Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  The room seemed even larger without the safety of the elevator behind me. I took a few hesitant steps forward, wishing I had a knife, or better yet, twenty knives, or better yet, twenty knives and a brick of C-4. Plastic explosives are a strange and dangerous security blanket, but they tend to make whatever’s scaring me go away quickly, so I’m in favor.

  My reflection looked small and scared and frazzled, nothing like the image of myself that I’ve always tried to project. I stopped, looking critically at myself. My hair was good. Megan didn’t have hair of her own—again, snakes—and consequentially viewed me and Fern as life-sized versions of her childhood Barbie dolls. When she’d learned I used henna to keep my hair closer to red than brown, she’d actually squealed and demanded I let her take over the process. Since I hadn’t been doing my own henna since high school, I’d gladly handed her the reins.

  I needed to eat more. My collarbones were showing too clearly through my skin, and that has never been a good look for me, or a goal of mine. My sister is a dancer and always will be, whether she’s doing it professionally or not. For her, weight management is a part of her career. I, on the other hand, skate to kill and set things on fire with the power of my mind. The trapeze requires a certain awareness of size, but that’s as much about knowing the strength of your partner as it is the size of your pants. Sam had been perfectly happy to sling me around the big tent—boobs, hips, and all—and he had never once suggested I needed to cut back on the sandwiches in anything other than jest.

  Lowryland hadn’t been as kind. I was still eating, but my meals were more like the one I’d failed to consume yesterday for the most part: Park food, scarfed down fast, assuming it made it past my lips at all. Nutrition and the food pyramid were no longer my friends.

  “Hello?”

  No response.

  “I’m assuming you’re watching me right now, since it wouldn’t make sense for you not to be—not when I’m in your nice training room and all. So if you’re watching me, you must be testing me in some way.” I was talking partially to hear myself talk, and partially to see whether anything in the room reacted. Nothing did. “I do better on tests when I know what I’m supposed to be accomplishing. Just an FYI.”

  Still no response. This would get irritating fast if I allowed it to do so, which was probably what my new teacher was counting on: the more annoyed I was, the more likely I was to set something on fire without meaning to. I didn’t know whether this was intended to gauge how much power I could generate or give them a baseline of how easy I was to annoy, and—honestly—I didn’t care. They were playing games. I could play games, too.

  “I wish I had my skates. This is a nice smooth floor like the ones I used to train on, not like the bumpy paths in Lowryland. I could build up a real head of steam here.” I walked to the middle of the room, dropped my bag, and kept walking until I came to the bar in front of the mirror, where I kicked off my shoes. Verity would already have been practicing her ballet form. I had something similar in mind.

  My hands hurt less than they had immediately after being burned. My fingers still felt thick and clumsy, slow to obey my commands and slower still to clamp down, but that was okay; what I had in mind didn’t require fine motor manipulation. Bending forward, I rested my forearms against the floor, putting the bulk of my weight on my elbows. I held that position for a moment, letting my spine lengthen into the pose, before lifting up onto my toes, clenching the muscles at my core, and slowly, carefully lifting my legs into the air.

  As always, there was a moment where it felt like I was going to overbalance, sending myself crashing to the floor. The moment passed, and then my toes were lightly tapping the surface of the mirror, reassuring me that gravity was working the way it was supposed to.

  Trampoline and the trapeze are all about core strength. Without it, you’ll never get off the floor. Funny thing: cheerleading and being a roller derby jammer work the same muscle groups. I may not be the fastest thing on two feet—although give me a pair of skates and I’ll give damn near anyone a run for their money—and I may not have the best aim in my family, but I can hang upside down like a bat for hours. It’s actually pretty soothing. Even blood needs a vacation every now and then, and I enjoy sending mine to visit my brain.

  Closing my eyes, I focused on my breathing, letting every inhale fill my entire body, letting every exhale root me deeper in my pose. The pain in my hands receded, driven away by the meditative focus on being exactly who and what and where I was.

  A door clicked shut somewhere behind me. I didn’t open my eyes.

  “Miss West, may I ask what in the world you’re doing?”

  The voice belonged to Wand Guy. Nice to know I’d been right about who was keeping an eye on me. Still not opening my eyes, I said, “I figured you’d gotten stuck in a meeting or something, and wanted me to entertain myself. I’m meditating.”

  “You’re inverted.”

  “Not quite. I can’t trust my hands, and there’s no hang bar on the ceiling anyway.”

  “Please remember what it means to be right-side up, and turn to look at me while I’m talking to you.” He didn’t sound angry. More confused, with a healthy side order of amusement.

  That was something I could work with. I tapped my toes against the mirror one last time before lowering my legs toward the ground, pushing myself farther up onto my elbows at the same time, until I was drawing a horizontal line with my body. This accomplished, I lowered my legs the rest of the way down and opened my eyes, meeting my own gaze in the mirror.

  There was Wand Guy, standing behind me and about eight feet back, his wand in his hand. He was wearing a suit—big surprise there—and a quizzical expression.

  “Yoga?” he inquired.

  “Among other things.” I pushed myself to my feet, dusting off my knees before I turned to face him. “It helps to keep me calm.”

  The corner of his mouth quirked upward. I’d guessed correctly about the idea behind putting me in this room by myself, then. “I see,” he said.

  I offered him my biggest, brightest smile. “So what’s the plan? How are you going to teach me to avoid going full Carrie?”

  “How much do you know about other sorcerers in your family line?”

  The question was mild, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t have teeth. It’s always hard to know how people will react to the name “Price.” Some of them think we’re still with the Covenant, which makes us monsters. Others think we’ve long since sold the human race out in favor of the cryptid communities of the world, which also makes us monsters. And regardless of how he responded, telling him who I really was would compromise that whole “hiding” thing I had going on. So I kept smiling, and I lied.

  “Not much.” So far so good. “It was my grandfather, according to our family ghost, and she didn’t see too much of what he could do—just knew that he could do it. He didn’t leave behind any instruction manuals. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any other family, so it wasn’t like we could go talk to them when I started smoking.”

  “How much does your grandmother know? Having a family ghost is unusual enough that she must be aware of something.”

  This was where I’d need to start treading carefully. So far as I knew, magic-users can’t detect falsehood any more than, say, routewitches, or babysitters. They can learn to read people, but they can’t hear a lie the way a trainspotter would. So I could tell Colin lies and be okay, as long as I constructed a chain that made logical sense and wasn’t likely to trip me up later. It was just that if he asked me to repeat any of this in front of the trainspotter, I was going to go down in flames.

  Oh, well. I’d come too far to let one more possible disaster keep me from learning what I needed to know. “I didn’t know she was my grandmother when I was little. I thought she was my imaginary friend,” I said glibly. “She would appear after my parents turned the lights out. She told me bedtime sto
ries and chased the monsters out of my closet before she went away. When I asked my mom about her, she always said there was no girl in my room after bedtime. Every kid has their own version of normal, you know? When other kids talked about their imaginary friends, I thought they could see them the way I could see mine.”

  “I . . . see,” said Colin.

  In for a penny, in for a pound. “She went away when I was nine. That was the year I found out Santa Claus wasn’t real, and neither were imaginary friends. She came back five years later, when I had a bad dream and set my pillow on fire. She’s been with me ever since.”

  “And she couldn’t tell you anything else about your grandfather?”

  “Just that he’d been an immigrant, so if he had any relatives, they were very far away, and he never liked to talk about them.” I looked at Colin, all wide eyes and innocence. If I’d had a bow to clip in my hair, I would have. Anything to make me look less like a potential threat. “I really hope you can help me. I’m so tired of being afraid everything is going to burn.”

  “That isn’t a fear you’ll need to harbor for much longer,” said Colin. “Have you ever listened to a baby’s cry?”

  I blinked. “Um, yeah. I’m a human being who works at Lowryland. My days are filled with crying babies.”

  “Infants scream without concern for the damage they may do to themselves in the process. Their little throats are forever raw from the strain of howling their indignation to an uncaring world. As they grow older, they learn to use their voices for other things. They learn to speak, in some cases to sing, to modulate themselves. Would you say that speech is a better use for the voice than primal howls?”

  “I guess . . .”

  “That’s what I’m here to do for you,” said Colin, with more than a trace of smugness. “Right now, you are an infant. A powerful one, yes, but capable of nothing more complex than the magical equivalent of screaming because you want your diaper changed. You are a danger to yourself and others. As you learn to control what you can do—to speak, in a magical sense—you won’t be able to scream as loudly. Your body will learn its limits, and refuse to allow you to endanger yourself unless your life is on the line.”

  I brightened. “No more fires?”

  “Not unless you intend to cast them, and even then, they’ll require substantially more work than they do now.” He shook his head. “The Covenant of St. George has much to answer for. They’ve been the end of so many magical bloodlines—very nearly including yours, I’d wager. There’s no other reason for an adult sorcerer to leave his territory and move someplace where he’d have neither family nor familiarity to protect him.”

  In a way, the Covenant had been responsible for the death of all my grandfather’s blood relatives. They had sent them, one after the other, into the face of danger, and when danger swallowed them whole, the Covenant had turned its eyes to other families, and other opportunities. The Price family was small now, but we were doing worlds better than Grandpa Thomas had been, back when he’d been the last branch of a dying family tree.

  “All right,” I said. “Where do we begin?”

  * * *

  We began with concentration exercises. Colin would show me flash cards, asking me to memorize their contents in a matter of seconds, and hold them at the forefront of my mind as he asked me dozens of unrelated questions. He would recite poetry, only to stop and demand that I echo it back to him. He wouldn’t repeat a single word.

  I drew circles and chanted riddles and focused and concentrated, and at the end of our three-hour session, I felt like I’d been running laps for the entire time. My head ached, my skin was too tight, and I was deeply aware of every ache in my ass from spending most of the lesson sitting on the hardwood floor.

  Colin smiled at me. “How are your hands?” he asked.

  I paused. “Cool,” I said finally.

  “Good,” he said. “Your lessons start in earnest tomorrow.” Then he stood and walked away, into the window, into nothingness, and was gone, leaving me to stare after him.

  Okay. This was going to be interesting.

  Eleven

  “You can’t do this alone. Nobody can. Nobody should have to.”

  –Alice Healy

  Lowryland, three weeks and eighteen lessons later, trying to stay awake

  MY BREAK FROM WORK only lasted for three days—paid, of course, since I’d been wounded in the course of trying to show the “true Lowry spirit,” and since my new mentor held some undisclosed but apparently terrifying position in the corporate hierarchy—before I was shoved back into the workforce, hands still bandaged to keep the healing damage from freaking out the paying guests.

  (I was doing better than poor Cathy. Lowry, Inc. was covering her medical bills, since it was their deep fryer that had experienced a mechanical fault at the exact wrong time. That was the least of her problems. She was going to have a long road to recovery, one that would involve multiple skin grafts to rebuild her face. Every time someone mentioned her in my presence, it was all I could do not to blurt out the location of the last Caladrius-run hospital I knew of in North America. The avian cryptids can heal almost anything, given sufficient time and resources. They could put Cathy’s face back together, or at least back into a shape that wouldn’t hurt every time she tried to open her eyes. Some secrets must be kept. That doesn’t make keeping them any less painful.)

  Every morning I got up and went to the PR building, where I spent hours with Colin, studying, reciting, and working my way through the long, slow process of learning to control the gifts I’d never asked my genes to give me. When I was done with that, I would shower, change, and get a ride to the employee gate, usually arriving just in time for my shift to start. Not exactly the sort of schedule that leaves a lot of time for a social life.

  Not that my time mattered. I’d been assigned to Fairyland on a permanent basis after telling Emily it was my preference within the Park. Having friends in high places paid some useful dividends, even if half the people I worked with now looked at me like I was a corporate spy, while the other half scurried around in silent terror, having somehow convinced themselves that I’d shoved the unfortunate Cathy into the fryer under the mistaken assumption that she was Robin.

  I had never been popular at work, but this was rapidly approaching ridiculous.

  And yet.

  I hadn’t started a single fire, intentionally or otherwise, since I’d started working with Colin. He’d asked me to pull the heat out of several candles and a handful of bright, spitting sparklers, turning fire into smoke into nothing at all, and I was starting to feel like that was the sort of thing I could learn to enjoy, the point where my body somehow converted the kinetic potential of the world into a beautiful sort of stillness.

  If I really tried, I could hold that same stillness under my breastbone, comforting and soothing me when my coworkers left me standing by myself in the middle of a guest-clogged store. I was clinging to that stillness now, as the afternoon parade floated majestically by outside the gift shop. The Goblin Market float was parallel to our window, and Princesses Laura and Lizzie ran wildly from one side to the other, dodging marauding goblins. Every time the music hit a crescendo they would grab one of the large plastic vines that had been provided for their use and swing themselves out over the adoring crowd, waving and blowing kisses before they turned around and did it all again.

  Other floats had other princesses and other routines, which meant that Fern was probably enjoying her lunch right about now. The princesses in the parade weren’t the ones who did the meet-and-greets with the guests: their costumes were usually sparklier, less screen-accurate, and designed for a different range of motion. Since only one iteration of each character could be loose in the Park at any given time, the photo princesses were getting a well-deserved break.

  The same could be said for those of us working along the parade route. The sidewalks a
nd walkways were clogged with gaping guests, making it virtually impossible for anyone to get into or out of the store. It was probably a safety hazard. As long as it gave us time to fold all these damn shirts, I didn’t care.

  That’s what I was doing when the engine blew. I was folding shirts, hands working on autopilot while my mind reviewed Colin’s most recent set of training exercises, my back to the street. There was a loud banging noise, like a nail gun going off, and someone screamed. That first scream was the bellwether for quite a few more. In a matter of seconds, the world was made entirely of screaming.

  I dropped the shirt, fingers suddenly nerveless, hands refusing to close. There was no heat, but I whipped around all the same, running toward the window. Half my coworkers were already there. No one shoved or jockeyed for position. We just stood, frozen, terrified, as the Goblin Market float toppled sideways, falling onto the crowded sidewalk.

  Several screams cut off abruptly, like the screamers were no longer available for comment. That was enough to break the spell my shock had cast. I ran for the door, pausing only long enough to lean over the counter and grab the first aid kit we kept there for the inevitable staff accidents. I didn’t think individually packaged aspirin and mini-bandages were going to help much, but I had to do something.

  The street outside had devolved into pure chaos. People were still screaming, scattering away from the fallen float like it was a giant grenade chucked into their midst. The sound was somehow muted, unable to live up to the impact of that first, ear-splitting cacophony. Babies and young children wailed, clinging to their parents or—more chillingly—sitting abandoned on the curb, with no caretakers in sight.

  The float itself was on its side, completely obscuring a long stretch of sidewalk, burying whatever had been there under more than a ton of plastic, papier-mâché, and metal rebar. A red pool was forming along the float’s edge, and despite the theme of the area, I knew it hadn’t come from a pomegranate, full and fine.