Page 2 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“It will. I know it will. Someday your weirdo will come.”

Antimony snorted. “Whoever it is, they must have been very, very naughty to wind up stuck with me.”

Fern opened her mouth to object—she didn’t like anybody saying bad things about her friends, not even her friends—but stopped as a bloody, vaguely equine shape trotted into the clearing below. Wisely, Fern shut her mouth and pointed.

Antimony turned to follow Fern’s finger. Her smile in that moment would probably have been enough to hurt her dating prospects, such as they were, for the foreseeable future. It was the smile of someone finally being allowed to start breaking things.

“All right,” she breathed, sheathing one of her knives and reaching under her vest to produce a Ziploc baggie filled with raw steak. It had been pressed against her side long enough that it was virtually at body temperature, and the smell, when she broke the seal, was strong.

Fern wrinkled her nose and didn’t say anything. She kept not saying anything as Antimony dropped the baggie like a plummeting meat bomb. It burst when it hit the ground, strewing chunks of steak everywhere. The unicorn’s head snapped up, nostrils twitching.

It really was a horrifying creature, bearing less resemblance to a My Little Pony than to a horse that had been sent to the glue factory, murdered everyone it found there, and come looking for revenge. The only part of it that could be considered beautiful or majestic was the long, spiraling horn that emerged from its forehead. The horn shone like mother-of-pearl, despite its thin coating of gore.

Fern whimpered. It was a reasonable response.

“Shhh,” said Antimony, and pulled another bag of steak—this one laced liberally with rat poison, because there’s no kill like overkill—out of her vest. She was grinning as she dropped it. In a very soft voice, she continued, “See why I don’t date? You try explaining this to your significant other, and see how single you are in the morning.”

The unicorn was under the tree, nosing at the spilled steak. As it began to eat, Antimony unsheathed her second knife, winked at Fern, and unhooked her legs from the branch where she’d been hanging.

The unicorn never saw what hit it.

One

“Don’t look back. You’ll never see anything but what you’re doing your best to leave behind, and you’re a lot more likely to trip and fall down, which gives it another chance to eat you.”

–Frances Brown

A large corn maze somewhere in the middle of Ohio

Six days ago

THE WIND BLEW ACROSS the corn with a sound unnervingly like a million bones rattling in the distance, a skeleton army marching on our position. I’ve never seen a skeleton army, but if they exist, I’m absolutely positive they’d be marching on Ohio. There’s nothing else to do in Ohio. It’s just corn, corn, skeleton army, possibly evil corn maze, football, corn.

When they show farms in the movies, the ground is always soft and loamy, inviting. It’s ground that says “hey, have a picnic on me.” This ground wasn’t like that. This ground was hard and dry and seemed to consist of equal parts petrified dirt and rocks, which dug into my butt in a way that managed to be simultaneously uncomfortable and invasive. I tried to squirm unobtrusively. All I did was work a few particularly pointy chunks deeper.

Sam grimaced. “Is it ants? Please tell me it’s not ants. You can lie if you want. In this one situation, I give you full and enthusiastic permission to lie.”

“It’s not ants,” I said. “I think I’m sitting on a rock.”

“I know you’re sitting on a rock. I’m sitting on at least six rocks.” Sam leaned back on his hands. “I feel like this farm is missing its true calling. Get rid of the corn, harvest rocks.”

“I doubt a rock maze would attract nearly as much in the way of tourism.”

“Okay, first, this is Ohio, there is no tourism. There’s just bored teenagers looking for someplace to go on a Friday night. Second, how much tourism do you think they’re getting, with all the mysterious disappearances? Ballpark figure?”

“They got a lot of bonus tourism after the first couple disappeared.” If there’s one thing humans and sapient cryptids have in common, it’s the burning desire to gawk at the site of an accident—and that goes double when you substitute “mysterious disappearance” for “accident.” One mysterious death or missing teenager is a short-term gold mine for the heartless entrepreneur. As long as you don’t mind building your success on a foundation of bones, you can make a lot of money.

The trouble begins when the deaths and disappearances keep happening. The “lightning never strikes twice” school of morbid curiosity can turn into “maybe I should have a vague sense of self-preservation” with reassuring speed, and the crowds stop coming.

The corn maze where we were enjoying the wonders of nature had been the site of not one, not two, but eleven disappearances since the start of the Halloween season. Always couples, always in their late teens or early twenties, and always fitting the “would totally sneak away to make out in the corn maze” demographic.

(Not as narrow or specialized a demographic as you might think. I know for a fact that my older sister went all the way in a corn maze with one of her high school boyfriends. She came home with husks in her hair, a smug expression on her face, and the phone number of the guy who’d been driving the hay wagon. My brother never got lucky in the corn as far as I know—although it’s also possible that Alex has more of a sense of discretion than Verity, which hello, not hard—but he definitely took a few girlfriends to walk the supposedly haunted trails and hold hands in an atmosphere of delightfully artificial fear. Sex and terror go hand in hand.)

Sam frowned, tilting his head back until he was gazing at the sky. The nearest city was far enough away that it was a gorgeous deep black, splashed generously with stars. The moon was a perfect bone-pale circle, looking down on us like a single unblinking eye.

“Didn’t you say you had family near here?”

“My maternal grandparents,” I confirmed. “They live in Columbus. My cousin Sarah was staying with them the last time I checked. She hasn’t been well.” That’s putting things mildly. Sarah is a cuckoo, a kind of pseudo-mammalian cryptid telepath. She’s a nerd fantasy on the outside, all long black hair and big blue eyes and books on complicated mathematics. On the inside, she has more in common with a tarantula wasp than she does with your average mathlete. She’s not human. She’s only technically a mammal. Evolution made her, threw up its hands, and went home.