Page 73 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“Charming,” said Leonard. He turned his attention to me. “Are all your friends this hospitable?”

“You’ve made a lot of endangered species over the years,” I said. “Maybe you should expect a little justified hostility.”

“Hmm.” He gave Cylia a more thoughtful look. “Dragon princess?”

“Go with that,” said Cylia, slamming her foot down on the gas.

Dragon princesses are nothing more nor less than female dragons, evolutionarily adapted to pass themselves off as attractive human women for the sake of staying safe from men like the one next to me. That isn’t common knowledge, and there was no reason for me to whisper a word of it to Leonard. Let him be the ignorant one for a change.

Cylia kept her eyes on the road as she drove, her hands white-knuckled on the wheel. “I assume Annie already gave you the speech about shallow graves and no witnesses if you hurt a single one of us.”

“It was largely implied,” said Leonard coolly. “I’m not a monster, Miss … ?”

“You could have fooled me,” said Cylia. “I know a lot of broken families because of men like you. I know a lot of unfinished stories. You don’t get my name. You don’t get to offer me the hand of friendship just so you can pull it away when you decide I’d be better off dead. You get a ride in my car, and you get me not killing you yet. That’s all I’m willing to give.”

Leonard gave me a look, smirking faintly. “You have charming friends,” he said.

“I have friends who have very, very good reasons to hate you, and since you’re pretty proud of those reasons, I don’t think you have the moral authority to get angry at them,” I said. “You have a lot of blood on your hands.”

“Hundreds of years of it,” Leonard agreed. “Only a century’s-worth has been washed from yours. What does that make you, do you think?”

“Deep in debt, but at least aware that I’m there,” I said. “Now give me the charm.”

Leonard blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Part of our deal was that you give up the tracking charm you’ve been using to follow me. I want it.”

“The crossroads—”

“Successfully destroying them wasn’t a condition of getting my life back.” I held my hand out. “The charm, Leonard. Now. Or I tell my friend here that you clearly have no interest in keeping your word, and we do that ‘shallow grave’ thing she’s so into. I haven’t gotten her a birthday present yet.”

“A little murder would improve my day immensely,” said Cylia.

Leonard scowled as he reached inside his jacket—a gesture that caused Cylia to tense even more behind the wheel—and produced a small, flat glass disk that gleamed red as rubies in the light. The blood contained inside had somehow remained bright and fresh, captive of the magic that kept it from clotting. I snatched it out of his hand and made it vanish into my pocket.

“Will you give it to your new keepers, so they can keep tabs on you?” he asked, a sneer in his voice.

“I’ll destroy it,” I said. “And then, assuming you’re smart enough to keep your word, I’ll be able to go home. Don’t you want to go home, Leo? Because if you try to double-cross us, you won’t. Ever. You’ll die here, in a foreign country, and leave your parents and sister to mourn you.”

“Remember that mutually assured destruction?” he asked. “If I disappear, my family will not rest until they know what happened to me.”

“See, in England, you think a hundred miles is a long way,” I said. “In America, we think a hundred years is a long time. It’s funny, when you stop to think about it. We have a lot of empty places where your body could disappear. Sure, your family might figure it out eventually, but I promise you, you’d be missing a lot longer than you think, and we’d have plenty of time to get a head start. Play nice. We can all get out of this alive.”

Cylia snorted but didn’t say anything. Under the circumstances, that was probably the best I was going to get.

“I’m not sure why you think I’ll want to work with you when you insist on threatening me at every turn,” said Leonard.

“Our sparkling personalities,” I said. “Also the part where you’re getting the credit for this, at least as far as the Covenant is concerned. You’re going home a hero. A big, successful, awesome hero. No one’s going to care that you lost me because you’ll be the man who killed the crossroads.”

Leonard didn’t have to look tempted for me to know that I had him. He wouldn’t have been in the car otherwise. Hopefully, he hadn’t thought through the rest of what this meant.

He was going to be working with us. Even if he tried to double-cross us—which let’s face it, he was almost certainly going to do—he would still have worked with us, and we would still know the truth. We’d know the hero of the Covenant of St. George had teamed up with his ancestral enemies to help us finish a job that was already almost done, and would have been finished with him or without him. Knowing meant we could document every damning step of the process.

Talk about “mutually assured destruction.” Maybe a Covenant soldier like Dominic had been, like my grandfather had been, could have handled the sudden revelation that he’d voluntarily teamed up with a pair of sorcerers and a bunch of cryptids to fight an eldritch horror, but Leo was supposed to be their next leader. He was the proverbial chosen one, meant to usher the Covenant of St. George into their bright and genocidal future, and if I could use this to undermine his authority, I would. In a heartbeat.

Of course, so much was contingent on me having a heartbeat when all this was over. The air outside the car pressed in on us, until it was like we were driving through the deep, unseen sea, surrounded by creatures that had never seen the light of day. I knew it was my paranoia speaking—the crossroads had no need for that kind of fancy special effects, and if Bethany had been lucky enough to be paying attention during my brief field trip outside the wards, she would already have come to say howdy and remind me about all the homicide I was supposed to be committing. I hated to depend on luck. I hated knowing that one slip and I’d be burning again, with a fire that should have been my friend.

“I am so much more like my grandfather than I want to be,” I muttered.