Page 65 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

He had to.

James’ eyes widened, the cold fading as my words sank in. “You really think … ?”

“I am making no promises, but I think they’d be stupid not to be keeping those people alive. They’re a horrifying eldritch construct that doesn’t belong here. They’re not vampires.” I tapped the page. “We read. We learn things. And once we know stuff, we fix things.”

“Hear, hear,” said Cylia.

And so we read, and as we read, we wrote, pulling a dead woman’s secrets into the light for the first time since she’d tucked them away in her hidden room, banking on the hope that her son—who she already suspected was going to be like her in more ways than one, whose fingers were always cold and whose eyes were always focused on something past the horizon—would one day find them and make them his own. We read, we wrote, and we hoped to find the answer.

Until finally, impossibly, there it was. I stared at it, the writing in my own hand, black lines on white paper, answers and questions combined, and my mouth was dry, and I didn’t know what to say.

Perhaps predictably, it was Sam who first noticed that I wasn’t writing anymore. “Annie?” he asked, putting down his pencil. “You okay?”

“No,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Okay. First, James, I apologize: your stupid time travel idea wasn’t all that stupid after all. Second, we’re going to need to go through the rest of the library to see whether there’s anything there on summoning ghosts.”

“Why?” asked James warily.

“Because we’re going to need my Aunt Mary for the next part.” I picked up my notes and read, “‘The crossroads are a place and an idea at the same time, which is both their strength and their weakness. Because they are both physical and not, an attack on one aspect which does not address the other will never be sufficient to guarantee their destruction.’”

“This is making my head hurt already,” murmured Sam.

I ignored him. “‘It is my belief that, based on the following accounts’—and she has a list of names here, of people who made bargains; I recognize a few of them, so I bet we’ve transcribed all their stories—‘the weakest point of this contradictory existence can be found at its origin. A spell which carried a petitioner back to the moment of the crossroads’ creation would also enable the crossroads to be sundered into their component parts. The echo of this sundering might then weaken their grip on the world, and allow a simple exorcism of the spiritual force powering the crossroads as we know them now to be effective.’”

“That’s … that’s a really fancy way of saying ‘throw the TNT and pray,’” said Cylia dubiously. “It can’t be that easy. If it were that easy, somebody would have nuked the crossroads the first time they exploded a herd of cows, and we wouldn’t be doing this now.”

“The first problem is access,” I said. “It says … okay, so it says in order to get to the point where an attack can have any chance of working, you must first bring someone who has been wronged by an unfair bargain to the crossroads. They have to get all the way to the deal point without changing their mind. And they need a crossroads ghost to basically play mediator. I don’t think Bethany is going to volunteer for a plan that ends with her not having a job anymore.”

Of course, that was only the first problem. I had to hope that “first” wasn’t the word they’d focus on.

It wasn’t. “Would Mary volunteer?” asked Sam dubiously.

I paused. Mary, my Mary, Mary Dunlavy, who’d become a babysitter after her body was already cold in the field. Mary, who’d always done her best to protect her family, my family, from the clutches of the crossroads, who had only become a crossroads ghost because it was that or disappear into the afterlife, leaving her father alone. He’d died shortly after her deal had been made, and he hadn’t lingered, not like Mary, but he was still the reason she’d decided to stay.

“There’s that awful saying, blood is thicker than water,” I said. “At least that’s how we say it now, hundreds of years after it was originally written. Some people say the whole phrase should be ‘the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.’ The family you make is as important as the family you’re given. Maybe more important. When you choose someone, it’s because you have a choice. Mary chose my family. She’s one of us, and she wants us to be safe. I think … I think if we can get her back, she’ll help us challenge the crossroads.”

Cylia nodded. “So we take you, because you’ve been wronged, and we get Mary back, and—”

“No.” I shook my head. “I haven’t been wronged. That’s the problem.”

Silence. Everyone blinked at me, briefly united on Team Missing the Point. That was okay. It wasn’t like I’d exactly drawn them a flow chart to work from.

“Annie, they want you to kill James,” said Sam carefully.

“I noticed,” I said.

“It’s just that that sort of feels like they’re wronging you.”

“They’re not.” I shot James an apologetic look. “I agreed to a favor to be determined later. I knew they could ask me to do something awful, something I’d have to find a way to get out of, and I said I’d do it, because I wanted to live more than I wanted to know that I was dying with clean hands. If anything, I’m wronging them by refusing to do what I promised.”

“I appreciate your rebellious streak,” muttered James.

“Hey. I didn’t know for sure that they were going to ask me to kill a person. I didn’t know what they were going to ask for. I just knew I had a lot more options if I wasn’t dead, and that if I didn’t get to my friends, they were going to be dead.”

“As one of the people she saved, I want to go with ‘yay Annie’s flexible morality,’” said Cylia. “If I get a vote.”

“Um, same,” said Fern.

James—the only person in the room who hadn’t been at Lowryland, who didn’t understand the pressure I’d been under when I’d agreed to sell myself to the crossroads—flung his hands up in a gesture of disgusted defeat. “Fine,” he said. “I’m the one who’s been wronged. We can get your ghost and we can get ourselves to a potential bargain site, but how do we reach the actual liminal space where the bargains happen? The crossroads are malicious, shortsighted, and occasionally ignorant of human nature, but they’re not stupid. They’ll know something’s up.”