NATE STAYS QUIET UNTIL we’re halfway down the block. Then he grabs my arm and spins me to face him, exclaiming, “Rose! That was amazing! What, are you a ghostbuster-buster now?”
“No,” I say. “That sounds exhausting, and also really dangerous. I have enough dangerous bullshit in my death. I don’t need to go looking for more.”
“Then how—?”
“I could ask you the same.” I push him in the shoulder. His flesh is faintly yielding, soft and spongy in a way that would mean something really bad if he were a mortal man. He’s not, so what it means is that he’s gone too long without mapping something. He needs to give directions. Once he does that, he’s going to be fine.
He’s not going to enjoy the prevalence or accuracy of mapping software in this modern world. Cartographers are getting rarer as satellites are getting more accurate. That’s sad—I’ve liked most of the cartographers I’ve known—but it’s also natural. The twilight is forever changing. It uses the prism of death to split humanity into a hundred different species of haunt, with competing habitats and habits, and sometimes one of those species gets outcompeted and fades away. The loss of the Neanderthals was probably also sad, to the Neanderthals. The hominids who kept going as their failed cousins faded into memory may or may not have paused long enough to mourn. Forward momentum is the way of humanity, no matter what we look like, no matter what we’ve become. We don’t slow down, and we don’t look back.
“What do you mean?” he asks, looking wounded.
“How did you not know how to recognize a Mesmer cage when you saw one?” I ask. “They’re not subtle. A Seal of Solomon or a house of mirrors, I’d understand, but this was a Mesmer cage. That’s rookie bullshit.”
“I saw you follow the kid right inside, and you didn’t notice it either,” he says, stung. “So I guess we’re both rookies.”
“I’m wearing his coat,” I counter. “When I have a coat on, my sense for things like that is dulled way, way down. If you’re only managing to be as good as I am while I’m incarnate, you need to work on your attention to detail. Got it?”
“Sorry,” he says, looking down. He kicks at a rock. His foot passes right through it. That’ll stop as he gets reacclimated to the road. Cartographers draw substance from travel. I get to be technically alive again as long as I’m wearing a coat. Nate gets to be physical but not alive as long as he keeps moving. Cartographers are the sharks of the open road. By and large, they don’t appreciate the comparison.
“I didn’t notice the Mesmer cage because I was tired and lonely and there’s a compulsion on the place that makes ghosts want to go inside when they’re passing by. I’ll swing back by here in a month or so, to make sure it’s not being used to hold anyone against their will. They promised you not to dance with the dead anymore, and I know it can be hard for you to wind up exactly where you want to be. The least I can do is double-check for you.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I appreciate that a lot.”
“How long have I been gone?”
“About eight years, give or take,” I say. “That’s the last time I remember seeing you, but that doesn’t have to mean anything. Not really. I am not my brother’s keeper, and all that.”
“No, I was one of Timmy’s first lucky hauls. I got caught pretty soon after the last time we traveled together,” he says. “That weird little fun fair you took me to.”
“It was run by routewitches, and routewitches always give road ghosts free hot dogs,” I counter. “You seemed to like it well enough when we were on the Lobster and you were eating cotton candy.”
“That’s just because you looked so happy and I didn’t want to kick your puppy,” says Nate. He kicks at a chunk of broken glass this time. His toe catches it, and it goes tumbling down the curb, coming to rest against a crack in the sidewalk. His smile is triumphant. “Anyway, you caught a ride with that pothead in the Chevy, and I kept walking. I wound up here, and I was tired and lonely, and the sign at that diner was like a lighthouse welcoming me home from sea.”
“Pretentious,” I say.
“Accurate,” he says. “I couldn’t not go in. It was like what I wanted didn’t matter. I needed to go inside and sit down and order something I couldn’t eat and didn’t need. It felt sort of like you’ve described the draw toward catching a ride.”
“That makes sense.” As a cartographer, the only compulsion Nate deals with on a regular basis is the need to keep going—and since some maps are incredibly detailed, he doesn’t have to move far. It’s different for me. When the time comes to catch a ride, nothing else matters. My world narrows to the highway shoulder, my thumb turned toward the silently judgmental sky, and the cars whizzing past me, not slowing down. That narrowing doesn’t reverse until someone stops and unlocks their doors and asks me inside.
“So I went in, and the compulsion went away, and I tried to go back out, but I couldn’t get past the doorframe,” he says. “And then that lady in the apron was offering me a menu, and I wound up sitting down in a little booth and that was it. That was all she wrote.”
“The lady in the apron was an umbramancer,” I say.
Nate snaps his fingers. “I knew it! Shit, Rose, I would have stayed in there forever if you hadn’t come along. You saved my death. Thank you.” He moves to embrace me, pausing when he spots my corsage peeking out from under the cuff of Timothy’s denim jacket. “Uh, Rose, I didn’t know you were into flowers. That’s new.”
“It’s white asphodel,” I say, holding up my hand and peeling back the sleeve far enough to show him the structure of the petals. “Also, my name is Rose. I think me being into flowers is the least surprising thing about me.”
“White asphodel only grows in the Underworld,” he says, and looks at me with wide, startled eyes. “What did you do?”
“I went to the Underworld,” I say. “Had a full katabasis and everything. Spoke to the Lord and Lady of the Dead.”
Nate stares at me. “Why did you do that?” he asks.
“Bobby Cross brought me back to life, and in order to be sure I’d remain the same kind of ghost I’ve always been, I needed to die without dying. Pulling a Eurydice seemed like the best way to get it done.” When I put it that bluntly, it sounds pretty ridiculous. That’s true of most things. Nothing good survives summarization. Not even pie, and pie is a universal constant of goodness.
“How . . . Rose, you’ve been dead longer than I have.” We’ve continued walking as we talked. The town is receding behind us, blurring into foggy streetlights and dimming storefronts. There was no fog when we left the diner. We’re crossing the boundary between the daylight and the twilight. It’s a slow, subtle transition, like sinking into clear water, very different from the abrupt drops and ascensions I experience when I’m traveling on my own. The rules are different for Nate than they are for me, but he’s still a road ghost, and like all road ghosts, he can take passengers when he wants to.
“Yeah, but I wound up alive again for a little while. I didn’t want to be,” I add hastily, in case he gets the wrong idea. “Bobby Cross perverted the Halloween mysteries to render me incarnate. He convinced a routewitch to kill herself in order to make his nonsense stick. Bobby sucks, in case you missed the memo.”
“I know Bobby sucks,” says Nate. “That’s basically his defining characteristic. Bobby Cross is a self-centered asshole who never met a rule he didn’t want to break for his own benefit. But how the hell does ‘Bobby sucks’ translate into ‘Bobby Cross can reincarnate the dead’? No one can do that! And you’re a hitcher, Rose! You have no business performing katabasis. That’s a good way to get your eternal soul dissolved and scattered across the fields of the blessed for all of time.”
I stare at him, stunned and stung. “I just freed you from a Mesmer cage that you couldn’t evade on your own, and you want to make shitty comments about how I’m not allowed to do things I already did? Is this honestly a good use of your time? Because it doesn’t feel like a good use of your time. It feels sort of like being a really shitty friend.”
Nate looks abashed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be hurtful. But you have to admit this all sounds a little, well, far-fetched from the outside. How did Bobby Cross pervert the Halloween mysteries?”
“I’m not sure Persephone wants me to go around telling people,” I say uncomfortably. “It wasn’t supposed to happen in the first place, I shouldn’t be making it easier for other people to pull the same stunt. Not that you would, but you know what they say about keeping secrets.”
“Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead,” says Nate, and chuckles direly. “What about when both of them are dead? That makes things more complicated, I guess. Fine, no more questions about how that happened. Why didn’t you just stay alive? I thought that was what most ghosts wanted. I don’t think I’d be able to give it up a second time if I had a choice.”
Like most road ghosts, Nate didn’t have a choice the first time he died. He was mapping a series of hiking trails for a small press specializing in nature books, and he stepped on a rattlesnake. The snake did what snakes do. The funny thing is? Nate never blamed it. I’ve seen him sitting in the middle of great balls of rattlesnakes who were killed by people who judged them for existing, soothing their frightened, venomous souls, helping them to move on to whatever waits for rattlesnakes on the other side of our fragile afterlife. He loves them enough that he’s probably responsible for half their manifestations in the twilight. But the fact that he doesn’t blame the snake that killed him for doing what snakes do naturally doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t happily return to the life he left behind if he had the opportunity.
Or at least that’s what he thinks. It’s what I would have thought once, before the chance was offered to me and I discovered that I was happier turning it away.
“I died in 1952,” I say.
“I know.”
“Do you really?” I shake my head. “You died in 1977. You’re twenty-five years behind me, ghost-wise, and that means you’re twenty-five years closer to the modern world. Some of the people you knew when you were alive might still be running around, and you smoked enough pot that some of them might even believe you when you tell them you haven’t gotten any older because you’ve been off being dead for the last forty years. But the world has moved on without you. All those pretty girls you used to flirt with are grown up and married with children of their own. All those dreamy boys you used to run around with, all of them have jobs that require them to wear ties and sensible shoes. You’d be Peter Pan to them, the boy who refused to grow up, and I’ve been dead so much longer than you have. Everyone I know is already a ghost. When Bobby brought me back, it was like dying all over again, but in the other direction, and being alive is disgusting. You sweat and stink and pee and you actually have to eat to stay alive, not just because you want to. I hated every second of it. I bet you would, too.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” says Nate. “You’re right that you’ve been a ghost longer than I have, but I was alive longer than you were. I got to do some pretty awesome shit that you missed out on. I would be okay with coming back to life if it meant I got to do all that awesome shit again. So I don’t think I would have reached the point of trying for a katabasis.”
“Everyone makes their own choices.” I pull my coat a little more tightly around me. Everything around us is foggy and gray, removed from the living world, but I still have my coat, which means we haven’t passed fully into the twilight—not yet. We will, soon. “We just hope not to be judged too much for them.”
“And I guess I was judging you, huh?” Nate puts one big hand on the back of his neck, laughing a little. “I know, I know, you’ve been dead since before I was alive, but you still look sixteen, Rose, and sometimes that makes it hard to take you seriously when you say things like ‘oh, I just popped down to the Underworld so Persephone herself could make me dead again.’”
I turn long enough to glower at him. “I don’t care how hard it is to take me seriously. That’s what happened, and that’s why I have white asphodel clamped around my wrist. We’re friends, Nate, and it’s good to see you again after all this time, but none of that gives you the right to call me a liar.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, still rubbing at the back of his neck. “I guess being held captive by dead umbramancers does a number on my manners, huh?”
“I guess.” I take a step, matching his, and pause as Timothy’s jacket falls through my abruptly insubstantial frame to land on the street. We’ve crossed the line. We’re not just flirting with the twilight anymore; we’ve gone over the border and into the shadows. I can feel the endless night open all around me, spreading like a flower, welcoming me passively home. The street hums under my feet, and best of all, the wind is cool and clear, with no lingering scent of wormwood or ashes. Bobby Cross is nowhere near here. He’s done that a few times in the past, driving away to try and make me feel like I’m safe, and then doubling back and waiting for me on the outskirts of town. The man is obsessed, and I say that as the girl who’s currently dedicating herself to finding and destroying him.
“Want to hear something that’s really going to make you want to call me a liar?” I ask, feeling more upbeat than I did even a few steps ago. Timothy may have been a double-crossing umbramancer collecting ghosts for his dead aunt, but he was a living man who gave me a coat and gave me a ride and fulfilled my obligations to the twilight in the process, even if he hadn’t been in a position to fully grasp what he was doing. My skin doesn’t itch anymore. I’m free to return to the Last Dance, check in with Emma and Gary, tell them what I discussed with the anima mundi, and maybe have a real piece of pie before I head out again. And it’s all thanks to Timothy the jerk. I’d send him a nice thank you card if I knew his address. And if I didn’t sort of hate him for what he did.
“What’s that?” asks Nate, distracted by the twilight unspooling around us. He’s looking more confident, and more coherent. Being cut off for eight years can’t have been good for him, no matter how stable he looks. Ghosts aren’t meant to be kept in tanks like freshwater fish, fed on dried flakes and subject to the whim of whoever’s job it is to change the water. It’s bad for us.
“The crossroads are dead.” Four little words that combine to form the weirdest sentence it has ever been my job to say, and I’ve died twice, journeyed to the underworld, and am currently engaging in a semi-consensual romantic relationship with a car. Weird is sort of what I do, and this is breaking weirdness records.
“So they need to find a new guardian?” Nate sounds interested but not alarmed. “Not my kind of job, but I appreciate you telling me about it all the same.”
I stop walking and stare at him for a moment as he keeps on going. When he finally stops and turns to face me, it’s with a quizzically raised eyebrow and an expression that says I’m being silly for not keeping up. “What?” he asks.
Sometimes it can be easy to forget how little interaction normal ghosts have with the crossroads—how little interaction I had with them, before I started hanging out with Mary, before my niece went and sold herself into their service. Saying “the crossroads are dead” is sort of like announcing “the Easter Bunny has been killed.” Unless you’re talking to a bunch of kids with a thing for chocolate eggs, you’re not going to get much of a reaction. You’re talking about killing a thing most people don’t fully believe exists. It’s not a major concern.
For Nate, the crossroads are probably about as pressing and realistic as the Easter Bunny. Which is an odd thing to say about a force of nature that has been helping to dictate the structure and dangers of the world in which we exist, but there you have it.
“I don’t mean the crossroads lost their guardian spirit,” I say, with exquisite carefulness. “I mean the crossroads themselves are dead. They’ve been killed. They’re gone.”
He’s still looking blank, so I try to explain a little more.
“The crossroads gave Bobby Cross his car. They’re the reason that arrogant waste of skin is still racing around killing people and stuffing them into his gas tank.”
“Ah,” says Nate. “So you didn’t like them much, I’m guessing?”
“I didn’t—no, I didn’t like the crossroads! No one with any sense likes the crossroads! They’re a terrible, alien something that feeds on pain and misery! Or they were, before they finally got themselves murdered! Honestly, my main regret here is that I wasn’t the one who did it! I should have killed them! It would have been only fair!” I ball my hands into fists and stomp my foot, aware that I must look like a kid having a tantrum, but unable to work up the energy to care. Nate needs to listen to me.
We don’t have a hierarchy among the dead, not in terms the living would recognize. No kings, no presidents, no “listen to your elders.” It’s possible for your elders to look like they aren’t done toilet training. But people are people, and they tend to hold onto some of the prejudices they had while they were alive. Nate has always treated me like something of a little sister, old enough to get myself into trouble, young enough to need help getting out of it at the end. Usually, that doesn’t bother me much. Usually, we intersect for a few miles and a few laughs, and then we’re on our own again, leaving him none the wiser and me none the crankier. I guess today is the exception.
“The crossroads are—were—the closest thing I’ve ever encountered to pure, unadulterated evil. They have no redeeming features that I’ve ever been able to find. They’re bad. They hurt people because it amuses them to hurt people, and they don’t care how much damage they do in the process of making their bargains. And someone killed them. Finally. Killed them dead and destroyed them. No more crossroads.”
“Huh,” says Nate. “When did that happen?”
“Just recently,” I say. “It’s the reason the twilight is currently in total disarray.” The stretch we’re currently occupying seems almost normal, but the grass on the highway verge looks hungry, reaching ravenously toward us with fronds waving like a single vast, living anemone. I don’t like it. “Be careful not to go to any unfamiliar layers without backup. Even the routewitches have noticed. Their Queen left the Ocean Lady to ask me to help.”
“Is Apple still in charge over there?” asks Nate.
I nod. “She is. I don’t think she’s going to step down until something forces her to. She wants to take care of her people.”
“That’s good. Someone should be taking care of them.” Nate looks toward the horizon. I don’t know whether he was a routewitch when he was alive; it never seemed to matter enough for us to have a real discussion about it.
Then again, that seems to have applied to most things between us. I know how he died, and know what he did when he was alive, but I don’t know much of anything else about him. I know he doesn’t know much about me, other than that Bobby Cross killed me. I don’t think he even knows that I’m originally from Michigan. That suddenly seems like a pretty big omission.
“Hey, Nate? Where did you live before you died?” That should be a mild enough way of putting it.
His gaze sharpens. “Why the sudden curiosity, Rosie?”
“We’re friends, right? Friends should be able to ask each other where they’re from. Why are you calling me ‘Rosie’? You never did that before.” The anima mundi was responsible for dropping me in Bobby’s location, but suddenly, the question of why Bobby had been located in Warsaw, Indiana when I got dropped on him seems a lot more pressing.
Bobby is supposed to be hunting my loved ones. Well, I don’t have any loved ones in or near Warsaw. So why did he take a detour that wouldn’t help him accomplish his goals? Now that I think about it, he must have known about the Mesmer cage. It’s the sort of thing a living man who’s been playing with the dead for seventy years would absolutely have encountered before, and it’s not like Daisy and Timothy were being subtle. So why didn’t he empty it out and eat its chewy contents the way he eats everything else?
Why, unless he was using it to store spirits he was going to want access to later? I look at Nate with new horror in my eyes. Eight years. That’s nothing in the twilight, that’s not even long enough to go from vaguely missing someone to actually worrying about them, but for a cartographer, that’s an eternity. Why isn’t Nate more worried about what changed while he was locked away? He should be panicking, not looking at me with mild, patently artificial concern.
“When did Bobby double-cross you?” I ask, in a voice that feels like sandpaper on the back of my throat, like it’s scraping everything dry.
How long has Bobby Cross been doing this? Driving back along my trail so he can subvert the people who look like they might eventually be in a position to hurt me in some way? He got to Laura, and now it’s looking like he got to Nate, too, even though Nate was never anything more than a bit player in the story of my existence. Has he been following me around and suborning anyone who so much as looks at me twice this whole time? I suddenly want to rush home and ask Emma whether he ever tried to get to her, except that I know she’d tell me if I asked, and I don’t want to know. I know she’s on my side. That has to be enough.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Nate, voice too stiff, offense too feigned. He knows exactly what I’m talking about. He’s been waiting for this question since I pulled him out of that diner. Maybe that’s why he didn’t stand up when he saw me come through the door with Timothy. It’s not like I’m not recognizable. I may be the most recognizable hitchhiking ghost to walk the roads in the last hundred years, thanks to the dress that has become my trademark and iconography. They know the Ocean Lady by her road signs, they know Emma of the Last Dance by the changing gleam of her neon signs, and they know me by my green silk gown. That feels pretentious to say, but a thing can feel pretentious and still be as true as any other true thing. Reality doesn’t care about being arrogant. Reality just endures.
“Sure you do,” I say, and walk toward him, prowling like a predator on the track of some small, defenseless mammal. I’ve had a long time to learn how to stalk my prey, for all that I don’t like to think of myself as a hunter. But that’s what I am. That’s what a hitcher has to be. I hunt the people who are most likely to give me the rides I need in order to survive in my strange hinterland between life and death, in the places where the dead girls go. I’ve walked these roads too often to be anything other than what I was always intended to be.
“Bobby Cross,” I say. “We were just talking about him, remember? He’s a bad man with a bad car and a bad habit of running teenage girls off the road. Although I guess he’s learned to mix it up since he killed me. He causes accidents now. Kills a dozen people in one go so he can grab the single soul he needs. And I think he’s been responsible for a few hit-and-runs. What, do they not matter because they weren’t hiking in the wrong spot, didn’t upset the wrong rattlesnake? Don’t their deaths have enough weight for you?”
Nate backpedals as I get closer, the color draining from his cheeks, which is a nice trick, since it’s not like he has a functional vascular system. We mimic the living in so many tiny ways that even we aren’t necessarily aware of, because they only matter when they fail us. We blink, we wink, we sneeze, we sigh. We pale in the face of closing danger. It’s all a shadow show, a series of performances so natural and instinctive that we can’t help ourselves. We might do a better job of remembering how much we’ve lost if we could.
“I didn’t—I mean, Rose, I would never—” he stammers.
“Someone did,” I say calmly. “Someone always does. Maybe now’s when you start talking. I’m not the sort of enemy you want to make out here in the twilight. I have what someone recently referred to as ‘powerful friends,’ and most of them aren’t very forgiving when they think someone’s been double-crossing the people they care about.”
“You don’t even know how frightening you are, do you?” he whispers.
I narrow my eyes. “I don’t have a problem with that since I’m currently trying to frighten you. Being terrifying is part of my job these days. Looking for rides, hunting assholes, and being terrifying. Be terrified. Tell me what I want to know.”
Nate takes a deep breath he doesn’t need, in through his nose and out through his mouth, turning his face away from me, toward the high, waving grasses that line the footpath the sidewalk has become. They’re probably something prehistoric, something from the same original era as my patchwork saurian friend, and they linger here out of habit, anchored by the love of some paleobotanist who read Jurassic Park too many times before middle school.
“Bobby had been talking to me for a while,” he admits, voice soft. “He said he didn’t want to hurt you anymore. He just wanted to discuss what happened, and help you understand how sorry he was.”
“And you believed him?”
“Not really. It didn’t match the story you’d told me, and your story matched the situation so perfectly that one of you had to be lying. I didn’t think it was you. But he was . . . compelling. He knows how to spin a good lie, that Bobby Cross. Knows better than he necessarily realizes. He just wanted to talk. So he asked me to keep an eye on you and tell him when I knew where you were going. It was a little, harmless thing. It didn’t have the weight to hurt anyone. Certainly not you. I don’t know what would have the weight to hurt you, Rose Marshall, the Phantom Prom Date. I didn’t understand why you were so afraid of him.”
“And then what happened?” I prompt because something must have happened. Something always happens. If nothing had happened, Nate wouldn’t have been missing for eight road-changing, technologically fraught years. He would have been here this whole time, traveling down roads parallel to my own, sometimes by my side, more often left to his own devices. He would be an integral part of my story, not just a footnote. But something happened.
“Bobby came to see me, and he was mad. No. He was furious. He said you’d cheated him, that he’d tried to talk to you and you’d slashed his tires and called him a bastard, left him stranded in the middle of a small town in Texas, where the road signs all told lies and the local routewitches navigated by the roadkill. It was bad. He said that if I didn’t tell him everything he wanted to know, if I didn’t prove that I was on his side once and for all, he’d shove me into his gas tank and get a few hundred miles out of me.”
Texas, about eight years ago . . .
“He was talking about the bus accident,” I blurt.
It had been one of those hot summer days that always burn brightest in the desert, the sort of day when the living felt no need to be wary of the dead, because surely there was no way we’d be out and about and making mischief. Dallas in July is not one of my favorite destinations, although it’s better than Phoenix by a long shot. At least the roads usually don’t melt. Melting roads are bullshit.
The bus had been full, a decent mix of tourists and locals, and I’d been drawn to it by the faint taste of rosewater and wormwood in the air, like a bittersweet perfume designed entirely to make my nose itch. The driver, a routewitch I’d seen a few times during earlier trips to Dallas, had nodded at my approach, handing me a coat and letting me board without asking for a fare. That hadn’t earned me as many odd looks as the fact that I was wearing a canvas raincoat in the middle of the summer. No one sane wears a jacket during a Texas summer, which is just one more reason I try to avoid them. I don’t like making myself any more visible than I absolutely have to, especially not with literally everyone carrying around their own personal camera these days. It was easier back when almost no one was likely to snap a photo of a stranger on the street.
Not all ghosts photograph. The ones who have been reduced to little more than mist and moans tend to distort film rather than being captured on it. But ghosts like me, who take on flesh and form and walk among the living like we belong there, we photograph just fine. Not a problem necessarily—it’s not like I have living family who could recognize me—but as the evidence builds up, as we appear in the background of pictures from California to Connecticut, as facial recognition software starts connecting the dots, well . . .
It’s going to be real hard to get rides when no one wants to stop and pick up the dead girl anymore.
I sat toward the back of the bus, near a nice Spanish-speaking family with five children, all dolled up in their Sunday best. So many shiny shoes, so much carefully crafted taffeta. It was a pleasant change from the group of angry teens toward the front. Sitting with them would have been more age appropriate, but I tend to come off as a little Miss Goodie Two-Shoes when I try to interact with modern teens, and that was a complication I didn’t need, not when I was trying to shake Bobby Cross off of my trail. He’d been following me for three nights, dipping in and out of the twilight while I ran, going truck stop to truck stop. It was like a game to him.
Well, I was tired of playing. Despite the smell of wormwood on the bus, which is almost always an indicator that Bobby is planning to harm the person it’s clinging to, I was holding fast to the narrow idea that he wouldn’t possibly cause an accident involving this many potential victims. It was messy. It was unpredictable. It was a bad idea.
And all those things were true, but still, an antique-looking car of no discernible make or model but with very classic 1950s lines came blasting out of the traffic ahead of us, driving straight toward us, like the driver was playing a very stupid, very impulsive game of chicken with the entire bus. Which is exactly what Bobby was doing. Our driver swore, loudly enough that he would probably have been fired if he had survived what came next, and hauled on the wheel, trying to avoid the collision.
He did it. He managed to avoid not only Bobby’s car, but all the other cars on the road around us. He couldn’t avoid the bank, however, which was unable to dodge on account of it being a building, fixed to its foundations. We were going far too fast by the time the bus hopped the curb for his frantic pumping of the brakes to do us any good. That was probably less Bobby’s fault than some essential failure of the mechanics, unless this bus had been targeted because Bobby had already sabotaged it, something I wasn’t entirely willing to put past him. He never met an overly complicated plan he didn’t want to commit to and make even more prone to possible failure.
The bus ploughed into the front of the bank at what passed for top speed. People screamed. Several of the angry teenagers were thrown out of their seats, one landing at a neck-breaking angle that was followed by total motionlessness and more screams from the people around her. Three of the little church-going children went flying. I clung to the pole nearest to me, feeling my insides slosh vigorously around, aware that the crash couldn’t kill me, but that it could sure as hell hurt.
Then we were shuddering to a stop, all our momentum bled off into the chaos of the crash. Several of the windows had broken on impact. Several of the passengers weren’t moving. The driver wasn’t swearing anymore. I forced my legs to unlock, forced myself to stand, and pulled my way along the tilting aisle toward the front. Several of the angry teens shouted and wailed and grabbed for me, but I was almost certain all the teens trying to stop me were alive, and so I ignored them in favor of continuing onward.
The driver was slumped over his steering wheel, back hunched in a manner consistent with massive internal crush injuries. He wasn’t going to be getting up again. This had been his final ride. I still paused to touch his fingers, to see if maybe a ghostly hand would latch onto mine and allow me to pull him to his feet. His skin was already starting to cool, and if he was planning to muster up the energy for a haunting, he didn’t feel any need to kick it off for me.
The front window showed a horrifying view of the bank lobby, which had somehow become the street right in front of us. There were bodies. Two clerks and a patron, all of whom had been too slow to get out of the way when we came hurtling into what they must have assumed was a safe space.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath of the hot, abruptly rancid bus air—adding vomit and several other human bodily fluids to the already cramped public transit vehicle had not improved the atmosphere—and let go of the coat and borrowed flesh that anchored me to the scene of the accident. The bystanders were already going to be confused by what they’d been through. Anything they said about a disappearing girl would be written off as the babbling of traumatized people who’d just watched their friends get killed. This way, I kept my own face out of the papers.
As soon as I dropped into the twilight, things changed.
The air on the bus was still fetid, but it acquired a thick, swampy undertone, as if the corpses on the floor had been rotting for weeks, unburied and unattended to. One of the angry teens who had been motionless only moments before was up on her knees, crouching next to her own body, hands over her face, swaying gently back and forth. I took a step toward her, hand raised to offer kindness or comfort, whichever she seemed more inclined to accept.
“Are you all right?” I asked, the language of the living once again failing to make the necessary transition into the lands of the dead. No, she wasn’t all right: she was dead, that was her body on the floor in front of her, her life hadn’t just changed, it had ended, and nothing would ever return what she’d just lost. “All right” was now and forever in another time zone.
She lowered her hands and I saw that she hadn’t been covering her face; her face was gone, replaced by a smooth stretch of skin pulled tight across the topography of her skull. She was somehow still keening, making the sounds I associated with weeping, despite the absence of both eyes and tear ducts. I took a step backward, stopping when the front of the bus bumped into my thighs. It was here with us in the twilight, poor broken vessel that had failed to keep its passengers safe as it had promised to do. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, and none of this should have been happening.
One of the children who’d gone flying when we hit the bank was sitting up, her taffeta dress askew around her, a long scratch down one cheek. She looked around, expression utterly baffled, a bafflement which only grew as she saw that her parents—both of whom had survived the crash—weren’t there. She opened her tiny rosebud of a mouth to wail, and the whole bus shook with the impact of her grief and dismay.
Oh, swell, an infant poltergeist. Just what we needed.
I turned toward the little girl, edging carefully past the faceless teen, and felt my dress unfurl around me like the petals of a flower, brushing against my ankles. The teen turned her head to track me. Her friend was just beginning to stir. Unlike her, he had made the transition into the twilight with his face fully intact, although he had a large gash across his left temple. It wasn’t bleeding. He didn’t have blood anymore. It would probably be a while before he noticed that, assuming he noticed at all. The wound was unlikely to become a major part of his new identity, and without him remembering and reasserting it, it would probably close and fade away.
“Angela?” he said, reaching for his faceless friend. She didn’t try to move away. “Hey, what’s wrong? Where is everyone else?”
She turned toward him, and he stopped talking, growing paler and paler as his eyes bulged and his throat worked. I suppose finding a friend faceless and weeping over their own corpse made it sort of difficult to deny that things had changed, or to pretend they were going to be okay again. It was definitely a ruder awakening than I had enjoyed in the aftermath of my own accident.
I scooped the little petticoated poltergeist into my arms and bounced her, twice, like I thought I could shake the inner earthquake out of her. She sniffled and slung her arms around my neck, too shocked and unhappy to register the fact that I was a total stranger. We were both cold as the grave, and so she felt almost warm in my arms when compared to the chill of the twilight around us. She asked me a question in sharply interrogative Spanish. I shook my head. “I’m sorry, button,” I said. “I don’t speak Spanish, but your parents aren’t here. They’re still alive. They can’t see you.”
The bus shook around us again, and I heard the distinct sound of brakes screeching to a halt. I stood, little girl still cradled to my chest, and moved to peer out the window at the broken ribbon of the road.
Bobby Cross smirked at me through the window of his car, revving his engine. The sound was incredibly loud in the relative quiet of the twilight, completely drowning out Angela’s ongoing sobs. It was too much. I turned and lowered the little girl to the nearest bench seat, unwinding her arms from around my neck. Her body was on the floor, although she hadn’t noticed it yet, along with the body of one of her brothers. Children are more likely to leave ghosts than adults, if not as likely as teens; there was still a decent chance he was going to wake up and join his sister in the twilight. The thought had barely finished forming before another body appeared, an older woman dropping to the floor out of nowhere, one hand clutching at her chest. No ghost materialized to accompany the body, which made sense. She was old enough that she’d probably done everything she truly wanted to do, and she had the time to come to grips with the fact that one day the world would exist without her in it. That’s the big hurdle, the thing many people can’t get over. That the world was before they were here and will be after they’re gone. Not everyone can manage the mental adjustment, no matter how old they are. But for the people who can, it tends to be absolute.
The little girl sniffled and reached for me, clearly not prepared to give up the closest thing she had found to comfort since the world shook and tore and her family disappeared. I pushed her hands gently away, shaking my head. “No,” I said. “No, I can’t hold you right now. I’m sorry. I need you to stay here and wait for me.”
I couldn’t understand her, but maybe she could understand me. Osmosis doesn’t always come with fluency where language is concerned. She stopped reaching for me, slumping back in the seat and sniffling. It was such a beautiful example of exaggerated misery that I would have laughed, if she hadn’t been a preschool-age child whose life had just been brought to an abrupt and terrible end. Instead, I straightened, grabbing a chunk of broken glass from the bus floor, and walked toward the door.
The mechanism that opened it was bent and broken from the crash. It still swung open for me, more familiar with its job than with the damage. Bobby grinned through his car window as I stepped down to the pavement, showing me every perfect, gleaming tooth in his head. I clutched my makeshift weapon and stared at him down the length of my nose, hoping he could somehow feel the force of my hatred and disdain.
Maybe he couldn’t feel it, but he could see it in my face, because the grin slipped off of his, replaced by a petulant pout that would have fit better on the face of the dead little girl behind me. He rolled his window down, looking at me with clotted, sullen hatred.
“It’s nice to see you, too, Rosie-my-girl,” he said.
I didn’t fight Bobby Cross, not then, not before Persephone and everything she’d done to change my place in the twilight, but I looked at his petulant pout, still somehow smug, still proud of what he’d done, and rage bubbled up like acid in the center of what passed for my soul. Before I could think or allow my natural instinct to run to overwhelm me, I screamed and lunged, hands raised, chunk of broken glass poised to stab.
Bobby shied back, pressing himself into his seat. I stopped before my arm could brush against the door, hand shaking, the tip of my glass shard barely an inch from the skin of his throat. “Rosie, if you keep acting like this, I’m going to think you’re not happy to see me,” he drawled, expression going tight, throat working frantically as he tried to press himself even further back, away from me and the danger I had suddenly come to represent. There was a new caution in his eyes, and I realized, dimly, that he had never considered me a threat before. I had spent too much of our acquaintance running away from him and his damn demon car.
His hand moved, groping for the handle. I realized what he was going to do barely a beat before he did it, and threw myself backward, away from the opening door. My skirt fluttered in the breeze generated by my motion, almost touching the metal before it settled against my legs. I pressed my free hand to my chest, trying to still the senseless, useless pounding of my heart, which felt like it was going to break out of its cage and run away without the rest of me. You have no blood to pump, I thought. Your job is over. Stop it. It didn’t stop.
Now back in his more comfortable dynamic of predator and prey, Bobby slung one long, blue-jeaned leg out of the car and stood, sauntering toward me with the casual ease of a man who knew that his victory was inevitable, if somewhat inconveniently delayed.
I wondered whether he realized that put him between me and his car. I wondered whether he cared.
“Rosie-my-girl! You’re an unexpected surprise on this fine Texas day!” he drawled. “Did you miss me too much to stay away?”
“You’ve been chasing me for days, you bastard,” I spat. “All I do is try to stay away from you.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “This is all your fault, isn’t it? All these poor dead people, that much more weight to add to those pretty little shoulders of yours. If you would just stop running away and let me finish what I started, this would all be over. No more graves with your profile on the headstone. No more weeping mothers damning your name.”
“Go to hell,” I spat.
He took a step toward me, but his eyes were on the bus, from which the faint sound of sobbing drifted. He knew there was at least one ghost onboard, someone innocent and new who wouldn’t know what to hit and what to avoid, who would be an easy target for his hands. “I’m sorry you had to go through the accident,” he said. “It wasn’t my intention. I thought you’d be smart enough to disappear before impact.”
“You’re a bastard,” I said, my voice low and filled with more anger than I’d realized my body could contain. I matched his step forward with one of my own, intending to hook my hands around his throat and squeeze until he remembered he was mortal, until I felt better about my choices. The chunk of glass dug into my palm, and I realized I had a better choice. Bobby seemed to realize it at the same time, because he took a step back, toward his patiently waiting car.
“Now Rosie, don’t go getting any nasty ideas in that pretty head of yours, you know it never goes well when you do—” he said, stopping when I lunged again, shoving the glass toward his face. The edge caught his cheek, opening the flesh in a long, thin line that had to be shallow, given the angle I was standing at. Then he was scrambling away, back to the car, back to the safety of his familiar driver’s seat, where he could watch the world with a smirk on his face.
“You don’t have any cover, Rose!” he shouted. “Stay here and you’re mine, or you can leave whatever’s inside that bus for me to take care of! Are they worth it? You’ve been running for so damn long. Is this where you stop?”
No. No, it was not. The people on that bus were already dead, and I was dead, too, and the only thing that made my existence more valuable than theirs was the fact that it was mine. I’d been fighting to stay away from Bobby Cross for so long that I couldn’t let this be how I went down. I dropped the chunk of glass to the ground, where it shattered, and let go of the twilight, falling back up into the daylight, where the authorities were helping the survivors of a bus crash stagger back into the sun, casting around for the car which had caused the accident in the first place, yet had somehow managed to slip away in the chaos. The air was thick with dust, and the smell of wormwood and rosewater was gone, drowned out by blood and gasoline. I ducked into the shadows before anyone could notice me and my idiosyncratic, outdated dress. Then I slipped away, heading down the street as quickly as I could without actually breaking into a run.
When I was far enough away—six blocks—I dropped back into the twilight and kept going, away from Bobby, away from his terrible car, away from the new-minted ghosts I had abandoned to their fate. I would never forget them, I knew, and if they survived, they would never remember me. I was unimportant, a footnote in their stories, and that was better than being anything else.
Back in the present, Nate is staring at me, not sure what I’m remembering, not sure whether he should be here or whether he should be taking advantage of my distraction to get away. I flash him a tight smile. “I remember the incident. He wasn’t entirely honest with you. Big surprise. It wasn’t his tires I slashed. It was his pretty fucking face. With a piece of twilight glass, no less.”
Nate gapes at me. “But twilight glass doesn’t exist in the daylight. It’s . . . it’s ghost glass. There’s no way you could have cut him with it! He’s alive.”
“He’s alive, but he’s spent so many years down among the dead that it’s started rubbing off on him.” How did I miss the significance of the moment when it was actually happening? I should have realized at the time that it represented a sea change, a shift in the status quo of Bobby Cross’ rampage across the twilight. Even with the crossroads protecting him, he’d fallen deep enough into our world, our rules, to be hurt by our weapons. He’d become vulnerable. I was too focused on getting away from him to stop and think about how I’d been able to hurt him, and so he was able to spend another eight years terrorizing the dead. That ends now.
“Please don’t hate me, Rose,” says Nate. “Bobby said he’d changed. He said he didn’t want to hurt you anymore. And I . . .” He trails off. He didn’t necessarily believe Bobby when he said such big, ridiculous things, but he wanted an excuse to carry tales out of school without feeling like a monster.
Many ghosts are cowards. Getting something after your life ends can feel like a blessing you didn’t earn, like the universe screwed up and let you stay in the theater after the play ended. Not having that afterlife snatched away becomes the only thing that matters. It’s silly, how much people who have already died care about surviving, but I can’t fault them for it. I’m the same way. I care so much more about staying safe now that I’m dead than I ever did when I was alive.
I can’t be mad at Nate, because as much as I want to be a hero, stalwart pillar of goodness and righteousness, I would probably have made the same call he did. Better to risk someone else than to risk yourself, and haven’t I made that choice over and over again since I died? Running away when people are in danger, leaving other ghosts to risk their necks with Bobby Cross while I get the hell out of Dodge? It’s not something I’m proud of, particularly. It’s just something that I am.
I smile thinly at Nate. “Do you have a way of contacting him?” I ask.
“What?”
“If you’d been telling him things before he stranded you in that Mesmer cage, you must have had a way of contacting him. Do you still have a way of contacting him?” The smell of asphodel seems to curl through the air around us, becoming cloyingly sweet and almost overbearing. Nate doesn’t seem to notice, which is a little bit distressing. I don’t know how cartographers navigate—my particular perfume-based method of assessing the dangers around me may or may not overlap—but this is a sign from the Lady of the Dead herself. I would expect it to apply to all ghosts in range, not only to me.
Nate nods, very slowly. “I do,” he says, and dips a hand into the pocket of his jeans, pulling out a small blue disk that I recognize, after a moment’s silent study, as a chunk of polished Fordite. The color doesn’t match Bobby’s car, but I doubt that matters much. “He gave me this. It gets warm when I talk to it, and he shows up as soon as he can. Why?”
Fordite is a man-made gem in every sense of the word—it’s petrified, polished automotive paint, chipped from the Detroit assembly lines. Some people treat it like a precious stone, turning it into jewelry and other, even fancier accessories, not seeming to care that it’s just waste paint, or that a lot of it was made before modern safety standards were put into place, and consequentially can contain a truly stunning quantity of lead. The living have always been easily distracted by beauty, in all its many forms.
“I want you to send him a message. Tell him you’re out of the Mesmer cage, and you’re pissed. Tell him you need to talk.” My smile is just this side of feral. Nate shies away. “Tell him you’re waiting, and that he needs to come to you.”
Where I’ll be waiting, too.