He perked up. “Great! Maybe we can take real showers before the smell in here gets strong enough to owe us gas money.” He grabbed his shoes from the floor and started for the back door, pulling them on and shifting into his human form at the same time as he walked. Unlike a normal person, he was coordinated enough to do all three things without tripping and falling on his face. Oh, the joys of dating a man who breaks all human laws of athletic grace.
The genuine joys, under most circumstances. He wasn’t being unreasonable. He just didn’t understand what he was getting into, doing essentially anything in Buckley.
My grandparents met there, when the Covenant sent my grandfather to spy on my great-grandparents. He was a sorcerer, too, so I guess in some ways, his relationship with my Grandma Alice was a nice mirror of my relationship with Sam. He eventually quit the Covenant in order to marry her, but not until after he’d been tricked into making a bargain with the crossroads. Just thinking about them was enough to steal the remnants of my good humor. Sure, they’re dead, and they’re going to stay that way if the anima mundi has anything to say about it, but they did a lot of damage to my family while they were still around.
We lost Grandpa. Not to death, which would have been understandable and ordinary and something we might have been able to collectively get over. No, I mean we lost him, through a hole in the wall of the world that swallowed him down in the middle of the night while Grandma Alice was pregnant with my Aunt Jane, whose impending arrival was the only thing that prevented Grandma from immediately jumping into the hole and going after him. As soon as she’d recovered from labor, she’d dumped both her children on our Aunt Laura, yet another in the string of aunts, uncles, and cousins who aren’t actually biologically related to us.
Dad and Aunt Jane grew up essentially as wards of the Campbell Family Carnival, and I know that Aunt Jane at least still considers the carnies more her family than her own mother. Grandma has never been able to regain ground with her biological children, even though all us grandkids love her desperately. So in a way, the crossroads cost us both of them.
Buckley Township, Michigan, is one of those places that gets talked about in hushed tones whenever there’s a census, a place where people die young and weirdly. If it wasn’t rural and reasonably poor, it would probably be empty by now—or maybe not. People can become surprisingly attached to their homes and don’t want to leave them for what they view as silly reasons. “Silly” can mean everything from “bank foreclosure” to “rabid jackalopes ate the neighbors, and now they’re coming for us.” So Buckley endures, even if it doesn’t precisely thrive, and while new people don’t often move to town, the ones who already live there don’t leave, and neither do their children. If those children die at a rate slightly higher than the national average, well, their deaths are almost always accidental.
Aunt Mary died in Buckley. So did Aunt Rose. So did all my Grandma Alice’s biological relatives. She’s the last branch of her original family tree, and the existence of some distaff cousins with the Covenant in England won’t unbury all the bodies in Buckley.
Somewhat clumsily, I said, “The house isn’t the sort of place where people generally go to get naked. Not unless they’re local teens doing it on a dare. It’s sort of, potentially, I don’t know, well, evil.”
Sam’s eyes widened. “How is a house evil? Is it haunted? Because I thought you had a pretty good relationship with your dead aunts.”
“No. If anything, it’s the opposite of haunted. Ghosts don’t go there if they have any choice in the matter. Aunt Rose won’t even cross the threshold. Aunt Mary will sometimes, but it makes her really sad, so we try not to ask her to do that. She knew my grandfather.” They were friends, even though they didn’t meet until after she was already dead—which means there’s a very good chance she was the one who handled the crossroads bargain that eventually claimed him. The crossroads were cruel that way. It’s a damn good thing that they’re gone and won’t have the opportunity to be cruel to anyone else.
“It was your grandfather’s house?” Sam stopped in front of