That Ain't Witchcraft Read online

  “One of those, large, and a slice of banana bread. And my friend here will have . . . ?” She glanced expectantly at me.

  “Black coffee with marshmallows,” I said.

  James blinked. “What?”

  “It says I can have hot chocolate with marshmallows. I don’t want hot chocolate, but I do want marshmallows. So, black coffee with marshmallows, please. Oh, and one of those rice cereal bars.” I like sweet. I just prefer it on my own terms.

  James rolled his eyes, but didn’t otherwise comment as he rung up our order. At least this explained why he couldn’t be to the house until later. Most employers won’t accept “spending the morning hanging out with strange women, figuring out how to perform an act of large and terrifying sorcery” as a reason for not coming to work. Maybe the world would be a better place if they did.

  Cylia paid while I wandered off to find us a seat, studying my surroundings. There were watercolor paintings on the wall, done by a local artist—mostly landscapes and delicate studies of flowers. A bookshelf was shoved into a corner near the bathrooms, with a sign reading “take a book/leave a book” hanging next to it. I kept going, hoping to find an open table with two seats. Finally, I saw one, tucked into the farthest corner of the coffee shop.

  It would have been nice to have a better view of the windows, but beggars can’t be choosers. I settled in one of the open chairs, curling my legs up under myself, and relaxed into the leather. If I closed my eyes, I could have been literally anywhere. I could have been home.

  God, I missed home.

  “You look comfortable.” There was a clatter as Cylia put our drinks down on the table. I cracked one eye open. Real ceramic cups, on real saucers. “The barista charged me for cocoa, since there’s no setting for ‘putting marshmallows in coffee like a savage,’ and cocoa normally comes with whipped cream. The third mug is full of whipped cream.”

  I leaned forward, suddenly interested. “So it is. Did you want any?”

  “Be my guest.” Cylia sipped her own coffee—if you could call it that—before giving it an impressed look. “Okay, I think I could fill a hummingbird feeder with this stuff. I like it.”

  “Better you than me.” I spooned whipped cream into my coffee, stirring until it dissolved. Half the marshmallows dissolved in the same time. When I finally tasted my drink, it was sweet, creamy, and filled with that subtle swampy taste that can only come from incorporating real marshmallow into something.

  “Says the woman drinking sludge. That’s sludge. I always knew you were abusing your body, but I’m starting to suspect you died of scurvy years ago and haven’t slowed down enough to notice.”

  I toasted her with my cup. “To leaving a beautiful corpse.”

  “Or something.” She took a larger gulp of her own drink, looking around. “This is a nice place. Cozy.”

  Most of the clientele looked to be about our age—mid-twenties, nothing better to do. Apart from the table of teens with their Dungeons and Dragons and a few retirees sitting near the counter, we could have been part of the daily demographic. That was soothing, too.

  “I wonder what people do around here for fun,” I said.

  “Drink coffee, apparently,” said Cylia. “There isn’t a roller derby league. I checked. And don’t look so concerned—it’s not like I was going to suggest we try out. Even though I bet we could have taught the locals a thing or two.”

  I smirked.

  There are three positions on a flat-track roller derby team: the jammer, who goes fast to score points, the blockers, who try their best to keep the jammer from going fast to score points, and the pivot, who can switch between those two roles under specific, carefully controlled circumstances. Some people think jammers have big egos, since there’s only ever one jammer per team on the track at a time. Those people are not necessarily wrong. They’re not necessarily right, either . . . but it’s true that many jammers are not great at sharing. Cylia and I, when we’re at home, are both jammers. We were still jammers in Maine, just jammers without a team to jam for. Somehow, this had evolved into a friendly rivalry, in which we both insisted we knew the rules of derby best, and would one day show the world . . . as soon as we had the chance to strap on skates again.

  It’s amazing what the mind can get up to when faced with the endless tedium of driving across America. Endless, endless America. If I’d tried to focus on one more non-evil corn field, I think I would have lost my mind.

  Cylia snapped her fingers. I jumped.

  “Hello, and welcome back to the scene already in progress,” she said brightly. “I’m about done with my drink. And my banana bread. I was going to walk down the street, see what else there is around here worth seeing. You want to come with?”

  “I’ll stay here, if that’s cool with you,” I said. “Let me get a feeling for the way things work around here, and maybe have another cup of swamp coffee.”

  “Got it,” said Cylia. She stood. “If I’m not back in an hour, meet me at the car?”

  “Deal.”

  I sipped my coffee as I watched her walk away.

  None of us had a fixed address we could use on a cellphone contract. Even if we had, phones can be tracked. The more sophisticated cellular technology becomes, the more tools there are for using it to find people. We needed to stay out of sight, and so we’d been solidly low-tech since fleeing Lowryland: Cylia had a pay-as-you-go for emergencies, but we kept it turned off to keep it from being traced.

  I didn’t miss having a phone as much as I’d expected to. Sure, scrolling endlessly through Twitter was a good way to kill a few minutes, but so was reading a book, or watching the people around me.

  They seemed pretty normal, as small-town populations went. They came and went with the frequency I expected, and the bathrooms were used often enough that I knew they couldn’t be entirely disgusting.

  James wandered over with a pot in his hand. “Refill?” he asked.

  “It would dilute my marshmallows,” I said.

  Calmly, he reached into the pocket of his apron and pulled out a small paper cup full of marshmallows, which he set down in front of me. “Refill?” he repeated.

  “I think you may be my favorite,” I said gravely, extending my cup toward him. “Don’t tell anyone else. They’d all be jealous.”

  “Right,” he said. Lowering his voice, he added, “Especially your boyfriend, who should have been a linebacker. He’d twist my head off like a bottle top.”

  “He doesn’t usually twist heads off, but point taken.”

  “Are you here to spy on me?”

  I quirked an eyebrow. “If we are, that officially makes us the worst spies in the history of spying. And the history of spying includes some very, awfully, terribly bad spies. Like, unrealistically bad. So no, we’re not here to spy on you. This was the first coffee shop we saw, and we followed the sweet lure of hot caffeine all the way to the door.”

  “There’s a Starbucks by the grocery store.”

  “Oh, be still my heart, what a terrible mistake we have made, shopping locally, enjoying marshmallow flavored delights,” I deadpanned. “Seriously, it’s a coincidence. Not everyone who wanders through the door is doing so with malicious intentions. Thank you for the marshmallows.”

  “Let me know if you need anything else,” said James, with the blithe politeness of a professional food service worker.

  I saluted him with my coffee mug as he turned to walk away. Then I froze, suddenly finding it difficult to breathe.

  The man who’d just walked through the café door was tall and thin, with a pointed chin and sandy brown hair. He was dressed like he was on a lunch break from a local law firm: proper suit and tie, everything fitted exactly as it ought to be. Nothing cheap or off-the-rack for him. His wire-framed glasses managed to conceal the color of his eyes, making him pleasantly, attractively generic. He was every act one boyfriend
in every romantic comedy ever made; he was every Clerk #2 from every episode of every show in the Law & Order franchise.

  There was nothing about him that should have made my heart beat fast and my blood run cold, nothing that should have turned me into a suspense movie cliché, except for everything about him. Except for the fact that I knew him.

  Leonard Cunningham had found me.

  Nine

  “You know, given the choice—given the ability to change everything about myself—I don’t think I’d have been born into this family. Because I wouldn’t only be choosing a better world for myself. I’d be choosing for my children.”

  –Jane Harrington-Price

  Burial Grounds, absolutely trapped

  I PUT MY COFFEE DOWN, scanning the room for avenues of escape. What had seemed like a quaint, charming design before now felt like a dead-end alley specifically made to trap me. There might be a fire door on the other side of the bathrooms—why the hell hadn’t I bothered to check the bathrooms? Was I really getting that complacent?—but there might not be. Either way, if I went looking, Leonard would see me move. He would notice me.

  Assuming he hadn’t already. As if on cue, he met my eyes and smiled, raising one hand to tap his temple in an utterly polite gesture of greeting. I sank farther into my chair.

  I could bolt. The counter wasn’t blocked by anything, not so much as a service door, and if I waited for him to place his order and pick up his drink, I could make a break for it. Vault past James and out the door and . . . what? Run? On foot, no gear, no prep, no way of telling my allies that the Covenant was in town? Sam would never forgive me if I ran out on him again. I might forgive myself, if running meant he would live, but that wasn’t the case. Not now.

  There were sixteen people in the café with me, not counting James, who could take care of himself, but who might not know about the Covenant and the kind of danger he’d be in if they realized he was a sorcerer. I didn’t know how good Leonard was in close quarters, or whether he’d be willing to kill innocents to take me down. I wasn’t going to bet this many lives on it.

  Sometimes, the only thing to do is nothing. I forced my shoulders back and my chin up, sitting as straight as I could. This was a place where my background in cheerleading came in handy as hell: derby girls can snarl and cry and bleed, but cheerleaders are expected to retain their poise no matter what. I’ve seen girls carried off the field with broken legs, still smiling. I could do this. For them, in their honor, I could do this.

  Leonard stepped up to the counter, speaking briefly with James before collecting a mug and accompanying saucer and making his way toward me. I watched him come, and didn’t move.

  Finally, he was standing in front of me, so close I could have put a knife in his throat before he had a chance to move. He smiled pleasantly, indicating Cylia’s abandoned chair with his free hand.

  “Is this seat taken?”

  “Yes.”

  He sat down anyway. I hadn’t honestly been expecting anything else.

  “You’re looking well, Annie. The fugitive life clearly agrees with you. Have you been able to keep up your training? It hurts to think of all that physical conditioning slipping away because you’ve eaten too many gas station pies.”

  I looked at him and said nothing.

  Leonard sighed. “Don’t be like that. I swear, women are so touchy sometimes. If I implied that you’d gained weight, I’m sorry.”

  “If that were all you’d done, I’d buy bigger jeans and deal with it.”

  “Ah. Still holding that messy business at the carnival against me, are you?” He took a careful sip of his drink—coffee, by the smell of it—before offering, “I didn’t kill you when I had the chance, you know. I think that ought to buy me a little tolerance.”

  “I could slit your throat before anyone in this place realized I was going to move.”

  Leonard took another sip. “Mmm. Maybe yes, maybe no, but then you’d be covered in blood—arterial spray is so messy—and that would be a bit difficult to explain. Not to mention you have no idea whether I’m here by myself. I could have an entire team waiting across the street to take you down.”

  “You’d be dead. That might be a fair trade.”

  “Not really. You wouldn’t still be running if you’d realized that the best way for you to protect that viper’s nest you call a family was to come to me willingly.” He put his cup down and reclined in his chair, smiling, utterly at ease. “If you were an operative in good standing, we could return to the old status quo, where we leave your people alone except for the occasional observer, and your people understand that if they rise against us, we’ll destroy them. It was good enough for Enid and Alexander. I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be good enough for the current generations.”

  “We’re not living in the fifties anymore.”

  “No. No, we’re not. Sometimes I think it’s a pity, other times I’m not so sure. The Internet is a blessing, absolutely. And facial recognition software! My God. Let it advance a little further and we won’t need witches. We’ll finally be able to purge them from the human population, and won’t that be a blessing for everyone?”

  “Maybe not for the witches,” I said softly.

  Leonard looked at me like I was a fool. “Have you ever met a witch, Annie? They’re beset by demons of their own creation from the cradle to the grave. They never know peace, never know comfort, never know anything more than the torment of their own unnatural abilities, their own unbearable burdens. I know you want us to be monsters, because it would be easier for you if we were, but remember, the Covenant was formed to protect humanity from the things lurking outside the firelight. Sometimes that includes humanity itself.”

  I looked at him. Then I turned to look at the coffee shop around us. People were going about their business, blithely unaware of the danger. We might as well have been talking about the weather. It was a good tactic. Most people don’t pay nearly as much attention to their surroundings—or to the conversations happening around them—as they believe they do, and the Dungeons and Dragons game at the front of the shop was only going to help keep us under the radar, since anyone who did overhear us would probably assume we were talking about something similar, some world where all the monsters were drawn on graph paper and all the problems could be solved with a roll of the dice.

  “Why are you here, Leonard?” How are you here, how did you find me, what do you want, how do I make you go away. The questions were like puppies, tumbling over themselves inside my mind, getting tangled into balls of limbs and waggling tails. I wanted to ask them all. I didn’t want to ask any of them.

  I didn’t have time for this. James would finish his shift soon. He’d leave, and I would be alone with Leo in a way I hadn’t been since the carnival, when he had finally seen fit to remind me that he was more than just another Covenant operative: he was their heir apparent, the man raised since birth to one day lead the greatest organization of monster hunters in the world. The fact that he could seem ordinary enough to make me forget that fact was just one aspect of why he scared me so badly.

  He . . . lulled. He made things I’d hated my entire life seem forgivable, or at least understandable, like there were two sides to the story. Listening to him was like attending a lecture on moving a person’s Overton window, making the unthinkable permissible one simple, logical twist at a time.

  “Why do you think I’m here, Annie?” He picked his mug up again, turning it in his hand. His eyes remained fixed on me. “It’s my responsibility to check on the recruits, to make sure they’re doing well. You did an excellent job with that Blight infestation in Ohio. How did you clear the field alone? Oh, of course—you weren’t alone. You had the ape with you. How is he doing? Still deluding himself that he could ever hold onto you? I’m sure you’ll get tired of slumming soon. Don’t worry. I won’t hold it against you. You’re not the first, and you won’t
be the last, to think there’s value in a little extracurricular hunting.”

  “If you ever talk about Sam like that again, I will kill you, and damn the consequences,” I said pleasantly.

  Leo laughed. “I almost wish I could test that conviction. It would be worth the pain to see you realize how badly you’d messed up.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You know, I prefer you this way: honest.” He sipped his coffee. “No pretenses, no lies, just this glorious, untamed killer looking for a place to direct her rage. You could be spectacular with the right hand to guide you. Warriors do better when they have scholars standing behind them and pointing at the target. You’d never have to think again. All you’d need to do was move. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  I couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing. James looked over his shoulder, frowning when he saw the source of the noise. I couldn’t explain. I smiled sweetly at Leo instead, leaning forward.

  “See, that’s where you show that you don’t know me at all. I’ve never wanted to be the blunt instrument.” That was Verity’s job, and she was welcome to it. She enjoyed moving through the world like a knife, slashing and stabbing and cutting away at the foundation of things until they crumbled around her. She didn’t plan. She . . . choreographed.

  I planned. I considered the consequences. And yeah, sometimes I acted impulsively, sometimes I went against my own better instincts and my own precious planning, but I always did it for a reason. The fact that Leo thought otherwise was one more piece of proof that he had never seen me, Antimony. He’d only ever been looking at my name, and what it would mean to bring my family back into the fold.

  “There are other paths open to you,” he said.

  “I like the one I’m on just fine,” I replied. “Why are you here, Leo?”

  “You disappeared for quite a while. I was concerned. You’re my project, Annie, and I’m going to see you to completion. Your parents might have raised you in hiding—however many of you there are—but once we knew you existed, there was no way you were ever going to get away. You’re clever enough to understand that much.”