Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  Mary gave me a disapproving look. “You don’t believe that.”

  “Does it really matter what I believe?” Being a Lowryland Cast Member had done a lot for my ability to keep smiling even as the life drained out of my voice, leaving me a pleasant, amenable robot designed to please the guests without letting on that I was miserable. “It’s not safe. Mom knows that, or she would already have threatened you with an exorcism to get you to tell her where I am. She tells you she wants me to call because she knows that’s what a good mother would do, not because she expects me to do it.”

  My mother is a good mother. She has three kids and two kids-in-law, and she loves us all with the fierce protectiveness of a mama bear trying to keep its cubs alive. She’s also a pragmatist. She wasn’t raised by humans—my maternal grandparents are a cuckoo and a Revenant, and try explaining that when it’s time to draw the family tree—and they taught her early that sometimes, when the door closes, the people on the outside are on their own. The survival of the whole matters more than the survival of the individual pieces. If bringing me home meant endangering the rest of the family, she would let me stay away. She would trust me to take care of myself. But she would keep asking me to call because that’s what a human mother would do.

  Mary sighed. “I don’t like this.”

  “I know. I don’t expect you to.” We had reached the short corridor between the store and the backroom, where additional stock would be found, if we had any. I stepped into it. Mary followed me, coming as far as a guest reasonably could, while I hovered at the edge, out of the view of any cameras. There were no listening devices—yet. Give corporate a few more years and they’ll figure out a way to cram those into their surveillance system.

  Hopefully, I’ll be long gone by then, having figured out a way to safely thwart the Covenant and return home. That’s the trouble with going into hiding to escape from a multinational organization with unknown resources and capabilities. I don’t have an exit plan. What I knew to do began and ended with “run.” I’d run. I’d found a place to hide. Now I got to live with it.

  “My hands are heating up again,” I told Mary, keeping my voice low. We could get away with maybe five minutes of unauthorized break, assuming none of my managers wandered by and decided to ask why I was spending so much time on one guest instead of keeping the whole floor happy. “I’ve managed not to set anything on fire, but it’s getting harder.”

  “You should do a controlled burn,” said Mary. “On your next day off, find a trash can and just let loose.”

  “Arson is not a good thing.”

  “No, but until we find someone who can train you, it’s a little bit inevitable, so we may as well make the best of it.” Mary shrugged. “I’d help more if I could. I’ve been looking for books. Turns out, most magic-users don’t like to share.”

  “Tell me about it.” I’d been working from my grandfather’s books when I was still at home. Grandpa Thomas had been a magic-user and a member of the Covenant of St. George. Somehow, he’d managed to conceal the first from the second for long enough to get away alive, which was no small feat.

  There were days when I wished, more than anything, that he’d been as good at avoiding crossroads bargains and being sucked into dimensional rifts as he’d been at escaping from the Covenant. Maybe then he would still have been around to train me, and I wouldn’t be living in fear of the day I went all Firestarter on my friends. Having most of my potential futures come straight out of Stephen King books is not reassuring.

  Mary looked at me with concern. “Don’t,” she said.

  “I wasn’t going to!”

  “No, but you were starting to think about it, and every time you do that, I’m going to tell you not to.”

  I glared at her. “You’re not the telepath in this family. You don’t get to tell me what I’m thinking.”

  My cousin Sarah is the telepath in the family. Our reunions are a lot of fun.

  “No, I’m not the telepath.” She folded her arms. “I’m just the girl who’s been serving the crossroads since before your parents were born, and I can tell when someone’s starting to think that making a deal would be good for them. It wouldn’t be good for you. It’s not good for anyone. So I’m going to tell you no over and over again, until you learn to listen.”

  “Mary . . .” I paused, and sighed. “I wouldn’t do that to you. You know I wouldn’t do that to you. And there’s no way the crossroads would send anyone else to broker a family deal, which means that even if I’m tempted, I can’t do it.”

  “Good,” she said coldly. Then she thawed a little, and said, “I saw Sam.”

  “What?” My voice broke at the end of the word, hitting a note too loud and too shrill to be safe. I looked guiltily around before leaning toward her and asking, “How is he? Where is he? He’s not looking for me, right? He’s smart enough that he’s not looking for me?”

  “The show has settled at a rented training facility in Indiana while they wait for the insurance money; they should be able to replace everything they’ve lost and be back on the road by the beginning of next season,” said Mary. She paused, looking at me carefully before she added, “The Campbell Family Carnival is there with them. They’re helping to get the show back on their feet, and making sure no one loses their edge due to idleness.”

  “But the Campbells—”

  “Are family, yes. Not blood family. No one’s going to have a tracking charm that can link them to you, or use them to hurt your friends. Breathe. You’re not the only person in this family with a brain in their head. You can trust us to not fuck up completely just because you can’t make all the decisions.”

  “Intellectually, I know you’re right. Emotionally . . .” I paused, unable to put what I was feeling into words. It was like the words didn’t exist. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe I’d finally discovered the unspeakable.

  Sam Taylor wasn’t the love of my life. He wasn’t even my significant other, whatever that meant, or my boyfriend, although he’d kissed me like he was, against a burning carnival sky, when everything had been crashing to an end. And then I’d walked away from him, because it was the only way to keep him safe. I didn’t love him—at least I didn’t think I did—but I might have, if we’d been allowed to take the time to figure out who we were to one another. We’d both been lying from the start of our relationship, and that sort of thing can take some time to get past.

  God, I wished we’d had the time.

  Unfortunately, while Sam wasn’t blood family—and hence wasn’t a target for tracking charms, and should have been able to safely come find me—he was something the Covenant viewed as even worse: he was a cryptid. A fūri, to be specific, a kind of yōkai therianthrope originally from China. He was a virtuoso on the flying trapeze, because when he wasn’t forcing himself to look human, he had a prehensile tail and feet that could do double duty as hands, and he was one of the most beautiful men I’d ever met. Maybe not when he was standing still, but in motion . . .

  I’ve always been about the motion. Whether it’s the cheering field or the derby track, motion is where beauty lives. When Sam moved, he was a poem, and I wanted to memorize the whole damn thing, and for his sake, I could never see him again, and that sucked harder than I could say.

  Mary leaned over and touched my arm. “I’ll tell your family you’re okay, and that you still don’t need them to come get you. But you say the word . . .”

  “I know,” I said. “Thank you, Aunt Mary.”

  “Any time, kiddo,” she said, and she was gone.

  I wiped the tears from my cheeks and stepped out of the alcove, pasting my Lowry-approved smile back into place. Time to get to work. After all, this was my life now.

  Four

  “Loving too much is just as bad as not loving at all. Maybe it’s worse. People who don’t have anything to lose never have to worry about the inevitable.”

>   –Alice Healy

  Lowryland, eight hours and about sixty thousand inane questions later

  I SAT AT A TABLE outside the Midsummer Night’s (Ice) Cream Shoppe, back in civilian clothes, my glittery eyeliner scrubbed away, and wondered whether I would ever feel like standing up again. My feet were one solid ache, one that I could feel pulsing in time to the beating of my heart. In a way, the pain was a good thing, since it was distracting enough that I wasn’t worried about setting anything on fire. And if that isn’t the definition of making lemonade out of life’s lemons, I don’t know what is.

  The Park was winding down around me. Parents dragged exhausted, weeping children in mass-produced costumes toward the trails that would take them out of Fairyland and back to the central hub, which was themed after Lowry’s idea of a perfectly bucolic American town, half Ray Bradbury and half Lake Wobegon (without actually coming close enough to owe copyright acknowledgment to either, naturally—the man was a genius at dancing the thin line of public domain). I silently toasted them with my milkshake, wishing them luck at getting past that dazzling arcade of shopping and concessions and final opportunities to spend all their money. Lowry’s Welcoming World was designed to be a flytrap for wallets, and it stayed open a full hour after the rest of the Park shut down, making sure it would have time to suck out every last dime.

  (I hate working in Lowry’s Welcoming World. I hate it. The shops are too diverse for the area to have a cohesive theme, and while that might seem like a good thing, in practice it means that anyone wearing a Welcoming World uniform can be grabbed by a guest at any time to help them find a pair of earrings or shorts in their size or whatever piece of useless crap they’ve decided they need to make their theme park-loving lives complete. Which, hey, fine. I am a nerd, I understand that sometimes life isn’t worth living if you don’t have the commemorative tchotchke of your dreams. It’s just that people want to do their shopping after midnight, when they have poor impulse control and—frequently—worse manners, and their feet hurt, and they’re exhausted, and they tend to take it all out on the poor cast members who have to explain that no, they don’t control the prices, no, they can’t give a discount because there was a long wait to see Lindy the Lion in Candyland, no, they don’t know where their managers are. Give me the rest of the Park, with its safe, sane closing hours, and leave the retail to the masochists and the heroes.)

  The lights went out in the ice cream stand as the final food service employee booked it for the safety of behind-the-scenes, where no guests would be able to grab them and request one last double-dip cone. The glittering white fairy lights twined through the oversized toadstools and climbing morning glory flowers continued to twinkle, creating the illusion that tiny fairies were everywhere, watching everything that happened in their slice of Lowryland. I sipped my milkshake and let myself sink deeper into my seat, enjoying the sound of the area atmospherics. Crickets, and droning cicadas, and the occasional distant chime of bells: all the sounds Lowry’s engineers had decided would say “Fairyland” to their young guests.

  I couldn’t say it had been a bad day. Sure, there’d been a few rude guests, including one asshole who decided that screaming at a clerk in a shop filled with children was a great idea, and sure, there’d been the usual assortment of incidents, ranging from shoplifting to overly excited toddlers peeing in the middle of the store when they saw Oberon and Titania walking by with their handlers, but that was all pretty standard for Lowryland. I couldn’t say it had been a good day either. Good days . . .

  Good days were rare. Good days were the ones where I somehow managed to convince myself that Melody West was a real person, and that I wouldn’t be wearing her name tag and her uniform if she wasn’t me. Melody West didn’t have any dark secrets to run away from, and she wasn’t hiding from people who wanted to hurt her; she was just a woman with a job that wasn’t too hard and wasn’t too easy and came with free admission every day to one of the most magical places in the world. Melody West didn’t have to worry about setting things on fire if she lost her temper. She didn’t cry herself to sleep at night wondering whether she’d ever see her family again, or whether she’d walked away from the best shot she’d ever have at a relationship with someone whose jagged edges matched her own. Melody could be happy.

  When Mary came to visit, it got harder to hold onto Melody, because Melody wasn’t the sort of person whose dead aunt would haunt her. So while I was always glad to see Mary and the connection she represented to home, I resented it at the same time. As long as I couldn’t let myself go and melt into Melody, I’d keep remembering how much I hated it here.

  “Freedom!” announced Fern, dropping into the chair across from me with more force than should have been possible for such a diminutive figure. Ah, the varying density of the sylph. She could mostly control how dense she was, but she tended to get lighter when stressed and heavier when tired. There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere.

  “You still have glitter in your . . .” I paused to give her a quick once-over. She was back in street clothes, and her fine blonde hair hung limp around her shoulders, pressed flat and lifeless by a day crammed inside her Aspen wig. Most of her eyeshadow was gone, but the ghosts of it haunted the creases of her face, sparkling in the fairy light. “Okay, you have glitter in your everything. You are a testament to the power of glitter.”

  “I’m like a slug,” said Fern blissfully. She was holding a milkshake cup of her own, and took a long, snorting slurp before leaning back into her own chair. “How was retail?”

  “Soul-destroying. How was the life of a fairy-tale princess?”

  “Eh.” She made a seesaw motion with her hands. “Most of the kids were okay. Adults, too. There were a few creepers who tried to grab our butts and got escorted out by Security, but it was mostly just people who loved the movie when they were little and wanted to tell us how much. They were harmless and sweet.” She paused.

  I recognized that pause. It was the sound of a “but” on the horizon, coming closer all the time. I frowned. “What happened?”

  “There was a family. Two women holding hands, and two little girls who looked so much like them that it was . . . you know.” Fern looked down at her milkshake. “I don’t think they were human people. I think they were maybe dragon people.”

  “Could be,” I said carefully. Dragons are notoriously cheap. For them, all money is potentially gold, and they need gold for both their physical and mental well-being. Lowryland isn’t cheap. For a pair of dragons to bring their daughters here, well . . . it seemed unlikely.

  But kids are kids, regardless of species, and kids love glitter and spectacle and rides designed to fling them into the sky while keeping them safely confined by straps and harnesses. Dragon mothers love their daughters as much as human ones do. Why shouldn’t a pair of dragons bring their little girls for a day in a world that didn’t really exist? If one of them worked for the Park—and quite a few dragons work for the Park—they could get in for free. Between that and their employee discounts, the trip would be a lot more reasonable than it seemed on the face of things.

  There’s no bad blood that I’m aware of between the sylphs and the dragons. They fill different slots in the global ecosystem, and they don’t compete for resources. There are always surprises, though, and so I was even more careful with my tone as I looked at Fern, sidelong, and asked, “Did they do something to make you uncomfortable?”

  “I couldn’t tell them,” said Fern simply.

  “Oh,” I said, as understanding dawned.

  The easiest assumption in today’s world is that anything that can pass for a human is a human. For me, as a human, the numbers said I was probably in the right. Humans are very, very efficient predators when we want to be. Life evolved on this planet in hundreds of forms, a daunting number of them intelligent, and it only took us a few centuries to put ourselves firmly at the top of the food chain.

 
For Fern, as a nonhuman, rational threat assessment said it didn’t matter whether she was in the right. She needed to see everyone as a human until she was told otherwise, because humans were dangerous, and letting her guard down around the wrong people could get her killed. Even other kinds of cryptids could be dangerous. Some of them we’d hunted because they were predators, not because they were competition for the top billing on the world’s list of intelligent species. A ghoul would devour someone like Fern as quick as they’d devour someone like me, and with even less concern for getting caught. A lot of cryptids won’t call the police when something bad happens to one of their own. Too many of the cops are human, and sometimes the risk of exposure isn’t worth the hope of justice.

  I went very still as it struck me that, right now, I was living like a cryptid. I was hiding from people who wanted to do me harm as much because of who I was as because of anything I’d done. That was normal—being a Price meant I’d had a bounty on my head from the day I was born—but the isolation that came with it was new. The need to view everyone around me as a potential danger, to hide, it was all new, and it burned. There were dragons working all over Lowryland, and while none of them were part of my personal clique of Mean Girls, none of them knew my name either. It wasn’t safe. It might never be safe again, not until we’d found a way to end the danger posed by the Covenant—and that was something we’d been trying to accomplish for generations.

  Fern nodded gravely. “You understand,” she said, and took another sip of her milkshake.

  Fern had never been safe, not really. Fern couldn’t afford the risk of telling a little girl that magic was for everyone, even children whose mothers had borne them without fathers, children who could set themselves on fire without fear of the flames, because what if she was wrong? Wrong could be easy, saying something weird to a human child and getting written up for breaking character, but wrong could be very, very hard. Wrong could be a Covenant family scoping Lowryland for signs of cryptid infiltration. Wrong could trigger a purge. For Fern, breaking cover had always come with the risk of never being safe ever again.