That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8)

by Seanan McGuire

  Mary can find me anywhere I go. It’s one of the advantages of being her specific kind of ghost. If this was her trying to make a peace offering, maybe it was time to let her. I took a deep breath and opened the kitchen door.

  I was almost disappointed when I stepped into the kitchen and found Fern standing at the stove, flipping bacon strips with a fork. She looked up at the sound of my footsteps, already smiling even before she saw me. “It’s eleven,” she informed me brightly. “You slept until eleven. I didn’t know you knew how to do that.”

  “Is there coffee?” I asked.

  “Coffee, toast, and bacon. No eggs. There weren’t any eggs in the fridge. No milk, either. Cylia has a list going over on the table. Check the fridge and cupboards and write down anything you want her to get from the store.”

  “Right,” I said, casting around until I found the coffee maker. It was old-fashioned, twenty years old if it was a day, but the coffee was black and hot, and the sugar was sweet, and when I put them together, it started to feel like maybe I was going to finish waking up after all. “Where’s Cylia?”

  “She’s cleaning out the car. Sam went for a walk in the woods. He wants to know how many neighbors we have.”

  “Mmm,” I said, spooning more sugar into my coffee. Knowing the location and number of the neighbors mattered more to him than it did to the rest of us. If there were too many of them, he’d need to spend most of his time either indoors or making the effort to seem human. But if we were isolated, he could finally relax.

  For his sake, I hoped he could relax.

  The coffee was good. The bacon was better. I sat and ate and added things to the shopping list, some essential—bread and canned soup and mac and cheese—and others frivolous—marshmallow fluff and sugared cereal and microwave pizzas. There was a microwave. I could once again live on my natural diet of salt, fat, and artificial cheese.

  Fern finished cooking and sat down across from me to eat her own breakfast. After we’d both swallowed more fried pig than was strictly good for us, she asked, “Do you like it here?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’ll get some shoes on and go for a walk, assuming Cylia doesn’t want me to come to the store with her.”

  “I think she’s excited to have some time to herself,” admitted Fern.

  “That’s what I figured,” I said. “Do you like it here?”

  Her smile was immediate and bright. “It’s wonderful. There’s a little room up in the attic with bars on the window, so I can have it open all night and not worry about floating away.” Her smile dimmed. “I mean. Unless you want it. We’re supposed to pick our rooms today, now that we’re all awake.”

  “Okay, first, us picking rooms doesn’t mean you automatically lose the one you want, so no, and second, I’m looking forward to sharing a room with Sam for more than a couple of days. We need to figure out all the ways we get on each other’s nerves. So a ‘little’ room isn’t going to work for us. I’m happy staying where we slept last night, unless Cylia has another suggestion.”

  “Oh.” Fern relaxed. “Good.”

  I took the last bite of bacon and chewed thoughtfully, watching her. We’d been trying to look out for each other during this unwanted adventure, taking care not to push anyone too far. Despite that, Fern had been actively fraying. She needed privacy as much as the rest of us, if not more. I had no idea what “normal” social activity looked like for a sylph. Did they enjoy and crave company as much as humans did, or did they prefer solitude?

  One more question that may never have a real answer, courtesy of the Covenant of St. George. The large, harmless cryptids, like Fern and Cylia, were among the hardest hit by the purges. They’re not teetering on the edge of extinction like the manticores are, but they don’t have anything resembling the kind of community they would have once, before the humans decided this planet was ours and ours alone.

  Sometimes I sort of hate my ancestors.

  We finished our breakfast in comfortable silence, and I washed the dishes while Fern wrapped the leftover bacon in foil and tucked it into the fridge. With that done, we looked at each other awkwardly for a moment before, in unison, we started to laugh.

  “Okay, this was weird and all, but I’m going to get my shoes and see if I can’t find Sam out in the woods,” I said. “I’ll try not to go out of earshot. If you need me, just whistle.”

  “Sure, Annie,” said Fern. She stepped around the table and hugged me, hard, before I could move away. “It’s going to be good here. You’ll see. We’re going to get to rest.”

  “I hope so,” I said, hugging her back. Then I turned and left the room. Time for a walk in the woods.

  * * *

  It was a beautiful day. Early fall in Maine is neither too cold nor too hot, but is instead as close as the state comes to putting on its best dress and inviting people to the party. The house was surrounded by a large grassy patch, less “lawn” and more “private meadow.” I stopped at the edge of it, looking back and trying to assess our temporary home by daylight.

  It was a pretty standard piece of New England construction, built to keep heat in and cold out, covered in double-paned windows that stared judgmentally out on the world. The porch wrapped most of the way around the ground floor. I looked at it and thought about the last lazy days of fall, about spending them counting fireflies and eating hamburgers and laughing, finally safe, finally able to breathe.

  Three months was a lot of time to regroup and recover. It was also a lot of time to let the guilt catch up with me. My family had to be going out of their minds with worry. But again, time. Now that we weren’t focusing on running, maybe I could figure out a way to set up a line of communication with my cousin Artie. If anyone in the family knew how to use the Internet to talk in complete privacy, it was him.

  Cylia hadn’t just found us a temporary home. She’d found us a way to start hoping again. I appreciated that more than I could put into words. Turning away from the house, I made my way into the trees, leaves crunching under my feet, and I was alone in the world, and it was glorious.

  I watched carefully as I walked for signs that Sam had passed through, or that something else had. I didn’t know these woods. I’d never been to Maine before, and I didn’t have any of the family bestiaries to prepare me for what I might find. There are cryptids everywhere in the world, which only makes sense, when you consider “cryptid” means “science doesn’t know about it yet.” New species are discovered every year, brought into the scientific fold and lifted out of cryptozoological obscurity. These days the word mostly gets used to mean the big stuff some people say is real and other people say is a big hoax, like Bigfeet, unicorns, and the occasional giant snake.

  (Always assume the giant snakes are real. The alternative is finding yourself being slowly digested in the belly of something you didn’t want to admit existed, and while I’m as fond of healthy skepticism as the next girl, I’m a lot more fond of continuing to have my original skin. As in, the one I was born with, not the one the snake has left me with after a little recreational swallowing me whole.)

  Woods like these—dark, and dense, and clearly mostly ignored by the locals, either because they were full of ticks or because the people who lived around here had better things to do with their time—are a paradise for the smaller, shyer, less dangerous cryptids of North America. There were probably angler tortoises and tailypo living in the underbrush, and if I found a creek, I’d also find bloodworms nestled fat and comfortable in the mud, getting ready for their long winter hibernation.

  I made a mental note to do exactly that. A surprising number of things can be lured in with bloodworm ichor, and my field kit was less “running low” than it was “nonexistent.” If I was going to take a long field trip-slash-exile from my family, I might as well try to gather some useful data while I did it.

  Poison oak looks the same no matter where it’s growing. That’s a good thing. Ticks are harder to watch for. That’s a bad thing, and I stepped c
arefully, trying to avoid kicking any bushes that looked specifically likely to harbor a large and hungry arachnid population. Lyme disease would not exactly improve my year.

  I was so busy watching the ground that when I finally stopped and looked up, I had no idea where I was.

  Whoops.

  Trees stood sentinel around me, tall and silent and unmoving. Their branches blocked enough of the sun to have created a series of clear patches through the wood, places where the underbrush was thin, and I’d been automatically following them as I walked. That would make it easier for me to find my way back … maybe. Paths like that, in woods like these, have a tendency to branch.

  The light was golden, filtered through the changing leaves, and everything had the vaguely unreal air of a Normal Rockwell painting. I breathed in the scent of loam and growing things, feeling the tension leave my back inch by struggling inch. This wasn’t like the woods back home, which smelled of pine and pitch and petrichor, but it was close, so close, and there was a hint of winter in the air, warning me that the days of wandering peacefully through the trees weren’t going to last forever. Better get my time in while I could.

  I started walking again, paying more attention this time. A few branches had been broken recently; something had been through here. I shifted my path to follow the damage, and when I stepped around a particularly thick-barreled tree, I saw him. Sam. He was standing in a clearing, back to me, attention focused on something in his hands. He’d acquired a heavy wool coat somewhere, probably in one of the closets at the house, and had the collar turned up to cover most of the back of his head. It made sense. He was a carnival boy, born and raised, and he’d always spent the winter tucked safely away either indoors or in a place where snow was a rumor, rather than a reality. The idea of a fall and early winter in Maine was probably simultaneously fascinating and terrifying.

  Learning how to move through the woods without making noise is Price Family Survival 101. I’ve been sneaking up on rangers and forestry workers since I was seven. It was easy to start stepping lightly and moving with deceptive speed, like I was channeling my inner Jason Voorhees. Minus the machete and the murderous rage, natch. In only a few seconds, I was standing behind my runaway boyfriend.

  Never cover a jumpy person’s eyes when they’re standing in the middle of the woods unless you want an elbow to the sternum. I didn’t, so I put my hands on his shoulders instead, leaning in close at the same time.

  “Guess who?” I murmured, only inches from his ear. His very human ear. His very human, very alone in the middle of nowhere—

  Oh, crap. I realized what I’d done half a beat before the man in front of me shouted and whirled, his hands already raised defensively. He was holding a book, and used it to partially block his face, like he thought I was going to start throwing punches.

  I wasn’t there, of course. I was three feet back from my starting position, my own knees slightly bent, ready for flight or a fight, whichever came first. The man stared at me. I stared back.

  He did not, seen from the front and without the veil of my road-weary assumptions, look a damn thing like Sam. He was white, for one thing, with blue eyes and an angular face that seemed designed to have made him seem worried even when he wasn’t. I mean, he sort of had good reason to be worried, since a strange girl had just grabbed his shoulders in the forest, but that was beside the point. His hair was dark and shaggy enough to have created the right silhouette when combined with the bulk of his coat. Hindsight, as they say, is always twenty-twenty, and never more so than when you’ve accosted a total stranger.

  “Um,” I said. “Sorry. I thought you were somebody else.”

  The man stared at me, lowering his book in order to stare with more of his face at the same time. That was another place where his angular bone structure and rather remarkably thick eyebrows served him well. He could stare disbelievingly like nobody’s business.

  “Who did you expect to find in the middle of the woods on a Thursday morning?” he demanded. He had a faint New England accent, the sort of thing that would no doubt be used as a quaint character trait on a CW drama, but which really just made him sound even more judgmental than the average man on the street. “The Jersey Devil doesn’t come this far north.”

  “To be fair, if you were the Jersey Devil, I think the wings would have sort of given you away before I went and grabbed you,” I said. “For which I am sincerely sorry, and which I will never do again.”

  He kept staring.

  “Come on. I didn’t stab you or set you on fire or throw things at you, I think you can stop looking at me like I’m some sort of serial killer.”

  “You’re not from around here, and you’re in the middle of the woods, which isn’t exactly what I’d call normal,” he said, voice taking on a strident note. I’d spent enough time around my cousin Artie to recognize the sound of someone working themselves into a tizzy. “There’s nothing around here except—”

  The man stopped mid-sentence and went back to staring at me.

  “Oh, no,” he said.

  “If you were about to say ‘there’s nothing around here except that house that was for rent, which is a reasonable walk that way,’” I pointed vaguely, “then you’re in the neighborhood of reaching a logical conclusion. Hi. I’m assuming you’re my new neighbor.”

  “Oh, no,” he repeated, with more heat. “He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t dare.”

  “If by ‘he’ you mean ‘the man who rented us the house,’ then yes, he would dare. Has dared. We have a contract for the next three months and everything.” I crossed my arms. My willingness to play nicely—engendered, for the most part, by my own mistake—was fading fast. “He’s off to Europe, and we’re looking forward to an exciting adventure with the upstairs shower, which is apparently finicky. Hi. I’m Annie. You are?”

  Using my real name, even in its shortened form, was risky. Using my “Melody West” identify, which had been well and truly blown by my time in Lowryland, would have been even riskier. “Annie” is a common name, where “Antimony” is not. It would be fine.

  And if it wasn’t fine, these woods looked like they’d offer plenty of places to hide a body.

  “James,” the man said stiffly, pulling himself into a locked, upright position. He was tall, taller than me, taller than Sam. If he hadn’t been slumped, there’s no way I could have gotten them confused.

  Honestly, if I hadn’t been exhausted, there’s no way I could have gotten them confused. All this time on the run had done more damage to my situational awareness than I’d realized. “Nice to meet you, James, and again, sorry for startling you. I didn’t mean to. You live around here?”

  James hesitated. I could see the debate on whether or not to lie raging in his eyes. I sighed.

  “You’re the one who told me there was nothing anywhere near here, thus implying you’d have to be from somewhere nearby. I’m trying to make conversation. Do you think you could meet me halfway? Maybe? This will be a lot easier for both of us if you do your share of the heavy lifting.”

  “Excuse me if I’m not proficient in the art of having conversations with strange women who accost me in the middle of the forest,” he said.

  “You’re excused,” I replied. “Now can we start this over, or do we need to spend some more time riding the roller coaster of shame around the recrimination mountains? Because you seem nice and all, and I really am sorry I upset you, but I have shit to do today, and this is getting old.”

  James blinked. Then, to my surprise and relief, he laughed. He was a lot less intimidating when he laughed.

  I mean. The man didn’t look like he knew what strength training was, and there was absolutely no question of whether I could take him in a fight, but there’s something about scowling strangers in unfamiliar woods that triggers a mild “maybe I fucked up” response in most thinking creatures.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I take myself too seriously sometimes. Can we start over?”

  “Without m
e mistaking you for my boyfriend and scaring the crap out of you? Absolutely.” I extended my hand. “Annie Brown.”

  “James Smith,” he said. His grip was firm without being painful; his palms were dry. “So you’re renting my cousin Norbert’s house?”

  “I guess,” I said. “A friend of mine made most of the arrangements. I slept during the drive over. Tall guy, sort of nervous-looking, said he was on his way to Europe to spend a couple of months backpacking?”

  “You’d be nervous, too, if you had a name like ‘Norbert,’” said James. “But yeah, that’s the one.”

  My real name is a lot closer to “Norbert” than it is to something as ordinary as “James.” I didn’t comment, just smiled and said, “I guess that means we’re neighbors, assuming you don’t lurk around isolated woods for no specific reason.”

  “I live that way,” he said, and pointed at the densest part of the wood, in the opposite direction from the house. That was a relief. I didn’t mind sharing the woods—look at me, getting all possessive already—but it was good to know we’d at least have some privacy. Sam was going to need it. “Just me and my dad.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  He grimaced. “Is this where you call me weird for living at home?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I lived with my parents until very recently. I liked it. I don’t see any reason to move out if you’re comfortable.”

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far …” James trailed off mid-sentence as he realized what he was saying. Cheeks flaring red, he stepped away, moving his book behind his back. “Welcome to the neighborhood. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

  “I’m sure you will,” I agreed. I knew a dismissal when I heard one. Offering a genial nod, I turned to go back the way I’d come.