Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  There was a choice here. I could do what she wanted. I’d already come this far. Or I could do the smart thing for once, and not allow the creepy, overly secretive routewitch to get me into a room I didn’t know the dimensions of.

  But she knew what I was. She knew I wasn’t trained. She wasn’t family: if she said she could help me, the Covenant couldn’t use her to track me down. If I didn’t get myself under control soon, I was going to do some serious damage—the sort of thing that couldn’t be covered up by lighting a candle or spraying some Febreze.

  I stepped through the door.

  The room on the other side was a small, featureless white square. Emily stepped through after me, pulling the door gently closed. “Five,” she said. “Four, three, two, one.”

  “Because that’s not the sort of thing that freaks people out,” I said flatly.

  She gave me a small cat that ate the canary smile and turned back to the door, producing another key. When she opened the door this time, it revealed, not the colorful hallway of the PR building, but a set of industrial chrome stairs descending into the dark of a basement that Florida’s high water table should have rendered functionally impossible.

  (Dig a hole in a place with a high water table, the water comes in to say howdy. All of Lowryland’s underground ride structures are equipped with an incredible assortment of pumps, barricades, and dehumidifiers. That’s part of why the Park has such a robust generator system. If the power ever went completely out for a substantial period of time, the flooding damage would be measured in the millions.)

  I must have made a sound to register my disbelief. Emily’s canary-eating smile widened.

  “It’s safe,” she said. “You have my word. I swear by the Ocean Lady that no harm will come to you while you are in my company.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded pretentious, and when dealing with routewitches, that’s usually enough for me. They tend to be the Hot Topic sort, fond of catchphrases and ritual weirdness. I can’t really blame them. When magic introduces itself into the world in the form of a highway deciding to strike up a conversation, it’s probably natural to go full-on mall Goth as a response.

  Emily would have made an excellent mall Goth in her teen years. She had the bone structure for red eyeliner and glitter lipstick. Picturing her that way made her less terrifying, and I held tight to the image as I stepped through the door, down onto the impossible steps.

  They held. They might be impossible, but that was no excuse for them to be structurally unsound. The walls were concrete, and the handrails had been bolted solidly into place, preventing accidents. The stairs themselves were gridded metal, the kind I’d encountered in a hundred gyms and auditoriums, and walking down them was dismayingly like walking back into my own past, descending the risers at some unfamiliar school’s athletic field, ready to throw myself back into the fray.

  Emily’s steps echoed behind me, delicate tap, tap, taps as her heels impacted with the metal. I’d seen dozens of teen queens and derby spectators get their heels caught in stairs like these, sending them sprawling and suddenly shoeless, like Cinderella fleeing from the ball. Thinking of Emily eating stair was even better than the mall Goth thing, at least where it came to keeping me from freaking out. And keeping me from freaking out was essential. I wasn’t sure how real this basement was, but I was damn sure I didn’t want to be in it if it suddenly decided that being on fire was more fun than the alternative.

  The stairs went on for a hell of a lot longer than was safe or possible in Florida, until they ended at a door. I looked over my shoulder to Emily. She nodded, smiling encouragingly, which was terrifying. Once again, it occurred to me that maybe going into a strange, potentially nonexistent room with a routewitch I didn’t know was a terrible idea.

  That didn’t matter. It was go with Emily or run from Lowryland, and I was so tired of running. Sitting still was killing me, a little bit at a time, but my family didn’t raise me to run. I was a Price. I needed ground. I needed someplace to stand.

  I opened the door.

  There was a shock when my fingers closed around the doorknob, like static arcing through the metal. It wasn’t enough to hurt, barely enough to sting, and when it passed, I was looking at a conference room. Not just any conference room: judging by the view out the wide picture window, a conference room on one of the top floors of a building. Maybe the one I’d started out in. Maybe not. A large oak table dominated the room, and a buffet was set up along one wall, the smell of food earning a growl from my under-served stomach. I ignored it. I had bigger things to worry about.

  Like oh, say, the people. Four of them were sitting around the conference table and one was standing at the end, next to the sort of bar graph that absolutely meant we were interrupting something. All of them had turned to look at the door when it opened, which meant all five were now looking directly at me. I had never felt so small, or so grubby, in my life.

  Emily planted her hands between my shoulders and pushed me into the room. “Look what I found,” she said, voice loud enough to carry all the way to the man with the bar graph. I didn’t recognize him. I didn’t recognize any of these people. I could see that they were all management, or whatever comes after management, the people who manage the managers. To them, I was nothing, an utterly replaceable gear in their perfect clockwork.

  Or at least I had been, right up until now. They turned the full force of their regard on me as I stumbled into their conference room, and I’d never wished for anonymity so much in my life.

  “Emily?” The man next to the bar graph put his pointer down on the table with a soft tap. “Who’s this?”

  “Her name is Melody West, and she’s a junior cast member, mostly working in the Fairyland zone,” said Emily. “She’s been trained for all zones of the Park, shows a marked preference for themed retail, and does not enjoy working in Lowry’s Welcoming World. Of the five guest complaints she’s received since starting her tenure, three were received in the Welcoming World.”

  “Five?” asked one of the women. “That seems excessive.”

  It wasn’t excessive. Guests come to Lowryland for a magical experience that doesn’t cost as much as Disney World, and some of them are primed to complain from the second they reach the Park and realize they’re not miraculously going to have the whole place to themselves. Guests who’ve gone into full entitlement mode will make complaints against cast members because we didn’t throw everyone else out of the store to give them the full princess experience they’ve been dreaming of since they were five. Honestly, the only reason we didn’t all receive a hundred complaints a day was because making a complaint required going to see Guest Relations in the Hall of Records, and that took effort. People who want to complain about the color of the pavement aren’t usually into making an effort.

  “It’s not,” said Emily. “It’s actually below the average for someone of her tenure and temperament.”

  “Have you brought her here to have her memory erased?” asked the man by the bar graph. I looked at him again, more alarmed this time. He looked calmly back at me. “Did you see something you shouldn’t have seen, Miss West?”

  “No one’s erasing anyone’s memory, thanks,” I said. The fire was trying to surge back into my fingertips. I folded them against my palms, trying to stop the heat from spreading. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing, and I’m happy to keep things that way, so if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way.”

  One of the women was sitting up straighter, her eyes fixed on my hands. Shit. “I can see fire through your fingers,” she said. “Sorcerer. Emily, you’ve found us a sorcerer.”

  “It’s not polite to trespass on someone else’s territory,” said the man, picking up his pointer again. That tap when he had put it down: that had been wood touching wood, not metal. His pointer was made of polished, old-fashioned wood. There’s a word for a pointer made
of wood, in some circles.

  People call them wands.

  I took a step backward, narrowly missing a collision with Emily. “I didn’t mean to trespass on anyone’s territory, and I’m not here looking for trouble,” I said quickly. The door we’d come in through was clearly magical, and going back through it might not take me anywhere near where I’d started. Someone might even close it while I was inside, stranding me in that liminal room full of concrete and stairs. “I just needed a job. Lowryland seemed like a good fit for my skills.”

  “She’s untrained,” said Emily triumphantly. “Powerful, yes, but with no idea how to use it. She’s been getting lessons from a ghost.”

  All five of them looked at me again. I squirmed, torn between the desire to explain myself and the desire to flee.

  Based on the view out the window, we were at least seven floors away from the ground. Fleeing was not going to end well for me. “She knew the last member of our family to have any magic at all,” I said, making my voice curt and hard, like I was getting ready to fight with my sister. “She didn’t have any of her own, but she can at least tell me how he managed not to set everything on fire all the time.”

  “Fascinating.” Another of the men stood, walking carefully toward me. “What was your name again?”

  “Melody West.” I’d been Melody for eight hours a day, every day, for four years, and longer on practice and game days, when I had sometimes been Melody for twelve to sixteen hours at a stretch. I tried to summon the smell of freshly-cut grass and sweat, the sound of the crowds roaring for our football team, which was never the best in our school district, but tried really hard, every day. I was Melody because I had been Melody long enough for her to belong to me, body and soul.

  The man frowned, tilting his head and squinting. “That’s not the only name you’ve used, but it belongs to you,” he said.

  “And you’re a trainspotter,” I said, recognizing the way he was looking at me, like someone nearsighted trying to read a schedule board. “How the hell is a routewitch working with a trainspotter and a sorcerer,” I nodded toward the man with the pointer, “in a Lowryland conference room? This feels like the setup to a bad joke.”

  “In a way, it is,” said the sorcerer. He pointed his wand at me. “Welcome to the Lowryland cabal. Please tell me, in small words, why I should let you live.”

  Seven

  “Ain’t no party like a pity party, because a pity party only ends when you bury the bastards who made you feel sorry for yourself.”

  –Frances Brown

  In an unknown location in Lowryland, surrounded by magical assholes

  I STARED AT HIM. He smirked back.

  I burst out laughing.

  This did not appear to be the reaction he’d been expecting. His smirk melted into a confused frown, and his confusion melted into irritation, until he was glaring at me, making no effort to conceal his anger.

  “What?” he demanded. “What is so funny?”

  “I’m sorry!” I said. “I’m sorry, that was just the most ‘welcome to the X-Men, hope you survive blah, blah, blah’ moment I’ve ever had in my life. Like, I wish I’d had a camera running, because I want to relive that sentence over and over again forever. You have a wand. An actual wand. Harry Potter Land is in Orlando, you know.”

  His glare deepened. “This is no laughing matter. You’ve trespassed.”

  “No, I haven’t. There’s no posted sign saying ‘sorcerers not allowed without an engraved invitation.’ I applied for a job. I got a job. I do my job well. I do my job every day, because I don’t want to get fired. Which, by the way, you’re keeping me from right now—I was supposed to be at work over an hour ago.”

  “You’re a sorcerer,” said the man with the wand. “You shouldn’t need to be told.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Can you please show me the super-secret sorcerer bulletin board? Is it an Internet forum, maybe? I don’t have a logon. I wouldn’t have been here if I’d known I wasn’t allowed.”

  Emily stepped up next to me. “Let’s not be hasty,” she said.

  “No, let’s be hasty,” I said. “I didn’t ask for this. I’d like to leave, if you don’t mind. This isn’t really my scene.”

  “But it ought to be,” she said. Turning to the others, she continued, “Melody is almost entirely untrained, and has spent no time working with anyone else of her kind. She’s strong enough that I could feel the heat coming off her from feet away. This kind of power can do a great deal of damage—or a great deal of good.”

  Heads started nodding all around the table. I glanced at Emily, alarmed, and took a step to the side, putting some distance between us. It was mostly symbolic, given how close our quarters were, but it was a start.

  “No,” I said. “No, and no, and hell no. I’m not looking for my own personal Emma Frost, thanks.”

  “What?” she asked blankly.

  “She’s the headmistress of the Massachusetts Aca—you know what? Never mind. Just assume that I’ll talk about comic books when I’m nervous, and you won’t be wrong, which means you won’t need to understand what I’m talking about.” I focused on Wand Guy. He seemed to be the one in charge. “I’m not looking to be recruited.”

  “Most neophytes aren’t,” he said. His glare was fading, replaced by a cool satisfaction that was actually substantially more unnerving. “Let’s see. Your hands started getting hot some time ago. It was slight enough at first that you dismissed it, and then flammable things—paper, cotton, even hair—started to char when you touched them, until you set your first fire. It may have happened while you were sleeping. Many of our kind wake to ruined sheets and fire alarms blaring.”

  I said nothing.

  “Perhaps you’ve made a few small objects float, or have moved something from one place to another. Perhaps you think you have things under control, that you can walk in the world as a living violation of the laws of physics and the world will be forgiving. I am here to tell you that you’re wrong. There are people who hunt those like us. They call themselves ‘the Covenant of St. George,’ and they’ll cut you down as a monster as soon as they’ll look at you.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. The Covenant has always had a tradition of captive magic-users, people like me and Grandpa Thomas who’ve been bent to the goal of making the world safe for a very specific idea of what it means to be human. I still did my best to look shocked and horrified, widening my eyes and slackening my jaw just that fraction that people usually read as sincerity.

  “So why are we here?” I asked. “If there’s people hunting us, we shouldn’t all be together.”

  “Oh, she’s adorable,” said a woman in an orange jacket. “I want to swallow her whole.”

  “No, thank you,” I said quickly.

  The woman laughed as Wand Guy shook his head. “We’re safe here,” he said soothingly. “Lowryland is under our protection. We keep the Park healthy and thriving in the face of all the challenges thrown up by the entertainment industry, and in exchange, it provides us with the psychic and magical cover we need to remain hidden. You knew, didn’t you, that placing yourself amongst so many people would keep you from being detected?”

  “It even kept you from being detected by us,” said Emily. “That’s a bug in the system.”

  “My ghost said that if I went where there were lots of people, it would be harder to track me,” I said carefully. I needed to avoid lies. The trainspotter would hear it if I lied. I didn’t know how charged he was, but there were sufficient trains in and around Lowryland that I had to assume he was running at full power. That made him more dangerous than a polygraph, and a hell of a lot more effective.

  “Your ghost. How quaint.” Wand Guy smirked. “Your ghost was correct. People confuse the universe. All that thinking, all those changes to their ideas about the world. People can power anything, if you allow them the room t
o do it. You could stay here for a hundred years and the Covenant would never find you.”

  “A hundred years. Got it, thanks. Can I go back to work now?”

  Wand Guy looked at Emily. “Is she not very bright, or is she damaged in some way?”

  “I just met her,” protested Emily. “I brought her to you because you needed a say in what was done with her, and because I had her. I didn’t want to come up with an excuse to get my hands on her again.”

  “Wait,” I said, holding my hands up in front of me. My fingertips were hot again. I realized all six of the people in the room were watching me intently. Some of them looked downright nervous. They knew what I might be capable of, maybe even better than I did. “Let’s stop, okay?”

  “Stop what?” asked Wand Guy.

  “Stop preening and flexing and pretending we’re all bad-asses. I sell souvenirs for a living. I’m . . . really not sure what you people do up here, but I’m betting it’s above my pay grade. Why am I here? What do you want from me?”

  “It’s simple,” said Wand Guy. “You’re here because I want to teach you how to be a better version of what you already are.”

  I stared at him, and for once in my life, I didn’t have anything to say.

  * * *

  Magic is real. Call it physics we don’t quite understand or really complicated math or an annoying way to cheat the rules—those descriptions come from Grandpa Thomas’ notes, my cousin Sarah, and me, by the way—but it doesn’t matter how it’s described, because changing the description doesn’t make it go away. Magic is real, magic has always been real, and some people can do magic.

  Not all people, sadly. It’s like having brown eyes or being left-handed: most forms of magic use are genetic, and people are either born with it or not. Routewitches can be made according to my Aunt Rose, but she’s always really cagey about how that can happen (and to be honest, none of us have ever wanted to press the issue). Everything else runs in families, which means cases like mine, where the person who should have been doing the training is sadly unavailable, are more common than anyone wants them to be.