THE SKY CYCLES THROUGH COLORS above us, bruised purple to deep, drowning sapphire blue to that brittle false dawn combination of red, gold, and coral pink that only seems to exist in the very sweetest of dreams. The wind whispers through the prehistoric grass, and I sit on a rock that has probably been here as long as there’s been a continent on this part of the planet, picking at my nails and watching Nate pace back and forth on the slim section of road in front of me.
“You really went to the Underworld,” he says. “You really met Persephone.”
“I really did,” I say, lowering my hand. “I don’t know how many ways I can tell you it happened before you’ll start believing me. I’ve tried blunt, I’ve tried poetic, and I’m about to try annoyed. I don’t like repeating myself.”
“Was she nice?”
He sounds like he needs her to have been nice. I hesitate. “She was . . . she was kind,” I say finally. “When she was looking at me, it felt like nothing else mattered, like I could be happy forever if she just said it was important for me to try. She loved me before she met me, and there’s nothing I could ever do that would make her stop loving me. She loves all the dead. Whether or not we linger, she loves us. And even when we fight and disagree and betray each other, she keeps on loving us, because that’s what she’s for.”
“People aren’t for things, Rose.”
But Persephone isn’t people, any more than the anima mundi is people, or the Ocean Lady, or any of the other shadows that control our movement through the twilight. She’s an idea elevated to the status of an individual, and she doesn’t get all the twisty turns and tricks that make up a person. She doesn’t need them. When you’re an idea that walks like a woman, you get to be simple if you want to. Persephone is simple. All the divinities I’ve met have been simple. Oh, they have depths and undertows. They can get complicated real fast if that’s what they feel they need to do. But on a basic, “how difficult do I need this to be” level, they’re simple.
“Persephone is,” I say mulishly, and I’m right, and I don’t know how to make him understand, short of sending him on a katabasis of his own. But those are difficult, for the dead. Blame Orpheus; blame Eurydice. They set a lot of the base rules, and one of those rules says traveling into the Underworld and then making it back out is for the living. I was able to accomplish it only because Bobby Cross had broken so many rules trying to make me vulnerable. I went as the living and I came out as the dead. Nate would never get past Cerberus in his current state.
Nate scoffs and resumes his pacing. I lean back on my hands and tilt my face up toward the sky, watching the thin ribbons of color as they shift and dance above me.
Everything has brought us here. The crossroads are dead. I have Persephone’s blessing on my wrist and the proof of her protection on my back; there’s every chance that Bobby’s car can’t touch me now, not with its patron dead and my patron still standing strong. All that remains is facing him down.
A thin ribbon of heat uncurls in my belly, too bright and sharp for the twilight. It feels like the sort of thing that should haunt the living and leave the dead alone. I press a hand against my stomach, trying to shove the heat back down. It doesn’t belong here. We’re in the twilight; we’re always cold. But this heat doesn’t care where we are or what its presence means. It burns, until I start to wonder whether eating food inside a Mesmer cage is enough to give a ghost indigestion. I don’t want it to be. I don’t want any of this. I don’t have any answers. I’m not sure there are answers to have. We’re in uncharted waters now. We have been since the crossroads fell. They were such a big part of the twilight, even if they weren’t meant to be, that without them, things are shaky.
The sound of a car’s engine revving splits the night like a knife. It’s distant. We wouldn’t be able to hear it at all if we were still in the daylight, where there are so many other sounds available to cloud the air and confuse the issue. But it’s coming closer.
I take my hand away from my stomach. Nate stops pacing, head snapping up as he stares down the road toward the horizon. Then he hurries toward me, taking shelter in the prehistoric grass, where maybe there’s a chance he won’t be immediately seen.
“What did you say to him?” I ask as I stand, shaking my skirt clean of grass and dust, leaving it to hang loose and easy around me.
“That I was out of the Mesmer cage and I wanted to talk,” he says, casting quick, anxious glances at the road. “I didn’t say anything about you being here. He doesn’t know.”
Except that he saw me in that gas station parking lot, and while Bobby is a lot of things, he’s not a stupid man. He’ll draw the line between “Rose Marshall was in Warsaw, Indiana” and “an old friend of hers, who I thought I had safely locked away in a Mesmer cage, is suddenly calling after eight years of silence.” Nate is waving a red flag in front of a bull right now. Bobby’s coming in expecting a fight.
Bobby’s going to get one. I bend and scoop up a handful of earth, letting it trickle between my fingers as I straighten.
“Lady of the Dead, I know you are always with me, and I am always with you,” I say, voice low. Nate glances at me, and then back to the road. Bobby is a much more urgent danger right now than me deciding to be a little weird. Anyone who’s ever met me is used to me being weird. Weirdness is part and parcel of the overall Rose Marshall experience.
“I know you guard and guide my steps, and I know it’s not my place to ask you for more than you have already offered, that I should be grateful for even scraps of your grace.” The sound of Bobby’s engine is getting closer. I talk faster. “But I must ask you to aid me, as I confront a great darkness that has long preyed upon your people and will end tonight.” The last of the dirt slips through my fingers, leaving me empty-handed. I sigh. “In your name, Persephone, may I persevere.”
I don’t actually know how people prayed to Persephone back when she was a going concern in the daylight, but I know it wasn’t with folded hands and dainty kneeling. She’s the Goddess of the Spring as well as the Lady of the Dead, and touching her soil seems like the best way to show her what respect I can. I brush my fingers against my dress and turn my attention to Nate.
“Well?” I ask. “What are you hiding back here with me for? Get out there, or Bobby’s going to drive right by.”
“I want Bobby to drive by,” says Nate, in a fierce whisper. He’s scared, skin of his face drawn so tight that the whites show all the way around his eyes. “I want nothing to do with him. I’m sorry I helped him keep track of you, but that doesn’t mean I want to die by way of an apology.”
“You can’t die, Nate,” I say. “You’re already dead.” Then I reach over, grab his arm, and swing him away from me, toward the road. He isn’t expecting that; no one ever expects me to get physical. He stumbles, and his momentum carries him out of the tall grass, onto the pavement.
This is a farmer’s field, of sorts. All fields in the twilight are farmer’s fields. Fields sometimes have tools hidden in them, abandoned by careless farmhands or dropped when a farmer suffered a massive coronary, loved enough in life to leave a shadow in the spirit world. I step daintily over to where Nate stumbled, bending to feel around for whatever may have tripped him.
I only have to move a few handfuls of loam out of the way before my fingers find a wooden shaft, smooth and polished and about as big around as both my thumbs put together. I work my way through the roots of the tall prehistoric grasses to get my hands around it, gripping tight and tugging upward, away from the ground. This might seem a little convenient, but there are no coincidences among the dead, and I just offered Persephone my prayers. The twilight is malleable to the Lady of the Dead. If she wants me armed, I will be. Her will is law.
I pull. The grass resists the resurrection of its property from dead, discarded thing to usable tool. I pull harder. There is a vast ripping sound, louder than it should be given the size of the affected area, and I stumble backward, a scythe in my hands. I stare at it. I’ve seen this scythe before. It’s a common piece of iconography among the dead, carried by the Dullahan like Pippa, assigned by stories to the Grim Reaper himself, a figure I’m fairly sure doesn’t actually exist, but who would be pretty fun at a party if he did. There should be no way this specific tool is familiar, but it is. I saw the anima mundi swinging it in her fields when she was wearing Mary’s face.
It’s not just Persephone looking out for me at this point.
The sound of Bobby’s engine roars closer. The ribbon of heat in my belly widens and deepens, becoming a chasm, until it feels like the fires of Hell are burning inside of me, summoned by the closeness of my conflict. I clutch the scythe tighter and bow my head in momentary gratitude.
“Thank you,” I say. The field, which has already given up its bounty, and has nothing more to offer, gives no reply. The grass rustles. I raise my head and turn, back toward Nate, back toward the road.
The sound of Bobby’s engine is so loud as to be nearly overwhelming. I stay where I am, letting the grass close around me, letting the field enfold me and keep me as safe as anything is going to keep me right now, under these circumstances, which are so far from ideal that they can’t see it on the sunniest of days. But laying an ambush for Bobby, even a bad one, requires a certain amount of discretion, and that means staying where I am until I don’t have any choice but to move.
Bobby’s brakes squeal as he pulls up level with Nate, a faintly baffled expression on his eternally pretty face. “Didn’t think I’d see you outside that diner until I decided to come and let you out,” he says. “What do you think you’re doing, breaking loose without my permission?”
I didn’t tell Nate to lie for me, and so it’s not a surprise when he says, “Rose Marshall broke the Mesmer cage and let me out. She broke us all out, stared down the old lady who made the cage, and snapped the runes so we could all leave.”
Bobby clucks his tongue and shakes his head, still not looking deep enough into the grass to see me lurking. “She’s always been a damn busybody, that girl,” he says. “Sometimes I think killing her might have been a mistake on my part. It’s not like I’ve gained anything from it, and she’s caused me enough trouble over the years for ten ordinary ghosts. I’d be better off if she’d gotten old and died fat and wrinkly, with a whole passel of routewitch grandbabies around her bedside.”
“Maybe,” says Nate. “I don’t know. She’s always been nice to me.”
“Because you’re not the man who killed her, you numbskull,” says Bobby.
The grass rustles and I’m gone, moving through the twilight like a moth moves through the air, letting the ground drop out from under my feet until pavement replaces soil and I’m standing on the road behind Bobby’s car. I’ve never done anything like this before, and I shouldn’t have been able to do it now, but the scythe is still clutched firmly in my hands, and this mode of movement feels right, feels true . . . feels mine. The blade is dull and riddled with rust, but it’s what I have, it’s what Persephone and the anima mundi saw fit to offer me, and I’m not foolish enough to look a gift weapon in the blade. Instead, I tap the tip of it against Bobby’s bumper, the sound ringing through the cool evening air like the chiming of a church bell, and I clear my throat.
“Most people don’t concern themselves all that much with the comfort and contentment of their murderers,” I say. “Hi, Bobby.”
He leans out the window and cranes his neck around so he can look at me, and there is a cool resignation in his eyes. He’s been waiting for this confrontation longer than I have, maybe, since he fell into place behind me on Sparrow Hill Road back in Michigan and made the decision to gun his engine, to run an innocent girl over the edge of the drop-off and let the chips fall where they would. The heat in my belly burns brighter, an all-consuming flame that hurts even as it flares. It doesn’t care about me. If it cares about anything at all, it’s that Bobby burns here for what he’s done, the damage he’s done to the twilight, the affronts he’s thrown in the faces of the gods and goddesses whose task it is to keep us as close to safe as a dead thing can ever be. Nate stumbles backward, into the clutching depths of the ancient grass, seeing, somehow, that his part in this little shadow show has been fulfilled. He was never going to be called upon to see this to its end. No. That’s down to Bobby and to me.
Somewhere in the distance, an animal bellows. My friend from the gas tanks. It may not join us here, but it remembers me, and everything is narrowing toward this moment, toward this point and this place, where Bobby and I finally look each other in the eye as something resembling equals.
“Get out of the car, Bobby,” I say, and my voice doesn’t shake, not even a little, and I’m so proud of that. I’m burning up inside, with a scavenged scythe in my hands and a man who willingly betrayed me as my only immediate ally, and my voice isn’t shaking. This is all I could ever have hoped for.
Well, surviving would also be nice.
“Make me,” he says, voice cool and self-assured. He doesn’t look nervous. He doesn’t look like this is anything to worry about. I’m just a hitchhiking ghost, after all. Maybe I’m the one who got away—over and over and over again—but I’m not a poltergeist or a gather-grim or anything else that could endanger him. He knew what he was doing when he ran me off the road. He knew that I would never become a threat. Very few ghosts can be, to a man like him. A man who’s had decades to run the roads like he owns them, like there’s nothing in the world that can hurt him.
It makes me so angry. I raise my scythe and slam the point of it down on his trunk, slicing a jagged line through the paint. The fire in my stomach roars approval at the violence of the action. My heart, which hasn’t needed to beat in more than fifty years, stutters in my chest. I’ve never done anything like this before. There’s a good reason Bobby isn’t afraid of me. Hitchhikers run. It’s what we’re made to do. That bus ride was the only time I didn’t run from him, and the first time I felt this ribbon of heat in my stomach, this pulsing, devouring heat. The urge to drop the scythe and flee is strong. The fire is stronger.
Bobby’s eyes narrow when I hit his car and widen when I lift the scythe and step back. I shouldn’t have been able to do that. The car should have trapped me as soon as I touched it, like flypaper latching down on some innocent insect that happened to drift too close.
“Now, Rosie-my-girl, I know you and I have had our differences, but that doesn’t mean you should be taking them out on my car. How’d you like it if I took them out on your car?”
“You leave Gary out of this,” I snap.
“Why? Because he used to be alive? He’s just a car now.”
“I’ve noticed,” I mutter, unable to quite keep the resentment out of my tone.
“Aw, trouble in paradise?” There’s a click as Bobby unlocks the door. “If my car’s a fair target for you, your car’s a fair target for me. You don’t know where my good ol’ girl came from.”
“Yeah, I do. She came from the crossroads, which means she was never alive, and she’s not alive now. She’s a ghost trap created by something that should never have interfered with the twilight, and she doesn’t belong here, any more than you do.” I clutch the shaft of the scythe, twisting it between my hands. “She’s not even really a car.”
Bobby’s hands aren’t on the wheel anymore. The car still lurches forward a few inches as its engine roars. I’ve managed to offend the ghost trap. That’s a new one, even for me.
“You need to get the hell over here, Bobby,” I say. “No more hiding behind what the crossroads gave you.”
“You have a scythe, and I don’t even have a pocketknife,” says Bobby. “How’s that fair?”
“How was it fair when you decided to run a teenage girl who didn’t even know if the afterlife existed off the road before she could make it to her prom?” I ask, voice sharp. “How was it fair when you talked a routewitch into slitting her own throat just so you could talk trash about me to Persephone? You killed a woman so you could lie to a goddess. You’re a misogynistic asshole, Bobby. It’s probably a good thing you decided to leave Hollywood and mess with the dead instead. You couldn’t have done anything good for modern culture.”
He pulls back into the car, and a second later, he’s spinning the wheel and the car is lurching forward, into a wide turn that clips the grass by the side of the road. Then he’s racing toward me, moving fast, moving straight for me, making no effort to swerve. I bend my knees and adjust my grip on the scythe. Maybe this is stupid. Maybe it’s the right thing to do. It’s not like he can hurt me since I’m dead and this is the twilight.
Then the car slams into my thighs, knocking me off balance, knocking the air out of my lungs, sending me hurtling backward and forward at the same time. I barely manage to keep my grasp on the scythe as my forehead bounces off the hood of Bobby’s car. He keeps driving forward, pushing me along with him. It feels almost like I’m flying.
I can see him through the windscreen, teeth bared in a manic grin, hands tight on the wheel. He looks incredibly pleased with himself. The fire in my stomach is still burning, bright and painful in a way that the impact wasn’t. He can’t hurt me. This burning can. It feels like it’s eating me alive from the inside, like it’s somehow determined to keep getting stronger until I am inevitably devoured. I have no interest in being eaten alive . . . or undead, as the slightly more accurate case might be. I don’t breathe or age, but I think and I feel and I exist, and maybe all the “is this life or not” has been nothing more than inflated semantics. It changes nothing. So it doesn’t matter.
I raise my hands and hammer the shaft of the scythe down on Bobby’s hood again and again, like it’s a rolling pin, using the length of it as the weapon. The dent starts shallow but rapidly grows as we accelerate down the road, scarring the paint. I still can’t say what color it is. That’s a problem for someone else, someone less pinned to the hood of a car like a butterfly under glass. I slam the scythe down again, digging my deepest gouge yet into the paint. Bobby leans on his horn.
The sound is like the roaring of some impossible beast, and I stop hammering as a plan begins to form. The prehistoric grass is the connection, and it’s still waving all around us. The blast will have been audible for miles. There’s nothing here to stop the sound, not even the memory of some beloved building that burned down but was remembered enough to manifest in the twilight.
The burning in my belly has been joined by a tingling in my hands and arms where they’re pressed against the car. The hood is starting to take on a recognizable color, a delicate, familiar seafoam green. I glance down at the bodice of my dress, unsurprised to see that the color is bleeding out of it, vanishing into the paint. Bobby’s car may have been weakened by the loss of the crossroads and be warded off by Persephone’s blessing, but it’s still a ghost trap, and it’s still hungry. My corsage means it hasn’t consumed me yet. It doesn’t mean it never will.
I lift the scythe, slamming it down again just as hard as I can. More scratches open in the rapidly greening paint. My dress must be halfway gray by now; at this rate, they’re going to have to find something else to call me, since “the Girl in the Green Silk Gown” isn’t going to be accurate for much longer. But at least it’s just green. It’s just fabric. This dress has been with me for decades. It’s not a part of me. I have an existence beyond and outside it. And apart from the burning in my belly, I’m not in pain. The car hasn’t been able to do more than pull on my arms and hands, numbing them and setting them tingling. It’s not pulling the color from my skin or the flesh from the memory of my bones.
“I must be really frustrating for you, huh?” I demand, and hit it again, and again, and again.
Bobby leans on the horn a second time, sending the roar of an unspeakable beast echoing across the fields. This time, there’s an answer, just as loud, just as unspeakable, just as difficult for my modern ears to comprehend. But there’s a difference. The second bellow is more familiar, and more welcome, and more mine. It belongs to the ghost of a line that failed, the aggregate memory of thousands of dead lizard kings, who once claimed this entire world for their own. Behind the glass, Bobby shies back, eyes wide in shock and what looks very much like horror. He doesn’t slow down. The man’s a racer, always has been, and he still thinks speed will be enough to save him.
I’m raising the scythe to hit the hood again when he stomps on the brakes and comes screeching to a halt. The stop is so sudden that it throws me, still following the path momentum has set for me. I hit the pavement so hard that for one dazzling second it actually hurts, some ancient, mammalian instinct buried in my bones remembering what that impact would have done to living flesh. My body keeps rolling, the scythe clutched in both hands, until I roll to a stop near the edge of the road.
I raise my aching head, half-convinced I’ll see a trail of shredded skin leading to my position. There’s nothing, of course, but I still ache all over. Even the burning in my belly has pulled back to a dull, sizzling ember. I groan.
Behind me, something roars.
I manage to find the strength to roll over, just enough to see the terrible patchwork dinosaur running down the middle of the road, forearms raised and claws bared, ready for a fight with whatever titan has been crying out a challenge in the middle of its territory. The smell of gasoline rolls off its unspeakable, mismatched body, thick enough to choke me. It doesn’t seem to have noticed me yet; its attention is fixed on Bobby’s car, with its seafoam hood against the rest of its moonlight-blank paint job.
The creature takes a step forward, lips drawing back from its teeth. It looks cleaner than it did when it emerged from the gas tanks. I can see delicate bands and patterning on its plumage, which it raises in answer to the presumptive threat of the car. It looks sort of like a giant murder-turkey getting ready to fight the biggest farmer that ever lived. It’s a fun image, and I try to hold onto it as I clutch my scythe and lever myself to my feet.
My legs shake so hard as I stand that for a moment I’m actively afraid that I’m going to fall down again, dumped on my own behind by the combination of gravity and my perceived injuries. My skirt is basically a tangle of gray ribbons around my legs, too shredded to provide any further cover or protection from the elements. I try to change my clothes, picturing the jeans I wear when I’m hitchhiking, and nothing happens. The dress remains, graying and tattered and more damaged than I’ve ever seen it.
The dinosaur charges toward Bobby’s car, mouth open, crest up and flaring a challenge. It runs like an angry turkey, and that’s enough to make me glad I made my peace with it earlier. I don’t want to be on the receiving end of those teeth. They’re as mismatched as everything else about it, some too big for its jaw, others too small. It would starve if it had to try eating with that mouth. It would die. But it’s already dead, and those teeth are harvested from the memory of its long-gone, unmarked graves, and they’re terrifying enough for the situation at hand.
Bobby’s hands are raised in horror. The wheel spins itself as the car chooses its own path forward, and then it’s lurching into motion, racing toward the dinosaur, two titans set on a collision course in the middle of this broken stretch of unforgotten country road.
It’s not clear who hits who first. Then the dinosaur has the car’s bumper in its mouth, rearing back until the car’s front wheels leave the ground and spin helplessly in midair. The dinosaur shakes its head back and forth, trying to rip the bumper off, as Bobby finally snaps out of his shock and slams his hand down on the wheel. The challenging roar of the car’s horn blasts through the air, and the dinosaur can’t resist. Instinct is too strong. It drops the car in order to roar its own challenge at its opponent. It leaves easily a dozen teeth embedded in the bumper, and the paint, where it isn’t seafoam green, is beginning to turn a rich, banded green, shot through with black and yellow.
If the dinosaur keeps touching the car, it will go the way of its many bodies, becoming fuel for the machine it’s fighting so viciously to defeat. I shout and wave the scythe over my head, trying to get its attention. It roars again before stomping on the car’s hood with one massive foot, talons scoring the paint.
Watching a dinosaur destroy Bobby’s car isn’t as viscerally satisfying as I would have expected it to be. I’m too concerned about my prehistoric friend to really relax and enjoy the moment. The dinosaur stomps again before stepping fully onto the hood, planting one foot on the car’s roof and roaring a third time from its new vantage point.
More and more brown banded with black and yellow is bleeding into the car’s paint, even washing away some of the seafoam green. The dinosaur is fading to the same nondescript, indescribable gray as parts of my dress, some essential part of its vitality stolen away. I can’t stand here and watch this happen. I can’t. The fire in my stomach surges, acid-hot and almost unbearably strong, as I run for the car, scythe held over my head, and swing it as hard as I can for the passenger window. The sight of Bobby’s face through the glass, eyes wide and mouth a perfect O in the face of his surprise, is enough to make me laugh out loud as I draw back to hit the car again. The tingling in my arms and hands has entirely faded. There’s nothing missing. That damn car got a little of the color from my dress, but that’s all. I’m not going in the gas tank. I’m not going to be a part of the story of Bobby Cross. He doesn’t win. He doesn’t get to win.
The dinosaur’s roaring changes timbres, going from anger and dominance to something that sounds unnervingly like fear. Prehistoric murder-turkeys shouldn’t sound that scared, about anything. I look up.
The dinosaur is melting into the car’s frame. Its feathers are virtually colorless, all their iridescent brightness having bled into the paint. The car is feeding. The gouges in its hood and roof are healing, increasingly rapidly as it swallows more and more of the non-thrashing dinosaur. The chips I’ve made in the window remain longer than anything else, only beginning to fill in once the dinosaur’s legs are entirely gone.
It’s like watching the La Brea Tar Pits fix an error of omission, finally gulping down the last of their possible victims to walk in the world. The dinosaur pulls frantically against the car, trying to get away. Its head swivels, eyes fixing on me, and it makes a small, pathetic chirping sound, trapped and frightened and appealing to the closest thing it has to a friend. I take one hand off the scythe and hold it out. The dinosaur pushes its muzzle into my palm. I turn my eyes back to the car, glaring.
It’s weaker. We would both have been swallowed whole by now if it were at full strength. The crossroads can’t protect it anymore. And the dinosaur has been rendered down into oil before. It’s distressed and trapped, not actually hurt—not yet.
I step back, taking my hand away from the dinosaur’s muzzle, and swing my head around to focus on the car. Bobby has his hands on the wheel again, like he still thinks he’s in control here. Arrogant man. He’s always been an arrogant man. Only arrogance would lead someone to trade their soul for the promise of eternal youth—a promise the crossroads aren’t going to be able to keep, since they’re dead and he’s defenseless.
I swing my scythe at the window one more time, as the heat in my stomach combusts, and for a brutal, blistering moment, it feels like I’m actually on fire, actually burning from the inside out as the rusted tip of my borrowed blade strikes and cracks the glass, sending bits of it flying into the car. One piece slices across Bobby’s cheek, drawing a red line in its wake, so reminiscent of that day in Dallas, but this isn’t ghost glass, this is demon glass, crossroads glass, and it’s not a surprise that it can touch the living. The surprise would be if it couldn’t.
Bobby slaps a hand to his face, looking startled when his fingers come away damp with blood. I smile thinly at him and hit the window again, the burning in my bones settling down to something I can almost live with. It hurts, yes, but it’s mine, and nothing that belongs to me is ever going to destroy me. Not like Bobby has tried and tried to do.
“Come out here and face me like a man, you coward!” I shout, hitting the window a third time. It breaks completely under the blow, collapsing inward, scattering glass across the smooth leather of the seat. “Hiding behind a car from a defenseless little teenage girl? For shame, Bobby. What would those girls who loved you think of you now? What would your mother think of you? Oh, I forgot—she’s dead by now, isn’t she? Everyone who ever loved you is dead. You’re as alone as I am. More alone. You never bothered to go out and make friends.”
The dinosaur moans, injured but still with us, and makes another attempt to pull itself free of the car. It might be my imagination, but it feels like more of the great beast is able to separate further from the frame than it was before I broke the window.
“Hurting people isn’t the way to make the world love you.” I reach through the broken window and unlock the car. My fingers tingle when I touch the handle, but only for a moment, and they come away without any resistance. The car is already preoccupied with trying to digest the dinosaur. That, combined with its weakened state, means that it can’t hold me.
Bobby shrinks away as I wrench the door open, pressing himself against the driver’s side door like he thinks he can somehow escape from me without getting out of the car. I flip the scythe around and shove the end of it into the cab, jabbing him in the leg. He yelps and shrinks even further away.
“Just be glad I used the blunt end,” I say. “I could have stabbed you.”
“Go away, Rosie,” he says. “I promise I’ll leave you alone after this if you’ll just go away.”
I stare at him. “You killed me,” I say, in as patient a tone as I can manage. It isn’t easy. I don’t want to be patient with him. I want to scream and rail and slash at him with the business end of my scythe until he learns to respect the power of farming implements. “Even if I were somehow able to magically forgive you for that, which I’m not, you killed Laura. You’ve killed so many people, some of them for the crime of being near me. People tell stories all over the country of how I’m a killer, I’m a murderer, I’m the reason some brother or cousin or friend isn’t coming home, and it’s mostly because of you. But they don’t tell stories about you anymore, Diamond Bobby, the man who disappeared. You’re a footnote, a historical mystery, and they’re forgetting about you. I’d almost be willing to let you go, because I know how badly it’s going to hurt you the first time you realize some pretty young thing has no idea who you look like.”
He scrambles to press himself more firmly against the door. I jab him in the leg again. He makes a sound that I could charitably call a moan, but which is really closer to a whimper. I jab him a third time, and he repeats the noise. This is fun. I could do this all day.
“You never learned to suffer,” I say. “You drive around acting all tough, but really, you never learned to suffer. You opted out of your life as soon as it started to look like it might not be easy forever, and you got yourself a prize you could use as a weapon. Your biggest problem for the last fifty years has been figuring out where your next tank of gas is coming from. You have no idea how to hurt, Bobby. You have no idea how to build anything with your own two hands, and you certainly have no idea what it means to own the things you build. Why have I been so afraid of you for so long?”
“Rosie,” he croaks. “You’re on fire.”
“Fuck you, Bobby Cross.” I jab him in the leg again. “Fuck you, and fuck your car, and fuck everything you’ve done. The crossroads are dead. There’s no one to protect you anymore. And I want my green back.” I step away from the car, whirl, and slam the point of my scythe down on the hood as hard as I can, careful to miss the dinosaur’s tail. There’s a loud tearing noise, followed by a gout of steam. I’ve hit something important, possibly something vital.
But I know I haven’t hit the gas tank. The crossroads followed the basic rules of automotive design when they made Bobby’s car—it has wheels, a frame, headlights, all the pieces you’d expect from a car of its apparent age and era—which means the fuel tank will be toward the back and beneath the car. I don’t know if I can make that swing.
The dinosaur moans. It sounds like it’s in pain.
I can make the swing.
The blade of the scythe is almost three feet long, and I don’t have to worry about the security protocols you find on modern cars; this vehicle was conjured decades ago, and the crossroads never cared enough about Bobby to go back and make improvements. They wouldn’t have been willing to do it for free anyway, and they didn’t have anything left to offer him, since the only thing he’d wanted for a long, long time was me, and I was never theirs to give. I take a step back, dispassionately noting the almost transparent flames now licking around my hands and arms. Bobby was right. I’m on fire. I wish I knew what that meant. What I can see of my dress is still gray, the color of the ashes at the bottom of a campfire, the ones that are so soft that running them through your fingers feels like touching silk.
Once I’m sure of what I’m about to do, I circle the car to the driver’s side and swing for the tank, the scythe biting into the metal with a ferocity that I don’t think would be possible from an ordinary farming tool. There’s a screeching, snapping, tearing sound, and for a moment, I can’t pull back for another swing. The blade is wedged in place. I yank as hard as I can, and it comes free with a pop, leaving me to stagger backward. The smell of gasoline fills the air, and the bottom foot or so of the scythe’s blade is wet. I hit the tank. If I’m right about what that means . . .
The dinosaur roars as a thick black fluid begins to drip from the underside of the car. I take a step away from the vehicle, nearly dropping the scythe as the colorless flames enrobing my arms spread along the shaft, heading for the gas-soaked blade.
“Okay, I don’t know what’s happening right now, but I really, really don’t want to explode,” I say, and my voice is thin and anxious, more frightened than I have any right to be under these ridiculous circumstances. Bobby is staring at me through the rolled-up, unbroken window on his side of the car. He looks like he’s way more scared than I sound, and that’s what gives me the nerve to tap the point of my scythe against the glass, not hard enough to break it this time, just hard enough to be impossible for him to ignore.
Slowly, he creaks the window down about an inch. Just far enough to hear me.
Spiff. “I’m pretty sure I just punctured your gas tank,” I say mildly. “You might want to get out of the car.”
The dinosaur is pulling itself back together, rising up from the hood like an avenging angel as the car loses the ability to hold it down. It was partially merged with the metal, and as it rips itself free, it leaves patches of rust and decay behind. It’s an impressive, if surreal, effect. The dinosaur stands, stomping its feet, wrenching its tail free of the frame. The color is returning to its skin and feathers, bleeding back more quickly than it bled out. It turns its horrible head toward the windshield, eyes fixing on Bobby, and roars. The sound is full of razorblades that weren’t there before.
I give my scythe a spin. “I think you’ve made my friend angry,” I say. “You shouldn’t let your car eat people. It’s not nice. When you’re not nice, you can’t expect anyone to be nice to you.”
The dinosaur nudges the windshield with the tip of its nose, snorting. The glass fogs over, becoming briefly opaque, thanks to dinosaur breath.
“Get out of the car, Bobby.” The thick, gooey substance is continuing to drip from the bottom of the car. It doesn’t look like any gasoline I’ve ever seen before. It doesn’t even look like tar. It’s thicker, somehow, and more rancid. Rainbows dance and swirl on its surface, sour and clotted, forming the illusion of screaming faces if I look too closely. It’s a slurry of souls, the pieces that remain of everything and everyone that’s been shoved into that tank and not completely consumed. A thin river of the stuff snakes up the side of the car, flowing into the substance of the dinosaur. It’s getting itself back.
“You’re on fire, Rose,” he counters.
“Your car is bleeding out, the crossroads are dead, and you’re not going to win this,” I say, just as the fire that’s been sliding along the scythe reaches the gasoline-wetted stretch of the blade. It bursts into sudden, lambent flame, and I nearly drop the whole thing. “Whoa!”
“What the hell are you playing at, girl?” Bobby demands, making no move to get out of the car.
“I don’t know! I’ve never just caught fire before!” I wasn’t a sorcerer when I was alive, and even if I had been, those talents would have carried over into the twilight as soon as I died, not waited fifty years and more to catch up with me. I swing the scythe, trying to extinguish the flames. They dance and wave, but don’t go out. They don’t grow higher, either, and if they’re putting off any heat, I can’t feel it. I look down at my ash-gray skirt. It’s completely covered in the lambent, glittering flames. It’s almost pretty if I look at it from the right angle. The right angle would require it not to be attached to me.
The dinosaur, now entirely free of Bobby’s car, hops down from the hood, although not before headbutting the windshield and roaring one more time. Bobby shouts and slams his hand on the horn again. What emerges is not the klaxon on a healthy demon-powered car, but the strained squawk of a dying bird.
The car might be able to heal, given enough time and distance from our assault. The color still hasn’t returned to my dress, although that could be as much about the fact that it’s on fire as it is about the car’s attempt to swallow me whole. I hit the fender with my burning scythe regardless, scraping the paint without transferring the fire.
“Get out of the car, Bobby,” I snap, and the dinosaur growls, making its position on the whole thing very clear. The tarry substance has almost stopped dripping from the underside of the car and is spreading out in a viscous pool that’s managed to touch three of the four tires so far. I step back, out of the range of its spread. I don’t know if what I suspect is about to happen is really going to happen, but if it does, I don’t want to get caught.
The dinosaur doesn’t appear to have fully grasped the situation. I put out an arm, nudging it gently back. The fire licking across my skin doesn’t even singe its feathers. “Look,” I say, with a nod toward the spreading pool. “You don’t want to touch that.”
The dinosaur makes a curious chirping noise, crest rising like the feathers on a cockatoo’s head. The thin rivulet that connected the pool to its foot has long since fallen away; all of its substance has been returned.
“We reap what we sow,” I say, and pause to chuckle. The scythe in my hands makes that statement a little more on-the-nose than it would normally have been. Blame this agrarian afterlife of mine. “Wherever the crossroads found this thing, I think it’s going back there.”
The pool finishes its expansion, now covering the bottoms of all four tires. The car suddenly lurches, not forward, exactly, but downward, as the two front tires dip a few inches below the surface of the road. It’s a sharp, convulsive motion. Inside the car, Bobby shouts and slams his door open, scrambling to get free. In only a matter of seconds, he’s standing on the road, exposed and vulnerable, maybe for the first time. I turn my attention on him. The dinosaur continues watching his car.
Bobby pales, taking a big step back, barely missing the outline of the pool.
“I wouldn’t step in that if I were you,” I say. “Whatever that thing you call a car is, the crossroads had to get it from somewhere, and I think it’s going home. Back to the starlight, or someplace even deeper. The twilight isn’t heaven, but it isn’t hell, either. This is a sort of purgatory, and it is whatever we make it. Your car never belonged here. You don’t belong here either.”
“R-Rosie,” says Bobby, swallowing hard, his Adam’s apple working in his throat like he’s catching up on fifty years of running scared all at the same time. “You know I never meant to hurt anyone. I only wanted what I deserved. I only wanted what I’d been promised.”
“You know, people like to say parents hurt their children by lying to them about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and all that childhood bullshit, but those lies have never been the problem,” I say, taking a step forward. “Friendly spirits of generosity and plenty who want you to have gifts and coins and chocolate just because you exist? Every kid knows that’s not true, because every kid walks in the world, and they can see with their own eyes that the world doesn’t work that way. The bad lies are the ones no one notices we’re being told. Lies like ‘everyone starts out on an equal footing’ and ‘everyone’s voice is equal’ and ‘you deserve to be happy.’ The American Dream is a lie as big as the horizon, and people keep telling it, and when it settles in the stomach of people like you, you start thinking words like ‘deserve.’ You deserve to be happy. You deserve to be loved. You deserve to get every damn thing your heart desires, even when getting it means taking it away from someone else, even when you didn’t do a fucking thing to earn it, because someone lied to you, and you decided to believe them. Because it was easier than asking questions. Am I right?”
Bobby shies away from me, careful to keep his feet clear of the tarry pool. Too bad. If he stepped into it, I’m pretty sure he’d sink faster than his car, which is thoroughly mired, almost down to the tops of its tires. Its paint has entirely returned to that poisonous moonlight color, the one that shouldn’t exist. There are no traces of either brown or green remaining. I wonder where my green went. It should have come back to me if it was going to leave the car, and it didn’t. That’s not fair. It belongs to me, not to Bobby Cross. He doesn’t get to steal anything else from me.
“Be reasonable, Rose,” he says, raising his hands like he thinks a living man standing stranded in the twilight can ward off a furious, burning girl with a scythe and a dinosaur through the sheer power of asking me to mind my manners. “Not everything’s a lie. Some people do deserve more because some people are better than others. I was handsome and talented and special, and I just wanted to make sure the world would remember me that way. Was it so wrong of me to go looking for a way to make sure my image would never be tarnished?”
“Yes, it fucking was,” I spit, taking another step toward him. “I was sixteen. I was on my way to prom, to dance with a boy who loved me. Maybe I wasn’t beautiful, and maybe I wasn’t special, but I was pretty, and I was smart, and I was trapped, because my parents were poor, and I wasn’t lucky enough to be born someplace where they hand out second chances on the street corners for the pretty girls with good bone structure visible because of poor nutrition. I was sixteen. I had my whole life ahead of me. Why did my life matter less than your image?”
“Look what you got out of it, Rosie! You’re a star! The Phantom Prom Date is going to live forever, even though you didn’t. There’s going to be a movie! People have written songs, and books, and all sorts of things about you!”
“Do you think that helped my mother sleep at night? Do you think she was comforted when people told her that her daughter wasn’t ever going to rest in peace? Maybe I got something out of the way I died, but I never asked for it, and it wasn’t what I deserved.” I spit the word out like it tasted foul, like there’s something septic and poisonous about it. “If I deserved anything in this world, it was the ability to make my own choices and live my own life, and you took that from me on a whim. You weren’t even running on empty, or you would have been more careful about where you ran me off the road. You killed me because you thought you were entitled to my death, you thought you deserved it. You bastard.”
“I was getting old, Rosie,” he whines, stepping backward again. This time, his heel almost lands in the tarry goo. The car lurches again, sinking deeper beneath the surface of the road. There won’t be any getting it back soon. It’s being lost in slow motion, and maybe that’s for the best, because it gives him time to suffer. “They were already starting to talk about the next me. The pretty little boy who’d be taking my place and my parts and my lines. They were ready to throw me away like I didn’t matter! I went to the crossroads to save myself. A man’s allowed to save himself, isn’t he?”
“If you’d been in any actual danger, I might agree,” I say, and whip the scythe around, pointing the burning blade toward his chest. “They weren’t going to use you as the hot young thing anymore, sure, but they still loved you. You were box office gold. Diamond Bobby was a guaranteed hit. All you had to do was keep doing what everyone who lives does. All you had to do was keep dying.”
“I didn’t want to,” says Bobby, and is it my imagination, or are there lines at the corners of his eyes and the edges of his mouth that weren’t there when he got out of his damaged, dying car? It’s sinking deeper and deeper into the road, disappearing faster all the time, and he’s standing in the twilight with nothing to protect him from a place where a living man has no business being, and time is catching up with him. “I wanted to be young and sweet and handsome forever. Was that so wrong?”
“How many people are dead because you wanted what you felt like you deserved?” I ask, stepping forward.
Bobby looks at me, clearly miserable, getting older by the second. “I don’t know,” he says, voice creaking. The skin on his face is softening and loosening, beginning to drip into wrinkles and forming jowls along the line of his jaw. There’s nothing wrong with that. If it were anyone other than Bobby, it would seem perfectly normal. Seeing his eternally youthful face start to show the passing of time is strange enough to be disconcerting. “I lost count.”
“I’d say they all remember, but you shoved them into the tank of your car and burned them up.” I jab my scythe at him again. He steps back. This time his heel hits the tarry surface of the pool. In a second, he’s up to his knee in the blackness, staggering and off-balance. He reaches for me in what seems to be a completely automatic gesture on his part, freezing when he sees the wrinkled, weathered backs of his hands.
“Rose!”
I jab the scythe one last time, whipping it so close to his head that he winces, and a lock of his hair flutters free. The token I promised to get for Bethany. I catch it on the flat of the blade, somehow knowing exactly how to twist my weapon, and take a large step backward, making sure he can’t grab any burning part of me. “No. I’m not your savior. I’m not your victim. I’m nothing to you except for the woman who finally beat you. You’re done, Bobby. This is the end. Your car’s sinking, and your bargain is broken, and there’s no way for you to make another one. This is the end of the road for you.”
“This is . . . it’s cruel!” The black stuff is yanking him deeper down. He shouldn’t be able to fit there without slamming into his car, but he does. I guess physics yields when it’s something like this. “You’re not supposed to be the bad guy!”
“I wasn’t, when you killed me.” I smile at him, sweet as anything. “I was a good girl. Sweet little Rose, who always did what she was told.”
“So help me,” he says, still reaching out with his increasingly withered hands. It’s all catching up to him at once. It’s no more than he deserves.
“She died,” I say, and take another step back. “She died on Sparrow Hill Road, and she’s not here to help you anymore, Bobby. Robert, I guess. ‘Bobby’ is a young man’s name.”
The look of horror on his face is everything I’ve ever wanted to see. He screams, and the black tar pulls him deeper, and then his car sinks completely below the surface of the road, disappearing from the twilight. I don’t know where it’s going. Not the midnight, and not the starlight either. Those places don’t want him any more than we do. I don’t turn away. I keep my eyes on Bobby, watching as the blackness pulls him deeper and deeper down, into the road. Then he’s gone, with a final choked-off scream, and the tar itself begins to withdraw into the pavement, disappearing like the car, like Bobby. In a matter of seconds, it’s all gone, back to wherever the crossroads called it from.
But the road isn’t empty. Half a dozen spirits appear, pale as paper and tissue-thin, without the substance of a specter. One of them turns toward me, mouth moving in a silent question. I step forward, spreading my arms, trying to hold the burning scythe like it’s anything other than a threat. The dinosaur moves with me. That’s going to make “not a threat” a harder sell. I can’t tell it to go away, not after the car tried to eat it. It deserves to be here.
“Bobby’s gone,” I say. “He can’t hurt you anymore.” I don’t recognize any of these shades, but I know who they have to be. They’re the remnants of the spirits Bobby most recently fed into his car, the ones who hadn’t been completely consumed before I punctured the gas tank. The one who looks most solid is a girl in her late teens. Christina from Warsaw, most likely, the victim Bobby claimed to get himself away from me. She turns toward me, and she looks almost like an ordinary ghost with holes in the knees of her jeans and a bruise on her cheek.
“What?” she asks, and her voice is as thin and pale as the rest of her, worn almost to nothing.
She’s been dead less than a full day. All of this must be so incredibly confusing to her. It’s still pretty confusing to me.
“The man who hurt you is gone,” I say. She nods, a miserable look on her pretty, translucent face. None of the ghosts are reacting to the dinosaur, which would have been the first thing I reacted to. A woman on fire, with a scythe, is one thing, but a patchwork dinosaur covered in feathers and filled with teeth? That’s something a lot more worrisome, and a lot less achievable with a bottle of lighter fluid and a match.
Then the dinosaur takes a step forward, nudging one of the ghosts with its feathery head, and croons. The ghost responds with silent delight, beginning to pet the dinosaur’s crest, and I realize that they were all together in the gas tank, even if it was only for a few minutes. I’m a burning stranger. The dinosaur is a prehistoric friend.
I’d like to not be on fire anymore. It’s weird to be this warm in the twilight. And even if it doesn’t hurt, it’s disconcerting, and I’d like things to go back to normal. I want to look at my dress and see the green they named my story after. I want to stick my thumb out and flag down a ride.
I want to feel victorious. Bobby Cross is gone, and for some reason, it feels like things aren’t over yet. I feel like I’m frozen, even as I’m burning. I try to let go of the scythe. It refuses to leave my hands. It’s like the thing has bonded with my skin, but when I try to shift my grip, I can do that easily. I can do anything but put it down.
This is going to be a problem. People don’t give rides to girls on fire with destroyed dresses carrying farming implements. If I can’t drop the scythe, I’m never going to get a ride again. I shake my hands, trying to make the wood break contact with my skin. It doesn’t work. I look toward the dinosaur. It’s ignoring me, more focused on herding the—can I call them survivors when they’re all dead?—the survivors of Bobby’s last ride toward the grass. They go willingly enough, responding to its faint chirps and trills with statements I can’t hear, but it seems to understand. They’re bonded by their shared trauma. I managed to avoid that particular trauma, whether I deserved to or not, and I’m not a part of their circle. They need time to heal and recover as much as they can from what Bobby did to them. The dinosaur can give them that time. I can’t. I don’t have the power to protect them the way it can.
The dinosaur looks back as it herds the last of the ghosts into the grass, crest raised, and roars one final time. It’s a triumphant sound, and strangely comforting, for all that it still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, remembering that humans were never meant to share the world with lizards this big, or this proudly predatory. Alligators are enough. Evolution didn’t prepare me for this.
I take one hand off the scythe—it’s willing to let me do that much, at least—and wave to the dinosaur. It bobs its head, acknowledging the gesture, and then it follows the ghosts into the grass, disappearing with remarkable speed for something that big and that mismatched. I’m alone.
There’s no trace of Bobby; not his car, not the pool of tarry blackness that swallowed him whole, nothing. The only thing out of the ordinary on this stretch of the ghostroads is me, still burning.
I clutch the scythe, slamming the butt end of it into the pavement, and allow my knees to buckle, trusting in the wood to hold me up while I hang my head and cry. Because here’s one of the things they never told me about death when I was alive: things that suck for the living still suck for us. Sometimes they can suck even worse because we lack the sense of “this, too, shall pass.” For us, everything is happening right now, and right now can last the better part of forever.
The sight of my ash-gray dress is enough to make me cry harder, until my tears have turned everything blurry and difficult to discern. I want my green back. I want to give away this fire, which burns without consuming, licking along my arms and the bodice of my dress. If I could somehow take the dress off and put it aside, I’m sure the fire would stay with my skin, hot but not painful, somehow independent of any source of fuel. It’s not burning me up. It’s not burning me away. It’s just burning.
“What’s wrong, Rose?”
The voice is sweet, and female, and draped in a strong English accent that feels incongruous here, in this mirror of the American agrarian ideal. She’s a long damn way from home.
“I thought better of you than this. Not much better, if I’m being honest with you, but better. You living never fully adapt when you wake up and find yourselves properly dead. I don’t quite understand why the Lady doesn’t restrict herself to proper liminals. We do so much better with forces beyond our ken.”
“Go away, Pippa,” I mumble, not lifting my head. Everything about this situation is terrible. What’s the use of getting rid of Bobby if I’m just going to be on fire from now on? I can’t go into the daylight like this. I’m not sure I could rise to the daylight if I wanted to, not when I can’t even focus enough to change my clothes. I feel trapped and lessened, and some of that may be shock, because for the first time since I died, I don’t need to be looking over my shoulder for the man who killed me. I’m free. I’m free of Bobby Cross and everything he represented. And I’m still trapped because I’m still here.
“Shan’t,” she says. I hear footsteps behind me. She’s coming closer. “The Lady asked me to come and look in on you and your little errand, and it seems like she was right to do it. You’re burning up, Rose!”
“No shit, Sherlock,” I reply bitterly, and wipe the tears away from my cheeks with a flick of my hand that sends droplets scattering on the road, where they continue to burn even without the rest of me. Swell. I get to be a natural accelerant from now on. That’s just what I always never wanted.
“Doesn’t that seem a little, well, strange to you? Do human ghosts normally catch fire for no good reason?”
“Will-o-the-wisps do sometimes. And onibi. But I’m not a burning ghost. I’m a walking ghost. I’m supposed to be lonesome and wistful and lead people down unpaved roads, into places they would never have gone without me.”
“Ah, but you’re a psychopomp as well, and I know that’s not a part of the hitchhiker’s lot,” says Pippa.
“I didn’t mean to be,” I reply. “That just sort of . . . happened.”
Psychopomps guide the spirits of the recently departed into the twilight, and sometimes beyond. Pippa’s right; it’s not normally a part of the hitchhiker’s job. Sometimes, though . . . sometimes we wind up sensitive to the smell of death on the wind, and we choose our drivers based on who’s going to need someone to ease them past the transition. That’s what I did, in the beginning, targeting the people Bobby had already decided to chase down, sticking out my thumb and shortening my hems for the truckers who were destined to become offerings to the open road. I guess I didn’t like the idea of them dying alone, and I didn’t consider how eagerly the twilight would seize on any hint that I was willing to be more than circumstance demanded of me.
In the beginning, it had only been people I’d known when I was alive and the occasional trucker who died in my presence. Then, bit by bit, the scents of the world crept in, until I could tell in a sniff whether someone was heading toward their own death, and whether that death was something avoidable—accidents due to alcohol or exhaustion versus train derailments or malicious action. Once that talent had solidified, I’d been tagged as a psychopomp forever.
“Lots of things seem to just happen where you’re concerned, Rose. Have you considered that you’re the unifying factor? Maybe they’d stop happening if you’d stop existing.”
I whip around so fast I nearly overbalance. I would, if not for the scythe still patiently holding me up. “I’m not moving on because I’m having a flammable day.” At least the lock of Bobby’s hair isn’t burning, somehow. That’s something.
“Suit yourself,” says Pippa. She’s standing right behind me, her own scythe in her hands. As always, she’s dressed like a Gothic princess, but the “princess” part is a little more literal than usual right now: she’s wearing a ball gown made of shimmering material that’s gunmetal gray where the light hits it and opalescent white when it’s in shadow, one long strip gathered up and hanging over her shoulder, cutting across the straight slash of her neckline. The black velvet band that keeps her head in place is her only adornment. She looks like some kind of terrifying warrior queen out of a fairy tale, like she’s going to strike me down for the crime of standing too close to her.
The edge of her scythe is covered in the same small, lambent flames as cover my entire body, flickering and glittering in the light. Every time she shifts position, the flames spark, just a little, glinting white as the heart of a bonfire.
“What are you going to do, then?” she asks. “Planning to just stand here and burn, and cry like some new-dead numpty? Doesn’t seem like the very best use of your time to me. Having a lot of it doesn’t mean it has no value.”
“Why are you so calm?” I demand. “I’m on fire.”
“Yes,” she says. “I’ve noticed. This is normal for the stage you’re in.”
“The stage of what?” I straighten up, taking one hand off the scythe. I still can’t drop it, no matter how hard I try. It clings to my palm like it’s been glued to me, like it’s a very inconvenient extension of my body.
“You didn’t think you could attract the attention of three divinities and walk away unscathed, did you?” Pippa cocks her head at a sharp enough angle that I’m momentarily afraid it’s going to fall off. That happens with Dullahan. It’s disconcerting. “That isn’t how any of this works. It never has been. Those who attract the attention of the gods are doomed to serve them, one way or another. You weren’t content with the Ocean Lady knowing your name. You had to go and make sure Persephone would know you personally, and then you went dancing with the anima mundi! Three goddesses of the twilight is three more than most people get to know. You must have known there’d be a price to pay.”
“None of them said anything about prices,” I say, staring at her.
“None of them should have needed to. Maybe it’s because you’ve been a hitcher for so long, but there’s no such thing as a free ride. Not really. You’ve been lucky for a long time, Rose Marshall, chasing your revenge down the highways and the byways, always one step too slow to catch him. So you asked the gods to make you faster, to make you better, and when they answered, those gifts came with a price.”
“I didn’t ask for anything,” I snap. “The Ocean Lady—or at least, Apple, and she speaks for the highway as long as she stays Queen—asked me to stop Bobby, because the crossroads are dead, and someone had to do it.”
“Isn’t the Ocean Lady keeping your niece from disappearing into the dust?” asks Pippa, with a lazy wave of her hand. “Isn’t she anchoring your distaff descendant to a reality that doesn’t want her anymore? That’s a favor. That’s a gift from a goddess. You asked for more than you were asked to do.”
I shake my head. “No. No, that isn’t true.” But it is true, isn’t it? I was more concerned about Bethany than I was about what the loss of the crossroads would do to the routewitches. They never drew their power through the crossroads, but they were always tied to them, always intimately aware of how to find them, enough so that Apple had taken the responsibility for Bobby’s bargain on her narrow shoulders and never found the way to lay it down. The crossroads were tied to the Ocean Lady by bonds of magic and obligation, whether or not she had ever wanted them to be, and now that she was finally free, I had asked her to keep a reminder of their terrible burden. I had asked her to find a way to fix Bethany, to let her stay.
She—or more likely, Apple—should have said something if I was asking too much. But I couldn’t deny that I had asked.
“And you know you asked Persephone for favors,” says Pippa, inexorably. “Three times. Once for that tattoo on your back, to keep you safe from marauding spirits. Once for the return of your death, which tied that corsage around your wrist. You haven’t been shy about wearing her favor where others can see, either. You could have taken it off as soon as you were back in your proper place, could have gone down to the River Lethe and scrubbed the tattoo from your spine. You did neither of those things, nor ever raised the question of payment. You were happy to receive her gifts when you thought they came to you freely.”
“Three times? That’s two. I didn’t graduate from high school, but I can count.”
“I thought the third time needn’t be mentioned, since not even you could have already forgotten sending me to petition her on your behalf,” says Pippa smugly. “It’s been so recent. Is your memory so faded as all that?”
“No,” I counter. “I’m just that distracted by the fact that I’m still on fire. Are you going to tell me how not to be on fire anymore?”
“It’s not for me to say, little ghost. Your kind are outside my ken.”
I sag, once more using the scythe to hold myself up. “That’s a fancy way of saying you have no damn clue, isn’t it?”
Pippa shrugs. “The third goddess is the one most in need of payment right now, for she both has and has not been absent from her duties for a very long time. The anima mundi lost her place to an intruder who spent her treasures freely and without reasonable concern for recompense. She can’t afford to be spending what little she has left without consideration. No free rides here.”
“All of which somehow adds up to me on fire?”
“As the phoenix knows, sometimes the old must burn away to make proper room for the new.”
“What ‘old’? I never got to get old. I’m still a teenager.”
“Which isn’t making this any easier.” Pippa shakes her head, eyes going dark. “You asked for aid in seeking vengeance. You asked to be made more effective in your quest to be avenged. Well, you shouldn’t ask for things if you don’t truly want them. It’s not right, nor reasonable.”
“What’s not reasonable is you standing there talking in circles when I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I snap.
“Isn’t it obvious? The gods have granted your wish, and you’ve been accepted into the ranks of the Erinyes. You’re to fly with the Furies, Rose Marshall, and leave the daylight to its own concerns save when your duties draw you through the veil between the living and the dead. You took their gifts and used them well, and now you’re granted another gift as your reward. Rejoice and be glad.”
“What?” I stare at her. She’s not making sense.
I’ve heard of the Furies. Everyone in the twilight has heard of the Furies. They’re a children’s story, something we use to threaten the newly dead when they don’t seem willing to accept the fact that things have changed. Be good and don’t haunt the living, or the Furies will get you. Pay attention when someone explains what your kind of ghost does, or you won’t serve the twilight properly, and when you start to fade, you’ll risk attracting the attention of the Furies. They’re not real. They’re not something you can just become.
It feels like the ground has dropped out from beneath my feet, like everything is going suddenly askew. None of this is possible. But I’m on fire and the scythe is stuck to my hand, so “possible” isn’t playing a very big role in anything I do today. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.” Pippa shakes her head. For the first time, she looks like she might actually be sympathetic to my situation, like she understands how confusing this has to be. “Chin up, Rosie. Your bad guy’s gone. You needed something else to keep you busy if you didn’t want to do that oh-so-human thing and fade into the next level of the afterlife. A girl like you was never going to be content returning to stranger’s cars and silence after having a great grand quest like you’ve done. Now you’ll get to stay a bit longer.”
“So this isn’t forever?” I seize on that because it’s the only part that makes sense.
“Doesn’t have to be,” says Pippa. “My Lady doesn’t want the unwilling. If you refuse her calling, she’ll let you go.”
I exhale in relief.
“Of course, she won’t look kindly on you any longer, and I’m not sure how long you’d last without the favor of the gods, the way you do go on.”
I blink at her. “What?”
“This is a gift from the gods. It’s a new calling, and a new challenge, and not an honor they grant very often. If you refuse it, you’re telling them that you know better than they do, and that’s not a message the gods like to receive. You’re bound to them whether you like it or not, Rose Marshall. You’ve attracted their attention, and that makes them your concern.”
Pippa folds her arms, managing to make the gesture perfectly elegant and fluid, like the scythe in her hands isn’t interfering at all. If I’m going to be carrying one of the things from now on, maybe I should ask her for some pointers . . .
No. There’s a way out of this. There has to be a way out of this. I’m a hitchhiking ghost. I’m not a Fury. I refuse to be a Fury. The gods never said anything about payment before. Maybe that should have struck me as strange—people like to know that they’ll get a favor when they give a favor, after all—but they should have said something to me. They should have been clearer.
They shouldn’t have behaved like Bobby Cross and tried to trap me when they knew I didn’t have any options.
The fire on my skin seems to be dying out, or at least dwindling, going from licking flames to a thin layer of heat just above my skin. I run my hand along my arm, stirring the heat briefly back into licking flame. It dies down as soon as I pull my hand away. So this isn’t letting me go so easily.
“Now what?” I ask Pippa.
“Now the Lady will see you,” she replies.
I blink. “But I’m dead.”
“She’s the Lady of the Dead,” says Pippa, with amusement. “Most of the people she talks to are deceased. I assure you, you’re not special.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant, I can’t perform a katabasis as a dead person, can I? The Underworld is a roach motel for spirits. We can check in, but we can never check out.”
“There are other ways in.”
“So why did you take me through the Elgin Marbles? That way sucked.” Except for the three-headed dog. He’d been pretty cool, and nice to pet, once I got past the overwhelming smell of giant mastiff.
“It was the way that was open to you.” She waves a hand. A tunnel opens in the prehistoric grass. “Now this way is open. Will you come?”
“Sure, why not? It’s not like I was doing anything important with my time.” I start toward the opening, pausing when the motion causes my skirt to sway back into view. “Am I going to get my green back? I’m not the Girl in the Gray Silk Gown.”
“That is entirely up to the divine.”
“See, you say that like it’s somehow a comforting answer, and I want to assure you that really, it’s not comforting at all. Humans—and by extension, human ghosts—like to feel like we’re in control of our own lives. Maybe not entirely, but mostly.” Only that’s not entirely true, is it? I’ve always known people who thought that “Jesus take the wheel” was somehow comforting, and not a statement of fatalistic horror. Too many humans are happy to hand control over to the first cosmic power to stumble across them.
“It’s not comforting to me,” I amend. “I want to be the master of my fate.”
“You’re dead, Rose,” she says. “Just be glad you have a fate for people to fight you over.”
Charming.
I step into the grass.
The opening leads to a hallway, incongruous and impossible in what should be a field of swaying, prehistoric grasses. The walls are smooth and white, the wainscoting is polished, and the floor is carpeted in an assortment of twisted rag rugs. I recognize some of the fabric they contain. One has several strips of what I would swear is the dress I’m currently wearing; others contain pieces of denim, or strips of white cotton from my favorite tank tops. Cute.
Pippa doesn’t follow me into the hall. That’s not much of a surprise. The Dullahan has never been much for going through the doors she opens. I look back, just to see if she might be behind me, and the opening back into the field has closed. There’s nowhere to go but forward. That’s also not much of a surprise. Places like this don’t like it when you change your mind and try to do something else. A course, once committed to, is committed to forever in the eyes of the strange and terrible entities who try to guide the twilight.
Lacking anything else to do, I start down the hall. My burning feet don’t ignite the rag rugs. I’m almost glad of that, even as I resent the strips of green silk for their color. I want it back. It’s not something I ever thought I might be able to lose, and now that I have, I resent its absence with a fierceness that’s a little scary.
There’s a door at the end of the hall. It’s not locked. I push it open and step through—
—into the Last Dance Diner. Emma is behind the counter, filling one of those tall metal cups with ice cream as she prepares to blend a malt. The stools are empty. So are the booths, all save one, where Persephone herself is sitting.
She’s beautiful, although I couldn’t describe her if I wanted to, because her appearance is constantly shifting, hair going from straight to curly, light to dark, and her skin shifting in tempo with it, so that she’s every woman in the world at the same time, and all of them achingly, effortlessly beautiful. She’s impossible. She’s the ideal the rest of us can’t even aspire to achieve.
Either she learned this trick from the anima mundi, or they learned it from her. Neither one of them has a single face, because they’re both wearing the face of every woman in the world. Persephone is less blended and changes faster, though. She changes like sunlight on the sea.
She smells like sun-ripened wheat, pomegranate molasses, and asphodel. Always asphodel. She could be a garden unto herself, the smell of flowers is so strong. It paints the air around her with almost visible swirls of ivory and gold, gilded like the pollen at the heart of the flowers at my wrist. They haven’t gone to gray. I don’t think they could. The corsage was my first god-gift, and the one I welcomed most warmly.
I didn’t ask for it, either. Was accepting it the beginning of an ending I couldn’t have predicted?
I approach her booth, uncertain of either my welcome or the etiquette involved here. What if she wants to be left alone? But then, she wouldn’t be here, in my place, in my way station, if she didn’t want to speak with me, would she? I don’t know what to do.
“Rose, don’t be rude,” says Emma, and she sounds exactly like herself, tolerant and familiar and a little bit impatient, like she can’t believe I’m hesitating. She puts her metal cup on a tray, alongside a frosted glass and a slice of strawberry pie dripping with honeyed syrup, picking the whole thing up and carrying it over to deposit in front of the patiently waiting goddess. “It’s not polite to say you’ll meet someone here and then leave them waiting.”
“I never agreed to meet anyone here,” I say, and walk slowly across the diner, each step an ordeal, to stop in front of Persephone’s booth. “Can I have a vanilla malt, please? Heavy on the malt.”
“Dessert dessert, got it,” says Emma, and retreats to the counter, leaving me semi-alone with Persephone, who looks at me with a tolerantly amused smile playing on her constantly shifting lips.
“Well?” she says and raises a hand to indicate the seat across from her, open as if it’s been waiting for my arrival. “Please. Sit down. We have a great deal to talk about.”
Her voice is as changeable as her face, shifting tones, shifting octaves from one syllable to the next. She could be a chorus of women, each of them bringing her own story to the table.
“Pippa said I’m on fire because you want me to be a Fury.” I slide into the seat, and the vinyl is cool against my back and shoulders, even through the lingering heat of the flames. They flicker and lick against the material, which resists them as effortlessly as it resists everything else. The Last Dance is no ordinary diner, subject to the wear and tear of ordinary entropy. It’s a temple to the American road, and it will be in perfect condition from now until the very end of time.
It’s a little reassuring to know that the gods are not somehow stronger than this place, which has been my sanctuary and my salvation for so very long. I set my stolen lock of hair on the table as I glance out the window to the moonwashed parking lot, where Gary waits for me, as patient as ever. I’m really here, then. This isn’t some complicated illusion. That means I need to be on my best behavior, since I don’t want Persephone to trash the place if Emma would have to clean it up.
“I don’t,” says Persephone.
I perk up. “You don’t?”
“I don’t want anyone to be a Fury. It’s not an easy part to play. It’s all vengeance and the hunt, and none of the sweet rest that should await the dead in my fields. If it were up to me, the world would change so that Furies were no longer needed, and the Erinyes would be forgotten.” She picks up her malt, sipping delicately through the straw. “Alas, I don’t make the rules and never have. But no, Rose. I don’t want you to be a Fury. If you’re right for the role, it’s because you made a Fury of yourself.”
“I . . . but . . . but that’s not fair!” I protest, leaning the scythe against my leg in hopes that it will take the contact as proof that I haven’t put it down and allow me to let it go. It works. When I take my hands away from the shaft, it allows me to pull them free. Now it’s stuck to my leg, sure, but that’s still an improvement. “I didn’t do anything I didn’t have to do!”
“We both know that isn’t true, Rose. You could have run and kept on running, like everyone else who’s managed to escape from Bobby Cross across the years. You could have refused the psychopomp’s part. You could have let your niece fall down with no one to catch or comfort her. Again and again, the twilight gave you the choice between the right thing and the easy one, and again and again, you chose to do what was right and just, instead of what would leave you free to flee. We don’t choose the Furies. The Furies choose themselves. You’ve been on this road for a long time. You solidified your place when you chose to pursue Bobby and assist those who would become his victims.”
The dinosaur. I could have tried to fight it. I didn’t. I hold out my hand, showing the tiny flames licking along my fingers.
“How do I make the fire stop? If I’m a Fury, I guess I’m a Fury, and if what you’re saying is true and I did this to myself, fighting it isn’t going to do me any good. But I can’t walk around on fire all the time. My milkshakes would melt.”
“Set your anger aside. There’s nothing here to fight or to seek revenge upon, unless you want to seek revenge upon yourself—a fruitless occupation that has destroyed more good people than I could number.” Persephone takes another sip from her malt. “It’s yours. Control it.”
I’m not carrying any anger with me right now, am I? I defeated Bobby. I saw him pulled down into the depths by the weight of his own bargain with the crossroads. He’s gone.
He’s gone, and I’m angry about that.
Bobby Cross was mine. He was my monster and my murderer, and if anything was going to rip him to pieces, it should have been me, not some unseen force summoned by the death of the crossroads. The fact that my honorary niece was the one who destroyed the crossroads doesn’t change my burning desire to be the reason he’s gone, and while I won’t call defeating him exactly easy, I will say that it wasn’t the vast, terrible battle I had built up in my mind. I’m angry because I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself without him. I’m angry because I don’t want him to be gone so easily.
The fire dancing on my skin is my own anger made manifest, and it doesn’t want to let me go. I look at Persephone, silently pleading. She shakes her head.
“No one can help you with this,” she says. “You know the twilight changes everyone who walks in it. You’re not the girl you were when you died. You’re not even the girl you were when you would have welcomed your resurrection. You were a high school student who got into an accident. You became an urban legend and a campfire story and a way for children to scare each other at slumber parties. Some of the things you’ve said and done would be unthinkable to the girl you were. Is it such a shock that you should change again, Rose Marshall who was ‘that dirty girl from the Marshall house’ and became ‘the phantom prom date’? You know as well as anyone that once a thing is changed, it can’t decide to simply go back to being what it was in the beginning. I can’t go back to being the goddess of a simple spring. I never could, and neither can you. You earned this anger. The fact that now you find it inconvenient doesn’t make it any less your own. You need to accept it.”
I glare at her for a moment before the part of me that enjoys existence pipes up to question the wisdom of glaring at a goddess. Tearing my eyes away from her, I take a deep breath, holding it for a count of thirty before letting it slowly out through my nose. I don’t need to breathe, but it helps sometimes, especially when the goal is calming down.
This anger belongs to me, I think. No one can take it away, and no one wants to, because I earned it. It’s not fair that Bobby killed me. It’s not fair that I didn’t get to kill him. It’s not fair that I almost let him turn me into a murderer. All those things can be true at the same time. This isn’t a game where you only win one prize.
I feel calmer. Am I really upset by the idea of being a Fury? Or am I just upset by the idea that I didn’t get to choose? I don’t like it when people decide things for me. That’s not new. That’s part of who I’ve been since the beginning.
“What do Furies have to do?” I ask.
“Most of the time? Whatever they did before they were chosen. They’re still a part of whatever level of the afterlife they were bound to. You’ll be a twilight Fury, with wings of wind and cornsilk, and a scythe designed as much for harvest as for harm. Starlight Furies are colder, sharper things, faster to strike and slower to plant. Daylight Furies are counting down the days until they die and find their true eternity. You’ll still eat cheeseburgers, I suppose, still vex the gods and go into the world of the living more than you strictly should. But when something is wrong and needs righting, you’ll be pulled to it, unable to resist. You’ll involve yourself whether you want to or not. You’ll do what you’ve always done: your best to save them. As long as they deserve to be saved, you’ll struggle in their name. And you’ll be armed with steel and with flame and with the blessing of three of the divinities of liminal space.”
“You’re going to share me?” I ask, voice a little sharper than I intend for it to be.
Persephone nods. “Myself, the Old Atlantic Highway, and the Spirit of the Living World have agreed that you belong to all of us, through bonds of debt and favor, and there is no point to making things more difficult by trying to insist on sole ownership.”
I want to say that I don’t belong to anyone. I’m sensible enough to keep my mouth shut for once in my long and often foolish death. “All right,” I say slowly. “Will I still be a hitcher?”
“If you wish to be. The twilight will not compel, but neither will we forbid.”
That feels like a loophole, and I file it away for later. I like loopholes. They’re like hauntings: subtle until you’re in the middle of them, and then impossible to overlook. “I’m mad because it feels like the crossroads stole my revenge by dying,” I say. “But I’m not mad at my niece for killing them. They needed to go, if only because they didn’t belong here, and the bargains they were letting people make were bad for the world. She did nothing wrong. I’m probably always going to be a little mad that I didn’t take Bobby apart with my bare hands, but hey, I’ve made it this far without killing anyone. I guess I’m also grateful that I didn’t get the chance.”
The flames on my fingers blow out like they were never there. That strange new heat is still burning in my belly, bright and all-consuming, but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere else right now. I look down at the ash-gray bodice of my dress. No flame. I’m out.
“You’re the Goddess of Spring, right?” I ask, raising my head and looking at Persephone once more. “Can you help me bloom again? I need my green back.”
“You never struck me as particularly vain before,” says Persephone, with evident amusement. “Why does the color of your clothing matter so much?”
“I’ve been wearing this dress for coming on seventy years,” I reply. “It matters. It’s part of how I know I’m still myself.”
“Interesting,” she says. “And you don’t think defeating your oldest enemy should cost you something? Bobby Cross is gone. Isn’t a little green dye a small price to pay for being rid of him?”
“It’s more than he’s worth,” I say, keeping my eyes steadily on hers. Her irises shift through a kaleidoscope of colors, more shades of blue and brown than I knew existed, but also green, hazel, violet, even a few shades of honey, clear and bright and disconcerting. I don’t allow myself to look away. If I want this, if this matters to me, it can’t look like something I’m willing to yield on.
Persephone sighs and snaps her fingers, and I look down in time to watch the seafoam green bleeding back into the bodice of my gown, washing the ash away.
“When we call, you’ll come,” she says. “You won’t be able to resist. It’ll be like the itch that calls you to seek a ride in the living world, only far worse. It’s not wise to fight us.”
She presses her hands against the table like she’s going to stand up, and I straighten in alarm. “Wait!”
She pauses, looking back at me. The weight of her regard is suddenly much heavier than it was before I was keeping her here. I press on. I have to. “Pippa said I had to be a Fury now because I asked you for favors, and you said I’m a Fury because of my own choices. Which is it?”
“You chose to ask us for favors,” she says, sounding faintly amused. “Free will cuts both ways.”
“All right,” I say. “In that case, I need to ask for one more favor, although it might be more a job for the anima mundi than for you. I’m not sure.”
“What is it?”
“Bethany and Mary. They both served the crossroads. Neither of them is a road ghost. Without the crossroads to keep them anchored, they don’t have a purpose here. I’m afraid they’ll fade away. The anima mundi said Bethany could be a spirit of vengeance if I brought her a token from Bobby, and I did, but I have nothing for Mary.”
“Ah,” says Persephone. “I was wondering if you would remember the ones you claim for your own. It reflects well on you that you do. Your Mary Dunlavy has already found herself a new calling. Phantom Nannies were more common in the days before vaccination was quick and easy—young women would catch childhood diseases from their charges, crawl into their beds to die, and then return to work as if nothing at all had changed—but there’s precedent.”
So Mary’s really a babysitter ghost now, the way we always used to tease her she was. That’s reassuring. She’ll be able to stay with her beloved Price family, and keep bringing their children up to be fine, upstanding citizens of the cryptozoological world. Only now, the crossroads won’t be able to use her to control what her chosen family knows. Oh, this is going to be fun.
“And Bethany?”
“She was wronged by a man and died for his sins. It seems obvious what the twilight would make of her.”
A white lady. No. Not my niece. There’s not a lot of love lost between me and Bethany, but she’s still my brother’s granddaughter, and I refuse to accept this fate for her. “No,” I say, as firmly as I can. “That’s not where she belongs.”
Persephone blinks at me, slowly, looking a little surprised by my insolence. “If not a white lady, there aren’t many options open for her. You say the anima mundi promised vengeance. Perhaps that would be your best avenue.”
“Do you need more groundskeepers?” Persephone and Hades spend most of their time in an infinitely beautiful garden, surrounded by flowering vines and bushes heavy with fruit. Someone had to be taking care of all that greenery.
This time, Persephone is definitely amused. “We do our own gardening in the Underworld. The dead cannot cultivate asphodel. Only the divine can do that.”
There’s a definite division between death and divinity, no matter how often those two things can seem to coincide. “Please. There has to be something that she’s suited for, that will let her stay in the twilight without devoting herself to hurting people. Maybe she’ll choose to move on sooner rather than later now that she doesn’t have to serve the crossroads anymore, but it should be her choice to go. Free will, remember?”
“There are a few paths open to her,” says Persephone, slowly. “She could be a midnight beauty. Or she could be a reaper. Diametric opposites, in some ways, but both essential parts of the twilight.”
The midnight beauties are the party girls of our afterlife. I don’t see many of them. They aren’t normally attracted to the dirt and uncertainty of the road. They appear between sunset and midnight, they haunt the trendiest nightclubs and the hottest dance floors, and they don’t hurt anyone, either intentionally or through their presence. I don’t know if that existence would make Bethany happy or not, but she wouldn’t be doing any damage. Not like when she was with the crossroads. She might be able to pay back some of the debt she’s incurred since dying.
Reapers are true psychopomps. They escort the spirits of the dead and dying from the daylight to the border. They tend to be quiet and reserved, sticking mostly to the company of their own kind. These options are like two sides of the same coin, almost polar opposites.
“Does she get to choose?” I ask.
“She can,” says Persephone.
“Then I’ll ask her,” I say. “She’s with the routewitches now. And if she picks one of these two paths, she won’t fade into nothingness?”
“No. She’ll have a new anchor to hold her in the twilight.”
I nod, more decisively than I feel. “Good. Then I’ll do it, and she can stay.”
“Good.” Persephone stands. “If she declines to select a path, she’ll have to become what the anima mundi promised her, or leave the twilight, of course. There aren’t any other roles that would welcome her.”
I’m sure that’s not true, but I’m not going to contradict a goddess. Not after everything we’ve already said to one another. “I’ll tell her. But the scythe. Can I put it down? Because otherwise, this Fury gig is really going to interfere with my normal routine.”
“You can send it where the fire goes. It will always return when you need it.”
“That’s suitably obscure enough to be confusing. I’ll roll with it.” I look at the scythe and try to think about how much I don’t need it right now, how much happier it will be in some other space, somewhere that isn’t a cozy twilit diner, unthreatened and unafraid. It doesn’t disappear so much as it was abruptly never there in the first place, like a trick of the light in the form of a farming implement.
“There,” I say, satisfied, as I turn back to Persephone . . .
. . . but she isn’t there either. Only Emma, finally approaching with my too-long-awaited malt.
“Here we go,” I say, feeling lost in the absence of the goddess. Everything’s changing.