Chapter 5
Candles and Consequences
SQUIRMING DOESN’T DO ANY GOOD. These knots were tied by someone who knew what they were doing, and I don’t have the leverage to break free. I squirm harder, and only succeed in giving myself a muscle cramp, which hurts. That realization is enough to make me freeze for several seconds, biting my lip as I struggle not to scream. It’s not a big pain—I can remember bigger ones, the time I broke my arm, the time my brother’s dog bit me hard enough I needed stitches—but they’re all in the past, far away and veiled in honey-colored nostalgia. This pain is real, this pain is now, and I don’t want it. I don’t want any of this.
Breathing rapidly in and out through my nose, I focus on staying quiet until the pain passes. When it does, I go back to squirming, more carefully now, aware that my body—my body, why do I have a body—could betray me at any moment if I’m not careful. After what feels like forever, but can’t have been more than a few minutes, not with the candle still smoking, I manage to force myself into a seated position. I stop there, fighting for my breath. When did breathing get so difficult? Why am I breathing in the first place? Everything about this is wrong.
A floorboard creaks. I freeze. The sensation of fear—hormonal, living fear—is also new to me, as new as pain, and for a moment, I feel like I’m going to choke to death on my own terror. The moment passes. The creak becomes a footstep.
Violet Barrowman steps out of the dark.
Her eyes widen when she sees me, but not with surprise. This looks more like satisfaction at a job well done, an impression that strengthens as she begins to smile. I glare sullenly back, refusing to ask any questions, refusing to do anything but wait her out. I may be prisoned in flesh for some inexplicable, impossible reason, but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost the habit of patience. Sixty years dead did a lot to teach me about waiting. Sometimes it’s the most powerful tool we can have.
It works. Her smile fades. She begins to fidget. Finally, she snaps, “Oh, don’t look at me like that. You could be a little grateful. What we’ve done here should have been impossible, and yet there you are, pretty as a picture, alive. You’re alive again, Rose. All the way alive.”
I don’t say anything. Let her think it’s because I’m being intransigent. Let her think I have the emotional maturity of the teenager I appear to be. Being sixteen forever has to be good for something.
But if what she’s saying is true, you’re not sixteen forever, whispers a tempting, terrible voice at the back of my mind. You’re going to age, Rose Marshall. You’re going to grow up. Neverland is leaving you.
I shudder, and Violet’s smile returns.
“Cold?” she asks sweetly. “Or maybe you’re hungry, or thirsty, or you need to use the bathroom? Those are the gifts we’ve given to you. This took a lot of time to set up, little girl. You’d think you could be grateful.”
“Grateful?” My voice is low, gravelly, filled with an anger so big it seems to fill the room. “Put me back. Put me back right fucking now.”
For the first time, Violet actually looks surprised. “I . . . it doesn’t work that way, Rose. I can’t snap my fingers and make you dead again. You’re alive. This is a great gift. Do you know how many ghosts would kill for this opportunity?”
“The opportunity to be tied up and incarnate in some freak’s barn? Oh, yeah, we’re all clamoring for this down in the twilight.” I jerk against my bonds. “Why did you do this to me?”
The air tastes like dust. It sticks to my tongue, and the flavor fills my mouth. I don’t want it, but I can’t make it go away, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t catch any of the scents that mean safety or danger on the wind creeping through the cracks in the walls. The fear feels like it’s fossilizing in my veins, replaced drop by drop with a cold, sludgy dread.
“The kindness of our hearts,” says Violet—but her eyes dart to the side as she speaks, not looking at me. She’s lying. Why is she lying?
“Where’s your husband?”
“He’s . . . picking our older daughter up from a friend’s house. Willow doesn’t enjoy the family Halloween the way the younger ones do.” She still isn’t looking at me. Why isn’t she looking at me? Why . . .
Oh. “Better be careful,” I say, leaning back, feeling the rough prickle of the hay bales behind me as they pierce the thin fabric of my shirt. “Bobby says a lot of things. Says ‘I’ll give her back’ and ‘You can trust me.’ He lies. Bobby Cross always lies.”
Violet gasps. Any pleasure I might have felt at eliciting that kind of response is outweighed, however, by the fact that she isn’t untying me, and I’m still not dead.
“What did he tell you?” I demand. “That I’m his ‘one true love’ and he just wanted me back? I can’t imagine he told you I was a murderous bitch and needed to be punished, because the only thing you’ve said so far that strikes me as actually being true is that life is a gift. You think you’ve given me something I want, when all you’ve done is shackle me inside a bunch of rotting meat. Stop it. Break whatever ritual you have going, and let me go.”
“I can’t,” Violet whispers.
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“Can’t,” she repeats, voice shaking. “It’s not a ritual that’s keeping you alive. You’re alive because we called you back.”
“How the . . .”
She relaxes a little. Apparently, explaining unspeakable necromancy is something she’s comfortable with. That’s swell. I know I feel better when I’m hanging with people who believe it’s okay to screw with the dead for shits and giggles.
“Mr. Cross came to us a year ago,” she says. “He said . . . well, he said a lot of things, and most of them aren’t any of your business, but he said he had a business proposition for us. He wanted our help pulling a woman he cared for very deeply back into the lands of the living. He knew that our relationship with the Queen meant that any ghost he marked would be sent to us, and he wanted our aid. How could we refuse?”
Translation: if that wasn’t when Bobby had taken the daughter, it was when he’d made it clear that he could, without any trouble or risk to himself. He’s always been a charmer when he wants to be, and most people don’t see the viper lurking in those pretty whiskey-colored eyes. All he would have needed to do was get himself past the door.
“Did you ever ask whether I cared about him? Or did you only care what he wanted?”
Violet’s cheeks flush red. She raises her chin. “The first part of the ritual had to be performed before Halloween. If he hadn’t done it, nothing we did could have held you. Do you honestly expect me to believe he was able to pin you down when you didn’t want him to?”
A chill runs along my skin, leaving it covered in goose bumps, tight and painful. The routewitch. The one who’d bled herself out at his command, damaging my protection and causing Apple to suggest Halloween with a family she trusted—a family that wasn’t made up of true routewitches, which meant they wouldn’t have come to her with their troubles. She’d sent me into a trap thinking she was saving me.
“What did you do?” I whisper.
“We called to Styx. We showed her you were worthy, that you had been cleansed, and you were already incarnate, thanks to the Samhain blessing. All she had to do was refuse to take your body back to the River when the candle died.” Violet smiles again. She’s less sure that what she’s done was right, if she ever truly believed it had been, but she’s trying, oh, how she’s trying. Denial is such a tempting drug. “We’ve done the impossible. It’s been centuries since the last true resurrection.”
“There are reasons for that,” I spit. “Everything is balance. That’s how the afterlife functions. He talked a routewitch who was probably about your daughter’s age into slitting her own throat to ‘cleanse’ me. Did he tell you that part?”
There are lots of ways to accomplish a temporary resurrection. Halloween is one of them; technically, my cadging of coats and their associated flesh from the living is another. The lines between life and death have always been vague, blurry things, closer to guidelines than hard and fast rules. But there’s one rule we all learn hard and fast and early, because things get ugly when we don’t.
To get a life, you have to take a life. To accomplish a true resurrection, something not bounded by the length of a task or the span of a holiday, someone has to die. Forever die, no-ghost-die, good-bye-forever die. It’s messy and complicated and brutal and difficult, which is why we don’t constantly have dictators and warlords popping out of the twilight for another shot at taking over the world. Even the ones who could find someone to bleed out for them don’t generally have the delicacy required to get all the steps right.
But Bobby Cross . . . Bobby has resources. He has a pretty face and a silver tongue and a car that scares the hell out of every ghost in the twilight, which means he has everything he needs to get his questions answered, to put together the impossible one piece at a time. I’m alive. There’s nothing that’s going to change that, not right now, but if I sit here too long, something that is going to change that will come along.
Bobby Cross is on his way. If anything, it’s a miracle he’s not already here.
“This is what you’re going to do,” I say, and my voice is low and hard and steady. I want some kind of an award for keeping it from shaking. “You’re going to come over here and untie me, and then you’re going to turn your back while I run away. When Bobby gets here, you’re going to tell him I escaped. Technically, it’ll be true. He may not even kill you for that.”
“Now why in the hell would I do any of those things?”
“Because, you stupid cow, I was sent here by Apple, the Queen of the Routewitches, and she’s going to notice when I don’t come back. If I get to her, I can tell her you were misled. I can tell her Bobby had your daughter, that you didn’t have a choice. Maybe she’ll forgive you and maybe she won’t, but she’s a reasonable ruler. She won’t rain down fire and brimstone on your farm. She won’t cut you off from the roads.”
“We are no subjects of hers,” Violet says. There’s no heat in her words. The color has left her cheeks, and she looks more the ghost than I do.
Ambulomancers read the future in the roads. It blows off the blacktop and the gravel, right into their hands. The Barrowmans had probably never experienced a bad season or a ruined harvest, because they could always see what was coming and prepare. They aren’t the same as routewitches. They don’t have to obey the Ocean Lady, or listen to the queen.
But Apple could seal the roads. Could stop the futures from trickling through, leave the ambulomancers with nothing but the ghosts attracted to their gifts, leave them haunted, harried, and hungry.
“I wish you’d stayed away,” says Violet fiercely, and bends to untie me.
“So do I,” I say, and do not fight her. The knots are tight, but she tied them: she knows how to tug and how to fumble, and in a matter of seconds, I’m free.
My ankles and wrists are numb. My feet feel like lead weights tied to the ends of my legs. I grip the hay bales, pulling myself up, and pause as the motion disturbs the hay that I’d been sitting on. There are sigils on the floor where I’ve been sitting, symbols and runes that I recognize. They’re the same ones I saw in that routewitch’s kitchen, drawn in red paint instead of salt.
He’s been planning this for a long time. Maybe since before I got my tattoo. I look up, my eyes meeting Violet’s one last time.
“Don’t you dare tell him which way I went,” I say, and I turn, and I run.
My legs are weak and my feet are asleep and I’m almost dizzy with hunger. I was always hungry when I was dead, always cold, always yearning, but none of those things came with any real consequences. I could go months without eating, and the roar in my stomach wouldn’t change. I could spend days in the twilight, visiting old friends, not going anywhere near the borrowed warmth of the daylight, and I wouldn’t freeze. Now . . .
I’m going to need food. And water. And someplace to crouch when my body finishes processing both those things, which is about the most disgusting thing I’ve ever considered. Being alive means having the usual assortment of internal organs, all of them doing their weird internal organ things. My lungs are pulling in air. My sweat glands are putting off stink.
This body is a horror show of potential failures. I could break a bone, or breathe in the wrong microbe and get sick. I could die of a burst appendix, like one of the cheerleaders I went to school with back in Buckley. Humans are so frail. How can any of them live like this?
Thinking about how horrifying my body is provides a nice distraction as I run from the barn to the apple orchard, and then past it, to the half-frozen marsh that Apple told me about. There are trails beat all through it, none of them wide enough to qualify as a road; Bobby won’t be able to get his car in here. That helps. I run harder, faster, until I start to feel like I’m going to throw up from the exertion.
I look back. The farm is a smear in the distance. Nothing moves; nothing pursues.
I know that can’t last.
So I run again, feet pounding against the marshy ground, and the clothes that fit a bit awkwardly last night chafe and scratch my skin, exposing the tenderness I thought the road had worn away. This body, my body, should be impossible; I died so long ago, I’m not even dust anymore, not even ashes. But here I am, and everything about me sings Rose, Rose, Rose when I allow myself to listen. These are my hands, my limbs, my sorely unprepared lungs. I am the girl I was on the night when Bobby ran me off the road.
Roads. Sweet Persephone, roads. For the first time in sixty years, I can’t hear the road humming at the back of my mind, phantom highway stretching here to Heaven, bidding me to walk a little farther and see what I can see. It’s like losing a limb, and I stumble at the sudden realization of how cut off I really am.
I don’t know anyone among the living. The Last Dance doesn’t exist here. Neither does the Ocean Lady. Supposedly, I had the potential to be a routewitch once, the first time I was alive, but I don’t know what that means, and I don’t hear any road I know whispering my name. Maybe spending that long tithed to the ghostroads means the living ones won’t speak to me, see me as already marked by something greater than they are. The only ghost I know who comes when she’s called is Mary Dunlavy, and inviting her attention means inviting the attention of the crossroads.
If there’s something out there that’s worse than Bobby Cross, it’s the crossroads. They made the bastard, after all. They’d probably be happy to do the same for me. Pull Gary up out of the twilight, make us into a darker mirror to reflect Bobby back on himself, Rose Marshall, the killer who races for more than just pink slips.
For a moment, it’s tempting, and I’m going to have to live with that shame for the rest of my hopefully short life, and then forever after when I’m back on the ghostroads. There’s fighting a monster and then there’s becoming one. The first should never be enough of an excuse for the latter.
I run. I run through the marsh to the fields on the other side, the fields that don’t belong to the Barrowman family, and I consider—oh so briefly—finding the farmhouse, spinning them a story of teenage woe, getting access to a warm kitchen and a telephone. But I have no one to call, and people tend to react to runaway teenagers with suspicion, or worse, with calls of their own to the local police. I’m still too close to where Bobby expects me to be. He’ll check the neighboring farmhouses first, concerned older brother looking for his runaway sister, she’s a little touched in the head you know, she’s not safe out there on her own, and then he’ll roll down to the station and pluck me from a holding cell like Persephone plucking a pomegranate from a branch. I’ll be lost. I’ll be his. And I’m pretty sure this pesky “alive” thing won’t last long once he gets his hands on me.
No: the farmhouse isn’t safe. I keep running, plunging into the cornfield, doing my best to race along the thin lines of dirt between the rows to keep the rustling to a minimum. There’s enough wind that as long as I keep myself under control, it won’t be easy to tell what’s me and what’s the weather.
Not so easy is keeping myself from getting turned around out here. I am racing through a sea of golden and green, and the greatest danger in open water is losing track of the shore. I can’t afford to burst into somebody’s backyard, fully visible and unable to vanish onto the ghostroads. I also can’t afford to run out into the road. The risk of being hit by a car aside, roads are where Bobby lives. If it’s wide enough for his car, Bobby can take advantage, and he won’t hesitate to run me down.
A thin, cold worm of fear works its way along my spine, nearly making me stumble again. Bobby’s pride tells him to kill me: I’m the one who got away, the one who embarrassed him in a way he can’t forgive. The trouble with proud men is that sometimes balance isn’t enough. He’ll kill me if he can. There’s nothing saying he has to do it right away.
I’ve been running from Bobby Cross for sixty years. I’ve never been this eager to stay away from him.
Who do you know? I ask myself, unwilling to risk my suddenly precious breath on words. Who do you know?
All those years of moving between the twilight and the daylight, all those lives saved, those drivers seen safely to whatever destination I could help them reach, and who do I know? Sweet Persephone, time is not my friend. Half the names I can come up with have died since I knew them among the living, and most of them have moved on to whatever rest waits for the innocent and the unwary. Even Tommy—
I stagger to a stop in the middle of the cornfield, gulping in air and trying not to think what I’m already thinking. Because I know one person for sure who isn’t dead, who isn’t working with Bobby Cross, and who knows the sound of my voice well enough to believe me when I tell her who I am. I know one person whose number isn’t going to be unlisted, unlike my family in Portland. Kevin and Evelyn and the kids are great people, but they don’t like strangers knowing how to find them, and without access to the twilight, I’m effectively a stranger. Can’t call Mary, can’t reach the Prices.
But I can reach Laura.
Laura Moorhead, the world’s premier expert on the story of the Phantom Prom Date, a woman whose academic career has been narrow to the point of becoming single-minded, all her attention and all her ambition focused on the simple, terrible goal of finding me and making me pay for what she thinks I did to her boyfriend.
Laura Moorhead, who works for a university. Who can be reached by calling the school. Who may not want to help me—who probably won’t want to help me—but who has no connection to Bobby Cross, and wouldn’t hand me over to him if she did. Letting Bobby have me would be a disaster, but it lacks the poetic justice she’s been seeking for all these years. I need her. I know where to find her.
Now I just need a phone.
I close my eyes and spin in a slow circle, trying to listen past the pounding of my heart and the rasping of my breath, looking for the distant sound of tires on pavement and engines roaring like the souls of captive dragons. I can’t feel the road the way I’m used to, but I am of the road more than anything else I might possibly claim to be, and I know what a road sounds like.
Somewhere in the far distance, a horn honks. I open my eyes and start wading through the corn toward the sound.
Fields are finite. It’s one of the nicer things about them. Sure, sometimes “finite” can span miles—even states, if Iowa is anything to go by—but they have borders. Edges. Every field is defined by its terminus, and if I walk long enough, I’ll get there.
My knees ache. My feet hurt. There’s a foul taste in the back of my mouth, and I’m horrifyingly aware of the fact that it’s been sixty years and a big pancake breakfast since the last time I brushed my teeth. There is nothing about this situation that I don’t hate.
I’m mulling over my hatred when I step out of the corn and onto the hard-packed earth of the shoulder. I immediately take a step backward, hiding myself. Bobby’s car is a demon sheathed in steel, and it can run silently when he wants it to, just like it can snarl down the heavens when he wants it to. He’ll be looking for me soon, if he isn’t looking for me already. I can’t afford to be exposed.
But this is a road. Humans build roads—came up with the very idea of roads—because they need to stop being where they are and start being where they belong. Roads are one of the deepest, truest ideas the human race ever managed to hit upon, and that’s where they get their magic, and that’s why it’s so damn important that I don’t try to deny how much I need it. I’m looking for a road to take me out of this dead-end town, a road that I can ride all the way to glory. Fading back into the field would be easy, so easy. It wouldn’t save me.
A car blazes by, small and sporty and modern, and nothing to do with Bobby Cross. I feel a pang of regret as I watch that potential ride to safety blaze onward, and I don’t move. Small, sporty cars aren’t good for me right now.
Hitchhiking is dangerous. It always has been. For sixty years I’ve been getting into cars with strangers, and not all of them have been very nice people. Some of them were genuinely kind, hoping to help someone get a little closer to home, hoping to save me from the very dangers they could have represented. Others . . .
Let’s just say I’ve met my share of monsters, and not all of them have been deceased.
Before, there were no stakes for me, not really. I could get into a stranger’s car, and if they pulled a knife or pulled down their fly, whatever. I could disappear, or I could decide to ride it out and teach them a lesson about being better people. I couldn’t get hurt. I couldn’t die.
Things are different now. People with new cars who stop for hitchhikers are sometimes lovely, kind, ready to extend the hand of community to someone who needs them . . . but maybe they’re not the majority. Maybe most of the knives that have been pulled on me, most of the guns, most of the half-erect dicks, have been pulled in new cars. Maybe.
Pick-up trucks are a mixed bag. A place like this, farm country, everybody drives a pick-up. I’ve probably got sixty percent odds that whoever stops for a teenage girl by the side of the road means well. Trouble is, they’re also all locals, which means they’ll realize I’m not from around here, and take me for a runaway or a junkie or both. Since I’m trying to avoid the police station, that’s not a good plan.
No. I know what I need. I need to be among my people. And that’s why, when I see the shadow of the big rig crest the line of the horizon, I saunter out onto the shoulder as easy as you please, my thumb already out, my hip cocked like I haven’t got a care in the world.
Truckers know me. Even the ones who’ve never seen me, never picked me up, they know me. They know the story of the girl in the diner, the walking girl. The story of Graveyard Rose. They know part of their job is getting me home if they happen to come across me, because maybe they’re saving me, but maybe—more likely—I’m saving them. Ask any trucker in America if he believes in ghosts, and then ask him whether he believes in me. No matter what his answer to the first question is, he’ll always answer “yes” to the second.
Sweet sixteen and pretty as a picture, with short brown hair and a smile like a month of Sundays. That’s what they say about me, and that’s what I am in this moment, standing under this icy blue Nebraska sky, on the edge of neutral ground between cornfield and asphalt, waiting to see whether I’ve made the right decision. I keep my expression steady, even a little cocky. I’m the phantom prom date. I can do this. I can do anything.
The truck slows, stopping next to me with a rattle like bones in a cage shaking themselves to pieces. The trucker leans across the cab, pushes the passenger-side door open.
“You all right?” he asks.
“Going my way?” I reply.
There’s a flicker of wariness on his bearded face. Hitchhikers can be predators too. “What’s your name?”
“Rose,” I say.
He hears the truth in it. He relaxes. “Hop in.”
I grin. “Got a coat I can borrow? It’s cold out there,” I say, seeking warmth in the other half of the ritual as I climb into the truck, and we’re away; we’re rolling, once again, for that horizon.