Page 64 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry I don’t want to be selfish, I don’t want to be bad, but I don’t want to die either. I want to prove I’m smart and strong and clever enough to have babies of my own. I want to have adventures, but I want to live.”

“You will,” I assured her, and I didn’t think I was lying, except in the greater “the grave comes for us all” sense of the idea. “You’re going to find another sylph and have lots of babies that bob against the ceiling like so many balloons, and it’s going to be wonderful. I’ll even babysit for you.”

“Creche childrearing,” she reminded me, with a small hiccup in her voice that could have been either a laugh or a sob.

“So I’ll come to the creche and do a shift there. Imagine me covered in babies. I don’t even like babies. It’ll be hilarious. All we have to do is get through this mess and we can do that, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, and pulled away enough to wipe her eyes. “You’ll think about it?”

“I’ll think about it,” I promised. “Now let’s get to work.”

You know what’s boring as hell? Transcription, which is why court stenographers and the people who do captions for television should be paid substantially better than they are. Typing what someone else is saying is no fun at all. Copying someone else’s manuscript, also not fun. Copying someone else’s handwritten diaries that were never exactly designed for public consumption may well be the least fun of all. Doing it when the writing keeps trying to disappear, well …

“This is like the American Ninja Warrior of homework, and I hate it,” said Sam.

“No contest here.” I squinted at the page in front of me. “James!”

“Coming!” James rushed around the table and placed his hands above the book, fingers spread, face screwed up with concentration. The temperature dropped precipitously and the wavering, indistinct letters flared back into solidity.

“Thank you,” I said, and paused, assessing him. Most of the color was gone from his face; his eyes seemed shadowed, and there was an odd chapped quality to his lips, like he’d been walking outside in the freezing cold long enough to have all the moisture sucked out of his skin. “Are you okay?”

“Are we done?”

“No.” James’ mother had been a thorough documentarian, recording every scrap of data she could beg, borrow, steal, or observe about the crossroads. That was good. She had also been using the books to keep a diary of her daily activities, and while she never quite crossed the line into TMI—no lurid accountings of her sexual exploits or descriptions of James’ father in the nude—she was perfectly willing to go on for paragraphs about the woman who’d shorted her change at the grocery store. Which still would have been fine, if she’d been writing on the front of the paper and using the back to record her more sorcerous observations.

That would, apparently, have been too easy on her eventual offspring, and thus had been dismissed as cheating. Her invisible writing was tucked into margins and on the open lines between the more mundane observations, and since it was all the same color once James had witched it into visibility, I had to keep forcing myself to focus on “the crossroads, on being thwarted, stripped the skin from Goodie Martha’s body,” and not “Jimmy was fussy again this morning, poor mite; he takes too much after my side of the family.”

I was suddenly tempted to go home and find a way to witch the words out of Grandpa Thomas’ diaries, and also terrified that if I did, I’d find a lengthy accounting of the places he and Grandma Alice had had sex in the house back in Buckley. Sticking two narratives in one book was exhausting.

“I’m done with this one,” said Cylia, holding up a notebook. “How many more do we have?”

“Too many,” said Sam glumly. “Can’t we just nuke the place from orbit?”

“It’s the only way to be sure, but no,” I said. “I don’t think the crossroads are something you can nuke.”

“Not unless you want to make the dimension adjacent to our own radioactive for the next millennia, and probably still hostile,” said James, as he hurried to refresh the writing on Fern’s book. “Has anyone found anything that seems useful?”

“Your mom wrote down crop yields for like, three years, and I’m still not sure why,” said Sam.

“Oh, I have an account of a local farmer trading his youngest daughter to the crossroads in exchange for a decade of good harvests,” said Fern. “If the dates match up, maybe she was making sure the crossroads kept their word.”

“Did the daughter die?” I asked.

“Disappeared,” said Fern. “Like, um.” She cast a sidelong look at James.

“Like Sally,” he said grimly. “Yes, they’re quite fond of that trick. Pull it all the time.”

“Which is possibly a good thing,” I said.

Slowly, he turned to stare at me. The temperature dropped again, the writing on the pages in front of me growing darker and crisper as his magic filled the room. Goosebumps formed on my arms. I fought the urge to pull back in my chair, remembering—not for the first time—that there are reasons people are, on the whole, afraid of sorcerers and the things we can do.

“What, exactly, do you mean by that?” he asked. His voice was even colder than the air around us.

“I mean that if they do this frequently, and we’re not finding anything to indicate the crossroads have been handing out corpses, or brainwashed slaves, or fresh new bodies, then there’s a good chance a lot of these people may still be alive somewhere. Someplace on the other side of the pocket realm where they do their bullshit business. There’s a lot of reality on the other side of our dimensional wall. My grandmother has been exploring it for decades. Once we have an idea of where the crossroads might have been putting all these people …”

Once we had a scrap of information, a sliver of a clue, I could set Grandma loose on all the dimensions that had ever existed, and she would find all those people, and she’d bring them home. She’d bring Sally home.

She’d bring Grandpa home. Grandpa, who knew what it was to understand the Covenant and reject them anyway, who understood what I was and what I was becoming better than anyone in our shared family. We’d never met, but I had absolute faith that he’d be able to help me, because I was, in so many ways, his mirror. He could help me.