Page 86 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“I’m not alone,” I said. “I have Mary.”

“She’s in a jar.” Fern rolled her eyes. “Can we pretend we’ve had this whole fight, and skip ahead to the part where you admit I’m right and we get on the stupid bike? I want this over with. I want to go home.”

I opened my mouth and paused. “You’re right,” I said finally. “Let’s do this.”

Fern looked relieved. James nodded.

“Be careful,” he said and walked to the car, sliding into the back with Leonard. Cylia and Sam were in the front, the one because she was driving, the other because if something happened and he had to change forms, it would be much easier for him to shove himself through the window from the front.

I swung my leg over the bike, barely feeling the frame shift as Fern settled herself behind me, her mass dialed as far down as it would go. She wasn’t going to slow me down. If anything, her ability to get heavier and add a little bit of ballast when I went around corners would keep me from losing control and hence speed me up.

“Ready?” I asked.

Fern slid her arms around my waist. “Hope so,” she said.

I waved to Cylia, signaling for her to start the car. She did, rolling out slowly at first, then gathering speed as I began to pedal, sliding smoothly into position behind her. Fern held me tight, and the road was open, and we had so far to go, and we were almost finished. God help me, we were almost done.

New England is the place to go for tiny, creepy towns that look like they belong in the latest Stephen King made-for-TV movie. The trees along the highway shielded us from most of New Gravesend, but what I glimpsed between them was more horror cliché than anything else: tiny, mismatched houses with artfully shabby yards, lived-in but abandoned at the same time. The occasional child at play made things even worse, standing next to trampolines or holding red rubber balls as they considered their next moves. If any of them had been close enough to talk to us, I would have had no trouble believing they’d invite me to come play with them—or worse, tell me that everyone floated in this terrible town.

It was my imagination working overtime, taking the fact that I was on my way to challenge the crossroads and had allied myself with the Covenant and using it to turn my natural suspicion of the unknown up to eleven. Even knowing that didn’t make me more comfortable, especially when Cylia turned off the main road, down a narrow, twisting lane so lined with trees that even the moonlight couldn’t find a way to shine through. I pedaled as hard as I could, unwilling to risk losing the faint illumination of her taillights. This was an ordinary road, part of an ordinary town that certainly didn’t deserve the thoughts I was throwing in its direction, but everything felt shadowy and terrible and like it was going to come crashing down at any moment, leaving us trapped.

“I need better hobbies,” I muttered, and pedaled onward.

I’d never seen the infamous “hanging tree” before, but I knew it when it came into sight. No other label could have applied. It was a monster, skeletal and spidery at the same time, with branches that spread wide to claw the sky, forcing other trees to grow away from it lest they find themselves denied the opportunity to grow. Its trunk was a vast, gnarled thing, roots bursting through the ground and the roadway alike, shattering the pavement. It was easy to understand why settlers in the area might have looked at this tree above all others, and thought, “Yes, this is a good place to start killing people.”

A second road—barely wide enough to be worthy of the name, although it was paved, which was more than I’d been expecting—ran across the first, creating a small but distinct crossroads. Cylia pulled off to the shoulder, putting her hazard lights on. An unnecessary precaution: this didn’t look like the sort of place that got a lot of traffic.

I stopped the bike behind her, lowering the kickstand. “Here we go,” I said.

Fern unlooped her arms from my midsection. “Are you nervous?” she asked.

“I’m terrified,” I said, sliding off the bike and turning to face her. She blinked, clearly surprised. I shook my head. “Lying never got us anywhere. We’re about to bait a force that’s bigger than any of us into pulling us out of this level of reality, and once we’re there, we’re going to try something monumentally stupid. If this doesn’t work, we could all be lost forever.”

Would Grandma Alice add me to her list of people to look for? Or would the crossroads shunt me off to wherever they’d been keeping my grandfather, giving him someone to talk to for maybe the first time ever? It was a surreal thought. I didn’t want to learn the answer.

“I just didn’t expect you to say it, that’s all,” whispered Fern.

I put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to do this. This isn’t your fight.”

“You’re my friend,” she said. “It’s always been my fight.”

A car door slammed. I turned. The others were climbing out of Cylia’s car, Sam in human form and looking cranky about it, Leonard scowling, and James looking like he was just shy of throwing up on his shoes. Given what was about to happen, I couldn’t blame any one of them. I removed my helmet and slung it over the handlebars. We were isolated enough that I wasn’t as worried about someone stealing our shit as I was about never coming back to get it.

Fern by my side, I walked over to join the others. James looked at me. I looked levelly back.

“You ready?” I asked.

He nodded, lips thin, utterly silent. That was fine. If he’d tried to talk, he probably would have started coming up with reasons why we needed to change the plan, and so he was biting his tongue because he understood there wasn’t another way. We needed the crossroads to manifest. Everything else depended on that.

I held my hand out to Sam. He reached into his shirt and produced one of my throwing knives, dropping it into my palm. The feeling of relief that washed over me was indescribable. I was armed again. Even if it was only long enough for me to stab an ally.

“What’s that for?” asked Leonard warily.

“You’ll see,” I said, and grabbed James’ arm with one hand. “Come on.”

James didn’t help me, but he didn’t resist as I hauled him to the place where the two roads converged. The others followed at a safe distance, waiting for the shit to hit the fan. I stopped at the dead center of the crossroads, noting that the leaves under our feet were undisturbed. No one had come this way in a while.

Nothing happened.