Chapter 12
A Rose By Any Other Flame
APPLE HAS VANISHED INTO HER TRAILER to read the cards and figure out what she’s going to do with me now that she has me: it’s been so long since there was a true resurrection that I’m still an urban legend, even draped in flesh and bone and sundered from the ghostroads where I belong. Laura is sitting in the corner with a red and white striped bucket of popcorn that smells of salt and butter. She’s eating it by the handful, eyes closed, tears running down her cheeks.
I don’t know whether to hope Tommy will come with the others to see her, or hope he’s smart enough to stay away. If she sees him now, with butter on her fingers and the weight of the Ocean Lady pushing down around her, her heart might give out. It’s not that I think death is necessarily a bad thing, or even that it would be a bad thing for her. It’s that I can’t do a psychopomp’s duty right now, and more, that she can’t help me shed my own skin if she’s no longer dressed in hers.
I’m trying to decide whether I should talk to her when the door bangs open and a lanky man runs into the room, Paul behind him, protesting that this goes against all etiquette. I catch a glimpse of red hair further back, trailing after the pair, and then Gary is yanking me to my feet, throwing his arms around me and squeezing until it hurts, until I feel my ribs bend inward. He buries his face against the fabric of my collar with a great huffing sound that’s half a groan and half a sigh, and he doesn’t let me go.
The door opens again. Emma steps inside, more decorously than either Gary or Paul. “There you are,” she says, in a serene tone that’s not quite enough to conceal the depth of her relief. “You scared the life half out of me, disappearing on Halloween like that. We thought . . .” Her voice trails off, leaving the unthinkable unspoken.
I close my eyes for a moment, the reasons behind Gary’s fierce embrace and refusal to let go coming suddenly, painfully clear. They’d thought I was gone. Not dead—I’d already been dead, I’m supposed to be dead—but gone, extinguished by the strange magic of Halloween and never more to haunt the highways and byways of America. They’d been mourning me. It took me less than two days to find my way from the Barrowman farm to Apple, and I still feel like I’ve just been kicked. I made them wait. I made them sit in their sorrow and wait.
When I open my eyes, Emma is looking at me with understanding, mouth curved into a small smile. “Don’t be daft,” she says. “None of this is your fault. You’d no more choose to go back to the land of the living than I would choose to be British.” She puts a spin of exaggerated disgust on her last word, strong enough to steal a laugh from my lips.
Gary still isn’t letting go. He’s shaking, so subtly that I might miss it if he weren’t pressing as much of himself against me as possible. It’s like the engine he doesn’t currently have is trying to roar through his borrowed skin. I stroke his back, and jerk my hand away as I realize how cold he is, how clammy. His face is cold too, but that’s a bit more expected with faces, which are exposed to the wind and chill and world. His body feels . . . it feels like . . .
He feels like the grave. Because he’s dead, and I’m not. We have reversed the wall that kept us apart for most of our shared existence. Now I’m the one standing on the eroding shore, while he sails the ocean of eternity without me.
Or he would be, if he was ever intending to let me go.
“Are you hurt?” asks Emma, tearing my attention from Gary. “Have they been taking care of you?”
“I called Laura as soon as I found a phone,” I say. “She made sure I had everything I needed.”
Emma turns to consider the woman sitting in the corner with her bucket of popcorn. “That’s Tommy’s girl, isn’t it?” she asks. There’s a hollow note to her voice, a whisper of her beán sidhe’s song. It’s hard to shake the feeling that when she looks at Laura, she doesn’t only see her as she is now, but as she was and as she will be, extending like a velvet ribbon to the beginning and ending of her life.
“Yeah,” I say. “She’s the one who trapped me in the Seal of Solomon.”
“That’s what I thought. So why is she . . . ?”
“Well, I sort of am her professional career, with all the books and lectures and hunting me down to stuff me into a spirit jar or exorcise me or whatever.” I shrug around the still-clinging Gary. This is going to get old fast, but I don’t want to make him let go before he’s ready. Sometimes my comfort is less important than someone else’s heart.
I hate being mature enough to know that. Sometimes I wish I had truly been sweet sixteen since the day I died, never learning anything that mattered, never changing. A homecomer instead of a hitcher, in other words, incapable of becoming more tomorrow than I am today. And I would have been miserable if I had ever been able to understand what I’d become, and so I shove the thought away, fixing my eyes on Emma, trying to ignore the thin shiver of disquiet she sends along my spine.
Apple’s a routewitch. Me, Gary, we’re ghosts, the spirits of the human dead running around and putting our affairs in order, or at least pretending to. Emma . . .
Emma’s a beán sidhe. Emma is not, never was, never will be human. She’s a predator, a strange beast designed by the universe to swim the seas between the living and the dead, attaching herself to a family and . . . I don’t know. When we met, she was the family beán sidhe of a girl named Amy. After Amy died, Emma started managing the Last Dance, and she’s been there ever since, serving milkshakes, smiling at the people who stumble through her door. But she’s still a beán sidhe. She always will be. I don’t know what she eats, or whether she technically counts as the living or the dead. I don’t know whether she’ll go looking for another family someday, or how she moves between the daylight and the twilight. She doesn’t disappear when the sun comes up. She doesn’t age.
Looking at her is hard. It hurts, now that I’m something temporary again, something that can slip up and die. I don’t want to meet her eyes for long. I do it anyway. Gary is clinging to me and crying and Emma is standing at a safe distance and these are my friends. These are my family. I’m not letting a little resurrection mess that up.
The back door slams as someone comes into the room.
“Rose, Apple says to tell you that—” The voice behind me cuts off abruptly. I don’t need to look to know that Bon, pretty Irish Bon with her lilac-streaked hair and her faded shirt, has spotted Emma. In a trembling voice, she asks, “Have you come to weep for me?”
“Hello, Siobhan,” says Emma softly. Then, as if compelled: “Siobhan Kavanagh. Eldest daughter of Richard and Jill, both gone to dust these long years since. Two children, Donal and Minerva. It’s been a while since you’ve seen them. Do you want to know if you have grandchildren?”
“Well, this is creepy,” I say, to no one in particular. “What a fun party trick I’ve never seen before. Emma, can you cut it out before the poor woman dies of fright? I don’t know about you, but I find that the monarchs of secret slaughtered highways tend to be a little less willing to help after I’ve killed their people.”
Emma’s eyes are so green. I’ve never seen anything so green. They look like the hills of Ireland, and they’re terrifying. The shiver along my spine has become a full-on spasm, a scream from all my primate instincts, telling me to get out of here, to go, to run. Whatever a beán sidhe really is, they must have been hunting us for millennia, always walking alongside, always slipping through the cracks.
“I am not here to wail for you, Siobhan Kavanagh. I am free of a family, and I choose to remain so, at least until the last of those I cared for is only dust and bones.” She turns her face away, breaking what I presume is the eye contact between herself and Bon.
I glance over my shoulder. Bon is standing frozen just inside the room, her face pale and her hands clenched into fists. All the other routewitches are equally still, like birds in the presence of a cat. They watch Emma with wary eyes, some of them with hands dipped into their pockets to grab charms or witch-works that they feel might help them if she decides to strike. When did everything get so complicated?
“Gary, I love you, but you need to let go now,” I murmur. He does, and I do my best to suppress the shudder of relief that runs through me as his cold flesh is no longer pressed to mine. Carefully, casually even—and don’t think that doesn’t take an effort—I walk over to Emma and loop my arm through hers. She shoots me an amused look.
Her skin feels normal. A little clammy, maybe, like she’s been outside in a thick fog, but still warm enough that she could pass for human if she needed to. That helps, too. I don’t know if I could take it if both of them were revolting to the touch.
“This,” I say, loudly and clearly, “is my friend Emma. Yes, she’s a beán sidhe, but she’s not here for any of you. She’s here for me.”
“That’s a bit simplistic, don’t you think?” asks Emma. “I could be here for any number of reasons.”
“Yeah, but you’re not.” I shrug, still holding onto her arm, trying not to look at the wounded expression on Gary’s face. He doesn’t like that I let go of him to hold onto her. He’ll get over it. We’ll have time, and he’ll get over it. We’ll have forever. “You’re here because you were worried about me, and you’re not going to sing anyone into their grave. Right? Tell them, before Apple shows up with a net.”
“You put a great deal of faith in one little routewitch,” she says, and sighs before raising her voice and announcing, “I am not here for any of you. I’m just trying to help my friend.”
That seems to satisfy the routewitches, or maybe they’ve been told not to threaten things they don’t actually want to fight, but whatever the reason, they relax, pull their hands out of their pockets and away from their belts, and go back to whatever it is they were doing before Bon arrived and announced Emma’s nature to the room. Bon herself starts cautiously toward us, eyes flicking along Emma’s form as she walks, like she’s taking the other woman’s measurements.
“Hi, Bon,” I say. “I see you and Emma have some fun cultural baggage to work through, and won’t that be exciting for you, after you tell me what Apple wants me to know.”
“She wants to see you,” says Bon, glancing to me long enough to make sure I know who the invitation is for. Then it’s back to staring at Emma, with a deeply unnerving intensity.
“Okay,” I say, and start to step forward, arm still linked with Emma’s.
Bon puts her hand up. “Only you,” she adds. “Not the ghost car or the beán sidhe. This doesn’t concern them.”
“Everything about Rose concerns me,” says Gary. His voice is gravelly, probably from all the crying. My poor sweetheart. I want to kiss him, to tell him everything’s going to be all right, but I can’t shake the feeling that if I actually touched my lips to his, I would throw up again. That doesn’t seem all that reassuring.
“I’ll come back,” I say softly. The look he gives me is anguished. “I will.”
“You didn’t last time.”
“Last time, Bobby Cross was waiting for me.” If there’s any place where it’s safe to say that name, it should be here, at the heart of the routewitches’ power. The Ocean Lady will protect me. “Apple hates him as much as I do, if not more, because he’s the reason her predecessor stepped down and gave her the throne. The routewitches blame themselves for Bobby. That means they’ll do everything in their power to stop him from getting what he wants. What he wants is me. I am safe here. Apple will not let me come to harm.”
His jaw sets in that stubborn, mulish look that I know and love so well, the one he wore when we were in high school and people were warning him against dating a girl of my background, a girl who could surely only break his heart. “She’s the one who sent you to those farmers. I’m going to haunt them for what they’ve done.”
The image of a ghost car following Violet Barrowman to the store draws a quick, sharp laugh from my lips, which earns me a disappointed look from Gary. I can’t risk kissing him, but I can reach out with my free hand and brush my fingertips across his cheek. The contact is glancing, and still makes me feel like I’ve trailed my hand through the water of a polluted swamp. The places where the dead rub against the living are not always kind.
It would be better if he were my kind of ghost, if he could shrug on a coat and bring borrowed flesh and blood with it. We’re on the Ocean Lady. He should feel more human here, less of the grave. But he doesn’t. Sweet Persephone, he doesn’t.
“They will be punished,” I say. “We’ll haunt them together, if it comes to that. Right now, the Queen of the Routewitches is calling for me, and I have to go. I need her. And it’s not like I have a choice.”
“I need you,” he says mournfully, and he’s telling the truth, and I smile sadly and walk away anyway. Here, now, there is nothing else that I can do.
As the back door swings shut behind me, I hear Bon asking, “So which family did you belong to, beán sidhe?” and the answering bells of Emma’s laughter. Life—or a reasonable facsimile thereof—goes on. Life always goes on.
Apple’s trailer is unguarded, the door standing open and propped with a simple red brick. It seems quaint at best, foolish at worst—what’s to keep someone like Bobby, like the man Paul apparently was before he lost to her, from charging in and doing whatever they like? But that’s the reason for the seeming carelessness of it all. Apple is making a show of power, and she’s doing it with a red brick and an open door.
The rules of the routewitches are not quite the rules of the road. They’re close enough that I can find the shape of them, mark them on the map. That’s both a good thing and a bad one. Good because I’m less likely to make the kind of wrong turn that gets people into trouble they can’t get out of; bad because the people around me may assume I know more than I do, and be less forgiving of my little missteps.
I walk cautiously toward the trailer, watching for one of those little missteps. As a ghost, I wasn’t exactly free to come and go from the Ocean Lady as I pleased, but I approached Apple as an outsider, someone who respected her laws out of courtesy and a certain mutual awareness of how much damage we could do to one another. Now, as a routewitch, as one of her fucking subjects, I have to approach her with my metaphorical hat in hand, treading carefully, lest I offend. There’s so much about who she is and what she does that I don’t fully understand, so many hidden wires for me to trip over and strangle myself on.
She’s sitting at her dressing table when I poke my head around the doorway, a brush in her hand, running it methodically over the sleek black river of her hair. She glances up, meets my eyes in the mirror, and smiles.
“Rose,” she says. “That took longer than I expected. Did Bon see your banshee?”
She says the word in the American manner, not the way Emma says it; she says it like it’s something made-up, something fictional. It’s just an accent, just a regionalism, and yet it makes me feel a little better, like there’s something she doesn’t know to go with all the things that I don’t know.
“Yeah,” I say, and step fully into the trailer. She holds the brush out toward me. I take it, stepping into place behind her, and begin brushing her hair without needing to be asked. I know my place in this performance. If I’m not going to challenge for her throne, and if I’m not going to stay and be one of her subjects, I can play the faithful handmaid, at least for a while.
Her hair smells like cherry blossoms and apple cider vinegar, and I wonder, very briefly, what kind of shampoo she uses. It’s not an ordinary combination.
“Bon is rare, as routewitches go: we’re tied to the road, not just to the distance we travel, and so for her to decide she needed to move across the ocean was a very big deal. I don’t think she expected to see someone like your friend here.”
“I don’t think so either, given the way she reacted. Like Emma was a death sentence in a pretty dress.”
Apple’s lips twist, wry and quick. “I don’t ask my subjects what they’re running from, as long as it’s not something that’s going to rebound onto me.”
But how can you know, I want to ask, how can you be sure of what’s a threat and what’s irrelevant background information? Does the road tell her? Is there something written in the scrimshaw scratches of gravel bouncing off of highway signs? Or does she just go with her gut, and hope that she won’t make the kind of mistake her predecessor did when he agreed to take Bobby Cross down to the crossroads to pray?
“Gary feels dead,” I say.
“He is dead.”
“Yes, but he feels dead. He’s . . . he’s cold and clammy and awful, and touching him is like sticking my hand into a crypt. Why?”
“Gary isn’t a natural ghost,” says Apple. “He lured you in to play psychopomp for him, which meant he didn’t move on right away, and then he anchored himself into an artificial haunting. It’s a complicated trick. I wouldn’t have put down money on anyone who wasn’t at the very least a trainspotter accomplishing it, and I think he only succeeded because he wanted it so badly, and you wanted it so badly, and the routewitch who performed the ritual was able to use that as, well, glue to stick the whole thing together.”
“And?” I keep brushing. Her hair falls through my fingers like water.
“And that means there are no rules to govern his interactions with the living. He wrote his own rules, and you were dead, and everything he decided was tailored to make it easier and better for him with you, as you were, as you’re meant to be.” Apple tilts her head back, meeting my eyes in the mirror again. “Give him enough time and he’ll probably learn to make a body for himself even when he’s not on the Atlantic Highway, now that he’s figuring out what it feels like. But he’s always going to feel like a corpse to the living, because he isn’t meant to be here.”
One more complication piled on top of a situation full of them. I want to throw the brush. I keep running it over Apple’s hair instead, trying to let the motion soothe me. “Now what?”
“Now that we have you here, and safe, we look for a way to return you to the twilight without actually killing you. We need a victim without a murder. It’s like a riddle. There’s always an answer, even if it doesn’t make immediate sense.”
“Can we do it?”
Apple meets my eyes in the mirror. “Do you want me to lie?”
The temptation to say yes, lie to me, yes, deceive me, give me something I can hold onto and believe is strong—oh, it’s strong. But it’s not what I need. “No.”
“I don’t know. This is something new. Something I’ve never tried to deal with before. But we’re on the Ocean Lady—Bobby Cross can’t touch you here. We have time.”
Apple has been a teenage girl for longer than I’ve been dead. She rendered a grown man younger than herself somehow, ripped away everything time had given him and replaced it with spotty, sullen servitude that will only end when she says it’s finished. She can’t understand what it is to feel my body aging and dying with every minute that passes, to be trapped in a cage made of my own flesh. Her face in the mirror is serene. As far as she’s concerned, we have our answer. We have time.
I keep brushing her hair, and wonder how long it will take before time runs out. Apple is silent, letting me work, until the last tangle is gone, the last hint of a knot has been eliminated, and her hair is smooth and soft and still smells of apple cider vinegar. She turns then, reaching up to take the brush out of my hand, and looks at me solemnly.
“We will figure this out,” she says. “I know you don’t want to stay here, and honestly, I don’t want you to. Someone would use you as a weapon sooner or later, and there are already plenty of those lying around, waiting to be wielded against me. We’ll get you back where you belong.”
“I may have some ideas about that,” says a voice. We turn, both of us, toward the doorway.
Emma is leaning there, arms folded across her chest, and she is an aberration in her sea-green diner uniform and starched white apron, with her long red hair and her grave expression. She looks like something from another time, my time, and this is Apple’s place, frozen a decade and more before I knew what it was to want something better than I had.
That’s the trouble with time. It keeps happening, no matter how hard you push back against it, how much you ask it to step aside and pass you by. Even in the lands of the dead we have new and old and in-between, and the gap between what’s modern and what’s archaic expands and contracts depending on who’s around. Here, now, Emma is modern, and the sight of her alone is enough to make my bones ache with wanting to leave this kingdom of signs and portents for her cold land of milkshakes and moments preserved in endless amber neon.
“I was talking to Bon,” continues Emma. “She came over from Ireland. I didn’t know a routewitch could do that without harming themselves, but she seems to have managed well enough, for all that she’s fairly firm on never going back.”
“It’s hard,” says Apple. “We don’t do oceans well. Airplanes make the problem less extreme, but then we pick up distance so fast that sometimes it goes sour, and that can be dangerous to everyone around us.”
“Good. Very good.” Emma turns to me, and her eyes aren’t modern at all. Her eyes are filled with something ancient and terrible and unforgiving, and I want to run from them, I want to run from them and never look back.
I stay exactly where I am. Those eyes may be the key to my salvation, no matter how terrible they seem.
“Rose,” she says calmly, “how much do you know about Orpheus?”