and weirdoes,” muttered Sam, sinking a little deeper in his seat. Grandma raised an eyebrow. He shook his head and said, slightly louder, “I knew I was signing up for the modern Addams Family when I told Annie I was in love with her. I’m a monkey who pretends to be a man in love with a human flamethrower who’s on her way home to a congregation of talking mice, and it turns out there’s stuff that’s too weird even for me. Aging backward fits the bill.”
“Well, dear, it’s a good thing I’m not on the market,” said Grandma, leaning across the table to pat his hand.
“I’m not really into blondes,” he said. “I’d have started dating creepy dead aunt number one if I were, since she seemed a lot less likely to get herself shot in the head.”
“He means Mary, and he’s the one who got shot in the head,” I said, as Fern finally drifted down from the rafters with cobwebs and probably a few live spiders tangled in her hair. “It’s been an eventful road trip.”
“I should think so,” said Grandma. She tilted her head. “But what did you want to tell me that was so important that you keep trying to put it off?”
“The sorcery wasn’t enough?”
“I’m your grandmother. I know when you’re not telling me something. Now, I know you’re not pregnant—”
“Thank God,” I said, firmly enough that it would probably have been insulting if Sam and I hadn’t been so careful.
“—and I know you’d never lead the Covenant to the Angel, or to Buckley. So what’s weighing on you, my girl? What have you been up to?”
I took a deep breath. “I told you James’ family was laboring under a generational crossroads bargain. What I didn’t tell you was that I made a bargain of my own, while I was in Florida. I had to, in order to save myself, and to save Sam. Mary brokered it for me. She tried to talk me out of it, too, but I wouldn’t let her. I needed to live. I needed Sam to live.”
My grandmother, who had gone very pale somewhere in the middle of all that, stared at me like she had never seen me before. “You know your grandfather sold himself to the crossroads to save me,” she said quietly.
“Only because we’ve all been comparing notes for years. You never wanted to give anyone a straight answer about that.”
“Because I didn’t want any of you kids to decide that it was okay, or acceptable, or romantic! Saving your lover’s life doesn’t mean you get to stay with them. The crossroads are very clear about that. Mary tried to save my Thomas, bless that poor girl’s spectral heart, but they outsmarted her, and they’ll outsmart you, too! Oh, Annie. Annie, Annie, my girl . . . I never wanted this for you.”
“I’m fine, Grandma,” I said. “The crossroads aren’t going to hurt me. I killed them.”
“ . . . what?” The word was barely loud enough to qualify as a whisper.
“They wanted me to murder James in order to fulfill my debt to them and get my sorcery back,” I said. “I didn’t want to do that.”
“And I’m very grateful, but I don’t think your grandmother is breathing right now,” said James. “You may want to hurry this explanation up a little bit.”
“I’m not sure I can,” I said. “His best friend from school was a girl named Sally. She’d gone to the crossroads to make a deal when they were about to graduate from high school. The crossroads took her instead of honoring whatever she’d asked for.”
“I know Sally went to ask them for my freedom, and I know they didn’t grant it,” interjected James. “They took her, and they didn’t give her anything in return. That’s how we were able to get Annie the access she needed to beat the ever-loving shit out of them.”
The profanity sounded odd coming from James, who was usually so much more careful about his word choices than the rest of us. I couldn’t say that he was wrong.
“Because the crossroads violated their own rules, I was able to get Mary to take me for an arbitration. I bent time in the little pocket dimension where the crossroads ‘lived,’ and I saw them arrive in this world. They displaced the original force of the living Earth, the anima mundi. The anima mundi wasn’t expecting an attack from outside. They weren’t prepared to fight off whatever the crossroads actually