That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8)

by Seanan McGuire

  –Mary Dunlavy

  The library of an increasingly familiar house in New Gravesend, Maine

  IT HAD BEEN FIFTEEN minutes, and the feeling was returning to my right hand. The skin was red and chapped, like I’d been outside in a bad snowstorm. My joints ached, but I didn’t think I was going to lose any fingers. That was the good part. James Smith was tied securely to a chair, his hands covered in oven mitts that would keep him from grabbing hold of anyone else. That was the better part.

  Cylia leaned against the wall, dressed in a fluffy yellow bathrobe that made her resemble nothing so much as a malevolent daffodil come to pass judgment on the weak. She still looked friendlier and more understanding than Sam, who was in human form, wearing only his jeans, and glaring at James like he was trying to decide how to dispose of the body. Which, let’s be fair, was probably pretty close to the truth. It turned out Sam didn’t like it when people froze his girlfriend.

  Gosh, I loved that man.

  Fern was outside, checking the house perimeter to make sure James had been acting alone when he broke in. We already knew how he’d entered: one of the panes in the library window was shattered in a snowflake pattern, like it had been exposed to sudden, shocking cold. He must have frozen it, smashed it, and then reached through to unlock the window and let himself inside. The sound of the glass breaking was what had woken me up.

  James looked at me warily. A thick trail of dried blood connected his left nostril to his upper lip. There wasn’t much visible swelling; I hadn’t managed to break his nose. Pity. I couldn’t justify punching him again, either, not until we’d managed to get some information out of him. If he stopped talking, maybe then I could punch him. That was a fun idea. My hand hurt, and everyone was grumpy as hell, and punching was just the thing to make me feel better.

  “Let’s try this again,” I said. “Why did you break into our house?”

  “It’s not your house,” he said sullenly. “It belongs to my cousin.”

  “What a lovely, subtle, pointless clarification,” I said. “That makes my hand feel so much better. Which reminds me. What did you do to my hand?”

  “I didn’t do anything to your hand,” said James. “You’re the one who punched me in the face and tied me to a chair.”

  “Actually, I did that, on account of how you broke into our house and broke my girlfriend’s hand.” There was a low, dangerous note in Sam’s voice, one that promised a remarkable amount of pain to anyone who got in his way. “The knots would be a lot tighter if she’d done it.”

  “I didn’t break her hand,” protested James, shooting an alarmed look in Sam’s direction. The oven mitts we’d taped over his hands flexed with the movement of his fingers.

  “No, you just froze them a little.” I held up my left arm. A red, angry handprint was etched in the skin around my wrist. It didn’t hurt as much as my hand, but that wasn’t saying much. “I’m going to lose skin. Not too much, I don’t think. Not sure I care how much. It was my skin, and I didn’t say you could have any of it.”

  “And I didn’t say you could go breaking windows on the house I just rented,” interjected Cylia. Sam shot her a sour look. She shook her head. “I’m upset about her being hurt, too, but I’m also the one who promised to pay for any damages incurred during our stay. Windows are expensive. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t call the police right now.”

  “My father’s the chief,” said James. “Please call the police. I’m begging you. I’m sure he’ll be really interested in why I’m tied to a chair with a broken nose instead of safe at home where I belong.”

  “Your nose isn’t broken,” I said defensively.

  Cylia put a hand over her face. “Of course, his father’s the local police chief. Of course. Of all the luck.” She muttered the last like it was the direst curse in her vocabulary, and for a jink, maybe it was.

  I focused on James. “You broke into our house,” I said. “We didn’t kidnap you. We were defending ourselves against a home intrusion.”

  “This is Maine,” said James, like that explained everything.

  Maybe it did, in whatever weird little world he was inhabiting. I turned to Cylia. She lowered her hand and met my eyes, expression despairing.

  “He’s right,” she said. “I forgot. For a few minutes, I forgot.”

  “Forgot what?” I asked.

  “We’re in New England. It’s like …” She took a breath, clearly trying to organize her thoughts. Then she turned toward Sam. “When you were with the carnival, how did you feel if some townie wandered backstage, where they weren’t supposed to be? Were you welcoming? Happy to see them? Or did you tell them to get the hell out?”

  “We told them to get the hell out,” he said, voice still rough and angry. “We didn’t like strangers.”

  I could testify to that. Our first meetings had been a dance of snark and snipe, him trying to bait me into walking away and leaving the carnival forever, me trying to convince him I deserved a chance to prove myself. “What does that have to do with anything?” I demanded.

  “New England is a lot like a carnival, or a secret society, or the insular group of your choosing,” said Cylia. “I mean, they welcome tourists, they can’t close their doors against the whole world, but in most of the small towns around here, they’ll choose the familiar over the strange every single time. If we call the police and tell them we have the police chief’s son tied to a chair, the fact that he’s the one who broke into our house won’t matter one damn bit. What’s going to matter is why is his nose broken, why did you have a knife in your hand when you went to confront him, all the things that shouldn’t matter. Because we’re strangers. Because we’re new. Because we don’t belong here.”

  “A cat can have kittens in an oven, but that doesn’t make them muffins,” said Sam.

  I eyed him. “What?”

  “Something my grandmother used to say.” Sam looked at the red marks on my wrist, then back to James. “So if we can’t call the police, what do we do?”

  “We get the shovel out of the car and we deal with things the old-fashioned way, I guess. Maybe I’ll actually break his nose, since you all keep saying I did it.” I sighed heavily as I turned my attention to James. “Someone else is going to have to do most of the digging. My hands aren’t working properly for some reason.”

  His eyes widened. “You wouldn’t.”

  “You broke into my house, you froze my hand, and you’re lying about basically everything except, I assume, being the chief of police’s son,” I said. “I don’t know how you deal with unsolvable problems here in New England, being a stranger to your town and all, but where I come from, if someone presents you with a situation you can’t win, you don’t say ‘well, guess Starfleet wants me to fail this exam.’ You say ‘what would James Tiberius Kirk do,’ and then you shoot the asshole who broke into your house in the head and go about your business.”

  James’ eyes widened further, although not so much with fear. “Did you seriously just use the Kobayashi Maru as a threat?”

  “The what?” asked Sam.

  “It’s a Star Trek thing, and yes, I did,” I said. “There’s no such thing as an unwinnable scenario.”

  “Oh, my God,” said James. “But cool. Cool. I clearly didn’t actually break into the house, and am having a very vivid and painful dream. Awesome. I can deal with that.”

  “Nope,” I said, and leaned over to flick him in the nose. My fingers ached at even that small gesture. He rocked back in his chair, gasping from the pain. Worth it. “Not a dream. You’re about to die at the hands of a house full of nerds, unless you want to change your song and tell me how you froze my hand and why you broke into the library.”

  Eyes full of tears, he sat up straighter and fixed me with a haughty look. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Let me guess: puberty hit, and you discovered you secretly had strange and inexplicable powers, powers that required you to stand apart from your fellow m
an, at least until you received a call from Professor Xavier’s Institute for Higher Learning, and—”

  The flicker of interested, wary curiosity that had been growing in his eyes flickered and died. I stopped talking and looked at him for a moment. Really looked at him, trying to see the man beneath the blood, bad decisions, and bravado.

  And when I saw him, I recognized him.

  “Hang on a second.” I took a step back. “I was making a bad X-Men joke, since again, house of nerds, but until you realized that …” I stopped talking, mind racing wildly.

  There are cryptids that thrive in cold places. There are even cryptids, like the yuki-onna, who can create cold when they need to, much as there are cryptids—like the dragons—who can create heat. It’s not a completely unheard-of trick. But James … I was willing to bet on James being human. Call it intuition or call it long training, but nothing about him screamed “cryptid” to me. My track record isn’t one hundred percent—I thought Sam was human until he showed me otherwise—and yet. Punching someone in the face is usually a good way to get them to reveal anything they might not want you to see.

  Just in case, I leaned forward, well into James’ personal space, and squinted at his eyes. They were blue, but lacked the delicate snowflake scaffolding inside the iris that I would have expected from a yuki-onna. “Are you wearing contacts?” I asked. “Please be honest. I’ll poke you in the eye if you lie.”

  “You’re really aggressive,” he said. “No, I’m not wearing contacts. Why?”

  “Because you froze me with a touch, and you started getting nervous when I mentioned suddenly discovering abilities that people around you wouldn’t understand, and fire is more common, but we can’t all be Jean Grey, can we, Bobby?”

  “Can you please start speaking English instead of geek?” demanded Cylia. “I’m not following you.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, eyes still on James. “He’s following me, and that’s what matters. He’s a sorcerer, aren’t you, James? You freeze things with a touch. How many times did you shatter your pillow before you got it under control?”

  “Wait, really?” Sam stood up straighter. For a moment, I thought he was just interested. Then he took a step forward, advancing on James, and I realized the uncomfortable truth: he was livid.

  James realized it, too, and leaned back as far as the ropes would allow. “I don’t know where she’s getting any of this, but I swear—”

  “Because see, if you’re a sorcerer, even a shitty one, you clearly have enough of a grasp of what you’re doing that you’re not freezing yourself all the time. You’re not pissing icicles. Which means you can mostly keep it under control. Which means you froze her on purpose, and I am not cool with that. I am sort of the opposite of cool with that.”

  “I didn’t mean to!” James yelped. Me punching him in the face didn’t appear to have distressed him nearly as much as being loomed over by a shirtless man who looked like he could break way more than noses. “I thought I was being quiet, and she startled me, she hurt me, I was just defending myself! I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone! I thought I had time!”

  “Time for a home invasion?” I asked, pulling his attention back to me. “What sort of schedule is that?”

  “My cousin had been looking for renters all month,” said James. “I thought I could get him to agree to let me caretake the place. I was even willing to pay for utilities, since I knew he was heading for Europe. He wasn’t supposed to find anyone who was willing to stay in here.”

  “Please don’t tell me the house is haunted,” said Cylia.

  For the first time, James looked genuinely nonplussed. “What? No. Why would I be worried about that? Ghosts are harmless.”

  “Depends on the ghost,” I said. “Eyes on me, Jimmy-boy. We’re not done talking.”

  “Don’t call me ‘Jimmy,’” he said, suddenly scowling. His hands flexed. The oven mitts were my favorite thing. I loved the oven mitts. “That’s not my name.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Still, eyes here. Why did you want this place? What’s here that matters enough to break in when you know a bunch of strangers will be trying to sleep? We could have done a lot worse than breaking your nose, you know.”

  James took a deep breath, clearly steeling himself. Then, choosing his words with exquisite care, he said, “There’s something horrible feeding on people who don’t know what else to do, who think they don’t have any other options. I need the books here so I can stop it.”

  “Oh,” I said faintly. “Is that all?”

  * * *

  “I’d be a lot happier if the asshole was still wearing the oven mitts,” grumbled Sam, casting a narrow-eyed glance at the dining room table where James sat with Cylia and Fern. They had promised to hold off on figuring out what sort of comic horror was getting ready to eat us all until I could make a pot of coffee. I needed something hot to wrap my hands around as much as I needed the caffeine.

  Sam didn’t need any caffeine. He’d been looking at James like he wanted to bounce the guy off the nearest bridge since the break-in, and he wasn’t calming down. I couldn’t blame him. If Sam had been the one hurt, I would probably already have been dragging James toward a shallow grave.

  “He’s playing nice, so we’re going to do the same,” I said, picking up the tray of coffee mugs.

  Fern’s check of the outside hadn’t found any sign that James was working with a partner. He hadn’t even driven to the house. There was a bicycle next to the mailbox, and a folding ladder propped against the wall outside the library window. So far, everything he’d told us had proven to be true, except for the whole “I didn’t freeze you I don’t know what you’re talking about” routine, and I genuinely couldn’t blame him for that. I would have done the same thing if I’d been the one tied to a chair with my hands covered.

  It was funny. I’d never met an untrained sorcerer before, only people like the assholes at Lowryland; James Smith was possibly the closest thing I had to an actual peer, and I had no idea what to say to him, or even where to start. “I’m a sorcerer, too, but I sold my magic to the crossroads in exchange for not drowning, and maybe I’m never going to get it back, and maybe I’m okay with that” didn’t feel like the sort of thing that was going to fly. Either he’d think I was lying to build rapport, or he’d think I was out of my mind for ever letting my magic go.

  To be honest, I wasn’t sure which side of that conflict I’d fall on. Sam following behind me like a particularly surly bodyguard, I walked back into the dining room and put the tray of coffee cups, sugar, and milk down in the middle of the table. My hands barely shook at all.

  “Good news: I don’t think you did any nerve damage,” I said, with more cheer than I actually felt. “That means I probably don’t have to kill you.”

  James looked abashed. “I really am sorry,” he said. “I’ve never frozen a living person before. I didn’t realize how much it would hurt you.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. I took a seat and a cup of coffee at the same time. Sleep could wait. “Like I said, fire’s more common, and fire-based sorcerers generally can’t burn themselves. You probably can’t give yourself frostbite, so how would you know what it would do to somebody else?”

  “Don’t do it again,” snapped Sam. He sat next to me, somehow still managing to loom.

  That was going to get old fast. “All right: introductions. Everyone, this is James Smith, who I met in the woods. James Smith, this is everyone.”

  James looked expectantly around the table. No one offered a name, not even Fern who was looking at him with uncharacteristic wariness. He seemed to deflate a bit.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I guess I don’t deserve you trusting me just yet. But … how do you people even know what a sorcerer is? It took me months in my mother’s library before I found a name for what was happening to me. Who are you? Where did you come from?”

  “My grandfather was a sorcerer,” I said. It was true, and enough of the story to be believable. “Fire
, not ice. He accidentally toasted a lot of stuff before he figured things out.”

  James’ eyes lit up as he sat up straighter in his chair. “Really? Can I meet him? I’ve never met another sorcerer.”

  “You’re not going to meet this one,” I said. “He’s been gone for a long time. I never got to meet him myself.”

  “Oh.” James’ shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Yeah, well. Every family has to suffer a few.” It’s difficult to say how much of a “loss” Grandpa Thomas really is. Grandma Alice insists he’s alive somewhere out there, and that she’s going to find him. Most of the family thinks she’s deluding herself, but since she’s regularly carrying more ordnance than a small gun store, no one wants to tell her that. I …

  I thought she was deluding herself, too, until I made my own deal with the crossroads. Some of the things they said make me think she might be right. He might still be out there somewhere, trapped and scared and waiting for her to save him. I don’t know what to hope for anymore. I don’t have so many grandparents that I can afford to leave them trapped in eternal limbo. I also don’t know how I’m going to tell Grandma Alice that she’s not crazy without triggering a full-out assault on the crossroads, and I don’t think even she could survive that.

  James looked down at the table. “I know about families and losses. My mother was a sorcerer. Ice, like me. She was good, too, at least if I believe her books. I remember her making it snow in the kitchen when I was a kid, like it was no big deal, and she’d be laughing, and it was … it was magic. I always hoped I’d get magic just like her.”

  “What happened?” asked Cylia. Her voice was surprisingly gentle.

  “She got sick,” said James. He matched her gentleness with bitterness, until every word was dripping with it. “She had magic and she had knowledge and she had money and none of it mattered, because she got sick and she died and she left me alone with a man who wouldn’t know magic if it flew up and bit him in the face.”

  “Your dad doesn’t know?” I blurted.