Page 17 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

Guns are a bad idea in a rental house. I belted a set of throwing knives around my waist and eased the door open, stepping gently out into the hall.

The house was dark and close enough to silent as to make no difference. There are always sounds in an old house at midnight. The rumble of the heating system, the soft settling of old timbers as they sink deeper into their positions, the whistle of the wind outside the walls. At the moment, I was grateful for every familiar, predictable noise. As long as I was careful, they would cover for me.

A dim light was coming from under the library door, too dim to be anything but a flashlight. I looked at it, eyes narrowing. Any chance that it had been Cylia, unable to sleep and looking for a nice book on civic history to ease her into dreamland, died with that light. She would have flipped the switch. She would have used the overheads.

We had an intruder.

I drew a knife as I placed a hand on the library doorknob. The air felt electric with the confrontation to come. I took a slow, careful breath, centering myself, and shoved the door open.

There was a yelp as the person inside realized they were no longer alone. I didn’t see them: they dropped their light, whatever it was, and the library was cast into darkness. That was fine. I closed my eyes to keep any shadows or outlines from distracting me, balled my free hand into a fist, and swung, missing by at least a foot.

Blind fighting—the art of punching people while you can’t see them—is a useful skill to have, which is why my parents insisted my siblings and I all develop it, if only for the inevitable day when we’d be trying to punch a robber in a rented house in Maine. It’s all about knowing the space and following the sounds inside it. The intruder backpedaled away from me, every step broadcasting their location.

I swung again. This time, I was rewarded with the pleasant crunch of knuckles mashing against cartilage.

“My nose!” exclaimed a male voice. I drew back to swing at him a third time. I was keeping my knife until and unless I really needed it. Punching burglars is much easier to explain to the local police than stabbing them. Stabbing them can cause … problems.

Our intruder had better reflexes than I expected—that, or it had been long enough since I’d had a good sparring partner that I was getting rusty. Either way, my fist smacked into a palm rather than hitting his face, and pain followed immediately after. Not searing pain. Not even the dull pain of hitting something too hard for my hand to take. No, this was the brutal, bitter pain of thrusting a hand into a pocket of subzero water that had miraculously remained unfrozen, dropping the temperature of my skin into frostbite territory almost instantly.

I shrieked, jerking my hand away, and kicked the intruder’s feet out from under him. There was no point in trying to be quiet, not when all the available backup was mine. Sam was already going to be pissed that I’d gone looking for the intruder without him. He’d be livid if I got myself frozen to death because I didn’t scream.

The intruder fell hard, with a grunting sound that confirmed the location of his head. Great. I dropped to one knee, feeling it strike home against the bottom of his crotch, and leaned forward to press the edge of my knife against his throat. It wasn’t the sharpest blade, since it was designed for throwing rather than slashing, but I was pretty sure he’d get the idea.

“What the hell are you doing in my house?” I demanded.

The light clicked on before he could answer, and James Smith—the man from the woods—squinted in pain and surprise against the glare. I gaped at him. That gave him the chance he was looking for. Moving fast, he grabbed my wrist. Cold flowed from his fingers into my skin, and I dropped the knife as my hand forgot how to clamp down. I howled. He tried to roll away.

“No,” I snarled, and punched him again with the hand he’d frozen first. My knuckles hit his nose with an audible crunch, followed by a bolt of pain that seemed to travel all the way to my shoulder. If I hadn’t broken something, I’d at least bruised it, in both of us, and I was going to need medical attention.

His head snapped back, smacking against the floor so hard that his eyes rolled back and his body went limp. I staggered to my feet, one hand hanging functionally useless, the other hand aching so badly that I could feel my pulse in the traceries of pain, and stared at the unconscious form of literally the only person I’d met since getting to Maine.

Well, fuck.

Five

“Death is not the last great adventure. Death is the natural consequence of getting the last great adventure wrong.”

–Mary Dunlavy

The library of an increasingly familiar house in New Gravesend, Maine

IT HAD BEEN FIFTEEN minutes, and the feeling was returning to my right hand. The skin was red and chapped, like I’d been outside in a bad snowstorm. My joints ached, but I didn’t think I was going to lose any fingers. That was the good part. James Smith was tied securely to a chair, his hands covered in oven mitts that would keep him from grabbing hold of anyone else. That was the better part.

Cylia leaned against the wall, dressed in a fluffy yellow bathrobe that made her resemble nothing so much as a malevolent daffodil come to pass judgment on the weak. She still looked friendlier and more understanding than Sam, who was in human form, wearing only his jeans, and glaring at James like he was trying to decide how to dispose of the body. Which, let’s be fair, was probably pretty close to the truth. It turned out Sam didn’t like it when people froze his girlfriend.

Gosh, I loved that man.

Fern was outside, checking the house perimeter to make sure James had been acting alone when he broke in. We already knew how he’d entered: one of the panes in the library window was shattered in a snowflake pattern, like it had been exposed to sudden, shocking cold. He must have frozen it, smashed it, and then reached through to unlock the window and let himself inside. The sound of the glass breaking was what had woken me up.

James looked at me warily. A thick trail of dried blood connected his left nostril to his upper lip. There wasn’t much visible swelling; I hadn’t managed to break his nose. Pity. I couldn’t justify punching him again, either, not until we’d managed to get some information out of him. If he stopped talking, maybe then I could punch him. That was a fun idea. My hand hurt, and everyone was grumpy as hell, and punching was just the thing to make me feel better.

“Let’s try this again,” I said. “Why did you break into our house?”

“It’s not your house,” he said sullenly. “It belongs to my cousin.”

“What a lovely, subtle, pointless clarification,” I said. “That makes my hand feel so much better. Which reminds me. What did you do to my hand?”

“I didn’t do anything to your hand,” said James. “You’re the one who punched me in the face and tied me to a chair.”