Page 44 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

Everything hurt. I didn’t like it. I slipped away again.

Flash: The ground beneath me, crackling with leaves, sharp with stones, cold, but not as cold as the rest of me. Sam was hitting me on the back, solid smacks between my shoulders, like he was trying to play some kind of drum. I coughed and water flowed over my lips, wet and warm and terrible. It had been part of me and now it wasn’t anymore. I felt, paradoxically, like I had lost something. I sank back down to think about it, even though there was no thinking on the other side of wakefulness.

Flash: Sam, no longer human, his hands larger and his skin warmer as he held me against him, his breath coming in short, panicked gasps. His voice was a distant echo, distorted and far away. “Annie? Hey, Annie? Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes, or say something, or do anything if you can hear me?”

I could not. I returned to the dark, where the lake was waiting, ready and eager to pull me under. The water was no longer cold, or even really water; it was the light and floating nothingness that had met me at the crossroads when I went to make my bargain. It was a space outside of space, where nothing could hurt me ever again. If I opened my eyes, I was sure I could find Mary, and that she’d be happy to show me where I needed to go. She was waiting for me. I just had to go to her.

But I couldn’t see her, and when I did open my eyes, just a little, it was on another flash of the real world: Sam, running through the wood, every step jarring the crossbow bolt in my shoulder, sending waves of pain and nausea crashing through my entire body. It was too much. I closed my eyes again, and the next time I opened them, I was on the couch in the living room, Cylia bending over me, James and Sam hovering, equally useless, nearby.

“I need to get this out so I can clean the wound, and I don’t want her bleeding to death,” said Cylia. “James, get over here.”

I wasn’t fully present, but I was close enough to realize what was about to happen, and struggle to dive back into the dark. No such luck: Cylia said something rendered incomprehensible by my own dizziness and the increasing pounding in my ears.

I still have enough of a heartbeat for it to pound, I thought, feeling strangely proud of myself. I stopped fighting, exhausted from this revelation. Cold spread through my shoulder, even deeper and more intense than the cold of the lake. It was like someone had wrapped just that corner of my body in a sheet of ice.

“Hey. Be careful. She needs that arm.”

“I am being careful.”

“She’s a cryptozoologist, not a side of beef.”

I recognized Sam’s voice. That was nice. It was nice that he was here. It was nice that he’d been able to make it out of the lake. I didn’t know how he’d done that, not with the thing that had been in the water, that had taken me—unless he was the thing. Maybe that wasn’t a big revelation, but at the moment, groggy from blood loss and cold and shock, it seemed like a twist worthy of the original Twilight Zone. Up was down, left was right, and Sam was the monster in the lake.

Any further revelations would have to wait. The cold stopped spreading, and before it could recede, it was replaced by a pain so intense that I snapped all the way to wakefulness, already screaming.

“Hi,” said Cylia amiably, and held up the crossbow bolt she had just removed from my shoulder. “Welcome back and don’t move, I still need to get you patched up. James slowed down the blood in your shoulder enough that you’re only leaking instead of gushing, but that’s still not great.”

“Annie?” Sam sounded worried. For the first time, I realized the pillow beneath my head was too warm and too firm to be anything but his leg. “Are you okay?”

“Never ask someone who’s just been shot if they’re okay.” I closed my eyes, hissing through my teeth as Cylia began methodically cleaning my wound. “But I’m alive.”

“Thank fuck.” He smoothed back my hair with one large hand. His fingers were shaking, the motion traveling across my skin like a subsonic vibration. “I thought … fuck. You know what I thought.”

“Sorry. You don’t get rid of me that easily.”

There was a knock at the door. I opened my eyes, staring up at the ceiling.

“I don’t suppose Fern took the car and went to the store,” I asked carefully.

“No,” said Cylia. “She’s upstairs, where she can keep a watch on the whole yard and shout if somebody comes walking across the yard with a crossbow.”

“Swell.”

Whoever was outside knocked again.

Would Leo be knocking? Assuming he knew where the house was—and realistically, he had to know where the house was; there simply couldn’t be that many visiting strangers in a town this size—would he come in through the front door, knowing we’d all be pissed off and waiting for him, or would he go around the back and approach us like the low-down dirty snake he was? If not him, then who?

Fern hadn’t yelled. If it were Leonard, wouldn’t she have yelled to warn us that he was coming? She didn’t know what he looked like, but the crossbow was probably a big giveaway on the “bad intentions” scale.

“James, are your hands bloody?” I struggled to sit up. Sam pushed me gently down.

“No,” he said. “Not yet. Please stay put so I don’t have to make you.”

“Kinky,” said Cylia, with forced cheer, and kept patching my shoulder.

“There’s no blood on me,” said James. “It froze and fell off. Why?”

I closed my eyes again. There was nothing on the ceiling for me to see. “Go answer the door. It’s either Leo, who shouldn’t shoot you when he doesn’t know you, or it’s your father, and you can tell him you’re here to visit your new tourist honeybunch. Buy us time. That’s what we need right now.”