Page 97 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

“Ask, and I’ll answer, if I can.”

“What about Sally?” What about my grandfather, and all the other people the records indicated had disappeared over the centuries? They had to have gone somewhere. They had to be lost, and even if some of them were long, long dead, there had to be at least a few—like Sally—who hadn’t been gone long enough for age to have caught up with them.

Now that we understood what had been happening, we owed them the chance to come home. Someone had to at least go looking. And Mary probably still couldn’t tell my grandmother that my grandfather might still be alive out there after all.

“She is not here,” said the anima mundi. “The parasite cast her, and the others, very far away, and could not return them.”

“That’s sort of what I was afraid of.”

“Then your choice is made?”

“I want to rest,” I said slowly, “but I’m not ready yet. I think, right now, what I need is to go back to the others. I need to stay alive. Can I … can I do that? Am I allowed to wake up?”

“Don’t come here again,” said the anima mundi. “There are better ways.”

“Not always,” I said, thinking of a dark tunnel filled with water where I had almost drowned, where all of this trouble had started. Sometimes the deus ex machina was the only solution you had. “But I’ll try to stay away.”

“Good,” said the anima mundi. They snapped their fingers, and they were gone, replaced by a wall of flame, and I was burning, I was burning, I was—

“—so try harder!” Sam was shouting. That was rarely a good sign. But hey, I could hear him, and I hadn’t been expecting to do that again.

Shout away, Sam, I thought, struggling to open my eyes. That strange sense of all-encompassing warmth had returned, wrapping itself tightly around me, preventing all motion. The cooling sensation was continuing to spread, making parts of my body actively cold, but the overall warmth remained.

“I can’t try harder unless I want to freeze you all solid,” snapped James. “Why don’t you try something, if you’re such a smart guy?”

“I have fur! Fur is flammable!”

“Everything is flammable if you try hard enough,” said Fern. “Annie, you need to wake up. I don’t know how long Mary can keep us here. The creepy crossroads thing went away, and now everything is empty. We need to go home.”

Home. I wanted to go home so badly. I wanted my bed and my things and to talk about comic books with Artie and to skate again. I wanted to introduce my boyfriend to my roller derby team. I wanted to introduce him to my parents. And I wanted to make sure Sally, and the people like her, had the chance to do the same.

I opened my eyes. Everything was fire, dancing around me, not consuming me. It was lower in places, like something had stolen its heat away, and I knew if I lifted my head, I’d see James working to chill it, to force it down. I also knew where it was coming from, because the anima mundi had said that all bargains were released: all debts were discharged.

Welcome home, I thought.

My fire purred and roared, so glad to be back that its joy couldn’t be contained.

I missed you, too, but you’re scaring people, I thought. Rest. I won’t give you up again.

Was magic always this argumentative? I didn’t remember it fighting me like this before the first time I’d agreed to give it away. Not that it mattered. It was back now, safe with me, and I was never letting it go again.

The fire hesitated. Then, slowly, it began to flicker and recede, pulling back into my skin where it belonged. I blinked at the suddenly clear sky above me. It was softening already, moving more into alignment with what it had been before all this happened, before everything went wrong.

Someone gasped. I sat up.

The others were standing about where I’d assumed from the sound of their voices. Cylia had her hand over her mouth. Fern was beaming. Sam’s tail was wrapped so tightly around his leg that he was at risk of cutting off the circulation. Leonard was gaping, open-mouthed and bemused. James was the only one kneeling, his hands stretched out above my left leg, the palms covered in a thin layer of frost. Like the others, he was staring at me.

I lifted an eyebrow. “You can put those away now,” I said. “I’m good.”

“You were on fire,” he said, in a tone that implied I might not have noticed.

“Yes.” I smiled. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

That was the last thing I had time to say before Sam slammed into me, wrapping his arms around my torso. I laughed, wrapping my arms around him in turn. Cylia and Fern were close behind him, and I held on to all of them for dear life, and this was good, this was right, this was the way home.

Epilogue

“You can always come home. No matter what you’ve done, no matter where you’ve been, you can always come home, and we’ll be waiting.”