Page 29 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“He broke into our house.”

“And I lied my way into your carnival. People do messed-up stuff when they’re desperate.” I turned, putting a hand on his arm. “He’ll be back in the morning. Let’s go to bed. I’m tired and I’m cold and I’m a little scared of what all this is going to mean. So if it’s cool with you, I’d like to not think about it for a while.”

Sam nodded, expression softening, before he turned and started for the stairs, his tail wrapped around my wrist like a tether making sure I didn’t lose my way. In the dining room, James Smith’s frozen coffee sat on the table, slowly thawing, all but forgotten.

Eight

“Every debt comes due. Given enough time, every debt has its day.”

–Enid Healy

The next morning, behind the house

MY KNIFE FLEW STRAIGHT and clean, hitting my makeshift target dead center. I had used pieces of plywood from the barn to make half a dozen of the crude things. I was fairly sure our “landlord” wouldn’t notice them missing: there were about a dozen identical sheets crammed in there, half of them riddled with mold or cracked down the center. If he had a problem with it, I could always leave him a check.

I took a breath in through my nose, let it out through my mouth, and threw again. This knife landed next to the first, socking into the same groove. My shoulders started to relax. If I could keep throwing clean, I was okay. Stressed and scared and a long way from home, but okay. That was all I really needed to be.

“I’m heading into town,” said Cylia. I turned, the next knife already in my hand. She offered a strained smile, her hands tucked deep in the pockets of her jacket. “If we’re going to be helping the chief of police’s son do something dangerous and potentially fatal, I figure we should show our faces around the place first, so no one can call us ‘those strangers at the old Smith house’ when they have to explain our corpses to the paper. You want to come?”

I hesitated. James had said he wouldn’t be able to come to the house until early afternoon, and while throwing knives was fun and all, it wasn’t necessarily as productive as getting a sense of the community. Leaving the wards was fine, as long as I didn’t say anything the crossroads wouldn’t like while I was away from them. Technically, I was already outside the wards, and nothing bad had happened yet.

You can’t hang ghost wards on a person, because a person is just a ghost with a nice Sunday suit of breath and blood and bone. If I wanted to stay warded, I needed to stay in, or near, the house.

Screw that.

“Sure,” I said. “Let me get my coat.”

“I’ll meet you at the car,” said Cylia, and walked away.

Sam was in the kitchen when I thundered through the back door. He turned to watch my arrival, eyebrows raised. “Do I need to get unfuzzy?” he asked.

“No one’s here, I’m going into town with Cylia.” I paused in my journey toward the dining room long enough to lean up and kiss him on the cheek. “You cool staying here and watching for James, in case he shows up early? I don’t want him going through those books unsupervised.”

“You could always stay here with me,” Sam offered.

“Nuh-uh. One, we tend to distract each other, and two, I need to get a sense of the town. You should do it, too, either tomorrow or the next day. We need to rub off this veneer of new and interesting before we attract attention we don’t want.”

“Fine. Find us a place we can get coffee or ice cream or something, and I’ll take you on a townie date. No carnival, no theme park, just footsie under the table and something with too much sugar.”

“Deal,” I said, and flashed him a grin before darting out of the room.

Dating is difficult when you spend more than half your time dealing with the nonhuman communities of the world, and don’t really have the necessary selling points to fill out an OK Cupid profile. There are a few cryptid dating sites—necessary, when you’re a member of an endangered species with very specific mating requirements—but the working cryptozoologist population is too small to sustain anything like that, and we wouldn’t use one if we had it. Our need isn’t as great, and there’s too much chance the Covenant would catch wind and decide to try infiltrating it. No.

What that means, though, is that most of us will meet our significant others, whether temporary or long-term, “on the job.” My parents met when my father followed reports of an impending Covenant strike to my mother’s house, and discovered the “monsters” in the chatter were her adoptive parents and little brother. His parents met when Grandpa Thomas was assigned by the Covenant to kill or recruit Grandma Alice. And her parents met when my great-grandfather went looking for the Questing Beast that was devouring people in the wake of my great-grandmother’s carnival. There’s no such thing as normal in the cryptozoological world. There’s just a wide, wide range of weirdness.

Sam and I are part of a long line of weird, and I’m not ashamed of that. It did, however, mean that we had yet to have anything remotely close to an ordinary date. So far, we’d done a night at his family’s carnival, a roller derby game that ended with him trying to strangle me while I set him on fire, and a day at Lowryland, which ended, if such things are possible, even worse. Sitting down for a cup of coffee or an ice cream sundae would be perfect, and exactly what I needed to take my mind off the fact that Mary was still missing and the crossroads wanted me to commit a murder.

Compartmentalization is a necessary function of the sapient mind. Every species I’ve met with human-level—or potentially beyond human-level—intelligence has been capable of going “sure, the world is ending, but what about my soup?” I honestly believe that without that capacity for self-distraction, we’d all break under the weight of the world we have to live in.

Cylia was leaning against the hood of her avocado-colored muscle car, squinting at her fingernails. “I need to find a place to get a mani-pedi,” she said, as I approached. “My cuticles are wasted.”

“Is Fern coming with us?”

“She’s sleeping in. I think she was more unnerved by last night’s visitor than she’s letting on, and this is how she copes.” Cylia looked at me through her lashes. “She really counts on you to know what to do. That means she’s always going to follow your lead.”

“I know.” I slid into the passenger seat, waiting for Cylia to get behind the wheel before I said, “It’s a little terrifying sometimes. I don’t know why she believes in me so much.”

“You’re a Price.” Cylia shrugged and buckled her belt. “Honestly, if I’d known that sooner, I’d probably be just as bad as she is.”