Page 4 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“That it’s awesome how my job involves making out with my boyfriend in the middle of a potentially haunted cornfield.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “You’re so weird sometimes, Annie. You get that, right? You understand that you’re not a normal girl?”

“That’s why you love me, right?”

His smile was bright enough to make up for the lack of light, and even sappier than mine had been. “Damn straight,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss me.

Kissing Sam while he was in human form was unusual enough to demand my full attention. Structurally, his face doesn’t change much when he transforms, but he’s always a clean-shaven human, and has full, remarkably fluffy sideburns when he’s relaxed enough to go fūri. Two boyfriends for the price of one.

Boyfriend. There’s a word I never expected to become relevant to me, Antimony “pit traps are more interesting than dating and boys don’t like girls who can hit harder than they can” Price. I mean, boys other than my brother, who is a) weird, and b) my brother, ew. I’d been figuring on a life of happy solitude, broken when I needed to punch someone or set something on fire. And then snide, snarky, unavoidable Sam Taylor had come along, and now I was stuck in a relationship I had absolutely no interest in getting out of.

One of his hands slid up my side, presumably to distract me from his other hand, which was creeping under the hem of my shirt. I slapped it lightly away and kept kissing him. The corn rustled louder around us, despite the lack of any obvious wind. Sam pulled me closer, and this time when he slipped his hand under my shirt, I let him. The clots of dirt digging into my ass and thighs seemed suddenly a lot less important than seeing how tightly we could press our bodies together, his hands roving across my body, my hands pressed flat against his back, fingers digging in for purchase.

The corn rustled louder still. Sam bent his head to kiss my neck, lips brushing against the curve of my ear as he straightened.

“Now?” he murmured.

“Not yet,” I replied, and kissed him again.

This is something slasher movies, inaccurate and frequently sexist as they are, get right

Lots of things don’t like it when humans have sex—or even indulge in excessive heavy petting—in their vicinity. There’s nothing puritan about it. Sex is loud and messy and distracting, which means it simultaneously frightens away the local prey animals and transforms the humans in question into easy pickings. For everyone who’ll break off from their paramour to ask what that noise was, there are ten who’ll make the jump to “maybe it was the wind, boobs are great, whee” all on their own. Which means sneaking up on someone who’s having sex is measurably safer than most of the alternatives.

Sex is also the mechanism via which humans make more humans, and after centuries of people following “kill it with fire” as if it were a sacred commandment, most of the intelligent creatures we share this planet with have good reasons to genuinely hate humans. We’re tiny, virtually defenseless persistence hunters who can’t stop killing each other. We don’t have claws, or fangs, or poison, or telepathy. We can’t transform into something bigger and stronger, we can’t hibernate for centuries, we can’t do anything. And somehow we still managed to take over the world. Humans are terrifying. The last thing anything with a brain wants is to leave humans alone to make more humans.

(It doesn’t help that a remarkably large number of intelligent cryptids have adopted “look as much like a human as possible” as a survival strategy. From therianthropes like Sam to jinks like Cylia, there are dozens of nonhuman species hiding among the human population. Which means that human couple getting busy in your local monster’s hunting grounds could actually be a couple of bigger, meaner monsters playing defenseless in order to lure in an easy meal. It’s a hard world for a giant impossible carnivore.)

If you’re in the middle of nowhere and worried about something attacking you, have sex, or at least indulge in some therapeutic making out. The odds are good that whatever you’re scared of will choose that moment to attack. And if you happen to be heavily armed, well, it’ll be a good way to work out the frustration of being interrupted.

A cryptozoologist is always prepared for mayhem, whatever form it takes.

Sam’s hand cupped my breast, familiar and strange at the same time. Looking back, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time we’d made out while he was bothering to stay human. Unlike most therianthropes, fūri default to their more simian form: it’s the human that’s a transformation, and hence the human that takes work to maintain. I’m not sure he could have sex without losing control of the specific tension that lets him look like just another hot guy on the street, and I’m not cruel enough to ask him to find out.

Besides, without going into unnecessary detail, let’s just say that having a significant other with a prehensile tail is occasionally its own reward.

I groaned despite myself and bit down on his shoulder, leaning forward until my hair fell over my face. The corn rustled louder behind me. This time, I knew there was no wind. The corn was moving on its own—or, more likely, something a lot more material than the wind was moving it.

What felt like a hand made of spidery roots caressed the back of my neck. I reacted instantly, whirling away from Sam and pulling the small scythe out of my waistband in the same motion. The “hand” withdrew, but not fast enough: the edge of my blade caught it across the palm, slicing it neatly in half. The severed portion of the hand fell, twitching and writhing as it separated into its component parts—a handful of twigs, roots, and twisted corn husks.

“Corn Blight,” I snapped, scrambling to my feet. “Sam, get the can.”

“Everywhere has corn blight!” he replied. “Corn blight doesn’t try to kill you.”

“That’s ‘Blight’ with a capital ‘B’!” The corn was still moving, shaking and rustling like an entire platoon of creepy kids was hiding on the other side. That would have been nice. A little Stephen King action would have been a delight compared to what we were actually standing in the middle of-slash-up against and potentially about to be eaten by.

When you say “monster,” people think of bears and alligators, or manticores and dragons. Big things, terrible things, things that can chase and catch and hunt. They forget, for the most part, that there’s more to the world than the animal kingdom.

Fungus, for example. Fungus is everywhere, in everything. However much we can see—a mushroom, a toadstool, a patch of mold—there’s so much more beneath the surface, wrapping its roots through whatever it finds, using the world to nurture itself. Fungus outmasses and outbreeds everything else on the planet. Most of it is fairly calm, content to spend its life consuming and reproducing and not bothering anyone. The rest …

Well, the rest can be a problem.

“Sam, go,” I hissed.

“I don’t want to—”

“You go or we both die. Not a hard call. I’ll be here when you get back.”

“You’re a real jerk sometimes, you know that?”