She was beautiful. That was nice to know. The composite of every human woman in the world was beautiful.
“Why are you a woman?” I blurted.
“Why do you assume I’m a woman?” she countered. “I look like this for you because your life has been filled with friendly ghosts. You were a haunted house before you knew what it was to be more than just a room. Your friends would all see something different when they looked at me. I don’t have a specific gender, any more than the thing that tried to destroy me did. I’m just more invested in being kind to the people who walk my path.”
“Oh,” I said, cheeks flaring red. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. People have always assumed. It’s only recently that they’re realized they should also regret, when those assumptions are wrong.” The anima mundi shook their head. “I’m still filtering through all the changes to humanity that have come in the last five hundred years. You’ve made such progress for a silly, self-centered little species, and yet you haven’t changed at all. It’s going to be amazing learning what you can do now.”
“Will the magic get stronger? Now that you’re back?”
“The magic never left. Magic is a constant force of the universe, like gravity, or time. It could grow thin as that thing consumed and spent it, but it could never disappear.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“I know. But this is still the crossroads, and questions asked here are difficult things. They have consequences. You still have a question unanswered.”
I hesitated. “I don’t remember asking a question.”
“But you did. You asked yourself whether you were going to die here, and since you’re still at the crossroads, you asked me.” The anima mundi looked at me solemnly. “That means I get to offer you a bargain.”
“Wait, I mean, just hold on a second here,” I said, alarmed. “I already have one outstanding deal with the crossroads.”
“No, you don’t. For this one moment in time, no one has a deal with the crossroads, because the parasite that took my place, that used my power to harm my people, has no authority here. Some of the things it gave were good, even if they were in the pursuit of an evil: I doubt your lover would be pleased to find his lungs filling with fluid, or your grandmother would be delighted to find the flesh rotting from her bones. I’m not taking back its gifts. I’m also not taking on its debts. The slates are clean. The books are balanced. We begin fresh, here, today, and you, Antimony Timpani Price, will be my first new negotiation. Shall we begin?”
“… crap,” I said, before I could catch myself. “I … okay, no, crap. Is there any way we could not do this? Like, I just performed an exorcism, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be jet-lagged for the next decade, I really, really don’t want to deal with semi-cosmic forces right now.”
“Unfortunately, you stand balanced on a scythe’s edge, and you have to fall one way or another. Living or dead. Choose.”
“Again, that debt thing. I don’t want it. I just want to go home.”
“Where is home?”
I hesitated. Home was Oregon, safe in our compound, surrounded by trees, where no one could find us, or get past the fences, or cross the yard when they didn’t know where the traps were located. But home was also the carnival, stealing kisses with Sam atop the Ferris wheel, everything spread out beneath us in lights and music and the empty midway, and it was the backseat of Cylia’s car, and it was … it was …
“Home is where my heart is,” I said. “It’s a cliché, but sometimes things become clichés because they’re too damn true not to. I want to go home. I want to see my family again. I want to be the reason my friends are smiling, not the reason they’re crying. I … maybe I want too much, I don’t know, but I want it anyway.”
“I thought you wanted to rest.”
I shook my head. “I’m exhausted, yeah. This has been a pretty shitty year, you know? But I sleep better with a knife under my pillow and a fūri at my back than I will six feet down.”
“I could offer you a lot, if it meant you’d stay,” said the anima mundi. “I could promise you that everyone who came to save me with you would be safe, and comfortable, and spared from danger for the rest of their days. They wouldn’t even have to pay for it. They’d miss you, and that would be payment enough. But you could serve as the first of my new guardians, and help the others adjust. Some of them will have to move on, you understand. They were not the sort of people I would have trusted to represent me, in their lives, and the force they’ve served has done nothing to change that in their deaths. I’m going to need spirits I can trust to ease me into this age.”
“That doesn’t sound like rest,” I protested.
“No. But it’s calm and comfort for the people you have chosen as extensions of your heart, which means it’s calm and comfort for your home. Three of them don’t belong to the currently dominant species. Calm and comfort would be a great boon to them.”
I stared. The anima mundi looked back at me, utterly serene.
“You could still see Mary. She’d be here with you, showing you what to do, how things work, how to negotiate the world on my behalf. As for James, the bargain that kept him in New Gravesend is discharged. He can go wherever he likes, and carry my promise of peace with him. The Covenant will never find him. Leonard will find another way. He could change the organization that made him from within, could reform them, make them what they were always meant to be. Your death would be life for so many.”
“I …” I paused. “Does this offer cover my family? My actual blood family, I mean?”
The anima mundi shook their head. “No. The Prices are what they are. They court danger like a lover, and seem surprised when their affections are returned. I couldn’t grant them calm without remaking them completely, and that would cost more than I currently have to spend. My bargains will be small things until the magic strengthens around me, and even if it were at its greatest, you’re a single life. You can’t buy that much.”
That was almost a relief. I wasn’t sure I could have called it a choice, if I’d known that staying would have meant my entire family could be safe, forever. “Okay. I have one more question.”
“Ask, and I’ll answer, if I can.”
“What about Sally?” What about my grandfather, and all the other people the records indicated had disappeared over the centuries? They had to have gone somewhere. They had to be lost, and even if some of them were long, long dead, there had to be at least a few—like Sally—who hadn’t been gone long enough for age to have caught up with them.
Now that we understood what had been happening, we owed them the chance to come home. Someone had to at least go looking. And Mary probably still couldn’t tell my grandmother that my grandfather might still be alive out there after all.
“She is not here,” said the anima mundi. “The parasite cast her, and the others, very far away, and could not return them.”
“That’s sort of what I was afraid of.”
“Then your choice is made?”
“I want to rest,” I said slowly, “but I’m not ready yet. I think, right now, what I need is to go back to the others. I need to stay alive. Can I … can I do that? Am I allowed to wake up?”
“Don’t come here again,” said the anima mundi. “There are better ways.”
“Not always,” I said, thinking of a dark tunnel filled with water where I had almost drowned, where all of this trouble had started. Sometimes the deus ex machina was the only solution you had. “But I’ll try to stay away.”
“Good,” said the anima mundi. They snapped their fingers, and they were gone, replaced by a wall of flame, and I was burning, I was burning, I was—
“—so try harder!” Sam was shouting. That was rarely a good sign. But hey, I could hear him, and I hadn’t been expecting to do that again.
Shout away, Sam, I thought, struggling to open my eyes. That strange sense of all-encompassing warmth had returned, wrapping itself tightly around me,
preventing all motion. The cooling sensation was continuing to spread, making parts of my body actively cold, but the overall warmth remained.
“I can’t try harder unless I want to freeze you all solid,” snapped James. “Why don’t you try something, if you’re such a smart guy?”
“I have fur! Fur is flammable!”
“Everything is flammable if you try hard enough,” said Fern. “Annie, you need to wake up. I don’t know how long Mary can keep us here. The creepy crossroads thing went away, and now everything is empty. We need to go home.”
Home. I wanted to go home so badly. I wanted my bed and my things and to talk about comic books with Artie and to skate again. I wanted to introduce my boyfriend to my roller derby team. I wanted to introduce him to my parents. And I wanted to make sure Sally, and the people like her, had the chance to do the same.
I opened my eyes. Everything was fire, dancing around me, not consuming me. It was lower in places, like something had stolen its heat away, and I knew if I lifted my head, I’d see James working to chill it, to force it down. I also knew where it was coming from, because the anima mundi had said that all bargains were released: all debts were discharged.
Welcome home, I thought.
My fire purred and roared, so glad to be back that its joy couldn’t be contained.
I missed you, too, but you’re scaring people, I thought. Rest. I won’t give you up again.
Was magic always this argumentative? I didn’t remember it fighting me like this before the first time I’d agreed to give it away. Not that it mattered. It was back now, safe with me, and I was never letting it go again.
The fire hesitated. Then, slowly, it began to flicker and recede, pulling back into my skin where it belonged. I blinked at the suddenly clear sky above me. It was softening already, moving more into alignment with what it had been before all this happened, before everything went wrong.
Someone gasped. I sat up.
The others were standing about where I’d assumed from the sound of their voices. Cylia had her hand over her mouth. Fern was beaming. Sam’s tail was wrapped so tightly around his leg that he was at risk of cutting off the circulation. Leonard was gaping, open-mouthed and bemused. James was the only one kneeling, his hands stretched out above my left leg, the palms covered in a thin layer of frost. Like the others, he was staring at me.
I lifted an eyebrow. “You can put those away now,” I said. “I’m good.”
“You were on fire,” he said, in a tone that implied I might not have noticed.
“Yes.” I smiled. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
That was the last thing I had time to say before Sam slammed into me, wrapping his arms around my torso. I laughed, wrapping my arms around him in turn. Cylia and Fern were close behind him, and I held on to all of them for dear life, and this was good, this was right, this was the way home.
Epilogue
“You can always come home. No matter what you’ve done, no matter where you’ve been, you can always come home, and we’ll be waiting.”
–Enid Healy
The living room of a rented house in New Gravesend, Maine, trying not to hit anyone
LEONARD NARROWED HIS EYES. “There’s something you’re not telling me. What happened after you disappeared? Why did you come back on fire?”
“There’s so much I’m not telling you that I could open a whole bookstore called ‘Things Leonard Cunningham Doesn’t Get to Know,’” I said. “We had a deal, remember? The crossroads have been defeated. The exorcism was a success. Now’s the part where you run back to England and tell the rest of the Covenant that you lost me.”
“You’ll be a black mark on my record that I may never live down.”
“Should’ve thought of that before you decided to keep my family name a secret.” I folded my arms. “We had a deal, and you need to get the hell off this continent.”
“You’ll join us one day,” Leonard persisted. “You’re too smart and too human to throw in with these … things. I will be the one to bring your family back where they belong, and you will understand why I’ve been right all along.”
“Whatever,” I said. “We’ll have people watching for you—specifically you—at all the international airports and major border crossings. If you come back to this country, we’ll know. And next time, I don’t send you home a hero.”
Leonard looked at me for a long moment before he sighed. “We’re going to be so good together when you finally come around,” he said. “You’ll see.” Then he was gone, turning and disappearing through the open front door.
I counted to ten. He didn’t come back. “You can come out now,” I said, without raising my voice.
Immediately, Fern’s head popped around the stairs. “He’s gone?”
“He’s gone,” I said, as arms slid around me from behind. I tilted my head back to look at Sam. “Where were you hiding?”
“Kitchen,” he said. “Cylia’s finishing making lunch. We’ll be ready to hit the road in like, twenty minutes, if you’re packed.”
“Since this morning,” I said. “You hear from James?”
“He’s got his mother’s car, and Cylia says it’s safe to drive, now that she’s fixed the carburetor. He’ll be here in ten minutes. Fern’s going to ride with him.”
Caravanning across the country was an awkward solution, but it was better than trying to cram five people into Cylia’s car for more than an hour, and I had faith that we’d pull into a rest stop somewhere and find a perfect little camper-trailer suitable for hooking to James’ car, owned by someone who’d always wanted to swap it for an avocado-colored monstrosity. That’s how things work when you’re traveling with a jink. Sometimes the cards just fall your way.
Sally was still missing. The anima mundi either didn’t know where she was or couldn’t tell us—and I suspected the former, given how willing they’d been to put everything else back to normal. Mary was helping them with the transition, and if they resented the fact that I’d chosen to walk away, well. I’d helped to save them. They could learn to live with the disappointment.
Sally was still missing, but so was my grandfather, and Grandma Alice was going to be very interested in what James had to say. Maybe they could help each other. Even if they couldn’t, James was going to help me. Between his mother’s books and my grandfather’s books, we were going to start our own homeschool Hogwarts and get this shit under control. And we were going to do it safely behind the compound walls, in Oregon, where my family could keep an eye on us.
They were going to love him. Bringing home new family members is a time-honored tradition, and a new sorcerer might be enough to distract from the part where I was enthusiastically dating a monkey. Maybe.
Probably not, though.
The Covenant wasn’t looking for me anymore. Oh, they would be again someday—I was absolutely sure of that—but Leonard no longer had his tracker, and without that, I could stay hidden for as long as I needed to. Rose was going to be following him to the airport and reporting back once she had seen him safely loaded onto the next available flight to the United Kingdom. There was time to put things back together. There was time to figure my shit out.
“What are you smiling about?” Sam asked.
I tilted my head backward until I could see his eyes, and said, “I’ve got so much to tell the mice.”
“Weird,” he said, and kissed me, and everything was good, and I was finally going home.
Read on for
a brand-new InCryptid novella
by Seanan McGuire:
THE MEASURE
OF A MONSTER
“The amount of damage humanity is willing to do to prevent tragedies that ‘might’ someday occur is astonishing, especially since many of those tragedies would be a response to things we had already done.”
—Thomas Price
A nice, if borrowed, bedroom in an only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio
Now
SHELBY LAY ON HER back, one arm draped across her stomach and the other thrown across my chest, snoring softly. The pollen count had been stratospheric for weeks, and her allergies were making it difficult for her to breathe. It was a tiny, mundane problem, the sort that could be treated with over-the-counter medication, and maybe it was weird of me, but I was loving it. Most of our problems spent way too much time trying to kill us. It was nice to have something less potentially fatal to contend with.
(Shelby didn’t think so, of course, but Shelby was the one with the allergies. No one enjoys being filled with mucus—and I do mean no one. I’ve met cryptids who revel in everything from raw meat to pulling their own teeth out, and not a single one of them has revealed an odd fetish or lifestyle obsession with having stuffed-up sinuses.)
The sun had been up for more than an hour, making this the local equivalent of staying in bed until noon. Coming back from our Australian vacation with a ring on Shelby’s finger—opal, naturally, both to play to cultural stereotypes and because she thought it was pretty—had finally convinced management at the zoo where we both worked to synchronize our days off. Shelby liked to say it was because they had seen reason. I was pretty sure they were afraid of her. Same difference, really.
Breaking the lease on her apartment had taken almost two months. By the time she turned her keys in, she’d been sleeping at my place five nights a week, and the majority of her stuff was stored in the attic, waiting for the day when we’d be striking out on our own, whatever that meant. Her parents wanted us to move to Australia; my parents wanted us to come back to Oregon; my grandparents didn’t care what we did, as long as we remembered to keep our anti-telepathy charms on us whenever we were planning to have sex.
Oh, right. Whenever I say “my place,” you should really replace that with “my grandparents’ place,” since the house belongs to them. Martin and Angela Baker, good citizens of the Columbus metro area. Businesspeople, former members of the PTA, parents of three adopted children—including my mother—and generally the kind of neighbors everyone dreams of having. The part where he’s a construct made from multiple reanimated corpses and she’s a form of highly evolved pseudo-mammalian telepathic wasp is sort of beside the point.
That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8) Page 35