That Ain't Witchcraft (InCryptid #8)

by Seanan McGuire

  “Um,” said Megan. “I mean Annie.”

  I stared at her for a few seconds before returning my attention to the road and starting the car moving forward again. Having something to distract me might keep me from shaking her until she either told me where my sister was, or the snakes atop her head decided to bite me.

  “I see,” I said. My voice was impressively neutral to my own ears. “Because she’s been missing for a while now, and we’re all really worried about her. Is there any chance you could tell me where she is?”

  “No. I mean, I’m sorry. But I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”

  Of course she didn’t. Annie did better in her basic survival training than any of us. I was never intending to go into fieldwork, and Verity has never really mastered the idea of “subtle.” Wherever Megan had seen my sister, there was no chance that she was still there.

  “Where was she?” I asked.

  “Lowryland.”

  I somehow managed not to hit the brakes again. Of course. Of course. It made terrible, awful, perfect sense. Annie was on the run from the Covenant. The Covenant may hate magic in all its forms, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to bend it to their own ends when the need arises. She had trained with them. Blood, sweat, and tears, those are all things that can be used to make a tracking charm, if you have the proper training.

  Running to Lowryland would have confused any spells the Covenant tried to use to find her, because the sheer density of people meant a hundred false positives and unclear results, until it was impossible to narrow anything down, or even be sure that they were looking in the right place. It was a sideways sort of genius, and I was proud of my baby sister, even as I wished she had the sense to come in from the cold.

  We’ve faced the Covenant before. We’ve always won. We always will.

  “Do you have any idea where she was going?”

  “I wish I did,” said Megan. “She took our roommate and some other people, and she left. I don’t think they knew where they were going.”

  So Annie wasn’t alone anymore. That made me feel a little better. No matter how much we train, we’re always better with backup. “Thank you for telling me. It’s going to make our parents feel a lot better to know that she’s all right.”

  “I think she’s the sort of person who always winds up all right,” said Megan, a little wryly. “If the world tries to tell her she’s not, she’ll just punch it until it starts playing nice.”

  “That sounds like Annie,” I said.

  “Can you … I mean, I assume eventually she’ll go home,” said Megan. “When she does, can you call my parents and let them know? I worry about her sometimes. I worry about all of them.”

  She wasn’t naming names. That was probably a good thing: it’s always best to play your cards close to the chest when you’re not sure of people’s safety. At the moment, however, it was endlessly frustrating. We’ve always known that Annie was alive—Aunt Mary would have told us if she wasn’t—but that’s all we’ve known.

  At least this might help my parents sleep a little better.

  “I will,” I said. “In the meantime, how much do you know about Johrlac?”

  Megan looked at me blankly. “I know we’re going to pick one up, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them before.”

  “You would probably have heard them referred to as ‘cuckoos.’”

  Her blank expression melted into horrified comprehension. “They’re killers. Dangerous killers. They’ve wiped out entire communities, and they did it for fun.” A note of bewilderment crept into her voice. “Humans kill because they’re afraid of losing their place at the top of the food chain, but cuckoos kill because they can.”

  “Okay, you’re not wrong,” I said. “My cousin Sarah—the woman we’re on our way to get—is a cuckoo, although she prefers the term Johrlac. She says cuckoo is pejorative.” What she would really have preferred was a complete change of species. Since that’s not in the cards—not even with the intervention of the crossroads, who can do a lot of things, but who can’t transform a pseudo-mammalian wasp into a human girl—she makes do with a certain amount of caution with her language. We all have our own ways of coping.

  Megan stared at me. “You live with one of them?”

  “I do. Shelby and I both do. So does Annie, when she’s at home. It’s not a bad idea to be afraid of cuckoos: most of them are extremely dangerous. Sarah is different. I grew up with her. I trust her with my life.”

  “There was a human boy who used to hang out on my favorite NeoPets forum,” said Megan. “His family ran one of those little roadside zoos. He used to post pictures of himself with their bear. He always said she loved him. That she was different. When he stopped posting, I went looking for news articles about the zoo. The bear killed him. Maybe she was different, but she wasn’t different enough.”

  I didn’t say anything. Megan wasn’t saying anything new: she was expressing a fear shared by several members of my own family, my Grandma Alice among them. Cuckoos kill. It’s what evolution designed them to do. Grandma Angela may be a CPA, and Sarah may be a math nerd, but they’re both built to be killers, and there’s always the chance that one day, nature will win out over nurture.

  Of course, there are people who say the same about my family. We belonged to the Covenant for centuries, after all: we are the descendants of killers who waded through rivers of blood to put humans at the top of the pecking order. An upsettingly large percentage of the cryptid population is waiting for the day when we decide to go back to the old way of doing things.

  If I could believe in my family’s ability to walk away from the Covenant, I could believe in Sarah’s ability to walk away from the need to twist the world to her own desires. I had to believe in it, because she was family, too. There are more important things in this world than blood.

  “So you’re aware, Sarah knows what most people think of her, and her kind,” I said. “She doesn’t get mad about it, since she knows it’s true, and she’d rather people have some warning. But once she’s in the car, if you look at her and think ‘monster’ too loudly, she’ll probably hear you, and we want her to be willing to help find your colony’s missing kids.”

  Megan’s cheeks flushed red as she turned her face toward the window. Maybe I was being a little heavy-handed. Whatever. I was about to ask Sarah to do something I knew she absolutely would not want to do, and it was going to be a lot easier if she didn’t have someone sitting by, waiting to be murdered.

  The driveway was still empty when we pulled up in front of the house. My grandparents hadn’t come home yet. That would make this easier, since it meant Grandma couldn’t argue with me about whether or not Sarah was ready to leave the house. It would also make this harder, since Sarah would probably try to say that she couldn’t go out without permission.

  “Come on.” I stopped the engine, unbuckled my seatbelt, and opened the door. “No matter what you see, I need you to stay calm and keep your wig on, all right?”

  Megan gave me a horrified look. She followed me anyway. I guess the fear of losing the children was stronger than her fear of an ordinary suburban home.

  The living room was empty when I unlocked the front door. The distant sound of drumming echoed through the walls, faint enough to be easily mistaken for the thump of a faulty air conditioner. I closed the door before leaning over and rapping shave and a haircut on the nearest retaining wall.

  “The sound will carry,” I explained.

  “Carry where?” she asked.

  In answer, a tiny, cunningly camouflaged door popped open in the wall. The edges had been sanded until they were completely flush with the drywall around them, making it functionally invisible to anyone who didn’t already know it was there.

  “HAIL!” cried the mouse who had opened the door. It was dressed in the regalia of the Thoughtful Priestess, also known as my mother, which made sense: apart from the mice who were traveling with me, most members of the resident colo
ny were adherents of her particular subsect of their faith. “HAIL TO THE RETURN OF THE GOD OF SCALES AND SILENCE!”

  “Um,” said Megan.

  “Hey,” I said, to the mouse. “I need to take Sarah out of the house for a little while. Can I leave a message for Grandma, in case she gets home before we do? She’s going to want to know where we are.” I didn’t insult the mouse by asking if it would remember. Aeslin mice have perfect recall of everything they see or hear. They don’t believe in written records, considering them fragile and fallible: for them, the oral tradition is all.

  The mouse puffed out its chest with pride. “I Listen and Repeat!” it squeaked.

  “Awesome. Okay. Tell her this: that the God of Scales and Silence has taken the younger Heartless One to the children of Stheno, for their offspring are in danger, and Sarah is needed to bring the young ones safely home. Tell her that the Unpredictable Priestess is also with the children of Stheno. If we do not return by sunrise, we have failed, and more aid is required.”

  “It shall be Spoken,” said the mouse, bobbed its head politely to Megan, and withdrew into the hole, pulling the door shut with a soft but definite click.

  “Um,” said Megan again.

  “Aeslin mice,” I explained. “They’re almost extinct, but my family has managed to preserve a colony. A pretty healthy one, too. Their population is still increasing.”

  “I’ve … heard of them,” said Megan, looking suddenly awkward.

  I had to swallow a laugh. “Let me guess, in the context of ‘these were a delicacy, but no one can find them anymore.’”

  She nodded, cheeks flaring red.

  “Don’t worry. Everyone shares the same food chain. Will you be okay here by yourself for a few minutes? I want to go get Sarah.”

  “I won’t touch anything,” said Megan.

  “Cool. Be right back.” I started up the stairs before she could change her mind and demand to come with me. Sarah already knew she was in the house, of course: I was wearing an anti-telepathy charm, but Megan wasn’t, and she couldn’t sneak up on a cuckoo if she tried. That was probably a good thing. Sarah has a harder time reading minds she hasn’t encountered before, so Megan’s presence was going to be less “invasive” and more “warning.” It’s always good to give the twitchy telepath as much advance notice as possible.

  Her door was still closed. I knocked lightly. “Sarah? I know you’re in there.”

  Silence.

  “You don’t have a car, you haven’t gone outside voluntarily in months, and the mice would have said something if you’d wandered away. Open the door.”

  Again, silence, stretching long enough that I was afraid I was going to have to enter her room uninvited. Then the doorknob turned, and the door creaked open, just a few inches, just enough to let me see one large, accusatory blue eye peering back at me.

  “You brought a stranger into the house,” said Sarah.

  “I did,” I agreed. “Her name is Megan; she’s Dee’s daughter. She knows Antimony.”

  The door creaked open a little wider. “Annie? She knows Annie? Is she okay?”

  “She was,” I said. “You can ask Megan yourself, if you want; you’ll just have to do it in the car. I need you to come with me to look for the missing children.”

  Sarah jerked the door all the way open, eyes going even wider in surprise and, yes, fear. “ With you? You mean to where the gorgons live?”

  “Yes.” I looked at her steadily. “Please.”

  “No!” She took a step backward, moving deeper into her room, which was so scrupulously clean that it could have been a showroom display at IKEA. It hurt a little, seeing it that way. She’s never been the most cluttered member of our family, but she used to at least keep a few personal touches in reach. “Gorgons, they aren’t just one mind, not like humans are; they’re all these little minds touching on one big central mind, and it’s like standing in the middle of a snowstorm and trying to guess which flake is in control of all the others. It’s confusing.”

  “But it’s not painful,” I guessed.

  She bit her lip and didn’t correct me.

  “Sarah, their children are missing. Someone took them, and from the way it looks, that someone was a human, part of a group of humans. They’re going to sell those children to the highest bidders. Do you know what happens to cryptid kids who get bought by humans?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. We didn’t talk about it much, for a lot of reasons, but her older brother, my Uncle Drew, was one of those kids. He’d been stolen from the bogeyman community where he was born when he was too young to remember anything about it. My grandparents had saved him from his “owner,” and his adoption had been an act of essential mercy. He had been afraid of his own species, as well as almost everything else, for years after his rescue.

  “So you understand why we need to find them as soon as possible. There should only be two humans in the woods: me and Shelby. If you follow the sound of human thoughts, we’ll find where they have the children.”

  “They could already be gone,” she said.

  I shook my head. “They were smart enough to set lookouts on the major roads in and out of the area. They’re smart enough to go to ground for a few days, to let the heat die down and give the children time to accept their new reality.” And to start pulling fangs. If they maimed a few of the older children, the others would fall into line.

  It wasn’t going to get that far. I wasn’t going to let it.

  Sarah closed her eyes.

  “Please,” I repeated.

  “I could … I could lose control,” she said. “I could hurt someone. I could get scared and decide I needed to be protected and hurt someone.”

  “You won’t,” I said.

  She opened her eyes, looking at me gravely. “How do you know?”

  “Because you’re my cousin, and I love you, and I trust you, and you’ve never hurt anyone like that,” I said. “Not even when you were a little kid. You were scared and you were running and you were looking for someone to keep you safe, and even then you didn’t take over anyone’s mind on purpose. Besides, who’s going to take better care of you than I could? If you get scared, you’ll just get behind me.”

  She smiled wanly. I still took it as a good sign.

  “You think pretty highly of yourself, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Well, you know, I have it on pretty good authority that I’m not completely bad at my job,” I said. “I mostly come home in one piece.”

  “So far,” she said. Then, awkwardly, she added, “Do the gorgons, um … do they know you’re coming here to get me? Not everyone likes having a cuckoo around.”

  “They know,” I said. “I have permission.” That, more than anything, would tell her how serious this was.

  Sarah nodded. “All right,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  * * *

  The ride back to the community was awkward, made even more so by the way Sarah sat in the center of the backseat, head bowed and hair covering her face, like she was preparing for the starring role in yet another remake of The Ring. Megan kept stealing anxious glances at her in the rearview mirror, and her wig was emitting a steady hissing sound that was almost comical while we were alone in the car but would become a serious problem if we got pulled over for some reason.

  “Sarah, we’re coming up on the barrier between the community and the main road,” I said. “For me, it manifests as a bunch of illusions, and the strong desire to turn around and go back the way I came. If you start feeling like we shouldn’t be here, try to remember that it’s external.”

  “All right, Alex,” she said, without lifting her head. Then: “Please ask Megan to be less afraid of me. It’s like she’s screaming and screaming in my ear, and I don’t like it. It makes it hard to concentrate.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Megan, hey, could you try to be less terrified of my cousin? Please, as a favor to me?”

  “She can hear you,” said Megan.

  �
�I know, but she asked me to try, so I’m trying,” I said. “Look, she’s a nerd, all right? She does math for fun, she puts spaghetti sauce on her ice cream, and she reads too many comic books. She’s not going to hurt you. She’s here because she wants to help.”

  “‘Want’ is a generous word,” said Sarah. “I’m willing. Children shouldn’t have to be afraid of the people who are supposed to take care of them. But I don’t want to be out of my house, and I don’t want to be around people who’re afraid of me. It’s not my fault I can read your mind.”

  “So don’t,” snapped Megan.

  Sarah finally peeked out from behind the curtain of her hair. “Tell the snakes on your head to stop breathing,” she said.

  Megan’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “They’re breathing. Tell them to stop.” Sarah sat up straighter, pushing her hair out of her face and looking defiantly at Megan’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “Well? I’m waiting.”

  “I can’t do that!”

  “And I can’t stop having a certain low-level awareness of your consciousness. I’m not digging through your memories, all right? That would be rude, and it would be hard, and being out of the house is hard enough for me right now. I’m not changing your mind for you. If I were, don’t you think we’d be best friends? You’d be sitting back here and braiding my hair and telling me about the cute girl in your immunology lecture series. Instead, you’re sitting up there trying not to think about how scared of me you are and wondering whether your venom would petrify me before I could wipe your sense of self. I didn’t choose my biology any more than you did, and it’s not fair of you to sit up there hating me for it when I’m on my way to help save kids you care about. You need to stop.”

  Megan blinked and looked away, visibly ashamed. That was a nice start. “I’m sorry. I’ve never met a cu—a Johrlac before.”

  “Yes, you have.” Sarah sounded genuinely apologetic. “I can see the scars. It probably happened at Lowryland. The dangerous ones, the real cuckoos, they like places with a whole lot of people. It makes it easier for them to pass unnoticed. I don’t think you’ve ever been targeted, but they’ve brushed past you on the street.”