Page 39 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“How?”

James took a deep breath. “They aren’t normally subject to the physical laws of this universe. They exist … outside it, somehow, like they’re on a different channel. When they manifest to make or seal a deal, they become temporarily subject to the same physical laws as anything else. There are spells that can rend a body apart—spells that don’t require the presence of actual flesh to work. If the crossroads are manifest, and I pour my magic into the casting, I can hurt them. Under the right circumstances, I can even kill them. And if I cast the right binding ritual, they can’t get away from me until they give me what I want.”

“Sally,” I said grimly.

James nodded. “Sally,” he agreed. “The main problem is getting the crossroads to manifest when I’m not offering to make a bargain.”

“That’s the part where you’d been losing me,” I said. “Why not say you’re there to offer a bargain and then double-cross them?”

“The binding ritual that will hold the crossroads in our reality while I demand they give Sally back won’t work if I don’t cast it with the purest motivations possible. Revenge is fine. Selfishness is fine. Lying is not fine. I could still pin them down long enough to hurt them, but they might be able to turn things back on me and take me with them. I’d rather not die if I don’t have to. Not unless it’s the only way to bring Sally back.”

“Noble, but I promise you, Sally wouldn’t be amused if you died to get her out of magical mystery jail.”

James gave me a sidelong look over the top of his book. “You never met her. How do you know?”

“Because while I’ve never met her, I’ve been socially isolated, and I’ve had socially isolated friends, and never once did any of us say ‘you know what, I’d be cool if you died for me when you didn’t absolutely have to.’ We don’t work that way. By which I mean friends don’t work that way.”

“Sally may have died for me,” he said.

“Yeah, but she may not have, and either way, she didn’t mean to. She was trying to do something good and she fucked up, which is basically the story of humanity’s time on this planet—we’re always trying to do something good, and we’re always fucking up. I bet if she’d told you she was running off to die for your sake, you would have smacked her upside the head.”

“I never hit Sally,” said James stiffly.

“I wasn’t implying—lighten up, okay? I know you’re doing this for her, and I know that when you’re trying to save someone, all kinds of self-sacrificing bullshit can seem like a great idea. Can you just breathe for a second? We’re getting off the subject.”

“I know, but I—” James stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “All right. My current plan is to convince the crossroads to become manifest, cast the binding ritual, demonstrate that I can harm them, and demand they return Sally. If they refuse, I harm them more, until they agree. If they are unable to return her alive, I destroy them. If they return her to me safely, I destroy them anyway. This ends.”

“How are you going to destroy them? Just … punch them to death with your hurt-stuff spell?”

James looked at me, eyes wide. “You really don’t have much more training than I do, do you?”

“Nope,” I said cheerfully. “Answer the question.”

“There’s … another ritual. My mother was researching it when she died, and I have most of the pieces. Explaining it takes a little background.” He paused. I nodded, and he continued, “Like I said before, things changed in 1490. Prior to that, the crossroads were neutral, not malicious. I’m not the first sorcerer to get the idea that the crossroads should be stopped. The trouble is, if you kill them now, they grow back. Like a weed. You have to go back to the root of the problem. To 1490.”

I stared at him.

“There’s a record from the late 1300s, of a woman going to the crossroads—the old crossroads—with a complaint about losing her mother’s locket. She asked them to rewind time for her.”

“Um, okay, that’s where we’re stopping, because if you’re talking about rewinding the entire world to 1490 so you can screw the crossroads, I’m going to have to give this plan a hard pass. I like the Internet, and indoor plumbing, and having ever been born. I refuse to Butterfly Effect my way through history.”

James rolled his eyes. “Bradbury was exaggerating a simple scientific idea for the sake of drama. We wouldn’t actually become strange dinosaur creatures if we crushed a moth.”

“Okay, one, we don’t have time for me to start in on you downplaying the brilliance of Bradbury, so I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that, and two, maybe humanity wouldn’t be replaced by something else, but that doesn’t mean we’d still be here. Even if we ignore the sheer improbability of any specific sperm and egg combination managing to happen—if we go full multiverse and say that yes, your parents, if they existed, would absolutely have conceived you, James Smith, no question, no chance of you being replaced by somebody else—getting to your parents requires a chain of coincidences and accidents of timing that’s about a million miles long. Every living being on this planet is a winning lottery ticket of genetic circumstance, and I’m not interested in having my ticket recalled. Not even for the sake of an innocent girl, since we’d be erasing her, too.”

“That’s all well and good, and I appreciate your pragmatic approach to survival, but I’m not proposing rewinding reality to the fifteenth century.”

“You just said—”

James sighed. “The woman whose bargain ran time backward didn’t actually run time backward. The crossroads moved themselves earlier in time, and they carried her with them. She was able to go to the farm, watch where her earlier self put the locket away for safekeeping, and retrieve it. While she was in the past, no one could see her. No one could touch her.”

“Okay …”

“I have the exact wording of her bargain. I can command the crossroads to rewind me, and just me, once they’re manifest, and then—”

It was my turn to cut him off. “Wow, okay, no.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Now I know you didn’t have a sufficient assortment of nerd friends when you were a kid, because you’re not thinking like an asshole. Ever heard the phrase ‘literal genie’? It means giving someone exactly what they ask for, instead of what they wanted. The ‘make me a sandwich’ gag.”

James frowned. “What do you mean?”