That Ain't Witchcraft

by Seanan McGuire

  He reached up, touching a small scar on his forehead as he said, “It was dark when I woke up. I ran the rest of the way. Three miles into the woods with no flashlight and no jacket and no clue what I was going to do when I got there, but I don’t think I’ve ever run that fast in my life.”

  No one spoke. No one moved. It felt like we were all frozen by something even colder than the ice in James’ hands, until the very thought of movement was impossible.

  “Her backpack was there. It had been . . . it had been ripped right off her body. The straps were torn in two. There wasn’t any blood, but the official report says it was a bear.” James’ mouth twisted into an entirely humorless smile. “My father wrote it. I told him it wasn’t a bear, and he said all the evidence was there, and he wrote it down and he told her parents he was sorry and he closed the case. Like Sally could ever be a case. Like she didn’t matter.”

  A tear ran down his face. He swiped it fiercely away. “They gave me her college fund. She didn’t have a will in the legally enforceable sense, but she had a list of everything she cared about and who liked it best, or who needed it, and they followed that. I think she knew there was a chance going to the crossroads could get her killed, and she did it anyway. To help me. All she wanted to do was help me.”

  “Why are you still here?” asked Cylia. “If you have the magic and you have the money, and the crossroads can be anywhere, why stay? You could have gone to school. Learned more about how this sort of thing works.”

  “Because it wasn’t a bear,” said James. “The crossroads took her, and if there’s any chance I can get her back, I need to do it here, where she got lost. Maybe I can do it, if I do it here.”

  I could hear echoes of my grandmother in his desperation, and they chilled me more than his hands had. She’d believed the same thing: that if she started from the place where my grandfather had gotten lost, she’d be able to bring him home again. That was more than fifty years ago. If he’s ever going to come home, it hasn’t happened yet.

  “The crossroads don’t give back what they take,” I said.

  “You think I don’t know that?” James picked up his coffee mug, twisting it between his hands. “I can’t find anything that says otherwise. Even when people have offered to trade themselves for the missing party, it doesn’t work out. No one comes home. But there’s a first time for everything. I’m going to figure out how to destroy them, and I’m going to offer them a choice: give Sally back or die.”

  “What happens if they give her back?” asked Fern.

  James’ smile was the rictus grin of a death’s-head. “I kill the fucking thing anyway. No more Sallys. Never again.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So long as we’re on the same page.”

  * * *

  It was late, and we were all exhausted, both physically and emotionally. James rolled his bike to the edge of the driveway and slung his leg over the seat, waving once before he pedaled away. Sam, looming behind me like a very strange bodyguard, scowled.

  “Do you believe him?” he asked.

  “I do,” I said.

  “He broke into our house.”

  “And I lied my way into your carnival. People do messed-up stuff when they’re desperate.” I turned, putting a hand on his arm. “He’ll be back in the morning. Let’s go to bed. I’m tired and I’m cold and I’m a little scared of what all this is going to mean. So if it’s cool with you, I’d like to not think about it for a while.”

  Sam nodded, expression softening, before he turned and started for the stairs, his tail wrapped around my wrist like a tether making sure I didn’t lose my way. In the dining room, James Smith’s frozen coffee sat on the table, slowly thawing, all but forgotten.

  Eight

  “Every debt comes due. Given enough time, every debt has its day.”

  –Enid Healy

  The next morning, behind the house

  MY KNIFE FLEW STRAIGHT and clean, hitting my makeshift target dead center. I had used pieces of plywood from the barn to make half a dozen of the crude things. I was fairly sure our “landlord” wouldn’t notice them missing: there were about a dozen identical sheets crammed in there, half of them riddled with mold or cracked down the center. If he had a problem with it, I could always leave him a check.

  I took a breath in through my nose, let it out through my mouth, and threw again. This knife landed next to the first, socking into the same groove. My shoulders started to relax. If I could keep throwing clean, I was okay. Stressed and scared and a long way from home, but okay. That was all I really needed to be.

  “I’m heading into town,” said Cylia. I turned, the next knife already in my hand. She offered a strained smile, her hands tucked deep in the pockets of her jacket. “If we’re going to be helping the chief of police’s son do something dangerous and potentially fatal, I figure we should show our faces around the place first, so no one can call us ‘those strangers at the old Smith house’ when they have to explain our corpses to the paper. You want to come?”

  I hesitated. James had said he wouldn’t be able to come to the house until early afternoon, and while throwing knives was fun and all, it wasn’t necessarily as productive as getting a sense of the community. Leaving the wards was fine, as long as I didn’t say anything the crossroads wouldn’t like while I was away from them. Technically, I was already outside the wards, and nothing bad had happened yet.

  You can’t hang ghost wards on a person, because a person is just a ghost with a nice Sunday suit of breath and blood and bone. If I wanted to stay warded, I needed to stay in, or near, the house.

  Screw that.

  “Sure,” I said. “Let me get my coat.”

  “I’ll meet you at the car,” said Cylia, and walked away.

  Sam was in the kitchen when I thundered through the back door. He turned to watch my arrival, eyebrows raised. “Do I need to get unfuzzy?” he asked.

  “No one’s here, I’m going into town with Cylia.” I paused in my journey toward the dining room long enough to lean up and kiss him on the cheek. “You cool staying here and watching for James, in case he shows up early? I don’t want him going through those books unsupervised.”

  “You could always stay here with me,” Sam offered.

  “Nuh-uh. One, we tend to distract each other, and two, I need to get a sense of the town. You should do it, too, either tomorrow or the next day. We need to rub off this veneer of new and interesting before we attract attention we don’t want.”

  “Fine. Find us a place we can get coffee or ice cream or something, and I’ll take you on a townie date. No carnival, no theme park, just footsie under the table and something with too much sugar.”

  “Deal,” I said, and flashed him a grin before darting out of the room.

  Dating is difficult when you spend more than half your time dealing with the nonhuman communities of the world, and don’t really have the necessary selling points to fill out an OK Cupid profile. There are a few cryptid dating sites—necessary, when you’re a member of an endangered species with very specific mating requirements—but the working cryptozoologist population is too small to sustain anything like that, and we wouldn’t use one if we had it. Our need isn’t as great, and there’s too much chance the Covenant would catch wind and decide to try infiltrating it. No.

  What that means, though, is that most of us will meet our significant others, whether temporary or long-term, “on the job.” My parents met when my father followed reports of an impending Covenant strike to my mother’s house, and discovered the “monsters” in the chatter were her adoptive parents and little brother. His parents met when Grandpa Thomas was assigned by the Covenant to kill or recruit Grandma Alice. And her parents met when my great-grandfather went looking for the Questing Beast that was devouring people in the wake of my great-grandmother’s carnival. There’s no such thing as normal in the cryptozoological wor
ld. There’s just a wide, wide range of weirdness.

  Sam and I are part of a long line of weird, and I’m not ashamed of that. It did, however, mean that we had yet to have anything remotely close to an ordinary date. So far, we’d done a night at his family’s carnival, a roller derby game that ended with him trying to strangle me while I set him on fire, and a day at Lowryland, which ended, if such things are possible, even worse. Sitting down for a cup of coffee or an ice cream sundae would be perfect, and exactly what I needed to take my mind off the fact that Mary was still missing and the crossroads wanted me to commit a murder.

  Compartmentalization is a necessary function of the sapient mind. Every species I’ve met with human-level—or potentially beyond human-level—intelligence has been capable of going “sure, the world is ending, but what about my soup?” I honestly believe that without that capacity for self-distraction, we’d all break under the weight of the world we have to live in.

  Cylia was leaning against the hood of her avocado-colored muscle car, squinting at her fingernails. “I need to find a place to get a mani-pedi,” she said, as I approached. “My cuticles are wasted.”

  “Is Fern coming with us?”

  “She’s sleeping in. I think she was more unnerved by last night’s visitor than she’s letting on, and this is how she copes.” Cylia looked at me through her lashes. “She really counts on you to know what to do. That means she’s always going to follow your lead.”

  “I know.” I slid into the passenger seat, waiting for Cylia to get behind the wheel before I said, “It’s a little terrifying sometimes. I don’t know why she believes in me so much.”

  “You’re a Price.” Cylia shrugged and buckled her belt. “Honestly, if I’d known that sooner, I’d probably be just as bad as she is.”

  There it was again: my family name, setting expectations I couldn’t live up to since, well, forever. It was weird, being in a situation where my allies put all the weight of the family on my shoulders, but my enemies had no idea what that was supposed to mean.

  Well. Not enemies, exactly. James wasn’t an enemy yet, and if we were working together to take down the crossroads, he was never going to have to be. If, on the other hand, they decided to enforce me doing them the “little favor” I’d agreed to do . . .

  No. They had my magic, and they had the authority to hold it until I kept my end of the bargain. Fine, whatever, let them keep it. I’d been a sister and a friend and a cheerleader and a derby girl and a very, very efficient killer long before I’d started setting things on fire by laying hands on them. If the crossroads wanted to keep my magic, that was one small piece of who I was. I could learn to live without it. Hell, I already more than half had. It was nice not to have to worry about setting Sam’s fur smoldering when we cuddled.

  “Do we have an agenda for this trip?” I asked.

  Cylia started the engine. “Go into town, find a coffee shop, buy coffee and muffins, praise them to the high heavens, make sure people see us. If anyone asks, my name’s ‘Celia.’ Less chance of it standing out. We’re already going to stand out enough.”

  “If there’s a drug store, I’d like to pick up some henna,” I said. “My roots are showing off like they’re in a beauty pageant.”

  “I like it when you’re vain,” said Cylia, a laugh in her voice. “Reminds me that you’re a person and not a terrifying battle android sent from the twenty-fifth century to destroy us all.”

  I snorted and settled in my seat, watching out the window as the woods rolled by.

  When we’d arrived in New Gravesend, it had been dark and I had been asleep. That wasn’t a great combination for getting the lay of the land. Now, I was coming to realize my assessment of the area wasn’t as far off as I’d been afraid it was. Everywhere I looked, there were more trees. They towered, reaching for the sky, transforming the landscape from midday brilliance into a strange sort of quasi-twilight. Everything that lived here had to adapt to living in shadow. The trees wouldn’t allow anything else.

  It took us about five minutes to make our way out of the winding backroads and onto a broader, better-maintained street that slipped smoothly from the shadow of the trees into a more landscaped setting. The trees here were just as tall, just as old, but they had been thinned, possibly over the course of decades, until they were almost a friendly barrier wall against the deeper, darker forest. Stay in these trees and it would be all gingerbread witches and Halloween specials, rather than the horror movie that lurked a little deeper in.

  We crested a ridge, small but deep enough to shape the landscape, and there it was: the town of New Gravesend, Maine, bustling, bucolic, and clearly dreaming of the day when it could be called a city. It looked like a postcard brought to life, all brick and clean wood and comfortable New England architecture. Tourists probably flocked here in the late fall—about four weeks from where we were standing—to count the changing leaves and gasp at their beauty, returning to their cozy little bed and breakfasts at the first hint of evening frost.

  The streets were occupied but not crowded, with plenty of parking along what I assumed was the “main drag.” About half the shops were the sort of thing designed to appeal to my hypothetical tourists—one selling just candles, another selling nothing but maple syrup and maple syrup accessories, and a third selling the kind of fancy cupcakes that probably cost three dollars and required the eater to spend an hour brushing their teeth. The rest of the shops were more practical, selling home goods, fresh produce, and warm winter clothes. It was like looking at a town that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be when it grew up. There was something surprisingly comforting about that. If a municipality could have an identity crisis, maybe the fact that I was still sorting my shit out wasn’t so big a deal.

  “Yes!” Cylia actually fist-pumped. “Nail salon. Next time Fern feels up to it, we’re totally doing nail day. Think Sam would like to come?”

  “The whole point of pedicures is getting the foot massage and relaxing,” I said. “If he relaxes, he gets fuzzy. So no, I don’t think he’d like to come, but he’ll probably appreciate the offer anyway.” No one likes being left out, even when they know they can’t come along.

  “He can mow the lawn instead. The very opposite of relaxing.” Cylia pulled into an open spot directly in front of what looked like the only coffee shop on the block. I glanced at the window, and fell instantly in love.

  The wood was mahogany, polished until it gleamed; the glass was thick, obviously leaded, with the name of the shop—BURIAL GROUNDS—painted in ornate gold letters inside a frame of stylized tombstones. Elegance and creepy trappings, just the way I like it. Inside, I could see multiple overstuffed chairs next to private tables, about half of them occupied, as well as several larger tables. The crowning glory? A group of teenagers had colonized one of the big tables, coffee cups by their hands, clearly engrossed in their game of Dungeons and Dragons.

  “I’m not coming home with you,” I said in a dreamy voice. “I live here now. If you need me, you can check between the beans and the biscotti.”

  “I never took you for a coffee girl.”

  “I’m not a coffee girl, in the ‘give it to me if you want to live’ sense. I’m more of a ‘give me an old-fashioned library aesthetic and a bunch of chairs heavy, big, and comfortable enough for me to disappear into for a week or so and I’ll be happy’ girl.”

  Cylia laughed. She sounded light, easy, relaxed—all the things she hadn’t been since she’d followed me to Florida. “Come on,” she said. “First cup’s on me.”

  The bell over the door was real brass. There was weight to the way it jingled, like even the sound was antique. I smiled, eyes half-closing with the pleasure of it. Everything about this was normal. I could have been in Portland, or Seattle, or anywhere else in the world where people enjoy a hot beverage and a comfy chair to drink it in.

  Cylia elbowed me lightly. I glanced at her, sur
prised, and she pointed to the counter, past the gleaming display of baked goods packed with delicious butter, sugar, and calories.

  There, standing next to the register and blinking at us like we had no right to exist outside of our rental home, was James Smith.

  Cylia flashed me a quick grin before undulating forward, putting more sway into her narrow hips than I would previously have thought possible. I’d never seen her trying to look seductive before. It didn’t quite fit, like the first time I’d seen Verity dance the tango. Yes, she was a lovely woman, and yes, she had the right to shake what her maker gave her any way she wanted to, but thinking of her like that just didn’t feel right. She was a widow. She was still in mourning.

  You would never have known it by the way she leaned against that counter, beaming at James like she was starving and he was on the menu.

  “Hi,” she said brightly. “We’re new in town. What’s good?”

  “Try the banana bread,” he said, with just enough bored detachment that I could tell he’d caught on to what she was doing. I would have applauded, if it wouldn’t have given the game away. “It goes great with seasonal mocha.”

  According to the whiteboard, the seasonal mocha was maple walnut. The thought alone was enough to make me want to scrape my tongue until the sweetness went away. Cylia didn’t appear to share my reservations. Her smile grew broader.