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NOTE: These stories are
intended for a mature audience.

Tell Laura I Love Her
A Sparrow Hill Road story
by
Seanan McGuire
Start at the beginning of Sparrow Hill Road

No one knows what happened that day, how his car overturned in flames,
But as they pulled him from the twisted wreck
With his dying breath they heard him say:
"Tell Laura I love her. Tell Laura I need her
Tell Laura not to cry, my love for her will never die..."
-- "Tell Laura I Love Her," Dicky Lee.

I spent my first year on the ghostroads in denial, walking the frontage roads that run closest to the surface of the twilight, scaring the living crap out of countless fraternity boys and high school seniors as I flagged them down, begged them to take me home, and then disappeared on them. First stage of grief is denial, even among the dead. I spent my second year trying to find someone I could argue with, someone who'd have the authority to take back what had happened to me. Angels, demons, rumors, I chased them all. I got luckier than I deserved to be: I didn't catch any of them. Instead, I walked the sorrow off my shoes, and walked myself deeper down into the twilight, where I could start to learn the realities of my new existence. It took a lot of years and a lot of walking to work my way deep enough to come back into the light, and maybe that's the biggest secret that the ghostside has to offer; that if you work long enough to reach the darkness, you're almost inevitably going to find your way to the light. They're the same thing, viewed from two different directions, and they can both get you lost, and they can both bring you home.

The danger in walking your way to freedom is the way things change depending on your point of view. What's dark to me is light to you; what's true to you is lies to me. Every story has a thousand truths behind it, because everything looks different depending on where you were standing when you saw it happen. I leave the philosophy to the umbramancers and the routewitches, and I try to keep myself focused on the things that matter in the here and now: following the whispers of the running road, following the signs that lead me between the layers of America, and learning to read the palimpsest etchings that dig deep as bruises and unchanging as scars into the flesh of the ghostside. I've been in the dark a lot longer than I was in the light, and while I still regret the way that I died, I've given up on trying to fight my way back. All I want to do now is find a way to stop the man who condemned me to this twilight wandering--the one who would have done a lot worse, if I'd given him the chance.

I guess you can call me an angel of vengeance, these days. That and a quarter used to be enough to buy a cup of coffee. Still is, at the Last Dance. Everywhere else...not so much.

The trouble with truth is that it's subjective, depending entirely on where you were standing when you saw the accident happen. Maybe you saw the first car veer to avoid hitting a cat, and maybe you didn't. Maybe you saw the second car try to hit the brakes, and maybe you only saw them go careening into the vehicle ahead of them, making no attempt to slow in the moments before impact. Maybe all you saw was the shadow of the cat as it darted through the underbrush, running away from a tearing roar that sounded like the end of the world. Every splinter of the broken glass of the moment is a genuine part of the whole, but none of them is the whole in and of itself. We carry our own truths tucked away inside us, bright bits of glass blunted by our living flesh, and when they come into the light, we bleed. Honesty is in the eye of the beholder.

It can be hard as hell to tell the truth from broken lies even when all the pieces of the puzzle happen in the daylight. When half the story is buried in shallow graves along the ghostroads, it can turn impossible to tell what's real from what's not...and sometimes, without that knowledge, there's no way to move past grieving into acceptance. Sometimes, the dead aren't the only casualties, especially here. Especially in the dark.

***

It's a beautiful night, all big white moon and the distant gold-silver-glitter of too many stars to count, scattered across this desert sky like dimestore confetti. This is the middle of nowhere, one of those places that manages to exist half a mile outside of every jurisdiction, half an hour away from any sort of safety, real or not. The man--the boy, fuck, he's barely twenty-two, he's too young to be here--behind the wheel of this aging Toyota is practically vibrating as he looks toward the stretch of road ahead of us. He'd be handsome, if he didn't look so scared, if he wasn't so damn close to tumbling into twilight, leaving this road and all the roads like it behind him forever.

"That's the raceway," he says, and he means this empty expanse of nothing, this little slice of nowhere-road that stretches smooth and deserted through the night. He's breathing too fast, just this side of panting, tension filling the car like smoke. He doesn't want to be here. He thinks he does, but he's wrong. "You'll be able to find another ride from here. There's lots of guys here every night. One of them will be going your way."

I seriously doubt that. This is pure daylight road, for all that the sun's gone down, and the only place that edges into the twilight is the driver himself, boy who thinks he's a man, boy teasing things he should know to leave well enough alone. I've been trying to steer him away from this place since I asked him for a ride two hours ago, and he didn't listen then, and he isn't listening now. The smell of ashes and lilies is gathering around him, accident waiting to happen, coming on stronger with every minute that ticks past.

"I don't think this is a good idea, Tommy." He isn't listening. I still have to try. I always have to try, because that's part of how this story goes: part of what keeps me on the edge I walk along. If I start walking away from the ones who might be saved, I'll lose my grasp on the narrow line of the twilight, sink deeper down into the dark, and never find my way back to the levels where the living play spin-the-bottle with the dead. I have to try. "We should go back. We should--"

"My girl deserves better than some crackerjack ring from a greasemonkey." There's a set to his jaw that I know. Gary used to look like that, late nights in the diner when he was telling me how we were going to get out of town someday, how we'd be together forever, and he wouldn't be just a mechanic, and I wouldn't be just the mechanic's girl. I bite my knuckles. The pain helps, a little. Not enough, but it keeps the tears out of my eyes, and right here, right now, I'll settle for what I can get. "You understand, don't you, Rose?"

I understand the way that poverty can turn solid in the middle of the night, pressing down on your chest until it steals your breath away, the way they used to say cats stole the breath from babies in their cradles. I understand watching your father work until all he can do when he gets home is drink to forget how much work's still waiting, and waiting your mother clip coupons and count her pennies, skirting a little closer to the edge every day. I understand hand-me-down skirts and triple-darned socks, cabbage soup and homemade shampoo. I understand better than he thinks I do.

Most of all, I understand that this is not the way.

"Turn back," I whisper, and Tommy starts the engine, and we roll onward, toward the raceway, toward the future, toward the place where the road he's on now comes to its inevitable end.

We roll on.

***

March has slammed down on the American road with the force of a hurricane, washing out bridges and turning the roads into something closer to an obstacle course. Rides are always harder to get during March and April; it's warm enough that you lose the wintertime "poor thing, come in out of the cold," but it's wet and nasty enough that no one wants to slow and stop for a stranger. Springtime is the worst time of year for hitching. I keep walking along the edge of the pavement, thumb thrust jauntily upward. Either I'll find a ride or I'll find a rest stop; that's how this works. In the meanwhile, if I want to stay on this level of America, I'll keep following the rules, and the rules say that hitchhiking ghosts, well, hitch.

(The rules will change if I can get someone to give me a coat. Even the definition of "coat" is a generous one, since I've been able to accept jackets, sweaters, lab coats, smocks, even--once, at a carnival in Alabama, where the ground was the color of dried blood and the rain came down so hard it seemed like the sky was falling--yellow plastic rain slickers. Any of them is enough to shift me off the ghostroads and back into the light. I'm not quite the living and not quite the dead when I have a coat to steal substance from, and in that in-between state, a lot of rules don't apply. They can't catch hold for long enough to bind me.)

Staying wet was one of the hardest things to learn about hitching in the rain. You can recognize young hitchers easily when it rains; they're the ones walking in a downpour and staying completely dry, because the water doesn't even know they're there. Never open your doors to a dry stranger in a rainstorm, not unless you're sure of your protection against possessions. Older hitchers understand that being able to change your clothing with a thought means being able to change dry clothes into wet clothes, even if it's only ghost-water, even if it only dampens the ghostside. Most people don't look closely enough to catch that little distinction, and once one of us has a coat in our hands, well, it's like I said. All the rules change.

It won't be the end of the world if I can't catch a ride on this stretch of deserted Maine highway, hemmed in by the creeping undergrowth and ringed with ditches full of muddy run-off. I've gone without rides before, and with the way the rain keeps pounding down, I'd be cold even with a living person's coat to loan me warmth. That's the worst thing about being dead: the cold that never ends. Only way to beat it back is to join the living for a little while, but on a night like this, I'm not sure I want to be warm quite that badly. There's a truck stop ahead. I remember it vaguely from the last time I walked this way, and the road may be worn-down and lonely, but it isn't singing the songs of the completely abandoned. Even if the stop is limping on its last legs, the doors are open, the coffee is hot, and the neon is still sending out its lighthouse prayers to the sailors of the inland American sea. "Come to me, come to me, and I will grant you warmth, and I will be your home until the tide rolls out."

Roads don't sing the same when the stops close down. They turn lonely, and then they turn bitter, and then they turn dangerous. If you're lucky, they die after that. If you're not, a lot of people die before the road does. I helped to kill a highway once, one that tried to keep on going after the bean sidhes keened its termination and the ambulomancers read its future in the potholes on the blacktop and the pebbles on the median. That's an experience I'd be happy if I never had again.

The sky rolls white with lightning, and the rain starts falling harder than before, pounding straight through me like it wants to wash the world away. I keep my thumb out--follow the rules, always follow the rules, it's breaking the rules that gets you in trouble--and walk a little faster, following the lighthouse song of safety through the night.

I'm moving fast enough, focused enough on my goal, that when I reach the driveway and turn off the road, the condition of the parking lot barely registers with me. Potholes and broken pavement are a consequence of use as much as neglect, and the truck stop is singing. That should be enough. I'm halfway across the parking lot when the song cuts off, abrupt as a razor blade in candy floss, and I lift my eyes to the shattered shell of a sanctuary. This is no lighthouse. This is a tomb.

The bones of the truck stop are standing almost naked in the night, the skeletal pumps, the broken shell of the garage, the crumbling diner with its neon sign, unlit, still almost intact on the edge of the roof. This isn't right. This can't be right. The songs of this road are not the signs of a road in the process of dying, but they should be; this is the heart of the highway, and a heart that's been broken keeps nothing alive.

I take a step forward, frightened little ghost girl in the rain, and that step is all it takes to tip the balance, because once I start, I can't stop. I know I should turn back, that I'm acting like one of those stupid girls in the drive-in horror movies, but I can't stop. My feet keep pulling me onward, through the parking lot, into the broken diner, where everything is darkness.

***

We're the first ones at the raceway, Tommy too eager and too stupid to be anything but early, even with me in the seat beside him still begging him to find another way. His heart is set. "I don't know anyone who's ever gotten out of here," he said earlier, eyes wide and earnest and too young to understand what he was getting into. "People say they will, but they don't. We all wind up working for our daddies, if our daddies are still alive. We drink in the bars where they drank, we sit on the porches where they sat, and we get old swearing we're going to get out one day. Meanwhile, our sons grow up just like us, and the cycle never gets broken. I don't want that. I want roads I've never seen before, and a house where the walls don't always smell like grease and old butter, and I want my girl to be proud of me. I want her to say 'that's my man,' and have it be pride speaking, not shame."

"You want more." That's what I said to him then, and if I could take those words back, I would, because he took them as permission to do what he'd been planning anyway. He took them as permission to drive out here to this empty road that sunset turned into a raceway, and all the while, the smell of ashes and lilies gathered deeper and deeper around him. I'd take them back if I could.

The world doesn't work that way.

Tommy's car is beautiful, a 1985 Toyota that he's rebuilt so many times that even the air inside the cabin feels custom. She trusts him, this blue-back beauty with her wheels set solid on the pavement. She believes in him. The love of a car may be the truest love there is, save maybe for the love of a dog for its person--and even there, there's a divide, because the love of a car proves that the car has been loved. A dog loves because dogs exist to love man. A car loves because man exists to love the car. I touch her hood, fingertips only slightly warmer than the engine-heated metal, and I want to tell her that everything will be all right, and I can't do it. Everything isn't going to be all right. Everything will never be all right again.

"Tommy, I got a bad feeling about this. Let's just go. You can find the money some other way. I know people, people who maybe could help you. I--"

"If you know people, why were you standing off the Interstate with your thumb up in the air, Rose?" The look Tommy gives me is challenging and cold. "You're wearing my jacket, and you ate that grilled cheese like nobody'd fed you in a month of Sundays. If you can find that kind of money, what are you doing here?"

There's not an answer for that question in the whole world, because he's standing in the daylight, and in the daylight, "I'm here because I'm dead" isn't an answer, it's a joke. I swallow, shift, look toward the horizon, and pray for a miracle, even though I don't believe in miracles anymore, if I ever believed in them to begin with. The age of miracles has been over for a long time, and the final nail went into that coffin in February of 1959, when the world asked for a Valentine and got the death of Buddy Holly in its place. "Tommy--"

"No, Rose. No. I don't want to get old in this ten-cent town, and there's no way I'm gonna marry my girl knowing what I'm sentencing her to. She deserves better, and I'm going to get it for her."

"Or you're going to die trying. Did you ever think of that, Tommy? How proud of you is she going to be when you're six feet underground?"

Tommy shakes his head and steps away, moving toward the rear of the car, where he can watch for the other racers. They'll be coming soon. The road is singing so loudly of their arrival that even I can hear it, and I'm no routewitch. "You don't understand."

He's right; I don't. I may understand poor, and I may understand frightened, but if someone had begged me to stay home the night I died, I would have listened. I know I would. I would have locked the door and waited until Gary came to apologize, and if I'd missed the prom, so what? I would have so many other opportunities to dance. I would have listened.

I hope.

But he won't. The night has fallen, the stars are shining, and Tommy's going to die tonight. And there's not a damn thing I can do.

***

Stepping through the door of the diner is like sticking my entire body into a swarm of biting ants. The pain is brief and intense, and shocking enough that I finish my step, stumbling forward, hitting the ground on my knees. It doesn't hurt as much as dying did, or even as much as being shot in the chest by a crazy strigoi who doesn't know he's dead, but it hurts enough to make my vision go blurry. The broken linoleum covering the old diner floor cuts my knees through the denim of my jeans as I fall, and I have to catch myself on my hands to keep from scraping my face across the floor.

With everything that's going on, I don't notice that my heart has started beating until I'm pushing myself back to my feet. The scrapes on my hands and knees burn dully, a familiar childhood feeling that calls forth the memory of parental kisses and Mercurochrome. When I wipe my hands on the tail of my shirt, they leave trails of blood behind, and my breath plumes slightly in the chilly springtime air.

"What the...?"

It's breaking the rules that gets you in trouble, and whatever this is, it's sure as shit breaking the rules. My heart hammers with almost-living fear as I turn and run for the door. I need to get out of here. Something about this place is breaking all the rules of the road, and that means I can't stay here.

The air turns solid and stops me almost a foot and a half from safety. The door is still open; I can see the outside, see the rain sheeting down, but I can't get there. All I can do is bounce off the air. I back up, run for the invisible wall, and throw myself against it, to no avail; it's too solid, and I can't break through. Panting, I step back, and feel every drop of blood in my suddenly-living veins go cold as my gaze falls on the floor beneath the unseen barrier. "Shit," I whisper, feeling very small, and very vulnerable. I was careless. I'm about to pay for it.

The edges of the vast Seal of Solomon painted on the diner floor are clearly visible near the open door. It's no wonder that I didn't see it when I was coming in--I was walking away from the light, not into it--and the lines are done in red and black paint, detailed with what looks like silver Sharpie. Only the metallic parts would have been at all visible, and even if I saw them, I just dismissed them as broken bits of glass or metal. I sure as hell wasn't expecting a trap. Not here, not now...and not for me. Traps are for the dangerous things, the strigoi and the goryo and the shadow people. They're not for hitchers. We're harmless.

"Fine. So they caught me by mistake. Great. Okay." I rake my fingers through my hair--dry still, since the rain is outside and I wasn't solid until the trap made me that way--as I squint to follow the outline of the Seal in its path around the room. Whoever did this knew their demonology well. It's not the most intricate Seal I've ever seen, but intricacy doesn't always equate to strength, and this one is made to be strong. There's gold ink in the pattern, as well as the silver, marking the cardinal points, and there's a second ring around the first, this one of pure salt. The salt ring is only open at the diner door, to allow the spirits foolish enough to get caught to make their way inside. I rake my hair back again. This isn't some teenage routewitch prank. This is serious hoodoo.

After an hour of throwing myself against the seal, I give up and sit down at the center of the circle, cross-legged, propping one elbow on my knee and resting my chin atop my knuckles. Whoever set this trap has to come along eventually to see what they might have caught. Part of me keeps screaming that it's Bobby, it's Bobby, he's changed his ways and he's coming for me, but I'm still calm enough to know that for the nonsense that it is. Bobby Cross could no more draw a Seal of Solomon than he could walk past Saint Peter and through the pearly gates of Heaven. This isn't him. This is something else.

The rain outside keeps falling as the hours trickle by, adding an element of psychological torture to a situation that really doesn't need help scaring the crap out of me. I know what happens if I'm wearing a coat when the sun comes up: the coat loses its power and I fade back onto the ghostroads, dead as always. But what happens if the sun comes up while I'm trapped in a Seal of Solomon that's somehow doing what only a coat's supposed to do to me? Do I get free? Or do I get sucked into a bottle like some fairy tale djinn, Barbara Eden with a bad attitude and better fashion sense?

"I would kill for a routewitch about now," I mutter, and go back to waiting.

Enough time has passed by the time the door swings all the way open that I almost don't notice; I'm staring off into space, thinking about how much I'd be willing to do for a cup of coffee. It's the sound of footsteps on the linoleum that makes me realize I'm not alone anymore. I scramble to my feet, the scrapes on my hands and knees complaining at the rough treatment. I don't care. I don't my captor to see me looking that defenseless.

The woman who's just stepped into the diner doesn't even look at me as she pulls a canister of salt from her pocket and closes the break in the circle. This accomplished, she starts walking around the edges of the Seal, lighting candles I didn't even notice in the gloom. Each one beats back the darkness just a little; nowhere near enough. I turn, watching her, but I don't say anything. I'm not going to be the first one to speak.

I see her more and more clearly as the candles flicker to life. She's in her late thirties, with long, straight hair that shade of dirty blonde that means she's been blonde all her life, too proud to start dyeing when it started to darken. Her glasses glitter in the candlelight, making it impossible to tell the color of her eyes. She's pretty, in the dark, in the candlelight, but it's hard to focus on anything but the book she's holding under one arm, the thick, leather-bound book with the Seal stamped on its cover. That sort of book never means anything good to midnighters like me, especially not in the hands of someone like her, someone who carries the twilight with her like a sour perfume. She was born a daylight girl, but she's burrowed her way down, I can taste it. I just don't know why.

I just know that I've never seen her before in my life, or in my death. I've been trapped by a stranger, ghost rat in a ghost cage. That makes it all the worse when the last candle is lit and she closes the diner door, finally turning to study me. She runs her eyes over every inch of my body, measuring what she's caught. Finally, horribly, she smiles.

"Hello, Rose," she says.

Shit.

***

I could never have prevented this accident from happening. It was too late before Tommy met me. Maybe it was too late before I got within a hundred miles of this town. I don't know. All I know is that I tried as hard as I could, and that it wasn't enough.

I'm glad I don't need sleep anymore. After this, I'd be awake for a week at least.

The racers came just like Tommy swore they would, rolling over the horizon in their cars that were ten times more expensive and half as alive as Tommy's. Some of them were good men, and some of them were bad men, but they were all of them hard men, because they'd chosen a hard aspect of the highway to receive their worship. A few of them tried to tell Tommy not to race, and those are the ones I'll remember to the Atlantic Highway the next time that I walk her borders. Some just laughed. The boy wanted to put down his pink slip and his pride on a race he couldn't possibly win, well, he'd learn a lesson from the losing. Only there are no more lessons for Tommy on this road, or on any other.

The wheels of his car are still spinning as I run across the blacktop toward him, my breath harsh in my ears, my feet striking hard against the pavement. He's still alive, and so I run to him. Once he dies, slips onto the ghostroads and leaves the daylight forever, the coat he gave me will lose its power to hold me to the laws of the living. That's in the rules. Only live people have substance to share, and you can't steal life from the dead.

The men who raced against Tommy have realized that something is very wrong; that this isn't the sort of accident someone laughs at and walks away from. Their cars have stopped, and the men are getting out, looking back toward where Tommy's car lies shattered on the road. None of them are moving to help him--to help us, since every one of them thinks I'm his townie girlfriend, the one he's doing this stupid, suicidal thing for. They just let me run, my throat raw with screaming, tears running down my cheeks as I reach for another soul I failed to save.

They were going too fast and the road seemed smooth, but there are cracks in the cleanest pavement, slick spots, potholes, rocks. I may never know which one hit the wheels of the car ahead of Tommy, and it doesn't really matter; he spun out, adjusted, caught himself and drove on. In the process, he clipped Tommy, and something about that collision was enough--just enough--to send the smaller, lighter Toyota into a spin it never pulled out of. Tommy's car rolled three times before it stopped, twisted metal and smoking engine, a broken body on the road.

She's already gone when I get there. All that's left is cooling death, and a young man cut almost in half by his own steering column. There's blood everywhere. I don't let that stop me. If there's one thing I've learned since the night I died, it's that blood washes off, but no one--no one--deserves to die alone.

"Tommy? Tommy, can you hear me?" I beat my fists against the glass of the passenger window, trying to catch his attention. I could take off the coat, slide through this door like it was smoke, but then I'd be on the ghostroads again, and I wouldn't be able to hold his hand until the dying finished. He's a fool, yes, and he still deserves to have someone holding his hand while the lights go out. "Tommy!"

Three of the racers come running up, big men, muscling their way past me to wrench the door open. Then they stop, hands dangling uselessly, as they try to figure out what else they can do for him. Maybe someone's called an ambulance, and maybe nobody will; this sort of race is illegal, after all, and they have to be measuring their own lives yet to come against the death of one boy barely out of his teens and too stupid to know when to find another way. They can't take him out of the car, that much is clear; the way it's wrapped around him is like a lover's embrace, and there's no way of breaking it without breaking him even further.

If Tommy can't come to us, I'll go to him. It's the only thing left that I can do. I squeeze my way between the racers (and if any of them notice the sudden give to my flesh, the way I seem to be losing substance by the second, they don't say anything; the ones who'd notice are the ones who know the twilight well enough to know me) and kneel next to the driver's-side door, gravel biting into my knees. My hands are blood even before I realize that his blood is on the seat, and it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, blood can't hurt me.

"Tommy? Tommy, can you hear me?" My fingers almost pass through his cheek the first time I reach out to him. I pull back, concentrate, and try again. This time I can feel my fingers graze his skin, and I don't know if that's because I'm closer to living, or because he's closer to dead. "Come on, Tommy, stay with me. Open your eyes, and stay with me."

It's too late now. It's all over except for the dying. But I'm still here, and he's still here, and as long as that's the case, I'm going to be here for him. I owe him that much. I owe all of them that much.

Tommy swallows with obvious difficulty, and opens his eyes. They aren't quite focusing anymore. He won't really see the other racers, or the road, or the blood that's dripping over everything, like the red flag signaling that it's time to leave the finish line. But he'll still see me. We're in the same place right now, he and I. "R-Rose?"

"I'm here. I'm right here, Tommy."

"I think I messed up, Rose."

It's a beautiful night, big white moon and too many stars and the desert around us like an ocean of gold. It's a beautiful night, and Tommy--a boy whose last name I never learned, a boy who did this for a girl I've never met--is bleeding to death with my hand against his cheek. "Yeah," I say, not looking away from him. "I think you did."

***

"You don't know how long it's taken me to track you down." She pulls a rusted chair with a ripped green vinyl cover from one of the nearby tables, moving it to the edge of the salt circle and sitting primly down. Resting the book on her knees, she smiles at me. "I mean, at first I wasn't even sure that you were real. It took me years just to find someone who could really prove to me that you existed. I appreciated that day. It told me that I wasn't crazy. I mean, I spent three years chasing truckers and visiting psychics and going into every diner I saw to ask if anyone in there knew who you were or had seen you or knew where I might find you." She leans forward and smiles at me, smiles like a rattlesnake getting ready to strike. "You have a lot of friends, Rose. A lot of people looked me in the eye and lied for you. I was impressed by that."

"Who the hell are you?" I step toward her, as far as the Seal will let me go. She doesn't flinch back, just keeps smiling that rattlesnake smile. She knows she has me pinned. "I don't know why you want me, lady, but I'm not a good housepet."

"Oh, I'm not going to keep you. Don't be silly." She looks genuinely amused as she settles in her seat. "Keep you. What a ridiculous idea."

"Then what--"

"I'm going to exorcise you. I'm going to read aloud the words of a thousand ancients, and I'm going to rip you from this world one thin thread at a time, until you're nothing but a thin scream clinging to the memory of pain. And then I'm going to call you back into this world, and I'm going to do it again. And again. And again. Until, when the sun rises, I finish the exorcism and send you to the hell you deserve, you murdering little slut."

Her expression doesn't change as she speaks, not once. That may be the most terrifying thing of all. She's talking about murder, about killing me for the second time in my existence, and she isn't batting an eye. I'm not a person to her. I'm a thing to be exterminated.

"What-what...what are you talking about?" My heart is hammering and my mouth is dry as cotton. That's the worst thing about this damn Seal--all the downsides of being alive, and none of the benefits, no sex or coffee or cheeseburgers. Just raw terror and every nerve in my body sounding the alarm. "I don't know who you are, or who you think I am, but I assure you, I am not your girl."

"Your name is Rose Marshall. You were born in Buckley Township, Michigan, in 1929--that was a hard one to confirm, by the way. There was no birth certificate on file for you at any of the local hospitals. There was an announcement in the paper, though. I suppose it was a slow news week."

"I was born at home," I whisper.

"Ah! Well, that explains it, then. You made the news again in 1945 when you decided to drive yourself to the senior prom and confront your boyfriend, who had failed to pick you up. It's not really surprising. You were only a sophomore. He probably didn't want to be seen with you." This time, her smile is cruel as well as venomous, human snake that knows exactly what she's doing. "Poor little Rose. I suppose you didn't know he'd broken down on the way to your house--and by the time he got back on the road, you were so much cooling meat."

"Lady, why are you doing this? What do you want from me?"

She keeps going like she hasn't heard me--and maybe she hasn't, not in any meaningful way. You don't learn to draw a Seal like this on a whim, or in a weekend. You don't track down the dead for nothing. Whatever strange engine drove her here, she's not letting it go that easily. "Only you couldn't stay dead, could you, Rose? You couldn't rest in peace. That would have been too easy for a spoiled bitch like you."

I've been called a lot of things, and some of them I even deserved, but "spoiled" has never been one of them. My eyes narrow, and I speak before I think, spitting out my words: "You don't know anything about me."

"I know you killed the only man I ever loved." The accusation is casual, almost off-handed; there's no heat behind it. She's just reciting a fact. I still freeze, rooted to the spot as she continues, "For a while, I thought I was chasing a myth, looking for you, but once I had a name, you got a lot easier to follow. Legends and ghost stories scattered across a country--you've been a busy little girl, Rose. How many innocent men have you killed? How many have died for your vanity, all because you couldn't bear to be the one left standing home alone?"

I've heard this accusation before. It doesn't get any easier. "I've never killed anyone. You have the wrong girl."

Candlelight glints off her glasses as she lifts her head and looks at me, smile fading into memory, replaced by terrifying emptiness. "His name was Tommy," she says, in a voice like a crypt door slamming shut. "His name was Tommy, and he was going to marry me, and you killed him. And now I'm going to kill you."

***

Tommy is bleeding out fast, red blood mingling with the black oil that drips from the car's shattered engine. At least they're not both suffering. She loved him enough to wait for him on the ghostroads, and that's better than many men will have. Still, I keep my hand against his cheek, feeling my solidity waver a little more with every breath he struggles to take, and I wonder when, if ever, the moments like this will stop hurting so damn bad.

"I can't see."

"It's all right, Tommy. Just keep on breathing. Help's on the way." That's a lie, that's a goddamn lie--help isn't coming, help won't get here for hours, not until the raceway is a road again and there's nothing left of Tommy but an empty shell cradled in a steel and chrome coffin. I don't regret lying to him. Sometimes lies are the only thing I have to give them.

"Will you find my girl?" His voice is fading, losing strength. He'll find it again on the other side, when he doesn't have to fight against failing lungs and a broken spine. Somehow, that's cold comfort, even to me.

"Yeah, Tommy, yeah. I'll find her." More lies, but they're the lies he needs to hear. How could I find her, dead man's living lover? I'd have no way to even start the search. "What do you want me to tell her?"

The question seems to puzzle him for a moment, leave him fumbling for words. Only the fact that the gravel still digs into my knees tells me that he's still holding onto life; I'm slipping, but I haven't slipped, not all the way, not yet. Finally, he says, "Tell her I love her. Tell her I did this because I love her." A smile twists his lips upward, heartbreaking snapshot of a lover on his way out the door. "I was going to marry her."

"I know."

"Just tell Laura..." His voice falters and fades in the middle of the sentence, leaving him silent. One more hitching breath, two, three, and then no more; his chest is still, his struggling heart finally finishing its fight.

His blood falls through my fingers, leaving them clean and pale as I rise. His jacket likewise falls, hitting the concrete with a soft, anti-climactic rustle. I turn to face the racers still standing clustered behind me. The ones who let me through before--the ones who've touched the twilight, or been touched by it--take a step backward, faces going pale. They know what they're seeing, they know what the fall of the jacket has to mean. The rest only look at me, puzzled and afraid, boys mixed with men in almost equal numbers.

"This race is over," I say, my tone leaving no room for argument. "If you must race, do it somewhere else. No more stupid kids who don't know the risks. Understand? If you let this happen again, I'll know, and I'll find you." Empty threat. But they don't know that.

"Yeah?" asks one of the ones who doesn't look frightened enough to understand who I am, what I am, what he's seen. "Who the fuck are you?"

The living are difficult to convince and easy to impress. I fix him with a stare, smile, and say, "I'm Rose." Then I release my hold on the daylight, and the racers are gone, left in another America, while I step onto the ghostroads where I belong.

Tommy is there, unbroken, unbloodied, standing next to his car and staring blankly up into a sky the color of ink. There are no stars. Not here; not in the midnight. We're on the deepest level now, the one where ghosts are the natives, and the living are the strange invasions. He looks toward the sound of my feet scuffling on the surface of the road, eyes wide in his young man's face. "Rose? What's going on?"

"You died, Tommy." I step forward, offer him my hand, offer him a smile that almost balances the sorrow in my eyes. I could never have saved him. I have to keep telling myself that until I start believing. "Now come on.""Where?""That's up to you." I cast a glance toward his car, which has never looked this good, and never could have, not in the daylight, where metal is constrained by the limits of construction, and not the limits of love. "But I can make a few suggestions."

***

"Oh, fuck." I never saw a picture of Laura, and Tommy never called her anything but beautiful. Still, she's the right age to be the girlfriend of the boy I helped through the painful process of dying, and I wasn't exactly subtle when I told those racers to shut their death-trap down. "You're Laura."

"Finally." She shakes her head, stands, moves to re-light a candle that's blown out. "I thought you'd be smarter than this. You've been at it for a long time. I suppose I didn't think dumb luck could carry you this far." She rakes another look along my body, and adds, "I also thought you'd be better-looking, or at least have bigger breasts. I suppose that pretty isn't required in a dead whore."

"I didn't kill him! God, what is it going to take to make you believe me? I tried to keep him away from that stupid race!" I stayed with him while he bled to death, I guided him down the ghostroads like he was an old friend, and not just some kid too dumb to listen when I told him to be careful. "I did everything I could to save him."

"Well you didn't do enough." She blows out her match and drops it to the diner floor, grinding it into dust with the toe of one foot. "I hope you're happy with all the lives you've ruined."

"Laura--"

"You won't be ruining any more." She opens the book, standing outlined in the candlelight like some avenging angel, and she begins to read.

Her words are ice and fire and acid and the bitter needles of pounding rain turned into a weapon by the driving wind. Her words are the bite of locusts and the sting of wasps, rust consuming steel, poison corroding silver. They blister my skin and rip the screams from my lips, writhing like living things as they flay me open and display my inadequacy to the universe. I don't know how long she reads; I don't care how long she reads, because every word is murder, and I die a thousand times before she quiets. There is only the sound of rain and the harsh rasp of my breathing as I pitch forward, sprawling on the diner floor.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Rose, didn't you like that? Wasn't that fun for you?"

I want to say something nasty, want to match the malicious joy in her tone with the acid in my own, but I can't seem to force my lips to form the words. Everything hurts too badly.

"Well, I hope you're recovered enough to continue, because we're just getting started, and I'm not ready to put you back together again. I thought you'd be a pretty sturdy ghost. Don't disappoint me."

She starts to read again. This time, somehow, I find the strength to scream.

***

True to her word, Laura takes me to the very edge of truly gone before pulling me back again, changing her wasp-words for milk and honey and the soothing promise of peace. It's almost worse than the pain, because it means the pain can start all over again, flaying off the layers of my existence until I barely remember who I am. I'm not sure how long she can do this before I lose my mind. I'm even less sure that she cares.

Once the restoration is complete, she stops, puts the book down on her chair, and begins to walk the edge of the Seal, re-lighting candles, checking her line of salt. "I bet you're wondering if I know how much this hurts you. If I've considered how cruel I'm being." She glances my way, smiles, rattlesnake again. "Believe me, I've considered it. I just wish I had a way of making it go on for longer."

"Yeah, well, forgive me if you're alone in that," I whisper. "I didn't kill him."

"He's still dead."

There's nothing I can say to that. I sag into the floor, trying to gather what strength I can from this brief respite. There's still no route of escape presenting itself, no golden "Get Out of Jail Free" card suddenly appearing to tell me which way to run. The Seal is close enough to perfect that I can't worm out of it, the line of salt clean and unbroken, the candles lined up in triplicate so that even when one blows out, the light endures. I am well and truly fucked.

"You know, I'll be sorry when the sun rises. I've been looking for you for so long, and I've worked so hard for this night...I suppose I'll have to find something else to do with myself after this. Maybe I'll go into the exorcism business. It's surprisingly satisfying, when you know what you're doing."

"Go to hell."

"No, Rose. That's where you're going." She walks back to the chair, collects her book, opens it. I take a breath, preparing for the pain to start.

Instead, the sound of tires on broken blacktop, an engine drawing closer and stopping, a car door slammed. Laura tenses and looks up, light glinting off her glasses. I consider screaming, and decide against it. Most people won't believe me if I say that I'm a ghost; they'll think we're playing some sort of fucked-up sex game and leave me here, and then Laura will just be angrier. It's not worth the risk.

The footsteps start a few seconds after the car door slams, drawing closer with every heartbeat. Laura puts down the book and reaches into the belt of her jeans, producing a Bowie knife which she holds loosely behind her back. I guess when you've decided to commit one murder, the second one gets easier, even if that first victim was already dead.

The diner door swings open, and a dead man steps across the threshold, stopping just shy of the circle of salt. "You okay, Rose?" he asks, and his voice is young, but the tone is much older, voice of a man who's spent a decade running the roads in the midnight, where young is forever, and innocence is for an instant.

"Not really," I say, pushing myself unsteadily back to my feet. The world is reeling. I feel like I'm going to throw up. "Hi, Tommy."

Laura drops the knife.

***

"You--you can't be here," she says, taking a step toward him. Her eyes are wide behind her glasses, shock and terror and amazement mingling in her expression. "You're dead. We buried you. I cried at your funeral. You're dead."

"So's Rose, but that hasn't stopped you locking an innocent hitchhiking ghost in your little cage." He glances toward the salt line, lip curling in unconscious disgust. "I thought a lot better of you, Laura. I knew you were looking for her, but I never thought you'd do anything like this."

"Wait," I say. "You knew she was looking for me?"

I might as well have held my tongue. Laura only has eyes for Tommy, and he's just as focused on her. "Why didn't you come to me?" she demands. "I prayed every night for you to come. To haunt me. I needed you so badly."

"Dead's dead, and living's living, and I'm not the kind of ghost Rose is; I don't move between the levels as easy. I'd have been haunting you like you were an empty house, and it wouldn't have been fair. You'd never have been willing to be filled if I were there."

"I was never anyone's home without you," she whispers.

Tommy looks at her calmly, an infinity of love and disappointment in his eyes, and says, "That's not my fault, and my death wasn't hers. Now open the circle, Laura. Let Rose go."

Her eyes stay on him as she crosses back to the Seal, kicks a break in the salt, and bends to slash a Sharpie across the delicate lines of the outer ring. My substance goes the second the binding breaks, leaving me insubstantial. I have never in my life been so glad to be dead.

"Rose?" says Tommy.

"I'm okay." I step out of the circle without looking at Laura, and keep my shoulders steady as I walk out the door, to the parking lot, where the rain falls straight through me. Tommy's car flashes her lights at me as I approach, warm welcome. The passenger-side door swings open. I slip inside, leaning back into the warm seat, closing my eyes.

The sky is turning light when Tommy comes to join me. The engine starts without him turning a key. "Where to?" he asks me.

"Take me down, Tommy; take me all the way down." I shake my head. "The living are too damn dangerous for me."

The rain starts to clear as he pulls out, and we drive down through the levels of the world, away from the living and their pains, back into the world where we belong. Back down to the ghostroads, and the dead.

Story by Seanan McGuire, Copyright 2010
Image by Rory Clark, Stopped Motion Photography, Copyright 2010