“What did you do?” I asked, in a very small voice.
“It’s not what I did,” he said. “It’s what James’ great-great-great-great-grandfather did.”
Dammit. “James’ mother,” I said. “She got sick when James was a kid. Did she know she was going to get sick?”
He nodded.
“Did she know she was going to die?”
He nodded again.
“Did the same thing happen to one of her parents?”
A third nod. “She was an only child. They’re always only children on her side of the family, and they always see one of their parents die when they’re eleven or twelve years old. Old enough for it to hurt.”
I was pretty sure losing a parent would hurt no matter how old somebody was when it happened, but I didn’t say that. “Why?”
“Because some ancestor of hers decided his magic,” there was a bitter twist to the word that was almost more shocking than hearing the word at all, “was more important than his family, and he made a deal to make sure it would always breed true. Apparently, it doesn’t a lot of the time, for magic folks.”
“It skips generations,” I said, in as neutral a tone as I could manage.
“It does,” said Captain Smith, and frowned. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“Because I’m not,” I said. “One of James’ ancestors made a deal with the crossroads to guarantee all his descendants would be sorcerers and had worded it in such a way that when each new member of the family began to come into their magic, the previous member of the family would die a sudden and unavoidable death. That’s pretty straightforward. What keeps him here in town?”
“The bargain included the phrase ‘that New Gravesend should always be protected against the dangers of the unseen world,’” said Captain Smith.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Of course it did. All right. First, you should talk to your son, because he has no idea you know any of this, and he’s a sorcerer, so telling him you know magic exists wouldn’t be the worst idea you ever had. And you don’t break a crossroads bargain by making sure someone is ignorant of the fact that it affects them.” Was he ignorant? Truly?
He had to be. He would have said something if not, or recognized that he could be contesting his family’s bargain, rather than Sally’s: there’s nothing like an old family debt that you didn’t volunteer for and can’t get away from to make a case for systemic unfairness.
Captain Smith’s cheeks reddened. “I didn’t come here to be told how to raise my son.”
“Uh, you already raised him. He’s an adult. The only reason he hasn’t been clawing the walls down trying to get out of this town is because he’s been trying to get justice for Sally, but one day he’s going to give up, or he’s going to decide he needs to consult with somebody who knows more about this shit than he does. He’s going to take whatever he’s been able to save from his shitty job and buy a bus ticket for anywhere but here, and then what? He crosses the city limits and dies of a massive coronary? You’re doing him no favors and a lot of future harm by keeping him in the dark. So no, I will not stay away from your son, and no, I will not help you do a better job of lying to him, and I would like you to get out of my house now, please.”
Captain Smith regarded me levelly for several seconds. “I could make life in this town very difficult for you.”
“Life in this town is already difficult enough. Leave, please.”
He started for the door. Then he paused, turning to give me a thoughtful look. “How do you know all this about magic?”
“Oh, didn’t I mention? I’m a sorcerer, too.” I raised my hand, fingers poised like I was going to snap and, I don’t know, blow us both to Kingdom Come. “Leave, please. I don’t want to explain why you’re here when James comes back.”
Captain Smith gave me a look that was half anger, half fear before bolting for the door. I ran after him, slamming it so hard the windows rattled and flipping the deadbolt home. My heart was pounding; my skin felt two sizes too small.
“Get it together, Annie,” I whispered, leaning my forehead against the doorframe and forcing myself to breathe. “Get it together.”
The crossroads hated sorcerers. That wasn’t a surprise. But how many of us had it destroyed, limited, confined, all for the sake of avoiding the confrontation I was trying to help kick off? This was too much. This was too big. We weren’t going to win. The crossroads had destroyed generations of people just like me, and it was hubris to think we were going to be any different. James wasn’t going to get away. I wasn’t going to get away. It was over. We’d lost.
I looked longingly toward Cylia’s purse, still sitting on the floor by the end of the couch. She had a prepaid burner cell. I knew she did because I’d been there when she bought it. Having a phone number was essential if she wanted to set up and pay for things like utilities.
I could call home. One last time. I could tell my mother I loved her. I could tell my father I was sorry. I could tell my mice they were going to need to prepare a new set of catechisms soon, rituals I was never going to be a part of, because we were going to lose bad. We were all going to die here, so damn far away from home, and I hated it, and it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right, and I could call home if I wanted to. I could say good-bye.
Or I could win. I could tell the odds and the crossroads to go fuck themselves, and I could win. It seemed impossible. It seemed more than impossible. It was still the better option.
Reluctantly, I pushed away from the door and walked toward the kitchen, leaving Cylia’s purse alone. The curtains were drawn across the kitchen window. I pushed them aside, and shouted in dismay as Sam’s face appeared, all but pressed against the glass.
“There you are,” he mouthed, words silenced by the thick, storm-ready pane. He disappeared. The door opened a moment later, and he stuck his head inside.
“James says the circle is close enough to perfect as makes no difference, and he wants you to come have a look before we get ready to start the summons,” he said. “Leonard should be at the crossroads by now. Think they’ll eat him? Could we get that lucky?”
“Talk to Cylia if it’s luck you’re looking for,” I said, and took a deep breath before muttering, “Here goes nothing,” and stepping out the back door.
Bethany didn’t appear. I allowed my shoulders to unlock.
Sam nodded. “See? We’re doing this.” Then he grabbed my wrist with one still-human hand and tugged me off the porch, heading across the field toward the distant shadow of the boathouse.
I’ve never been the most outdoorsy member of my family, but I’ve never been on the verge of losing everything outside my bedroom walls before. The world seemed to have become supersaturated during my short time inside, the colors growing brighter, the smells growing more intense. I looked around as much as I dared as we trotted through the field, not quite running, but more than walking fast.
Fern was waiting just outside the boathouse. “What took you so long?” she asked.
“I got distracted cleaning up.” I could tell them about Captain Smith later, when Mary was back and we were going up against the crossroads directly. James would need to know. He didn’t deserve to be blindsided by the news that one of his ancestors had guaranteed his mother’s death, or that his father had been lying to him for his entire life.
Sometimes, good intentions do more damage than all the wicked plots in all the world.
Inside, someone—probably Cylia—had strung a bunch of white hazard lights around the edges of the boathouse, casting a cool white light over the circle sketched in chalk, salt, and little white feathers across the majority of the floor. I stopped, frowning.
“Where did you get that many white feathers?” I asked. “Did somebody kill a goose?”
“No, we killed a pillow,” said Cylia. “Our landlord has good taste in linens. James did most of the work of drawing the summoning circle. The rest of us just handed him feathers when he asked for them.”
; That was good. Anyone can draw a summoning circle, but they work best when drawn by someone with actual power. I walked a slow loop around the edge, checking for breaks, checking for places where the lines were narrower, or shallower, or anything else that could lead to us getting something other than what we bargained for. To his credit, James watched me but didn’t say anything about the inspection. It’s a fool who argues about a second set of eyes on a complicated problem, whether you’re talking calculus or demonology.
The candles were placed with precision. The semiprecious stones, which were mostly quartz and appeared to have been gathered from the edge of the lake, were properly nestled in their cradles of salt. I bent to adjust a few of them, moving their angles more into alignment with the rest of the scene, and didn’t say a word. This was going to work or it wasn’t. We were going to get one of our allies back—one of our weapons back—or we weren’t.
Only one way to know for sure.
I straightened, looking slowly around the room. My motley crew of allies and oddities looked back, waiting for the word.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s do this.”
Twenty
“People who say that right and wrong are all about absolutes are usually getting ready to stab someone for looking at things differently. Try to stab them first.”
–Enid Healy
In a somewhat decrepit boathouse, preparing to do something genuinely foolish
WE ARRAYED OURSELVES AROUND the circle, standing as evenly spaced as possible, our hands outstretched and our fingers splayed, not quite touching one another. Sam’s arms were long enough in his fūri form that he could have reached the people to either side of him—me and Cylia—but that wasn’t the point. We were sketching a phantom connection as part of our snare to catch a ghost, and actual contact would have interfered.
The rules of magic are complicated, confusing, and sometimes contradictory. Magic is basically the English language of universal constants.
“Mary Dunlavy, we call to you from across the void,” I said. “You have duties yet unfinished and promises yet unfulfilled here upon this mortal plane, and you will answer me, or give good reason why.”
“Wouldn’t giving good reason be an answer?” Fern asked, sounding faintly baffled.
I didn’t answer. It didn’t matter if she spoke. Cylia and Sam were similarly unlimited. Only James and I had to stay completely on task. We were the ones who supposedly knew what we were doing. And hey, James had never called a ghost before, and I was distracted by the fact that the fresh new wards on the boathouse were of necessity less complete than the ones on the house, since we needed to be able to pull Mary through them, but at least we’d read the back of the cereal box. Or something.
“Mary Dunlavy, you are needed,” said James. “Your work is not yet done. Your time is not yet finished. Your allies call to you, and will not go unheard.”
The air in the boathouse began to chill. Whether that was because the calling was starting to work or because James was nervous enough to be freezing the air around him was anybody’s guess.
“Mary, come to me.” I let some of the solemnity slip from my voice, replaced by raw pleading. “I’m not done with you yet. You’re not going to be my babysitter forever, and that means I should enjoy the time I have left.”
“Everybody should have a dead aunt,” said Sam.
I resisted the urge to glare at him.
The candles flickered. The air kept getting colder, chilling around us degree by degree. I glanced at James, who shook his head while mouthing “not me.” Okay. Something was coming to answer our summons. Whether it was Mary or something worse had yet to be determined.
Perhaps belatedly, it occurred to me that if the crossroads could monitor me through her, maybe they could also answer a summons intended for her. Maybe we’d just triggered the final showdown well ahead of our intentions, and we were about to face the consequences.
Oh, well. Too late now, and at least we were surrounded by things we could use as makeshift weapons, if it came down to it. Things could have been a lot worse. We could have been doing this skyclad and empty-handed, for example. I tried to hold onto that flash of optimism as the air chilled even further, until—with no flash or fanfare—Mary, or something very much like her, appeared in the middle of our circle.
She was naked, folded forward in a bestial crouch, with her face shrouded by the cobweb sheet of her tangled white hair. Her skin wasn’t her usual Welsh pallor, betraying a life spent avoiding the sun and a possible vitamin D deficiency but not much else: it was the chalky, bruised blue-gray of the grave. I could count every one of her ribs and every knob along her spine.
“Uh,” said Sam. “Is that … did we get the wrong ghost? Because I’m not really into the idea of a possession right now.”
“Mary?” I whispered.
The girl in our circle didn’t respond, didn’t move so much as a muscle in answer to my question. She was still as only the dead can be, not even breathing as she crouched.
It was the hair. No one was left who’d known her when she was alive—she hadn’t become my grandmother’s babysitter until after her death, although my great-grandma hadn’t known that when she hired her—but I was pretty sure she hadn’t had waist-length white hair as a living teenage girl. That sort of thing tends to get remembered. She’d probably been some shade of blonde, only to get sun-bleached by the endless country road that lingered, haunted, in her eyes.
Maybe her human face was a pretty façade she put on for the sake of the living people she adored. Maybe this was what she looked like. But she was still Mary.
“Stay here,” I said, and stepped over the salt line, entering the circle.
Summoning circles are tricky things. People like to brag about using them to catch demons, but I’m not actually sure demons exist, and if they did, they’d be too big and too scary to catch with salt and candles. Mostly, summoning circles are used to call and contain ghosts. The people doing the calling have to know, for sure, that the ghost is out there: have to know the ghost’s name and as many details as possible about who they were when they were alive and who they’ve become since death. Get a few things wrong, get nothing. Or worse, get the wrong ghost.
Sam started to follow me. James motioned sharply for him to stop.
“It’s too late,” he said. “She’s over the line.”
Sam frowned but didn’t argue. I was quietly relieved. All Sam could have done was join me in the circle or tackle me out of it, and both those options had their serious downsides. If this was Mary, I didn’t need help. If it wasn’t Mary, I didn’t need him breaking the salt line and letting her out.
It only took a few steps to put me in front of the crouching spirit. I knelt, resting my hands on the floor so she could see I wasn’t armed, wasn’t holding salt or glass or anything else I could use to hurt her.
“Mary?” I whispered.
Slowly, she raised her head and looked at me.
I did not recoil. If I never do anything worth doing again, at least I’ll always know that I did not recoil: in that moment, when Mary needed me to be strong for her sake, I didn’t pull away from her. I wanted to. My muscles locked and the hair on my arms stood on end and every instinct I had screamed for me to get away as fast as I could, to put some distance between myself and the terrible thing now looking at me.
Her face belonged on a mummy dug out of a bog, some twisted, unspeakable horror that had been marinating in the muck and slime for a thousand years. Her skin was leather and slime at the same time, simultaneously drawn tight across her bones and sagging like it was going to slough off and puddle to the floor. She was a creature from a child’s worst nightmare, too twisted and terrible to exist outside the lands of the dead.
And her eyes were a hundred miles of open, empty road.
I didn’t hesitate. I leaned forward, wrapping my arms around her skeletal shoulders and pulling her close to me, bracing myself against the expected scent of
the grave. It never came. She smelled, if she smelled of anything, of sunlight on green corn: sweet and dusty and alive.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered against the shriveled flesh of her shoulder.
Mary held herself stiff for a few more long, agonized moments before slowly, creakily raising her left hand and patting me on the back. The gesture started off awkward, like she was a puppet that hadn’t quite figured out how her strings worked, but loosened up quickly, until it was the familiar, comforting feeling of being soothed by my babysitter.
“… sorry … baby …” she said. Her voice was a distant hiss.
“What can we do?” I kept her close. Part of it was selfish: I never wanted to let her go again. Part of it was the desire not to see what the crossroads had done to her. Punching an ancient force of terrible magic in the face is rarely as good an idea as it seems.
“… don’t … know …”
I paused. What I was about to try seemed ridiculous, the real-world equivalent of one of those stupid kiddie shows where everything can be fixed with the power of love and friendship and wishing really hard. It was still the only idea I had. Whether this was what Mary looked like behind the friendly human façade she worked so hard to project or whether this was something the crossroads had done to her didn’t matter: she was in pain, she was being punished, and this needed to stop.
“You’re two kinds of ghost at once,” I said. “Whether you were supposed to be or not, you are. You’re a crossroads ghost, and I guess that’s how they have enough power over you to have done this to you. But you’re also my babysitter, and I need you. I need you to be ready to protect me. I need you to be ready and able to stand up on your own in case I try to, I don’t know, drink bleach or something else stupid as hell. I’m just a kid. I can’t do this without you.”
My voice broke on the last word. There was a low noise behind me, like someone stifling a gasp. I didn’t turn to see who it was. I didn’t do anything but stay where I was, and wait.
Finally, in a tone that was weary but amused—and more amused than weary—Mary said, “You’re not a kid, Annie. You’re old enough to drink, drive, and destroy other people’s property.”
That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8) Page 29
