Page 7 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

That didn’t mean I was willing to trust her definition of “better” quite yet. “Meaning … ?” I said carefully.

“Meaning I dialed a number at random and told the person who picked up that I was calling about the house,” she said. “That’s why I spilled my coffee yesterday.”

“You spilled everybody’s coffee yesterday,” said Fern.

She wasn’t wrong. Cylia had knocked over so many cups that I was pretty sure the tank top she’d been wearing was now permanently brown. It had been a small streak of bad luck, but it had gone on for the better part of a day, culminating in a gas station coffee machine somehow coming detached from the wall and shattering at her feet. We’d barely escaped that one without being scalded.

“What about the house?” I asked.

“Well, we’re renting it for the next three months,” said Cylia. She sounded smug. Maybe she was just thinking about taking a real shower. “Three bedrooms, lakeside access, barn that probably doesn’t actually contain livestock, and plenty of privacy. Best of all, the owner is doing it all under the table while he’s off backpacking around Europe—he was cagey enough about where he’s going and why that the dude is either a routewitch powering up for the dry season or smuggling something, and—honestly—I don’t care. The place is furnished, utilities are included, and it’s within our budget.”

“Um,” I said. “None of us have jobs, and I don’t really have much money. Neither does Sam.”

“I do,” said Fern brightly. “I saved all my paychecks, and I didn’t have to buy uniforms while we were at Lowryland.”

“You were a princess,” I said.

“I still am in my heart,” she said.

Cylia laughed. “It’s fine. I’ve got it covered. Tav had a lot of life insurance, and he died a natural death. He’s still looking out for me. And when he stops, I’ll start buying lottery tickets.”

“Fair enough,” I allowed. As long as she never went for the big score—no miracle escapes, no multimillion dollar jackpots—her luck would last. She knew what she was doing. “Did you at least get to see the house?”

“Nope,” she said, laughed again, and kept on driving.

The trouble with people is that we’re all stories already in progress. Even before we’re born, we have history, who loved who, who left who, who betrayed a global organization of monster-hunting assholes for who—the usual. I’m no different. I used to think maybe I could be, that I’d somehow be the one who broke the family mold and found something new to be, before I realized that family molds are never as close or confining as we think they are. I’m my own person, unique in the annals of my family tree, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a part of the lineage that made me.

Either four or five generations ago, depending on how you start counting, my great-great-great- grandparents decided they didn’t want to be genocidal jerks anymore and quit the Covenant of St. George with as much fuss and bother as they could manage. They died a long time before I was born, but I’ve read their diaries, and they were capable of a lot of fuss and even more bother. They moved to America after that, figuring an ocean between them and their old bosses might be enough to keep the vengeance to a minimum.

They were mostly right: it took a long, long time for the Covenant to send someone to check up on their wayward lambs. The story might have bent in a very different direction after that, except that the Covenant decided to use “checking up on the heretics” as a punishment for one of their less obedient soldiers, and shipped the man who’d go on to become my grandfather off to the middle of nowhere to make sure their former members weren’t making any trouble.

No one in my family has ever been able to resist trouble. Not only had my great-great-grandparents been making trouble, they’d been making more family members. Two generations of them, to be exact. By the time the dust settled, Grandma Alice was married to Grandpa Thomas, who was missing—as in “yanked into another dimension”—and the Covenant believed we were all dead, a happy situation that managed to endure for two more generations before my older sister, Verity, outed us all as alive on national television.

If that’s confusing, don’t worry about it. Sometimes it confuses even me, and I lived through it, day by agonizing, irritating day.

After Verity spilled the beans on our survival, we needed to find out what the Covenant knew, which is where one of their creepier habits came in handy. See, the Covenant of St. George is a secret society with a limited number of members and an even more limited capacity for recruitment, since it’s not like the continued existence of the cryptid world is exactly public knowledge. In an effort to keep this from becoming a serious problem, they’ve been running a breeding program for centuries. As in a “we tell you who to marry, we tell your kids who to marry, we craft the future of your family one carefully curated pairing at a time” program. Because that’s not fucked up and wrong.

The Covenant breeding program has resulted in a bunch of families with consistent “looks” created by genes capable of beating up every recessive in the neighborhood and taking their lunch money away. All the other women in my family have what the Covenant calls the “Carew look,” thanks to my great-great-grandmother, Enid Carew, and my great-grandmother Fran, who looked enough like Enid to make it kind of creepy when my great-grandfather married her. Every Price woman in my generation is short, petite, and very, very blonde.

And then there’s me. Tall and busty and brown haired and perfectly Price in every way, as in Grandpa Thomas, as in “I look like the representative of a bloodline the Covenant no longer recognizes, since Grandpa was the last of them, and he hasn’t been seen in decades.” So when Verity decided to turn us all into targets, it made sense that I’d be the one sent to infiltrate the Covenant, since there was no way they’d recognize me. What could possibly go wrong, right?

Right.

To be fair, my infiltration of the Covenant seemed to go well—so well, in fact, that the Covenant sent me to infiltrate a carnival suspected of harboring at least one killer cryptid. The Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, to be precise, where I’d found the suspected killer cryptid, and stopped her before she could kill anyone else … and where I’d met Sam Taylor, grandson of the carnival’s current owner.

Sam Taylor, the boy—the man—who’d put an end to my longstanding “dating is a waste of time” policy, through sheer dint of being such an asshole that my options boiled down to kissing or killing, and you know what? Kissing was way more fun.

Only the Covenant disagreed since Sam wasn’t human. The Covenant disagreed with a lot of things, including my belief that the rest of the carnival should be spared. None of them had been killing people. That didn’t matter to the Covenant. That especially didn’t matter to my handlers, one of whom had died in the effort to extract me … or to Leonard Cunningham, the current heir apparent to the entire mess. He’d twigged to me as a Price almost as soon as he’d met me, and he’d allowed the whole charade to play out as a sort of a test of my character.

I’d passed. He’d allowed me to live. He’d even allowed me to escape and go into hiding, secure in his fanatic belief that I’d eventually come crawling back. He was wrong—God, he had to be wrong—but getting out of the Covenant’s surveillance band had also meant getting out of my family’s reach. I hadn’t spoken to any of them since I’d left to go undercover. If not for my dead Aunt Mary, they would probably have believed that I’d been captured, or killed, or—worst of all—converted to the cause.

(I’ve mentioned my dead Aunt Mary a couple of times now. I’ll get to her soon, I swear.)

Where does a girl go when she’s running from her family, her not-quite-boyfriend, and the largest monster-hunting organization on the planet? Lowryland, Florida, of course. One of the biggest and most successful amusement parks on the planet, which means it’s also one of the most crowded, which means tracking spells couldn’t follow me there. It was a great idea, up until I ran into the secret cabal of magic-users who were secretly running the place. In what felt like no time at all, I wound up semi-apprenticed to their leader, who siphoned off most of my magic in order to fuel a massive conspiracy of luck-theft that had caused an unknown number of injuries, deaths, and disasters in and around the Park.

Nothing in my life is ever simple, I swear. To make matters worse, in the course of getting away from the fuckers running Lowryland, I was nearly killed by a runaway roller coaster, and found myself in a position no one in my family had been in since my grandfather’s day: I found myself making a bargain with the crossroads. Which is where my dead Aunt Mary comes in.

See, Aunt Mary is a crossroads ghost, which means she was a human when she was alive, and went to work for whatever the hell the crossroads actually are when she died. She’s like a public defender for the people who feel the need to make bargains with something too big and too powerful for the human mind to fully understand. The crossroads speak. They offer things. Mary explains why taking those things would be a bad idea. She offers alternatives. The alternatives are usually “don’t do this, death would be better, you will be sorry forever if you do this.”