Page 90 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“You knew before we came here that James would be busy. Was this the plan the whole time?”

Everything went silent. I took a breath, turning to fully face her before I reached out and grasped her shoulders.

“You are my best friends,” I said. “You’re the best friends a girl like me could ever have. You get that, right? I’m a Price. I grew up thinking all I’d ever have would be my family, and maybe the occasional flash of gratitude from someone I saved because we’re still trying to pay off a karmic debt that started centuries ago. And I got you. All of you. You’re amazing. You’re strong and clever and good. God, you’re good. So yeah, this was the plan all along, and it’s not because I have a death wish, and it’s not because I owe anything. It’s because no matter how much else changes, I’m still a Price, and we’re like cockroaches. We don’t die.”

“Except when you do,” said Leonard.

I had almost forgotten he was there. I glanced at him and frowned. “Except when we do,” I said. “But that’s not going to be here, and it’s not going to be today. So how about you wish me luck and watch my back, okay?”

I waited for them to nod before I pulled the folded piece of paper from my pocket, opening it to reveal the spell I had meticulously copied from James’ mother’s journal. Seeing it in my own handwriting made it make more sense. That always happened. Making a thing your own made it more comprehensible, and hence easier to manage.

Please let this be easy to manage.

Sitting cross-legged on the hard-packed dirt of the road, I leaned forward and used my pointer finger to inscribe the beginning of a circle around myself. Finishing it took some twisting, but I was careful to keep my butt firmly on the ground. The simpler a spell, the more important it is to follow it exactly, and this one was as simple as they come. If it wanted me sitting while I drew my circle, I was going for the full sit.

I looked up. Cylia and Fern were watching James and Mary as they faced down the crossroads. Leonard was watching me, a scowl on his face. So was Sam, although he wasn’t scowling, just staring at me with open-faced longing. His tail was wrapped around his left ankle, squeezing so hard it had to hurt. It was taking everything he had not to grab me and book it. I could see it in his eyes, and I loved him for wanting to save me, even as I loved him even more for staying where he was.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said, with a confidence I didn’t entirely feel. “Trust me. I’m a professional.”

“Professional pain in my ass,” he muttered.

I flashed him a quick, strained smile, and looked back down at the paper in my hands. Lowryland had done me few favors, but my training there had given me this much, at least: I had a better sense of what the spell was meant to do, and how to craft and control it. Now all I needed was the magic.

“Come back to me,” I whispered, bowing my head until my chin almost grazed my chest and closing my eyes, straining for a flicker of fire anywhere around me. “The deal was you’d go to the crossroads until I paid for your release. Well, I’m at the crossroads now. We’re in the same place. The deal didn’t say anything about keeping your distance while we were in the same place.”

Was there a hint of heat in my fingertips, or was that wishful thinking? If I was lucky—and Cylia was here to make sure I was lucky—it was my magic straining to get back to me. It wasn’t much. It would have to be enough.

Spells come in two major varieties. One type imposes the caster’s will on the world, creating something out of nothing or mending something that’s been broken. Those spells are pretty clear violations of the laws of physics, many of which have unkind things to say about people who go around summoning extra mass or setting things on fire all willy-nilly. If a physicist ever acquires the power to cast those types of spells, and the underlying forces that make them possible, I expect the human race will have access to faster-than-light travel inside of the week.

(Honestly, it’s sort of a terrifying miracle that no sorcerers have decided to go into physics. It takes someone who really understands gravity to figure out how best to turn it off. Then again, maybe that’s why it hasn’t happened. No one with the sense God gave the little green apples is going to want to combine the peanut butter of physics with the strawberry jam of sorcery into one big, delicious sandwich of ending reality as we know it.)

The second kind of spell is subtler. It’s the sort of nasty working that the coven controlling Lowryland used when they tailored their tickets to steal luck from their clientele. It draws its power from the thing it focuses on, rather than from the caster. That means the caster’s strength isn’t the limit on what the spell can do. It also means the target the spell is linked to can wind up seriously hurt, depending on how skilled the sorcerer doing the casting is.

The real world is big and complicated and unforgiving, and we don’t get the luxury of pretending there’s “good magic” and “bad magic.” This isn’t Harry Potter. But if it were, the spell I was about to attempt would definitely have been verging on the Dark Arts.

Carefully, I sketched the shape of it on the ground in front of me, pressing down until I left layers of skin behind. I didn’t need to bleed for this specific spell, but pain is always good fuel for the kind of magic capable of chewing people up and spitting them out again. Sam made a wordless noise of dismay. I kept my eyes on the ground. He really wasn’t going to like what happened next.

Exorcisms can be performed by anybody. There’s nothing magical about them. They’re more like anti-virus programs for the universe, and they don’t have anything to do with demons, or faith, or any of the other trappings of the Catholic church. They’re just an ordinary person who belongs in the dimension where they’re standing, looking at something that shouldn’t be there and saying, “Yeah, you need to go the hell home.”

Time travel is another matter.

“Tick,” I said, and focused on the days that had passed since I’d left my home. All my stuff was there. My bedroom, packed with everything I’d ever wanted to be in love with, the carcasses of a hundred hobbies, the still-breathing bodies of a dozen current obsessions. Would they continue to hold the same appeal for me when I finally made it back to Oregon? Or would I have become someone so different that I no longer knew how to be in love with the things that had made me who I was? Everything that lives can change. Change isn’t always a good thing.

“Tock,” I said, and focused on the carnival, the days I’d spent—however briefly—as Timpani Brown, last survivor of a dead show, orphan and drifter and newest member of the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival. That was where I’d met Sam, where he’d somehow managed to turn an antagonistic dance into a courtship into the closest thing I was ever likely to experience to a fairy-tale romance. Sure, it was more Shrek and Fiona than anything by Disney, but honestly, that suited me. I would have looked silly in a ballgown anyway.

“Tick,” I said, and focused on Lowryland, the time I’d spent there, wishing each day away, content to sink into mundanity and bland security. I didn’t regret those days. I mean, I regretted the ones that had led to me getting tangled up in a coven of sort of evil assholes who were happy to use my magic to boost their own nasty plans, but that was less about the time and place and more about the people involved. Lowryland had given me the space to recover, the time to breathe, and a place to heal. For that alone, I would always think of it fondly.

The air was getting thicker and more opaque around me. I could barely see Sam’s feet through the growing barrier. If I’d dared to look up, I probably wouldn’t have been able to make out any of the details of his face. That was unnerving, if not unexpected. He existed in the here and now of the crossroads. I was trying to use their own power to take myself somewhere else, somewhere older and deeper and less here.

The heat slipped out of my fingertips, slowly at first, growing faster and faster as the air continued to blur, now becoming then becoming now becoming nothing, every time and anytime all tangled up together. The Doctor would have been proud. Of course, the Doctor would also have come equipped with his very own time machine and rendered this entire exercise functionally moot. Who needs an untested, unpredictable act of sorcery when you have a big blue box?

“Tock,” I said, and the air exploded outward in a shimmering wall of razor-sharp shards, passing through the place where my friends should have been before dispersing into a field of shining golden wheat. I stared.

The landscape had shifted without changing a bit. I was still sitting in the middle of a lonely dirt road, stretching from one end of the horizon to the other like an unbroken string, ready to carry the travelers home. The sky was still midsummer blue, the sun still too bright to look at directly … but there were clouds there now, white and puffy and breaking the glare into smaller, more manageable pieces. They flitted almost playfully across the sun, and while it was warm, it wasn’t so hot that I felt the need to run for cover.

The corn was gone, replaced by harvest-ready wheat, each head heavy with grain. It was enough to feed a family, a township, a world, if it was managed correctly. There was movement far out in the field, like someone was reaping even now, gathering the goodness of the season to fill their belly.

There were no footprints in the earth around me. My friends hadn’t disappeared: they’d never been here in the first place. I was far away from them, in a time so far before my own that it might as well have been another country, breathing air that had never been intended for me. I rose on shaky legs, trying to focus on the wheat, the road, on anything apart from the question I hadn’t allowed myself to ask before attempting this particular feat of foolhardy heroism.