That Ain't Witchcraft

by Seanan McGuire

  Cylia was leaning against the wall, while James and Sam sat on opposite sides of the table like they were getting ready to start arm wrestling each other. All three of them looked over as we arrived in the room.

  “False alarm?” asked Cylia.

  “Sort of,” I replied. “James, is there any chance your father would have decided to come do a walk-around of the property while you were at work?”

  His scowl was immediate and intense. “Absolutely. He doesn’t think anyone deserves privacy. If you don’t have anything to hide, you shouldn’t mind the police sticking their nose anywhere they feel it belongs.”

  “I have plenty to hide, but aside from that, I still wouldn’t want strangers pawing through my underwear drawer,” I said. “A reasonable expectation of privacy is not an admission of guilt. Would it put you in a bad position if I asked you to tell him he’s welcome to drop by whenever, but we’d really prefer it if he didn’t skulk around in the bushes while we’re doing the shopping? Because he freaked Fern out pretty badly.”

  James grimaced. “If I ask him that, I’m as good as admitting that I’m spending time here.”

  “Who was it that didn’t like the idea of secret friends?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light. “That runs both ways.”

  “Fair.” He sighed. “I’ll tell him I dropped by to get a replacement chain for my bike and wound up showing you how to reset the fuses or something. Anything to make me sound useful.”

  “Your dad’s sort of a dick, isn’t he?” asked Sam.

  “Yeah, he is,” said James. “I should probably defend him, but why bother? It won’t make him any less of an asshole.”

  “Fun times.” I walked over to lean against Sam’s chair. I was too filled with nervous energy to sit; I’d wind up carving notes in the table without realizing I was doing it, and I didn’t feel like paying for a new one. “To answer the question of what’s wrong: Leonard Cunningham, presumptive heir to the Covenant of St. George—as in, he’s going to be the man in charge as soon as his grandfather dies, whether of natural or Leonard-induced causes—has tracked me down.”

  Cylia paled. Fern made a small, unhappy sound. Sam said nothing, but his tail snaked out to wrap around my ankle once again, keeping me anchored where I was. It felt like a tether, like a lifeline. As long as he was holding on to me, I couldn’t drift away. “If any of you want to leave, this is the time to do it.”

  “I’ve heard of the Covenant,” said James thoughtfully. “They’re a holy order, right? They hunt monsters.”

  “Everyone in this room who’s classified as a monster by the Covenant, raise your hand,” said Cylia.

  Four hands went up. James paled. I looked at him steadily.

  “Hand up, Iceman,” I said. “They’d kill you, too, for the crime of not being an ordinary human. Or, if you seemed dedicated enough to the cause of human ascendency, they’d use you, breed you, and use your kids, right up until the day when you weren’t useful enough. Then they’d kill you the way they’ve killed hundreds of innocent cryptids. Some of them might be sorry.”

  Some of them. Not many, and even thinking that some of them might understand mercy felt like a betrayal of my family. Still, I’ve spent enough time with the Covenant that I can’t think of them as an unflinching force of hate the way I used to.

  Chloe snored. Margaret just wanted to understand her place in the world, when her family and her community were at the kind of odds that could only be resolved with a shovel and a shallow grave. Even Leo had a tendency to hum under his breath when he was focusing on something. They’re people to me. Much as I don’t want them to be, they’re people.

  “Some of them would be sorry,” I amended. “Some of them would carry your death for the rest of their lives. But since they’d never be able to put it down, they’d find a way to use it. To say ‘see, if it weren’t for the monsters, he would have lived,’ and not acknowledge that they’d been the ones to pull the trigger. If you’re convinced enough that you’re in the right about something, lying to yourself gets easy. Don’t let the fact that you’re human lull you into thinking you’re safe.”

  James had grown, if possible, even paler. “And you brought this to my town? Why?”

  “I promise, I didn’t do it on purpose,” I said. “The full story would take a long damn time to tell.”

  “I think I deserve it.”

  “And you’ll get it, after we decide what we’re going to do.” I looked to Fern and Cylia. “I don’t think he saw you, or if he did, I don’t think he’s made you. Neither of you was with the carnival, and the population density at Lowryland kept them from getting a lock on me there.”

  “Plus keeping a tail on me when I don’t want it there is virtually impossible, unless you have a blood sample,” said Cylia. “Nice try. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Neither am I,” said Fern. “Teammates stick together.”

  “You guys . . .” I shook my head. “You could get hurt. Really hurt.”

  “Remember Smashed Potatoes, from the Concussion Stand?” asked Fern. “She left, like, half her face on the track. Her actual face. I think she had to get dental implants. We can get hurt anywhere. It’s better to get hurt doing something you love, or helping someone you love, than to get hurt because the world isn’t fair. You can’t make us leave.”

  “I have a lot of knives,” I said.

  “That’s nice,” said Cylia. “You’ll never hit me.”

  James looked between the two of them, finally cracking a small smile as he turned back to me. “You’re so lucky,” he said. “You have two Sallys. I can’t leave here. Even if I wanted to, even if I had money or somewhere to go, I can’t. I have to find a way to save her, or at the very least avenge her, and that’s not going to happen if I’m running.”

  “He already knows who I am,” said Sam amiably. “If he touches you, or comes anywhere near me, I’m gonna twist his head off and use it as a basketball.”

  We were all quiet for a moment.

  “Too much?” asked Sam.

  “The sad part is, no,” I said. “That’s actually really sweet. Thank you. All of you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” said James. “I’ll stop coming around if it’s not safe. Sally matters more than any of you. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I understand.”

  “We all do,” said Cylia. “But you need the books we have here, and I’m assuming you can’t move them to your place without your father figuring it out.”

  “Yeah,” said James. “It’s going to be hard enough spending time here without him getting suspicious.”

  “I could be your girlfriend,” said Fern.

  We all turned to stare at her. She flushed red.

  “I don’t mean really,” she said. “You’re the wrong species, and I’m not a pervert like Annie. Um. Sorry, Annie.”

  “No offense taken,” I said. “I like my monkey.”

  “Ook,” said Sam blandly.

  “Humans aren’t . . . you smell wrong, I’m sorry,” said Fern. She was still blushing. So was James. It would have been adorable, if they hadn’t both been so clearly mortified. “But I look like a human girl, and I’m pretty, I know I’m pretty, and I can pretend to be into you. Would your dad be okay with you hanging around here if he thought it was because of me?”

  “I’m more flexible, attraction-wise, than Fern is, but I’m also ten years too old for you,” said Cylia. “I’d take her up on the offer.”

  “It . . . might work,” said James slowly. “My father would be ecstatic if I started seeing someone, even if it was a stranger.”

  “Oh, if your dad’s anything like some of the carnie dads I used to know, he might be even happier to know that your first girlfriend will eventually leave town and let you try again with more practice under your belt,” said Sam.

  I lift
ed an eyebrow. He shrugged.

  “Grandma never wanted me to date outside the carnival, but she was in the minority,” he said. “Dating townies meant things never got serious enough to be a problem. A lot of people did it. I did not do it. I have not been concealing a string of townie girlfriends. Please don’t glare at me.”

  “Nah, I’d just shave you while you slept.” I took a deep breath, trying to let some of my tension go. It wasn’t anything like easy. “All right: so we’re all staying, and we have two problems. The crossroads, and the Covenant. James, is there anything we can do to help you with the first problem?”

  “How are you at taking notes?” he asked.

  I grinned.

  * * *

  There’s one of us in every class. The kid who takes notes when the teacher sneezes—or worse, who doesn’t need to, who views teachers sneezing as so vitally important that it can be remembered without being written down. The one who blows the bell curve to hell and dances on the ashes.

  When we started, all five of us were crammed into the library, making the air several degrees warmer and making it difficult to move between the shelves. Sam was the first to give up, after an hour of increasingly frustrated squinting at books he had no interest in reading and didn’t fully understand.

  “I love you,” he said, kissing the crown of my head. “I’m going to go check the woods for more unwanted guests. If I find this Leo guy, I’ll bring back one of his arms. Maybe with the rest of him still attached. Maybe not.”

  “More practical than roses,” I said cheerfully as I went back to my book.

  Cylia was the next to bow out, muttering something vague about another trip to the grocery store and making a casserole for when we inevitably experienced a massive blood sugar crash. Fern hesitated before running after her, not even saying good-bye, and James and I were alone.

  He was a fast reader, taking notes one-handed in a crabbed shorthand that I couldn’t understand. That made sense. Most of the teacher’s pets I’ve known, myself included, have had their own way of writing things down. I take my notes in unbroken cursive, with minimal spaces between words, using Russian grammar, since leaving out unnecessary articles means having more room on the page for things that matter, and being flexible with word order means the important words can come first. It also cut way, way down on bullies and mean girls asking to see my work after they’d spent the entire class period whispering and passing notes between themselves, which cut down on my parents needing to make excuses for how those kids had “tripped” and fallen face-first into my fist.

  I’d gone through three elementary schools before figuring that little trick out.

  The books from James’ mother’s hidden library were as focused on the local history as the more public-facing volumes, but with a distinctly eldritch twist. The handwriting in the margins was hers, of course, adding context and commentary to already horrible situations. After reading the third account of someone using the crossroads in front of the hanging tree to summon a dead ancestor to tell them where the family fortune was hidden, I lowered the book and gave James a sidelong look.

  “Is Stephen King really writing fiction?” I asked. “Or is he just a small-town historian who somehow got filed in the wrong part of the bookstore?”

  “Every serious metaphysical scholar in Maine secretly dreams of climbing in Mr. King’s kitchen window and filling his house from top to bottom with centipedes,” said James idly, turning a page.

  I blinked. Finally: “You’re screwing with me.”

  “Yes.” He looked up, offering me a quick, thin smile. “You catch on quickly. You should be proud of yourself.”

  “Dweeb,” I said, and went back to my book.

  “Nerd,” he muttered, sounding oddly pleased.

  We read in silence for a while after that, until I frowned, tapping the page with my finger. “You said you already knew how to hurt the crossroads,” I said.

  “Yes,” said James.

  “How?”

  James took a deep breath. “They aren’t normally subject to the physical laws of this universe. They exist . . . outside it, somehow, like they’re on a different channel. When they manifest to make or seal a deal, they become temporarily subject to the same physical laws as anything else. There are spells that can rend a body apart—spells that don’t require the presence of actual flesh to work. If the crossroads are manifest, and I pour my magic into the casting, I can hurt them. Under the right circumstances, I can even kill them. And if I cast the right binding ritual, they can’t get away from me until they give me what I want.”

  “Sally,” I said grimly.

  James nodded. “Sally,” he agreed. “The main problem is getting the crossroads to manifest when I’m not offering to make a bargain.”

  “That’s the part where you’d been losing me,” I said. “Why not say you’re there to offer a bargain and then double-cross them?”

  “The binding ritual that will hold the crossroads in our reality while I demand they give Sally back won’t work if I don’t cast it with the purest motivations possible. Revenge is fine. Selfishness is fine. Lying is not fine. I could still pin them down long enough to hurt them, but they might be able to turn things back on me and take me with them. I’d rather not die if I don’t have to. Not unless it’s the only way to bring Sally back.”

  “Noble, but I promise you, Sally wouldn’t be amused if you died to get her out of magical mystery jail.”

  James gave me a sidelong look over the top of his book. “You never met her. How do you know?”

  “Because while I’ve never met her, I’ve been socially isolated, and I’ve had socially isolated friends, and never once did any of us say ‘you know what, I’d be cool if you died for me when you didn’t absolutely have to.’ We don’t work that way. By which I mean friends don’t work that way.”

  “Sally may have died for me,” he said.

  “Yeah, but she may not have, and either way, she didn’t mean to. She was trying to do something good and she fucked up, which is basically the story of humanity’s time on this planet—we’re always trying to do something good, and we’re always fucking up. I bet if she’d told you she was running off to die for your sake, you would have smacked her upside the head.”

  “I never hit Sally,” said James stiffly.

  “I wasn’t implying—lighten up, okay? I know you’re doing this for her, and I know that when you’re trying to save someone, all kinds of self-sacrificing bullshit can seem like a great idea. Can you just breathe for a second? We’re getting off the subject.”

  “I know, but I—” James stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “All right. My current plan is to convince the crossroads to become manifest, cast the binding ritual, demonstrate that I can harm them, and demand they return Sally. If they refuse, I harm them more, until they agree. If they are unable to return her alive, I destroy them. If they return her to me safely, I destroy them anyway. This ends.”

  “How are you going to destroy them? Just . . . punch them to death with your hurt-stuff spell?”

  James looked at me, eyes wide. “You really don’t have much more training than I do, do you?”

  “Nope,” I said cheerfully. “Answer the question.”

  “There’s . . . another ritual. My mother was researching it when she died, and I have most of the pieces. Explaining it takes a little background.” He paused. I nodded, and he continued, “Like I said before, things changed in 1490. Prior to that, the crossroads were neutral, not malicious. I’m not the first sorcerer to get the idea that the crossroads should be stopped. The trouble is, if you kill them now, they grow back. Like a weed. You have to go back to the root of the problem. To 1490.”

  I stared at him.

  “There’s a record from the late 1300s, of a woman going to the crossroads—the old crossroads—with a complaint about losing her mothe
r’s locket. She asked them to rewind time for her.”

  “Um, okay, that’s where we’re stopping, because if you’re talking about rewinding the entire world to 1490 so you can screw the crossroads, I’m going to have to give this plan a hard pass. I like the Internet, and indoor plumbing, and having ever been born. I refuse to Butterfly Effect my way through history.”

  James rolled his eyes. “Bradbury was exaggerating a simple scientific idea for the sake of drama. We wouldn’t actually become strange dinosaur creatures if we crushed a moth.”

  “Okay, one, we don’t have time for me to start in on you downplaying the brilliance of Bradbury, so I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that, and two, maybe humanity wouldn’t be replaced by something else, but that doesn’t mean we’d still be here. Even if we ignore the sheer improbability of any specific sperm and egg combination managing to happen—if we go full multiverse and say that yes, your parents, if they existed, would absolutely have conceived you, James Smith, no question, no chance of you being replaced by somebody else—getting to your parents requires a chain of coincidences and accidents of timing that’s about a million miles long. Every living being on this planet is a winning lottery ticket of genetic circumstance, and I’m not interested in having my ticket recalled. Not even for the sake of an innocent girl, since we’d be erasing her, too.”

  “That’s all well and good, and I appreciate your pragmatic approach to survival, but I’m not proposing rewinding reality to the fifteenth century.”

  “You just said—”

  James sighed. “The woman whose bargain ran time backward didn’t actually run time backward. The crossroads moved themselves earlier in time, and they carried her with them. She was able to go to the farm, watch where her earlier self put the locket away for safekeeping, and retrieve it. While she was in the past, no one could see her. No one could touch her.”