“I told you, I’m working on—”
“Not good enough.”
“All right, how about this: he knows the crossroads ate his best friend.”
Silence. I couldn’t tell whether I’d startled her or whether she was gone. That’s the trouble with ghosts. Sometimes, they make things unnecessarily complicated.
Finally, Bethany said, “The bargain of Sally Henderson was sworn and witnessed before my time, but I’m assured she got what she asked for. What she paid for.”
“That’s cool and all, but still. Ate his best friend. I don’t care whether she did it so she could have a pony, that’s going to be upsetting for the people she left behind, which is to say, James.”
“That’s why he wants to hurt us?”
I paused. Something about her voice . . .
“I’m not talking to Bethany anymore, am I?” I asked.
In response, a hand grasped my wrist and yanked. I stumbled, falling forward—
—and landed on my feet on an endless country road. Fields of corn stretched out toward eternity on either side. The sky was the color of a worn-out dishrag, so stained with other people’s dirt, with other people’s crimes, that it would never come clean again. Bethany stood in front of me, looking suddenly small and young and bewildered, like she had no idea how we’d gone from the stairwell to the outside.
I had some idea. I’d been here before, after all, although the last time, I’d come willingly, and to save my own skin. I focused on the empty air behind Bethany, and spoke like I knew what was going on.
“I’d rather skip the intermediaries, if you don’t mind.”
“That sounds like a request.” The crossroads—the entity that shared the name of the physical place—coalesced out of shadow and dust, becoming a hole slashed in the fabric of the world. I couldn’t focus directly on it, couldn’t say anything about it other than that it was roughly human-shaped, with a head and arms and torso made of the same nothingness as the rest of it.
It cocked that head, and I had the disconcerting feeling it was looking at me.
“What will you pay?” it asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I haven’t asked for anything. ‘If you don’t mind’ meant it was your choice, and you chose to appear, presumably because you know how creepy it is to talk to a hole in the world.” I crossed my arms, only wincing a little as it pulled on the wound in my shoulder.
A little was more than enough. “We can fix that for you,” said the crossroads. “We can make it as if you were never hurt. A small thing. A token, really, requiring only the smallest of payments.”
“I’m good,” I said. “Dudes dig chicks with scars.” Half-true. Sam didn’t exactly “dig” my scars, but he appreciated the work I’d put into acquiring them, and he was willing to celebrate the fact that no matter how many times the world had tried to gut me, I’d persisted in surviving. “Why am I here?”
“You haven’t killed the Smith boy.”
“That wasn’t what I was told to do,” I said, as calmly as I could. “I’m supposed to make him trust me, learn everything he knows about how to hurt you, and then kill him.”
“We don’t want you to know how to hurt us.” The crossroads sounded sullen. No small trick for an anthropomorphic personification of making a shitty deal at the flea market. “If you learn everything he knows, you’ll know how to hurt us.”
“If I don’t learn everything he knows, I won’t know where the books I need to destroy are being kept. Someone else will be able to figure out how to hurt you.”
“And we’ll kill them, too.”
Who could have guessed that arguing with an unknowable force of the cosmos would be so much like arguing with a toddler who had stayed up past bedtime? “I haven’t killed the Smith boy because right now, it isn’t safe to kill him. There are too many variables. You told me to befriend him, to make him trust me, and then to kill him. I’m still on step one.”
“Or you’re stalling.”
I said nothing.
The shape made of absence took a step toward me. “We think you’re stalling. We think you don’t want to kill a human being who has, by your standards, done nothing wrong. He’s a threat to us, but we’ve never been something your family,” it said the word like it was filthy, like it was blasphemous, “wanted to protect. You people, with your little idealisms and your little ideas of what it is to be good or evil or in-between. We think you’ve decided he might be right. That’s why you’ve locked our eyes outside. You don’t want them to see you plotting.”
“I locked Bethany outside because she’s not Mary,” I said. “You want me to drop the wards, give me back my babysitter. I’ll let Mary watch every damn thing I do, and I’m pretty sure she can’t lie to you, or you would have lost track of my family the second Grandma gave Dad and Aunt Jane to my great-aunt Laura.”
Great-Aunt Laura had been an ambulomancer and a magnet for the dead, just like her mother, which had led to her becoming the best ghost-wrangler in North America, at least for a while. She’d been able to weave a ghost cage from a piece of newspaper and a tattered cobweb, and her wards had been the stuff of legend. Literally. People had come from all over the world to look at them and learn how to improve their own wards. It would have been easy for her to ward her charges from the eye of the crossroads, if not for Mary, who had come with the children—babysitter and trusted friend and keeper of so much of their history. Without Mary, we would still have had the mice, but they don’t understand human things the way she does. Without her, we might have lost what it meant to be a Price.
My stomach twisted, a wave of nausea washing over me. Without Mary, we might also have lost the focus of the crossroads. Had anyone ever realized that exchange was being made? It seemed like the sort of thing that should have been a choice, not a fait accompli presented to each new generation as unavoidable.
“Mary is too involved,” said the crossroads. “She tries to put your interests above our own. She has to be taught who she belongs to. A ghost is only as good as its manners.”
The nausea abated somewhat as I realized the crossroads had—however accidentally—given away one very important piece of information.
They were talking about Mary in the present tense. Whatever they’d done to her, she still existed. There was a chance, however slim, that I might be able to save her.
“Then we’re at an impasse,” I said. “I’m not going to lower the wards for a ghost I don’t know, who has been nothing but rude to me since she appeared, and who’s already shown herself to be perfectly willing to assault me. You get one favor. You can ask me to kill James Smith, or you can ask me to let your spy into my house. Who knows? Maybe I’ll learn enough to make killing him seem like a good idea even if you’re not making me do it.”
“Yes,” said the crossroads. “We are, indeed, at an impasse. You think you have a position to bargain from. You forget we have already bargained. We have already struck a deal with you, and you are refusing to adhere to our agreement. We promised your life would not be taken from you, no matter what happened, and we hold to the compact. We did not, however, promise to take disobedience lightly.”
“What—” I began.
That was as far as I got before the world caught flame around me. No: not around me. Inside me, burning every nerve and every fiber of my muscles, until I felt like a bonfire wrapped around bone, consuming myself without being consumed. I screamed, the sound ripping out of me in an agonized wail as I dropped to my knees on the impossible road. I didn’t even feel the moment of impact. The pain was too great. The pain was the entire world. Electric fire beat me down until I was on my hands and knees, gasping and choking, trying to force myself to keep breathing when my lungs were full of ash and ember, smothering me.
“We seem to have struck a nerve,” said the crossroads, and giggled—actually giggled, a high, tittering sound t
hat rubbed across my already-aching nerves and somehow made them even rawer, giving the pain new and innovative ways to work its way into my body. “Feel that, little miss negotiation? That’s the price of failure. You gave us fire. We’re allowed to let it burn. Best of all, because it sparked in you, it can never kill you. You can burn together forever, you and the flame. It won’t cleanse. It won’t clean. It will just hurt. Always, and always, and always, until you decide the pain has to stop somehow. How long do you think you can burn before you decide your family’s considerable skill at killing things needs to be turned inward? We promised not to kill you ourselves. We made no promises about your own hand.”
The fire was everything. The pain was enormous, screaming, swallowing every thought I tried to have, until the world was a handful of crushed glass shards, each of them containing nothing but a single word wrapped in a veil of pain. I couldn’t breathe. I had to breathe. If I stopped . . .
“Poor thing. Now. Let’s see if you’re ready to be good.”
The pain stopped.
I promptly vomited on the road, gasping and shaking from the shock of having the agony ripped away. I felt like I’d run a marathon, naked, through a field of barbed wire. The pain in my shoulder was almost incidental, something fleshy and easily ignored behind the worn-down ache that filled my entire body.
“Suffering exhausts a person. So many of the people who come to us are looking to be relieved of pain. We’ve had so much time to study what it does to the psyche of a human being, to suffer without cease. We can give you a lifetime of scholarship on the matter.”
There was a soft scuff in the dirt as the shapeless shadow of the crossroads moved into my field of view and knelt, showing me its absence.
“Is this what you want, Antimony? Do you care so much about a man you just met that you would burn for him forever? Because that’s what waits for you, if you don’t do as we say. Do you understand? Nod if you understand.”
Choking back bile, I forced myself to nod.
The crossroads had no face. It couldn’t smile. Still, it seemed pleased as it rose.
“Good girl. Now, as we finally understand each other, do you want to change anything about your earlier answer?”
I wanted to say “yes.” I wanted, in the craven, cowardly pit of my soul, to tell the crossroads that I’d go back to the real world and snap James’ throat as soon as they released me. Anything to put the fire back into my hands where it belonged and keep the crossroads from using it against me. Anything to get away.
And I couldn’t. Maybe the crossroads hadn’t let me burn long enough to break me, but my stubborn streak has always been a mile wide, and I hate being told what to do. I swallowed hard, the muscles of my throat protesting the motion, and whispered, “No. He doesn’t trust me enough to let me that close.”
“Are you sure?” There was a warning note in the figure’s voice.
Again, the answer rose in my throat, burning like acid. Tell it what it wants to hear, I thought, and “Yes,” I whispered. “He needs to trust me, or all this was for nothing.”
“We can hurt you any time we want to. You understand that, don’t you? We can hurt you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. We’re always with you because you belong to us. If you died right now, you’d be as much ours as Bethany is, and we’d burn you until the stars went out to punish you for refusing to behave.”
It didn’t take any effort at all to whimper. A hand caressed my hair.
“Good girl. You’re learning. We’ll see you soon.”
The world blinked, like I had closed my eyes for a long, terrible moment, and the empty road and the corn and the crossroads were gone, replaced by the blackness of the hidden stairwell. I was crumpled on the stairs, not on my hands and knees, but on my side, like a child’s discarded toy.
The exhaustion was still consuming my muscles, making sure I understood that the pain I had suffered at the hands of the crossroads had been very real, and the threat of its return was equally sincere. I pushed myself, shaking, onto my hands and knees, feeling around the wall until I found the rail. There was no smell of vomit. Wherever I’d thrown up, it hadn’t been here.
That was terrifying. The crossroads existed at least partially outside our reality, and they could apparently take me there whenever they wanted to. Was that a forever thing, or a “just until you finish fulfilling your bargain” thing? If it was the former, I was screwed. I could easily see them snatching me off the track or out of my own bed, throwing me into the dirt and setting my nerves aflame.
Which was just one more reason to destroy them. I pulled myself to my feet and resumed climbing the stairs, closing my eyes to make it easier to move through the dark. It’s a psychosomatic thing. People who navigate by sight expect to, well, see where they’re going . . . unless their eyes are closed. Take sight out of the equation and they move with more confidence, like they’ve already decided that a few stubbed toes are a foregone conclusion.
The rail was surprisingly solid, holding my shaky weight with ease. I climbed until my outstretched hand found another door. Those windows again. If there hadn’t been a door at the top of the stairs, the light would have been able to shine into the stairwell. I opened my eyes. I opened the door.
The missing half of the attic was as open and airy as the half where James was presumably still looking for clues was cobwebby and cramped. I stepped through the door, careful to close it behind myself, and looked around.
Someone had been using this space as a private office once, a very long time ago. A layer of dust covered everything, from the small rolltop desk situated across from the window to the bookshelf positioned to keep it safe from the worst of the sun. There was a filing cabinet old enough to be used for a 1950s period piece, and the usual assortment of knickknacks: a few framed pictures, covered in a layer of dust so thick that their subjects could no longer be seen, a letter opener, and a long-dead plant, its wilted remains draped over the side of a clay pot. The door through which I’d entered was behind me. Another, smaller door was on the wall ahead of me, the base of it raised more than a foot above the floor.
There was nothing about the room to indicate that anyone had been in it for more than a decade. I took a cautious step forward. The last thing my day needed was the sudden discovery of dry rot.
I did not plummet back down to the second floor, or into whatever mysterious oubliette this room’s owner had established to deter intruders. I took one more look around before walking over to the second door, knocking briskly, and pulling it open, revealing what looked like the back of some large, solid piece of furniture.
No handy secret entrance on this side, then. Crap. Voice muffled by the wood, I heard James say, “Hello? Annie?”
“I am a magical talking wardrobe,” I said, too exhausted to do a good spooky voice. “Move me and all your questions will be answered.”
A series of thumps and small noises of complaint marked James’ progress across the attic. The wooden panel blocking my view rocked once before he complained, “It’s too heavy.”
“I have faith in you.”
James scoffed. “That makes one person.”
“Look, I can clap my hands and say I believe in fairies, if that’s what it’s going to take to get you to exert yourself, but I can’t exactly help. Crossbow bolt to the shoulder, remember?” I didn’t feel like explaining my encounter with the crossroads. It already seemed hazy, like a dream I would have been better off forgetting.
There was nothing hazy or dreamlike about the ache filling my body, making it difficult for me to stay steady on my feet. There was a chair at the desk. Fond visions of sitting down filled my head, nearly luring me away from the wardrobe. It wasn’t like I was helping anyway . . .
And it wasn’t like James deserved to come into his mother’s private study and find me sitting at her desk, wiping away what few traces of her presence migh
t remain. It was that thought alone that kept me on my feet, while the wardrobe rocked and shuddered and finally shifted a few inches to the side, revealing a slice of James’ pale, pointed face.
His eyes widened as he saw the sunlit room behind me. “What in the . . .”
“I found the other half of the attic,” I said, reaching up with my good arm, weak as it currently was, to help him keep on pushing. The wardrobe was heavy, the kind of furniture built to pass down through generations like some sort of cursed idol or unholy artifact. James’ grandkids might be living on a space station in orbit around Sirius IV, but they’d have this wardrobe with them, taking up half their available space, looming disapprovingly.
“I see that.” The opening was finally large enough for him to squeeze through. I stepped to the side. He didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy staring at his surroundings, turning in a slow, mesmerized circle.
Finally, in a hushed tone, he said, “Mom used to say she was going to get some writing done while I went out to play, and promise to be downstairs by lunch. Only one day, she wasn’t. I was seven. I searched the whole house for her, and I was getting really scared when there was a bang and she came down the stairs. She told me she’d been in the bathroom and hadn’t heard me calling. But she wasn’t in the bathroom, was she?”
“Nope,” I said. “Surprise.”
“How . . . ?”
“She was a sorcerer. There are lots of tricks to make things boring. Too boring to investigate, even for a smart guy like you.” That also explained his father’s willingness to abandon an entire floor of his otherwise perfect home. Yes, he was punishing James, but that didn’t mean giving the spiders a stronghold from which to attack the lower floors. A minor distraction charm, however, especially one that was intended to eventually let James find what she had hidden . . .
He was turning in a slow circle, eyes wide, drinking in every dust-covered inch. He bit his lower lip, cast a glance in my direction, and started for the bookshelf.
“Her diaries,” he said, grabbing the first volume. He opened it to a random page, and blinked. “It’s blank.” He flipped frantically through the book before grabbing another, and another, finally turning to me and saying despondently, “They’re all blank.”
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