Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  “No,” I said. Her smile broadened. “But that doesn’t mean I was planning to share with you.” That same smile froze, while her eyes screamed silent confusion. I offered a smile of my own. “You’re a bully. You’re mean to people you don’t need to be mean to, and you push people around whenever it suits you. You can’t even get my name right. I was given these so I could offer them to my shift mates as apology for any inconvenience my absence caused them, but see, I know you, and I know my absence didn’t cause you any inconvenience. Any extra work that tried to land on your shoulders would have been shunted off to whoever didn’t dodge fast enough.”

  Robin’s smile finally flickered and died. “You little b—”

  “Excuse me, but do you have this in my size?” The guest appeared at my elbow like she’d come from out of nowhere, probably because she had. Ghosts aren’t always good about following the rules of linear reality.

  Robin jumped, squeaking in surprise. I turned. There was Mary, back in her Hot Topic shirt and jeans. I guess once a ghost figures out the right outfit for a haunting, they like to stick with it. She was holding one of the newer Laura and Lizzie designs in one hand, having probably snatched it off a shelf at random.

  I offered her a bland, corporate-approved smile. “Let’s go check,” I said, and walked deeper into the store, away from Robin, who stared after me like I’d just drowned her puppy in the well.

  Mary waited until we were well clear of my coworkers before dropping her voice and asking, “Where were you this morning?”

  “Home, then I had to stop off at one of the admin buildings for a while, and then here. Why? Were you waiting for me?”

  “No, I . . .” Mary paused, waving her free hand in frustration as she tried to toe the line between what she knew and what she was allowed to say to one of the living. I looked at her and forced myself to wait patiently. It wasn’t always easy.

  Having ghosts in the family means knowing the afterlife is absolutely, no question, real. Some people stick around after they die, continuing to interact with the living world—although how much interaction is normal is sort of up in the air, since our ghosts have been with the family since Buckley, where Mary and Rose both died, and the average man on the street is a lot less likely to believe in a haunting than we are.

  Having ghosts in the family also means knowing that someone is probably always looking out for you—literally, in the “I can see it when you touch yourself” sense. When I was a kid and Mary was my babysitter, I used to be convinced that she was secretly Santa Claus. The white hair helped.

  In the present, Mary finished her attempt to put a sentence together and said, “I don’t always know where you are, but I always know that you are. I know when a member of my family dies.”

  “We’re not blood relations.”

  “That doesn’t matter. If it did, people couldn’t haunt their spouses. Your family is who you tell the twilight belongs to you, and I told the twilight—and the crossroads—that I was a Price-Healy. You’re mine. I’m yours.”

  I frowned. “If you know whenever one of us dies—”

  Mary held her hand up. “Don’t ask. I know what you’re thinking about asking me, and I’m telling you, don’t. You’re not allowed to know. Not unless you want to take this to the crossroads.”

  Of course, it couldn’t be that easy. If it was, Grandma Alice would have asked Mary years ago whether or not Grandpa Thomas was alive, and we wouldn’t be in our current mess. Either we’d have them both back, or we’d have a whole different Grandma Alice-shaped mess to deal with.

  “Sorry,” I said. “You were saying?”

  “I was saying that for about an hour and a half today, you were gone. You weren’t alive. I didn’t feel you die, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.” Mary gave me a worried look. “You scared me.”

  I took a quick look around, making sure that none of my coworkers were lurking to try to score something they could use to blackmail me into giving up my time slips. Then I leaned closer and said, “You need to come to the apartment tonight. Something happened.”

  It was clear from her expression that she wanted to ask for details. It was equally clear that she knew better. Mary nodded, handed me the shirt she had been holding, and disappeared. Her timing was good, as always: immediately after she shuffled off her visitor’s pass to this mortal coil, my supervisor came around the corner, looking uncomfortable as only a grown man in a wine-colored velvet vest could look.

  “Melody,” he said, striding toward me. “Robin has made a complaint against you.”

  “Has she, now?” I folded the shirt Mary had handed to me and returned it to the nearest shelf. “What a coincidence. I was just trying to decide whether I should make a complaint against her.”

  My supervisor raised his eyebrows, looking at me expectantly.

  No one liked Robin, except for the people who liked her too much, the ones who scurried along at her heels and agreed with everything she said. It wasn’t hard to decide what I should do:

  I told him everything.

  Oh, not everything-everything. I didn’t mention magic-users, or routewitches, or being with Fern when she found the body. But I told him about going to the PR building to help my roommate, and how I’d been given a ride by my hiring manager, who wanted to encourage me to show the real Lowry spirit even if she had to haul me by the hand every step of the way. I pulled the book of time slips out of my pocket, showing him the six and the fact that all the coupons were still in place.

  “I’m supposed to share these with the people my absence inconvenienced, to avoid hard feelings that might impact our ability to do our jobs,” I said. “I didn’t want to do it until our shift ended, because distracting other workers to make myself feel better isn’t right. Robin came over and tried to strong-arm some of them out of me.”

  “She says you called her a bully.”

  “Only after she tried to bully me.” I looked at him calmly. “Did she tell you she called me a bitch? If we’re playing the name game, I think she wins, which means she loses.”

  He frowned . . . but his eyes were still on the book of time slips in my hand. Right. “You know I’m supposed to pass all formal complaints along to management.”

  “But in this case, given the circumstances, you’d be willing to let it slide as long as I gave you one of these, huh?” I tugged one of the slips free. The paper was heavy, slick, and ridged in places with the careful swirls and indents of the watermarking. It felt rich. I offered it to him.

  He made it disappear. “I’ll tell Robin I can pass her complaint along, but that doing so would require me to pass yours along at the same time. I expect she’ll change her mind. Is there anything I can say that might help to mend the bridge between you two?”

  “No,” I said. He blinked. I shrugged. “She’s awful to me. She always has been. I have something she wants right now, but that’s not going to be true forever, or even for very long. I could give her the whole book and she’d still be awful to me as soon as she realized I didn’t have a second one. You can tell her my name is Melody, not ‘Mel.’ That might mend my bridges.”

  “All right.” He started to step away. Then he hesitated, and said, “You should take your lunch.”

  “I just got—”

  “I’ll see you in an hour.”

  He walked away, leaving me staring after him and wondering what I’d missed.

  * * *

  One application of my employee discount later, I was sitting in one of the outdoor break areas, protected from the rest of Fairyland by a tall, comforting wall. Our side of it was bare wood occasionally blazoned with signs reminding us to wash our hands, smile, and embody the Lowryland spirit. The Park-facing side was a lush maze of thorny tangles and artificial branches, making it look like an extension of the deep dark wood that ran all through Fairyland, helping to create the illusion of isol
ation that allowed us to exist separately from the rest of the Park.

  My salad, a limp, dressing-soaked concoction from Mustardseed’s, was about as appealing as eating cardboard. But it had calories, and nutrients, and I needed both those things if I wanted to survive the rest of my shift, especially since taking my lunch so early meant that I wasn’t going to get another break today. I picked up my fork. I took a bite. Mustardseed’s and their ability to ruin anything with too much vinaigrette came through again: it was like filling my mouth with someone’s faintly bitter perfume. Apparently, “dressing on the side” was a concept they had never heard of. I chewed, swallowed, and repeated the action, trying to put my body on autopilot before I threw down my salad in disgust.

  There was a distant bang. Someone screamed.

  I threw down my salad, not in disgust, but in my hurry to jump to my feet and run toward the sound. As I ran, I spared a thought for the fact that my parents raised me to be the first one dead in any horror movie—the girl who runs toward danger is a hell of a lot less likely to survive than the girl who gets the hell out of the situation.

  The thought that yes, good, something was happening, something I could potentially hit . . . that was a lot stronger, and accompanied by a sudden, triumphant heat in my hands, like the fire lurking in my blood wanted to be invited to this party as much as the rest of me did. I kept running, finding a little extra speed in my legs and applying it to the sprint. I might not have been doing my job recently—my real job, that is—being too busy hiding to seek out and get to know the local cryptid community, but I’d been staying in shape, laying in reserves against the inevitable day when the Covenant found me and decided it was time to bring me to justice. When that happened, I’d do no one any good if I wasn’t in top form.

  The screaming continued, getting higher and shriller, until it had almost become a keen. Before, it had been the shocked sound of someone being hurt. Now it was the shriek of someone in an intense amount of pain. I whipped around the corner—

  —and stumbled, nearly toppling over as I took in the scene in front of me.

  The woman who was careening around, trying to reach for her face, was wearing a Fairyland zone uniform: she must have been like me, on her break during the lull, going to grab a snack or a drink to tide her over until the next time she got a moment to herself. Unlike me, she had walked behind the Hill and Dale Fried Chicken Shop.

  One of the fryers had exploded. I didn’t know how that was possible. There should have been a thousand safety precautions to keep that sort of thing from happening, and to keep it contained inside the shop if it happened anyway. Fire extinguishers and sprinkler systems and foam baffles should have come into play. And they hadn’t. Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong, resulting in a jet of boiling oil being forced through the thin back wall of the shop, where it had doused this poor woman from head to toe in heat.

  Her hair was on fire. So was the back of the shop, and the nearby wall. Her hair seemed like the biggest problem at the moment. A few other cast members were hovering around the edges, some pointing, some shouting, at least one with their cellphone out, hopefully calling 911 or Park Security—Security would get to us faster—but none of them were helping her.

  I recovered my balance and kept running, whipping off my apron. The flames on her head were small. That was the only good thing about this situation. She was more than half-coated in sizzling oil: if those flames reached the edge of the stain, she’d go up like a candle. This was going to hurt her. I was pretty sure being on fire would hurt her more.

  When I was close enough, I whipped my apron onto her head, smothering the flames. She screamed again, agonized and confused. The fire in my hands surged, responding to the heat and the horror of the moment. I pulled the fire back as hard as I could, reining it in.

  This was no time for hesitation. I hesitated all the same. If I could pull the fire already in my hands into myself and damp it out, why couldn’t I pull more than that? I had no training. I had no preparation. I had to try.

  Still using the apron to smother the flames on her head, I pulled harder, focusing on the way it felt to smother my own nascent fire in my own flesh. It was difficult to push and pull at the same time, like the old joke about rubbing your belly and patting your head, but I narrowed my eyes and bullied on through, refusing to allow for the idea of failure.

  If it gets hot enough here, the second oil boiler will go, I thought, and pulled.

  If I don’t get the heat out of her skin, she’s going to keep cooking under the weight of all this oil, I thought, and pulled.

  If this place really catches, we’re all going to die, and I refuse to die like this, I thought, and yanked, feeling the thermal energy around me surge and flow, finally obedient, into my waiting hands. There was too much of it. I yelped and dropped my apron, dancing back from the still-smoking, still-keening woman. My hands felt like they were on fire. Not literal fire, the way they sometimes were: so much heat that they were cooking. I could see blisters forming on my fingers. I waved them wildly, trying to make the heat disperse. I couldn’t swallow any more of it, not without igniting, going up like the back of the fry shop, all fire and ash and—

  Someone grabbed my hands and bore down hard, so that I felt my blisters burst. I turned a startled glance toward the face of the Emma Frost lookalike who was squeezing my fingers.

  “Give it to me,” she hissed.

  I let the heat go.

  Emily’s hair frizzed out around the edges, blown upward by the heat, but her skin didn’t redden, and her hands remained cool against my singed fingers. The only sign that this was any sort of challenge for her was in her eyes, which narrowed incrementally. The whole process only took a few seconds. Then she was letting me go, turning toward the injured woman, and shouting, “Somebody go tell the EMTs where to go! And for the love of God, someone get a flash mob going!”

  Half the other cast members dispersed, seeming relieved to have clear instructions. I could hear murmurs on the edge of my awareness; guests, clustering outside the wall, trying to find the source of the screaming. Give them one of the biggest playgrounds in the world and they would still go looking for the things that they weren’t supposed to see.

  The woman who’d been injured wasn’t screaming anymore. She was sobbing, her hands occasionally fluttering toward her face, but stopping shy of touching it, like she was afraid feeling the damage would make it real. Her burns were so bad that she was unrecognizable. I’d probably shared shifts with her for months, but I didn’t know who she was.

  I was struck by the sudden, terrible thought that this might be my fault. My magic, such as it was, was entirely uncontrolled, and responded to my anger. That boiler shouldn’t have exploded. If this was Robin . . .

  No. Her undamaged nametag said her name was Cathy. I hadn’t done this. The realization allowed me to relax fractionally—which caused the pain in my hands to come surging back, as bright and electric as it had been when I was burning myself. I yelped and blew on them, trying to soothe the damaged skin and seared tissues.

  A hand touched my shoulder. I stopped blowing and turned. Emily looked at me sternly.

  “You’ll need to see the EMTs,” she said. “That was very brave and very foolish, what you just did. Sticking your hands into the fire to extinguish her hair? You’re a credit to the Lowry name.”

  Her voice was a little too loud and a little too cadenced, like she was making sure that when people thought of this moment, it would be her version of events that they remembered.

  Assuming anyone was even paying attention. The flames were lower and sparser than I remembered, slowed down by my sudden, violent removal of so much heat from the area, but they were still climbing, and they’d started to grow again. Outside the wall, I heard the sudden blast of a bugle. The Wild Hunt was going to ride through the Park early today, hurrying the guests away from the area, allowin
g the fire department to get access without shutting all of Lowryland down. Safety first, but if safety could be accomplished without actually losing any money, that would always be the preferred option.

  Someone shouted, and a team of Lowry EMTs in bright jumpsuits came running into the area, surrounding the unfortunate Cathy even as security staffers rushed in behind them with extinguishers in their hands. I wobbled. It felt like these people were shamefully late, but I knew the feeling was lying to me: I knew that it had only been a few seconds, a minute at most, since I had heard the screaming.

  Emily’s hands were a welcome pressure on my arm, holding me up. My booklet of time slips was on the ground, oily and now getting spattered with drops of fire retardant. Emily followed my gaze to the booklet, and sighed.

  “I’ll get you another,” she said. “Truly, it’s the least we can do after your heroic intervention.”

  Well, that, and bribing me didn’t do much good if I didn’t hold onto the bribe. That was fine. I didn’t want to try bending my fingers right now anyway.

  “How did you get here so fast?” I asked, blinking slowly at Emily. The EMTs were all busy with Cathy. It would be a few minutes before they got to me. The shock was starting to set in, unwilling to wait. Burns hurt.

  “Just lucky, I suppose,” said Emily, with another glance at Cathy. “I’ll inform your supervisor that you won’t be returning today, and put in for a commendation for your quick thinking and flexible response to the situation. Lowryland thanks you.”

  “Cool,” I said, and stayed where I was as she walked away, leaving me surrounded by shouting, flames, and the smell of burning wood.

  This day was not getting any better.

  Nine

  “Oh, isn’t that special. Honey, go tell your father we’re going to need a bigger chainsaw.”

  –Enid Healy

  A shitty company apartment five miles outside of Lakeland, Florida