“No,” I say. “Please. I know you’re trying to help, but the way you help is figuring out how to get me out of this body. I can’t do this. I can’t rejoin the land of the living. I’m sixty years out of time and completely out of place. My ‘life’ is in the land of the dead. And where would I go if I tried to stay here? You really want to be my aunt full-time? Because that’s what it would mean. I don’t have anyone else.”
Laura takes a deep breath. “All right,” she says. “Let’s do this.”
We walk together across the shattered parking lot to the body of the diner. It’s a dead thing as surely as I am, grim and gutted by time and the ravages of the weather. The front window is entirely smashed, rendering the ground treacherous with shards of broken glass. This was part of a chain once, although I couldn’t say which one; the construction is too squat, too cookie-cutter to have been anything else. That’s a good thing. Say what you like about the Denny’s and Big Boys of the world, they have strong bones.
Laura produces a flashlight from her purse and sets it on the counter, beam blazing white through the muck and grime. She hoists her suitcase up next to it, opens it, and pulls out the makeup kit I know is full of far more ritual supplies than eyeshadows.
“I wish we had a broom,” she mutters. “Rose, look around and see if you can find something that looks like it might be a broom.”
It’s busywork and we both know it: none of the things she’s going to do need to have a perfectly clean floor. Some of them might actually work better if she does them on top of the grime of years, letting new magic mask old neglect. But she doesn’t want me underfoot, fussing about the curve of every line, questioning the meaning of every sigil, and if I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t want to be there. I wouldn’t even want to be here, in this decrepit relic of a diner, if I didn’t have to be.
The night is dark and full of dangers, and for the first time in a long time, I’m aware of what they could mean for me. So I pick my way deeper into the body of the diner, Laura and her tempting light behind me, trying to let all those years I’ve spent in places like this one guide me.
There are lots of things that can kill a diner. Fire is the big one, followed by people killing each other—no one wants to drink coffee and eat a burger in a place that’s made the papers any way other than hosting an eating competition. But time and money are gaining ground. The world has moved away from sitting in cramped booths, feeling the vinyl stick to the side of bare thighs, listening to whatever the collective tastes of a building full of strangers has put on the jukebox. These days, it’s drive-throughs and convenience stores, hurry, hurry, keep on the road, never stop never slow never look back. I never feel older than I do when I think about the American relationship with the diner, which is changing, slowly but surely, and not changing back.
This diner was killed by time. There are no scorch marks on the walls, no bloodstains on the floor; just torn vinyl and missing ceiling tiles, places where the paint has been patched in something different, something cheaper. This place was buried alive, one overdue electric bill and mortgage payment at a time, and I want to be sorry for its loss—for the road’s loss—and all I can manage to be is grateful for our gain. A building this intact should be easier to gimmick up.
The smell by the bathrooms is deep and swampy and somehow cleaner than what I encountered in the truck stop. This is nature taking back the night soil it’s been given and using it to feed new growth, the reclamation of what was always its to begin with.
I feel around until I find a doorknob, and it’s only as I’m opening the door that I think about the things that could be inside this closed-up closet, the dangers the living world has to offer a girl like me, who is so suddenly, terribly mortal. There could be a raccoon in here, rabid and angry. Or spiders, or worse. I freeze, door half open, doorknob cold in my hand, and try to tamp down the raging panic that threatens to rise up and completely overwhelm me.
I can’t do this. I can’t. I’m supposed to be fearless, reckless, the one who charges in despite everything, because nothing can hurt me. Only right now, everything can hurt me. I’m an untried teenage girl in a body that feels too young and too old and too solid, all at the same time, and nothing about this is good, or right, or fair.
Laura is rattling around behind me, making small sounds of contentment and frustration as she gets her sigils in order. I may need her help, but she needs me too. If someone from the twilight shows up here to find her fumbling around with things she should really leave alone, she’ll have problems. She needs me to stand between her and the world of the dead.
She needs me. I need me. I can’t stand back and wait to be saved. I yank the door the rest of the way open and shove my hand inside, relaxing a little when it hits the handle of what is definitely some kind of cleaning device. I pull it out. It’s a mop. Not quite right, but at least it tells me I’m on the right track.
My second attempt nets me the broom I was looking for. It’s dusty, which seems a little comic given its function, but the head is intact, its spines ready for sweeping. I turn and trot back to Laura, broom brandished proudly in one hand, like it means something. Like it matters.
She’s in the process of sketching out a complicated rune on a piece of binder paper, a stick of charcoal held between thumb and forefinger, slowly coating her in a grayish film. She looks up at my approach, blinking in evident surprise. “You found one.”
“I did,” I say, holding up the broom for inspection. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Sweep as much of the broken glass into the kitchen as you can. It won’t be a danger there, and I’d rather not slice my hands open trying to reset this floor.”
It makes sense when she puts it like that. Blood often goes into runic castings of this sort, but it’s best when the blood is chosen, controlled, and not getting everywhere due to a misplaced shard of window. I bob my head, agreeing to the task, and begin to sweep with more enthusiasm than skill, shoving dirt and glass alike toward the dark maw of the kitchen.
The enthusiasm fades as I continue to work, replaced first by concentration, and then, slowly, so slowly that I barely notice it happening, by habit. It’s been decades since I stood on this side of a broom, but there are things the body never forgets, not in life and not in death. I may be the girl in the green silk gown now—and sweet Persephone, I miss that dress, I miss it like I never thought I would or could, like it’s the answer to a question I never realized I was asking; I, the Cinderella girl from the wrong side of town, trapping herself a minute to midnight for sixty years, so the clock could never chime and the spell would never end—but I was little Rosie Marshall once. My mother was trash and so was I, at least if you asked the kids I grew up with, the ones whose awareness of the social structure was even more set in stone than that of their parents. The adults in Buckley might have been willing to see me as a child, worthy of protection, worthy of a chance, at least until puberty brought me the breasts that meant I was going to be exactly like my mother, and no better than I should have been. Their offspring were never that generous.
I’ve been sweeping floors since I was old enough to hold a broom, splinters in my fingers and my mother’s voice in the back of my head, reminding me that she was working hard to put food on the table with my daddy gone and my two big brothers trying to finish school, telling me I had to do my fair share around the house if I wanted us to have a chance to get ahead. Add one more good thing to the growing tally of the benefits of being dead. Maybe I never got a chance to grow up, but hell, at least I didn’t grow up to be the girl they thought I was going to be.
I’m so focused on sweeping that I stop paying attention to the diner. In a way, it isn’t even there anymore. I’m long ago and far away, in a shitty little house in Michigan, sweeping the floor that’s going to be mine until I find a man of my own to hit me the way my father used to hit my mother, or until I snap and burn the place do
wn in the middle of the night. Gary was one potential escape, but I never really believed he was going to get me out of there. Girls like me don’t get happy endings. Not even when we were never what they thought we were. Maybe especially when we had the gall to not be what they thought we were.
Something catches in the bristles of my broom. I bend to pull it out, and the sharp shock of glass slicing flesh wakes me from the unwanted dream of my past. I hiss, pulling air through my teeth, and shake the glass away. It goes flying, lost to the dark, taking some of me with it. Blood, running down my hand. I’m bleeding. Not the first time since I’ve died—when I walk among the living, blood is always a risk—but the first time where it counts, the first time it could scar.
My stomach rolls. I drop the broom and run for the door, unwilling to step into the dark recesses of the bathroom, equally reluctant to vomit on the floor I’ve been working so hard to clean, the floor Laura will need to transform into a living liminal space if we’re going to catch the Ocean Lady’s attention. I run, and my hand bleeds, and I make it to the parking lot before what feels like everything I’ve eaten since my resurrection comes boiling past my lips and onto the pavement. My hand hurts worse than I could have imagined. The pain is enough to make me vomit again, this time bringing up nothing but stringy acid and more pain. So much pain.
I bend forward, hands on my knees, blood leaking onto my jeans and staining them with the evidence of living, and try to catch my breath. The back of my throat burns. My nose is clogged with vomit and snot, making it difficult to smell anything else. I breathe out as hard as I can, and send a hot jet of mucus to join the rest of the mess.
This is me. All this is me, it came from me, and there’s no way to put it back where it belongs. I could return to the ghostroads right now, fading out of the human world like the phantom I am, and this would still remain, changing the world in tiny, inconsequential ways. It’s a dizzying, upsetting thought, and I don’t want to have it anymore, so I straighten up, wipe my mouth on my sleeve, and stagger back toward the diner.
I step over the threshold. The world snaps into light and color and the smell of apple pie around me, suddenly fresh and bright and new. I can hear the clatter of spoons against coffee cups, the scrape of forks against plates. I can hear it, but when I look, there’s no one there.
Something moves at the corner of my vision. I turn, and the world splits into two parallel realities, running on top of and alongside one another, contradictory and self-contained. In one of them, the diner is bright and new, a palace of the road. In the other, it’s dead, dark and broken. Laura is bent over a particularly intricate swirl of her runes, a paintbrush in her hand, lit by her flashlight and by the candles she has set up and lit on every available surface around her.
I don’t know whether she’s the fastest ritual magician I’ve ever seen or whether I was sweeping for a lot longer than I thought, but either way, she’s done it. She’s cast her spell and called this diner up out of the grave, making it look as new as the day it was constructed. It is a corpse shambling out of the shadows and into the light; the broken places are still here, concealed under the thinnest of veneers. It doesn’t matter. The shock of its resurrection will be echoing through the twilight, spilling out across the Ocean Lady, drawing attention.
Hopefully drawing the right kind of attention. There are predators in the shadows, things that would think nothing of swallowing two living women and an impossible diner whole. I look at Laura, putting the finishing touches on a rune drawn in gold paint and what looks like sparkly black eyeliner, and I feel a pang of guilt. I should probably have told her more about the risks, instead of just demanding that she do this for me, that she make this possible for me. I should have made sure she understood that she was risking her life in the interests of canceling mine.
I don’t open my mouth. I don’t say a word. The runes are set, the die is cast, and much as I do not want to be the reason this woman, who has been my enemy and is helping me anyway, dies, I want to be here even less. I want to go home.
“Now what?” asks Laura.
“Now we wait,” I reply, and hold up my injured hand. “Do you have any Mercurochrome?”
Chapter 10
Forbidden Fruit
LAURA DOES NOT HAVE ANY MERCUROCHROME. Mercurochrome was banned as unsafe in the United States almost twenty years ago, and there are so many other options on the market these days that no one’s fighting to bring it back. The stuff she puts on my cut hand is milky and clear and doesn’t stain my skin around the flesh-colored bandage she puts over the wound itself, and it’s hard to believe it’s going to do me any good. Medicine should leave a mark.
The runes are definitely leaving a mark. Every time I blink it gets harder to see the true diner under the false one, which is strengthening and stabilizing with every passing moment. It’s unnerving. Not just to me; Laura looks around and laughs a little, unsteadily.
“We’re going to have people pulling into the parking lot and asking for pie if this keeps up,” she says.
“Isn’t this what happened last time?”
Laura shakes her head. “When I set that trap for you, it was . . . I used a lot of the same ritual markers. Not all—there’s no Seal of Solomon here, I’m not trying to catch anything this time—but the shape of things was the same. I expected the results to be the same. I don’t know why this is coming on so strong.”
I do. We’re on the Ocean Lady, and there’s no way the Atlantic Highway herself didn’t have a hand in us “chancing upon” such a perfect ritual location. We should have been driving around until morning trying to locate an abandoned diner that suited our needs, not finding one on our first try. She wants us to succeed. And I should have been a routewitch, would have been a routewitch if I’d lived. The road may not be speaking to me, but the Ocean Lady knows.
There’s more power in this moment than Laura could ever have predicted, and almost certainly more than her runes can safely contain. I don’t think Urban Decay preps their eyeliners to channel the ritual strength of a phantom highway, or if they do, they should probably charge more for them. I shrug, forcing a smile.
“Maybe it helps that you’re sending out an invitation, not setting a trap?” I suggest.
“Maybe.” Laura doesn’t look convinced. That speaks well of her intelligence, since I’m literally talking out of my ass. I keep smiling. If she breaks the runes now . . .
Well, if she breaks the runes now, it may not do anything. The Ocean Lady is fueling this summons, and she doesn’t really care what little human magicians do or don’t want from her. She does as she pleases. I just hope what she pleases is helping me.
Laura produces granola bars and beef jerky from her bag. They help to take the taste of vomit from my mouth, leaving me less disgusted by the entire reality of my physical being. She finds a stool that’s actually as structurally stable as it looks, and sits down. I perch on the counter, resisting the urge to pick at my bandage, nibbling on a granola bar instead. Time oozes by like treacle, thick and slow and unrelenting.
Laura doesn’t say anything. Neither do I. We’re not friends, could never have been friends, not with everything we have between us. She’s helping me because she needs me, if she wants to be sure of getting Tommy back, and I’m sitting here with her because I don’t have any other choice. That’s not enough to make us friends.
But the silence is cruel. It opens space for my thoughts to chase each other through the warrens of my mind, teasing and taunting me. What if I’m changing more than I think I am? What if the little differences between who I am and who I was are already enough to keep me off the ghostroads? I could go back into the twilight and find myself starting over as something entirely new, something I don’t know how to be or want to learn about.
It’s a terrifying thought. It’s like tar: no matter how hard I shove it away, it leaks up around the edges and wraps itself around me, drawing
me into its unwanted embrace. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can’t do anything but listen to the hammering of my heart, and wonder how thin its walls are. Can I scare myself to death?
The bell over the door is louder than thunder. I jump, almost falling off the counter before I catch myself. Laura tenses, one hand going to the knife in her bag of ritual supplies. We both turn, briefly united in our terror.
The girl in the doorway looks at us, a slow frown growing on her face. Her hair has been pulled back with a series of brightly colored elastic bands, like she’s trying to build a rainbow from black silk and nostalgia. Her clothes are as clean and well-mended as ever. When she sees me, her eyes widen and she raises one hand to press against the hollow of her throat, like she’s struggling to hold her heart inside. There’s no mistaking the surprise, or the raw disbelief in her expression.
“Rose?” she asks.
“Apple!” I fling myself from the counter and toward the Queen of the North American Routewitches. I’m a few inches taller than she is. I always have been, but before, we’ve always been meeting on the Ocean Lady, where power and position made her seem larger than she is. She barely has the time to spread her arms to catch me, and then I’m embracing her, I’m holding on for dear death, fighting to use her to anchor myself to the world where I belong and not the world where I am.
“I’m guessing you know her,” says Laura, behind me.
“Rose, let go.” Apple sets me gently aside, straightening, and in that moment, she goes from small, careful teenage girl to monarch at the height of her strength. We’re on the Ocean Lady, even here in the world of the living where the unforgiving minutes beat us down, one by one, into the future.