That Ain't Witchcraft

by Seanan McGuire

  Break one of the rules here, break them all. The crossroads had created their own prison when they seized a place that seemed impermeable to outside attack. Sure, they were almost untouchable from the outside, but once someone was able to get in . . .

  I took a step backward, away from the brewing confrontation. Sam gave me a curious glance. I nodded, and he mirrored my movement. Cylia, Fern, and Leonard did the same, until all five of us were backing carefully away, moving inch by inch down the road, away from Mary, and James, and the terrible fury of the crossroads.

  Finally, we were far enough away that it felt safe to turn and run, paralleling the corn, which continued to rustle like the world’s greatest graveyard.

  “I do not want to go into that!” shouted Sam.

  “None of us do!” I replied.

  “Where the fuck are we going?” asked Cylia.

  It was a valid question. It deserved a serious answer. I considered as I ran, and finally called back, “Away.”

  She glared at me. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t blame her. We were, after all, running down an endless unpaved road under a blasted summer sky, in a pocket dimension wholly owned, operated, and controlled by an unspeakable eldritch terror with a thing for being an asshole wishing ring.

  That was the point. Not the asshole thing: the pocket dimension. We kept running until figures appeared on the horizon and I stumbled to a stop, motioning for the others to do the same. Fern, her density dialed down too far to make stopping easy, shot on a few more feet before Sam’s tail whipped out, wrapped around her middle, and jerked her back.

  “What the hell?” Leonard demanded.

  “Look.” I pointed at the figures up ahead.

  He squinted for a moment. Then his eyes widened. “Is that . . . ?”

  “Yeah.” Three figures, one a shape cut out of the air, one white-haired and standing in front of the third. They were too far away for us to pick out fine details, but it didn’t take fine details to recognize Mary, James, and the incarnate crossroads. There was no one else they could have been.

  Leonard and the others turned to stare at me. I shrugged.

  “My grandmother says there are two kinds of dimensions: real ones, like Earth, and artificial ones. The fake dimensions never extend as far as the real ones. Most of them don’t want to. They’re there to fulfill a purpose, and they don’t waste energy having things like ‘distance’ or ‘geography.’”

  “What kind of foolishness have you people been getting up to?” demanded Leonard.

  I ignored him.

  “There are lots of crossroads,” said Fern. “People all over the world make bargains like you did. How can there be lots if their whole world is so small that we can run through it without running out of breath?”

  “I’m not a dimensional physicist,” I said. “I have no idea.”

  “So we ran away for the sake of not running away,” said Cylia. “Why?”

  I took a breath and looked her directly in the eye. Here went everything.

  “We’re in the crossroads,” I said. “Everything here is the crossroads. The sky, the ground, the corn, even that weird cut-out fucker arguing with Mary and James. That means the things they’ve taken from people are here. Not my grandfather or Sally—I don’t think anything human can live here for very long—but the things.”

  Cylia nodded slowly. “Things like your magic.”

  “Things like my magic,” I said. “I can’t reclaim it with the bargain unfulfilled. What we’re about to do may mean I never get it back. But at Lowryland, when I was close to it, my fire knew I was there. If I’m close enough to the magic, and if I’m very, very lucky, I could use it. Not enough to start a fire or something like that. Enough to cast a spell.”

  “Annie . . .” said Sam.

  “What kind of spell?” asked Cylia.

  “The kind that throws us backward through time to the point where everything went wrong, and lets me try to stop it.” James’ plan. James’ idea. Just a slightly different execution.

  “You would need to be . . . very lucky,” said Cylia carefully. “Even then, odds are good the luck would snap back on you after the spell was cast. You could die.”

  “I’m against any plan where Annie dies,” said Sam.

  “As am I,” said Leonard. The pair of them paused to glare at each other.

  “I’m hard to kill,” I said.

  “That’s not the only thing that could go wrong,” said Cylia.

  “I know, but James is busy, and none of the rest of you have any magic at all, not even in someone else’s jar.” I offered her a wan smile. “It’s a bad plan. It’s a dangerous plan. It’s the plan we’ve got, and we’re doing it.”

  “Annie?” Fern sounded uncertain.

  “Yeah?”

  “You knew before we came here that James would be busy. Was this the plan the whole time?”

  Everything went silent. I took a breath, turning to fully face her before I reached out and grasped her shoulders.

  “You are my best friends,” I said. “You’re the best friends a girl like me could ever have. You get that, right? I’m a Price. I grew up thinking all I’d ever have would be my family, and maybe the occasional flash of gratitude from someone I saved because we’re still trying to pay off a karmic debt that started centuries ago. And I got you. All of you. You’re amazing. You’re strong and clever and good. God, you’re good. So yeah, this was the plan all along, and it’s not because I have a death wish, and it’s not because I owe anything. It’s because no matter how much else changes, I’m still a Price, and we’re like cockroaches. We don’t die.”

  “Except when you do,” said Leonard.

  I had almost forgotten he was there. I glanced at him and frowned. “Except when we do,” I said. “But that’s not going to be here, and it’s not going to be today. So how about you wish me luck and watch my back, okay?”

  I waited for them to nod before I pulled the folded piece of paper from my pocket, opening it to reveal the spell I had meticulously copied from James’ mother’s journal. Seeing it in my own handwriting made it make more sense. That always happened. Making a thing your own made it more comprehensible, and hence easier to manage.

  Please let this be easy to manage.

  Sitting cross-legged on the hard-packed dirt of the road, I leaned forward and used my pointer finger to inscribe the beginning of a circle around myself. Finishing it took some twisting, but I was careful to keep my butt firmly on the ground. The simpler a spell, the more important it is to follow it exactly, and this one was as simple as they come. If it wanted me sitting while I drew my circle, I was going for the full sit.

  I looked up. Cylia and Fern were watching James and Mary as they faced down the crossroads. Leonard was watching me, a scowl on his face. So was Sam, although he wasn’t scowling, just staring at me with open-faced longing. His tail was wrapped around his left ankle, squeezing so hard it had to hurt. It was taking everything he had not to grab me and book it. I could see it in his eyes, and I loved him for wanting to save me, even as I loved him even more for staying where he was.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said, with a confidence I didn’t entirely feel. “Trust me. I’m a professional.”

  “Professional pain in my ass,” he muttered.

  I flashed him a quick, strained smile, and looked back down at the paper in my hands. Lowryland had done me few favors, but my training there had given me this much, at least: I had a better sense of what the spell was meant to do, and how to craft and control it. Now all I needed was the magic.

  “Come back to me,” I whispered, bowing my head until my chin almost grazed my chest and closing my eyes, straining for a flicker of fire anywhere around me. “The deal was you’d go to the crossroads until I paid for your release. Well, I’m at the crossroads now. We’re in the same place. The deal d
idn’t say anything about keeping your distance while we were in the same place.”

  Was there a hint of heat in my fingertips, or was that wishful thinking? If I was lucky—and Cylia was here to make sure I was lucky—it was my magic straining to get back to me. It wasn’t much. It would have to be enough.

  Spells come in two major varieties. One type imposes the caster’s will on the world, creating something out of nothing or mending something that’s been broken. Those spells are pretty clear violations of the laws of physics, many of which have unkind things to say about people who go around summoning extra mass or setting things on fire all willy-nilly. If a physicist ever acquires the power to cast those types of spells, and the underlying forces that make them possible, I expect the human race will have access to faster-than-light travel inside of the week.

  (Honestly, it’s sort of a terrifying miracle that no sorcerers have decided to go into physics. It takes someone who really understands gravity to figure out how best to turn it off. Then again, maybe that’s why it hasn’t happened. No one with the sense God gave the little green apples is going to want to combine the peanut butter of physics with the strawberry jam of sorcery into one big, delicious sandwich of ending reality as we know it.)

  The second kind of spell is subtler. It’s the sort of nasty working that the coven controlling Lowryland used when they tailored their tickets to steal luck from their clientele. It draws its power from the thing it focuses on, rather than from the caster. That means the caster’s strength isn’t the limit on what the spell can do. It also means the target the spell is linked to can wind up seriously hurt, depending on how skilled the sorcerer doing the casting is.

  The real world is big and complicated and unforgiving, and we don’t get the luxury of pretending there’s “good magic” and “bad magic.” This isn’t Harry Potter. But if it were, the spell I was about to attempt would definitely have been verging on the Dark Arts.

  Carefully, I sketched the shape of it on the ground in front of me, pressing down until I left layers of skin behind. I didn’t need to bleed for this specific spell, but pain is always good fuel for the kind of magic capable of chewing people up and spitting them out again. Sam made a wordless noise of dismay. I kept my eyes on the ground. He really wasn’t going to like what happened next.

  Exorcisms can be performed by anybody. There’s nothing magical about them. They’re more like anti-virus programs for the universe, and they don’t have anything to do with demons, or faith, or any of the other trappings of the Catholic church. They’re just an ordinary person who belongs in the dimension where they’re standing, looking at something that shouldn’t be there and saying, “Yeah, you need to go the hell home.”

  Time travel is another matter.

  “Tick,” I said, and focused on the days that had passed since I’d left my home. All my stuff was there. My bedroom, packed with everything I’d ever wanted to be in love with, the carcasses of a hundred hobbies, the still-breathing bodies of a dozen current obsessions. Would they continue to hold the same appeal for me when I finally made it back to Oregon? Or would I have become someone so different that I no longer knew how to be in love with the things that had made me who I was? Everything that lives can change. Change isn’t always a good thing.

  “Tock,” I said, and focused on the carnival, the days I’d spent—however briefly—as Timpani Brown, last survivor of a dead show, orphan and drifter and newest member of the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival. That was where I’d met Sam, where he’d somehow managed to turn an antagonistic dance into a courtship into the closest thing I was ever likely to experience to a fairy-tale romance. Sure, it was more Shrek and Fiona than anything by Disney, but honestly, that suited me. I would have looked silly in a ballgown anyway.

  “Tick,” I said, and focused on Lowryland, the time I’d spent there, wishing each day away, content to sink into mundanity and bland security. I didn’t regret those days. I mean, I regretted the ones that had led to me getting tangled up in a coven of sort of evil assholes who were happy to use my magic to boost their own nasty plans, but that was less about the time and place and more about the people involved. Lowryland had given me the space to recover, the time to breathe, and a place to heal. For that alone, I would always think of it fondly.

  The air was getting thicker and more opaque around me. I could barely see Sam’s feet through the growing barrier. If I’d dared to look up, I probably wouldn’t have been able to make out any of the details of his face. That was unnerving, if not unexpected. He existed in the here and now of the crossroads. I was trying to use their own power to take myself somewhere else, somewhere older and deeper and less here.

  The heat slipped out of my fingertips, slowly at first, growing faster and faster as the air continued to blur, now becoming then becoming now becoming nothing, every time and anytime all tangled up together. The Doctor would have been proud. Of course, the Doctor would also have come equipped with his very own time machine and rendered this entire exercise functionally moot. Who needs an untested, unpredictable act of sorcery when you have a big blue box?

  “Tock,” I said, and the air exploded outward in a shimmering wall of razor-sharp shards, passing through the place where my friends should have been before dispersing into a field of shining golden wheat. I stared.

  The landscape had shifted without changing a bit. I was still sitting in the middle of a lonely dirt road, stretching from one end of the horizon to the other like an unbroken string, ready to carry the travelers home. The sky was still midsummer blue, the sun still too bright to look at directly . . . but there were clouds there now, white and puffy and breaking the glare into smaller, more manageable pieces. They flitted almost playfully across the sun, and while it was warm, it wasn’t so hot that I felt the need to run for cover.

  The corn was gone, replaced by harvest-ready wheat, each head heavy with grain. It was enough to feed a family, a township, a world, if it was managed correctly. There was movement far out in the field, like someone was reaping even now, gathering the goodness of the season to fill their belly.

  There were no footprints in the earth around me. My friends hadn’t disappeared: they’d never been here in the first place. I was far away from them, in a time so far before my own that it might as well have been another country, breathing air that had never been intended for me. I rose on shaky legs, trying to focus on the wheat, the road, on anything apart from the question I hadn’t allowed myself to ask before attempting this particular feat of foolhardy heroism.

  If I was here to stop the thing we knew as the crossroads from latching onto and replacing the actual crossroads—whatever that was or meant—and I had managed to use the parasite’s power to come back this far, how was I going to get home?

  Twenty-four

  “We make our choices. We live with their consequences. That’s what it means to walk in this world, whether we like it or not.”

  –Evelyn Baker

  In the liminal space between worlds, having a minor panic attack

  THE ANSWER TO THE question I hadn’t asked came from an unexpected place: behind me. “You can’t go home,” said a voice, familiar as waffles on a Sunday morning and cold as the wind blowing through a graveyard. “You’re already there. Antimony Timpani Price, do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  Some of the tension left my shoulders, replaced by a yawning exhaustion that felt big enough to reach up and swallow me whole. “Hi, Aunt Mary,” I said, turning. I’d always known, on some level, that when I finally died, she would be the one who’d come to carry me down into the twilight, down to where the ghost girls go.

  Rose claims the position of primary psychopomp for our family, and that’s all right, really. She’s earned it. But for Mary, the youngest member of the family is her responsibility until they’re not, and that meant if—well, if—

  “Am I dead?” I blurted. “Because that wasn�
�t supposed to make me dead, but I don’t really see how you can be here if I’m not.”

  “You’re not dead,” she said. She wasn’t smiling. That wasn’t a good sign. “You did just break about a hundred rules of dealing with the crossroads. We’re standing five hundred years in the past. Do you understand how much trouble you’re in, young lady?”

  “Are you going to ground me for irresponsible time travel?”

  “I might!” She stomped her foot, glaring at me. “You don’t seem to understand how serious this is! What were you trying to do?”

  “Travel five hundred years into the past. Give or take a few decades.”

  Mary stilled. “Why?”

  “How are you here? The spell only covered me. Are you still arguing for James? He’s defenseless if you aren’t there to stand between him and the crossroads.”

  “He has his sorcery, which is more than I can say for you,” she countered. “And he has a group of cryptids who’ve already said they want to keep him alive, and a foolhardy knight of that damned Covenant looking to prove himself against a greater foe. James is fine. As for your first question, I’m here because you’re mine, and anywhere you go, I can always follow. Whether I want to or not, apparently. Annie, what are you doing?”

  I took a deep breath. “Hopefully? An exorcism.”

  Mary stared at me for a count of ten, empty highway eyes wide with confusion that slowly transformed into horror. “Annie.”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “Annie.”

  “It’s not really time travel. I’m not going to create a paradox or rewrite the past or anything stupid like that.” Or was I? If I broke the hold of the faux-crossroads before they could clamp down, would the crossroads ever have the chance to take my grandfather? Maybe I was about to create a timeline where I’d never been born, one where I either didn’t exist or was the last shipwrecked survivor of a world that had never been given the chance to become.