Page 84 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“You better believe it.” I took a deep breath. “Look. He didn’t just tell me to stop seeing you. He told me some things about your mother.”

“As if he knows anything—”

“He knew she was a sorcerer.”

That silenced him. James stared at me, eyes wide, cheeks pale enough to make his earlier blush seem like a mistake.

“She told him before they got married, because she wanted him to know … and because there’s sort of a curse on your family line.” This was where I had to tread carefully. If James started blaming himself for his mother’s death, dealing with the crossroads was going to become one hell of a lot harder. “One of your ancestors was afraid the family would lose the magic. Sorcery is sort of the ultimate recessive gene, at least as far as human magic-users go. Even sorcerers marrying sorcerers won’t guarantee it gets passed along. So he went to the crossroads, and he asked them to promise his line would always breed true. I guess the crossroads ghost who was supposed to help him word that request was a little less diligent than Mary, because he used the phrase ‘that New Gravesend should always be protected against the dangers of the unseen world.’”

“Meaning what?” asked James, in a small, strangled voice.

“Meaning there’s a reason you’ve never been outside the municipality. His crossroads bargain is still in effect, and it won’t let you leave. You have to stay here because you’re the town’s official protector.” Untrained, untested, and unprepared. Some protector. It was an elegant trap, one that would probably have finished snapping shut the first time something that actually needed to be protected against wandered into the city limits.

“And my mother knew?” he asked.

This was the hard part. I took a deep breath. “According to your father, she knew, and she also knew that as soon as you were old enough for your magic to stabilize—as soon as the bargain was kept—she’d get sick. Only one descendant at a time. The crossroads don’t like sorcerers. They weren’t going to allow your family to breed an army against them.”

James was silent for several seconds. Then, jerkily, he stood, and punched the nearest wall. Frost clung to the wallpaper where his knuckles hit. I took a step back, watching silently as he struck it again and again, until he stopped and slumped, leaning forward until his forehead hit the wall. He was panting.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know this is a lot.”

His laughter was bitter. “A lot? I killed my mother.”

“No, you didn’t. She knew, James. She knew she’d only get a few years with you, and she decided it was worth it. You don’t get to say that she was wrong. Okay? She wanted you to exist. She wanted to know you.”

He turned to look at me bleakly. “What do I do now?”

“Now?” I shrugged. “Now you do what you’ve been working toward all along. You kick the crossroads until they beg for mercy, and you do it for Sally, and you do it for your mother. And then you come home with me, and I introduce you to the rest of the family.”

He hesitated. “Will they … do you think they’re going to like me?”

It was no effort at all to smile at him. “I think they’re going to love you, new brother. I really think they will.”

The waffle party was in full swing downstairs. Cylia had piled several plates high and set them in the middle of the dining room table, surrounded by an assortment of toppings both predictable—maple syrup and powdered sugar and strawberry jam—and a little bit surreal—bacon bits and chicken nuggets and candied cauliflower. She saw me eyeing the chicken nuggets, and shrugged.

“Chicken and waffles is a time-honored tradition,” she said. “I wasn’t going to fry chicken, so you get the next best thing.”

“Plus no bones,” said Fern gleefully. “The best meat doesn’t have any bones.”

“Sylphs are natural insectivores,” I said, for James and Sam’s benefit. Their mutual horrified looks were simply a bonus. Fern giggled. The bonus wasn’t just for me.

Sam was perched on the back of the couch with his plate of waffles, eating with both hands while holding his coffee with his tail. I settled on the cushion in front of him with my own smaller portion, watching the room as I cut the waffles into bite-sized pieces.

Looking at Cylia, it would have been easy to tell myself she was completely at ease with the situation, ready to deal with whatever the world wanted to throw at her. The platters of waffles put the lie to that idea. She was as tightly wound as the rest of us, and dealing with the situation the only way she could: by taking care of us now, before she couldn’t anymore.

She didn’t think we were going to make it through this. That was almost reassuring, in a messed-up way. I might be stubbornly willing to keep telling myself I could find a route that saved everyone I cared about, even if I couldn’t necessarily save my magic, or even myself, but if she was accepting the depth of the shit we were in, that meant she wasn’t deluding herself. And if Cylia had accepted the reality of our situation, Fern had, too. Sam might think I could handle anything, but he was enough of a realist to know things might not go our way. As for James …

He’d spent years planning a way to get his revenge on the crossroads and bring Sally home. Alive or dead. Alive would be better, of course, but at least having a corpse would give her family freedom, even as it broke his heart forever. Sometimes closure is the only gift worth giving.

We’d been in town for less than a week, and he was on the cusp of finally getting what he wanted—possibly even including his freedom, if he survived the confrontation. If this went the way we were hoping, when it was done, he’d be able to put New Gravesend behind him forever. He could walk away from the father who’d never understood him, from the shadows on his mother’s grave, from the people who had been perfectly happy to live in the safe harbor of a sorcerer’s protection, without remembering what that meant for the sorcerer.

(Maybe that was unfair. James hadn’t known about the crossroads deal, after all, and if the sorcerer didn’t know, how could the people he was ostensibly forgetting understand what he’d given up to stay with and watch over them? The problem with bargains that span generations is that they can be forgotten without being invalidated. It’s not right and it’s not fair, but it’s the world we live with, and it’s the only world we’ve got.)

Everything was changing. All we could do was try to keep up.

The doorbell rang. Sam shifted back to human form without getting off the back of the couch. I stayed where I was, continuing to inhale waffles. Everyone else had had the chance to get a head start on me and James, after all. Cylia looked around the room, saw that no one was moving, rolled her eyes, and moved toward the door.

“Think she needs backup?” asked Sam, swallowing.