“No, they’re native to our world,” he said. “I was able to grab my wallet before Mary banished me here. I had some seeds in the billfold. Planting them gave me something to do in the early years, besides fighting, when we were still most focused on establishing and defending our territory. And then we realized how useful it was to have a natural sedative, for both medicinal and defensive reasons, and I encouraged more and more of them to grow. The smell always reminded me of you.” His smile was small, brief, and painfully fond. “They’re genuine Buckley bromeliads, if that makes you feel better about succumbing to them.”

  “Wait, wait,” said Sally, with all apparent delight. “You mean you were serious about that? You literally knocked her out with a swamp bromeliad? She’s been here less than a day and you’re already sedating her. How do you think this is going to work?”

  I took a deep breath and turned to fully face Sally. “I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot for some reason,” I said. “Let’s try and start over, okay? Hi. My name is Alice Price-Healy, and I’m a cryptozoologist who’s been looking for my missing husband since he was abducted by the cosmic incarnation of being a massive asshole roughly fifty years ago. We have two kids, both grown, six grandkids, and a colony of Aeslin mice and a troop of tailypo at home. I’m not here to take anything away from anyone, or to take anyone’s place. I’m here because I want to take my own.”

  Sally blinked, several times, while Thomas made a small, half-muffled sound of surprise. I glanced at him. He was doing his best to hide a smile behind his hand. Well, whatever he found so funny was something we could deal with later.

  “Hi,” she said, hesitantly. I snapped my attention back to her. “I’m Sally Henderson, and before you say anything about my name, I was adopted, I don’t speak Korean, I wish I did, but we didn’t really have any good language classes in the town I’m from. I was abducted by the same cosmic incarnation of being a massive asshole about seven years ago, give or take a few months, after I tried to bargain for the freedom of my best friend. They said they could make sure he got the money for college, if I’d just agree to pay them something of equal or greater value, and when I agreed, they snatched me, and I wound up here. I was seventeen, and I had my whole life ahead of me, and now I’m living in an arid hellscape with a warlord who’s turned out to be a pretty decent person, so you’ll please forgive me if I’m a little wary of the weird teenager who fell out of the sky and assaulted me for trying to protect him.”

  I tilted my head, studying her. “Sally,” I said.

  “That’s my name.”

  “Yeah. That best friend you mentioned. His name wouldn’t happen to be James, would it?”

  She moved with admirable speed. If she’d been a teenager from a small town when she landed here, Thomas must have been responsible for a remarkable amount of her training. Not all of it. Body language is like spoken language. People have dialects and accents, they use and repeat certain phrases, and they pass them along to the people they teach to “speak.” There were elements of Thomas in Sally’s stance, in the way she threaded herself though the needle of the open space between us, but they weren’t all his. Some of it was natural talent, and some of it was a conversational style I didn’t know, one which placed her directly in front of me in remarkably short order, her hand gripping the front of my shirt, her other hand pulled back like punching me in the face was the greatest idea she’d ever had.

  “Where did you hear that name?” she demanded.

  I remained perfectly still, watching her in mild silence. If I so much as breathed wrong, she was going to deck me, and then all hell was going to break loose. I can stand calmly while someone threatens me. I will react if I’m assaulted.

  And that didn’t even account for Thomas, who was staring at her like he’d never seen her before, like she was a stranger who had somehow managed to insert herself into his inner circle. He raised a hand, and I was relieved to see that he was holding some sort of throwing dart. Not relieved because he was threatening the woman who was threatening me—relieved because he was properly armed again. I’d been worried.

  “It’s okay, honey,” I said to him, keeping my eyes on Sally. “She’s not going to hurt me.”

  “Yes, I am,” Sally snarled.

  “That’s what you think,” I countered. “Right now, we’re friends. As soon as you throw that punch, we’re not friends anymore. I don’t think that’s what you want. I think you want answers, and if you hit me, I’m not going to be inclined to give them to you. Now how about you let go before someone does something you’re going to regret?”

  Slowly, Sally unhooked her fingers from the front of my shirt and let me go, stepping back. “Answer the question,” she said. “Now, please.”

  “I’m here because my granddaughter said she’d spoken to the living spirit of our world, and she told me the crossroads weren’t killing the people they abducted, just putting them somewhere they wouldn’t be found,” I said implacably. “She was traveling with a boy.” Two boys, actually, but these people didn’t want to hear about Sam, and if I got too far off the point, I was afraid Sally was going to actually take a swing at me. That would change the situation, and not in a good way.

  “What boy?” she asked warily.

  “Dark hair, blue eyes, impressive eyebrows,” I said. “She said his name was James Smith, and he didn’t like it when I called him Jimmy, and he was a sorcerer.” I glanced at Thomas to measure his reaction. “Just like her.”

  He blinked. “She’s a sorcerer?” he asked. “How in the world—”

  “Uh, think you had something to do with that, sport, since you told me it was genetic. Took two generations and five grandkids, but they finally threw a sorcerer, and she sets things on fire just like you do, and she looks so much like you that sometimes it hurts to look at her, and I hope you get to meet her.” I looked back to Sally. “Her friend James said the crossroads took his best friend, a girl named Sally, and because he never got what she bargained for on his behalf, they were able to use that as a loophole to reach the crossroads on their own ground and destroy them.”

  Sally made a choked sound, putting her hand over her mouth, tears gleaming in her eyes.

  “Is he still looking for me?” she asked. “That stupid, stupid boy. I left him a note . . .”

  “Oh, because leaving notes for the people who love us always works so well at getting them not to do stupid things.” I shrugged. “Then again, Thomas didn’t leave a note. So maybe it would have changed my mind. Maybe I’d be home and old and happy, and all my kids and grandkids would adore me, instead of being vaguely afraid of me and confused about how I keep not getting any older.”

  Saying that caused a brief bubble of panic to work its way up from the depths of my psyche, and I suppressed a shudder. This wasn’t the time to fall apart again. Maybe that time was never going to arrive. Wouldn’t that be nice? We could go home, and I just wouldn’t let Naga hurt me anymore, and Thomas would ignore him, and I wouldn’t have to deal with what he’d been doing to me all this time. It wouldn’t be forgiven. It would just be . . . forgotten, swept aside in the face of so many better things to worry about.

  “I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to write anything down,” he said, with the stiffness I had long since come to recognize as apology in his tone.

  “I don’t know if he’s still looking for you,” I said, eyes on Sally. If I looked at Thomas with the panic over Naga bubbling at the bottom of my mind, I would lose my cool, and everything would fall apart. Sally, though . . . Sally was essentially a stranger. Sally was safe. I could look at Sally.

  “I don’t know, because I wasn’t really listening after the point where Annie said Thomas was really alive out there for me to find. I was losing faith. I hate to admit it, but I was, and I needed that moment to get me moving again, to get me looking properly, not just circling in dimensions I already knew, going through the motions and occasionally finding some new corner to explore. I was stuck. So Annie told me I didn’t have to be, and I got going again, and now I’m here. But he’s there, Sally. He got out of the town where you grew up, and he’s with my granddaughter, which is about the best place he could possibly be, even if her boyfriend may not agree with that.”

  Sally snickered, eyes still overly bright. “Oh, James isn’t going to be any threat to the boyfriend,” she said. “Kids like us travel in packs for our own protection, especially when your school’s too small to have a GSA.”

  “I don’t know what any of that means, but good to know Annie won’t be setting him on fire.”

  Thomas cleared his throat. The dart had vanished, back into wherever he’d been hiding it before, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on him and find out.

  Later. “Does me knowing about your best friend who I couldn’t possibly know about help you believe that I am who I say I am, or does it make it less believable? I just want to know how many asses I’m going to have to kick before you stop randomly assaulting me. A ballpark number would be great.”

  “If we’re pausing for questions, I want to know what you meant when you said, ‘Destroy them,’” said Thomas, tone measured. “Are you telling me the crossroads have been . . . how is that even possible?” I glanced at him. He was watching me, gaze sharply focused and understandably anxious.

  “I don’t have all the details because I was a little distracted and trying to get out of there; this was at the Red Angel, and Cynthia wouldn’t have appreciated it if we’d stayed around forever. If I had my mice, they could tell you exactly what Annie said. I can just give you the gist.”

  “Please,” said Thomas.

  “She said that because the crossroads broke the rules they were supposed to operate by, she was able to ask Mary to take her for an arbitration?”

  It turned into a question at the end, largely because I didn’t know what an arbitration was in this context. Thomas, however, nodded, a look of satisfaction on his face. “Mary always did her best to be on our side,” he said. “Even when she couldn’t, she was sorry not to be. I’m not surprised our granddaughter asked her for an arbitration.” He paused. “I am a little surprised Mary’s still with the family. I would have thought you would ask her to leave after everything that happened.”

  “Mary is one of the first people I remember,” I said. “I got in trouble in school because I was drawing pictures of a dead girl when they asked me to draw pictures of my family.”

  Sally blinked. “Dead girl?”

  “Mary is our family babysitter,” I explained. “She died about a year after I was born, and no one noticed, so she just kept on going about her life. My mama hired her to take care of me. And she liked our family well enough that she stuck around after we found out she was dead. We’re the house she haunts.”

  “What my lovely wife,” and Thomas stressed the last word just a little, as if reminding Sally of my place in all this, “isn’t mentioning is that in addition to serving as the Healy family babysitter, Mary is a crossroads ghost.”

  Sally tensed immediately. “A crossroads ghost is bound to her family, and you still married the woman?”

  I decided to let her anger slide, since she’d at least acknowledged me as his wife, instead of calling me an imposter again. I shrugged, spreading my hands. “Most of the time, Mary was just trying to keep me from licking the frickens. Unless we invoked the crossroads, she didn’t bring them into things.”

  “My bargain was made under extreme pressure—but not because Mary convinced me it was the right thing to do,” said Thomas. “She fought against me until it became clear that we were out of time. If we continued to fight, Alice would die, and the only thing that ghost cared about more than keeping her people away from her employers was the girl who had grown up in her care—and even then, she made a stab at convincing me that Alice would be better off a ghost like her than she would be with further ties to the crossroads, even by association.” He turned his attention back to me. “I was worried you would have called for an exorcist after the crossroads called in my debts.”

  “Like I said, one of the first people I remember,” I said. “It took me a long, long time to forgive her, even knowing the constraints she was under. But she helped as much as she could, and having her and the mice meant the kids grew up knowing about their family and where they came from, and that was important.” I hadn’t been able to raise my own children, but I’d been able to make sure they could take care of the mice and stay connected to their history, at least a little.

  “I want to ask about these mice you keep mentioning, but I feel like we’re already getting pretty far off the point,” said Sally. “The crossroads were destroyed?”

  “Annie said she went to the pocket dimension where the crossroads existed, and that it was somehow outside of time. She saw them come to Earth and displace the pneuma we were supposed to have. They were never meant to exist in our reality.”

  “A traveler,” said Thomas thoughtfully. “That would explain how they knew about this place. If they had come from far away, they would have encountered dead realities that petrified instead of putrefying, turning into fossil reminders of what was lost rather than tainting and destroying everything around them.”

  “Or they created those places,” I said. “We don’t know that our world was the first the crossroads affected. They attacked our pneuma and took its place, until Annie bent time and fought them before that could happen. I don’t really understand how that works—how could she have fought them before they displaced our pneuma when we’ve been suffering the consequences of that displacement for centuries? But they were all very firm on the idea that it had happened, and Annie’s boyfriend talked about her killing the crossroads like it was something that definitely occurred.”

  “How long ago did this happen?” asked Thomas.

  “They were driving home to Oregon, and James seemed like a comfortable but fairly new addition to a pre-existing group, so I’m going to say it all went down somewhere on the East Coast,” I said.

  “Maine,” said Sally. “We’re from Maine.”

  “All right. Maine to Michigan doesn’t take more than a couple of days, and I ran into them at the Angel about four months ago as I experienced it, but I apparently hit some time mismatch between dimensions, so according to Cynthia, that was about three years ago,” I said.

  “That’s when the new arrivals stopped,” said Sally. “Before you showed up, we hadn’t seen anyone in roughly three Earth years.”

  “Sally begged for an accurate cross-dimensional calendar when she arrived here, and it’s become rather the standard,” said Thomas.

  “Without the crossroads banishing people, you stopped getting guests,” I said.

  “But most of the people here made their bargains on worlds other than Earth,” said Sally. “How can choices made in our reality, fights fought on our world, impact theirs?”

  “If my granddaughter had truly traveled through time, she would have created a paradox,” said Thomas slowly. “Reality is malleable, but it refuses most great transformations as intrusions. So her actions could not unmake the choices we had made or undo the lives we had led. If we made bargains, they were still made, because they were part of our pasts, and we lived through them. The things we paid were still lost; the gifts we received were still given.” He glanced at me, and he didn’t need to say a word for me to understand the message in his eyes.

  Out of all the things I’d been afraid of during my long search, Thomas falling out of love with me had never made the list. It was still nice to know that he wasn’t sorry for what he’d done and didn’t wish he could unmake the choices he had made. I was alive because he’d been willing to barter with the crossroads, despite knowing what it could cost us both, and our children and their children existed because of that choice. If not for the crossroads, our family wouldn’t exist.

  That was an uncomfortable reality to sit with. “If the pneuma of our world wasn’t killed by the crossroads, just displaced, it could have gone looking for a new source of nourishment,” I said. I didn’t like to think of my own world turning predatory in that way, but we were all demonstrations of the fact that people will do almost anything to guarantee their own survival.

  “And if . . . Annie . . . stopped our pneuma from being displaced, it would never have become the crossroads of whatever world it attacked, and that world’s pneuma would never have done the same to the next world along the chain, and so on, and so on,” said Thomas. “It’s a paradox, and one that impacts us primarily because we were impacted by things that happened, but now didn’t.”

  “That makes no sense,” said Sally.

  “Time travel never does,” said Thomas. “In all my days, I only met one sorcerer who thought it was a worthwhile exercise, and he had gone quite mad due to isolation and alienation from humanity. We’re all here because of what the crossroads did, and now they never did any of those things, thanks to my granddaughter being too untrained to understand that she was attempting the impossible.”

  “I’m pretty proud of her, too,” I said. “She’s a smart kid, always has been. We did okay.”

  “Yes,” said Thomas. “I suppose we did.”

  “So what’s the problem?” I turned back to Sally. “I woke up alone—why?”

  “Your arrival did not go unnoticed by our enemies, and I’m afraid we’ll have to make a show of force to prevent greater issues.”

  “Some of our neighbors don’t like how the Autarch hogs all the hot babes,” said Sally, and snorted with semi-private amusement, like this was some great and secret joke. “They were even more unhappy when the ladies stopped falling through the barrier. Sometimes they could get in ahead of our scouts.”