Chapter 15
All Ideas Are, to Someone, Terrible Ideas
APPLE DROPS THE ATLAS on the picnic table with enough force to send a puff of dust billowing from its pages. Laura winces.
“I know you’re the queen and the absolute authority here and everything, but can you please try to be nicer to the books?” she asks. “Please. For me. As a favor.”
“You’re neither routewitch nor road ghost,” says Apple. “I owe you no favors. But yes, I will try to be nicer to the books. For you. Because otherwise you’ll sulk, and that would be distracting in the extreme.”
I do my best to ignore them—they’ve been bickering for hours, and it seems to keep them calm, so I’m not going to try to make them stop—as I crane my neck to peer at the open page. It looks like Europe, or what I vaguely remember Europe looking like. It’s been a long time since my high school geography classes. There are no countries, only land, and the brightly colored, tangled threads of the major roads. They’re beautiful. They almost seem to move, flickering and shining as they race along their predetermined courses—
Apple waves her hand in front of my face. I look up, and blink as I realize that everyone is staring at me. Gary is pale, his hands clenched in his lap. Laura looks puzzled. Emma just looks resigned.
“Don’t look at the map,” says Apple.
I blink again. “What?”
“You’re a routewitch right now, and you’re not trained. The map isn’t safe for you.”
I want to object—the idea of a map being safe for one person and not another is ridiculous. I don’t. The idea of a dead teenager becoming an urban legend because she’s too stubborn to rest in peace is ridiculous. So is the idea of a dead man becoming a car, or a runaway being elevated to the position of queen by a highway that thinks for itself. We live in the ridiculous. If I start to object to it now, it might all come crashing down.
“Right,” I say, and turn my eyes away.
“New York,” says Laura. “We should go to New York.”
There’s a soft shushing sound as Apple runs her fingertip along the paper. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan does have the largest collection of Grecian artifacts in North America. If there’s a way to reach the Underworld here in the United States, it’s at the Met. Problem is, they’re better known for their Egyptian wing, which means the narrative weight of the museum doesn’t tie to the pantheon we need. Trying to enter via the museum grounds might result in things getting . . . confused.”
“Meaning?” I ask.
“Meaning you could find yourself having your heart weighed against a feather, instead of asking Persephone for her mercy.” Apple’s voice is grim. “Anubis is nicer than his reputation would imply, but there’s a reason we didn’t call on him when we were trying to protect you. He doesn’t much care for ghosts who refuse to move on to their punishment or reward.”
“Isn’t he the one with the giant croco-hippo who eats the people who fail?”
“Technically Ammit is a crocodile-hippo-lion hybrid, but yes, she eats the hearts he judges unworthy, and with them, devours the ghosts they might have become.”
“Yeah, let’s go with not taking me to the Met to be devoured by something ridiculous and wrong.” I shake my head. The map is a tempting tingle at the edge of my vision, luring me, whispering horrible things in its effort to get my attention. I don’t want to look. I need to look.
I don’t look.
“If not the Met, what are we talking?” I ask. “Are we going to Greece after all?”
“No, England,” says Emma. “The British have always had sticky, sticky fingers. They picked up enough pieces of the mysteries to shift certain doorways out of true. If you want to walk the path Orpheus walked, you’ll start in London, and you’ll descend from there.”
England . . . even with my lousy grasp of world geography, I know what that’s close to. I turn to Emma. “Will you come?”
“No, Rosie, I won’t.” She shakes her head. There’s regret there, yes, but more, there’s resignation. “I crossed the Atlantic in the shadow of the family who belonged to me. If I go back without anyone to keen for, I’m likely to find myself called back into service. I don’t want that, not yet. I’m not through enough with mourning to want a whole new brood to bury. I’ll stay here, among the dead, where such things can’t trouble me, and I’ll be glad of it.”
Which means it’s just me and Laura after all. She’s watching me, making no real effort to conceal her scrutiny. It sort of makes me want to scream. I’m not used to being treated like a zoo exhibit, and I don’t like it. “How do we get there?”
“Plane,” says Apple. “The boats would take too long, and there are good reasons to avoid the water.”
“The drowned men,” says Emma knowingly, and Apple nods.
“Can I get a little remedial ‘what the hell’ education?” I ask.
“There are road ghosts,” says Apple. “What makes you think there wouldn’t be sail ghosts?”
It seems like an awkward way to put it, but it also fits. Anything that lives can leave a ghost, but the ghost wolves that prowl New England aren’t road ghosts, any more than the ghosts of trainspotters—which we call “rail ghosts,” and I wish to hell “rail” and “sail” didn’t rhyme—are. Death is an ecosystem, and everything has its niche. “Are there seafaring routewitches, too?” I ask.
Apple nods. “Sea and air alike, although we outnumber them. We have truces with the people of the air. They run their flying machines along runways—along roads—before they take to the wind, after all, and they want my good regard. When the routewitches and the skyfolk don’t get along, a great many planes crash on takeoff and landing.”
She says it so casually, like she’s not talking about accidents where the body count is in the hundreds. I look at her and I wonder if she realizes she’s as inhuman as everyone else at this table, save perhaps for Laura, who never carried on a conversation with a highway or sang a dead woman to her rest. Laura may have spent most of her life in obsessive pursuit of a ghost, but at least she still knows what it is to be human.
“I don’t have a passport.”
Apple waves a hand. “I can get you onto any plane departing from North American soil, and my counterpart will send someone to meet you on the other end, to get you around any complications that might arise. Sending a ghost to visit the Grecian Underworld is a unique enough circumstance that I’m sure he’ll be interested. After that . . . if you need to take a plane to get back here, we have bigger problems.”
“Like the part where I’m going to be alive until I die,” I say grimly.
Apple nods. “Yes. There may be another way, but if there is, I don’t know it. This is your best shot. Don’t screw it up.”
“Inspirational,” I say. “When do we leave?”
“Bon is going to go and get your tickets.”
I wonder if Bon knows that. I wonder whether it would make a difference either way. Here, among these people, Apple’s word is law. “Great.” I stand, looking to Gary. “Walk with me?”
He rises and follows me to the door, and neither of us says anything as we leave the living—or in Emma’s case, the undecided—behind.
Night has fallen on the Ocean Lady, painting her in shades of purple and blue. She’s beautiful like this, under the shine of a hundred million stars, painted across the horizon like glitter across the curve of a closed eyelid. I tuck my hands into my pockets to keep myself from reaching for Gary. He walks cautiously close, not reaching for me either. Good. He’s learning. If we can’t help hurting each other, we can at least be a little more aware of the rules.
“I guess now I understand why you never came for me when I was alive,” he says.
The rules are different for me. When I have a coat, I’m indistinguishable from a living woman. I could have spent every night of Gary’s life holding his hand without revolting him the way his touch currently revolts me. I don’t say that. He’s trying, and I don’t need to rub his nose in what a raw deal he arranged for himself when he decided to find a way to stay on a road that didn’t want him. “The living and the dead aren’t supposed to touch,” I say instead, and that’s completely true, even as it has virtually nothing to do with our current situation.
“I hate this. We’re supposed to be getting our second chance, together. We’re supposed to be a team. Not . . . I don’t even know the word for what we are right now.”
“Lost.” I shrug. “Scared. Confused. I’ve been all those things before. I’m sure I’m going to be all those things again. We’ll get through this, Gary, and we’ll have time to figure out what we are.”
He gives me a sidelong look, brown eyes sad behind those long damn lashes. Why do boys always get the best eyelashes? It’s not fair. “I thought I knew what we were.”
Laughter claws at my throat like a raccoon caught in a chimney, trying frantically to break free before it suffocates. “You were my high school boyfriend,” I say. “If we were both still alive, you’d be the guy I see at the reunion, the one whose wife doesn’t like me because I remember you from a time before there was her.”
“Or you’d be the wife, and we’d still be making jokes about the dress you wore to prom.” His jaw sets stubbornly, and oh, he’s beautiful, and oh, this is the worst possible time for us to be having this conversation. I’m a living girl, with a living girl’s hormones and desires, and the last time I was like this, he was the most beautiful thing in the world.
If I touch him, it’ll be like sticking my hands into a decaying corpse, all cold flesh and rot. Part of me thinks it would be worth it. I shrug instead, ramming my hands down harder into the pockets of my jeans, and say, “There’s no way to say, because that didn’t happen. We never went to that reunion. I died, you lived. We both changed. We don’t know each other anymore, Gary. You’re still in love with the idea of a teenage girl who died literally decades ago. I love you, but I think it’s mostly because you made this grand, romantic, stupid gesture and I didn’t know what else to do with it.”
“Rose—”
“I don’t think it’s going to be easy for us to figure each other out. Not when you’re a car and everything. But we’re supposed to have time. We’re supposed to be able to do it, because we’re not supposed to be in a hurry. So I’m going to London with Laura, and then I’m going to the Underworld, and I’m going to grovel in front of a goddess until she agrees to let me be dead again, the way I was intended to be in the first place.”
“I wish I could come with you.”
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” I shake my head. “I need you to stay here and try not to piss Apple off. I don’t want to come back and find out she’s sold you to some ghost chop shop.” They exist. They dismantle coachmen and the cars belonging to phantom riders. The dead don’t die easily. If they took Gary apart, he’d find himself screaming in pieces for however many years it took me to find and put them all back together. Not a good time.
Gary looks at me full on for a long moment before he sighs. “I don’t like this.”
“Neither do I,” I reply, and we stand together, silently waiting for the next shoe to drop.
The next shoe comes in the form of a dainty Japanese-American teenager picking her way across the parking lot. The sound of her shoes crunching on the gravel is enough to make me turn around and face her. Apple smiles, sad and a little wry.
“Normally, you wouldn’t be allowed to leave the Ocean Lady without making the proper sacrifices and renewing your vows to me,” she says. “We don’t allow unaligned routewitches in North America. Too much of a risk that one of them might get the bright idea to challenge me for my throne, and we all know how that ends.”
“With a revolution?” suggests Gary.
Apple’s smile is more like a baring of her teeth. “With a public execution,” she says. Her attention swings back to me. “Like I was saying, we normally wouldn’t let you go without swearing proper fealty, but there are some concerns—frustratingly valid ones—that if you swore to me, Persephone might see that as a closer claim than hers.”
“Wait,” says Gary. “What do you mean, her claim? Persephone doesn’t have a claim on Rose.”
“She’s a goddess,” I say. “I’m pretty sure she has a claim over whoever she wants.”
“Rose bears Persephone’s cross on her back,” says Apple, tone patient, like she’s trying to explain something important to a particularly stupid child. To her, that’s probably what Gary looks like. They’re almost the same age, but while he was running around trying to find a way to reconnect with his dead girlfriend, she was ruling a twilight nation larger than any daylight country. Apple hasn’t been young in a long, long time. “That means she’s accepted Persephone as her patron, even if she didn’t realize she was doing so at the time.”
I didn’t. I had gone to the routewitches looking for protection from Bobby, and they had sworn me to Persephone without so much as a by-your-leave. I didn’t blame them for that—I would have agreed, if they had bothered to ask—but I hadn’t had any idea until it had already been done.
“So?” demands Gary.
“So Persephone has good reason to listen when Rose speaks, but not if she thinks there’s someone with a more immediate claim. Like most goddesses, she can be a little egotistical. She doesn’t want to feel like she’s being cheated on.” Apple shrugs. “I may not be a goddess—and wow do I not want to be, now or ever—but I am in direct service to the Old Atlantic Highway, and she sort of is a goddess at this point. Rose taking a fresh vow to serve me might transfer enough of her fealty that Persephone would refuse to help.”
This is all political and complicated and confusing as hell, and I can’t wait until I can get back to the world I understand, the one where it’s all medians and minivans and flirting with strangers to get them to pay for my coffee. “Got it,” I say, before Gary can offer another objection and draw this out even further. “No oaths for Rose. I’m cool with that. I never much cared for taking oaths in the first place. Does that mean it’s time for us to go?”
Apple’s mouth twists, like she’s bitten into something sour. “I think I’m glad you died before we had the chance to meet for the first time, Rose Marshall of Buckley Township,” she says, and there’s a weight on my name that wasn’t there before, like it’s a title, like it’s a condemnation. Her eyes are filled with lonely roads and shallow graves. She’s never looked this much like Mary. She’s never been so terrifying. “You would have been a rival and a thorn in my side, and one of us would have been the death of the other, if we’d been in the position of standing on this highway at the same time, on the same footing. The only way we could ever have been friends was for one of us to be six feet under.”
“No argument here,” I say, trying not to flinch away from those highway eyes.
People in the daylight say that eyes are the windows to the soul, and they’re not wrong about that. They also say you can tell the content of a person’s character by how willing they are to make eye contact. That’s why so many of them can’t last here in the twilight, no matter how strong and smart and clever they consider themselves to be. Here, on this side of the sun, the eyes are the windows to the soul, and what you see when you look through them may be more than you can stand.
Apple pauses, sighs, and takes a step backward. “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” she says awkwardly. “I look at you and see a challenge to my rule.”
“That’s new,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “It aches. The Ocean Lady doesn’t want me gone, or I’d be gone already, but she knows power when she sees it, and you, right now, you have power. You’re untrained and you don’t know half of what you’re capable of, and that doesn’t change the fact that you have the power to make my life a lot less pleasant than it is. If you weren’t planning to go to the Underworld and get your death back, I’d have two choices.”
“Apprenticeship or banishment?” I suggest.
“Apprenticeship or execution,” Apple counters. I must look appalled, because she shakes her head and says, “Even apprenticeship wouldn’t be entirely safe for me, but again: you’re my friend, whether or not it feels like it right now. I would have tried. And if it hadn’t worked out, or if you had refused the offer, I would have been compelled to rip every foot you’ve ever traveled from your bones. I would have unwound you, skein to spindle, and draped your strength around myself like a cloak of bones to dissuade my enemies from coming after me while I was mourning. There’s no way I could let a routewitch of your potential stay in North America unchallenged.”
My heart is beating too hard. My breath is a stone in my throat. I choke it down, and it lands heavy in my stomach as I say, “Good thing I’m leaving, then.”
“Yes,” Apple agrees. “It is. Bon has your tickets. Another of my own will meet you at the airport to provide you with passports and currency. You’ll have time. Barely, but time.”
“Thank you,” I say. Anything else would be too much, would be a challenge to her authority, and I don’t want to do that. I can read the warning in the air. It’s not the same as the warnings I’ve always received on the ghostroads—there’s no smell of ashes, no taste of lilies—but everything is too still and too bright, like a thunderstorm rushing in. She’s holding herself back for my sake, for the sake of everything we’ve been together. She can’t do it forever.
I can’t make her do it forever.
“Here’s how this is going to work,” she says, and her words are branches breaking in the dark, implacable, final, impossible to mend. “You are going to walk to the edge of the parking lot, and you aren’t going to look back. Laura will come to you, with your things. Together, you will walk away from here. You will return to your car. She will drive you to the airport. You will board the plane, and when you land in England, you will be met by one who knows the way.”
I want to ask her how we’re going to know our guide. I don’t. This is old magic, older than me, older than America, and I’m an American ghost. I’m neon and truck stops and greasy cheeseburgers, I’m prom nights and cheap corsages and shared milkshakes at a diner counter. I have no place in old magic, no right to challenge it or claim it as my own. Maybe if I’m quiet, the world won’t notice, and the magic will work for me.
All I want is to go back where I belong. All I want is cold wrapped around my ghostlight bones and a stranger’s coat draped around my shoulders. If this is what it takes to get those things, then this is what I’ll do.
Gary is a silent shadow beside me. I want to look at him, to read the lines on his face and tease the patterns of his thoughts out of the set of his shoulders. I don’t. I won’t. He gets to stand here and watch while I walk away, hunting for a salvation that may or may not come. In this moment, he gets a little privacy.
“You will go to the location of the gate. You will descend into the Underworld. You will not eat; you will not drink; you will make no promises to anyone save the ones you are there to see. You will remember who you are and why you have come.”
Her words sound like warnings, like these are things I really need to hear. That’s more than a little distressing. “I’m not prone to forgetting what I want,” I say. “Even if I wanted to, this stupid body would remind me.”
“You have to listen,” says Apple. She seizes my hands, and I have to fight not to pull away from her, remembering the stretch of distance she’s already sliced off me, cutting it away as cleanly as a fisherman cuts the scales from their catch. “You have to heed, or we’ll never see you again, and you are my friend. I don’t have as many of those as you might think.”
It’s a lonely thing, to be a queen. I bite back my first response, and my second, and finally I just nod, saying, “I’m listening.”
“Any promises you make to those you’ve come to see will be binding, so consider them carefully. Even if you think it’s worth what they’re asking you to pay, be certain, because no one’s going to get you out of your own word, freely given. They will tell you the way out. You may ask them to place that exit in North America, if it’s within their power to do so. We’re sending you to walk the road Orpheus once walked, but that’s metaphorical, not literal; you aren’t going to pop out in ancient Greece.”
“You sound pretty damn sure of that.”
The corner of her mouth twitches in a smile, quickly smothered. “I’m pretty damn sure that if you had suddenly appeared in the time of gods and heroes, there’d be something in the folklore about this weird woman who didn’t speak Greek, and yet still managed to punch Zeus in the dick before she got turned into an almond tree.”
“Why almond?” asks Gary.
“They’re bitter.” Apple keeps her eyes on me. “You will go. You will be careful. You will come home, no longer in a position to be my rival, but only as always, my friend. Do you understand me, Rose Marshall of Buckley Township, Michigan?”
“I do,” I say. Before I can reconsider, I pull my hands from hers, step forward, and embrace her. Unlike Gary, she feels exactly as I expect her to feel: she feels like a living girl, slight and shivering. She hugs me back, fiercely, and for a moment—only a moment—everything stops. We are two teenagers holding each other tight in the twilight that never ends, and whatever happens next, we will always have had this. We will always have been alive together, hearts beating at the same time, and we will always, always have been friends.
Always.