Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  One of the curling blackberry vines the actresses playing Laura and Lizzie usually used as handholds while they raced around their float was on fire. I ran toward it, trying to feel the heat, to focus my training on pulling it out of the world. A burning float was one of the only things I could think of that would make this already bad situation genuinely worse.

  My hands stayed cold and calm. They were just hands. I stopped in the middle of the street, buffeted on all sides by guests fleeing from the accident, and stared at them. There was no heat. I could feel what was coming off the float, feel it getting stronger as the fire began to spread, but it was all external fire. There was nothing inside me.

  Colin’s words about babies and the way they screamed, hurting themselves because they didn’t know any better, flashed through my mind. I knew better now. I knew hurting myself didn’t do me any long-term good. But dammit, I could have done with that lesson kicking in a little later.

  “Fuck,” I muttered—a firing offense if any of the fleeing guests felt like reporting me for swearing while wearing an official Lowryland uniform—and started running again, heading for the center of the chaos.

  The actress playing Lizzie had been flung free when the float went down. She was sprawled on the concrete about ten feet away from the wheels, one arm bent at an angle that spoke clearly of a bad break, the sort of thing that would require more than just a cast to repair. I stopped next to her, crouching down and feeling for a pulse. She moaned when my fingers pressed against her throat. That was a good sign. Dead people don’t usually make a lot of noise.

  “You need to be as still as possible,” I said. Most of the crowd was already past this point, fleeing for places that weren’t at risk of being on fire; the injured actress’s chances of being trampled were low. “You fell hard, and you could have a spinal injury.”

  She moaned again. It was difficult to tell for sure whether she could hear me. If she couldn’t, she was unlikely to move, and if she could, she would hopefully listen. I shoved myself back to my feet and ran on toward the float, hissing, “Mary,” under my breath.

  “Mary” is a pretty common name. My dead aunt doesn’t appear every time I say it, which is a good thing, given how many Marys I’ve met through cheerleading, roller derby, and being a physical meat creature who walks in the world and has to deal with the consequences of uninspired parents. But she hears it every time a member of the family says her name, and she can choose to come and see what we’re going on about. I ran, and suddenly a white-haired woman was running next to me, her steps making no sound.

  “What the hell?” she demanded.

  “Float fell,” I replied. There were sirens in the distance, the sound of Lowryland’s emergency teams racing toward us. There’d be no effort to cover this one up. This wasn’t some behind the scenes accident where no guests had been injured. This was a full-on disaster, and everyone was going to get involved.

  The trouble with something like this—apart from the loss of life and the therapy that all these children were going to need—came from Lowryland’s design. Like most Florida theme parks, real estate was at a premium, and a space that wasn’t somehow interactive or eye-catching or otherwise keeping our guests engaged was a waste of money. That meant there were very few straight roads within the Park itself. Security staff could come through the backlot and the tunnels, but the emergency vehicles? Those had to travel along one of a limited number of routes, and at this time of day, with the rest of the parade still clogging the street and screaming guests fleeing everywhere, getting through to us was going to be just this side of impossible.

  “What do you want me to do?” demanded Mary.

  I looked quickly around. No one was looking at us. Anything that happened now was likely to be written off as shock, a hallucinatory aftereffect of seeing something this horrible happen in a place that was supposed to be all about happiness and joy.

  “Go under the float,” I said. “See how many dead we’re dealing with. If there are any ghosts, see if you can convince them to go away. I’m going to take care of the kids.”

  Mary nodded and was gone. I kept running until I reached the sidewalk and the first of the sobbing, somehow left behind children.

  Please, you were with an older sibling who forgot about you, I thought desperately, picking up a weeping little girl with one arm and grabbing a baby carrier with the other. The girl wailed and buried her face against my shoulder. I was a stranger, sure, but I was a stranger in a Goblin Market costume. She was wearing a sparkly Princess Laura dress. Having someone from what was probably her favorite movie come to rescue her must have been the only thing that made sense right now.

  There was blood on the lacy edge of her dress. Please think it’s jam, I thought, and ran until I reached a bench, where I plopped both child and carrier down.

  The little girl didn’t go easily. She grabbed for me as soon as it became apparent what I was trying to do, making a keening noise in the back of her throat, like a distressed puppy. I offered her my brightest Lowryland smile.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Melody. What’s your name?”

  “Ginger,” she sniffled.

  “Is this baby with you, Ginger?”

  She shook her head.

  “Okay. I have a big job for you, princess. Do you think you can do a big job for me?”

  “I want my mommy,” she whispered.

  I understood the sentiment better than I’d ever thought I would as an adult. I wanted my own mommy so badly that it hurt. “I know, princess,” I said, smoothing Ginger’s hair back from her face. “But I need to help some more people before we can go find your mom, and I need you to be brave and strong like Laura, and watch this baby for me, okay? I can’t take a carrier with me while I make sure everyone else is okay.”

  Everyone else was not okay. There was too much blood for that, and too much screaming, even now that most of the guests had fled. A lot of people were never going to be okay again. I kept looking at Ginger and kept smiling, listening to the sirens getting closer and the wailing of the wounded.

  Finally, sniffling, she said, “Okay,” and leaned against the baby carrier. The pressure of her body caused it to rock, and the wailing infant stopped, apparently startled into silence.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said solemnly, before turning on my heel and sprinting back into the chaos.

  Mary was there, her hair standing out like a banner against the blood and smoke. Sometimes I thought she had someone with her, but whenever I tried to look closer, they were gone, fading back into the landscape. She was gathering ghosts, the newly-dead who were still too close to the twilight to be visible to the living. That was . . . that was not great. I mean, it was great in the sense that Lowryland might not wind up more haunted than it already was, and yet. It would have been nice if no one had died.

  It would have been wonderful.

  I plucked four more children off the sidewalks and ran them back to Ginger, who was taking enthusiastically to her new role as “person who was keeping an eye on everyone else.” I would drop them off and run again as she started to explain the situation, that I was one of Princess Laura’s helpers, and I was going to find all their mommies and daddies just as soon as I was finished finding everyone. She made it sound like a game. That was probably at least half shock speaking, keeping her from fully understanding what was going on.

  A little shock would have been nice. A little shock would have been great, as I moved aside a sheet of fallen plastic to reveal the actress who played Laura. Had played Laura. She wasn’t going to be playing any roles after this one, save perhaps—after the mortician finished working on her—the role of beautiful corpse. Lizzie’s actress had gotten off easy with her broken arm. Laura’s actress had a broken neck, and a wide swath of skin had been scraped off the side of her face, exposing muscle and bone.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, and
placed the plastic gently back across her body, so none of the remaining guests would accidentally see her and realize what had happened.

  She wasn’t the only casualty. She wasn’t even the worst of them. I was trying to convince a weeping man to let go of his boyfriend’s hand and move away from a structurally unsound piece of the float when the sirens suddenly got much closer, and I turned to see the full Lowryland security team rounding the corner. A knot in my chest let go, allowing me to breathe again. They were here. I wasn’t alone anymore. I wasn’t alone.

  A glance at the flower clock next to the gift shop told me that it had been less than ten minutes since the float collapsed. It felt like it had been so much longer. I straightened, trying to shake off the feeling that time was broken, that something had somehow gone horribly wrong and caused everything to stretch out like taffy.

  A child was crying. An adult was still screaming. The Lowryland security team was running for the float, while the handlers they’d brought with them were working to clear the remaining guests away.

  A hand touched my elbow. I flinched and whipped around. There was Mary, now wearing the uniform of a Fairyland staffer. It made sense. She didn’t do it often, for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention from management, but with the chaos around us, no one was going to be pointing fingers at a single unfamiliar face.

  “Come on,” she said, getting a firmer grip on my arm and tugging me backward, toward her, away from the chaos. “You need to stop staring and come on.”

  I looked at her blankly, not resisting, but not helping her either. That shock I’d been wishing for felt like it was finally settling in. Yay. “What? Why?”

  “Because people are snapping out of it, and they’re taking pictures, and you’ve been behind smoke or behind ghosts until now, but the number of cameras is about to skyrocket, and I can’t keep your ugly mug off the news forever.” Mary looked at me grimly. “Run or get outed to the world.”

  I chose “run.”

  Mary slung an arm around my shoulders as I hunched slightly forward, trying to give the impression that I was feeling poorly and needed to get to a toilet before I tossed my cookies all over the bloody pavement. People behind us were shouting and clearing the sidewalks, and no one was paying attention to two seemingly uninjured workers.

  We made it through the employee door and into a quiet stretch of the backlot before my knees went weak and I nearly toppled forward. Mary was there to grab me and keep me from going over—mostly. She was still sweet sixteen, and a skinny sixteen to boot. I was more than a foot taller, and easily fifty pounds heavier. She managed to slow my descent, but in the end, she couldn’t keep my knees from hitting the concrete.

  The crunching sound they made was familiar from a thousand roller derby practices, and oddly soothing. The world was turning itself merrily upside down. I could still feel pain, and still pay for the choices I made.

  “Hey.” Mary knelt in front of me, brushing my hair away from my eyes. Her own eyes were a thousand miles of empty highway, a color that wasn’t really a color and was more a state of despair. They shouldn’t have been soothing. I’ve been looking at them for almost my entire life, and they were something familiar I could cling to. “Stay with me now. Don’t you go wherever it is you want to go.”

  “I want to go home,” I whispered, and my voice had so much in common with little Ginger that it hurt to hear.

  “You could.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I know.” Mary offered a small, half-pained smile. “But you’re with me now. Breathe. Keep breathing. I’m going to go get you something to bring your blood sugar back up. You should be safe here. Do you feel like you’ll be safe here?”

  I nodded, closing my eyes. Despite the bone-deep weariness that was settling over me now that the adrenaline was leaving my body, I wasn’t hurt; I wasn’t even scratched, unless I wanted to count my aching knees. I was just tired. This was so like what I had trained for, and so unlike it at the same time, that I didn’t have the coping mechanisms I needed.

  “Okay. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

  There was the faintest of sounds, like air rushing back into the space where she’d been, and I was alone. I kept my eyes closed, inhaling through my nose and exhaling through my mouth, looking for that quiet core of serenity that Colin had been helping me to find.

  The fire hadn’t been there when I needed it. After so many accidents and one notable save—it’s hard to top burning down the big tent while I was still in it for the needlessly dramatic, even if that alone hadn’t been enough to save the carnival—the fire hadn’t been there. I was learning to speak, and losing the ability to scream. That was unnerving on a level that I didn’t really have the words for. If turning me into a better sorcerer meant I wasn’t going to be able to defend myself, was it really worth it?

  (Did I even want to be a sorcerer? I didn’t have a choice about being a magic-user. It’s in my genes, a gift from a distant grandfather who disappeared long before I was born, and I can’t reject it any more than I can change the color of my eyes. But there’s a big difference between having a talent and training it in a specific way. If I kept working with Colin, one day his way wouldn’t just be the right way: it would be the only way, and I wouldn’t understand why I’d ever thought differently. There was only so much of a window for stopping this, and it was getting narrower by the day.)

  “Miss West.” The voice was Emily’s. The fact that it hadn’t been accompanied by footsteps was somehow unsurprising. Routewitches aren’t heard when they don’t want to be. “Why am I not surprised to find you in the midst of another crisis?”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said, not opening my eyes. I hadn’t done it. The fact that I’d been nearby both times was just a terrible coincidence.

  Wasn’t it?

  “I know. I do believe we may need to have a conversation, however, about why you run away whenever it seems your picture might be taken. You can open your eyes, by the way. It’s just the two of us here.” I could hear the smile in her voice. It had teeth. “Your little ghost isn’t going to be able to come back until I decide to let her. It seemed like a good time to remind her that she’s a guest in our home.”

  Crap. I opened my eyes and tilted my head, looking up at her. “You knew she was here?”

  “I know whenever a ghost steps foot on Lowryland property. Most of them are tourists even among the guests. You’d be surprised by how many people have ‘ride the Midsummer Night’s Scream one last time’ as their unfinished business. Well, that, and the Re-Entry. I’m not sure why it’s the roller coasters that bring back the dead. Maybe it’s something about wanting to feel afraid enough to be alive again.” Emily shook her head, looking unperturbed by the lack of a clear explanation. “I know every time she visits. I just didn’t know why she was showing up here. Now I do, and I can find her whenever I want.”

  “Right.” My stomach sank. After more than fifty years, was I going to be the one who doomed Mary to a routewitch’s spirit jar, all because I wound up choosing the wrong theme park? They probably didn’t have these problems at Disney World.

  “Get up.” Emily offered her hand. I took it, letting her pull me to my feet. She looked at me critically. “You have blood in your hair and on your collar. That’s going to be difficult to get out of the fabric.”

  “I’m good with blood.”

  Emily raised an eyebrow. “As you say. I’m going to be recommending all damages due to this incident be waived on the cast member level. We don’t want to discourage people from playing Good Samaritan when things like this happen—which, God forbid, is sometimes unavoidable. We run a fairly tight ship here. Accidents are still going to slip through.”

  My fingers itched, not with fire, but with the urge to slap her. “Princess Laura’s face came off on the pavement,” I said quietly. “This wasn’t an accident. This was a tragedy
.”

  Ginger was probably still waiting for me to come back. No. No. I couldn’t think like that. Ginger’s mother was fine. She wasn’t one of the people crushed under the bulk of the float. She was fine. She was probably with her daughter right now, helping to get the other children back to their families. Ginger would be the darling of the people looking for a positive human interest story to pluck out of this disaster, the little girl in the Princess Laura dress who’d stepped up and somehow organized her own little nursery school.

  I was happy to let her have the limelight. She might get something good out of it. All I would get was pain.

  “Of course, it’s a tragedy,” said Emily. “What do you take me for? I’m not a monster, Melody. But this Park is my world, and it’s your world , at least for now. Whether you intend to stay with us forever or not, you need to consider Lowryland in everything you do.”

  “Her face,” I repeated.

  “Yes. Security is coordinating the EMTs now, and we have firetrucks and engineering en route, ready to remove the float and find out what caused the failure. This is a public relations nightmare. We’ll be dealing with the repercussions for a year or more. Disney will laugh all the way to the bank. And you helped. You ran into the danger when there was no reason to. You’re a very lucky girl.” Emily reached out and took my chin between her thumb and forefinger, looking at me critically. “Very lucky.”

  I took a step back when she let me go. It was automatic, unavoidable. She didn’t look surprised.

  “Go home, Melody,” she said. “We’re closing early today.”

  Then she turned and walked away, leaving me utterly, achingly alone.

  Twelve

  “There are a lot of ways to be haunted. Some of them are even good ones, if you’re up for it.”

  –Mary Dunlavy

  Lowryland, backstage, walking slow

  MARY DIDN’T COME BACK.