Going home shouldn’t be the sort of thing that makes a person look like that. I glanced at him, sobering, and followed him up the driveway to the house.
It was a larger, better-tended version of the house where I was staying. The windows were clean, the paint was fresh, and the shingles were in excellent repair. It could have been on the cover of a magazine about rural living in modern Maine.
James slowed as we neared the house, hopping off his bike and walking it alongside him. “I have to leave it in the back,” he said. “It’s unsightly.”
“It’s a bike.”
“Yeah, well.” His laugh was small and tight. “I don’t make the rules. I forgot to ask before: did you bring any shoes? Because you can’t wear those skates in the house. If my father came home and found you tracking up his hardwood floors, I’d be moving in with you over at my cousin’s place after he threw us both out on our asses.”
That might not have been such a bad thing. James needed something in his life to change. Being thrown out of his house wasn’t ideal, but it would be a start. “I always have shoes with me.”
“Good. I mean, you can’t wear those in the house either, since they’d still track up the floors, but at least this way, they’ll be next to the door and my father won’t think you’re some weirdo who runs around the woods barefoot.”
I couldn’t imagine anyone looking at their son’s new girlfriend and immediately starting to assess her footwear, at least not outside of some messed-up retelling of Cinderella. I didn’t say anything. James looked genuinely worried, and no matter how silly or overblown I thought that concern might be, he deserved better than to be teased about it.
“Got it,” I said. “Any other house rules I need to know?”
James stopped, looking me frankly up and down. I resisted the urge to squirm.
“That kind of sweater isn’t quite a coat, so you don’t need to take it off. Your hair should be fine. If he comes home, try not to squirm, don’t swear, and don’t say anything that might make him suspect something’s up.”
“What’s going to make him assume something’s up?”
“Everything,” said James grimly, and propped his bike against the back porch. He waited long enough for me to remove my skates and place them in my bag before unlocking the door. Silent, I followed him inside.
Some houses always feel like homes. Maybe they’re clean and maybe they’re not, but they’re lived-in in a way that makes it clear their residents enjoy living there, or at least don’t mind it overly. Other houses feel more like waystations, a place to stop for a little while before continuing on to whatever comes next.
This wasn’t either one of those. This was a house that felt like a museum if I was being charitable, and like a prison if I wasn’t. Oh, it was nice enough—nicer than the house where I’d grown up, which had always shown the signs of being home base for multiple cryptozoologists, their spouses and children, and whatever pets we’d all dragged home that week. The floors were polished mahogany, the walls were lined with beautiful, antique-looking shelves and small, decorative objects, and everything radiated class in that unique New England way. I could have filmed a period drama there and no one would have questioned my set design.
But the air was cold, and the smell of floor polish and mothballs dogged our footsteps, clinging to the inside of my nostrils. Sorcery is hereditary. I still couldn’t shake the thought that if I’d grown up here, I would have manifested ice over fire as well. This was a place for freezing by inches, where nothing burned bright.
There was only one picture on the hallway wall: a man who looked somewhat like an older, sterner James, albeit with broader shoulders and a handlebar mustache, standing next to a devastatingly lovely dark-haired woman in a white lace wedding gown. She was smiling for the camera, but I could see the etched-in lines of sadness around her eyes.
James put his shoes on the rack next to the door. I followed his lead, and he followed my eyes to the portrait. “She really did want to marry him,” he said, voice soft. “Everyone agrees about that. No one’s ever been able to tell me why, but it’s not like I could go around quizzing relatives at her funeral. She loved him. She loved me. She left us anyway.”
“Sometimes people don’t have a choice,” I said. The words were useless; I could tell that even as I spoke them.
“People should try harder,” said James, and resumed making his way down the hall.
It ended in a small foyer, light breaking into rainbows as it cascaded through the decorative stained glass around the front door, painting the stairs in patterns of prisms. He went up. I followed, silently charting escape routes and things that could be used as supplementary weapons if the knives hidden inside my clothing didn’t prove to be enough.
Sometimes I wish I were more comfortable with firearms. And then I remember that I spend most of my time either on roller skates or hanging from a trapeze, and consider how easy it would be to shoot myself, and that reconfirms my desire to be the girl with all the knives, rather than the girl with the sucking chest wound. Although as Leo was so happy to demonstrate, sometimes it’s possible to be both.
Asshole.
The stairs extended upward for three stories, marking each transition with another landing, another turn. James took them fast enough that I only got glimpses of each respective floor, until we finally reached what I assumed was the top, stepping onto a floor that was a little less polished than the others had been, where the wallpaper was a little more faded. There were signs of ongoing upkeep—no dust on the baseboards or cobwebs in the corners—but it seemed perfunctory, especially compared to the rest of the house.
I gave James a curious look. He shook his head.
“My room is up here,” he said. “My father thinks it will encourage me to get a better job if he doesn’t pay the maid to come to the third floor. I either do all the cleaning myself or find a way to stretch my paycheck enough to cover her expenses—which, mysteriously, he claims would cost what it currently costs him to pay her to clean the rest of the house. She’s a lovely woman, taught me how to wash windows without streaking when she realized what he intended to do, but I’m not willing to empty my savings for the sake of having a floor I can see myself in.”
“What kind of better job does he think you’re going to get without leaving your small town and without a college education?” I asked. “I mean, is he one of those people who thinks big paychecks with full medical and dental grow on trees, and we’re all just lazy?”
“Essentially, yes,” said James. “What do you do?”
“Play roller derby, mostly. Hunt. Try to negotiate peaceful coexistence between human and cryptid communities. It’s not what most people would consider ‘gainful employment,’ but it’s fulfilling, and I’m good at it.”
“And your parents approve?”
“They tolerate the roller derby. The rest of it is a pretty classic case of ‘I learned it from watching you.’”
“Ah.” James stopped at the end of the hallway, where a hatch had been cut in the ceiling. “Hang on a moment. I’ll get the hook.”
“Attic?”
“Yes.” He opened a closet, producing a long wooden pole with a metal hook at the end. Deftly, he pulled the hatch open, releasing a rickety ladder to descend into the hall. It looked like it had last been given a thorough inspection for termite damage and rusty nails sometime around, oh, never. I eyed it dubiously.
“Ballpark figure,” I said. “How many times have you nearly died using that thing?”
“Only five or six,” he replied, and propped the hook against the wall. “Come on.”
He started up the ladder. My shoulder throbbed, as if to remind me that I was in no condition to be climbing anything, much less a death trap masquerading as a useful household fixture.
I hate it when my injuries tell me what to do. I followed him.
The attic was about what I expected: small, cramped, and crammed with junk, to the extent that it no longer seemed to matter whether the house had any insulation, since the boxes and chests and old furniture would serve as a no doubt excellent windbreak. James couldn’t stand upright without whacking his head on the roof. I had maybe a half inch of clearance, less if I moved toward the back, where the wall sloped down until no one older than five or six would have felt genuinely comfortable.
“You could rent this place out to a whole family of bogeymen and be able to afford a cleaning service,” I said.
James blinked at me. “The Bogeyman is real?”
A life spent in the company of Aeslin mice has left me sensitive to capital letters where they don’t belong. “No, the dude in your closet who wants to eat your baby is a myth. Bogeymen, on the other hand, are completely real. You probably have some living in the local sewer system, assuming they were able to get in there early enough to partition off some of the larger tunnels. They like to be subterranean, they don’t like to be bathed in the smell of other people’s shit.”
“That’s . . . huh.” James shook his head. “The more time I spend around you, the stranger the world becomes.”
“Says the cut-rate Bobby Drake. Call me when you figure out how to make those nifty frozen slides, Iceman.” I turned slowly, letting the light of the attic’s single bare bulb show me my surroundings. “Where are we even supposed to start here? And where’s the rest of it?”
“My father had all Mom’s things moved up here after she died. I’ve found a few other books throughout the years, although they’ve been—wait.” James suddenly frowned at me. “What do you mean, where’s the rest of it?”
“I mean, this attic is like, maybe half the size it should be.” I knocked on the ceiling, triggering a cascade of dust and splinters. “The house is bigger than this. There’s a window visible from the outside that isn’t visible from the inside. Did you never notice that?”
“Don’t be stupid. I would have noticed a window.” James was trying to sound arrogant, but he looked unsure. Almost confused.
“Would you?” I can be a steamroller when I get going. I know that, and I’ve learned to be gentle when I have to. It’s simple self-preservation: sometimes being gentle is the only thing that keeps the people I’m trying to talk to from turning and running for their lives. “When we know what something looks like, sometimes we stop seeing it. We make assumptions based on the things we know, and we don’t go looking for proof, because we don’t need it anymore.”
“This is the only attic I’ve ever seen.”
“All right,” I said. “Wait here.”
Going back down the ladder was no easier than going up it had been. If anything, it was harder, since now the wound in my shoulder was awake and aggravated and wanted me to know that my behavior was entirely unacceptable. I ground my teeth and plotted terrible things to do to Leonard Cunningham as I descended, until my shoulder was throbbing and my feet were firmly on the hallway floor.
Bastard was going to pay for shooting me. I can put up with a lot of nonsense in the course of doing my job, but shooting me? That was a step too far, and I was not going to tolerate it. As for the part where he’d been aiming for Sam, well . . .
If I thought about that too hard, I’d go from justifiably annoyed to outright angry, and that wasn’t going to do any of us any favors. One thing at a time. Figure out what was wrong with James’ attic, find the missing piece of the crossroads puzzle, discharge my side of the bargain without getting myself killed in the process, find Leo, kick his smug bastard teeth all the way out of his ass. Priorities.
The hall hadn’t changed: it was still dusty, shabby in a way that would have been anathema anywhere else in the house, and lined with logical, reasonable doors leading to logical, reasonable rooms and storage spaces. James’ bedroom was the closest door to the stairs. The door next to it led to a linen closet, and the door on the other side led to a currently empty bedroom, only a few faded cardboard boxes shoved up under the window.
The window. I paused to give it a longing look. Under normal circumstances—i.e., without a hole in my shoulder, and without the need to worry about either James’ father coming home or Leo showing up with another crossbow—I would have gone straight out that window and up the side of the house to the other window James swore wasn’t relevant. Easy peasy. Only not so much when I couldn’t be sure of maintaining my grip, and double not so much when I didn’t want to go to jail for breaking and entering.
(There isn’t much Verity and I agree on. Marshmallow fluff being an awesome sandwich topping is one of them. A dismaying willingness to climb things in order to find out what’s at the top is another. I just believe in doing it safely, with a net whenever possible, while she seems to find joy in the plummet.)
The hallway furnishings, such as they were, gave the distinct impression of having been booted upstairs after failing some downstairs quality check or other. The shelf between the linen closet and the bathroom had chips in its finish; the curio cabinet under the window had a thin cobweb of cracks in one corner. Nothing that would have drawn a second glance in my house, but here, those were sins that might never be forgiven.
I looked at the cracked curio cabinet, and thought about home, where glass got cracked and tile got chipped, but everything was filled with light and life and joy. We loved each other, even when we hated each other. That was what family was for. I couldn’t let James keep living like this, especially not when he was the only other sorcerer my age I’d ever met. He needed training. He needed people who could understand him, and who wouldn’t get mad if he froze the pipes every once in a while.
Half my family isn’t actually related to me, aunts and uncles and cousins and even siblings we’ve acquired somewhere along the way and refused to put back where we found them. I wondered how well Alex was going to take the news that he was no longer my only brother. Hell, I wondered how well James was going to take the news.
Given that being part of my family came with parents who gave a fuck and houses that didn’t feel like punishments, I was pretty sure he’d be okay with it. And Sam might throw him a parade. I may be weird, but even I’m not going to start dating my adopted brother.
One bookshelf didn’t fit the rest of the hall aesthetic. It was solid mahogany, built to last, with a warm, almost rosy varnish over the wood, which had been lovingly carved and sanded, making it look like the good kind of museum piece, the kind that got preserved because it was loved, not because it was valuable. The glass fronts of the doors were leaded and unbroken, and there was nothing about it that should have seen it banished to this hall. So why was it here?
I approached the bookshelf, studying the way it met the wall—without so much as a crack to slide a sheet of paper through—and the apparent weight of the books inside. They were thick, hefty tomes, enough to have caused even the sturdiest shelf to eventually bow a little, but there was no bend. Everything looked exactly like it was supposed to, which was the problem. It was like someone had crafted the perfect dollhouse bookshelf, only to realize that it was built to human scale and stick it here instead.
There was a cleaning service. Even if they no longer came upstairs, this thing had been cleaned once. Keeping that in mind, I got up onto my tiptoes, extended my uninjured arm, and felt carefully around the decorative molding of the very top, the places where the dust would have been impossible to get at, and where many services would never even have tried.
There was a click. The bookshelf shuddered as it swung out from the wall, revealing a plain, slightly undersized door on the other side. I smirked, turned the knob, and stepped through, onto a narrow staircase that might be rickety and choked with cobwebs, but was at least better than a ladder.
The bookshelf swung shut behind me, casting the entire stairway into absolute darkness, and behind me, in a pleasant voice, Bethany said, “There aren’t any ward
s here, Annie. I was just waiting until we could have a moment alone.”
Shit.
Fourteen
“Always know where your exits are. If you don’t have any, be prepared to make one.”
–Enid Healy
Locked in a secret passage with a dead woman, where no one is going to hear the screaming
“GO AWAY, BETHANY, I’M working,” I said, voice low and tight.
“Mmm . . . no. I don’t think so.” Ghostly fingers caressed the back of my neck, cool and clammy. That was a choice. Assuming the rules governing Mary were universal to crossroads ghosts, Bethany could be as warm as the living when she wanted to. If she wasn’t, it was solely because she wanted to mess with me.
I hate being messed with. “I’m serious. Go away, or first chance I get, I’m finding someone who can craft a spirit jar, and I’m putting you on time out.”
“Oh, because that’s a proportionate punishment for bothering you? Locking me in solitary confinement until the great Antimony Price decides I’m worthy of my freedom? I didn’t know much about your family before I died, but I’ve been doing my homework, and you people are a real class act. You’re still Covenant in your bones. You may have changed what windmill you’re willing to die defending, but that doesn’t do anything to take the swords out of your self-righteous, hypocritical hands.”
“That argument would work better if I thought you believed any part of it, and weren’t just repeating buzzwords—oh, and getting your metaphors wrong. Get out. I can’t win his trust if he doesn’t trust me, and boys don’t go for haunted girls.”
“Please. Mary’s been haunting your family for what, three generations? If boys didn’t go for haunted girls, you’d have died out like the relics you are.”
I couldn’t see a damn thing. I pinched the bridge of my nose, wishing I hadn’t been so quick to give away the fire in my fingers. “What do you want?”
“We want to know what the boy knows.”
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