Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(51)
"Tricked," I spit at her. "I thought better of you."
"Better of me than what? Giving you the chance to tell your story to the Valkyries? Their blessing is a good and important thing to have, especially if you're still planning to go after him." Emma frowns, eyes flashing again. "I've been dreaming about you, Rose. They're not all good dreams. If you start down this road..."
"I've already started." I sigh, walking back to my stool and sitting. The air smells like ozone in the wake of the Valkyries. "I need you to tell me what the tattoo on my back means. And I need you to get the grill started back up."
"Am I paying for deception with cheeseburgers?" I nod, and Emma smiles. "Fair enough."
The lights come back on when she snaps her fingers, the jukebox spinning to life. Tom Petty sings about a girl taking her last dance, and I sit at the counter of the Last Dance, listening to Emma moving through the kitchen, listening to the minutes ticking by. One more dance to kill the pain...
...and the dancing never ends.
Do You Want to Dance?
A Sparrow Hill Road story
by
Seanan McGuire
Do you want to dance and hold my hand
Tell me baby I'm your lover man
Oh baby do you want to dance?
Do you want to dance under the moonlight
Hold me baby all through the night
Oh baby do you want to dance?
Do you want to dance under the moonlight
Kiss me baby all through the night
Oh baby
Do you want to dance?
-- "Do You Want To Dance?" Bobby Freeman.
The dead keep their own calendar, celebrate their own holidays. Every ghost is a sovereign nation, unbound by the laws of the nations around them. We have our commonalities—Halloween is universal, for reasons that should be obvious—but on the whole, every one of us marks time in our own way, measuring by the dates that matter to us. Some of them we choose. Some of them we don't. But all of them bind us, using the laws of our nations against us, and forcing us to conform to whatever our deaths have made us.
There are holidays on the ghostroads, too. Forgotten holidays, holidays that have slipped between the cracks of the daylight world. The people in the twilight pray to dead gods, building temples to religions that were lost so long ago that no one really remembers what they were. Living faiths have no comfort to offer to the dead, so the dead go seeking comfort from their own. Saint Celia of the Open Hand, who keeps the phantom riders running true along their routes. Danny, God of Highways, whose given name has been forgotten, and who guards the gates between the twilight, the darkness, and the light. There are hundreds of ghost gods on the ghostroads, and their faiths are as faded and tangled as back country roads.
I've met a few of them. I still refuse to believe in their existence, just as a matter of principle. It doesn't seem to matter, either way.
***
"It's a mistletoe branch surrounded by white lilies and—I think that's white asphodel, actually, which makes a lot of sense, if you think about it." I'm not wearing a coat right now. I'm not wearing a shirt of any kind; it would cover my tattoo, which would defeat the whole purpose of this exercise. Emma's fingers trail underneath the surface of what should be my skin, sending cold shivers all through me. I hate being touched by the living when I'm not solid. The fact that Emma isn't technically quite alive doesn't change that.
"I'm thinking about it, and it doesn't make any fucking sense at all." I'm snapping at her. I know that, and I don't particularly care. Emma sprung the Valkyries on me. The fucking Valkyries. I think I've earned a little snapping after that. "What the fuck is asphodel?"
"It's a flower." She pulls her hand away. "This isn't the kind of asphodel you'd find in a botany textbook. This is white asphodel. Real white asphodel, and that only grows in one place."
"Where's that?" I stand, rolling my shoulders and calling my clothes back into existence in the same motion. White tank top again, phantom recreation of the shirt I once borrowed from my only living boyfriend. Gary never wore this shirt, but it's a comfort all the same.
Emma walks back around the counter, eyes glinting a brief, feline green before she turns to start dishing up a slice of apple pie. "The Asphodel Meadows, in the Greek Underworld. The land of the balanced dead. If you're not good, and not evil, you go there when you die."
"Great, so it's what, a moral judgment?"
"Of sorts." She turns, setting the plate of pie in front of me. "The center of the design is a pomegranate, sliced to show the seeds at the center. I can't be sure, but it looks to me like there are six seeds missing. It's Persephone's blessing. I think, anyway. It's not like the Lady of the Greek Underworld has me on her speed dial."