That Ain't Witchcraft Read online

  I lifted an eyebrow. “You can put those away now,” I said. “I’m good.”

  “You were on fire,” he said, in a tone that implied I might not have noticed.

  “Yes.” I smiled. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  That was the last thing I had time to say before Sam slammed into me, wrapping his arms around my torso. I laughed, wrapping my arms around him in turn. Cylia and Fern were close behind him, and I held on to all of them for dear life, and this was good, this was right, this was the way home.

  Epilogue

  “You can always come home. No matter what you’ve done, no matter where you’ve been, you can always come home, and we’ll be waiting.”

  –Enid Healy

  The living room of a rented house in New Gravesend, Maine, trying not to hit anyone

  LEONARD NARROWED HIS EYES. “There’s something you’re not telling me. What happened after you disappeared? Why did you come back on fire?”

  “There’s so much I’m not telling you that I could open a whole bookstore called ‘Things Leonard Cunningham Doesn’t Get to Know,’” I said. “We had a deal, remember? The crossroads have been defeated. The exorcism was a success. Now’s the part where you run back to England and tell the rest of the Covenant that you lost me.”

  “You’ll be a black mark on my record that I may never live down.”

  “Should’ve thought of that before you decided to keep my family name a secret.” I folded my arms. “We had a deal, and you need to get the hell off this continent.”

  “You’ll join us one day,” Leonard persisted. “You’re too smart and too human to throw in with these . . . things. I will be the one to bring your family back where they belong, and you will understand why I’ve been right all along.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “We’ll have people watching for you—specifically you—at all the international airports and major border crossings. If you come back to this country, we’ll know. And next time, I don’t send you home a hero.”

  Leonard looked at me for a long moment before he sighed. “We’re going to be so good together when you finally come around,” he said. “You’ll see.” Then he was gone, turning and disappearing through the open front door.

  I counted to ten. He didn’t come back. “You can come out now,” I said, without raising my voice.

  Immediately, Fern’s head popped around the stairs. “He’s gone?”

  “He’s gone,” I said, as arms slid around me from behind. I tilted my head back to look at Sam. “Where were you hiding?”

  “Kitchen,” he said. “Cylia’s finishing making lunch. We’ll be ready to hit the road in like, twenty minutes, if you’re packed.”

  “Since this morning,” I said. “You hear from James?”

  “He’s got his mother’s car, and Cylia says it’s safe to drive, now that she’s fixed the carburetor. He’ll be here in ten minutes. Fern’s going to ride with him.”

  Caravanning across the country was an awkward solution, but it was better than trying to cram five people into Cylia’s car for more than an hour, and I had faith that we’d pull into a rest stop somewhere and find a perfect little camper-trailer suitable for hooking to James’ car, owned by someone who’d always wanted to swap it for an avocado-colored monstrosity. That’s how things work when you’re traveling with a jink. Sometimes the cards just fall your way.

  Sally was still missing. The anima mundi either didn’t know where she was or couldn’t tell us—and I suspected the former, given how willing they’d been to put everything else back to normal. Mary was helping them with the transition, and if they resented the fact that I’d chosen to walk away, well. I’d helped to save them. They could learn to live with the disappointment.

  Sally was still missing, but so was my grandfather, and Grandma Alice was going to be very interested in what James had to say. Maybe they could help each other. Even if they couldn’t, James was going to help me. Between his mother’s books and my grandfather’s books, we were going to start our own homeschool Hogwarts and get this shit under control. And we were going to do it safely behind the compound walls, in Oregon, where my family could keep an eye on us.

  They were going to love him. Bringing home new family members is a time-honored tradition, and a new sorcerer might be enough to distract from the part where I was enthusiastically dating a monkey. Maybe.

  Probably not, though.

  The Covenant wasn’t looking for me anymore. Oh, they would be again someday—I was absolutely sure of that—but Leonard no longer had his tracker, and without that, I could stay hidden for as long as I needed to. Rose was going to be following him to the airport and reporting back once she had seen him safely loaded onto the next available flight to the United Kingdom. There was time to put things back together. There was time to figure my shit out.

  “What are you smiling about?” Sam asked.

  I tilted my head backward until I could see his eyes, and said, “I’ve got so much to tell the mice.”

  “Weird,” he said, and kissed me, and everything was good, and I was finally going home.

  Read on for a brand-new InCryptid novella by Seanan McGuire:

  THE MEASURE OF A MONSTER

  “The amount of damage humanity is willing to do to prevent tragedies that ‘might’ someday occur is astonishing, especially since many of those tragedies would be a response to things we had already done.”

  –Thomas Price

  A nice, if borrowed, bedroom in an only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio

  Now

  SHELBY LAY ON HER back, one arm draped across her stomach and the other thrown across my chest, snoring softly. The pollen count had been stratospheric for weeks, and her allergies were making it difficult for her to breathe. It was a tiny, mundane problem, the sort that could be treated with over-the-counter medication, and maybe it was weird of me, but I was loving it. Most of our problems spent way too much time trying to kill us. It was nice to have something less potentially fatal to contend with.

  (Shelby didn’t think so, of course, but Shelby was the one with the allergies. No one enjoys being filled with mucus—and I do mean no one. I’ve met cryptids who revel in everything from raw meat to pulling their own teeth out, and not a single one of them has revealed an odd fetish or lifestyle obsession with having stuffed-up sinuses.)

  The sun had been up for more than an hour, making this the local equivalent of staying in bed until noon. Coming back from our Australian vacation with a ring on Shelby’s finger—opal, naturally, both to play to cultural stereotypes and because she thought it was pretty—had finally convinced management at the zoo where we both worked to synchronize our days off. Shelby liked to say it was because they had seen reason. I was pretty sure they were afraid of her. Same difference, really.

  Breaking the lease on her apartment had taken almost two months. By the time she turned her keys in, she’d been sleeping at my place five nights a week, and the majority of her stuff was stored in the attic, waiting for the day when we’d be striking out on our own, whatever that meant. Her parents wanted us to move to Australia; my parents wanted us to come back to Oregon; my grandparents didn’t care what we did, as long as we remembered to keep our anti-telepathy charms on us whenever we were planning to have sex.

  Oh, right. Whenever I say “my place,” you should really replace that with “my grandparents’ place,” since the house belongs to them. Martin and Angela Baker, good citizens of the Columbus metro area. Businesspeople, former members of the PTA, parents of three adopted children—including my mother—and generally the kind of neighbors everyone dreams of having. The part where he’s a construct made from multiple reanimated corpses and she’s a form of highly evolved pseudo-mammalian telepathic wasp is sort of beside the point.

  Well, no. It’s not. For most of the humans I’ve known, the fact that my family includ
es a lot of what they’d call “monsters” is the point. If they ever found out that their sunny suburbs hosted things like us, it would be time for the torches and pitchforks. No matter how advanced humanity gets, it seems like we’re always just a few steps away from becoming an angry mob.

  That’s why there are people like me and Shelby. We help keep the “monsters” hidden, and we try to keep the world safe for the rest of humanity until the day arrives when they finally realize that we’re all just people. We’re all just trying to do our best.

  Living with my grandparents, my cousin Sarah, and my fiancée all in the same house should probably have been weird, but it was turning out to be surprisingly normal. The family expectation had always been that my siblings and I would eventually go out, find spouses, and bring them home to the sprawling, multilevel house that my parents had constructed for exactly that purpose. This was the same idea, in a slightly different location. The only potential problem was Sarah, and the anti-telepathy charms took care of that.

  (Sarah and Grandma Angela are members of the same species. We call them “cuckoos,” because they’re brood parasites, replacing human infants with their own offspring. On the whole, the species is a nasty piece of work that raises a lot of really unpleasant questions about evolution, biology, and whether some things actually deserve the torches and pitchforks. So far as we’re aware, Sarah and Grandma are the only exceptions.)

  Even with her edges blurred by my lack of glasses, Shelby was beautiful when she slept. Tall, tan, blonde, and perfect, like an Australian ordered straight from Central Casting. We met when we both started working at the same zoo, me as a visiting herpetologist, her as a visiting big cat expert. We’d started dating about three months later, which had been a massive shock to me, since Shelby was way out of my league by any rational measure. Of course, things hadn’t stayed rational for long, and she’d tried to kill Sarah not long after we’d started getting serious. Thankfully, Sarah didn’t hold a grudge.

  Somehow, Shelby hadn’t broken up with me over the number of cuckoos in my family, or the fact that I’d lied to her about my name when we first met. It’s not safe to be a Price in public, not with the Covenant of St. George constantly looking for a way to solidify their secret stranglehold on the world. The first time I’d seen her in the field had been like a dream come true. First, she’d ridden an injured lindworm like a bucking bronco, grinning like Athena herself, and then, when we realized how it had been injured, she had switched smoothly to sympathizing with it. I’d proposed almost involuntarily.

  At the time, I’d believed she’d dismissed it as a joke. The joke was on me: she’d just been biding her time until the perfect moment came along for her to accept, which she’d done while we were in Australia, helping her family deal with a lycanthropy outbreak. Happy endings all around, right?

  Except for the part where shortly after we’d come back to the United States, my sister Verity had declared war on the Covenant of St. George live on network television. We still didn’t know how the broadcast had managed to go on that long without being cut off by standards and practices. Our best guess was that they had been so busy watching for wardrobe malfunctions on the part of the female dancers that they hadn’t paid any attention to the giant snake eating people. American ideas of censorship do not always make much sense.

  Except for the part where the only thing my family could think of to do in response to Verity’s hotheaded declaration was to send my other sister, Antimony, to England to go undercover with the Covenant. Maybe she could learn something about the way they operated, something she could use to keep the family safe while we weathered this. Everyone had agreed. Even me. And maybe someday, I’ll stop feeling guilty about that, because Annie had gone to England and disappeared, dropping off the radar so completely that the only reason we knew she was still alive was the fact that our family ghosts had yet to tell us otherwise.

  She was lost. She was lost, and she was alone, and she was my baby sister, and there was nothing I could do to save her. There was nothing I could do to even let her know I was worried about her. So no, life wasn’t perfect, and happy endings only happen when all parties involved are safely dead and buried and resting six feet down.

  Shelby yawned and rolled onto her side, facing me. Then she opened her eyes and smiled.

  “Lazy boy,” she accused softly. “Still in bed when the sun’s been up for hours.”

  “You’re one to talk,” I replied. “I couldn’t get up without waking you.”

  “Ah, but you see, I’m antipodean. My natural rhythms are the reverse of yours. Trying to get me out of bed early is a denial of my culture.”

  I rolled my eyes. “There you go again, blaming everything on Australia.”

  “It’s convenient. A whole continent, and it’s not here to defend itself. Why, if I do this often enough, the tourism board will send me my gold ‘Confusing the Americans’ badge, and then I’ll have fulfilled all my childhood dreams.”

  “Brat,” I said, and leaned closer, intending to kiss her.

  Instead, I got a face full of feathers as Crow, my resident Church Griffin, dove onto the bed from somewhere in the vicinity of the ceiling and stretched out on his back, all four legs in the air, croaking and creeling his demands for attention. Shelby laughed. I groaned, beginning to scratch the spot on his belly where the feathers of his upper body gave way to the fur of his lower body. Somewhere in the distance, the mice began drumming, signaling that everyone in the house was finally awake.

  Just another ordinary day in Ohio. And I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

  * * *

  • • •

  Sarah was sitting at the kitchen table when I came downstairs, yawning and trying to smooth my hair down with one hand. She had a book open in front of her and was eating a bowl of what looked like Lucky Charms. I paused and looked again. Lucky Charms, yes, but they weren’t in milk. Instead—

  “Sarah, are you eating your cereal with tomato soup?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t look up from her book. “I like it better than V8. It’s not as spicy. I don’t mind the spicy, really—it’s mild—but it clashes with the little marshmallows, and I like the little marshmallows.”

  I paused, contemplating that. Like most things about Sarah’s faintly horrifying and idiosyncratic diet, it made sense. That didn’t make it any less disgusting to my human palate. “Okay,” I said finally. “What are you reading?”

  “Fermat’s Last Theorem. It’s about a really famous mathematical puzzle and how it was eventually resolved.” She finally looked up, blinking vast, blue eyes at me. “You can borrow it when I’m done, if you want.”

  “Will I understand it?”

  Sarah shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “I’ll pass. I have a lot to read.”

  “Okay.”

  For reasons yet to be discovered—mostly because we can’t exactly interview cuckoos who don’t belong to the family without having our minds telepathically hollowed out and taken over—cuckoos are obsessed with math. It’s a species-wide trait, one shared by Grandma Angela and Sarah. Even when Sarah couldn’t reliably remember her own name, she was still enthralled by simple equations and endless viewings of an old PBS kids’ show called Square One. Her recovery has been marked by increasingly complicated equations, and the day she started doing theoretical calculus again was the day my grandparents threw us a spontaneous pizza party.

  (Sarah hurt herself trying to save Verity from the Covenant of St. George. She succeeded, which is why I am currently short only one sister, not two. But, in the process, she did the telepath equivalent of throwing her back out and wound up functionally spraining her entire mind. There was a time when we weren’t sure whether she was ever going to be herself again. I’m still not completely sold . . . if I’m being honest. She’s alert and aware and consistently knows who she is and what she’s doing. That’s good. She’s also sh
yer, more timid, and less willing to take risks. That’s bad. Cuckoos often trend toward cowardice, preferring to hide when possible. It took Sarah a long, long time to learn not to flee when things got bad. That’s a lot of ground to lose.)

  “Are you and Shelby staying in today?”

  “Maybe.” I opened the fridge, pulling out the orange juice. “Dee and Frank are hosting a barbeque tonight; I thought we might go down and see them. Frank grills a mean goat. You’re welcome to come, if you like.”

  Sarah’s answering smile was quick and wry. “No, I’m not, but I appreciate you inviting me.”

  “Suit yourself.” She wasn’t wrong. Most sensible people have a healthy fear of cuckoos. It’s hard not to be scared of something that can literally get inside your head. But Frank, Dee, and the rest of the local gorgon community had a lot of experience dealing with unusual people, and Dee liked Sarah.

  “Morning,” chirped Shelby, sashaying into the room. She looked fresh as a daisy, and not at all like she’d tumbled out of bed not ten minutes previous. I would have hated her, if I hadn’t loved her so desperately. “What’s good today, Sarah?”

  “An abstract philosophical concept meant to guide the actions of people who would really rather be doing whatever they want without concern for repercussions,” said Sarah solemnly.

  Shelby nodded, pausing to kiss my cheek on her way to the fridge. “Don’t know what I expected, but that’s pretty good,” she said. “Got a plan for today?”

  “Read my book, eat my cereal, get online and argue with Artie for an hour about why he can’t come to visit yet,” said Sarah.

  I frowned. “Why can’t he? I mean, apart from the whole ‘distance’ thing.” My cousin Artie is half-incubus on his father’s side and got all the upsetting pheromones without any of the control. His life is mostly defined by the size of his bedroom. When he has to go out, he douses himself in the kind of cologne that sears mucus membranes and destroys the sense of smell of everyone in a ten-foot radius.