Page 52 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“They tolerate the roller derby. The rest of it is a pretty classic case of ‘I learned it from watching you.’”

“Ah.” James stopped at the end of the hallway, where a hatch had been cut in the ceiling. “Hang on a moment. I’ll get the hook.”

“Attic?”

“Yes.” He opened a closet, producing a long wooden pole with a metal hook at the end. Deftly, he pulled the hatch open, releasing a rickety ladder to descend into the hall. It looked like it had last been given a thorough inspection for termite damage and rusty nails sometime around, oh, never. I eyed it dubiously.

“Ballpark figure,” I said. “How many times have you nearly died using that thing?”

“Only five or six,” he replied, and propped the hook against the wall. “Come on.”

He started up the ladder. My shoulder throbbed, as if to remind me that I was in no condition to be climbing anything, much less a death trap masquerading as a useful household fixture.

I hate it when my injuries tell me what to do. I followed him.

The attic was about what I expected: small, cramped, and crammed with junk, to the extent that it no longer seemed to matter whether the house had any insulation, since the boxes and chests and old furniture would serve as a no doubt excellent windbreak. James couldn’t stand upright without whacking his head on the roof. I had maybe a half inch of clearance, less if I moved toward the back, where the wall sloped down until no one older than five or six would have felt genuinely comfortable.

“You could rent this place out to a whole family of bogeymen and be able to afford a cleaning service,” I said.

James blinked at me. “The Bogeyman is real?”

A life spent in the company of Aeslin mice has left me sensitive to capital letters where they don’t belong. “No, the dude in your closet who wants to eat your baby is a myth. Bogeymen, on the other hand, are completely real. You probably have some living in the local sewer system, assuming they were able to get in there early enough to partition off some of the larger tunnels. They like to be subterranean, they don’t like to be bathed in the smell of other people’s shit.”

“That’s … huh.” James shook his head. “The more time I spend around you, the stranger the world becomes.”

“Says the cut-rate Bobby Drake. Call me when you figure out how to make those nifty frozen slides, Iceman.” I turned slowly, letting the light of the attic’s single bare bulb show me my surroundings. “Where are we even supposed to start here? And where’s the rest of it?”

“My father had all Mom’s things moved up here after she died. I’ve found a few other books throughout the years, although they’ve been—wait.” James suddenly frowned at me. “What do you mean, where’s the rest of it?”

“I mean, this attic is like, maybe half the size it should be.” I knocked on the ceiling, triggering a cascade of dust and splinters. “The house is bigger than this. There’s a window visible from the outside that isn’t visible from the inside. Did you never notice that?”

“Don’t be stupid. I would have noticed a window.” James was trying to sound arrogant, but he looked unsure. Almost confused.

“Would you?” I can be a steamroller when I get going. I know that, and I’ve learned to be gentle when I have to. It’s simple self-preservation: sometimes being gentle is the only thing that keeps the people I’m trying to talk to from turning and running for their lives. “When we know what something looks like, sometimes we stop seeing it. We make assumptions based on the things we know, and we don’t go looking for proof, because we don’t need it anymore.”

“This is the only attic I’ve ever seen.”

“All right,” I said. “Wait here.”

Going back down the ladder was no easier than going up it had been. If anything, it was harder, since now the wound in my shoulder was awake and aggravated and wanted me to know that my behavior was entirely unacceptable. I ground my teeth and plotted terrible things to do to Leonard Cunningham as I descended, until my shoulder was throbbing and my feet were firmly on the hallway floor.

Bastard was going to pay for shooting me. I can put up with a lot of nonsense in the course of doing my job, but shooting me? That was a step too far, and I was not going to tolerate it. As for the part where he’d been aiming for Sam, well …

If I thought about that too hard, I’d go from justifiably annoyed to outright angry, and that wasn’t going to do any of us any favors. One thing at a time. Figure out what was wrong with James’ attic, find the missing piece of the crossroads puzzle, discharge my side of the bargain without getting myself killed in the process, find Leo, kick his smug bastard teeth all the way out of his ass. Priorities.

The hall hadn’t changed: it was still dusty, shabby in a way that would have been anathema anywhere else in the house, and lined with logical, reasonable doors leading to logical, reasonable rooms and storage spaces. James’ bedroom was the closest door to the stairs. The door next to it led to a linen closet, and the door on the other side led to a currently empty bedroom, only a few faded cardboard boxes shoved up under the window.

The window. I paused to give it a longing look. Under normal circumstances—i.e., without a hole in my shoulder, and without the need to worry about either James’ father coming home or Leo showing up with another crossbow—I would have gone straight out that window and up the side of the house to the other window James swore wasn’t relevant. Easy peasy. Only not so much when I couldn’t be sure of maintaining my grip, and double not so much when I didn’t want to go to jail for breaking and entering.

(There isn’t much Verity and I agree on. Marshmallow fluff being an awesome sandwich topping is one of them. A dismaying willingness to climb things in order to find out what’s at the top is another. I just believe in doing it safely, with a net whenever possible, while she seems to find joy in the plummet.)

The hallway furnishings, such as they were, gave the distinct impression of having been booted upstairs after failing some downstairs quality check or other. The shelf between the linen closet and the bathroom had chips in its finish; the curio cabinet under the window had a thin cobweb of cracks in one corner. Nothing that would have drawn a second glance in my house, but here, those were sins that might never be forgiven.

I looked at the cracked curio cabinet, and thought about home, where glass got cracked and tile got chipped, but everything was filled with light and life and joy. We loved each other, even when we hated each other. That was what family was for. I couldn’t let James keep living like this, especially not when he was the only other sorcerer my age I’d ever met. He needed training. He needed people who could understand him, and who wouldn’t get mad if he froze the pipes every once in a while.

Half my family isn’t actually related to me, aunts and uncles and cousins and even siblings we’ve acquired somewhere along the way and refused to put back where we found them. I wondered how well Alex was going to take the news that he was no longer my only brother. Hell, I wondered how well James was going to take the news.

Given that being part of my family came with parents who gave a fuck and houses that didn’t feel like punishments, I was pretty sure he’d be okay with it. And Sam might throw him a parade. I may be weird, but even I’m not going to start dating my adopted brother.