That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8)

by Seanan McGuire

  “It’s not possible.” Leonard put his coffee cup down, the better to gesture vaguely with both hands. “If the crossroads could be destroyed—or even rendered less dangerous—we would have done it centuries ago.”

  “Except no, because you’d have to be willing to work with people, not against them,” I said. “We have a plan. It requires a sorcerer, a crossroads ghost, and someone the crossroads believe they have a hold over. Can you honestly say the Covenant would be able to put together the same kind of group?”

  Silence.

  “I didn’t think so. We have a plan and we have a team, and now we need you.”

  “Me?” Leonard sat up a little straighter. “What do you want from me?”

  “First, we want your word that you won’t try to attack us again while we’re dealing with this shit. The crossroads are bigger and nastier than you are, but that doesn’t mean we’re magically immune to crossbows while we’re dealing with them.” I allowed myself the luxury of a scowl. “What the hell is it with your family and crossbows, anyway? First Chloe, now you. I’m getting real tired of Cunninghams trying to shish kebab me.”

  “They’re convenient and easier to dispose of than firearms.”

  “Maybe in England. Over here, we’re all about the unregistered handgun. Anyway, the point stands: I want your word that you won’t try to attack me again, or any of us. We need to be able to work without fear of some kind of messed-up sneak attack.”

  Leonard gave me an assessing look, clearly searching for the catch. “For how long?”

  “See, where I come from, ‘please don’t attack me anymore’ isn’t the kind of request that comes with a time limit. I’d really prefer it if you never attacked any of us again. If you can’t bring yourself to promise that, how about we do this: you give me the tracking charm and you promise me a year.”

  “A year.”

  “A year,” I repeated. “One year, during which you won’t follow me, you won’t look for me, you won’t do anything to disturb me. You said you were preparing for war back in Europe? Well, you stop it. For a year, you stop it. When the clock runs out, either we’ll have found a way to make peace, or we’ll pull the whole world down with us.”

  Leonard hesitated. “What you’re asking …”

  “You already have a narrative that fits. I’m your sweet little recruit, stolen by beasts during a mission I should never have been sent on, a mission that claimed the life of a senior agent.” An agent whose face I still saw when I slept—and probably would for the rest of my life.

  My parents raised me to defend myself and protect the world around me, a world of magic and monsters and people who deserved the chance to live. That doesn’t mean I’d been prepared for the impact of killing a human being. I wasn’t sure anything, ever, could have prepared me for that.

  “Yes,” said Leonard slowly.

  “You were looking for me, and you stumbled across, fuck, I don’t care. A coven of like-minded wizards who were planning to set magic aside as soon as they’d managed to use it for one great good. A big red button labeled ‘erase crossroads forever.’ Whatever. It doesn’t matter, and you know what your grandfather is going to believe. You stopped to take care of the greater evil, and my captors whisked me away while you were distracted. You couldn’t find me. You needed to make your report. I’m sure once you’re back at Penton Hall, you’ll be able to come up with plenty of paperwork and administrative bullshit to keep you busy until the year runs out and it’s fair game again.”

  “You’d have me look like a fool for losing track of you.”

  I scoffed. “A fool who just got full credit for destroying the crossroads, much? Maybe you’ll look a little heartless for letting poor me get eaten by ghouls or whatever while you were distracted by cleaning up an actual threat to mankind, but I’m pretty sure your superiors will forgive you. The Covenant has always been willing to make sacrifices for the greater good, right? Gryffindor bullshit.”

  “Are you making Harry Potter references because I’m British and you assume that’s the way to reach me?”

  “No, I’m making Harry Potter references because I’m an enormous nerd and it amuses me to remind you of that,” I said. “One year, Leonard. Your word that you don’t attack me or any of my friends for that time, and that you don’t try to track us, either.”

  “Why should you believe me?”

  “Oh, that’s easy.” I smiled sweetly. “We learned about this concept in school, called mutually assured destruction. So here is what I am assuring you. If you come near me before that year is out, if you send one of your strike teams after me, if you inconvenience me in any way or with any intent to do me harm, I will come back to England, knowing everything I know about your resources and your security, and I will kill you. The question thus becomes: do you think you can completely redo your security, without blowing your own ‘I was trying to get her back, I absolutely didn’t encourage a spy to nestle in our midst’ cover story, before I can come there and start making you understand why it was a bad idea to cross me? Because I don’t think you can. I think I’d do a lot of damage, and yeah, you’d probably put me down, but I’m okay with that if it means you find out that choices have consequences.”

  Leonard paled. “You’re bluffing.”

  “I’m a Price, Leo. Do Prices bluff?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “Your word, and you get to be a hero. Or tell me no, keep fighting us, and you get to be a corpse. One way or another. If I were you, I’d take door number one. It’s a pretty sweet deal, and it means you still have the chance to bring me back to the fold, as you so charmingly put it, assuming you still want me. I don’t want you, but hey, that’s always been beside the point as far as you’re concerned, right?” I picked up my mug. Took a sip. Set it down. “One year, your word, and you make the world a better, safer place for humanity. I thought that was your mission statement.”

  “I’m beginning to question the wisdom of recruiting you,” he said sourly. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

  “I’ve been telling you that for a while,” I said brightly. “You in?”

  Leonard hesitated.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  My smile became genuine. “Great. Let me get a to-go cup and we’re out of here.”

  * * *

  Cylia watched in the rearview mirror as Leonard and I climbed into the back seat. The front passenger seat was open, but I wasn’t leaving Leo alone, and I wasn’t seating him next to Cylia. That left treating her like a taxi, at least in the short term. I would have felt bad about that, if I hadn’t been transporting a potentially armed Covenant operative. Patting him down in the coffee shop would have been suspicious.

  “Hello,” she said, voice cool. “If you even reach for your wallet, I’m running us off the road.”

  “Charming,” said Leonard. He turned his attention to me. “Are all your friends this hospitable?”

  “You’ve made a lot of endangered species over the years,” I said. “Maybe you should expect a little justified hostility.”

  “Hmm.” He gave Cylia a more thoughtful look. “Dragon princess?”

  “Go with that,” said Cylia, slamming her foot down on the gas.

  Dragon princesses are nothing more nor less than female dragons, evolutionarily adapted to pass themselves off as attractive human women for the sake of staying safe from men like the one next to me. That isn’t common knowledge, and there was no reason for me to whisper a word of it to Leonard. Let him be the ignorant one for a change.

  Cylia kept her eyes on the road as she drove, her hands white-knuckled on the wheel. “I assume Annie already gave you the speech about shallow graves and no witnesses if you hurt a single one of us.”

  “It was largely implied,” said Leonard coolly. “I’m not a monster, Miss … ?”

  “You could have fooled me,” said Cylia. “I know a lot of broken families because of men like you. I
know a lot of unfinished stories. You don’t get my name. You don’t get to offer me the hand of friendship just so you can pull it away when you decide I’d be better off dead. You get a ride in my car, and you get me not killing you yet. That’s all I’m willing to give.”

  Leonard gave me a look, smirking faintly. “You have charming friends,” he said.

  “I have friends who have very, very good reasons to hate you, and since you’re pretty proud of those reasons, I don’t think you have the moral authority to get angry at them,” I said. “You have a lot of blood on your hands.”

  “Hundreds of years of it,” Leonard agreed. “Only a century’s-worth has been washed from yours. What does that make you, do you think?”

  “Deep in debt, but at least aware that I’m there,” I said. “Now give me the charm.”

  Leonard blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Part of our deal was that you give up the tracking charm you’ve been using to follow me. I want it.”

  “The crossroads—”

  “Successfully destroying them wasn’t a condition of getting my life back.” I held my hand out. “The charm, Leonard. Now. Or I tell my friend here that you clearly have no interest in keeping your word, and we do that ‘shallow grave’ thing she’s so into. I haven’t gotten her a birthday present yet.”

  “A little murder would improve my day immensely,” said Cylia.

  Leonard scowled as he reached inside his jacket—a gesture that caused Cylia to tense even more behind the wheel—and produced a small, flat glass disk that gleamed red as rubies in the light. The blood contained inside had somehow remained bright and fresh, captive of the magic that kept it from clotting. I snatched it out of his hand and made it vanish into my pocket.

  “Will you give it to your new keepers, so they can keep tabs on you?” he asked, a sneer in his voice.

  “I’ll destroy it,” I said. “And then, assuming you’re smart enough to keep your word, I’ll be able to go home. Don’t you want to go home, Leo? Because if you try to double-cross us, you won’t. Ever. You’ll die here, in a foreign country, and leave your parents and sister to mourn you.”

  “Remember that mutually assured destruction?” he asked. “If I disappear, my family will not rest until they know what happened to me.”

  “See, in England, you think a hundred miles is a long way,” I said. “In America, we think a hundred years is a long time. It’s funny, when you stop to think about it. We have a lot of empty places where your body could disappear. Sure, your family might figure it out eventually, but I promise you, you’d be missing a lot longer than you think, and we’d have plenty of time to get a head start. Play nice. We can all get out of this alive.”

  Cylia snorted but didn’t say anything. Under the circumstances, that was probably the best I was going to get.

  “I’m not sure why you think I’ll want to work with you when you insist on threatening me at every turn,” said Leonard.

  “Our sparkling personalities,” I said. “Also the part where you’re getting the credit for this, at least as far as the Covenant is concerned. You’re going home a hero. A big, successful, awesome hero. No one’s going to care that you lost me because you’ll be the man who killed the crossroads.”

  Leonard didn’t have to look tempted for me to know that I had him. He wouldn’t have been in the car otherwise. Hopefully, he hadn’t thought through the rest of what this meant.

  He was going to be working with us. Even if he tried to double-cross us—which let’s face it, he was almost certainly going to do—he would still have worked with us, and we would still know the truth. We’d know the hero of the Covenant of St. George had teamed up with his ancestral enemies to help us finish a job that was already almost done, and would have been finished with him or without him. Knowing meant we could document every damning step of the process.

  Talk about “mutually assured destruction.” Maybe a Covenant soldier like Dominic had been, like my grandfather had been, could have handled the sudden revelation that he’d voluntarily teamed up with a pair of sorcerers and a bunch of cryptids to fight an eldritch horror, but Leo was supposed to be their next leader. He was the proverbial chosen one, meant to usher the Covenant of St. George into their bright and genocidal future, and if I could use this to undermine his authority, I would. In a heartbeat.

  Of course, so much was contingent on me having a heartbeat when all this was over. The air outside the car pressed in on us, until it was like we were driving through the deep, unseen sea, surrounded by creatures that had never seen the light of day. I knew it was my paranoia speaking—the crossroads had no need for that kind of fancy special effects, and if Bethany had been lucky enough to be paying attention during my brief field trip outside the wards, she would already have come to say howdy and remind me about all the homicide I was supposed to be committing. I hated to depend on luck. I hated knowing that one slip and I’d be burning again, with a fire that should have been my friend.

  “I am so much more like my grandfather than I want to be,” I muttered.

  “What’s that?” asked Leonard.

  “Nothing.” He could find out about my specific issues later. Or not at all. I liked option two better.

  No ghosts appeared to trouble us as we finished the drive to the house, and if I hustled for the front door a little faster than was seemly, whatever. Let Leonard think I was desperate to get to the bathroom after hanging out in a coffee shop for the last hour. Everybody pees.

  Fern and James were in the front room, Fern filing her nails with the careful nonchalance of someone who wanted to be just about anywhere else, James making notes in a small, leather-bound notebook that looked like it had seen better days. The couch had also seen better days. Books covered every square inch that wasn’t occupied by James, and he had enough books piled on his legs that I wasn’t sure he was making a difference in the overall burden.

  While the air no longer held the brutally frigid snap of artificial winter, it was still cooler than it should have been, like we’d been running the air conditioning. Sam was nowhere to be seen. I looked around, frowned, and returned my attention to Fern.

  “Is he in our room? Because I don’t have time to do another heart-to-heart right now.” Being in a relationship was hard. I still liked it—especially the parts where I got to have sex on a regular basis—but wow was it more work than I had ever realized it was going to be.

  Fern shook her head and pressed a finger to her lips, signaling me to be quiet. Oh. I turned, watching as Cylia and Leonard made their way toward the house.

  Cylia was in the lead, probably because he assumed she’d know where the traps were. That was why she made it over the threshold while he was still climbing the porch steps, and was safely inside when Sam dropped soundlessly, like something out of a horror movie, from the awning to land behind Leonard.

  I’ll give Leo this much: Sam might not have made a sound, but whatever small displacement of the air he’d caused had been enough to clue Leonard to the fact that he was in danger. He stopped walking, back going very straight as he considered his options.

  He didn’t have many. Unless he wanted to treat those of us in the house as the “safe” option, which hey, maybe we were. Or maybe this had all been a very complicated murder plan.

  “Mutually assured destruction, I thought,” he said.

  “Yup,” I agreed amiably. Sam was coming out of his crouch, unfurling behind Leo inch by inch in a manner that would have been unbelievably menacing if I hadn’t found it so ridiculously hot. There was something very wrong with me. I welcomed it.

  Cylia grinned. Fern continued filing her nails. James glanced up from his notes long enough to make a disapproving face—less “oh no, a threat to human life is happening where I can see,” more “if I get blood on my book, I’m going to be pissed”—and went back to writing.

  “I came in good faith.”

  “This time,” I said. “I don’t think I’m your problem, though.”r />
  Finally, slowly, Leonard turned and considered the fūri behind him. Sam was standing completely straight, lips drawn back to show teeth that were thicker and stronger-looking than the human norm, the hair-slash-fur atop his head bristling in a clear threat display. His tail was curved in the high angle that meant he was angry, rather than the relaxed curl of comfort. I took a moment to appreciate all the research I’d done into his semi-unique body language. This little scene would have been a lot less fun if I’d been guessing at whether my boyfriend was really ready to commit murder on my behalf.

  He was. He so, so was. All I had to do was say the word and Leonard would be one ex-Covenant member, mostly because they seem to require their members to have heads attached to their bodies.

  “Er,” said Leonard. “Hello. I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced.”

  I was impressed. Given how incredibly dedicated to the idea that all cryptids were monsters that needed to be destroyed most members of the Covenant were, I had expected a less civil response. Then again, maybe the fact that Sam looked willing to answer incivility with violence was doing something to temper Leo’s natural instincts.

  “No,” said Sam curtly. “We haven’t been.”

  “Leonard Cunningham.” Leo stuck his hand out like he fully expected Sam to shake it. “If you kill me, you’ll bring the wrath of the entire Covenant of St. George down upon your head, and the heads of your companions. As you seem reasonably fond of them, I assume you’re not intending to do anything foolish.”

  “Nah. Nothing foolish.” Sam’s hand engulfed Leonard’s, long fingers wrapping around it and overlapping onto themselves. Leonard’s back stiffened further as he realized how strong Sam’s grip was.

  “I wish I had popcorn,” I muttered to Cylia.

  “You and me both,” she said.

  “See, you’re right: I like my friends. They’re pretty cool. Even the asshole on the couch isn’t as annoying as I thought he was going to be when I first met him. And you’re right that I don’t want to make trouble for them, since that’s not really friendly-like. But there’s something you’re wrong about.” Sam tugged. Leonard stumbled toward him, unable to break free of the stronger man’s grasp.