That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8)

by Seanan McGuire

  I’ll give Leo this much, if nothing else: shaken as he clearly was, he maintained a scrap of dignity as he asked, “What’s that?”

  “Annie’s not my friend.” Sam’s smile widened, becoming even more threatening. “You shot her. You shot her with a crossbow, and she fell into the lake. She could have died. You get that, right? She could have died. You did that.”

  “I was aiming for you,” said Leo.

  “And maybe I could have forgiven you for that—I mean, probably not, but maybe—only you didn’t hit me. You hit her. She could have died.” Sam let go of Leo’s hand so abruptly that the other man stumbled backward, thrown off-balance. Sam looked at him dismissively. “If you ever threaten her again, I’m going to rip your spine out and beat you with it until you stop twitching. If you ever actually hurt her again, you’re going to wish I’d done something as friendly as removing pieces of your skeleton. Got it?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” said Leonard.

  “Great,” said Sam. “Welcome to the party.”

  Nineteen

  “Find out what people expect and then do as close to the opposite as your conscience and the laws of physics will allow. Gets ’em every time.”

  –Frances Brown

  The front room of a rented house in New Gravesend, Maine, getting ready to make some really impressive mistakes

  LEONARD LOOKED AT J AMES’ meticulously written and organized notes, a small frown on his patrician face. He’d been reviewing our work for the past twenty minutes, and I was starting to twitch. Who knew I could get test anxiety from watching a member of the Covenant go over my plans to either change the world forever or get myself and everyone who trusted me utterly, irredeemably fucked? What a fun voyage of self-discovery I was on.

  If Leonard was aware that we’d arranged ourselves to box him in, he wasn’t saying anything. James was still in his original position on the couch, having moved a few books but otherwise not acknowledging that Leonard might like to be comfortable. That was part of the plan. If Leo tried to bolt, James could grab him and present him with a nice case of frostbite to slow him the hell down. Cylia was leaning against the front door, Fern was sitting cross-legged at the entry to the hallway, and Sam and I were sitting on the stairs, me with my back against his chest, him casually playing with my hair while shooting nasty looks in Leo’s direction. He was as tense as I’d ever felt him when not in human form, and his tail was wrapped around my left ankle tightly enough to hurt a little. I didn’t object.

  “There’s a flaw in your reasoning,” said Leonard finally, looking up and scanning the room until he met my eyes. “A fairly large one.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “And what’s that?”

  “Your plan hinges on you having access to your original crossroads ghost, the one you say is well-inclined toward your family,” he said. “If you can’t leave the wards without risking exposure to the second ghost, the one that isn’t well-inclined, how are you planning to get the first ghost back?”

  I smiled slowly. Sam’s body was warm behind me, chasing the last of the lingering chill from the air. I felt like I was starting to thaw for the first time since Bethany had appeared to tell me what the crossroads wanted me to do.

  “I’m sure you must have asked yourself why we’d need another warm body when the party was already pretty full,” I said. “I mean, it’s not that we didn’t want to run around wondering if we were going to get stabbed in the back at any moment, it’s just that five is the usual sweet spot for any sort of superhero outing.”

  Leonard looked at me warily. “I’m sure you’re speaking English.”

  “All that snobbery and you don’t even read comic books. Man, I really dodged a bullet getting away from you people.”

  “You didn’t dodge the crossbow bolt,” said Sam.

  “Point,” I said. Looking at Leonard, I said, “We need you to go to the crossroads—not the main one, not the one by the hanging tree, we’re saving that to visit with Mary—and indicate that you’re ready to make a deal. We have summoning charms that should work to get Bethany’s attention. Then all you need to do is hem and haw enough that she stays focused on you while we get Mary back.”

  “And what, pray tell, am I to claim to want?” asked Leonard.

  “Simple.” I felt an echo of Sam’s smile in my own as I bared my teeth at the man in front of me. “Say you want me. Say you can’t go home without me. Say you can tell the crossroads have some sort of claim on me, and you’ve come to buy it back. All you have to do is avoid sealing an actual bargain while we get Mary out of wherever she’s been banished to. Once that’s done …”

  Once we had Mary, we’d be able to petition for a reassessment of Sally’s deal. We could get to the crossroads where they lived, if that was even the right term. And then things would really get interesting.

  Leonard looked at me levelly. “You’re trusting me a great deal.”

  I rolled one shoulder in a shrug. “You’re not going to make a crossroads bargain over me. You don’t want to win by cheating, and those bargains always have loopholes in them. Your control over the Covenant is going to depend on not having any of those loopholes in your past, waiting to strike. Also, you pretty much think the crossroads are literally the big-D Devil, and you’re probably not wrong. So yeah, I trust you, but only because I know I can. You fake it. You flirt and you fluster and you keep Bethany busy, and in exchange, we give you the world. Think you can manage?”

  Slowly, almost reluctantly, Leonard began to smile.

  “You only needed to ask,” he said.

  * * *

  Finding a local crossroads manifestation point was easy. Too easy: while every crossing potentially could be a breakthrough for a bargain, most municipalities don’t have more than one spot that has actually been used recently enough to have the necessary resonance. Maybe two. In New Gravesend, it seemed like every possible crossing point had been used. Several times.

  “It’s always been like this,” James said. “I tried to research it at the beginning, when I was trying to determine what mattered. In the end, I had to stop because it doesn’t matter why the crossroads pay so much attention to a little town like this one. They do. That’s enough.”

  I thought of how few sorcerers there were left in the world—fewer, even, than could be accounted for by the rabid way the Covenant hunted us, because sorcerers can hide. They’re masters of tucking themselves away, out of sight and hence out of mind. I thought of the way the crossroads had gone for my grandfather, and how eagerly they’d gone after me once the opportunity arose. They couldn’t be that hungry for every possible bargain, or there’d be no way to keep them a secret from the wider world. The fact that they’d pursued him, pursued me, and even pursued James … they didn’t like sorcerers. They didn’t like us at all.

  James’ mother had been a sorcerer. This had been her town. And the talent ran in families. It might be difficult to tell which had come first, but I was willing to bet if we really went digging, we’d find that the number of bargains began to climb right around when the first of James’ ancestors had moved to New Gravesend.

  I was right. I was sure that I was right. Looking at James’ face as he earnestly explained where Leonard was going to go to bait the crossroads—where the rest of us were going to go while Bethany was distracted, to get Mary back—I knew I could never tell him. He was a smart guy. If he’d wanted to consider the possibility that his family had brought this down on their hometown, he would already have done so. The fact that he hadn’t told me it didn’t matter and, more, that he needed to stay at least a little bit in denial.

  “What do I do if the crossroads decide to have done with me?”

  “Come back here,” said Cylia. “There’s a key under the mat at the back door. Let yourself in, have a cookie, and wait to see whether we survive.”

  “If you don’t?”

  “Run,” said Fern. She wrinkled her nose. “The crossroads will probably still be hungry
after it eats us.”

  “How encouraging.” Leonard stood, looking at the window, where the sun was dipping ever lower. “What happens if you succeed at your task?”

  “Bethany probably freaks out and disappears,” I said. “You run. We’ll be at the hanging tree at midnight. You can help us destroy the crossroads if you show up before we go into the final battle against the eldritch terror.”

  Leonard turned to stare at me. Finally, he shook his head, and said, “You would have fit in so much better with our number than you believe is true. You could have been the best of us.”

  “Instead, I’m going to be the best of the opposition,” I said. “Good luck out there.”

  “I won’t need it,” he said, and walked to the front door, letting himself out.

  “That man is either very brave or very stupid,” said Sam. “Or both. Can I vote both? I’m going to vote both.”

  “Maybe he’ll die,” said Cylia hopefully. “I bet the crossroads could turn him inside out if they wanted to. There’s no way the Covenant could blame that on us.”

  “The Covenant doesn’t need a specific target when they start pointing fingers,” I said grimly. “If he gets turned inside out, that just makes it harder for us to hide the body. I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’s a snake, and snakes always slither out of trouble.” I turned to James. “How long would it take you to walk to the crossing you’ve directed him to?”

  “About twenty minutes, assuming I didn’t get lost,” he said. “Give him thirty minutes, just to be sure.”

  “Is that enough time to set up the ritual circles?”

  “I hope so.” He put his book aside and rose. “If you’d all come with me, we can get started. Not you, Annie. You need to stay inside until we’re ready to begin.”

  “I know.” I didn’t bother trying to keep the bitterness out of my tone. I wanted to help. I wanted to be there to check every line and analyze every curve, to squabble with James over the placement of candles and semiprecious stones. Summoning the dead can be very simple or very complex, depending on what kind of spirit you’re trying to call, and while we could normally snag Rose with a handful of dirt and a gas station hot dog, Mary was going to be harder. The fact that we needed to call her back without attracting the attention of the crossroads was just one more layer of difficulty on top of an already sticky situation.

  I stayed seated on the stairs as the others rose and followed James to the back door. Sam was the last to go, pausing long enough to bend over and press a kiss against my temple.

  “You going to be okay in here?” he asked.

  “I’ll watch from the kitchen window,” I said. The boathouse, which had seemed like the best place to set up a summoning circle without either violating the wards or attracting unwanted attention, wouldn’t be exactly in view, but if someone needed me, they could run back and wave until I opened the window. Summoning via semaphore.

  “It’ll be over soon,” he said as he stepped away, already back in human form, just in case someone saw them. He grabbed his jacket from the back of the couch, not bothering with any kind of shoes.

  It only took a few seconds for me to be left entirely alone. I stayed where I was, looking at the empty room, strewn with books and notes and nothingness, before I finally rose and started toward the couch, beginning to collect our research materials. Anything to keep myself moving, to keep myself busy while they got started setting things up.

  “I can’t do this,” I murmured, and that was the complete, achingly honest truth. I didn’t know how my grandfather had been able to do this, to handle the borders of his world narrowing until they weren’t even large enough to encompass his entire house. I’d read his journals, of course—we’d all read the journals—but they showed a level of “stiff upper lip” that I guess we should have expected from a Covenant-trained British man. Grandma might have been able to tell me more, if we’d ever felt like it was safe to ask her.

  That was a fun thought. We could kidnap James and ask him to transfer the ghost wards to Cylia’s car if this didn’t work. She could drive me to Michigan, all of us peeing in bottles and trying not to yearn for showers, James recasting the wards whenever they ran down. We still owned the house where Thomas Price had become a captive of the crossroads. Grandma Alice went there all the time, and we all tried to pretend it was healthy for her to spend her time on Earth in a house that might not hold any ghosts but was absolutely haunted all the same.

  We could put me there. Fix up a bedroom and leave me like a cork in a bottle, one more Price for a house that had already tried and failed to protect our family.

  “Morbid much?” I muttered. I kept picking up books, stacking them on the coffee table with their spines turned away from the door. That was a little piece of habit I’d picked up when I was a kid, a way to keep Verity from commenting on the books I was reading. Privacy had never been plentiful in our house.

  I missed it. I missed knowing there was a good chance any open door would reveal a member of my family, sharpening knives or making out with their latest significant other, or even folding laundry and waiting to dragoon the first person too slow to get away into rolling socks. I missed home.

  In that moment, it was incredibly hard to believe I was ever going home again.

  I was stacking James’ notes in a tidy pile when the doorbell rang. I whipped around, a cascade of papers accompanying the motion, and stared at the door. The doorbell rang again before someone started hammering on the wood.

  Swell. Cylia’s car was in the driveway and the lights were on; there was no way I could slink back to the kitchen and pretend no one was home. Bethany wasn’t likely to ring the bell. Even if she did, she couldn’t get me as long as I stayed behind the wards. I took one quick look around the front room, confirming that nothing really weird was visible, and moved, cautiously, toward the door.

  I pulled it open just as Captain Smith raised his hand to start another round of hammering. He blinked at me. I blinked at him.

  “James isn’t here,” I blurted.

  “May I come in?” he asked, and pushed past me without waiting for an answer, sweeping his eyes over the book-strewn living room. He didn’t seem to realize that most of the books had come from his house: his gaze skipped straight over them, lip slowly curling in a sneer. “He’s been here,” he said.

  “Well, yes, because we were making out for like, an hour, but I don’t see why that’s any of your business.” I crossed my arms, glad Sam wasn’t in the room to hear that particular lie. Although it would have been nice to have the backup. “He’s not here.”

  Belatedly, I realized his bike might still be outside. Oh, well. Too late now.

  “Good.” Captain Smith turned back to me. “I want to talk to you.”

  “And I want you out of my house. Isn’t it fun how we’re both being thwarted today?”

  “You need to stay away from James.”

  “My house. Out of.” Belatedly, it occurred to me that I was speaking not only to the local chief of police, but to the father of the man I was supposedly dating. I added a grudging, “Please.”

  “He’s a delicate boy. He doesn’t need some loose woman coming from out of town and getting him all confused.”

  I blinked. “I … what? I don’t know whether to be more offended by you calling James ‘delicate’ or you calling me ‘loose.’ I assure you, I am the opposite of a loose woman. I’m a tightly-wound, sort of prickly woman. Hermione Granger is my Patronus.”

  From the look on Captain Smith’s face, he wasn’t entirely sure I was speaking English. “I don’t think you understand how unpleasant I can make things for you.”

  “I don’t think you understand how little I care.” Rage washed through me, crisp and chemical and oh-so- welcome. Here was a distraction. Here was something I could sink my teeth into. I stepped forward, jabbing a finger in the direction of his chest. “We’ve broken no laws. We’re both adults. Holding hands and kissing is none of your concern. Maybe you should
be asking yourself why you’ve never sent him to college. He’s a smart guy. He deserves better than whatever the hell weird obsession you’ve got with keeping him nice and captive and—”

  “He’s never been outside of New Gravesend in his life,” snapped Captain Smith.

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “His mother’s!”

  We both froze, staring at each other. He didn’t look like he’d intended to say that. Interesting.

  “I thought she died,” I said.

  “She did,” he replied. “She became very sick, and then she passed away, and he’s been delicate ever since. He doesn’t need more stress.”

  “College—”

  “Would have been stressful for the boy. He hasn’t even tried to leave town since he was eleven. School field trip. He collapsed at the city limits. He doesn’t understand how fragile he is.”

  I opened my mouth to answer, then stopped, cocking my head and looking at him. Really looking at him, not at James’ idea of him, not at the chief of police, but at the man. The man who’d married a sorcerer and buried her when she should have been in her prime. The man who’d raised a son he didn’t seem to understand or want, but who’d refused to let that child go, when the logical thing would have been to ship James off to the first boarding school that was willing to take him.

  The man who lived in the most crossroads-touched town I’d ever seen, who tried to keep the law functioning there, and who couldn’t possibly be as oblivious as his son assumed he had to be. There was just no way.

  “You knew she was a sorcerer, didn’t you?” I asked.

  He looked away. That was answer enough.