That Ain't Witchcraft

by Seanan McGuire

  I heaved a sigh of relief. “Finally,” I said. “Something I can help with.”

  Fifteen

  “Some skills are essential, no matter what your future holds. Never assume that knowledge is useless.”

  –Jane Harrington-Price

  In the private attic office of a dead sorcerer, playing intrepid detective

  “IT’S A FORM OF invisible ink,” I said, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the office floor across from James, an open book between us. It was a relief to be seated. I wasn’t sure I would be able to stand up again, but hey, one thing at a time. “All kinds of magic-users use it to keep their notes from being discovered by people who might want to hurt them.”

  It’s a testimony to Grandpa Thomas’ love for his magically-deficient wife that most of his notes—at least the ones written after his arrival in Buckley—had been taken in ordinary, ever-visible ink. But there had been a note, tucked at the back of one of his books, that mentioned more information might be found by someone who looked the right way.

  I like to think he’d suspected his genes would assert themselves somewhere down the line, winning out over bubbly blondness to produce, well, me. A descendant who’d have fire in their fingers and would need a way to learn what that meant. Not that he could leave much in the way of useful instruction—very few sorcerers are self-taught, because very few “spells” have clear, coherent steps that take well to being written down—but at least he could reassure that potential grandchild or great-grandchild or whatever that they weren’t losing their minds or starting fires the normal way, with matches and lighter fluid, and then forgetting about it. No sleep pyromania here! Just a good clean dose of Jean Grey syndrome.

  James looked at me dubiously. “Invisible ink,” he echoed. “Are you going to suggest we get a hair dryer to make the words appear?”

  “Okay, one, that’s lemon juice, two, you’re making fun of me, and three, this is way more like one of those fantasy novels where the writing only appears by moonlight than some kid’s science project. I want you to put your hands above the page. About six inches up. You don’t want to freeze the book.”

  The dubious look intensified. “Freeze the book.”

  “Look, I make fire, not ice, so I am very safety-first. I had to do this part with a bucket of sand in easy reach.” Not a fire extinguisher: that would have been too difficult to explain to my parents, and too potentially destructive for the books. Any time something started to smolder, I’d just thrown fistfuls of sand over it until the smoldering stopped. Low-tech but effective, that’s the family motto.

  James sighed. “All right. You found the room, we’ll do things your way.” He squared his shoulders and extended his arms, palms down.

  He clearly resented my continued presence, and I couldn’t blame him, because this room . . . this was a piece of his mother he had never seen before. I couldn’t imagine what that felt like. I didn’t want to imagine what that felt like. I knew I was lucky to have both my parents. I was even luckier to have two parents who genuinely loved me and wanted what was best for me, even if we didn’t always agree about what that was. James . . .

  He’d lost the one person who should have been there to love and understand him from the beginning, and then he’d lost the one person who had volunteered to try filling the gap, until he was left with only a father who viewed him as a burden and an embarrassment. Any questions I might have had about how accurate that view of the situation was had died when we’d climbed the stairs to the second floor. The charms around the hidden door might have contributed to Mr. Smith’s neglect of the cleaning, but they wouldn’t have caused him to mistreat his only son.

  “What do I do?” asked James.

  I snapped out of my introspection. “Focus on your hands. Try to call the cold without allowing it to happen. You want to touch the potential, not the actuality.”

  The temperature in the attic dropped several degrees. I wrinkled my nose.

  “Dial it back, Iceman,” I said. “The idea, not the real thing. Think about what the magic feels like when it answers you. Think about the way it hums.”

  I’ve never had the kind of training James needed—or that I needed, quite frankly. Magic-users are rare. Sorcerers, being wholly hereditary, recessive, and hunted by assholes like the Covenant of St. George for centuries, are even rarer. There’s no way to advertise for a teacher, and the people who’d answer an advert like that are usually not the sort of folks it’s a good idea to trust. But I’ve had access to my grandfather’s books, and for a little while at Lowryland, I had Colin, who may have been syphoning off my powers and using them to fuel a malicious luck-theft spell that would eventually have gotten a lot of people killed, but who also knew what the hell he was doing.

  “Breathe,” I said. “Settle into the magic. Think of it as choosing to sing instead of scream. Screaming hurts your throat. So does singing, if you don’t warm up properly, but it can be so much easier, and it can last for so much longer. Pull back the cold. You don’t need it like you think you do.”

  The air around his hands glittered, filled with power and potential. The air began to grow warmer, thawing as he pulled the cold back into himself.

  The blank pages under his hands shimmered, and letters began to appear. They were faint at first, but quickly grew in visibility, until both pages were packed with slanting letters in rust-colored ink, as real as any diary had ever been.

  James gasped.

  “Is that her handwriting?” I asked. I already knew the answer: it matched the writing in the margins of the books back at our rental house.

  He nodded. There were tears in his eyes.

  “Great.” I leaned forward, trying not to flinch from the chill still radiating from his palms, and slammed the book shut.

  “What?!” James glared at me, the air growing colder around us once again—this time with irritation. “Why did you do that?”

  “We need to take these books back to the house.”

  “Why? We can read them here!”

  “Well, one, here, your father could come home any time, which would put a damper on research, and two, we promised the others we’d come back.” We’d done no such thing, only implied it. James was a smart guy. I hoped he’d catch on soon, since doing charades to say “there are no wards here” was a bit beyond my skills.

  Instead, he glowered. “They’re my mother’s diaries.”

  “Yes, and she clearly hid them here figuring that if you inherited her powers, you’d find them and figure out how to read them. But the others are waiting.” Silently, I mouthed, “Please.”

  James started to object again. Then he caught himself, visibly course-correcting, and asked, “How much room do you have in your backpack?”

  “Enough,” I said.

  Thank God.

  * * *

  It took about ten minutes to get the diaries into our respective backpacks. Lifting mine was difficult, to say the least; between the injury in my shoulder and the ongoing weakness of my body as a whole, I felt like I was trying to attend a weight training course after a six-hour derby bout. Not good.

  Worth it. Whatever was in these books was enough to scare the crossroads, which meant we needed to decode them while behind the closest thing we had to a locked door. Once the crossroads knew what James’ mother knew, they would not only be able to defend themselves, they’d be a lot more likely to demand I kill him on the spot. They were already pushing that agenda hard enough to be concerning if I wanted to undersell the situation in a way James probably wouldn’t appreciate. “Hey, the eldritch nightmare you’re devoting your life to wiping out sort of wants me to get on with slitting your throat, but sure, we have time to argue about where your mother’s diaries belong” is concerning, right?

  “Be careful with those,” said James, as he squeezed through the opening into the main attic. It made the most
sense to get the wardrobe back into position and then meet each other in the hall, where I could show him how to access the office. I had the feeling he was going to be spending a lot of time in there.

  Good. He deserved a safe place in his own house, somewhere his father would never think to look for him. Somewhere to decide what happened next.

  “I’ll treat them like they’re those weird egg babies we had to take care of in social studies,” I said, and flapped my hands in a “go on, then, shoo” gesture. “Get moving. I want to get back to the house.”

  James, who still hadn’t twigged to the fact that it was the lack of wards that was distressing me, gave me a curious look. He didn’t know about Bethany attacking me in the stairwell, and why should he? It wasn’t like I could say her name without the risk of summoning her. Stupid ghosts.

  I flapped my hands again. James began wrestling the wardrobe into place.

  There wasn’t much I could do from my side of things. I stayed where I was, watching to be sure he got it close enough to the wall to restore the seal and prevent anyone else from stumbling on the hidden room. It took a while, and when the wardrobe was once again snugly positioned, I closed the door and started for the stairs.

  The absolute blackness of the stairwell was as unsettling on my repeat visit as it had been on my first one. At least this time no unwanted ghosts appeared to haul me off to meetings with the crossroads. I took the steps as fast as I dared in the dark, one hand clutching the rail and the other stretched in front of me, waiting for the moment when my fingers would brush against the door. There was still no smell in the air, of vomit or otherwise. I’d been half expecting it to appear after the fact, making my story harder to believe.

  Harder for anyone else to believe, anyway. I had no doubt about what I’d been through, and if I’d been inclined to start questioning, the continued twitching of the muscles in my neck would have been enough to convince me not to. I’d been tortured. I hadn’t been tortured here.

  James was waiting in the hallway when the bookshelf swung open and I stepped through. He shook his head, looking impressed and almost offended at the same time.

  “I never tried to move that shelf,” he said. “I never even thought of trying.”

  “That was your mom,” I said. “She put protections up, and I guess she figured either they’d break down faster than they did or she left you something you haven’t found yet that would have told you where to look.”

  “I suppose,” he agreed, eyes still troubled.

  Impulsively, I reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “You’ve got her diaries. You’ll have time to find out.” Assuming I could keep the crossroads from forcing me to kill him before he had the chance.

  How much of that pain would I be able to take before it broke me? It was a question I had never wanted the answer to. I still didn’t . . . but I was afraid I was going to get it before all this was over.

  We closed the bookcase and descended the stairs to the first floor together, James a few steps ahead of me. While I hadn’t dared say as much to him, it was so if my legs gave out and dumped me on my ass, he’d be there to catch me.

  Skating back to the house was going to be a lot of fun, I could see that already.

  “If you have snacks you want during the study party that’s about to get underway, I’d suggest picking them up now,” I said, moving to retrieve my unworn shoes from the rack next to the back door.

  James opened his mouth to answer, and froze as the sound of a car’s engine rumbling to a stop washed through the room. He paled. That alone was enough to tell me this wasn’t the day the cleaning service came, and this wasn’t the kind of house where door-to-door solicitors dropped casually by.

  There was no way we were getting out of here without being seen. I dropped my shoes back on the rack. James lunged for the fridge. Neither of us said a word, but we both knew this drill. I’d learned it trying to steal a little privacy from two older siblings. James had learned it in a much harder setting, and was thus faster and more efficient in his motions. By the time my ass hit one of the chairs at the kitchen table, there were two glasses of milk and a plate of Chips Ahoy waiting, creating the impression of a wholesome, bucolic afternoon.

  I took a big gulp of my milk, only wiping half of the ensuing mustache away as James took his own seat. He blinked.

  “Authenticity,” I said, by way of explanation. There wasn’t time to say anything else. We both heard the key turn in the front door, and the door itself swinging open, followed by a heavy boot tread on the floor.

  “I saw your bike, boy,” called a man’s voice, almost disdainfully. “Where are you?”

  James sat up a little taller, shoulders squaring, chin coming up, like he was preparing to be judged. Which might not have been so far from the truth, all things considered. “I’m in the kitchen, sir.”

  I reached out like I was going to take a cookie, waiting until the footsteps grew closer before pulling my hand back. My timing was good: James’ father appeared in the doorway in time to catch the movement, and his eyes flicked to me, drawn like all good predators to the impression of something trying to run away.

  “Jimmy?” he said. “Who’s this?”

  “This is Annie,” he said, and gave me a besotted smile that spoke well of his future with the local theater group. “She and her friends are renting Cousin Norbert’s house for the fall.”

  “Hello, sir,” I said, standing and smoothing the hem of my shirt like I was suddenly anxious about its appropriateness. “You have a lovely home.”

  James’ father said nothing as he looked me up and down.

  The wedding pictures had been enough to prepare me for the ways in which he was like and unlike his son, and I was grateful to have seen them. What they hadn’t prepared me for was the sheer weight of his presence. He filled the room like a thundercloud, dangerous and fascinating at the same time. He was still in uniform, dressed to protect and serve.

  Finally, he asked, “Where are you from, Annie?”

  “Vancouver,” I said. West coast accents are fairly interchangeable to the east coast ear, and being Canadian seemed like a good way to cover for any mistakes I made. I hadn’t been born in a barn: I had just been born in another country.

  “Huh,” he said. His gaze flicked to the milk and cookies on the table, and then back to me. “You’ve got a little something on your lip.”

  “Oh!” I raised my hand to cover it, like I was ashamed, and reached for a napkin. James was already in the process of handing me one. Our fingers brushed. Quick as I could, I pictured Sam naked in my bed, then pictured my grandmother walking into the room. That did it. Heat rose in my cheeks as I jerked my hand away. To the nonpsychic observer, it would look like the mere act of touching hands had been enough to make me blush.

  James’ father was not, thankfully, psychic. He lifted his eyebrows, then looked to James. “A word?”

  “Yes, sir.” James stood. “Annie, I’ll be right back to escort you home.” So please don’t move.

  “All right,” I said. “It was nice to meet you, sir.”

  “Likewise, young lady.” That seemed to be enough to serve as a good-bye: James’ father turned and walked out of the room, and James hurried after.

  Moving seemed like a bad idea, especially when the chief of police was interrogating his own son on his intentions toward the tourist girl in the next room over. I took a cookie instead. The fact that Chief Smith had somehow failed to notice that James and I were apparently having the kind of date more appropriate for sixth graders was almost irrelevant. He didn’t know his son. I wasn’t sure he’d ever taken the time to try.

  The cookie was store-bought but tasty. I ate another one, and drank about half my milk. It felt good enough on my scraped-up throat that I finished the glass before looking thoughtfully at James’. He hadn’t touched it. I was on the verge of making the swap when
James himself came storming back into the kitchen, head down and shoulders hunched.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Ready.” I stood immediately, grabbing the backpack from where it rested next to my chair. “I just need to get my skates on and we can go.”

  “Good.” James made for the back door without another word, not even pausing to clean up our “snack.” He grabbed his shoes on the way out. I did the same, although I stuffed mine into the bag before sitting down and starting to lace up my skates.

  James didn’t stop. He went to the bottom of the porch and got his bike, hands white-knuckled on the handlebars. I gave him a concerned look, but I didn’t hurry. There are things in life that shouldn’t be rushed. Lacing up a pair of skates is one of them. When your mode of transport is attached to your feet, the last thing you want is for a knot to give way.

  Eventually, I felt secure enough to stand, slip my arms into the backpack’s straps, and walk carefully down the stairs to join James. “I know the way,” I said softly. “If you need to go ahead, you can.”

  “He’s probably at one of the windows, watching us go,” James replied. “If he sees me pedal off without you, the game is up.”

  “Is that all?” I asked, and leaned in to kiss James on the cheek. Only the cheek. It was suitable to the length of our supposed relationship, and more, given what he’d said about his life so far, I was willing to bet he hadn’t kissed many girls.

  The startled look on his face when I pulled away was enough to confirm my guess. I offered a sideways smile.

  “Veracity,” I said, and started skating.

  My legs were sore and tired enough that I hadn’t managed to get very far by the time he caught up with me. He coasted along, matching my pace, until the house was out of view around the curve of the driveway and there was no way his father was still watching us.