Page 59 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

James didn’t stop. He went to the bottom of the porch and got his bike, hands white-knuckled on the handlebars. I gave him a concerned look, but I didn’t hurry. There are things in life that shouldn’t be rushed. Lacing up a pair of skates is one of them. When your mode of transport is attached to your feet, the last thing you want is for a knot to give way.

Eventually, I felt secure enough to stand, slip my arms into the backpack’s straps, and walk carefully down the stairs to join James. “I know the way,” I said softly. “If you need to go ahead, you can.”

“He’s probably at one of the windows, watching us go,” James replied. “If he sees me pedal off without you, the game is up.”

“Is that all?” I asked, and leaned in to kiss James on the cheek. Only the cheek. It was suitable to the length of our supposed relationship, and more, given what he’d said about his life so far, I was willing to bet he hadn’t kissed many girls.

The startled look on his face when I pulled away was enough to confirm my guess. I offered a sideways smile.

“Veracity,” I said, and started skating.

My legs were sore and tired enough that I hadn’t managed to get very far by the time he caught up with me. He coasted along, matching my pace, until the house was out of view around the curve of the driveway and there was no way his father was still watching us.

“Veracity?” he echoed, in a strangled tone.

“If we just met, we wouldn’t be making out on your lawn yet—and if we did, your father would probably decide I wasn’t the kind of girl you ought to be hanging out with. I’m not calling him sexist. My father would make the same call if he saw me making out with someone I barely knew.” Heaven only knew what he was going to make of Sam. At least, I wasn’t the first one to go out on an assignment and come home with a shiny new significant other. Hopefully, he was still annoyed enough about Verity bringing home an ex-Covenant operative not to mind that Sam wasn’t human.

“Insufficient kissing wasn’t my objection!”

“I’m sorry if I crossed a line, and I should have asked first—consent counts, even when you’re undercover. But if he was watching us, selling the bit was more important. I sold it.”

“You must have been the pride of your Girl Scout troop,” said James scornfully.

“Never joined. Something about them being nosy Nancies kept my parents from signing the paperwork. My cousins and I formed our own scouting organization. We called ourselves the Danger Scouts and went camping in the woods behind the house and annoyed the local Bigfoot population something awful.” I smiled fondly. “I’m pretty sure Mom threatened every cryptid within a hundred miles with the consequences of what would happen if we got hurt, because those were the nicest camping trips ever.”

James looked at me blankly. “Your family sounds very strange.”

“Oh, you have no idea. You’re going to love them.” I winced as one of the muscles in my right thigh objected to my moving. “I’ll explain why when we get back to the house, but do you think you could pull me for a while? I think my legs are about to give out.”

James’ blank look morphed to one of genuine concern. “What’s wrong?”

“Again, I’ll explain when we get there.”

“All right.” He didn’t sound like he believed me. “Grab on.”

There was a little metal grid at the base of his seat, designed for clipping on wagons or other accessories. I threaded my fingers through it as I fell in behind the bike, focusing on locking my knees rather than pushing myself forward. It helped. I closed my eyes in relief, letting my legs take a much-needed rest. James kept pedaling, more slowly now that he had my added weight to contend with.

This wasn’t good. If the crossroads could catch me any time I set foot outside of the wards, I was going to wind up like my grandfather had been in the last years of his life: locked into a steadily narrowing space, unable to go outside or fight back. It was a chilling thought. More chilling was the question of whether the wards mattered. The crossroads had sent Bethany to collect me, but nothing said that was necessary. They weren’t ghosts. As far as I could tell, their only connection to the so-called “spirit world” was their habit of using ghosts as their messengers. The fact that they could pull me into their liminal space without killing me was another vote for the rules being different for them. Mary and Rose could move back and forth between the lands of the living and the dead, and could even carry things with them, but they couldn’t transport living beings—like me or the mice—without consequences.

The only consequences I was experiencing came from being tortured, not from visiting the crossroads, at least as far as I could tell. If I was going to catch ghost tuberculosis and die on top of everything else, I was going to be pissed.

James kept pedaling, and I kept holding on, letting the road roll by under my wheels, trying to put together a plan for what was going to happen next. Chief Smith might be a problem if he decided to start running background checks on us. Then again, he might not; Cylia was the only one who could be easily found in any official records, and so far as I knew, she’d never had so much as a parking ticket. Sure, we’d been pulled over a few times when her luck fizzled or snapped back on us, but she’d always been able to charm her way out of actually receiving a citation. If she and my cousin Elsie ever decided to start hanging out together, they could take over the world with a smile and a wink.

Honestly, that might not be such a bad thing.

“You okay back there?”

“I’m fine.” I cracked an eye open. “Getting tired?”

James scoffed. “Please. I’ve been riding my bike everywhere since I was nine.”

“You don’t drive?”

“No.” There was a long pause as he considered his next words. Finally, he said, “When I turned sixteen my father told me if I wanted a car I’d have to pay for it myself. But Sally had a car, and I was putting everything aside for college, so it didn’t seem important. After Sally disappeared, he said it was time to stop letting girls drive me around everywhere. He said it made me look like a—forgive me, this is his word, not mine—like a pansy who couldn’t take care of himself. So I decided my bike was more than good enough for me, thank you very much, and I swore not to learn how to drive until and unless it was time to watch this town getting smaller in my rearview mirror.”

Oh, I was definitely taking him home with me. “I get it,” I said. “I don’t drive either.”

“Really? Why not?”