Page 42 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

My own steps were lighter, placed so as to cause minimal disturbance to the brush. It was unlikely that anyone would have been able to follow me as I was following Sam. That was a combination of healthy paranoia and early training coming to the fore: my parents taught me often and mercilessly that a predator who couldn’t find you is a predator that can’t kill you. Since I didn’t much care for the idea of being caught unawares, I did my best not to leave any trail for potential hunters to follow.

The trees thinned. The broken branches stopped, and there was a mighty disturbance of the leaves, showing me where Sam had jumped down. I kept walking. The great blank disk of the lake loomed up in front of me, gleaming gunmetal gray in the sunlight. The boat house was visible to the left, decrepit but holding. It was a horror movie accessory turned house fixture, and the trail of scuffed leaves and broken branches led me straight there.

There was a small dock around the side, around fifteen feet in length. It would have been a good place to tie a boat, if we’d had access to one. As things stood, it was a good place for Sam to sit, chucking rocks moodily out across the water, his back to the woods.

I walked over and plopped down next to him, grabbing one of the rocks from his pile and sending it skipping merrily on its way. “Are you trying to give a fish a concussion?”

“Jesus, Annie!” He flinched away, staring at me. “Learn how to make noise when you walk, would you?”

“Now, where would be the fun in that?” I sobered. “You should be more careful, though. If I can sneak up on you, so can Leonard.”

“Leonard. Right.” He grabbed another rock and threw it hard at the surface of the water. It didn’t skip so much as it tore in a straight line across the lake until momentum gave out and it sank. “Leonard from the Covenant, who’s totally obsessed with you and going to kill the rest of us so he can take you home to mama.”

“Not me: my family name. He wants to be the one who brings the Prices back to the Covenant, and he doesn’t care much about my thoughts on the matter.” I bumped my shoulder against Sam’s. “As long as we’re careful and he’s alone, we can take him. Which is good, because we’re going to have to do it sooner or later. He can find me. No matter where I go, he can find me.”

“Right. Tracking spells.”

“Yeah.” Maybe there was something about scrambling them in the books James’ mother had left behind. I’d have to get my magic back before I could attempt to perform even the simplest ritual, but once I had …

A witch is no match for a sorcerer, and so far as I’m aware, witches are all the Covenant has left. If this worked, I could go home. The thought was intoxicating. I could see my parents. Update the mice. Introduce Artie and Sam. I could play roller derby again. It was a wonderful dream. It was worth fighting for.

“That’s why you ran away from the carnival in the first place, right? Because they might have tracking spells, and they might find you, and people might get hurt. And that was a good enough reason for you to leave.” Sam picked up another rock, weighing it in his hand as he stared off at the horizon.

I sighed, shoulders slumping. “Sam,” I said, in a small voice, “if you’re pissed at me for some reason, will you say so, so I can start apologizing and we can get whatever this is over with? Please? I came to check on you because I wanted to see you, not because I wanted to get yelled at over something stupid.”

“I’m just wondering how long it’ll be before you go off with Leonard to ‘save’ the rest of us. It’d be easier. Sure, he’s a genocidal maniac who’d probably skin me as soon as look at me, but at least he’s human. Or there’s James. You could stay here with him and play small-town witch, and not have to deal with any of this bullshit.”

I started to reply. Then I stopped, forcing myself to count to ten.

There were a lot of ways this conversation could go. I could see several of them unfolding, like a terrible Choose Your Own Adventure. There was the version where I let my frustration boil over and started yelling, and we had the kind of fight that we maybe didn’t recover from. There was the version where I listened to what he was saying without thinking about why he was saying it, and got hurt, and walked away, turning some of his fears true.

Both of them were versions that would absolutely have won out, once. I was the baby of my family, the one who’d never had any expectations set upon her shoulders, the one who’d been allowed to keep the family babysitter long past the point where it was necessary. I’d been a little mean and a little judgmental and, weirdly, a little sheltered, which is something that can be difficult to accomplish when my parents insisted on dragging me into the woods to meet every damn thing that came along. It had been easy to focus inward since the world was big and didn’t seem to want me.

Sam had grown up in a community that was larger and smaller than mine at the same time, surrounded by people who loved and accepted him, but who never let him forget he wasn’t human, that he could never leave. College had never been on the table for him: he couldn’t sleep and stay in human form. Without a degree, most jobs wouldn’t even look at him twice. He’d been born into the carnival. He’d expected to stay there forever, no exit, no escape.

And then he’d met me, and I’d been the first girl who wasn’t from his community who didn’t seem to care that he wasn’t human, or that he was a rude asshole when he was anxious, which was most of the time when there were strangers around. I’d also been the first girl to kiss him without demanding he turn human first, like the side of him that came more naturally was somehow inappropriate or obscene.

Cryptids like Fern and Cylia move through the world looking like members of the currently dominant species, and if they decided to hook up with a human, no one would bat an eye. But Sam … he would always be a little fuzzy, and I suspected, would always be a little insecure about it. He’d been raised by humans, indoctrinated by human stories and human media, and if we weren’t exactly a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, it was only because we could both be pretty beastly when we wanted to.

“Hey.” I touched his shoulder. He didn’t turn. “Hey.”

“What?” Sam finally looked at me, eyes wary. “Are you going to argue with me? Because I don’t think—”

I leaned over and kissed him.

Sam stiffened, clearly not sure what he was supposed to do. He’d been expecting a fight, not … this. In the end, hormones won out. His hands slid around my waist, pulling me closer, as his tail snaked up to tangle in my hair. I scooted over accommodatingly, letting him pull me as close as he wanted, offering no resistance.

Kissing Sam is basically the same as kissing a human. There are some subtle differences in his bone structure, and his sideburns are fur, not hair, making them dense and soft against my fingers, but apart from that, he has lips, he has a nose, he has a face that’s close enough to human that when I close my eyes, I can easily pretend. So I didn’t close my eyes. I kept them open, watching as I kissed him. Watching the tension in his brow, and the way the skin around his own eyes crinkled, still tight.

I pulled back, stroking his temple with one hand. “Hey,” I said. “No. Okay? Don’t go there. There’s nothing good, and you don’t need to waste your time.”

“Really?” He opened his eyes, looking at me solemnly. “Because it sure feels like I need to book a ticket.”

“Really,” I said, still stroking his temple. “I’m not saying we’re going to be together forever, okay? You need to meet my family. You need to figure out what you signed up for when you took me on that Ferris wheel. But I’m not running away with the first human guy who glances in my direction. After you, human guys would seem boring. But maybe more importantly … you know, we talked about your dating history—”

“Such as it is,” he muttered.

“—but we never really talked about mine. You know I wasn’t a virgin when we got together. That wasn’t because I’d been in capital-L love before. It was because I fucking hate unicorns and didn’t want to be somebody’s sacrifice of the week. Even though ‘virgin sacrifice’ means ‘sacrifice whose blood has not been used in a ritual before,’ and not ‘never gotten laid,’ linguistic drift happens and people get confused and I’m babbling again.” I took my hand away from his face. “I didn’t date before you came along and fucked up my life of voluntary celibacy, okay? I was happy not dating. Relationships are a lot of work. They’re complicated and confusing, and they never seemed worth it before you. You made this worth the work. Do you get what a big thing that is for me? I love you. Capital-L love, stupid squishy let’s write a musical about it love. I’ve never been able to say that before. I don’t fall fast, and I don’t fall easy, and I’m not going to run after the first human guy who bats his eyes at me. Okay?”