Page 93 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“Hey, I come from a time where killer corn is all the rage,” I protested. “I like to ask.”

“That boon I can grant without charge,” she said. “Go into the wheat. Do as you like, but try not to damage anything. Agriculture is among the greatest of humanity’s achievements.”

“Got it,” I said, and turned my back on the force of nature with my babysitter’s face, taking one last, wary glance at the bruised sky before diving into the waving field of golden grain. I had work to do.

Like I said before, exorcisms aren’t about magic, and they aren’t about religion. They’re about knowing and maintaining the natural order of things. Most bodies are only meant to play host to a single soul at a time. Casting out the one that doesn’t belong isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but it’s less about power than it is about ritual, preparation, and will.

Exorcising the crossroads in the modern day, when they’d had five hundred years to strengthen their hold on this world, was next to impossible. Doing it in the past, even if the past was an illusion, might work. It had to work.

If it didn’t work, I was going to be in a world of hurt.

I plunged into the wheat, walking fast, until I found a place where the stalks had been cut down and the ground had been stomped flat, preparing for another planting. I took the salt out of my pocket and drew a circle around myself, letting it trickle between my fingers as I turned. I opened my mouth to begin the ritual … and stopped.

Church has never been my family’s thing. I could recite Bible passages all I wanted, but they wouldn’t mean anything to me, not really. When it comes to liturgies and catechisms, there’s really only one faith that’s been completely available to us, offered freely and without the expectation that we’ll join in. We’ve never needed to believe. We’ve only ever needed to know.

“In the days when the faith in the Feathered Lords was waning, came Elizabeth Evans, called Beth, the Kindly Priestess, who did find Us gathered in her yard, and say, Why, Look At You, You Must be Starving. And she did gather Us in her apron and carry Us into her Home, which would be our Home thereafter, and say, You Are Safe Here, If You Will Follow the Rules I Set—”

The bruise in the sky became a gaping, rotting wound, and the summer shattered, the air going cold. Wind whipped through the wheat, chilling and killing it. How long did this field lie fallow before the corn came pushing its way through the earth, already ripening, already aware?

I shivered, and continued, “Her child, Caroline, the Well-Groomed Priestess, did come to us with open hands, and say, My Mother Is Old, and The Covenant Does Not Understand; Come With Me, For Any Husband I Will Have Will Have You Also. She did marry Peter Carew, the God of Hard Work and Sunshine, and they did raise four children in hope and in glory, hidden from the Eye of the Covenant by the strength of their affections—”

The sky … tore. The sky broke, like a plate dropped from a great height, and there were shards of sky falling all around me, terrible, impossible shards of sky, which shattered again when they hit the ground, becoming an oily, sticky film that danced with diseased rainbows before sinking into the earth. In the distance, the anima mundi shrieked, fear and rage and agony blurring into a single heartrending sound.

I wanted to go to her. I didn’t know her, for all that she looked so much like Mary, but something in her scream tore at my heart and made me want nothing more than to break the circle I’d drawn and run to her aid. Whether that was the incoming crossroads trying to lure me or the spirit of Earth calling for help didn’t matter. I had to stay where I was. I had to finish this.

I took a steadying breath, and said, “Her eldest daughter, Agnes, refused us, but did not break her mother’s Confidence, saying, You Ask Too Much of Me. But her second daughter, Enid, the Patient Priestess, did say, Mother, I Love You, and I Love the Mice, and I Will Keep Them Safe. She did marry Alexander Healy, the God of Uncommon Sense, and on their wedding night—”

Something fell from the broken, breaking sky, something made of angles and reflections and wrongness. Everything about it was wrong. It was obscene, offensive to the eye: it had no business here, or anywhere near here. It didn’t belong.

It howled, and its voice was the voice of the void. The anima mundi screamed, agony and anxiety. I pulled a handful of salt out of my pocket, cutting the catechism short as I flung it into the air.

“In the name of Beth Evans, I cast you out! In the name of Caroline Carew, I refuse you passage here! In the name of Enid—”

A hand made of crackling static and absence grasped my wrist, jerking me off my feet and out of the circle. I found myself dangling, toes several inches above the ground, looking into the emptiness that was the face of the crossroads.

“You don’t belong here, human child,” it hissed, like static, like nothingness, like the act of being erased. There was no fire in my fingers. There had never been fire in my fingers. I was vibrating apart, my component atoms becoming nothing but dust and the opposite of memory. I would be the déjà vu that haunted my family for a hundred generations, the girl who should have been but never was born.

(and a carnival burned before a Covenant strike team, and a screaming fūri died with his grandmother’s body in his arms, howling rage, howling misery).

(and a jink tried desperately to stop a feeding mara from destroying a roller derby league one skater at a time, until her own luck ran out from the strain of manipulating everyone else’s, until her neck snapped in a bad fall, and she was still, so still, so still).

(and a sylph died at the business end of a manticore’s tail, eyes open and startled, staring into nothing, not sure why she thought she could be saved).

(and they died, and they died, and they died because I wasn’t there, because I had never been there, because I had never existed at all).

“In the name of Enid Healy, I deny your power,” I whispered. The words were harder than I expected them to be. I had never been touched by a force of entropy before.

I didn’t like it.

“Stop that, and I’ll show mercy,” snarled the crossroads—only it wasn’t the crossroads yet, was it? It was fighting me instead of attacking the anima mundi. Flakes of light were starting to appear in the shattered sky as the world struggled to reassert itself, becoming hazy and unclear.

It hurt, oh, fuck, it hurt. I felt like my entire body was fizzing at the edges, dissolving and reforming at the same time. “In the name of Frances Healy, I cast you out,” I whispered.

The thing shook me like a limp rag. I scrabbled to get a better grasp on the hand that held me, using the strength it had and I didn’t to keep myself as close to upright as possible.

“I could have been merciful,” it snarled, and I was on fire.

Not literally: literal fire would have been a problem for both of us, considering we were surrounded by dry, flammable wheat. This was the fire that burned in the center of my cells, the fire that should have been mine, before I had given it away to save myself from drowning. The anima mundi might not have been able to reach forward to the things her replacement had claimed in bargain after bargain, all the long and awful days of its ascendance, but the parasite had no such problems.