That Ain't Witchcraft Read online

  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.”

  “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 a
nother 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 little 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. M
y 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?”