teacher. Routewitches and umbramancers intersect enough that there’s probably at least one mixed marriage among her subjects, at least one person who can roll over in bed and ask their beloved spouse to step up and keep this kid from self-destructing.
With the crossroads gone, we’re all going to need to make adjustments. Nothing is going to be the same.
“How about you?” I demand, shifting my attention to Daisy. “Do you swear to leave the dead alone?”
She nods in silence. I pull a Sharpie out of my jacket pocket and turn to repair the damage I did to the Mesmer cage. It only takes a few seconds, smoothing the jagged edge of the rune I scraped with quick flicks of the pen. The air turns to jelly around us. Nate stiffens, giving me a wounded look.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I can pull you out.” I put the cap back on the Sharpie and return it to my pocket.
“Is that a magic pen?” asks Timothy.
“Only in that all Sharpies are magic according to high school principals and asshole policemen,” I say. “It’s just a Sharpie. Your Sharpie since it was in the pocket of this coat when you handed it to me.”
“But the original runes were painted using ink that had been prepared according to the highest, most meticulous ritual standards!” objects Daisy.
“And now you know you can fix them with Sharpie,” I say. “Aren’t you glad to know that Timothy can fix any future damage on his own?”
“I suppose,” she says, and subsides. Maybe she’s realized that fighting with me isn’t going to do her any good.
“Excellent.” I grab Nate’s arm and step outside the bounds of the cage again, tugging him with me. There’s a moment of resistance as I pull him over the threshold. Then he’s out, looking at me with wide, wondering eyes, like I’ve just accomplished something genuinely impossible. Which, hell, maybe I have. I don’t exactly have a checklist of “this can be done” and “this can’t be done” situations that I’m likely to find myself in.
“Keep your word,” I say sternly to Daisy and Timothy.
Then I turn and head out of the diner, still pulling Nate with me, still wearing Timothy’s denim jacket.