Chapter 4
Bad Moon Rising
THE DEAD KEEP OUR OWN HOLIDAYS. I guess that sounds trite, but it’s true, and I’ll say it until the stars go dark, because it’s hard to make the living understand. We walk in a world of shared culture before we die. In America, that means Christmas trees in every department store, chocolate eggs on sale by the dozen at every drug store. Turkeys on the tables, fireworks in the sky, and even if those aren’t your holidays, even if your holidays are less mainstreamed in the modern world, those others are still everywhere. Every kid recognizes a Christmas stocking or a Thanksgiving pie. How many can say the same about Saint Celia’s bloody handprint or the torn toll stub of Danny, God of Highways?
Would you know Persephone’s Cross if someone decided to etch it on your skin, bitter and bleeding as a pomegranate kiss? I didn’t, and odds are good I’ve been dead a lot longer than you have.
But all this is by way of making a point, and the point is that there’s no unified calendar in the twilight, no standard set of symbols to mark the march of days and seasons. There can’t be, not when so many of us have a—let’s call it “casual”—relationship to time. The Feast of Saint Celia is celebrated on a hundred different days, and every celebrant will tell you theirs is the only one that’s properly holy. They’re all right, and they’re all wrong. Saint Celia herself will tell you that, if you ever meet her—if you ever realize who she is.
Some of us can’t even agree on the days of the week. And yet all of us agree, without argument, on one thing.
All of us agree on Halloween.
Halloween, when the veil is thin; Halloween, when the rules are different. Halloween, when the clamor of the living seeps through into the twilight, hanging heavy in the ancient air. I’ve never been a fan. The worlds of the living and the dead were never meant to mingle the way they do on Halloween. Traditionally, I’ve spent that holiest of nights hiding as deep in the twilight as I can, staying away from the surface. I don’t like the consequences of being in the mortal world when the clock strikes Halloween.
But when the Queen of the Routewitches says something is the only way, it’s not like there’s much choice. I want Bobby’s fingerprints off me. I want my protection back. So it’s time to go to church.
Can I get a Hallelujah?
The sun rises slow and cautious over fields of pumpkins and harvest corn, and the world smells of bonfires, falling leaves, and secrets. Halloween morning, two thousand sixteen. My eyes flutter open, consciousness triggered by some subtle change in the light, and I take my first breath of clean, sweet autumn air. I start coughing immediately after, falling off the hayrick as I try to stop the burning in my lungs. Hitting the ground makes my butt hurt almost as much as my lungs do, which is a distraction if nothing else. I stagger to my feet, using the edge of the hayrick to brace myself.
There are other dead folks rising in the hay, most of them coughing as hard or harder than I am, and still more are rising from the ground all around us, using fat orange pumpkins to pull themselves up.
Someone in the hayrick—one of the newer dead, one whose lungs are more accustomed to modern pollution than mine—starts laughing. It’s a delighted sound, little kid at Christmas, teenager turned loose at their very first parent-free county fair. And why shouldn’t that unseen not-quite-ghost be laughing? We’re back. For one beautiful day and one glorious night, we’re back, walking in the world of the living without so much as a borrowed coat or stolen breath.
Never mind that not all of us are here voluntarily. Never mind that I would so much rather be safe in the twilight, as far away from this nightmare of flesh as possible. No one can tell by looking at me. To them, I’m just another risen dead girl, enjoying a beautiful Halloween morning.
I force myself to join in the laughter, pausing only to cough a few times as my lungs adjust to the modern air. When I’m a hitcher, I can borrow a coat and start breathing no problem. I can even smoke, if I want to. The weird afterlife loophole that allows me to take substance from the living also grants me the ability to breathe their air. If the Martians came tomorrow, I could follow them home as long as I was wearing one of their jackets. Only now it’s Halloween, and the only substance I’m borrowing is my own.
Hell if I know how it works. Call it the dead girl equivalent of a Christmas miracle and leave it alone. Halloween has its share of the bad things—does it ever—but even as much as I don’t want to be here, I can’t deny that there’s something amazing at feeling my own flesh, my own heartbeat, and not something taken from someone else. I’m alive. Me, Rose Marshall, the risen girl.
The coughing has mostly stopped and the dead are starting to congregate, all of us assembling around the hayrick like the world’s weirdest nudist convention. That’s another thing. There are at least fifteen of us here, and there’s not a stitch of clothing in evidence. I guess we come into the world naked every time.
The thought strikes me as funny, maybe because I’m tired and scared and being bombarded with the chemical soup that living people have in their bodies, like, all the time. I’m laughing again when a farmer clad in jeans and a heavy flannel jacket comes striding through the pumpkin patch, a pile of shirts held to his chest. Two lanky teenagers struggle to keep up with him. Behind them, a woman and two smaller children pick their way through the harvest. All of them are carrying clothes. As I realize that, my reawakened nerves start informing me, urgently, that it’s colder than a witch’s tit out here, and when you’re alive, frostbite hurts.
I’ve never experienced this before, but I’ve heard about it, talking to the Halloween junkies who spend all year waiting for their next fix. This is part of the normal experience, one of the tricks that comes with all the treating. It helps me recognize which of these people are new dead and which are old hands. The new dead are the ones who go running to the farmer and his family, running on legs that barely remember what legs are meant to do, and snatch the clothing from his arms. They’re babbling by the time I and the other long dead finish strolling over. We’re just as cold as they are, but we’re too jaded to show it.
The new dead all want news—what’s the date, what’s the year, do you know my husband, my wife, my sister, my parents? Do you know me, do you know how I died, am I really dead? Was it all just a dream?
It wasn’t a dream. It still isn’t. The clothes the farmer carries are the most threadbare, the least warm, and that too is a part of the normal Halloween experience. I offer him a nod as I walk past, not stopping until I reach the youngest of the children. I crouch, putting myself on her level, and ask, “Can I please have something to wear?”
The missing teeth in her smile makes her look a little like a jack-o-lantern herself as she hands me the jeans, underpants, and flannel shirt that are the proper reward for that question. Her siblings are doing the same all around me, while her father stands at the center of his swarm of new and needy risen dead.
“You Rose?” asks her mother, in the pause between handing out pairs of socks and button-down shirts to the dead.
I nod.
“Our lady told us you’d be coming for the festivities this year,” she says. “We’re honored to have you with us.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m Violet Barrowman. You need anything at all, you just need to come find me, and I’ll sort you out.”
“Thank you, Violet. I really appreciate it.” The jeans are snug against my skin, blue denim benediction welcoming me back into the world of the living, whether I want to be here or not. “Happy Halloween.”
The pumpkin patch yields up its harvest of the dead under the watchful eye of the rising sun. So many of them are new, only dead within the last year, unaware of what exactly is at stake. They’ll learn. Because that, too, is a part of Halloween.
Sweet Persephone, I don’t want to be here. Damn you, Bobby Cross. Damn you forever.
“What’s the big deal about Halloween?” Gary asked, looking between me and Apple with clear confusion on his face. He hadn’t been dead long enough to understand. I wanted to grab his cheeks and kiss him and tell him not to worry, that there was no possible way I was going to do this.
I didn’t. I couldn’t. If Apple said this was the only way that meant it was the only way, because she had no reason to lie to me. We were allies, as much as a routewitch and a dead girl ever could be, and more, she felt guilty enough over Bobby’s existence that I knew there was no way she’d intentionally hurt me.
Halloween could hurt me. It wouldn’t even have to intend to. But if she was sure . . .
“How will it help?” I asked grimly.
“Halloween will cast you in skin again, make it so the world fixes its eyes on you. The road will remember your name, and it’ll read the power you’ve collected for what it is. That means that when the clock strikes midnight and the night officially ends, you’ll be your own sacrifice, and that sacrifice will be greater than Dana’s. It’ll be enough to burn the blood away. It’s all about power, and putting the distance you carry on your skin to work.”
“Why can’t someone else do it?” Gary grabbed my hand and held it tight. “There’s something you’re not saying.”
“No one else can do it because I’m not asking a routewitch to die for me,” I said. “It’s as simple as that.” As the words left my mouth, my heart sank. I had just committed myself.
Apple looked at me with sympathy. “It never is,” she said. “You have to.”
“I know,” I said.
“Then I’m going too,” said Gary. “Whatever this is, I’m going too.”
“No!” He stared at me, startled. I tried, and failed, to suppress a shiver as I repeated, “No. You can’t. Promise me.”
“Rose—”
“Promise me.”
“Okay.” He frowned. “I promise.”
“Good.” I leaned my head against his shoulder, closing my eyes. “Where?”
“I’ll send you to the Barrowmans,” said Apple. “They’re good people. Old ambulomancer blood, which means they’re not my subjects, but they listen to me out of courtesy, and they regard the presence of the dead as a blessing upon their farm. That’s great for our purposes, because it encourages them to treat you well.”
“Treat us well how, exactly?” I asked warily.
“Anyone who hosts the dead on Halloween is required to clothe and feed them, but there’s nothing that says they have to dress you warmly or feed you well. The Barrowmans do both those things, as much as tradition allows. They screen the people they invite to their fields. They’ll take as good care of you as is possible, especially once I tell them you’re mine.”
“There’s still a risk,” I said.
Apple looked at me, a lifetime of sadness and sacrifices in her eyes.
“Isn’t there always?” she asked.
Apple told me the Barrowmans went above and beyond what’s required, but I didn’t expect this sort of spread. They’ve packed picnic tables into the field behind their barn, loading them down with platters of pancakes, casserole dishes of scrambled eggs, and sizzling plates of bacon. They’re not just treating us well: they’re treating us very well. My stomach growls. The newly dead jockey for position around the food, and I wonder if they understand how much is at stake. How much is always at stake when the jack-o-lanterns burn away the dark and the dead go walking with the living.
Violet takes a seat next to me on the bench, her youngest sticking close to her like a solid shadow. “How’s the road been treating you?” she asks, and piles more bacon on my plate.
There’s a word in German that means “grief bacon,” eating because sadness hasn’t left any other options. I wonder idly whether there’s a word for guilt bacon, because that’s what this is: this is bacon offered because she feels bad for what she’s helping the holiday do.
“I can’t complain,” I reply—the right answer, even if it’s not entirely the truth. I could complain all day long, but there isn’t time for that, and there isn’t enough bacon in the world to wipe her guilt away if she starts seeing me as a person. Instead, I turn a smile on the little girl, waving a strip of bacon in what I hope is an amiable manner. “Hi. I’m Rose. What’s your name?”
Violet pales. She brings her kids around the risen dead, but she doesn’t want them talking to us. Well, tough. Too late now.
“Holly,” whispers the kid.
Trust Apple to send me to a farm filled with flower names. “You’re how old? Four?”
Holly holds up five fingers, expression solemn.
“Wow, five? Really? That’s amazing.” I feign astonishment, but it isn’t entirely false. I have no idea how to tell the ages of living kids. It’s easier with ever-lasters. They age as they move through their self-imposed grades, and they look older than I do by the time they graduate. The only age that matters is the one they choose, and they’re always happy to share it.
They’re the only ghosts who can grow up in the twilight. The rest of us stay where we stopped, forever, no matter how many years roll by.
“We were surprised when Her Majesty chose to send a champion,” says Violet, tousling Holly’s hair to distract her. “Are you a fighter? We have a good batch this year, but you look strong enough.”
She’s trying to flatter me. It’s not going to work. “No.” My answer is simple, because that’s all it needs to be. Will I fight, here, on Halloween, when the dead wear flesh and the living seek to steal it? No. Not this year, not next year, not ever. “I’m running.”
“Oh.” Violet doesn’t sound like she approves or condemns my choice: she’s just curious, and that’s the worst part of all. She probably grew up on this farm, watching the dead rise every Halloween, watching what came next. “What happens if you don’t get away?”
“I guess if I don’t get away, I die the death you don’t come back from.” I shrug and pull a platter of pancakes closer. Around me, the chatter of the new dead is quieting, dying down to a murmur as the long dead tell them what’s really going on. What price we actually have to pay for a day of wearing farm hand-me-downs and eating breakfast near the pumpkin patch.
Trucks are driving up the gravel driveway, their tires grinding like the teeth of some unspeakable beast. Halloween is upon us. The treats have been delivered. Now comes the time for the biggest trick of them all.
My initial count was off by two, stragglers who took their time stumbling out of the hayrick. Seventeen living dead people stand in a ragged line behind the Barrowman family barn. Of the six long dead, I’m the youngest; of the eleven new dead, one died only a week ago, a fresh-faced teenage football star who still doesn’t understand that this is something more important than the games his funeral has forced him to miss. Violet is around the front, wrangling the hunters, keeping them from crossing the line before the time is right. The farmer—Matthew Barrowman—is attending to us dead folk, his teenage sons behind him, like we’re the ones they need protecting from.
Silly boys. We’re not the ones with the guns.
“Some of you know how this goes, so I’m asking for your patience while I explain it to the rest. Everyone has to have the same chances when the candle’s lit.” He casts an apologetic glance my way. Violet must have told him that of the long dead, I’m the only one who’s not choosing to stand and fight. “For the rest of you . . . this is Halloween. You’ve probably noticed that you’re all breathing.”
Laughter from the crowd. One of the newly dead shouts, “Best trick or treat prize I’ve ever gotten!”
“We’ll see if you still feel that way in a minute,” says Matthew. His tone is grim—grim enough to stop the laughter. “Around the front of the barn are twenty men and women with guns in their hands. They’ll be coming around the barn soon, and they’re not here to serve you breakfast and say hello. They want to kill you again, and if you die here today, on Halloween, you don’t come back. Not here, not in the twilight, not anywhere.”
“But . . . but why?” gasps a new dead woman with pretty funeral parlor curls in her glossy black hair. She has stars tattooed down her neck, inviting people to make wishes on her skin. “What did we ever do to them?”
“We’re alive,” says one of the long dead. Long enough dead that I can see him as he should be, as he would be in the twilight, in the way he sets his shoulders, the way he holds his hands. He’s a phantom rider. The wind should be the only thing fast enough to catch him. Here and now, he’s flesh and blood, like everybody else. “That’s enough.”
The new dead gape at him, contestants in a game they never volunteered to play. We’re all contestants here. It’s just that some of us have seen the game before, even if we’d managed to avoid it up until now. “Those twenty people are either dead or dying,” someone says—I say. Dammit, when did I become the one who’s always taking pity? “Probably half of them came back on this field once before. The other half, they’ve got something broken in them, they’ve heard the beán sidhe’s song, and they’re trying to stick to skin a little longer. So they come here to hunt, and kill, and stay. Happy fucking Halloween.”
From the way Matthew looks at me, I can’t tell whether he’s amused or annoyed by my interjection. “If they kill you tonight, they win a year of life,” he says, slipping back into the narration like he’d never stopped. Oh, he’s done this before. “One year, from candle to candle. If you can keep away from them and stay alive until the candle goes out, you’ll go back to the twilight and nobody will be able to touch you until next Halloween.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell us this?” asks the star-necked woman. She sounds distraught, like nothing about this makes any sense at all. Smart lady. “I didn’t do anything wrong, and I wouldn’t have come if I’d known! I shouldn’t have to die again!”
“It’s not about right and wrong; it’s about the balance between the living and the dead,” says Matthew, not unkindly. He’s trying to be gentle with them, trying to get them ready to run. The hunters are here for a hunt; they tell themselves that shooting a man who runs is somehow more honorable than shooting one who stands his ground. Maybe they’re right. How the hell would I know? I’ve never felt the need to shoot anyone. “You came because someone told you you’d get to spend a day alive, you’d get fed and clothed and be able to breathe real air, to walk in the world. Well, this is how you pay for that.”
“Tell them about the other option,” says a voice, and it’s mine again. I keep speaking up when I have no business speaking.
It’s really been one hell of a year.
This time Matthew frowns at me, like my contribution is unwelcome, and I wonder, with a cold chill, whether he was planning to explain the whole deal. “There are weapons hidden around the farm,” he says. “No guns, but . . . other things. If you find them, you can choose to stand and fight the hunters. Kill one, and you get a year among the living.”
“So what’s the catch?” asks our new dead football star, with a look on his face that says this is too good to be true. “I kill some homicidal asshole and I get my life back?”
“If you kill on Halloween, you give up your place in the twilight,” says Matthew earnestly. “You’ll get a year. After that, you’ll have to come back here and kill again, or else you’ll end.”
“We’ll die?” asks the girl with the stars on her skin.
“No,” says Matthew, “you’ll end. Dying implies going on to something, back to the twilight or on to the other side, and that won’t happen for you. Not if you take a life on Halloween. You’ll just end.”
She looks at him, big doe-eyes wide and solemn, and nods like she understands. I have to fight the sudden urge to slap the stars off her skin. “You don’t get your life back if you do this,” I say sharply. Maybe a little too sharply. Every head turns in my direction, and only the long dead look like they know what I’m trying to say. “Your family buried you. Or they cremated you, or they donated your body to science, but whatever. You’ve been recycled. You’re gone. If you fight, if you do this, you’re buying your way back into the world of the living, but you’re not buying your way back into your life. That’s over.”
“What are you going to do?” sneers the football star.
“I’m going to run,” I say. “I recommend you do the same.”
“I know you,” says the phantom rider. “You’re Rose Marshall. Way I hear it, running away is your forte.” He smirks. Like running is something shameful; like I should play Russian roulette with, for lack of a better word, my soul.
“Shove it up your ass,” I snap.
The hunters around the front of the barn let up a wild cheer. One of the Barrowman teens comes quick-stepping around the corner, a candle in one hand, the fingers of his other hand curled protectively around the flame. “Mama says it’s time,” he says breathlessly, hurrying to his father’s side.
“That’s the bell, folks,” says Matthew as he takes the candle from his son’s hand. “Good luck out there.”
I don’t stick around to see him place the candle in the mouth of the waiting jack-o-lantern. I’m already turning and diving into the corn like a mermaid fleeing back into the sea. My borrowed shoes pinch my feet. I don’t let that slow me down. Halloween is here, and all I have to do to make my sacrifice count is make it through the night alive.
The corn whips around me as I run, veiling the world in green, obscuring everything. It will hide me. That’s good. It can also hide the hunters. That’s bad.
Two sets of footsteps fall in beside mine, and I know almost before I look who it’s going to be: the football player and the star-necked girl, both of them doing their best to keep up. He’s doing it easily, she’s stumbling, but they’re giving it the old college try.
“What are you doing?” I hiss.
“Please,” whispers the star-necked girl, gasping, already running out of wind. She wasn’t an athlete, that’s for sure. “You’re the only one who seems to care. Please, don’t leave me.”
Halloween is no time to feel sympathy; it’s a time to run, and to hide, and to shove anyone who gets in your way into the line of fire, because at the end of the night, only so many of you are going to walk away. Every hunter who makes a kill is one more hunter who isn’t gunning for me. There’s no Halloween bonus for bringing in the greatest haul. So there’s no good reason for me to slow down, to step into the shadow of a tall row of corn, and ask, “What are your names?” No reason at all.
I do it anyway.
“S-Salem,” says the star-necked girl, hair not quite so perfect anymore, pulse jumping in her pale throat.
“Jimmy,” says the football star. He smiles, confident and cocky, and I realize he thinks I stopped because of him, because he’s always been the kind of boy who looks like catnip to the kind of girl I used to be. He doesn’t understand how much too young for me he is. “It’s Rose, right? You’ve done this before?”
Kid, I died before your mama was born, I think, and shake my head, and say, “I’ve done my best to stay clear of these fields. You should have done the same. I’m running, and I’m hiding. If you’ve got other ideas about tonight, this is where you get the hell out of my way.”
“Aw, don’t be like that. You know all about this shit. That means you must know where they hide the weapons, right?” Jimmy’s smile gets wider, little boy playing at being a predator. “We could win this thing.”
“There’s no winner on Halloween,” I snap. “You want to ‘win this thing,’ you can go do it without me. If you want to keep yourself safe, come with me. If not, stay here and find your own damn weapons.” I turn and start walking again, building up to a slow jog. We’re in the corn. That’s a start. I hear footsteps behind me, both Salem and Jimmy following, and speed up a little. They’ll keep up or they won’t. Either way, I don’t intend to die until that candle blows out and I fall back onto the ghostroads, finally restored to what I’m supposed to be, free to move between the twilight and the daylight, protected against Bobby Cross by Persephone’s blessing.
Apple showed me a map of this farm. Cheating, I guess, but I don’t care. She told me we’d wake up in the pumpkin patch and that we’d be taken to the barn from there, and that the Barrowmans change the place as much as they can every year—but there’s only so much you can change when geography and climate combine to limit your options. The orchards were always in the same place; the marsh was sometimes frozen and sometimes not, but it would always be on the other side of the irrigation ditch. Those were the things that could help me stay alive.
“Once you’re in the corn, you need to run for the corn maze,” Apple had said, tracing my route with her fingertip. “Don’t head for the interior—that’s a labyrinth, and they’ve never repeated a design, so I can’t show you the way through—but if you go around back, there’s a channel the family uses for maintenance. It’s their short cut. From there, it’s a straight shot to the apple orchard and the old barn. If you get there, you can find a hiding place and hunker down for the rest of the night. You could hide there for a hundred years.”
I don’t need that kind of time. I just need a single Halloween. Signaling Salem and Jimmy to stay quiet, I point right, and break back into a run.
Gunshots in the distance mark the progress of the hunters. They aren’t constant—not yet. This early in the game, only the truly desperate will be seriously working to make their kills. Everyone else will be enjoying the day, looking for their prey amongst the panicked throng of the dead. And there are always a few who won’t hunt the unarmed, men and women who wait for the dead to arm themselves before closing in. Never mind that they have guns and the best the dead are going to find will be old farm tools and rusty knives. It’s the principle that matters to them, not the actual potential for one of the dead to defeat them. They want to be hunters, not killers.
Fuck them and their fragile justifications. If it were up to me, we wouldn’t do this, and if that wasn’t an option, no one would go armed at all. You’d have to beat your victims to death with your fists, feel their blood on your fingers, feel their teeth breaking your skin, and truly understand that your life was coming at the expense of someone’s eternity. So it’s probably a good thing for everyone that I’m not the one in charge. I don’t know who is—Odin, probably, or some other god of death and war—and I hope I never have the opportunity to ask them why they would do this to us.
We run through the corn in silence, Jimmy hanging back to pace me, Salem pushing herself harder than she ever did in life. As long as those gunshots stay distant, I’m not worried. I can’t imagine that anyone ever comes out this far, this fast. The mouth of the rear channel is almost a surprise, looming out of the gray-and-green stalks like a mirage. Grabbing Salem by the elbow, I turn, and keep on running. She yelps, managing not to stumble as I haul her along.
“So where are we going?” asks Jimmy, pulling up alongside me again. He’s not even breathing hard. Asshole.
“Out of the corn,” I snap, using as little air as possible. God, I wish all this exercise would count for something. With as much time as I’ve spent incarnate and running for my life in the last year and a half, you’d think I’d be able to work my way into slightly better shape. “Apple orchard. Old barn.” And the marsh behind it, but I don’t want to tell him that, not yet. There’s too much of a chance he’ll be a liability, and I’ll need a route he doesn’t know about.
Salem’s already a liability, too slow, too visible against the corn, little Snow White tattoo girl, like a naughty fairy tale running from the hand that holds the apple. But at least she’s trying. Jimmy looks like this is all a joke, and I don’t have a clue how I can get it through his head that this is anything but funny.
We run until the corn gives way, our feet pounding against the hard-baked earth. The apple orchard looms ahead of us, trees groaning under the weight of the fruit waiting for the harvest. “This way,” I snap, grabbing Salem by the hand and hauling her in my wake.
“I thought we wanted to stay under cover,” says Jimmy, still too damn amused for anyone’s good. A little voice in the back of my head is shrieking danger danger danger, and it’s too late now, too late to do anything but run.
“If you’ve got a better idea, you can just be my guest.” I’m too annoyed by his attitude to stop the words from getting out. Halloween is serious business, and here he is, treating it like it’s all just another game.
“I think I will,” he says. Putting two fingers in his mouth, he whistles shrilly. There’s a click in the trees to the left, and then—almost before I hear the gunshot—Salem is wobbling, a comic look of surprise distorting her features. A bloody red rose blooms on her chest, Snow White felled in the presence of a hundred unpicked apples. Her hand pulls free of mine as she falls, crumpling to the ground.
“What did you do?” I demand, dropping to my knees. It’s too late, I know that even before I see Salem’s open, glazed-over eyes; she’s gone. For the second time, she’s gone, and this time, she won’t wake up in the dubious safety of the twilight, won’t have any second chances. I stare at the red blood staining her borrowed clothes, realizing numbly that I don’t even know what she was. Hitcher, phantom rider, yuki-onna, wraith . . . the choices are endless, and Salem wasn’t.
Salem ended.
Salem ended, but I haven’t. That thought gets me back to my feet, poised to run, run away from this little boy who brought the hunters down on a stupid little fairy-tale princess. Let him face the rest of this long night alone. I’m done.
Instead, I find myself looking at a man in hunter’s green, holding a shotgun pointed square at the middle of my chest. Jimmy is smiling like he’s just won himself the world.
“See, Anton?” he says. “I told you I could break some of them away from the rest of the herd.”
The man with the shotgun has Jimmy’s eyes. This can’t possibly be good.
I raise my hands, trying to look innocent and young. Everyone who comes here to hunt knows they’ll be shooting ghosts to ransom their own lives, but some of them still have trouble killing kids. “Please don’t shoot, mister,” I say. “I’ll do anything you want.”
“I see we’ve got us a brave one,” says the man, and snorts. He walks to Salem, nudging her with his boot. “If they’re all this accommodating, I should’ve let you take the goth chick. Goth chicks will do some freaky stuff if they think it’ll get them somewhere.”
Hate uncurls hot and liquid in my belly. “Her name was Salem,” I say, dropping the act as swiftly as I adopted it. It’s clear it won’t work here. “I don’t know how she died the first time. I never had the opportunity to ask.”
“It was probably an overdose. It always is, with this kind,” says the man dismissively, and smiles at me. It’s the coldest smile I’ve ever seen on a man who wasn’t Bobby Cross. “You tell my baby brother all about the holidays?”
“What makes you think I know what’s going on here? I’m as confused by all of this as he is.”
“She’s lying,” says Jimmy, still easy, still treating all this like a game. “She explained the whole thing while we were running. All I have to do is kill her and I can be alive again.”
I never said that. I said something similar, sure, but I never said that. I’m opening my mouth to tell him so when I realize what he’s planning, and shut it with a snap. The man—Anton—hands his gun to Jimmy, patting the smaller, deader boy on the shoulder as he does.
“Sorry, Rose,” says Jimmy, and pulls the trigger.
The gun speaks like thunder and I tense, waiting for the pain. It doesn’t come. Instead, Matthew Barrowman steps out of the corn, Violet a beat behind, both of them with scowls on their faces and guns in their hands. The air around me has turned thick and glittery, like it’s been painted with gel.
“The dead do not kill the dead: that is not the game,” says Matthew. “Both of you, leave our land. You’re not welcome here any longer.”
“Now, Matthew—” begins Anton.
The bolt sliding back on Matthew’s shotgun is impossibly loud. “You’ve got a year, Anton. You killed a dead girl, you get a year. Your brother only has a few hours. You’re both going to need to find a new fallow field if you want to try again next Halloween.”
“That isn’t fair!” wails Jimmy.
“Death never is,” says Violet. “Now go.”
The Barrowmans stand with me as Anton and Jimmy vanish into the corn. I wonder whether Anton will be able to get his brother off the grounds without some other opportunistic hunter taking a shot. I wonder whether I care.
It’s not a difficult question to answer.
“You have our apologies, child,” says Violet. “We genuinely hoped you’d go to ground and wake up none the wiser.”
“What?” I turn to look at her, bemused.
I never see what hits me.
When I wake up, my head is aching. I’m hogtied on a bed of hay, and the Halloween jack-o-lantern is sitting a few feet away, the stub of a candle flickering in its heart. It’ll go out any second now.
Any second now.
Any—
The candle gutters like a sigh and dies, leaving a wisp of wax-scented smoke curling through the air. I do my best to stretch, expecting my bonds to drop away, taking flesh and blood and this whole horrible experience with them.
They don’t. In slowly dawning horror, I stare at the darkened jack-o-lantern, waiting for whatever ember is still burning there to finally give up and go out. It doesn’t happen. There is no fire to extinguish.
The candle’s out, and I’m alive.
Something is very, very wrong.