Page 89 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“Where the fuck are we going?” asked Cylia.

It was a valid question. It deserved a serious answer. I considered as I ran, and finally called back, “Away.”

She glared at me. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t blame her. We were, after all, running down an endless unpaved road under a blasted summer sky, in a pocket dimension wholly owned, operated, and controlled by an unspeakable eldritch terror with a thing for being an asshole wishing ring.

That was the point. Not the asshole thing: the pocket dimension. We kept running until figures appeared on the horizon and I stumbled to a stop, motioning for the others to do the same. Fern, her density dialed down too far to make stopping easy, shot on a few more feet before Sam’s tail whipped out, wrapped around her middle, and jerked her back.

“What the hell?” Leonard demanded.

“Look.” I pointed at the figures up ahead.

He squinted for a moment. Then his eyes widened. “Is that … ?”

“Yeah.” Three figures, one a shape cut out of the air, one white-haired and standing in front of the third. They were too far away for us to pick out fine details, but it didn’t take fine details to recognize Mary, James, and the incarnate crossroads. There was no one else they could have been.

Leonard and the others turned to stare at me. I shrugged.

“My grandmother says there are two kinds of dimensions: real ones, like Earth, and artificial ones. The fake dimensions never extend as far as the real ones. Most of them don’t want to. They’re there to fulfill a purpose, and they don’t waste energy having things like ‘distance’ or ‘geography.’”

“What kind of foolishness have you people been getting up to?” demanded Leonard.

I ignored him.

“There are lots of crossroads,” said Fern. “People all over the world make bargains like you did. How can there be lots if their whole world is so small that we can run through it without running out of breath?”

“I’m not a dimensional physicist,” I said. “I have no idea.”

“So we ran away for the sake of not running away,” said Cylia. “Why?”

I took a breath and looked her directly in the eye. Here went everything.

“We’re in the crossroads,” I said. “Everything here is the crossroads. The sky, the ground, the corn, even that weird cut-out fucker arguing with Mary and James. That means the things they’ve taken from people are here. Not my grandfather or Sally—I don’t think anything human can live here for very long—but the things.”

Cylia nodded slowly. “Things like your magic.”

“Things like my magic,” I said. “I can’t reclaim it with the bargain unfulfilled. What we’re about to do may mean I never get it back. But at Lowryland, when I was close to it, my fire knew I was there. If I’m close enough to the magic, and if I’m very, very lucky, I could use it. Not enough to start a fire or something like that. Enough to cast a spell.”

“Annie …” said Sam.

“What kind of spell?” asked Cylia.

“The kind that throws us backward through time to the point where everything went wrong, and lets me try to stop it.” James’ plan. James’ idea. Just a slightly different execution.

“You would need to be … very lucky,” said Cylia carefully. “Even then, odds are good the luck would snap back on you after the spell was cast. You could die.”

“I’m against any plan where Annie dies,” said Sam.

“As am I,” said Leonard. The pair of them paused to glare at each other.

“I’m hard to kill,” I said.

“That’s not the only thing that could go wrong,” said Cylia.

“I know, but James is busy, and none of the rest of you have any magic at all, not even in someone else’s jar.” I offered her a wan smile. “It’s a bad plan. It’s a dangerous plan. It’s the plan we’ve got, and we’re doing it.”

“Annie?” Fern sounded uncertain.

“Yeah?”