Page 14 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“Not you.” Cylia moved the bag out of my grip. “You’d make spaghetti with maple syrup and canned tuna, or something equally horrifying. You may be the only human in the house, but you’re also the only person who doesn’t eat like one.”

“Youngest child.” I shrugged. “If I wanted my food to survive in the fridge, I needed it to be as unappetizing as possible. Have you and Fern talked about rooms yet?”

“I want to keep the one we slept in last night, if that’s okay,” said Sam. “That’s a great bed, and the rafters are perfect for me to do my stretches without putting anyone else out.”

Cylia shot him a startled look. “Okay, not the reasoning I was expecting, but sure. Fern’s happy in the attic, and I found a bedroom off the living room that will work perfectly for me. That way, we have someone sleeping on every floor. Helps us keep watch for robbers.”

“What reasoning did you expect?” I asked.

“You’ve got the bathroom to one side and the library to the other, which means even if the walls are thin, nobody’s going to hear you having sex,” said Cylia. “I honestly figured I’d be getting the privacy argument.”

I perked up. “There’s a library?”

Sam groaned. “Oh, great. Now we’ve lost her.”

He wasn’t wrong; I was already heading for the door.

What people sometimes forget about my family, when we’re being all badass with our knives and our bullets and our ability to keep fighting even when we’re long past the point where anyone with any sense would have given up is, well …

We’re enormous nerds. Seriously. I am the inevitable result of a lineage which includes researchers, librarians, and the kind of animal lovers who think everything, no matter how potentially deadly, deserves the chance to flourish. While they observe and take notes, naturally. It’s not science until somebody writes it down.

I pounded up the stairs. The door to the room where Sam and I had spent the night was open, propped by my suitcase, which Cylia must have carried in from the car while I was wandering in the woods. The doors to either side were closed. I tried the one on the left: bathroom. I tried the one on the right. It opened easily, and all my wishes came true.

“Jackpot,” I whispered, taking a moment to stand there and just breathe, glorying in the anticipation of stepping through.

The library had clearly started its existence as two rooms of reasonably average size, before they were joined into one mega-room, like an architectural Voltron. Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the walls, blocking everything except for the fireplace and the single, relatively small window. As if that weren’t enough, the shelves were packed—absolutely packed—with books. Old books. Cloth-bound and leather-bound and—I’m not a book snob, I love my paperbacks as much as the next girl, but there’s a certain degree of weird literary bullshit that will never, ever come out in paperback.

I exhaled and stepped into the room as if in a daze, slowly walking along the shelves, letting my fingers trail along the spines of all those lovely books. Most were dusty. The few that weren’t seemed to be mostly local history and folklore. That was good enough for me. Snagging the first one off the shelf, I sank into the confines of a nearby armchair and allowed the text—dry as dust, but filled with so many things I didn’t know, and hence hungered to learn—to carry me away.

The book, A History of New Gravesend, Maine, by one Nathanial Smith, was about as interesting as the title implied, in both possible directions. He spent an entire chapter on the architecture of the local sewer system and barely spared a page and a half for a dramatic fire that had consumed half of downtown, but which had, in its aftermath, provided what he referred to as “multiple opportunities for redevelopment.” That seemed like a pretty shitty way of saying “all the poor people burned to death.”

I wasn’t the only one who thought so. I turned the page to find that someone had written, in tidy ink letters, “Bastard never saw a tax loophole he wouldn’t exploit. Check ownership records for area, ref. Dunning. Possible someone tracked land profit?”

Normally, I would have been annoyed to find that someone had been writing in a book, especially a book as old as this one. In this case, I was delighted. When trying to learn local history, the real story is usually in the footnotes and the indices, hidden in the places where people don’t want you to look.

Dunning. The name was familiar. I unfolded myself from the chair and, sure enough, found Dunning’s Families of New Gravesend on the shelf two volumes over from where I’d found the first volume. I pulled it down, along with three others that seemed likely to show up in further footnotes, before returning to my chair.

This town could be as boring as bathwater, a place where nothing interesting enough to make a Wikipedia page out of had ever happened, but I was going to find out. I was going to learn it all, every story, every secret. I had three months to do it in.

I was so engrossed in my unplanned research project that I didn’t notice how dark it was getting outside the window until someone knocked on the doorframe and cleared their throat. I looked up. Sam was standing there, ringed in light from the hall behind him.

“Dinner’s ready,” he said. “Find something good?”

“How long have I been up here?” My stomach grumbled. However long it had been, it had definitely involved missing lunch. That was almost … well, nice. I hadn’t had the opportunity to spend a day sunk in a book since leaving Portland. It felt like I was getting back to normal, at least for me.

I liked the idea of getting back to normal.

“Long enough that if you hadn’t left the door open, we would probably have been afraid you’d died,” he said. “I unpacked all our stuff. And made the bed. And offered to make you a sandwich. You didn’t notice.”

“Oh.” I offered him a sheepish smile. “Sometimes I get really into my reading.”

“Uh, yeah, I’d say. If you were any more into your reading, you would actually be inside the book.”

“Never go into a book. Either it’s a dimensional portal, which is bad, or it’s some sort of Dungeons and Dragons-style mimic-thing, which is also bad, although in a less ‘we’ll never find your body’ sort of a way.”

Sam blinked at me slowly. “You know,” he said finally. “I like you exactly the way you are, because I am not stupid and do not want you to hit me with a shoe for implying that there’s something wrong with you, but you were a lot easier to understand when you were just the annoying chick who wanted to throw knives at my head.”

“Don’t worry.” I got out of my seat, setting the books I’d been reading carefully aside for later. “I’m still the annoying chick who wants to throw knives at your head. I’ve just diversified my interests.”