It was a pretty horrifying idea. Although if there was any consolation, it was also pretty cool.
“Are you sure? Absolutely certain? You’re talking about fighting a force powerful enough to claim and corrupt all this.” She waved her hands, indicating the pastoral landscape around us.
“About that,” I said. “Where is the current crossroads?”
“There isn’t one.”
I blinked.
“There never was.” Mary sighed. “It was only us, in the beginning. Ghosts like me, who’d died where the roads converged, who listened and helped people tap into the power of this place. It’s the anima mundi, Annie. It’s the spirit of Earth. This is where all the magic and all the will that doesn’t get used by the living goes when they become the dead. It’s a lake. People could drown here if they weren’t careful, and that’s why guardians were posted around the edges, to keep the ones who found their way this deep from losing themselves entirely. The bargains are part of keeping the water levels high—or they were, until things changed.”
“Why did they change?”
“I don’t know.” She turned her face toward the sky. “But I think we’re about to find out.”
I looked up. The clouds, no longer fluffy and white, were gathering in what looked suspiciously like a hurricane funnel. It was obscene, a stain on the previously perfect sky, and I hated and feared it in immediate equal measure. I took an involuntary step backward, as if I could run away from something that looked wide enough to swallow the entire world.
“What you did, whatever you did, undo it,” hissed Mary. “Get out of here while you still can.”
“Can you get out of here?”
She said nothing.
I paused. “Mary?”
“Yes?”
“You’re not really you, are you? You didn’t know all that stuff about the crossroads. You only knew what the parasite was willing to tell you, and I’m betting it didn’t start with a ‘how I ate the world yum yum yum’ history lesson. And you never told me things I hadn’t earned. You’re still—I mean, Mary’s still—in the present, helping James fight with whatever’s using your name now.”
“My name?” asked the figure with my babysitter’s face.
“Yeah. Yours. Because you’re the anima mundi, aren’t you?”
Slowly, Mary’s lips curved upward in a smile. She blinked, and the empty road in her eyes was gone, replaced by a starfield, specks of light scattered across an endless velvet blackness. They were beautiful, and terrifying, and they had no place in Mary’s face.
“Oh, you are a clever one,” said the anima mundi. “You’re not here using my strength. You’re riding the one who comes to usurp me. You can’t stop it from happening. You said so yourself. This has to be, because it has already been.”
“But you’re not dead,” I said. “You survived whatever it’s going to do to you.”
“I’m the ghost of the dreams of a living Earth,” said the anima mundi. “I’m the layer that connects the twilight and the daylight. No one sees me unless they come here, to my crossroads, and then they pay for the privilege, because there have to be mysteries, and there have to be costs. I’m not the great work you think of when you say ‘crossroads.’ That comes after and before me.”
“And that’s great, if a little crunchy granola for me, but the thing that controls the crossroads when I’m from is bad,” I said. “It hurts people because it can. It makes cruel bargains. It hurt my family, and it hurts the ghosts who’re supposed to be helping people understand the deals before they finish making them, and I’m pretty sure it started by hurting you. It throws power around like it’s never going to run out. But it is going to run out, isn’t it?”
Silently, the anima mundi nodded.
“The crossroads are using the power of the living Earth to fuel their bargains, and they don’t replenish it, and they’re draining it dry.” It was a horrifying thought. It also explained a lot of things, like why the “age of magic” was supposedly over, and why the birthrate for magic-users had declined the way it had. Even with the Covenant hunting down and killing practitioners, magic was something I would have expected to see cropping up with enough regularity that hiding it from the world would be a lot more difficult, if not outright impossible. Instead, only the routewitches seemed to be maintaining their numbers, and according to Aunt Rose, they drew their power from the ghostroads and the twilight, not the living Earth.
It was like a piece had been missing from my understanding of the magical world, and now everything was starting to make sense. And that meant I had to make it home alive. If I hadn’t already been planning on it, now I had to, because my family needed to know what we’d been ignorant of. We needed to write this down and document it, so it wouldn’t be lost again.
“Yes,” said the anima mundi.
“So I’m going to stop it.”
“How can you, future girl? You gave your own power away. This isn’t how you bring it back to you.”
“Maybe not. And maybe this is a problem my family didn’t help create, since we’re not the ones who decided to mess with the way the crossroads operate. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to fix it. Fixing things is my job.” I turned my eyes back to the stain across the sky. The parasite, the thing that would replace the crossroads for five hundred years, was coming. “Do you know what it is?”
“It comes from outside,” she said, voice little above a whisper. “It was me, once, or something very much like me, the living spirit of a world that needed to be cared for, that needed to care. It lost its way. It lost its world. Now it lives by feeding on worlds that have never learned to defend themselves. I was turned so far inward that I never once looked outward.”
“Time is sort of a negotiable concept for you, huh?”
The anima mundi looked at me wearily. “My death approaches, child. You should not make light of what you’ll never know.”
“I think I liked you better when you were pretending to be Mary.” I reached into my pocket. The salt was still there, soothingly solid under my fingers. “Right here, right now, before it comes, do you have the power to make bargains?”
For the first time, the anima mundi looked surprised. “Yes, but I can’t give you back your magic. That happens so far after me that it might as well have happened on another planet.”
“If you’re the anima mundi, and you’re about to be replaced by something from another world, I think it sort of did happen on another planet.” The invaders from Mars weren’t coming. The Martians were dead in their beds, quietly rotting, while their entire world had come to swallow the Earth.
Metaphorically. I was pretty sure the crossroads weren’t being possessed by the anima mundi of Mars, if only because this—whatever it was—didn’t feel like a local. It had come from outside. Was coming from outside. The bruised streak in the sky was getting wider and deeper and rawer looking, like a wound that was never going to heal. Streaks of corrupted yellow and green spilled from its center, slashing through the sky, tainting everything they touched. The clouds that hadn’t joined the growing maelstrom had dissipated, leaving the bleakly empty horizon that I was used to seeing when I came into contact with the crossroads.
“I suppose,” she said uncertainly. “What do you want from me?”
“Permission to go into the field without your wheat eating me, or whatever it is supernatural wheat likes to do to intruders.”
She lifted an eyebrow.
“Hey, I come from a time where killer corn is all the rage,” I protested. “I like to ask.”
“That boon I can grant without charge,” she said. “Go into the wheat. Do as you like, but try not to damage anything. Agriculture is among the greatest of humanity’s achievements.”
“Got it,” I said, and turned my back on the force of nature with my babysitter’s face, taking one last, war
y glance at the bruised sky before diving into the waving field of golden grain. I had work to do.
Like I said before, exorcisms aren’t about magic, and they aren’t about religion. They’re about knowing and maintaining the natural order of things. Most bodies are only meant to play host to a single soul at a time. Casting out the one that doesn’t belong isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but it’s less about power than it is about ritual, preparation, and will.
Exorcising the crossroads in the modern day, when they’d had five hundred years to strengthen their hold on this world, was next to impossible. Doing it in the past, even if the past was an illusion, might work. It had to work.
If it didn’t work, I was going to be in a world of hurt.
I plunged into the wheat, walking fast, until I found a place where the stalks had been cut down and the ground had been stomped flat, preparing for another planting. I took the salt out of my pocket and drew a circle around myself, letting it trickle between my fingers as I turned. I opened my mouth to begin the ritual . . . and stopped.
Church has never been my family’s thing. I could recite Bible passages all I wanted, but they wouldn’t mean anything to me, not really. When it comes to liturgies and catechisms, there’s really only one faith that’s been completely available to us, offered freely and without the expectation that we’ll join in. We’ve never needed to believe. We’ve only ever needed to know.
“In the days when the faith in the Feathered Lords was waning, came Elizabeth Evans, called Beth, the Kindly Priestess, who did find Us gathered in her yard, and say, Why, Look At You, You Must be Starving. And she did gather Us in her apron and carry Us into her Home, which would be our Home thereafter, and say, You Are Safe Here, If You Will Follow the Rules I Set—”
The bruise in the sky became a gaping, rotting wound, and the summer shattered, the air going cold. Wind whipped through the wheat, chilling and killing it. How long did this field lie fallow before the corn came pushing its way through the earth, already ripening, already aware?
I shivered, and continued, “Her child, Caroline, the Well-Groomed Priestess, did come to us with open hands, and say, My Mother Is Old, and The Covenant Does Not Understand; Come With Me, For Any Husband I Will Have Will Have You Also. She did marry Peter Carew, the God of Hard Work and Sunshine, and they did raise four children in hope and in glory, hidden from the Eye of the Covenant by the strength of their affections—”
The sky . . . tore. The sky broke, like a plate dropped from a great height, and there were shards of sky falling all around me, terrible, impossible shards of sky, which shattered again when they hit the ground, becoming an oily, sticky film that danced with diseased rainbows before sinking into the earth. In the distance, the anima mundi shrieked, fear and rage and agony blurring into a single heartrending sound.
I wanted to go to her. I didn’t know her, for all that she looked so much like Mary, but something in her scream tore at my heart and made me want nothing more than to break the circle I’d drawn and run to her aid. Whether that was the incoming crossroads trying to lure me or the spirit of Earth calling for help didn’t matter. I had to stay where I was. I had to finish this.
I took a steadying breath, and said, “Her eldest daughter, Agnes, refused us, but did not break her mother’s Confidence, saying, You Ask Too Much of Me. But her second daughter, Enid, the Patient Priestess, did say, Mother, I Love You, and I Love the Mice, and I Will Keep Them Safe. She did marry Alexander Healy, the God of Uncommon Sense, and on their wedding night—”
Something fell from the broken, breaking sky, something made of angles and reflections and wrongness. Everything about it was wrong. It was obscene, offensive to the eye: it had no business here, or anywhere near here. It didn’t belong.
It howled, and its voice was the voice of the void. The anima mundi screamed, agony and anxiety. I pulled a handful of salt out of my pocket, cutting the catechism short as I flung it into the air.
“In the name of Beth Evans, I cast you out! In the name of Caroline Carew, I refuse you passage here! In the name of Enid—”
A hand made of crackling static and absence grasped my wrist, jerking me off my feet and out of the circle. I found myself dangling, toes several inches above the ground, looking into the emptiness that was the face of the crossroads.
“You don’t belong here, human child,” it hissed, like static, like nothingness, like the act of being erased. There was no fire in my fingers. There had never been fire in my fingers. I was vibrating apart, my component atoms becoming nothing but dust and the opposite of memory. I would be the déjà vu that haunted my family for a hundred generations, the girl who should have been but never was born.
(and a carnival burned before a Covenant strike team, and a screaming fūri died with his grandmother’s body in his arms, howling rage, howling misery)
(and a jink tried desperately to stop a feeding mara from destroying a roller derby league one skater at a time, until her own luck ran out from the strain of manipulating everyone else’s, until her neck snapped in a bad fall, and she was still, so still, so still)
(and a sylph died at the business end of a manticore’s tail, eyes open and startled, staring into nothing, not sure why she thought she could be saved)
(and they died, and they died, and they died because I wasn’t there, because I had never been there, because I had never existed at all)
“In the name of Enid Healy, I deny your power,” I whispered. The words were harder than I expected them to be. I had never been touched by a force of entropy before.
I didn’t like it.
“Stop that, and I’ll show mercy,” snarled the crossroads—only it wasn’t the crossroads yet, was it? It was fighting me instead of attacking the anima mundi. Flakes of light were starting to appear in the shattered sky as the world struggled to reassert itself, becoming hazy and unclear.
It hurt, oh, fuck, it hurt. I felt like my entire body was fizzing at the edges, dissolving and reforming at the same time. “In the name of Frances Healy, I cast you out,” I whispered.
The thing shook me like a limp rag. I scrabbled to get a better grasp on the hand that held me, using the strength it had and I didn’t to keep myself as close to upright as possible.
“I could have been merciful,” it snarled, and I was on fire.
Not literally: literal fire would have been a problem for both of us, considering we were surrounded by dry, flammable wheat. This was the fire that burned in the center of my cells, the fire that should have been mine, before I had given it away to save myself from drowning. The anima mundi might not have been able to reach forward to the things her replacement had claimed in bargain after bargain, all the long and awful days of its ascendance, but the parasite had no such problems.
I screamed. Burning hurt no less here than it had in the future, when Bethany had been the one to pour pain into my palms and pretend it was a gift. Bile rose in my throat. I swallowed it back down, forcing myself to keep breathing. Pain is pain. I’d been in pain before.
“In the name . . .” I rasped. “In the name of . . . Alice Price-Healy, I tell you that you have no place here.”
The parasite snarled and shook me again. The fire burned higher, hotter. That was almost a good thing. The pain was reaching the point where it hurt so much that it didn’t hurt at all. Parts of me were shutting down, going into shock. In the long run, that was going to be a problem. Right now . . .
“In the name of Evelyn Price, I refuse you any place here,” I whispered. All the Priestesses, all the generations of Aeslin mice who believed, truly believed to the bottom of their souls, that we were connected to the divine, that we could shape the world with our actions—and we had, we had, every one of us had. We had become a pantheon in their eyes, and we had fought so hard, for so long, to be worthy of what they saw when they looked at us.
“I will not be exorcised lik
e some common spirit,” spat the parasite.
It hurt. It hurt so much that there was nothing to me but the hurting, nothing to the world but pain. I somehow found the strength to force a smile, despite it all.
“Our world,” I whispered. “Our rules. In the names of Verity Price, Elsie Harrington, and myself, Antimony Price, the Precise Priestess, I command you to leave this place and never come here again. This is not yours. You are not wanted here.”
The parasite howled. The anima mundi screamed. I screamed, and I was burning, I was burning, the flames were higher than they had ever been, so high that they were breaking through my skin, and everything was fire, everything was fire, and there was nothing left for me but to burn, to burn, to—
Twenty-five
“Oh, baby. Rest now. Rest, and remember that I love you.”
–Frances Brown
Burning
IT DIDN’T HURT ANYMORE.
That was the first thing I noticed. Nothing hurt: nothing even ached. For the first time I could remember, everything was perfect. I was cradled in warmth, like I was sleeping next to the heater in the middle of December, safe and comfortable and protected from anything that might want to hurt me. I couldn’t see, but that made sense, since my eyes were closed. I didn’t know what was out there, and I didn’t want to know, because there was one thing I was pretty sure of:
I was pretty sure I was dead.
I’d traveled through time—technically—through a loophole in the laws of temporal physics, to stop an eldritch force of incredible power before it could displace the anima mundi and become the terror we all knew and hated. A spell simple enough to be cast by someone with virtually no magic couldn’t be powerful enough to cause an actual paradox: maybe I’d traveled through time, but I’d only done it within the confines of the crossroads themselves. Even if I’d succeeded, I couldn’t succeed until the crossroads returned to the present day. The thing I’d just gotten into a slap-fight with would still have five hundred years of torturing humanity before my exorcism caught up with it.
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