“You’re a real jerk sometimes, you know that?”
“I do.” I took my eyes off the corn long enough to throw a grin over my shoulder at him. It wasn’t a surprise to see that he’d relaxed into his natural form. If anything, it was a relief. When he’s not focusing on looking human, Sam is faster, stronger, and sturdier—all good things in a fight. “Now go, so I can stay a breathing jerk.”
He rolled his eyes and was gone, leaping into the air with an ease that I could only envy and vanishing into the rustling rows of corn.
Speaking of rustling. I returned my attention to the corn in front of me, and the half-glimpsed shape that had retreated there after I sliced off a chunk of it. I pulled the other scythe from my waistband, holding them in front of me. Not my preferred weapons, but knives aren’t as effective against an entire killer cornfield as I might like, and flexibility is sometimes the key to survival.
“All right,” I said. “Come on if you’re coming, or stop wasting my time.”
The corn rustled and was silent. I tensed, bracing myself.
The corn attacked.
Blights-with-a-capital-B are thankfully rare. Their spores can only sprout under very specific conditions, and those conditions aren’t met as often as they used to be. Something big had wandered into this field at the start of everything—a deer, maybe, or someone’s sick cow. It had made it into a part of the maze where people didn’t go, and it had died, and it had had the bad luck to do it atop a Blight spore. The fungus had woken up in response to the feast, sending its hyphae deep into the flesh of the unfortunate animal, and it had grown, and it had eaten well.
The smell of the Blight would have been horrific during those early growth stages, when it was nothing but decay and hunger. That must have attracted its first victim, some farmhand or local civic employee who had managed not to be included in the list of official disappearances by virtue of being gone long before the first kissing couple dropped off the radar.
Well, I’d found them. All of them.
The Blight rushed at me in the fungus-wrapped, corn-swaddled form of that unidentified first victim, an unspeakable scarecrow creation of meat and rot and fury. Its hands, one missing half the fingers, were outstretched to grasp and tear at my flesh. It would have my throat out if it could, feeding itself in the warm spray of my blood while its hyphae worked their way into the meat of me, beginning the process of conversion.
Blights are awful things. They’re about half as smart as the smartest thing they’ve eaten, and since this one had been eating humans for a while now, it was clever enough to lurk, plan, and pounce. It had been going after the distracted couples because it knew they were easy prey. Its only mistake—so far—had been assuming that Sam and I were equally distracted.
I grinned, gave my scythes a spin, and met it halfway.
My parents started my self-defense training when I was four years old. It would have been sooner, but I’d been the youngest and quietest of three, and I guess they’d thought they had a little time. The only reason they’d figured out how wrong they were was because I’d started setting tripwires around the living room, which was pretty impressive for someone who was still figuring out how to tie her own shoes. What can I say: I’ve always been an overachiever.
The Blight moved fast but jerkily, like it wasn’t fully connected to its own body, probably because it wasn’t. It was a vast, slow fungal intelligence, operating its terrible meat puppets for its own benefit. The one it had chosen to take us out lunged for me. I spun my scythes as I danced to the side, cleaving its arms off at the elbows. It howled, the sound more animal than anything else about it, and lunged again.
This time my strike took its arms off at the shoulders. They snapped like the hollow, rotten things they were, spilling out the smell of rot and a cascade of writhing maggots and dried-out corn cobs. The Blight would eat anything it could get its substance on, spreading and growing, stripping the land. The corn was already infected, every bit of it, and I spared a moment’s thanks for the fact that this corn had never been intended for eating: the commercial crops were in a different field. What we were about to do wasn’t going to leave the family who owned the farm destitute and starving.
Bored, maybe. The maze was officially closed for the remainder of the season.
There are traditions all over the world—or at least everywhere corn is grown—of burning the cornfields at the end of the harvest. It’s supposed to help the soil. Whether it does, I couldn’t tell you, but I know a good burning is the only reliable way to kill a Blight once it takes root, and a few preemptive burnings will pretty much guarantee your farm stays clean. Assuming you catch it before your brain is a swampy mess of fungus and you no longer remember what it is to burn.
Another Blight-body lunged from the corn, strands of fungus and clots of corn silk tangled in the rotted remains of its long brown hair. It didn’t have eyes, just pulsing pits of Blight, but it tracked me all the same, and as I staggered backward to avoid its grasping hands, something else grabbed hold of my ankle.
Eleven disappearances, at two people per disappearance, plus the person who’d originally fallen into the corn to incubate the Blight spore equaled way more bodies than I was equipped to handle alone. I spun and hacked at the hand holding my ankle, hoping Cylia’s field of improbable luck was holding and the thing hadn’t managed to break the skin. Blight aren’t zombies, they’re fruiting bodies controlled by a greater, if subhuman, mind, but every cut and scratch increased my chances of infection, even with the best fungicide on the market. I’d rather skip the risk, thanks.
I swung the scythe in my left hand for the nearest Blight, only to have it twist at the last moment, so the blade embedded itself in the broadest point of the Blight’s chest. I realized what was about to happen an instant too late to do anything about it. The Blight fell, and in the process, wrenched the scythe out of my hand.
It was smart enough to know I needed my weapons if I was going to win, and it had sufficient bodies that it could afford to sacrifice a few in the name of victory. I, on the other hand, only had one body, and if I lost it, I was fucked.
A Blight grabbed my right wrist. I slapped it on the shoulder as hard as I could, expecting it to burst into flames. It did not oblige. I froze.
You know the only thing worse than developing semicontrollable pyrokinesis? Losing it and being suddenly faced with the reality of a world that refuses to burn just because you asked it to. The Blight yanked me closer. I switched the scythe to my left hand and started hacking, trying to get the thing to let me go before it could reach me with its terrible teeth. Belatedly, the thought that maybe going up against an entire cornfield full of man-eating fungus on my own wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had—and I’ve had some really terrible ideas.
“Annie! Duck!”
I stopped hacking and hit the ground the second I heard Sam shout. The Blight’s arm was weakened enough from my repeated blows that it couldn’t hold me when gravity was on my side; it let go and howled. It was still trying to decide whether it should charge the newcomer or drop and rip my throat out when the jet from the flamethrower hit it squarely in the face.
Yes, flamethrower. When you can’t generate your own flames, artificial flames will do. I rolled away from the thrashing pyre the Blight had become, and kept rolling as Sam directed the flames in a wide arc, igniting multiple Blights and a substantial amount of the corn.
“Remind me again why we didn’t do this in the first place?” he shouted.
“Because we had to be sure it was Corn Blight, and not something really nasty!” I scrambled to my feet, grabbing the second flamethrower from its place against his leg.
God, I love my job sometimes.
Two
“Keep on falling in love, no matter how much it hurts you. Eventually, it’ll end up giving you a safe place to land.”
–Enid Healy
About two hundred miles outside the city limits of New Gravesend, Maine
> Now
“IF YOU'D STOP SCRATCHING it, it would heal faster.”
“But it itches now.”
Cylia glanced up, her eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror. “And whose fault is that, exactly?” she asked, voice cool. “I told you not to fight a field. A field is bigger than you. No question, no contest, no way you were going to win.”
“But we did win,” I objected. “We burned the Blight to the ground. The field is clean, the farmer isn’t going to be eaten by evil fungus, everybody wins.” Not everybody. The Blight’s victims had been consumed enough that the fungus had weakened and worn away their bones. When the fire came and cleansed the fungus away, there had been nothing left to hold the skeletons together. Maybe a forensic anthropologist could have sifted through the dust and ashes to find conclusive proof that at least twenty-three people had died there. Maybe not.
For the families of the victims, there would be no closure, no confirmation that their loved ones were gone. There would just be the aching question, forever, of what had happened to them. It was difficult to think about that and not draw parallels to my own family’s situation. They didn’t know where I was or what I was doing or whether I was even still alive.
Well. They probably knew I was alive. I was pretty sure my dead Aunt Mary was allowed to tell them if I died, and the mere fact of that sentence making sense is proof that my life is damn weird.
“You need to be more careful,” said Cylia. “You can’t count on luck to save you every time. Believe me, I should know.”
I wanted to bristle and object that I hadn’t been counting on luck to save me, that I’d been counting on tactical planning and years of training for situations even stranger than “and then I convinced a cornfield to attack me by making out with my boyfriend.” Good sense caught up with me at the last second, reminding me that counting on luck was exactly what I’d been doing.
Dammit. I hate it when other people are right. I slumped in my seat, careful not to pinch Sam’s tail. He had it wrapped around my waist, and had since he’d fallen asleep about a hundred miles back. The poor guy was exhausted.
We all were. Travel is fun when there’s an end in sight, but when you’re on a seemingly endless road trip through the middle of America, there comes a point where the weariness settles into your bones and latches on like a novel new kind of parasite. I don’t know how the routewitches do it. They have to travel to preserve their power. Maybe that dependence comes with an increased tolerance for diner hamburgers and gas station bathrooms. Me? I don’t have any of that, and I was ready to commit violence for the sake of a shower with decent water pressure.
“Are we there yet?” I asked waspishly.
“Almost,” said Cylia.
I blinked, sitting up straight. “What?”
“I said, almost.” This time when she looked at me in the rearview mirror, she was smiling. “We’re almost there.”
I stared at her.
Of the four people in the car, Sam was the only one who was visibly not human. As always, he’d slipped into his fūri form as soon as he fell asleep, which was why he was wearing a hoodie, with the hood pulled securely over his head. If we got pulled over, he’d be able to shift back to his less simian guise before anyone got a good look at him. And of the four people in the car, I was the only one who was actually human according to any standard definition.
Fern and Cylia look superficially alike. Both are skinny, pale, and blonde. But where Fern is a fairy-tale princess turned live-action derby girl, with skin like cream, enormous blue eyes, and a dancer’s build, Cylia is tall and freckled, with eyes the color of pondwater and bones that seem to be constantly on the verge of breaking through her skin and running off on their own adventures. She’s remarkably strong, for all that she doesn’t have much in the way of leverage, and favors shirts without sleeves that show off her biceps and tattoos at the same time.
Both of them used to play roller derby and, presumably, will again when we eventually finish our road trip from hell and turn toward home. That was where we’d met: on the track, where Fern and I had been skating for the Slasher Chicks, and Cylia had been skating in one of the competing local leagues. We’d always gotten along, and after this little road trip of the damned, I strongly suspected any return to Portland would be accompanied by Cylia switching leagues. You can’t help someone take a sponge bath in a truck stop bathroom without forming the kind of bond that simply won’t go away.
They have something else in common, apart from the roller derby and the general “make me feel like I’m at a family reunion” blondness: neither of them are even partially human, unlike Sam, whose mother was as human as they come. Fern is a sylph, a walking fuck you to the laws of physics. Her density is sort of optional, and she can make herself heavier or lighter with a thought. It shouldn’t work. Biology and physics both say it shouldn’t work. But she does it anyway, because what’s the point in having scientific laws if you can’t break them once in a while?
And I’m glad we’ve already accepted that idea, because Cylia is worse. She’s a jink, one of two known species of human-mimicking, luck-manipulating cryptids. (The other species, the mara, mostly just eat the stuff. We are not big fans of mara. And by “we,” I mean “anyone with any sense.”) Things tend to go her way, although her lucky breaks are always accompanied by little misfortunes, like getting to the one motel in twenty miles that has any vacancies and discovering we’ll have to share a bed. Things that will inconvenience but not endanger.
It says something about her skill at working the luck that she can keep it that consistent. Most jinks who survive to reach adulthood are like that. They learn what they can bend and how far they can push it, and they hone their craft on the sharp, unforgiving knife of knowing that the first time they screw up, the Covenant of St. George will be knocking on their doors, having miraculously tracked them down. Luck goes both ways. If yours is bad enough, it’ll serve the ones who hate you.
Cylia’s husband, Tav, died as a consequence of his own bad luck, having spent their years together manipulating the world to keep her safe. It had been an act of love, and I was pretty sure that if it had been possible to ask him—if one of the family ghosts had been able to find him lingering in whatever afterlife waits for the jinks and mara—he would have said he had no regrets. Cylia had been safe while she was with him, and now that she was without him, she had a firm enough grasp of her own capabilities that she was doing just fine.
For the moment, anyway. Technically, the smart thing for her to do would have been to put me out of the car, since at last count, I had the Covenant of St. George, the sorcerers who ran Lowryland, and the crossroads themselves all wanting a piece of my ass. Getting far, far away from me would be safer and more sensible than taking me on a cross-country road trip.
Thankfully, no one has ever accused my friends of having sense.
“Where are we going, exactly?” I asked. “Did you throw darts at a map again?”
“Better,” said Cylia. She sounded serene, but I could hear the cracks behind her calm demeanor. Being in the car for weeks was wearing on her as much as it was wearing on the rest of us. Maybe more, since I don’t drive, Sam preferred not to—he had to stay human to do it, and that made him uncomfortable—and Fern’s driving could be described as either “enthusiastic” or “hazardous.” Cylia had been behind the wheel almost constantly since we’d left Florida. She deserved a break.
That didn’t mean I was willing to trust her definition of “better” quite yet. “Meaning … ?” I said carefully.
“Meaning I dialed a number at random and told the person who picked up that I was calling about the house,” she said. “That’s why I spilled my coffee yesterday.”
“You spilled everybody’s coffee yesterday,” said Fern.
She wasn’t wrong. Cylia had knocked over so many cups that I was pretty sure the tank top she’d been wearing was now permanently brown. It had been a small streak of bad luck, but it had gon
e on for the better part of a day, culminating in a gas station coffee machine somehow coming detached from the wall and shattering at her feet. We’d barely escaped that one without being scalded.
“What about the house?” I asked.
“Well, we’re renting it for the next three months,” said Cylia. She sounded smug. Maybe she was just thinking about taking a real shower. “Three bedrooms, lakeside access, barn that probably doesn’t actually contain livestock, and plenty of privacy. Best of all, the owner is doing it all under the table while he’s off backpacking around Europe—he was cagey enough about where he’s going and why that the dude is either a routewitch powering up for the dry season or smuggling something, and—honestly—I don’t care. The place is furnished, utilities are included, and it’s within our budget.”
“Um,” I said. “None of us have jobs, and I don’t really have much money. Neither does Sam.”
“I do,” said Fern brightly. “I saved all my paychecks, and I didn’t have to buy uniforms while we were at Lowryland.”
“You were a princess,” I said.
“I still am in my heart,” she said.
Cylia laughed. “It’s fine. I’ve got it covered. Tav had a lot of life insurance, and he died a natural death. He’s still looking out for me. And when he stops, I’ll start buying lottery tickets.”
“Fair enough,” I allowed. As long as she never went for the big score—no miracle escapes, no multimillion dollar jackpots—her luck would last. She knew what she was doing. “Did you at least get to see the house?”
“Nope,” she said, laughed again, and kept on driving.
* * *
The trouble with people is that we’re all stories already in progress. Even before we’re born, we have history, who loved who, who left who, who betrayed a global organization of monster-hunting assholes for who—the usual. I’m no different. I used to think maybe I could be, that I’d somehow be the one who broke the family mold and found something new to be, before I realized that family molds are never as close or confining as we think they are. I’m my own person, unique in the annals of my family tree, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a part of the lineage that made me.
That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8) Page 3