Page 92 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“What you did, whatever you did, undo it,” hissed Mary. “Get out of here while you still can.”

“Can you get out of here?”

She said nothing.

I paused. “Mary?”

“Yes?”

“You’re not really you, are you? You didn’t know all that stuff about the crossroads. You only knew what the parasite was willing to tell you, and I’m betting it didn’t start with a ‘how I ate the world yum yum yum’ history lesson. And you never told me things I hadn’t earned. You’re still—I mean, Mary’s still—in the present, helping James fight with whatever’s using your name now.”

“My name?” asked the figure with my babysitter’s face.

“Yeah. Yours. Because you’re the anima mundi, aren’t you?”

Slowly, Mary’s lips curved upward in a smile. She blinked, and the empty road in her eyes was gone, replaced by a starfield, specks of light scattered across an endless velvet blackness. They were beautiful, and terrifying, and they had no place in Mary’s face.

“Oh, you are a clever one,” said the anima mundi. “You’re not here using my strength. You’re riding the one who comes to usurp me. You can’t stop it from happening. You said so yourself. This has to be, because it has already been.”

“But you’re not dead,” I said. “You survived whatever it’s going to do to you.”

“I’m the ghost of the dreams of a living Earth,” said the anima mundi. “I’m the layer that connects the twilight and the daylight. No one sees me unless they come here, to my crossroads, and then they pay for the privilege, because there have to be mysteries, and there have to be costs. I’m not the great work you think of when you say ‘crossroads.’ That comes after and before me.”

“And that’s great, if a little crunchy granola for me, but the thing that controls the crossroads when I’m from is bad,” I said. “It hurts people because it can. It makes cruel bargains. It hurt my family, and it hurts the ghosts who’re supposed to be helping people understand the deals before they finish making them, and I’m pretty sure it started by hurting you. It throws power around like it’s never going to run out. But it is going to run out, isn’t it?”

Silently, the anima mundi nodded.

“The crossroads are using the power of the living Earth to fuel their bargains, and they don’t replenish it, and they’re draining it dry.” It was a horrifying thought. It also explained a lot of things, like why the “age of magic” was supposedly over, and why the birthrate for magic-users had declined the way it had. Even with the Covenant hunting down and killing practitioners, magic was something I would have expected to see cropping up with enough regularity that hiding it from the world would be a lot more difficult, if not outright impossible. Instead, only the routewitches seemed to be maintaining their numbers, and according to Aunt Rose, they drew their power from the ghostroads and the twilight, not the living Earth.

It was like a piece had been missing from my understanding of the magical world, and now everything was starting to make sense. And that meant I had to make it home alive. If I hadn’t already been planning on it, now I had to, because my family needed to know what we’d been ignorant of. We needed to write this down and document it, so it wouldn’t be lost again.

“Yes,” said the anima mundi.

“So I’m going to stop it.”

“How can you, future girl? You gave your own power away. This isn’t how you bring it back to you.”

“Maybe not. And maybe this is a problem my family didn’t help create, since we’re not the ones who decided to mess with the way the crossroads operate. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to fix it. Fixing things is my job.” I turned my eyes back to the stain across the sky. The parasite, the thing that would replace the crossroads for five hundred years, was coming. “Do you know what it is?”

“It comes from outside,” she said, voice little above a whisper. “It was me, once, or something very much like me, the living spirit of a world that needed to be cared for, that needed to care. It lost its way. It lost its world. Now it lives by feeding on worlds that have never learned to defend themselves. I was turned so far inward that I never once looked outward.”

“Time is sort of a negotiable concept for you, huh?”

The anima mundi looked at me wearily. “My death approaches, child. You should not make light of what you’ll never know.”

“I think I liked you better when you were pretending to be Mary.” I reached into my pocket. The salt was still there, soothingly solid under my fingers. “Right here, right now, before it comes, do you have the power to make bargains?”

For the first time, the anima mundi looked surprised. “Yes, but I can’t give you back your magic. That happens so far after me that it might as well have happened on another planet.”

“If you’re the anima mundi, and you’re about to be replaced by something from another world, I think it sort of did happen on another planet.” The invaders from Mars weren’t coming. The Martians were dead in their beds, quietly rotting, while their entire world had come to swallow the Earth.

Metaphorically. I was pretty sure the crossroads weren’t being possessed by the anima mundi of Mars, if only because this—whatever it was—didn’t feel like a local. It had come from outside. Was coming from outside. The bruised streak in the sky was getting wider and deeper and rawer looking, like a wound that was never going to heal. Streaks of corrupted yellow and green spilled from its center, slashing through the sky, tainting everything they touched. The clouds that hadn’t joined the growing maelstrom had dissipated, leaving the bleakly empty horizon that I was used to seeing when I came into contact with the crossroads.

“I suppose,” she said uncertainly. “What do you want from me?”

“Permission to go into the field without your wheat eating me, or whatever it is supernatural wheat likes to do to intruders.”

She lifted an eyebrow.