Page 46 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

Aunt Rose, better known as Rose Marshall, better known as the Girl in the Green Silk Gown, smirked at him. She was wearing what I always thought of as her traveling clothes, blue jeans and sneakers and a white T-shirt with a faded truck stop logo on the front, the letters worn down to ghosts of themselves, so it was impossible to guess whether she was advertising something near or far away or nonexistent. Her hair was cropped short, almost a pixie cut, and swept carelessly away from her eyes. Like Mary, Rose had been in her teens when she died. She still was. Let the stars burn out and the sun explode, and she’d still be sixteen years old. Some things about being a ghost are lousier than others.

Smirk fading, Rose swung around to face me. “I’m guessing by the bloodstains on the boyfriend’s shirt that he’s the reason you’re still among the living. What the hell happened? And why am I the first one here? Mary should be clawing these wards down to get to you.”

“She’s gone.”

Rose blinked. “What?”

“The crossroads took her because they thought she might be more on my side than theirs.” Saying it out loud made it feel terribly real—and more, terribly like my fault. If I hadn’t made that bargain …

If I hadn’t made that bargain, Sam and I would both be dead. I’d take guilty over the grave any day. “They sent a replacement, though, which is why we have the wards up. I don’t really need a strange crossroads ghost telling me how to manage my business.”

Rose frowned. “Does the replacement have a name?”

“Bethany?”

“Of course.” She put a hand over her eyes. “Of course it’s Bethany. Of course they’d try to use family to fuck family.”

I blinked. “Aunt Rose?”

“Bethany isn’t your family. She’s mine.” She lowered her hand, looking at me bleakly. “She’s my brother’s granddaughter. She tried to … well, never mind what she tried to do. She got punished for it, she died, and now she works for the crossroads. She’s not a bad kid, but she isn’t going to fight the crossroads for the sake of a woman she doesn’t know. Especially not if she realizes you know me.”

“That’s fun,” I said, voice flat.

“That’s life.”

“Excuse me.” I turned. James had stepped forward. “Could I get an introduction? Since it seems this is a friend of yours?”

“Right, sorry. James Smith, meet Rose Marshall. Aunt Rose, meet James. Aunt Rose is a hitchhiking ghost. James is a sorcerer. Play nicely with each other, or I’ll knock your heads together.”

“Hey,” said Rose, with a small wave. “Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” said James.

“Now that we’ve got that out of the way …” Rose looked back to me. “I understand, completely, why you’re not going to lower these wards. Don’t. But do you mind telling me why you almost died, and why I shouldn’t be heading for your parents right now to tattle on you?”

“Covenant fucker shot her in the shoulder,” said Sam.

Rose raised an eyebrow. “Oh, is that all?”

“He shot me in the shoulder with a crossbow bolt that had been coated in some sort of tranquilizer, so I promptly passed out, fell into the lake, and nearly drowned,” I said.

“Him shooting you next to the lake was a stroke of luck,” said Cylia. “The water was cold enough to slow the bleeding, and it rinsed away most of the tranquilizer. Really, this could have been much worse.”

My stomach clenched. I hadn’t considered how much luck had been involved in my survival—or how much of that might have been Cylia’s doing. “Are we … ?”

“I like how much faith you have in me, but you have your own luck,” Cylia said. “I’m not keeping things sunny enough to prevent you getting shot. That’s the sort of long-term violation of the laws of nature that winds up ending when the one doing the bending has a stroke or gets broadsided by a semi. You got lucky because you got lucky. Don’t count on it happening in the future.”

James looked like he needed a footnote on what the hell that meant. I mouthed “later” at him and returned my attention to Rose.

“You probably can’t stay here without attracting the attention of the crossroads, which wouldn’t be a great thing right now,” I said. “Plus we can’t let you in, and we don’t have any coats you can borrow.”

Rose waved a hand, dismissing my concerns. “I wasn’t planning to stick around anyway. Maine? Not my scene. We’re near enough to the terminus of the Ocean Lady that I’ll just get someone to drive me to Calais so I can head down south to visit the routewitches.”

“This would be a very enlightening conversation if I understood half of it,” said James.

“Later,” I repeated, this time audibly. “Aunt Rose, are the crossroads going to … have they done something to Mary? Is she all right?”

“I don’t know, kiddo,” she said. “I wish I did. One of the first rules of getting by in the twilight is stay the fuck away from the crossroads. They don’t do favors. They try to act like they do, but—really—they’re all about taking care of themselves. Maybe she’s fine. Maybe they have her in some kind of spirit jar, or, hell, maybe they’ve sent her to broker deals in Puerto Rico while Bethany chews your ass. They might have done that simply because they know it’ll hurt her to be unable to help you when you’re suffering. Or maybe they’ve cut her off entirely, and she’s …” Rose paused, mouth twisting. “Ghosts can’t die. We’re already dead. But we all have things we have to do if we want to stay anchored in the afterlife. I don’t hitchhike because I want to. I do it because if I don’t do it, the twilight doesn’t know what to do with me, and I start to fade in and out of the world. It’s possible they’ve severed her from her job. You need to be prepared for that.”