Perhaps predictably, it was Sam who first noticed that I wasn’t writing anymore. “Annie?” he asked, putting down his pencil. “You okay?”
“No,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Okay. First, James, I apologize: your stupid time travel idea wasn’t all that stupid after all. Second, we’re going to need to go through the rest of the library to see whether there’s anything there on summoning ghosts.”
“Why?” asked James warily.
“Because we’re going to need my Aunt Mary for the next part.” I picked up my notes and read, “‘The crossroads are a place and an idea at the same time, which is both their strength and their weakness. Because they are both physical and not, an attack on one aspect which does not address the other will never be sufficient to guarantee their destruction.’”
“This is making my head hurt already,” murmured Sam.
I ignored him. “‘It is my belief that, based on the following accounts’—and she has a list of names here, of people who made bargains; I recognize a few of them, so I bet we’ve transcribed all their stories—‘the weakest point of this contradictory existence can be found at its origin. A spell which carried a petitioner back to the moment of the crossroads’ creation would also enable the crossroads to be sundered into their component parts. The echo of this sundering might then weaken their grip on the world, and allow a simple exorcism of the spiritual force powering the crossroads as we know them now to be effective.’”
“That’s . . . that’s a really fancy way of saying ‘throw the TNT and pray,’” said Cylia dubiously. “It can’t be that easy. If it were that easy, somebody would have nuked the crossroads the first time they exploded a herd of cows, and we wouldn’t be doing this now.”
“The first problem is access,” I said. “It says . . . okay, so it says in order to get to the point where an attack can have any chance of working, you must first bring someone who has been wronged by an unfair bargain to the crossroads. They have to get all the way to the deal point without changing their mind. And they need a crossroads ghost to basically play mediator. I don’t think Bethany is going to volunteer for a plan that ends with her not having a job anymore.”
Of course, that was only the first problem. I had to hope that “first” wasn’t the word they’d focus on.
It wasn’t. “Would Mary volunteer?” asked Sam dubiously.
I paused. Mary, my Mary, Mary Dunlavy, who’d become a babysitter after her body was already cold in the field. Mary, who’d always done her best to protect her family, my family, from the clutches of the crossroads, who had only become a crossroads ghost because it was that or disappear into the afterlife, leaving her father alone. He’d died shortly after her deal had been made, and he hadn’t lingered, not like Mary, but he was still the reason she’d decided to stay.
“There’s that awful saying, blood is thicker than water,” I said. “At least that’s how we say it now, hundreds of years after it was originally written. Some people say the whole phrase should be ‘the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.’ The family you make is as important as the family you’re given. Maybe more important. When you choose someone, it’s because you have a choice. Mary chose my family. She’s one of us, and she wants us to be safe. I think . . . I think if we can get her back, she’ll help us challenge the crossroads.”
Cylia nodded. “So we take you, because you’ve been wronged, and we get Mary back, and—”
“No.” I shook my head. “I haven’t been wronged. That’s the problem.”
Silence. Everyone blinked at me, briefly united on Team Missing the Point. That was okay. It wasn’t like I’d exactly drawn them a flow chart to work from.
“Annie, they want you to kill James,” said Sam carefully.
“I noticed,” I said.
“It’s just that that sort of feels like they’re wronging you.”
“They’re not.” I shot James an apologetic look. “I agreed to a favor to be determined later. I knew they could ask me to do something awful, something I’d have to find a way to get out of, and I said I’d do it, because I wanted to live more than I wanted to know that I was dying with clean hands. If anything, I’m wronging them by refusing to do what I promised.”
“I appreciate your rebellious streak,” muttered James.
“Hey. I didn’t know for sure that they were going to ask me to kill a person. I didn’t know what they were going to ask for. I just knew I had a lot more options if I wasn’t dead, and that if I didn’t get to my friends, they were going to be dead.”
“As one of the people she saved, I want to go with ‘yay Annie’s flexible morality,’” said Cylia. “If I get a vote.”
“Um, same,” said Fern.
James—the only person in the room who hadn’t been at Lowryland, who didn’t understand the pressure I’d been under when I’d agreed to sell myself to the crossroads—flung his hands up in a gesture of disgusted defeat. “Fine,” he said. “I’m the one who’s been wronged. We can get your ghost and we can get ourselves to a potential bargain site, but how do we reach the actual liminal space where the bargains happen? The crossroads are malicious, shortsighted, and occasionally ignorant of human nature, but they’re not stupid. They’ll know something’s up.”
“Oh, that part’s easy,” I said. “We just have to convince them I’m there to kill you.”
And then I could deal with the second problem. Because I had the spell, the words and gestures that would hopefully, if performed in a liminal space like the crossroads, use their questionable relationship to reality to rewind time to the point where all the trouble began. The only question was who would cast it, since none of the others had or knew how to use magic, and James was going to be playing witness in the trial that would determine his own future.
That left me, and my magic was currently in the custody of the crossroads. Which meant I needed to find a way to access it while it was being held captive. No pressure or anything. It was just that if I got this wrong, we were all going to die.
Seventeen
“Lord save me from the living.”
–Mary Dunlavy
The dining room of a rented house in New Gravesend, Maine
MY PRONOUNCEMENT FELL INTO the room with all the grace and buoyancy of a lead balloon. If we could have tied it around the crossroads’ metaphorical ankles, our problems would have been over—or at least temporarily confined to the bottom of the lake.
Finally, with a surprising amount of delicacy, Fern said, “So, um, you want us to take you and James to the crossroads at the same time, where you’re going to stab him or something?”
“I shouldn’t need to stab him very much,” I said.
“That’s encouraging,” muttered James.
“Oh, don’t be such a big baby,” I said. “I’m good at stabbing people. I can make it look very violent and impressive without puncturing a kidney or anything.”
He stared at me. “Is this meant to be reassuring? Because if it is, you’re doing it wrong.”
“If we do this right, I shouldn’t have to stab you at all,” I said. “Although stabbing you a little would help, since it would mean I had a knife. Which you could then take away from me, leaving me unarmed.” Unarmed, and going to confront an unspeakable horror on its own turf.
There was a time when I thought I was the smart one in my family. Now I just think I’m the one who was saving up all her stupidity to use it in one gloriously impressive display of What Not To Do.
“I have so many problems with this plan that I don’t think I could list them all even if I wanted to try,” said Sam. “On second thought, no. I really want to try, because this isn’t so much a ‘plan’ as it is the Rube Goldberg version of a suicide attempt.”
“Do you have a better idea?” I asked.
“Yeah. We ward the fuck out of the car and we get out of M
aine.” Sam glared at me. “This doesn’t have to be our fight. This shouldn’t be our fight. This is a bad fight, and I don’t like it, and I don’t want you getting hurt.”
“See, that’s the important word here. ‘Hurt.’ Mary’s hurt. Whatever the crossroads are doing to her, it’s not pleasant. Maybe it’s not pain like the living experience it, but it’s not good. So someone I love is already suffering because of all this. James is hurt. When the crossroads took Sally, they hurt him, and he has a right to be angry, and he has a right to want to make them pay for what they did. And while I’m pretty sure you don’t care about either of those things as much as you would if you didn’t feel like I was in danger—and I really love you for caring about whether or not I’m in danger—here’s something you should care about: I can’t live my life behind wards. I can’t be locked in some shiny cage and told that you’ll take care of me.”
I waved my hands, indicating the room around us, the safely warded house with its strong walls and sturdy windows.
“My grandfather made a deal with the crossroads to save my grandmother’s life,” I said. “I don’t know the exact terms he agreed to. No one does except for Mary, and she’s never been allowed to tell us what they were. What I do know is that after he made his deal, he stopped going outside. Not right away, but slowly, staying a little closer to home every day. His world narrowed inch by inch, and by the time the crossroads carried him away, he couldn’t even go down the stairs. Grandma had to carry his meals up to him, because he’d lost everything below the second floor. They crushed him like a rat in a trap, and when that wasn’t funny anymore, they came for him anyway. There aren’t wards to keep the crossroads out. All you could do is break me, so that when they showed up and said, ‘Hey, kiddo, time to pay for fucking with us,’ I’d be grateful for the chance to see the sky again.” I took a breath. “Also, warding a car isn’t like warding a house. I’m not sure it would work, and even if it did, we’d have to take James with us and have him recast the wards every hundred miles or so, which wouldn’t work out for long.”
Sam stared at me for a moment before he shoved his chair away from the table, rose, and walked out of the room. I watched him go, fighting the urge to run after him. Not so I could promise to stay out of danger—that was never going to happen—but so I could put my arms around him and hold on until he realized we were doing the right thing. It was terrible and it was dangerous and it was right.
He was going to be really thrilled when I went looking for Leo.
“This is so much fun, gosh, why did it take me this long to completely fuck up my life,” I muttered.
“I’m the one you’re planning to stab,” said James, a note of wry sympathy in his otherwise dry tone. He was trying to distract me.
I’ve always been happy to be distracted with the idea of stabbing someone. “True enough,” I said, gathering the shreds of my composure into something that could almost pass for cheer. “I bring one knife, I stab you to show the crossroads I’m serious, then you take the knife away. They won’t expect it to be my only weapon. It’s too far out of character.”
James gave me a dubious look. “How many weapons do you customarily have?”
“The family record is fifty-three, currently held by my mother, who is absolutely terrifying and also really good at hiding darts in her hair without scratching herself,” I said. “I mean, we have some apocryphal numbers on Grandpa Thomas, but he’s been missing for decades, and no one is willing to believe anything in triple digits until we’ve seen actual proof.”
“Is disarming the traps a mating ritual for you people?” demanded James, aghast.
I winked broadly. “Indiana Jones ain’t got nothing on someone who successfully dates a member of my family.”
James put his hands over his face and groaned. I turned my attention to Cylia and Fern, sobering.
“Cylia, do you have enough good luck to add a little extra oomph to the summoning ritual we use to get Mary back, as soon as we figure out what that ritual is going to be?”
She hesitated before nodding. “Yes, but if that’s what you want me to do, that’s all I can do. We have Covenant operatives, we have a malicious hole in the world, and I love you, but that doesn’t mean I’m dying for you, got it? I need to hold back enough to make sure I get out of here in one piece.”
“Does that include getting Fern out of here in one piece?”
“It does.”
“Then fair, and good, and absolutely right. You help us recover Mary and then you’re in the clear. You don’t have to do another thing if you don’t want to.”
Cylia made a sour face. “I don’t want to do any of this.”
“Don’t I get a vote?” asked Fern. “What if I don’t want to get out of here without you?”
“Sorry, sweetie, but you’re the endangered species in the room, not me,” I said.
“That’s not true,” she said. “You and James are both sorcerers. Isn’t that hereditary and like, super-recessive? You’re endangered, too.”
James and I exchanged a look.
“In the alternate universe where Sam didn’t exist and we were somehow compatible—”
“Which we’re not: I prefer women who are marginally less likely to puncture my internal organs over a minor spat,” he muttered.
“—maybe that would be a concern,” I finished. “Sorcery is super-recessive, yes, but I’m not currently planning to have kids, and we’re trying to keep James from being murdered. I think for us, running away is the greater risk. For you, it’s the way you get clear of what’s about to happen. Take the exit, Fern. Please. For me. Let me go into this knowing that you’re safe.”
She looked at me, blue eyes wide and pleading. It was hard to meet those eyes and not agree to do anything she wanted, if she’d just stop giving me that look.
“What about me?” she asked. “You want me to run away knowing that you’re not safe. You’re my best friend, Annie. I don’t want to leave you.”
“Maybe you won’t have to,” I said. “I mean, we still have a plan that depends on you knocking me down and sitting on me if the crossroads get too far into my head. That hasn’t changed.”
Fern looked slightly mollified. That was okay. If I was my friend, I’d look forward to the chance to hit me, too.
“After we have Mary back, we can ask her nicely if she’d be willing to climb into a spirit jar for us,” I said, leaving the topic of who was leaving who behind. “They’re a kind of ghost prison. It’s cruel to leave a ghost in them for long, or to imprison them without consent, but once a ghost is confined, if they’re not struggling to escape, they’re undetectable.”
James caught on first. “Meaning we could carry her with us to the crossroads without them realizing she’s there.”
“Exactly. They’ll probably feel it when we free her, but if they assume she ran as soon as she was free, we’ll be able to get the drop on them. I haul you down there, threaten you, stab you a little, get the crossroads to manifest in order to gloat—”
“At which point we free the ghost to demand a renegotiation of the deal that wronged me.” He was starting to get excited. “That might actually work.”
“Assuming the crossroads doesn’t seize control of you and make stabbing him a little into stabbing him a lot,” said Cylia. “How are we going to prevent that?”
“He’ll freeze my hand to make me drop the knife,” I said. “I won’t have any other weapons, and I’m not that great in a hand-to-hand fight. Sam can take me easily.” Barring that, Leonard could subdue me. The idea of having my ass kicked by a Covenant operative wasn’t appealing. The idea of having my ass kicked by that Covenant operative was even less appealing.
If Sam wasn’t willing to go along with this, Leonard might be my only option. I was pretty sure I’d be able to talk Leonard into helping us fight the crossroads, which were, after all, a threat to
all humanity, and hence the sort of thing the Covenant should have been fighting.
In a better world, that’s what they would have been doing. In a better world, the Covenant would have listened when my great-great-grandfather went to them with evidence that slaughtering intelligent creatures wasn’t the only way to make things better for humanity, and they would have started to conserve and protect, as well as kill. Leonard and I could have been on the same side all along. In a better world.
Too bad this was the world we had to live in.
“When Mary forces the renegotiation, what happens?” asked Cylia.
“We get pulled into the liminal space where the exorcism can be effective,” I said. “It’s not a true exorcism—no priests, no demons, no holy water or pea soup. It’s more of a banishing ritual tied into the innate power of the crossroads themselves. They don’t have time there, not the way we have it here, and we should be able to reach all the way back to the root of what they did and sever the connection.”
“Wait,” said Fern, a sudden frown on her face. “Doesn’t the crossroads have your magic? That’s how they can hurt you the way you said they can. What happens if we break the connection before you get it back?”
I shrugged, trying to sound like I didn’t feel strongly one way or the other as I said, “I never really liked setting things on fire anyway. If it gets rid of the crossroads, it’s worth it.”
I tried not to remember the way my fire had clung to me when I reclaimed it in the hidden room at Lowryland, the feeling that I’d betrayed something essential about myself when I gave it away in the first place. I tried not to dwell on how hollow my bones felt, like there was an empty space inside them where the magic should have been. I’d never wanted it. I’d never asked for it. But that didn’t mean I was ready to lose it.
And none of that mattered. If giving up my magic was the only way to make sure the crossroads stopped ruining lives and destroying families—if it was the only way to keep them from turning me into a murderer—that was what I was going to do.
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