James didn’t say anything as I walked out of the room.
The house was quiet. Everyone else was off doing whatever they found more enjoyable than sitting in a room with a grumpy semi-stranger and reading. I felt more awake than I had in weeks. I had a problem to solve; I had books to use while I was solving it; and most of all, I had a grumpy semi-stranger. Someone to study with and snipe at was basically my idea of a day at the spa.
Studying had always been the place where my brother Alex and I came closest together, no matter how far apart our interests were. We could sit side by side and argue about things that didn’t mean a thing to anyone else, and when we were done, it always felt like we were … friends. Like we had found something beyond siblings to be for one another.
As I descended the stairs, I realized I missed him. Really missed him, in a small but painful way. I wanted my big brother. He would have loved this, like a word problem that didn’t use math for its solution, but some bizarre combination of philosophy, economics, and applied backstabbing.
When this was all over, I was going to ask him to come over and spend a day learning about something stupid, just to have an excuse to sit next to him with one of Grandpa’s journals in my hands and nothing pressing on my schedule.
I was still thinking about how nice that would be—some old books, a few free hours, my brother, and me—when I stepped out the front door onto the porch and froze. Bethany, still in her letter jacket and spirit bows, now matched with blue jeans and a red crop top, leaned against the rail and smiled at me through lips lacquered red as a poisoned candy apple.
“What’s shaking, Annie?” she chirped. “What’s the news, what’s the haps, what’s the status of you winding that boy around your finger? Because I gotta tell you, management isn’t happy with how fast you’re working. And when management isn’t happy, nobody gets to be happy.”
Crap.
Eleven
“Family doesn’t always make things better. Sometimes family only makes it worse.”
–Mary Dunlavy
On the front porch, wishing it were easier to hit a ghost
“IT’S BEEN LESS THAN a day,” I said stiffly, drawing myself up to my full height. At least I was taller than she was. Ghost or not, she looked like she’d been human before she died, and humans are still primates. We like to be tall. “No one gives away all their secrets in less than a day. Tell your ‘management’ that I’m a sorcerer, not a miracle worker. I’m not even really a sorcerer right now, since they’ve got all my magic.”
“You gave it to them,” said Bethany. “They might not be so cranky if you hadn’t spent the morning having coffee with your boyfriend.”
“Sam wasn’t anywhere ne—ew.” I wrinkled my nose, my disgust causing me to briefly forget the threat Bethany represented. “That’s vile. Go tell your bosses that they have filthy minds, and I’m not my sister. I don’t date Covenant men. The genocide never scrubs off of them.”
“Please. Anyone with eyes could see the way he was looking at you. Plus he’s human, so that’s got to be attractive, right? No one with options goes for the guy in the gorilla suit.”
“You know, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to punch a ghost in the throat,” I said, through gritted teeth.
“A lot like punching a cloud,” said Bethany. “I don’t recommend it. I’m not some stupid hitchhiker who can be frightened with threats of violence. I serve the crossroads, and in case you’ve managed to forget, they own you. A little civility is in your best interests.”
“This is a little civility,” I said. “More importantly, this is the best you’re going to get unless you give Mary back to me. He’s here, we’re making nice, it’s been less than a day. You want his secrets, you have to give me time.”
“The more time you have, the more time he has. The more time he has, the more likely it becomes that he’s going to do something you’re going to regret.” Bethany smiled, ignoring my dig about Mary. “Unless you want to find out what happens when you don’t give the crossroads what you promised them? Because I don’t think you’re going to enjoy it very much.”
“If your bosses only wanted me to kill him, I wouldn’t need any time at all. Knives don’t have a waiting period. They want me to be his friend. They want me to know what he knows. People like James don’t trust quickly, no matter how tempting it is. I need to go slowly, or I’m going to lose him, and then you’re never going to know what he knows, or where he learned it.” Not for the first time, I was incredibly grateful that telepaths were rare—and that I’d never, so far as I knew, encountered a ghost who could read minds. If cuckoos leave ghosts, they don’t do it often. And thank fuck for that.
“I’ll tell them you’re not finished. They won’t be happy.”
“Seems like right now, that’s more of a problem for you than it is for me.” I looked at her as calmly as I could. “Where’s Mary?”
“Mary Dunlavy. You people just cannot let the idea of her go, can you?” Bethany shook her head. “She didn’t do her job the way she was asked to. Do you have any idea how long our bosses have been waiting for her to bring one of you people to them? She found her loophole and she exploited it until it closed around her like the noose it was. She’s none of your concern.”
“She’s my aunt.”
Bethany’s nose wrinkled. “Aunts aren’t anything, not even when they’re blood. They’re people who pretend to be family because they have a relative in common somewhere way back on your father’s side, and they never make things better. You should be happy to be rid of her.”
“And yet I’m not. Tell the crossroads that. Tell them I’d be working faster if I weren’t so worried about her.”
“They gave her the kind of leeway they did because she brought them Tommy Price and Bobby Cross, and those two were enough to feed a whole lot of bargains. But leeway doesn’t last forever, and Mary-Mary, quite contrary, hasn’t been pulling her weight for a long time. You need to forget about her.”
Distantly, I realized James and I had the same goal now: we were both tilting at the crossroads like they were our own personal windmill, hoping it would be enough to bring back someone we had never intended to lose. For James, it was the living. For me, it was the dead.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon,” I said. “You can go.”
“Why is your house warded against ghosts?” She tried to make the question sound casual, but it had teeth, and I knew they were poised to crash down and rip me open.
Fortunately, I had an answer. “My family is pretty haunted,” I said. “Mary is usually good about keeping Aunt Rose in check, but she’s gone, and I don’t want to risk waking up to find a ghost sitting at the end of the bed and critiquing my underpants. It’s happened before. Forgive me for taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
There was a flash of something dark and unhappy in Bethany’s eyes when I mentioned Rose. “How many dead aunts do you have?”
“It’s amazing how often I hear that question.” I crossed my arms. “Go away, Bethany. You have all the information I can give you, and the more time I spend out here trying to convince you I’m not hiding anything, the less time I’m spending with James. If your bosses want constant eyes on me, they can give Mary back. I’ll let her follow me to the bathroom if that’s what it takes. You, on the other hand, I don’t know and I don’t trust and I don’t want inside my house.”
Bethany looked down the length of her nose at me. “You’re going to regret that. You’re going to regret that more than you can possibly understand.”
“I’m willing to take the risk.”
She scoffed and disappeared, not even making the faint sound of air being displaced. She had never been fully solid. That was, oddly, encouraging.
Most ghosts have rules that govern how much time they can spend among the living, and how well they can “pass” while they’re here. For example, Aunt Rose is a hitchhiking ghost. As long as she h
as a coat on, she’s functionally alive. She eats, she breathes, she drinks all the soda in the house—when we know she’s coming for a visit, Mom buys this really gross old-fashioned celery soda that tastes like bad decisions and fad diets, which Rose pours over vanilla ice cream like that’s somehow reasonable. Her coats wear off at sunrise, but she can always put on another one. If not for the inevitable need to go back to the road, she could masquerade as one of the living for years.
Mary—and presumably Bethany—is more of a fringe case. Her job with the crossroads requires her to be able to move among the living without attracting attention or seeming out of place. So she doesn’t need a coat, and she doesn’t turn transparent at sunrise, and she doesn’t instinctively change into the clothes she was wearing when she died every time someone startles her. She has to spend a certain amount of time at the crossroads for every hour she spends with the living, but she’s never been willing to disclose the exact ratio.
Bethany could follow me through town if she wanted to. She could sit at the next table over in Burial Grounds, sipping coffee she didn’t need and watching every move I made. Suddenly, the ghost wards on the house didn’t feel petty or small. They felt essential. This was how I took care of my small, weird, found family.
Shoving my hands into my pockets and trying to shake off the lingering unease of Bethany’s visit, I tromped down the porch stairs and started across the yard, scanning the trees as I went. There was a lot of forest, and a lot of vertical space for a fūri to occupy. Make it a logic puzzle, then. Which way would Sam go?
Not toward town. Town meant people, and people meant needing to seem human when he really didn’t want to. Not toward James’ house, either, not with Chief Smith lurking around the woods. It seemed unlikely for the local chief of police to try to sneak up on us, but stranger things have happened. That left deeper into the woods, or through the narrower patch to the lake. After a moment’s indecision, I turned lakeward and started walking.
Tracking something—or someone—arboreal means relying on a whole different set of contextual clues. There weren’t going to be many, or any, broken branches at ground level; everything was going to be happening overhead. Unfortunately, I have a healthy respect for gravity, which meant climbing every tree I passed was out of the question, and I couldn’t walk with my head bent all the way back unless I wanted to hook my foot on a root and eat ground.
(Verity would have had no such problems. Verity would have taken this as an excuse to play me Tarzan, you lucky, and gone swinging through the woods after him. Verity is human, unlike Sam, and her constant striving toward high places is one more predictor of her inevitable plunge into an early grave.)
In the end, I settled for splitting my attention, scanning the ground for anything out of place—freshly broken branches, excessively bright, new-fallen leaves—and looking up to trace them to the place where they’d started. Sam was fast and strong enough to leave a lot of distance between traces, but he wasn’t the most subtle person I’d ever tried to follow. Less than ten yards in, I was confident of his direction. After twenty, I was moving fast, not pausing or looking back.
My own steps were lighter, placed so as to cause minimal disturbance to the brush. It was unlikely that anyone would have been able to follow me as I was following Sam. That was a combination of healthy paranoia and early training coming to the fore: my parents taught me often and mercilessly that a predator who couldn’t find you is a predator that can’t kill you. Since I didn’t much care for the idea of being caught unawares, I did my best not to leave any trail for potential hunters to follow.
The trees thinned. The broken branches stopped, and there was a mighty disturbance of the leaves, showing me where Sam had jumped down. I kept walking. The great blank disk of the lake loomed up in front of me, gleaming gunmetal gray in the sunlight. The boat house was visible to the left, decrepit but holding. It was a horror movie accessory turned house fixture, and the trail of scuffed leaves and broken branches led me straight there.
There was a small dock around the side, around fifteen feet in length. It would have been a good place to tie a boat, if we’d had access to one. As things stood, it was a good place for Sam to sit, chucking rocks moodily out across the water, his back to the woods.
I walked over and plopped down next to him, grabbing one of the rocks from his pile and sending it skipping merrily on its way. “Are you trying to give a fish a concussion?”
“Jesus, Annie!” He flinched away, staring at me. “Learn how to make noise when you walk, would you?”
“Now, where would be the fun in that?” I sobered. “You should be more careful, though. If I can sneak up on you, so can Leonard.”
“Leonard. Right.” He grabbed another rock and threw it hard at the surface of the water. It didn’t skip so much as it tore in a straight line across the lake until momentum gave out and it sank. “Leonard from the Covenant, who’s totally obsessed with you and going to kill the rest of us so he can take you home to mama.”
“Not me: my family name. He wants to be the one who brings the Prices back to the Covenant, and he doesn’t care much about my thoughts on the matter.” I bumped my shoulder against Sam’s. “As long as we’re careful and he’s alone, we can take him. Which is good, because we’re going to have to do it sooner or later. He can find me. No matter where I go, he can find me.”
“Right. Tracking spells.”
“Yeah.” Maybe there was something about scrambling them in the books James’ mother had left behind. I’d have to get my magic back before I could attempt to perform even the simplest ritual, but once I had …
A witch is no match for a sorcerer, and so far as I’m aware, witches are all the Covenant has left. If this worked, I could go home. The thought was intoxicating. I could see my parents. Update the mice. Introduce Artie and Sam. I could play roller derby again. It was a wonderful dream. It was worth fighting for.
“That’s why you ran away from the carnival in the first place, right? Because they might have tracking spells, and they might find you, and people might get hurt. And that was a good enough reason for you to leave.” Sam picked up another rock, weighing it in his hand as he stared off at the horizon.
I sighed, shoulders slumping. “Sam,” I said, in a small voice, “if you’re pissed at me for some reason, will you say so, so I can start apologizing and we can get whatever this is over with? Please? I came to check on you because I wanted to see you, not because I wanted to get yelled at over something stupid.”
“I’m just wondering how long it’ll be before you go off with Leonard to ‘save’ the rest of us. It’d be easier. Sure, he’s a genocidal maniac who’d probably skin me as soon as look at me, but at least he’s human. Or there’s James. You could stay here with him and play small-town witch, and not have to deal with any of this bullshit.”
I started to reply. Then I stopped, forcing myself to count to ten.
There were a lot of ways this conversation could go. I could see several of them unfolding, like a terrible Choose Your Own Adventure. There was the version where I let my frustration boil over and started yelling, and we had the kind of fight that we maybe didn’t recover from. There was the version where I listened to what he was saying without thinking about why he was saying it, and got hurt, and walked away, turning some of his fears true.
Both of them were versions that would absolutely have won out, once. I was the baby of my family, the one who’d never had any expectations set upon her shoulders, the one who’d been allowed to keep the family babysitter long past the point where it was necessary. I’d been a little mean and a little judgmental and, weirdly, a little sheltered, which is something that can be difficult to accomplish when my parents insisted on dragging me into the woods to meet every damn thing that came along. It had been easy to focus inward since the world was big and didn’t seem to want me.
Sam had grown up in a community that was larger and smaller than mine at the same time, surrounded by people wh
o loved and accepted him, but who never let him forget he wasn’t human, that he could never leave. College had never been on the table for him: he couldn’t sleep and stay in human form. Without a degree, most jobs wouldn’t even look at him twice. He’d been born into the carnival. He’d expected to stay there forever, no exit, no escape.
And then he’d met me, and I’d been the first girl who wasn’t from his community who didn’t seem to care that he wasn’t human, or that he was a rude asshole when he was anxious, which was most of the time when there were strangers around. I’d also been the first girl to kiss him without demanding he turn human first, like the side of him that came more naturally was somehow inappropriate or obscene.
Cryptids like Fern and Cylia move through the world looking like members of the currently dominant species, and if they decided to hook up with a human, no one would bat an eye. But Sam … he would always be a little fuzzy, and I suspected, would always be a little insecure about it. He’d been raised by humans, indoctrinated by human stories and human media, and if we weren’t exactly a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, it was only because we could both be pretty beastly when we wanted to.
“Hey.” I touched his shoulder. He didn’t turn. “Hey.”
“What?” Sam finally looked at me, eyes wary. “Are you going to argue with me? Because I don’t think—”
I leaned over and kissed him.
Sam stiffened, clearly not sure what he was supposed to do. He’d been expecting a fight, not … this. In the end, hormones won out. His hands slid around my waist, pulling me closer, as his tail snaked up to tangle in my hair. I scooted over accommodatingly, letting him pull me as close as he wanted, offering no resistance.
Kissing Sam is basically the same as kissing a human. There are some subtle differences in his bone structure, and his sideburns are fur, not hair, making them dense and soft against my fingers, but apart from that, he has lips, he has a nose, he has a face that’s close enough to human that when I close my eyes, I can easily pretend. So I didn’t close my eyes. I kept them open, watching as I kissed him. Watching the tension in his brow, and the way the skin around his own eyes crinkled, still tight.
That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8) Page 16
