Page 75 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“Great,” said Sam. “Welcome to the party.”

Nineteen

“Find out what people expect and then do as close to the opposite as your conscience and the laws of physics will allow. Gets ’em every time.”

–Frances Brown

The front room of a rented house in New Gravesend, Maine, getting ready to make some really impressive mistakes

LEONARD LOOKED AT J AMES’ meticulously written and organized notes, a small frown on his patrician face. He’d been reviewing our work for the past twenty minutes, and I was starting to twitch. Who knew I could get test anxiety from watching a member of the Covenant go over my plans to either change the world forever or get myself and everyone who trusted me utterly, irredeemably fucked? What a fun voyage of self-discovery I was on.

If Leonard was aware that we’d arranged ourselves to box him in, he wasn’t saying anything. James was still in his original position on the couch, having moved a few books but otherwise not acknowledging that Leonard might like to be comfortable. That was part of the plan. If Leo tried to bolt, James could grab him and present him with a nice case of frostbite to slow him the hell down. Cylia was leaning against the front door, Fern was sitting cross-legged at the entry to the hallway, and Sam and I were sitting on the stairs, me with my back against his chest, him casually playing with my hair while shooting nasty looks in Leo’s direction. He was as tense as I’d ever felt him when not in human form, and his tail was wrapped around my left ankle tightly enough to hurt a little. I didn’t object.

“There’s a flaw in your reasoning,” said Leonard finally, looking up and scanning the room until he met my eyes. “A fairly large one.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And what’s that?”

“Your plan hinges on you having access to your original crossroads ghost, the one you say is well-inclined toward your family,” he said. “If you can’t leave the wards without risking exposure to the second ghost, the one that isn’t well-inclined, how are you planning to get the first ghost back?”

I smiled slowly. Sam’s body was warm behind me, chasing the last of the lingering chill from the air. I felt like I was starting to thaw for the first time since Bethany had appeared to tell me what the crossroads wanted me to do.

“I’m sure you must have asked yourself why we’d need another warm body when the party was already pretty full,” I said. “I mean, it’s not that we didn’t want to run around wondering if we were going to get stabbed in the back at any moment, it’s just that five is the usual sweet spot for any sort of superhero outing.”

Leonard looked at me warily. “I’m sure you’re speaking English.”

“All that snobbery and you don’t even read comic books. Man, I really dodged a bullet getting away from you people.”

“You didn’t dodge the crossbow bolt,” said Sam.

“Point,” I said. Looking at Leonard, I said, “We need you to go to the crossroads—not the main one, not the one by the hanging tree, we’re saving that to visit with Mary—and indicate that you’re ready to make a deal. We have summoning charms that should work to get Bethany’s attention. Then all you need to do is hem and haw enough that she stays focused on you while we get Mary back.”

“And what, pray tell, am I to claim to want?” asked Leonard.

“Simple.” I felt an echo of Sam’s smile in my own as I bared my teeth at the man in front of me. “Say you want me. Say you can’t go home without me. Say you can tell the crossroads have some sort of claim on me, and you’ve come to buy it back. All you have to do is avoid sealing an actual bargain while we get Mary out of wherever she’s been banished to. Once that’s done …”

Once we had Mary, we’d be able to petition for a reassessment of Sally’s deal. We could get to the crossroads where they lived, if that was even the right term. And then things would really get interesting.

Leonard looked at me levelly. “You’re trusting me a great deal.”

I rolled one shoulder in a shrug. “You’re not going to make a crossroads bargain over me. You don’t want to win by cheating, and those bargains always have loopholes in them. Your control over the Covenant is going to depend on not having any of those loopholes in your past, waiting to strike. Also, you pretty much think the crossroads are literally the big-D Devil, and you’re probably not wrong. So yeah, I trust you, but only because I know I can. You fake it. You flirt and you fluster and you keep Bethany busy, and in exchange, we give you the world. Think you can manage?”

Slowly, almost reluctantly, Leonard began to smile.

“You only needed to ask,” he said.

Finding a local crossroads manifestation point was easy. Too easy: while every crossing potentially could be a breakthrough for a bargain, most municipalities don’t have more than one spot that has actually been used recently enough to have the necessary resonance. Maybe two. In New Gravesend, it seemed like every possible crossing point had been used. Several times.

“It’s always been like this,” James said. “I tried to research it at the beginning, when I was trying to determine what mattered. In the end, I had to stop because it doesn’t matter why the crossroads pay so much attention to a little town like this one. They do. That’s enough.”

I thought of how few sorcerers there were left in the world—fewer, even, than could be accounted for by the rabid way the Covenant hunted us, because sorcerers can hide. They’re masters of tucking themselves away, out of sight and hence out of mind. I thought of the way the crossroads had gone for my grandfather, and how eagerly they’d gone after me once the opportunity arose. They couldn’t be that hungry for every possible bargain, or there’d be no way to keep them a secret from the wider world. The fact that they’d pursued him, pursued me, and even pursued James … they didn’t like sorcerers. They didn’t like us at all.

James’ mother had been a sorcerer. This had been her town. And the talent ran in families. It might be difficult to tell which had come first, but I was willing to bet if we really went digging, we’d find that the number of bargains began to climb right around when the first of James’ ancestors had moved to New Gravesend.

I was right. I was sure that I was right. Looking at James’ face as he earnestly explained where Leonard was going to go to bait the crossroads—where the rest of us were going to go while Bethany was distracted, to get Mary back—I knew I could never tell him. He was a smart guy. If he’d wanted to consider the possibility that his family had brought this down on their hometown, he would already have done so. The fact that he hadn’t told me it didn’t matter and, more, that he needed to stay at least a little bit in denial.

“What do I do if the crossroads decide to have done with me?”

“Come back here,” said Cylia. “There’s a key under the mat at the back door. Let yourself in, have a cookie, and wait to see whether we survive.”