Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“Arson is not a good thing.”

“No, but until we find someone who can train you, it’s a little bit inevitable, so we may as well make the best of it.” Mary shrugged. “I’d help more if I could. I’ve been looking for books. Turns out, most magic-users don’t like to share.”

“Tell me about it.” I’d been working from my grandfather’s books when I was still at home. Grandpa Thomas had been a magic-user and a member of the Covenant of St. George. Somehow, he’d managed to conceal the first from the second for long enough to get away alive, which was no small feat.

There were days when I wished, more than anything, that he’d been as good at avoiding crossroads bargains and being sucked into dimensional rifts as he’d been at escaping from the Covenant. Maybe then he would still have been around to train me, and I wouldn’t be living in fear of the day I went all Firestarter on my friends. Having most of my potential futures come straight out of Stephen King books is not reassuring.

Mary looked at me with concern. “Don’t,” she said.

“I wasn’t going to!”

“No, but you were starting to think about it, and every time you do that, I’m going to tell you not to.”

I glared at her. “You’re not the telepath in this family. You don’t get to tell me what I’m thinking.”

My cousin Sarah is the telepath in the family. Our reunions are a lot of fun.

“No, I’m not the telepath.” She folded her arms. “I’m just the girl who’s been serving the crossroads since before your parents were born, and I can tell when someone’s starting to think that making a deal would be good for them. It wouldn’t be good for you. It’s not good for anyone. So I’m going to tell you no over and over again, until you learn to listen.”

“Mary . . .” I paused, and sighed. “I wouldn’t do that to you. You know I wouldn’t do that to you. And there’s no way the crossroads would send anyone else to broker a family deal, which means that even if I’m tempted, I can’t do it.”

“Good,” she said coldly. Then she thawed a little, and said, “I saw Sam.”

“What?” My voice broke at the end of the word, hitting a note too loud and too shrill to be safe. I looked guiltily around before leaning toward her and asking, “How is he? Where is he? He’s not looking for me, right? He’s smart enough that he’s not looking for me?”

“The show has settled at a rented training facility in Indiana while they wait for the insurance money; they should be able to replace everything they’ve lost and be back on the road by the beginning of next season,” said Mary. She paused, looking at me carefully before she added, “The Campbell Family Carnival is there with them. They’re helping to get the show back on their feet, and making sure no one loses their edge due to idleness.”

“But the Campbells—”

“Are family, yes. Not blood family. No one’s going to have a tracking charm that can link them to you, or use them to hurt your friends. Breathe. You’re not the only person in this family with a brain in their head. You can trust us to not fuck up completely just because you can’t make all the decisions.”

“Intellectually, I know you’re right. Emotionally . . .” I paused, unable to put what I was feeling into words. It was like the words didn’t exist. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe I’d finally discovered the unspeakable.

Sam Taylor wasn’t the love of my life. He wasn’t even my significant other, whatever that meant, or my boyfriend, although he’d kissed me like he was, against a burning carnival sky, when everything had been crashing to an end. And then I’d walked away from him, because it was the only way to keep him safe. I didn’t love him—at least I didn’t think I did—but I might have, if we’d been allowed to take the time to figure out who we were to one another. We’d both been lying from the start of our relationship, and that sort of thing can take some time to get past.

God, I wished we’d had the time.

Unfortunately, while Sam wasn’t blood family—and hence wasn’t a target for tracking charms, and should have been able to safely come find me—he was something the Covenant viewed as even worse: he was a cryptid. A fūri, to be specific, a kind of yōkai therianthrope originally from China. He was a virtuoso on the flying trapeze, because when he wasn’t forcing himself to look human, he had a prehensile tail and feet that could do double duty as hands, and he was one of the most beautiful men I’d ever met. Maybe not when he was standing still, but in motion . . .

I’ve always been about the motion. Whether it’s the cheering field or the derby track, motion is where beauty lives. When Sam moved, he was a poem, and I wanted to memorize the whole damn thing, and for his sake, I could never see him again, and that sucked harder than I could say.

Mary leaned over and touched my arm. “I’ll tell your family you’re okay, and that you still don’t need them to come get you. But you say the word . . .”

“I know,” I said. “Thank you, Aunt Mary.”

“Any time, kiddo,” she said, and she was gone.

I wiped the tears from my cheeks and stepped out of the alcove, pasting my Lowry-approved smile back into place. Time to get to work. After all, this was my life now.





Four




“Loving too much is just as bad as not loving at all. Maybe it’s worse. People who don’t have anything to lose never have to worry about the inevitable.”

–Alice Healy

Lowryland, eight hours and about sixty thousand inane questions later

I SAT AT A TABLE outside the Midsummer Night’s (Ice) Cream Shoppe, back in civilian clothes, my glittery eyeliner scrubbed away, and wondered whether I would ever feel like standing up again. My feet were one solid ache, one that I could feel pulsing in time to the beating of my heart. In a way, the pain was a good thing, since it was distracting enough that I wasn’t worried about setting anything on fire. And if that isn’t the definition of making lemonade out of life’s lemons, I don’t know what is.

The Park was winding down around me. Parents dragged exhausted, weeping children in mass-produced costumes toward the trails that would take them out of Fairyland and back to the central hub, which was themed after Lowry’s idea of a perfectly bucolic American town, half Ray Bradbury and half Lake Wobegon (without actually coming close enough to owe copyright acknowledgment to either, naturally—the man was a genius at dancing the thin line of public domain). I silently toasted them with my milkshake, wishing them luck at getting past that dazzling arcade of shopping and concessions and final opportunities to spend all their money. Lowry’s Welcoming World was designed to be a flytrap for wallets, and it stayed open a full hour after the rest of the Park shut down, making sure it would have time to suck out every last dime.