That Ain't Witchcraft

by Seanan McGuire

  I liked the idea of getting back to normal.

  “Long enough that if you hadn’t left the door open, we would probably have been afraid you’d died,” he said. “I unpacked all our stuff. And made the bed. And offered to make you a sandwich. You didn’t notice.”

  “Oh.” I offered him a sheepish smile. “Sometimes I get really into my reading.”

  “Uh, yeah, I’d say. If you were any more into your reading, you would actually be inside the book.”

  “Never go into a book. Either it’s a dimensional portal, which is bad, or it’s some sort of Dungeons and Dragons-style mimic-thing, which is also bad, although in a less ‘we’ll never find your body’ sort of a way.”

  Sam blinked at me slowly. “You know,” he said finally. “I like you exactly the way you are, because I am not stupid and do not want you to hit me with a shoe for implying that there’s something wrong with you, but you were a lot easier to understand when you were just the annoying chick who wanted to throw knives at my head.”

  “Don’t worry.” I got out of my seat, setting the books I’d been reading carefully aside for later. “I’m still the annoying chick who wants to throw knives at your head. I’ve just diversified my interests.”

  “See, you say that like it’s reasonable, but all I hear is ‘blah blah blah, I’m probably going to stab you in my sleep.’” He wrapped his tail around my waist, pulling me closer while he placed his hands to either side of my face. Then he grinned and kissed me.

  When he pulled back, he said, “On the plus side, the make-outs are amazing.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” I said, leaning in to kiss him again. There was something so refreshing about being goofy and sappy and not worrying that somebody would see us. This was the first time we’d really been able to stand still since the start of our relationship, the first time I’d been able to kiss him without either forcing him to stay human or checking to see whether the motel curtains were closed. It was nice. It was special.

  It was never going to last. Good things never do.

  “What’s for dinner?” I asked.

  “Cylia made a sort of goulash with pasta shells and hamburger and stuff,” he said. “It smells amazing. There’s parmesan cheese for the rest of you, and no dairy at all for me.”

  “She remembered.”

  His smile was almost shy. “She did.”

  Cylia had been my friend long before she met Sam. Sam, on the other hand, had grown up sheltered by an entire carnival of people who loved and looked out for him—and who had warned him, over and over again, that if he was ever exposed to the rest of the world, he’d wind up in a zoo, or worse. Humans are not historically kind to things we don’t understand. Even without the ever-present threat of the Covenant of St. George, a cryptid in today’s world has a lot to worry about.

  Meeting Cylia and Fern, who weren’t human and weren’t from the carnival and didn’t give a damn what he was, just that he was good to me, had been a revelation. It had been nothing short of miraculous to him that they could care about him enough to keep track of little things like the fact that he was lactose intolerant, or that he didn’t like riding in the front seat because then he couldn’t risk falling asleep. People are a lot more likely to notice when the guy in the passenger seat is a monkey than when it’s just another dark shape in the back.

  “Goulash is better when it’s hot,” I said. He unwound his tail from my waist and took my hand, and together we made our way down to dinner.

  Cylia had set the table, putting the pot on a trivet in the middle. “You’re doing the dishes,” she said, pointing her spoon at me.

  I nodded. “Seems fair.”

  Fern was buttering bread. She looked up and smiled. “Did you find something to read?”

  “Is that an actual question, or are you just being polite?”

  Fern thought about it while the rest of us were taking our seats. Then, nodding solemnly, she said, “Actual question. I mean, we’re all exhausted. You could have decided to take a nap. I’ve had three showers so far today, because I can. I’ll probably have another one before bed.”

  “I admire your dedication to exhausting the local water table,” I said. Cylia handed me a bowl of goulash. I sprinkled cheese on the top as I thought about how to phrase things. Finally, I said, “I’ve been reading books on local history. They’re about as interesting as you’d expect for a small town in the middle of nowhere. Lots of ‘and then there was a feud over who owned the chickens, which went on for fifteen years, long after both the chickens and the original participants were dead, because it was something to do.’ This may be Maine, but that doesn’t make it Stephen King territory.”

  To my surprise, Cylia relaxed visibly. “Oh, thank the Fates,” she said.

  I blinked at her. “Did I miss something?”

  “Luck brought us here; luck found us this house,” she said. “And it’s perfect for what we need, have you noticed that? It’s perfect.”

  A warm current of unease worked its way through my stomach. “Perfect things exist. Besides, this house isn’t perfect. The water pressure in the upstairs shower’s hinky.”

  “There’s a master bedroom right next to a library,” said Cylia. “There’s an attic bedroom with bars on the windows. We’re surrounded by the kind of forest where a six-foot monkey can run around and not worry about being seen by strangers. It’s not perfect in the ‘will win awards’ sense. It’s perfect in the ‘does it suit our idiosyncratic little group of weirdoes’ sense.”

  The unease grew stronger. From the look on Sam’s face, he was experiencing something similar. “So why does this make us not being in Stephen King country a good thing?”

  “That’s one of the ways the luck could have equalized,” said Cylia. “It could have decided, hey, we got the perfect house, in the perfect town, with the perfect unmarked graveyard filled with angry spirits out back. Or the perfect family of hungry ghouls looking for a group of tourists no one would miss. Or—”

  “I get the horrifying picture,” I said. “Boring town is better. Check. But doesn’t that mean we’re still waiting to see how the luck is going to equalize?”

  “It does,” admitted Cylia. “It also means we’ll have a little time and can get our footing before we have to fight for our lives again. Sometimes boredom is its own punishment. Now, can someone pass the pepper?”

  * * *

  Dinner was exactly as advertised: filling, delicious, and hearty in that summer camp kind of way, like we were storing up calories against the possibility of never getting to eat again. Cylia was a pretty decent cook, as long as what you wanted was carbs, protein, and vegetables that came out of a can. Sam, after tucking away three helpings, paid her the highest compliment in his vocabulary.

  “You cook like a carnie.”

  Cylia laughed, and Fern laughed, and even I laughed, as much out of relief as amusement, because this was really happening: this was real life. We had our own place, and the space to stop and breathe and just be for a little while. I’d never realized, back when I was spending my days on my cousin Artie’s bed complaining about the X-Men and my nights on the track with the rest of my team, how much I needed to stop once in a while.

  As promised, I did the dishes, and Sam, who had grown up in a carnival boneyard where everyone was expected to pull their weight, dried them and put them away, and by the time we were finished, both Fern and Cylia had gone to their respective rooms and shut their doors, leaving us alone in the kitchen. They might as well have left us alone in the house. It had been so long since I’d had privacy, real privacy, privacy that wasn’t stolen in a motel restroom or the middle of a cornfield filled with killer Blight, that for a moment I didn’t know what to do with it.

  I stared at Sam. He stared back.

  “Um,” he said finally. “Am I being weird and creepy and so totally a dude if I say I
really, really want to go upstairs to our bedroom with the door that shuts and locks and walls that don’t connect to any place where someone else is trying to sleep?”

  “No, because I was about to say the same thing.”

  The look of relief on his face was profound enough that it was almost comical. “Race ya,” he said, and took off like a shot.

  There is no planet where I can keep up with Sam, and so I didn’t even try. I was tormenting myself as much as I was tormenting him, and still I took the stairs with the decorous grace of a Jane Austen heroine, one hand on the railing, one foot in front of the other, stretching out the journey until every nerve I had was screaming. There might not be fire in my fingers anymore, but there was still fire in my blood, and it wanted to burn—oh, God—it wanted so badly to burn.

  The bedroom door was closed when I got there. I opened it, stepped inside, and was treated to the sight of a perfectly made bed, the covers turned down in obvious invitation, the pillows—which must have come from a hidden linen closet—plumped and ready. All that was missing was my boyfriend.

  So I did what people don’t do. I looked up.

  Sam, holding himself perfectly still in the corner by bracing his hands and feet against opposite walls, grinned at me. His lips were drawn tight across his teeth, as always, keeping the expression from turning into a threat display.

  “Found me,” he said.

  “I wasn’t aware we were playing hide and go seek.” I closed the door, clicking the lock into place as a precaution before bending to unlace my shoes. I tried to look unconcerned, like I didn’t care how long he hung out on the ceiling rather than getting his ass to floor level and ravishing me.

  “And I wasn’t aware that we were playing keep away.” There was a soft thump.

  I continued untying my shoes. “Haven’t you ever heard of delayed gratification?”

  “Oh, let’s see.” The springs on the bed creaked. “First, I had to wait for you to tell me you weren’t just some weirdo who happened to come with a pair of talking mice. Then, I had to wait until I got up the courage to ask you out. Then, just when I’m thinking hey, maybe I’ll actually get to touch a girl, I find out you’ve been lying to me since the minute we met.”

  I glanced up sharply, suddenly tense. Sam was sitting on the edge of the mattress. He offered me a small, almost twisted smile before pulling his shirt off over his head. That helped with some of the tension, even as it made other elements of it worse. Say what you like about the risks of the flying trapeze, but you won’t find a better workout this side of the circus.

  “That’s over, that’s settled and done,” he said, tossing his shirt to the foot of the bed. “I lied to you, you lied to me, we canceled each other out. Still put a crimp in our sex life.”

  “Theoretical sex life, at that point.” I stepped out of my shoes and unbuttoned my jeans. “We weren’t sleeping together yet.”

  “We were in my dreams,” he said wistfully and paused to watch as I gracelessly rolled my jeans down my hips and kicked them off. “The reality is better. But, you know. Stuff kept getting in the way. Like the asshole assassins, and you burning down the carnival and running away, leaving me behind.”

  “It was for your own good.”

  “Uh-huh. Try pulling that trick again and see how far that excuse gets you. Small hint: not far.” Sam folded his arms. “Then I had to find you, and then I had to deal with wacko assholes who wanted to suck the luck out of the world like little kids with an orange, and then we were on a road trip for weeks with people I didn’t really know, and anyway, I think my gratification is plenty delayed at this point. My gratification is going to summer school and watching all the other gratifications running around playing baseball.”

  I paused in the act of unfastening my bra. “You were homeschooled at the carnival. Do you even know what summer school is?”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m just saying, that metaphor sort of got away from you somewhere.”

  “And I’m just saying, shut up.” Then he was kissing me, and one hand was busy finishing what I’d started with the bra, and conversation was no longer a necessary part of our evening.

  Prior to Sam, I would have said my interest in dating—limited as it was—was doomed to stay pretty much hypothetical. I hadn’t been a virgin, thanks to a few beer parties in high school combined with a burning desire not to wind up tied to the altar of the next cult that needed a specific kind of sacrifice, but that had been more about practicality and physicality than actually making a connection with anyone. Sex had been something that could happen, that wasn’t so frightening it needed to be avoided, but that I didn’t think about on a regular basis.

  Turns out having a significant other who likes sex and likes me and really likes combining the two changes my priorities a bit. The extra hands don’t hurt, either.

  When we were finished, exhausted and sweaty and content with one another, we brushed our teeth, cleaned up as much of our strewn clothing as felt reasonable, and fell back into bed, this time for less aerobic activities. I was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  I woke some unknown length of time later, spine rigid, hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. I held myself perfectly still, reviewing things that might have woken me. My dreams had been pleasantly abstract and were already fading, leaving none of the thin veil of unease that came with nightmares. Sam was sleeping solidly beside me, his breath a steady constant too soft to be the reason I was awake. His tail was wrapped loosely around my left wrist. I tugged. He let go, making a small sound of discontent, and didn’t open his eyes.

  Whatever the cause of my unwanted wakefulness was, it wasn’t in this room. It was—

  There. A sound, faint but distinct, from outside the bedroom. Not outside the window, where it could have been any number of woodland creatures, from bunny to bear: inside. Someone was moving around nearby. Someone who sounded too large to be Cylia. I’d already eliminated Fern. If she needed to be on this floor for some reason, she would have dropped her density until her steps were the next best thing to inaudible. No one robs a house like a sylph.

  Moving as quietly as I could, I slid out of the bed and retrieved my jeans. It only took a few seconds after that to find my bra and tank top. It felt a little silly to be putting my tits away to go and investigate a creepy noise in my house, but that’s one of the things the women in horror movies always get wrong. If there’s something that might slow you down in a fight—like, say, leaving your boobs to flop around free-range and cumbersome—you deal with it before the fight gets started.

  Guns are a bad idea in a rental house. I belted a set of throwing knives around my waist and eased the door open, stepping gently out into the hall.

  The house was dark and close enough to silent as to make no difference. There are always sounds in an old house at midnight. The rumble of the heating system, the soft settling of old timbers as they sink deeper into their positions, the whistle of the wind outside the walls. At the moment, I was grateful for every familiar, predictable noise. As long as I was careful, they would cover for me.

  A dim light was coming from under the library door, too dim to be anything but a flashlight. I looked at it, eyes narrowing. Any chance that it had been Cylia, unable to sleep and looking for a nice book on civic history to ease her into dreamland, died with that light. She would have flipped the switch. She would have used the overheads.

  We had an intruder.

  I drew a knife as I placed a hand on the library doorknob. The air felt electric with the confrontation to come. I took a slow, careful breath, centering myself, and shoved the door open.

  There was a yelp as the person inside realized they were no longer alone. I didn’t see them: they dropped their light, whatever it was, and the library was cast into darkness. That was fine. I closed my eyes to keep any shadows or outlines from distracting me, ba
lled my free hand into a fist, and swung, missing by at least a foot.

  Blind fighting—the art of punching people while you can’t see them—is a useful skill to have, which is why my parents insisted my siblings and I all develop it, if only for the inevitable day when we’d be trying to punch a robber in a rented house in Maine. It’s all about knowing the space and following the sounds inside it. The intruder backpedaled away from me, every step broadcasting their location.

  I swung again. This time, I was rewarded with the pleasant crunch of knuckles mashing against cartilage.

  “My nose!” exclaimed a male voice. I drew back to swing at him a third time. I was keeping my knife until and unless I really needed it. Punching burglars is much easier to explain to the local police than stabbing them. Stabbing them can cause . . . problems.

  Our intruder had better reflexes than I expected—that, or it had been long enough since I’d had a good sparring partner that I was getting rusty. Either way, my fist smacked into a palm rather than hitting his face, and pain followed immediately after. Not searing pain. Not even the dull pain of hitting something too hard for my hand to take. No, this was the brutal, bitter pain of thrusting a hand into a pocket of subzero water that had miraculously remained unfrozen, dropping the temperature of my skin into frostbite territory almost instantly.

  I shrieked, jerking my hand away, and kicked the intruder’s feet out from under him. There was no point in trying to be quiet, not when all the available backup was mine. Sam was already going to be pissed that I’d gone looking for the intruder without him. He’d be livid if I got myself frozen to death because I didn’t scream.

  The intruder fell hard, with a grunting sound that confirmed the location of his head. Great. I dropped to one knee, feeling it strike home against the bottom of his crotch, and leaned forward to press the edge of my knife against his throat. It wasn’t the sharpest blade, since it was designed for throwing rather than slashing, but I was pretty sure he’d get the idea.