“Sometimes people don’t have a choice,” I said. The words were useless; I could tell that even as I spoke them.
“People should try harder,” said James, and resumed making his way down the hall.
It ended in a small foyer, light breaking into rainbows as it cascaded through the decorative stained glass around the front door, painting the stairs in patterns of prisms. He went up. I followed, silently charting escape routes and things that could be used as supplementary weapons if the knives hidden inside my clothing didn’t prove to be enough.
Sometimes I wish I were more comfortable with firearms. And then I remember that I spend most of my time either on roller skates or hanging from a trapeze, and consider how easy it would be to shoot myself, and that reconfirms my desire to be the girl with all the knives, rather than the girl with the sucking chest wound. Although as Leo was so happy to demonstrate, sometimes it’s possible to be both.
Asshole.
The stairs extended upward for three stories, marking each transition with another landing, another turn. James took them fast enough that I only got glimpses of each respective floor, until we finally reached what I assumed was the top, stepping onto a floor that was a little less polished than the others had been, where the wallpaper was a little more faded. There were signs of ongoing upkeep—no dust on the baseboards or cobwebs in the corners—but it seemed perfunctory, especially compared to the rest of the house.
I gave James a curious look. He shook his head.
“My room is up here,” he said. “My father thinks it will encourage me to get a better job if he doesn’t pay the maid to come to the third floor. I either do all the cleaning myself or find a way to stretch my paycheck enough to cover her expenses—which, mysteriously, he claims would cost what it currently costs him to pay her to clean the rest of the house. She’s a lovely woman, taught me how to wash windows without streaking when she realized what he intended to do, but I’m not willing to empty my savings for the sake of having a floor I can see myself in.”
“What kind of better job does he think you’re going to get without leaving your small town and without a college education?” I asked. “I mean, is he one of those people who thinks big paychecks with full medical and dental grow on trees, and we’re all just lazy?”
“Essentially, yes,” said James. “What do you do?”
“Play roller derby, mostly. Hunt. Try to negotiate peaceful coexistence between human and cryptid communities. It’s not what most people would consider ‘gainful employment,’ but it’s fulfilling, and I’m good at it.”
“And your parents approve?”
“They tolerate the roller derby. The rest of it is a pretty classic case of ‘I learned it from watching you.’”
“Ah.” James stopped at the end of the hallway, where a hatch had been cut in the ceiling. “Hang on a moment. I’ll get the hook.”
“Attic?”
“Yes.” He opened a closet, producing a long wooden pole with a metal hook at the end. Deftly, he pulled the hatch open, releasing a rickety ladder to descend into the hall. It looked like it had last been given a thorough inspection for termite damage and rusty nails sometime around, oh, never. I eyed it dubiously.
“Ballpark figure,” I said. “How many times have you nearly died using that thing?”
“Only five or six,” he replied, and propped the hook against the wall. “Come on.”
He started up the ladder. My shoulder throbbed, as if to remind me that I was in no condition to be climbing anything, much less a death trap masquerading as a useful household fixture.
I hate it when my injuries tell me what to do. I followed him.
The attic was about what I expected: small, cramped, and crammed with junk, to the extent that it no longer seemed to matter whether the house had any insulation, since the boxes and chests and old furniture would serve as a no doubt excellent windbreak. James couldn’t stand upright without whacking his head on the roof. I had maybe a half inch of clearance, less if I moved toward the back, where the wall sloped down until no one older than five or six would have felt genuinely comfortable.
“You could rent this place out to a whole family of bogeymen and be able to afford a cleaning service,” I said.
James blinked at me. “The Bogeyman is real?”
A life spent in the company of Aeslin mice has left me sensitive to capital letters where they don’t belong. “No, the dude in your closet who wants to eat your baby is a myth. Bogeymen, on the other hand, are completely real. You probably have some living in the local sewer system, assuming they were able to get in there early enough to partition off some of the larger tunnels. They like to be subterranean, they don’t like to be bathed in the smell of other people’s shit.”
“That’s … huh.” James shook his head. “The more time I spend around you, the stranger the world becomes.”
“Says the cut-rate Bobby Drake. Call me when you figure out how to make those nifty frozen slides, Iceman.” I turned slowly, letting the light of the attic’s single bare bulb show me my surroundings. “Where are we even supposed to start here? And where’s the rest of it?”
“My father had all Mom’s things moved up here after she died. I’ve found a few other books throughout the years, although they’ve been—wait.” James suddenly frowned at me. “What do you mean, where’s the rest of it?”
“I mean, this attic is like, maybe half the size it should be.” I knocked on the ceiling, triggering a cascade of dust and splinters. “The house is bigger than this. There’s a window visible from the outside that isn’t visible from the inside. Did you never notice that?”
“Don’t be stupid. I would have noticed a window.” James was trying to sound arrogant, but he looked unsure. Almost confused.
“Would you?” I can be a steamroller when I get going. I know that, and I’ve learned to be gentle when I have to. It’s simple self-preservation: sometimes being gentle is the only thing that keeps the people I’m trying to talk to from turning and running for their lives. “When we know what something looks like, sometimes we stop seeing it. We make assumptions based on the things we know, and we don’t go looking for proof, because we don’t need it anymore.”
“This is the only attic I’ve ever seen.”
“All right,” I said. “Wait here.”
Going back down the ladder was no easier than going up it had been. If anything, it was harder, since now the wound in my shoulder was awake and aggravated and wanted me to know that my behavior was entirely unacceptable. I ground my teeth and plotted terrible things to do to Leonard Cunningham as I descended, until my shoulder was throbbing and my feet were firmly on the hallway floor.
Bastard was going to pay for shooting me. I can put up with a lot of nonsense in the course of doing my job, but shooting me? That was a step too far, and I was not going to tolerate it. As for the part where he’d been aiming for Sam, well …
If I thought about that too hard, I’d go from justifiably annoyed to outright angry, and that wasn’t going to do any of us any favors. One thing at a time. Figure out what was wrong with James’ attic, find the missing piece of the crossroads puzzle, discharge my side of the bargain without getting myself killed in the process, find Leo, kick his smug bastard teeth all the way out of his ass. Priorities.
The hall hadn’t changed: it was still dusty, shabby in a way that would have been anathema anywhere else in the house, and lined with logical, reasonable doors leading to logical, reasonable rooms and storage spaces. James’ bedroom was the closest door to the stairs. The door next to it led to a linen closet, and the door on the other side led to a currently empty bedroom, only a few faded cardboard boxes shoved up under the window.
The window. I paused to give it a longing look. Under normal circumstances—i.e., without a hole in my shoulder, and without the need to worry about either James’ father coming home or Leo showing up with another crossbow—I would have gone straight out that window and up the side of
the house to the other window James swore wasn’t relevant. Easy peasy. Only not so much when I couldn’t be sure of maintaining my grip, and double not so much when I didn’t want to go to jail for breaking and entering.
(There isn’t much Verity and I agree on. Marshmallow fluff being an awesome sandwich topping is one of them. A dismaying willingness to climb things in order to find out what’s at the top is another. I just believe in doing it safely, with a net whenever possible, while she seems to find joy in the plummet.)
The hallway furnishings, such as they were, gave the distinct impression of having been booted upstairs after failing some downstairs quality check or other. The shelf between the linen closet and the bathroom had chips in its finish; the curio cabinet under the window had a thin cobweb of cracks in one corner. Nothing that would have drawn a second glance in my house, but here, those were sins that might never be forgiven.
I looked at the cracked curio cabinet, and thought about home, where glass got cracked and tile got chipped, but everything was filled with light and life and joy. We loved each other, even when we hated each other. That was what family was for. I couldn’t let James keep living like this, especially not when he was the only other sorcerer my age I’d ever met. He needed training. He needed people who could understand him, and who wouldn’t get mad if he froze the pipes every once in a while.
Half my family isn’t actually related to me, aunts and uncles and cousins and even siblings we’ve acquired somewhere along the way and refused to put back where we found them. I wondered how well Alex was going to take the news that he was no longer my only brother. Hell, I wondered how well James was going to take the news.
Given that being part of my family came with parents who gave a fuck and houses that didn’t feel like punishments, I was pretty sure he’d be okay with it. And Sam might throw him a parade. I may be weird, but even I’m not going to start dating my adopted brother.
One bookshelf didn’t fit the rest of the hall aesthetic. It was solid mahogany, built to last, with a warm, almost rosy varnish over the wood, which had been lovingly carved and sanded, making it look like the good kind of museum piece, the kind that got preserved because it was loved, not because it was valuable. The glass fronts of the doors were leaded and unbroken, and there was nothing about it that should have seen it banished to this hall. So why was it here?
I approached the bookshelf, studying the way it met the wall—without so much as a crack to slide a sheet of paper through—and the apparent weight of the books inside. They were thick, hefty tomes, enough to have caused even the sturdiest shelf to eventually bow a little, but there was no bend. Everything looked exactly like it was supposed to, which was the problem. It was like someone had crafted the perfect dollhouse bookshelf, only to realize that it was built to human scale and stick it here instead.
There was a cleaning service. Even if they no longer came upstairs, this thing had been cleaned once. Keeping that in mind, I got up onto my tiptoes, extended my uninjured arm, and felt carefully around the decorative molding of the very top, the places where the dust would have been impossible to get at, and where many services would never even have tried.
There was a click. The bookshelf shuddered as it swung out from the wall, revealing a plain, slightly undersized door on the other side. I smirked, turned the knob, and stepped through, onto a narrow staircase that might be rickety and choked with cobwebs, but was at least better than a ladder.
The bookshelf swung shut behind me, casting the entire stairway into absolute darkness, and behind me, in a pleasant voice, Bethany said, “There aren’t any wards here, Annie. I was just waiting until we could have a moment alone.”
Shit.
Fourteen
“Always know where your exits are. If you don’t have any, be prepared to make one.”
–Enid Healy
Locked in a secret passage with a dead woman, where no one is going to hear the screaming
“GO AWAY, BETHANY, I’M working,” I said, voice low and tight.
“Mmm … no. I don’t think so.” Ghostly fingers caressed the back of my neck, cool and clammy. That was a choice. Assuming the rules governing Mary were universal to crossroads ghosts, Bethany could be as warm as the living when she wanted to. If she wasn’t, it was solely because she wanted to mess with me.
I hate being messed with. “I’m serious. Go away, or first chance I get, I’m finding someone who can craft a spirit jar, and I’m putting you on time out.”
“Oh, because that’s a proportionate punishment for bothering you? Locking me in solitary confinement until the great Antimony Price decides I’m worthy of my freedom? I didn’t know much about your family before I died, but I’ve been doing my homework, and you people are a real class act. You’re still Covenant in your bones. You may have changed what windmill you’re willing to die defending, but that doesn’t do anything to take the swords out of your self-righteous, hypocritical hands.”
“That argument would work better if I thought you believed any part of it, and weren’t just repeating buzzwords—oh, and getting your metaphors wrong. Get out. I can’t win his trust if he doesn’t trust me, and boys don’t go for haunted girls.”
“Please. Mary’s been haunting your family for what, three generations? If boys didn’t go for haunted girls, you’d have died out like the relics you are.”
I couldn’t see a damn thing. I pinched the bridge of my nose, wishing I hadn’t been so quick to give away the fire in my fingers. “What do you want?”
“We want to know what the boy knows.”
“I told you, I’m working on—”
“Not good enough.”
“All right, how about this: he knows the crossroads ate his best friend.”
Silence. I couldn’t tell whether I’d startled her or whether she was gone. That’s the trouble with ghosts. Sometimes, they make things unnecessarily complicated.
Finally, Bethany said, “The bargain of Sally Henderson was sworn and witnessed before my time, but I’m assured she got what she asked for. What she paid for.”
“That’s cool and all, but still. Ate his best friend. I don’t care whether she did it so she could have a pony, that’s going to be upsetting for the people she left behind, which is to say, James.”
“That’s why he wants to hurt us?”
I paused. Something about her voice …
“I’m not talking to Bethany anymore, am I?” I asked.
In response, a hand grasped my wrist and yanked. I stumbled, falling forward—
—and landed on my feet on an endless country road. Fields of corn stretched out toward eternity on either side. The sky was the color of a worn-out dishrag, so stained with other people’s dirt, with other people’s crimes, that it would never come clean again. Bethany stood in front of me, looking suddenly small and young and bewildered, like she had no idea how we’d gone from the stairwell to the outside.
I had some idea. I’d been here before, after all, although the last time, I’d come willingly, and to save my own skin. I focused on the empty air behind Bethany, and spoke like I knew what was going on.
“I’d rather skip the intermediaries, if you don’t mind.”
“That sounds like a request.” The crossroads—the entity that shared the name of the physical place—coalesced out of shadow and dust, becoming a hole slashed in the fabric of the world. I couldn’t focus directly on it, couldn’t say anything about it other than that it was roughly human-shaped, with a head and arms and torso made of the same nothingness as the rest of it.
It cocked that head, and I had the disconcerting feeling it was looking at me.
“What will you pay?” it asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I haven’t asked for anything. ‘If you don’t mind’ meant it was your choice, and you chose to appear, presumably because you know how creepy it is to talk to a hole in the world.” I crossed my arms, only wincing a little as it pulled on the wound in my shoulder.
“I’m good,” I said. “Dudes dig chicks with scars.” Half-true. Sam didn’t exactly “dig” my scars, but he appreciated the work I’d put into acquiring them, and he was willing to celebrate the fact that no matter how many times the world had tried to gut me, I’d persisted in surviving. “Why am I here?”
“You haven’t killed the Smith boy.”
“That wasn’t what I was told to do,” I said, as calmly as I could. “I’m supposed to make him trust me, learn everything he knows about how to hurt you, and then kill him.”
“We don’t want you to know how to hurt us.” The crossroads sounded sullen. No small trick for an anthropomorphic personification of making a shitty deal at the flea market. “If you learn everything he knows, you’ll know how to hurt us.”
“If I don’t learn everything he knows, I won’t know where the books I need to destroy are being kept. Someone else will be able to figure out how to hurt you.”
“And we’ll kill them, too.”
Who could have guessed that arguing with an unknowable force of the cosmos would be so much like arguing with a toddler who had stayed up past bedtime? “I haven’t killed the Smith boy because right now, it isn’t safe to kill him. There are too many variables. You told me to befriend him, to make him trust me, and then to kill him. I’m still on step one.”
“Or you’re stalling.”
I said nothing.
The shape made of absence took a step toward me. “We think you’re stalling. We think you don’t want to kill a human being who has, by your standards, done nothing wrong. He’s a threat to us, but we’ve never been something your family,” it said the word like it was filthy, like it was blasphemous, “wanted to protect. You people, with your little idealisms and your little ideas of what it is to be good or evil or in-between. We think you’ve decided he might be right. That’s why you’ve locked our eyes outside. You don’t want them to see you plotting.”
That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8) Page 20