* * *
SAM
Sam lay sprawled on his shitty motel bed, staring at the shitty, water-stained ceiling, and wondered how anyone could handle living in a place that never moved. The view out the window—also shitty, although he guessed his standards for windows were lower than his standards for, y’know, mattresses—was always the same, parking lot and narrow slice of street and shitty little stores on the other side. No mysteries. No surprises.
It wasn’t like that in the boneyard. The carnival only ever put down shallow roots, clinging just hard enough to keep from being blown away. When they wore out their welcome they were gone, moving on to the next town, or heading for whatever rental property they were using for the winter. Permanence had never been the goal, not once.
Annie wasn’t like that. She hadn’t been willing to say much about where she’d grown up, which made sense, given the whole “actively being hunted by the Covenant of St. George,” but her calendar had been the opposite of his. Summers with the carnival, seeing as much of the world as she could from the boneyard and the midway, and the rest of the year spent under a fixed roof, with a view that never changed.
He rolled onto his stomach, wadding a pillow to support his chin. If their circuit had ever taken them further west, he might have met her sooner. Gawky teenage Annie hanging from the trapeze and criticizing his form. College Annie throwing things and telling him to get faster, what did he think this was, some kind of game? It was like there was a whole life they never got to have together because of stupid geography, and now they weren’t getting to have this life together either, because of the stupid Covenant.
Sam groaned and rolled over again, automatically whisking his tail out of the way so he wouldn’t pin it with his own leg. “This sucks,” he informed the empty room. “Everything about it is awful and I hate it.”
“You and me both, kiddo,” said a flat female voice.
Sam froze.
On the one hand, maybe not the best response to suddenly hearing an unfamiliar woman in his room, having somehow gotten past the locked door without him noticing: he was still in his natural form, after all, and even robbers with shitty ideas about where to look for the next score were likely to notice the giant humanoid monkey in pants. Monkeys did not normally wear pants, or have proportions this close to human, or—
He was spiraling. Great. Well, no. The opposite of great. He should have moved, should have bolted for the bathroom or leapt for the sound of that voice. There was almost nothing in the world as fast as a fūri, except for maybe another fūri. And while the universe could be cruel, he didn’t think it was cruel enough to throw a girl fūri at him while he was busy panicking about his missing, all-too-human girlfriend. That wasn’t funny. That was mean.
“I know you’re not dead,” said the voice, still sounding rather, well, obnoxiously disinterested in the whole situation. She was the one who’d started this. The least she could have done was sound like she meant it. “I have what you might call a second sense for dead people.”
Dead . . . Sam sat up, turned, and scowled at the white-haired woman sitting in the threadbare armchair next to the window. “You’re Annie’s dead aunt,” he accused.
“And you’re smarter than you act,” she replied, with a quick, frosty smile. “Hi.”
She looked younger than Annie, somewhere in her late teens, with long white hair and eyes that made him oddly uncomfortable, although he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why. There was something in the way they reflected the world—or didn’t—that made him want to turn and run and never look back. Humans were predators and so were fūri: he got a certain bloodthirstiness from both sides of his heritage. But this woman . . .
Something in him knew her for a bigger, better predator, and had no interest whatsoever in attracting her attention. Let her sit there in her jeans and yellow peasant blouse, looking utterly innocent. It didn’t matter. The part of him that had evolved to stay alive knew better.
“Uh,” he said. “Hi.”
“It’s Mary, in case you’ve forgotten. Mary Dunlavy.”
“Right.”
“I thought you might like to know that I’ve been keeping an eye on you, and that I’m still looking for Annie. But she’s not dead. I’d know it if she were. She’s out there somewhere, stubborn as ever, and I’ll find her soon.”
Just like that, he was off the bed and standing in front of her, tail wrapped tight around his ankle like he thought he could keep himself from coming untethered from the floor and floating away. He began to reach for her, to shake her until she told him what he wanted to know, but a glance at those eyes made him think better of the idea, and he froze again, hands only half-raised.
Mary looked amused. At least one of them was.
“Where is she?” he asked, somehow managing to make the question sound more like a plea than a demand. “She shouldn’t be out there by herself. She doesn’t even have her mice. She’s going to get hurt. So where is she?”
“Stop,” said Mary. There was ice in her voice, an avalanche packed into that single syllable. Sam shied back before he could stop himself, feeling the hair stand on end all the way along the length of his spine. “You can’t ask me questions, Sam, and you can’t ask me for things. Those are the rules. If you break them, you’ll be sorry.”
“What—” He stopped, catching himself, and eyed her warily. “It sure would be nice if I understood why that was the case, dead aunt lady.”
“Again, it’s Mary,” she said. “How much do you know about ghosts?”
“It sucks that you can ask me questions and I can’t return the favor,” he grumbled. “Ghosts. People leave them behind when they die, sometimes. Nobody really knows why for sure. They haunt houses and stuff, and Grandma has an umbramancer come by the boneyard once a year to make sure none of them have attached themselves to the show. Something about how phantom carnies really mess with insurance rates.”
“That’s a start,” said Mary. “Ghosts are like cryptids or yōkai: one name to describe hundreds of different things. It would take too long to list the things I’m not, so I won’t bother. I am a very specific kind of ghost. I don’t haunt a place: I haunt a concept.”
Sam hesitated. “When Annie introduced us back at the carnival, she mentioned the crossroads. Did she mean . . . ?” He caught himself and groaned. “Fuck I am not good at not asking questions.”
“That’s one of the few you’re allowed to ask.” Mary’s smile contained no pleasure. “You can’t deal with the crossroads if you don’t know what they are, which means the only debt you incur by asking about them is their attention. Normally, I’d say that was debt enough, but I’ve met you, and I know Annie well enough to know what kind of man she’d fall for. You’ll have the crossroads interested in you one way or another.”
“Because that doesn’t sound dire and horrible,” grumbled Sam. “What are the crossroads?”
“They’re where you go when you want something so badly that you’re willing to bargain everything you have against the chance that you might get it.” Mary looked at him calmly. “They’re where brave men sell their souls and good men sell their futures, and bad man sell everything they have. When you go there, when you’re taken there, you tell the shadows what you want. I’m the ghost who tries to talk you out of it.”
“Oh,” said Sam, in a voice that was suddenly small, yet seemed to be too big for the room around them. He felt like he was shouting. “I guess that’s an important job. I still don’t get why I’m not allowed to ask you questions.”
Mary actually smiled at that. “Nicely phrased. You’re catching on. Because I work for the crossroads, because I work through the crossroads, when you talk to me, you’re also talking to them, in a metaphysical sense. I don’t know where Annie is. At the same time, if you said ‘hey, Mary, where exactly is Annie,’ I could take you to the nearest crossing so they could tell y
ou. All you’d have to do is make a deal. It’s just that some—most—of those deals aren’t nice.”
“So you’re the asshole rabbit from Madoka?”
“All right, I can see why Annie likes you so much, but no. The crossroads are the asshole rabbit from your little cartoon. They want you to make deals you can’t live with. They want you to give them everything—everything—in exchange for things you never really needed in the first place. It’s my job to take you to them if you ask. It’s also my job to make you reconsider. Leave the crossroads alone. They’re not for you.”
“Sort of seems like you’re saying they’re not for anyone.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Do you understand the rules now?”
“Don’t ask you questions, which is sort of a bummer, don’t go to the crossroads, don’t sell my soul.” Sam ran his hand through his hair, leaving it in spiky disarray. “I guess I’m sort of curious about why you’re here, though, with so many rules.”
“I’m here because I figured you’d want to know that Annie is okay, even if I’m not in a position to tell you where she is right now.” Mary gave him a wry smile. “You’re not family, but you’re family-adjacent, and that means I’m allowed to check up on you from time to time. Before I was a ghost, I was a babysitter, after all.”
“This is weird,” said Sam.
“Yes,” agreed Mary.
“Very weird,” said Sam.
“If you start singing show tunes, I’m leaving,” said Mary.
“What?” asked Sam.
Mary rolled her eyes. “Never mind. Kids these days, I swear. You get the mice to the airport okay?”
“I did,” Sam said. “I, uh . . . I sort of want to ask if they’re going to be all right out there. They’re awfully small.”
“I know,” said Mary. She sighed. “Aeslin mice always are.”
* * *
MINDY
At the pipe’s end was a Kitchen such as I had never seen before, not even at Penton Hall, where they fed so many people each day that it was dizzying. This Kitchen was vast, shared between multiple groups of humans, who moved from station to storefront and back again as they worked.
Mork and I froze in the shelter of the pipe, watching the humans move, counting out their steps. Once we knew the pattern, once it was committed to memory, we left our shelter, and we ran. Pipe to table leg, while all backs were turned, all eyes were lifted; table leg to the side of the freezer while the man who worked nearest to it was consumed with staring at a pretty co-worker. Freezer to door.
Door to crevice, and crevice to hall, and suddenly we stood in an echoing room with floor of concrete and ceiling of high, naked beams, all steel and glass and the smell of cleaning fluid. We moved quickly, darting behind the nearest object: a metal bookshelf laden with heavy binders.
People moved here as well, but not as many, and not with as much purpose. We were behind closed doors, where the public could not go.
Mork looked to me, and I felt my chest swell with pride. I was a Leader. I was bringing him to true faith, and I was bringing him home. Truly, those who had sponsored me into the priesthood would feast and dance on our arrival.
“Where do we begin?” he asked.
“The holy Departures Board in the airport where we began was black, and mounted high upon the wall,” I said. “I do not believe they would put such effort into Form here; this is a place for Function. Seek things whose Function seems to be the spreading of information, and meet me here in the time it takes to recite the first Catechism of the Kindly Priestess.”
“A wise thought,” he said, and pushed his whiskers lightly against my own before he scampered away.
I took a breath. “On the fifth day of summer, after a week of poor forage,” I began, and scampered in the opposite direction, reciting all the way.
My eldest sister was called to the services of the Kindly Priestess. She knows all the rituals, even the ones so obscure that they are no longer performed within the main colony. She can perform the Calling of the Chickens, and sing the lullabies for the children whose names were willfully removed from the ranks of the divine, who wished only to forget their mother’s strangeness and live as did their peers. We treat our gods as a single branch, stretching straight and true, but we cannot forget that we were the ones to prune them so, at their own requesting.
There are no other Lost Colonies, however much we might wish it so. It took crossing an ocean to cause a schism in our current faith, and that has only happened the once. We are, and we remain, the last.
This place, designed as it had been for the ease of humans, afforded plentiful hiding spots. I ran, keeping close to the wall, looking in all directions for a Departures Board, and found nothing. When I reached the middle point of my recitation I stopped, made the sign of the Kindly Priestess across my chest and withers, and turned to run back in the direction from whence I had come.
The Lost Colony kept its liturgies well: Mork and I arrived back where we had parted at the same time, both of us mouthing the final words of the rite. He twitched his ears, greeting and apology, and said, “There was no Departures Board in the direction I chose. Only men, and bags, and a room of computers.”
Were the God of Chosen Isolation with us, he could have made those computers tell us everything we needed to know. But had he been with us, we would have had no need of the knowledge. He would have placed us in his bag and carried us onto the airplane, even as the Precise Priestess had done, and our only task would have been to mark his actions.
A pang of homesickness grew where my heart should have burrowed. How I missed the safety of my gods, who were large and powerful and walked in a world built to their scale, carrying us, their faithful, with them. This would all have been so much easier, had we not been alone.
But that was what made it a trial, and not a vacation. Slicking back my whiskers in defiance and acknowledgment, I said, “There was less in the direction I chose, but I saw there a door, labeled ‘Open Slowly,’ which I believe led to the Place of Passengers. Let us go there together. We do not need to Open Slowly. We do not need to Open at all. We can find the Board of Departures, and from there decide which plane will carry us most quickly home.”
The Precise Priestess had lived up to her name and title when giving her directions: either Portland or Seattle would do, although Portland was to be preferred, but if necessity demanded we choose between a direct flight to Seattle and a connecting flight to Portland, we were to go to Seattle. Changing planes would mean putting ourselves in active danger a second time, and it would be better if that part of our journey were finished as quickly as possible.
“Yes.” Mork hesitated, and then, with the shape of my name on his whiskers, he asked, “Will they truly welcome me? Me, who was outcast, who was lost?”
“You were never outcast, nor were any of your ancestors,” I said, moving closer, touching my tail to his. How strong he was, and how frail! My children would be blessed in their father, to be sired by one so brave. “Those who chose to stay did so from devotion. We have never doubted your faith. You will be lauded when you return home by my side, the lost son finally returned to us, filled with the moments we have yet to learn. Those who keep the devotions of the God of Bitter Honesty and the Obedient Priestess have been waiting lifetimes for your arrival. We need only to reach them, and you will see. You will understand.”
“I believe you,” whispered Mork, the sweetest words that any lover has ever spoken. Together once more, we turned and ran for where I had seen the door. We would continue. We would prevail. We were Aeslin, and together, we would be strong.
* * *
SAM
“You can’t tell me where Annie is, and you won’t let me give you my number for when you see her, and you won’t promise to remind her that it’s a serious dick move to run out on your boyfriend so you can be martyred by a bunch of assho
le monster hunters.” Sam folded his arms and scowled. “I’m starting to wonder whether there’s anything you will do.”
“Well, for one thing, I appear to have taught you how not to ask questions, which is a skill that will serve you extremely well if you’re going to continue hanging around with Annie. I love her to death—which is completely true when I say it, since I’m already dead—but I swear asking her questions is like taking the midnight train to oh god why would you do that no, no, please stop talking-ville. She’s a good kid. I’m not trying to warn you off her. I just hope you have an incredibly high threshold for awful.”
“I grew up with a traveling carnival.”
“Then you’re going to be fine.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Are all ghosts jerks, or just you?”
“All ghosts who willingly associate with the Price family are jerks, because we’re trying to keep up with the rest of the group. And don’t roll your eyes. They’ll stick that way, and you’ll start swinging into things.”
“I’m not Spider-Man,” grumbled Sam.
Someone knocked on the door.
Both Sam and Mary froze before turning, slowly, to look at the door. Sam straightened, tail vanishing as he shifted back into his human form. “Uh, who is it?” he called.
“Samuel? Who are you talking to in there?” The voice was Emery’s.
Sam winced. “Uh, no one? I have the TV on.”
“Don’t you lie to me, young man, I know the difference between a commercial and a conversation.”
“Shit,” muttered Sam. He looked to Mary. “If you’re going to vanish, this is when you do it. Like, right now.”