Angel of the Overpass by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire [McGuire, Seanan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2021-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Back to the Beginning With Me

I’M SPRAWLED IN THE MIDDLE of a gas station parking lot, gravel and chunks of broken glass digging into my skin. They’d be cutting me if not for the fact that my dress is bunched beneath my waist and hips in a way that’s uncomfortable as hell, but probably saved me from something a lot worse. I try to sit up, pulling my hair in the process and grinding the gravel and glass even deeper into my flesh. It hurts like hell. I wish being dead meant an end to pain. That would be a nice trade-off, considering how many other things end when you die. Instead, it just means pain is . . . muted, sometimes. Not even always. Not right now.

“Hey! Lady!” A young man who looks a few years older than I do, but is probably several decades younger, rushes across the parking lot to help me up. “What are you doing? You could have been seriously hurt!”

“I don’t know.” My head aches, too. I must have hit it when I fell. But I don’t remember falling. I was just talking to the anima mundi, and then they made everything go away. It feels like a cosmic force of reality could have put me down a little bit more gently, or at least not damaged me in the process of whisking me out of their presence, but who am I to judge? Just an ordinary ghost girl, with no more authority over the anima mundi than the living have over the dead.

“I don’t know how I got here,” I say, trying to address the clear confusion of the gas station attendant. I pull away from him, standing on my own two feet, and brush some of the gravel off of my skirt. My fingers come away slick with oil, and I wrinkle my nose. My dress is filthy. I can’t change it while I’m in front of this living man, and so I’m going to have to be dirty for a little while. Dandy.

To make things even worse, when the anima mundi put me down, they don’t seem to have activated my usual instinctive connection to the ghostroads. I have no idea where I am, and there’s a whole world out there, full of options. “Where am I?”

He blinks, alarm and disbelief in his eyes, and says, “Um, Warsaw.”

“Poland?”

“No. Indiana.”

Maine to Indiana is a pretty big jump. Distance isn’t as rigid in the twilight as it is in the daylight—for all that both can seem pretty infinite when you’re just a girl with a thumb and a fondness for walking, I’m pretty sure the twilight is smaller, meaning a mile traveled there can be ten miles or more traveled in the daylight, and that’s before accounting for the way the land can sometimes bend or compress itself when it wants to be helpful. And all that being true, it’s still a pretty impressive transition. I don’t like it.

“Better Indiana than Poland,

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