Page 87 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

I didn’t want to go straight to the stabbing: I was only planning to do it once, and I didn’t actually want this encounter to end with an unnecessary corpse. “Fight me,” I hissed.

James’ eyes widened in understanding, and he began struggling to get his arm out of my grasp. “Let go, you lunatic!” he snapped. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but you’re going to regret this!”

His voice was high and shrill, the performance of a man who’d never done theater in his life. It shouldn’t have fooled anyone. But as he went on, the air around us grew thick and electric with something that wasn’t pressure, yet managed to have weight all the same. The eyes of the crossroads were upon us, watching, waiting to see what we were going to do. We had their attention.

“Sorry,” I mouthed. James, realizing what was about to happen, stopped yelling, true panic slipping into his eyes. He might have been preparing a protest, an excuse, anything to keep me from moving on to the next part of the plan.

He didn’t have the chance. The knife was already in my hand, and it slid into his side with the soft, characteristic slicing sound of metal meeting meat. He gasped, panic melting into shock. The air around us chilled as he called his magic, instinctively flailing for a way to make the hurting stop.

I’d promised to only hurt him a little, and I’d meant it, but that didn’t mean I was going to stand by and let him deliver another case of frostbite. My knife was embedded in the muscle of his side, positioned to stay well clear of his internal organs. I gave it a small twist anyway, causing more damage. More importantly, having a knife twisted inside your body hurts. The cold broke as James lost his concentration.

The weight of the watching crossroads grew even heavier. Come on, Bethany, I thought. Be a good girl and do your job, we’re counting on you to do your job—

The air shimmered, growing hazy as a summer day in the middle of the desert, even though the sky was dark and the wind was cold. Bethany didn’t appear. That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to, but for the moment, when we spoke, we were speaking directly to the dark.

“Here you go,” I said loudly, and shoved James away from me, away from the blade of my knife. He fell in the dirt in a tangle of limbs, one hand clasping his side. Blood trickled between his fingers, thick and red. He was practically panting from the pain. He’d probably never been stabbed before. Amateur.

The others were arrayed behind me; I could hear them breathing, hear the soft scuffs of their feet as they shifted their weight. Otherwise, the wood was silent, as if the world itself was holding its breath.

“Well?” I demanded. “I’m not killing him if no one’s going to witness it. I refuse to let you say I didn’t do it because you didn’t see it. I’m not letting you weasel out of this.”

“We weasel out of nothing,” said a voice from the air, as affronted as a child accused of stealing cookies. “How dare you accuse us of cheating? Flesh cheats. We deliver.”

“Prove it,” I said, and flung the knife into the dirt by James’ head. It landed less than an inch from his ear, causing him to recoil in genuine surprise and no small trace of fear. “Manifest.”

“You are not our master,” hissed the voice of the crossroads. Then, in a tone of smug sadism, it said, “But we can show you what it means for us to be yours.”

The air twisted. In the time it took to blink, the night sky was gone, replaced by a golden twilight that stretched from one side of the sky to the next. The trees went with the sky, replaced by endless cornfields and a horizon that seemed so far and open that human hands could never hope to hold it. Not all the trees: the hanging tree remained, looming in bleak and terrible judgment over all.

I was standing on the well-worn pavement of an endless country road, at the point where it was crossed by a gravel farmer’s trail. This was where the thresher would have gone, if this field had ever been intended for harvest. The knife I had thrown at James’ head was still there. So was James. I glanced to the side, not quite daring to turn.

“We’re here,” said Leonard, voice low. “Wherever ‘here’ is.”

So I wasn’t doing this without my backup. That was good. My friends were still in danger. That was bad. Leonard was in danger, which was a little more good than bad, but wasn’t ideal. Worst of all, the presence of the hanging tree told me we weren’t entirely in the pocket dimension where the crossroads “lived,” if the term could be considered applicable. The so-called real world surrounded us on all sides, only inches away, covered by an overlay of the unwanted and obscene.

James could perform his exorcism here and accomplish nothing. We needed to go deeper.

“We see you now,” said the voice of the crossroads, coming from everywhere around us at the same time. The smugness was still there, now underscored by a note of greedy anticipation, like a spoiled child on Christmas morning. “Finish it.”

“If I do, I get my magic back? I need to be able to protect myself from Leonard.” I gestured toward him. I didn’t have to work to put a quiver into my voice. That part came naturally, and I hated myself for it, just the slightest bit. There was every chance destroying the crossroads would mean giving that part of my soul up forever. It was a small price to pay, especially when measured against the lives the crossroads had claimed or destroyed over the years. It still stung.

“Yes, yes,” said the crossroads impatiently. “You will be restored, only kill him.”

“Right,” I said, and reached into my pocket as I turned toward James.

His eyes widened, and in that moment, I could see the fear there, clear as day. He carried frost in his fingers. He knew—or could guess—how much it would hurt to have it stolen away, and he knew what he’d give to get it back. What was one life against everything I should have had, everything that was already mine by right? My friends would forgive me. I could say I’d lost control, or that the crossroads had somehow forced me to do it, I could claim to be Jean Grey in the grasp of the Phoenix, and they’d believe me, because it would be so much better than the alternative. I could have my freedom and my fire back, and all it would cost was the life of one measly little self-taught sorcerer.

Bethany flickered into existence only a few feet away, eyes even wider than James’. She knew. Somehow, she knew. “Stop her!” she squealed.

“Catch,” I said, and threw the spirit jar containing Mary at James’ chest.

He didn’t catch it, quite: it bounced off his open hands and onto the pavement, where it cracked. It didn’t shatter, but it didn’t need to. A ghost can fit through any opening. A broken vessel can’t contain a spirit that doesn’t want to be contained. Smoke snaked through the crack, glittering in the twilight air, coming faster and faster until it shaped itself into the semblance of a teenage girl, solidified, and dissipated, leaving Mary in its wake.

I clapped a hand over my mouth, tears rising to my eyes. This was Mary as she was meant to be, without any interference from the crossroads or influence from the kids she agreed to babysit. Her hair was a streak of bone-white down her back, and her eyes were no color at all, but the shadowed hollows of a skull granted the illusion of life by a trick of the light. She wore a winding shroud, like something I might have expected to see on the Grim Reaper, and all she needed was a scythe and a strictly pointing finger to complete the illusion that she was the Ghost of Christmas Future come to deliver a major ass-kicking.

“Fuck. That,” said Bethany, and disappeared again, back to wherever crossroads ghosts go when not summoned.

“Why am I here?” Mary asked, before any of the rest of us could react.