Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  Grandma and I stared at her, briefly united in our positions as the only humans in the room.

  “Well, she’s going to get a little dusty,” said Grandma.

  “No bet,” I said, and touched the tip of my index finger to a strand of webbing, which promptly burnt away in a flash of light and crumbled into ash. “I can’t do the whole room; I’d burn the place down.”

  “No need,” she said. “Cynthia must be keeping a thousand pounds of cobweb for a reason. I can’t imagine what it might be, but it’s the only reason I can think of for a health code violation of this magnitude.”

  “It’s delicious,” said Cynthia, walking into the room with a Tupperware pan filled with raw chicken and what smelled like barbeque sauce. “So are the spiders.”

  “Are you on a diet?” asked Sam, using his tail to swipe the cobwebs out of his hair. “Because I can’t think of any scenario that results in this many spiders where you aren’t on a diet.”

  Cynthia laughed and continued onward to the back door, nudging it open with her foot and stepping out onto the back deck. Cylia followed her. The door banged shut, cutting off the sound of their laughter as they got away from our weird family drama.

  Given that Fern was still up in the rafters, I was starting to feel a little bit abandoned by my friends.

  “Does your boyfriend not understand sexual reproduction?” Grandma pulled a chair out from the nearest table, kicked it twice to scare off any resident spiders, and whipped it around so she could sit on it. Backward. Of course. If anyone’s going to get an emo teen for a grandmother, it’s going to be me.

  That’s not fair. I love my grandmother very much, even if I sometimes worry about her stabbing me because I look too much like someone who’s been dead for decades. It’s not her fault that she’s forgotten how to age. At least, I don’t think it’s her fault. No one’s ever really been able to get her to discuss it.

  “He understands sexual reproduction just fine, Grandma,” I said, steadfastly not looking at Sam. “He also understands protection, which is why we’re not going to be reproducing any time soon. If we ever do at all. ‘Boyfriend’ doesn’t automatically mean ‘serious enough that we’ve been talking about kids.’”

  “You have more fun these days than we did when I was your age,” said Grandma, and laughed, while Sam uncomfortably pulled out and dusted off another chair, pausing occasionally to pick cobwebs out of his fur. He looked so monumentally miserable that I joined him, scorching the cobwebs off my own chair before sitting down.

  “It’s nice to finally meet more of your family,” he said, sounding deeply, deeply uncomfortable. He settled next to me, tail once again winding firmly around my ankle. “She seems nice.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” I said. “She seems like an unstable old lady who somehow keeps aging backward, and who carries grenades that are older than I am way too frequently for comfort’s sake.”

  Grandma leaned on her elbows and smirked at me across the grimy table. “Please, keep talking about me like I’m not here. It’s a wonderful idea.”

  “Um,” said Sam.

  “Grandma, could you please stop trying to terrify my boyfriend? It took me a long time to find a guy I was interested in dating, and if you scare him away, I’m probably going to be single until I’m dead.”

  She raised an eyebrow and took a swig from her beer. “That sounds pretty serious, you know. Have you told your parents?”

  I deflated. “Not yet. I haven’t talked to them yet.”

  “Why the hell not? They’ve been as worried about you as I have. More worried, even. You’re going to give your poor mother a heart attack if you don’t phone home soon.”

  “Um.” I looked down at the dusty tabletop, suddenly deeply interested in the wood. “I wanted to get closer to Oregon before I called.”

  “Worried she’ll be on the first plane to wherever you say you are?”

  I took a deep breath. “Worried she won’t be.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Grandma leaned across the table, putting a hand on my arm. “You know your mother loves you. You know she wants you to be safe and make good choices about your life. Don’t ever doubt that she cares.”

  “It’s hard to believe that when she’s always been so willing to send me into danger in order to keep Verity out of it.” Most younger sisters worry that they’ll never live up to the standards set by their siblings. In my case, I have a little more reason to be worried than most. When Verity screwed up by declaring war on the Covenant of St. George live and on television, my family’s response had been to ask me if I’d be willing to go undercover, cut off all contact with the people who were supposed to be my backup, leave the continent, and place myself in the virtual belly of the beast. Sure, I’d agreed to go, but only because I hadn’t been able to imagine saying no and staying with the people who’d considered that to be a reasonable request.

  And if I hadn’t gone, I would never have met Sam, the crossroads would still have been beguiling people into deals designed to destroy them, and James would probably still have been trapped in New Gravesend, unaware of the deal that bound him there. Me going undercover with the Covenant had turned out to be the best thing that could possibly have happened. But there had been no way of predicting that when I’d agreed to go. My own family had looked at me and decided that I was the expendable one, that out of everyone in my generation, I was the one they could somehow manage to live without.

  “I know that look,” said Grandma. “You’re thinking that your family threw you away. But Annie, everyone’s been sick with fright, waiting to hear whether you’re okay—and waiting for Rose or Mary to bring you home the only way they know how.”

  “You know they would have told you if I were dead. The crossroads would have allowed Mary to do that much,” I said. “Rose was only keeping her mouth shut because I asked her to. If something had happened to me, she would have broken her word in a heartbeat.”

  “Maybe so, but that doesn’t change a parent’s fear. Your father was starting to talk about contacting the bogeyman community. Their whisper network can find almost anything.”

  True enough, and they would charge dearly for any help they offered. Bogeymen don’t work for free. It’s one of the things I like about them.

  I took a deep breath, trying to shove aside the feelings of resentment and abandonment that almost always accompanied thoughts of my family. Some of them were justified and some weren’t, and none of them were useful right now.

  “I have something I need to tell you, Grandma,” I said.

  “You mean apart from your sudden second calling as a flamethrower?” she asked. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about that. It’s a little hard to miss.”

  “Grandpa Thomas was a sorcerer, too, right?” I snapped my fingers, summoning a tiny ball of flame to balance on the tip of my thumbnail. “Aunt Mary says he was, and this stuff runs in families.”

  “Yes. Yes, my Thomas could call fire out of nothing when he wanted it.” Grandma’s gaze went misty, the way it always did when someone brought up my grandfather without mentioning the fact that he was missing and very probably dead. “That man never had cold hands, not even in the very depths of winter.”

  “Okay, one, too much information and ew, and two, good to know, I’ll have to work on that.” Being able to keep myself at a decent temperature no matter what was going on with the weather would be useful. “I guess the Price genes won out in my case. That explains the cheekbones.”

  “It’s why I’ve always had to fight so hard not to let everyone see that you’re my favorite,” she agreed.

  I blinked. “I’m not anybody’s favorite.”

  “You’re my favorite,” said Sam mildly.

  “Only because you didn’t meet my sister first,” I said. “Trust me, no one who meets Verity before they meet me chooses the spare.”

  “Antimo
ny Price, don’t you dare talk about yourself like that!” snapped Grandma, sitting up straighter. “You’re not the spare anything. You’re my granddaughter.”

  “Sorry, Grandma,” I said, trying to ignore the alarmed look on Sam’s face as he stared at me. He didn’t like me talking about myself so negatively any more than she did.

  The door we’d all come in through banged open, and James stepped inside, looking pale and shaken. “You could have told me this was a cryptid bar,” he said, voice dropping as he caught sight of my grandmother. “Or that you were going to be drinking with friends. Hello, ma’am. I’m James Smith.”

  “Hello, Jimmy,” said Grandma cheerfully. “How’d you know I was a ‘ma’am’?”

  “Every woman I’m not related to is a ‘ma’am’ until I’m sure they’re not going to eat me,” James said. “And I prefer ‘James,’ if you don’t mind.”

  “Sorry,” said Grandma. “Annie, is this the friend you were talking about before?”

  “It is,” I said. “He’s from New Gravesend, in Maine. One of his ancestors made a deal with the crossroads to make sure there would be a sorcerer in every generation. But they didn’t word it very carefully. The crossroads set the bargain to ensure that there would only ever be one sorcerer in New Gravesend. As soon as the next one was old enough to start manifesting their powers, the old one would die. Freak accidents and illnesses, stretching back generations. James, this is my grandmother, Alice Price-Healy. You’ll hear a lot about her from the cryptids you’re going to meet.”

  “I’m sort of an urban legend among the urban legends,” said Grandma cheerfully. “People are a little freaked out by humans who live as long as I have.”

  “Ah,” said James. “I mean—you’re not really—how are you Annie’s grandmother? You look like one of the girls I went to high school with.”

  “Family mystery,” she said, laughing, a bright, cackling sound that seemed to fill every corner of the room.

  “She never gives a straight answer to that question,” I said. “Whatever she’s doing, it’s not something she’s proud of.”

  “So you age normally, right?” asked Sam. “I’m not going to wake up in bed with a middle schooler one morning?” He sounded genuinely unsettled.

  I put a hand on his arm. “Good concern, and one I should have predicted, but no. I age like a normal human, or I always have up until this point; I’ve only been flinging fire around for about a year, so who knows what that’s going to do to me?”

  “I’ve been freezing things for substantially longer than that, and I’ve been getting older,” said James reassuringly. “Don’t worry, I think your normal levels of perversion are all you’re going to have to deal with.”

  “Thank the God of carnies and weirdoes,” muttered Sam, sinking a little deeper in his seat. Grandma raised an eyebrow. He shook his head and said, slightly louder, “I knew I was signing up for the modern Addams Family when I told Annie I was in love with her. I’m a monkey who pretends to be a man in love with a human flamethrower who’s on her way home to a congregation of talking mice, and it turns out there’s stuff that’s too weird even for me. Aging backward fits the bill.”

  “Well, dear, it’s a good thing I’m not on the market,” said Grandma, leaning across the table to pat his hand.

  “I’m not really into blondes,” he said. “I’d have started dating creepy dead aunt number one if I were, since she seemed a lot less likely to get herself shot in the head.”

  “He means Mary, and he’s the one who got shot in the head,” I said, as Fern finally drifted down from the rafters with cobwebs and probably a few live spiders tangled in her hair. “It’s been an eventful road trip.”

  “I should think so,” said Grandma. She tilted her head. “But what did you want to tell me that was so important that you keep trying to put it off?”

  “The sorcery wasn’t enough?”

  “I’m your grandmother. I know when you’re not telling me something. Now, I know you’re not pregnant—”

  “Thank God,” I said, firmly enough that it would probably have been insulting if Sam and I hadn’t been so careful.

  “—and I know you’d never lead the Covenant to the Angel, or to Buckley. So what’s weighing on you, my girl? What have you been up to?”

  I took a deep breath. “I told you James’ family was laboring under a generational crossroads bargain. What I didn’t tell you was that I made a bargain of my own, while I was in Florida. I had to, in order to save myself, and to save Sam. Mary brokered it for me. She tried to talk me out of it, too, but I wouldn’t let her. I needed to live. I needed Sam to live.”

  My grandmother, who had gone very pale somewhere in the middle of all that, stared at me like she had never seen me before. “You know your grandfather sold himself to the crossroads to save me,” she said quietly.

  “Only because we’ve all been comparing notes for years. You never wanted to give anyone a straight answer about that.”

  “Because I didn’t want any of you kids to decide that it was okay, or acceptable, or romantic! Saving your lover’s life doesn’t mean you get to stay with them. The crossroads are very clear about that. Mary tried to save my Thomas, bless that poor girl’s spectral heart, but they outsmarted her, and they’ll outsmart you, too! Oh, Annie. Annie, Annie, my girl . . . I never wanted this for you.”

  “I’m fine, Grandma,” I said. “The crossroads aren’t going to hurt me. I killed them.”

  “ . . . what?” The word was barely loud enough to qualify as a whisper.

  “They wanted me to murder James in order to fulfill my debt to them and get my sorcery back,” I said. “I didn’t want to do that.”

  “And I’m very grateful, but I don’t think your grandmother is breathing right now,” said James. “You may want to hurry this explanation up a little bit.”

  “I’m not sure I can,” I said. “His best friend from school was a girl named Sally. She’d gone to the crossroads to make a deal when they were about to graduate from high school. The crossroads took her instead of honoring whatever she’d asked for.”

  “I know Sally went to ask them for my freedom, and I know they didn’t grant it,” interjected James. “They took her, and they didn’t give her anything in return. That’s how we were able to get Annie the access she needed to beat the ever-loving shit out of them.”

  The profanity sounded odd coming from James, who was usually so much more careful about his word choices than the rest of us. I couldn’t say that he was wrong.

  “Because the crossroads violated their own rules, I was able to get Mary to take me for an arbitration. I bent time in the little pocket dimension where the crossroads ‘lived,’ and I saw them arrive in this world. They displaced the original force of the living Earth, the anima mundi. The anima mundi wasn’t expecting an attack from outside. They weren’t prepared to fight off whatever the crossroads actually were. I suspect they were the anima mundi of a dead world, someplace that couldn’t sustain them anymore. So they went looking for something new to eat, and they found us. Or they would have, if I hadn’t been waiting there to kick the crap out of them.”

  Grandma stared at me blankly.

  Sam nudged me in the side. “I told you that trying to explain time travel never did anybody any good,” he said. “The crossroads existed before you killed them. They did all the things you remember them doing.”

  “I know,” I said wearily. “But because I killed them before they could kill the anima mundi, they never existed in this world. It’s a paradox. It sucks, but this is how it is now. We have to live with the repercussions of something that never happened. We have to clean up the messes the crossroads never had the chance to make. Magic is a headache given flesh.”

  “You can say that again,” said Cylia cheerfully as she stepped back inside, leaving the door to slam shut behind her. “Cynthia says the chick
en will be done in about ten minutes. Annie, your grandmother looks like she’s about to keel over.”

  “Breathe, Grandma.” I leaned across the table to touch her hand. She let me. Under the circumstances, that was probably a good thing, and not a sign of shock. I hoped. “Mary is fine, because of us. As a family, I mean. We’re the house she haunts, and so when the crossroads went away, they didn’t take her with them.”

  “Oh,” said my grandmother, very faintly. “That’s nice.”

  “Mary thinks so.” I took a deep breath. “There were things she couldn’t tell you while she still served the crossroads—not unless you were willing to enter into a deal with them.”

  “I never did it,” said Grandma. “I promised Thomas that I wouldn’t, no matter how bad things got or how tempted I might be, and I didn’t. Not ever.”

  “I know,” I said. “But that’s why she couldn’t tell you that you were probably right. He might still be alive out there.”

  Moving with terrifying speed, she grabbed hold of the hand that was touching hers, bearing down on my fingers until I bit my lip and groaned under the pressure. “What do you know?” she demanded. “Whatever it is, you have to tell me, and you have to tell me right now.”

  The temperature of the air to my left dropped by several degrees. “Ma’am, I’m going to need you to let her go,” said James.

  “So am I,” said Sam. “I can’t freeze you solid like James here, but I can punch you a lot.”

  Grandma let go of my hand, settling back in her chair. “Are you boys really going to sit here and threaten me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said James. “We just met you. Annie’s our friend.”

  I shook my hand, trying to make the throbbing stop. “Boys, stand down. Cylia, why didn’t you join in the threatening?”