Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  “What can they take?” asked Sam.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said luck and magic aren’t road concepts, so routewitches can’t take them,” said Sam. “That makes it sound like there’s something they can take. What can they take?”

  “Distance,” said Rose. “Routewitches can steal distance.”

  I frowned. “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Distance is potential, and potential is power,” said Rose. “If you walk a hundred miles, that’s a hundred miles of power slathered all over your skin. A good routewitch can peel that away from you. It’s the basic driving force of the snake cults, only less scaly, and less stupid.”

  “I knew that part,” I said. “I’ve heard of routewitches using distance—it’s the main power behind most of their spells—but I’ve never heard of them stealing it before.”

  “That’s because ethical routewitches won’t,” said Rose firmly. “Apple won’t let them.”

  Sam put up a hand. “Who’s Apple?” he asked, with the air of a man who had gone wading in the shallows, only to discover that there was a whole deep ocean waiting to devour him.

  “She’s the current Queen of the Routewitches. She holds court on the Ocean Lady, and she’ll kick your ass from here to Tuesday morning if she thinks you’re breaking her rules. Not a nice woman, necessarily, but a fair one, and a reasonably kind one, when it comes to that. The routewitches have done worse.” Rose shook her head. “Stealing distance is like stealing anything: it’s a violation. They’d have to rip it off of a person, unless they could make it a trade somehow, and even that would be . . . difficult. The road thrives on fair exchange.”

  “Meaning . . .” I prompted.

  “Meaning I get flesh from the loan of a coat, and a phantom rider gets freedom from the length of a road, and everything balances. If a routewitch wants distance from the living, they would normally need to make it part of a barter. I’ll give you this if you give me that. It’s hard to do that accidentally.”

  A cold feeling appeared in the pit of my stomach. I felt myself go very still, the hair on my arms standing on end. “Sam,” I said, and turned to face him, only him, focusing on the lines of his face until I couldn’t see anyone else, not even in my peripheral vision. It needed to be only him, because this was my fault. “Can I see your ticket?”

  Sam blinked. Understanding bloomed in his eyes, spreading to cover his entire expression, wiping everything else away. “Yeah,” he said, and dipped his hand into his pocket.

  He put the ticket on the table like it was a dead rat, something to be dropped as quickly and as cleanly as possible. He pulled his fingers away almost instantly, as if he was afraid lingering would give me the opportunity to touch him again. That hurt. Not as much as the realization of what must have happened, but . . . it still hurt.

  I picked up the ticket, turning it over. The fine print on the back was as dense and tight-packed as I remembered. Turning my body toward Rose, I read aloud, “‘This ticket is provided under the auspices of Lowry Entertainment, Inc., and cannot be transferred or re-sold once activated. Acceptance of this ticket constitutes agreement to be filmed, photographed, and interviewed for future marketing purposes while on Lowry property. Acceptance of this ticket is perpetual and binding. All clauses can and will be exercised at the discretion of Lowry Entertainment, Inc. No refunds or returns will be entertained.’” My mouth was dry. I paused and swallowed, resisting the urge to close my eyes. “There’s a quote under that, from one of the early Monty Mule cartoons. ‘If you’re lucky enough to be lucky, share the luck around.’”

  Rose snapped her fingers. “And there it is.”

  “Oh, my sweet Zeus.” Cylia put her head on the table. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Sam looked between us, and scowled. “Now’s where someone explains this to me in small words, or I get pissed.”

  “When you took the ticket, you gave Lowry permission to take your luck.” Rose stepped forward and snatched the ticket out of my hand—or tried to, anyway. In the absence of a coat, her fingers passed straight through the paper. She scowled. “Mary!”

  “I’m not your maid,” said Mary. She moved to stand next to Rose, gesturing for me to hand over the ticket. I did. Rose transferred her scowl to the other ghost.

  They’re both dead, but the rules governing them are very different, and while I wouldn’t want to be the one to say that one was better off than the other, watching Rose struggle to interact with the living world when she didn’t have a coat was sometimes a strong vote in Mary’s favor. Although unlike Mary, Rose doesn’t answer to a malicious and sometimes predatory force of the universe. Checks and balances in all things, I suppose.

  “Is that going to take Mary’s luck now?” asked Sam.

  “No; the ticket’s nontransferable,” said Rose, sounding distracted. She leaned forward, scowling at the words for a moment before straightening, shaking her head, and announcing, “You work for assholes. You know that, right, Timmy?”

  “‘Timmy’?” asked Cylia.

  “My full name’s ‘Antimony,’” I said, frowning at Rose. “I sort of know that, but why do you say so?”

  “Because taking one of their theme park tickets grants them unlimited consent to take your luck whenever you’re on Lowry property. Do you know how much shit Lowry owns? They’re no Disney, but I’m pretty sure they own an airport. You’re fucked. You take one of these and stuff it in your wallet as a pretty souvenir and it doesn’t matter if it’s six years later, they can activate it and steal whatever they want from you.” Rose shook her head. She looked disgusted. She also looked distantly impressed, like she was fighting her own desire to admire their work. “A routewitch didn’t write this, but a routewitch helped. It’s very close to the standard distance exchange. I give you this, you give me that, everybody walks away happy.”

  I put my head in my hands. “When Sam took the ticket, he agreed to the fine print, and now Lowry gets to take his luck.”

  “Not if we burn the ticket,” said Mary calmly.

  I lifted my head and peered at her. “Aren’t you worried about your luck?”

  “It’s nontransferable, and I’m dead,” she said. “I have a different kind of luck now. Isn’t that right, Cylia?” She turned her open highway eyes toward our hostess.

  Cylia sucked in a startled breath, sitting up a little straighter. “Yes, ma’am,” she said. Any incongruity in a woman nearly ten years my senior addressing a teenager as “ma’am” was washed away by the empty roads of Mary’s eyes. “No living jink can touch ghost luck. Dead ones can touch living luck, but we don’t talk about them much.”

  “You shouldn’t,” Mary agreed. “If you did, even the people who ought to be your allies would join the Covenant in hunting you down. Some power shouldn’t belong to anybody. Annie?”

  “Yes, Aunt Mary?”

  “You need to get the hell away from Lowryland. Whatever these people are doing, it’s not right, it’s not good, and it’s going to get a lot more people hurt than it already has.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “But I’m not going.”

  Everyone stopped. In the case of Mary and Rose, they stopped so perfectly, so completely, that they might as well have been pictures painted on the air. Sam and Cylia just froze. They were still alive, and I took comfort in that fact. Sometimes it can be awkward, being the only living person in a room.

  Sam recovered first. “If I were allowed to touch you right now, I’d be slinging you over my shoulder and running for the door,” he growled. “Why the hell don’t you want to leave?”

  “Because you’re not allowed to touch me right now,” I said.

  He looked at me blankly. So did the others. I sighed.

  “The luck-theft doesn’t target employees,” I said. “We don’t get tickets like guests do. We have our passes, and we’re supposed to ke
ep our ID badges on us at all times. I’m willing to bet that there’s some kind of a counter-charm built into the plastic to keep us from being affected if we do pick up a ticket for some reason, or we’d be dealing with a rash of dead janitors.” They couldn’t be stealing luck from employees. There was no way they’d have been able to cover for that many accidents.

  “So?” said Sam.

  “So employees are getting hurt. It started recently, and it’s getting worse. People died in the parade collapse.” I took a deep breath. “This began when Fern found the dead man outside the Midsummer Night’s Scream. The people who would know said that . . . they said he’d been unlucky. The cut that killed him was a fluke. So call him a possible consequence of the normal luck theft. He got his luck swiped, and then he got into a fight, and what should have been a pretty standard tussle turned into murder.”

  “This isn’t explaining why you need to stay, sweetie,” said Mary, sounding more like my babysitter than she had in years. “If anything, this is explaining why you need to go.”

  “Because it was after that man died that the cabal running Lowryland found out I existed,” I said. “They’re stealing my magic. They said they would train me, and instead, they’ve been using me like a battery. Employees didn’t start getting hurt until I waltzed in and dropped an untrained, uneducated magic-user in their laps. They’re using me to boost their effects, and people are dying. We can’t leave until I figure out how to stop them and get my magic back.”

  I had lived for years without fire in my fingers, and when it had started to develop, I’d wished it gone with everything I had. Now I finally had someone willing to take it away from me, and all they wanted in exchange was more than anyone had the right to ask me to give.

  Lowryland owed a lot of people a lot of luck, and I was going to make sure the bills were paid. I owed the dead that much. They had been hurt, however inadvertently, because of me.

  Mary sighed. “Why the hell did I instill a sense of responsibility in you? Biggest mistake I ever made.”

  “You wanted me to be the best that I could be,” I said.

  “Well, the best you can be is a pain in my ass,” she said.

  I turned to Cylia. “Can Sam stay here? Until his strength comes back and he can shift again?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Cylia, and “Fuck that idea,” said Sam, at the same time, so their words piled on top of each other in a complicated heap.

  I frowned at him. “You can’t be near me until your luck comes back.”

  “No, I can’t be near you and human until you stop being a magical energy vacuum cleaner, but you keep saying you don’t need me to be human, so who the fuck cares?” Sam gave me a pointed look. “Unless you were lying.”

  I didn’t hesitate. I leaned forward and kissed him, deeply enough to get my point across. Sam kissed me back, and I would have been a fool not to feel the relief in the action, or the way his shoulders relaxed, letting his body settle a little deeper into his chair, making a space for me to fall into.

  Mary cleared her throat. “I’d say ‘get a room,’ but you might,” she said. “Can we focus?”

  “Sorry,” I said, sitting up.

  Sam beamed at her. “Not sorry,” he said.

  “Didn’t think you were,” said Mary. “Sam, you understand that it’s not safe—”

  “If it’s not safe for me, it’s not safe for her,” he said. “I don’t have to go out in public. Both her roommates know I’m not human. I can sleep on the couch if I need to, give my luck time to grow back and shield me from the sucking. Whatever. What I can’t do is walk away and leave her alone again. Don’t ask me to.”

  “And this way you don’t have to feel bad about not calling my parents,” I said. “I’ll have backup. Cylia can even drive us back to the apartment. Maybe Megan and Fern will have some luck to spare.”

  “Saints preserve me from the living,” said Mary, rolling her eyes ceiling-ward. “All right. Since it seems like you’ve thought of everything, can you just promise me that you’ll be careful?”

  “Nope,” I said. “When a Price promises to be careful, that’s when we get dead.”

  “Speaking of dead,” said Rose. “It’s been fun seeing you again, Timmy. Good luck defeating the evil luck-sucker empire, but if this is routewitch doing, I’m not sticking around to find out what they’ll do to a girl like me.”

  It was the sensible thing to do. Rose has been a hitchhiking ghost for so long that she’s crossed the continent dozens, if not hundreds, of times, and the spells she’d fuel would be terrifying. I smiled wanly.

  “Thanks for coming, Aunt Rose,” I said.

  “Anytime, squirt,” she said, and was gone, vanishing from the world as easily as she’d appeared.

  Something wrapped around my ankle. I didn’t need to look down to know that it was Sam’s tail.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s fix this.”

  Nineteen

  “You don’t owe the world anything. That’s why you should try to make it better no matter what. A lack of obligation does not mean a lack of mercy.”

  –Evelyn Baker

  A shitty company apartment five miles outside of Lakeland, Florida, getting ready for a war

  EXPLAINING THE SITUATION TO Fern and Megan had been easier than I’d expected. Maybe it was showing up with a fūri who couldn’t transform, or maybe it was the dead woman offering to draw flow charts. Mostly, I think, it was Cylia, who looked human and wasn’t human and hadn’t asked for anything they could measure or perceive.

  I sat on the couch with my hands tucked between my knees, wondering how I could have been foolish enough to think I could get something for nothing—that a little training would be enough to stop the fire from consuming everything around me, and that all I’d have to pay for it would be my time. It had been a beautiful promise and a perfectly tailored trap, and I had walked into it with my eyes wide open.

  The cushion beside me barely dented as Fern sat down. On the other side of the room, Cylia was taking a finger-scoop of good luck from Megan and wiping it on Sam, who bore it with furry, put-upon dignity.

  “You okay?” asked Fern, bumping my shoulder with hers.

  I wanted to tell her to be careful. I wanted to tell her that there was a hole in my heart pulling away the energy of the people around me. I didn’t. She already knew that—it had been a part of the explanation of the situation—and unlike Sam, she hadn’t had her luck ripped away. She was safe from me, as long as she was employed by Lowryland.

  Instead, I ducked my head, offering her a weary smile, and said, “I’ve been better.”

  “You don’t look like you’ve eaten in, oh, hours,” she said.

  “Probably because I haven’t. Cylia gave us some lemonade.” I leaned back on the couch. Megan was wiping the spit off her forearm. Sam was flexing his hands, looking around the room like he was trying to decide where to go without risking bumping into me.

  Having him here and not being able to touch him was almost worse than not having him here at all. Only almost. Being able to see him, to know that he was . . . well, not okay, but at least alive, at least breathing, that was better than anything as simple as physical contact.

  “Lemonade isn’t food,” said Fern disapprovingly. “We could order pizza.”

  “Pizza is food,” I agreed.

  Fern took that as consent. She turned to the rest of the room. “Anybody up for pizza?” she called.

  “Better make that two,” said Cylia. “Sam’s body is trying to rebuild luck and energy at the same time. He’s going to eat like a teenager.”

  “I already eat like a teenager,” said Sam. “I’m a growing monkey.”

  “Don’t grow too much more, or you’ll be morally obligated to climb the Empire State Building,” said Megan, looking him up and down.

  He waved it off with a sweep
of his hand. “Nah. I don’t like blondes.” The look he shot in my direction made it very clear that brunettes were another matter.

  My cheeks reddened, but I held to my dignity, sitting up a little straighter and saying, “We need to figure out what we’re doing about this cabal, and about the luck thefts.”

  “They don’t have a jink working for them, so you don’t need me,” said Cylia. “If you sneak me into the Park without expecting me to touch one of those tickets, I can try to rebalance the luck of anyone who’s been affected, but that’s about as far as I can go.”

  “It’s better than nothing,” I said. “Thank you for being willing to help.”

  “There’s some self-interest here,” she said. “If the Covenant ever heard there had been issues with inexplicably missing luck in Florida, they’d probably come for another purge. I couldn’t live with myself if I’d been in a position to prevent that, and had chosen to do nothing.”

  I couldn’t stop a small, grim chuckle. “You’ve just described the motivation of everything my family has done in the last hundred years,” I said.

  “Then I understand you a little better,” she said. Producing her phone from her pocket, she said, “I’ll go order the pizza,” and retreated into the hall.

  Megan looked at me, expression calm, snakes hissing wildly all around her face.

  “We must practically seem like statues to you,” I blurted.

  She blinked, painted-on eyebrows rising, before she smiled in sudden understanding. “It was the source of a lot of early cultural confusion,” she admitted. “Our ‘hair’ always gives our feelings away, unless we cover it, and for a gorgon to cover their heads in private is a grave insult. We didn’t understand that humans could stand there with their heads uncovered, and tell us lies, and be believed.”

  “That makes sense,” I said softly.

  “I treated the wounded, after the parade collapsed. I held hands. I listened to people asking if we’d seen their children. I’m just a resident. I shouldn’t have been doing half the things I was doing, but the hospital was overwhelmed, and we had to take care of everyone. Whoever’s using you to boost their luck-theft, they’re killing people now. I’m in this until it’s over. You should know that.” Megan’s voice remained calm, and her snakes grew more and more agitated. “Whatever I can do, I’ll do.”