will, at that,” she said. “Well, if you kids need anything else from me, I’ll be at the bar. Enjoy your chicken.”
She turned and disappeared then, back out into the slightly cleaner, less cobweb-choked main room of the Red Angel.
As soon as the door closed, Grandma turned her attention back to me. “Where did the crossroads send him?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The anima mundi didn’t know either. But they said that the people the crossroads sent away were alive when they went. That means he could still be alive out there. If he’s as resourceful as you’ve always said he was, he could still be hanging on.”
Of course, he probably wouldn’t have Grandma’s little anti-aging trick, and he’d been older than her when he disappeared, all the way back in 1965. He had to be in his nineties by now, and that could make bringing him home difficult. Not that my grandmother gave one good goddamn about difficult. She’d been throwing herself through endless hells since his disappearance, with no goal in mind beyond bringing her lost love home.
It was a little obsessive, sure, but I’d sold my magic and potentially my life to the crossroads to save Sam, and he and I hadn’t been together even half as long as my grandparents had. People do stupid things when they’re in love. That’s sort of what love is for.
It would be nice if my family could manage love with a little less disaster, but I guess it’s true what they say: people learn from example. And all of our examples are catastrophic ones.
I took another bite of barbequed chicken. Everyone else reached for their forks and speared pieces for themselves, and for a few minutes, there were no sounds but the sound of chewing, and of Fern bouncing about gently in the rafters. Then she drifted serenely down to floor level, stabbed a piece of chicken, and asked, “Are we staying with your grandmother tonight, Annie?”
I looked at Grandma, who nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess we are.”
* * *
Cynthia didn’t charge us for the chicken. “It’s nice to have proof that Alice has eaten something on this plane of reality more recently than the pie-eating contest we held back in 1992,” she said, waving us toward the door. “Now get out of here. This many humans makes the rest of my clientele nervous.”
Given that the rest of her clientele appeared to be two bogeymen, a swamp hag, and what might have been a minotaur, I had serious reason to doubt that, but not enough to make me argue with her until she gave us a bill. Instead, I waved and led the rest of our motley group to the exit, where Grandma was waiting.
“We’ll have to walk to the house,” she said. “I’ll leave my motorcycle here for the night. Not the first time, probably not going to be the last, and it’s not like I could fit all of you on the seat.”
“I know the way,” I protested. “We could meet you there.”
“Your mother would literally never let me hear the end of it if I lost track of you right now,” she said. “Evie’s a pretty dab hand with her necromancy, so you know I mean that literally.”
I rolled my eyes but didn’t argue. People leave ghosts when they die with unfinished business. It’s common if undiscussed knowledge among my family that if Grandma Alice dies hunting for her wayward husband, she’s going to keep coming to family dinners for the rest of time, because there’s no possible way she’s going to rest in peace. Again, love sucks, and again, there’s a reason I spent so much of my life purposefully not looking for it.
“This way, kids,” called Grandma cheerfully, before she started stomping down the road, heading toward the dark, somehow menacing edge of the forest. “Look alive, and don’t step on anything you don’t recognize.”
“She’s like a preschool teacher,” said James, stepping up next to me, a bemused look on his face. “A heavily-armed, questionably-stable preschool teacher.”
“Yeah, but she’s not wrong around here,” I said. “Buckley is what we like to call a high-weirdness zone. Sort of like New Gravesend, only your weirdness was artificially imposed. You had the full attention of the crossroads. We don’t. We just have the result of generations of cryptozoologists going out of our way to protect some of the weirdest wildlife North America has to offer. The local population is almost entirely human, because only the