Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  “Mr. Knighton,” said Sophie, stepping toward the central of the three PR reps, hand already outstretched. He looked at her coolly before reaching out and slipping his hand into hers.

  He looked more like a funeral director than someone who had any business working in Lowryland. When he switched his attention from Sophie to me, it was all I could do not to recoil. Megan was an actual reptile, and her gaze wasn’t that reptilian. It was a crude, mammal-centric way of looking at things, and yet I couldn’t help myself, because it was also true. He looked at me like he was trying to figure out the best way to take me apart.

  “You must be Melody West,” he said.

  I had never been so grateful to be at Lowryland under an assumed name. If he’d said my real name in that voice, that hollowed-out, sepulcher tone, I would have been compelled to stab him. There are bogeymen who never manage to sound that much like they belong under a rock.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Your friend assures me she was alone during last night’s unfortunate incident,” he said. “We have some security footage that would seem to contradict that. Can you tell me what happened?”

  Why PR was asking this and not Park Security was sadly easy to understand. Park Security didn’t care. Unless they had reason to suspect me of being the person who did the stabbing, their attention was needed elsewhere. But PR . . .

  PR made sure people kept repeating that old canard about how no one had ever died on either Disney or Lowry property, because they spun and kept on spinning, turning straw into gold, turning rumors into reality. PR swept in when one of the studio’s teenybopper TV stars got wasted in Goblin Market’s supposedly adults-only wine bar, turning it into stomach flu and teenage hijinks and concealing the public drunkenness faster than a six-year-old can cover themselves in glitter. PR did the heavy lifting, keeping the Lowry brand bright and shiny and buffing out all the dings. They were the true predators of the Park ecosystem, the lords of this particular veldt, and I had good reason to be afraid of them. They’d tear me limb from limb if that was what they thought Lowry required.

  They were loyal. Lowry kept them well-fed. They still scared the crap out of me, and I’d fought actual monsters that were trying to kill me with teeth and claws and other nice, normal things.

  “Fern and I were roller skating after closing,” I said, careful to keep my voice meek and my tone from wavering. If I oversold this, I’d end up setting off their bullshit detection systems, and then things would get ugly. “She knew I was supposed to open this morning, while she had the afternoon shift, so when I said I was getting tired, she told me to go ahead and go home. We do that sometimes.”

  “That seems like a great deal of trouble to go to for less than five minutes of enjoyment,” said one of the two women. They were flanking Mr. Knighton like lionesses, and seemed just as friendly when it came to outsiders. I decided not to like them. Not that there had been much chance of that.

  “It’s part of how we stay close as roommates, and prevent fights in the apartment,” I said. “Megan doesn’t skate with us, but she always comes to watch, and she thinks it’s funny.”

  “That would be Miss Rodriguez, would it not?” asked the other woman.

  I concealed my wince at having been the first one to bring my second roommate into the conversation, and nodded. “Yes, it would,” I said. “She’s a resident at the hospital. She was at the ice cream shop while we were skating.”

  “Lowryland frowns on activities such as skating in the Park,” said Mr. Knighton.

  “We’ve spoken to Security, and they said as long as we wear protective gear and don’t try to sue the Park if we bang our elbows, they have better things to worry about,” I said. That wasn’t exactly what they’d said, but it was the gist of it. We did a lot of things by “the gist of it” at Lowryland. Disney was probably more formal. Disney also had a lot more rules, a lot more moving parts, and a lot more overhead. Honestly, if this was the life I had to lead, I was glad I’d landed where I had. Disney would probably have ended with me stabbing some asshole in a Mickey Mouse costume in the throat for implying that I wasn’t showing the proper attitude.

  “Miss West is correct,” said Sophie, smoothly interjecting herself back into the conversation. “While we don’t encourage after-hours activities on Park property, we’ve shown time and time again that part of what gives the Lowry family our ability to stand together against adversity is the off-hours bonding we do of our own free will and without coercion. As Miss West and Miss Conway were not damaging Park property, and were wearing safety equipment, their activities are not under review at this time.”

  Her eyes said drop it loudly enough that it might as well have been verbal. To my surprise, the PR team frowned but didn’t object.

  Sophie looked to me. “How long do your skating sessions usually last?”

  “Can be five minutes, can be three hours, depending on when we’re scheduled to work the next day and how we’re feeling.” I shrugged. “I’ll be honest—”

  “Please,” said Mr. Knighton.

  I did my best to ignore him. “—sometimes knowing I’ll get to have some fun in the Park before I go home is what makes it possible for me to keep smiling for our guests. I know work is work and play is play, but they have fun all day long, and I just want my turn. Is that weird?”

  Mr. Knighton looked like he was grinding his teeth as he said, “It’s perfectly normal.”

  Score one for the little liar. I gave him my best wavering smile, the one I used to use on teachers who wanted explanations for my bruises, and asked, “Is Fern okay? Can I see her?”

  “Emily will take you to your friend,” said Mr. Knighton. One of the two PR women—the one in the chunky green necklace and the impeccable eyeliner, winged back like she was about to go to war—took a half-step forward, identifying herself. He turned to Sophie. “Miss Vargas, if you would?”

  Sophie walked over to join him and they strolled away down the hall, the second PR woman following them, and just like that, I was dismissed. I turned to Emily, strengthening my smile against whatever obstacle I was going to slam it up against next.

  “Hi,” I began. “I’m—”

  “You stink like ghost, little girl,” she said, an open sneer in her cultured tones. “Something’s been haunting you. What have you been doing that you shouldn’t have been?”

  Six

  “Being right is never as important as staying alive.”

  –Evelyn Baker

  Inside the Lowryland Public Relations building, trying not to panic

  I FROZE. My fingers heated instantly, so fast that I didn’t have time to ball them into my palms before they brushed against the nylon strap of my duffel bag. The smell of singed plastic filled the air. I prayed Emily wouldn’t notice.

  Emily noticed. Her lips curved into a knowing smile. “Oh,” she said. “So that’s the way it is, hmm? I should have guessed. So what are you? Ambulomancer? Trainspotter? We’ve had a few of them infiltrate the Park. They say the monorail and the roller coasters do enough to keep them going. Or are you an umbramancer? We haven’t had one of those in ages.”

  “I don’t even know what that last one is,” I said, my voice barely reaching the status of a squeak. “I mean . . .”

  “You’ve got some balls on you, kid,” said Emily. “Big brass balls. Or should that be big crystal ones?” She barked brief laughter at her own joke. The sound was utterly humorless.

  “I have no idea what’s happening right now, and I would like to leave,” I said, in the prim, tight voice of an unhappy child. I heard that voice a hundred times a day from children who wanted to sit down, or go to the bathroom, or do anything that would allow them to feel like they had some influence over their own lives while in a place that was supposedly designed to cater to their every whim. Sometimes I thought their shrill demands for the latest Princess Thistle loom or Prin
cess Laura storybook were born less out of greed and more out of the need to assert that they were still people who walked in the world; they were something other than the projection of their parents’ desires for a perfect vacation scrapbook and “making memories.”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t have wandered into a crime scene,” said Emily, making the suggestion sound almost amiable. “Look, I get it. You’re stressed out, you’re afraid I’m getting ready to blow the whistle on you, and you’re apparently setting things on fire, which is a nice trick. Let me set your mind at ease.” Her hand dipped into the pocket of her blazer. When she pulled it out again, she was holding a deck of cards. She held them out to me, fingers easing them into a fan.

  Emily smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes. It barely reached her lips.

  “Pick a card,” she said.

  Something in her tone told me this wasn’t a request. Hesitantly, I reached out and pulled a card from the middle of the fan.

  “Show it to me,” she said.

  “I thought you were supposed to guess,” I replied. I was stalling for time, hoping Sophie would come back or Fern would wander out of whatever room they were holding her in. Anything that could get me away from this cold statue of a woman, with her card tricks and her freezing eyes.

  She would have been lovely, if it hadn’t been for the chill coming off her in waves. She had the sculpted bone structure and porcelain coloring of an original edition Emma Frost—and all the good humor and friendliness that went with that particular comparison, which was to say, none at all. Her blazer and skirt fit so well that they had to be bespoke, and her shoes were black leather kitten heels, elegant and subtle and not so high as to leave her unable to keep up with someone moving at a brisk pace. Whether she’d shaped herself to the environment or whether the environment had shaped itself to her didn’t matter. She was here, she was flawless, and she was poised to kill.

  Meekly, I showed her my card. This time, her smile was more obvious, and far easier to read.

  “The three of hearts,” she said. “You’re a sorcerer. Not a sorceress. There’s no need to gender power. Power simply is, and it does what it will. But you haven’t been trained, have you? No, barely at all—wait.” She plucked the card from my hand, making it disappear. “That’s why you reek of ghost. It’s all about the bloodline.”

  My own blood felt like it was burning and freezing at the same time. My fingertips were as hot as they had ever been. If I’d touched the duffel bag now, it wouldn’t have been scorched: it would have been engulfed in flame. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sorcerers and routewitches have one thing in common,” she said. The rest of the cards followed the three of hearts, slipped back into her pocket and out of sight. “They run in families. Where you find one, you’re likely to find a line of them, stretching all the way back to caveman days. Something in the genes. You’re being haunted by someone who’s trying to make you understand what you can do before you burn down the world, aren’t you?”

  Slowly, I forced myself to straighten, forced the tension out of my shoulders and the terror out of my eyes. I couldn’t force the fire from my fingers. Like she said, it was in the blood, and right now, my blood was singing, stinging, demanding that I let it defend me and, by extension, itself.

  So I stopped trying. I let the heat rise until she could feel it from where she stood, keeping my fingers well away from anything I might accidentally ignite. “She’s my grandmother,” I said coolly. Making Mary a blood relative was the best way to deflect suspicion, and my actual grandmother wouldn’t mind. Better to make it seem like I was the last of my line. “She knew the last person in our family who had my little . . . problem, and she’s been trying to help. She can’t help. Not really. Now it’s your turn. Who the hell are you, and how did you know about her?”

  “Routewitches always know,” she said, and smirked like this was some sort of amazing revelation. Which I guess it would have been, if she hadn’t decided to treat me like a cat toy first.

  My head throbbed. Fern was still somewhere in this building, possibly without a clean shirt, definitely without a clean pair of undies. Every minute that passed was another minute where I wasn’t working, and even if there wasn’t going to be a black mark on my record that anyone could see, everything has consequences in a place like Lowryland. It didn’t matter how many times management said my absence had been forgiven: management wasn’t a jury of my peers. The people I was supposed to have been sharing my shift with wouldn’t necessarily remember all the times I’d covered their butts, but they’d sure remember the day I didn’t bother to show up. I’d be paying for this for months. The fire in my fingers wasn’t backing down, and for maybe the first time since I’d retreated into the comfortable identity of Melody West, former high school cheerleader and woman in hiding, neither was I.

  “That’s swell,” I snarled, and was rewarded by her smirk fading, just a little, as she remembered that in the hierarchy of humans who can bend the forces of nature to their will, she was well below me. Or would have been, if I’d had any actual training.

  Still, I could burn this building down around our ears if I felt threatened enough. That was something.

  Routewitches are the most common kind of human magic-user, and they’re tricky. Most of their powers have to do with distance and the road. Somehow—don’t ask me why—this also translates into a certain amount of access to the afterlife, which they call “the twilight.” They can talk to ghosts. Some of them can bend ghosts to their will, or ban them from areas. They do what they do and they do it well. It’s just that what they do is limited to parlor tricks, compared to what a true magic-user can accomplish.

  Taking Emily’s fear as a sign to continue, I asked, “Why are you telling me this? I thought protocol was that we nod to each other and continue on without making a fuss. Sorcerers and routewitches don’t fight over territory.”

  “No, they don’t; that’s true,” she said. “Will you please come with me, so I can show you I mean you no harm? That I only want to help you?”

  I eyed her warily. “I’m going to need a second.”

  “Of course.”

  I took a step back, putting some distance between me and Emily, before I closed my eyes and tried to focus on happy, soothing thoughts. Thoughts that didn’t make me want to burn down the building, and fry myself along with it.

  Me, and Sam, and the flying trapeze. He was relaxed, in his furry, fūri form, and he was holding onto the bar with his feet, reaching for me with his hands, primed to snatch me out of the air. My own bar was swinging high, and when I let go, I wasn’t falling; I was flying, soaring across the tent toward him—

  The fire in my fingers guttered and died, extinguished by the memory of better times. I opened my eyes.

  “All right,” I said. “Show me.”

  Emily smiled.

  * * *

  There was no sign of Sophie or the rest of the PR team as we moved deeper into the building, past posters, playbills, and framed cels that were worth more money than I’d ever seen in my life. Emily saw me looking and raised an eyebrow.

  “I wouldn’t have taken you for a true believer, with the way you were carrying on back there,” she said. “This building is a priceless trove of Lowry artifacts.” That you were threatening to burn down, came the silent accusation.

  “Then you shouldn’t have been threatening me in it,” I said coolly. It was getting easier to maintain my reserve now that I was past the initial shock of confrontation. All I had to do was pretend Emily was my older sister and I could match every scrap of her smugness with a sneer. Better yet, my fingers were staying cool. Today’s bout of wild magic was apparently finished, and not a second too soon.

  “I suppose that’s fair,” conceded Emily. She kept walking, leading me through candy-colored halls toward what might well be my doom.

  All the br
ight paint and childish posters aside, the building where Lowry housed their PR team could have belonged to any corporation in the world. We walked past offices, kitchenettes, and open floor plan work areas where clerical staffers typed, answered calls, and illicitly checked their email on company time. The air-conditioning and dehumidifiers were working overtime, so that even though it was a hot Florida morning outside, some of the people in here were wearing sweaters. Living the American dream of heavy-duty climate control that someone else has to pay for.

  And I’d come within a panic attack of killing them all. My fingers stayed cool, but my cheeks grew hot as blood rushed to my face. I ducked my head, turning slightly away. If I hadn’t been able to get my fire under control—

  This had to stop eventually. It had to. Grandpa Thomas didn’t leave a trail of char and embers behind him during his journey from England to Michigan, and according to his diaries—at least the ones I had access to—he’d never had a dependable instructor. He’d put most of the rules of what he was and what he was capable of together on his own, and if he could do it, so could I. I refused to consider any other option.

  Emily stopped in front of an unmarked white door, pulling a key from her pocket. Really, the existence of pockets in such an artfully tailored skirt was more impressive than her card trick.

  “I’ll make sure your management knows you were with me; that will carry more weight than any excuses Ms. Vargas-Jackson may have offered,” she said, sliding the key into the slot and turning it hard to the left. The air crackled with the sudden taste of ozone, like I was biting down on tin foil. Emily turned the key back to its original position. “I’ll also send you with a book of free time slips for your shift mates. It wouldn’t do to damage your social standing simply because you had the bad luck to find a corpse.”

  “I wasn’t there when Fern found it,” I said automatically.

  Emily shot me an amused smile. “Please,” she said. “Lies between us would be pointless and petty.” She pushed the door open, gesturing for me to walk through.