Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(7)

"I'm ahead of schedule, thanks to your little shortcuts." His smile is sincere. I hope mine looks as real as his. We took those shortcuts, even though they meant dipping down into the twilight, because if we hadn't, we would have been on the highway when a group of drunk college kids lost control of their car and flipped it over the center divider. They'd been in the parking lot where I first found him, and they smelled like ashes and lilies. They were already over the edge, too far gone to save. But Kyle...Kyle could drive away clean, if he could hit the gas and floor it out of the twilight before the ghostroads claimed their own.

"Get out of here." I nod toward the road. "Highway's calling. I'll be fine."

He's in too deep, and part of him knows that, because he nods, says, "Take care of yourself, Rose," and then he's gone, peeling out into the night, leaving me in the parking lot with the taste of diesel fuel and shadows filling my mouth like cheap wine. I wish I could go with him. I wish I had a way out of the twilight.

I wish I knew where I was.

***

I turn toward the taste of diesel fuel and shadows, toward the rainbow gleam of neon struggling to paint the night in something more than darkness. I know this sign. The Starbright Diner, one more little piece of Americana struggling to stay alive in the evolving maze of the highways. I've been here a thousand times. It's never looked like this before. It isn't normally this dark; it isn't normally this deep into the twilight. Something is very wrong, and whatever it is, it's not something I'm familiar with. Ash and lilies means an accident ahead that can't be avoided. Rosemary and my grandmother's sugary perfume means the chance to turn a different way. Kyle smelled like rosemary and perfume when I found him. That's how I knew he wasn't too far gone to save. But this...

This is something new. I don't like new. I haven't liked new since the days when I was sixteen for real, frightened little phantom running rabbit down the ghostroads.

Half the moths that flutter in the glow of the streetlights are translucent, ghost insects overlaying the living ones for a second at a time. That's not right, either. That sort of melding only happens when the ghostroads are bleeding through, and I haven't been here long enough for that to start happening. I watch them as I walk toward the diner, trying to count the ghosts, trying to figure out how bad the bleed is. They move too fast for me to get an exact number, but what I get is enough to tell me that there's trouble. The kind of trouble that makes me glad you can't die twice--not under normal circumstances, anyway.

Death doesn't smell like anything, not like an accident does. Death is more of a feeling, fingernails being dragged slow and sharp down the skin just above your spine. It's hard to feel until you're right on top of it. That's why I don't realize what's really wrong until it's too late, until the diner door swings open at the touch of my hand and sets the bell above it ringing wildly. There are a dozen people here, all of them clustered around the counter, eyes wide and terrified. The night waitress is wearing a pink and white uniform. The left side of her blouse is stained Chuck Berry red with her own blood. I freeze just inside the door, feeling the nails along my spine, realizing why I tasted diesel fuel and shadows, understanding, too late, what the ghostroads were trying to tell me. It was a warning.

"Looks like we have another guest at the party," says a voice behind me, whiskey-rough and a little shaky, like even the speaker isn't sure how things are going to end. The gun barrel is cold where it digs into the skin on the back of my neck. I can't stop myself from cringing. Maybe that's the right response, because the speaker sounds pleased when he says, "Well, little party crasher? Go on and join the others."

He plants a hand between my shoulder blades and shoves me forward. I'm almost glad to go staggering away from him, away from the gun in his hand. One of the people at the counter, a middle-aged man in a white apron and a fry cook's paper hat, catches my arm before I can fall. "You shouldn't have come," he whispers harshly.

I meet his eyes. There's no recognition there. He's a daylighter, plain and simple, and I start to hope that maybe this is a daylight problem; maybe the smell of death is just the natural result of what's happening here. The blood on the waitress's uniform isn't enough to explain the blood on the floor. Someone has already died in this room--maybe more than one somebody--and that happens in every America. Death is not the exclusive province of the darker levels.

"Hey. Look at me."

The man at the door sounds completely at ease. That's enough to slice through my fear and turn it into anger. Anger that he's managed to scare me. Me. I've been dead longer than anyone in this room has been alive, and here I am, captive with the rest of them. I turn, ready to give the man with the gun a piece of my mind, and I see him for the first time.