Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(70)

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.