Page 76 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“If you don’t?”

“Run,” said Fern. She wrinkled her nose. “The crossroads will probably still be hungry after it eats us.”

“How encouraging.” Leonard stood, looking at the window, where the sun was dipping ever lower. “What happens if you succeed at your task?”

“Bethany probably freaks out and disappears,” I said. “You run. We’ll be at the hanging tree at midnight. You can help us destroy the crossroads if you show up before we go into the final battle against the eldritch terror.”

Leonard turned to stare at me. Finally, he shook his head, and said, “You would have fit in so much better with our number than you believe is true. You could have been the best of us.”

“Instead, I’m going to be the best of the opposition,” I said. “Good luck out there.”

“I won’t need it,” he said, and walked to the front door, letting himself out.

“That man is either very brave or very stupid,” said Sam. “Or both. Can I vote both? I’m going to vote both.”

“Maybe he’ll die,” said Cylia hopefully. “I bet the crossroads could turn him inside out if they wanted to. There’s no way the Covenant could blame that on us.”

“The Covenant doesn’t need a specific target when they start pointing fingers,” I said grimly. “If he gets turned inside out, that just makes it harder for us to hide the body. I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’s a snake, and snakes always slither out of trouble.” I turned to James. “How long would it take you to walk to the crossing you’ve directed him to?”

“About twenty minutes, assuming I didn’t get lost,” he said. “Give him thirty minutes, just to be sure.”

“Is that enough time to set up the ritual circles?”

“I hope so.” He put his book aside and rose. “If you’d all come with me, we can get started. Not you, Annie. You need to stay inside until we’re ready to begin.”

“I know.” I didn’t bother trying to keep the bitterness out of my tone. I wanted to help. I wanted to be there to check every line and analyze every curve, to squabble with James over the placement of candles and semiprecious stones. Summoning the dead can be very simple or very complex, depending on what kind of spirit you’re trying to call, and while we could normally snag Rose with a handful of dirt and a gas station hot dog, Mary was going to be harder. The fact that we needed to call her back without attracting the attention of the crossroads was just one more layer of difficulty on top of an already sticky situation.

I stayed seated on the stairs as the others rose and followed James to the back door. Sam was the last to go, pausing long enough to bend over and press a kiss against my temple.

“You going to be okay in here?” he asked.

“I’ll watch from the kitchen window,” I said. The boathouse, which had seemed like the best place to set up a summoning circle without either violating the wards or attracting unwanted attention, wouldn’t be exactly in view, but if someone needed me, they could run back and wave until I opened the window. Summoning via semaphore.

“It’ll be over soon,” he said as he stepped away, already back in human form, just in case someone saw them. He grabbed his jacket from the back of the couch, not bothering with any kind of shoes.

It only took a few seconds for me to be left entirely alone. I stayed where I was, looking at the empty room, strewn with books and notes and nothingness, before I finally rose and started toward the couch, beginning to collect our research materials. Anything to keep myself moving, to keep myself busy while they got started setting things up.

“I can’t do this,” I murmured, and that was the complete, achingly honest truth. I didn’t know how my grandfather had been able to do this, to handle the borders of his world narrowing until they weren’t even large enough to encompass his entire house. I’d read his journals, of course—we’d all read the journals—but they showed a level of “stiff upper lip” that I guess we should have expected from a Covenant-trained British man. Grandma might have been able to tell me more, if we’d ever felt like it was safe to ask her.

That was a fun thought. We could kidnap James and ask him to transfer the ghost wards to Cylia’s car if this didn’t work. She could drive me to Michigan, all of us peeing in bottles and trying not to yearn for showers, James recasting the wards whenever they ran down. We still owned the house where Thomas Price had become a captive of the crossroads. Grandma Alice went there all the time, and we all tried to pretend it was healthy for her to spend her time on Earth in a house that might not hold any ghosts but was absolutely haunted all the same.

We could put me there. Fix up a bedroom and leave me like a cork in a bottle, one more Price for a house that had already tried and failed to protect our family.

“Morbid much?” I muttered. I kept picking up books, stacking them on the coffee table with their spines turned away from the door. That was a little piece of habit I’d picked up when I was a kid, a way to keep Verity from commenting on the books I was reading. Privacy had never been plentiful in our house.

I missed it. I missed knowing there was a good chance any open door would reveal a member of my family, sharpening knives or making out with their latest significant other, or even folding laundry and waiting to dragoon the first person too slow to get away into rolling socks. I missed home.

In that moment, it was incredibly hard to believe I was ever going home again.

I was stacking James’ notes in a tidy pile when the doorbell rang. I whipped around, a cascade of papers accompanying the motion, and stared at the door. The doorbell rang again before someone started hammering on the wood.

Swell. Cylia’s car was in the driveway and the lights were on; there was no way I could slink back to the kitchen and pretend no one was home. Bethany wasn’t likely to ring the bell. Even if she did, she couldn’t get me as long as I stayed behind the wards. I took one quick look around the front room, confirming that nothing really weird was visible, and moved, cautiously, toward the door.

I pulled it open just as Captain Smith raised his hand to start another round of hammering. He blinked at me. I blinked at him.

“James isn’t here,” I blurted.

“May I come in?” he asked, and pushed past me without waiting for an answer, sweeping his eyes over the book-strewn living room. He didn’t seem to realize that most of the books had come from his house: his gaze skipped straight over them, lip slowly curling in a sneer. “He’s been here,” he said.