Page 96 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

She looked … nothing like Mary. Her skin was smooth and brown; her lips were thin and her nose was broad and her eyes were soft and sad and the color of the wheat blowing all around us. Her hair was black and blonde and red and brown and silver at the same time, falling to her shoulders in streaky corkscrew curls. Some of them were tipped in blue or purple or pink, like even the fashion colors were a part of the living spirit of the world. She still wore the belted shroud she’d had on when she appeared with Mary’s face, dressed like she was going to produce a scythe and go reaping souls at any moment.

She was beautiful. That was nice to know. The composite of every human woman in the world was beautiful.

“Why are you a woman?” I blurted.

“Why do you assume I’m a woman?” she countered. “I look like this for you because your life has been filled with friendly ghosts. You were a haunted house before you knew what it was to be more than just a room. Your friends would all see something different when they looked at me. I don’t have a specific gender, any more than the thing that tried to destroy me did. I’m just more invested in being kind to the people who walk my path.”

“Oh,” I said, cheeks flaring red. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. People have always assumed. It’s only recently that they’re realized they should also regret, when those assumptions are wrong.” The anima mundi shook their head. “I’m still filtering through all the changes to humanity that have come in the last five hundred years. You’ve made such progress for a silly, self-centered little species, and yet you haven’t changed at all. It’s going to be amazing learning what you can do now.”

“Will the magic get stronger? Now that you’re back?”

“The magic never left. Magic is a constant force of the universe, like gravity, or time. It could grow thin as that thing consumed and spent it, but it could never disappear.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“I know. But this is still the crossroads, and questions asked here are difficult things. They have consequences. You still have a question unanswered.”

I hesitated. “I don’t remember asking a question.”

“But you did. You asked yourself whether you were going to die here, and since you’re still at the crossroads, you asked me.” The anima mundi looked at me solemnly. “That means I get to offer you a bargain.”

“Wait, I mean, just hold on a second here,” I said, alarmed. “I already have one outstanding deal with the crossroads.”

“No, you don’t. For this one moment in time, no one has a deal with the crossroads, because the parasite that took my place, that used my power to harm my people, has no authority here. Some of the things it gave were good, even if they were in the pursuit of an evil: I doubt your lover would be pleased to find his lungs filling with fluid, or your grandmother would be delighted to find the flesh rotting from her bones. I’m not taking back its gifts. I’m also not taking on its debts. The slates are clean. The books are balanced. We begin fresh, here, today, and you, Antimony Timpani Price, will be my first new negotiation. Shall we begin?”

“… crap,” I said, before I could catch myself. “I … okay, no, crap. Is there any way we could not do this? Like, I just performed an exorcism, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be jet-lagged for the next decade, I really, really don’t want to deal with semi-cosmic forces right now.”

“Unfortunately, you stand balanced on a scythe’s edge, and you have to fall one way or another. Living or dead. Choose.”

“Again, that debt thing. I don’t want it. I just want to go home.”

“Where is home?”

I hesitated. Home was Oregon, safe in our compound, surrounded by trees, where no one could find us, or get past the fences, or cross the yard when they didn’t know where the traps were located. But home was also the carnival, stealing kisses with Sam atop the Ferris wheel, everything spread out beneath us in lights and music and the empty midway, and it was the backseat of Cylia’s car, and it was … it was …

“Home is where my heart is,” I said. “It’s a cliché, but sometimes things become clichés because they’re too damn true not to. I want to go home. I want to see my family again. I want to be the reason my friends are smiling, not the reason they’re crying. I … maybe I want too much, I don’t know, but I want it anyway.”

“I thought you wanted to rest.”

I shook my head. “I’m exhausted, yeah. This has been a pretty shitty year, you know? But I sleep better with a knife under my pillow and a fūri at my back than I will six feet down.”

“I could offer you a lot, if it meant you’d stay,” said the anima mundi. “I could promise you that everyone who came to save me with you would be safe, and comfortable, and spared from danger for the rest of their days. They wouldn’t even have to pay for it. They’d miss you, and that would be payment enough. But you could serve as the first of my new guardians, and help the others adjust. Some of them will have to move on, you understand. They were not the sort of people I would have trusted to represent me, in their lives, and the force they’ve served has done nothing to change that in their deaths. I’m going to need spirits I can trust to ease me into this age.”

“That doesn’t sound like rest,” I protested.

“No. But it’s calm and comfort for the people you have chosen as extensions of your heart, which means it’s calm and comfort for your home. Three of them don’t belong to the currently dominant species. Calm and comfort would be a great boon to them.”

I stared. The anima mundi looked back at me, utterly serene.

“You could still see Mary. She’d be here with you, showing you what to do, how things work, how to negotiate the world on my behalf. As for James, the bargain that kept him in New Gravesend is discharged. He can go wherever he likes, and carry my promise of peace with him. The Covenant will never find him. Leonard will find another way. He could change the organization that made him from within, could reform them, make them what they were always meant to be. Your death would be life for so many.”

“I …” I paused. “Does this offer cover my family? My actual blood family, I mean?”

The anima mundi shook their head. “No. The Prices are what they are. They court danger like a lover, and seem surprised when their affections are returned. I couldn’t grant them calm without remaking them completely, and that would cost more than I currently have to spend. My bargains will be small things until the magic strengthens around me, and even if it were at its greatest, you’re a single life. You can’t buy that much.”

That was almost a relief. I wasn’t sure I could have called it a choice, if I’d known that staying would have meant my entire family could be safe, forever. “Okay. I have one more question.”