That Ain't Witchcraft Page 9

  “Oh.” James’ shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Yeah, well. Every family has to suffer a few.” It’s difficult to say how much of a “loss” Grandpa Thomas really is. Grandma Alice insists he’s alive somewhere out there, and that she’s going to find him. Most of the family thinks she’s deluding herself, but since she’s regularly carrying more ordnance than a small gun store, no one wants to tell her that. I . . .

  I thought she was deluding herself, too, until I made my own deal with the crossroads. Some of the things they said make me think she might be right. He might still be out there somewhere, trapped and scared and waiting for her to save him. I don’t know what to hope for anymore. I don’t have so many grandparents that I can afford to leave them trapped in eternal limbo. I also don’t know how I’m going to tell Grandma Alice that she’s not crazy without triggering a full-out assault on the crossroads, and I don’t think even she could survive that.

  James looked down at the table. “I know about families and losses. My mother was a sorcerer. Ice, like me. She was good, too, at least if I believe her books. I remember her making it snow in the kitchen when I was a kid, like it was no big deal, and she’d be laughing, and it was . . . it was magic. I always hoped I’d get magic just like her.”

  “What happened?” asked Cylia. Her voice was surprisingly gentle.

  “She got sick,” said James. He matched her gentleness with bitterness, until every word was dripping with it. “She had magic and she had knowledge and she had money and none of it mattered, because she got sick and she died and she left me alone with a man who wouldn’t know magic if it flew up and bit him in the face.”

  “Your dad doesn’t know?” I blurted.

  “No, and I’d ask you not to tell him, except for the part where he wouldn’t believe you if you did; he’d just think you were trying to screw with him. If you don’t want to have the chief of police and uncle of your landlord watching you like a hawk, you won’t say a word.” There was a bone-deep stubbornness and no small amount of pride in the look he gave me. I recognized that expression. It was the face of a man who was accustomed to being the smartest person in the room.

  Most of the time, that look was on my own face. I’d never realized how obnoxious it was. “We’re not going to tell him,” I said. “What good would it do? It’s not like I can force you to make ice in front of him, and I’m pretty sure punching you in the face again to get you to freeze me wouldn’t make your dad very happy with us, even if you don’t get along. You’re a sorcerer, you make things cold, you must be a delight in the middle of the summer. What books are you looking for?”

  “Mom couldn’t keep her library at home without making my father suspicious. He married her because she was pretty, and because she knew how to keep house, and because he was smart enough to recognize a good thing when it looked him in the eye, but she had to make a lot of concessions to make things work.” James’ smile was small and even bitterer than his words, if such a thing was possible. “She married him because she loved him, so I guess we all get to fuck up once. Anyway, she got my cousin Norbert’s parents to let her have a couple of shelves in the library, since they liked her so much, and they knew my father wasn’t as big on books as they were. They’re still here. The books, I mean, not the parents. They died a long time ago.”

  “People do that.” I’d been in a room with someone’s private manuals of sorcery and spellcraft, and I had somehow managed to spend my time reading municipal land records. That basically summarized my life. “So you need her books to learn more about this horrible thing you mentioned, and you didn’t get them out of here before we moved in, which meant breaking into the library in the middle of the night. Got it. What’s the horrible thing?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said James.

  “We believed you about the freezing-my-girlfriend thing,” said Sam sourly. “We’re at least trying to believe you about your weird family shit. Maybe try us with the next piece.”

  “I don’t—” James began. Then he stopped, catching himself, and looked around the table. All of us were watching him expectantly. “Okay. You might believe me. You people are really weird. Are you some kind of cult?”

  “We’re carnies,” I said, voice flat.

  James blinked before apparently accepting this. He shrugged once, picked up his coffee, and asked, “Have you ever heard stories about people going to the crossroads to make a deal? Like, a big deal, something they couldn’t get any other way?”

  I stopped breathing. Literally stopped. My throat felt like it had closed, slamming shut and refusing to let anything through. Sam gave me a worried glance, putting his hand on my arm. I shook my head, motioning for him to stay quiet.

  James didn’t even notice. He sipped his coffee, shoulders drooping in what might have been resignation, or might have been relief. He was finally getting the chance to tell people what he was afraid of. And maybe we were serious or maybe we were weird stoners who wouldn’t believe a word he said, but, either way, we were strangers, and there was nothing we could do to use what he told us against him. There was a power in that. A sincere, cleansing power.

  “There are stories about the crossroads everywhere in the world. If you go to a place where two paths cross, there’s power there, and maybe you can make a deal with it, and maybe it can give you whatever it is you’ve always wanted. What’s interesting, though, is if you go back far enough, the deals . . . they were always small, and maybe people regretted them and maybe they didn’t, but there was balance. At the end of the bargain, no one walked away feeling like they’d been cheated.”

  “What changed?” asked Cylia.

  “It’s ‘what,’ and it’s ‘when,’” said James. “It takes work to find records that go back five hundred years, but I did it. I called in favors, I volunteered at local history days, I bribed people in other countries to go to their museums and copy manuscripts for me, and I did it.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  James looked at me. “Five hundred years, give or take a few decades,” he said. “The first records I’ve been able to find of a crossroads bargain turning bad, taking more than the person who made it intended to pay, are from the late fourteen hundreds. People seemed genuinely shocked, like prior to that, going to the crossroads had been extreme but understandable. Divination via the crossroads fell off sharply, and some places began to talk about them as places where witches congregated. What’s interesting is that if you read carefully, it’s pretty clear that this is when the witches stopped congregating at the crossroads. It was like they realized something had changed, turned dangerous, and they didn’t want to have any part of it.”

  “Witches?” I asked carefully.

  “They’re not the same as sorcerers,” said James, a faint lecturing note coming into his tone. He was clearly enjoying this: he had the opportunity to talk about things most people would never listen to without laughing. That probably didn’t happen very often. “There are all kinds of witches in the world, and some of them draw power from the road. There are probably a few of them traveling around North America right now, maybe even with a carnival like the one . . . you all . . .” He stopped, looking around the table again.

  Under other circumstances, the sudden blend of hope and fear in his eyes might have been amusing. He was looking for commonalities, or at least for people who could understand him. He was looking, in his own sideways manner, for witches.

  “Sorry,” I said. “None of us are witches, route or otherwise.”

  “Route?”

  Inwardly, I winced. “If they draw power from the road, it makes sense, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so,” he said. “But yes: after the crossroads changed, the witches started avoiding them. There’s some evidence that they tried to warn people away, and got killed or driven from their homes for their trouble.” />
  “People don’t like things that are different,” said Sam bitterly.

  I leaned over until my shoulder brushed his, eyes still on James. “What does all this have to do with anything?”

  “I thought I said.” James took a deep breath. “The crossroads prey on people when they’re at their weakest. The crossroads hurt people. They can be any place where two roads or paths cross, but there are always places that have . . . weight, for lack of a better word. Places where the crossroads are more likely to hear you.”

  I knew what came next. God help me, I knew what came next. I didn’t say anything.

  “One of those places is here, in New Gravesend. It’s easier to reach the crossroads than it ought to be. People do it by mistake, sometimes, and they get hurt. They get hurt bad. Some of them . . .” His voice caught in his throat. When he finished, it was quieter, more introspective. “It’s not how things are supposed to be. I know it’s not. The crossroads weren’t always like this, and now that they are, someone has to stop them. I have to stop them.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said.

  “No, it’s not.” James looked me squarely in the eye. “There’s a way, and I know how.”

  I stood so abruptly that my chair scraped, hard, against the floor.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and left the room. The others could make excuses for me, if they wanted to. Sam was more likely to glare at James until one of them exploded. That was fine. I had to go. I had to get out.

  The front door was locked. I fumbled it open and let myself outside, walking along the wrap-around porch until I reached the swing on the left side of the house. It looked out on the woods, and the moonlight glinting off the thinnest slice of the distant lake. I sat down, my heart pounding so hard it felt like I could taste it.

  “All right,” I said softly. “You can come out now.”

  The air changed around me.

  “Hello, Annie,” said Mary. “Long time no see.”

  Six

  “There’s no honor in running away from a debt. There’s no shame in running away from a bullet. Learn to tell the difference as early as you can.”

  –Evelyn Baker

  Outside on the porch, preparing for an awkward conversation

  “NOT LONG ENOUGH, BASED on the conversation I just had,” I said, keeping my eyes on the lake. The water sure was pretty. It must have been wonderful in the summer, when the sun was hot and the lake was cool and everything made a certain sort of seasonal sense. “How’s the family?”

  “Worried about you.” The porch swing creaked as she settled next to me. Dead since before my grandmother was born, and she can still have mass and substance when she wants it, can still move through the world like she belongs there. It’s a neat trick.

  Her eyes always give her away, at least to people who know what to watch for. Mary Dunlavy—Aunt Mary to three generations of Price children, all of us growing up under her careful eye, with her wiping our spills and kissing our booboos, the eternal babysitter—has eyes like a hundred miles of empty highway, every color and no color at the same time. Look into them too long and you’ll see the cornfields waving next to an Iowa offramp, the tangled forests of Oregon and the sunset splendor of Arizona. Everywhere the road is, she is, because she serves the crossroads, and they’ve marked her, permanently, to make sure she never forgets.

  As if she ever could have. Being dead and bound to work forever for an eldritch horror masquerading as a piece of roadwork isn’t exactly the sort of thing a person forgets.

  “I’m sorry to worry them,” I said.

  “They know. Believe it or not, they trust you enough to believe that if you’re not coming home, it’s because you have a good reason.”

  I snorted. I’m the baby of the family, not the heir and not the spare, not the good kid or the exciting renegade. I’m just Antimony, the one without ambition or direction or any of the other things someone my age is supposed to have. The idea of them having faith in me was almost ridiculous. Oh, my cousins might—Artie and Elsie and even Sarah, if she was currently capable of remembering who I was—but my parents? My siblings? No way.

  “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep track of you the way I have been.”

  I opened my mouth to ask her why not, and froze, the implications of her statement sinking in. Slowly, I turned to stare at her.

  Mary was wearing her usual seventies hippie gear, several decades too modern for her actual date of death, but remarkably well-suited to her straight white hair and those impossible eyes. A climbing clematis vine was embroidered up the side of her peasant blouse and around the squared-out neckline, until it looked like it was trying to strangle her one carefully stitched tendril at a time. She looked exhausted. No small feat, for a ghost. But she smiled, ever so slightly, as she met my eyes, and she nodded, the tiniest inclination of her chin.

  Mary is the family babysitter. Somehow, she’s managed to turn that into a loophole in her contract with the crossroads, an excuse to keep following the family around the world—or, more specifically, to keep following the youngest member of the family. The one who most recently needed babysitting. As the last born in my generation, I’d enjoyed Mary’s company and occasional protection longer than either of my siblings or any of my cousins. If she wasn’t going to be following me anymore . . .

  The loophole was closing. “I’m guessing asking you who is going to have the baby would be a little too close to something useful,” I said.

  Mary nodded again, more firmly this time. “I can’t tell you. The crossroads would love to get a tighter hold on you right about now, and that means real information is off the table. But you already knew that.”

  “Yeah, I did,” I said, pushing the idea of a baby—a baby, a Price baby—to the back of my mind. “Just like I knew you’d be showing up tonight. I didn’t want you to pop in inside. You would have given our poor houseguest a heart attack.”

  “Might have solved a few problems if I had,” said Mary regretfully.

  That’s the thing about Mary: she’s a good person in a bad situation, and she has never, to the best of my knowledge, liked her job. The crossroads call. The crossroads cajole. The crossroads convince, and the whole time, Mary—or another ghost like her—is there, trying to explain why this is a bad idea, why the person making the deal should walk away. And almost always, she loses. By the time a person goes to the crossroads, they’re not interested in being convinced to stop. They know what they want, and they’re going to get it if it kills them. Which, sometimes, it does.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’m guessing this isn’t a friendly visit.”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t seen you since Lowryland. I was starting to think you were avoiding me.”

  “I have been. The crossroads have always known your name, Annie. Now they know where you are, and they know what it tastes like when you’re afraid. They want you.”

  “I already owe them.”

  Mary shook her head. “No. I mean, yes, you owe them, but they haven’t beaten you. They haven’t taken you. They hate your family.”

  “Wh—” I caught myself before it could become a question. “I guess why that’s the case would count as one of those questions I’m not supposed to ask.”

  “I guess it would,” Mary agreed. “I really wish you’d had the chance to meet your grandfather.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Thomas Price never met a strict letter of the law he didn’t feel like subverting. It’s like he thought life was a riddle that could be solved in a way where no one had to get hurt—or maybe where only the people who deserved it got hurt. Remember, he started out Covenant. Slippery as he was, he still had some pretty firm ideas about morality.”

  I held my tongue. If she was talking, it was because she wanted me to hear something. All I could do by interrupting was increase the c
hance she’d have to stop.

  “Sometimes I thought he married your grandmother in part because the Covenant had been so fixated on him finding a way to subvert her and bring her back into the fold. Not that Alice hasn’t always been stubborn in her own right—they were a pair. No matter what else I can say about them, I can say with conviction that neither of them would ever have found someone better suited to their specific brands of crazy. And I got you, and your siblings, and your father, out of the deal.” Mary’s smile was fleeting. “It would have broken my heart if the family tree had ended with Alice. I’m really not qualified for any jobs but babysitting, and people don’t hire you if you don’t have references these days.”

  “I’m not planning on having children any time soon,” I said.

  “I know, but your brother and sister both want to, and that should be more than enough to keep me busy for a while.” Mary looked down at her hands, resting between her knees, and said, “Your grandfather knew about the crossroads. He knew to avoid them, and he knew if he ever made a deal, they’d do their best to hurt him. He stayed away as long as he could.”

  “Lot of people stay away for their whole lives.”

  “You didn’t.”

  Silence fell like a hammer, smothering all the natural night sounds of the forest around us. I tried to speak. Nothing happened. She had me dead to rights, and what’s more, she had just, in her own sideways manner, answered one of the questions that had plagued me for my entire life. What could have driven a man like Thomas Price, a scholar, a sorcerer, a former member of the Covenant of St. George, who knew exactly what kind of danger the crossroads represented, to make a bargain with them?

  What, if not the life of the woman he loved? Mary had said, when I made my own crossroads deal, that she’d been the one to broker the contract for Alice Healy’s life—Healy, not Price. They hadn’t been married yet, and so far as I knew, my grandmother had only gone to the crossroads after she had a ring on her finger and an empty place where her husband should have been. That visit had ended in fire and tears, but no bargain, which led me to believe the crossroads had asked for something she wasn’t willing to give up, not even to save the man she’d go on to spend the next forty years searching for.