The weight of the watching crossroads grew even heavier. Come on, Bethany, I thought. Be a good girl and do your job, we’re counting on you to do your job—
The air shimmered, growing hazy as a summer day in the middle of the desert, even though the sky was dark and the wind was cold. Bethany didn’t appear. That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to, but for the moment, when we spoke, we were speaking directly to the dark.
“Here you go,” I said loudly, and shoved James away from me, away from the blade of my knife. He fell in the dirt in a tangle of limbs, one hand clasping his side. Blood trickled between his fingers, thick and red. He was practically panting from the pain. He’d probably never been stabbed before. Amateur.
The others were arrayed behind me; I could hear them breathing, hear the soft scuffs of their feet as they shifted their weight. Otherwise, the wood was silent, as if the world itself was holding its breath.
“Well?” I demanded. “I’m not killing him if no one’s going to witness it. I refuse to let you say I didn’t do it because you didn’t see it. I’m not letting you weasel out of this.”
“We weasel out of nothing,” said a voice from the air, as affronted as a child accused of stealing cookies. “How dare you accuse us of cheating? Flesh cheats. We deliver.”
“Prove it,” I said, and flung the knife into the dirt by James’ head. It landed less than an inch from his ear, causing him to recoil in genuine surprise and no small trace of fear. “Manifest.”
“You are not our master,” hissed the voice of the crossroads. Then, in a tone of smug sadism, it said, “But we can show you what it means for us to be yours.”
The air twisted. In the time it took to blink, the night sky was gone, replaced by a golden twilight that stretched from one side of the sky to the next. The trees went with the sky, replaced by endless cornfields and a horizon that seemed so far and open that human hands could never hope to hold it. Not all the trees: the hanging tree remained, looming in bleak and terrible judgment over all.
I was standing on the well-worn pavement of an endless country road, at the point where it was crossed by a gravel farmer’s trail. This was where the thresher would have gone, if this field had ever been intended for harvest. The knife I had thrown at James’ head was still there. So was James. I glanced to the side, not quite daring to turn.
“We’re here,” said Leonard, voice low. “Wherever ‘here’ is.”
So I wasn’t doing this without my backup. That was good. My friends were still in danger. That was bad. Leonard was in danger, which was a little more good than bad, but wasn’t ideal. Worst of all, the presence of the hanging tree told me we weren’t entirely in the pocket dimension where the crossroads “lived,” if the term could be considered applicable. The so-called real world surrounded us on all sides, only inches away, covered by an overlay of the unwanted and obscene.
James could perform his exorcism here and accomplish nothing. We needed to go deeper.
“We see you now,” said the voice of the crossroads, coming from everywhere around us at the same time. The smugness was still there, now underscored by a note of greedy anticipation, like a spoiled child on Christmas morning. “Finish it.”
“If I do, I get my magic back? I need to be able to protect myself from Leonard.” I gestured toward him. I didn’t have to work to put a quiver into my voice. That part came naturally, and I hated myself for it, just the slightest bit. There was every chance destroying the crossroads would mean giving that part of my soul up forever. It was a small price to pay, especially when measured against the lives the crossroads had claimed or destroyed over the years. It still stung.
“Yes, yes,” said the crossroads impatiently. “You will be restored, only kill him.”
“Right,” I said, and reached into my pocket as I turned toward James.
His eyes widened, and in that moment, I could see the fear there, clear as day. He carried frost in his fingers. He knew—or could guess—how much it would hurt to have it stolen away, and he knew what he’d give to get it back. What was one life against everything I should have had, everything that was already mine by right? My friends would forgive me. I could say I’d lost control, or that the crossroads had somehow forced me to do it, I could claim to be Jean Grey in the grasp of the Phoenix, and they’d believe me, because it would be so much better than the alternative. I could have my freedom and my fire back, and all it would cost was the life of one measly little self-taught sorcerer.
Bethany flickered into existence only a few feet away, eyes even wider than James’. She knew. Somehow, she knew. “Stop her!” she squealed.
“Catch,” I said, and threw the spirit jar containing Mary at James’ chest.
He didn’t catch it, quite: it bounced off his open hands and onto the pavement, where it cracked. It didn’t shatter, but it didn’t need to. A ghost can fit through any opening. A broken vessel can’t contain a spirit that doesn’t want to be contained. Smoke snaked through the crack, glittering in the twilight air, coming faster and faster until it shaped itself into the semblance of a teenage girl, solidified, and dissipated, leaving Mary in its wake.
I clapped a hand over my mouth, tears rising to my eyes. This was Mary as she was meant to be, without any interference from the crossroads or influence from the kids she agreed to babysit. Her hair was a streak of bone-white down her back, and her eyes were no color at all, but the shadowed hollows of a skull granted the illusion of life by a trick of the light. She wore a winding shroud, like something I might have expected to see on the Grim Reaper, and all she needed was a scythe and a strictly pointing finger to complete the illusion that she was the Ghost of Christmas Future come to deliver a major ass-kicking.
“Fuck. That,” said Bethany, and disappeared again, back to wherever crossroads ghosts go when not summoned.
“Why am I here?” Mary asked, before any of the rest of us could react.
James, gaping, said nothing.
She turned to look over her shoulder at him, giving a small “well, hurry it up” nod of her head at the same time. “Why am I here?” she repeated urgently.
“Uh,” said James.
Cylia stepped forward. “Our friend wishes to contest an unfair crossroads deal,” she said, voice loud and carrying. “He has that right.”
“Only if he does so of his own free will,” said Mary, still looking at James. “Well? We haven’t got all night.”
“I do!” he gasped, staggering to his feet. “I mean, I am. I mean, yes. I’m here to contest an unfair crossroads bargain.”
“You have made no bargains with us,” snarled the voice of the crossroads. “What trickery is this? Do you think to cheat?”
“It’s not a cheat,” said James. “I didn’t make the bargain, but Sally did. She came to you to find a way to get me out of this town. Well, she didn’t get me out. She didn’t get me anything but left alone. The deal that keeps me in New Gravesend is still in place, and Sally’s gone, and that means the bargain you made with her wasn’t honored. You’re a liar and a cheat, and you didn’t give me what Sally paid for, and I demand recompense!”
“Oh, you’ll have it,” said Mary, and smiled like the sun before she clapped her hands together and the world, such as it was, flashed corn-gold and blight-black in the same moment, and then everything was gone, and we were gone with it.
Twenty-three
“Family is more than what’s in your blood. Family is what’s in your heart, and who you reach for when the sun goes down.”
–Mary Dunlavy
In the liminal space between worlds … because that’s a great idea
THE FLASH FADED, and we were standing on a new road.
The corn still surrounded us, but where before it had been ordinary, even pleasant, the sort of corn that can be found in any farmer’s field, this corn was threatening, almost predatory, if that word could be applied to a plant. It grew higher than my head, and as the wind whispered through it, it rustled,
a sound like the gnashing of a million terrible teeth, like the sharpening of a thousand cruel claws.
The road under our feet was hard-packed dirt, and the twilight was gone, replaced by blazing midday sun. Everything smelled of heat-baked earth, of rust, and the distant, unmistakable taint of long-dried blood.
Mary had moved during the transition, and was on the other side of me now, putting herself between us—all of us—and the shape that had suddenly been sliced out of the flesh of the world. It was a person and it was a void at the same time, more of an absence than anything else. It hurt my eyes if I tried to look directly at it. It was wrong, an offense to everything that was good and right and true, and I was suddenly, horribly grateful Leonard was here. Maybe now that he’d had a look at a true abomination, he’d start chasing those and leave the innocent cryptids of the world alone.
Or maybe he’d run screaming and kill anything that frightened him twice as hard. People are complicated and difficult and hard to predict.
“My God,” whispered Leonard. I’d never heard a member of the Covenant of St. George sound so afraid.
“A complaint has been raised,” said Mary, voice clear and carrying. “I did not arbitrate the bargain in question, but I am here now. I will speak for the man James Smith, who carries such complaints against you.”
There was something lilting and old-fashioned in her voice, like the modern world was falling away from her one syllable at a time. She had lived and died in the 1930s, but the sound of her now was much older.
James stepped up behind her, one hand pressed over the wound in his side. “Yes,” he said. “I have a complaint.”
The crackling, impossible shape of the crossroads somehow managed to get across the impression that it was snarling at the pair of them. “Dead men can’t carry complaints.”
“But he’s not dead yet, and Antimony brought him to the crossroads,” said Mary. “Sally made her bargain before Annie did. It takes priority, and that means the complaint against it takes priority. You must resolve this before he becomes touchable again. Those are the rules. You want to follow the rules, don’t you?”
There was a thin edge of warning in her voice, like failing to follow the rules would have consequences. Maybe they would. This place … this wasn’t a real place, not like Earth, not even like the various dimensions where my grandmother searched for her missing husband. This was a gap hewn out of the space between worlds, and if the rules dropped away, there would be nothing left to keep it standing.
Break one of the rules here, break them all. The crossroads had created their own prison when they seized a place that seemed impermeable to outside attack. Sure, they were almost untouchable from the outside, but once someone was able to get in …
I took a step backward, away from the brewing confrontation. Sam gave me a curious glance. I nodded, and he mirrored my movement. Cylia, Fern, and Leonard did the same, until all five of us were backing carefully away, moving inch by inch down the road, away from Mary, and James, and the terrible fury of the crossroads.
Finally, we were far enough away that it felt safe to turn and run, paralleling the corn, which continued to rustle like the world’s greatest graveyard.
“I do not want to go into that!” shouted Sam.
“None of us do!” I replied.
“Where the fuck are we going?” asked Cylia.
It was a valid question. It deserved a serious answer. I considered as I ran, and finally called back, “Away.”
She glared at me. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t blame her. We were, after all, running down an endless unpaved road under a blasted summer sky, in a pocket dimension wholly owned, operated, and controlled by an unspeakable eldritch terror with a thing for being an asshole wishing ring.
That was the point. Not the asshole thing: the pocket dimension. We kept running until figures appeared on the horizon and I stumbled to a stop, motioning for the others to do the same. Fern, her density dialed down too far to make stopping easy, shot on a few more feet before Sam’s tail whipped out, wrapped around her middle, and jerked her back.
“What the hell?” Leonard demanded.
“Look.” I pointed at the figures up ahead.
He squinted for a moment. Then his eyes widened. “Is that … ?”
“Yeah.” Three figures, one a shape cut out of the air, one white-haired and standing in front of the third. They were too far away for us to pick out fine details, but it didn’t take fine details to recognize Mary, James, and the incarnate crossroads. There was no one else they could have been.
Leonard and the others turned to stare at me. I shrugged.
“My grandmother says there are two kinds of dimensions: real ones, like Earth, and artificial ones. The fake dimensions never extend as far as the real ones. Most of them don’t want to. They’re there to fulfill a purpose, and they don’t waste energy having things like ‘distance’ or ‘geography.’”
“What kind of foolishness have you people been getting up to?” demanded Leonard.
I ignored him.
“There are lots of crossroads,” said Fern. “People all over the world make bargains like you did. How can there be lots if their whole world is so small that we can run through it without running out of breath?”
“I’m not a dimensional physicist,” I said. “I have no idea.”
“So we ran away for the sake of not running away,” said Cylia. “Why?”
I took a breath and looked her directly in the eye. Here went everything.
“We’re in the crossroads,” I said. “Everything here is the crossroads. The sky, the ground, the corn, even that weird cut-out fucker arguing with Mary and James. That means the things they’ve taken from people are here. Not my grandfather or Sally—I don’t think anything human can live here for very long—but the things.”
Cylia nodded slowly. “Things like your magic.”
“Things like my magic,” I said. “I can’t reclaim it with the bargain unfulfilled. What we’re about to do may mean I never get it back. But at Lowryland, when I was close to it, my fire knew I was there. If I’m close enough to the magic, and if I’m very, very lucky, I could use it. Not enough to start a fire or something like that. Enough to cast a spell.”
“Annie …” said Sam.
“What kind of spell?” asked Cylia.
“The kind that throws us backward through time to the point where everything went wrong, and lets me try to stop it.” James’ plan. James’ idea. Just a slightly different execution.
“You would need to be … very lucky,” said Cylia carefully. “Even then, odds are good the luck would snap back on you after the spell was cast. You could die.”
“I’m against any plan where Annie dies,” said Sam.
“As am I,” said Leonard. The pair of them paused to glare at each other.
“I’m hard to kill,” I said.
“That’s not the only thing that could go wrong,” said Cylia.
“I know, but James is busy, and none of the rest of you have any magic at all, not even in someone else’s jar.” I offered her a wan smile. “It’s a bad plan. It’s a dangerous plan. It’s the plan we’ve got, and we’re doing it.”
“Annie?” Fern sounded uncertain.
“Yeah?”
“You knew before we came here that James would be busy. Was this the plan the whole time?”
Everything went silent. I took a breath, turning to fully face her before I reached out and grasped her shoulders.
“You are my best friends,” I said. “You’re the best friends a girl like me could ever have. You get that, right? I’m a Price. I grew up thinking all I’d ever have would be my family, and maybe the occasional flash of gratitude from someone I saved because we’re still trying to pay off a karmic debt that started centuries ago. And I got you. All of you. You’re amazing. You’re strong and clever and good. God, you’re good. So yeah, this was the plan all along, and it’s not because I have a death wish, and it’s not beca
use I owe anything. It’s because no matter how much else changes, I’m still a Price, and we’re like cockroaches. We don’t die.”
“Except when you do,” said Leonard.
I had almost forgotten he was there. I glanced at him and frowned. “Except when we do,” I said. “But that’s not going to be here, and it’s not going to be today. So how about you wish me luck and watch my back, okay?”
I waited for them to nod before I pulled the folded piece of paper from my pocket, opening it to reveal the spell I had meticulously copied from James’ mother’s journal. Seeing it in my own handwriting made it make more sense. That always happened. Making a thing your own made it more comprehensible, and hence easier to manage.
Please let this be easy to manage.
Sitting cross-legged on the hard-packed dirt of the road, I leaned forward and used my pointer finger to inscribe the beginning of a circle around myself. Finishing it took some twisting, but I was careful to keep my butt firmly on the ground. The simpler a spell, the more important it is to follow it exactly, and this one was as simple as they come. If it wanted me sitting while I drew my circle, I was going for the full sit.
I looked up. Cylia and Fern were watching James and Mary as they faced down the crossroads. Leonard was watching me, a scowl on his face. So was Sam, although he wasn’t scowling, just staring at me with open-faced longing. His tail was wrapped around his left ankle, squeezing so hard it had to hurt. It was taking everything he had not to grab me and book it. I could see it in his eyes, and I loved him for wanting to save me, even as I loved him even more for staying where he was.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said, with a confidence I didn’t entirely feel. “Trust me. I’m a professional.”
That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8) Page 32