That Ain't Witchcraft

by Seanan McGuire

  “Here.” The diminutive sylph appeared at my elbow as if by magic, although I knew it was much more likely to be connected to her fondness for lurking in corners and keeping out of the way when not actively involved in whatever was happening. “What do you need?”

  “Clear the dining room table. Get notepads for everybody. We’re about to do a speed transcription project.”

  Fern rushed off while Cylia turned to me, eyebrows raised. “I’m assuming there’s a reason for this, and we’re not just working on our handwriting?” she asked.

  “James’ mom did most of her serious research in witchletters, and right now, he’s the only one who can make them appear,” I said. “It’ll go faster if he activates multiple books at once, but that means the writing’s going to start fading almost as fast as it shows up.”

  “Meaning we transcribe as quickly as possible,” said Cylia. “All right, got it. Any additional complications?”

  I opened my mouth and hesitated, looking around the group. Things were already so bad. Did they really need the added burden of knowing the crossroads could hurt me whenever they wanted to, possibly to the point of incapacitating me?

  Hell, yeah, they did.

  “If I leave the ghost wards James set up on the house—say, to go to his place, or to deal with the crossroads, or to buy a cup of coffee—Bethany can find me,” I said. “She found me at James’. And once she finds me, the crossroads can find me. It turns out they have ways of making sure people don’t back out on their side of the bargain.”

  “Can they take back whatever you bargained for?” asked James.

  “Thankfully, no,” I said. “Aunt Mary made sure of that during the negotiation process. Since what I bargained for was not drowning, and Sam not drowning,” and I was still sure, deep down, that he’d already drowned when the crossroads answered my request; that I’d lost him, possibly forever, before I decided to barter myself against the tempo of his heart, “they can’t take that back. They’re not allowed to kill me over a debt. But they took my magic as collateral against my doing them a favor.”

  “Killing me,” said James.

  “Yes, killing you.” I looked at him levelly. “I didn’t know when I made the deal that it would be a commitment to play assassination games, and honestly, I would probably have done it regardless, because I wanted to live. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Where there’s death, there’s . . . well, there’s still hope, if my dead aunts are anything to go by, but it’s a different kind, and not one that would have given my parents any comfort.”

  “If I’d died in Lowryland, I’m pretty sure my grandmother would have gone into necromancy so she could bring me back and shout at me.” Sam paused. “Is necromancy real? Annie, is necromancy real?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t want to know, and if people are raising the dead for recreational reasons, they need to stay way the hell away from me.”

  Cylia put up her hands. “I feel like we’re getting away from the point again. Something we’re incredibly good at, especially when the point is unpleasant. What are you saying, Annie?”

  “I’m saying the crossroads can force people who owe them to go along with paying our debts. They . . . hurt me.” I paused, feeling suddenly awkward. Words weren’t enough, and this whole thing sounded ridiculous. A bodiless force of chaos and capitalism hurt me? Sure it did.

  Taking a sharp breath, I continued, “The crossroads used Bethany to pull me into the space they usually occupy, and they used my own magic to make every nerve in my body ignite at the same time. I can’t resist something that came from me in the first place. I don’t think there are any wards that could keep it from coming home—and once it does, it’s in someone else’s control, and it burns.”

  God, how it burned. Like acid, like fire, like every regret in the history of the world all rolled up into a single striking sword, slicing through me over and over again without leaving any marks behind. It was the kind of pain that broke people. It could easily have broken me. If I had to experience it again, I was direly afraid that it would break me.

  James stared at me, a stricken expression on his face. “Where did this happen?” he asked.

  “In the hidden stairwell. I think she was watching. Waiting for a moment when I wouldn’t have anyone around who might try to interfere.” I suppressed a shudder. Something brushed against my ankle. I looked down to see Sam’s tail wrapping itself loosely around the curve of my calf, holding on without holding too tight.

  It helped. Maybe I’m too weird to consider myself a part of polite society anymore, but it helped. I looked back up.

  “I threw up when the crossroads stopped hurting me,” I said. “It happened while I was still in the in-between space where they take you to make a bargain. There wasn’t any vomit on the stairs when they dropped me back into the real world. I think that’s the proof we’ve been waiting for that the crossroads really do exist in some other place.”

  “That is a terrible way of proving a point no one was contesting,” said Cylia flatly. “Do not prove any further points in this manner, all right? I don’t want to explain any of this shit to your cousin when we get back home.”

  Home. There was an idea. I’d been happy there. I’d been bored there, and suddenly boredom seemed like the very pinnacle of the human condition. If we could figure out how to get me out of my bargain with the crossroads, and get the Covenant off my ass, maybe I could bring Sam home to meet the family. He’d like them. They were weird enough to appeal to his idea of normal.

  And that was never going to happen, because no matter how optimistic Cylia tried to be, I was never going to go home. There were too many obstacles in the way.

  “James.” I turned to face him. “When you go home, I want you to apologize to the air and say you’re sure any ghosts who happen to be listening are lovely people, but that you need privacy. Tell them you need to masturbate. Whatever. And then get some damn wards in place, as fast as you can.”

  James flushed red. Sam snorted. I glanced in his direction. He was fighting not to laugh.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just . . . can you imagine what the mice would do with that?”

  “Yes, and since I don’t want to celebrate the Festival of James Smith is a Wanker for the rest of my life, we’re leaving this part out when we tell them about the whole situation.” James turned even redder. I shot him an apologetic look. “Aeslin mice. I’ll explain more later.”

  “I’m not sure whether I want you to,” said James.

  “Too bad,” I said. “To get back on track: pain. The crossroads can hurt me any time I’m not behind wards—maybe even when I am behind wards, but I’m trying to think positively—and that means they can keep me from acting. If they have enough time, if we don’t stop them, they might be able to hurt me so badly that I’ll agree to do anything they ask. I can’t . . .” I stopped and swallowed, overwhelmed by the enormity of what I was about to say. It went against everything I believed in, everything I knew about myself and my place in the world.

  We all—my siblings, my cousins, and me—know a certain amount of self-defense, because any weapon that can be taken away from you is not a perfect weapon. Alex is great at punching people, enough so that even Grandma Alice says he’s impressive. She doesn’t impress easily. Verity is more of a kicker, and when you’re talking about someone who thinks extending a leg over her head is easy, that means something. Elsie likes to go for eyes and throats, while Artie was the star of his school track team.

  And then there’s me. Little Annie, isn’t it cute how she lays traps and digs pits and sets blasting caps and never wants to hurt her hands. Isn’t it funny how she sleeps with a knife under her pillow and a pair of brass knuckles in the pocket of her flannel pajama pants, where they leave a bruise on her thigh every morning that looks like she’s been punching herself for hours.

  Little Annie, who
puts her faith in weapons over flesh and bone. Who doesn’t even go to the shower unarmed.

  “You’re going to have to take my weapons away any time I need to leave the house,” I said haltingly. “If I go out without them, then even if the crossroads compel me, there’s only going to be so much damage I can do. Especially with Fern and Sam ready to put me down.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that,” said Sam quietly.

  “I can,” said Fern.

  We all turned. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, expression grim. The stern line of her mouth melted into a faint smile as she looked at me.

  “If I dial my density as far up as it can go, my skin gets harder to break, too, because otherwise I think my bones would explode it or something,” she said. “So all I need to do is become super heavy, knock you down, and sit on you. Then you won’t be able to hurt anybody, even if the crossroads really wants you to.”

  “I knew I liked you for a reason,” I said.

  Her smile turned, briefly, more sincere, before fading away entirely. “If we’re going to fight the crossroads, though, I think there’s something we have to think about, maybe. It could make things easier.”

  “Fern, no,” said Cylia.

  I frowned. “Someone want to fill me in?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” muttered James.

  “She wants you to offer the Covenant asshole a truce,” said Cylia.

  I blinked.

  “Not a truce,” protested Fern. “Offering him a truce makes it sound like I want us to be friends. I don’t want us to be friends. But he already knows our faces, and the Covenant probably doesn’t like the crossroads any more than we do. If we can get him to come be on our side for fifteen minutes, or at least stop trying to shoot us every time we go outside, we can focus on one problem instead of two, and then maybe we’ll all stay alive for a little longer. I want to stay alive, Annie. I’m sorry if that’s selfish or something, but it’s true. There aren’t enough sylphs left for me to just . . . just run off and get myself killed.”

  She sounded genuinely distressed. I sighed and tugged my ankle away from Sam’s grasp before walking over and folding her into an awkward hug. I’m not good at physical displays of affection. Maybe that’s why I like Sam’s need to have a hand, foot, or other appendage on me at all times; it takes the burden of performing comfort off of me. Fern made a small choking noise and sagged in my embrace.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry I don’t want to be selfish, I don’t want to be bad, but I don’t want to die either. I want to prove I’m smart and strong and clever enough to have babies of my own. I want to have adventures, but I want to live.”

  “You will,” I assured her, and I didn’t think I was lying, except in the greater “the grave comes for us all” sense of the idea. “You’re going to find another sylph and have lots of babies that bob against the ceiling like so many balloons, and it’s going to be wonderful. I’ll even babysit for you.”

  “Creche childrearing,” she reminded me, with a small hiccup in her voice that could have been either a laugh or a sob.

  “So I’ll come to the creche and do a shift there. Imagine me covered in babies. I don’t even like babies. It’ll be hilarious. All we have to do is get through this mess and we can do that, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, and pulled away enough to wipe her eyes. “You’ll think about it?”

  “I’ll think about it,” I promised. “Now let’s get to work.”

  * * *

  You know what’s boring as hell? Transcription, which is why court stenographers and the people who do captions for television should be paid substantially better than they are. Typing what someone else is saying is no fun at all. Copying someone else’s manuscript, also not fun. Copying someone else’s handwritten diaries that were never exactly designed for public consumption may well be the least fun of all. Doing it when the writing keeps trying to disappear, well . . .

  “This is like the American Ninja Warrior of homework, and I hate it,” said Sam.

  “No contest here.” I squinted at the page in front of me. “James!”

  “Coming!” James rushed around the table and placed his hands above the book, fingers spread, face screwed up with concentration. The temperature dropped precipitously and the wavering, indistinct letters flared back into solidity.

  “Thank you,” I said, and paused, assessing him. Most of the color was gone from his face; his eyes seemed shadowed, and there was an odd chapped quality to his lips, like he’d been walking outside in the freezing cold long enough to have all the moisture sucked out of his skin. “Are you okay?”

  “Are we done?”

  “No.” James’ mother had been a thorough documentarian, recording every scrap of data she could beg, borrow, steal, or observe about the crossroads. That was good. She had also been using the books to keep a diary of her daily activities, and while she never quite crossed the line into TMI—no lurid accountings of her sexual exploits or descriptions of James’ father in the nude—she was perfectly willing to go on for paragraphs about the woman who’d shorted her change at the grocery store. Which still would have been fine, if she’d been writing on the front of the paper and using the back to record her more sorcerous observations.

  That would, apparently, have been too easy on her eventual offspring, and thus had been dismissed as cheating. Her invisible writing was tucked into margins and on the open lines between the more mundane observations, and since it was all the same color once James had witched it into visibility, I had to keep forcing myself to focus on “the crossroads, on being thwarted, stripped the skin from Goodie Martha’s body,” and not “Jimmy was fussy again this morning, poor mite; he takes too much after my side of the family.”

  I was suddenly tempted to go home and find a way to witch the words out of Grandpa Thomas’ diaries, and also terrified that if I did, I’d find a lengthy accounting of the places he and Grandma Alice had had sex in the house back in Buckley. Sticking two narratives in one book was exhausting.

  “I’m done with this one,” said Cylia, holding up a notebook. “How many more do we have?”

  “Too many,” said Sam glumly. “Can’t we just nuke the place from orbit?”

  “It’s the only way to be sure, but no,” I said. “I don’t think the crossroads are something you can nuke.”

  “Not unless you want to make the dimension adjacent to our own radioactive for the next millennia, and probably still hostile,” said James, as he hurried to refresh the writing on Fern’s book. “Has anyone found anything that seems useful?”

  “Your mom wrote down crop yields for like, three years, and I’m still not sure why,” said Sam.

  “Oh, I have an account of a local farmer trading his youngest daughter to the crossroads in exchange for a decade of good harvests,” said Fern. “If the dates match up, maybe she was making sure the crossroads kept their word.”

  “Did the daughter die?” I asked.

  “Disappeared,” said Fern. “Like, um.” She cast a sidelong look at James.

  “Like Sally,” he said grimly. “Yes, they’re quite fond of that trick. Pull it all the time.”

  “Which is possibly a good thing,” I said.

  Slowly, he turned to stare at me. The temperature dropped again, the writing on the pages in front of me growing darker and crisper as his magic filled the room. Goosebumps formed on my arms. I fought the urge to pull back in my chair, remembering—not for the first time—that there are reasons people are, on the whole, afraid of sorcerers and the things we can do.

  “What, exactly, do you mean by that?” he asked. His voice was even colder than the air around us.

  “I mean that if they do this frequently, and we’re not finding anything to indicate the crossroads have been handing out corpses, or brainwashed slaves, or fresh new bodie
s, then there’s a good chance a lot of these people may still be alive somewhere. Someplace on the other side of the pocket realm where they do their bullshit business. There’s a lot of reality on the other side of our dimensional wall. My grandmother has been exploring it for decades. Once we have an idea of where the crossroads might have been putting all these people . . .”

  Once we had a scrap of information, a sliver of a clue, I could set Grandma loose on all the dimensions that had ever existed, and she would find all those people, and she’d bring them home. She’d bring Sally home.

  She’d bring Grandpa home. Grandpa, who knew what it was to understand the Covenant and reject them anyway, who understood what I was and what I was becoming better than anyone in our shared family. We’d never met, but I had absolute faith that he’d be able to help me, because I was, in so many ways, his mirror. He could help me.

  He had to.

  James’ eyes widened, the cold fading as my words sank in. “You really think . . . ?”

  “I am making no promises, but I think they’d be stupid not to be keeping those people alive. They’re a horrifying eldritch construct that doesn’t belong here. They’re not vampires.” I tapped the page. “We read. We learn things. And once we know stuff, we fix things.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Cylia.

  And so we read, and as we read, we wrote, pulling a dead woman’s secrets into the light for the first time since she’d tucked them away in her hidden room, banking on the hope that her son—who she already suspected was going to be like her in more ways than one, whose fingers were always cold and whose eyes were always focused on something past the horizon—would one day find them and make them his own. We read, we wrote, and we hoped to find the answer.

  Until finally, impossibly, there it was. I stared at it, the writing in my own hand, black lines on white paper, answers and questions combined, and my mouth was dry, and I didn’t know what to say.