Page 94 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

I screamed. Burning hurt no less here than it had in the future, when Bethany had been the one to pour pain into my palms and pretend it was a gift. Bile rose in my throat. I swallowed it back down, forcing myself to keep breathing. Pain is pain. I’d been in pain before.

“In the name …” I rasped. “In the name of … Alice Price-Healy, I tell you that you have no place here.”

The parasite snarled and shook me again. The fire burned higher, hotter. That was almost a good thing. The pain was reaching the point where it hurt so much that it didn’t hurt at all. Parts of me were shutting down, going into shock. In the long run, that was going to be a problem. Right now …

“In the name of Evelyn Price, I refuse you any place here,” I whispered. All the Priestesses, all the generations of Aeslin mice who believed, truly believed to the bottom of their souls, that we were connected to the divine, that we could shape the world with our actions—and we had, we had, every one of us had. We had become a pantheon in their eyes, and we had fought so hard, for so long, to be worthy of what they saw when they looked at us.

“I will not be exorcised like some common spirit,” spat the parasite.

It hurt. It hurt so much that there was nothing to me but the hurting, nothing to the world but pain. I somehow found the strength to force a smile, despite it all.

“Our world,” I whispered. “Our rules. In the names of Verity Price, Elsie Harrington, and myself, Antimony Price, the Precise Priestess, I command you to leave this place and never come here again. This is not yours. You are not wanted here.”

The parasite howled. The anima mundi screamed. I screamed, and I was burning, I was burning, the flames were higher than they had ever been, so high that they were breaking through my skin, and everything was fire, everything was fire, and there was nothing left for me but to burn, to burn, to—

Twenty-five

“Oh, baby. Rest now. Rest, and remember that I love you.”

–Frances Brown

Burning

IT DIDN’T HURT ANYMORE.

That was the first thing I noticed. Nothing hurt: nothing even ached. For the first time I could remember, everything was perfect. I was cradled in warmth, like I was sleeping next to the heater in the middle of December, safe and comfortable and protected from anything that might want to hurt me. I couldn’t see, but that made sense, since my eyes were closed. I didn’t know what was out there, and I didn’t want to know, because there was one thing I was pretty sure of:

I was pretty sure I was dead.

I’d traveled through time—technically—through a loophole in the laws of temporal physics, to stop an eldritch force of incredible power before it could displace the anima mundi and become the terror we all knew and hated. A spell simple enough to be cast by someone with virtually no magic couldn’t be powerful enough to cause an actual paradox: maybe I’d traveled through time, but I’d only done it within the confines of the crossroads themselves. Even if I’d succeeded, I couldn’t succeed until the crossroads returned to the present day. The thing I’d just gotten into a slap-fight with would still have five hundred years of torturing humanity before my exorcism caught up with it.

Maybe that was why it had always hated sorcerers so much. Maybe it had targeted people like James’ family—like my own grandfather—because it remembered a woman with the ghost of fire in her fingers breaking its hold on the world before that hold could become strangling. I wasn’t causing a paradox. I was preventing one.

And now I was warm, and not in pain anymore, and probably dead. It was interesting, really. I’d always assumed death would be cold.

“—hear me?”

The voice was distant and broken, like I was hearing it across a crackling fire. I didn’t turn. Whoever it was, they could wait until I was damn well good and ready to stop catching my breath. Did the dead breathe? Rose did, but she was usually wearing a coat and temporarily alive when she hung out at the house.

“—burning, she’s burning, how do we stop—”

The second voice held a thin edge of hysteria, audible above the crackle of the flames. It sounded familiar, although I couldn’t quite say why. I tried to open my eyes, and found, to my dismay, that they wouldn’t budge.

Oh, man. If my afterlife was going to be sitting around impersonating a charcoal briquette, I was going to get really bored, really quickly.

“Annie, can you hear me?”

Mary. The first voice was Mary. I tried again to open my eyes. I failed again.

“Is she even breathing?”

Cylia.

“She’s still on fire, can we deal with the part where she’s still on fire?”

Sam. Oh, Sam. He sounded like he was on the verge of beginning to punch things for the sake of having something less confusing to deal with. Violence isn’t always the answer, but sometimes it’s a good stopgap until the answer can be found.

“Killing her would be a mercy. This is unnatural.”