That Ain't Witchcraft

by Seanan McGuire

  “You don’t mean that,” she said, still staring at me. Her expression had shifted to something akin to horror.

  “I don’t approve of it, no, and I don’t think it’s a good solution for anyone involved. It’s still the way some gorgon families did things for centuries after the Covenant of St. George burned their settlements and drove them from their homes. Survival of the species forgives a lot.” I shook my head. “Humans have done similar things, across history. Gorgons abandoned those traditions more than a hundred and fifty years ago, at least here in North America, but there are always people who think the old ways are the best ones.”

  “Bastards,” muttered Shelby.

  “No contest here. At the same time . . . that really would be the best-case scenario. It would mean the children were taken by people who want them and are prepared to care for them and could possibly be convinced to give them back if we’re able to provide them with other options. There are always other ways to do things.” Gorgons aren’t human. They’re still people, and they still grow up in the complex stew of cultural expectations that simmers all around us. I couldn’t imagine even the most traditional family group would feel good about becoming kidnappers just for the sake of their own survival.

  “All right. What’s next on the list?”

  “Covenant.” I shrugged. Dee’s car was the only one on the road ahead of us, but that didn’t mean I could take my eyes off her for long. As soon as we started hitting the protections intended to keep humans from stumbling into the local gorgon community, losing sight of her car had the potential to mean never reaching our destination. “This could be the start of a purge.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just go in and . . .” Shelby ran a finger across her throat, making a guttural slurping sound at the same time.

  “Classy,” I said.

  She beamed. “You adore me.”

  “No question there. But no, it wouldn’t have been easier. We’re talking about a whole community of Pliny’s gorgons—and remember that the fringe, at least, is really dug-in and defensible. The children are wary of strangers, with good reason; at the same time, because they have such good defenses on the approach road, they tend to assume that anyone who’s actually inside the community itself is a friend. So their guards would be down. If you want to start by killing the adults, you need a huge amount of manpower. You need to be absolutely sure that you can kill them all before anyone sounds the alarm. Kidnapping is easier, and now everyone’s out of their minds with worry for their kids. Even if they’re more alert and aware of the danger, they’re also off-balance and likely to slip up. Tactically, this isn’t a bad move.”

  “But you don’t think that’s what’s happening here.”

  “No, I don’t.” I shook my head. “We have people watching the major airports and border crossings. Even the ones who don’t like my family are working with us on this because no one wants the Covenant here. I honestly don’t think they could have gotten a strike force large enough for this kind of operation into the country without us hearing about it—and if they somehow managed it, I wouldn’t expect them to start with a gorgon community in the middle of Ohio.”

  “Even though that community has ties to your family?” The question was mild. The meaning behind it wasn’t.

  I took a deep breath. “The fact that we’ve had dealings with this community before could be a factor, but I think you’re assuming a level of intel that we’ve never known the Covenant to have. They rarely think of cryptids as having relationships, or histories, or anything other than the need to taste human flesh.”

  Shelby wrinkled her nose. “That’s graphic.”

  “That’s the Covenant. If they knew that my great-grandfather had been instrumental in the founding of this community, yes, it would be a massive target. Given that even I didn’t know until Hannah told me, I really don’t think they have that kind of detail on what’s going on around here.”

  My great-grandfather, Jonathan Healy, had been the one to help Hannah’s parents find a place where they could settle down without being judged for the fact that they belonged to two different, socially incompatible species of gorgons. Without him, this community would never have existed. Without him, Hannah would never have existed. Which also meant that without him, Lloyd would never have existed, and several people would still have been alive.

  Every deed, whether intended for good or for ill, has its repercussions. Forgetting that is never a wise idea.

  “All right,” said Shelby slowly. “What’s the third option?”

  “Poachers.”

  She scowled. “Oh, I was afraid you were going to say that. I bloody hate poachers. Cowardly, craven arseholes. But . . . you can’t poach people. Can you?”

  “No, you can’t. Normally, that’s called kidnapping or abduction, and it’s viewed very poorly. Unfortunately, you don’t have to belong to the Covenant to think that only humans count as people, and there are humans out there who will pay a lot for ‘exotics’ like young gorgons.”

  Shelby looked at me, utterly aghast. “How could you even . . . it’s not safe! There’s no way you could keep a young gorgon alive without endangering yourself!”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. There are ways. We’re just not going to discuss them when we’re this close to the parents.” Dee had guided us safely through every layer of illusion and dissuasion, easily enough that either I was becoming desensitized to the wards, or someone had managed to adjust them to let us pass. We were driving along the curving private road that led down into the valley where the gorgon community stood, temporary and permanent at the same time, as much of a contradiction as its occupants.

  What looked like a small trailer park waited at the bottom of the road, the trailers arrayed in a circle that would easily unwind if the residents ever needed to hook up their wagons and go looking for a new place to live. Not that some of those supposedly “mobile homes” were designed to be moved: as with any long-term trailer park, the residents had settled in, building porches and brick steps, installing aboveground pools and planting vegetable gardens. Most of the occupants, like Dee’s husband Frank, had been born in those trailers, and had every expectation of dying there.

  They had an apple orchard, corn fields, and enough planted, carefully plotted land to sustain a community almost twice their size—and that was without going into the fringe, the subcommunity of gorgons where Dee herself had been born. They had permanent homes, of brick and wood and drywall. They were planning to be in Ohio forever, even if it meant eventually running out the human occupants.

  It wasn’t the worst plan ever. They had guns and venomous snakes growing out of their heads. They were probably going to be fine, assuming no one showed up with a tank. As gorgon communities went, this was one of the largest, healthiest ones I’d ever heard of.

  Which, unfortunately, made it all the more likely that we were dealing with poachers. A community of this size couldn’t avoid having contact with the outside world, and even if they were careful, rumors spread; people see things. The Internet added a whole new layer of possible gossip. All it would take was one bored teen posting a few supposedly harmless pictures on their Instagram. Let the wrong person see them, and—suddenly—we had a problem.

  And we definitely had a problem. There were gorgons everywhere, standing in front of the trailers and arguing, their body language tight and terrified. The few people whose children hadn’t disappeared were keeping them close, sometimes literally by holding onto their arms or shoulders. No one was wearing a wig. I parked a safe distance away and leaned over to open the glove compartment, pulling out two pairs of smoked goggles. I offered one wordlessly to Shelby.

  She smiled as she took it, fondness and frustration mixed together in equal measure. “How I thought you were a harmless nerd at first, the world may never know.”

  “To be fair, I am a nerd,” I said, fitt
ing the goggles on over my glasses. “If I weren’t, I wouldn’t have goggles in my glove compartment.”

  “Point stands,” she said, and got out of the car.

  Pliny’s gorgons aren’t mammals, which means their growth patterns don’t follow mammalian norms. They don’t stop growing when they reach their twenties: they just slow down. Some of the people turning toward us were seven or eight feet tall, towering over their more human-height neighbors.

  Dee flung herself out of her car and raced toward one of the taller men, yanking her wig off as she ran. He leaned down and wrapped his arms around her, the snakes on their heads twining together in affectionate greeting. It was a sweet moment, made sweeter when a slightly shorter, slimmer version of Dee joined their embrace.

  Shelby and I followed at a more sedate pace. The goggles would protect us from the petrifying gaze of the gorgons, but they wouldn’t protect us from being bitten by agitated snakes. Humans really are remarkably fragile in the greater scheme of things.

  An even taller woman appeared from the back of the crowd. The snakes atop her head were long, dangling like arboreal vipers instead of curling and twisting like rattlesnakes. The other gorgons moved politely out of her way, allowing her to approach us. I stopped walking. Shelby did the same, and the three of us met in the open space in front of the rest of the community.

  “Alexander Price,” said Hannah. Her voice was mild, with a Saskatchewan accent that a lifetime in Ohio had yet to ease or erase. It was utterly at odds with her appearance: she sounded more like the nicest waitress at the local diner than a terrifying, nine-foot-tall gorgon matriarch.

  “Hannah.” I said her name as respectfully as I could, inclining my head in a solemn bow at the same time. If she had a surname, I didn’t know it. Greater gorgons don’t live among humans as frequently as Pliny’s gorgons do, and some of our habits have yet to catch on in their communities. Hannah took after both her parents.

  “I didn’t think to see you here again nearly so soon, and if there were any other choice, I would have taken it,” she said. Her tongue flicked out, human-seeming but supple as a snake’s, and she squinted briefly at Shelby. “Still, our need is great, and you are our best chance of bringing the children home. You understand how precious children are.”

  The last part of her statement—“even though you killed my son”—went unspoken. It was still there between us, inevitable and unavoidable.

  This is why I hate fieldwork. I’m much happier doing conservation and breeding projects with nonsapient cryptids. We owe them just as much as we do their larger cousins, but they’re so much less likely to hold a grudge. I didn’t say any of that; it wouldn’t have done any good. We were in the situation we were in, and now we just needed to survive it.

  “We do,” I said. “Do you have any idea who might have done this?”

  “It’s my fault.”

  The voice was unfamiliar, high and agonized and heavy with guilt. I turned, as did Hannah and Shelby.

  The girl who looked a little bit like Dee had pulled away from what I presumed were her parents and was looking directly at me, chin up, snakes coiled tight in obvious distress. She was wearing jeans and a Lowryland T-shirt, and she looked so young and so afraid.

  “My name’s Megan,” she said. “I just got home. This is my fault.”

  “It’s not,” Dee said firmly. “You didn’t do this.”

  “It is, Mom. Stop trying to defend me.”

  “Why do you think that?” I asked. “What do you think you did?”

  She took a deep breath. “I’ve been doing my residency at the Lowryland hospital in Florida,” she said. “The semester just ended, so I drove home.”

  I nodded slowly. “Okay,” I said. It made sense that she had driven: flying hasn’t been safe for gorgons since the enhanced security measures went into effect. All it would take was one TSA agent trying to pat down a gorgon’s wig for things to get very bad, very quickly.

  “Only I couldn’t drive . . . I couldn’t drive straight through without stopping. It’s fifteen hours if you do it in one straight shot. I couldn’t.” Megan kept her eyes on me—partially, I realized, so she wouldn’t have to look at anyone around her. “I stopped a couple of times. For gas, mostly, and at a motel for the night.”

  “What happened, child?” Hannah sounded surprisingly gentle. Megan was still a part of her extended family, even if she’d made some sort of mistake.

  “I think someone saw me,” said Megan.

  The gorgons around us exploded into shouts and protests. One woman rushed for Megan, hand raised to strike the younger gorgon, and was dragged back by two others. Megan cringed, snakes hissing and writhing in abject misery.

  “It was an accident!” she cried. “The curtains were closed, I swear they were, but when the air-conditioning came on, it blew them apart, just a few inches, and I was getting out of the shower, and—” She stopped, holding her hands up helplessly.

  “What did they see?” I asked. “Who saw it?”

  “I wasn’t wearing my wig,” said Megan. “You can’t really towel-dry snakes. So they saw my . . . everything.”

  “They who?”

  “Two men. I closed the curtains, I put my wig on, I opened the door—I figured I could explain, or . . .” She stopped again, biting her lip.

  I shook my head. “I’m human. That doesn’t mean I’m going to judge you.” Gorgons are endangered. Humans aren’t. It’s harsh logic. It still matters. Every death hurts someone, and I’m sure the families of those men would have been heartbroken if Megan had managed to catch them and do what she didn’t want to say she’d been intending to do, but the species wouldn’t have noticed. Megan, on the other hand, was a female Pliny’s gorgon of breeding age. Losing her would be much more of a blow.

  “Right. Price.” She took a shaky breath. “I was going to kill them if I’d managed to catch them, but they were gone by the time I got outside. I didn’t see their car.”

  “And you think they followed you here,” I said grimly.

  She nodded.

  “How could you?” Hannah was suddenly looming over Megan, the snakes on her head standing to terrible attention and making her seem even taller. I took an involuntary half-step backward. Humans are only a few millennia removed from monkeys, and part of us will always remember why it’s a good idea to be afraid of really enormous snakes.

  Megan stood her ground, but the snakes on her head coiled tight and drooped in clear submission.

  “You should have gone the other way as soon as you realized you’d been compromised,” said Hannah, several of her snakes mock-striking toward Megan. “You should have led them as far from us as possible.”

  “I thought they were gone,” said Megan. “I had no idea I was being followed.”

  “How far away were you when you stopped?” I asked.

  Both of them turned to look at me, and I had to fight the urge to step back again.

  “Why?” demanded Hannah.

  “Because there’s still a cockatrice on the loose out there,” I said. “My basilisks would have a hunting range of up to twenty miles a day in the wild; they’re happy in their habitat at the zoo because I feed them, but if I let them out, they’d keep walking in whatever direction they could find food. I don’t know what a cockatrice’s range is. If it’s been hunting, petrifying small animals or even things like deer, there could be rumors. Hunters talk.”

  North America has a big problem with Bigfoot hunters. Never mind that of all the cryptids out there, Bigfoot and Sasquatch are the most closely related to humans, which you’d think might buy them a little respect from their short, fragile, comparatively hairless cousins; there’s always some asshole with a big gun who thinks the way to prove how awesome he is involves shooting and stuffing a sapient being.

  The trouble is, Bigfoot are good at going undetected—surprisingly so, gi
ven their size. Teen Bigfoot enjoy challenging each other to follow hunters through the woods while pretending to be trees any time there’s a chance they might be seen, and very few of them are ever spotted. Great fun for the Bigfoot, not so much for the hunters, who have a tendency to get frustrated and decide that they should widen their interests. Sadly, this never seems to mean going home and taking up needlepoint. No, it means going all “I want to believe” and striking out to find something new and endangered to shoot at.

  The Covenant of St. George has never had a monopoly on so-called “monster hunters.” They just have the best organizational structure and the most dedication to playing weekend extinction event.

  “Have you heard those rumors?” asked Hannah.

  “No. But my family doesn’t talk much with hunters. They don’t like us because of the way we keep breaking their noses and taking their toys away.” Grandma Alice, especially, hates them with a focused, burning passion. People were a lot more willing to believe in the existence of the unknown when she was young, and the distance between belief and bullets is never as far as we would like.

  “Also we were sort of busy going to Australia, fighting werewolves, and trying to keep the Covenant from showing up in your backyard, so maybe go a little easy on him, hey?” said Shelby. Her tone was deceptively mild. She was annoyed. “We didn’t let the cockatrice loose in the first place, and if we haven’t found it, well, you haven’t found it either. Fact is, it being out there means the rumors of a petrifactor could easily be spreading, and now we get to do the cleanup.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Megan again.

  Dee stepped up next to her daughter, putting her arm around Megan’s shoulders and looking at Hannah with flat defiance. The snakes atop her head drew back, assuming a rearing position.

  “What’s done is done,” said Shelby. “We can stand here pointing fingers, or we can get on with finding your kids. Does someone want to show us where they were taken from?”

  A low murmur spread through the gorgons. Finally, a woman with white snakes banded in buttery yellow stepped forward.