Page 67 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

James put his hands over his face and groaned. I turned my attention to Cylia and Fern, sobering.

“Cylia, do you have enough good luck to add a little extra oomph to the summoning ritual we use to get Mary back, as soon as we figure out what that ritual is going to be?”

She hesitated before nodding. “Yes, but if that’s what you want me to do, that’s all I can do. We have Covenant operatives, we have a malicious hole in the world, and I love you, but that doesn’t mean I’m dying for you, got it? I need to hold back enough to make sure I get out of here in one piece.”

“Does that include getting Fern out of here in one piece?”

“It does.”

“Then fair, and good, and absolutely right. You help us recover Mary and then you’re in the clear. You don’t have to do another thing if you don’t want to.”

Cylia made a sour face. “I don’t want to do any of this.”

“Don’t I get a vote?” asked Fern. “What if I don’t want to get out of here without you?”

“Sorry, sweetie, but you’re the endangered species in the room, not me,” I said.

“That’s not true,” she said. “You and James are both sorcerers. Isn’t that hereditary and like, super-recessive? You’re endangered, too.”

James and I exchanged a look.

“In the alternate universe where Sam didn’t exist and we were somehow compatible—”

“Which we’re not: I prefer women who are marginally less likely to puncture my internal organs over a minor spat,” he muttered.

“—maybe that would be a concern,” I finished. “Sorcery is super-recessive, yes, but I’m not currently planning to have kids, and we’re trying to keep James from being murdered. I think for us, running away is the greater risk. For you, it’s the way you get clear of what’s about to happen. Take the exit, Fern. Please. For me. Let me go into this knowing that you’re safe.”

She looked at me, blue eyes wide and pleading. It was hard to meet those eyes and not agree to do anything she wanted, if she’d just stop giving me that look.

“What about me?” she asked. “You want me to run away knowing that you’re not safe. You’re my best friend, Annie. I don’t want to leave you.”

“Maybe you won’t have to,” I said. “I mean, we still have a plan that depends on you knocking me down and sitting on me if the crossroads get too far into my head. That hasn’t changed.”

Fern looked slightly mollified. That was okay. If I was my friend, I’d look forward to the chance to hit me, too.

“After we have Mary back, we can ask her nicely if she’d be willing to climb into a spirit jar for us,” I said, leaving the topic of who was leaving who behind. “They’re a kind of ghost prison. It’s cruel to leave a ghost in them for long, or to imprison them without consent, but once a ghost is confined, if they’re not struggling to escape, they’re undetectable.”

James caught on first. “Meaning we could carry her with us to the crossroads without them realizing she’s there.”

“Exactly. They’ll probably feel it when we free her, but if they assume she ran as soon as she was free, we’ll be able to get the drop on them. I haul you down there, threaten you, stab you a little, get the crossroads to manifest in order to gloat—”

“At which point we free the ghost to demand a renegotiation of the deal that wronged me.” He was starting to get excited. “That might actually work.”

“Assuming the crossroads doesn’t seize control of you and make stabbing him a little into stabbing him a lot,” said Cylia. “How are we going to prevent that?”

“He’ll freeze my hand to make me drop the knife,” I said. “I won’t have any other weapons, and I’m not that great in a hand-to-hand fight. Sam can take me easily.” Barring that, Leonard could subdue me. The idea of having my ass kicked by a Covenant operative wasn’t appealing. The idea of having my ass kicked by that Covenant operative was even less appealing.

If Sam wasn’t willing to go along with this, Leonard might be my only option. I was pretty sure I’d be able to talk Leonard into helping us fight the crossroads, which were, after all, a threat to all humanity, and hence the sort of thing the Covenant should have been fighting.

In a better world, that’s what they would have been doing. In a better world, the Covenant would have listened when my great-great-grandfather went to them with evidence that slaughtering intelligent creatures wasn’t the only way to make things better for humanity, and they would have started to conserve and protect, as well as kill. Leonard and I could have been on the same side all along. In a better world.

Too bad this was the world we had to live in.

“When Mary forces the renegotiation, what happens?” asked Cylia.

“We get pulled into the liminal space where the exorcism can be effective,” I said. “It’s not a true exorcism—no priests, no demons, no holy water or pea soup. It’s more of a banishing ritual tied into the innate power of the crossroads themselves. They don’t have time there, not the way we have it here, and we should be able to reach all the way back to the root of what they did and sever the connection.”

“Wait,” said Fern, a sudden frown on her face. “Doesn’t the crossroads have your magic? That’s how they can hurt you the way you said they can. What happens if we break the connection before you get it back?”