Page 22 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

I snorted. I’m the baby of the family, not the heir and not the spare, not the good kid or the exciting renegade. I’m just Antimony, the one without ambition or direction or any of the other things someone my age is supposed to have. The idea of them having faith in me was almost ridiculous. Oh, my cousins might—Artie and Elsie and even Sarah, if she was currently capable of remembering who I was—but my parents? My siblings? No way.

“I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep track of you the way I have been.”

I opened my mouth to ask her why not, and froze, the implications of her statement sinking in. Slowly, I turned to stare at her.

Mary was wearing her usual seventies hippie gear, several decades too modern for her actual date of death, but remarkably well-suited to her straight white hair and those impossible eyes. A climbing clematis vine was embroidered up the side of her peasant blouse and around the squared-out neckline, until it looked like it was trying to strangle her one carefully stitched tendril at a time. She looked exhausted. No small feat, for a ghost. But she smiled, ever so slightly, as she met my eyes, and she nodded, the tiniest inclination of her chin.

Mary is the family babysitter. Somehow, she’s managed to turn that into a loophole in her contract with the crossroads, an excuse to keep following the family around the world—or, more specifically, to keep following the youngest member of the family. The one who most recently needed babysitting. As the last born in my generation, I’d enjoyed Mary’s company and occasional protection longer than either of my siblings or any of my cousins. If she wasn’t going to be following me anymore …

The loophole was closing. “I’m guessing asking you who is going to have the baby would be a little too close to something useful,” I said.

Mary nodded again, more firmly this time. “I can’t tell you. The crossroads would love to get a tighter hold on you right about now, and that means real information is off the table. But you already knew that.”

“Yeah, I did,” I said, pushing the idea of a baby—a baby, a Price baby—to the back of my mind. “Just like I knew you’d be showing up tonight. I didn’t want you to pop in inside. You would have given our poor houseguest a heart attack.”

“Might have solved a few problems if I had,” said Mary regretfully.

That’s the thing about Mary: she’s a good person in a bad situation, and she has never, to the best of my knowledge, liked her job. The crossroads call. The crossroads cajole. The crossroads convince, and the whole time, Mary—or another ghost like her—is there, trying to explain why this is a bad idea, why the person making the deal should walk away. And almost always, she loses. By the time a person goes to the crossroads, they’re not interested in being convinced to stop. They know what they want, and they’re going to get it if it kills them. Which, sometimes, it does.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m guessing this isn’t a friendly visit.”

“No.”

“I haven’t seen you since Lowryland. I was starting to think you were avoiding me.”

“I have been. The crossroads have always known your name, Annie. Now they know where you are, and they know what it tastes like when you’re afraid. They want you.”

“I already owe them.”

Mary shook her head. “No. I mean, yes, you owe them, but they haven’t beaten you. They haven’t taken you. They hate your family.”

“Wh—” I caught myself before it could become a question. “I guess why that’s the case would count as one of those questions I’m not supposed to ask.”

“I guess it would,” Mary agreed. “I really wish you’d had the chance to meet your grandfather.”

“Me, too.”

“Thomas Price never met a strict letter of the law he didn’t feel like subverting. It’s like he thought life was a riddle that could be solved in a way where no one had to get hurt—or maybe where only the people who deserved it got hurt. Remember, he started out Covenant. Slippery as he was, he still had some pretty firm ideas about morality.”

I held my tongue. If she was talking, it was because she wanted me to hear something. All I could do by interrupting was increase the chance she’d have to stop.

“Sometimes I thought he married your grandmother in part because the Covenant had been so fixated on him finding a way to subvert her and bring her back into the fold. Not that Alice hasn’t always been stubborn in her own right—they were a pair. No matter what else I can say about them, I can say with conviction that neither of them would ever have found someone better suited to their specific brands of crazy. And I got you, and your siblings, and your father, out of the deal.” Mary’s smile was fleeting. “It would have broken my heart if the family tree had ended with Alice. I’m really not qualified for any jobs but babysitting, and people don’t hire you if you don’t have references these days.”

“I’m not planning on having children any time soon,” I said.

“I know, but your brother and sister both want to, and that should be more than enough to keep me busy for a while.” Mary looked down at her hands, resting between her knees, and said, “Your grandfather knew about the crossroads. He knew to avoid them, and he knew if he ever made a deal, they’d do their best to hurt him. He stayed away as long as he could.”

“Lot of people stay away for their whole lives.”

“You didn’t.”

Silence fell like a hammer, smothering all the natural night sounds of the forest around us. I tried to speak. Nothing happened. She had me dead to rights, and what’s more, she had just, in her own sideways manner, answered one of the questions that had plagued me for my entire life. What could have driven a man like Thomas Price, a scholar, a sorcerer, a former member of the Covenant of St. George, who knew exactly what kind of danger the crossroads represented, to make a bargain with them?

What, if not the life of the woman he loved? Mary had said, when I made my own crossroads deal, that she’d been the one to broker the contract for Alice Healy’s life—Healy, not Price. They hadn’t been married yet, and so far as I knew, my grandmother had only gone to the crossroads after she had a ring on her finger and an empty place where her husband should have been. That visit had ended in fire and tears, but no bargain, which led me to believe the crossroads had asked for something she wasn’t willing to give up, not even to save the man she’d go on to spend the next forty years searching for.

Sometimes I wonder whether families are less complicated when they don’t insist on running around messing with the supernatural and getting themselves locked into unspeakable bargains with the other side of the veil. Then I realize I’d rather not know. Better or worse, this is what we’ve got, and this is what we’re keeping.

“When your grandfather went to the crossroads—and remember, you didn’t ask any of this, I’m talking because I want to, and you can’t stop me—they’d been waiting for him for a long, long time. He had power. He moved through a world filled with chaos, and sometimes he made it worse and sometimes he made it better, but always, always, he made it more fair. That was what he cared about more than anything. The crossroads looked at him and saw someone who could help them if he belonged to them, but who could hurt them if he didn’t. They wanted him for years before he came to them, and when he did, they offered a bargain that should have given them everything.”