Emma looks up when she hears Tommy approaching, and her eyes widen at the sight of me in his passenger seat. The mug slips from her hand and smashes on the pavement. He barely has time to stop the car before I’m opening the door and flinging myself at her. She matches me move for move, and we come together in the center of the blacktop, her arms around my rib cage, mine around her neck, both of us holding on for dear death.
I don’t say good-bye to Tommy. I don’t have time. I hear his engine rev behind me and I know he’s gone, back to chasing the horizon, doing his best to set aside the call of what’s next until he can tuck Laura in beside him and drive her the whole way home. I could say something about how few people leave ghosts, how few of those ghosts are called to the road, but I’ve been a psychopomp for my own living loved ones often enough to believe that he’ll be able to find her when the time comes. Death can be cold. I don’t think it’s intentionally cruel.
A horn sounds, long and loud and insistent, like someone is slamming their hand down and refusing to let go. I pull away from Emma, not bothering to wipe the tears from my cheeks before I throw myself across Gary’s hood, arms spread wide, embracing him as best as I can. The horn stops, replaced by a mournful song about burying a lover.
Emma’s hand settles on my shoulder, not trying to cut short our reunion, but reminding me I have other people to attend to. “Rose, where have you been?” she asks. Her voice cracks. “It’s been . . . it’s been . . .”
“How long?” I push myself up, turn over, sit on Gary’s hood. His engine purrs beneath me, vibrating the metal.
“Three months,” she says.
I close my eyes. “Damn.”
Three months is nothing in the grand scheme of things: barely a blink in the eye of forever. I once spent three months looping around the same city so I could sneak into a theater that happened to have an umbramancer working the door. He let me sneak in to watch Star Wars more than a hundred times before the road demanded that I catch another ride. Three months is pocket change.
But those three months were mine. And instead of spending them with my friends, or figuring out my relationship with Gary, I had lost them to Bobby Cross.
“What happened?”
“What do you think happened?” I open my eyes, wave my hands to indicate my dress. “Bobby fucking Cross happened. He got some poor routewitch to summon me using a ritual I don’t know, and then she killed herself right in front of me. I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t do anything but watch her die.”
“Where?”
“I’m not sure. When I got out of the summoning circle and tried to head for the road, I fell into the twilight. I found a homestead.”
Her eyes widen. “It let you go?”
“She did, after I promised to see about bussing in some ever-lasters to keep her company. She’s just a kid, and she has a lot of room for them to run around.” I stroke Gary’s hood with one hand, trying to take comfort in the gesture. “My clothes keep changing back to this damn dress, and I can’t access the daylight, no matter how hard I try. Bobby did something. Something bad.”
“Locking you in the twilight can’t be his only goal,” she says slowly. “He can’t get at you here, and he wants you. So what’s his game?”
“I don’t know.” It burns, the not-knowing of it all. Bobby Cross is a creature of the daylight, for all that his cursed car can take him onto the ghostroads for short periods. That’s how I’ve been able to survive for as long as I have, if “survive” is the word for someone who’s already dead. When I move between the daylight and the twilight, I can run from him. I can get away.
Sealing me in the twilight takes away one of my greatest weapons—mobility—but it also locks me in the place where he has less power, where his attempts to grab me can be thwarted by everything from haunt to homestead. Most of the dead don’t care for the living interfering with our business.
A sudden sick certainty washes over me. I slide off Gary’s hood. “We need to go inside.”
Gary sounds his horn in protest. I pat his fender, trying to force myself to smile. It’s a harder task than it should be. Oh, I want so badly to be wrong. I need so badly to be wrong.
Emma frowns a little as she looks from me to the car I love, the questions she isn’t asking me written clearly in her eyes. “You need a malted?”
I do. I need a malted, and a cheeseburger, and a slice of pie with ice cream and whipped cream and every kind of cream the afterlife has to offer. I shake my head. “No. We need to get me out of this dress.” This would be so much easier if I were wearing a T-shirt.
Emma’s nod is small. I pause to plant a kiss on the curve of Gary’s windshield, and then we’re heading into the Last Dance, bathed in the sweet green neon glow, and I have never wanted so badly to be wrong in my entire life. Persephone, please.
Please let me be wrong.
* * *
Few ghosts need to use the restroom when they’re in the twilight. Turns out peeing isn’t one of the biological functions—unlike say, sex or cheeseburgers—that most people are super nostalgic about. But a diner wouldn’t be a diner without swinging doors leading into mirrored chambers filled with tiny, privacy-granting stalls. The Last Dance probably holds the record for quickies this side of the ghostroads. There’s nothing like a little swing on the jukebox and a little whipped cream on the lips to make the comfort of a stranger’s arms seem like a good idea.
Emma bustles me into the bathroom, checks the stalls for wayward spirits, and turns to face me, suddenly all practicality. “All right. Strip.”
“Why, Emma. I didn’t know you felt that way.” The zipper along the left side of my dress slides as smoothly as it did on the day I tried the damn thing on, back when I thought I was going to wear it while Gary and I danced out of our childhoods and into the rest of our lives. I slide the straps off my arms and let the whole thing puddle at my feet, leaving me standing in my bra and panties.
Emma’s seen me naked before. She’s seen me bruised and bloody from run-ins with some of the nastier occupants of the twilight; she’s also seen me covered in nacho cheese and throwing chips at the other patrons. I’ve never felt this exposed in front of her.
She takes a step toward me, eyes suddenly hollow, and when she speaks, her voice carries an echo of Ireland’s shores. It’s like the veneer of humanity she normally wears is melting away, leaving her revealed in all her beán sidhe glory. “Turn.”
I turn. Her fingers touch the skin above my spine a moment later, and I don’t know whether they’re cold because we’re both dead, or because I still can’t feel anything.
“Ah, Rose,” she breathes, sorrow and disappointment in her tone.
“What?” I crane my neck, trying to see. I can’t see. “What is it?”
“The tattoo’s still here, but it’s been . . . obscured, in places. The lines are broken.”
“Broken how?”
“If you asked me to guess, I’d say someone had spattered red paint across your back and somehow bonded it to the skin.”
Red . . . “It’s not paint,” I say grimly. “It’s the routewitch’s blood.”
“Ah.” She pulls her hand away. “That’s our answer, then, in two directions at the same time: why he did it, and why he did it this way.”
I’m silent. Most of the time, asking questions only distracts people from telling you things they already want to say. Silence gets the answers faster.
“The blood is . . . bonded to you. It’s almost like a second tattoo, and it doesn’t belong here. Bobby can’t lock you out of the twilight—it’s your home, he doesn’t have that kind of power—but the living can’t move between levels without something to help them. As soon as you got free, you went home, and now that you’re here, the blood you carry won’t let you leave.”
“Bobby can’t touch me here. I have too many allies. Bobby can’t touch me a
nywhere while I have my tattoo.”
“But you don’t have your tattoo, not entirely, not right now. The blood breaks the lines. It’s not enough to shatter Persephone’s promise or take away her protection. It’s certainly enough to weaken it.”
“How much?” Some questions matter.
“Not enough to take you. Enough to hurt you.”
“Can he do it again?” Goosebumps form on my skin, physiological response tied to a physiology I no longer technically possess. Sometimes being an echo of humanity really gets on my nerves.
“If he gets his hands on another routewitch who fits the specifications of the ritual he’s using, I don’t see why not.” Emma steps back, stoops to retrieve my dress from the bathroom floor. I turn to face her, and fight not to shy away from the grimness in her eyes. “If he gets enough blood on you, I’m guessing it will overwhelm the protection entirely.”
“And lock me in the twilight, and kill a lot of routewitches.” That woman—that girl—she hadn’t known what she was doing when she slit her throat for Bobby Cross. He’d used her, the same way he’d been using people since before he went down to the crossroads.
Someone has to stop him. I have to stop him.
“Yes,” says Emma.
“I need to go to the Ocean Lady and talk to Apple.” I tug my dress back on, zipping it up and smoothing it into place. I’d be happier in jeans, but if this is what I have, this is what I’ll work with. “I know I just got back. I’m sorry about that.”
“You do what you need to do, Rose. You know me. I’ll be fine.” There’s a shadow in her eyes that tells me she’s lying. I decide not to press. Some lies should be allowed to stand. The ones told out of kindness usually fall into that category.
“I know,” I say, and I smile for her, trying to look like I’ve got this, like I have no doubts in this or any other world. It’s harder than it ought to be. I’ve been dead long enough to know that doubt is an essential part of the universe. “You always are.”
Emma laughs, and if there’s a note in her voice that sounds closer to a sob, it wouldn’t be polite to point it out. So I don’t, and we leave the bathroom together.
The Last Dance is still bathed in green, neon holding steady at safe, instead of trying to issue us a warning. That’s nice. If I have a home in the twilight, it’s this chrome-and-vinyl tribute to the 1950s as they never existed outside of film and television and fantasy. Dreams can carry a lot of weight here, if enough people share them, and the collective subconscious of the living has dreamed me a doozy. As to how an Irish beán sidhe with no family left to cry for wound up in charge of the place, that’s a story I still haven’t unsnarled, and one that Emma’s never been particularly eager to share. But I’d bet my left shoe that it’s a good one.
Gary’s headlights blaze through the windows, a constant reminder that he’s trapped outside, he can’t hear what’s going on in here. A pang of guilt lances through me. Is this what it’s always going to be like for us? Me running off or getting kidnapped by Bobby, while Gary sits in a parking space and waits for me to find my way back to him?
That’s a panic attack for another time. Right now, we need to move.
The bell above the door is still jingling from the force of my shove when I reach Gary. The driver’s side door swings open at my approach, and this is good, this is right: this is how the world is supposed to be. I pause in the act of getting in, looking over my shoulder. Emma stands in the diner door, alone. The neon paints green highlights in her red hair, and she has never looked more beautiful, or more lost.
“I’ll be back,” I say. “I promise.”
Her smile is a small and wilted thing. “You’d best,” she says, and goes inside.
Gary’s radio is playing, some jazz number I don’t know about questions for a lover. I finish slipping into the cab, relaxing as my butt hits the warm leather seat, and run my hands along his wheel. Lovingly. Persephone, I love this man, this mad, glorious man who remade himself to stay with me. If things are hard or complicated, that just proves it’s real.
“We need to go to the Ocean Lady,” I say. “You’d better let me drive.”
His engine roars, and the wheel is easy in my hands, and we’re off.
* * *
The living have their monuments, their Disneylands and their biggest balls of twine and their roadside attractions dedicated to whatever happens to catch their fancy. The dead are no different. It’s just that our monuments have a tendency to last forever, gaining strength from the people who seek them out, hold them in their hearts, and worship them. So:
The Atlantic Highway was the first major transit artery in North America. She used to run from Calais, Maine to Key West, Florida, carrying dreams all the way along the coast. She ran hard and she ran clean and she ran for the rich and the poor alike; she ran for the sake of everyone who’d ever looked at the horizon and thought they’d seen the doorway into paradise. Because she was the first, there was a good long stretch of time where she was also the only. Anyone who wanted to cross the metaphysical boundaries between the north and south had to let her carry them there. They had to put their faith in the road.
One truism of all roads, whether they run through the lands of the living or the lands of the dead: distance is power. Ten people walking a mile each is the same as one person walking ten miles, and the Atlantic Highway, our sweet and revered Ocean Lady, pulled in a lot of miles in her ascendency. Her strength and reach were great enough, in fact, that some of the powers in the daylight got scared. How could this inanimate thing, this road, be strong enough to bedevil their magics and break their enchantments? How could the Ocean Lady dare to challenge them, when she was nothing but a public works project writ large?
They tell a lot of ghost stories in the daylight, and they write a lot of murder ballads, but you’d have to go far and listen hard to ever hear the song of the old Atlantic Highway, who was murdered by people who feared what she might become. First they snapped her into a dozen tributaries, rerouted and truncated and reduced her, handing her mile markers to a dozen lesser highways like that would make any kind of real difference. When that didn’t work, they destroyed great swaths of her altogether, until all that remained in the daylight was the dream of a memory of a ghost.
But see, that’s the thing. Ghosts exist, and whatever’s loved lives on, and the Ocean Lady sank into the twilight, throwing down roots and running, running, running ever on, like they had never tried to break her. That’s where the Queen of the Routewitches keeps her court, technically in the twilight, technically on the ghostroads, but protected by the loving heart of the first and greatest of the American highways.
Because she still loves the living, the Ocean Lady is not a safe place for the dead. She’s self-aware, or close enough to it as to make absolutely no difference, and she doesn’t care for being haunted, or for feeling like her people are being harassed by restless spirits. I’ve walked her before, but that doesn’t stop a thrill of nervousness from racing down my spine as Gary turns a corner, shifts gears, and suddenly drops from one level of the ghostroads down to the next, down to the place where the Atlantic Highway waits, eternally, for people foolish enough to go looking for her.
There’s a hitch as we descend, and for one terrible moment, I’m afraid I won’t be able to make the transition with him. Then it’s over, and we’re through, and we’re still rolling.
The Last Dance moves around, untethered to any specific geographic location. Not so the Ocean Lady. She always runs from Maine to Florida, and the fact we’ve reached her so fast means the diner must currently be located somewhere along her route. Most things in the twilight have their own agenda. The Last Dance has always been a lighthouse of sorts, for me and ghosts like me, providing us with a beacon when we need it, leading us through the darkness, leading us home.
For a long time, I thought the Last Dance was a myth, the kind of place pe
ople invent because they don’t want to live in a universe where nothing exists solely for the sake of being kind. Maybe it was, once. Maybe so many people like me dreamt of a safe haven that it called itself out of the ether, and called a beán sidhe whose earthly family was on the cusp of extinction to keep the lights on and wipe down the counters. Whatever its provenance, the diner always seems to know what I need.
“Thank you,” I whisper as Gary’s radio dial spins, settling on a cover of “Route 66.” Wrong highway, right sentiment: we may not get many kicks along this road, but I’ll be damned if I don’t drive it to the end.
Outside, the landscape is sketchy and strange, barely more than blotches of ill-defined color. I think I see pine trees; I think I see vast yellow eyes, like luminous jack-o’-lanterns, watching from a patch of septic green. I think I see a lot of things. Gary doesn’t roll his windows down, and I don’t try to make him. The Ocean Lady protects her own, and I have been here before, but neither of us belongs to her, and I don’t want to push it. I just want to make it safely to the other side.
The radio spins again, this time blasting 1980s synth into the cab. I roll my eyes.
“Honey, we’ve been in the danger zone for a long time.”
There’s a blast of static—the sound of Gary snickering—and the song continues.
I’m not used to driving in my prom dress; it binds my legs and snarls around my feet. I’m not entirely used to driving period: until Gary, it’s not like I had regular access to a vehicle that didn’t belong to someone else. Most of the cars you’ll find on the ghostroads either have their own ideas about who’s allowed behind their wheels, or are literally bonded to their drivers, as Tommy’s car is to him or as a coachman is to . . . well, to themself, really. And sure, I spend a lot of time in the daylight, but when I’m there, I’m looking for someone else to do the driving while I borrow a coat and shake the ice out of my bones, however temporarily.