Page 54 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“I’d rather skip the intermediaries, if you don’t mind.”

“That sounds like a request.” The crossroads—the entity that shared the name of the physical place—coalesced out of shadow and dust, becoming a hole slashed in the fabric of the world. I couldn’t focus directly on it, couldn’t say anything about it other than that it was roughly human-shaped, with a head and arms and torso made of the same nothingness as the rest of it.

It cocked that head, and I had the disconcerting feeling it was looking at me.

“What will you pay?” it asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I haven’t asked for anything. ‘If you don’t mind’ meant it was your choice, and you chose to appear, presumably because you know how creepy it is to talk to a hole in the world.” I crossed my arms, only wincing a little as it pulled on the wound in my shoulder.

A little was more than enough. “We can fix that for you,” said the crossroads. “We can make it as if you were never hurt. A small thing. A token, really, requiring only the smallest of payments.”

“I’m good,” I said. “Dudes dig chicks with scars.” Half-true. Sam didn’t exactly “dig” my scars, but he appreciated the work I’d put into acquiring them, and he was willing to celebrate the fact that no matter how many times the world had tried to gut me, I’d persisted in surviving. “Why am I here?”

“You haven’t killed the Smith boy.”

“That wasn’t what I was told to do,” I said, as calmly as I could. “I’m supposed to make him trust me, learn everything he knows about how to hurt you, and then kill him.”

“We don’t want you to know how to hurt us.” The crossroads sounded sullen. No small trick for an anthropomorphic personification of making a shitty deal at the flea market. “If you learn everything he knows, you’ll know how to hurt us.”

“If I don’t learn everything he knows, I won’t know where the books I need to destroy are being kept. Someone else will be able to figure out how to hurt you.”

“And we’ll kill them, too.”

Who could have guessed that arguing with an unknowable force of the cosmos would be so much like arguing with a toddler who had stayed up past bedtime? “I haven’t killed the Smith boy because right now, it isn’t safe to kill him. There are too many variables. You told me to befriend him, to make him trust me, and then to kill him. I’m still on step one.”

“Or you’re stalling.”

I said nothing.

The shape made of absence took a step toward me. “We think you’re stalling. We think you don’t want to kill a human being who has, by your standards, done nothing wrong. He’s a threat to us, but we’ve never been something your family,” it said the word like it was filthy, like it was blasphemous, “wanted to protect. You people, with your little idealisms and your little ideas of what it is to be good or evil or in-between. We think you’ve decided he might be right. That’s why you’ve locked our eyes outside. You don’t want them to see you plotting.”

“I locked Bethany outside because she’s not Mary,” I said. “You want me to drop the wards, give me back my babysitter. I’ll let Mary watch every damn thing I do, and I’m pretty sure she can’t lie to you, or you would have lost track of my family the second Grandma gave Dad and Aunt Jane to my great-aunt Laura.”

Great-Aunt Laura had been an ambulomancer and a magnet for the dead, just like her mother, which had led to her becoming the best ghost-wrangler in North America, at least for a while. She’d been able to weave a ghost cage from a piece of newspaper and a tattered cobweb, and her wards had been the stuff of legend. Literally. People had come from all over the world to look at them and learn how to improve their own wards. It would have been easy for her to ward her charges from the eye of the crossroads, if not for Mary, who had come with the children—babysitter and trusted friend and keeper of so much of their history. Without Mary, we would still have had the mice, but they don’t understand human things the way she does. Without her, we might have lost what it meant to be a Price.

My stomach twisted, a wave of nausea washing over me. Without Mary, we might also have lost the focus of the crossroads. Had anyone ever realized that exchange was being made? It seemed like the sort of thing that should have been a choice, not a fait accompli presented to each new generation as unavoidable.

“Mary is too involved,” said the crossroads. “She tries to put your interests above our own. She has to be taught who she belongs to. A ghost is only as good as its manners.”

The nausea abated somewhat as I realized the crossroads had—however accidentally—given away one very important piece of information.

They were talking about Mary in the present tense. Whatever they’d done to her, she still existed. There was a chance, however slim, that I might be able to save her.

“Then we’re at an impasse,” I said. “I’m not going to lower the wards for a ghost I don’t know, who has been nothing but rude to me since she appeared, and who’s already shown herself to be perfectly willing to assault me. You get one favor. You can ask me to kill James Smith, or you can ask me to let your spy into my house. Who knows? Maybe I’ll learn enough to make killing him seem like a good idea even if you’re not making me do it.”

“Yes,” said the crossroads. “We are, indeed, at an impasse. You think you have a position to bargain from. You forget we have already bargained. We have already struck a deal with you, and you are refusing to adhere to our agreement. We promised your life would not be taken from you, no matter what happened, and we hold to the compact. We did not, however, promise to take disobedience lightly.”

“What—” I began.

That was as far as I got before the world caught flame around me. No: not around me. Inside me, burning every nerve and every fiber of my muscles, until I felt like a bonfire wrapped around bone, consuming myself without being consumed. I screamed, the sound ripping out of me in an agonized wail as I dropped to my knees on the impossible road. I didn’t even feel the moment of impact. The pain was too great. The pain was the entire world. Electric fire beat me down until I was on my hands and knees, gasping and choking, trying to force myself to keep breathing when my lungs were full of ash and ember, smothering me.

“We seem to have struck a nerve,” said the crossroads, and giggled—actually giggled, a high, tittering sound that rubbed across my already-aching nerves and somehow made them even rawer, giving the pain new and innovative ways to work its way into my body. “Feel that, little miss negotiation? That’s the price of failure. You gave us fire. We’re allowed to let it burn. Best of all, because it sparked in you, it can never kill you. You can burn together forever, you and the flame. It won’t cleanse. It won’t clean. It will just hurt. Always, and always, and always, until you decide the pain has to stop somehow. How long do you think you can burn before you decide your family’s considerable skill at killing things needs to be turned inward? We promised not to kill you ourselves. We made no promises about your own hand.”

The fire was everything. The pain was enormous, screaming, swallowing every thought I tried to have, until the world was a handful of crushed glass shards, each of them containing nothing but a single word wrapped in a veil of pain. I couldn’t breathe. I had to breathe. If I stopped …

“Poor thing. Now. Let’s see if you’re ready to be good.”

The pain stopped.