That Ain't Witchcraft

by Seanan McGuire

  James laughed. The sound was thin and strained, the laughter of a man who didn’t know what else to do. “Does it matter? This is happening. This has been happening for my entire life and longer. Someone has to do it.”

  I glanced at Sam. His expression was grim. He was hearing the same thing I was, the echoes of our earlier conversation spreading through the room from other sources, from lips other than my own.

  “When a thing is right, and you know you have the power to do it, backing down is wrong,” I said, and touched the spirit jar in my pocket. It was cold against my fingers, colder than it had any right to be, chilled by the circling spirit of a teenage girl who had never been given the chance to grow up. “Can I talk to you? Alone?”

  James gave me a startled look. “I—why?”

  “I’ll explain upstairs.”

  Sam waved. “If you’re worried about that head-twisting thing I mentioned before, it’s cool. I’m not in a decapitating mood.”

  “All right,” said James warily. “Annie, lead the way.”

  Cylia and Fern frowned in eerie unison. It was Cylia who spoke, asking, “Annie? Is this something that should be shared with the entire class?”

  “That’s up to James,” I said. “We’ll be back downstairs as soon as we can.”

  “All right, then. Who wants waffles?” Cylia spread her hands. “I can twist our luck until it screams, I can do as much as I can to make sure things fall our way, but I can’t make any promises. I don’t have knives, or magic. I can’t fly. I can’t move faster than a speeding bullet.”

  Sam rubbed the scar on his forehead left by a Covenant bullet, and said nothing.

  “What I can do is make sure we’re all fed and fortified before we go off to tangle with a deathless eldritch force from another reality. So I ask you again, who wants waffles?”

  As it turned out, everybody wanted waffles. James and I slipped away while she was whipping up the batter. Hopefully, we’d be back downstairs soon.

  Hopefully, this wasn’t the straw that broke the sorcerer’s back.

  Hopefully.

  Twenty-one

  “Nobody’s chosen. Everybody gets to choose. Make the choice that brings you home. We’re not being paid to save the world, here.”

  –Jane Harrington-Price

  In the upstairs library of a rented house in New Gravesend, Maine, getting ready for an uncomfortable conversation

  I’LL GIVE JAMES THIS much: he’d grown up in a house with a father who resented him for existing, had developed sorcery without spilling the beans to any of his classmates or coworkers, and had fallen begrudgingly but completely into our weird little world, and he had done it all with a closed mouth and an open mind. He waited until we were in the library with the door shut before he rounded on me.

  “Well?” he demanded. “What now? Are we secretly blood relations, or have you discovered that the ritual to summon the crossroads requires us to get married before we conjure the dead? Or have you decided to kill me after all, and this was your way of getting me alone before you do the deed?”

  I blinked. Then, helplessly, I began to laugh.

  This seemed to annoy James further, thus proving that he was a sensible man who’d simply had the misfortune to fall in with a bunch of weirdos. I flapped a hand, trying to get my laughter under control. It had a hysterical edge that I didn’t like, especially under the circumstances.

  Finally, tears rolling down my cheeks, I managed to make it stop. “I’m sorry,” I gasped. “This isn’t funny, it’s just—the look on your face—” It was all I could do not to start laughing again.

  To my surprise, James quirked a small, somewhat wan smile. “Sally said something similar the day she informed me of her intention to be my new best friend. Apparently, I looked like a deer in front of a train.”

  “I can’t wait to meet her.” I wiped my tears away, sobering further. “Really, though, I need to talk to you, and I need you to listen to me until I’m done. Okay?”

  The smile vanished, replaced by more familiar wariness. “All right. What do you need to say?”

  “Your father dropped by.”

  James scowled. “I assure you, whatever he told you, it wasn’t on my behalf.”

  “I figured, since he started off by telling me not to have any further contact with you. I thought about telling him you were in the boathouse, naked, waiting for me to show up with the maple syrup and the handcuffs, but I was afraid he’d take me seriously and go storming out there to make you put your pants back on.”

  James said nothing as his cheeks and ears flared beet red. Laughing at him would have been unkind. I settled for patting him on the hand.

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t say it.”

  “Thank God,” said James, in a strangled voice. “I think he’d lock me in the attic for a month.”

  I paused to eye him. “Do you mean that seriously?”

  He turned his face away.

  Fuck. “Just so you know, I had already decided I was adopting you and taking you home to meet the rest of the family. I really, really hope you wanted siblings, because you now have two sisters, a brother, a sister-in-law, a brother-in-law, and assorted cousins, aunts, uncles, and other such familial detritus.”

  James looked back to me, blinking in slow bewilderment. “Ah,” he said finally. “I suppose I’ll have a busy Christmas.”

  “You better believe it.” I took a deep breath. “Look. He didn’t just tell me to stop seeing you. He told me some things about your mother.”

  “As if he knows anything—”

  “He knew she was a sorcerer.”

  That silenced him. James stared at me, eyes wide, cheeks pale enough to make his earlier blush seem like a mistake.

  “She told him before they got married, because she wanted him to know . . . and because there’s sort of a curse on your family line.” This was where I had to tread carefully. If James started blaming himself for his mother’s death, dealing with the crossroads was going to become one hell of a lot harder. “One of your ancestors was afraid the family would lose the magic. Sorcery is sort of the ultimate recessive gene, at least as far as human magic-users go. Even sorcerers marrying sorcerers won’t guarantee it gets passed along. So he went to the crossroads, and he asked them to promise his line would always breed true. I guess the crossroads ghost who was supposed to help him word that request was a little less diligent than Mary, because he used the phrase ‘that New Gravesend should always be protected against the dangers of the unseen world.’”

  “Meaning what?” asked James, in a small, strangled voice.

  “Meaning there’s a reason you’ve never been outside the municipality. His crossroads bargain is still in effect, and it won’t let you leave. You have to stay here because you’re the town’s official protector.” Untrained, untested, and unprepared. Some protector. It was an elegant trap, one that would probably have finished snapping shut the first time something that actually needed to be protected against wandered into the city limits.

  “And my mother knew?” he asked.

  This was the hard part. I took a deep breath. “According to your father, she knew, and she also knew that as soon as you were old enough for your magic to stabilize—as soon as the bargain was kept—she’d get sick. Only one descendant at a time. The crossroads don’t like sorcerers. They weren’t going to allow your family to breed an army against them.”

  James was silent for several seconds. Then, jerkily, he stood, and punched the nearest wall. Frost clung to the wallpaper where his knuckles hit. I took a step back, watching silently as he struck it again and again, until he stopped and slumped, leaning forward until his forehead hit the wall. He was panting.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know this is a lot.”

  His laughter was bitter. “A lot? I killed my mother.”

  “No, you
didn’t. She knew, James. She knew she’d only get a few years with you, and she decided it was worth it. You don’t get to say that she was wrong. Okay? She wanted you to exist. She wanted to know you.”

  He turned to look at me bleakly. “What do I do now?”

  “Now?” I shrugged. “Now you do what you’ve been working toward all along. You kick the crossroads until they beg for mercy, and you do it for Sally, and you do it for your mother. And then you come home with me, and I introduce you to the rest of the family.”

  He hesitated. “Will they . . . do you think they’re going to like me?”

  It was no effort at all to smile at him. “I think they’re going to love you, new brother. I really think they will.”

  * * *

  The waffle party was in full swing downstairs. Cylia had piled several plates high and set them in the middle of the dining room table, surrounded by an assortment of toppings both predictable—maple syrup and powdered sugar and strawberry jam—and a little bit surreal—bacon bits and chicken nuggets and candied cauliflower. She saw me eyeing the chicken nuggets, and shrugged.

  “Chicken and waffles is a time-honored tradition,” she said. “I wasn’t going to fry chicken, so you get the next best thing.”

  “Plus no bones,” said Fern gleefully. “The best meat doesn’t have any bones.”

  “Sylphs are natural insectivores,” I said, for James and Sam’s benefit. Their mutual horrified looks were simply a bonus. Fern giggled. The bonus wasn’t just for me.

  Sam was perched on the back of the couch with his plate of waffles, eating with both hands while holding his coffee with his tail. I settled on the cushion in front of him with my own smaller portion, watching the room as I cut the waffles into bite-sized pieces.

  Looking at Cylia, it would have been easy to tell myself she was completely at ease with the situation, ready to deal with whatever the world wanted to throw at her. The platters of waffles put the lie to that idea. She was as tightly wound as the rest of us, and dealing with the situation the only way she could: by taking care of us now, before she couldn’t anymore.

  She didn’t think we were going to make it through this. That was almost reassuring, in a messed-up way. I might be stubbornly willing to keep telling myself I could find a route that saved everyone I cared about, even if I couldn’t necessarily save my magic, or even myself, but if she was accepting the depth of the shit we were in, that meant she wasn’t deluding herself. And if Cylia had accepted the reality of our situation, Fern had, too. Sam might think I could handle anything, but he was enough of a realist to know things might not go our way. As for James . . .

  He’d spent years planning a way to get his revenge on the crossroads and bring Sally home. Alive or dead. Alive would be better, of course, but at least having a corpse would give her family freedom, even as it broke his heart forever. Sometimes closure is the only gift worth giving.

  We’d been in town for less than a week, and he was on the cusp of finally getting what he wanted—possibly even including his freedom, if he survived the confrontation. If this went the way we were hoping, when it was done, he’d be able to put New Gravesend behind him forever. He could walk away from the father who’d never understood him, from the shadows on his mother’s grave, from the people who had been perfectly happy to live in the safe harbor of a sorcerer’s protection, without remembering what that meant for the sorcerer.

  (Maybe that was unfair. James hadn’t known about the crossroads deal, after all, and if the sorcerer didn’t know, how could the people he was ostensibly forgetting understand what he’d given up to stay with and watch over them? The problem with bargains that span generations is that they can be forgotten without being invalidated. It’s not right and it’s not fair, but it’s the world we live with, and it’s the only world we’ve got.)

  Everything was changing. All we could do was try to keep up.

  The doorbell rang. Sam shifted back to human form without getting off the back of the couch. I stayed where I was, continuing to inhale waffles. Everyone else had had the chance to get a head start on me and James, after all. Cylia looked around the room, saw that no one was moving, rolled her eyes, and moved toward the door.

  “Think she needs backup?” asked Sam, swallowing.

  “I think she needs a target for her pent-up aggressions,” I said, and ate a bite of waffle paired with chicken nugget. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, either, but my culinary preferences have always been more about convenience than quality. “If it’s James’ dad again, he’s never coming back.”

  “If she scares him off the property, I’m moving in with you,” said James.

  I laughed, and was still laughing when Cylia returned, now trailed by a ruffled-looking Leonard Cunningham. He fixed me with a steely-eyed gaze that was probably meant to be impressive, but really made him look like he’d eaten something unpleasant.

  “Want some waffles?” I asked.

  Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. He paused, blinking at me.

  “Yes, please,” he finally said. “I’m starving.”

  “They’re on the table, help yourself,” I said. “We’re carb-loading before we head for the crossroads. Everything go okay?”

  “He’s not inside out, so I’m assuming yes,” said Sam.

  “Everything went . . . reasonably well,” said Leonard. “I feel the need for a stiff drink, or perhaps five, but no one died, and I was not badgered into accepting any bargains.”

  For the first time, I noticed how pale he was, and the faint tremor in his hands. He had been genuinely shaken by the encounter. I set my plate aside and stood.

  “Drinking is probably a bad idea right now,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know.” Leonard shook his head. “I’d heard stories, but I always assumed . . . I thought the people who let themselves be taken advantage of were weak, somehow. That they’d earned the fates the crossroads cast for them. But I . . .”

  He stopped, waving his hands for a moment before he looked at me helplessly.

  “I could have fallen to temptation,” he said. “You are my enemy. I know that. I may never convince you that my side is the right one. But with God as my witness, it is my duty to help you stop this thing. This is an abomination. It should never have been.”

  I smiled and extended one hand. After a beat, he took it, expression turning quizzical.

  “All right,” I said. “Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s get this party started.”

  Twenty-two

  “Nothing is too much to pay to bring the ones you love safely home. Remember that when the time comes to pay the last thing you wanted to lose.”

  –Alice Healy

  Crossing New Gravesend, moving toward a confrontation

  IT TURNED OUT LEONARD didn’t have an American driver’s license: he’d been getting around town via a local taxi service. Good for the economy, not so great for the part where we had one car and six people. Cylia’s fondness for ridiculously roomy classics meant we could cram five people into the car we had, as long as the folks in the back didn’t mind getting real friendly, but six was a step too far. Worse, we were hoping to come back from the crossroads with seven. The laws of physics said cramming Sally in with the rest of us wasn’t going to happen.

  When in doubt, remember that there’s more than one way to get anywhere. James had his bike. He was the one who knew the way, which made it important for him to stay in the car with Cylia, but I, in addition to never learning how to drive, had been riding my own bike since I was nine years old.

  “You’re sure you’re okay with this,” said James, for the fifth time. “I could write the directions down, and you could ride with Cylia.”

  “I’m fine.” I checked the strap on my helmet. Roller derby safety gear and bicycle safety gear are basically identical, at least for our current
needs. “Just make sure she goes slow, and I’ll be able to keep up without crashing. We get there, we get Sally back, everything is awesome, we all go out for donuts.”

  “I like donuts,” said Fern, stepping up next to me with her own helmet in her hand.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Am I missing something?”

  “Only the part where we’re riding doubles to the hanging tree,” she said and dimpled. “I’m the lightest, remember? I don’t want to be squished in with a Covenant boy. And you’re stupid if you think we’re letting you out there alone. There’s too much that could go wrong.”

  “Did Sam put you up to this?”

  Fern’s smile lost a few watts, dimming into something more reasonable. “Sam’s not the only one allowed to worry about you. I was here before he was, and with the way you humans date, I’ll probably be here when he’s gone.”

  She wasn’t trying to be hurtful. Sylphs have a different approach to relationships, prizing friendship over romance. Whether they operated that way before humans killed off so many of them that being willing to live alone became a survival strategy is anyone’s guess. We’ve left a permanent mark on this planet, and not only because of our fondness for digging holes.

  “I’m not alone,” I said. “I have Mary.”

  “She’s in a jar.” Fern rolled her eyes. “Can we pretend we’ve had this whole fight, and skip ahead to the part where you admit I’m right and we get on the stupid bike? I want this over with. I want to go home.”

  I opened my mouth and paused. “You’re right,” I said finally. “Let’s do this.”

  Fern looked relieved. James nodded.

  “Be careful,” he said and walked to the car, sliding into the back with Leonard. Cylia and Sam were in the front, the one because she was driving, the other because if something happened and he had to change forms, it would be much easier for him to shove himself through the window from the front.