Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(77)

Laughter from the crowd. One of the new dead shouts, "Best trick or treat prize I've ever gotten!"

"We'll see if you still feel that way in a minute," says Matthew. His tone is grim—grim enough to stop the laughter. "Around the front of the barn are twenty men and women with guns in their hands. They'll be coming around the barn soon, and they're not here to shake hands and say hello. They want to kill you again, and if you die here, today, on Halloween, you don't come back. Not here, not in the twilight, not anywhere."

"But...but why?" gasps a new dead woman with her glossy black hair in pretty funeral parlor curls. She has stars tattooed down her neck, practically begging people to make wishes on her skin. "What did we do to them?"

"We're alive," says one of the long dead. When we're in the twilight, he's a phantom rider, and the only thing fast enough to catch him is the wind. Here and now, he's flesh and bone, just like everybody else. "That's enough."

The new dead gape at him, contestants in a game they never volunteered to play. We're all contestants here. It's just that some of us have been playing long enough to learn the rules. "Those twenty people are either dead or dying," someone says—I say. Dammit, when did I become the one who's always taking pity? "Probably half of them came back on this field once before. The other half, they've got something broken in them, they've heard the bean sidhe's song, and they're trying to stick to skin a little longer. So they signed up for the Halloween game."

From the way Matthew looks at me, I can't tell whether he's amused or annoyed by my interjection. "If they kill you tonight, they win a year of life," he says, stepping back into the narration, smooth as anything. "One year, from candle to candle. If you can keep away until the candle goes out, you'll go back to the ghostroads, and nobody will be able to touch you until next Halloween."

"Why us?" asks the star-necked woman. She sounds distraught, like nothing about this makes any sense at all. Smart lady. "I didn't do anything!"

"Because you're road ghosts," says Matthew, not unkindly. He's trying to be gentle with them, trying to get them ready to run. The hunters are here for a hunt; they tell themselves that shooting a man who runs is somehow more honorable than shooting one who stands his ground. Maybe they're right. How the hell would I know? I've never felt the need to shoot anyone. "This is how you earn the right to stay on the road, instead of moving on."

Heaven, Hell, or Halloween: those are the choices, when you get right down to it. Move on to whatever waits for you where the road runs out, or show up in this field once a year—this field, or another like it, tended by a family like the Barrowmans, who know their duty, and do it, year after unending year—and run for the right to stay the thing that you are. Every road has tolls. Willow Barrowman knew that as well as anybody. That's why she only lingered for one Halloween before she moved on to the unknown.

"Tell them about the other option," says a voice, and it's mine again. I keep speaking up when I have no business speaking.

It's really been one hell of a year.

"There are weapons hidden around the farm," says Matthew. "No guns, but...other things. If you find them, you can choose to stand and fight the hunters. Kill one, and you get a year among the living."

"What's the catch?" asks our new dead football star, with a look on his face that says this is just too good to be true. "I kill some homicidal asshole and I get my life back?"

"If you kill on Halloween, you give up your place on the ghostroads," says Matthew, earnestly. "You'll get a year, and then you'll have to come back here, and kill again, or else you'll end."

"We'll die?" asks the girl with the stars on her skin.

"No," says Matthew, "you'll end. Dying implies that you'll go on to something, back to the ghostroads or on to the other side, and that won't happen for you. Not if you take a life on Halloween. You'll just end."

She looks at him, big doe-eyes wide and solemn, and nods like she understands. I have to fight the sudden urge to slap the stars off her skin. "You don't get your life back if you do this," I say, sharply. Maybe a little too sharply. Every head turns in my direction, and only the long dead look like they know what I'm trying to say. "Your family buried you. Or they cremated you, or they donated your body to science, but whatever. You've been recycled, you're gone. If you fight, if you do this, you're buying your way back into the world of the living, but you're not buying your way back into your life. That's over."

"Rose always runs," says the phantom rider, a small smirk on his lips. Like it's something shameful. Like I should play Russian roulette with, for lack of a better word, my soul.