Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(57)

She takes a step forward, raising the knife in her hand. The other students move to follow her. I'm sure they expect me to scream, to beg them to spare me. It's almost a shame to disappoint them. I can barely hold back my laughter as I say, "No, you don't count. And you can't count, either."

"What are you talking about?" she demands. She leans down to grab my shoulder, probably intending some small, ritual cut to begin the blood-letting. Her hand goes cleanly through what should have been solid flesh. She's still staring at me, surprise written large across her face, when I cast a glance toward the silk wrap—now lying on the floor, having fallen right through me--and offer her a smile.

"You needed to keep track of time, Bethany. It's midnight. That means you can't hold me here." And, still smiling, I vanish.

***

I don't go far, just from the little room where they had me tied—the old weight room, I realize now, the equipment put away, out of sight—to the hallway outside. I want to know what they'll do, how many of her companions will panic at the first sign of something that's truly unexplained. Talking about ghosts and selling souls is all well and good, but what do you do when the Devil actually comes to collect his dues?

Voices drift down the hall, some raised in panic, some in simple confusion. "—was right here, so where did she—" "—oh, God, you mean she was really a ghost? We really caught a ghost? I thought—" "—was the Phantom Prom Date, Bethany, I mean, that was the real thing. What if she comes back for us? What if—"

Bethany's voice cuts across the others, cold as ice and filled with commanding anger: "All of you, hush up. I can't hear myself think. She won't have gone far. Tom, Minda, you get the salt and seal the edges of the gym. Keep her here. Everybody else, stay alert. She's probably pissed."

"At least she's smart enough to get that far," I mutter, and vanish, moving through the space between me and the gym door faster than my niece's minions can hope to travel. Salt can bind a ghost, that's true, but it takes a special kind to catch a hitcher, and I doubt she has the skill to do it.

I almost have to respect her, in a way. Sure, she's probably insane, but I understand what it is to want out of Buckley so badly that you ache with it, so badly that you're willing to do just about anything if that's what gets you an exit. The night air is cool, and tastes like minutes wasted in doctor's waiting rooms, precious seconds that you'll never get back again. One more prom night, come and gone. It doesn't really matter that I spent it at a decoy prom, tied to a chair by my grand-niece. A prom night is a prom night, and this one is slipping into memory. The ghostroads will open soon, and then I can get the hell out of here.

"Leaving so soon, Auntie Rose?" asks Bethany behind me. I turn toward the sound of her voice, reflex as much as anything, and flinch back as the dried flower corsage she throws at me bounces off the center of my chest, long-dead flowers filling the air with sour-sweet perfume. Bethany's expression is triumphant. That worries me. Not as much as it worries me that the flowers actually made contact.

"Prom night's over, Bethany," I say, tried to keep the shock from showing on my face. How the hell did she hit me with that thing? I'm not wearing a coat. I don't have a body to be hit. "Give it up."

"Prom night's never over for you, Auntie Rose. That's why they call you the 'phantom prom date,' isn't it?" She smiles, pointing to the corsage that lies between us like a roadkilled squirrel. "Gary Daniels bought this for you on what should have been the night of your senior prom. 'Course, you were long dead by then, and they'd barely stopped blaming him for being the one who killed you, so you never got it. It's yours. And that means you're not going anywhere."

My breath catches in my throat; until that moment, I hadn't really realized that I was breathing. I've heard of things like this, ghost-catchers, tokens that the living have held onto for too long, imbued with too many memories, but I've never seen one. It just figures that if there was going to be a ghost-catcher tuned to me, it would be in the hands of my crazy grand-niece with the Bobby Cross fixation. I put my hands up, palms turned toward her.

"Come on, Bethany. Let's think about this, all right? You don't want to deal with Bobby Cross. He's..." A bastard, a madman, a murderer. "...he's not a nice man, and he's not going to play fair just because you hold up your end of the bargain. I'm family. Doesn't that mean something?"

"Family didn't mean anything to you when you decided to go off and get yourself turned into road kill. Grandpa's been mourning you as long as I've been alive. He even wanted to name me 'Rose.' Don't you think it's time to rest?" Bethany starts toward me, the bug-zappers that spark and flash around the edges of the school roof sending glints of blue light off the knife in her left hand. "It doesn't have to be this hard. You've had so many years, and I'm sorry, Auntie Rose, but I have to do what I have to do. You, of all people, should understand. You remember what it's like to be trapped here."