Crossroads Burning

by Nash, Layla

  The book felt heavier and heavier as I got closer to Frank with a coffee mug, setting it down so I could splash an inch of whiskey into it. “There.”

  He didn’t look at me before picking up the mug and gulping it down, holding the ridiculous Mickey Mouse mug we’d gotten for Gran one Christmas. “More.”

  I rolled my eyes and refrained from reminding him about saying “please,” since he looked on the edge of a complete mental breakdown. So I added more whiskey and waited, wondering if Lucia would throw a fit if I made myself a drink as well for liquid courage. The dense fear of the dream still lingered in a cold knot in my stomach, making the whiskey even more necessary.

  Frank finished the second mug of whiskey just as quickly, then braced his hands on the table as he stared at the long, straight fingers and the disconcertingly perfect nails. “That is my book. It took me a lifetime to fill it. I must have it back.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “There are some things in it that have... caused some concern. The curse for making werewolves, for instance.”

  He went still once more as the blood drained from his face. He cleared his throat a couple of times and shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s a joke, really. Like alchemy.”

  “Recipes for turning base metal into gold don’t end up with people turning into animals and dying,” Lucia said. “So let’s start simple. Do you remember your name now?”

  “Ronan,” he said, looking up at us finally. “Ronan Luckett.”

  I dropped the whiskey and Liv dropped the shotgun, and even Lucia couldn’t move. A male Luckett.

  Chapter 41

  I cleared my throat a couple of times and jumped to pick up the whiskey before it spilled all over the floor. “Say that again.”

  “I’m Ronan Luckett,” he snapped, some of the fire coming back to his eyes. “Surely you have heard of me.”

  Liv snorted and juggled the shotgun so she could reach for the whiskey and take a swig. “Sorry, friend. We don’t know any male Lucketts.”

  “That’s preposterous,” he said. “There were quite a few of us. All druids. And—”

  “Druids?” I retreated a few steps. So he was like Lincoln. Lincoln acted as if it were such a rare, hated thing that I was surprised to hear him admit it so readily. “I thought they were all banned for practicing blood sacrifices and killing people and stuff.”

  “Hardly,” he muttered. “We are more powerful than any other faction. Kings and gods listen to us. We see the future in the stars and play chess with the lives of men.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Liv said. She winced at the whiskey and handed it back to me. “But that doesn’t explain why you were a werewolf. Surely someone who sees the future in the stars would have figured out how to avoid that?”

  Frank—Ronan—stared at her as if he’d never seen her before and only then became aware that she existed. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You were a werewolf,” I said, not wanting him to focus too much on Liv. If he attacked anyone, I wanted it to be me. I wouldn’t hesitate to deal with him if it came down to it, and if I couldn’t... Well. At least I’d slow him down enough for Liv to aim the shotgun. “We’re witches and changed you back to human. You’ve been a pain in the ass ever since.”

  He shook his head. “Preposterous. Mere witches could not undo a curse like that, even if it had been worked on me. Which it would not have been, because I—”

  “Because you came up with it?” Lucia asked. Her knuckles were white where she held onto the arms of her chair, watching him like the dangerous snake that fell out of the light fixture in the living room one particular winter.

  Ronan lifted his chin and slowly slid his chair away from the table. “Yes, as a matter of fact I did. So I know from experience that witches simply aren’t clever or strong enough to mitigate that curse.”

  Great. Just fucking wonderful. I didn’t know if I believed that he’d created the werewolf curse, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint why he would lie. That wasn’t really something to brag about, at least not when three women who’d called themselves witches confronted him with it.

  I needed more whiskey than we had in the house to deal with this. “How old are you? When were you born?”

  “I am over three hundred years old,” he said, pompous as fuck. I rolled my eyes. He looked ridiculous taking on airs without a shirt and wearing only slouchy sweatpants, but he managed to look at least somewhat intimidating all the same. “And am the reincarnation of powerful druids from when Rome ruled the world and heroes of legend walked the forests of Britannia.”

  I sighed, leaving the whiskey bottle on the counter so I could fold my arms over my chest. “Well, that’s great. What’s the last year you remember?”

  He deflated a little when his pedigree didn’t impress us. And some of that pain and grief returned to his eyes as he stared at us, searching and struggling to remember. “I’m not... not certain. We fled England after they began to hang witches in earnest, and then King William’s War began in the colonies, and when we reached Salem Town, we found trouble there as well.”

  Salem Town. I massaged my temples, not quite believing what he was saying. He couldn’t have meant the witch hunt in Salem. He couldn’t. It wasn’t possible. “You found trouble or you caused trouble, powerful druid like you?”

  “We did what we had to in order to guarantee prosperity for ourselves,” he said. “And we protected our own from the war and the savages and the pox. Those religious zealots overreacted, and—”

  “And you cursed them, too? Bell and Book.” Lucia shook her head in disbelief, and squeezed her coffee mug like she wanted to chuck it at his head.

  Ronan drew himself up, expression hardening. “We did what we had to.”

  “And you got innocent people killed at Salem,” she said.

  “The guilty died as well,” he said. “They killed witches there. That some of our accusers were also themselves accused is merely the rule of three coming back to them.”

  “I can’t do this tonight, Sass,” Lucia said. She lurched to her feet and headed for the stairs. “I don’t know what you want to do with him, but I can’t hear any more of this.”

  “Looch—” I started, but cut myself off when I saw the pure rage in her eyes.

  She might have breathed fire at me if I moved or did more than just look at her, and my older sister held on to control by the skin of her teeth. “Didn’t you listen to him? Did you hear what he said?”

  “Yeah, I did.” I pressed my hands to my eyes, suddenly a hell of a lot more tired than I had been only a minute before. “But I also heard his name, and I think you know what that means, the same as I do.”

  Ronan flipped his dark hair out of his eyes and pushed to his feet. “What does it mean? Do you know where my family is?”

  “We do,” I said. Maybe we would have been better off trying to call Gran’s ghost back to the house. She’d probably have been more helpful than the yahoo we changed back from a werewolf. Or maybe we could sic Gran on Ronan and have her bring him to task for all the suffering we’d done. Ronan might have to deal with his own rule of three—coming back to him by spending hundreds of years as a werewolf—but I got the feeling the reason the Lucketts were stuck in Rattler’s Run had something to do with him visiting suffering upon the citizens of Salem Town. The Bell only knew how much damage he’d done in Europe before finally fleeing to the colonies to bring his sparkling personality across the ocean. “We’re it, Ronan. We’re all that’s left of the Lucketts.”

  He rocked back on his heels, more horror in his face than when I’d first told him he’d been a werewolf. “That’s impossible. My line would never die out to just... women.”

  “Charming,” Liv said under her breath. She gripped the shotgun like she reconsidered shooting him on the basis of misogyny alone.

  Lucia held her hands in the air and retreated a few more steps. “I’m done tonight, Sass. Lock him back in the shed if you want.”

&nbs
p; “You will listen to me,” Ronan snapped, trying to loom over us. “If you are…all that is left of my line, then you must obey me. I am the head of the family, and I demand that—”

  “You don’t demand anything,” I said. At least the book was still tucked into my back pocket. “It’s a different time, friend. This is the twenty-first century. You were out of it for a long time, running around as a werewolf. Until we get all that sorted out, you’re more of a criminal than a hero. So settle down and we can try and talk this through.”

  “I refuse.” Ronan folded his arms over his chest and jerked his chin at the kitchen. “I demand you prepare me a proper meal, serve it, and give me my book. And find a more comfortable chamber than what you called the guest room. It is hardly fitting a man of my standing.”

  Lucia snorted and ignored him, going up the stairs without another word. Liv, still wearing her silly costume, flounced an exaggerated curtsy before flipping him off and following our sister. Which left me staring at the imperious ancestor, wondering what the hell I was going to do with him, since the shed was still in shambles.

  Chapter 42

  Nothing occurred to me as I looked at him, and Ronan seemed nearly as flummoxed as I felt. At length, I took a deep breath and pointed at his chair. “Sit back down. Things are very different now, and you’re going to have to check your ego at the door in order to survive.”

  “Are you threatening me, girl?”

  “Right now I’m the only one still talking to you, Ronan, which should worry you more.” I sank into my chair and leaned back, too tired to get upset by his attitude. I supposed he was my many times great-grandfather or great-uncle or something, so he deserved a little more tolerance than I would have shown a non-relative. Even if his bad decisions continued to punish the rest of us across time. “If the last thing you remember is leaving Salem due to the witch hunt, that was in 1690-something.”

  “And?” He looked around the kitchen and strode to the fridge, hauling open the door and sticking his hand inside. “You have wondrous magical items all over your house, which will no doubt draw the ire of your neighbors. Three old maids should not live so ostentatiously.”

  Old maids. It was a really good thing that Lucia had walked away before that got said. “We don’t live ostentatiously, believe me. We’re as bottom of the barrel as you can get without living in a house with wheels.”

  “You would rather live in a wagon? How strange.”

  Gran give me strength. I picked up the dirty dishes and the crumpled hamburger wrappers to distract myself from how much I wanted to punch him right in the throat. “No, Ronan. That’s not what I meant. We can come back to that. What I was starting to say is that we live more than three centuries later. So you’re not three hundred years old. You’re more than six hundred, even without your reincarnation stuff.”

  The color left his face once more. “That’s impossible. It cannot be... Three hundred years? You are certain?”

  “Believe me, Ronan. I’ve got no reason to lie.” I threw out the trash and put the dishes in the sink, then flipped open the dishwasher so I could put away the clean ones before loading in the dirty. “Something happened and you ended up as a werewolf. Apparently you’ve been a werewolf for some time, otherwise you should have remembered more from later than Salem, right?”

  Ronan sank into a chair at the table, head in his hands. “It cannot be.”

  “Unless you know some tricks to send you back in time, friend, you’re stuck. It happened. I don’t know how to prove it to you, other than... well, than how everything has changed. The clothes and language and electricity didn’t tip you off?”

  “Magic makes anything possible,” he said, sounding tired. “And though druidic magic is only used for pure purposes, witches may use their magic for baser pleasures and creature comforts. It did not surprise me that a trio of women would endeavor to use magic to avoid housework and replace those chores a man would do.”

  I kicked the dishwasher closed in irritation. Sure, druids were a ton better than witches, probably because druids were men and witches were women. If he hadn’t looked so pathetic and lost, I might have given him more than just a piece of my mind. Instead, I took Lucia’s chair at the other end of the table and tried to dredge up some sympathy for my ancestor. “You’ve got to stop talking like that. Or at least try not to be so condescending.”

  “I hardly think—”

  “Look, man.” I massaged my temples and peered at the clock on the microwave. “It’s late and I haven’t slept enough to be patient with you. So this is what we’re going to do. You’re going to go to the guest room and chill the fuck out. I’m going to go sleep until morning. Then we can start over and figure out how we’re going to figure out what happened to you and how we can manage the whole werewolf thing.”

  “What do you mean, ‘werewolf thing’?” He practically sniffed in dainty objection to my characterization of his circumstances, and ignored entirely my subtle request to stop being such a dick.

  I resisted the urge to pull the book from my pocket, not wanting to remind him that I had it. “We don’t have werewolves around here normally, but we’ve had eleven or so in the last week. They’re attacking people and causing a lot of trouble, and they could end up... well, end up getting us all killed, like what happened in Salem.”

  His eyes narrowed as he studied me. “Surely your... magic is sufficient to stop some animals?”

  He said “magic” like an offensive word, the verbal equivalent of having to pick up someone else’s dirty drawers. But I wasn’t going to fall for it. I pushed to my feet and headed for the guest room, a hint of an idea forming in my mind. “We can talk about that tomorrow. For tonight, you stay here. Don’t go wandering around. There are other wild animals nearby, and we don’t need you doing any druid shit and drawing more attention to us. Here.”

  Ronan followed me reluctantly, his lip curling as he surveyed the guest room. It wasn’t much and we all knew it, but it was clean and as comfortable as we could manage for a room that didn’t see a whole lot of use. He looked at the thick book I held out to him, but he didn’t touch it. “What is that?”

  “It’s the first volume of the encyclopedia.” I tossed the book on the bed, then pointed at the pile of books that ended up in the bottom of the bookshelf near the closet after we moved things around after Gran passed and then Ma got sick. “We’ve got all of them. If you want to catch up on what happened while you were gone, dive in. You can go alphabetically, or just pick through them as you like. This’ll give you a little more information. And maybe adjust your attitude a bit,” I added under my breath. “I recommend you pay attention to the 1960s and 70s, along with the civil rights movement and women’s suffrage and all kinds of other updates.”

  Ronan gave me a dirty look.

  I walked to the door and resisted the urge to slam it in his face, but turned back to see him standing in the middle of the room, looking lost. Despite his attitude and overbearing presence, I felt a little sorry for him. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to wake up expecting one time, and finding instead that it was three hundred years in the future. “We’ll figure this out, Ronan. It’ll be okay.”

  “If I cannot fix this... situation, surely you will not be able to.” He turned his back and picked up the encyclopedia I’d left on the bed, and just like that my sympathy evaporated.

  I shut the door and locked it, just in case. I didn’t want to put a magical ward on it to keep him in, so the old-fashioned way was the only way. Part of me didn’t really care if he ran away. With his attitude, he’d end up in jail within twenty-four hours, and if that didn’t get him, he’d die of exposure in about as long. Small blessings, I figured. The dire wolves could finish off the rest, or maybe one of the werewolves he created would bite him again and bring things around full circle. The universe liked symmetry, or so Nona always said.

  I hauled myself upstairs and into my room, ignoring that the light was still on under Lucia’s do
or. No doubt she didn’t want to talk about anything, least of all the asshole occupying our guest room, but part of me wanted to ask her what the hell I was supposed to do about Lincoln. I even paused outside her door, holding my breath as I raised my hand to knock, but my throat closed up and nerves took over and I retreated to my room without another word.

  Chapter 43

  Even though I fell into bed exhausted, the moment my head hit the pillow I was wide awake. Thoughts of Ronan and his past and the possible link to the original werewolf curse raced through my mind, scattering and swirling until I didn’t know what was true and what had been a dream. As I tried to sort through the pudding in my brain and the occasional static of another possible dream-connection, I wanted to call Lincoln. I wanted to hear his voice, sure, and to get his opinion on all the shit that Ronan said, but more than that, I wanted to be reassured. He would tell me that things would be okay, and I would believe him. I might have been able to sleep if Lincoln told me things would work out.

  I pulled the book out of my pocket and studied it in the light of the lamp on my bedside table, squinting at the watery ink and the shaky scrawl of fancy letters. At least Ronan would be able to decipher the contents, if he was the one who wrote it.

  And if he was willing to be honest about what was written. I didn’t trust him not to lead us astray, particularly if he sought to keep a bunch of hysterical female witches away from his pure druid knowledge.

  Pure druid knowledge. I frowned at the book and ran my fingertip along the torn cover. Maybe Lincoln could decipher it. Not the part about the werewolves, depending on how things went the next day, but his translations could help me create a test for Ronan. Or maybe Ronan would listen to Lincoln, since Lincoln was a dude. Apparently having a penis really mattered for druids.