“I’m still younger than you.” I finally pulled away enough to look at her.
My babysitter looked back.
She was dressed in the peasant blouse and jeans that were her default—and I wondered, for the first time, whether part of that “look” might not be her matching my mother’s subconscious expectation of what a babysitter was supposed to look like. When she took over watching the next generation, would her default shift to something more modern, seamlessly jumping over decades to settle on the nineties or the aughts? Still charmingly old-fashioned by the standards of the so-called modern world, but comforting enough to parental eyes to add an air of responsible respectability to someone who looked far too young to be trusted with an infant?
“What,” said Sam clearly, “the actual fuck.”
“Language, young man,” said Mary, not taking her eyes off me. “I’ll tell your grandmother on you.”
“She’d probably appreciate it,” he replied. “At least then she’d know I was alive.”
Mary ignored him, choosing instead to reach for my hands and stand, pulling me along with her. She was shorter than me. She had been for years, but in this moment she was radiating “responsible adult” fiercely enough that our heights suddenly seemed like a parsing error in the universe.
“That was not a safe or clever thing to do, but I am so proud of you,” she said, and pulled me into another hug. This time, she was warm and solid and safe, just like she’d been when I was a kid and couldn’t imagine ever wanting another babysitter to watch over me.
“No, I’m serious here,” said Sam. “What just happened? Small words, please, and remember that I’m strong enough to twist your heads off, so maybe try to explain before the urge to do some twisting overwhelms my patience.”
“That’s very violent,” said Fern.
“It’s been a violent sort of week,” said Sam.
“Ghosts are flexible when they’re new; they’re also, as a rule, weak,” said Mary, letting me go and turning toward Sam. “They have one big flash of power, and then they fade. That’s why most hitchers start by getting themselves a ride home, and most ever-lasters start by finding their way back to campus, but then no one sees them or hears about them for years. It’s because they’re lost in the twilight, gaining strength, deciding what kind of ghost they’re going to be.”
“Wait,” I said. “That’s not how Aunt Rose tells it. She says she was a hitcher the second her neck snapped.”
“She was. But saying she was a hitcher only gives you the broad shape of the spirit. There are a million different ways to be anything.”
“Like how a derby player can be a jammer or a blocker or a pivot, and still be a derby girl,” said Cylia slowly.
Mary nodded. “Exactly. Rose is the kind of hitchhiking ghost she is because of choices she made after the road shoved her into a category.”
“Still not understanding,” said Sam.
“I am a crossroads ghost,” said Mary. Her words were calm: her expression was not. Rage and resignation warred for ownership. “Nothing’s going to change that. The first bargain any crossroads ghost makes is with the crossroads proper. They offer us what we think we want, and we take it, and then we’re stuck. They offered me the chance to go home and take care of my father. He wasn’t well, you see. I was all he had. So I died, and I rose, and I went home, and the crossroads left me there, because they wanted me to see that all mortal flesh decays. They wanted me to lose him and turn bitter and be truly theirs. Maybe I would have. Maybe I should have. But Frances Healy needed a babysitter, and she asked me, and I was human enough to say yes, and so—during my malleable period, when my choices could still change me—I went home with her. I started taking care of her daughter.”
“You were already a kind of caretaker,” I said. “You were supposed to take care of the crossroads. Now you’re … you’re a babysitter ghost. Like, literally. God, that sounds ridiculous.”
“As a wise woman once said to me, it only sounds ridiculous because you’re not used to hearing it,” said Mary, with a hint of a smile. “You’re a girl who throws fire, lives with talking mice, and loves a shapeshifting monkey. I think ‘ridiculous’ is a concept for other people.”
“Who controls you, if you’re a babysitter and a crossroads ghost at the same time?” James asked.
“In this circle, I control me,” said Mary. “Take me outside and it changes. I don’t know why you called me back from the void, and don’t think I’m not grateful, but I don’t know what good it’s going to do. As soon as the crossroads realize I’m here, I’m gone.”
The void. That was why she’d looked so terrible when we pulled her out. Without access to the power of her connection to the crossroads—and presumably, her connection to my family—she had become a spirit with nothing to haunt, and started consuming herself. It was a chilling thought. What would have happened to her if we hadn’t called her back when we did?
Nothing good, that was for damn sure.
“We need you,” I said.
She looked at me. “Why? I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know. The crossroads may not know where I am right now, but they will, and their rules still apply.”
“We found a loophole.”
Mary blinked. “Go on.”
“Sally went to the crossroads because she wanted to make a deal that would get James out of New Gravesend,” I said. “They took her bargain. They took her. But she didn’t get James out of town.”
“I’ve never even been to Bangor,” said James.
“That may be intentional,” said Mary. She hesitated before saying, “The crossroads don’t … they don’t like sorcerers very much. They’ll do what they can to keep them contained.”
“So we’ve gathered,” I said, fighting the urge to look at James. I needed to tell him what I’d learned from his father—but not here. That was a conversation that could happen inside the house. “If the crossroads took payment without giving him a bus ticket or something, the deal wasn’t fair. That means James can appeal. We need a ghost if we’re going to make that appeal, however. We need someone who can represent us when we make our claim.”
Mary went very still. Finally, in a low voice, she asked, “What are you planning to do?”
“Stop this. Stop all of this.” I walked back to the edge of the circle and stepped out, bending to retrieve the jam jar James had prepared. The ragged edge of a label clung to its side; the glass smelled faintly of strawberry.
I held it up for her to see.
“Will you help us?” I asked.
Mary bit her lip as she nodded.
I leaned over the edge of the circle, put the jam jar down, and pulled my hand back. The air shimmered as Mary dissolved into a thick mist and flowed through the jar’s open mouth, filling it with what looked like a slow-moving dust devil made of glitter, like the sparkle of broken glass on pavement. I leaned in again, this time to put the lid in place.
“Thank you,” I said, and the room was silent.
* * *
The wards on the boathouse were good enough to keep Bethany from finding me, but there weren’t any seats, and the air was already getting cold. We couldn’t stay out there forever, no matter how convenient it might have been. In the end, the best solution was for Sam to swing me over his shoulder, shift into fūri form, and cross the yard at a speed some motorcycles couldn’t match.
By the time we hit the porch, the wind had been knocked out of me from jouncing up and down, my hair was a wind-swept disaster, and I wanted nothing more than to go for another run. When Sam dropped me back to my feet, I was grinning broadly. He raised an eyebrow.
“You are so weird.”
“Nice way to talk to your girlfriend, monkey-boy.” I took a step away from the door, putting myself more firmly in the kitchen, and patted my pocket to be sure that the spirit jar hadn’t been dislodged. Cylia, Fern, and James were trudging across the lawn toward the door, all of them looking solemn and more than a l
ittle dispirited. What we were doing … it was big, it was stupid, it was relatively untested, and it was likely to get one or more of us killed. At the very least, it was going to get James stabbed, and while I knew I was telling the truth when I said I was only planning to stab him a little bit, he didn’t know that. Not for sure.
“Speaking of talking …” I said, and took a deep breath. “I need to talk to James. Alone.”
Sam blinked at me, nonplussed. “Mind if I ask why?”
“His father was here,” I said. “While you were getting the ritual circle ready. I learned a few things, and James needs to know them, but they’re … they should be private. I shouldn’t know them.”
“Family secrets,” said Sam. “Yeah, I can understand those.”
“I figured that might be the case.”
“Yeah. I mean, my family has plenty. I just …” He shook his head. “Is it always going to be like this? Are we always going to be just … just lurching from one disaster to the next, like some sort of fucked-up horror franchise in slow motion?”
“Maybe,” I said. It felt like a great admission, like I was betraying myself and my family in a single word. “I mean, I do stuff. I’ve gone months without anyone or anything trying to kill me. We have fun. We have lives. My sister had time to go on a reality dance competition, and my brother flies to Australia twice a year. But still, maybe. I sort of have an addiction to wandering past the warning signs in order to poke the potentially dangerous things with a stick. Is that a problem?”
“I don’t know.” Sam shook his head. “I want to say it isn’t. I want to say this isn’t exhausting. But it sort of is exhausting, you know? It shouldn’t have to be you all the time.”
“It isn’t,” I assured him. “It’s just that this sort of thing happens a lot more often than anyone realizes. There’s not a chosen one. There never was. There’s just people, all over the world, trying their best to make sure the sun comes up tomorrow. We do the job because we know the job exists, and once you know the job exists, it’s hard to pretend it doesn’t matter. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah,” said Sam, his tail sliding around my waist and pulling me closer as he spoke. I went without resistance. “I guess it does.”
“Is that okay with you?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”
He leaned down and kissed me. He was still kissing me when the others reached the back door. Fern giggled.
“Oh, my sweet Lady Luck, can you people get a room?” asked Cylia. “Should you be making out with the monkey while you have your babysitter in your pocket? Because I’m not human, but that feels wrong to me.”
“We have a room,” said Sam, breaking away in order to turn and smirk at her. “It’s upstairs, remember? I just figured you wouldn’t want us running off when there’s work to do.”
James looked back at the boathouse through the open back door. Then he grasped the knob and pulled it shut, bowing his head, not looking at any of us.
“We’re actually doing this,” he said. “This is actually going to happen.”
“Tonight,” I said. I stepped away from Sam. He unwound his tail, letting me move freely. “Are you ready?”
James laughed. The sound was thin and strained, the laughter of a man who didn’t know what else to do. “Does it matter? This is happening. This has been happening for my entire life and longer. Someone has to do it.”
I glanced at Sam. His expression was grim. He was hearing the same thing I was, the echoes of our earlier conversation spreading through the room from other sources, from lips other than my own.
“When a thing is right, and you know you have the power to do it, backing down is wrong,” I said, and touched the spirit jar in my pocket. It was cold against my fingers, colder than it had any right to be, chilled by the circling spirit of a teenage girl who had never been given the chance to grow up. “Can I talk to you? Alone?”
James gave me a startled look. “I—why?”
“I’ll explain upstairs.”
Sam waved. “If you’re worried about that head-twisting thing I mentioned before, it’s cool. I’m not in a decapitating mood.”
“All right,” said James warily. “Annie, lead the way.”
Cylia and Fern frowned in eerie unison. It was Cylia who spoke, asking, “Annie? Is this something that should be shared with the entire class?”
“That’s up to James,” I said. “We’ll be back downstairs as soon as we can.”
“All right, then. Who wants waffles?” Cylia spread her hands. “I can twist our luck until it screams, I can do as much as I can to make sure things fall our way, but I can’t make any promises. I don’t have knives, or magic. I can’t fly. I can’t move faster than a speeding bullet.”
Sam rubbed the scar on his forehead left by a Covenant bullet, and said nothing.
“What I can do is make sure we’re all fed and fortified before we go off to tangle with a deathless eldritch force from another reality. So I ask you again, who wants waffles?”
As it turned out, everybody wanted waffles. James and I slipped away while she was whipping up the batter. Hopefully, we’d be back downstairs soon.
Hopefully, this wasn’t the straw that broke the sorcerer’s back.
Hopefully.
Twenty-one
“Nobody’s chosen. Everybody gets to choose. Make the choice that brings you home. We’re not being paid to save the world, here.”
–Jane Harrington-Price
In the upstairs library of a rented house in New Gravesend, Maine, getting ready for an uncomfortable conversation
I’LL GIVE JAMES THIS much: he’d grown up in a house with a father who resented him for existing, had developed sorcery without spilling the beans to any of his classmates or coworkers, and had fallen begrudgingly but completely into our weird little world, and he had done it all with a closed mouth and an open mind. He waited until we were in the library with the door shut before he rounded on me.
“Well?” he demanded. “What now? Are we secretly blood relations, or have you discovered that the ritual to summon the crossroads requires us to get married before we conjure the dead? Or have you decided to kill me after all, and this was your way of getting me alone before you do the deed?”
I blinked. Then, helplessly, I began to laugh.
This seemed to annoy James further, thus proving that he was a sensible man who’d simply had the misfortune to fall in with a bunch of weirdos. I flapped a hand, trying to get my laughter under control. It had a hysterical edge that I didn’t like, especially under the circumstances.
Finally, tears rolling down my cheeks, I managed to make it stop. “I’m sorry,” I gasped. “This isn’t funny, it’s just—the look on your face—” It was all I could do not to start laughing again.
To my surprise, James quirked a small, somewhat wan smile. “Sally said something similar the day she informed me of her intention to be my new best friend. Apparently, I looked like a deer in front of a train.”
“I can’t wait to meet her.” I wiped my tears away, sobering further. “Really, though, I need to talk to you, and I need you to listen to me until I’m done. Okay?”
The smile vanished, replaced by more familiar wariness. “All right. What do you need to say?”
“Your father dropped by.”
James scowled. “I assure you, whatever he told you, it wasn’t on my behalf.”
“I figured, since he started off by telling me not to have any further contact with you. I thought about telling him you were in the boathouse, naked, waiting for me to show up with the maple syrup and the handcuffs, but I was afraid he’d take me seriously and go storming out there to make you put your pants back on.”
James said nothing as his cheeks and ears flared beet red. Laughing at him would have been unkind. I settled for patting him on the hand.
“Don’t worry. I didn’t say it.”
“Thank God,” said James, in a strangled voice.
“I think he’d lock me in the attic for a month.”
I paused to eye him. “Do you mean that seriously?”
He turned his face away.
Fuck. “Just so you know, I had already decided I was adopting you and taking you home to meet the rest of the family. I really, really hope you wanted siblings, because you now have two sisters, a brother, a sister-in-law, a brother-in-law, and assorted cousins, aunts, uncles, and other such familial detritus.”
James looked back to me, blinking in slow bewilderment. “Ah,” he said finally. “I suppose I’ll have a busy Christmas.”
“You better believe it.” I took a deep breath. “Look. He didn’t just tell me to stop seeing you. He told me some things about your mother.”
“As if he knows anything—”
“He knew she was a sorcerer.”
That silenced him. James stared at me, eyes wide, cheeks pale enough to make his earlier blush seem like a mistake.
“She told him before they got married, because she wanted him to know … and because there’s sort of a curse on your family line.” This was where I had to tread carefully. If James started blaming himself for his mother’s death, dealing with the crossroads was going to become one hell of a lot harder. “One of your ancestors was afraid the family would lose the magic. Sorcery is sort of the ultimate recessive gene, at least as far as human magic-users go. Even sorcerers marrying sorcerers won’t guarantee it gets passed along. So he went to the crossroads, and he asked them to promise his line would always breed true. I guess the crossroads ghost who was supposed to help him word that request was a little less diligent than Mary, because he used the phrase ‘that New Gravesend should always be protected against the dangers of the unseen world.’”
“Meaning what?” asked James, in a small, strangled voice.
“Meaning there’s a reason you’ve never been outside the municipality. His crossroads bargain is still in effect, and it won’t let you leave. You have to stay here because you’re the town’s official protector.” Untrained, untested, and unprepared. Some protector. It was an elegant trap, one that would probably have finished snapping shut the first time something that actually needed to be protected against wandered into the city limits.
That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8) Page 30
