“Pulling enough luck off of the inanimate could make it vulnerable,” said Cylia thoughtfully. “Or it could be the sinkhole effect.”
“Please don’t use fancy terms like you think we’re supposed to know them,” said Sam sourly. “I just met you. I’m not hugely comfortable with any of this, and I really don’t want to need a phrasebook to know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Cylia sighed, putting her glass down. “Okay. Something stripped all your luck away. We’re agreed on that, right?”
“Yes,” I said, before Sam could say anything else. He was in a bad mood, and I couldn’t blame him. I was in a pretty rotten mood myself. But I’d known Cylia long enough to trust her, and he hadn’t. Right now, that was making all the difference in the world.
I missed the feeling of his tail around my ankle and his hand in mine. I would have felt a little less unmoored, I thought, if something had been holding me down. I also missed the fire in my fingers. If anything should have brought it surging back, it was this . . . but it wasn’t coming because it wasn’t there. Because someone had been stealing it away from me.
If that someone was Colin, or anyone else from his little magical nursery school, I was going to show him that there was more than one way to set somebody on fire.
“When luck is removed, it creates . . . Zeus, I don’t have the words for this shit. It creates a blank spot. And for a little while, the shock of the removal will keep that blank spot blank. Hence you still being effectively a null-luck zone when you got here. Your body hadn’t had the time to recover and start gathering luck again. With me?”
“Sure,” said Sam. “Why the fuck not?”
Cylia didn’t look like she appreciated his answer, but she pressed on. I silently vowed to buy her ice cream or something. “Once the shock wears off, the system will panic and begin gathering luck from any place that it can find it.”
“Which means bad luck, right?” I asked.
“Yes and no.”
For a moment, Sam and I were united in glaring at her. Cylia grimaced.
“I told you this was complicated,” she said. “Look, if you’re talking free-range luck, the bad kind is infinitely more common, and hence infinitely easier to find. But someone who has no luck won’t just suck up the free-range stuff, they’ll start pulling it off things that can’t fight back. Inanimate things.”
“Hang on,” I said. “So what you’re saying is that if what happened to Sam has happened to other people, and those people went to Lowryland, they might have pulled the luck off of parts of the Park trying to rebuild their own?”
“If they stayed long enough, yes.” Cylia looked grim. “Which would mean those things would start gathering free-range luck, since they’d lack the self-awareness to go looking for intentional replacement luck, and they’d wind up with a big load of badness.”
I rubbed my face with one hand. “I need to go.”
“Where?” asked Sam. “I still can’t transform.”
“I know,” I said. “But I need to get back to Lowryland.”
Eighteen
“Never gamble with anything you’re not willing to lose. The house doesn’t always win, but there are some chances not worth taking.”
–Mary Dunlavy
Lakeland, Florida, at the warehouse home of the Lakeland Ladies
“NO,” SAID CYLIA CALMLY, taking another swig of her lemonade. She swallowed, sighed, and added, “I wish like hell I could risk something stronger, but you know what they say about day drinking. Once you start, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to waking up one day as a bartender in some crappy coastal tourist resort, shaking your denim-clad rear for tips. I like bartenders. I like denim miniskirts. But wow, do I hate tourists.”
Sam and I both stared at her blankly. Finally, in a hesitant tone, Sam said, “I don’t think anyone says that. Like, ever. I don’t even believe that you’ve said that before just now.”
Cylia shrugged. “Yet here we are.”
My temper was beginning to boil. I narrowed my eyes, looking down the length of my nose at her, and pictured how nice she would look on fire. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean ‘no.’” Cylia looked back at me. “I will not drive you back to Lowryland. I will not tell you which bus to take to get to Lowryland. I will not let you run out of here and ditch me with your fuzzy boyfriend while you go and get yourself killed. This is not a good idea. This is a bad idea.”
“What makes you so sure I’m going to go and get myself killed?”
Cylia rolled her eyes so hard that for a moment, they looked like they were going to pop out of her head and roll away across the floor. “Please. First, I’ve met you. Second, you’re currently a weird energy sink, and third, you have some of the most bizarre luck I’ve ever seen. You could get yourself killed walking to the 7-11 for chocolate milk. If you run out of here without a plan, you’re going to end up dead, and how am I supposed to explain that to Fern?”
“I’d be more worried about how you were going to explain it to me,” said Sam dourly. “Annie, why do you want to go back to Lowryland? It sounds like whatever’s going on started there and . . . crap. I just answered my own question, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did.” I looked at Cylia. “How much do you know about human magic-users?”
“Enough to know that I don’t know jack,” she said. “They make magic, they use magic, sometimes a lot of things wind up on fire because of their magic, and there’s never been a jink who could do what they do.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “Humans can’t see luck the way jinks can.”
“Everyone can move luck, but only we can see it.”
I paused. “Uh, Cylia?”
“Yes?”
“Are you cool with dead people?”
Cylia blinked. “There are about a hundred different ways I can interpret that question, and none of them actually make any sense,” she said. “What do you mean, exactly?”
“Annie has dead aunts,” said Sam.
“Somehow, not helping,” said Cylia.
“I need to ask someone a question, and it probably isn’t you,” I said. “Are you cool with dead people?”
“You mean ghosts?” Cylia shrugged. “I guess. One of my second cousins stuck around being a ghost for a few years before he went off to do whatever comes after ghosting. He was a pretty chill guy. Used to help me sneak into the movies.”
“Great.” I clapped my hands, chanting, “Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse.”
“How many times do I need to tell you, that’s borderline offensive and not a good way to summon a ghooooo . . .” Mary trailed-off mid-word, suddenly realizing that she was in an unfamiliar kitchen, standing in front of a total stranger. “Uh.”
“It’s okay, Aunt Mary,” I said. “Cylia’s from my roller derby league.”
“Technically, no, but what’s a little intrastate rivalry between friends?” Cylia offered Mary a bright smile that was only slightly strained around the edges. “I didn’t know I was going to be hosting a party today. I would have done some cleaning up if I had.”
“I don’t care if she’s from your roller derby league, pumpkin. Being a derby girl doesn’t make somebody cool with the dead.” Mary glanced at Sam, only now seeming to see his furry condition. She frowned. “Okay, what the hell is going on?”
“That’s a really long story and I promise you’ll get the whole thing, probably with footnotes and I may need to draw some flowcharts to make sure I understand it, but can you please do me a huge favor?” I flashed my brightest, most hopeful smile in her direction. “Can you see if you can find Aunt Rose?”
“Why?” Mary’s eyes narrowed. “Antimony Timpani Price, you will tell me what’s going on right now, or so help me—”
“Something stole all of Sam’s luck and something different is sapping my magic, which
is why I can’t set anything on fire, and when I touched him after his luck was gone, the thing that’s been stealing my magic stole his . . . whatever the fuck it is that therianthropes use when they transform, so he’s currently stuck all monkeyed-out, which means we can’t go anywhere and he nearly got caught on camera by Lowry Security, so I need to talk to Aunt Rose and find out whether a routewitch could do any of this, because it’s going to make a difference for what happens next.”
The words poured out of me in a messy rush. Mary stared at me. So did Sam and Cylia. I shrugged, spreading my hands helplessly, and said nothing.
Mary turned her eyes heavenward. “Sometimes I wonder why I don’t move on,” she muttered, and vanished.
“All right, before the dead woman comes back to my apartment and what the hell is this day even doing, I want you to explain,” snapped Cylia. “Now.”
“Mary is a crossroads ghost,” I said. “She always knows where her family is, and she’s been with us for three generations now. She has a vested interest in me staying alive.”
“Well, that’s just dandy. Invite the crossroads over for coffee. Sounds great to me.”
I shook my head. “She’s a ghost, not a guardian. She doesn’t set up the deals. She speaks on behalf of the person trying to make them, and tries to minimize the damage, if she’s allowed. No member of my family has gone to the crossroads to make a deal since my grandfather.” What had happened to Grandpa Thomas had been enough to make every member of the family since listened when Mary told us to be careful. We liked this dimension. We wanted to stay in it.
“Okay,” said Cylia slowly. “And Rose is . . . ?”
“Rose Marshall.”
Sam turned to stare at me. “Rose Marshall.”
I nodded.
“The girl in the diner.”
“They call her that in some places, sure.”
“The girl in the green silk gown.”
“I think that one’s a little more common on the coasts these days. We don’t have as many diners. But yes, that’s her.”
“The phantom—”
“—prom date,” finished a new voice, as my Aunt Rose appeared in the middle of the kitchen, hands shoved into the back pockets of her faded jeans, head canted at a hard angle. Aunt Mary was a silent presence behind her, watching as Rose said, “Wow, Annie, you went and found a fellow who knew all the stories. Impressive. Did you notice the part where he’s a monkey? Because I don’t know about you, but that would make a bit of a difference for me.”
“You’re dating your car,” I said, and smiled in sweet relief. “Hi, Aunt Rose.”
“Hi, yourself,” she said, and smiled back.
Like Mary, Rose died young. A lot of ghosts did, or at least look like they did: since their appearance is malleable, the dead tend to settle at whatever age they felt most comfortable when they were alive. A ghost who looks sixteen might have died at sixteen, or might have died at sixty-five. It’s hard to say. But they can’t look older than they were when they died, because they never wore that face, never lived inside that skin. For Rose and Mary both, the clock stopped before high school ended, and they’ll never look old enough to drink.
Unlike Mary, with her long white hair and her empty highway eyes, Rose still looks like the kind of girl you might see down at the corner store, drinking a soda and sticking her thumb out for a ride. She usually wears whatever’s “in” with people who actually are the age she appears to be, cycling effortlessly through the fashion spectrum, coming back time and time again to a sort of Bruce Springsteen greaser chic, in jeans, white tank top, and sneakers. And jacket, of course. Rose is a hitchhiking ghost, eternally wandering the highways and byways of America, looking for the ride that will get her where she needs to go. She’ll never find it—that ride doesn’t exist—but she’ll have a good time while she tries.
They call her the girl in the green silk gown because she died on her way to the prom, back in the 1950s, and when things get bad, she appears in the dress she was wearing when her car ran off the road. Seeing her in jeans meant things weren’t as bad as they could be.
Rose has no obligation to help our family. But she’s an honorary aunt for a reason, and she does what she can to keep us out of trouble, when we call. Which isn’t often, by mutual agreement. She’ll always try to come. She’ll always do her best. And we’ll always remember that when we call her away from the road, we’re calling her away from an afterlife that doesn’t have anything to do with us—not yet—where she’s needed, and valued, and has shit to do.
“Aunt Rose, this my friend Cylia Mackie, and my . . .” I hesitated. Was I ready to take this step with a family member? More importantly, with a family member who didn’t share Mary’s inclination toward keeping her cards close to her chest? If Mary was a lockbox, Rose was a loudspeaker, and anything I told her today would wind up getting broadcast to the rest of the family as soon as she saw them.
Good. Maybe they’d feel better if they knew I wasn’t all by myself, and Sam looked somewhere between wary and miserable, like he’d been waiting for me to repudiate him since the moment he’d realized he could no longer pass for human. Fuck. That.
“This is my boyfriend, Sam Taylor,” I said firmly. “He’s a fūri.”
“Half,” said Sam. “Uh, hi, second dead aunt.”
Rose stuck her pinky in her ear and swiveled it exaggeratedly around. “I’m sorry. I could have sworn you just said ‘my boyfriend,’ which would imply that you, Annie, have a boyfriend, and means a bunch of people have probably lost bets.”
“Shut up,” I said genially.
Sam frowned. “Is this because I’m not human, or . . . ?”
“Oh, no, honey, I don’t give two shakes of a dead dog’s dick about that, and neither will anyone else worth knowing,” said Rose. “We have all sorts of people in the family, living and dead. You’ll fit right in. It’s mostly the idea of Annie dating at all. She always said it was a waste of time.”
“We’ve only managed to have three dates,” I protested. “One was at the carnival, one was at a roller derby game, and one was at Lowryland.”
“So you found a boyfriend who likes to do the shit you like to do? Miracles never cease. Now.” Rose sobered. The air in the room seemed to chill. Her hands were still shoved into her back pockets, but she suddenly looked much older than her apparent sixteen years, and there were shadows in her eyes I didn’t want to challenge. “Why did you send her,” she hooked a thumb toward Mary, “to drag me off the ghostroads and into whatever you living people are trying to do to each other this time? I’ve got shit to do, little Annie, and my thumb didn’t bring me here.”
“I need to ask you about routewitches.”
Rose went still.
Routewitches are common, as humans with magic go. That’s a very qualified statement. Maybe one person in a thousand has the potential to become a routewitch, and most will lose or bury that potential before they hit their teens. I don’t know what the actual numbers are, but if more than one person in ten thousand can actually hear the highways sing, I’ll eat my skates.
It’s commonly understood that most, if not all, road ghosts—ghosts like Rose—were or could have become routewitches when they were alive. Not only that, their natural habitat brings them into regular contact with the routewitches, whether they want it to or not. Routewitches and road ghosts represent one of the frontiers where the living and the dead collide, no matter how hard they try to keep themselves separate . . . and quite honestly, most of them don’t seem to try at all.
“I don’t know what you’re expecting me to tell you,” said Rose stiffly. “I’m not a routewitch. Even if I could have been, once, that kind of magic belongs to the living. I haven’t been among the living in a long, long time.”
“I know,” I said. I glanced to Cylia before looking back to Rose, and saying, in a careful tone, “Someone is si
phoning off my magic, Aunt Rose. I can’t start fires. I can barely feel the fire. It’s being drained away. And someone stole Sam’s luck, which meant that when I touched him, the siphon took the energy that lets him transform.”
“I gave him some luck back, but when I tried to take a slice from Annie to supplement it, whatever’s been draining her—wait, what?” Cylia’s head snapped around as she stared at me. “What do you mean, magic?”
“I’m a sorcerer,” I said with a shrug. “Surprise.”
“She sets shit on fire. It’s pretty sexy,” said Sam.
“Too much information, monkey-man,” said Mary.
Rose blinked. Rose snorted. And then, without further ado, Rose burst out laughing. She pulled her hands out of her pockets and put them over her eyes, bending slowly forward until her elbows were resting on her knees and her entire body was shaking with the effort of continuing to breathe. Which was honestly just dramatics, since she was already dead.
Sam leaned a little closer to me, careful to keep from touching my skin as he asked, quietly, “Is she okay?”
“Rose has a weird sense of humor,” I replied, not bothering to lower my voice. I glared at my dead aunt instead. “Which is fine, except for the part where it gets in the way of her getting on with things and telling me what I need to know.”
“Oh, man. Oh, Annie. Oh, jeez, I want to be there when your parents find out about this one.” Rose straightened up, wiping phantom tears from her eyes. “If I promise not to tell them about him, will you promise to call me before you take him home to meet them? Please?”
“Yes, but I need you to tell me about routewitches,” I said.
“Am I the only one upset by the idea of her,” Cylia pointed at me, “having the power to set things on fire with her mind?”
Rose shrugged. “Matches are cheap. Setting fires is good for a parlor trick, but it’s not as useful as it sounds. Are you asking whether a routewitch could steal your magic, Annie?”
“Yes,” I said.
“No.” Rose shook her head. “That’s not how routewitches work. They couldn’t steal your luck either. Those aren’t road concepts. They can’t take them.”