Page 57 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“Breathe,” I said. “Settle into the magic. Think of it as choosing to sing instead of scream. Screaming hurts your throat. So does singing, if you don’t warm up properly, but it can be so much easier, and it can last for so much longer. Pull back the cold. You don’t need it like you think you do.”

The air around his hands glittered, filled with power and potential. The air began to grow warmer, thawing as he pulled the cold back into himself.

The blank pages under his hands shimmered, and letters began to appear. They were faint at first, but quickly grew in visibility, until both pages were packed with slanting letters in rust-colored ink, as real as any diary had ever been.

James gasped.

“Is that her handwriting?” I asked. I already knew the answer: it matched the writing in the margins of the books back at our rental house.

He nodded. There were tears in his eyes.

“Great.” I leaned forward, trying not to flinch from the chill still radiating from his palms, and slammed the book shut.

“What?!” James glared at me, the air growing colder around us once again—this time with irritation. “Why did you do that?”

“We need to take these books back to the house.”

“Why? We can read them here!”

“Well, one, here, your father could come home any time, which would put a damper on research, and two, we promised the others we’d come back.” We’d done no such thing, only implied it. James was a smart guy. I hoped he’d catch on soon, since doing charades to say “there are no wards here” was a bit beyond my skills.

Instead, he glowered. “They’re my mother’s diaries.”

“Yes, and she clearly hid them here figuring that if you inherited her powers, you’d find them and figure out how to read them. But the others are waiting.” Silently, I mouthed, “Please.”

James started to object again. Then he caught himself, visibly course-correcting, and asked, “How much room do you have in your backpack?”

“Enough,” I said.

Thank God.

It took about ten minutes to get the diaries into our respective backpacks. Lifting mine was difficult, to say the least; between the injury in my shoulder and the ongoing weakness of my body as a whole, I felt like I was trying to attend a weight training course after a six-hour derby bout. Not good.

Worth it. Whatever was in these books was enough to scare the crossroads, which meant we needed to decode them while behind the closest thing we had to a locked door. Once the crossroads knew what James’ mother knew, they would not only be able to defend themselves, they’d be a lot more likely to demand I kill him on the spot. They were already pushing that agenda hard enough to be concerning if I wanted to undersell the situation in a way James probably wouldn’t appreciate. “Hey, the eldritch nightmare you’re devoting your life to wiping out sort of wants me to get on with slitting your throat, but sure, we have time to argue about where your mother’s diaries belong” is concerning, right?

“Be careful with those,” said James, as he squeezed through the opening into the main attic. It made the most sense to get the wardrobe back into position and then meet each other in the hall, where I could show him how to access the office. I had the feeling he was going to be spending a lot of time in there.

Good. He deserved a safe place in his own house, somewhere his father would never think to look for him. Somewhere to decide what happened next.

“I’ll treat them like they’re those weird egg babies we had to take care of in social studies,” I said, and flapped my hands in a “go on, then, shoo” gesture. “Get moving. I want to get back to the house.”

James, who still hadn’t twigged to the fact that it was the lack of wards that was distressing me, gave me a curious look. He didn’t know about Bethany attacking me in the stairwell, and why should he? It wasn’t like I could say her name without the risk of summoning her. Stupid ghosts.

I flapped my hands again. James began wrestling the wardrobe into place.

There wasn’t much I could do from my side of things. I stayed where I was, watching to be sure he got it close enough to the wall to restore the seal and prevent anyone else from stumbling on the hidden room. It took a while, and when the wardrobe was once again snugly positioned, I closed the door and started for the stairs.

The absolute blackness of the stairwell was as unsettling on my repeat visit as it had been on my first one. At least this time no unwanted ghosts appeared to haul me off to meetings with the crossroads. I took the steps as fast as I dared in the dark, one hand clutching the rail and the other stretched in front of me, waiting for the moment when my fingers would brush against the door. There was still no smell in the air, of vomit or otherwise. I’d been half expecting it to appear after the fact, making my story harder to believe.

Harder for anyone else to believe, anyway. I had no doubt about what I’d been through, and if I’d been inclined to start questioning, the continued twitching of the muscles in my neck would have been enough to convince me not to. I’d been tortured. I hadn’t been tortured here.

James was waiting in the hallway when the bookshelf swung open and I stepped through. He shook his head, looking impressed and almost offended at the same time.

“I never tried to move that shelf,” he said. “I never even thought of trying.”

“That was your mom,” I said. “She put protections up, and I guess she figured either they’d break down faster than they did or she left you something you haven’t found yet that would have told you where to look.”

“I suppose,” he agreed, eyes still troubled.