Sparrow Hill Road

by Seanan McGuire

  “Yeah, well, I’m dead, not psychic, so when you want me to know something, you need to tell me.” It’s getting easier to suppress fear in favor of anger. There’s not much I hate more than I hate to be laughed at. “Why did you grab me? Where are we going? How are we going?”

  There isn’t much of a vocabulary to bridge the worlds of the dead and the living. When you’re living, you don’t need it, and once you’re dead, you have better things to worry about. The farm boy who grabbed me seems to understand, which is something of a relief; he nods, once, and says, “Well, Miss Rose, I grabbed you because if we stop this ol’ truck, she’s not likely to start up again until after the solstice, which seemed a bit long to wait when we’re wanted tonight. We’re heading to the Rest Stop”—I can hear the capital letters, like he’s talking about the only rest stop in the world—“and we’re traveling by magic, I suppose. Magic, and combustion engine.”

  “Okay, why are we traveling to ‘the Rest Stop’ via magic and combustion engine?”

  “Now there’s a good question.” He smiles, and there’s a glint in his eye that whispers “routewitch.” I would have seen it before, if I hadn’t been so annoyed. “We’re going to see the Queen.”

  The tattoo on my back hasn’t burned since I left the Last Dance, but with his words, it starts burning again. The Queen of the Routewitches has summoned me, and that means my debt to her is coming due. This is a lot sooner than I thought it was going to be.

  I hope like hell that I’m truly prepared to pay, and the truck drives deeper and deeper down into the twilight, away from the lands of the living.

  The transition between layers of the twilight is silken-smooth, like peeling the nylons from a hooker’s legs. The drop from the twilight onto the asphalt shores of the Ocean Lady is something else altogether. The truck jerks and shudders like it’s hitting the world’s biggest pothole, and the sudden pressure in my chest tells me that I’ve been slapped back into solidity, back—temporarily—among the living once again. I pick myself up from the bed of the truck, dusting straw off my arms and glaring at the routewitch thugs surrounding me. “You know, I think I’ve spent more time incarnate in the last year than I have in the last decade.”

  “Congratulations,” says one of the routewitches.

  I focus my glare in his direction, wishing I’d lived long enough to reach an age where my glares could be considered more cutting than cute. “That wasn’t intended as a happy statement.”

  Now it’s time for the routewitch to glare. He’s not cute, exactly, but his L’il Abner haircut and bib overalls render the expression impotent, robbing it of menace. “You’ve been invited to the Ocean Lady, Miss Rose. That’s an honor most ghosts never get.”

  “And me without my party dress.” The words are out before I realize how true they are: I’m not in my party dress. My coat is discarded in the chaff, but I’m still wearing the clothes I conjured for a day on the Indiana road, blue jeans and an old workman’s shirt with Gary’s name stitched in black on the breast pocket. I’m incarnate, back among the living whether I want to be or not, but I’m still in ghost’s array. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not, and I don’t have time to know, because here comes the Rest Stop on the Ocean Lady, blossoming in front of us like the last neon oasis in the desert of the dead.

  If the Last Dance Diner is every diner that’s ever been or ever will be, the Rest Stop is something more, something bigger and more profound. It’s every roadside dive, every truck stop, every place where a weary traveler has ever had cause to stop and lay their head. I didn’t see it clearly the last time I was here; the Ocean Lady didn’t know me yet, and didn’t yet speak the language of my heart. She does now, after a fashion, and the structure ahead of us is every good thing about every good place the road has ever offered me. It’s the diner where Gary kissed me for the first time, nervous teenage affection that tasted like chocolate soda and tomorrow. It’s the truck stop where Larry bought me a burger and let me show him the way he had to go. It’s a thousand places, a thousand moments, and it hurts my heart, makes it skip a beat it shouldn’t be taking. Looking at the Rest Stop, I understand why the routewitches don’t encourage the dead to come here. In its own strange way, the truth of the Ocean Lady’s soul might kill us.

  L’il Abner the first scoots up behind me, warm and solid in the slightly unreal twilight dark, and says, “We’re almost here, Miss Rose. You might want to get yourself ready.”

  “Are you going to tell me what I’m getting ready for?”

  “That’s for the Queen to do, Miss. All we know is that she sent us to find you, and that it was very important that when we found you, we found you in the corn.”

  It doesn’t take a genius to know that doesn’t sound good. I clutch the edge of the pickup bed, the heartbeat I shouldn’t have hammering in my chest, and I let the Ocean Lady open her arms and welcome her wayward children home.

  The Queen of the Routewitches doesn’t need to justify herself to dead girls, which explains the way she had me collected, but she’s a reasonable person, for the most part, and she doesn’t make me wait for my reception. She’s standing on the blacktop when the truck pulls up, an old green-painted picnic table with an honest-to-God picnic basket on it behind her. There’s an older routewitch seated there, a woman I don’t know, with ribbons tangled in her oddly girlish ponytail.

  The truck rocks and rumbles to a stop, and I hear the driver’s-side door slam before the previously unseen driver himself is there to open the back of the truck, offering me his hands. I could balk, but it’s better to pick your battles when you can. I let him help me down. The feeling of solid ground beneath my feet is a comforting thing. My type of ghost exists because of rides freely given, not because of rides we never agreed to take. The L’il Abners climb down after me, bowing deeply to the whisper-thin Japanese teen now walking toward us. Apple. Queen of the North American Routewitches. She’s older than she looks.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” she says, like I had a choice. Her gaze flicks past me to her subjects. “Thank you for bringing her. You’re free to go. The Lady’s hospitalities are open to you all.”

  Whatever that means, it must be good, because the routewitches are gone almost before she’s finished speaking, offering quick apologies and good-byes as they hustle toward the building. In a matter of seconds, the three of us—me, the Queen, and the routewitch I don’t know—are alone. I fold my arms, trying to look defiant. It helps that she looks so young. Apple and I stopped aging at approximately the same point, although I did it by dying, while all she did was leave the living world behind.

  “You could have called.”

  “You don’t have a phone,” counters the Queen. “He still hasn’t taken you.”

  “Not for lack of trying.” I sigh. I owe her, and so I should probably stop glaring. That doesn’t make it easy. “I’m guessing you didn’t ask me here for dinner. What’s going on?”

  “Dinner is a part of things. I asked you for a favor, and you promised to grant it to me. Will you keep your word, here on the back of the Ocean Lady?”

  “Do I look like an idiot? Of course I will.”

  “Then come, sit down, and eat with us. I’ll explain what has to happen tonight.” The Queen gestures to the picnic table. I’m smart enough to recognize an order when I see one, and so I walk past her to the picnic table and sit down across from the older routewitch. The Queen follows, sitting next to me.

  “Who’s your friend?” I ask.

  The older routewitch raises her head and looks at me. That’s all she has to do, because her eyes are familiar, even though they’re filled with shadows, and with screams. There’s a thousand years of agony in those eyes. Some small, bitter part of me isn’t quite convinced that that’s enough.

  “Oh,” I say. “Hello, Bethany.”

  “Hello, Aunt Rose,” she says, in a quivering voice that’s just as old as the rest of her.

  The Queen of the Routewitches is layin
g out a picnic spread fit for, ironically, a queen. As always seems to be the case when I’m in her company, I don’t have any appetite at all. “And this started out as such a good night,” I say, plaintively.

  Thankfully, both Bethany and the Queen have the grace not to reply.

  “When Bobby Cross carried Bethany into the dark, I’m sure he meant to kill her and render her soul for fuel,” says the Queen matter-of-factly, as she spreads mustard on a slice of white bread. “Unfortunately, he hadn’t reckoned on her belonging to your bloodline—which is ironic, given that it was her relation to you that enabled her to trap you in the first place.”

  Something neither of them has apologized for, by the way. I frown. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You’re protected from him. As blood of your blood, so is Bethany, if not quite as . . . directly. He was able to take her into the twilight. He was able to steal her youth, her innocence, and her hope. But he couldn’t take her soul. In your own way, you stopped him.” The Queen’s gaze is level as she turns it on Bethany. For the first time, I hear disapproval of my niece’s actions in her voice as she says, “Amusing, given the situation.”

  “I could die laughing,” I say, deadpan. Bethany reddens, looking down at her untouched sandwich. “So why am I here? It sounds to me like things are in balance. She tried to fuck me over, and she got fucked instead. Case closed.”

  “Those books are balanced,” the Queen agrees. “But as a routewitch, she has the right to ask the Ocean Lady for aid, and the Lady answered her. It wasn’t my decision; I wouldn’t have called you if she’d come to me alone. As you say, some punishments, we earn.”

  The routewitch relationship with the Ocean Lady—ghost of the oldest true highway in America—is complicated. They treat Her half as a place, half as a person, and all as a goddess. I’ve been learning a lot about routewitch religion lately, and believe me when I say that I am not qualified to even begin to explain. “So the Lady said she’d help. Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Meaning you have to take me to the crossroads before the stroke of midnight,” says Bethany. It’s the first time she’s spoken since we acknowledged each other.

  I stare at her. “You’re kidding.”

  The Queen of the Routewitches sighs, deep and tired. “Sadly, she’s not. That’s how you’ll pay your debt to me, Rose Marshall: by taking my subject, your niece, to the crossroads to barter for her future.”

  “Fucking swell,” I mutter, and the twilight all around us seems to agree.

  “Have another sandwich,” the Queen suggests. “You’re going to need it.”

  At least there’s pie.

  Going to the crossroads, the quick and dirty version: as long as there have been people, there have been roads, places where the footsteps of a hundred strangers have worn a groove in the world and changed it in a way that might seem superficial, but goes all the way down into the root of things. As long as there have been roads, the places where those roads met have held a power entirely their own. Towns spring up in the places where roads meet. Fairs are held. Goods are exchanged. And sometimes, if you’re desperate, or stupid, or just feel like you have nothing left to lose, bargains are made. I don’t know who made the first crossroads bargain, and I don’t need to know, because that groove, too, has been worn into the root of things. Go to the crossroads at midnight when you need to make a deal. Everyone knows that’s how it works.

  What the proverbial “everyone” doesn’t know is how to get to the crossroads, because there’s only so much magic to go around these days, and not just any old intersection will do. You need the right combination of place and time, madness and longing, and you need to get there by the stroke of midnight, because that’s the way it has to go. I’ve never gone to the crossroads for myself. In the decades since I died, I’ve only ever gone for other people, and even then, only when they begged, only when there was no other choice.

  “What makes you think I can even find the crossroads?” I ask, vainly hoping the Queen will recognize what a lousy idea this is and get her piece of deceased masonry to call off the trip. “It’s been a long time since I had to go there.”

  “Twenty-six years,” Apple agrees. “It was in Coney Island that time, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. It was.” The girl I led there was eleven years old and was born almost a hundred years before I was, and when she found me, she had no shadow. I took her to the crossroads because I didn’t know any other way to get a shadow back, and I guess it worked, because after she stood at that roadside for half an hour, she ran over and hugged me, shadow chasing her heels. Then she kicked her feet away from the ground and flew into the sky like a kite without a string, and I never saw her again.

  “It won’t be this time.”

  “This is a bad idea,” I say.

  “I know,” says the Queen wearily.

  “Can we just go?” asks Bethany.

  Apple’s hand flashes out like a striking snake, and the sound of her palm meeting Bethany’s cheek is louder than it has any right to be. Bethany stares at her, eyes young and hurt amidst their nest of wrinkles. The Queen glares back, her own eyes briefly betraying her own greater age. “You will not speak to your family with anything less than courtesy,” she commands. “I am asking your aunt to do this because the Lady bids it; were it left to me, I would call this a just punishment for your actions. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” whispers Bethany.

  “Good. Remember: you are here because you are a routewitch, and I cannot bar you without just cause. She is here because she’s welcome.”

  That seems to be my cue. I sigh, standing. “Come on, Bethany. Let’s go spend the night doing something stupid and suicidal.”

  I don’t wait to see if she’ll follow me. I just start walking.

  Bethany follows; of course Bethany follows. I’m her only chance at getting her youth back, and as a routewitch, she can expect to be old for a long, long time. We walk down the drive to the Rest Stop gates. The road beyond ripples slightly, unreal and undefined; it is all roads, it is no roads, and it is, at least potentially, the road to where we’re going. “Take my hand,” I order. She isn’t worthy of a “please.”

  “Why?” asks Bethany, suspiciously.

  “One, because you asked me for help, so it’s not like I’m trying to walk you into a trap, which, two, you’ve already done to me once, but mostly because three, I’m going to go from the Ocean Lady to the ghostroads to the daylight, and if you don’t hold onto me, you’re likely to get lost somewhere along the way.” I offer her a thin smile. “Unless you want to spend a few days wandering one of the twilight layers without an escort?”

  Bethany takes my hand. I’m almost disappointed.

  “Good call,” I say, and step through the open gate to the shimmering road beyond.

  For me, now, after being dead so long, moving between the layers is an automatic thing most of the time, almost as easy as flexing the fingers of my hand. Not so with Bethany hanging onto me, mortal deadweight that understands, on some profound, unaware level, that living flesh was never meant to do this sort of thing. Bethany screams as reality flickers around us like a broken strip of film, endless past and present roads tangling together. I keep pulling, keep rising upward through the twilight, back toward the day. We’re not going all the way, not quite—the crossroads exists in a place just below the surface of full daylight, in a place where things become possible because no one’s ever told them that they can’t be.

  We’re almost there when I realize that we’re about to have another problem. Bethany is still alive, and I, by definition almost, am not. Which wouldn’t be a problem if I had a coat, but my most recent coat is lying discarded in the bed of a pickup truck a lot of layers of reality away from here. “Shit,” I mutter.

  “Shit?” demands Bethany. “What do you mean, shit?”

  My fingers are already turning hazy in hers. She’d have noticed already, if she wasn’t so busy freaking out. �
��Just hold on!” I command, and try to pull us through the layers even faster, anything to build up enough momentum that Bethany will be carried with me when holding on ceases to be possible.

  I’ve never tried anything like this before. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when there’s a blinding burst of light and everything goes away, replaced by darkness. Darkness, and the distinct feeling that I’ve just screwed something up. “Shit,” I mutter again . . . and the world is gone.

  I come to slowly. I’m sprawled in a nest of crushed corn stalks, scenting the air all around me with the rich green perfume of harvest coming. That’s the first thing. The second is that I’m deeply—disturbingly—solid. I shouldn’t have been able to crush the corn. I sit up, and only an instinctive grab at the fabric sliding down my chest keeps Bethany’s coat from tumbling to the ground beside me.

  “Are you awake yet?” Bethany demands. I turn, still clutching the coat, to see her standing next to me. “This cold is killing my joints.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.” I shrug into the coat as I stand, tugging it tight around me. The feeling of solidity tightens with it. Back among the living once again. I’m starting to feel like a ping-pong ball. “How long was I out?”

  “Too long. I don’t remember giving you permission to pass out.”

  “Well, since I don’t remember giving you permission to ransom me to Bobby Cross, I guess we’re essentially even. Come on. We’re burning moonlight.” I turn once to get my bearings—it’s easier to get lost in a cornfield than it is to get lost almost anywhere else in the world—and start walking briskly across the uneven ground. At least we don’t need to hold hands anymore. That’s more family togetherness than I’m in the mood for.