“Still the dead lady,” said Sam. “Hi, Rose.”
Aunt Rose, better known as Rose Marshall, better known as the Girl in the Green Silk Gown, smirked at him. She was wearing what I always thought of as her traveling clothes, blue jeans and sneakers and a white T-shirt with a faded truck stop logo on the front, the letters worn down to ghosts of themselves, so it was impossible to guess whether she was advertising something near or far away or nonexistent. Her hair was cropped short, almost a pixie cut, and swept carelessly away from her eyes. Like Mary, Rose had been in her teens when she died. She still was. Let the stars burn out and the sun explode, and she’d still be sixteen years old. Some things about being a ghost are lousier than others.
Smirk fading, Rose swung around to face me. “I’m guessing by the bloodstains on the boyfriend’s shirt that he’s the reason you’re still among the living. What the hell happened? And why am I the first one here? Mary should be clawing these wards down to get to you.”
“She’s gone.”
Rose blinked. “What?”
“The crossroads took her because they thought she might be more on my side than theirs.” Saying it out loud made it feel terribly real—and more, terribly like my fault. If I hadn’t made that bargain …
If I hadn’t made that bargain, Sam and I would both be dead. I’d take guilty over the grave any day. “They sent a replacement, though, which is why we have the wards up. I don’t really need a strange crossroads ghost telling me how to manage my business.”
Rose frowned. “Does the replacement have a name?”
“Bethany?”
“Of course.” She put a hand over her eyes. “Of course it’s Bethany. Of course they’d try to use family to fuck family.”
I blinked. “Aunt Rose?”
“Bethany isn’t your family. She’s mine.” She lowered her hand, looking at me bleakly. “She’s my brother’s granddaughter. She tried to … well, never mind what she tried to do. She got punished for it, she died, and now she works for the crossroads. She’s not a bad kid, but she isn’t going to fight the crossroads for the sake of a woman she doesn’t know. Especially not if she realizes you know me.”
“That’s fun,” I said, voice flat.
“That’s life.”
“Excuse me.” I turned. James had stepped forward. “Could I get an introduction? Since it seems this is a friend of yours?”
“Right, sorry. James Smith, meet Rose Marshall. Aunt Rose, meet James. Aunt Rose is a hitchhiking ghost. James is a sorcerer. Play nicely with each other, or I’ll knock your heads together.”
“Hey,” said Rose, with a small wave. “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” said James.
“Now that we’ve got that out of the way …” Rose looked back to me. “I understand, completely, why you’re not going to lower these wards. Don’t. But do you mind telling me why you almost died, and why I shouldn’t be heading for your parents right now to tattle on you?”
“Covenant fucker shot her in the shoulder,” said Sam.
Rose raised an eyebrow. “Oh, is that all?”
“He shot me in the shoulder with a crossbow bolt that had been coated in some sort of tranquilizer, so I promptly passed out, fell into the lake, and nearly drowned,” I said.
“Him shooting you next to the lake was a stroke of luck,” said Cylia. “The water was cold enough to slow the bleeding, and it rinsed away most of the tranquilizer. Really, this could have been much worse.”
My stomach clenched. I hadn’t considered how much luck had been involved in my survival—or how much of that might have been Cylia’s doing. “Are we … ?”
“I like how much faith you have in me, but you have your own luck,” Cylia said. “I’m not keeping things sunny enough to prevent you getting shot. That’s the sort of long-term violation of the laws of nature that winds up ending when the one doing the bending has a stroke or gets broadsided by a semi. You got lucky because you got lucky. Don’t count on it happening in the future.”
James looked like he needed a footnote on what the hell that meant. I mouthed “later” at him and returned my attention to Rose.
“You probably can’t stay here without attracting the attention of the crossroads, which wouldn’t be a great thing right now,” I said. “Plus we can’t let you in, and we don’t have any coats you can borrow.”
Rose waved a hand, dismissing my concerns. “I wasn’t planning to stick around anyway. Maine? Not my scene. We’re near enough to the terminus of the Ocean Lady that I’ll just get someone to drive me to Calais so I can head down south to visit the routewitches.”
“This would be a very enlightening conversation if I understood half of it,” said James.
“Later,” I repeated, this time audibly. “Aunt Rose, are the crossroads going to … have they done something to Mary? Is she all right?”
“I don’t know, kiddo,” she said. “I wish I did. One of the first rules of getting by in the twilight is stay the fuck away from the crossroads. They don’t do favors. They try to act like they do, but—really—they’re all about taking care of themselves. Maybe she’s fine. Maybe they have her in some kind of spirit jar, or, hell, maybe they’ve sent her to broker deals in Puerto Rico while Bethany chews your ass. They might have done that simply because they know it’ll hurt her to be unable to help you when you’re suffering. Or maybe they’ve cut her off entirely, and she’s …” Rose paused, mouth twisting. “Ghosts can’t die. We’re already dead. But we all have things we have to do if we want to stay anchored in the afterlife. I don’t hitchhike because I want to. I do it because if I don’t do it, the twilight doesn’t know what to do with me, and I start to fade in and out of the world. It’s possible they’ve severed her from her job. You need to be prepared for that.”
For a long, long moment, I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, staring at the dead woman who had become my aunt through adoption and inertia—when someone sticks around for decades, it’s hard not to make them part of the family—and feeling the dull ache in my shoulder grow stronger.
I had the crossroads breathing down my neck. I had a Covenant asshole shooting at me, or at least shooting at my boyfriend, which wasn’t actually any better. And now I had to face the possibility that I’d lost my babysitter and constant companion, not because someone was having a baby, but because I had screwed up badly enough to need to call upon the crossroads.
“No,” I said. My voice was surprisingly clear. I took a breath, and repeated, “No. That’s not going to happen. We’re going to get her back. You can’t stay, it’s not safe for you to stay, but I need you not to tell my parents what’s happening. There’s nothing they could do to help, and with the Covenant on the ground here, it’s not safe for them to get involved.”
“Someday you’re going to outgrow this need to martyr yourself, and then things are going to get interesting.” Rose reached out like she was going to touch my cheek, only to recoil when her fingertips brushed the wards. She managed a weak smile. “Good work on the wards. Keep them up. No matter how much you think you want to take them down, keep them up. You’re going to need a place where Bethany can’t reach you. You think you’ve dealt with crossroads ghosts before. You haven’t. You’ve dealt with Mary, and she’s not the norm. Stay careful. Stay safe. And, kiddo, please try to remember … Mary’s as dead as I am. She had her chance. You’re still having yours. It’s not worth it to trade yourself for her.”
She turned to Sam and James, suddenly smiling the bright, easy smile that has coerced generations of truckers to let her into their passenger seats, promising easy roads and minimal traffic ahead. She’s had decades to perfect that smile. It was still funny to see the boys trying to deal with the sheer intensity of it.
“Sam, nice to see you again. Remember, every day you keep putting up with our girl is a dollar in the betting pool for me, so I hope to dance at your wedding. James, nice to meet you, always a pleasure to be on a sorcerer’s good side, if you ever n
eed a hitchhiking ghost, I’m your girl. Now, all of you, behave, and try not to let Annie get shot again.”
Like that, she was gone, not fading out of the world so much as simply ceasing to be a part of it. She had never been fully solid, and so there was no inrush of air, only silence. There wasn’t even a coat to leave behind.
I looked at the place where she’d been for a very long moment. Then, carefully, I closed the door and turned to face the others.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s fix this.”
Thirteen
“If you do your job and get out, people will wonder about you forever. If you do your job, ask for applause, and pass the hat, they’ll forget you in the morning.”
–Frances Brown
In the living room of a rented house, trying to figure out what happens next
“DID THE CROSSROADS REALLY turn this lady’s husband inside-out?”
Sam sounded so plaintive that I craned my neck to see the page he was looking at, not moving from my place against his side. Cylia didn’t want me out of her sight until she was sure there weren’t going to be any negative side effects from Leo’s tranquilizer, which meant the research party was back on, and had taken over the living room. Fern was upstairs in the attic, watching for trouble, but that didn’t mean she’d been spared; Cylia had toted an entire armful of local histories and a sheet of questions from James all the way to the top of the house for her to work on.
Having what was essentially a homework party while wrapped in a mothball-scented blanket and propped against my living heater of a boyfriend shouldn’t have been so pleasant, but it really, really was. I felt like several pleasant academic fantasies were all coming true at the same time, and fully expected to be crowned homecoming queen the next time I fell asleep.
“Looks like it,” I said. “She asked them to reverse his manner of thinking and behavior, so they straight up reversed him. This is why it’s best to be careful with your wishes. What year does it say that happened?”
Sam squinted at the page. “Um, 1495.”
“That fits with the rest of the reports,” said James. “When the change happened, it was followed by several years of deals that weren’t just counter to the desires of the petitioner, but destructive in a way they had never been before. I’m guessing it took the new crossroads several years to determine how cruel they could be without driving their potential, er, customers away.”
Something about that didn’t sound right. I returned to my original position, leaning my head back to rest against Sam’s shoulder, and stared up at the ceiling.
Cylia asked James a question. I didn’t really hear it. I heard even less of his answer. I was far away, remembering my first weeks as a roller derby trainee, otherwise known as “fresh meat.” Roller derby can be dangerous, but it would be a lot worse if not for the training everyone went through before we were allowed anywhere near a bout. We had to learn how to skate. We had to learn how to hit. And most importantly of all, we had to learn how to control our momentum, because once you strapped a reasonably athletic woman into a pair of roller skates, she became a physics-fueled engine of death, presenting a danger to both herself and others. During my first few weeks on skates, the most dangerous thing about the sport had been, well, me.
“No.” I sat up abruptly. The motion pulled at my injured shoulder, making it throb in an unpleasant manner. “That’s not what happened.”
James looked up from his own book and raised his eyebrows. “It wasn’t? Because everything I have here seems to imply that it was.”
“It’s one of those things that looks intentional if you’ve never been there,” I said. “It’s like learning a sport. You can hurt yourself if you don’t know your own strength.”
James looked at me blankly. I realized that an introverted, nonathletic kid with few friends would not have been in much demand for his high school teams, and that’s where most Americans learn whether or not they enjoy playing sports. There are things you can do as an adult, but they’re fewer, farther between, and they take more individual effort. Time to try another approach.
“Remember when you started freezing things?” I asked. “You probably shattered a few sheets when they got too cold, because you didn’t know how strong you were and you hadn’t learned to control it. The more you know, the more delicate you can be.”
James’ eyebrows climbed even higher toward his hairline. It was Cylia who spoke.
“Are you saying the crossroads are being controlled by some sort of cosmic horror in short pants?” she asked. “Because if we’re about to fight a toddler from beyond the stars, I’m out. I will pack the car and be gone by sunrise.”
“It’s good to know you have limits,” I said and meant it. “But not quite. I’m saying that whatever moved into this dimension and hooked into the crossroads in 1490 either got stronger when it crossed into our world or found a richer source of power than it expected. Add a language barrier or twenty—I’m betting there was a lot of turnover in the crossroads ghosts when this change was happening—and it’s understandable that people were getting turned inside out or whatever. The thing had to adjust to being where it was now.”
“I hurt my grandmother once,” said Sam.
We all turned to look at him.
His cheeks reddened, and he ducked his head. “I was a kid,” he said. “She wanted me to go to bed and I didn’t want to go, and I hit her. She fell. There was this awful snapping sound, and she fell, because humans are fragile when you’re a little kid fūri and you don’t know your own strength. I got better after that. I learned how to be careful.”
“The crossroads don’t care about whether or not they’re hurting people,” said James.
“Oh, but I think they do,” said Cylia. “It’s like bending the luck. If everyone who lives near a jink is having nothing but bad luck all the time, no matter what, they’re going to get suspicious. Worse, they’re going to decide they can’t live there anymore because it isn’t safe for them. Even if they never know there’s a jink on the other end of their losing streak, they’ll know the house is cursed, and they’ll get out. Which means the jink doesn’t have neighbors anymore. No camouflage, no one to borrow luck from. Not a good situation.”
“You’re saying the crossroads doesn’t want to kill people because then no one will come to them to make a deal,” said Sam slowly.
“I am,” said Cylia. “Is there some sort of record of how many people go to the crossroads?”
“Why does this concept make more sense when it comes from someone you like?” asked James. “I already said this.”
“Yeah, but she makes me bacon,” said Sam.
James sighed. “Right. No, Cylia, there isn’t a record of how many people go to the crossroads. They can appear anywhere a crossing exists, streets, cow paths, sidewalks, anything that intersects, which makes it difficult to measure foot traffic. And most people who go to make a deal don’t exactly advertise it. The accounts we have are collected from oral accounts.”
“Okay, boring but cool,” said Cylia. “Was there a big decrease in oral accounts after the crossroads started turning people inside out?”
“Fuck, yeah, there was,” said Sam. “It even says it in this book. ‘After the sad case of Mr. Wallace, none in the township dared approach the gallows for the better part of seven years.’”
“See?” Cylia looked smug. “The crossroads did too much damage, people stopped being willing to take the risk, so they had to do like Annie said and figure out how to be less hard core, since otherwise they were going to lose all their customers. We don’t know what they get out of the deals. Whatever it is, it’s something they need, and they didn’t want to lose access because they were killing people accidentally.”
“On purpose is another story.” I frowned, looking up at the ceiling again. “They know James is working to destroy them.”
“Not news, hon,” said Sam.
“No, I mean … they know he’s planning to t
ake them down. They know he hates them, and they know why. So why not offer him a bargain of his own?”
“I would never,” said James, his voice colder than his hands could sometimes be.
“Wouldn’t you? Because there was a time when I said I would never, and then it turned out that ‘never’ is negotiable. Humans like to survive. We like to win. Maybe more than any other species I’ve ever met, we like to come out on top. If the crossroads had approached you—probably through Bethany—” And maybe that’s why most crossroads ghosts are attractive young women, with the emphasis on young. They look harmless. No one’s afraid of a babysitter or a pep squad organizer. They have faces people want to trust. “If they’d said, ‘Hey, your friend made a bad deal and we’re sorry, but you can make a deal to get her back, no funny business,’ are you really sure you’d have turned it down? If you got Sally, and maybe a little something nice on the side, would that have been enough?”
James was silent. I’d struck a nerve. That was good. I was about to hit harder.
“I don’t think they have the power to return her.”
He flinched, visibly, and turned to look at me, eyes wide and cheeks pale.
“Take that back,” he said.
“I don’t think she’s dead, because I know my grandfather is alive, and they took him the same way. I also know that if they had a sense of self-preservation, they would have given him back to my grandmother like, five seconds after they realized they had a human hunting dog determined to gnaw their legs off.”
“Is she a sorcerer, too?”
I paused to contemplate the sheer horror of Grandma Alice with access to actual, flexible magic, instead of being limited to the static charms she etched on her skin. “No,” I said finally. “Let’s be thankful for that because I think we’d all be dead if she were. But it shouldn’t matter. The crossroads don’t like her. She’s a nuisance and a danger, and she just wants her husband back. The cost of keeping my grandfather should have long since become too great, and they should have returned him. They didn’t, which means they can’t. They’re actively scared of you. You are a sorcerer, and you have your mother’s books and a grudge. There’s no good reason not to give you what you want, even if it’s just to make you go away.”
That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8) Page 18
