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NOTE: These stories are
intended for a mature audience.

Last Train
A Sparrow Hill Road story
by
Seanan McGuire
Start at the beginning of the Sparrow Hill Road series

I ain't a man of constant sorrow
I ain't seen trouble all day long
We are only passengers on the last train to glory
That will soon be long, long gone

I want to hop on the last train in the station
Won't need to get yourself prepared
When you're on the last train to glory
You'll know you're reasonably there...

-- "Last Train," Arlo Guthrie.

There's one thing every haunt, spirit, and shade on the twilight side of the ghostroads learns early and well, and that's this: your word is sometimes the only currency you have, and those are the times when breaking it can leave you vulnerable to the kind of consequences that you don't recover from. The Kindly Ones watch for oathbreakers. Certain types of shadow only manifest in the path of liars, and they can cling and catch as surely as tar. If you want to survive in the twilight, you tell the truth--at least on the ghostroads. Lying to the living that don't belong in the twilight spaces doesn't come with any consequences. The living don't count.

Lying to your fellow dead, on the other hand, or, God forbid, lying to the routewitches or the ambulomancers...that's playing the sort of roulette that the house always, always wins. Never make a promise you don't intend to keep. Never incur a debt you don't intend to pay. Never double-cross a routewitch. We may not have much of a life here, among the dead, but what we do have is too precious to gamble on a hand that can't possibly be won. Exorcism would be kinder than some of the tools the routewitches have at their disposal.

I was pretty honest before I died. A good girl. I'm not as good as I used to be, but I'm a lot more honest, because the stakes are a lot higher than getting grounded or missing a school dance. The stakes are death and worse-than-death, and I like my current state of being.

That's me. Some people still make bargains they can't keep; some people still make promises that they don't intend to honor. Some people still let the bills get higher than they ever meant to pay. And some of them, Persephone give me strength...

Some of them are my own flesh and blood. Such as it is.

***

This particular stretch of Indiana highway is familiar; I've walked it before, and I'll probably walk it again, the world being what it is, and people being a little reluctant to stop in the middle of a corn field to pick up an unfamiliar teenage girl. Thanks for that one, Stephen King. You and your goddamn children of the corn can go piss up a rope for all the walking that you've made me do over the course of the last twenty years.

Still. It's a beautiful evening, with that sort of purple-bruised sky that only the American Midwest ever manages to conjure. It's almost the sort of sky we had when I was alive, before pollution gilded the world's sunsets in all the pretty shades of poison. There are even fireflies, dancing above the corn, and the whole world smells like green and good growing things. A night like this, I almost don't mind walking. Besides, my last ride was recent enough that I still have a coat to keep me warm, anchoring me in this world for as long as I choose to stay...or until that setting sun comes up. Whichever comes first.

I'm so busy walking through the growing dark that I don't hear the engine behind me, the crunch of wheels on roadside gravel, the rattle of the truck's back gate, held up by rope and bailing wire as much as by the memory of what it used to be. I'm lost in my own little world, right up until strong arms grab me around the chest, hoisting me up and off the ground almost before I can squeak. Then I'm in the hay and corn husk-filled bed of the truck, and we're accelerating away from the place where I was grabbed, and all I can think is that we're about eight seconds away from someone getting slapped.

***

Common sense wins out for once, and I decide to forego slapping in favor of the more sensible option: letting go and dropping back down into the twilight. So I release my hold on the coat that binds me to the mortal world, and it falls through the memory of my flesh to land with a rustle in the chaff surrounding us. Then I let go, and I fall...

...right into the bed of a clapped-out old junker of a pickup truck, the bed filled with hay and corn husks. The man who grabbed me is watching with obvious amusement. Slapping still sounds like a good option, but if these people can drive straight from the daylight to the twilight, that might not be the best idea.

I straighten, trying to look like I'm not scared enough to bolt for the deepest, darkest hole I can find. "Okay, does somebody want to tell me exactly what the fuck is going on here?"

My abductor laughs at that?actually laughs, like I just said something unbelievably funny. There's an answering chuckle from behind me, and I glance over my shoulder to see the first man's virtual twin. They're both sturdy blond Minnesota-looking farmboys, so cliche that they could have walked out of the pages of a L'il Abner adventure forty years ago. "Miss Rose, I think you don't quite understand what's going on here."

"Yeah, well, I'm dead, not psychic, so when you want me to know something, you need to tell me." It's getting easier to suppress fear in favor of anger. There's not much I hate more than I hate to be laughed at. "Why did you grab me? Where are we going? How are we going?"

There isn't much of a vocabulary to bridge the worlds of the dead and the living. When you're living, you don't need it, and once you're dead, you have better things to worry about. The farmboy who grabbed me seems to understand, which is something of a relief; he nods, once, and says, "Well, Miss Rose, I grabbed you because if we stop this ol' truck, she's not likely to start up again until after the solstice, which seemed a bit long to wait. We're heading to the Rest Stop," I can hear the capital letters, like he's talking about the only rest stop in the world, "and we're traveling by magic, I suppose. Magic, and combustion engine."

"Okay, why are we traveling to 'the Rest Stop' via magic and combustion engine?"

"Now there's a good question." He smiles, and there's a glint in his eye that whispers "routewitch." I would have seen it before, if I hadn't been so annoyed. "We're going to see the Queen."

The tattoo on my back hasn't burned since I left the Last Dance, but with his words, it starts burning again. The Queen of the Routewitches has summoned me, and that means my debt to her is coming due. This is a lot sooner than I thought it was going to be.

I hope like hell that I'm truly prepared to pay, and the truck drives deeper and deeper down into the twilight, away from the lands of the living.

***

The transition between layers of the twilight is silken-smooth, like peeling the nylons from a hooker's legs. The drop from the twilight onto the asphalt shores of the Ocean Lady is something else altogether. The truck jerks and shudders like it's hitting the world's biggest pothole, and the sudden pressure in my chest tells me that I've been slapped back into solidity, back?temporarily?among the living once again. I pick myself up from the bed of the truck, dusting straw off my arms and glaring at the routewitch thugs surrounding me. "You know, I think I've spent more time incarnate in the last year than I have in the last decade."

"Congratulations," says one of the routewitches.

I cast a glare in his direction, wishing I'd lived long enough to reach an age where my glares could be considered more cutting than cute. "That wasn't intended as a happy statement."

Now it's time for the routewitch to glare. He's not cute, exactly, but his L'il Abner haircut and bib overalls render the expression impotent. "You've been invited to the Ocean Lady, Miss Rose. That's an honor most ghosts never get."

"And me without my party dress." The words are out before I realize how true they are: I'm not in my party dress. My coat is discarded in the chaff, but I'm still wearing the clothes I conjured for a day on the Indiana road, blue jeans and an old workman's shirt with Gary's name on the breast pocket. I'm incarnate, back among the living whether I want to be or not, but I'm still in ghost's array. I don't know whether that's a good thing or not, and I don't have time to know, because here comes the Rest Stop on the Ocean Lady, blossoming in front of us like the last neon oasis in the desert of the dead.

If the Last Dance Diner is every diner that's ever been or ever will be, the Rest Stop is something more, something bigger and more profound. It's every roadside dive, every truck stop, every place where a weary traveler has ever had cause to stop and lay their head. I didn't see it clearly the last time I was here; the Ocean Lady didn't know me yet, and didn't yet speak the language of my heart. She does now, after a fashion, and the structure ahead of us is every good thing about every good place the road has ever offered me. It's the diner where Gary kissed me for the first time, nervous teenage affection that tasted like chocolate soda and tomorrow. It's the truck stop where Larry bought me a burger and let me show him the way he had to go. It's a thousand places, a thousand moments, and it hurts my heart, makes it skip a beat it shouldn't be taking. Looking at the Rest Stop, I understand why the routewitches don't encourage the dead to come here. In its own strange way, the truth of the Ocean Lady's soul might kill us.

L'il Abner the first scoots up behind me, warm and solid in the slightly unreal twilight dark, and says, "We're almost here, Miss Rose. You might want to get yourself ready."

"Are you going to tell me what I'm getting ready for?"

"That's for the Queen to do, Miss. All we know is that she sent us to find you, and that it was very important that when we found you, we found you in the corn."

It doesn't take a genius to know that doesn't sound good. I clutch the edge of the pickup bed, the heartbeat I shouldn't have hammering in my chest, and I let the Ocean Lady open her arms and welcome her wayward children home.

***

The Queen of the Routewitches doesn't need to explain herself to dead girls, which explains my collection, but she's a reasonable person, in her way, and she doesn't make me wait for my reception. She's standing on the blacktop when the truck pulls up, an old green-painted picnic table with an honest-to-God picnic basket on it behind her. There's an older routewitch seated there, a woman I don't know, with ribbons tangled in her oddly girlish ponytail.

The truck rocks and rumbles to a stop, and I hear the driver's-side door slam before the previously unseen driver himself is there to open the back of the truck, offering me his hands. I could balk, but it's better to pick your battles when you can. I let him help me down. The feeling of solid ground beneath my feet is a comforting thing. My type of ghost exists because of rides freely given, not because of rides we never agreed to take. The L'il Abners climb down after me, bowing deeply to the whisper-thin Japanese teen now walking toward us.

"Thank you so much for coming," she says, like I had a choice. Her gaze flicks past me to her subjects. "Thank you for bringing her. You're free to go. The Lady's hospitalities are open to you all."

Whatever that means, it must be good, because the routewitches are gone almost before she's finished speaking, offering quick apologies and goodbyes as they hustle toward the building. In a matter of seconds, the three of us?me, the Queen, and the routewitch I don't know?are alone. I fold my arms, trying to look defiant. "You could have called."

"You don't have a phone," counters the Queen. "He still hasn't taken you."

"Not for lack of trying." But that, right there, is what gives the Queen of the Routewitches the authority to interfere with one of the restless dead. A man named Bobby Cross wants my soul more than just about anything else?I'm the one that got away?and the tattoo the Queen arranged for me to wear has stopped him at least once. I owe her. "I'm guessing you didn't ask me here for dinner. What's going on?"

"Dinner is a part of things. I asked you for a favor, and you promised to grant it to me. Will you keep your word, here on the back of the Ocean Lady?"

"Do I look like an idiot? Of course I will."

"Then come, sit down, and eat with us. I'll explain what has to happen tonight." The Queen gestures to the picnic table. I'm smart enough to recognize an order when I see one, and so I walk past her to the picnic table and sit down across from the older routewitch. The Queen follows, sitting next to me.

"Who's your friend?" I ask.

The older routewitch raises her head and looks at me. That's all she has to do, because her eyes are familiar, even though they're filled with shadows, and with screams. There's a thousand years of screaming in those eyes. Some small part of me isn't quite convinced that that's enough.

"Oh," I say. "Hello, Bethany."

"Hello, Aunt Rose," she says, in a quivering voice that's just as old as the rest of her.

The Queen of the Routewitches is laying out a picnic spread fit for, ironically, a queen, and for once, I don't have any appetite at all. "And this started out as such a good night," I say, plaintively.

Thankfully, both Bethany and the Queen have the grace not to reply.

***

"When Bobby Cross carried Bethany into the dark, I'm sure he meant to kill her and render her soul for fuel," says the Queen matter-of-factly, as she spreads mustard on a slice of white bread. "Unfortunately, he hadn't reckoned on her belonging to your bloodline?which is ironic, given that it was her relation to you that enabled her to trap you in the first place."

Something neither of them has apologized for, by the way. I frown. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"You're protected from him. As blood of your blood, so is Bethany, if not quite as...directly. He was able to take her into the twilight. He was able to steal her youth, her innocence, and her hope. But he couldn't take her soul. In your own way, you stopped him." The Queen's gaze is level as she turns it on Bethany. "Amusing, given the situation."

"I could die laughing," I say, deadpan. Bethany reddens, looking down at her untouched sandwich. "So why am I here? It sounds to me like things are in balance. She tried to fuck me over, she got fucked instead. Case closed."

"Those books are balanced," the Queen agrees. "But as a routewitch, she has the right to ask the Ocean Lady to aid, and the Lady answered her. I wouldn't have called you if she'd come to me alone. As you say, some punishments, we earn."

The routewitch relationship with the Ocean Lady?ghost of the oldest true highway in America?is complicated. They treat Her half as a place, half as a person, and all as a goddess. I've been learning a lot about routewitch religion lately, and believe me when I say that I am not qualified to even begin to explain. "So the Lady said she'd help. Meaning what, exactly?"

"Meaning you have to take me to the crossroads before the stroke of midnight," says Bethany. It's the first time she's spoken since we acknowledged each other.

I stare at her. "You're kidding."

The Queen of the Routewitches sighs, deep and tired. "Sadly, she's not. That's how you'll pay your debt to me, Rose Marshall: by taking my subject, your niece, to the crossroads to barter for her life."

"Fucking swell," I mutter, and the twilight all around us seems to agree.

"Have another sandwich," the Queen suggests. "You're going to need it."

At least there's pie.

***

Going to the crossroad, the quick and dirty version: as long as there have been people, there have been roads, places where the footsteps of a hundred strangers have worn a groove in the world and changed it in a way that might seem superficial, but goes all the way down into the root of things. As long as there have been roads, the places where those roads met have held a power entirely their own. Towns spring up in the places where roads meet. Fairs are held. Goods are exchanged. And sometimes, if you're desperate, or stupid, or just have nothing else to lose, bargains are made. I don't know who made the first crossroad bargain, and I don't need to know, because that groove, too, has been worn into the root of things. Go to the crossroad at midnight when you need to make a deal. Everyone knows that's how it works.

What the proverbial "everyone" doesn't know is how to get to the crossroad, because there's only so much magic to go around these days, and not just any old intersection will do. You need the right combination of place and time, madness and longing, and you need to get there by the stroke of midnight, because that's the way it has to go. I've never gone to the crossroad for myself. In the decades since I died, I've only ever gone for other people, and even then, only when there was no other choice.

"What makes you think I can even find the crossroad?" I ask, vainly hoping the Queen will recognize what a lousy idea this is and get her piece of deceased masonry to call off the trip. "It's been a long time since I had to go there."

"Twenty-six years," agrees the Queen. "It was in Coney Island that time, wasn't it?"

"Not that it's any of your business, but yes." The girl I led there was eleven years old and was born almost a hundred years before I was, and when she found me, she had no shadow. I took her to the crossroad because I didn't know any other way to get a shadow back, and I guess it worked, because after she stood at that roadside for half an hour, she ran over and hugged me, shadow chasing her heels. Then she kicked her feet away from the ground and flew away, and I never saw her again.

"This is a bad idea," I say.

"I know," says the Queen.

"Can we just go?" asks Bethany.

The Queen's hand flashes out like a striking snake, and the sound of her palm meeting Bethany's cheek is louder than it has any right to be. Bethany stares at her, eyes young and hurt amidst their nest of wrinkles. The Queen glares back, her own eyes briefly betraying her own greater age. "You will not speak to your family with anything less than courtesy," she commands. "I am asking your aunt to do this because the Lady bids it; were it left to me, I would call this a just punishment for your actions. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," whispers Bethany.

"Good. Remember: you are here because you are a routewitch. She is here because she's welcome."

That seems to be my cue. I sigh, standing. "Come on, Bethany. Let's go spend the night doing something stupid and suicidal."

I don't wait to see if she'll follow me. I just start walking.

***

Bethany follows; of course Bethany follows. We walk down the drive to the Rest Stop gates. The road beyond ripples slightly, unreal and undefined; it is all roads, it is no roads, and it is, at least potentially, the road to where we're going. "Take my hand," I order.

"Why?" asks Bethany, suspiciously.

"One, because you asked me for help, so it's not like I'm trying to walk you into a trap, which, two, you've already done to me once, but mostly because three, I'm going to go from the Ocean Lady to the ghostroads to the daylight, and if you don't hold onto me, you're likely to get lost somewhere along the way." I offer her a thin smile. "Unless you want to spend a few days wandering one of the twilight layers without an escort?"

Bethany takes my hand.

"Good call," I say, and step through the open gate to the shimmering road beyond.

For me, now, after being dead so long, moving between the layers is an automatic thing most of the time, almost as easy as flexing the fingers of my hand. Not with Bethany hanging onto me, mortal deadweight that understands, on some profound, unaware level, that living flesh was never meant to do this sort of thing. Bethany screams as reality flickers around us like a broken strip of film, endless past and present roads tangling together. I keep pulling, keep rising upward through the twilight, back toward the day. We're not going all the way, not quite?the crossroad exists in a place just below the surface of full daylight, in a place where things become possible because no one's ever told them that they can't be.

We're almost there when I realize that we're about to have another problem. Bethany is still alive, and I, by definition almost, am not. Which wouldn't be a problem if I had a coat, but my most recent coat is lying discarded in the bed of a pickup truck a lot of layers of reality away from here. "Shit," I mutter.

"Shit?" demands Bethany. "What do you mean, shit?"

My fingers are already turning hazy in hers. She'd have noticed already, if she wasn't so busy freaking out. "Just hold on!" I command, and try to pull us through the layers even faster, anything to build up enough momentum that Bethany will be carried with me when holding on ceases to be possible.

I've never tried anything like this before. I guess I shouldn't be surprised when there's a blinding burst of light and everything goes away, replaced by darkness. Darkness, and the distinct feeling that I've just screwed something up. "Shit," I mutter again...and the world is gone.

***

I come to slowly. I'm sprawled in a nest of crushed corn stalks, scenting the air all around me with the rich green perfume of harvest coming. That's the first thing. The second is that I'm deeply?disturbingly?solid. I shouldn't have been able to crush the corn. I sit up, and only an instinctive grab at the fabric sliding down my chest keeps Bethany's coat from tumbling to the ground beside me.

"Are you awake yet?" Bethany demands. I turn, still clutching the coat, to see her standing next to me. "This cold is killing my joints."

"I hadn't noticed." I shrug into the coat as I stand, tugging it tight around me. The feeling of solidity tightens with it. Back among the living once again. "How long was I out?"

"Too long. I don't remember giving you permission to pass out."

"Well, since I don't remember giving you permission to ransom me to Bobby Cross, I guess we're essentially even. Come on. We're burning moonlight." I turn once to get my bearings?it's easier to get lost in a cornfield than it is to get lost almost anywhere else in the world?and start walking briskly across the uneven ground. At least we don't need to hold hands anymore.

Bethany swears and sputters as she stumbles after me. For all that she grew up in Michigan, same as I did, she doesn't seem to have done much walking in cornfields. Or maybe it's just her abruptly advanced age. It must be hard to grow old gracefully when you do it overnight. "Slow down!"

"Speed up!" I shout back. "We're on a pretty tight schedule here."

"Why?" She's panting as she staggers to my side. I take pity and slow down slightly. My debt to the Queen probably won't count as paid if Bethany drops dead before I can get her to the crossroad. "I want this taken care of more than you do, but doesn't midnight happen every night? If we miss it tonight, can't we just try again tomorrow?"

"Nope." I can see from her expression that she doesn't understand. This seems to be my night for taking pity. I sigh, and explain, "Once you start looking for the crossroad, you're on one of the crossing roads. It's some sort of symbolic thing, since you still need to find the roads in a physical sense, and I don't really understand it, but them's the rules. We have until midnight."

"Or what?"

"We wait a year."

Bethany's eyes widen in undisguised alarm. "What? I can't wait a year like this!"

"That's true. You may not have a year like this." I'm being nasty?Bethany doesn't look that old?but it's difficult to really care. This isn't how I planned to spend my evening. "So you'd better keep up."

"Bitch," Bethany mutters, picking up her pace a little more in order to draw a step ahead of me.

"Guess it runs in the family," I say, and keep on walking.

***

The cornfield extends for what feels like miles. We eventually come out on a wide dirt semi-road beaten into the corn, worn by years of farmers' footsteps as they checked their harvests. I know the road as soon as I step onto it, feel the electric tingle in the soles of my feet; I've never been here before, and I've been here dozens and dozens of times, because this is the first spoke on the crossroad wheel. If it isn't the first road, it's the road that will lead us to the first road. The first road will lead to the second road?they have to cross, after all?and then Bethany can make her bargain. Whatever that bargain might be.

Bethany steps onto the road behind me, and stops, letting out a deep sigh of relief. "Oh, thank God. This is the right road."

"This is part of the right road. Don't get too excited."

She shoots me a glare that reminds me that of the two of us, I'm the one who looks like a teenager, but she's the one who actually is a teenager. "Why are you like that?"

"Like what?"

"A spoiler. Spoiling things. This is the right road. Why won't you just let it be the right road?"

"Because maybe it's the wrong road. Maybe it's the road that leads to the road that leads to the right road, which doesn't mean this is the right road. Maybe I'm walking through a cornfield in the middle of the night with the niece who tried to hand me to my personal devil, and maybe that's not the sort of thing that puts me in a good mood. Maybe being dead for the better part of a century has made me a realist. Or maybe I just don't like you. Did you consider that?" I look steadfastly ahead, and keep on walking. "Next time, try asking one of the other routewitches."

"I did. They all turned me down." There's a wistful edge to Bethany's voice that makes me stop and turn to look at her. "They said...they said I got what I deserved. That I shouldn't have been messing around with things I didn't understand. That I shouldn't have been messing around with you."

"Routewitches and road ghosts have an arrangement. You don't mess with us, we don't mess with you." I start walking again. Bethany follows. "Most routewitches wind up road ghosts when they die. I guess they view treating us with respect as an investment in their own afterlife."

"Were you a routewitch?"

The question floors me for a moment. I think about it as I walk, and finally answer, "I think I might have been. Maybe. But I never had the opportunity to travel, and it's supposed to be travel that makes a routewitch understand what the roads are saying." I'd wanted to travel. Gary and I used to talk about it all the time. That didn't mean it ever happened, and then I was dead, and travel became a fact of--for lack of a better word?life.

"You could ask for that. At the crossroad."

"Ask for what?"

"The chance to be a routewitch."

I wheel around, walking backward as I demand, "You mean the chance to be alive again? Is that it? I could go to the crossroad and ask whatever...whatever fucked-up horror movie version of a fairy godmother it is that makes bargains there to bring me back from the dead?" I can tell from her face that she means exactly that. She's trying to make me want to go to the crossroad, like that will somehow transform this from a chore into the world's most bizarre family outing. "I should leave you. I should leave you right here and let you find your way without me."

Bethany's eyes widen in alarm. "Don't do that! I just...I just thought..."

"You thought I'd want to be alive again. Right. See, there was a time when I wanted to be alive again. There was a time when I would have sold my soul for the chance to be alive again. But that time passed. My world got old and moved on, and I kept on being sixteen years old. The phantom prom date. The girl who never grew up. My parents died. My brothers got married. My classmates graduated and got lives, and I was still sixteen, and I was still on the road. If you'd explained the crossroad to me when I was a year, five years, even ten years dead, I would have jumped at the chance to get my world back. My world isn't there anymore. It's never going to be there again. So asking me if I want to be alive again isn't just insulting. Isn't just superficial. It's mean. Now shut the fuck up and just keep walking."

"I'm sorry," Bethany whispers.

"Yeah. So am I."

The cornfields and the smell of the green surround us on all sides. And we just keep on walking.

***

The cornfield road gives way to a slightly larger road. This one comes with bonus haystacks, and the unending magnetic pull of the crossroad somewhere in the distance ahead. It knows we're coming. It's waiting for us. I just hope it understands that only one of us is actually coming to deal.

Bethany's having trouble keeping up. The walk is taking its toll on her, but I don't dare slow down. There's only so much distance between here and midnight at the crossroad, and if we miss the deadline...Bethany's going to have a lot more nights of achy joints and trouble breathing ahead of her. She's stupid. She's stupid, and short-sighted, and stubborn, and most of all, she's young. She's the kind of young I never had the chance to be. And yet a part of me understands her. She got into this mess because she wanted to get out of Buckley so badly she was willing to ransom her soul in order to do it. There was a time when I wanted out of Buckley just as bad. Admittedly, I was going to do it by marrying Gary and moving someplace big and exotic, like Ann Arbor, but hell. Who understands kids these days?

"Are we almost there?" she asks, wheezing.

"Maybe. Probably not. I have no idea. It's a beautiful night. Enjoy it."

"Easy for you to say. You're never going to get old."

"I'm also never going to get married, have children, or go to Europe. Think of this as a preview."

"Oh, wow. Great pep talk, Aunt Rose."

"Cheering you up isn't my job. Getting you there is. So keep on walking."

Bethany mutters and keeps on walking. That's all I want at this point. The road is humming more and more strongly under my feet, and the distant taste of copper is beginning to cling to the back of my throat. We're getting closer. If we just keep moving, we've got a good chance of making it.

The road curves, bending back into the cornfield. Then it splits, the wider, smoother avenue continuing in one direction, while a narrow dirt trail branches off to the right. The ground is pitted and broken, making the first dirt road we walked down seem like a boulevard. Of course, that's the way we have to go. I actually slow down a little to let Bethany catch up. The increasing pull of the crossroad tells me that this is probably the first road?a conviction that only grows when I set foot on it. If the previous two roads were electric, this is like grabbing hold of a live wire. Bethany feels it, too, even more than I do. She gasps when she steps onto the broken ground. Then she starts walking faster, rapidly outpacing me. I let her. This is her journey, not mine.

She walks faster and faster, the corn closing around us like a series of green and growing curtains. I feel the second road almost before I can see it up ahead of us, a clean slash through the cornfield. This must be why the Queen wanted me taken from a place with corn. The spot where I left the daylight would determine where I'd tumble back into it, and if she knew the crossroad was going to be in a cornfield, doing it this way saved us a lot of time.

"We're here!" Bethany almost shouts, and breaks into a run, old woman racing through the corn. I'm half-afraid she's going to fall and break her neck. I still don't try to stop her. The crossroad has her now. If she dies in the process of getting to her goal, my part of the deal is still done.

Then Bethany steps from one road onto the other, standing at the point where the two roads cross. Too late to turn back now. She's committed.

***

"I am come to the crossroad with empty hands and a hopeful heart," chants Bethany, with the faintly desperate sing-song of a schoolgirl reciting a lesson she hasn't really learned. "I am come to the crossroad to bargain with all I have and all I am. I am come to the crossroad with nothing to refuse. Please, please, please, hear me, heed me, and give me the chance to pay for what I need."

Silence falls around her, blocking out all sound from the crossroad. I don't see anyone come to join her, but there is a sudden increase in the shadows clinging to the corn. Whatever happens between Bethany and the crossroad is going to be a private thing. No voyeurs allowed, living or dead.

Someone steps up next to me. I didn't hear him coming; I don't think he was there to hear. He feels like an absence in the cornfield next to me, a space that happens to be shaped like a man. A man who, when I look at him from the corner of my eye, could have been one of the younger teachers at my high school, but who, when I look at him directly, isn't there to see. I keep my eyes turned resolutely forward, watching Bethany talking to the open air.

"Hello, Rose," says the man. His voice is plummy and warm, and I forget what it sounds like almost as quickly as I hear it. "It's been a while."

"True," I say. "I haven't had cause to come."

"Everyone has cause to come."

"That's a matter of opinion."

"Oh, Rose, Rose, Rose. You went to the routewitches. You could have come to us."

"To help me against Bobby Cross? Isn't it your fault he's on the loose to begin with?"

There's a momentary silence, made deeper by the absolute still of the cornfield around us. Finally, chidingly, he says, "That isn't fair. He asked, we gave. That's the nature of commerce."

"Uh-huh."

"We would have been glad to grant you aid."

"And charge me what, exactly?" Bethany is still waving her hands at the air, a look of naked desperation on her face. Whatever they're asking, whatever she's offering, I can't shake the feeling that she's fighting for her life right in front of me. This is all her fault. I shouldn't feel sorry for her. But I do. I guess Marshall girls just have a way of getting themselves into trouble.

"Ah. Now that's the question."

"Kinda figured." I shake my head, the man-shaped hole in the world flickering around the edges every time he comes almost into view. "I know it's your job to sell. I'm not buying."

"That will change," he says, and he's gone, taking the feeling of gnawing, alien absence with him.

"Hope not," I reply, and stand alone in the silence, waiting for Bethany to finish making her deal with the crossroad, and whatever angel, demon, or worse waits there for people like us. If I'm lucky, and the ghostroads are kind, I'll never have a reason to find out which one it is.

***

Midnight comes and midnight goes; that's what midnight does. Bethany stops gesturing, her hands falling to her sides as she slumps, defeated. She nods, just once. Sound returns to the cornfield, crickets chirping, an owl hooting in the middle distance, a train whistle sounding somewhere further out. The crossroad time is ending. I can even, for just a moment, hear Bethany breathing.

And then she falls, face down on that old dirt road, and doesn't move.

"Bethany?" I ask, just once, before I start running toward the crossroad. "Bethany, are you?" But she's not okay, she's not, she can't be okay, because as I run, I feel my solidity drop away, and her coat, powerless now, slips through me and drifts to the ground. Only the living can grant life to the dead. If Bethany's coat has stopped working, that means...

"Behind you, Aunt Rose." Her voice is young as springtime, young as a bell ringing on the first day of the school year. I stop running, eyes still on the body she's discarded like I discarded my coat, and I turn, and I look into the eyes of my no-longer-living niece.

Bethany is herself again, all teenage cockiness, ribbons in her hair now natural, and not decades out of place. She smiles a little, shame and cockiness and joy all mixed together in her expression, and says, "They couldn't give me back my life, so they gave me back my death, instead."

She had life, and she threw it away. A shorter life than she might have had, sure, but it was still life, and it was still hers. I want to shake her. I want to slap her. Now that she's on my side of the ghostroads, I could do it. Instead, I swallow, and ask her, "Why?"

"Because it was good enough for you."

I never said that, I never said that, but if that's what she chose to hear, it's too late now. For either of us. "What are you?"

Now she looks uncomfortable, if only for a moment. "Crossroad guardian," she says.

"What? You'll be the one making bargains?"

"No. I'll be the one making sure that only the right people get here to make them."

"Sounds like a cushy job."

"It's better than nothing."

No, Bethany, no; life was better than nothing. "If you say so." I look around the dark cornfield; listen to the train whistle blowing in the distance. "I should go."

She looks relieved as she nods. "Yes, you probably should. Midnight's over, and you didn't come to make a deal."

"Be sure you send someone to tell the Queen that I did my job."

"She already knows," Bethany says, and smiles, just a little, an expression of joy poisoned with grief. "She knows whenever a routewitch dies."

The words hang between us for a moment, heavier than they should be. I take a step back. "Great," I say. "Enjoy your afterlife, Bethany."

"Be careful, Aunt Rose," she replies.

I drop into the twilight and she's gone, taking the crossroad and the cornfield and the train whistle with her. All that remains is the road, stretching out forever, with a thousand crossings and dangers waiting for an unwary haunt. This was the last favor I'm going to do for her; Bethany will have to find the dangers on her own.

I hope she learns faster than I did.

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