That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8)

by Seanan McGuire

  “And my mother knew?” he asked.

  This was the hard part. I took a deep breath. “According to your father, she knew, and she also knew that as soon as you were old enough for your magic to stabilize—as soon as the bargain was kept—she’d get sick. Only one descendant at a time. The crossroads don’t like sorcerers. They weren’t going to allow your family to breed an army against them.”

  James was silent for several seconds. Then, jerkily, he stood, and punched the nearest wall. Frost clung to the wallpaper where his knuckles hit. I took a step back, watching silently as he struck it again and again, until he stopped and slumped, leaning forward until his forehead hit the wall. He was panting.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know this is a lot.”

  His laughter was bitter. “A lot? I killed my mother.”

  “No, you didn’t. She knew, James. She knew she’d only get a few years with you, and she decided it was worth it. You don’t get to say that she was wrong. Okay? She wanted you to exist. She wanted to know you.”

  He turned to look at me bleakly. “What do I do now?”

  “Now?” I shrugged. “Now you do what you’ve been working toward all along. You kick the crossroads until they beg for mercy, and you do it for Sally, and you do it for your mother. And then you come home with me, and I introduce you to the rest of the family.”

  He hesitated. “Will they … do you think they’re going to like me?”

  It was no effort at all to smile at him. “I think they’re going to love you, new brother. I really think they will.”

  * * *

  The waffle party was in full swing downstairs. Cylia had piled several plates high and set them in the middle of the dining room table, surrounded by an assortment of toppings both predictable—maple syrup and powdered sugar and strawberry jam—and a little bit surreal—bacon bits and chicken nuggets and candied cauliflower. She saw me eyeing the chicken nuggets, and shrugged.

  “Chicken and waffles is a time-honored tradition,” she said. “I wasn’t going to fry chicken, so you get the next best thing.”

  “Plus no bones,” said Fern gleefully. “The best meat doesn’t have any bones.”

  “Sylphs are natural insectivores,” I said, for James and Sam’s benefit. Their mutual horrified looks were simply a bonus. Fern giggled. The bonus wasn’t just for me.

  Sam was perched on the back of the couch with his plate of waffles, eating with both hands while holding his coffee with his tail. I settled on the cushion in front of him with my own smaller portion, watching the room as I cut the waffles into bite-sized pieces.

  Looking at Cylia, it would have been easy to tell myself she was completely at ease with the situation, ready to deal with whatever the world wanted to throw at her. The platters of waffles put the lie to that idea. She was as tightly wound as the rest of us, and dealing with the situation the only way she could: by taking care of us now, before she couldn’t anymore.

  She didn’t think we were going to make it through this. That was almost reassuring, in a messed-up way. I might be stubbornly willing to keep telling myself I could find a route that saved everyone I cared about, even if I couldn’t necessarily save my magic, or even myself, but if she was accepting the depth of the shit we were in, that meant she wasn’t deluding herself. And if Cylia had accepted the reality of our situation, Fern had, too. Sam might think I could handle anything, but he was enough of a realist to know things might not go our way. As for James …

  He’d spent years planning a way to get his revenge on the crossroads and bring Sally home. Alive or dead. Alive would be better, of course, but at least having a corpse would give her family freedom, even as it broke his heart forever. Sometimes closure is the only gift worth giving.

  We’d been in town for less than a week, and he was on the cusp of finally getting what he wanted—possibly even including his freedom, if he survived the confrontation. If this went the way we were hoping, when it was done, he’d be able to put New Gravesend behind him forever. He could walk away from the father who’d never understood him, from the shadows on his mother’s grave, from the people who had been perfectly happy to live in the safe harbor of a sorcerer’s protection, without remembering what that meant for the sorcerer.

  (Maybe that was unfair. James hadn’t known about the crossroads deal, after all, and if the sorcerer didn’t know, how could the people he was ostensibly forgetting understand what he’d given up to stay with and watch over them? The problem with bargains that span generations is that they can be forgotten without being invalidated. It’s not right and it’s not fair, but it’s the world we live with, and it’s the only world we’ve got.)

  Everything was changing. All we could do was try to keep up.

  The doorbell rang. Sam shifted back to human form without getting off the back of the couch. I stayed where I was, continuing to inhale waffles. Everyone else had had the chance to get a head start on me and James, after all. Cylia looked around the room, saw that no one was moving, rolled her eyes, and moved toward the door.

  “Think she needs backup?” asked Sam, swallowing.

  “I think she needs a target for her pent-up aggressions,” I said, and ate a bite of waffle paired with chicken nugget. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, either, but my culinary preferences have always been more about convenience than quality. “If it’s James’ dad again, he’s never coming back.”

  “If she scares him off the property, I’m moving in with you,” said James.

  I laughed, and was still laughing when Cylia returned, now trailed by a ruffled-looking Leonard Cunningham. He fixed me with a steely-eyed gaze that was probably meant to be impressive, but really made him look like he’d eaten something unpleasant.

  “Want some waffles?” I asked.

  Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. He paused, blinking at me.

  “Yes, please,” he finally said. “I’m starving.”

  “They’re on the table, help yourself,” I said. “We’re carb-loading before we head for the crossroads. Everything go okay?”

  “He’s not inside out, so I’m assuming yes,” said Sam.

  “Everything went … reasonably well,” said Leonard. “I feel the need for a stiff drink, or perhaps five, but no one died, and I was not badgered into accepting any bargains.”

  For the first time, I noticed how pale he was, and the faint tremor in his hands. He had been genuinely shaken by the encounter. I set my plate aside and stood.

  “Drinking is probably a bad idea right now,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know.” Leonard shook his head. “I’d heard stories, but I always assumed … I thought the people who let themselves be taken advantage of were weak, somehow. That they’d earned the fates the crossroads cast for them. But I …”

  He stopped, waving his hands for a moment before he looked at me helplessly.

  “I could have fallen to temptation,” he said. “You are my enemy. I know that. I may never convince you that my side is the right one. But with God as my witness, it is my duty to help you stop this thing. This is an abomination. It should never have been.”

  I smiled and extended one hand. After a beat, he took it, expression turning quizzical.

  “All right,” I said. “Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s get this party started.”

  Twenty-two

  “Nothing is too much to pay to bring the ones you love safely home. Remember that when the time comes to pay the last thing you wanted to lose.”

  –Alice Healy

  Crossing New Gravesend, moving toward a confrontation

  IT TURNED OUT LEONARD didn’t have an American driver’s license: he’d been getting around town via a local taxi service. Good for the economy, not so great for the part where we had one car and six people. Cylia’s fondness for ridiculously roomy classics meant we could cram five people into the car we had, as long as the folks in the back didn’t mind getting real friendly, bu
t six was a step too far. Worse, we were hoping to come back from the crossroads with seven. The laws of physics said cramming Sally in with the rest of us wasn’t going to happen.

  When in doubt, remember that there’s more than one way to get anywhere. James had his bike. He was the one who knew the way, which made it important for him to stay in the car with Cylia, but I, in addition to never learning how to drive, had been riding my own bike since I was nine years old.

  “You’re sure you’re okay with this,” said James, for the fifth time. “I could write the directions down, and you could ride with Cylia.”

  “I’m fine.” I checked the strap on my helmet. Roller derby safety gear and bicycle safety gear are basically identical, at least for our current needs. “Just make sure she goes slow, and I’ll be able to keep up without crashing. We get there, we get Sally back, everything is awesome, we all go out for donuts.”

  “I like donuts,” said Fern, stepping up next to me with her own helmet in her hand.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Am I missing something?”

  “Only the part where we’re riding doubles to the hanging tree,” she said and dimpled. “I’m the lightest, remember? I don’t want to be squished in with a Covenant boy. And you’re stupid if you think we’re letting you out there alone. There’s too much that could go wrong.”

  “Did Sam put you up to this?”

  Fern’s smile lost a few watts, dimming into something more reasonable. “Sam’s not the only one allowed to worry about you. I was here before he was, and with the way you humans date, I’ll probably be here when he’s gone.”

  She wasn’t trying to be hurtful. Sylphs have a different approach to relationships, prizing friendship over romance. Whether they operated that way before humans killed off so many of them that being willing to live alone became a survival strategy is anyone’s guess. We’ve left a permanent mark on this planet, and not only because of our fondness for digging holes.

  “I’m not alone,” I said. “I have Mary.”

  “She’s in a jar.” Fern rolled her eyes. “Can we pretend we’ve had this whole fight, and skip ahead to the part where you admit I’m right and we get on the stupid bike? I want this over with. I want to go home.”

  I opened my mouth and paused. “You’re right,” I said finally. “Let’s do this.”

  Fern looked relieved. James nodded.

  “Be careful,” he said and walked to the car, sliding into the back with Leonard. Cylia and Sam were in the front, the one because she was driving, the other because if something happened and he had to change forms, it would be much easier for him to shove himself through the window from the front.

  I swung my leg over the bike, barely feeling the frame shift as Fern settled herself behind me, her mass dialed as far down as it would go. She wasn’t going to slow me down. If anything, her ability to get heavier and add a little bit of ballast when I went around corners would keep me from losing control and hence speed me up.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  Fern slid her arms around my waist. “Hope so,” she said.

  I waved to Cylia, signaling for her to start the car. She did, rolling out slowly at first, then gathering speed as I began to pedal, sliding smoothly into position behind her. Fern held me tight, and the road was open, and we had so far to go, and we were almost finished. God help me, we were almost done.

  New England is the place to go for tiny, creepy towns that look like they belong in the latest Stephen King made-for-TV movie. The trees along the highway shielded us from most of New Gravesend, but what I glimpsed between them was more horror cliché than anything else: tiny, mismatched houses with artfully shabby yards, lived-in but abandoned at the same time. The occasional child at play made things even worse, standing next to trampolines or holding red rubber balls as they considered their next moves. If any of them had been close enough to talk to us, I would have had no trouble believing they’d invite me to come play with them—or worse, tell me that everyone floated in this terrible town.

  It was my imagination working overtime, taking the fact that I was on my way to challenge the crossroads and had allied myself with the Covenant and using it to turn my natural suspicion of the unknown up to eleven. Even knowing that didn’t make me more comfortable, especially when Cylia turned off the main road, down a narrow, twisting lane so lined with trees that even the moonlight couldn’t find a way to shine through. I pedaled as hard as I could, unwilling to risk losing the faint illumination of her taillights. This was an ordinary road, part of an ordinary town that certainly didn’t deserve the thoughts I was throwing in its direction, but everything felt shadowy and terrible and like it was going to come crashing down at any moment, leaving us trapped.

  “I need better hobbies,” I muttered, and pedaled onward.

  I’d never seen the infamous “hanging tree” before, but I knew it when it came into sight. No other label could have applied. It was a monster, skeletal and spidery at the same time, with branches that spread wide to claw the sky, forcing other trees to grow away from it lest they find themselves denied the opportunity to grow. Its trunk was a vast, gnarled thing, roots bursting through the ground and the roadway alike, shattering the pavement. It was easy to understand why settlers in the area might have looked at this tree above all others, and thought, “Yes, this is a good place to start killing people.”

  A second road—barely wide enough to be worthy of the name, although it was paved, which was more than I’d been expecting—ran across the first, creating a small but distinct crossroads. Cylia pulled off to the shoulder, putting her hazard lights on. An unnecessary precaution: this didn’t look like the sort of place that got a lot of traffic.

  I stopped the bike behind her, lowering the kickstand. “Here we go,” I said.

  Fern unlooped her arms from my midsection. “Are you nervous?” she asked.

  “I’m terrified,” I said, sliding off the bike and turning to face her. She blinked, clearly surprised. I shook my head. “Lying never got us anywhere. We’re about to bait a force that’s bigger than any of us into pulling us out of this level of reality, and once we’re there, we’re going to try something monumentally stupid. If this doesn’t work, we could all be lost forever.”

  Would Grandma Alice add me to her list of people to look for? Or would the crossroads shunt me off to wherever they’d been keeping my grandfather, giving him someone to talk to for maybe the first time ever? It was a surreal thought. I didn’t want to learn the answer.

  “I just didn’t expect you to say it, that’s all,” whispered Fern.

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to do this. This isn’t your fight.”

  “You’re my friend,” she said. “It’s always been my fight.”

  A car door slammed. I turned. The others were climbing out of Cylia’s car, Sam in human form and looking cranky about it, Leonard scowling, and James looking like he was just shy of throwing up on his shoes. Given what was about to happen, I couldn’t blame any one of them. I removed my helmet and slung it over the handlebars. We were isolated enough that I wasn’t as worried about someone stealing our shit as I was about never coming back to get it.

  Fern by my side, I walked over to join the others. James looked at me. I looked levelly back.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  He nodded, lips thin, utterly silent. That was fine. If he’d tried to talk, he probably would have started coming up with reasons why we needed to change the plan, and so he was biting his tongue because he understood there wasn’t another way. We needed the crossroads to manifest. Everything else depended on that.

  I held my hand out to Sam. He reached into his shirt and produced one of my throwing knives, dropping it into my palm. The feeling of relief that washed over me was indescribable. I was armed again. Even if it was only long enough for me to stab an ally.

  “What’s that for?” asked Leonard warily.

  “You’ll see,” I said, and grabbed James’ arm with
one hand. “Come on.”

  James didn’t help me, but he didn’t resist as I hauled him to the place where the two roads converged. The others followed at a safe distance, waiting for the shit to hit the fan. I stopped at the dead center of the crossroads, noting that the leaves under our feet were undisturbed. No one had come this way in a while.

  Nothing happened.

  I didn’t want to go straight to the stabbing: I was only planning to do it once, and I didn’t actually want this encounter to end with an unnecessary corpse. “Fight me,” I hissed.

  James’ eyes widened in understanding, and he began struggling to get his arm out of my grasp. “Let go, you lunatic!” he snapped. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but you’re going to regret this!”

  His voice was high and shrill, the performance of a man who’d never done theater in his life. It shouldn’t have fooled anyone. But as he went on, the air around us grew thick and electric with something that wasn’t pressure, yet managed to have weight all the same. The eyes of the crossroads were upon us, watching, waiting to see what we were going to do. We had their attention.

  “Sorry,” I mouthed. James, realizing what was about to happen, stopped yelling, true panic slipping into his eyes. He might have been preparing a protest, an excuse, anything to keep me from moving on to the next part of the plan.

  He didn’t have the chance. The knife was already in my hand, and it slid into his side with the soft, characteristic slicing sound of metal meeting meat. He gasped, panic melting into shock. The air around us chilled as he called his magic, instinctively flailing for a way to make the hurting stop.

  I’d promised to only hurt him a little, and I’d meant it, but that didn’t mean I was going to stand by and let him deliver another case of frostbite. My knife was embedded in the muscle of his side, positioned to stay well clear of his internal organs. I gave it a small twist anyway, causing more damage. More importantly, having a knife twisted inside your body hurts. The cold broke as James lost his concentration.