Page 28 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

He wasn’t the only one who’d been a smart, mouthy kid who got along better with the teachers than with the other students. Elementary school had been a special kind of hell for me. Ditto middle school. High school had brought cheerleading and its associated challenges, and probably saved my life. Without something to focus on and give me a place in the social pecking order, I would eventually have been eaten alive.

“She was on the other side of the playground, but she saw me go down. She ran over and jumped on him, and started punching him again and again, screaming about how he wasn’t nice, he wasn’t a nice boy, she was going to tell everyone he wasn’t a nice boy.” The confusion faded into admiration. “It took two teachers to pull her off him. She skinned her knees all to hell, but she didn’t mess up her hair at all, and I pretty much fell in love with her right there. Sally was amazing. She could have been anybody’s friend. Anybody’s. There wasn’t a kid in that school who wouldn’t have been lucky to even touch her hand, and she chose me. I don’t know why. She never told me.”

Sam’s tail tightened around my waist, and I knew what he was thinking. There are very few people in this world who will love and treasure us for who we are, rather than who they think we have the potential to someday become. For James to find one of those people was amazing. For him to lose her …

“When did she make her bargain at the crossroads?” I asked.

He glanced at me, then looked back down at the table. “We were seventeen,” he said. “She was looking at getting out of here, finding some scholarship or something that would give her a free ride to college. Not because she needed it, necessarily—her family’s pretty well-off. Because she wanted something that meant I’d get to go, too. I don’t know how … I mean, most kids go to the financial aid office, you know? But we’d been pounding the pavement for months, applying for everything, applying everywhere, and my grades were great, but I didn’t have any extracurriculars and my father said he didn’t see why he should pay to send me to spend more time rotting my brain reading when there was plenty for me to do here at home. And she knew …”

James stopped. Just stopped. He stared off into space, saying nothing, doing nothing, barely breathing. The rest of us were silent, waiting for him to snap out of it.

Finally, he said, “She knew about my mother. Who else was I going to tell? Sally was my best friend. I told her everything. I told her how maybe someday I’d get magic, too, and then I’d make sure she had whatever she wanted, forever. I told her how it was going to be okay, if we could just figure out how to fix things. And she knew about the crossroads. Mom never went there, but she wrote down everything she knew. She gave directions. I swear, I didn’t know Sally was going to follow them.”

“Of course, you didn’t,” I said. He glanced at me, expression pleading for explanation, for absolution, for something to lift the veil of guilt he’d been looking through for years. It was almost painful, how much I wanted to give that to him. We weren’t friends, although we might be eventually, but there are some burdens no one should be required to carry alone. “You understood the crossroads. Maybe not everything about them, or you’d have chained her to a tree before you’d take the risk, but you knew they were bad and you knew that smarter people than you had tried to make a bargain and been burned, and there wasn’t any fire in your fingers or frost in your hands, you couldn’t possibly have expected to win. So you knew you’d never go, and that meant Sally would never go. She was your best friend. She was the person who listened to you. You just forgot that sometimes the people who love us are willing to do things for us that they’d never dream of doing for themselves.”

Sam’s tail tightened around my waist. I wasn’t just talking about James and Sally anymore. He knew it. He wasn’t going to let me go.

James flinched. “So you think it’s my fault that she went.”

“No. It would be your fault if you had left books laying around open to the pages on the crossroads, if you’d mentioned them over and over again in an effort to get her interested, if you’d asked her to do it. We’re not responsible for the things people do when we haven’t asked them to save us. She was trying to save you.” I took a breath. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.” His voice was soft, almost dull. “She left a note that said she’d worked it out, she’d figured out how to word her bargain so it couldn’t be used against her, and she went while I was at the library. I was volunteering. Trying to punch up those extracurriculars enough to let me get the hell out of this town. I was—”

He stopped, catching himself, before he continued, “Anywhere two paths cross can be a focus for the crossroads, but there are some places they like better than others. Places where things have gone wrong in the past. There’s an old tree on the other side of the wood. Kids call it the hanging tree, and they don’t remember why, but they don’t go there alone after dark, either, and when dogs go missing near it, they’re never found. There’s a crossing in sight of the tree. It’s not a good place. As soon as I realized Sally had gone to find the crossroads, I knew that was where she would go.”

He fell silent. I could see his frantic journey in the way his throat worked, the way his jaw clenched. Wherever he’d found her note, it had been far enough from the hanging tree that he’d been forced to run, maybe, or grab his bicycle and go, seventeen years old and racing against his best friend’s love for him as he tried to snatch her from the jaws of a monster she didn’t fully understand, nor ever could.

Finally, softly, he said, “The ice woke up when I was halfway there. I think … I think that’s the moment when her bargain was sealed. I think she asked the crossroads to give me something that would mean I definitely got out of this town, and so they unlocked the magic I’d inherited from my mother and acted like it was some big gift, instead of something that would have come along in its own time if I’d just been patient, if I hadn’t complained to Sally about how I was afraid it was never going to happen. It was so cold. I couldn’t control it. I didn’t understand what was happening. I froze my handlebars. They snapped off in my hands, and I crashed into a tree.”

He reached up, touching a small scar on his forehead as he said, “It was dark when I woke up. I ran the rest of the way. Three miles into the woods with no flashlight and no jacket and no clue what I was going to do when I got there, but I don’t think I’ve ever run that fast in my life.”

No one spoke. No one moved. It felt like we were all frozen by something even colder than the ice in James’ hands, until the very thought of movement was impossible.

“Her backpack was there. It had been … it had been ripped right off her body. The straps were torn in two. There wasn’t any blood, but the official report says it was a bear.” James’ mouth twisted into an entirely humorless smile. “My father wrote it. I told him it wasn’t a bear, and he said all the evidence was there, and he wrote it down and he told her parents he was sorry and he closed the case. Like Sally could ever be a case. Like she didn’t matter.”

A tear ran down his face. He swiped it fiercely away. “They gave me her college fund. She didn’t have a will in the legally enforceable sense, but she had a list of everything she cared about and who liked it best, or who needed it, and they followed that. I think she knew there was a chance going to the crossroads could get her killed, and she did it anyway. To help me. All she wanted to do was help me.”

“Why are you still here?” asked Cylia. “If you have the magic and you have the money, and the crossroads can be anywhere, why stay? You could have gone to school. Learned more about how this sort of thing works.”

“Because it wasn’t a bear,” said James. “The crossroads took her, and if there’s any chance I can get her back, I need to do it here, where she got lost. Maybe I can do it, if I do it here.”

I could hear echoes of my grandmother in his desperation, and they chilled me more than his hands had. She’d believed the same thing: that if she started from the place where my grandfather had gotten lost, she’d be able to bring him home again. That was more than fifty years ago. If he’s ever going to come home, it hasn’t happened yet.

“The crossroads don’t give back what they take,” I said.

“You think I don’t know that?” James picked up his coffee mug, twisting it between his hands. “I can’t find anything that says otherwise. Even when people have offered to trade themselves for the missing party, it doesn’t work out. No one comes home. But there’s a first time for everything. I’m going to figure out how to destroy them, and I’m going to offer them a choice: give Sally back or die.”

“What happens if they give her back?” asked Fern.

James’ smile was the rictus grin of a death’s-head. “I kill the fucking thing anyway. No more Sallys. Never again.”

“Okay,” I said. “So long as we’re on the same page.”

It was late, and we were all exhausted, both physically and emotionally. James rolled his bike to the edge of the driveway and slung his leg over the seat, waving once before he pedaled away. Sam, looming behind me like a very strange bodyguard, scowled.

“Do you believe him?” he asked.

“I do,” I said.