Page 1 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

Prologue

“Children are a blessing. Like all blessings, occasionally they’re also a curse.”

–Evelyn Baker

The woods near Portland, Oregon, about to do something really stupid

Three years ago

THE STACCATO RHYTHM OF a woodpecker slamming its beak against a pine tree echoed through the woods, filtered and distorted by densely-packed branches. There were no other sounds, not from the birds and animals that lived there, and not from the human girl who hung by her knees on a bough in one of the larger trees, a knife in either hand.

Antimony sometimes thought that if she were to total up the amount of time she spent upside down—between her work with the family and taking the occasional header during roller derby—she’d probably be able to qualify as an honorary bat. As it was, she’d come to find inversion strangely soothing. It definitely helped to straighten out the kinks derby practice left in her spine.

Somehow, she didn’t think the rest of the team was going to take “spend a lot of time hanging out upside down in trees” as a therapeutic tip.

Also unlikely to catch on with the rest of the team: floating. Fern seemed happy about it, but Fern wasn’t human and, for her, being in a situation where she could dial her personal density down to something roughly akin to a blowup doll was probably really, really relaxing. She drifted gently up from the ground and grabbed the nearest available branch, stopping her ascent before she could reach the top of the trees.

“I have good news and bad news,” said Fern. “Which one do you want first?”

“The bad news, please.” Antimony didn’t bother keeping her voice down. They weren’t hunting anything arboreal: attracting unwanted attention wasn’t a concern. More importantly, her siblings were only about two hundred yards away, working their way toward her. If she wound up in a bad situation, one phone call would bring her backup running.

She wasn’t the biggest fan of her older brother or sister, but that didn’t mean they didn’t know how to do their jobs. If there was one thing she could count on, it was them following their parents’ instructions to the tediously detailed letter.

“Well, it’s definitely a unicorn,” said Fern. “It has all the unicorn-y bits. Like the horn. Also the blood. I did not expect a unicorn to have that much blood on it. Are unicorns usually covered in blood?”

“Every unicorn I’ve ever seen has been.”

“Oh.”

“Is the good news that it’s already super dead and I can come down from the tree and we can go out for pizza?” Antimony’s hands tightened on her knives, clearly telegraphing how annoyed she’d be if the unicorn had been handled without her.

Fern glanced at Antimony’s hands, but wisely didn’t comment. She had known her friend and teammate long enough to know when she was facing a fight she couldn’t win. “No, it’s alive and bloody and armed—um, horned—and heading this way, so it’s probably going to get here soon. The good news is that Karen is single again.”

“Karen—what?”

“You know, Karen. The blocker from the Concussion Stand. Um, she skates as Can’t Believe It’s Not Beater?”

“I know who Karen is, I’m just not sure why that’s good enough news to bring it up when we’re in the middle of a unicorn hunt.”

Fern looked at her with wide blue eyes, increasing her density just enough to let her gaze slightly up at Antimony, like a particularly trusting child. Sometimes Antimony envied that trick. No one knew exactly how sylphs were able to change their personal density—not even the sylphs, who usually shrugged and went about their business when asked—but they were good at it. Good enough to fly, or at least float, when the need arose. Also good enough to turn themselves into the proverbial immovable object.

Antimony wasn’t good at anything like that. In a family of Lilu, ghosts, dimensional travelers, and telepaths, she was just Ordinary Annie, the unnecessary third child. And nothing was ever going to change that.

“Karen likes you,” Fern said patiently. “I mean, I don’t understand why, since you’re sort of mean sometimes—not to me, but to the other girls during practice, when you think they’re not focusing enough—and it’s not like you ever hang out and talk to anybody, and the last time you came to a party you just leaned against the wall drinking Diet Coke and glaring at anyone who tried to get you to dance, but she does, and she’s single. So I bet if you asked her out, she’d say yes at least once.”

Antimony raised an eyebrow. “Why would I be doing this, exactly?”

“Because dating is fun and smoochies are fun and you’re lucky enough to have members of your own species around to do smoochies with, so you should at least try once in a while. You said you thought you might like girls. This is your chance to find out.”

“Okay, one, I doubt Karen wants to be my bisexual experiment, and two, I told you, I’m not looking for anyone right now. Not on the team, not off the team, not at the grocery store, not on the weird cryptozoologist dating site my cousin Artie keeps threatening to set up—”

“He’s not really going to, is he?”

“Uh, no. Half the signups would be Covenant assholes trying to infiltrate us, and the rest would either be overcommitted LARPers or some bored Bigfoot looking for someone to catfish. He’s smarter than that. He may not always act smarter than that, but he is.”

“Oh.” Fern bobbed in place, clearly relieved. “Good.”

“Yeah, good. But really and truly, I’m not interested in dating right now. If there’s someone out there for me, I’ll find them eventually. I mean, they’d have to be pretty weird to be interested in,” Antimony waved a knife, indicating her entire inverted self, “all this. So maybe it’s not going to happen.”