That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8)

by Seanan McGuire

  Either four or five generations ago, depending on how you start counting, my great-great-great- grandparents decided they didn’t want to be genocidal jerks anymore and quit the Covenant of St. George with as much fuss and bother as they could manage. They died a long time before I was born, but I’ve read their diaries, and they were capable of a lot of fuss and even more bother. They moved to America after that, figuring an ocean between them and their old bosses might be enough to keep the vengeance to a minimum.

  They were mostly right: it took a long, long time for the Covenant to send someone to check up on their wayward lambs. The story might have bent in a very different direction after that, except that the Covenant decided to use “checking up on the heretics” as a punishment for one of their less obedient soldiers, and shipped the man who’d go on to become my grandfather off to the middle of nowhere to make sure their former members weren’t making any trouble.

  No one in my family has ever been able to resist trouble. Not only had my great-great-grandparents been making trouble, they’d been making more family members. Two generations of them, to be exact. By the time the dust settled, Grandma Alice was married to Grandpa Thomas, who was missing—as in “yanked into another dimension”—and the Covenant believed we were all dead, a happy situation that managed to endure for two more generations before my older sister, Verity, outed us all as alive on national television.

  If that’s confusing, don’t worry about it. Sometimes it confuses even me, and I lived through it, day by agonizing, irritating day.

  After Verity spilled the beans on our survival, we needed to find out what the Covenant knew, which is where one of their creepier habits came in handy. See, the Covenant of St. George is a secret society with a limited number of members and an even more limited capacity for recruitment, since it’s not like the continued existence of the cryptid world is exactly public knowledge. In an effort to keep this from becoming a serious problem, they’ve been running a breeding program for centuries. As in a “we tell you who to marry, we tell your kids who to marry, we craft the future of your family one carefully curated pairing at a time” program. Because that’s not fucked up and wrong.

  The Covenant breeding program has resulted in a bunch of families with consistent “looks” created by genes capable of beating up every recessive in the neighborhood and taking their lunch money away. All the other women in my family have what the Covenant calls the “Carew look,” thanks to my great-great-grandmother, Enid Carew, and my great-grandmother Fran, who looked enough like Enid to make it kind of creepy when my great-grandfather married her. Every Price woman in my generation is short, petite, and very, very blonde.

  And then there’s me. Tall and busty and brown haired and perfectly Price in every way, as in Grandpa Thomas, as in “I look like the representative of a bloodline the Covenant no longer recognizes, since Grandpa was the last of them, and he hasn’t been seen in decades.” So when Verity decided to turn us all into targets, it made sense that I’d be the one sent to infiltrate the Covenant, since there was no way they’d recognize me. What could possibly go wrong, right?

  Right.

  To be fair, my infiltration of the Covenant seemed to go well—so well, in fact, that the Covenant sent me to infiltrate a carnival suspected of harboring at least one killer cryptid. The Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, to be precise, where I’d found the suspected killer cryptid, and stopped her before she could kill anyone else … and where I’d met Sam Taylor, grandson of the carnival’s current owner.

  Sam Taylor, the boy—the man—who’d put an end to my longstanding “dating is a waste of time” policy, through sheer dint of being such an asshole that my options boiled down to kissing or killing, and you know what? Kissing was way more fun.

  Only the Covenant disagreed since Sam wasn’t human. The Covenant disagreed with a lot of things, including my belief that the rest of the carnival should be spared. None of them had been killing people. That didn’t matter to the Covenant. That especially didn’t matter to my handlers, one of whom had died in the effort to extract me … or to Leonard Cunningham, the current heir apparent to the entire mess. He’d twigged to me as a Price almost as soon as he’d met me, and he’d allowed the whole charade to play out as a sort of a test of my character.

  I’d passed. He’d allowed me to live. He’d even allowed me to escape and go into hiding, secure in his fanatic belief that I’d eventually come crawling back. He was wrong—God, he had to be wrong—but getting out of the Covenant’s surveillance band had also meant getting out of my family’s reach. I hadn’t spoken to any of them since I’d left to go undercover. If not for my dead Aunt Mary, they would probably have believed that I’d been captured, or killed, or—worst of all—converted to the cause.

  (I’ve mentioned my dead Aunt Mary a couple of times now. I’ll get to her soon, I swear.)

  Where does a girl go when she’s running from her family, her not-quite-boyfriend, and the largest monster-hunting organization on the planet? Lowryland, Florida, of course. One of the biggest and most successful amusement parks on the planet, which means it’s also one of the most crowded, which means tracking spells couldn’t follow me there. It was a great idea, up until I ran into the secret cabal of magic-users who were secretly running the place. In what felt like no time at all, I wound up semi-apprenticed to their leader, who siphoned off most of my magic in order to fuel a massive conspiracy of luck-theft that had caused an unknown number of injuries, deaths, and disasters in and around the Park.

  Nothing in my life is ever simple, I swear. To make matters worse, in the course of getting away from the fuckers running Lowryland, I was nearly killed by a runaway roller coaster, and found myself in a position no one in my family had been in since my grandfather’s day: I found myself making a bargain with the crossroads. Which is where my dead Aunt Mary comes in.

  See, Aunt Mary is a crossroads ghost, which means she was a human when she was alive, and went to work for whatever the hell the crossroads actually are when she died. She’s like a public defender for the people who feel the need to make bargains with something too big and too powerful for the human mind to fully understand. The crossroads speak. They offer things. Mary explains why taking those things would be a bad idea. She offers alternatives. The alternatives are usually “don’t do this, death would be better, you will be sorry forever if you do this.”

  I did it. I did it to save myself, and to save Sam, who had been swept away by the same roller coaster. I did it for the sake of my family, and because I’d been scared out of my mind by the thought that I would never go home. Maybe my intentions weren’t entirely pure, but I was pretty sure the crossroads didn’t care. They appreciate a little honest selfishness.

  They saved my life, and they saved Sam’s life, and they took the fire out of my fingers as collateral against a favor to be performed later. One day soon, they were going to call on me to do something for them, and when they did, I wasn’t going to be in a position to refuse.

  I glanced at Sam sleeping in the seat next to me, and felt a deep, fierce possessiveness clamp around my heart, holding so tight that for a moment, I struggled to breathe. It had been worth it. It had all been worth it.

  I put my hand on his knee and closed my eyes. Maine. We’d be in Maine soon, and there would be time to rest and regroup and decide what we were going to do next. Cylia’s luck had led us to this house. It would be safe. It would be fine. For a little while, at least, we could stop running.

  That idea had never sounded so good.

  * * *

  The car door slammed hard enough to wake me up. Not just me: Sam’s tail tightened around my waist before letting go, disappearing back to wherever it went when he returned to his human form. Therianthropes are walking violations of about a dozen scientific principles at any given time, including conservation of mass.

  “Where are we?” he asked groggily.

  “Hang on and stay human; I’ll find out.” Growing up with
a family like mine means learning how to wake up very, very quickly under pretty much any circumstances, since the alternative could involve getting eaten. I unbuckled my seat belt, opened the door, and stepped out into the pine-scented air of someplace that was definitely not the rolling fields of farm country.

  I was standing on a gravel driveway. Trees pressed in on all sides, packed together until they were basically a horror movie waiting to happen. The sky overhead was a dark so deep and clear that it contradicted itself, becoming a virtual sea of stars that glittered, silver-bright, against the blackness. They weren’t the only source of light: the moon was huge, gilding the land in silver and glinting off a distant slice of what I assumed was a lake, since it didn’t look active enough to be an ocean.

  At the end of the driveway, a house that could easily have nabbed itself a starring role in Attack of the Return of the Blair Witch: Part III loomed against its background of trees, windows glowing dimly behind gauzy curtains.

  Cylia stood in front of the car, harshly lit by the headlights as she exchanged a stack of cash for a set of keys. The man next to her glanced uneasily at me, attention snagged by the motion. Cylia snapped her fingers.

  “Eyes here,” she said, not unpleasantly. “Focus on the nice lady with the nicer money. Lovely, lovely money. Three months of wandering-around-Europe money. Is there anything we need to know about the house?”

  “The upstairs shower is finicky,” he said. “You have to turn the hot water up twice as high as you think you do. There are snakes in the boathouse, but they’re not venomous, and they’re useful at keeping down the mice. There’s an account that pays the utilities automatically, so there’s no chance of the power being shut off, but it goes out sometimes anyway, when there’s a storm up. Best to keep your flashlights ready to use.”

  “Not haunted?” she asked.

  He laughed, more nervously than I was comfortable with. “Not so’s anyone would notice.”

  In my experience, that usually meant “not haunted, but there’s something unpleasant in these woods that eats people, and I’d rather you didn’t ask me about it.” That was fine. Once we got settled, I had every intention of spending a little time as something unpleasant in the woods. If I found the original unpleasant thing, we could have a contest to determine who was worse. I’d win. I always won.

  “Great.” Cylia made the keys vanish into her pocket as she smiled at our new landlord. “Have a wonderful time in Europe. We’ll see you in December.”

  “About that … if you don’t mind me asking, what brings you out here? Fall’s not the most hospitable season for visiting Maine.”

  “Maine has a hospitable season?” I blurted. They turned to look at me. I shrugged. “Sorry. Just … between the mosquitoes and the snow, I didn’t realize there was a tourist-intensive time of year.”

  “We’re here for the leaves,” said Cylia. “We just love a pretty tree, isn’t that right?”

  “Sure is,” I said, and bared my teeth in an approximation of a smile.

  Cylia lifted both eyebrows in what I recognized as the universal gesture for “get back in the car before you ruin everything.” I got back in the car. Sam, still apparently human, gave me a mistrustful look.

  “Is she buying drugs? Please tell me she’s buying drugs, and not selling one or more of us to the local zoo.”

  “She’s paying the rent on the house where we’re going to be living for the next few months.” I glanced at the front seat. Fern, who could probably sleep through the fall of the Roman Empire, was still out cold. “Apparently, the upstairs shower is finicky. I’m cool with that, since it implies the existence of a downstairs shower, meaning we have access to multiple showers.”

  “Is that—” Sam began, and caught himself. “What am I saying? Of course, it’s safe. Cylia wouldn’t be paying the man if it wasn’t safe.”

  Cylia was done paying the man. He waved at her before he walked down the driveway, passing the car without a single look as he receded into the night. Cylia followed him as far as the driver’s-side door, which she opened and slipped through, plopping herself behind the wheel.

  “We’ll figure out permanent sleeping arrangements in the morning,” she said. “For tonight, find a flat surface and enjoy getting some rest in a bed that isn’t moving or rented by the hour. Home, sweet home.”

  She started the car, and we drove on toward the future, which looked like it might at least have better plumbing than the past.

  Three

  “If cleanliness is next to godliness, bleach is proof of the existence of the divine.”

  –Jane Harrington-Price

  Waking up in an unfamiliar house in New Gravesend, Maine

  WAKING UP TO DISCOVER Sam had functionally tied himself to me in the night was no longer unusual, or particularly surprising. He’d grown up with his family’s carnival, never more than a few feet from people who knew what he was and didn’t have a problem with it. By choosing to run off and follow me, he’d given up the kind of safety and security most cryptids will never know, and he’d done it without being asked. If wrapping his tail around my ankle or waist while we slept meant he didn’t feel quite so unmoored, I was cool with it.

  What I hadn’t realized was how much I’d come to take that contact as a security blanket, a sign that the world was sticking with its new, somewhat idiosyncratic normal. But when I opened my eyes to find myself alone in the middle of a wide, bare mattress—no sheets or blankets in evidence, nothing but a single caseless pillow shoved under my head—my first response was fear. Piercing, unfettered fear, the kind I normally associated with free fall and near misses.

  I sat up. Sam didn’t appear. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t like being alone—I don’t have a problem with being alone—but that for the past several months, getting Sam away from my side had basically required a crowbar. We were both a little insecure after everything we’d been through, and while I might have eventually started seeing his presence as clingy, we weren’t there yet. So why was I alone?

  The room was good-sized. It had to be, to accommodate the king-sized bed I was sitting in. The curtains were insufficient to block out the sunlight, but judging by its brightness, I’d slept until almost noon. Gingerly, I rolled out of bed, retrieved my jeans from where I’d clearly abandoned them the night before, and started for the door.

  Everything after the conversation in the driveway was a blur, and not a very detailed one. I dimly remembered being shaken awake again, which implied that I’d gone back to sleep before we’d reached the house. I didn’t remember getting my things out of the car. Maybe I’d left them where they were for the night, trusting our isolation to keep them from getting stolen.

  Outside the door was a long, cool hall, dust motes dancing in the air. The runner down the middle of the floor was the kind of faded wine-red flower pattern that seems to spring spontaneously into being in old houses the world over. It didn’t provide any cushioning as I walked, although it could probably become a tripping hazard in a pinch.

  Photos of people I didn’t recognize and would probably never meet lined the walls, hung with care above locked barrister bookshelves full of leather-bound old volumes that didn’t look like they’d been touched in twenty years. I kept walking until I heard people talking quietly up ahead—and, more importantly, until I smelled bacon. That was enough to make my shoulders unclench. I took my hand away from the knife strapped to my wrist—more proof that I’d fallen into bed without taking the time to get properly undressed. I’m happy to sleep with weapons under my pillow. I’m less happy about sleeping with weapons actually on my person. When a bad dream can lead to a punctured kidney, nobody wins.

  (This is just one of the many reasons that I feel developing sorcery as an adult is unfair and unreasonable, even if it’s not uncommon among sorcerers—although sorcerers are pretty uncommon to begin with, making this a problem for one percent of one percent of people, if that. Before the fire was taken from my fingers, I was
n’t waking up stabbed. I was waking up on fire. Not the kind of party I enjoy.)

  The stairs were narrow, but not rickety, and carpeted in a rug that matched the one in the hall. At least our temporary home wasn’t a hovel. The third stair from the bottom creaked when I stepped on it. That would be an easy enough fix. Give me a hammer and some nails and I could take care of it in under an hour. The idea was pleasant. It had been way too long since I’d been able to spend an afternoon just improving my living conditions.

  The living room at the bottom of the stairs was complete with couch, comfy-looking chairs, and one of those big televisions that look expensive until you realize they’re more than a year old. We could probably buy a more recent model at the local Goodwill or equivalent for under a hundred bucks, which explained why the owner had left it here while he filled his house with strangers. It was still nice to see. I could watch bad horror movies and eat popcorn and not be running for my life for fifteen minutes.

  I’d never watched a horror movie with a boyfriend. I liked the idea. It’s more fun when there’s an excuse to get cozy, and when the monsters aren’t, y’know, real.

  I followed the smell of bacon across the living room to the dining room, which was dim due to lack of external windows. Someone laughed, the sound coming from behind a closed door, and I hesitated.

  The last time I woke up to surprise breakfast, it had been my Aunt Mary doing the cooking, and while that had been a delight—no one makes pancakes like someone who’s been doing it for more than fifty years—it wasn’t like she and I were currently exactly on what I’d consider speaking terms. She was furious with me for making my crossroads bargain, even though I’d done it to save my life. I couldn’t really blame her for that, although I could resent her a little for being willing to let me die if it meant the crossroads wouldn’t have a claim on me. I like being alive. It’s how I get things done.