That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8)

by Seanan McGuire

  “Professional pain in my ass,” he muttered.

  I flashed him a quick, strained smile, and looked back down at the paper in my hands. Lowryland had done me few favors, but my training there had given me this much, at least: I had a better sense of what the spell was meant to do, and how to craft and control it. Now all I needed was the magic.

  “Come back to me,” I whispered, bowing my head until my chin almost grazed my chest and closing my eyes, straining for a flicker of fire anywhere around me. “The deal was you’d go to the crossroads until I paid for your release. Well, I’m at the crossroads now. We’re in the same place. The deal didn’t say anything about keeping your distance while we were in the same place.”

  Was there a hint of heat in my fingertips, or was that wishful thinking? If I was lucky—and Cylia was here to make sure I was lucky—it was my magic straining to get back to me. It wasn’t much. It would have to be enough.

  Spells come in two major varieties. One type imposes the caster’s will on the world, creating something out of nothing or mending something that’s been broken. Those spells are pretty clear violations of the laws of physics, many of which have unkind things to say about people who go around summoning extra mass or setting things on fire all willy-nilly. If a physicist ever acquires the power to cast those types of spells, and the underlying forces that make them possible, I expect the human race will have access to faster-than-light travel inside of the week.

  (Honestly, it’s sort of a terrifying miracle that no sorcerers have decided to go into physics. It takes someone who really understands gravity to figure out how best to turn it off. Then again, maybe that’s why it hasn’t happened. No one with the sense God gave the little green apples is going to want to combine the peanut butter of physics with the strawberry jam of sorcery into one big, delicious sandwich of ending reality as we know it.)

  The second kind of spell is subtler. It’s the sort of nasty working that the coven controlling Lowryland used when they tailored their tickets to steal luck from their clientele. It draws its power from the thing it focuses on, rather than from the caster. That means the caster’s strength isn’t the limit on what the spell can do. It also means the target the spell is linked to can wind up seriously hurt, depending on how skilled the sorcerer doing the casting is.

  The real world is big and complicated and unforgiving, and we don’t get the luxury of pretending there’s “good magic” and “bad magic.” This isn’t Harry Potter. But if it were, the spell I was about to attempt would definitely have been verging on the Dark Arts.

  Carefully, I sketched the shape of it on the ground in front of me, pressing down until I left layers of skin behind. I didn’t need to bleed for this specific spell, but pain is always good fuel for the kind of magic capable of chewing people up and spitting them out again. Sam made a wordless noise of dismay. I kept my eyes on the ground. He really wasn’t going to like what happened next.

  Exorcisms can be performed by anybody. There’s nothing magical about them. They’re more like anti-virus programs for the universe, and they don’t have anything to do with demons, or faith, or any of the other trappings of the Catholic church. They’re just an ordinary person who belongs in the dimension where they’re standing, looking at something that shouldn’t be there and saying, “Yeah, you need to go the hell home.”

  Time travel is another matter.

  “Tick,” I said, and focused on the days that had passed since I’d left my home. All my stuff was there. My bedroom, packed with everything I’d ever wanted to be in love with, the carcasses of a hundred hobbies, the still-breathing bodies of a dozen current obsessions. Would they continue to hold the same appeal for me when I finally made it back to Oregon? Or would I have become someone so different that I no longer knew how to be in love with the things that had made me who I was? Everything that lives can change. Change isn’t always a good thing.

  “Tock,” I said, and focused on the carnival, the days I’d spent—however briefly—as Timpani Brown, last survivor of a dead show, orphan and drifter and newest member of the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival. That was where I’d met Sam, where he’d somehow managed to turn an antagonistic dance into a courtship into the closest thing I was ever likely to experience to a fairy-tale romance. Sure, it was more Shrek and Fiona than anything by Disney, but honestly, that suited me. I would have looked silly in a ballgown anyway.

  “Tick,” I said, and focused on Lowryland, the time I’d spent there, wishing each day away, content to sink into mundanity and bland security. I didn’t regret those days. I mean, I regretted the ones that had led to me getting tangled up in a coven of sort of evil assholes who were happy to use my magic to boost their own nasty plans, but that was less about the time and place and more about the people involved. Lowryland had given me the space to recover, the time to breathe, and a place to heal. For that alone, I would always think of it fondly.

  The air was getting thicker and more opaque around me. I could barely see Sam’s feet through the growing barrier. If I’d dared to look up, I probably wouldn’t have been able to make out any of the details of his face. That was unnerving, if not unexpected. He existed in the here and now of the crossroads. I was trying to use their own power to take myself somewhere else, somewhere older and deeper and less here.

  The heat slipped out of my fingertips, slowly at first, growing faster and faster as the air continued to blur, now becoming then becoming now becoming nothing, every time and anytime all tangled up together. The Doctor would have been proud. Of course, the Doctor would also have come equipped with his very own time machine and rendered this entire exercise functionally moot. Who needs an untested, unpredictable act of sorcery when you have a big blue box?

  “Tock,” I said, and the air exploded outward in a shimmering wall of razor-sharp shards, passing through the place where my friends should have been before dispersing into a field of shining golden wheat. I stared.

  The landscape had shifted without changing a bit. I was still sitting in the middle of a lonely dirt road, stretching from one end of the horizon to the other like an unbroken string, ready to carry the travelers home. The sky was still midsummer blue, the sun still too bright to look at directly … but there were clouds there now, white and puffy and breaking the glare into smaller, more manageable pieces. They flitted almost playfully across the sun, and while it was warm, it wasn’t so hot that I felt the need to run for cover.

  The corn was gone, replaced by harvest-ready wheat, each head heavy with grain. It was enough to feed a family, a township, a world, if it was managed correctly. There was movement far out in the field, like someone was reaping even now, gathering the goodness of the season to fill their belly.

  There were no footprints in the earth around me. My friends hadn’t disappeared: they’d never been here in the first place. I was far away from them, in a time so far before my own that it might as well have been another country, breathing air that had never been intended for me. I rose on shaky legs, trying to focus on the wheat, the road, on anything apart from the question I hadn’t allowed myself to ask before attempting this particular feat of foolhardy heroism.

  If I was here to stop the thing we knew as the crossroads from latching onto and replacing the actual crossroads—whatever that was or meant—and I had managed to use the parasite’s power to come back this far, how was I going to get home?

  Twenty-four

  “We make our choices. We live with their consequences. That’s what it means to walk in this world, whether we like it or not.”

  –Evelyn Baker

  In the liminal space between worlds, having a minor panic attack

  THE ANSWER TO THE question I hadn’t asked came from an unexpected place: behind me. “You can’t go home,” said a voice, familiar as waffles on a Sunday morning and cold as the wind blowing through a graveyard. “You’re already there. Antimony Timpani Price, do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  Some of
the tension left my shoulders, replaced by a yawning exhaustion that felt big enough to reach up and swallow me whole. “Hi, Aunt Mary,” I said, turning. I’d always known, on some level, that when I finally died, she would be the one who’d come to carry me down into the twilight, down to where the ghost girls go.

  Rose claims the position of primary psychopomp for our family, and that’s all right, really. She’s earned it. But for Mary, the youngest member of the family is her responsibility until they’re not, and that meant if—well, if—

  “Am I dead?” I blurted. “Because that wasn’t supposed to make me dead, but I don’t really see how you can be here if I’m not.”

  “You’re not dead,” she said. She wasn’t smiling. That wasn’t a good sign. “You did just break about a hundred rules of dealing with the crossroads. We’re standing five hundred years in the past. Do you understand how much trouble you’re in, young lady?”

  “Are you going to ground me for irresponsible time travel?”

  “I might!” She stomped her foot, glaring at me. “You don’t seem to understand how serious this is! What were you trying to do?”

  “Travel five hundred years into the past. Give or take a few decades.”

  Mary stilled. “Why?”

  “How are you here? The spell only covered me. Are you still arguing for James? He’s defenseless if you aren’t there to stand between him and the crossroads.”

  “He has his sorcery, which is more than I can say for you,” she countered. “And he has a group of cryptids who’ve already said they want to keep him alive, and a foolhardy knight of that damned Covenant looking to prove himself against a greater foe. James is fine. As for your first question, I’m here because you’re mine, and anywhere you go, I can always follow. Whether I want to or not, apparently. Annie, what are you doing?”

  I took a deep breath. “Hopefully? An exorcism.”

  Mary stared at me for a count of ten, empty highway eyes wide with confusion that slowly transformed into horror. “Annie.”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “Annie.”

  “It’s not really time travel. I’m not going to create a paradox or rewrite the past or anything stupid like that.” Or was I? If I broke the hold of the faux-crossroads before they could clamp down, would the crossroads ever have the chance to take my grandfather? Maybe I was about to create a timeline where I’d never been born, one where I either didn’t exist or was the last shipwrecked survivor of a world that had never been given the chance to become.

  It was a pretty horrifying idea. Although if there was any consolation, it was also pretty cool.

  “Are you sure? Absolutely certain? You’re talking about fighting a force powerful enough to claim and corrupt all this.” She waved her hands, indicating the pastoral landscape around us.

  “About that,” I said. “Where is the current crossroads?”

  “There isn’t one.”

  I blinked.

  “There never was.” Mary sighed. “It was only us, in the beginning. Ghosts like me, who’d died where the roads converged, who listened and helped people tap into the power of this place. It’s the anima mundi, Annie. It’s the spirit of Earth. This is where all the magic and all the will that doesn’t get used by the living goes when they become the dead. It’s a lake. People could drown here if they weren’t careful, and that’s why guardians were posted around the edges, to keep the ones who found their way this deep from losing themselves entirely. The bargains are part of keeping the water levels high—or they were, until things changed.”

  “Why did they change?”

  “I don’t know.” She turned her face toward the sky. “But I think we’re about to find out.”

  I looked up. The clouds, no longer fluffy and white, were gathering in what looked suspiciously like a hurricane funnel. It was obscene, a stain on the previously perfect sky, and I hated and feared it in immediate equal measure. I took an involuntary step backward, as if I could run away from something that looked wide enough to swallow the entire world.

  “What you did, whatever you did, undo it,” hissed Mary. “Get out of here while you still can.”

  “Can you get out of here?”

  She said nothing.

  I paused. “Mary?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re not really you, are you? You didn’t know all that stuff about the crossroads. You only knew what the parasite was willing to tell you, and I’m betting it didn’t start with a ‘how I ate the world yum yum yum’ history lesson. And you never told me things I hadn’t earned. You’re still—I mean, Mary’s still—in the present, helping James fight with whatever’s using your name now.”

  “My name?” asked the figure with my babysitter’s face.

  “Yeah. Yours. Because you’re the anima mundi, aren’t you?”

  Slowly, Mary’s lips curved upward in a smile. She blinked, and the empty road in her eyes was gone, replaced by a starfield, specks of light scattered across an endless velvet blackness. They were beautiful, and terrifying, and they had no place in Mary’s face.

  “Oh, you are a clever one,” said the anima mundi. “You’re not here using my strength. You’re riding the one who comes to usurp me. You can’t stop it from happening. You said so yourself. This has to be, because it has already been.”

  “But you’re not dead,” I said. “You survived whatever it’s going to do to you.”

  “I’m the ghost of the dreams of a living Earth,” said the anima mundi. “I’m the layer that connects the twilight and the daylight. No one sees me unless they come here, to my crossroads, and then they pay for the privilege, because there have to be mysteries, and there have to be costs. I’m not the great work you think of when you say ‘crossroads.’ That comes after and before me.”

  “And that’s great, if a little crunchy granola for me, but the thing that controls the crossroads when I’m from is bad,” I said. “It hurts people because it can. It makes cruel bargains. It hurt my family, and it hurts the ghosts who’re supposed to be helping people understand the deals before they finish making them, and I’m pretty sure it started by hurting you. It throws power around like it’s never going to run out. But it is going to run out, isn’t it?”

  Silently, the anima mundi nodded.

  “The crossroads are using the power of the living Earth to fuel their bargains, and they don’t replenish it, and they’re draining it dry.” It was a horrifying thought. It also explained a lot of things, like why the “age of magic” was supposedly over, and why the birthrate for magic-users had declined the way it had. Even with the Covenant hunting down and killing practitioners, magic was something I would have expected to see cropping up with enough regularity that hiding it from the world would be a lot more difficult, if not outright impossible. Instead, only the routewitches seemed to be maintaining their numbers, and according to Aunt Rose, they drew their power from the ghostroads and the twilight, not the living Earth.

  It was like a piece had been missing from my understanding of the magical world, and now everything was starting to make sense. And that meant I had to make it home alive. If I hadn’t already been planning on it, now I had to, because my family needed to know what we’d been ignorant of. We needed to write this down and document it, so it wouldn’t be lost again.

  “Yes,” said the anima mundi.

  “So I’m going to stop it.”

  “How can you, future girl? You gave your own power away. This isn’t how you bring it back to you.”

  “Maybe not. And maybe this is a problem my family didn’t help create, since we’re not the ones who decided to mess with the way the crossroads operate. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to fix it. Fixing things is my job.” I turned my eyes back to the stain across the sky. The parasite, the thing that would replace the crossroads for five hundred years, was coming. “Do you know what it is?”

  “It comes from outside,” she said, voice little above a whisper. “It was me, o
nce, or something very much like me, the living spirit of a world that needed to be cared for, that needed to care. It lost its way. It lost its world. Now it lives by feeding on worlds that have never learned to defend themselves. I was turned so far inward that I never once looked outward.”

  “Time is sort of a negotiable concept for you, huh?”

  The anima mundi looked at me wearily. “My death approaches, child. You should not make light of what you’ll never know.”

  “I think I liked you better when you were pretending to be Mary.” I reached into my pocket. The salt was still there, soothingly solid under my fingers. “Right here, right now, before it comes, do you have the power to make bargains?”

  For the first time, the anima mundi looked surprised. “Yes, but I can’t give you back your magic. That happens so far after me that it might as well have happened on another planet.”

  “If you’re the anima mundi, and you’re about to be replaced by something from another world, I think it sort of did happen on another planet.” The invaders from Mars weren’t coming. The Martians were dead in their beds, quietly rotting, while their entire world had come to swallow the Earth.

  Metaphorically. I was pretty sure the crossroads weren’t being possessed by the anima mundi of Mars, if only because this—whatever it was—didn’t feel like a local. It had come from outside. Was coming from outside. The bruised streak in the sky was getting wider and deeper and rawer looking, like a wound that was never going to heal. Streaks of corrupted yellow and green spilled from its center, slashing through the sky, tainting everything they touched. The clouds that hadn’t joined the growing maelstrom had dissipated, leaving the bleakly empty horizon that I was used to seeing when I came into contact with the crossroads.

  “I suppose,” she said uncertainly. “What do you want from me?”

  “Permission to go into the field without your wheat eating me, or whatever it is supernatural wheat likes to do to intruders.”

  She lifted an eyebrow.