Page 48 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

We all turned to look at him.

His cheeks reddened, and he ducked his head. “I was a kid,” he said. “She wanted me to go to bed and I didn’t want to go, and I hit her. She fell. There was this awful snapping sound, and she fell, because humans are fragile when you’re a little kid fūri and you don’t know your own strength. I got better after that. I learned how to be careful.”

“The crossroads don’t care about whether or not they’re hurting people,” said James.

“Oh, but I think they do,” said Cylia. “It’s like bending the luck. If everyone who lives near a jink is having nothing but bad luck all the time, no matter what, they’re going to get suspicious. Worse, they’re going to decide they can’t live there anymore because it isn’t safe for them. Even if they never know there’s a jink on the other end of their losing streak, they’ll know the house is cursed, and they’ll get out. Which means the jink doesn’t have neighbors anymore. No camouflage, no one to borrow luck from. Not a good situation.”

“You’re saying the crossroads doesn’t want to kill people because then no one will come to them to make a deal,” said Sam slowly.

“I am,” said Cylia. “Is there some sort of record of how many people go to the crossroads?”

“Why does this concept make more sense when it comes from someone you like?” asked James. “I already said this.”

“Yeah, but she makes me bacon,” said Sam.

James sighed. “Right. No, Cylia, there isn’t a record of how many people go to the crossroads. They can appear anywhere a crossing exists, streets, cow paths, sidewalks, anything that intersects, which makes it difficult to measure foot traffic. And most people who go to make a deal don’t exactly advertise it. The accounts we have are collected from oral accounts.”

“Okay, boring but cool,” said Cylia. “Was there a big decrease in oral accounts after the crossroads started turning people inside out?”

“Fuck, yeah, there was,” said Sam. “It even says it in this book. ‘After the sad case of Mr. Wallace, none in the township dared approach the gallows for the better part of seven years.’”

“See?” Cylia looked smug. “The crossroads did too much damage, people stopped being willing to take the risk, so they had to do like Annie said and figure out how to be less hard core, since otherwise they were going to lose all their customers. We don’t know what they get out of the deals. Whatever it is, it’s something they need, and they didn’t want to lose access because they were killing people accidentally.”

“On purpose is another story.” I frowned, looking up at the ceiling again. “They know James is working to destroy them.”

“Not news, hon,” said Sam.

“No, I mean … they know he’s planning to take them down. They know he hates them, and they know why. So why not offer him a bargain of his own?”

“I would never,” said James, his voice colder than his hands could sometimes be.

“Wouldn’t you? Because there was a time when I said I would never, and then it turned out that ‘never’ is negotiable. Humans like to survive. We like to win. Maybe more than any other species I’ve ever met, we like to come out on top. If the crossroads had approached you—probably through Bethany—” And maybe that’s why most crossroads ghosts are attractive young women, with the emphasis on young. They look harmless. No one’s afraid of a babysitter or a pep squad organizer. They have faces people want to trust. “If they’d said, ‘Hey, your friend made a bad deal and we’re sorry, but you can make a deal to get her back, no funny business,’ are you really sure you’d have turned it down? If you got Sally, and maybe a little something nice on the side, would that have been enough?”

James was silent. I’d struck a nerve. That was good. I was about to hit harder.

“I don’t think they have the power to return her.”

He flinched, visibly, and turned to look at me, eyes wide and cheeks pale.

“Take that back,” he said.

“I don’t think she’s dead, because I know my grandfather is alive, and they took him the same way. I also know that if they had a sense of self-preservation, they would have given him back to my grandmother like, five seconds after they realized they had a human hunting dog determined to gnaw their legs off.”

“Is she a sorcerer, too?”

I paused to contemplate the sheer horror of Grandma Alice with access to actual, flexible magic, instead of being limited to the static charms she etched on her skin. “No,” I said finally. “Let’s be thankful for that because I think we’d all be dead if she were. But it shouldn’t matter. The crossroads don’t like her. She’s a nuisance and a danger, and she just wants her husband back. The cost of keeping my grandfather should have long since become too great, and they should have returned him. They didn’t, which means they can’t. They’re actively scared of you. You are a sorcerer, and you have your mother’s books and a grudge. There’s no good reason not to give you what you want, even if it’s just to make you go away.”

James was quiet for a moment. Finally, in a small voice, he asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because the crossroads didn’t even try to lie. They didn’t offer Sally back and dump a corpse at your feet, or anything fancy like that. They know what you’re trying to do, they’re scared enough of you to want me to kill you for them, and yet they’re not lying to you. Why not?”

“They don’t lie,” said James. “They mislead. They distort. They misinterpret in the worst ways possible. But they don’t lie.”

“So let’s assume they can’t, meaning anything in these books,” I waved a hand to indicate the piles around us, “that someone attributes as coming directly from the crossroads has about a fifty percent chance of being the absolute truth.”

“Why only a fifty percent chance?” asked Sam.

“Authors lie, even if the crossroads can’t,” said Cylia. “Someone says ‘the crossroads told me this,’ and the author thinks ‘that lacks a certain gravitas,’ and the next thing you know, the crossroads are talking like something out of Dante. If we ask the crossroads something directly, they have to tell the truth.”