That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8)

by Seanan McGuire

  Sam frowned, tilting his head back until he was gazing at the sky. The nearest city was far enough away that it was a gorgeous deep black, splashed generously with stars. The moon was a perfect bone-pale circle, looking down on us like a single unblinking eye.

  “Didn’t you say you had family near here?”

  “My maternal grandparents,” I confirmed. “They live in Columbus. My cousin Sarah was staying with them the last time I checked. She hasn’t been well.” That’s putting things mildly. Sarah is a cuckoo, a kind of pseudo-mammalian cryptid telepath. She’s a nerd fantasy on the outside, all long black hair and big blue eyes and books on complicated mathematics. On the inside, she has more in common with a tarantula wasp than she does with your average mathlete. She’s not human. She’s only technically a mammal. Evolution made her, threw up its hands, and went home.

  Cuckoos are psychic, and that’s what got her into trouble. Most cuckoos use their telepathy passively, letting it make the world easier for them without actually exerting any effort. A few years ago, Sarah used her telepathy actively, in an attempt to save my sister’s life. She succeeded. Verity lived.

  She also failed—or at least, she also paid. Her telepathy hasn’t been working right since she used it to manipulate the memory of some Covenant goons, and when a telepath’s powers go on the fritz in the real world, it’s not the cute two-issues-and-resolved dramatic twist like you get in the comic books. It’s scary and it’s grueling and sometimes I’m scared that Sarah is never going to be back to what passes for “normal” with her.

  We’ll love her no matter what. She’s family. But I miss spending hours online chatting with her about her latest math obsession, and what’s happening in the comics, and whether she’s ever going to tell Artie—one of my other cousins, not actually related to Sarah; the family tree is complicated—that she’s hopelessly in love with him. I miss Sarah. I wish I could be sure she was coming home.

  I wish I could be sure I was.

  Sam glanced down, a hopeful look in his eyes. “We could go visit. Let them see that you’re okay.”

  I threw a handful of corn husks at him. “What part of ‘in hiding from my family for their own protection’ don’t you understand?”

  “The part where I’m tired of sharing rooms in shitty motels with Cylia and Fern, and I’m sort of hoping your grandparents have a guest room.”

  “Uh.” I raised an eyebrow. “Am I wrong to interpret that as ‘I miss getting laid, and I think my chances are better in your grandparents’ house’? Because if so, wow, do I suddenly have some questions about your pre-me dating life.”

  Sam snorted. “Please. You met my grandmother. Between her overprotective ‘I will end you’ routine and the whole monkey thing, you know I wasn’t getting any before you came along.”

  I threw another handful of husks at him, just on general principles. Sam laughed. I grinned. Despite the rocks digging into my butt and the whole part where we were sitting in a field known to be the site of multiple disappearances, this wasn’t the worst way to spend an evening. Maybe my standards are lower than they should be. Honestly, I don’t care.

  We were closer to my grandparents than I liked—no more than a hundred miles from Columbus, and that was being generous—but it hadn’t been a choice, not once we’d heard how many people had gone missing from this one sleepy little town. Their only real tourist attraction was the corn maze, more than a mile across and capable of holding hundreds of people at the same time without any of them being in eyeshot of anyone else. It was the perfect combination of domesticated fear and light exercise, and it had been running for years without problems. As we got closer to Halloween, the maze would—in an ordinary season—be overrun with hired teenagers in spooky costumes, paid to make the night more interesting.

  This wasn’t an ordinary season. This hadn’t been an ordinary season since the week after the maze had opened, when the first pair of teenage lovebirds had gone into the corn and failed to come back out.

  A lot of things hunt in cornfields. Some of them are human: all those movies about serial killers and farmhands who figured out that scythes can reap knees as easily as they reap wheat didn’t come from nowhere. Others are born of desperation, families of ghouls or harpies or other occasional man-eaters getting stranded in the middle of nowhere and going for an easy meal. I’m not excusing it. For one thing, I’m a human, and I enjoy not being eaten. For another, no one deserves to die that way. But it happens, and it’s always going to happen, and all we can do is try to minimize it as best we can.

  Thing is, most human serial killers are sloppier than whatever had been hunting in the corn. And most nonhuman killers are all too aware that this world doesn’t belong to them anymore, if it ever did, and are smart enough to move on after a meal or two. Becoming an urban legend is the first step toward becoming a corpse.

  Whatever was hunting here, it was something that liked the corn, but wasn’t smart enough to pack up and go somewhere else to avoid attracting attention. That meant it was likely to keep killing, and killing, until the season ended and the farmers came to raze the field—and depending on what we were talking about here, that might be when the real trouble started.

  My name is Antimony Price, although I’ve been known to call myself quite a few other things when the situation demands it. I’m a voluntary exile from my family. I’m a fugitive from a monster-hunting organization called the Covenant of St. George that would be delighted to use me to get to the people I love. I’m a roller derby player. I’m a cheerleader. Most of all, above everything else, I’m a cryptozoologist.

  Cryptozoology is possibly the only scientific discipline that still thinks we’re living in the Pulp Era. Our goals are twofold: conservation and concealment. When we can, we help supposedly fictional creatures stay under the radar and flourish, waiting for the day when they can come out of the shadows and book their appearances on Ellen. Unicorns and dragons, chupacabra and bogeymen, we find them and help them as best we can. We also study and properly document them. Their habits, their biology, and—where applicable—their society. This world has lost too many things already. If we’re going to lose more, the cryptozoological community is damn well going to make sure their stories have been written down before that happens.

  And that’s all well and good, but when your job involves things that could give Godzilla nightmares, it can sometimes get more action-adventure than anyone’s life really ought to be. Cryptids can’t be allowed to go around eating humans, for a lot of reasons. Sure, we have plenty of humans compared to the number of available wadjet, but when people get eaten, other people notice, and then things get messy. So when something like “multiple mysterious disappearances in Ohio corn maze” crops up—no pun intended—it’s on someone like me to go in and figure out what the hell is going on.

  To be honest, it was sort of a relief. We’d been in the car for weeks, following whatever meandering backroads Cylia thought looked interesting, and I was going out of my mind with boredom. A little cornfield creature feature was just what the doctor ordered.

  (Not to downplay the virtues of boredom, mind you. Cylia’s seemingly random road choices were being guided by her preternaturally honed luck, courtesy of her jink heritage. We’d had more flat tires, near-accidents, and unplanned rest stops than any six ordinary voyages … but we’d also missed the speed traps, avoided the possible bottlenecks, and made our way from Florida to Ohio without the Covenant of St. George making an appearance. She was sucking down minor bad luck to balance a fairly major piece of good luck, and she was doing it without complaint or visible strain. I might never be able to prove it, but at this point, I was more than reasonably sure I owed Cylia my life.)

  Sam sat up straight and leaned forward to tap my knee with one long-fingered hand. “Hey. Penny for your thoughts.”

  I favored him with a smile, allowing it to become sappier than I would have dared in more direct light. I hate being sappy. I hate knowing people can look at me and un
derstand how much I care about the asshole I’m smiling at. The asshole who was, in that moment, sitting in the dirt alongside me, willingly going along with a plan that most people would have dismissed as a slower, less entertaining form of starting a barfight for the sake of letting off some steam.

  In a just world, Sam Taylor would have found a nice carnie girl, someone who planned to spend her whole life on the flying trapeze, someone who didn’t come with a complicated family history and an even more complicated personal present. He deserves better than me. He deserves the world. Too bad I’m going to kick the world in the teeth if it ever tries to come between us again. I already did the “running away for his own good” routine, and it wasn’t enough to save either of us from the inevitable. So screw nobility. Annie Price loves Sam Taylor, and that’s how it’s going to be.

  It doesn’t hurt that he’s ridiculously good looking, regardless of what shape he’s in—although I’m probably biased. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, and built like the acrobat he is, with naturally tan skin and features that nicely blend the Chinese and European aspects of his heritage. He’s usually scowling, or at least frowning, when he has to walk around pretending to be human, but that just makes it better when he relaxes. When he smiles.

  Sam is a fūri, a kind of therianthrope cryptid whose natural form is the sort of anthropomorphized monkey that wouldn’t look out of place in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toy line. I’ve never been much of a furry, but like so many good geek girls, I had an early crush on Nightcrawler from the X-Men, and Sam’s the next best thing. If we ever go to San Diego Comic-Con together, I’m going to talk him into dyeing himself blue and laugh myself sick as he suddenly sprouts a legion of admirers.

  At the moment, he was wearing his human shape, his dark hair hanging over half his forehead and his feet covered by battered sneakers he could kick off in less than three seconds flat if he needed to. It was part of the lure. All eleven disappearances had been couples, and in the cases where they’d come to the corn maze with someone else, their friends had tearfully confessed that they’d split the party because the missing had wanted some “alone time” in the corn. They’d all been human, too, at least as far as a crawl through the archives of the local paper had been able to confirm.

  There was no way to prove for sure that all those people had disappeared from the corn maze itself. They could have wandered off, and there had been no signs of an abduction. Better, from the perspective of the local police, there had been no blood. As all the missing were above the age of eighteen, the farm wasn’t an active crime scene … yet. To make sure no one got the bright idea of making it one, Cylia and Fern were parked on a frontage road behind the maze, with Cylia twisting local probability to make sure no one human wandered by while we were working.

  “Hey.” Sam tapped me again. “Did you hear me? I said penny for your thoughts.”

  “Sorry. I was thinking.”

  “Thinking what?”

  “That it’s awesome how my job involves making out with my boyfriend in the middle of a potentially haunted cornfield.”

  Sam rolled his eyes. “You’re so weird sometimes, Annie. You get that, right? You understand that you’re not a normal girl?”

  “That’s why you love me, right?”

  His smile was bright enough to make up for the lack of light, and even sappier than mine had been. “Damn straight,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss me.

  Kissing Sam while he was in human form was unusual enough to demand my full attention. Structurally, his face doesn’t change much when he transforms, but he’s always a clean-shaven human, and has full, remarkably fluffy sideburns when he’s relaxed enough to go fūri. Two boyfriends for the price of one.

  Boyfriend. There’s a word I never expected to become relevant to me, Antimony “pit traps are more interesting than dating and boys don’t like girls who can hit harder than they can” Price. I mean, boys other than my brother, who is a) weird, and b) my brother, ew. I’d been figuring on a life of happy solitude, broken when I needed to punch someone or set something on fire. And then snide, snarky, unavoidable Sam Taylor had come along, and now I was stuck in a relationship I had absolutely no interest in getting out of.

  One of his hands slid up my side, presumably to distract me from his other hand, which was creeping under the hem of my shirt. I slapped it lightly away and kept kissing him. The corn rustled louder around us, despite the lack of any obvious wind. Sam pulled me closer, and this time when he slipped his hand under my shirt, I let him. The clots of dirt digging into my ass and thighs seemed suddenly a lot less important than seeing how tightly we could press our bodies together, his hands roving across my body, my hands pressed flat against his back, fingers digging in for purchase.

  The corn rustled louder still. Sam bent his head to kiss my neck, lips brushing against the curve of my ear as he straightened.

  “Now?” he murmured.

  “Not yet,” I replied, and kissed him again.

  * * *

  This is something slasher movies, inaccurate and frequently sexist as they are, get right

  Lots of things don’t like it when humans have sex—or even indulge in excessive heavy petting—in their vicinity. There’s nothing puritan about it. Sex is loud and messy and distracting, which means it simultaneously frightens away the local prey animals and transforms the humans in question into easy pickings. For everyone who’ll break off from their paramour to ask what that noise was, there are ten who’ll make the jump to “maybe it was the wind, boobs are great, whee” all on their own. Which means sneaking up on someone who’s having sex is measurably safer than most of the alternatives.

  Sex is also the mechanism via which humans make more humans, and after centuries of people following “kill it with fire” as if it were a sacred commandment, most of the intelligent creatures we share this planet with have good reasons to genuinely hate humans. We’re tiny, virtually defenseless persistence hunters who can’t stop killing each other. We don’t have claws, or fangs, or poison, or telepathy. We can’t transform into something bigger and stronger, we can’t hibernate for centuries, we can’t do anything. And somehow we still managed to take over the world. Humans are terrifying. The last thing anything with a brain wants is to leave humans alone to make more humans.

  (It doesn’t help that a remarkably large number of intelligent cryptids have adopted “look as much like a human as possible” as a survival strategy. From therianthropes like Sam to jinks like Cylia, there are dozens of nonhuman species hiding among the human population. Which means that human couple getting busy in your local monster’s hunting grounds could actually be a couple of bigger, meaner monsters playing defenseless in order to lure in an easy meal. It’s a hard world for a giant impossible carnivore.)

  If you’re in the middle of nowhere and worried about something attacking you, have sex, or at least indulge in some therapeutic making out. The odds are good that whatever you’re scared of will choose that moment to attack. And if you happen to be heavily armed, well, it’ll be a good way to work out the frustration of being interrupted.

  A cryptozoologist is always prepared for mayhem, whatever form it takes.

  * * *

  Sam’s hand cupped my breast, familiar and strange at the same time. Looking back, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time we’d made out while he was bothering to stay human. Unlike most therianthropes, fūri default to their more simian form: it’s the human that’s a transformation, and hence the human that takes work to maintain. I’m not sure he could have sex without losing control of the specific tension that lets him look like just another hot guy on the street, and I’m not cruel enough to ask him to find out.

  Besides, without going into unnecessary detail, let’s just say that having a significant other with a prehensile tail is occasionally its own reward.

  I groaned despite myself and bit down on his shoulder, leaning forward until my hair fell over my face. The corn rustled louder behind me.
This time, I knew there was no wind. The corn was moving on its own—or, more likely, something a lot more material than the wind was moving it.

  What felt like a hand made of spidery roots caressed the back of my neck. I reacted instantly, whirling away from Sam and pulling the small scythe out of my waistband in the same motion. The “hand” withdrew, but not fast enough: the edge of my blade caught it across the palm, slicing it neatly in half. The severed portion of the hand fell, twitching and writhing as it separated into its component parts—a handful of twigs, roots, and twisted corn husks.

  “Corn Blight,” I snapped, scrambling to my feet. “Sam, get the can.”

  “Everywhere has corn blight!” he replied. “Corn blight doesn’t try to kill you.”

  “That’s ‘Blight’ with a capital ‘B’!” The corn was still moving, shaking and rustling like an entire platoon of creepy kids was hiding on the other side. That would have been nice. A little Stephen King action would have been a delight compared to what we were actually standing in the middle of-slash-up against and potentially about to be eaten by.

  When you say “monster,” people think of bears and alligators, or manticores and dragons. Big things, terrible things, things that can chase and catch and hunt. They forget, for the most part, that there’s more to the world than the animal kingdom.

  Fungus, for example. Fungus is everywhere, in everything. However much we can see—a mushroom, a toadstool, a patch of mold—there’s so much more beneath the surface, wrapping its roots through whatever it finds, using the world to nurture itself. Fungus outmasses and outbreeds everything else on the planet. Most of it is fairly calm, content to spend its life consuming and reproducing and not bothering anyone. The rest …

  Well, the rest can be a problem.

  “Sam, go,” I hissed.

  “I don’t want to—”

  “You go or we both die. Not a hard call. I’ll be here when you get back.”