I bite back a groan, grinding it to silence between my teeth. When I’m sure it’s gone, I say, “I thought you, of all people, would know that I’m not like that.”
“We know what the road tells us, Rose, and what the road tells us is that your story is still being written.” She dips a fry in the smooth white surface of her vanilla milkshake and raises it, glistening, to her lips. “The Lady in Green is just as real as the Phantom Prom Date, on the right stretches of highway. They watch to be sure the right one has come to visit.”
This isn’t a new concept—the idea that stories change things, rewrite the past and rewrite reality at the same time—but it’s jarring all the same, hearing the routewitch Queen suggest that I could be something other than what I am. I swallow a mouthful of fries that somehow fail to taste as good as they did a moment ago, and ask, “So am I the right one?”
“I think so. I guess we’ll know I was wrong if you try to kill me, now, won’t we?” The Queen picks up another fry. “Eat. We’ll talk when the meal is through.”
For the first time in fifty years, I don’t want to eat, I don’t want to put something off until the meal, however delicious, is finished. The Queen is ignoring me again, her own attention returning to her fries and shake and grilled cheese sandwich. It’s clear that arguing won’t do me a bit of good, and so I pick up my burger, and I take a bite.
There’s always someone eager to tell the living what the worst thing about being dead will be. Those speeches usually start with the lakes of fire and the eternal damnation, and get nasty from there. I used to believe them, when I cared enough to listen, which wasn’t often. Then I died, and I learned that the worst thing about being dead has nothing whatsoever to do with fire.
The worst thing about being dead is the cold. The way it creeps in through every remembered cell of your phantom body, wraps itself around you, and refuses to ever, ever let you go. The worst thing about being dead is the fog, the one that clings to everything, blocking out the taste of coffee, the smell of flowers, the joy in laughter and the terror in a scream. On the living levels, ghosts are shadows wrapped in cotton, held apart from everything around them. Hitchers like me are lucky, because we have a way to claw ourselves back out of the grave, filling the world with substance and with joy. We’re also unlucky as hell, because it means we never forget how bright and vivid life is for the living. We don’t get to move on. Not until we let someone drive us to the exit past the Last Dance Diner; not until we move on completely.
All hitchers are addicts, and our drugs of choice are diner coffee, cheeseburgers, and the feeling of hands against our skin, the feeling of lips crushing down on ours and making us forget, even for a moment, that we’ve already paid the ferryman his fee. The taste of the cheeseburger fried for me in the kitchen of the Ocean Lady’s stronghold is all those things and more; it’s life in a bun, and I could easily forget everything I came here for. All I’d have to do is keep on eating, keep on tasting life.
I choke on that first bite, overwhelmed by the taste of it. Then I spit it out and shove the plate aside, sending it shattering to the floor. I grab for my napkin, wiping the last traces of temptation from my tongue.
The room has gone silent. I look up, still gasping a little. The napkin isn’t helping; the taste of life is still harsh and heavy in my mouth. The Queen of the Routewitches is watching me, the fountain-fall of her hair covering one eye, the other filled with quiet thoughtfulness.
“So you’re not that easy to tempt,” she says. “I like that. Devi, Matthew, you have the floor. Let anyone who arrives know that I’m in consultation, and I’m not to be disturbed.” She stands, leaving me behind as she starts across the floor toward a door at the back of the bar.
I’m still trying to catch my breath when she stops, turns, looks back toward me. Looking at her, I realize that we have at least one thing in common: we’re both of us a great deal older than we seem. “Well?” she asks.
Just that, and nothing more. That’s all she needs. I stand, forbidding myself to look at the bloodstain-splash of ketchup on the floor, and I follow the Queen of the Routewitches out of the main room, into the shadows of the unfamiliar.
The door at the back of the bar opens onto a hallway, which opens, in turn, onto the back parking lot. The Queen doesn’t look back once as she walks toward a double-wide trailer parked near the side of the building. No matter how fast I walk, she stays an easy six feet ahead, her steps eating ground with quiet, unflagging speed.
She stops when she reaches the trailer, resting her hand on the latch as she says, “Once we’re inside, Rose Marshall, daughter of Michigan, daughter of the road, once we’re inside, then my Court is called to order. Are you sure? Are you truly sure that this is the route the roads intend for you?”
“Fuck, no,” I say, before my brain can catch up with my tongue. “But I don’t have a better map, so I guess it’s gonna have to be you.”
“Good answer.” I can hear the smile in her voice as she opens the latch. The trailer door swings open, and she says, with the calm cadence of ritual, “Now we begin the descent. Enter freely, Rose Marshall, daughter of Michigan.”
“Aren’t you supposed to add ‘and be not afraid’ or something like that?” I ask, moving to enter the trailer.
The Queen of the Routewitches gives me a small, faintly amused smile, and asks, “Why would I do something like that? I’m here to answer your questions. I’m not here to lie to you.”
Somehow, that fails to reassure me in the slightest. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound, as my grandmother always used to say, and I’ve come too far to turn back now. I shrug, green silk sleeves moving against my shoulders. “Okay, then. Let’s rock.”
The trailer of the Queen of the Routewitches is decorated in Early Vagabond, with a few exciting traces of Thrift Store Chic. Not the sort of thing I’d expect to see from royalty, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Routewitches don’t like to buy anything new when they have a choice in the matter. Things get stronger the farther they’ve traveled, and the more hearts they’ve had calling them “mine.” As the Queen, she had to have her choice of the best the country’s flea markets and antique shops have to offer, and if that means things never quite matched, well, I don’t think that was necessarily going to be a factor in her decorating choices.
She motions me to a seat at a battered card table with a slightly stained lace tablecloth spread across it. “I’ll be right with you,” she says.
I sit.
She has a red glass wine bottle in one hand and a deck of cards in the other when she returns. “Now, what is it that I can do for you tonight?”
My throat is dry. The words are harder to say than I expected them to be. “Bobby Cross,” I say, finally.
“I thought as much. I asked myself, ‘what could bring the Phantom Prom Date to walk the Ocean Lady, even knowing how dangerous it is for someone like her,’ and the only answer I could come up with was ‘revenge.’” She places the bottle between us as she sits, watching me with faint amusement. “People are really pretty simple. Even the dead ones.”
“It’s not about revenge,” I protest, but I’m lying. It’s been about revenge for decades. It’s been about revenge since the day I understood just what was really going on. “It’s about stopping him. He needs to be stopped.”
“I didn’t say he didn’t need to be stopped. I only said that this was about revenge—and it is. Lie to me, if you like, but take care not to lie to yourself. That won’t make things better when the cards are down, and you’ve done what you feel needed doing.” The Queen begins to shuffle the cards, sliding them through her hands with quick, practiced ease. “Sin applies even after death, Rose Marshall, and if he’s what’s held you here all this time, disposing of him could very easily send you to your eternal rest. Were you in a state of grace when you died? Do you think you’re in a state of grace now?”
“I don’t know.” There’s something about the cards that pulls my ey
es to them, making it difficult to look away. “I don’t think it matters, really. He has to stop. It’s gone on for too long now.”
“Longer than you think; you weren’t the first. You weren’t even the first from Buckley.” She stops shuffling, sets the cards between us, and looks at me. “Ask your questions, Rose Marshall, and we’ll see what we can see.”
I swallow hard, and ask her, “How do I stop Bobby Cross?”
“Some men don’t need introductions, do they?” The first card is flipped, revealing a picture of a sleek black muscle car with red headlights racing along a midnight road. I can’t tell the make or model, and I don’t need to; I know what this represents.
“The Chariot,” she says, voice sweet as dandelion wine. “Robert Cross loved to drive. He loved the speed, and the thrill of the chase, even when all he chased was the wind. He chased that wind all the way to Hollywood, all the way to the silver screen. They called him Diamond Bobby. Some people say James Dean died the way he did because he was chasing the ghost of Bobby Cross, trying to catch up with a legend.” Her eyes dart up toward me, gaze piercing and cold. “You know the truth in that, don’t you?”
I don’t speak. I don’t need to. The Queen quirks the smallest of smiles and flips a second card. This one shows a little girl with hair the color of late-summer wheat standing in front of an old-fashioned movie theater. “The roles came fast and the lines came easy, and still he kept racing to catch up with the next big thing, the next thing that could prove to be worth chasing. They said he’d be one of the greats. But he was getting older, and he was afraid.”
“Everybody gets older,” I say. Everybody who lives to have the chance. I’ve watched my family grow old and die, leaving me alone in the world, and I’m still sixteen, and I’m still here, and it’s all because of Bobby Cross.
“Age may come for us all, but there are ways to beg indulgence.” She turns a third card, and there’s the truck stop on the Ocean Lady, neon bright and seeming to glow even when it’s only ink on paper. Her fingers caress the image ever so lightly, like they might caress a lover. “He came to the King of the Routewitches in the summer of 1950, a living, breathing man whose need and desire burned bright enough to set him on the path of the Atlantic Highway. He was no routewitch, no ambulomancer or trainspotter. He was just a man. That’s why, when he walked this far and begged for audience, his request was granted.”
My stomach lurches with the sudden need to lose what little I’d managed to eat in the bar. “Bobby Cross made his bargain with the routewitches?”
“No.” Her answer is sharp, silk circling steel, and she raises her head to glare at me. “Not only ghosts are allowed to come to us for answers, and the road answers the questions it decides deserve response. Bobby Cross asked the King how he could live forever, and the King sent him to the crossroads, where bargains can be made, if you’re willing to pay them. He made his own choice, and he made his own deal. The King did only as the road bid him, and he paid for that obedience. When next the time that the crown might be passed came around, our King removed himself from the throne, and passed his regency on to me. Place no blame without the knowledge to support it.”
“But Bobby—”
“Routewitches are born in the daylight and live in the twilight. We die in the midnight, and the ghostroads are the closest thing we have to a true home. Without them, the Ocean Lady will not open Her arms or Her heart to us, and we wither and die. Who has once worn the crown and sets it aside is no longer welcome on the ghostroads.” The Queen’s gaze remains coldly challenging. “When our King realized what he’d allowed by answering Bobby’s question, he exiled himself by passing the crown along. He died in the daylight. He died alone. He has been more than punished for his sins.”
I want to argue with her. I want to list off the names of Bobby’s victims. My own name would be at the head of that list. I don’t say a word.
The Queen gives a small, sharp nod and turns another card, two roads crossing in the desert night. “Have you been to the crossroads?”
“Yes,” I whisper. I wish that weren’t true. But I made no bargains there; I sold no souls. Not even my own.
“Then you understand. When you go to the crossroads, you take your chances with the bargain you’ll be offered. There’s no backing out once you begin. Bobby Cross requested eternal youth, time to race every road he could, and something came up out of the deepest levels of the midnight and granted him his heart’s desire.”
Bobby Cross rode out into the desert one night, following another successful movie premiere in a string that seemed like it would go on forever, and he was never seen again. There was no body, no wreck, nothing but some skid marks cutting across the pavement, and the disappearance of the greatest star of an age. Had he managed to drive into the twilight, where the cameras couldn’t find him, after making his bargain?
I was starting to believe that he had. I swallow, and ask, “So what was the catch? Nothing’s free. Not when it comes from the midnight. Not when it comes from the crossroads.”
“Clever little ghost.” She turns another card, and my stomach lurches again, dinner demanding the right to make a return appearance. The likeness is so exact that it could have been painted from a photograph, sixteen-year-old girl with her wheat-colored hair lightened by lemon juice, wearing a green silk gown that was risqué once, and now seems almost hopelessly old-fashioned. Sixteen-year-old girl with wide, trusting brown eyes, and all her life ahead of her.
If only I’d stayed home that night. If only I’d waited for Gary to call, to tell me why he was so late. If I could take it back I would, all of it, every second of that night and all the nights since, all the time that slipped away since the night that I looked in the mirror and saw the girl whose face is painted on the card.
“Eternal life is an easy thing to grant. All it takes is convincing the ghostroads that a person is already dead, while leaving them among the living. I could do it, if I had time enough, and reason, and wanted to anger the Ocean Lady. But eternal youth . . . now that’s a harder race to run.” She turns another card. This time the image shows a broken mirror, with blood staining the cobweb maze of shards at its center. “If Bobby wants to stay young enough to enjoy his side of the bargain, he has to do things. Things that might not seem so pleasant.”
“You mean he has to kill people.”
The Queen of the Routewitches smiles as she takes her hands away from the cards and opens the bottle of wine. The sharp, overly-sweet smell of cheap port fills the trailer. “I mean that it’s time we discussed the topic of payment.”
Nothing’s free in the twilight; everything’s an exchange. Sweet-talking someone out of their jacket for a few hours of stolen-back life. Preventing one accident at the cost of causing another. I don’t know why I thought for half a heartbeat that dealing with the Queen would be different. “I think I left my wallet in my other coffin,” I say, as drily as I can.
“We don’t deal in money here.” The Queen offers the wine bottle across the table, eyes fixed unwaveringly on mine. “A favor, Rose Marshall. That’s all I’ll charge you for your answers. One day, one of mine will come to you, and ask you to do something. Refuse, and the hands of my people will be set against you until such time as you run these roads no longer. Agree, and your debt is paid.”
“I can’t agree to every single thing I’m asked to do just because the person asking might be ‘one of yours,’” I protest.
“The one who comes to claim the favor will bring proof that they speak for me,” she replies, smooth and calm. “All you have to do is what you’re asked.”
“I won’t kill anyone.”
“Pretty little ideals for a ghost with nowhere else to turn. Do your scruples extend to Bobby, or has he forfeited his right to live?” The Queen smirks, utterly amused, utterly patient. She knows she has the upper hand here. God help me, so do I. “Agreed. You won’t be asked to kill anyone, or deliver anyone to any fate they have not earned through their own act
ions. If these requests are made of you, our bargain is done, and you owe me nothing.”
If there’s a catch here, I can’t see it. I’m tired. I really don’t know where else to turn. It was a whim that set me on the Ocean Lady . . . but it was a whim that’s been a long damn time coming, and it’s time that this was done. “A favor for my answers,” I agree. “I’ll do it.”
“I thought you might.” She continues to hold out the bottle, clearly waiting for me to take it. “Go ahead. Have a drink.”
The wine is sweet enough to be cloying; it burns the back of my throat, setting my head spinning in an instant. The Queen pulls the bottle away, taking a drink of her own before she sets it aside, and says, “So we have bargained and so we are bound, Rose Marshall of Michigan, Shadow of Sparrow Hill Road. May the Ocean Lady keep our words in safety.”
“That and a buck-fifty will get me half a cup of coffee,” I gasp, trying to swallow away the burning in my throat. “How do I stop Bobby Cross?”
“The eternal life is his, to do with as he chooses, but the eternal youth is centered somewhere closer to the road.” This time, the card she turns shows an odometer, with the mileage set at zero. “As long as his car is fed and tended, he stays young and strong—strong enough to keep racing, keep running, and keep his part of the bargain.”
My skin is living-warm, and the Queen’s trailer is well-heated, but I shiver all the same. I can’t help it. I’ve been chasing Bobby for years, and running from him for even longer, and I know all about the bastard’s car. I know what he feeds the damned thing.
Bobby Cross’ car runs on the souls of those who die in his vicinity.
“He doesn’t actually have to kill them himself, as long as they’re fresh; the bodies can’t be in the ground more than a day before he reaches them. And he doesn’t exactly need to run them off the road, although he enjoys that part. What he does need to do is harvest those souls from a very specific class of the dead. Ghosts are common. Specific types of ghost are rare. There are so many of you out there, dying so many kinds of death, that sometimes catching the ghost you want can border on impossible. Bobby’s car needs ghosts of the road to keep running, and to keep him young.”