And I wait.
And I wait.
I am not the most patient ghost in existence, and I’m beginning to consider the benefits of losing my shit completely when the blackness starts to fade, first becoming gray, then turning to a flickering gold. The ground shifts beneath me, until I’m sitting in a plain wooden chair. As soon as that comes into focus, so does everything else. I’m in a kitchen, old-fashioned enough to look like it hasn’t been redecorated since the late seventies, all lime-green linoleum and lemon-colored walls. There are no digital readouts or displays in evidence; whoever lived here stopped paying the power bill a long time ago.
What there are, instead, are candles. Literally dozens of candles, maybe as many as a hundred, candles in gray and red and a shade of green uncomfortably close to the prom dress I died in. Their light bounces off everything, turning it into something out of a fairy tale, glittering off the salt circle that’s been used to bind me here. I can’t see the circle’s exact runes from my position, and I don’t actually care to, because there’s something more important holding my attention.
It’s not the woman kneeling in front of the circle of salt, although I’m sure her hands were the ones to draw it, her fingers the ones to bleed to set the corners and lock the incantation into place. She looks like she’s barely nineteen, already well on her way to used-up, little routewitch who got her feet nailed to the floor by the circumstances of her birth before the road could call her home. She probably thinks she won some moral victory by refusing to run away, not understanding that the voice beckoning her with increasing desperation is the horizon itself, trying to save her before it’s too late.
She’s the road’s problem, not mine, even if she cast this summons and pulled me here, through the veil of death, back onto the mortal plane. My problem is standing behind her, a smirk on his pretty-boy face, ice in his pale brown eyes.
“Hello, Rosie girl,” says Bobby Cross. “It’s been a long time.”
Shit.
Chapter 2
Diamond Bobby, King of the Silver Screen
BOBBY STANDS BEHIND THE FLEDGLING ROUTEWITCH, his long-fingered hands resting on her shoulders and digging in, just enough, to make sure she doesn’t forget who’s in charge here. As if there were any chance of that. She’s staring at me like I’m some kind of miracle, like I represent a sea-change in everything she’s ever known, and hell, maybe for her that’s what I am. Maybe seeing a ghost will make her rethink her life and run for that horizon before it’s too late.
It won’t matter for me either way. She’s served me up to Bobby on a salted silver platter, and I don’t even get the cold comfort of hating her for doing it. She didn’t know. Power and ignorance are a dangerous blend.
“See, and here I was starting to think you were avoiding me,” said Bobby, giving the poor girl’s shoulders another squeeze. “Don’t you think it’s important to keep up with old friends?”
The tattoo on my back—Persephone’s blessing, the thing that keeps Bobby from touching me, no matter how dearly he wants to—is burning like a brand. It’s a good pain, a necessary pain. As long as I’m hurting, I’ll have something to think about that isn’t the sick stone of fear forming in my gut, weighing me down, making me feel like a fragile mortal teenager again. Making me feel like a victim. Like his victim.
Bobby Cross smirks. He’s the man who murdered me, and I know he knows how scared I am.
But I’m not that girl anymore. That girl died on Sparrow Hill Road. I’m the ghost that rose from her ashes, I’m the Phantom Prom Date, and I’m better than he is, because I’ve never hurt anyone the way he has. I sit up a little straighter, paint a smirk across my lips like Persephone’s own lipstick, and drawl, “Why, Bobby, I didn’t know you were lonely.”
His eyes narrow, hands bearing down until the routewitch makes a soft squeaking sound, pained and prisoned. “I don’t think this is the time for games, do you?”
“Seems like you’re playing one with me.” I wave my hands, indicating the candles, the circle, everything. “You know you can’t touch me. Try, and you’ll burn your fingers. Go hunt somewhere else.”
Bobby says nothing. He just fumes, caught between tantrum and truth.
See, Bobby Cross went to the crossroads a long time ago, looking for what everyone afraid of dying looks for: he wanted to live forever. He called something dark and uncaring out of the night, out of the space where even good ghosts fear to tread, and he asked for what he wanted, and he said no price would be too much to pay.
Before that moment, he had been a star. Diamond Bobby, King of the Silver Screen, panty-dropping dragster who made half the world wild with wanting. He was ahead of his time, the man every boy in America was expected to look up to and every girl was expected to dream about. I know I did, after he disappeared and before I found him again on the high curve of Sparrow Hill Road. I used to fantasize about being the girl who stumbled over Bobby Cross, supposedly dead but actually living a quiet life somewhere out of the limelight, waiting for somebody like me to come along.
It’s a terrible thing when fantasies come true. Because see, I was right: Bobby didn’t die in the desert, no matter what the official reports said. Bobby went to the desert to make sure he wouldn’t die, and the thing from the crossroads took his car and changed it into an external vessel for his soul. As long as Bobby keeps driving, he won’t ever get older and he won’t ever die. But nothing comes without a cost, and that car of his?
It runs on the restless dead.
That’s where I came in. My death wasn’t an accident. My death was a man who loved himself so much that he’d kill the world if it meant he could stay exactly as he was. I’d been one more victim, one more drop of fuel for his infernal engine, and I should never have escaped.
I didn’t get away because I was special or because I was powerful or anything fancy like that. I got away because I was lucky, and because Bobby was still pretty new at being a living man with access to the ghostroads. He didn’t know all the shortcuts yet. I slipped through his fingers, and I’ve kept on slipping for more than sixty years. He wants me bad, does Bobby Cross, because I’m the girl who got away—and because out here, distance is power. I could fill his tank all by myself, keep him running for a year or more, and in his mind, that’s what I ought to be doing. He’s still alive, after all, and I’m just the restless dead.
“You shouldn’t be like that, Rose,” says Bobby, frost in his voice and anger in his eyes. “I might start to feel you don’t like me anymore.”
“I never liked you in the first place.” Fire is licking along my spine, fierce and hot and unforgiving.
What Bobby did was an abomination in the eyes of the road, and more, in the eyes of the routewitches who tend it. They’ll never forgive him for what he’s done. So when I went to them and said I needed help getting away from him, they were more than willing to do what they could for me. They gave me a tattoo. Not just any tattoo: a tattoo that contains an invocation to Persephone, Lady of the Dead, entreating her to keep me safe. As long as it’s etched across my skin, Bobby can’t touch me.
One nice thing about being dead: I don’t get a lot of sun, and I don’t get any older. My tattoo will never fade. I still need to find a way to stop Bobby from doing what he does, but as long as I’m canny, as long as I’m clever, I’m safe.
Or so I thought. It’s sort of hard to extend my definition of “safe” to include this dirty little kitchen, this meek and broken routewitch. Bobby can still hurt me. All I’ve done is make him work harder for the privilege.
“Last time I saw you, I offered you a charm that would have stripped the power out of that sigil you wear,” he says, and his voice is a dark lake filled with hidden teeth, monsters lurking deep below the surface. “I offered you a chance to make this easy, Rosie, and you refused it. I want you to remember that.”
“You kidnapped my friend and made me race you
for the soul of my boyfriend on the road where you killed me,” I snarl. “If that’s what you call ‘easy,’ I never want to see your definition of ‘hard.’”
A smirk slithers across his face, and I realize I’ve walked right into his trap. Nobody knows how to get under my skin like Bobby Cross. It’s not that he has some amazing insight into what makes me tick: we’ve probably spent less than a full day’s time together, all told, and that spread out across the body of sixty years. But he killed me, and it turns out that sort of thing throws me off balance.
“Oh, you’re going to see hard, my sweet Rose. You’re going to see it, and know it, and understand it all the way down to those non-existent bones of yours. By the time I’m done with you, you’re going to be begging me to go back to playing easy.”
“Promises, promises.” I wave a hand, indicating the room again. “You’re going to have your new pet keep me here while you talk me into a ghostly stupor? Because I think Apple is eventually going to notice the part where you’re using one of her people without the blessing of the Ocean Lady.”
That’s a bluff. Apple may be the Queen of the Routewitches, but as far as I know, she can’t remotely sense what her subjects are doing. At the same time, I know Gary and Emma will be looking for me by now, and they won’t be alone. Sixty years in the twilight means I’ve made my share of allies. My niece, Bethany, and my quasi-friend, Mary, they’re both crossroads ghosts, sworn to the same entity that created Bobby Cross in the first place. If anyone can find him, they can, and neither of them is what I’d call a big fan of his. The crossroads don’t believe in loyalty. They believe in the deal. If Mary or Bethany wants to hunt him down, their bosses won’t stop them.
“I don’t need to keep you here forever,” he says, and he smiles, the sweet, boyish smile that made him such a star in his day. He was smart when he made his deal: he made sure it included eternal youth. He’s kept up with the times, because part of being young is fitting in and standing out at the same time, running just a little retro without becoming old-fashioned. It probably helps that dark jeans and white shirts never truly go out of style. His hair’s a few inches longer than it used to be, and he seems shorter, because the living keep getting taller around him, but he’s still a heartbreaker. Always was and always will be.
I just wish the heart he was out to break wasn’t mine.
“Let me go, Bobby.” I look at him flatly. “Let me go before all those people who told you to stay away from me come looking. This is your last warning.”
“I thought you were going to destroy me. Isn’t that what you promised to do? But here I am, outside the circle, and there you are, inside it. If I didn’t want you to pay for what you’ve done, I could have you snuffed out.” He takes one hand off the routewitch’s shoulders and reaches for the nearest candle, pinching its flame between thumb and forefinger in demonstration. It goes out with a hiss.
“So what’s your plan, then?”
“I’m going to make you suffer.” His smile is a rest stop where no one goes anymore, the site of unspeakable horrors. Despite myself, I shiver. “I’m going to grind that little legend of yours under my heels, and I’m going to make sure you learn what it is to cross me.”
“Now, Bobby?” asks the routewitch. Her accent is Oklahoma smooth, all plains and prairies, and her voice is filled with an aching hope. She wants to please him. She wants to make him smile for her the way he smiled for the girls in the movies, the ones who got him for their happy ever after.
Run away, little girl, I think, and she’s older than I ever lived to be, and she’s so damn young, and this isn’t fair. This has never been fair.
“Now,” says Bobby, and that little girl—that young woman with her whole life ahead of her, who deserved so much more than what she got, and Road curse you and yours, Apple, where the hell were the routewitches when this child needed you—pulls a razor from where it’s been hidden in the skirt of her pretty floral gown. It’s long and straight and silver, old-fashioned even to my old-fashioned eyes, and when she slashes it across her throat the flesh parts like a seam coming unraveled, allowing the hot red heart of her to spill forth.
The blood comes in a wave, spraying everywhere, coating everything. It doesn’t wash the circle of salt away, but it corrodes it, opening holes that I only vaguely notice. My eyes are consumed with the task of growing wider and wider, horror and shame building in my throat, trying to become a scream. Half the candles go out, doused by arterial spray. If there’s a mercy in this summons, it’s that the spell which drained the taste from the world also damps the scent of burning blood.
“She was willing,” says Bobby sweetly, taking his hands from the girl’s shoulders. Freed of their slight but constant pressure, she slumps sideways, landing well clear of the remaining salt. He planned everything about this, I realize: he placed her like a pawn on a chessboard, and when he sacrificed her—when she sacrificed herself at his command—she fell exactly where he wanted her. “You got that? Only thing I did to compel her was ask.”
“You bastard.”
“Now, Rosie, you know my parents were married. Call me a monster or call me your master, either of those things would be true. But don’t you ever tell me lies.” He smiles again. Somehow, this one is even worse. “Tick-tock. Clock’s running now, and it’s going to be hell when the time runs out. Good luck, pretty girl. By the time this is over, you’ll be begging me to take you for a ride.”
He dips his fingers in the dead routewitch’s blood and flicks it at me, eroding the circle of salt further. Then, with the kind of calm swagger that even the dead can envy, he turns and saunters out of the room.
The blood continues to spread, eating away at the salt, until, with a click I feel from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, the circle breaks. The frayed runes that constructed the summoning spell have no power left, and more footprints would only serve to muddy an already confusing scene; I step delicately over them as I leave the circle, pausing to look down at the routewitch unlucky enough to have fallen under Bobby’s sway.
Nothing about her is familiar. She’s not someone who gave me a ride once, not a distant relative or enemy. She’s just a girl. Just a girl who could have been anything, and wound up being little more than nothing, one more body to lay at the feet of a man too arrogant to die.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I say, and disappear.
* * *
I reappear in the middle of a cornfield that stretches from one end of the shadow-soaked horizon to the next, twilight sky dripping with stars overhead, green silk gown heavy around my ankles and tight around my hips. I usually have better control over my clothing than that, and for a moment I consider expending the effort to change it, to remake myself into the modern girl I’ve worked so hard to become. Then I think of Bobby, refusing to let himself look anything other than perfectly suited to his surroundings, and I change my mind. I can be an antique walking through a cornfield. I can be a shadow of the girl I was. Better that than to be like Bobby, holding on so tightly that I forget how to let go.
Speaking of letting go . . . I walk a few yards, enough distance that I should be at least a football field away from that rotten little house with its dead girl cooling in the kitchen, and I pull myself back into the daylight. Or I try to, anyway. The twilight holds me stubbornly down, twining around my ankles like so much kudzu, and pull as I might, I can’t return to the lands of the living.
This is new. Also new: the utter absence of anything resembling a road. I’m in the twilight, no question of that, not with the sky like a bruise and the corn whispering unforgivable secrets on every side, but the ghostroads aren’t here to meet me. I can’t go up. I try to drop down into the starlight or the midnight, and I can’t do that either.
That’s when I start to panic. If I can’t leave the twilight, that means I can’t get my heels on good, honest asphalt in either direction. Whatever Bobby did—and I don’t
know what Bobby did; I never learned that kind of trick—it’s got me stuck but good.
“I hate corn,” I announce to the uncaring field, and start walking.
You’d think cornfields in the afterlife would be more pleasant than their living counterparts. That’s assuming you’re willing to accept their existence in the first place. But anything that’s loved can linger, and there are people out there who really love their farms, who really love cornfields in specific, with their sweet green air and their tendency to get cut into mazes by bored farmers at Halloween. That might not be so bad—there are worse places to be lost than in a truly well-loved field—if not for the fact that anything that’s loved can linger.
There are people in this world who really, really love bugs. I don’t mean they’re fond of bugs, or that they saw a bug they thought was pretty neat once. I mean they love bugs. They adore them. They spend their lives running around with delicate nets in one hand and glass jars in the other, catching bugs, studying bugs, loving bugs with a passionate devotion that would be sort of charming if not for the fact that their love is enough to supply every cornfield in the twilight with a healthy assortment of spectral insects. Also spiders. Ghost spiders are a real thing. They exist.
Walking into an unexpected spider web is no more pleasant for the dead than it is for the living.
Picking bits of cobweb out of my hair and swearing under my breath, I shove a sheaf of corn aside with one arm. The motion reveals a scarecrow, which regards me with button-eyed solemnity. Its mouth is a gash through the burlap of its face, stitched shut with rough twine, and it couldn’t have looked more like a Halloween prop if it had been trying.
I cross my arms. “Well?” I ask. “You going to tell me where I am, or what?”