"You're Rose Marshall, the Shadow of Sparrow Hill Road," says one of the other routewitches, as she stands and walks toward me, expression lively with undisguised curiosity. She's a tiny thing, a whisper somehow stretched into a slight sigh of a girl, Japanese by blood, American by accent, dressed in jeans and a road-worn wool sweater at least three sizes too big for her. "The Ocean Lady let you through?"
"That, or this is the single most irritating hallucination I've ever had," I answer, watching her carefully. She's clean, this little routewitch with her close-clipped fingernails and her fountain-fall of black silk hair. Most routewitches don't bother with that sort of thing. The road dresses them in dust, and they wear it proudly, carrying the maps of where they've been in the creases of their skin. But a routewitch who doesn't swear allegiance to any single route, to any single road...she'd need to be clean. I quirk an eyebrow up, and take a guess: "Am I addressing the Queen?"
"I guess that's up to you, isn't it?" she asks.
Stupid routewitches and their stupid rituals. I take a breath, and say, as I said to the man at the gate, "My name is Rose Marshall, once of Buckley Township in Michigan. I died on Sparrow Hill Road on a night of great importance, and have wandered the roads ever since. I've walked the Ocean Lady down from Calais to visit the Queen, if she'll see me. I have a question for her to ask the roads for me."
She raises her eyebows, looks at me thoughtfully, and asks, "Is that all?"
My patience is anything but infinite. Scowling, I say, "Who does a girl gotta blow to get herself a beer in this place?"
And the Queen of the North American Routewitches smiles.
***
They have good beer here, these routewitches do, and their grill is properly aged, old grease caught in the corners, the drippings of a hundred thousand steaks and bacon breakfasts and cheeseburgers scraped from a can and used to slick it down before anything starts cooking. The plate they bring me groans under a triple-decker cheeseburger and a pile of golden fries that smell like summer nights and stolen kisses--and they smell, even before the platter hits the table. I look to the routewitch Queen, silent question in my eyes.
"Eat up," she says, reaching for her own plate. "The Ocean Lady doesn't feel the need to withhold the simple joys from anyone who's brave enough to walk this far along her spine."
"I may have to take back a few of the things I said while I was walking." The fries taste better than they smell, which may be a miracle all by itself. The Queen is already eating, ignoring me completely now that she has a meal in front of her. I don't know much about routewitch etiquette, but I've learned to go with the flow of things. If she wanted to eat before we talked, well, at least contact had been made.
The other routewitches settle all over the room, some of them sitting at tables, some perching on the bar. A few even sit on the floor. They break out decks of cards and tattered paperbacks, fall into hushed conversations, down shots of whiskey, but they're watching us. Every eye in the place is on the Queen, and on the uninvited guest who's come to try her patience.
The Queen looks up, sees me watching them watching us, and laughs. "Don't worry," she says, fingers grazing my wrist at the point where my resurrected pulse beats strong and steady. The half-life of the hitcher extends here, it seems, and I didn't even have to swipe a coat. "They get protective of me sometimes, and your reputation is a little...mixed."
I bite back a groan, grinding it to silence between my teeth. When I'm sure it's gone, I say, "I thought you, of all people, would know that I'm not like that."
"We know what the road tells us, Rose, and what the road tells us is that your story is still being written." She dips a fry in the smooth white surface of her vanilla milkshake and raises it, glistening, to her lips. "The Lady in Green is just as real as the Phantom Prom Date, on the right stretches of highway. They watch to be sure the right one has come to visit."
This isn't a new concept—the idea that stories change things, rewrite the past and rewrite reality at the same time—but it's jarring all the same, hearing the routewitch-Queen suggest that I could be something other than what I am. I swallow a mouthful of fries that somehow fail to taste as good as they did a moment ago, and ask, "So am I the right one?"
"I think so. I guess we'll know I was wrong if you try to kill me, now, won't we?" The Queen picks up another fry. "Eat. We'll talk when the meal is through."
For the first time in fifty years, I don't want to eat, I don't want to put something off until the meal, however delicious, is finished. The Queen is ignoring me again, her own attention returning to her fries and shake and grilled cheese sandwich. It's clear that arguing won't do me a bit of good, and so I pick up my burger, and I eat.