That Ain't Witchcraft Read online

  Maybe that was a good argument against him coming for a visit. The TSA would probably designate his cologne a kind of chemical warfare and refuse to let him on the plane.

  “I’m not . . . ready.” Sarah waved a hand helplessly in front of herself, indicting as much of her body as a single gesture could encompass. “I’m okay sometimes. I’m okay right now. But last night I forgot your name again, and if you hadn’t been wearing an anti-telepathy charm, I would have just gone right into your head looking for it. I’m not safe around people. I could hurt myself. I could hurt them.”

  I looked at her solemnly and didn’t say anything. There was nothing I could say. I’m human. Shelby’s human. We’ve got problems, mostly related to our families and their chosen professions, but we’re always going to have humanity on our side: for better or for worse, we belong to the dominant species on the planet. Everywhere we go, the world is built to suit our needs, to make us comfortable and safe. Sarah . . .

  Cuckoos are terrifying predators. I won’t pretend they’re not. But Sarah isn’t like that. She’s clever and she’s kind and she worries about losing control of herself. All her telepathic ethics have been carefully self-taught from X-Men comics and old episodes of Babylon 5, and she is far, far too aware of how easy it would be to let them all go and give in to the urge to follow her instincts and make the world conform to her own needs.

  Sarah shrugged and looked down at her tomato-soaked cereal. “I want to see Artie. I miss him really bad. But his mind . . . he’s soothing, you know? He thinks soothing thoughts. If he came here, I’d want to listen to him thinking soothing thoughts, and I’d forget how careful I have to be, and I’d hurt him. I don’t think I could live with myself if I did that. I don’t think—”

  She froze, head snapping up and eyes going wide as her attention shifted to the back door.

  “Someone’s coming,” she said, and shoved her chair away from the table, running out of the room just before there was a knock at the door. The motion knocked the spoon out of her bowl and sent it clattering to the floor, where it left a smear that was distressingly like a bloodstain.

  In sitcoms, people are always knocking at each other’s back doors, like it’s totally normal for someone to just be in your yard uninvited. It’s a lot less common in the real world, and in the kind of suburban neighborhood where everyone keeps to themselves and trespassing is more likely to get you a visit from the local police than a wacky laugh track, it’s unheard of. Shelby and I exchanged a look.

  My family has a reputation for being a little overzealous in the weaponry department, and it’s true, my sisters and my mother always have at least three knives on their persons. It helps them feel secure. My eyesight isn’t good enough for me to be comfortable carrying that many knives before breakfast, and my revolver was safely upstairs in my bedside table. Shelby touched her left hip, signaling that at least one of us was properly armed.

  The person outside knocked again. I adjusted my glasses with one hand, slipping into what Verity liked to call my “professor posture”: right foot slightly back, arms loose, hands free and open above my waist. An untrained attacker wouldn’t notice the slight rise in my right shoulder or the bend in my right knee, ready to absorb shock and turn it into momentum if I had to. A good martial artist might recognize it as a passive neutral stance, but most people would look at me and see another man born to a life of tweed, tea, and long lectures about English literature.

  I looked at Shelby and nodded. She nodded back, all ease gone. I opened the door.

  Dee lowered her hand and stared at me through the rose-tinted lenses of her glasses. Her eyes were wide, and her pupils were dilated. There was something wrong with their shape, a slight point at the top and bottom. Seeing me, she surged forward and grabbed my forearms, heedless of the fact that I could easily have responded by punching her.

  “Alex,” she gasped. “Thank Medusa.” Her hair was askew, like she hadn’t been able to get her wig seated properly before rushing out of the house, and it was hissing. The sound was agitated. I’d rarely heard her snakes that upset,

  I had never seen her this upset. As I pulled her farther into the kitchen, I realized that she was missing a shoe, and wasn’t wearing pantyhose. The small scales on the side of her leg that she normally took such careful precautions to conceal were totally visible. A casual bystander might have taken them for psoriasis, but there’s no way to tell a casual bystander from a Covenant spy.

  “Dee? What’s wrong?” Shelby moved past us, closing the door. I shot her a grateful look.

  Dee didn’t even seem to notice. She continued clinging to me as the hissing from her hair grew steadily louder.

  “You have to come,” she said. “You have to.”

  “Come where? Dee, what’s going on?”

  “You have to come home with me.” Dee pulled back enough to look at Shelby. “To the colony. Right now.”

  “Last I checked, they didn’t like us much there, on account of how we had that little spat with your half-brother,” said Shelby carefully. “Pretty sure Hannah would be happy to have us both decorating her yard.”

  Hannah was the matriarch of Dee’s community, half Pliny’s gorgon, half greater gorgon, and all terrifying. Hybrids like her are rare in nature, and hybrids who survive to adulthood are even rarer. Hannah had managed to hit the genetic jackpot on three levels: she’d been born, she’d grown up, and she’d proven to be fertile enough to have a son of her own, Lloyd. Unfortunately, that was where the jackpots ended. Lloyd had been angry at the world, embittered at his inability to fit in among either his own kind or the humans that surrounded them, and in the end, that anger and bitterness had twisted him into a killer.

  I had shot him to save Shelby’s life, along with Dee’s and my own. That didn’t mean his mother had forgiven me.

  Dee shook her head so vigorously that her wig slipped and the hissing from beneath it grew even louder. “She said. I asked her, and she said. She said you could come.”

  Shelby and I exchanged a look. I returned my attention to Dee.

  “Why?” I asked.

  She sniffled and stepped back, letting go of my arms. “It’s the children,” she said. “They’re gone.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Dee’s information, while sparse, was as much as we were going to get. Sometime in the night, strangers had come to the gorgon settlement in the woods outside city limits, and they had left with more than half of the community’s children. Gorgons aged two to twelve, all disappeared without a trace—along with over a dozen unhatched eggs, at least two-thirds of which were assumed to be fertile. It had been a professional job, in and out without waking any of the adults, which made me suspect that something other than stealth had been used.

  The ages of the children taken honestly concerned me more than how it had been accomplished. Ages two and up. Old enough to listen when someone demanded that they stay silent. Eggs. Too young to make a sound. Babies would have been less likely to fight back—and more importantly, babies didn’t have fully developed venom sacs yet, making them less of a risk to their kidnappers—but there’s no way to tell a baby not to cry. Whoever had done this, they’d come in with a plan and left with exactly what they were looking for.

  Dee had driven herself to the house; her car was parked unevenly at the foot of the driveway, where it was doubtless already attracting the prying eyes of nosy neighbors. None of them would do anything; it wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. But they’d sure be happy to gossip about it when they heard that we’d all been murdered in our beds.

  Shelby was in the kitchen with Dee, trying to calm the other woman down and get her to take a drink of water before we got going. The road to the gorgon community was protected with illusions and compulsion charms to keep people like us from just stumbling past the borders. It would be a lot easier if we could follow Dee’s car, so we need
ed Dee to calm down enough that she’d be safe to drive. And I . . .

  I had something else to take care of.

  Getting dressed had only taken a few minutes, even factoring in the time it took for me to get my weapons safely secured about my person. Taking an extra thirty seconds to check your holsters means never needing to say, “Hang on, I just accidentally stabbed myself.” Shelby would need about the same, once I went back downstairs to relieve her. We’re nothing if not efficient.

  Sarah’s bedroom door was closed. I knocked lightly.

  “Sarah? I need to talk to you.”

  “Closed doors mean I don’t want to talk.”

  “Not necessarily. Closed doors can mean a lot of things. Sarah, please, it’s important.”

  “There’s someone in the house.”

  “That’s not someone, it’s Dee. You know Dee.” At least, I hoped she knew Dee. If she had managed to forget my administrative assistant, what I was about to ask for was pointless.

  When I’d first shown up at the West Columbus Zoo, management had allowed me to bring an assistant. I had chosen Dee—Deanna Lynn Taylor de Rodriguez—both because she had excellent credentials, and because she was the only nonhuman applicant for the position. Since “species” isn’t a protected class, I had been pretty sure none of the other hopefuls were going to sue me, and I had genuinely needed someone who knew the ins and outs of the local cryptid community. I had gotten more than I had bargained for. I had gotten a friend, one I trusted implicitly. Sarah had met her on several occasions, and the two had gotten along reasonably well . . . I thought.

  I knocked again. “Come on, Sarah. You know I wouldn’t be up here if this weren’t important. Can you please open the door?”

  There was a long pause before it cracked open, just enough for me to see one wary blue eye through the gap.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “When Grandma gets home, I want you to please tell her that Shelby and I were called to an emergency with the local gorgon community, and that if we haven’t checked in by sunset, we probably need help. Tell her we left with Dee. Can you remember that?”

  The pause was even longer this time. Finally, in a small voice, Sarah asked, “What happens if I forget?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Can you try to remember?”

  She bit her lip and nodded. “I’ll try.”

  “Thank you. Will you be okay here by yourself?”

  To my relief, Sarah cracked a very small smile. “The mice will be here with me,” she said. “If I start forgetting who I am or anything like that, I’ll go ask them to remind me.”

  Aeslin mice never forget anything, and they’re always delighted to have the opportunity to recite their private and remarkably accurate catechism. Sarah’s life would never be completely forgotten, not as long as there were Aeslin mice around to remember it for her.

  Too bad we couldn’t bring them with us to the gorgon community. Sadly, mice are mice, whether or not they can talk, and it simply wasn’t safe to expose them to that many snakes. “Okay,” I said. “Call if you need anything.”

  “I will,” she said and closed the door. That was that: I was dismissed.

  I took the stairs two and three at a time in my rush to return to the ground floor. Shelby was leaning against the counter, sipping from a glass of orange juice, when I rushed back into the kitchen. Dee was sitting at the table, hands folded between her knees and wig discarded next to Sarah’s cereal bowl. The snakes that topped her head were twining anxiously around each other, still hissing almost constantly, their tongues flickering in and out as they tasted the air.

  It took years of human-gorgon interactions before anyone realized that gorgons instinctively view all humans as deceitful, because from their perspective, we have the best poker faces in the known universe. Our hair isn’t expressive, and to them, that’s as strange as having snakes growing out of our scalps would be to us.

  “Right, that’s me up, then,” said Shelby, and put her juice aside. “Give me five and we can roll, all right?”

  “All right,” I agreed, and watched her rush out of the room before returning my attention to Dee. “My cousin’s going to stay here, and let my grandparents know what’s going on. Are you safe to drive?”

  “Does it matter?” There was a dull note in her voice that I didn’t like at all. “I need to take you home with me. You have to find the children. You have to . . . how did this happen? We’ve always been so careful.”

  I refrained from pointing out that not that long ago, their version of “careful” had included a serial killer using a cockatrice to attack innocent bystanders. Even if I’d wanted to be the kind of asshole who blamed an entire community for the actions of one bad egg, I wouldn’t have been able to blame the children.

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to do my best to find out,” I said. “Shelby and I both. You’re our friend, and we’re going to help you.”

  She looked at me solemnly, tears rolling down her cheeks to drip from her chin. “Megan is home from school this week. She’s supposed to be hanging out with her friends and discussing suitors with me and her father, not trying to calm a bunch of panicked parents. How are we supposed to convince her that our community is a safe place to raise a family when we can’t even believe it ourselves?”

  It took me a beat to catch up. Megan is Dee’s adult daughter: she had been away at medical school for the entire time I’d been in Ohio. Gorgons live in secluded communities all over the world; Pliny’s gorgons, like Dee and her family, like to settle near human cities, where they can get groceries and other staples without giving up their culture and traditions. Sort of like the Amish, if the Amish were therapsid cryptids capable of turning people to stone. When the kids grow up, they either settle permanently in the community where they were born or move to a new community, and probably never see their parents again. It isn’t safe. Even with all the new technological advancements linking the world, it just isn’t safe.

  “Breathe, Dee. Just please, for me, breathe.”

  “Sorry about that.” Shelby came bounding back into the kitchen. She was dressed like we were heading to the zoo, in khaki shorts and a matching button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled past her elbows. It was incredibly hello, I am a stereotypical Australian of her, which made it incredibly clever at the same time. If we ran across any human hikers in the woods, she could just dial up her accent and start asking me to explain what a squirrel was. The fact that she looked like she’d just escaped from an Animal Planet documentary would do the rest.

  “It’s fine; we were just talking.” I flashed Shelby a quick, tight smile before returning my focus to Dee. “Well? Can you drive?”

  “I can.” She stood, grabbing her wig and jamming it back on her head with one hand. The snakes around the edges withdrew, voluntarily hiding themselves. They had minds of their own, but they were capable of responding to Dee’s emotional state. How that works, no one has ever been able to figure out, and until we get access to a lot of scanning equipment and a few neurologists who won’t ask awkward questions, we aren’t going to.

  “Great. We’ll be right behind you.”

  Dee nodded tightly before heading for the back door. Shelby followed, and I was close behind.

  Shelby paused at the threshold, giving me a concerned look. “How bad do you think this is going to be?” she asked.

  “On a scale of one to ten?”

  She nodded.

  “I honestly don’t know. But I think we should probably be braced for the worst.”

  Shelby nodded again and stepped outside.

  I locked the door behind me.

  * * *

  • • •

  “You all right?” I glanced at Shelby as I drove. She was still too alert-looking for anyone who’d been awake as short a time as she had, and it wasn’t entirely adrenaline�
��she was actually conscious. I’ve always envied people who could go from sleep to functionality that quickly. “You didn’t have time for coffee before Dee came busting in.”

  “I wasn’t in the mood for coffee anyway,” she said, waving a hand vaguely. “Not feeling like being wired today.”

  I opened my mouth, then paused, frowning. “I haven’t seen you drink coffee in a couple of days.”

  “I like to wean myself periodically. Remember what it’s like to live without a chemical dependency.”

  “Huh. Maybe I should try it.”

  The corner of Shelby’s mouth quirked upward in a smile. “You do that.” She sobered. “But seriously. How bad is this likely to be?”

  “Bad. There are three main scenarios to worry about here. The first—and honestly, the one I’m hoping for—is that another gorgon community is following some old-fashioned customs and raided them last night.”

  Shelby whipped around to stare at me. “You’re not serious.”

  “Unfortunately, I am. Look at it like this: you’re a member of a species that’s having trouble keeping your numbers above extinction levels. Too big to hide easily from the dominant predators, too dependent on certain resources to withdraw completely from their civilization, but too different to pass as one of them without a lot of work. Your family group is on the verge of dying out due to a lack of new blood and an inability to settle down long enough to meet fairly extensive breeding requirements. But there’s another family group that’s stable. Secure. They have the resources and the necessary space to breed. Which is more important? Respecting the fact that they love and want their children, or the survival of your species?”