That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8)

by Seanan McGuire

  Well, no. It’s not. For most of the humans I’ve known, the fact that my family includes a lot of what they’d call “monsters” is the point. If they ever found out that their sunny suburbs hosted things like us, it would be time for the torches and pitchforks. No matter how advanced humanity gets, it seems like we’re always just a few steps away from becoming an angry mob.

  That’s why there are people like me and Shelby. We help keep the “monsters” hidden, and we try to keep the world safe for the rest of humanity until the day arrives when they finally realize that we’re all just people. We’re all just trying to do our best.

  Living with my grandparents, my cousin Sarah, and my fiancée all in the same house should probably have been weird, but it was turning out to be surprisingly normal. The family expectation had always been that my siblings and I would eventually go out, find spouses, and bring them home to the sprawling, multilevel house that my parents had constructed for exactly that purpose. This was the same idea, in a slightly different location. The only potential problem was Sarah, and the anti- telepathy charms took care of that.

  (Sarah and Grandma Angela are members of the same species. We call them “cuckoos,” because they’re brood parasites, replacing human infants with their own offspring. On the whole, the species is a nasty piece of work that raises a lot of really unpleasant questions about evolution, biology, and whether some things actually deserve the torches and pitchforks. So far as we’re aware, Sarah and Grandma are the only exceptions.)

  Even with her edges blurred by my lack of glasses, Shelby was beautiful when she slept. Tall, tan, blonde, and perfect, like an Australian ordered straight from Central Casting. We met when we both started working at the same zoo, me as a visiting herpetologist, her as a visiting big cat expert. We’d started dating about three months later, which had been a massive shock to me, since Shelby was way out of my league by any rational measure. Of course, things hadn’t stayed rational for long, and she’d tried to kill Sarah not long after we’d started getting serious. Thankfully, Sarah didn’t hold a grudge.

  Somehow, Shelby hadn’t broken up with me over the number of cuckoos in my family, or the fact that I’d lied to her about my name when we first met. It’s not safe to be a Price in public, not with the Covenant of St. George constantly looking for a way to solidify their secret stranglehold on the world. The first time I’d seen her in the field had been like a dream come true. First, she’d ridden an injured lindworm like a bucking bronco, grinning like Athena herself, and then, when we realized how it had been injured, she had switched smoothly to sympathizing with it. I’d proposed almost involuntarily.

  At the time, I’d believed she’d dismissed it as a joke. The joke was on me: she’d just been biding her time until the perfect moment came along for her to accept, which she’d done while we were in Australia, helping her family deal with a lycanthropy outbreak. Happy endings all around, right?

  Except for the part where shortly after we’d come back to the United States, my sister Verity had declared war on the Covenant of St. George live on network television. We still didn’t know how the broadcast had managed to go on that long without being cut off by standards and practices. Our best guess was that they had been so busy watching for wardrobe malfunctions on the part of the female dancers that they hadn’t paid any attention to the giant snake eating people. American ideas of censorship do not always make much sense.

  Except for the part where the only thing my family could think of to do in response to Verity’s hotheaded declaration was to send my other sister, Antimony, to England to go undercover with the Covenant. Maybe she could learn something about the way they operated, something she could use to keep the family safe while we weathered this. Everyone had agreed. Even me. And maybe someday, I’ll stop feeling guilty about that, because Annie had gone to England and disappeared, dropping off the radar so completely that the only reason we knew she was still alive was the fact that our family ghosts had yet to tell us otherwise.

  She was lost. She was lost, and she was alone, and she was my baby sister, and there was nothing I could do to save her. There was nothing I could do to even let her know I was worried about her. So no, life wasn’t perfect, and happy endings only happen when all parties involved are safely dead and buried and resting six feet down.

  Shelby yawned and rolled onto her side, facing me. Then she opened her eyes and smiled.

  “Lazy boy,” she accused softly. “Still in bed when the sun’s been up for hours.”

  “You’re one to talk,” I replied. “I couldn’t get up without waking you.”

  “Ah, but you see, I’m antipodean. My natural rhythms are the reverse of yours. Trying to get me out of bed early is a denial of my culture.”

  I rolled my eyes. “There you go again, blaming everything on Australia.”

  “It’s convenient. A whole continent, and it’s not here to defend itself. Why, if I do this often enough, the tourism board will send me my gold ‘Confusing the Americans’ badge, and then I’ll have fulfilled all my childhood dreams.”

  “Brat,” I said, and leaned closer, intending to kiss her.

  Instead, I got a face full of feathers as Crow, my resident Church Griffin, dove onto the bed from somewhere in the vicinity of the ceiling and stretched out on his back, all four legs in the air, croaking and creeling his demands for attention. Shelby laughed. I groaned, beginning to scratch the spot on his belly where the feathers of his upper body gave way to the fur of his lower body. Somewhere in the distance, the mice began drumming, signaling that everyone in the house was finally awake.

  Just another ordinary day in Ohio. And I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

  * * *

  Sarah was sitting at the kitchen table when I came downstairs, yawning and trying to smooth my hair down with one hand. She had a book open in front of her and was eating a bowl of what looked like Lucky Charms. I paused and looked again. Lucky Charms, yes, but they weren’t in milk. Instead—

  “Sarah, are you eating your cereal with tomato soup?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t look up from her book. “I like it better than V8. It’s not as spicy. I don’t mind the spicy, really—it’s mild—but it clashes with the little marshmallows, and I like the little marshmallows.”

  I paused, contemplating that. Like most things about Sarah’s faintly horrifying and idiosyncratic diet, it made sense. That didn’t make it any less disgusting to my human palate. “Okay,” I said finally. “What are you reading?”

  “Fermat’s Last Theorem. It’s about a really famous mathematical puzzle and how it was eventually resolved.” She finally looked up, blinking vast, blue eyes at me. “You can borrow it when I’m done, if you want.”

  “Will I understand it?”

  Sarah shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “I’ll pass. I have a lot to read.”

  “Okay.”

  For reasons yet to be discovered—mostly because we can’t exactly interview cuckoos who don’t belong to the family without having our minds telepathically hollowed out and taken over—cuckoos are obsessed with math. It’s a species-wide trait, one shared by Grandma Angela and Sarah. Even when Sarah couldn’t reliably remember her own name, she was still enthralled by simple equations and endless viewings of an old PBS kids’ show called Square One. Her recovery has been marked by increasingly complicated equations, and the day she started doing theoretical calculus again was the day my grandparents threw us a spontaneous pizza party.

  (Sarah hurt herself trying to save Verity from the Covenant of St. George. She succeeded, which is why I am currently short only one sister, not two. But, in the process, she did the telepath equivalent of throwing her back out and wound up functionally spraining her entire mind. There was a time when we weren’t sure whether she was ever going to be herself again. I’m still not completely sold … if I’m being honest. She’s alert and aware and consistently knows who she is and what she’s doing. That’s good. She’s also shyer, more tim
id, and less willing to take risks. That’s bad. Cuckoos often trend toward cowardice, preferring to hide when possible. It took Sarah a long, long time to learn not to flee when things got bad. That’s a lot of ground to lose.)

  “Are you and Shelby staying in today?”

  “Maybe.” I opened the fridge, pulling out the orange juice. “Dee and Frank are hosting a barbeque tonight; I thought we might go down and see them. Frank grills a mean goat. You’re welcome to come, if you like.”

  Sarah’s answering smile was quick and wry. “No, I’m not, but I appreciate you inviting me.”

  “Suit yourself.” She wasn’t wrong. Most sensible people have a healthy fear of cuckoos. It’s hard not to be scared of something that can literally get inside your head. But Frank, Dee, and the rest of the local gorgon community had a lot of experience dealing with unusual people, and Dee liked Sarah.

  “Morning,” chirped Shelby, sashaying into the room. She looked fresh as a daisy, and not at all like she’d tumbled out of bed not ten minutes previous. I would have hated her, if I hadn’t loved her so desperately. “What’s good today, Sarah?”

  “An abstract philosophical concept meant to guide the actions of people who would really rather be doing whatever they want without concern for repercussions,” said Sarah solemnly.

  Shelby nodded, pausing to kiss my cheek on her way to the fridge. “Don’t know what I expected, but that’s pretty good,” she said. “Got a plan for today?”

  “Read my book, eat my cereal, get online and argue with Artie for an hour about why he can’t come to visit yet,” said Sarah.

  I frowned. “Why can’t he? I mean, apart from the whole ‘distance’ thing.” My cousin Artie is half-incubus on his father’s side and got all the upsetting pheromones without any of the control. His life is mostly defined by the size of his bedroom. When he has to go out, he douses himself in the kind of cologne that sears mucus membranes and destroys the sense of smell of everyone in a ten-foot radius.

  Maybe that was a good argument against him coming for a visit. The TSA would probably designate his cologne a kind of chemical warfare and refuse to let him on the plane.

  “I’m not … ready.” Sarah waved a hand helplessly in front of herself, indicting as much of her body as a single gesture could encompass. “I’m okay sometimes. I’m okay right now. But last night I forgot your name again, and if you hadn’t been wearing an anti-telepathy charm, I would have just gone right into your head looking for it. I’m not safe around people. I could hurt myself. I could hurt them.”

  I looked at her solemnly and didn’t say anything. There was nothing I could say. I’m human. Shelby’s human. We’ve got problems, mostly related to our families and their chosen professions, but we’re always going to have humanity on our side: for better or for worse, we belong to the dominant species on the planet. Everywhere we go, the world is built to suit our needs, to make us comfortable and safe. Sarah …

  Cuckoos are terrifying predators. I won’t pretend they’re not. But Sarah isn’t like that. She’s clever and she’s kind and she worries about losing control of herself. All her telepathic ethics have been carefully self-taught from X-Men comics and old episodes of Babylon 5, and she is far, far too aware of how easy it would be to let them all go and give in to the urge to follow her instincts and make the world conform to her own needs.

  Sarah shrugged and looked down at her tomato-soaked cereal. “I want to see Artie. I miss him really bad. But his mind … he’s soothing, you know? He thinks soothing thoughts. If he came here, I’d want to listen to him thinking soothing thoughts, and I’d forget how careful I have to be, and I’d hurt him. I don’t think I could live with myself if I did that. I don’t think—”

  She froze, head snapping up and eyes going wide as her attention shifted to the back door.

  “Someone’s coming,” she said, and shoved her chair away from the table, running out of the room just before there was a knock at the door. The motion knocked the spoon out of her bowl and sent it clattering to the floor, where it left a smear that was distressingly like a bloodstain.

  In sitcoms, people are always knocking at each other’s back doors, like it’s totally normal for someone to just be in your yard uninvited. It’s a lot less common in the real world, and in the kind of suburban neighborhood where everyone keeps to themselves and trespassing is more likely to get you a visit from the local police than a wacky laugh track, it’s unheard of. Shelby and I exchanged a look.

  My family has a reputation for being a little overzealous in the weaponry department, and it’s true, my sisters and my mother always have at least three knives on their persons. It helps them feel secure. My eyesight isn’t good enough for me to be comfortable carrying that many knives before breakfast, and my revolver was safely upstairs in my bedside table. Shelby touched her left hip, signaling that at least one of us was properly armed.

  The person outside knocked again. I adjusted my glasses with one hand, slipping into what Verity liked to call my “professor posture”: right foot slightly back, arms loose, hands free and open above my waist. An untrained attacker wouldn’t notice the slight rise in my right shoulder or the bend in my right knee, ready to absorb shock and turn it into momentum if I had to. A good martial artist might recognize it as a passive neutral stance, but most people would look at me and see another man born to a life of tweed, tea, and long lectures about English literature.

  I looked at Shelby and nodded. She nodded back, all ease gone. I opened the door.

  Dee lowered her hand and stared at me through the rose-tinted lenses of her glasses. Her eyes were wide, and her pupils were dilated. There was something wrong with their shape, a slight point at the top and bottom. Seeing me, she surged forward and grabbed my forearms, heedless of the fact that I could easily have responded by punching her.

  “Alex,” she gasped. “Thank Medusa.” Her hair was askew, like she hadn’t been able to get her wig seated properly before rushing out of the house, and it was hissing. The sound was agitated. I’d rarely heard her snakes that upset,

  I had never seen her this upset. As I pulled her farther into the kitchen, I realized that she was missing a shoe, and wasn’t wearing pantyhose. The small scales on the side of her leg that she normally took such careful precautions to conceal were totally visible. A casual bystander might have taken them for psoriasis, but there’s no way to tell a casual bystander from a Covenant spy.

  “Dee? What’s wrong?” Shelby moved past us, closing the door. I shot her a grateful look.

  Dee didn’t even seem to notice. She continued clinging to me as the hissing from her hair grew steadily louder.

  “You have to come,” she said. “You have to.”

  “Come where? Dee, what’s going on?”

  “You have to come home with me.” Dee pulled back enough to look at Shelby. “To the colony. Right now.”

  “Last I checked, they didn’t like us much there, on account of how we had that little spat with your half-brother,” said Shelby carefully. “Pretty sure Hannah would be happy to have us both decorating her yard.”

  Hannah was the matriarch of Dee’s community, half Pliny’s gorgon, half greater gorgon, and all terrifying. Hybrids like her are rare in nature, and hybrids who survive to adulthood are even rarer. Hannah had managed to hit the genetic jackpot on three levels: she’d been born, she’d grown up, and she’d proven to be fertile enough to have a son of her own, Lloyd. Unfortunately, that was where the jackpots ended. Lloyd had been angry at the world, embittered at his inability to fit in among either his own kind or the humans that surrounded them, and in the end, that anger and bitterness had twisted him into a killer.

  I had shot him to save Shelby’s life, along with Dee’s and my own. That didn’t mean his mother had forgiven me.

  Dee shook her head so vigorously that her wig slipped and the hissing from beneath it grew even louder. “She said. I asked her, and she said. She said you could come.”

  Shelby and
I exchanged a look. I returned my attention to Dee.

  “Why?” I asked.

  She sniffled and stepped back, letting go of my arms. “It’s the children,” she said. “They’re gone.”

  * * *

  Dee’s information, while sparse, was as much as we were going to get. Sometime in the night, strangers had come to the gorgon settlement in the woods outside city limits, and they had left with more than half of the community’s children. Gorgons aged two to twelve, all disappeared without a trace—along with over a dozen unhatched eggs, at least two-thirds of which were assumed to be fertile. It had been a professional job, in and out without waking any of the adults, which made me suspect that something other than stealth had been used.

  The ages of the children taken honestly concerned me more than how it had been accomplished. Ages two and up. Old enough to listen when someone demanded that they stay silent. Eggs. Too young to make a sound. Babies would have been less likely to fight back—and more importantly, babies didn’t have fully developed venom sacs yet, making them less of a risk to their kidnappers—but there’s no way to tell a baby not to cry. Whoever had done this, they’d come in with a plan and left with exactly what they were looking for.

  Dee had driven herself to the house; her car was parked unevenly at the foot of the driveway, where it was doubtless already attracting the prying eyes of nosy neighbors. None of them would do anything; it wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. But they’d sure be happy to gossip about it when they heard that we’d all been murdered in our beds.

  Shelby was in the kitchen with Dee, trying to calm the other woman down and get her to take a drink of water before we got going. The road to the gorgon community was protected with illusions and compulsion charms to keep people like us from just stumbling past the borders. It would be a lot easier if we could follow Dee’s car, so we needed Dee to calm down enough that she’d be safe to drive. And I …