***
Midnight comes and midnight goes; that's what midnight does. Bethany stops gesturing, her hands falling to her sides as she slumps, defeated. She nods, just once. Sound returns to the cornfield, crickets chirping, an owl hooting in the middle distance, a train whistle sounding somewhere further out. The crossroad time is ending. I can even, for just a moment, hear Bethany breathing.
And then she falls, face down on that old dirt road, and doesn't move.
"Bethany?" I ask, just once, before I start running toward the crossroad. "Bethany, are you—" But she's not okay, she's not, she can't be okay, because as I run, I feel my solidity drop away, and her coat, powerless now, slips through me and drifts to the ground. Only the living can grant life to the dead. If Bethany's coat has stopped working, that means...
"Behind you, Aunt Rose." Her voice is young as springtime, young as a bell ringing on the first day of the school year. I stop running, eyes still on the body she's discarded like I discarded my coat, and I turn, and I look into the eyes of my no-longer-living niece.
Bethany is herself again, all teenage cockiness, ribbons in her hair now natural, and not decades out of place. She smiles a little, shame and cockiness and joy all mixed together in her expression, and says, "They couldn't give me back my life, so they gave me back my death, instead."
She had life, and she threw it away. A shorter life than she might have had, sure, but it was still life, and it was still hers. I want to shake her. I want to slap her. Now that she's on my side of the ghostroads, I could do it. Instead, I swallow, and ask her, "Why?"
"Because it was good enough for you."
I never said that, I never said that, but if that's what she chose to hear, it's too late now. For either of us. "What are you?"
Now she looks uncomfortable, if only for a moment. "Crossroad guardian," she says.
"What? You'll be the one making bargains?"
"No. I'll be the one making sure that only the right people get here to make them."
"Sounds like a cushy job."
"It's better than nothing."
No, Bethany, no; life was better than nothing. "If you say so." I look around the dark cornfield; listen to the train whistle blowing in the distance. "I should go."
She looks relieved as she nods. "Yes, you probably should. Midnight's over, and you didn't come to make a deal."
"Be sure you send someone to tell the Queen that I did my job."
"She already knows," Bethany says, and smiles, just a little, an expression of joy poisoned with grief. "She knows whenever a routewitch dies."
The words hang between us for a moment, heavier than they should be. I take a step back. "Great," I say. "Enjoy your afterlife, Bethany."
"Be careful, Aunt Rose," she replies.
I drop into the twilight and she's gone, taking the crossroad and the cornfield and the train whistle with her. All that remains is the road, stretching out forever, with a thousand crossings and dangers waiting for an unwary haunt. This was the last favor I'm going to do for her; Bethany will have to find the dangers on her own.
I hope she learns faster than I did.
Bad Moon Rising
A Sparrow Hill Road story
by
Seanan McGuire
Hope you got your things together
Hope you are quite prepared to die
Looks like we're in for nasty weather
One eye is taken for an eye
Don't go 'round tonight
For it's bound to take your life
There's a bad moon on the rise
— "Bad Moon Rising," John Fogerty.
The dead keep their own holidays.
I've said that before, and I'll probably say it again, because it's hard to really make the point to the living. We walk in a world of shared culture before we die, Christmas trees in every department store, chocolate eggs at every soda counter. Turkeys on the tables, fireworks in the sky, and even if those aren't your holidays, even if your holidays are less mainstreamed in the modern world, they're still everywhere. Every kid recognizes a Christmas stocking, or a Thanksgiving pie. How many can say the same about Saint Celia's bloody handprint, or the torn toll stub of Danny, God of Highways?
Would you know Persephone's Cross if someone decided to etch it on your skin, bitter and bleeding as a pomegranate kiss? I didn't, and odds are that I've been dead a lot longer than you have.
But all this is by way of making a point, and the point is that there's no unified calendar in the twilight, no standard set of symbols to mark the march of days and seasons. We make our own calendars, and we live by them according to our own laws. The Feast of Saint Celia is celebrated on a hundred different days, and every celebrant will tell you that theirs is the only one that's right and proper. They're all right, and they're all wrong. Saint Celia herself will tell you that, if you ever meet her—if you ever realize who she is. Some of us can't even agree on the days of the week.