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“It’s all right, baby girl. This isn’t your fault, and the best thing you can do for me now is to live your life. The world isn’t your responsibility to save.”

—Eloise Dunlavy

A remote crossroad in the Mojave Desert

Seventy-five years ago

T HE SKY WAS THE DEEP , rich blue that was only possible miles from any signs of civilization, and it glittered with so many stars that they seemed to fill the entire world, lighting up the sand with a pale, luminous glow. The road that cut through the dunes was a scar against the flesh of the land, too dark and swallowing the starlight as nothing else in the environment did. The moon was a bleached, bloated disk, hanging high overhead like a silent judge over the scene that had yet to properly begin.

The air grew thick, and the staticky sound of a million insectile wings began to emanate from absolutely nowhere, forming an ongoing, inherently endless drone. There was something wrong with it, something unnatural in the precise timing of each individual wingbeat, like they were matched to an invisible metronome.

Overhead, a star glittered brighter for a moment, and a single gust of wind blew along the black tar ribbon of the road. A scorpion that had been lounging on the concrete, absorbing the last lingering heat of the day, rose on its segmented legs and scuttled away, vanishing into the sand.

The pale teenage girl who had appeared where the scorpion was looked around herself with disinterested eyes, long white hair ruffled by the wind. Her clothing was easily twenty years out of date, matching the age of the shadows in her graveyard eyes. They weren’t gray or black or any other color that has a name behind it; rather, they were the color of a cold afternoon in an empty churchyard, when everything smells of petrichor and loam. They were impossible eyes, for an equally impossible girl. Her fingers were stained blue and red and yellow, primary colors swirled together in a formless, artless mess.

The buzzing grew louder for a moment, and then a voice spoke out of the nothingness, saying, “You know this won’t do, Mary. You’re not dressed for a negotiation.”

“Huh, what’s that?” The girl—Mary—looked down at her loose, well-worn shirt and lifted her eyebrows, white as her hair, in an expression of exaggerated surprise. “You mean this isn’t what you think of as my uniform? Funny thing, that. I was supposed to have tonight off.”

“You’re our arbiter, and we own you,” said the voice from nowhere. “Dismiss this idea of nights off and dress yourself accordingly for your position, or we’ll do it for you.” The threat in those words wasn’t even partially veiled: it was open and direct.

Mary rolled her eyes and waved her painted hands in a sweeping gesture that managed to encompass her, the road, the fleeing scorpion, everything there was for her to encompass, and she… flickered, like a still from an old, well-patched strip of film. Her out-of-fashion clothing vanished in that flicker, replaced by a blouse with a deep V for a neck, colored as scarlet as her perfectly applied lipstick, a wide black belt, and a long A-line skirt that stopped just above her ankles, displaying her black Mary Jane pumps to perfect effect. Her hair remained loose and unstyled, now moving ever so slightly against the wind, like even it was running out of patience.

Her hands were abruptly clean, not a trace of paint in sight.

“Is this better?” she asked.

“Yes, Mary,” said the voice from nowhere, mockingly. “You finally look as if you know your proper place, and won’t embarrass us before tonight’s petitioner. You’re going to be meeting a very famous man on our behalf. A movie star. ”

Mary rolled her eyes. “I don’t care. Alice is almost too old for fingerpainting, and you pulled me away from her when you knew I was supposed to be sitting tonight. This goes against our agreement.”

“Do you really want to renegotiate the terms of your employment, Mary Dunlavy? Do you want to count on your connection to that mewling brat being strong enough to keep you manifest if we decide to be done with you?”

Wisely, Mary didn’t answer.

The nothingness chuckled. “Good girl,” it said. “He should be here soon.”

Under the endless stretch of stars, Mary and the desert waited.

Minutes stretched into hours, and the buzzing faded into an annoying background hum, like an overloaded power line singing to itself through the country night. Mary shifted her semi-substantial weight from one foot to the other, trying not to squirm. She wasn’t physically uncomfortable—that sort of burden was no longer hers to carry unless she wanted it to be, and as she wasn’t fully solid, she wasn’t heir to the miseries of the flesh. What she was heir to was boredom, made worse by the knowledge that Alice was missing her. The girl’s little voice had been tugging on the edge of Mary’s consciousness for well over an hour, repeating her name over and over again. It was like having someone ringing a hotel bell every few seconds to summon a clerk who was busy with another guest.

“Are you sure he’s coming?” she demanded peevishly, as off in the distance, the sound of an engine split the night. It was roaring, clearly pushed to its limits by whoever was behind the wheel.

“He comes,” said the voice from nowhere, sounding smug. Mary caught her breath and stood up a little straighter. “Hide yourself,” commanded the voice, and Mary disappeared. The buzzing stopped a moment later.

The night was silent except for the distant roar of the approaching engine, still as only a midnight desert could be. Even the wind had stopped.

With a screech of rubber tires and laboring brakes, a cherry-red roadster swept around the curve in the road and roared to a stop just shy of the physical crossroads. The cooling engine ticked almost angrily as a booted foot kicked the driver’s-side door open and a short, slim man slid out of the seat. He didn’t walk so much as he swaggered, like he was performing for some unseen camera. Like his car, he stopped just shy of the place where the two roads met, standing on the border of the physical crossroads.

He looked at the intersection for a moment, then up at the sky, studying the stars as the renewed wind stroked the perfectly gelled sweep of his pompadour.

“Oh, this is bullshit. This isn’t anyplace special. Just another chunk of dead-end road not worth pissing on,” he said. “That fucker was just saying whatever he could think of to get me out of his shit-ass trailer. Probably afraid I’d tell the fuzz where to find his little camp. Bet he’s terrified someone’s going to come along and sweep all his child brides away into the dark.”

(Beneath his feet the road, which had been neutral a moment before, cooled and turned against him. But Diamond Bobby had never been destined for a routewitch’s life, and he didn’t under stand how important it was to stay on the good side of the roads. He wasn’t paying attention.)

He scoffed, looking down again. “This is stupid,” he said. “Waste of time and gas.”

He began to turn back toward his car and the wind caressed his cheek, suddenly warm and smelling of sun-sweet corn, fresh from the stalk and ready to be swallowed sweetly down. “Say what you came here to say,” whispered a voice, barely audible but feminine and seductive all the same.

Bobby Cross had been a celebrity long enough to grow accustomed to the sound of beautiful women trying to talk him into things. Still, he stopped and turned once again to the intersection, taking a deep breath followed by a long step forward, past the border of the crossroads.

“The name I was given is Robert Cross. The name of my heart is Diamond Bobby. I am here tonight by the grace of the King of the North American Routewitches, who told me that if I came to the crossroads with desire in my throat, I could have what I most wish for in this world. I come prepared to pay.”

The world flickered around him, and he was abruptly standing in the same spot, on the same road, but in the middle of the day, with blue skies above him and green fields all around. The desert was gone with the night, replaced by the rolling richness of some farmer’s prize harvest. The corn rustled as the wind blew through it, and every leaf was like the bells of heaven, calling him home.

And then an angel stepped out of the corn. She had long white hair and a long black skirt, and the kind of figure that could have made her famous in Hollywood with a cock of her hip and a voluntary visit to a casting agent’s office. She was as impossible as the cornfield all around him, and those two impossibilities somehow canceled each other out, making her an ordinary sight. Why shouldn’t beautifully dressed angels wander around in cornfields? Where else did they belong?

“You don’t want this,” she said, and she wasn’t an angel after all. Angels didn’t have flat Michigan accents, didn’t sound like the fields and farmlands he’d been running from since the day he realized he was too good for that life. She sounded like all the girls his mother had ever tried to force on him, and he knew in an instant that he wasn’t going to listen to a damn thing she had to say.

Dress a bumpkin like a bombshell and she’ll still smell like cowshit when she comes to bed.

He looked her up and down with a sneer, not bothering to hide the way his eyes lingered on her breasts, and, as he finally reached her face, tried not to flinch away from the infinite horrors in her eyes. “You don’t know what I want, little girl,” he said. “What are you, sixteen?”

“Dead girls don’t age,” said the girl. “Which is a pity, because I’m a lot older than you take me for, and I know what I’m talking about. You don’t want this.”

“That old fuck in his trailer tried to tell me the same thing,” said Bobby.

The not-an-angel blinked. “The old… Did you see Big Buster?”

“Old bastard, big bushy beard, lots of young things hanging around him and batting their eyelashes like old-guy dick is something worth chasing.”

“That’s the King you’re talking about.”

“Lady, I’m an American. We don’t have kings here.”

“Not of America, of the— Oh, never mind. I guess now I know what happened.” At Bobby’s perplexed expression, she shrugged. “Time isn’t always linear for the routewitches. It’s just another form of distance to them. Eight years ago, he stepped down and cut himself off from the road, wandered off to die somewhere on the map of what’s real. I always wondered why.”

“But I just saw him.”

“Eight years ago, the man you saw tonight stepped down. His younger self has been sharing the throne with his successor since then, getting her eased into the position. It’s not important. You’re not one of his people. He sent you here?”

“Yes.” Bobby pulled himself as tall as he could. “I’m here to make a deal.”

“And I’m here to tell you that you don’t want to do that. I’m your advocate. That means I tell you how much this isn’t worth it.”

“How much what isn’t worth what?”

“Whatever you want,” she said. “No matter what you ask for, they’ll charge you more than you can possibly pay. This is your chance. Go.”

Bobby sneered at her. “I’m staying right here, and I’m going to get my crossroads deal. I’m not scared of any bill.”

The girl sighed. “I tried. That’s all they can ask of me.”

A strange, heavy buzzing filled the air, drowning out the sound of wind in the corn. Bobby turned, unable to stop himself, and watched as a figure appeared out of nothingness. Only the figure was nothingness, nothingness given a singular form, and looking directly at it hurt his eyes, so he didn’t allow himself to look away.

“A fair try, Miss Mary,” said the shape of nothing, and its voice was the buzzing in the air, horrible and distorted and inhuman. “A pity that they never listen, isn’t it? You can go now, if you’d like. We all know the outcome.”

“No,” said Mary. “You made me come here to advocate for him, and I’m going to advocate for him whether he likes it or not. You don’t get to use me to follow the rules when it suits you and then brush me off like a bit of lint when you can say you’ve done the bare minimum.”

The shape out of nothing didn’t have a face, or an expression; there was no way that it could look amused. And yet somehow, impossibly, it did precisely that.

“Brave little ghost,” it said. “Maybe we need to remind you who you work for. But no matter. Fine, then. Diamond Bobby, you have come to the crossroads according to the path laid out by the routewitches. You have followed the rules, and we will do the same. What bargain do you come here to seek?”

Mary sighed, the sound soft and small and closely akin to the wind rattling the rafters on an abandoned house. Bobby shuddered. He was starting to get the idea that spending time with dead things was not in his best interests.

“I’m a star,” he said. “Everyone loves me. There’s not a straight bitch in Hollywood who wouldn’t drop her panties in a heartbeat if she thought I wanted her, and I never need to settle for any of them twice. I’m on top of the world.”

“That doesn’t sound like a request,” said the nothing.

“Long way to fall when you’re standing at the top,” said Bobby. “I saw them screen-testing this little punk last week. Face like a baby’s ass, waist like one of my wrists. Big blue eyes and a girl’s pout on his pretty lips. He’s not going to be my replacement tomorrow, but three years from now? Five? He’s younger than me. He can wait me out.”

“Ah,” breathed the nothing. “So you’re asking for an exemption from time.”

“She”—Bobby pointed at Mary—“told me it was possible. Said those routewitch freaks have a negotiable relationship with the shit. I don’t want to get old. I want to be young and pretty and perfect forever. Can you do that for me?”

The air grew heavy, thick as honey, as the figure in the nothingness drew closer to him. “I can do that,” it agreed. “If it’s what you want, I can do that. Only say that you agree, and everything will be binding.”

“There’s the matter of price,” said Mary hurriedly. “What will this cost him?”

“What is he willing to pay?”

“Anything,” said Bobby.

Mary shot him a hard look. “You don’t mean that,” she said. “You think you mean that, but you don’t. What if they take your talent, or your looks? Youth won’t do you a lot of good without those.”

Bobby looked momentarily alarmed.

“We’ll have his stardom,” said the nothingness. “What he’s made will endure—and endure better than most of his contemporaries, we’ll throw that in for free. He’ll be remembered for as long as there is a record of his work, and celebrated in festivals and reviews. Retrospectives of his career will be unending.”

“A retrospective isn’t the same thing as a new movie,” said Mary.

“No, it’s not. It’s better—a retrospective doesn’t disappoint. He calls himself diamond. We’ll make sure he shines forever.”

Bobby looked between them, frowning. “I stay young, I stay handsome, and I get remembered. I’m not seeing a downside.”

“What will it cost ?” demanded Mary.

“Only his freedom. Only his place in the world of the living. He came here in a motor vehicle, and we’ll give him a better one—a car forged in the depths of the midnight layer of the afterlife, where the dead hearts of stars will serve as crucibles, and the ancient souls of sleeping beasts wait to be chained. It will be our gift to him, and with it, he’ll be able to drive through the twilight where the ghosts linger, and find them, and feed them into his fuel tank. As long as it never runs dry, time will never find him, and he will be eternal. Are we in agreement?”

“No,” said Mary.

“Yes,” said Bobby Cross, and the nothing reached out and grasped him and he screamed, the sound echoing across the desert and into eternity.

Mary, being a sensible dead girl, fled.

It had been well past midnight in the Mojave Desert, and the clock on the wall said that it was almost four o’clock in the morning when Mary appeared in the kitchen of the Healy family home in Buckley Township, Michigan. She was still wearing the black-and-red outfit she had donned to appease the crossroads, and although she’d been dead for years and couldn’t be physically ill, she had the distinct feeling that she was about to throw up. She clutched the edge of the sink to keep herself upright, waiting for her stomach to settle enough to allow her to change her clothes.

“Hard night at work?” asked a sympathetic voice.

Mary turned. Alexander was seated at the kitchen table with a mug of tea in front of him, looking at her kindly. She exhaled, still holding onto the sink.

“I had to broker a bargain,” she said. “It was a nasty one.”

“I know you can’t say any more than that, but Alice missed you tonight.” The crossroads had started calling her away during babysitting jobs as soon as Alice turned ten, demonstrating that their claim over her was stronger than her commitment to the child she cared for. They hadn’t been able to do that much when Alice had been younger, constrained by their agreement to let her protect her family.

Eventually, they’d be able to call her whenever they wanted to. There were crossroads all over the world, and there was always someone looking to make a bargain. The thought was the last straw for her poor, unsettled stomach, and she turned back to the sink, vomiting clear slime into the basin.

“Good thing I did the dishes when I couldn’t sleep, or Enid’d be furious with us both,” said Alexander, stepping up behind her. “She doesn’t care for ectoplasm in her teacups. You all right there, Mary?”

“All right as I ever am when I have to deal with my employers,” choked Mary, spitting to get the taste out of her mouth. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, sweetheart. This is your home and we’re your family, and family doesn’t get mad over a little sour stomach.” Alexander put a hand on her half-solid shoulder. “Come on. Let me make you a cup of tea.”

Sniffling, Mary nodded and let him lead her to the table. In that moment, the desert felt very far away, and the consequences of this night’s work were something that she would never be forced to face. Even though she knew that wasn’t true, as she sat and watched him fix her a cup of chamomile, sweet and comforting even to the dead.

The consequences of her actions would always come due. No matter how good her intentions had been. Someone always had to pay the piper.