Page 41 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“Please. Anyone with eyes could see the way he was looking at you. Plus he’s human, so that’s got to be attractive, right? No one with options goes for the guy in the gorilla suit.”

“You know, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to punch a ghost in the throat,” I said, through gritted teeth.

“A lot like punching a cloud,” said Bethany. “I don’t recommend it. I’m not some stupid hitchhiker who can be frightened with threats of violence. I serve the crossroads, and in case you’ve managed to forget, they own you. A little civility is in your best interests.”

“This is a little civility,” I said. “More importantly, this is the best you’re going to get unless you give Mary back to me. He’s here, we’re making nice, it’s been less than a day. You want his secrets, you have to give me time.”

“The more time you have, the more time he has. The more time he has, the more likely it becomes that he’s going to do something you’re going to regret.” Bethany smiled, ignoring my dig about Mary. “Unless you want to find out what happens when you don’t give the crossroads what you promised them? Because I don’t think you’re going to enjoy it very much.”

“If your bosses only wanted me to kill him, I wouldn’t need any time at all. Knives don’t have a waiting period. They want me to be his friend. They want me to know what he knows. People like James don’t trust quickly, no matter how tempting it is. I need to go slowly, or I’m going to lose him, and then you’re never going to know what he knows, or where he learned it.” Not for the first time, I was incredibly grateful that telepaths were rare—and that I’d never, so far as I knew, encountered a ghost who could read minds. If cuckoos leave ghosts, they don’t do it often. And thank fuck for that.

“I’ll tell them you’re not finished. They won’t be happy.”

“Seems like right now, that’s more of a problem for you than it is for me.” I looked at her as calmly as I could. “Where’s Mary?”

“Mary Dunlavy. You people just cannot let the idea of her go, can you?” Bethany shook her head. “She didn’t do her job the way she was asked to. Do you have any idea how long our bosses have been waiting for her to bring one of you people to them? She found her loophole and she exploited it until it closed around her like the noose it was. She’s none of your concern.”

“She’s my aunt.”

Bethany’s nose wrinkled. “Aunts aren’t anything, not even when they’re blood. They’re people who pretend to be family because they have a relative in common somewhere way back on your father’s side, and they never make things better. You should be happy to be rid of her.”

“And yet I’m not. Tell the crossroads that. Tell them I’d be working faster if I weren’t so worried about her.”

“They gave her the kind of leeway they did because she brought them Tommy Price and Bobby Cross, and those two were enough to feed a whole lot of bargains. But leeway doesn’t last forever, and Mary-Mary, quite contrary, hasn’t been pulling her weight for a long time. You need to forget about her.”

Distantly, I realized James and I had the same goal now: we were both tilting at the crossroads like they were our own personal windmill, hoping it would be enough to bring back someone we had never intended to lose. For James, it was the living. For me, it was the dead.

“I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon,” I said. “You can go.”

“Why is your house warded against ghosts?” She tried to make the question sound casual, but it had teeth, and I knew they were poised to crash down and rip me open.

Fortunately, I had an answer. “My family is pretty haunted,” I said. “Mary is usually good about keeping Aunt Rose in check, but she’s gone, and I don’t want to risk waking up to find a ghost sitting at the end of the bed and critiquing my underpants. It’s happened before. Forgive me for taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

There was a flash of something dark and unhappy in Bethany’s eyes when I mentioned Rose. “How many dead aunts do you have?”

“It’s amazing how often I hear that question.” I crossed my arms. “Go away, Bethany. You have all the information I can give you, and the more time I spend out here trying to convince you I’m not hiding anything, the less time I’m spending with James. If your bosses want constant eyes on me, they can give Mary back. I’ll let her follow me to the bathroom if that’s what it takes. You, on the other hand, I don’t know and I don’t trust and I don’t want inside my house.”

Bethany looked down the length of her nose at me. “You’re going to regret that. You’re going to regret that more than you can possibly understand.”

“I’m willing to take the risk.”

She scoffed and disappeared, not even making the faint sound of air being displaced. She had never been fully solid. That was, oddly, encouraging.

Most ghosts have rules that govern how much time they can spend among the living, and how well they can “pass” while they’re here. For example, Aunt Rose is a hitchhiking ghost. As long as she has a coat on, she’s functionally alive. She eats, she breathes, she drinks all the soda in the house—when we know she’s coming for a visit, Mom buys this really gross old-fashioned celery soda that tastes like bad decisions and fad diets, which Rose pours over vanilla ice cream like that’s somehow reasonable. Her coats wear off at sunrise, but she can always put on another one. If not for the inevitable need to go back to the road, she could masquerade as one of the living for years.

Mary—and presumably Bethany—is more of a fringe case. Her job with the crossroads requires her to be able to move among the living without attracting attention or seeming out of place. So she doesn’t need a coat, and she doesn’t turn transparent at sunrise, and she doesn’t instinctively change into the clothes she was wearing when she died every time someone startles her. She has to spend a certain amount of time at the crossroads for every hour she spends with the living, but she’s never been willing to disclose the exact ratio.

Bethany could follow me through town if she wanted to. She could sit at the next table over in Burial Grounds, sipping coffee she didn’t need and watching every move I made. Suddenly, the ghost wards on the house didn’t feel petty or small. They felt essential. This was how I took care of my small, weird, found family.

Shoving my hands into my pockets and trying to shake off the lingering unease of Bethany’s visit, I tromped down the porch stairs and started across the yard, scanning the trees as I went. There was a lot of forest, and a lot of vertical space for a fūri to occupy. Make it a logic puzzle, then. Which way would Sam go?

Not toward town. Town meant people, and people meant needing to seem human when he really didn’t want to. Not toward James’ house, either, not with Chief Smith lurking around the woods. It seemed unlikely for the local chief of police to try to sneak up on us, but stranger things have happened. That left deeper into the woods, or through the narrower patch to the lake. After a moment’s indecision, I turned lakeward and started walking.

Tracking something—or someone—arboreal means relying on a whole different set of contextual clues. There weren’t going to be many, or any, broken branches at ground level; everything was going to be happening overhead. Unfortunately, I have a healthy respect for gravity, which meant climbing every tree I passed was out of the question, and I couldn’t walk with my head bent all the way back unless I wanted to hook my foot on a root and eat ground.

(Verity would have had no such problems. Verity would have taken this as an excuse to play me Tarzan, you lucky, and gone swinging through the woods after him. Verity is human, unlike Sam, and her constant striving toward high places is one more predictor of her inevitable plunge into an early grave.)

In the end, I settled for splitting my attention, scanning the ground for anything out of place—freshly broken branches, excessively bright, new-fallen leaves—and looking up to trace them to the place where they’d started. Sam was fast and strong enough to leave a lot of distance between traces, but he wasn’t the most subtle person I’d ever tried to follow. Less than ten yards in, I was confident of his direction. After twenty, I was moving fast, not pausing or looking back.