Page 20 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“Don’t do it again,” snapped Sam. He sat next to me, somehow still managing to loom.

That was going to get old fast. “All right: introductions. Everyone, this is James Smith, who I met in the woods. James Smith, this is everyone.”

James looked expectantly around the table. No one offered a name, not even Fern who was looking at him with uncharacteristic wariness. He seemed to deflate a bit.

“Sorry,” he said. “I guess I don’t deserve you trusting me just yet. But … how do you people even know what a sorcerer is? It took me months in my mother’s library before I found a name for what was happening to me. Who are you? Where did you come from?”

“My grandfather was a sorcerer,” I said. It was true, and enough of the story to be believable. “Fire, not ice. He accidentally toasted a lot of stuff before he figured things out.”

James’ eyes lit up as he sat up straighter in his chair. “Really? Can I meet him? I’ve never met another sorcerer.”

“You’re not going to meet this one,” I said. “He’s been gone for a long time. I never got to meet him myself.”

“Oh.” James’ shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Yeah, well. Every family has to suffer a few.” It’s difficult to say how much of a “loss” Grandpa Thomas really is. Grandma Alice insists he’s alive somewhere out there, and that she’s going to find him. Most of the family thinks she’s deluding herself, but since she’s regularly carrying more ordnance than a small gun store, no one wants to tell her that. I …

I thought she was deluding herself, too, until I made my own deal with the crossroads. Some of the things they said make me think she might be right. He might still be out there somewhere, trapped and scared and waiting for her to save him. I don’t know what to hope for anymore. I don’t have so many grandparents that I can afford to leave them trapped in eternal limbo. I also don’t know how I’m going to tell Grandma Alice that she’s not crazy without triggering a full-out assault on the crossroads, and I don’t think even she could survive that.

James looked down at the table. “I know about families and losses. My mother was a sorcerer. Ice, like me. She was good, too, at least if I believe her books. I remember her making it snow in the kitchen when I was a kid, like it was no big deal, and she’d be laughing, and it was … it was magic. I always hoped I’d get magic just like her.”

“What happened?” asked Cylia. Her voice was surprisingly gentle.

“She got sick,” said James. He matched her gentleness with bitterness, until every word was dripping with it. “She had magic and she had knowledge and she had money and none of it mattered, because she got sick and she died and she left me alone with a man who wouldn’t know magic if it flew up and bit him in the face.”

“Your dad doesn’t know?” I blurted.

“No, and I’d ask you not to tell him, except for the part where he wouldn’t believe you if you did; he’d just think you were trying to screw with him. If you don’t want to have the chief of police and uncle of your landlord watching you like a hawk, you won’t say a word.” There was a bone-deep stubbornness and no small amount of pride in the look he gave me. I recognized that expression. It was the face of a man who was accustomed to being the smartest person in the room.

Most of the time, that look was on my own face. I’d never realized how obnoxious it was. “We’re not going to tell him,” I said. “What good would it do? It’s not like I can force you to make ice in front of him, and I’m pretty sure punching you in the face again to get you to freeze me wouldn’t make your dad very happy with us, even if you don’t get along. You’re a sorcerer, you make things cold, you must be a delight in the middle of the summer. What books are you looking for?”

“Mom couldn’t keep her library at home without making my father suspicious. He married her because she was pretty, and because she knew how to keep house, and because he was smart enough to recognize a good thing when it looked him in the eye, but she had to make a lot of concessions to make things work.” James’ smile was small and even bitterer than his words, if such a thing was possible. “She married him because she loved him, so I guess we all get to fuck up once. Anyway, she got my cousin Norbert’s parents to let her have a couple of shelves in the library, since they liked her so much, and they knew my father wasn’t as big on books as they were. They’re still here. The books, I mean, not the parents. They died a long time ago.”

“People do that.” I’d been in a room with someone’s private manuals of sorcery and spellcraft, and I had somehow managed to spend my time reading municipal land records. That basically summarized my life. “So you need her books to learn more about this horrible thing you mentioned, and you didn’t get them out of here before we moved in, which meant breaking into the library in the middle of the night. Got it. What’s the horrible thing?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said James.

“We believed you about the freezing-my-girlfriend thing,” said Sam sourly. “We’re at least trying to believe you about your weird family shit. Maybe try us with the next piece.”

“I don’t—” James began. Then he stopped, catching himself, and looked around the table. All of us were watching him expectantly. “Okay. You might believe me. You people are really weird. Are you some kind of cult?”

“We’re carnies,” I said, voice flat.

James blinked before apparently accepting this. He shrugged once, picked up his coffee, and asked, “Have you ever heard stories about people going to the crossroads to make a deal? Like, a big deal, something they couldn’t get any other way?”

I stopped breathing. Literally stopped. My throat felt like it had closed, slamming shut and refusing to let anything through. Sam gave me a worried glance, putting his hand on my arm. I shook my head, motioning for him to stay quiet.

James didn’t even notice. He sipped his coffee, shoulders drooping in what might have been resignation, or might have been relief. He was finally getting the chance to tell people what he was afraid of. And maybe we were serious or maybe we were weird stoners who wouldn’t believe a word he said, but, either way, we were strangers, and there was nothing we could do to use what he told us against him. There was a power in that. A sincere, cleansing power.

“There are stories about the crossroads everywhere in the world. If you go to a place where two paths cross, there’s power there, and maybe you can make a deal with it, and maybe it can give you whatever it is you’ve always wanted. What’s interesting, though, is if you go back far enough, the deals … they were always small, and maybe people regretted them and maybe they didn’t, but there was balance. At the end of the bargain, no one walked away feeling like they’d been cheated.”

“What changed?” asked Cylia.

“It’s ‘what,’ and it’s ‘when,’” said James. “It takes work to find records that go back five hundred years, but I did it. I called in favors, I volunteered at local history days, I bribed people in other countries to go to their museums and copy manuscripts for me, and I did it.”

“How long?” I asked.

James looked at me. “Five hundred years, give or take a few decades,” he said. “The first records I’ve been able to find of a crossroads bargain turning bad, taking more than the person who made it intended to pay, are from the late fourteen hundreds. People seemed genuinely shocked, like prior to that, going to the crossroads had been extreme but understandable. Divination via the crossroads fell off sharply, and some places began to talk about them as places where witches congregated. What’s interesting is that if you read carefully, it’s pretty clear that this is when the witches stopped congregating at the crossroads. It was like they realized something had changed, turned dangerous, and they didn’t want to have any part of it.”