Page 111 of The Rut in the Road

I really hoped there hadn’t been another hit-and-run murder. Or a different murder. Any murder would be bad.

“I’m your escort for the evening,” Maza replied.

I’m sure all three of us looked surprised at that. “Escort?” I repeated.

Maza nodded. “With everything going on, the RPD is on high alert.” His lips pressed together, dark eyes serious. “As are the feds.”

I scowled. “So Raj called you,” I guessed, annoyed.

“Hart texted,” Maza replied. “But honestly, we were already planning on a full barricade down there.” He grimaced. “The fact that they were given a goddamn permit to protest the Dead Dance”—I resisted the urge to correct the event’s name, knowing that it both wasn’t the point and that it would likely be seen as rude.—“is a travesty to begin with,” he grumbled. “It’s asking for this to go to hell, and quickly.”

“Do you think they’ll throw bricks again?” Vi asked.

Maza pinned her with a serious gaze. “We’ll be lucky if that’s the worst thing they come up with,” he replied darkly.

“We’ll stay well away from the riot line,” Ward told her. “We’re supposed to be pretty far in the back, on the other side of the event from the protest zone.”

I refrained from pointing out that designated zones weren’t going to stop anyone who was already planning on breaking the law by committing assault, causing property damage, or inciting an actual riot.

Maybe I should have.

I was havinga difficult time thinking, it was so loud. To judge by the glazed-over look on Ward’s face, he was having a similar problem.

Vi looked like she was having the time of her life.

Ward was dressed in what he called his ‘classic medium’ outfit—black leather pants, a billowy-sleeved black tunic-style top open at the throat to show a silver ankh, dangling crystal earrings, labradorite studs higher in his ears, and a sparkling purple amethyst in his nose. There were a couple heavy rings on his fingers in addition to the wedding band he always wore, with a silver-studded leather bracelet around each wrist. We were outside, but it was crowded enough that all of us were still masked, and Ward’s was a gauzy gaiter-style mask that he could pull up and down as he needed.

Vi and I were both in black jeans—Violette’s much tighter and more stylish than mine—and black t-shirts with the company name and logo on them. Vi had been slightly disappointed that we couldn’t go in costume, but I much preferred this. We also both had on black masks—Vi’s had a skull, mine had little dark grey cartoon ghosts.

There was dance music—albeit from a pretty wide variety of decades and genres—being played by a professional DJ installed at a tent and rolling across the shouting, laughing crowd from massive speakers. Ward had offered me a pair of earplugs, and while I’d taken them, they were still in their little plastic case in my pocket, since I thought it might be more important to tolerate the noise in order to make sure I didn’t miss anything Ward or Vi said.

Violette was dancing to the music, even as she helped to usher people to and fro, fetching objects as Ward requested them, and so on. I’d never really been interested in dancing, although I did enjoy music when it wasn’t making me feel as though blood might come dripping out of my ears.

Of course, she was only hearing part of what Ward and I were. Because the whole point of a Dance with the Dead party was to dance with the dead. Part of what we were here for was pulling the dead into the party—people weren’t coming to Wardfor ordinary séances, but to ask him to pull specific people back across the veil. Most of them were friends or family, but some people had requested celebrities and historical figures.

Ward trying to explain to George Washington’s ghost why, exactly, he’d been summoned would be a memory I would hold onto for a long time.

The first president of the United States had not been at all pleased, and Ward had quickly let him go, but I’d personally taken a lot of satisfaction from his use of the phraseridiculous, raucous cacophony. I wasn’t convinced that we’d actually had to summon George Washington—Hart had more than once, in his days at Beyond the Veil—suggested to Ward that he just make up the responses to some of the stupider requests we got, but Ward maintained that he would do the job he was paid to do, and, tonight, that apparently included George Washington. And Prince. And Michael Jackson, although to both of our surprise, those two had actually stuck around, at least for a while. I hadn’t gotten a glimpse of either in about an hour, but still.

It had gotten dark not long after we’d finished setting up, and the party was illuminated mostly by what had to be thousands of strings of café lights, white and orange and purple, LED luminaria, and a battery-powered lantern that we had set up on Ward’s table.

“Rayn!”

I leaned over the table, trying to get my ear closer to Ward’s mouth so that I could at least hear what he had to say without him having to shout even louder. All of us were going to be hoarse the next day, which wasn’t ideal, given that it was Halloween weekend, and we were working every day from now all the way through to the morning of November 2. I made a mental note to buy lozenges from CVS on my way home, if I happened to pass one of the twenty-four hour ones.

“Yes?” I yelled back.

Ward grimaced. “Fuck, it’s loud.” At least, that’s what I thought he said.

I nodded my agreement.

“Can you go back to the truck?” he yelled at me. “We’re running out of crystal pendants and sage.”

These were some of the various party favors—well,wethought of them as party favors—that we’d put together for people to take. Tea lights, bundles of sage, bundles of oak and walnut twigs, and crystals wrapped in wire to thread on cords. The crystals were the most popular.

We had limited space under the table, so we’d only brought out one of the bins, which had forced Vi and I to repack half the favors in each—distributed more or less evenly across the types. I lifted the edge of the tablecloth to grab one of the canvas tote bags we’d also used to bring in supplies, then headed back to where I’d parked the truck.

Thankfully, it was away from both the protest and the DJ, so I felt like I could almost start to think as I pushed my way through the thinning crowd.