“So?” demands Gary.
“So Persephone has good reason to listen when Rose speaks, but not if she thinks there’s someone with a more immediate claim. Like most goddesses, she can be a little egotistical. She doesn’t want to feel like she’s being cheated on.” Apple shrugs. “I may not be a goddess—and wow do I not want to be, now or ever—but I am in direct service to the Old Atlantic Highway, and she sort of is a goddess at this point. Rose taking a fresh vow to serve me might transfer enough of her fealty that Persephone would refuse to help.”
This is all political and complicated and confusing as hell, and I can’t wait until I can get back to the world I understand, the one where it’s all medians and minivans and flirting with strangers to get them to pay for my coffee. “Got it,” I say, before Gary can offer another objection and draw this out even further. “No oaths for Rose. I’m cool with that. I never much cared for taking oaths in the first place. Does that mean it’s time for us to go?”
Apple’s mouth twists, like she’s bitten into something sour. “I think I’m glad you died before we had the chance to meet for the first time, Rose Marshall of Buckley Township,” she says, and there’s a weight on my name that wasn’t there before, like it’s a title, like it’s a condemnation. Her eyes are filled with lonely roads and shallow graves. She’s never looked this much like Mary. She’s never been so terrifying. “You would have been a rival and a thorn in my side, and one of us would have been the death of the other, if we’d been in the position of standing on this highway at the same time, on the same footing. The only way we could ever have been friends was for one of us to be six feet under.”
“No argument here,” I say, trying not to flinch away from those highway eyes.
People in the daylight say that eyes are the windows to the soul, and they’re not wrong about that. They also say you can tell the content of a person’s character by how willing they are to make eye contact. That’s why so many of them can’t last here in the twilight, no matter how strong and smart and clever they consider themselves to be. Here, on this side of the sun, the eyes are the windows to the soul, and what you see when you look through them may be more than you can stand.
Apple pauses, sighs, and takes a step backward. “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” she says awkwardly. “I look at you and see a challenge to my rule.”
“That’s new,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “It aches. The Ocean Lady doesn’t want me gone, or I’d be gone already, but she knows power when she sees it, and you, right now, you have power. You’re untrained and you don’t know half of what you’re capable of, and that doesn’t change the fact that you have the power to make my life a lot less pleasant than it is. If you weren’t planning to go to the Underworld and get your death back, I’d have two choices.”
“Apprenticeship or banishment?” I suggest.
“Apprenticeship or execution,” Apple counters. I must look appalled, because she shakes her head and says, “Even apprenticeship wouldn’t be entirely safe for me, but again: you’re my friend, whether or not it feels like it right now. I would have tried. And if it hadn’t worked out, or if you had refused the offer, I would have been compelled to rip every foot you’ve ever traveled from your bones. I would have unwound you, skein to spindle, and draped your strength around myself like a cloak of bones to dissuade my enemies from coming after me while I was mourning. There’s no way I could let a routewitch of your potential stay in North America unchallenged.”
My heart is beating too hard. My breath is a stone in my throat. I choke it down, and it lands heavy in my stomach as I say, “Good thing I’m leaving, then.”
“Yes,” Apple agrees. “It is. Bon has your tickets. Another of my own will meet you at the airport to provide you with passports and currency. You’ll have time. Barely, but time.”
“Thank you,” I say. Anything else would be too much, would be a challenge to her authority, and I don’t want to do that. I can read the warning in the air. It’s not the same as the warnings I’ve always received on the ghostroads—there’s no smell of ashes, no taste of lilies—but everything is too still and too bright, like a thunderstorm rushing in. She’s holding herself back for my sake, for the sake of everything we’ve been together. She can’t do it forever.
I can’t make her do it forever.
“Here’s how this is going to work,” she says, and her words are branches breaking in the dark, implacable, final, impossible to mend. “You are going to walk to the edge of the parking lot, and you aren’t going to look back. Laura will come to you, with your things. Together, you will walk away from here. You will return to your car. She will drive you to the airport. You will board the plane, and when you land in England, you will be met by one who knows the way.”
I want to ask her how we’re going to know our guide. I don’t. This is old magic, older than me, older than America, and I’m an American ghost. I’m neon and truck stops and greasy cheeseburgers, I’m prom nights and cheap corsages and shared milkshakes at a diner counter. I have no place in old magic, no right to challenge it or claim it as my own. Maybe if I’m quiet, the world won’t notice, and the magic will work for me.
All I want is to go back where I belong. All I want is cold wrapped around my ghostlight bones and a stranger’s coat draped around my shoulders. If this is what it takes to get those things, then this is what I’ll do.
Gary is a silent shadow beside me. I want to look at him, to read the lines on his face and tease the patterns of his thoughts out of the set of his shoulders. I don’t. I won’t. He gets to stand here and watch while I walk away, hunting for a salvation that may or may not come. In this moment, he gets a little privacy.
“You will go to the location of the gate. You will descend into the Underworld. You will not eat; you will not drink; you will make no promises to anyone save the ones you are there to see. You will remember who you are and why you have come.”
Her words sound like warnings, like these are things I really need to hear. That’s more than a little distressing. “I’m not prone to forgetting what I want,” I say. “Even if I wanted to, this stupid body would remind me.”
“You have to listen,” says Apple. She seizes my hands, and I have to fight not to pull away from her, remembering the stretch of distance she’s already sliced off me, cutting it away as cleanly as a fisherman cuts the scales from their catch. “You have to heed, or we’ll never see you again, and you are my friend. I don’t have as many of those as you might think.”
It’s a lonely thing, to be a queen. I bite back my first response, and my second, and finally I just nod, saying, “I’m listening.”
“Any promises you make to those you’ve come to see will be binding, so consider them carefully. Even if you think it’s worth what they’re asking you to pay, be certain, because no one’s going to get you out of your own word, freely given. They will tell you the way out. You may ask them to place that exit in North America, if it’s within their power to do so. We’re sending you to walk the road Orpheus once walked, but that’s metaphorical, not literal; you aren’t going to pop out in ancient Greece.”
“You sound pretty damn sure of that.”
The corner of her mouth twitches in a smile, quickly smothered. “I’m pretty damn sure that if you had suddenly appeared in the time of gods and heroes, there’d be something in the folklore about this weird woman who didn’t speak Greek, and yet still managed to punch Zeus in the dick before she got turned into an almond tree.”
“Why almond?” asks Gary.
“They’re bitter.” Apple keeps her eyes on me. “You will go. You will be careful. You will come home, no longer in a position to be my rival, but only as always, my friend. Do you understand me, Rose Marshall of Buckley Township, Michigan?”
“I do,” I say. Before I can reconsider, I pull my hands from hers, step forward, and embrace her. Unlike Gary, s
he feels exactly as I expect her to feel: she feels like a living girl, slight and shivering. She hugs me back, fiercely, and for a moment—only a moment—everything stops. We are two teenagers holding each other tight in the twilight that never ends, and whatever happens next, we will always have had this. We will always have been alive together, hearts beating at the same time, and we will always, always have been friends.
Always.
Chapter 16
My Spindrift Soul
THE DRIVE FROM MAINE TO MANHATTAN takes more than five hours, Laura’s hands white-knuckled on the wheel the whole time. She’s shivering almost from the moment the engine starts, and I want to comfort her, but I’m not sure how. For me, the stroll along the Ocean Lady back to the diner parking lot was almost a return to normalcy: the sky tinted around the edges with colors the daylight has forgotten, the chirping of passenger pigeons in the trees, the hum of the highway under my feet. I’m so used to roads having opinions about things that it never occurred to me that for Laura, this would be the whole world twisting out of true. She’s broken somehow, fractured deep below the surface, and I don’t know how to put her right.
“Are you—” I begin, as we’re crossing the great metal backbone of the bridge that will take us into the city.
She shakes her head, hard and fierce. “Not right now,” she says.
I close my mouth. We fall back into the silence we’ve been riding in since we stepped back into the daylight, since we left the others—Apple, and Emma, and Gary—behind to vanish like phantoms in the night. Which, in a way, is exactly what they are. They span the gamut from truly living to truly dead, and this world isn’t theirs anymore, if it ever was to begin with.
It shouldn’t be mine, yet right now, it’s the only world I’ve got, and I have to admit a certain relief to being in it, watching cars filled with the ordinary living zip or creep past us as we wend our way along the highway. Traffic is always terrible in Manhattan—a natural consequence of cramming this many people into this little space—but that means more time to look out the window and breathe in deep, letting the world of the living fill my lungs.
Being a hitcher means that even though I enjoy being dead, I’ve never been able to entirely leave the daylight behind. I need the living if I want to stay connected to the road, and I need to stay connected to the road unless I want to sink way down deep into the twilight and never find my way back to the surface. There’s something so normal and right about this moment that I almost forget how bad things are, and how much I have left to lose.
“We’re almost there,” says Laura, and I remember everything. That’s the problem with moments of peace: they don’t last. They never last.
Something always comes and washes them away.
The signs say we’re almost to JFK International Airport, our gateway to the world, at least for today. We’re going to England to look for a different gateway to a different world, one that I still don’t fully understand. Apple says Laura and I can get to the Underworld without dying because Orpheus did it already; because the narrative force of his legend has defined, or maybe changed, the rules. But how did he get there if the rules hadn’t already been changed? We can access the Ocean Lady because she’s a goddess of the road and she changed the rules herself to keep her routewitches safe. She’s not the true twilight, more adjacent to it, playing her own long, slow game.
Right now, if I dropped into the true twilight, if I set foot on the real ghostroads, my heart would seize in my chest and the blood would freeze in my veins and I would fall down dead before I had time to realize what a terrible mistake I had just made. Going home is a death sentence as long as I’m alive. So what makes the Underworld different? Is it because Persephone and Hades are more powerful than the Ocean Lady, more capable of changing the rules outside of their domain? Why would they do that? Why would they invite the living?
None of this makes sense. I don’t know whether I hope it’s going to start, or whether I hope it gets even more convoluted, falls into the sort of fairy tale logic that saw a hundred red-cloaked and bloody-lipped heroines out of their forests and into their palaces when I was a child. There’s something to be said for fairy tales. As long as the people in them follow the rules, they tend to end happily.
I could use a guaranteed happy ending right about now.
Laura turns off the highway, following the signs to the airport. The road is a labyrinth of potholes and metal plates, which are probably meant to compensate for some of the asphalt’s many sins, but really only manage to make my teeth rattle in my head when Laura can’t swerve to avoid them. I need to pee again. My butt hurts from sitting on it too long, and my stomach is rumbling, which raises way too many concerns about another cycle of food-digestion-bathroom. These aren’t things I want to need to think about, and I can’t stop. Living sucks.
“I need to return the rental car,” says Laura. “I don’t think Apple is going to pick up the bill if I leave it sitting in long-term parking.”
“Okay,” I say, trying to sound agreeable.
I am at her mercy. I know it, and she knows it, and even if neither of us acknowledges it aloud, it’s still going to be true. I am a child in this world, without the rights of a legal adult, which is probably a good thing, since I don’t have the resources or paperwork of a legal adult, either. Without Laura, I might still be able to make this journey, but it would be a hell of a lot harder. She is the grease that eases the wheels of the modern world. And yet.
And yet.
If she decides she doesn’t want to do this after all—that what I’m seeking is suicide, instead of setting things right—all she needs to do is pick up a phone and tell someone in a position of authority that I’m a runaway thinking of hurting herself. All she has to do is drop a dime on me, and I’m locked up in a room with no hard edges, growing older under the watchful eye of people who won’t take care of me for one second longer than the law demands, who will turn me into a woman while they stand idly by talking about what’s going to be on TV that weekend.
It’s good for people to want to help each other. It’s good to keep real teenagers from hurting themselves. Death isn’t a vacation and it’s not a change to be undertaken lightly. But I died a long time ago, and my situation is different, and I just want to go home. That’s really what this boils down to, all the fear and the panic and the clawing at my own skin when it refuses to cool and turn to mist the way I know it ought to. I just want to go home.
Laura has been talking the whole time I’ve been sunk in the pit of my own thoughts. I snap out of it as she says, “—drop you at the curb.”
“What?”
She shoots me a look that can’t decide whether it wants to be amused or annoyed, and so splits the difference between them. “I said, I’m going to go and return the rental car, but that might take a little while. So I’m going to drop you at the curb. That way you can go and meet Apple’s contact and get our paperwork sorted out.”
Or maybe she’s already regretting her agreement to take me to the Underworld, where all manner of terrible things could happen to either or both of us. Laura wants a psychopomp to make sure she reaches Tommy before she moves on to whatever her reward is going to be, but she doesn’t want to die. Not yet. Death comes for us all in time, and Laura isn’t the kind of person who wants to hurry it up. She still has things she wants to do in this world, before she moves on to the next.
What if this is how she runs away?
My panic must show in my eyes, because she shakes her head, and when she speaks, her voice drips frustration. “I keep my word, Rose. But we’re cutting it close if we want to catch our plane, and I’d rather you tried to get our papers while I put the car back, instead of keeping you with me and doubling the amount of time we’re spending at the airport before we hit security.”
Oh. Oh. “I can try,” I say meekly. I hate that I sound like this. I hate that I need her. I
can’t change it. All I can do is keep pressing forward, keep heading down this tangled, unnecessary road, and hope that I can come out the other side with everything I am intact.
The curb in front of JFK Airport is a nightmare of honking horns and anxious security, all of them trying to hurry the cars away as quickly as they can. People are dropping off their friends and loved ones, aware—as the living always are, on some level—that they may never see those dearly beloved faces again, and the police are yelling at them to keep going. Laura doesn’t even try to fight her way through the crowd to the sidewalk. She pulls into a gap, double-parked and blocking at least three cars in.
“Go,” she says.
I do. Backpack over my shoulder and heart pounding, I fling myself out of the car.
“Meet me at the counter,” she says, and the door slams, and she’s gone, merging back into the slow molasses river of the other vehicles, passing out of my reach. Surrounded by the living, I am alone. If Bobby comes for me here, there won’t be anyone with the power to stop him or to save me.
It’s a warm day, for November in New York. I’m still shivering as I turn and walk into the airport, leaving the roads of America behind.
* * *
Inside the airport is clean and dry and bleach-scented, like walking into a convenience store the size of Disneyland. There are people everywhere, but they’re quiet, beaten down by the strain of observation. Security is everywhere, some in blue TSA uniforms, others in the characteristic beat cop dark navy of the NYPD.
I never set foot in an airport while I was alive, but I know it wasn’t always like this. Even when air travel was new and accidents were common—at least by modern safety standards—it wasn’t always like this. People used to see it as a gift, this magical ability to cross the country in less than a day. After sixty years with my thumb cocked to the sky, it feels a little bit like cheating. We are all Icarus now. Sometimes our wings are going to get singed. Nobody likes that, and I can’t blame them, but at least we used to believe it. Now there are metal detectors and X-rays and men with guns everywhere I look, like that could somehow change the reality that we’re about to pack ourselves into a metal tube and hurtle across the sky. Daedalus would be so proud. His son would be so jealous.