Page 15 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“See, you say that like it’s reasonable, but all I hear is ‘blah blah blah, I’m probably going to stab you in my sleep.’” He wrapped his tail around my waist, pulling me closer while he placed his hands to either side of my face. Then he grinned and kissed me.

When he pulled back, he said, “On the plus side, the make-outs are amazing.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” I said, leaning in to kiss him again. There was something so refreshing about being goofy and sappy and not worrying that somebody would see us. This was the first time we’d really been able to stand still since the start of our relationship, the first time I’d been able to kiss him without either forcing him to stay human or checking to see whether the motel curtains were closed. It was nice. It was special.

It was never going to last. Good things never do.

“What’s for dinner?” I asked.

“Cylia made a sort of goulash with pasta shells and hamburger and stuff,” he said. “It smells amazing. There’s parmesan cheese for the rest of you, and no dairy at all for me.”

“She remembered.”

His smile was almost shy. “She did.”

Cylia had been my friend long before she met Sam. Sam, on the other hand, had grown up sheltered by an entire carnival of people who loved and looked out for him—and who had warned him, over and over again, that if he was ever exposed to the rest of the world, he’d wind up in a zoo, or worse. Humans are not historically kind to things we don’t understand. Even without the ever-present threat of the Covenant of St. George, a cryptid in today’s world has a lot to worry about.

Meeting Cylia and Fern, who weren’t human and weren’t from the carnival and didn’t give a damn what he was, just that he was good to me, had been a revelation. It had been nothing short of miraculous to him that they could care about him enough to keep track of little things like the fact that he was lactose intolerant, or that he didn’t like riding in the front seat because then he couldn’t risk falling asleep. People are a lot more likely to notice when the guy in the passenger seat is a monkey than when it’s just another dark shape in the back.

“Goulash is better when it’s hot,” I said. He unwound his tail from my waist and took my hand, and together we made our way down to dinner.

Cylia had set the table, putting the pot on a trivet in the middle. “You’re doing the dishes,” she said, pointing her spoon at me.

I nodded. “Seems fair.”

Fern was buttering bread. She looked up and smiled. “Did you find something to read?”

“Is that an actual question, or are you just being polite?”

Fern thought about it while the rest of us were taking our seats. Then, nodding solemnly, she said, “Actual question. I mean, we’re all exhausted. You could have decided to take a nap. I’ve had three showers so far today, because I can. I’ll probably have another one before bed.”

“I admire your dedication to exhausting the local water table,” I said. Cylia handed me a bowl of goulash. I sprinkled cheese on the top as I thought about how to phrase things. Finally, I said, “I’ve been reading books on local history. They’re about as interesting as you’d expect for a small town in the middle of nowhere. Lots of ‘and then there was a feud over who owned the chickens, which went on for fifteen years, long after both the chickens and the original participants were dead, because it was something to do.’ This may be Maine, but that doesn’t make it Stephen King territory.”

To my surprise, Cylia relaxed visibly. “Oh, thank the Fates,” she said.

I blinked at her. “Did I miss something?”

“Luck brought us here; luck found us this house,” she said. “And it’s perfect for what we need, have you noticed that? It’s perfect.”

A warm current of unease worked its way through my stomach. “Perfect things exist. Besides, this house isn’t perfect. The water pressure in the upstairs shower’s hinky.”

“There’s a master bedroom right next to a library,” said Cylia. “There’s an attic bedroom with bars on the windows. We’re surrounded by the kind of forest where a six-foot monkey can run around and not worry about being seen by strangers. It’s not perfect in the ‘will win awards’ sense. It’s perfect in the ‘does it suit our idiosyncratic little group of weirdoes’ sense.”

The unease grew stronger. From the look on Sam’s face, he was experiencing something similar. “So why does this make us not being in Stephen King country a good thing?”

“That’s one of the ways the luck could have equalized,” said Cylia. “It could have decided, hey, we got the perfect house, in the perfect town, with the perfect unmarked graveyard filled with angry spirits out back. Or the perfect family of hungry ghouls looking for a group of tourists no one would miss. Or—”

“I get the horrifying picture,” I said. “Boring town is better. Check. But doesn’t that mean we’re still waiting to see how the luck is going to equalize?”

“It does,” admitted Cylia. “It also means we’ll have a little time and can get our footing before we have to fight for our lives again. Sometimes boredom is its own punishment. Now, can someone pass the pepper?”

Dinner was exactly as advertised: filling, delicious, and hearty in that summer camp kind of way, like we were storing up calories against the possibility of never getting to eat again. Cylia was a pretty decent cook, as long as what you wanted was carbs, protein, and vegetables that came out of a can. Sam, after tucking away three helpings, paid her the highest compliment in his vocabulary

“You cook like a carnie.”

Cylia laughed, and Fern laughed, and even I laughed, as much out of relief as amusement, because this was really happening: this was real life. We had our own place, and the space to stop and breathe and just be for a little while. I’d never realized, back when I was spending my days on my cousin Artie’s bed complaining about the X-Men and my nights on the track with the rest of my team, how much I needed to stop once in a while.

As promised, I did the dishes, and Sam, who had grown up in a carnival boneyard where everyone was expected to pull their weight, dried them and put them away, and by the time we were finished, both Fern and Cylia had gone to their respective rooms and shut their doors, leaving us alone in the kitchen. They might as well have left us alone in the house. It had been so long since I’d had privacy, real privacy, privacy that wasn’t stolen in a motel restroom or the middle of a cornfield filled with killer Blight, that for a moment I didn’t know what to do with it.