Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  That wasn’t me. That was my big sister, Verity, she of the awesome dance moves and totally absent common sense. “We’re in hiding from a global organization of monster hunters who thinks we’re public enemy number one,” she thought. “I’ll just go fight a snake cult on national television.”

  To be fair to her—not that I’m usually inclined to be fair to her—she probably didn’t say it exactly like that. And she wasn’t the one who summoned the giant dimension-hopping snake during a live broadcast. My family sometimes charges into danger without thinking about it, but we’re pretty good about not endangering civilians, or blowing our cover. Given a choice between blowing her cover and letting a lot of civilians die, Verity had taken the only real option she had available. It was the one I would have taken, too, if I’d been in her place.

  But once her face was broadcast around the world, people saw her. People knew her. The Covenant was suddenly aware that our family was still alive, kicking, and getting in the way of their undoubtedly nefarious plans for the world. That was a problem. The Covenant of St. George didn’t become the biggest, baddest monster hunting organization the human race has ever known by standing back and letting their enemies do whatever they wanted to. They’re killers. They were going to come for us.

  We needed to know how much they knew. And that’s where I briefly digress from my digression about the Covenant of St. George to talk about monster hunter breeding programs.

  See, the Covenant has been a closed wall against the rest of the world for centuries. They take new recruits when they can get them, but the monster hunters of old did way too good a job: they wiped out most of the dragons and ogres and giants and other really big, obvious, impossible to explain away monsters that evolution had to offer. They also believed that a lot of those creatures drew their power from being believed in, so they spent centuries trying to convince everyone that sea serpents were logs and crossroads ghosts were just a trick of the light. The end result? A world where no one believes in monsters and so nobody is really panting to sign up with a paramilitary monster hunting organization.

  But they still need members, and like all good paramilitary organizations, they’ve been recruiting from the easiest available population: their own children. This is where I’d say something nasty about their parenting skills, except for the part where my parents raised me the same way. I always knew I was going to go into the family business, because I always knew we lived in a dangerous, complicated world—one that needed me. Maybe that’s the Covenant in us coming to the surface.

  Up until five generations ago, we were members in good standing, as bloodthirsty and obedient as the rest. We got better. The rest of the Covenant didn’t.

  In order to avoid inbreeding and bad things, the Covenant started a genealogical branch right around the time they started having recruitment issues. Arranged marriages and predictable family traits became the name of the game. My family, my modern, American, non-Covenant family, looks a lot like a Covenant family called the Carews: short and blond and spunky and dangerous. Apparently, Carew genes are dominant, although Alex looks more like a Healy, taller and browner-haired and with slightly worse eyesight.

  Me, though? I actually look like a Price. And since my grandfather, Thomas Price, was the last Covenant member of his line, no one in the modern Covenant really knows what that means anymore. Out of all of us, I was the only one who could be sent to find out what the Covenant knew, and what they were planning to do with that knowledge. I barely had time to tell my roller derby league I was going on sabbatical before my family had me on a plane to London, where I’d hooked up with the local Covenant recruitment center and been whisked away to a big manor house in the middle of nowhere to be tested, evaluated, and eventually dropped into a shallow grave if they decided I wasn’t what they were looking for.

  I have always done excellently on tests. I passed them all, despite the stress of pretending to be a zealot while concealing my honor guard of talking mice, and the Covenant decided I was a great recruit deserving of a field trial. Which is how I wound up with the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, having been sent undercover by the people I’d been sent undercover to spy on, and if that sentence feels like a headache waiting to happen, just imagine how I felt when all this was actually going on.

  The Covenant wanted me to assess the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival for a purge. There had been some disappearances; there had been some questions raised. If there was something killing people, the Covenant was ready to step in and make it stop . . . and the fact that they’d be doing it on North American soil, in territory my family had been struggling to protect for decades, was almost icing on the cake. They were testing my loyalty. They were testing my skills.

  They were backing the wrong horse. In a move that was predictable to anyone who’d ever met me without my masks on, I betrayed them, saved the people of the carnival if not the carnival itself—we sort of burned that down—and then I got my mice to safety and ran, because they knew me. They had my blood, sweat, and skin, and if they were willing to bring their magic-users to the party, they could track me down. I wasn’t going to be the reason they found my family.

  The crowds at Lowryland are big enough to confuse that sort of tracking spell. See, everyone in the world is technically related, if you go far enough back along the family tree, and when you put a few thousand distant cousins in one place, the false positives are enough to overwhelm even the most focused magic. As long as I stayed where the people were, I would be safe, and as long as I had no contact with my family, I would be drawing no lines for the Covenant to follow.

  All it cost was my home, and my name, and everyone I cared about. No big deal, right?

  Right.

  Rubbing the back of my neck with one hand, like I could massage away all the aches and agonies of the day before they even happened, I left my room for the dubious comforts of the rest of my shared apartment. Lowryland promised affordable housing to all their thousands of employees, in part, I assumed, so they could figure out how much of our paychecks we were socking away in preparation for heading someplace better. They didn’t promise particularly comfortable housing, or that we wouldn’t have to share it.

  Enter my roommates. Banes of my existence, the only reason I was still sane, and best of all, the reason the hall outside my room smelled strongly of bacon and coffee.

  “Coffee,” I moaned, shambling toward the kitchen. The door to the room shared by Megan and Fern was shut, which probably meant they had suffered another laundry tornado and didn’t want to risk guests seeing inside. Not that we ever had any. Inviting guests over would have meant allowing other people to enter our home, and we had reasons to avoid that.

  Fern looked up when I appeared in the doorway. She was already beaming. “Morning, Annie,” she chirped. “I made you extra bacon because I know you’ve got an extra shift tonight.”

  “I love you, don’t call me ‘Annie,’” I said, and made a beeline for the coffee machine.

  Reason number one, and the main source of any mental stability I currently have: Fern. AKA, “the only person at Lowryland who could blow my cover at any moment if she chose to, but who has blessedly chosen not to.” AKA, “one of the girls I used to skate with on the Slasher Chicks roller derby team back in Portland.” AKA, “one of the few close friends I’ve ever had who wasn’t related to me, and thank God for that.”

  Fern is a sylph, a humanoid cryptid capable of controlling her personal density. She’s always short, skinny, and colored like a porcelain Bo Peep figure, all milky skin, golden hair, and vast blue eyes. It’s just that sometimes she’s light enough for a stiff breeze to carry away—literally—and other times, she’s denser than tungsten. Watching her deal with people trying to shove her out of the way on the train to work is one of my life’s small joys. As to why she’s in Florida instead of Portland, where I left her, I have yet to get a straight answer. And, honestly, I don
’t much care. I know she’s not reporting on me to the family. That’s all I need to know.

  (As for how I know . . . that’s another story, and involves my dead Aunt Mary, who checks in on me weekly. I have a weird family.)

  Without Fern, I wouldn’t have survived my first week with the company. Without Fern, I definitely wouldn’t be in one of the nicer apartments—and yes, our tiny, cabbage-scented place was considered one of the nicer options available. Fern had spotted me across the quad during housing registration for new hires, and had come bounding over to grab me by the elbow and announce me as her long-prophesized second roommate, awaited and adored. I’d been too surprised to fight, and she’d dragged me home with her, where I was given my own room and added to the lease.

  As for why I got my own room when I was the third person to come into the apartment, enter exhibit B: Megan. Short for “Magaere,” because that’s a name that modern people give to their children. Not that Megan’s parents are modern. Megan’s parents are Pliny’s gorgons, which makes Megan a Pliny’s gorgon, which means I couldn’t room with her unless I wanted to be in constant danger of being temporarily paralyzed. Not my idea of a party.

  (Fern didn’t have the same concerns. Something about the way sylph density works—or doesn’t—protects them from the gaze of the gorgon. Just one more mystery of science that we may never have the opportunity or the equipment to solve.)

  Currently, Megan was wigless, letting the snakes atop her head breathe freely. Their tongues constantly scented the air, assessing their environment. Like all gorgon “hair,” they looked like perfectly ordinary serpents, if I ignored the fact that their bodies ended at a humanoid scalp instead of in a snaky tail. (Gorgon X-rays are fascinating.) They were colored like delicate rattlesnakes in shades of dark brown verging on black and the very palest of peach. They were beautiful, as was the woman they were attached to, who was sipping from a mug of coffee with her eyes half-lidded behind her smoked glasses.

  One of the snakes yawned, showing its fangs. Beautiful and dangerous.

  “How did you sleep?” asked Fern blithely. Of the three of us, she was the only morning person. Megan and I were united in our hatred of her before noon. We were united in loving her the rest of the time, so it worked out.

  “Not long enough,” I said, splashing coffee into my cup. It was thick and black, brewed triple-strength, just the way I liked it. Just the way all three of us liked it.

  “Word,” muttered Megan.

  “What’s your shift today?” I asked, dumping sugar into my coffee.

  The snakes on her head coiled into a striking position, responding to the change in her mood. “Noon to midnight,” she said glumly. “I’m going to be a corpse tomorrow.”

  “Sucks,” I agreed sympathetically.

  I was a general employee, going where I was told and filling whatever positions needed to be filled. I could work a register, monitor a gate, set up a parade route, or help guests get to where they were going. Fern, with her delicate build, perfect features, and already cartoon-worthy voice, was what we called a “face character,” one of the people who got to put on a fancy costume and spend the day embodying one of Lowry’s cartoon creations—in her case, Princess Aspen from Goldtree and Silvertree, that 1989 masterpiece of soft-focus pseudo-feminism in a fairy-tale coating.

  (The girl who played Elm was human, and shared her apartment with two other face character performers, and thought Fern was out of her mind for continuing to associate with riffraff like me. It takes all kinds to make a properly annoying world.)

  Megan, on the other hand, was something elevated and rare, and wouldn’t have been in general housing at all if she hadn’t requested to be placed with Fern. Megan was a medical graduate student doing her residency at the Lowryland Hospital—which was, yes, a fully accredited and functional facility, with the necessary equipment for everything from delivering a baby to performing organ transplants and other major surgical procedures. Getting a position there was supposed to be difficult bordering on impossible, and no one could figure out how Megan had been able to get in, since she didn’t come from an affluent family with a history of training on Lowry property. No one in her family tree was a millionaire, or possessed of much political capital, or even human. I would have been willing to bet she was the first cryptid ever to be accepted into the program.

  That was probably part of how she’d been able to get in. Gorgon communities like the one she comes from always need doctors, and so do the dragons, the wadjet, and the other cryptids who look like mammals but are really reptiles or therapsids. Once she’d qualified for Lowry, it would have been easy to hire someone like my Uncle Al to give her application the push it needed to rise to the top of the heap.

  As the only nonhuman in the program, though, she couldn’t stay with the other residents without running the risk of blowing her cover and winding up in a biology lab. Hence her staying in the sticks with us, and dealing with the chaos of three competing schedules in one house.

  Three competing . . . wait. “Okay, why are we all up?” I asked, lowering my mug. “I’m supposed to be to work at eight. Did I oversleep again?” I didn’t look at the clock. If I was late, I was late, and nothing was going to change that. I was going to finish my coffee before I went off to get disciplined.

  “My mom called this morning,” said Megan.

  “Her mother called at four o’clock, is what she means to say,” said Fern. “She doesn’t understand that we can’t be fully nocturnal here.”

  “That, or she’s punishing me for being a fussy baby.” Megan yawned, wider than a human would have been capable of yawning, until my own jaw ached in sympathy. “I love my family, but I would swallow my own feet for a nap.”

  “So take one,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Can’t. If I sleep now, I’ll sleep through the start of my shift. Besides, if I’m up, I can give the two of you a ride to work.”

  I perked up. “Have I mentioned recently that you’re a brilliant, talented doctor who’s going to revolutionize the field of medicine?”

  Megan’s hair hissed at me.

  * * *

  It’s not that the train between employee housing and the park is unreliable. Like most things in Lowryland, it runs with a precision that would make a watchmaker weep. It’s not that it’s expensive. A monthly train pass is included with our employment, and can be used to get on either at the employee parking lot or at any of the six housing stops.

  It’s that the trains are always packed, and the air-conditioning is broken about two-thirds of the time, and the upholstery smells like canned meat and old sweat, and there’s no possible way to avoid people touching you, whether they intend to or not. It’s that there are cliques and social groups anyplace there are people, and being on the outside of the majority of them can make the ride pretty damned uncomfortable.

  (To be fair to them, it’s not like I’ve exactly gone out of my way to try making friends. To be unfair to them, it’s not like they would have made it easy for me if I had. Most of them don’t even like Fern, and she’s the walking, talking incarnation of a happy meadow filled with butterflies and flowers. Amusement park politics are like academic politics, only more so. The infighting’s so vicious because the stakes are so low.)

  Ten minutes after Megan offered us a ride, Fern and I were dressed—within reason—and crammed into her battered Toyota Corolla. I had a purse full of bacon, makeup, and small personal items. Fern had an entire garment bag, which she used as a pillow as she stretched out across the backseat and closed her eyes. That was probably a large part of how she could survive being a morning person: the girl was capable of napping anywhere, even places where it should have been physically impossible to nap.

  “Our rear end’s dragging,” muttered Megan, before twisting around and jabbing Fern in the leg. “Hey. You. Lighten up.”

  “Sorry, Megan,” mumble
d Fern sleepily. The car’s rear end rose six inches as she turned her personal density down, becoming about as substantial as her garment bag.

  Megan flashed me a wry sidelong smile, a moment of camaraderie between unlikely roommates. I smiled back, more strained. At least I was trying. That was more than most people would have guessed I’d do. I was trying.

  I never wanted my life to be a wacky sitcom about a human girl and her inhuman roommates struggling to get by at what many people consider to be the second-happiest place in the world. I’m not actually sure what I wanted my life to be. Figuring it out never seemed quite as important as living it. I’d been a cheerleader in high school and a roller derby player afterward. I’d taken my share of online courses, but I’d never bothered going to a “real” college. What was the point? The best I could do was get a degree I’d never use, since it’s not like the Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, offers courses in how to be a better cryptozoologist.

  (That may be unfair. Olympia is prime Bigfoot country, and if any school in the world is going to offer classes about them, it’s going to be Evergreen. It’s just that those classes would be vilely, violently wrong, and I’d probably have gotten myself expelled for punching a teacher.)

  On the rare occasions when I’d tried to imagine where I saw myself in ten years, it had either been on the track with my teammates, scoring points and skinning knees, or traveling with the Campbell side of the extended family, spending my days repairing rides and my nights slinging knives for the amusement of the paying audience. In a way, I guess I wanted what Verity wanted: I wanted a stage. I just wanted one that was smaller than hers, in warehouses and big tents rather than ballrooms, where no one remembered the performers, only the performance.