That Ain't Witchcraft

by Seanan McGuire

  I swung my leg over the bike, barely feeling the frame shift as Fern settled herself behind me, her mass dialed as far down as it would go. She wasn’t going to slow me down. If anything, her ability to get heavier and add a little bit of ballast when I went around corners would keep me from losing control and hence speed me up.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  Fern slid her arms around my waist. “Hope so,” she said.

  I waved to Cylia, signaling for her to start the car. She did, rolling out slowly at first, then gathering speed as I began to pedal, sliding smoothly into position behind her. Fern held me tight, and the road was open, and we had so far to go, and we were almost finished. God help me, we were almost done.

  New England is the place to go for tiny, creepy towns that look like they belong in the latest Stephen King made-for-TV movie. The trees along the highway shielded us from most of New Gravesend, but what I glimpsed between them was more horror cliché than anything else: tiny, mismatched houses with artfully shabby yards, lived-in but abandoned at the same time. The occasional child at play made things even worse, standing next to trampolines or holding red rubber balls as they considered their next moves. If any of them had been close enough to talk to us, I would have had no trouble believing they’d invite me to come play with them—or worse, tell me that everyone floated in this terrible town.

  It was my imagination working overtime, taking the fact that I was on my way to challenge the crossroads and had allied myself with the Covenant and using it to turn my natural suspicion of the unknown up to eleven. Even knowing that didn’t make me more comfortable, especially when Cylia turned off the main road, down a narrow, twisting lane so lined with trees that even the moonlight couldn’t find a way to shine through. I pedaled as hard as I could, unwilling to risk losing the faint illumination of her taillights. This was an ordinary road, part of an ordinary town that certainly didn’t deserve the thoughts I was throwing in its direction, but everything felt shadowy and terrible and like it was going to come crashing down at any moment, leaving us trapped.

  “I need better hobbies,” I muttered, and pedaled onward.

  I’d never seen the infamous “hanging tree” before, but I knew it when it came into sight. No other label could have applied. It was a monster, skeletal and spidery at the same time, with branches that spread wide to claw the sky, forcing other trees to grow away from it lest they find themselves denied the opportunity to grow. Its trunk was a vast, gnarled thing, roots bursting through the ground and the roadway alike, shattering the pavement. It was easy to understand why settlers in the area might have looked at this tree above all others, and thought, “Yes, this is a good place to start killing people.”

  A second road—barely wide enough to be worthy of the name, although it was paved, which was more than I’d been expecting—ran across the first, creating a small but distinct crossroads. Cylia pulled off to the shoulder, putting her hazard lights on. An unnecessary precaution: this didn’t look like the sort of place that got a lot of traffic.

  I stopped the bike behind her, lowering the kickstand. “Here we go,” I said.

  Fern unlooped her arms from my midsection. “Are you nervous?” she asked.

  “I’m terrified,” I said, sliding off the bike and turning to face her. She blinked, clearly surprised. I shook my head. “Lying never got us anywhere. We’re about to bait a force that’s bigger than any of us into pulling us out of this level of reality, and once we’re there, we’re going to try something monumentally stupid. If this doesn’t work, we could all be lost forever.”

  Would Grandma Alice add me to her list of people to look for? Or would the crossroads shunt me off to wherever they’d been keeping my grandfather, giving him someone to talk to for maybe the first time ever? It was a surreal thought. I didn’t want to learn the answer.

  “I just didn’t expect you to say it, that’s all,” whispered Fern.

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to do this. This isn’t your fight.”

  “You’re my friend,” she said. “It’s always been my fight.”

  A car door slammed. I turned. The others were climbing out of Cylia’s car, Sam in human form and looking cranky about it, Leonard scowling, and James looking like he was just shy of throwing up on his shoes. Given what was about to happen, I couldn’t blame any one of them. I removed my helmet and slung it over the handlebars. We were isolated enough that I wasn’t as worried about someone stealing our shit as I was about never coming back to get it.

  Fern by my side, I walked over to join the others. James looked at me. I looked levelly back.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  He nodded, lips thin, utterly silent. That was fine. If he’d tried to talk, he probably would have started coming up with reasons why we needed to change the plan, and so he was biting his tongue because he understood there wasn’t another way. We needed the crossroads to manifest. Everything else depended on that.

  I held my hand out to Sam. He reached into his shirt and produced one of my throwing knives, dropping it into my palm. The feeling of relief that washed over me was indescribable. I was armed again. Even if it was only long enough for me to stab an ally.

  “What’s that for?” asked Leonard warily.

  “You’ll see,” I said, and grabbed James’ arm with one hand. “Come on.”

  James didn’t help me, but he didn’t resist as I hauled him to the place where the two roads converged. The others followed at a safe distance, waiting for the shit to hit the fan. I stopped at the dead center of the crossroads, noting that the leaves under our feet were undisturbed. No one had come this way in a while.

  Nothing happened.

  I didn’t want to go straight to the stabbing: I was only planning to do it once, and I didn’t actually want this encounter to end with an unnecessary corpse. “Fight me,” I hissed.

  James’ eyes widened in understanding, and he began struggling to get his arm out of my grasp. “Let go, you lunatic!” he snapped. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but you’re going to regret this!”

  His voice was high and shrill, the performance of a man who’d never done theater in his life. It shouldn’t have fooled anyone. But as he went on, the air around us grew thick and electric with something that wasn’t pressure, yet managed to have weight all the same. The eyes of the crossroads were upon us, watching, waiting to see what we were going to do. We had their attention.

  “Sorry,” I mouthed. James, realizing what was about to happen, stopped yelling, true panic slipping into his eyes. He might have been preparing a protest, an excuse, anything to keep me from moving on to the next part of the plan.

  He didn’t have the chance. The knife was already in my hand, and it slid into his side with the soft, characteristic slicing sound of metal meeting meat. He gasped, panic melting into shock. The air around us chilled as he called his magic, instinctively flailing for a way to make the hurting stop.

  I’d promised to only hurt him a little, and I’d meant it, but that didn’t mean I was going to stand by and let him deliver another case of frostbite. My knife was embedded in the muscle of his side, positioned to stay well clear of his internal organs. I gave it a small twist anyway, causing more damage. More importantly, having a knife twisted inside your body hurts. The cold broke as James lost his concentration.

  The weight of the watching crossroads grew even heavier. Come on, Bethany, I thought. Be a good girl and do your job, we’re counting on you to do your job—

  The air shimmered, growing hazy as a summer day in the middle of the desert, even though the sky was dark and the wind was cold. Bethany didn’t appear. That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to, but for the moment, when we spoke, we were speaking directly to the dark.

  “Here you go,” I said loudly, and shoved James away from me, away from the blade of my knife. He fell in the dirt in a
tangle of limbs, one hand clasping his side. Blood trickled between his fingers, thick and red. He was practically panting from the pain. He’d probably never been stabbed before. Amateur.

  The others were arrayed behind me; I could hear them breathing, hear the soft scuffs of their feet as they shifted their weight. Otherwise, the wood was silent, as if the world itself was holding its breath.

  “Well?” I demanded. “I’m not killing him if no one’s going to witness it. I refuse to let you say I didn’t do it because you didn’t see it. I’m not letting you weasel out of this.”

  “We weasel out of nothing,” said a voice from the air, as affronted as a child accused of stealing cookies. “How dare you accuse us of cheating? Flesh cheats. We deliver.”

  “Prove it,” I said, and flung the knife into the dirt by James’ head. It landed less than an inch from his ear, causing him to recoil in genuine surprise and no small trace of fear. “Manifest.”

  “You are not our master,” hissed the voice of the crossroads. Then, in a tone of smug sadism, it said, “But we can show you what it means for us to be yours.”

  The air twisted. In the time it took to blink, the night sky was gone, replaced by a golden twilight that stretched from one side of the sky to the next. The trees went with the sky, replaced by endless cornfields and a horizon that seemed so far and open that human hands could never hope to hold it. Not all the trees: the hanging tree remained, looming in bleak and terrible judgment over all.

  I was standing on the well-worn pavement of an endless country road, at the point where it was crossed by a gravel farmer’s trail. This was where the thresher would have gone, if this field had ever been intended for harvest. The knife I had thrown at James’ head was still there. So was James. I glanced to the side, not quite daring to turn.

  “We’re here,” said Leonard, voice low. “Wherever ‘here’ is.”

  So I wasn’t doing this without my backup. That was good. My friends were still in danger. That was bad. Leonard was in danger, which was a little more good than bad, but wasn’t ideal. Worst of all, the presence of the hanging tree told me we weren’t entirely in the pocket dimension where the crossroads “lived,” if the term could be considered applicable. The so-called real world surrounded us on all sides, only inches away, covered by an overlay of the unwanted and obscene.

  James could perform his exorcism here and accomplish nothing. We needed to go deeper.

  “We see you now,” said the voice of the crossroads, coming from everywhere around us at the same time. The smugness was still there, now underscored by a note of greedy anticipation, like a spoiled child on Christmas morning. “Finish it.”

  “If I do, I get my magic back? I need to be able to protect myself from Leonard.” I gestured toward him. I didn’t have to work to put a quiver into my voice. That part came naturally, and I hated myself for it, just the slightest bit. There was every chance destroying the crossroads would mean giving that part of my soul up forever. It was a small price to pay, especially when measured against the lives the crossroads had claimed or destroyed over the years. It still stung.

  “Yes, yes,” said the crossroads impatiently. “You will be restored, only kill him.”

  “Right,” I said, and reached into my pocket as I turned toward James.

  His eyes widened, and in that moment, I could see the fear there, clear as day. He carried frost in his fingers. He knew—or could guess—how much it would hurt to have it stolen away, and he knew what he’d give to get it back. What was one life against everything I should have had, everything that was already mine by right? My friends would forgive me. I could say I’d lost control, or that the crossroads had somehow forced me to do it, I could claim to be Jean Grey in the grasp of the Phoenix, and they’d believe me, because it would be so much better than the alternative. I could have my freedom and my fire back, and all it would cost was the life of one measly little self-taught sorcerer.

  Bethany flickered into existence only a few feet away, eyes even wider than James’. She knew. Somehow, she knew. “Stop her!” she squealed.

  “Catch,” I said, and threw the spirit jar containing Mary at James’ chest.

  He didn’t catch it, quite: it bounced off his open hands and onto the pavement, where it cracked. It didn’t shatter, but it didn’t need to. A ghost can fit through any opening. A broken vessel can’t contain a spirit that doesn’t want to be contained. Smoke snaked through the crack, glittering in the twilight air, coming faster and faster until it shaped itself into the semblance of a teenage girl, solidified, and dissipated, leaving Mary in its wake.

  I clapped a hand over my mouth, tears rising to my eyes. This was Mary as she was meant to be, without any interference from the crossroads or influence from the kids she agreed to babysit. Her hair was a streak of bone-white down her back, and her eyes were no color at all, but the shadowed hollows of a skull granted the illusion of life by a trick of the light. She wore a winding shroud, like something I might have expected to see on the Grim Reaper, and all she needed was a scythe and a strictly pointing finger to complete the illusion that she was the Ghost of Christmas Future come to deliver a major ass-kicking.

  “Fuck. That,” said Bethany, and disappeared again, back to wherever crossroads ghosts go when not summoned.

  “Why am I here?” Mary asked, before any of the rest of us could react.

  James, gaping, said nothing.

  She turned to look over her shoulder at him, giving a small “well, hurry it up” nod of her head at the same time. “Why am I here?” she repeated urgently.

  “Uh,” said James.

  Cylia stepped forward. “Our friend wishes to contest an unfair crossroads deal,” she said, voice loud and carrying. “He has that right.”

  “Only if he does so of his own free will,” said Mary, still looking at James. “Well? We haven’t got all night.”

  “I do!” he gasped, staggering to his feet. “I mean, I am. I mean, yes. I’m here to contest an unfair crossroads bargain.”

  “You have made no bargains with us,” snarled the voice of the crossroads. “What trickery is this? Do you think to cheat?”

  “It’s not a cheat,” said James. “I didn’t make the bargain, but Sally did. She came to you to find a way to get me out of this town. Well, she didn’t get me out. She didn’t get me anything but left alone. The deal that keeps me in New Gravesend is still in place, and Sally’s gone, and that means the bargain you made with her wasn’t honored. You’re a liar and a cheat, and you didn’t give me what Sally paid for, and I demand recompense!”

  “Oh, you’ll have it,” said Mary, and smiled like the sun before she clapped her hands together and the world, such as it was, flashed corn-gold and blight-black in the same moment, and then everything was gone, and we were gone with it.

  Twenty-three

  “Family is more than what’s in your blood. Family is what’s in your heart, and who you reach for when the sun goes down.”

  –Mary Dunlavy

  In the liminal space between worlds . . . because that’s a great idea

  THE FLASH FADED, and we were standing on a new road.

  The corn still surrounded us, but where before it had been ordinary, even pleasant, the sort of corn that can be found in any farmer’s field, this corn was threatening, almost predatory, if that word could be applied to a plant. It grew higher than my head, and as the wind whispered through it, it rustled, a sound like the gnashing of a million terrible teeth, like the sharpening of a thousand cruel claws.

  The road under our feet was hard-packed dirt, and the twilight was gone, replaced by blazing midday sun. Everything smelled of heat-baked earth, of rust, and the distant, unmistakable taint of long-dried blood.

  Mary had moved during the transition, and was on the other side of me now, putting herself between us—all of us—and the shape that had suddenly been sliced
out of the flesh of the world. It was a person and it was a void at the same time, more of an absence than anything else. It hurt my eyes if I tried to look directly at it. It was wrong, an offense to everything that was good and right and true, and I was suddenly, horribly grateful Leonard was here. Maybe now that he’d had a look at a true abomination, he’d start chasing those and leave the innocent cryptids of the world alone.

  Or maybe he’d run screaming and kill anything that frightened him twice as hard. People are complicated and difficult and hard to predict.

  “My God,” whispered Leonard. I’d never heard a member of the Covenant of St. George sound so afraid.

  “A complaint has been raised,” said Mary, voice clear and carrying. “I did not arbitrate the bargain in question, but I am here now. I will speak for the man James Smith, who carries such complaints against you.”

  There was something lilting and old-fashioned in her voice, like the modern world was falling away from her one syllable at a time. She had lived and died in the 1930s, but the sound of her now was much older.

  James stepped up behind her, one hand pressed over the wound in his side. “Yes,” he said. “I have a complaint.”

  The crackling, impossible shape of the crossroads somehow managed to get across the impression that it was snarling at the pair of them. “Dead men can’t carry complaints.”

  “But he’s not dead yet, and Antimony brought him to the crossroads,” said Mary. “Sally made her bargain before Annie did. It takes priority, and that means the complaint against it takes priority. You must resolve this before he becomes touchable again. Those are the rules. You want to follow the rules, don’t you?”

  There was a thin edge of warning in her voice, like failing to follow the rules would have consequences. Maybe they would. This place . . . this wasn’t a real place, not like Earth, not even like the various dimensions where my grandmother searched for her missing husband. This was a gap hewn out of the space between worlds, and if the rules dropped away, there would be nothing left to keep it standing.