There was no flicker of recognition in James’ eyes at the sound of my surname. Normally, that would have been nice. Just my luck that the one time I wanted all the baggage that came with my name, I met someone who didn’t care about the cryptid world except where it intersected with the crossroads.
“Names are a nice start,” said James. “I still want to know why you have an ‘exception’ following you around.”
“Aunt Mary died a long time ago,” I said. “But she started off haunting her father. I guess he was old enough that the crossroads didn’t think he’d be much of an anchor, and they were right, because he died pretty soon after she did, but by that point, she was already babysitting my grandmother. It might not have been enough, if my family hadn’t known about ghosts. But they did, and when they found out Mary was dead, they didn’t care.” That was the simplified version. Oh, they’d cared, all right; they’d cried for the girl they’d come to love, whose death had somehow been so overlooked that she’d been able to slip right back into the life she’d left behind. And then they’d kept right on treating her like Mary, like who she was transcended everything else.
Maybe it had. Maybe that was why she was the only crossroads ghost who’d managed to maintain so much autonomy that she’d been able to continue being herself, being happy, even after everything else had changed.
“Your family is fine with dead people hanging around,” said James disbelievingly. “No problems, sure, come and haunt my house.”
“Not all of us,” I said. “My great-aunt Laura used to ward her trailer against the dead because they didn’t let her sleep. That’s how I know about wards, even if I can’t draw them.” I’d never bothered to learn. The only ghosts who were likely to interfere with my daily life were Mary and Rose, and I wanted both of them there.
“Got it,” said James. “Why are we warding the house now if your aunt is such an ‘exception’?”
“Because like I said, my aunt is gone, and the ghost the crossroads have sent in her place doesn’t seem nearly as friendly.” There was something coolly familiar about Bethany, something I couldn’t quite place. I was almost certain I had never met her before, alive or dead. I would have remembered her school colors, if nothing else, because cheerleaders never forget a spirit bow. “The crossroads … fuck. I don’t even know where to start.”
“Try the beginning,” said James. “That generally works for me.”
I took a deep breath. “All right. Did you see anything in the news about the accidents at Lowryland?”
* * *
James Smith was a decent audience: it took more than half an hour to explain the events that led up to my leaving Lowryland, and he only interrupted twice, both times to ask for clarification of something that needed more background to make sense. I was almost grateful for the pauses. They left me the space I needed to edit out cryptid involvement without actually lying. Sam, Cylia, and Fern might be willing to tell our new neighbor their names, but it was up to them when—and whether—they revealed the fact that none of them were as human as they looked.
When I reached the part about my bargain with the crossroads, and what I’d agreed to, his eyes became very wide and his cheeks became very pale. The air around him glittered as the temperature in the room dropped, not quite plunging to zero, but definitely trending away from the comfortable.
Finally, I said, “And that’s all. That’s why the crossroads are watching me.”
“They want you to kill me, don’t they?”
It was a simple question, almost casually asked: how’s the weather, what are you doing for the holidays, do the crossroads want you to kill me? I still had to stop and brace myself against the table. Sam placed a hand against the small of my back, steadying and stabilizing me. I shot him a grateful look. He looked back, familiar even in his unusual humanity, before returning his attention to James. I did the same.
“Yes,” I said. “They do. Although they want me to become your best friend first, so I can tell them everything you know. And supposedly in exchange, they’ll put the fire back in my fingers and let me go on my merry way, no longer in debt to anyone for anything.”
“They won’t, you know,” he said. “They’ll have some reason you didn’t quite follow their orders and need to do them one more favor before they let you go.”
“I know,” I said.
“You’ll never be free of them.”
“I know that, too.”
“So why did you—?”
“Knowing doesn’t change the fact that if I hadn’t agreed to their bargain, I would have died, and Sam would have died, and a bunch of other people I care about would have died, and sometimes a bad deal is better than no deal at all.” I shook my head, fighting the urge to glare. It would have been so easy to start blaming him for the destruction of our “take a break and recover for a while” plan. It would have been so easy. “I needed the chance to figure out how to get through this. I took what I could get.”
“Are you going to kill me? Should I be getting ready to defend myself?”
I hesitated. Salvation came from an unexpected source.
“Of course she’s not going to kill you,” snapped Sam. “What the hell kind of people do you think we are? We didn’t have to tell you any of this. And if she’d been planning to kill you, believe me, you’d be dead.”
“That isn’t as much of an endorsement as you think it is,” said James.
“Except for the part where he’s right,” I said. “Seriously, James, if I’d been planning to kill you, why would I have told you about it? You were already primed to believe whatever I said, because you want someone who understands what’s going on, who knows how to say ‘sorcerer’ without turning it into a Dungeons and Dragons joke. All I needed to do was tell you I was scared of the crossroads and ask for your help. I told you the truth. That means something.”
“Maybe it means none of you are very good liars,” snapped James.
“Oh, to hell with this,” said Sam, and stood, shifting and blurring as he did, until there was an anthropomorphic monkey where the man had been. Still shirtless, which provided an excellent view of the lines of fur running along his spine and the sides of his shoulders. And a lot more relaxed all of a sudden—something James didn’t seem to properly appreciate. He was staring at Sam, eyes even wider than before.
Sam leaned forward, resting his hands on the table, tail curled high in what I recognized as a display of dominance, like a biker flexing in the parking lot. Everything about his posture was informing James in no uncertain terms of who the winner would be if things got physical.
Too bad any fight they had wouldn’t restrict itself to the physical. Sam could hit harder and move faster than a human, which just meant James could freeze him more quickly than he could the average boxer. I put a hand on Sam’s forearm, indicating that I wanted him to stay where he was.
Sam either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Eyes narrowed in frustration, he said, “Annie isn’t lying. If you think she is, you know where the door is. And if she were lying to you, you’d never know. Believe me.”
“You’re a monkey.” The statement was almost flat, divorced from all emotional response. That made sense, since James was clearly on the verge of freaking out.
“I’m a sylph,” said Fern, not to be outdone.
“I’m not a monkey, I’m a fūri,” said Sam grumpily. “You’re a monkey, too, if you think I am. We’re both primates. I’m just a primate who can swing from trees and then go sit on airplanes.”
“Airplanes?” asked Cylia.
“Some seats were not designed for people with tails.” Sam managed to make it sound like some dire pronouncement, heralding the fall of nations.
I swallowed my laughter. It would have hurt his feelings, which was really too bad. A little levity would not have been welcome right about then. “Sorry about the limitations of human ingenuity,” I said.
“Forgiven.” Sam wrapped his tail loosely around my waist, still st
aring at James. Again, I had to swallow laughter. “So are you going to call me a monkey again, or are you going to listen?”
“You’re not human.” James turned to Fern. “You’re not human either. A … sylph? Aren’t those air spirits?”
“Sort of,” she said, with a broad shrug. “I can make myself lighter or heavier when I need to. It’s easy.”
“This is too much.” James looked back to me. “All of this is too much.”
“This is life,” I said. “Why do you hate the crossroads so much? Unless you were leaving something out before, they didn’t kill your mom. And you don’t seem civic-minded enough to be this upset about them just existing.”
“I don’t make friends easily.” James made the admission slowly, as if it pained him.
Sam snorted. I rewarded him with a light elbowing. He snorted again, this time at me, and rubbed the spot where my elbow had hit his side.
“You’re not alone in that,” I said.
“Hey, I make friends just fine,” said Cylia.
“I don’t,” said Fern.
James looked down at his long-neglected coffee. “I was a smart kid, and I was a hurting kid, and I was a little bit of a know-it-all. It was the easiest way for me to cope with what I was going through. I studied hard. I got gold stars and my teachers admired me and my peers knocked me into mud puddles and called me names. All of them hated me … except Sally.”
“Sally?” I prompted.
He glanced up and smiled, suddenly vulnerable, suddenly achingly sad. Or maybe not so suddenly. The roots of that sorrow were traced all through the lines of his face, growing in the fertile soil they found there.
“She was in my second grade class. We’d never really talked—like I said, I didn’t make friends easily, and Sally was pretty and funny and everybody liked her, and I knew better than to get too close unless I wanted to get my ass kicked. And then one day I was sitting on a bench reading, and this kid, Billy Maxton, he ran up and pushed me to the ground and started kicking me.” A note of wounded confusion slipped into James’ voice, all the harder to hear because it was so familiar.
He wasn’t the only one who’d been a smart, mouthy kid who got along better with the teachers than with the other students. Elementary school had been a special kind of hell for me. Ditto middle school. High school had brought cheerleading and its associated challenges, and probably saved my life. Without something to focus on and give me a place in the social pecking order, I would eventually have been eaten alive.
“She was on the other side of the playground, but she saw me go down. She ran over and jumped on him, and started punching him again and again, screaming about how he wasn’t nice, he wasn’t a nice boy, she was going to tell everyone he wasn’t a nice boy.” The confusion faded into admiration. “It took two teachers to pull her off him. She skinned her knees all to hell, but she didn’t mess up her hair at all, and I pretty much fell in love with her right there. Sally was amazing. She could have been anybody’s friend. Anybody’s. There wasn’t a kid in that school who wouldn’t have been lucky to even touch her hand, and she chose me. I don’t know why. She never told me.”
Sam’s tail tightened around my waist, and I knew what he was thinking. There are very few people in this world who will love and treasure us for who we are, rather than who they think we have the potential to someday become. For James to find one of those people was amazing. For him to lose her …
“When did she make her bargain at the crossroads?” I asked.
He glanced at me, then looked back down at the table. “We were seventeen,” he said. “She was looking at getting out of here, finding some scholarship or something that would give her a free ride to college. Not because she needed it, necessarily—her family’s pretty well-off. Because she wanted something that meant I’d get to go, too. I don’t know how … I mean, most kids go to the financial aid office, you know? But we’d been pounding the pavement for months, applying for everything, applying everywhere, and my grades were great, but I didn’t have any extracurriculars and my father said he didn’t see why he should pay to send me to spend more time rotting my brain reading when there was plenty for me to do here at home. And she knew …”
James stopped. Just stopped. He stared off into space, saying nothing, doing nothing, barely breathing. The rest of us were silent, waiting for him to snap out of it.
Finally, he said, “She knew about my mother. Who else was I going to tell? Sally was my best friend. I told her everything. I told her how maybe someday I’d get magic, too, and then I’d make sure she had whatever she wanted, forever. I told her how it was going to be okay, if we could just figure out how to fix things. And she knew about the crossroads. Mom never went there, but she wrote down everything she knew. She gave directions. I swear, I didn’t know Sally was going to follow them.”
“Of course, you didn’t,” I said. He glanced at me, expression pleading for explanation, for absolution, for something to lift the veil of guilt he’d been looking through for years. It was almost painful, how much I wanted to give that to him. We weren’t friends, although we might be eventually, but there are some burdens no one should be required to carry alone. “You understood the crossroads. Maybe not everything about them, or you’d have chained her to a tree before you’d take the risk, but you knew they were bad and you knew that smarter people than you had tried to make a bargain and been burned, and there wasn’t any fire in your fingers or frost in your hands, you couldn’t possibly have expected to win. So you knew you’d never go, and that meant Sally would never go. She was your best friend. She was the person who listened to you. You just forgot that sometimes the people who love us are willing to do things for us that they’d never dream of doing for themselves.”
Sam’s tail tightened around my waist. I wasn’t just talking about James and Sally anymore. He knew it. He wasn’t going to let me go.
James flinched. “So you think it’s my fault that she went.”
“No. It would be your fault if you had left books laying around open to the pages on the crossroads, if you’d mentioned them over and over again in an effort to get her interested, if you’d asked her to do it. We’re not responsible for the things people do when we haven’t asked them to save us. She was trying to save you.” I took a breath. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” His voice was soft, almost dull. “She left a note that said she’d worked it out, she’d figured out how to word her bargain so it couldn’t be used against her, and she went while I was at the library. I was volunteering. Trying to punch up those extracurriculars enough to let me get the hell out of this town. I was—”
He stopped, catching himself, before he continued, “Anywhere two paths cross can be a focus for the crossroads, but there are some places they like better than others. Places where things have gone wrong in the past. There’s an old tree on the other side of the wood. Kids call it the hanging tree, and they don’t remember why, but they don’t go there alone after dark, either, and when dogs go missing near it, they’re never found. There’s a crossing in sight of the tree. It’s not a good place. As soon as I realized Sally had gone to find the crossroads, I knew that was where she would go.”
He fell silent. I could see his frantic journey in the way his throat worked, the way his jaw clenched. Wherever he’d found her note, it had been far enough from the hanging tree that he’d been forced to run, maybe, or grab his bicycle and go, seventeen years old and racing against his best friend’s love for him as he tried to snatch her from the jaws of a monster she didn’t fully understand, nor ever could.
Finally, softly, he said, “The ice woke up when I was halfway there. I think … I think that’s the moment when her bargain was sealed. I think she asked the crossroads to give me something that would mean I definitely got out of this town, and so they unlocked the magic I’d inherited from my mother and acted like it was some big gift, instead of something that would have come along in its own time if I’d just been
patient, if I hadn’t complained to Sally about how I was afraid it was never going to happen. It was so cold. I couldn’t control it. I didn’t understand what was happening. I froze my handlebars. They snapped off in my hands, and I crashed into a tree.”
He reached up, touching a small scar on his forehead as he said, “It was dark when I woke up. I ran the rest of the way. Three miles into the woods with no flashlight and no jacket and no clue what I was going to do when I got there, but I don’t think I’ve ever run that fast in my life.”
No one spoke. No one moved. It felt like we were all frozen by something even colder than the ice in James’ hands, until the very thought of movement was impossible.
“Her backpack was there. It had been … it had been ripped right off her body. The straps were torn in two. There wasn’t any blood, but the official report says it was a bear.” James’ mouth twisted into an entirely humorless smile. “My father wrote it. I told him it wasn’t a bear, and he said all the evidence was there, and he wrote it down and he told her parents he was sorry and he closed the case. Like Sally could ever be a case. Like she didn’t matter.”
A tear ran down his face. He swiped it fiercely away. “They gave me her college fund. She didn’t have a will in the legally enforceable sense, but she had a list of everything she cared about and who liked it best, or who needed it, and they followed that. I think she knew there was a chance going to the crossroads could get her killed, and she did it anyway. To help me. All she wanted to do was help me.”
“Why are you still here?” asked Cylia. “If you have the magic and you have the money, and the crossroads can be anywhere, why stay? You could have gone to school. Learned more about how this sort of thing works.”
“Because it wasn’t a bear,” said James. “The crossroads took her, and if there’s any chance I can get her back, I need to do it here, where she got lost. Maybe I can do it, if I do it here.”
I could hear echoes of my grandmother in his desperation, and they chilled me more than his hands had. She’d believed the same thing: that if she started from the place where my grandfather had gotten lost, she’d be able to bring him home again. That was more than fifty years ago. If he’s ever going to come home, it hasn’t happened yet.
That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8) Page 11
