Home. There was an idea. I’d been happy there. I’d been bored there, and suddenly boredom seemed like the very pinnacle of the human condition. If we could figure out how to get me out of my bargain with the crossroads, and get the Covenant off my ass, maybe I could bring Sam home to meet the family. He’d like them. They were weird enough to appeal to his idea of normal.
And that was never going to happen, because no matter how optimistic Cylia tried to be, I was never going to go home. There were too many obstacles in the way.
“James.” I turned to face him. “When you go home, I want you to apologize to the air and say you’re sure any ghosts who happen to be listening are lovely people, but that you need privacy. Tell them you need to masturbate. Whatever. And then get some damn wards in place, as fast as you can.”
James flushed red. Sam snorted. I glanced in his direction. He was fighting not to laugh.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just … can you imagine what the mice would do with that?”
“Yes, and since I don’t want to celebrate the Festival of James Smith is a Wanker for the rest of my life, we’re leaving this part out when we tell them about the whole situation.” James turned even redder. I shot him an apologetic look. “Aeslin mice. I’ll explain more later.”
“I’m not sure whether I want you to,” said James.
“Too bad,” I said. “To get back on track: pain. The crossroads can hurt me any time I’m not behind wards—maybe even when I am behind wards, but I’m trying to think positively—and that means they can keep me from acting. If they have enough time, if we don’t stop them, they might be able to hurt me so badly that I’ll agree to do anything they ask. I can’t …” I stopped and swallowed, overwhelmed by the enormity of what I was about to say. It went against everything I believed in, everything I knew about myself and my place in the world.
We all—my siblings, my cousins, and me—know a certain amount of self-defense, because any weapon that can be taken away from you is not a perfect weapon. Alex is great at punching people, enough so that even Grandma Alice says he’s impressive. She doesn’t impress easily. Verity is more of a kicker, and when you’re talking about someone who thinks extending a leg over her head is easy, that means something. Elsie likes to go for eyes and throats, while Artie was the star of his school track team.
And then there’s me. Little Annie, isn’t it cute how she lays traps and digs pits and sets blasting caps and never wants to hurt her hands. Isn’t it funny how she sleeps with a knife under her pillow and a pair of brass knuckles in the pocket of her flannel pajama pants, where they leave a bruise on her thigh every morning that looks like she’s been punching herself for hours.
Little Annie, who puts her faith in weapons over flesh and bone. Who doesn’t even go to the shower unarmed.
“You’re going to have to take my weapons away any time I need to leave the house,” I said haltingly. “If I go out without them, then even if the crossroads compel me, there’s only going to be so much damage I can do. Especially with Fern and Sam ready to put me down.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” said Sam quietly.
“I can,” said Fern.
We all turned. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, expression grim. The stern line of her mouth melted into a faint smile as she looked at me.
“If I dial my density as far up as it can go, my skin gets harder to break, too, because otherwise I think my bones would explode it or something,” she said. “So all I need to do is become super heavy, knock you down, and sit on you. Then you won’t be able to hurt anybody, even if the crossroads really wants you to.”
“I knew I liked you for a reason,” I said.
Her smile turned, briefly, more sincere, before fading away entirely. “If we’re going to fight the crossroads, though, I think there’s something we have to think about, maybe. It could make things easier.”
“Fern, no,” said Cylia.
I frowned. “Someone want to fill me in?”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” muttered James.
“She wants you to offer the Covenant asshole a truce,” said Cylia.
I blinked.
“Not a truce,” protested Fern. “Offering him a truce makes it sound like I want us to be friends. I don’t want us to be friends. But he already knows our faces, and the Covenant probably doesn’t like the crossroads any more than we do. If we can get him to come be on our side for fifteen minutes, or at least stop trying to shoot us every time we go outside, we can focus on one problem instead of two, and then maybe we’ll all stay alive for a little longer. I want to stay alive, Annie. I’m sorry if that’s selfish or something, but it’s true. There aren’t enough sylphs left for me to just … just run off and get myself killed.”
She sounded genuinely distressed. I sighed and tugged my ankle away from Sam’s grasp before walking over and folding her into an awkward hug. I’m not good at physical displays of affection. Maybe that’s why I like Sam’s need to have a hand, foot, or other appendage on me at all times; it takes the burden of performing comfort off of me. Fern made a small choking noise and sagged in my embrace.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry I don’t want to be selfish, I don’t want to be bad, but I don’t want to die either. I want to prove I’m smart and strong and clever enough to have babies of my own. I want to have adventures, but I want to live.”
“You will,” I assured her, and I didn’t think I was lying, except in the greater “the grave comes for us all” sense of the idea. “You’re going to find another sylph and have lots of babies that bob against the ceiling like so many balloons, and it’s going to be wonderful. I’ll even babysit for you.”
“Creche childrearing,” she reminded me, with a small hiccup in her voice that could have been either a laugh or a sob.
“So I’ll come to the creche and do a shift there. Imagine me covered in babies. I don’t even like babies. It’ll be hilarious. All we have to do is get through this mess and we can do that, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, and pulled away enough to wipe her eyes. “You’ll think about it?”
“I’ll think about it,” I promised. “Now let’s get to work.”
* * *
You know what’s boring as hell? Transcription, which is why court stenographers and the people who do captions for television should be paid substantially better than they are. Typing what someone else is saying is no fun at all. Copying someone else’s manuscript, also not fun. Copying someone else’s handwritten diaries that were never exactly designed for public consumption may well be the least fun of all. Doing it when the writing keeps trying to disappear, well …
“This is like the American Ninja Warrior of homework, and I hate it,” said Sam.
“No contest here.” I squinted at the page in front of me. “James!”
“Coming!” James rushed around the table and placed his hands above the book, fingers spread, face screwed up with concentration. The temperature dropped precipitously and the wavering, indistinct letters flared back into solidity.
“Thank you,” I said, and paused, assessing him. Most of the color was gone from his face; his eyes seemed shadowed, and there was an odd chapped quality to his lips, like he’d been walking outside in the freezing cold long enough to have all the moisture sucked out of his skin. “Are you okay?”
“Are we done?”
“No.” James’ mother had been a thorough documentarian, recording every scrap of data she could beg, borrow, steal, or observe about the crossroads. That was good. She had also been using the books to keep a diary of her daily activities, and while she never quite crossed the line into TMI—no lurid accountings of her sexual exploits or descriptions of James’ father in the nude—she was perfectly willing to go on for paragraphs about the woman who’d shorted her change at the grocery store. Which still would have been fine, if she’d been writing on the front of the paper and using the back to record her mo
re sorcerous observations.
That would, apparently, have been too easy on her eventual offspring, and thus had been dismissed as cheating. Her invisible writing was tucked into margins and on the open lines between the more mundane observations, and since it was all the same color once James had witched it into visibility, I had to keep forcing myself to focus on “the crossroads, on being thwarted, stripped the skin from Goodie Martha’s body,” and not “Jimmy was fussy again this morning, poor mite; he takes too much after my side of the family.”
I was suddenly tempted to go home and find a way to witch the words out of Grandpa Thomas’ diaries, and also terrified that if I did, I’d find a lengthy accounting of the places he and Grandma Alice had had sex in the house back in Buckley. Sticking two narratives in one book was exhausting.
“I’m done with this one,” said Cylia, holding up a notebook. “How many more do we have?”
“Too many,” said Sam glumly. “Can’t we just nuke the place from orbit?”
“It’s the only way to be sure, but no,” I said. “I don’t think the crossroads are something you can nuke.”
“Not unless you want to make the dimension adjacent to our own radioactive for the next millennia, and probably still hostile,” said James, as he hurried to refresh the writing on Fern’s book. “Has anyone found anything that seems useful?”
“Your mom wrote down crop yields for like, three years, and I’m still not sure why,” said Sam.
“Oh, I have an account of a local farmer trading his youngest daughter to the crossroads in exchange for a decade of good harvests,” said Fern. “If the dates match up, maybe she was making sure the crossroads kept their word.”
“Did the daughter die?” I asked.
“Disappeared,” said Fern. “Like, um.” She cast a sidelong look at James.
“Like Sally,” he said grimly. “Yes, they’re quite fond of that trick. Pull it all the time.”
“Which is possibly a good thing,” I said.
Slowly, he turned to stare at me. The temperature dropped again, the writing on the pages in front of me growing darker and crisper as his magic filled the room. Goosebumps formed on my arms. I fought the urge to pull back in my chair, remembering—not for the first time—that there are reasons people are, on the whole, afraid of sorcerers and the things we can do.
“What, exactly, do you mean by that?” he asked. His voice was even colder than the air around us.
“I mean that if they do this frequently, and we’re not finding anything to indicate the crossroads have been handing out corpses, or brainwashed slaves, or fresh new bodies, then there’s a good chance a lot of these people may still be alive somewhere. Someplace on the other side of the pocket realm where they do their bullshit business. There’s a lot of reality on the other side of our dimensional wall. My grandmother has been exploring it for decades. Once we have an idea of where the crossroads might have been putting all these people …”
Once we had a scrap of information, a sliver of a clue, I could set Grandma loose on all the dimensions that had ever existed, and she would find all those people, and she’d bring them home. She’d bring Sally home.
She’d bring Grandpa home. Grandpa, who knew what it was to understand the Covenant and reject them anyway, who understood what I was and what I was becoming better than anyone in our shared family. We’d never met, but I had absolute faith that he’d be able to help me, because I was, in so many ways, his mirror. He could help me.
He had to.
James’ eyes widened, the cold fading as my words sank in. “You really think … ?”
“I am making no promises, but I think they’d be stupid not to be keeping those people alive. They’re a horrifying eldritch construct that doesn’t belong here. They’re not vampires.” I tapped the page. “We read. We learn things. And once we know stuff, we fix things.”
“Hear, hear,” said Cylia.
And so we read, and as we read, we wrote, pulling a dead woman’s secrets into the light for the first time since she’d tucked them away in her hidden room, banking on the hope that her son—who she already suspected was going to be like her in more ways than one, whose fingers were always cold and whose eyes were always focused on something past the horizon—would one day find them and make them his own. We read, we wrote, and we hoped to find the answer.
Until finally, impossibly, there it was. I stared at it, the writing in my own hand, black lines on white paper, answers and questions combined, and my mouth was dry, and I didn’t know what to say.
Perhaps predictably, it was Sam who first noticed that I wasn’t writing anymore. “Annie?” he asked, putting down his pencil. “You okay?”
“No,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Okay. First, James, I apologize: your stupid time travel idea wasn’t all that stupid after all. Second, we’re going to need to go through the rest of the library to see whether there’s anything there on summoning ghosts.”
“Why?” asked James warily.
“Because we’re going to need my Aunt Mary for the next part.” I picked up my notes and read, “‘The crossroads are a place and an idea at the same time, which is both their strength and their weakness. Because they are both physical and not, an attack on one aspect which does not address the other will never be sufficient to guarantee their destruction.’”
“This is making my head hurt already,” murmured Sam.
I ignored him. “‘It is my belief that, based on the following accounts’—and she has a list of names here, of people who made bargains; I recognize a few of them, so I bet we’ve transcribed all their stories—‘the weakest point of this contradictory existence can be found at its origin. A spell which carried a petitioner back to the moment of the crossroads’ creation would also enable the crossroads to be sundered into their component parts. The echo of this sundering might then weaken their grip on the world, and allow a simple exorcism of the spiritual force powering the crossroads as we know them now to be effective.’”
“That’s … that’s a really fancy way of saying ‘throw the TNT and pray,’” said Cylia dubiously. “It can’t be that easy. If it were that easy, somebody would have nuked the crossroads the first time they exploded a herd of cows, and we wouldn’t be doing this now.”
“The first problem is access,” I said. “It says … okay, so it says in order to get to the point where an attack can have any chance of working, you must first bring someone who has been wronged by an unfair bargain to the crossroads. They have to get all the way to the deal point without changing their mind. And they need a crossroads ghost to basically play mediator. I don’t think Bethany is going to volunteer for a plan that ends with her not having a job anymore.”
Of course, that was only the first problem. I had to hope that “first” wasn’t the word they’d focus on.
It wasn’t. “Would Mary volunteer?” asked Sam dubiously.
I paused. Mary, my Mary, Mary Dunlavy, who’d become a babysitter after her body was already cold in the field. Mary, who’d always done her best to protect her family, my family, from the clutches of the crossroads, who had only become a crossroads ghost because it was that or disappear into the afterlife, leaving her father alone. He’d died shortly after her deal had been made, and he hadn’t lingered, not like Mary, but he was still the reason she’d decided to stay.
“There’s that awful saying, blood is thicker than water,” I said. “At least that’s how we say it now, hundreds of years after it was originally written. Some people say the whole phrase should be ‘the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.’ The family you make is as important as the family you’re given. Maybe more important. When you choose someone, it’s because you have a choice. Mary chose my family. She’s one of us, and she wants us to be safe. I think … I think if we can get her back, she’ll help us challenge the crossroads.”
Cylia nodded. “So we take you, because you’ve been wronged, and we get Mary back, and—”
Silence. Everyone blinked at me, briefly united on Team Missing the Point. That was okay. It wasn’t like I’d exactly drawn them a flow chart to work from.
“Annie, they want you to kill James,” said Sam carefully.
“I noticed,” I said.
“It’s just that that sort of feels like they’re wronging you.”
“They’re not.” I shot James an apologetic look. “I agreed to a favor to be determined later. I knew they could ask me to do something awful, something I’d have to find a way to get out of, and I said I’d do it, because I wanted to live more than I wanted to know that I was dying with clean hands. If anything, I’m wronging them by refusing to do what I promised.”
“I appreciate your rebellious streak,” muttered James.
“Hey. I didn’t know for sure that they were going to ask me to kill a person. I didn’t know what they were going to ask for. I just knew I had a lot more options if I wasn’t dead, and that if I didn’t get to my friends, they were going to be dead.”
“As one of the people she saved, I want to go with ‘yay Annie’s flexible morality,’” said Cylia. “If I get a vote.”
“Um, same,” said Fern.
James—the only person in the room who hadn’t been at Lowryland, who didn’t understand the pressure I’d been under when I’d agreed to sell myself to the crossroads—flung his hands up in a gesture of disgusted defeat. “Fine,” he said. “I’m the one who’s been wronged. We can get your ghost and we can get ourselves to a potential bargain site, but how do we reach the actual liminal space where the bargains happen? The crossroads are malicious, shortsighted, and occasionally ignorant of human nature, but they’re not stupid. They’ll know something’s up.”
“Oh, that part’s easy,” I said. “We just have to convince them I’m there to kill you.”
That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8) Page 24