Maybe that was why it had always hated sorcerers so much. Maybe it had targeted people like James’ family—like my own grandfather—because it remembered a woman with the ghost of fire in her fingers breaking its hold on the world before that hold could become strangling. I wasn’t causing a paradox. I was preventing one.
And now I was warm, and not in pain anymore, and probably dead. It was interesting, really. I’d always assumed death would be cold.
“—hear me?”
The voice was distant and broken, like I was hearing it across a crackling fire. I didn’t turn. Whoever it was, they could wait until I was damn well good and ready to stop catching my breath. Did the dead breathe? Rose did, but she was usually wearing a coat and temporarily alive when she hung out at the house.
“—burning, she’s burning, how do we stop—”
The second voice held a thin edge of hysteria, audible above the crackle of the flames. It sounded familiar, although I couldn’t quite say why. I tried to open my eyes, and found, to my dismay, that they wouldn’t budge.
Oh, man. If my afterlife was going to be sitting around impersonating a charcoal briquette, I was going to get really bored, really quickly.
“Annie, can you hear me?”
Mary. The first voice was Mary. I tried again to open my eyes. I failed again.
“Is she even breathing?”
Cylia.
“She’s still on fire, can we deal with the part where she’s still on fire?”
Sam. Oh, Sam. He sounded like he was on the verge of beginning to punch things for the sake of having something less confusing to deal with. Violence isn’t always the answer, but sometimes it’s a good stopgap until the answer can be found.
“Killing her would be a mercy. This is unnatural.”
Leonard. Swell.
“Touch her, and I will rip your lungs out through your throat, I swear to Jesus I will.”
Sam, I love you, I thought, and wished that he could hear me.
“Let me through.”
It took me a moment to place the fifth voice. James. James Smith. He sounded tired, almost exhausted, but level. I couldn’t tell whether that indicated success or failure. Was Sally back? Did we win? I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t open my mouth, either. I was silent and stuck, unable to do anything at all.
Death, from what I could tell so far, really sucked. Clearly, I hadn’t managed to pick up one of the deluxe packages like Mary or Rose. Maybe I needed to die in a more easily-categorized way. “Fried by parasitic invader trying to consume the living spirit of the Earth” probably didn’t come with a clear type of haunting.
“If you touch her—” Sam again, voice low and tight and filled with a barely-contained menace. Between Leonard and James, he finally had something to focus his anger on. I hoped he’d reserve most of it for Leonard. Poor James had been through enough.
“I have to touch her if I want to put the fire out! Let me through, you asshole, before she explodes or something.”
Was I going to explode? Apparently, I was on fire, which was sort of unsettling, but I hadn’t considered the possibility that “on fire” could lead to “exploding like a car in a bad action movie.” Jean Grey spent, like, half her time on fire, and she never exploded. Then again, Jean Grey was a comic book character, and this was real life.
Pity, that. I could have used a little bit of the Phoenix Force to get me back to the land of the living.
“If you hurt her, I’ll kill you.”
“Understood,” snapped James.
There was a soft thudding sound, as if someone had dropped to their knees next to me, and then a wave of coolness washed through the warmth around me, chasing some of my comfortable cocoon away. I tried again to open my eyes. I failed again.
“Has she ever done this before?” asked Cylia. “Do humans usually catch fire when under stress?”
“Don’t you know?” asked Sam.
“Kid, I have gone out of my way for most of my life to have as little intimate contact as possible with humans. I play roller derby because everybody needs a social life, and nobody’s going to report you for being weird when you spend all your time with women who call themselves ‘Elmira Street’ and ‘Princess Leia-You-Out.’ I do administrative work when I need a paying job. Just me, a computer, and a bunch of big, important people trying to pretend they couldn’t be paying me more to deal with their bullshit. Annie here is the first human I’ve ever allowed in my car, much less in my house.”
“No, humans don’t usually catch fire when under stress,” said Leonard. “How can you avoid humans? We’re the dominant species on this planet.”
“Believe me, I’m aware,” said Cylia disgustedly. “Any chance she’s secretly a dragon with a dye job? Is she a natural blonde?”
“I feel like she would probably smack me for answering that question, but no, she’s definitely not secretly blonde,” said Sam.
I should have been annoyed by the way they were nattering on while I was burning. All I actually felt was relief. There was a thin, strained edge to their voices—they were scared, and trying to cover it up by talking about dye jobs and human behavioral quirks. That was normal. That was natural. They were okay.
The people I cared about were okay. Whether I had succeeded or not, they’d get to bury me and walk away from this, as soon as they figured out that people who are actively on fire are usually dead, and hence do not need to be consulted about future plans. Even if I was lingering on this mortal plane like Rose or Mary, I wasn’t going to follow them. Sam deserved better than a dead girlfriend, and my parents deserved to believe I was resting in peace, not condemned to a shadowy existence on the edges of the living world. The only ghosts in my family were Mary and Rose, and both of them had died a lot younger than I had, while they were still in their teens, and neither of them was a blood relative. Prices rest. Maybe it’s because we run so hard and so fast while we’re alive, but when we die . . .
Prices rest.
The cooling sensation spread, getting stronger—strong enough, in spots, that I was actually getting cold. I made a small sound of protest, not audible above the flames. I didn’t want to be dead and cold. I was tired. I was so damn tired. I was ready to rest.
“Really? Is that what you really want?”
This was a new voice, female, unfamiliar. Without thinking about it, I opened my eyes.
There was no fire. There were no friends. I was alone, sprawled in the middle of a great field of harvest-ready wheat. The sky above me was midsummer blue and perfect as a portrait, marked here and there with the skidding streaks of fluffy white clouds, moving briskly along in a wind I couldn’t feel. I sat up. The landscape didn’t change.
“Guys?”
There was no response. I stood, turning in a slow circle. There was no one there. I was totally alone. But the voices . . .
“They’re still at the crossroads,” said the female voice, from behind me.
I spun, reaching for a knife, and stopped dead. The anima mundi looked at me, amused and exasperated in equal measure. I stared speechlessly back.
She looked . . . nothing like Mary. Her skin was smooth and brown; her lips were thin and her nose was broad and her eyes were soft and sad and the color of the wheat blowing all around us. Her hair was black and blonde and red and brown and silver at the same time, falling to her shoulders in streaky corkscrew curls. Some of them were tipped in blue or purple or pink, like even the fashion colors were a part of the living spirit of the world. She still wore the belted shroud she’d had on when she appeared with Mary’s face, dressed like she was going to produce a scythe and go reaping souls at any moment.
She was beautiful. That was nice to know. The composite of every human woman in the world was beautiful.
“Why are you a woman?” I blurted.
“Why do you assume I’m a woma
n?” she countered. “I look like this for you because your life has been filled with friendly ghosts. You were a haunted house before you knew what it was to be more than just a room. Your friends would all see something different when they looked at me. I don’t have a specific gender, any more than the thing that tried to destroy me did. I’m just more invested in being kind to the people who walk my path.”
“Oh,” I said, cheeks flaring red. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. People have always assumed. It’s only recently that they’re realized they should also regret, when those assumptions are wrong.” The anima mundi shook their head. “I’m still filtering through all the changes to humanity that have come in the last five hundred years. You’ve made such progress for a silly, self-centered little species, and yet you haven’t changed at all. It’s going to be amazing learning what you can do now.”
“Will the magic get stronger? Now that you’re back?”
“The magic never left. Magic is a constant force of the universe, like gravity, or time. It could grow thin as that thing consumed and spent it, but it could never disappear.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“I know. But this is still the crossroads, and questions asked here are difficult things. They have consequences. You still have a question unanswered.”
I hesitated. “I don’t remember asking a question.”
“But you did. You asked yourself whether you were going to die here, and since you’re still at the crossroads, you asked me.” The anima mundi looked at me solemnly. “That means I get to offer you a bargain.”
“Wait, I mean, just hold on a second here,” I said, alarmed. “I already have one outstanding deal with the crossroads.”
“No, you don’t. For this one moment in time, no one has a deal with the crossroads, because the parasite that took my place, that used my power to harm my people, has no authority here. Some of the things it gave were good, even if they were in the pursuit of an evil: I doubt your lover would be pleased to find his lungs filling with fluid, or your grandmother would be delighted to find the flesh rotting from her bones. I’m not taking back its gifts. I’m also not taking on its debts. The slates are clean. The books are balanced. We begin fresh, here, today, and you, Antimony Timpani Price, will be my first new negotiation. Shall we begin?”
“. . . crap,” I said, before I could catch myself. “I . . . okay, no, crap. Is there any way we could not do this? Like, I just performed an exorcism, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be jet-lagged for the next decade, I really, really don’t want to deal with semi-cosmic forces right now.”
“Unfortunately, you stand balanced on a scythe’s edge, and you have to fall one way or another. Living or dead. Choose.”
“Again, that debt thing. I don’t want it. I just want to go home.”
“Where is home?”
I hesitated. Home was Oregon, safe in our compound, surrounded by trees, where no one could find us, or get past the fences, or cross the yard when they didn’t know where the traps were located. But home was also the carnival, stealing kisses with Sam atop the Ferris wheel, everything spread out beneath us in lights and music and the empty midway, and it was the backseat of Cylia’s car, and it was . . . it was . . .
“Home is where my heart is,” I said. “It’s a cliché, but sometimes things become clichés because they’re too damn true not to. I want to go home. I want to see my family again. I want to be the reason my friends are smiling, not the reason they’re crying. I . . . maybe I want too much, I don’t know, but I want it anyway.”
“I thought you wanted to rest.”
I shook my head. “I’m exhausted, yeah. This has been a pretty shitty year, you know? But I sleep better with a knife under my pillow and a fūri at my back than I will six feet down.”
“I could offer you a lot, if it meant you’d stay,” said the anima mundi. “I could promise you that everyone who came to save me with you would be safe, and comfortable, and spared from danger for the rest of their days. They wouldn’t even have to pay for it. They’d miss you, and that would be payment enough. But you could serve as the first of my new guardians, and help the others adjust. Some of them will have to move on, you understand. They were not the sort of people I would have trusted to represent me, in their lives, and the force they’ve served has done nothing to change that in their deaths. I’m going to need spirits I can trust to ease me into this age.”
“That doesn’t sound like rest,” I protested.
“No. But it’s calm and comfort for the people you have chosen as extensions of your heart, which means it’s calm and comfort for your home. Three of them don’t belong to the currently dominant species. Calm and comfort would be a great boon to them.”
I stared. The anima mundi looked back at me, utterly serene.
“You could still see Mary. She’d be here with you, showing you what to do, how things work, how to negotiate the world on my behalf. As for James, the bargain that kept him in New Gravesend is discharged. He can go wherever he likes, and carry my promise of peace with him. The Covenant will never find him. Leonard will find another way. He could change the organization that made him from within, could reform them, make them what they were always meant to be. Your death would be life for so many.”
“I . . .” I paused. “Does this offer cover my family? My actual blood family, I mean?”
The anima mundi shook their head. “No. The Prices are what they are. They court danger like a lover, and seem surprised when their affections are returned. I couldn’t grant them calm without remaking them completely, and that would cost more than I currently have to spend. My bargains will be small things until the magic strengthens around me, and even if it were at its greatest, you’re a single life. You can’t buy that much.”
That was almost a relief. I wasn’t sure I could have called it a choice, if I’d known that staying would have meant my entire family could be safe, forever. “Okay. I have one more question.”
“Ask, and I’ll answer, if I can.”
“What about Sally?” What about my grandfather, and all the other people the records indicated had disappeared over the centuries? They had to have gone somewhere. They had to be lost, and even if some of them were long, long dead, there had to be at least a few—like Sally—who hadn’t been gone long enough for age to have caught up with them.
Now that we understood what had been happening, we owed them the chance to come home. Someone had to at least go looking. And Mary probably still couldn’t tell my grandmother that my grandfather might still be alive out there after all.
“She is not here,” said the anima mundi. “The parasite cast her, and the others, very far away, and could not return them.”
“That’s sort of what I was afraid of.”
“Then your choice is made?”
“I want to rest,” I said slowly, “but I’m not ready yet. I think, right now, what I need is to go back to the others. I need to stay alive. Can I . . . can I do that? Am I allowed to wake up?”
“Don’t come here again,” said the anima mundi. “There are better ways.”
“Not always,” I said, thinking of a dark tunnel filled with water where I had almost drowned, where all of this trouble had started. Sometimes the deus ex machina was the only solution you had. “But I’ll try to stay away.”
“Good,” said the anima mundi. They snapped their fingers, and they were gone, replaced by a wall of flame, and I was burning, I was burning, I was—
“—so try harder!” Sam was shouting. That was rarely a good sign. But hey, I could hear him, and I hadn’t been expecting to do that again.
Shout away, Sam, I thought, struggling to open my eyes. That strange sense of all-encompassing warmth had returned, wrapping itself tightly around me, preventing all motion. The cooling sensation was continuing to spread, making parts of my body actively c
old, but the overall warmth remained.
“I can’t try harder unless I want to freeze you all solid,” snapped James. “Why don’t you try something, if you’re such a smart guy?”
“I have fur! Fur is flammable!”
“Everything is flammable if you try hard enough,” said Fern. “Annie, you need to wake up. I don’t know how long Mary can keep us here. The creepy crossroads thing went away, and now everything is empty. We need to go home.”
Home. I wanted to go home so badly. I wanted my bed and my things and to talk about comic books with Artie and to skate again. I wanted to introduce my boyfriend to my roller derby team. I wanted to introduce him to my parents. And I wanted to make sure Sally, and the people like her, had the chance to do the same.
I opened my eyes. Everything was fire, dancing around me, not consuming me. It was lower in places, like something had stolen its heat away, and I knew if I lifted my head, I’d see James working to chill it, to force it down. I also knew where it was coming from, because the anima mundi had said that all bargains were released: all debts were discharged.
Welcome home, I thought.
My fire purred and roared, so glad to be back that its joy couldn’t be contained.
I missed you, too, but you’re scaring people, I thought. Rest. I won’t give you up again.
Was magic always this argumentative? I didn’t remember it fighting me like this before the first time I’d agreed to give it away. Not that it mattered. It was back now, safe with me, and I was never letting it go again.
The fire hesitated. Then, slowly, it began to flicker and recede, pulling back into my skin where it belonged. I blinked at the suddenly clear sky above me. It was softening already, moving more into alignment with what it had been before all this happened, before everything went wrong.
Someone gasped. I sat up.
The others were standing about where I’d assumed from the sound of their voices. Cylia had her hand over her mouth. Fern was beaming. Sam’s tail was wrapped so tightly around his leg that he was at risk of cutting off the circulation. Leonard was gaping, open-mouthed and bemused. James was the only one kneeling, his hands stretched out above my left leg, the palms covered in a thin layer of frost. Like the others, he was staring at me.
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