Page 79 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

Inside, someone—probably Cylia—had strung a bunch of white hazard lights around the edges of the boathouse, casting a cool white light over the circle sketched in chalk, salt, and little white feathers across the majority of the floor. I stopped, frowning.

“Where did you get that many white feathers?” I asked. “Did somebody kill a goose?”

“No, we killed a pillow,” said Cylia. “Our landlord has good taste in linens. James did most of the work of drawing the summoning circle. The rest of us just handed him feathers when he asked for them.”

That was good. Anyone can draw a summoning circle, but they work best when drawn by someone with actual power. I walked a slow loop around the edge, checking for breaks, checking for places where the lines were narrower, or shallower, or anything else that could lead to us getting something other than what we bargained for. To his credit, James watched me but didn’t say anything about the inspection. It’s a fool who argues about a second set of eyes on a complicated problem, whether you’re talking calculus or demonology.

The candles were placed with precision. The semiprecious stones, which were mostly quartz and appeared to have been gathered from the edge of the lake, were properly nestled in their cradles of salt. I bent to adjust a few of them, moving their angles more into alignment with the rest of the scene, and didn’t say a word. This was going to work or it wasn’t. We were going to get one of our allies back—one of our weapons back—or we weren’t.

Only one way to know for sure.

I straightened, looking slowly around the room. My motley crew of allies and oddities looked back, waiting for the word.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

Twenty

“People who say that right and wrong are all about absolutes are usually getting ready to stab someone for looking at things differently. Try to stab them first.”

–Enid Healy

In a somewhat decrepit boathouse, preparing to do something genuinely foolish

WE ARRAYED OURSELVES AROUND the circle, standing as evenly spaced as possible, our hands outstretched and our fingers splayed, not quite touching one another. Sam’s arms were long enough in his fūri form that he could have reached the people to either side of him—me and Cylia—but that wasn’t the point. We were sketching a phantom connection as part of our snare to catch a ghost, and actual contact would have interfered.

The rules of magic are complicated, confusing, and sometimes contradictory. Magic is basically the English language of universal constants.

“Mary Dunlavy, we call to you from across the void,” I said. “You have duties yet unfinished and promises yet unfulfilled here upon this mortal plane, and you will answer me, or give good reason why.”

“Wouldn’t giving good reason be an answer?” Fern asked, sounding faintly baffled.

I didn’t answer. It didn’t matter if she spoke. Cylia and Sam were similarly unlimited. Only James and I had to stay completely on task. We were the ones who supposedly knew what we were doing. And hey, James had never called a ghost before, and I was distracted by the fact that the fresh new wards on the boathouse were of necessity less complete than the ones on the house, since we needed to be able to pull Mary through them, but at least we’d read the back of the cereal box. Or something.

“Mary Dunlavy, you are needed,” said James. “Your work is not yet done. Your time is not yet finished. Your allies call to you, and will not go unheard.”

The air in the boathouse began to chill. Whether that was because the calling was starting to work or because James was nervous enough to be freezing the air around him was anybody’s guess.

“Mary, come to me.” I let some of the solemnity slip from my voice, replaced by raw pleading. “I’m not done with you yet. You’re not going to be my babysitter forever, and that means I should enjoy the time I have left.”

“Everybody should have a dead aunt,” said Sam.

I resisted the urge to glare at him.

The candles flickered. The air kept getting colder, chilling around us degree by degree. I glanced at James, who shook his head while mouthing “not me.” Okay. Something was coming to answer our summons. Whether it was Mary or something worse had yet to be determined.

Perhaps belatedly, it occurred to me that if the crossroads could monitor me through her, maybe they could also answer a summons intended for her. Maybe we’d just triggered the final showdown well ahead of our intentions, and we were about to face the consequences.

Oh, well. Too late now, and at least we were surrounded by things we could use as makeshift weapons, if it came down to it. Things could have been a lot worse. We could have been doing this skyclad and empty-handed, for example. I tried to hold onto that flash of optimism as the air chilled even further, until—with no flash or fanfare—Mary, or something very much like her, appeared in the middle of our circle.

She was naked, folded forward in a bestial crouch, with her face shrouded by the cobweb sheet of her tangled white hair. Her skin wasn’t her usual Welsh pallor, betraying a life spent avoiding the sun and a possible vitamin D deficiency but not much else: it was the chalky, bruised blue-gray of the grave. I could count every one of her ribs and every knob along her spine.

“Uh,” said Sam. “Is that … did we get the wrong ghost? Because I’m not really into the idea of a possession right now.”

“Mary?” I whispered.

The girl in our circle didn’t respond, didn’t move so much as a muscle in answer to my question. She was still as only the dead can be, not even breathing as she crouched.

It was the hair. No one was left who’d known her when she was alive—she hadn’t become my grandmother’s babysitter until after her death, although my great-grandma hadn’t known that when she hired her—but I was pretty sure she hadn’t had waist-length white hair as a living teenage girl. That sort of thing tends to get remembered. She’d probably been some shade of blonde, only to get sun-bleached by the endless country road that lingered, haunted, in her eyes.