Chapter 14
There Isn’t That Much Distance
DISTANCE IS LIKE OXYGEN: it flows around us, over us, always, and we don’t notice it until it’s gone. Distance is nothing like oxygen at all. It’s the foundation behind the bruises on our knees and the tangles in our hair, it’s the context that puts the world into focus and keeps it from becoming one big pastel blur, all soft edges and vague memories.
Twisting a road like the Atlantic Highway isn’t easy or cheap, no matter how badly the Ocean Lady wants to help the one doing the twisting. Apple spent a lot of miles on that piece of showmanship, and while I’m not sorry she did it, I probably ought to be. Her power races through my veins and crawls across my skin, picking and plucking at all the miles I’ve ever known.
Dimly, I realize I’ve given her permission to do this, and more, that I represent the sort of hoard that comes along once in a lifetime, if that. All this distance, and none of it belongs to anyone who matters, just a dead girl with no one to fight for her—no one except the people who are here already, watching this happen, not understanding how much it hurts, it hurts. It feels like she’s rifling through my memories, flipping through them like a scrapbook intended only for her.
Finally, the flipping stops, and the pain is replaced by a warming sensation, like the contents of my stomach have been replaced with good, strong whiskey. Apple smiles, and I would do anything to see that expression on her face again. I would die for her, if I thought it would make her happy. I blink at her, trying to find the words to express the scope of my adoration.
“You’re pretty,” I manage.
“And you’re not in your right mind, but you will be soon,” she says, letting go of my hands. “The adoration is an effect of my position. There has to be some reward for witches in allowing a monarch to exist. I took the distance off a stretch of I-5 you hitchhiked in the late seventies, Rose. Do you remember that?”
I think back, because she wants me to. I remember that it was summer, and California is always glorious in the summer, hot enough to bake the underworld from my bones, variable enough that running back and forth along the length of the state had been amusing enough to keep me there for months. I know I was there from May until September, when the annual cycle of proms and homecoming games had called me back toward Buckley. I knew I’d spent some time with a group of ambulomancers in San Francisco, watching them get high and argue about the nature of the road. Apart from that . . .
The details are fuzzy. The colors are more the idea of color and less the actuality of it. I remember I slept with one of the ambulomancers, a sweet boy with big hands and a shy smile, who wanted to know what it was like to lie with the dead, who didn’t mind that I had to keep my borrowed jacket on or slip through his fingers like mist. I remember he cupped my waist like I was something precious, and sighed my name into my hair, letting it get trapped and tangled there.
But I don’t remember the color of his eyes, and I don’t remember his name, and I feel like something precious has been stolen from me. I shoot Apple a startled look, my eyes wide and wounded.
“What did you do?”
“I took the distance, and everything that comes with it,” she says. She smiles, just a little, sorrow and resignation: this is what it means to be a routewitch, this is what it is to be a queen. “His name was Michael.”
Michael. It sounds right, and it sounds wrong, and it sounds like nothing at all. It’s a name, just a name, and it doesn’t carry any of the weight of memory or connection. It might as well belong to a stranger.
I guess it does, now. Apple took every step that contained him, every inch and every mile, and it’s hard not to feel like I’ve been betrayed, like she could have warned me. But she spent the distance for my sake, and I can’t think of any journey that would have been better for her to take away. If taking the distance strips the context, better she steal some fresh-faced ambulomancer boy I only knew for a little while than something important, something that matters.
And none of that changes the fact that here and now, I want him back. I want the memory of the man who went with the hands I still have, the one who held me tight and told me I was beautiful, the one who never had the chance to love me.
I frown. Apple sighs.
“I told you it would pass,” she says, and lets me go, allows me to stumble away from the dangerous range of her hands. “I’m sorry. Normally, your first transfer would be something shorter, something shallower. It’s customary for people to take the long way when they’re coming here to see me, in order to collect distance they can give as an offering. I can’t travel as much as I’d like, you see, so it’s important for others to make up the difference. But your trip here is too important to take. You have to remember why you need to stop living.”
I have so many questions. My head spins with the weight of them all. I can’t think of how to ask them. “Is he gone?” I ask instead. “Bobby, is he really gone?”
“If you mean ‘has he left the Ocean Lady,’ yes,” says Apple. “More than that is beyond my power.”
“That’s why we’re not even looking for a North American passage to the Underworld,” says Emma. “There may be one in New York or Nova Scotia, someplace with a wild coast and deep roots borne out of Europe. The people who were here before the colonists came had their own doors, their own deep passages, but they wouldn’t take you where you need to go, and Bobby can find any passage on this continent. You have to fly. You have to fly as far away from here as you can imagine, and let the water hide you.”
It makes sense. Bobby is limited in the same way I normally am, by the kiss of wheels on concrete, the limitations of the black ribbon road that runs from here to the horizon. As long as he’s with his car, he’s eternally young. Take his car away and there’s no telling what happens to him. Even a slow crossing by freighter might not be enough, depending on how the crossroads worded his arrangement.
The thought of Diamond Bobby meeting his death by water is a tempting one. It would be so easy. Which is why I know it’ll never happen. Anyone can have a happy ending, even the bad guys, but girls like me never get an easy one.
“So Laura and I fly to Greece or wherever, find a doorway to the Underworld, pay Persephone a visit, convince her we should be allowed to leave again despite not having been invited in the first place, get me out of there, and then what? I’m in Greece?” I shake my head, focusing my frustration on this little, trivial aspect of the greater issue. This isn’t something I can fix or control, but it’s something I can get angry with, and that’s almost enough. “I can’t take a plane back. In case you haven’t noticed, they don’t usually pick up hitchhikers at the airport.”
Even if they did, I can’t stay solid when the sun crosses the horizon. I’m not sure which direction planes fly when crossing between the United States and Greece, but I’m absolutely certain that at some point during the flight, the sun will go up or come down, and if I’m wearing a borrowed coat at the time, I’ll find myself rather abruptly intangible and blowing through the wall of the plane.
“I’m sorry, love, but have you a better idea?” Emma looks at me solemnly. “We have all the time you’re willing to spend. We have, for lack of a better measurement, a lifetime. If that’s what you want to devote to the cause, be our guest. I was under the impression you wanted out of this skin a little faster than that.”
I stare at her, horrified to feel tears prickling at my eyelids, hot and hateful. I don’t cry. I’m Rose Marshall. I’m a ghost story, a legend, a lie, and I don’t cry.
But here I am, and here we are, and I am so tired of this.
“Where do we start?” I ask.
“I’ll make some calls,” says Apple. “There are other monarchs, in Europe. We’ve never met, of course, but we keep the channels open, for situations like this one.”
There has never been a situation like this one. Persephone willing, there will never be a situation like this one ever again. In this, at least, let me be unique. “What can I do?”
“You can convince Laura we’re not trying to trick her into committing some elaborate form of ritual suicide,” says Emma. “She’s a wary one, that woman, and she doesn’t trust us any further than she can throw us. If we want her to do this, well. It doesn’t have to be willing, but it would go better if it were.”
Emma looks so confident, so sure of herself. I wonder if she’d be so calm if she were the one standing in my place, risking exile from everything she knows and loves. I doubt it, somehow. I love her. She’s earned my friendship and my loyalty a hundred times over. But she was never human, and she doesn’t understand what drives us, not really.
“I’ll talk to her,” I say, and turn away from all three of them, the beán sidhe, the dead man, and the routewitch, as I walk into the rest stop.
Laura is sitting alone, hands wrapped around an empty mug for comfort. She looks up when the door closes, a concerned expression on her face. She’s out of her depth here. She has been for a while, but somewhere in the chaos of recent events, she’s actually started to realize it.
“What happened?” she asks. “What was that noise?”
“Bobby Cross decided to offer me a position under him,” I say. “I declined.”
Laura’s mouth works for a moment, no sound coming out, before she asks, “How did that make that noise?”
“Apple threw him off the Ocean Lady.” I shrug like it’s no big deal. It’s a huge deal, of course it is, but there’s no benefit in saying that.
“Ah, is that all,” asks Laura dryly, before she shakes her head and laughs. The sound is small, and bitter. “You’re making me feel old here. Being surrounded by immortal teenagers is not my idea of a good time.”
Emma looks like she’s somewhere in her twenties, but I can see where Apple might be unnerving. Maybe. “Apple isn’t immortal,” I say. “Someday she’ll step down, and without all that distance keeping her anchored, she’ll start her own journey again. And me, I’m aging right now. I guess it doesn’t show yet. It will, if we don’t fix this. I’ll keep getting older and older, until I’m not a teenager anymore.”
“Would that be so bad?”
“Yes,” I say, without hesitation. “I’ve been looking at the same face in the mirror, when I saw one, for sixty years. I don’t want to change. I don’t want to grow up.”
“But you do want to die.” Laura toasts me with her empty mug. “Way to be a role model.”
“I want to have died,” I correct. This conversation, this whole scene . . . Laura knows we’re talking about Orpheus, which means this is a part of convincing her to go. That’s swell. Because what I wanted to do with my day was spend it talking someone who has every reason to hate me into taking an all-expenses-paid trip around the world to visit the Underworld. That always works out well. “I don’t want to be a role model and I’m not trying to make you help me commit suicide. I am a dead woman walking. This skin, these bones, they’re not mine. They’re something magic made, and I don’t need them. I’m supposed to be . . .”
I stop. I don’t know how to describe what I’m supposed to be. So I settle for what’s easy. Most of the time, the less complicated something is, the closer it can come to being true.
“Me,” I say. “I’m supposed to be me, Rose Marshall, the girl who missed her prom and became an urban legend. I don’t want to change. I’m terrified of changing. So please, can we stop pretending this is the conversation we’re having, and move on to the one where I ask you if you’ll come to Greece with me and help the changes stop? I just want to put things back the way they’re supposed to be.”
Even as I say it, I know it’s not going to happen. Things are never going to go back to the way they were. Gary and I will always have fought. Emma will always have shown an outsider’s comprehension of human death. Apple will always have taken her due, stripped the context and the power from a slice of the distance I carry. Being alive changes things, and I didn’t want them to change. Now that they have, I want them to stop.
“We don’t know that we’re going to Greece,” says Laura. “We may be heading any number of places.”
“It’s the Grecian Underworld.” Which raises plenty of questions in and of itself, especially since my family isn’t Greek. But it’s Persephone’s blessing on my back, and thanks to Orpheus, the Grecian Underworld is one of the few with a documented escape clause. Since I’m not looking to move on to my eternal rest, I’m grateful that it’s there. I’d be happier if this was something that could be resolved with a few prayers to Saint Celia and an offering at one of her underpass shrines. Guess you can’t have everything you wish for.
“Yes, and the antiquities market has always been perfectly respectful of borders, boundaries, and other peoples’ cultural treasures,” says Laura dryly.
I frown. “You’re saying someone could have stolen the gateway to the Underworld?”
“I’m saying there was a time when sticky-fingered archaeologists roamed Europe just like they roamed everyplace else, and there’s a good chance that what we’re looking for isn’t exactly where Hades and Persephone left it.”
Which could mean a lot of things. Including angry gods looking for someone to blame for the involuntary relocation of their back door. This situation keeps getting better and better. “Apple can ask the road,” I say. “They’re not contiguous around the world, but I’m pretty sure she can at least get a direction from the roads of Europe and whatever. Then we go and deal with another monarch, in another place, and find our way where we need to wind up.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier just to go down to the crossroads you people keep mentioning, and make a deal?” My shock must show in my face, because she smiles the thin, predatory smile of the successful ambush. “Didn’t think I heard you, did you? I pay attention. I may be the living, and hence weak and useless this side of the veil, but I pay attention. Knowledge is power.”
“Not that knowledge. Never that knowledge.”
“Why not?”
She doesn’t know, she doesn’t know, my damned traitor heart is beating double time, hard enough to hurt, and I can’t even be angry with her, because she doesn’t know. There are whispers about the crossroads in the daylight. There have to be. Most of the people the crossroads claim come from there, where the population is larger and less well-informed of the risks. Especially since the crossroads can’t do what Bobby’s arranged to have done to me: no resurrections, no tickets back to the land of the living. Not for anyone. But there are stories, and she’s a folklore professor. Expecting her not to have heard them is like expecting a Phantom Rider not to drive.
“The crossroads are . . . not your friends,” I say slowly. “They want to give you things, not because they want to make you happy, but because they want to hurt you, and they want to own you, and if they’re clever—and they’re generally pretty clever—they can manage both at once. Bobby Cross is what happens when you go down to the crossroads.” Bobby Cross, and Thomas Price, and so many others. So terribly, awfully many others. Even poor Bethany, who was family, and a horrible person, and deserved better. “I don’t deal with the crossroads. Ever. I’d rather go on a wild goose chase looking for the entrance to the Underworld than risk attracting more of their attention than I already have. If you’re smart, if you want that reunion with Tommy that I promised you, you won’t deal with them either.”
“Are you saying you’d go back on our deal?”
“No. I’m saying the crossroads would find a way to take it away from you. They’d see that it was what you wanted more than anything they have to offer, and they would take it away, because that’s what they are. That’s what they do. This”—I wave my hands to indicate the rest stop around us, and by extension, the Ocean Lady herself—“is all natural magic. This is the kind of magic people were always supposed to have, the kind of magic we were always going to have. The crossroads aren’t like that. They aren’t part of the way the world is supposed to work.”
There’s so much more I could say. Like how an ordinary crossroad is a place of power, a place where choices are made and bargains are struck, but the crossroads are something else, something that comes from outside and uses that small pre-existing sympathy to worm its way into the world. Like how they stink like rotting flesh and unused rooms, sour and acrid and unforgiving.
Like how they’ll offer you anything you want, if you’ll just give them your hand and your heart and your future, from here until the end of time.
Laura frowns as she looks at me. “I believe you,” she says finally. “I’ve never seen you look this upset about something that isn’t actively going on.”
“You’ve barely seen me at all.” Before I’d called her from that truck stop, we had only met in person once. A lifetime spent trying to figure out how to find and destroy me is not the same thing as actually being acquainted. “So what do you say? Will you come with me to find the gateway into the Underworld, and play Orpheus to my Eurydice, and utterly fail to get me out of there?”
“I want to say ‘no,’ but to be quite honest, my field of study means that was never going to be an option.” Laura’s laughter is strained, compressed by forces I don’t understand and don’t want to know about. “I may never be able to write about this. That’s fine. I could meet a goddess.”
“Technically, you already have.”
“I could meet a goddess who isn’t also a highway.”
“More difficult,” I allow, and smile, relief and gratitude and anxiety all mixed up in a single expression that should probably collapse under the weight of it all. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she says primly, and laughs.
The door opens behind me. Emma steps into the room, looking at the laughing Laura with approval, and then looking at me.
“Sounds like she’s on board,” she says.
“Yeah,” I agree. “Where’s Gary?”
“He and Her Majesty are having a little chat about the nature and needs of road ghosts.” She looks, briefly, regretful. “When I told him you were still out there, you know I didn’t expect this. I wasn’t trying to complicate your afterlife.”
“I know.” It’s technically Emma’s fault that Gary spent his mortal life figuring out how to join me on the ghostroads. He was chasing legends and ghost stories across the country. She knew that one day, he was going to catch up with me, and that the reality of what I had become might not synch up with his romantic ideals. So she told him all about what it was to be a hitchhiking ghost, and somehow he—clever boy that he was—turned that into “I should become her car, because then we can be together forever.”
To be clear, I’m still not sorry he did it. I do sort of wish we had a chance to talk about it first. There are some things that shouldn’t be a surprise, like a puppy, or a ghost boyfriend.
“He’s new, isn’t he?” asks Laura. We both turn to look at her. She shrugs. “I’ve been collecting stories about Rose for decades. There’s never been a boyfriend before.”
“There was, once,” I say. “Back at the beginning.” Then I wait.
It doesn’t take long. Laura’s eyes widen. “That’s—that’s the boy you didn’t go to prom with? The one who drove you home for the first time?”
She’s come closer to the true story of what happened that night on Sparrow Hill Road than anyone else who wasn’t there. She’s still missing pieces, but the fact that she could have dug up my bones, soaked them in salt, and drowned them in the sea is unnerving. There’s more than one way to get rid of a ghost. Lucky for me, Laura always wanted her revenge to be as hands-on as possible.
“That’s him,” I say. “He lived a long, happy life, and when he died, he came here to be my car. He only has thumbs right now because we’re on the Ocean Lady, and she doesn’t stand with people pretending to be things that they’re not.” The road is honest and the road is true, and as long as that’s the case, the Ocean Lady will be both those things as well. She doesn’t have a choice. Divinity is a limitation in its own way.
“Damn,” says Laura. She looks at me with a new understanding in her eyes. “The two of you are like the inverse of me and Tommy.”
I jolt. It’s a natural comparison, but I don’t like thinking of it that way, and I like her making the connection even less. Laura’s obsession with Tommy is unhealthy. It’s driven her to do things that came very close to unforgiveable.
Gary never hurt anyone to get back to me. But he would have. I know that as surely as I know that my temporary return to the lands of the living has complicated everything.
Laura sees my confusion and discomfort and—another surprise in a day that’s been absolutely full of them—takes pity. She stands, dusts her hands against her thighs, and smiles. It’s the bright, disingenuous smile of a teacher about to jolly her students into doing something they don’t want to do, and I can admire its effectiveness even as I hate it a little.
“Well,” she says. “Let’s go find out where we’re going, shall we?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” I say. “We’re going a long, long way from home.”