When I wrote The Girl in the Green Silk Gown, I wasn’t necessarily expecting to have the chance to go in and check on Rose again. Which made me sad, but she’s been dead for a long time, and most of her days and nights are blessedly pretty boring: she hitchhikes, she convinces strangers to buy her dinner, she goes back to the twilight to see her ghost friends, lather, rinse, repeat. But then came That Ain’t Witchcraft, over in my InCryptid series, wherein Annie Price took it into her head to fight and destroy the crossroads, and it became very clear that Rose had to go on at least one more outing.
“At least” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, but it isn’t making any promises; as of the moment where I’m writing this, I don’t know if we’ll be visiting Rose in her own liminal space again. She’ll still be showing up in the Price-Healy chronicles, but her own route is currently closed for authorial repairs. So this isn’t goodbye. It’s just . . . for a while. This is the last we’ll see of her for a while.
The Sarah and Amber of our dedication are Sarah Kuhn and Amber Benson, my companions on the Magical Girls of Urban Fantasy tour. We drove from San Diego to Portland together, and no one died, and that alone should be cause for massive celebration. They were two of the best road trip buddies I’ve ever had, and there’s not much better reason to dedicate a Rose book to someone than “I can spend a lot of time in a car with this person and not do murder at the other end.”
This book is a love letter to Rose, to growing up and changing, to figuring out who you are rather than letting other people tell you who you’re going to be, and to getting things wrong the first time, as long as you’re willing to take a deep breath and do it over again until you get it right. Rose Marshall has been with me for a long time. I owed her this story.
My machete squad is an incredible, eclectic assortment of people, and I adore them utterly. Without them, I would make infinitely more mistakes, and be infinitely sadder. Britt Sabo drew and colored the incredible promo comic that we released ahead of The Girl in the Green Silk Gown, and I am so very grateful. Chris Mangum maintains my website code, while Tara O’Shea maintains my graphics, and they are so good. Thanks to everyone at DAW, the best home my heart could have, and to the wonderful folks in marketing and publicity at Penguin Random House.
The cover for this book was designed by the incredible Amber Whitney, of Unicorn Empire Designs. I am honored and thrilled by her work, which makes everything seem so much better and brighter. What a joy she is to work with.
Since the last time we spoke in the pages of this series, Elsie (the kitten I got to help me through the pain of Alice’s passing) has reached glorious, gorgeous adulthood and become the very finest of cats. She’s actually an owl in tortoiseshell fur, and I would be completely lost without her. I still am a little lost without Alice, but Elsie keeps me anchored. And we have recently been joined by a terrible cloud made of love and claws and colorpoint fluff, Verity, my very first Ragdoll.
This is especially fitting, since the previous Rose book happened when I was still fresh off my trip to New Zealand, and that was where I spent most of an afternoon at a cat café and fell in love with the breed. Verity’s older sister, Tinkerbell, is my mother’s cat, and both of them are ridiculously spoiled quarantine kittens. I’m trying not to dwell on the plague years as I write this, but they’ve influenced every part of our lives, whether we wanted them to or not; I’ve done a lot less travel as a consequence of COVID-19, which made rejoining Rose’s eternal road trip for a little while even nicer.
Thanks to Chris Mangum, for putting up with me; to Whitney Johnson, for Indian food and bounce; to Brooke Abbey, for continued mild tolerance; to Mike and Marnie, for host duties and driving before the world locked down; and to my beloved Kate Secor, for undertaking a difficult construction project while the world was on fire. I look forward to cursing your baby, sweetheart. My thanks to Shawn Connolly, Michelle Dockrey, and Charlaine Harris. And as always, to Amy McNally, for everything.
Any errors in this book are my own. The errors that aren’t here are the ones that all these people helped me fix. I appreciate it so much.
No body, no crime, as the sages say. And here we go at last, back on the road again.