Chapter 10
Forbidden Fruit
LAURA DOES NOT HAVE ANY MERCUROCHROME. Mercurochrome was banned as unsafe in the United States almost twenty years ago, and there are so many other options on the market these days that no one’s fighting to bring it back. The stuff she puts on my cut hand is milky and clear and doesn’t stain my skin around the flesh-colored bandage she puts over the wound itself, and it’s hard to believe it’s going to do me any good. Medicine should leave a mark.
The runes are definitely leaving a mark. Every time I blink it gets harder to see the true diner under the false one, which is strengthening and stabilizing with every passing moment. It’s unnerving. Not just to me; Laura looks around and laughs a little, unsteadily.
“We’re going to have people pulling into the parking lot and asking for pie if this keeps up,” she says.
“Isn’t this what happened last time?”
Laura shakes her head. “When I set that trap for you, it was . . . I used a lot of the same ritual markers. Not all—there’s no Seal of Solomon here, I’m not trying to catch anything this time—but the shape of things was the same. I expected the results to be the same. I don’t know why this is coming on so strong.”
I do. We’re on the Ocean Lady, and there’s no way the Atlantic Highway herself didn’t have a hand in us “chancing upon” such a perfect ritual location. We should have been driving around until morning trying to locate an abandoned diner that suited our needs, not finding one on our first try. She wants us to succeed. And I should have been a routewitch, would have been a routewitch if I’d lived. The road may not be speaking to me, but the Ocean Lady knows.
There’s more power in this moment than Laura could ever have predicted, and almost certainly more than her runes can safely contain. I don’t think Urban Decay preps their eyeliners to channel the ritual strength of a phantom highway, or if they do, they should probably charge more for them. I shrug, forcing a smile.
“Maybe it helps that you’re sending out an invitation, not setting a trap?” I suggest.
“Maybe.” Laura doesn’t look convinced. That speaks well of her intelligence, since I’m literally talking out of my ass. I keep smiling. If she breaks the runes now . . .
Well, if she breaks the runes now, it may not do anything. The Ocean Lady is fueling this summons, and she doesn’t really care what little human magicians do or don’t want from her. She does as she pleases. I just hope what she pleases is helping me.
Laura produces granola bars and beef jerky from her bag. They help to take the taste of vomit from my mouth, leaving me less disgusted by the entire reality of my physical being. She finds a stool that’s actually as structurally stable as it looks, and sits down. I perch on the counter, resisting the urge to pick at my bandage, nibbling on a granola bar instead. Time oozes by like treacle, thick and slow and unrelenting.
Laura doesn’t say anything. Neither do I. We’re not friends, could never have been friends, not with everything we have between us. She’s helping me because she needs me, if she wants to be sure of getting Tommy back, and I’m sitting here with her because I don’t have any other choice. That’s not enough to make us friends.
But the silence is cruel. It opens space for my thoughts to chase each other through the warrens of my mind, teasing and taunting me. What if I’m changing more than I think I am? What if the little differences between who I am and who I was are already enough to keep me off the ghostroads? I could go back into the twilight and find myself starting over as something entirely new, something I don’t know how to be or want to learn about.
It’s a terrifying thought. It’s like tar: no matter how hard I shove it away, it leaks up around the edges and wraps itself around me, drawing me into its unwanted embrace. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can’t do anything but listen to the hammering of my heart, and wonder how thin its walls are. Can I scare myself to death?
The bell over the door is louder than thunder. I jump, almost falling off the counter before I catch myself. Laura tenses, one hand going to the knife in her bag of ritual supplies. We both turn, briefly united in our terror.
The girl in the doorway looks at us, a slow frown growing on her face. Her hair has been pulled back with a series of brightly colored elastic bands, like she’s trying to build a rainbow from black silk and nostalgia. Her clothes are as clean and well-mended as ever. When she sees me, her eyes widen and she raises one hand to press against the hollow of her throat, like she’s struggling to hold her heart inside. There’s no mistaking the surprise, or the raw disbelief in her expression.
“Rose?” she asks.
“Apple!” I fling myself from the counter and toward the Queen of the North American Routewitches. I’m a few inches taller than she is. I always have been, but before, we’ve always been meeting on the Ocean Lady, where power and position made her seem larger than she is. She barely has the time to spread her arms to catch me, and then I’m embracing her, I’m holding on for dear death, fighting to use her to anchor myself to the world where I belong and not the world where I am.
“I’m guessing you know her,” says Laura, behind me.
“Rose, let go.” Apple sets me gently aside, straightening, and in that moment, she goes from small, careful teenage girl to monarch at the height of her strength. We’re on the Ocean Lady, even here in the world of the living where the unforgiving minutes beat us down, one by one, into the future.
She turns her eyes on Laura, and she is glorious and terrible all at once. She is a runaway and a lost child, and she is Peter Pan and the kidnapper who claims only herself. I don’t know how I ever worked up the nerve to hug her, who is so much more than I am.
The road is remembering who you are, whispers a voice, and it doesn’t matter, because I am in the presence of the queen.
“Who are you?” demands Apple, her eyes on Laura, her voice unforgiving. She has her body tilted to put herself between us, and I realize what this looks like from her side. I went to the Halloween fields. I didn’t come home. Instead, I vanished from the twilight, leaving neither body nor haunt behind, and maybe the Barrowman family told her what happened and maybe they didn’t; it wouldn’t have mattered either way, because by the time Apple had come looking, I was gone, long gone, hiding from Bobby Cross and making my way to Laura.
Laura looks like the woman who kidnapped me. Laura looks like a threat.
I force myself to raise my hand, to place it on Apple’s arm, going against every law of etiquette now presenting itself to me, rising through the soles of my feet and flooding my senses. Apple glances at me, surprised by my insolence. I shake my head.
“Her name is Laura Moorhead,” I say. “She’s helping me.”
Apple glances back to Laura, her surprise not fading. “Laura Moorhead?” she echoes. “Isn’t she Tommy’s girl?”
How many names does she keep track of, this little routewitch queen with her highway arteries, her backroad veins? How does she know us all? “That’s the one,” I say.
“You know Tommy?” demands Laura. There’s no deference in her tone. If she realizes who Apple is, she doesn’t care. I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse than ignorance. Probably worse. Ignorance can be corrected. Arrogance is a harder key to turn.
“I know all the phantom riders,” says Apple. “They run my roads and they pay me tribute by gathering the miles of the ghostroads up in my name, offering them to me in exchange for permission to keep running. I could stop their engines with a sign, and I don’t, and so they love me. Do you think he loves you, Laura Moorhead of the daylight?”
“Laura, this is Apple,” I say hastily, breaking in before things can get even uglier than they already are. I’m sure they can get uglier. It seems like things can always get uglier. “The Queen of the North American Routewitches. We’re in a diner that only sort of exists, anchored by the Ocean Lady, which means we’re in her territory. Which means play nice, please; which means remember why we’re here.”
“What, really?” Laura looks Apple up and down before turning to me in patent disbelief. “But she’s just a kid.”
“I was a kid the day the government decided my family needed to be locked up for the crime of being descended from a nation that was no longer our own,” says Apple. Her voice is acid and ice. “I was a kid the day I ran away from Manzanar, following the song of the road I’d been denied for too damn long. And I was a kid the day I took the crown, the day I agreed to serve the road and anchor the old Atlantic Highway for as long as I pleased her. I’ll be a kid until I do something to lose my throne, and then maybe I’ll grow up, have kids of my own, tell them how their mother escaped from a time of prejudice and cruelty. But maybe not. Prejudice and cruelty don’t seem to have fallen much out of favor.”
Laura pales as she looks back to Apple. “I see. You have my apologies.”
“You never seemed to have a problem with me being ‘just a kid,’” I say.
“You’re dead. She’s not.”
“Our kings and queens don’t serve past death,” Apple agrees. “We’re not umbramancers.”
That’s the first time I’ve heard it implied that the umbramancers might have a phantom ruler. I want to ask about it. I have more important issues to resolve. “I’m sorry if we startled you with this whole diner thing,” I say. “We needed to get your attention.”
“And you have it,” Apple agrees. She switches her focus to me. “Did this . . . this two-penny midway sorcerer do this to you? Tell me where the sigil is and I’ll destroy it, and you can come home. Gary’s been worried sick. We all have.”
The thought of a car being worried sick would be funny, if I didn’t love him so damn much, if I wasn’t so eager to get back to him. “No,” I say, shaking my head. “Laura’s helping me. She’s the one who called this diner out of the twilight so you’d know I was here.”
“Then who—”
“Bobby.” I’ve been trying not to say his name, for fear that he’ll hear it and follow the sound right to where I’m waiting. I’m less afraid now that Apple’s here. She might not be able to destroy Bobby, but she can protect me from him. I know she can. “He . . . he convinced the Barrowmans to help him. He took one of their kids hostage. They did something to me, so that when the Halloween candle blew out, it didn’t take me with it.”
The look on Apple’s face is half horror, half grudging respect. “They performed a true resurrection. They actually called someone back from the dead.”
“Yeah.” I spread my hands, indicating the length of my hated, heavy body. “I’m alive again. Hooray for me. Now we just need to fix it.”
“Can you hear the road?” Apple looks at me closely. “I should have felt you rise. You were supposed to be a routewitch. You should be mine now.”
“No.” I shake my head. “It’s not there. I thought it would be there. I’m flying without a compass, and it’s not fun.”
“Take off your shirt.”
I glance to Laura, who looks nonplussed. Then I shrug, and turn my back on Apple, and remove both my borrowed jacket and the shirt Laura bought for me, the one that’s too new and tight against my skin. It’s been so long since I wore anything I didn’t call out of the twilight myself that all these human clothes feel like a punishment.
Behind me, Apple makes a small sound of horror and understanding, and I feel her fingers trace the skin along my spine, glancing so lightly that I can almost tell myself that it’s only the wind.
“Your tattoo is still here, but it’s so faded that it looks like it’s a hundred years old,” she says, softly. “It’s a ghost. He pulled you into the land of the living and forced your protections into the land of the dead.”
“Is it still damaged?”
“Yes—the sacrifice hasn’t been made. You’re still alive.” Apple’s fingers brush across me again. “Not that it matters. It can’t protect you as you are.”
“What if Bobby kills her?” The voice is Laura’s; the question might as well be mine. “Will that count as the sacrifice this protection, whatever it is, needs?”
“I don’t know,” says Apple. “This is uncharted ground. What I need to know right here, right now, is why she can’t feel the road. She’s supposed to be mine. She was meant to be mine.” There’s an avarice in her voice I’ve never heard before, a fierce possessiveness that frightens and excites me at the same time. “Are you wearing anything they gave you? Anything at all?”
“Not anymore,” I say. “And I was naked when I showered. But I ate the things they offered me.”
“It can take up to three days for the body to fully process a meal,” offers Laura.
I do not clap my hands over my ears as I realize what she’s talking about. It’s one of the more difficult things I’ve done in a day filled with ridiculous things. “They thought I was going to stay put for Bobby to just take me,” I say. “Would they really have fed me something to block me from the roads?”
“As a precaution? They might. What did you eat?”
“I don’t know. Pancakes and bacon and orange juice. Coffee.”
“Salt.”
We both turn toward Laura. Apple speaks first. “What?”
“You put salt in pancakes. You can infuse salt with runic meaning.” Laura shakes her head. “It’s part of binding a ghost. If you’re looking for something like Rose normally is, a ghost that can come back to life for a little while, you can use salt to trace certain runes, and then put the salt in something to get that effect orally. It doesn’t always work. It doesn’t work as well as the runes themselves. For one thing, it’s not easy to get a ghost to eat something they don’t want to. For another, unless you can bind them to flesh somehow, they can just disappear, and whatever you did to them won’t follow.”
“So you’re saying they poisoned me with pancakes?” I wrinkle my nose. “That is a stupid way to get trapped on the material plane. I do not approve.”
“Salt is easy to flush out of the body,” says Apple. “All you need to do is drink a lot of water.”
I give her a wounded look. Laura bursts out laughing. I transfer the wounded look to her. She covers her mouth with her hand, not looking sorry in the least.
“I know, I know,” she says. “It’s just that . . . all right, your majesty, or whatever it’s appropriate to call you, Rose doesn’t like going to the bathroom.”
“I hate it,” I say mulishly. “It’s disgusting.”
“You were alive before you were dead,” says Apple. “You have to have been toilet trained.”
“I was! I am! I just . . . it’s been a long time, all right, and I forgot how awful it was.” I glare at both of them, Apple who looks perplexed, Laura who’s trying not to laugh. There’s a fine edge of hysteria around her merriment, like she’s laughing because it’s better than the alternatives. This must all be a little overwhelming for her, folklore professor who’s been wading in our world but never diving below the surface for so very, very long. “I don’t like it. It’s nasty and it smells and I would prefer not to.”
“Well, biological creatures don’t really get a choice about whether they use the bathroom, unless you’re looking to experience the joys of a UTI, which I assure you would be even less pleasant,” says Laura. “I can’t wait for the floorshow if you’re alive long enough to get your period.”
I blanch, spinning around so that I’m only looking at Apple, my queen, my salvation. “Fix this,” I plead, voice low and urgent. “I can’t do this. You have to fix it. Please.”
“First, you need to flush the salt out of your body. Until you can feel the roads, none of the things I have to offer will work for you.”
I stand a little straighter. “If I flush the salt out, I’ll be dead again?”
It’s a stupid question, born more of hope than logic. Apple still winces, and says, “No. You’re alive, Rose. You’re a human being, as much as I am. You could walk out of that door and go out there and have a life. You could grow up. Get old. Die peacefully in your bed surrounded by grandkids, if that was what you wanted.”
Laura said something similar when she was trying to convince me not to make the trip to the Ocean Lady. I feel like I should be tempted, like the world is trying to command me to choose life over death, and once it would have worked. Once, the idea of being alive again would have been all-consuming, sweet and tempting and worth anything, worth killing for. Now, it only makes me tired. I shake my head.
“I don’t want any of that,” I say. “I want to go home, and home is the ghostroads. Home is Gary and Emma and the Last Dance, it’s highways and hitching and yes, hunger. It’s borrowing life, not owning it. This isn’t me anymore. I stopped being this girl around the time the moss started growing on my tombstone. I’m happy as I am. As I was. I just want to go home.” My voice breaks on the last word, and my eyes sting, and I look away as I realize that I’m crying. Me, crying.
There is nothing about this that isn’t terrible.
A hand touches my arm. I glance up. Apple is looking at me with concern.
“Flush out the salt,” she says. “Let the road see you. Once the road can see you, I’ll be able to see you, and then I can take you back to the Ocean Lady.”
“I have water in the car,” says Laura.
“Can you fix this?” I ask Apple.
“I have no idea,” she says. “But I can try.”
“Good enough for me,” I say, and walk out of the diner, into the dark, heading for the car, hoping for a miracle. Also hoping that Laura brought toilet paper.
This is going to suck.
I am correct: it does, in fact, suck. Drinking a full bottle of water and then pissing at the edge of a deserted parking lot, holding onto a tree branch and hoping you’re not squatting over poison oak, is about as nasty as it sounds. Every noise from the shadows around me is terrifying, a sign that I’m about to die with my pants around my ankles. It is not easy to piss when terrified, which seems entirely unfair, given how many people I’ve seen wet themselves in fear. Apparently, when scared enough, the bladder does the opposite of whatever the bladder-haver wants.
Biology is stupid and cruel and should feel bad about itself.
But I drink and I pee and I drink and I pee, and when the water runs out Apple produces a bottle of something red and sticky-sweet from inside her bag. She won’t tell me what’s in it, and I stop asking after her second refusal. I just gulp it down, feel my insides roil in protest, and go back to what I was doing before.
I’m peeing for what feels like the hundredth time but is probably only the tenth when it feels like something snaps inside my brain, literally snaps, with a crack that should be audible to everyone around me. I have the self-awareness to fall forward, onto the dry, unforgiving parking lot. That’s about the last thing I have control over.
When I was a kid, we used to take sponges and hold them under the tap until they were so heavy with water they felt like they were going to explode. Then we’d go outside and throw them at each other, breaking the heat and monotony of the summer. I feel like one of those sponges. I am filled to bursting, and it hurts, it hurts, I have no way to stop or slow it down, and it hurts.
Hands are grasping my upper arms, pulling me upright, away from the ground. A voice I don’t know but should is snapping, “Get her legs. She’s going to hurt herself.”
I’ve already hurt myself, haven’t I? Something warm and wet is trickling down my forehead, too thick to be urine, in the wrong place to be tears. It must be blood. I’ve already hurt myself, and what’s the point in trying to stop me from doing it again? Pain is the lot of the living.
Then another snap shudders through me, and thought becomes impossible for a time as I buck and writhe.
“What’s wrong with her?” Another voice I ought to know, another piece of information missing. The world is shattering, falling down in diamonds of uselessness.
“She was never meant to be cut off from the roads! They’re all trying to assert dominance at once, and we’re on the old Atlantic Highway. There’s a fucking firehose plugged into her brain.” I recognize this voice now, know the desperation and the fury it contains: Apple.
“Make it stop.” The second voice has to belong to Laura. They’re the only ones here, aside from me, and I’m not saying anything. I don’t know if I’ll ever be saying anything again. The way I feel, speech is an impossible dream, reserved for somebody else.
“I can’t.” Frustration replaces some measure of the fury, smeared thick as peanut butter on toast. “This isn’t . . . oh, if I could kill that man, if it were allowed, I would strangle him with my bare hands. I would squeeze until there was no life left in him, and then I’d squeeze a little more to be sure he got the idea.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s no way the Barrowman family would have known she was a nascent routewitch before she died unless they were told. He prepared them for her. He knew I’d send her to a family I trusted, and there aren’t many of those left—the Barrowmans have always been at the top of my list, and they’re going to pay, believe me, they’re going to pay—and he made sure they’d cut her off from even the potential of aid. How much do you know about routewitches?”
“I’m a folklore professor,” Laura wails.
Apple’s snort is amusement and anger and disdain, all rolled up into a short, sharp sound. “So nothing. Swell. We’re the children of the road. We own the paths and the presidios, any place a thinking creature has walked. We mature through distance. A routewitch who never travels may never hear the road singing. One who grows up in an RV train will come into her powers by the time she’s eleven years old. I found mine when the government decided to ship me halfway along the state. I could have been a good girl, if not for them. If they hadn’t made it so essential for me to run away.”
Laura says nothing. Maybe, for once, she recognizes there’s nothing that’s hers to say.
“Rose has been hitchhiking her way around North America for sixty years. Even without training, that’s the kind of connection to the road that blows everything else away. She’s fighting with the entire American highway system for ownership of her own mind.”
Is that what I’m doing? Because it really feels like I’m having a seizure. I make a faint mewling noise, the first sound I’ve been able to make intentionally since this began—although not, I realize, the first sound I’ve made. My throat is raw. I’ve been screaming, and I didn’t even notice.
“Good girl,” says Apple, voice suddenly close to my ear. She squeezes my hand, bearing down until the pressure is just this side of painful. I seize onto it, trying to use it to anchor myself to this place, this moment, this sliver of the aching, endless road. “Fight, Rose. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I should have guessed but I didn’t know. Hold on to me. I’m bringing you home.”
This isn’t home. This is a parking lot in the middle of nowhere, night birds singing and the light of the moon. This is a slice of the daylight, no matter what the position of the sun says, and I belong in the twilight, down deep among the dead, where I never need to catch my breath or worry about banging my head against the pavement. This is not where I should be.
But Apple is holding on, and it seems rude to keep her waiting. I swallow, chasing away some of the roughness of my throat, and I swallow again, and the burning fades even more, and finally I whisper, “You didn’t tell me it was like this.”
“It isn’t, for everyone.” She’s still holding my hand, squeezing hard and holding me here. “It wasn’t for me. It wouldn’t have been for you, if you hadn’t been cut off. I’m so sorry. I should have taken you somewhere else before we asked you to clear the salt out of your system.”
“S’okay,” I whisper.
“It’s not, and I’m going to make it up to you. Give me time.” She gives my hand another squeeze before she lets go. “Can you open your eyes for me? Please? I need to see you.”
I wasn’t really aware that I’d closed them, but if she says I did, I did. I try to focus on the circumference of my own skin, the limits of what makes me a being apart and distinct from the roads. Once I find my outline, I start filling in details, naming hands and arms and feet and legs. I find my face.
I open my eyes.
The moon is bright and the night is dark and the stars are shining and this is the human world, this is the land of the living. None of that has changed. But at the back of my mind something is humming, thrumming, anchoring me to the moment and singing to me of the movement yet to come, the press of pavement against the soles of my shoes, the whisper of my wheels against the road. I can hear the road.
“Wow,” I breathe.
Apple leans over me. It’s dark, but she moves in her own light, every line of her etched in stardust and potential. She’s smiling, the way a nurse smiles for a patient who’s just made a miraculous recovery. “Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” I manage. Then her arm is around my shoulders, urging me into a sitting position, easing me upright. I can’t fight. That would take more strength than I have left. I loll against her shoulders, blinking blearily at the woman who appears in front of me.
Laura isn’t limned in starlight, isn’t glowing from within, but there is a brightness to her features, like someone is holding an unseen candle a few feet away from her, casting her into delicate relief. I frown.
“What does the light mean?”
“It means the road is showing you what it wants you to know,” says Apple. “Can you stand?”
I do not want to stand. But that isn’t the same thing. “I’m not sure.”
“Let’s try, okay? Ms. Moorhead, help me out here.”
Between them, Laura and Apple are able to tug me to my feet. My jeans and underpants are still down around my knees. They let go of me while I hike my clothes back into position, fumble with the zipper and negotiate the snap.
When I turn, Apple and Laura are watching me, the one hopeful, the other wary. Apple speaks first.
“How do you feel, Rose?”
“Like my head just got blown up and sticky-taped back together by asshole aliens,” I say, and rub my temple. There’s no pain. I’d expect a migraine after everything I just went through, but there’s no pain. “What happened?”
“The road remembered you.” Apple’s smile is wry. “Welcome to the family.”
“It worked?” I drop my hand. “Of course, it worked. You’re lit up like a giant firefly. You wouldn’t be if it hadn’t worked. So it worked. Now can we kill me?”
“You have a one-track mind,” says Laura.
“Yeah, and normally that track is all about getting a coat, getting a cheeseburger, and keeping some stupid trucker from driving off the edge of the world. Since none of those things apply right now, my one track is getting rid of this flesh-sack.” I hit my sternum with the heel of my hand. “I’m done. I’ve had my vacation in the land of the living. How do I go back?”
“We need to walk the Ocean Lady,” says Apple. “We need to ask her for aid.”
“Great, let’s go,” I say. Then I pause.
Laura Moorhead, the woman I would once have put right below Bobby Cross on my list of enemies, is looking at her feet. Her shoulders are slumped, her posture defeated. She sees me looking and smiles wanly.
“I guess you won’t be needing a ride back to the motel,” she says.
“No, because you’re coming with us.”
Apple glances at me, startled. I want to apologize. I want to take that surprise and mild disapproval off my queen’s face. The habit of obedience is, it seems, part and parcel of being a routewitch. Isn’t that a fun little bonus.
I look at Apple and I smile, guileless and innocent of intentional disobedience. Years of cadging rides from truckers who didn’t want to give them to me have transformed me into an excellent actress, under the right circumstances. “I’m a routewitch, apparently, and I’ve traveled far enough and long enough that I should be a pretty darn powerful one. You’re the queen. Between the two of us, there’s no way we don’t have the gas to take Laura as far as the rest stop. She’s my ride. A hitcher never abandons her ride.”
Apple frowns, eyes narrowing. She knows I’m bending the rules on purpose. She also knows there’s not a damn thing she can do about it, not without calling me out in front of a woman who barely belongs here. “It’s going to be dangerous.”
“Everything about this has been dangerous. If we leave her alone, we’re leaving her vulnerable, and it’s all because of me.” I let the pretense of my innocence fall away, replaced by the sincere need to make things right. I have to fix this. Not just for me: for everyone involved. “Please. She needs to come.”
“I swear you’re going to be the death of me, Rose Marshall,” says Apple, rubbing her temple with one hand. “All right. You need to extinguish the beacon before it attracts something we can’t get rid of. The car stays here.”
“It’s a rental,” says Laura. At Apple’s sharp glance, she amends, “But I can afford the late fees, and it’s insured. The car stays here.”
“Good. Can you break the beacon?”
“Yes,” says Laura. “I’ll be right back.” She walks quickly into the diner. She doesn’t look back.
Apple touches my cheek. I turn toward her, startled.
“If we go now, we can clear the boundary before she returns,” she says. “If she has some hold over you, if she’s compelling you—”
“She’s not,” I say, warmed and offended at the same time. I can take care of myself. Only I can’t, because everything about this world is unfamiliar and dangerous, and I don’t know how to keep myself alive long enough to die. “Laura is helping me. I need her. I want her to come.”
“Did you forget what she did to you?” Behind Apple, the artificial light goes out of the diner, leaving it the dead, deserted shell that it was when we arrived. “This woman is not your friend.”
I want to listen to her. I want to let her guide me, to tell me where the dangerous places of the world are so that I can avoid them. I guess that’s what it is, to have a queen. I guess if I’d met her when we were really the ages we appear to be, when I was young and innocent and eager to be led, I would have given in to the part of me that wants nothing more than to be told what to do. I think everybody has that part. It makes things easier. It makes the blame less.
Too bad for me that the part of me where I store the stubborn pig-headedness that’s kept me on the ghostroads longer than any other hitcher I know is so well-developed. “It doesn’t matter if she’s my friend or not. She’s my ally. She brought me all the way across the country when she didn’t have to, so I could attract the attention of the Ocean Lady and bring you here. I need her to come.”
Apple scoffs. There’s a scraping sound. We both turn to find Laura halfway back to us, the dark diner behind her, indecision in her eyes.
“I know you don’t like me,” she says. “I even understand it. I don’t think I’d like me much in your position, not after what I—what I tried to do to Rose. I’m sorry, if that helps at all. I know she didn’t hurt Tommy. He said so.” There’s wonder in her last three words, wonder and pain and the kind of longing that speaks of first loves and true loves and how much it hurts not to be able to let go. Some of us just aren’t made for moving on.
“So I’m sure you can understand why I don’t want you in my territory,” says Apple.
“You’ve been living among the dead for what, seventy years? You came to them before Rose did, if I have my dates right.” Laura’s an academic. She sounds confident about this part, at least. “Do you know what happens to a teenage girl without someone willing to claim her, today? What would have happened to Rose if I’d hung up the phone and refused to listen to what she had to say?”
Apple is silent.
“They have juvenile detention centers. They have foster homes. They have the kind of surveillance that would have kept her locked up for years. She might still have been able to make it to you on her own—she’s resourceful, I will absolutely give her that much—but how much time do you think it would have taken? That old song, how does it go? ‘They always say that the good die young’? She might not have been by the time she got here. Forget sweet sixteen. You’d have been lucky to get her by twenty-five, especially if she’d been foolish enough to tell anyone who she was or what she was running away from. There are drugs for people who see things. Treatments for people who say that they’re not teenagers, they’re hitchhiking ghosts from the middle of last century. I saved her. When I picked up that phone and agreed to help, I saved her. Doesn’t that earn me a fair chance?”
Apple looks from Laura to me and back again. Her laughter, when it comes, is thin and bitter.
“You’re mine, but you’re never going to be, are you, Rose?” she asks.
“No,” I say regretfully—and I am sorry, I truly am. It would have been nice to be able to relax into a world where someone else would make the big decisions, and leave me to run the roads without fear. “I think that bus pulled away a long time ago.”
She turns to Laura then, and the light that surrounds her—the brilliant, burning light—seems to brighten, to become all-consuming. “If you walk the Ocean Lady, you are putting yourself into my home and into my hands. You will do as you are bid. You will listen. My subjects have little love for those who would interfere with the functionality of the road, and that means our dead as well as our living. Do you understand the consequences of your choices?”
“Nope,” says Laura cheerfully. “What I understand is that I’m a folklore professor, and you’re offering me the chance to see a world that no one else in my field admits to knowing about. Even if I didn’t want to keep an eye on Rose, I’d want to go with you.”
Apple rolls her eyes, but it’s hard not to shake the feeling that she’s pleased, somehow, that this was the outcome she was hoping for, even if she didn’t say so. She’s planning something. She’s always planning something. That’s the only way she’s been able to keep her crown for so long.
“So shall we go?” asks Laura.
Apple looks to me.
I nod.
“Yes,” I say. “We shall.”