Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  “Because the stamina they need to change forms without suffering from multiple organ failure has just got to translate to bed,” Verity had replied, attempting what might charitably be called a leer.

  “You’re a pervert,” Elise had said, in a prim tone, and I had thrown my allegiance in with her on the spot.

  Now, years and miles and a thousand bad decisions later, I lay curled against Sam in the cocoon of my sheets, the hot Florida air pressing down on us and covering our exposed skin in a sheen of sweat, and thought Verity had been onto something, in her usual blunt instrument manner. It wasn’t the stamina, or the potential for shapeshifting. It was that the therianthrope in question was Sam Taylor. I didn’t love him. He didn’t love me. But as his tail tightened around my waist, drawing me closer in his sleep, keeping me anchored, I realized two things:

  If he didn’t leave soon, I was going to wind up loving him, whether I wanted to or not.

  And I didn’t want him to go.

  I pressed a kiss to the skin of his cheek, just above the furry line of his cheekbone, nestled my head against his shoulder, and closed my eyes. I was hot and sticky and needed a shower more than ever. Between the parade accident, the roller skating, and the remarkably acrobatic sex, I was sore in places that I hadn’t been consciously aware of before. There was no way I was going to fall asleep. No way.

  What felt like seconds later, I opened my eyes again, and I was alone in the bed. Sunlight slanted under the edge of the curtain, filling my room with an eerie Twilight Zone glow. I sat bolt upright, the muscles in my back and thighs protesting, looking wildly around for any sign that Sam’s sudden appearance on the doorstep hadn’t been an oddly sexual wish fulfillment dream.

  There wasn’t one. My clothes were strewn around the floor, but that happened regardless of whether I had company. Back at home, a messy room had been a solid defense mechanism. Once my siblings figured out that they couldn’t tell where I’d spilled the caltrops just by looking, they’d gotten a lot more careful about sneaking into my room to steal my shit. Here, it was a comforting reminder that this wasn’t forever: one day, I would shove all my secondhand Lowry tank tops and worn-out yoga pants into a bag and go back to the loving arms of my family, where I didn’t have to be frightened all the time. Better yet, I’d leave it all behind, and drop a match on it as I walked away.

  I slid slowly out of the bed and grabbed my yoga pants off the floor, yanking them on before casting around for a shirt that didn’t smell like blood, sweat, or diesel fuel. It was harder than it should have been, but in short enough order I was dressed and creeping out into the hall, shoulders hunched, listening for signs of danger.

  Instead, I heard laughter, and the distinctive pop of frying bacon. The smell of pancakes hit me a moment later. I straightened up. There’s only one person who would come into my apartment and start making breakfast—and as a hint, it’s not one of my roommates. Fern can’t cook to save her life. Megan can cook. It’s just that most of the things she produces are dangerous to the human esophagus.

  I walked briskly down the hall to the small “dining nook” attached to the kitchen, separated by a Formica island that should have been remodeled sometime in the late seventies. Our battered secondhand kitchen table was occupied for a change, by Fern, sipping a mixed berry smoothie out of a reusable 7-11 cup . . . and Sam, who had a cup of coffee in his right hand and another held firmly in his tail, in case someone tried to take it away.

  Mary was in the kitchen, flipping pancakes with the ease of a long-time diner cook. She turned at the sound of my footsteps—or maybe at the sound of my heartbeat, ghosts can be creepy sometimes—and flashed me a grin. She was dressed in her customary seventies hippie gear, peasant blouse and bell-bottomed jeans, and there were daisies braided in her hair.

  “You left your phone in your gym bag,” she said. “Fairyland is closed today, and all workers who witnessed the accident—that would be you—have been given a shift off, with pay, probably so you won’t sue. And, um, someone named Colin texted you and said that under the circumstances, you didn’t need to come see him this morning. So you’re free. There’s bacon, and pancakes will be up in a moment.”

  I stayed where I was, blinking, trying to tamp down the lingering remnants of panic and replace them with something verging on comprehension. It didn’t help that Sam wasn’t wearing a shirt. Combining a higher than human body temperature with our unreliable air-conditioning probably made that a bad idea. He offered me a sideways, almost hesitant smile.

  “You were out cold,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you. Especially not once Mary said you didn’t need to work.”

  “I wouldn’t have let him wake you anyway,” said Mary. “You don’t sleep nearly enough. You need to work on that.”

  “You’re dead,” I said. “You sleep forever. Where’s Megan?”

  “She had to go to the hospital for her shift,” said Fern around a mouthful of bacon. The reason for her relative quiet was obvious when I looked at her plate: she was doing her best to show Sam that size didn’t matter when it came to putting away breakfast foods. “She said to tell you she doesn’t care if your boyfriend stays over, but if he drinks her cherimoya juice, she’ll let her hair bite him.”

  “Sam, don’t drink Megan’s cherimoya juice,” I said, heading for the kitchen. The lure of pancakes was too great to resist any longer.

  “What’s a cherimoya?” he asked.

  “It’s a fruit,” I said. Mary handed me a plate. I began piling pancakes and bacon onto it. “They’re from Colombia, I think. Incredibly tasty, unless you eat the seeds, which will kill the crap out of you. Really interesting neurotoxins. Megan puts her cherimoya into the juicer whole.”

  Sam frowned. “Meaning . . . ?”

  “Meaning the juice is full of crushed neurotoxic seeds, and if you drank it, you’d probably be dead before you hit the floor, so don’t drink it.” I walked back to the table. The seat next to him was open. I hesitated like a kid in a high school cafeteria before sinking into it, and was rewarded for my bravery with a quick, shy grin.

  Fern rolled her eyes. “Get a room.”

  “I have a room,” I said. “I just came out of my room.”

  “I spent the night in her room,” said Sam with the faintest hint of smugness. He took a sip of his coffee—first one mug, and then the other. “No work today. That’s good, right?”

  “Good and bad.” I leaned across the table to snag the milk. When you have hobbies like mine, healthy bones aren’t just a good idea, they’re a necessary investment in not becoming a smear on the track. “Good, I didn’t oversleep and get myself in trouble. Bad, I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.”

  “Says the girl with her boyfriend, who she hasn’t seen in six months, sitting next to her,” said Mary.

  I shot her a glare that would probably have been a lot more effective if it had contained any actual heat. “I told you not to bring him here.”

  “I didn’t,” said Mary. “I just told him where to find you, and that you needed him if you wanted to stay alive.”

  “It’s not like I was doing anything,” said Sam.

  Fern fixed him with a stern look. In that moment, she seemed to be channeling my mother. I choked on my milk, barely managing to keep it from coming out of my nose.

  “What do you do?” she asked.

  “Well, ma’am,” he said, with sudden politeness, “I’m normally a trapeze artist with my family’s carnival, and I do a lot of administrative tasks for my grandmother, who owns the show. Unfortunately, we had a little issue with fire damage—”

  “Meaning Annie burned the whole damn place to the ground to keep the Covenant from tracking them all down and killing them deader than I am,” said Mary blithely.

  Sam continued, unruffled, “—and had to shut down for the rest of the season. The insurance money is coming through, and we
’ve rented a training facility in Indiana, so everybody’s staying in shape. This will probably be good for the show in the long run. New rides, new equipment, time to work on our routines without needing to worry about keeping our bellies full—honestly, it’s a blessing.”

  “I hear a ‘but’ coming on,” said Mary.

  “But it’s boring,” said Sam. “But there are humans around like, all the time, talking to my grandmother, or running more tests on the residue from the fire, or doing one more interview before they sign off on the latest report. And we’re sharing space with another carnival, and they’re all nice people, but they have their own way of doing things, and some of them are sort of naïve when it comes to remembering that humans don’t own the whole world, just most of it. So I have to stay human unless I’m in my room or in a closed rehearsal.”

  Fern frowned. “So?”

  “Imagine trying to hold in a sneeze when you really need to pee,” said Sam. “Now imagine doing that forever.”

  Fern’s frown melted into a look of horror. She looked to me for confirmation.

  “He means it,” I said, nodding. “Fūri aren’t like chupacabra. They actually have a default form, and it’s not the one that looks like me.”

  One of the other jammers with the league back in Portland, Princess Leya-you-out, is a chupacabra. For her, standing on two legs is exactly as natural and comfortable as wandering around on four. She doesn’t change forms when she sleeps, because whichever form she’s in is her “real” one. Sam, like all fūri, works slightly differently. For him, humanity is an effort, a disguise he puts on, rather than a shape he shifts out of.

  “Wow,” said Fern. Then, almost shyly, she said, “When we’re kids, sylphs don’t have a stable density. That’s why we don’t really live in big family groups anymore. Sometimes children float away, and that’s not safe, so we all have to take precautions.”

  “What kind?” asked Sam.

  “Um. Well, usually, people have babies and then give them to crèche workers to raise. We have, you know, a few of them left. Around the country. Big houses in the middle of nowhere, where kids can grow up until they’re old enough to know what density their body ought to be. Then you practice every day, until you can stay the same always.”

  I frowned. “When do your parents come back for you?”

  “Oh. They don’t. We’re all adopted.” Fern was suddenly very interested in her bacon. “Once you settle, a family that has a space for a kid will come and get you, and then you’re theirs. My family was really nice. They had dropped off a daughter about my age, so maybe I was even related to them.”

  Sam’s frown joined mine. “How do you, you know,” he asked. “Not wind up sleeping with your brother by mistake?”

  “People who aren’t good to sleep with smell wrong when you’re in estrus,” said Fern blithely. “Like you wouldn’t smell right, so I wouldn’t sleep with you, because you’re not the same species as me.”

  “Huh,” said Sam, while I stuffed a bite of pancake into my mouth to stop myself from asking any more questions. This was fascinating to me, and that was the problem. If I let myself, I could turn this into an all-day biology lesson, and I couldn’t even write anything down. Until I made it home, back to my mice and my notebooks and the safety of the family compound, I had to view every space as compromised, all the time, and that meant never leaving a written record.

  “I have to work today,” said Fern, and stood, saving me from myself. “They only closed Fairyland, and that’s going to channel extra traffic into all the rest of the Park.”

  “Even though bad things happened?” asked Sam.

  “Remember the carnival after I found the dead body?” I speared another piece of pancake. “People love a tragedy, as long as they feel like they’re seeing it from a safe distance. Ticket sales are probably up for the day.”

  Complaints would be up, too. People who’d decided to come to Lowryland hoping for a glimpse of charred pavement or damaged landscaping would nonetheless be furious when they realized that a whole section of the Park was closed down. The managers would be working double time to soothe the shouters and the tantrum-throwers, leaving their poor underlings to handle the wolves. It was going to be a fun, fun day, and while I wouldn’t say that a day off was worth it, I was grateful not to need to go into the fray.

  Not as an employee, anyway. I paused thoughtfully before I turned to Sam, grinned, and asked, “How’d you like to go to Lowryland?”

  Fifteen

  “There’s a place for everything, and everything has its place. It just so happens that this knife belongs in your spleen.”

  –Enid Healy

  The front gates of Lowryland

  AS AN EMPLOYEE OF Lowryland, I got free access to the Park and its guest facilities when I wasn’t working. Better yet, I was allowed to bring people with me. Not every day, but twice a month, which was twice more than I’d been asking anyone to come up until now. I hadn’t even known that Cylia was in town, and without her, who was I going to invite? Nobody, that was who.

  Nobody until now. Sam tilted his head back, features impeccably human, eyes shaded by a Monty Mule baseball cap that Fern had dug out of the front closet before running for the tram, and squinted at the façade above the gates. It was an impressive piece of wrought iron filigree, rendered all the more eye-catching by the fact that its elegant whorls and delicate traceries actually etched out the faces of Lowry’s most famous cartoon characters.

  “I never thought I’d get to see a Monty Mule head bigger than I am tall,” he said, in a hushed tone.

  I shot him a sidelong glance. “Don’t tell me you’re a true believer.”

  “What?” He shrugged broadly. “I grew up in a carnival caravan. Until I was old enough to actually do stuff, videos kept me from driving Grandma up the wall. I’ve seen everything Lowry’s ever done. Most of it twice.”

  “Only twice?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’m lying so I’ll still seem cool and macho and awesome, and like I’m not internally screaming about the idea of getting to meet Laura and Lizzie.”

  “You won’t today.” The line inched forward, tourists digging their tickets out of their fanny packs while sneering locals flashed their annual passes like the ability to fork over way too much money for a piece of character-branded plastic somehow granted them a measure of moral superiority. Both groups were accompanied by overexcited, overstimulated children, the girls in puffy princess dresses, the boys waving plastic swords and bellowing at one another.

  (Occasionally we’d get a girl with a sword—we got plenty of girls who looked at the swords with raw avarice in their eyes, like they’d never seen anything so beautiful before and never would, ever again—or a boy with a princess crown, but sadly, the parents were the ones paying, and the parents were often not in the mood to listen to what their kids wanted. If I ever had kids, they were all going to have dresses, and swords, and tiny siege engines, if that was what it took to make them happy.)

  Sam looked at me, hurt. “Why not? Do you need kids to meet the princesses?”

  The brief image of him bribing families to let him borrow their kids was as charming as it was likely to involve Park Security. I shook my head. “No, but Fairyland is closed, remember? They do their meet-and-greets in Fairyland.”

  “So who’s that?” Sam pointed past the ticket takers and the lines. I looked.

  There, in the front plaza, in front of the majestic Rainbow Fountain that ticked off the hours of Lowry’s dreamland, were two princesses in wine-dark jewel tones, surrounded by children squalling for their turn at a picture. I blinked, nonplussed.

  “I guess they moved the girls for the day.” It made sense—Laura and Lizzie were two of Lowry’s most popular princesses, buoyed by their soft feminist message and striking color palette. They weren’t pastel, which made them popular with girls who’d been s
old the message of “not being like other girls,” and their movie actually wasn’t awful, which meant they stayed popular with teenagers. Maybe I was biased, working in their section of the Park and all, but I should have realized that management would relocate the princesses rather than disappoint that many kids.

  The line moved again. We reached the front, and I showed the ticket taker my cast ID, letting her run it through the scanner. When it brought up the record indicating that I was an active employee who hadn’t brought in any guests this period, she handed Sam a ticket to use if he needed to leave and come back again before waving us both into the Park, not even bothering to tell us to dream big—the standard greeting.

  I didn’t mind, but this was Sam’s first time, and it bothered me a little, at least until I saw him making a beeline for the two actresses in their princess gear, a determined look on his face. I laughed and chased after him. No one needed to tell us to dream big. Sam was going to do it without any prompting.

  It took half an hour to get through the queue around the princesses and snap a few pictures of Sam, using his phone to do the dirty deed. He looked almost bashful, sandwiched between the two girls with his hat shading his eyes and a shy grin on his face. When he was done, he came bounding back to me, snatching the phone out of my hand and checking the pictures like he couldn’t believe they were really there.

  “Wow,” he said. “Oh, wow. Look at that. There I am.”

  “So did you come looking for me because you missed me, or because you heard I might be able to get you into Lowryland?”

  The question was asked in jest: I was laughing by the time I finished. The look Sam gave me was pure seriousness.

  “I’m here for you,” he said, tucking his phone into his pocket. “I just. You know. Wanted to meet them.”

  “Hey, and I’m cool with that,” I assured him. “Come on. Let me show you where I work.”

  I offered him my hand. He took it without hesitation, and we strolled, together, like a couple of tourists, out of the entry plaza and onto the long small town stretch of Lowry’s Welcoming World.