“Hey, I come from a time where killer corn is all the rage,” I protested. “I like to ask.”
“That boon I can grant without charge,” she said. “Go into the wheat. Do as you like, but try not to damage anything. Agriculture is among the greatest of humanity’s achievements.”
“Got it,” I said, and turned my back on the force of nature with my babysitter’s face, taking one last, wary glance at the bruised sky before diving into the waving field of golden grain. I had work to do.
Like I said before, exorcisms aren’t about magic, and they aren’t about religion. They’re about knowing and maintaining the natural order of things. Most bodies are only meant to play host to a single soul at a time. Casting out the one that doesn’t belong isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but it’s less about power than it is about ritual, preparation, and will.
Exorcising the crossroads in the modern day, when they’d had five hundred years to strengthen their hold on this world, was next to impossible. Doing it in the past, even if the past was an illusion, might work. It had to work.
If it didn’t work, I was going to be in a world of hurt.
I plunged into the wheat, walking fast, until I found a place where the stalks had been cut down and the ground had been stomped flat, preparing for another planting. I took the salt out of my pocket and drew a circle around myself, letting it trickle between my fingers as I turned. I opened my mouth to begin the ritual … and stopped.
Church has never been my family’s thing. I could recite Bible passages all I wanted, but they wouldn’t mean anything to me, not really. When it comes to liturgies and catechisms, there’s really only one faith that’s been completely available to us, offered freely and without the expectation that we’ll join in. We’ve never needed to believe. We’ve only ever needed to know.
“In the days when the faith in the Feathered Lords was waning, came Elizabeth Evans, called Beth, the Kindly Priestess, who did find Us gathered in her yard, and say, Why, Look At You, You Must be Starving. And she did gather Us in her apron and carry Us into her Home, which would be our Home thereafter, and say, You Are Safe Here, If You Will Follow the Rules I Set—”
The bruise in the sky became a gaping, rotting wound, and the summer shattered, the air going cold. Wind whipped through the wheat, chilling and killing it. How long did this field lie fallow before the corn came pushing its way through the earth, already ripening, already aware?
I shivered, and continued, “Her child, Caroline, the Well-Groomed Priestess, did come to us with open hands, and say, My Mother Is Old, and The Covenant Does Not Understand; Come With Me, For Any Husband I Will Have Will Have You Also. She did marry Peter Carew, the God of Hard Work and Sunshine, and they did raise four children in hope and in glory, hidden from the Eye of the Covenant by the strength of their affections—”
The sky … tore. The sky broke, like a plate dropped from a great height, and there were shards of sky falling all around me, terrible, impossible shards of sky, which shattered again when they hit the ground, becoming an oily, sticky film that danced with diseased rainbows before sinking into the earth. In the distance, the anima mundi shrieked, fear and rage and agony blurring into a single heartrending sound.
I wanted to go to her. I didn’t know her, for all that she looked so much like Mary, but something in her scream tore at my heart and made me want nothing more than to break the circle I’d drawn and run to her aid. Whether that was the incoming crossroads trying to lure me or the spirit of Earth calling for help didn’t matter. I had to stay where I was. I had to finish this.
I took a steadying breath, and said, “Her eldest daughter, Agnes, refused us, but did not break her mother’s Confidence, saying, You Ask Too Much of Me. But her second daughter, Enid, the Patient Priestess, did say, Mother, I Love You, and I Love the Mice, and I Will Keep Them Safe. She did marry Alexander Healy, the God of Uncommon Sense, and on their wedding night—”
Something fell from the broken, breaking sky, something made of angles and reflections and wrongness. Everything about it was wrong. It was obscene, offensive to the eye: it had no business here, or anywhere near here. It didn’t belong.
It howled, and its voice was the voice of the void. The anima mundi screamed, agony and anxiety. I pulled a handful of salt out of my pocket, cutting the catechism short as I flung it into the air.
“In the name of Beth Evans, I cast you out! In the name of Caroline Carew, I refuse you passage here! In the name of Enid—”
A hand made of crackling static and absence grasped my wrist, jerking me off my feet and out of the circle. I found myself dangling, toes several inches above the ground, looking into the emptiness that was the face of the crossroads.
“You don’t belong here, human child,” it hissed, like static, like nothingness, like the act of being erased. There was no fire in my fingers. There had never been fire in my fingers. I was vibrating apart, my component atoms becoming nothing but dust and the opposite of memory. I would be the déjà vu that haunted my family for a hundred generations, the girl who should have been but never was born.
(and a carnival burned before a Covenant strike team, and a screaming fūri died with his grandmother’s body in his arms, howling rage, howling misery).
(and a jink tried desperately to stop a feeding mara from destroying a roller derby league one skater at a time, until her own luck ran out from the strain of manipulating everyone else’s, until her neck snapped in a bad fall, and she was still, so still, so still).
(and a sylph died at the business end of a manticore’s tail, eyes open and startled, staring into nothing, not sure why she thought she could be saved).
(and they died, and they died, and they died because I wasn’t there, because I had never been there, because I had never existed at all).
“In the name of Enid Healy, I deny your power,” I whispered. The words were harder than I expected them to be. I had never been touched by a force of entropy before.
I didn’t like it.
“Stop that, and I’ll show mercy,” snarled the crossroads—only it wasn’t the crossroads yet, was it? It was fighting me instead of attacking the anima mundi. Flakes of light were starting to appear in the shattered sky as the world struggled to reassert itself, becoming hazy and unclear.
It hurt, oh, fuck, it hurt. I felt like my entire body was fizzing at the edges, dissolving and reforming at the same time. “In the name of Frances Healy, I cast you out,” I whispered.
The thing shook me like a limp rag. I scrabbled to get a better grasp on the hand that held me, using the strength it had and I didn’t to keep myself as close to upright as possible.
“I could have been merciful,” it snarled, and I was on fire.
Not literally: literal fire would have been a problem for both of us, considering we were surrounded by dry, flammable wheat. This was the fire that burned in the center of my cells, the fire that should have been mine, before I had given it away to save myself from drowning. The anima mundi might not have been able to reach forward to the things her replacement had claimed in bargain after bargain, all the long and awful days of its ascendance, but the parasite had no such problems.
I screamed. Burning hurt no less here than it had in the future, when Bethany had been the one to pour pain into my palms and pretend it was a gift. Bile rose in my throat. I swallowed it back down, forcing myself to keep breathing. Pain is pain. I’d been in pain before.
“In the name …” I rasped. “In the name of … Alice Price-Healy, I tell you that you have no place here.”
The parasite snarled and shook me again. The fire burned higher, hotter. That was almost a good thing. The pain was reaching the point where it hurt so much that it didn’t hurt at all. Parts of me were shutting down, going into shock. In the long run, that was going to be a problem. Right now …
“In the name of Evelyn Price, I refuse you any place here,” I whispered. All the Priestesses, all the generations of Aeslin mice who believe
d, truly believed to the bottom of their souls, that we were connected to the divine, that we could shape the world with our actions—and we had, we had, every one of us had. We had become a pantheon in their eyes, and we had fought so hard, for so long, to be worthy of what they saw when they looked at us.
“I will not be exorcised like some common spirit,” spat the parasite.
It hurt. It hurt so much that there was nothing to me but the hurting, nothing to the world but pain. I somehow found the strength to force a smile, despite it all.
“Our world,” I whispered. “Our rules. In the names of Verity Price, Elsie Harrington, and myself, Antimony Price, the Precise Priestess, I command you to leave this place and never come here again. This is not yours. You are not wanted here.”
The parasite howled. The anima mundi screamed. I screamed, and I was burning, I was burning, the flames were higher than they had ever been, so high that they were breaking through my skin, and everything was fire, everything was fire, and there was nothing left for me but to burn, to burn, to—
Twenty-five
“Oh, baby. Rest now. Rest, and remember that I love you.”
–Frances Brown
Burning
IT DIDN’T HURT ANYMORE.
That was the first thing I noticed. Nothing hurt: nothing even ached. For the first time I could remember, everything was perfect. I was cradled in warmth, like I was sleeping next to the heater in the middle of December, safe and comfortable and protected from anything that might want to hurt me. I couldn’t see, but that made sense, since my eyes were closed. I didn’t know what was out there, and I didn’t want to know, because there was one thing I was pretty sure of:
I was pretty sure I was dead.
I’d traveled through time—technically—through a loophole in the laws of temporal physics, to stop an eldritch force of incredible power before it could displace the anima mundi and become the terror we all knew and hated. A spell simple enough to be cast by someone with virtually no magic couldn’t be powerful enough to cause an actual paradox: maybe I’d traveled through time, but I’d only done it within the confines of the crossroads themselves. Even if I’d succeeded, I couldn’t succeed until the crossroads returned to the present day. The thing I’d just gotten into a slap-fight with would still have five hundred years of torturing humanity before my exorcism caught up with it.
Maybe that was why it had always hated sorcerers so much. Maybe it had targeted people like James’ family—like my own grandfather—because it remembered a woman with the ghost of fire in her fingers breaking its hold on the world before that hold could become strangling. I wasn’t causing a paradox. I was preventing one.
And now I was warm, and not in pain anymore, and probably dead. It was interesting, really. I’d always assumed death would be cold.
“—hear me?”
The voice was distant and broken, like I was hearing it across a crackling fire. I didn’t turn. Whoever it was, they could wait until I was damn well good and ready to stop catching my breath. Did the dead breathe? Rose did, but she was usually wearing a coat and temporarily alive when she hung out at the house.
“—burning, she’s burning, how do we stop—”
The second voice held a thin edge of hysteria, audible above the crackle of the flames. It sounded familiar, although I couldn’t quite say why. I tried to open my eyes, and found, to my dismay, that they wouldn’t budge.
Oh, man. If my afterlife was going to be sitting around impersonating a charcoal briquette, I was going to get really bored, really quickly.
“Annie, can you hear me?”
Mary. The first voice was Mary. I tried again to open my eyes. I failed again.
“Is she even breathing?”
Cylia.
“She’s still on fire, can we deal with the part where she’s still on fire?”
Sam. Oh, Sam. He sounded like he was on the verge of beginning to punch things for the sake of having something less confusing to deal with. Violence isn’t always the answer, but sometimes it’s a good stopgap until the answer can be found.
“Killing her would be a mercy. This is unnatural.”
Leonard. Swell.
“Touch her, and I will rip your lungs out through your throat, I swear to Jesus I will.”
Sam, I love you, I thought, and wished that he could hear me.
“Let me through.”
It took me a moment to place the fifth voice. James. James Smith. He sounded tired, almost exhausted, but level. I couldn’t tell whether that indicated success or failure. Was Sally back? Did we win? I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t open my mouth, either. I was silent and stuck, unable to do anything at all.
Death, from what I could tell so far, really sucked. Clearly, I hadn’t managed to pick up one of the deluxe packages like Mary or Rose. Maybe I needed to die in a more easily-categorized way. “Fried by parasitic invader trying to consume the living spirit of the Earth” probably didn’t come with a clear type of haunting.
“If you touch her—” Sam again, voice low and tight and filled with a barely-contained menace. Between Leonard and James, he finally had something to focus his anger on. I hoped he’d reserve most of it for Leonard. Poor James had been through enough.
“I have to touch her if I want to put the fire out! Let me through, you asshole, before she explodes or something.”
Was I going to explode? Apparently, I was on fire, which was sort of unsettling, but I hadn’t considered the possibility that “on fire” could lead to “exploding like a car in a bad action movie.” Jean Grey spent, like, half her time on fire, and she never exploded. Then again, Jean Grey was a comic book character, and this was real life.
Pity, that. I could have used a little bit of the Phoenix Force to get me back to the land of the living.
“If you hurt her, I’ll kill you.”
“Understood,” snapped James.
There was a soft thudding sound, as if someone had dropped to their knees next to me, and then a wave of coolness washed through the warmth around me, chasing some of my comfortable cocoon away. I tried again to open my eyes. I failed again.
“Has she ever done this before?” asked Cylia. “Do humans usually catch fire when under stress?”
“Don’t you know?” asked Sam.
“Kid, I have gone out of my way for most of my life to have as little intimate contact as possible with humans. I play roller derby because everybody needs a social life, and nobody’s going to report you for being weird when you spend all your time with women who call themselves ‘Elmira Street’ and ‘Princess Leia-You-Out.’ I do administrative work when I need a paying job. Just me, a computer, and a bunch of big, important people trying to pretend they couldn’t be paying me more to deal with their bullshit. Annie here is the first human I’ve ever allowed in my car, much less in my house.”
“No, humans don’t usually catch fire when under stress,” said Leonard. “How can you avoid humans? We’re the dominant species on this planet.”
“Believe me, I’m aware,” said Cylia disgustedly. “Any chance she’s secretly a dragon with a dye job? Is she a natural blonde?”
“I feel like she would probably smack me for answering that question, but no, she’s definitely not secretly blonde,” said Sam.
I should have been annoyed by the way they were nattering on while I was burning. All I actually felt was relief. There was a thin, strained edge to their voices—they were scared, and trying to cover it up by talking about dye jobs and human behavioral quirks. That was normal. That was natural. They were okay.
The people I cared about were okay. Whether I had succeeded or not, they’d get to bury me and walk away from this, as soon as they figured out that people who are actively on fire are usually dead, and hence do not need to be consulted about future plans. Even if I was lingering on this mortal plane like Rose or Mary, I wasn’t going to follow them. Sam deserved better than a dead girlfriend, and my parents deserved to believe I
was resting in peace, not condemned to a shadowy existence on the edges of the living world. The only ghosts in my family were Mary and Rose, and both of them had died a lot younger than I had, while they were still in their teens, and neither of them was a blood relative. Prices rest. Maybe it’s because we run so hard and so fast while we’re alive, but when we die …
Prices rest.
The cooling sensation spread, getting stronger—strong enough, in spots, that I was actually getting cold. I made a small sound of protest, not audible above the flames. I didn’t want to be dead and cold. I was tired. I was so damn tired. I was ready to rest.
“Really? Is that what you really want?”
This was a new voice, female, unfamiliar. Without thinking about it, I opened my eyes.
There was no fire. There were no friends. I was alone, sprawled in the middle of a great field of harvest-ready wheat. The sky above me was midsummer blue and perfect as a portrait, marked here and there with the skidding streaks of fluffy white clouds, moving briskly along in a wind I couldn’t feel. I sat up. The landscape didn’t change.
“Guys?”
There was no response. I stood, turning in a slow circle. There was no one there. I was totally alone. But the voices …
“They’re still at the crossroads,” said the female voice, from behind me.
I spun, reaching for a knife, and stopped dead. The anima mundi looked at me, amused and exasperated in equal measure. I stared speechlessly back.
She looked … nothing like Mary. Her skin was smooth and brown; her lips were thin and her nose was broad and her eyes were soft and sad and the color of the wheat blowing all around us. Her hair was black and blonde and red and brown and silver at the same time, falling to her shoulders in streaky corkscrew curls. Some of them were tipped in blue or purple or pink, like even the fashion colors were a part of the living spirit of the world. She still wore the belted shroud she’d had on when she appeared with Mary’s face, dressed like she was going to produce a scythe and go reaping souls at any moment.
That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8) Page 34