Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  “Me, too,” said Fern.

  “Me, three,” said Sam. He flexed his hands again, before scowling. “I still can’t change, but I feel like I’ll be able to soon. It itches.”

  “Well, don’t touch me again until your luck’s grown back enough to protect you,” I said. He looked hurt. I shook my head. “We need you at your best. That means fast and sturdy and capable of blending into a crowd. Right now, you’re not blending anywhere outside of a comic book convention.”

  “I’ve never been to one of those.”

  “Then when all this is over, I’ll take you to one.”

  “When all this is over . . .” He paused, looking at me seriously. “Are you gonna go home when this is over?”

  I slumped into the couch. “I can’t.” Sam looked like he was going to protest. I raised my hand, cutting him off. “Not ‘I don’t want to,’ Sam, I can’t. The problem that has me running hasn’t gone away yet. I just ran into a different problem. Lowryland is being controlled by unethical human magic-users who’re harvesting luck from their guests because who the fuck knows why. Because they’re power-hungry assholes. But they’re not the Covenant. If we beat them, that doesn’t magically make the Covenant go away, and it doesn’t magically make it safe for me to go back to my family. It just means I find another place to run.”

  “I always wanted to be a member of the A-Team,” said Sam philosophically.

  I blinked at him. “What?”

  “If you’re still running, I’m coming with you,” he said. “No offense, but this ‘I can do it on my own, just watch’ bullshit hasn’t worked out too well, so I figure it’s time we try a little ‘we have vigorous sex in every cheap motel between here and Maine’ bullshit. At least that’ll be more fun.”

  “I’m coming, too,” said Fern. “Not for the sex part. I have headphones.”

  “I’m not,” said Megan. “No offense, Annie. I didn’t go to medical school and put my family in debt to run off and play medic for your weird fugitive adventures. I just want to survive whatever the hell is going on at Lowryland and make it home to my parents. You being a Price makes sense—sweet Medusa, does it ever—but it doesn’t exactly encourage me to stay around you. Even if you might be able to get me your brother’s autograph.”

  “No offense taken,” I said. I stood. “I need weapons.”

  “Be still my heart,” said Sam.

  I wrinkled my nose at him as I walked out of the living room, into the hall, and past Cylia—still on her phone—to my bedroom.

  When I’d fled from the burning carnival, I’d been as close to devoid of weaponry as any Price ever got. I’d been running virtually naked for the better part of a year. Back home, I would have had an arsenal at my disposal, all the knives, guns, and more esoteric weaponry that a girl could want. Having a family obsessed with combat techniques and staying alive, and a grandmother whose idea of an appropriate gift for a little girl was a box of caltrops, had done a lot to distort my idea of what “normal” levels of weaponry were.

  Working at Lowryland meant no weapons, ever, because normal people don’t feel the need to hide twenty throwing knives in their clothing before they leave the house. Staff didn’t have to go through the metal detectors, but accidents happen—lord, do accidents happen—and I had no faith in my ability not to stab someone who got overly aggressive, which happened sometimes on days when the rides weren’t behaving, and the weather wasn’t behaving, and the tourists felt like they needed somebody to complain to. So I’d taken to keeping most of my paltry supply of weaponry in a box under the bed, where I could reach it if I needed it, but otherwise wouldn’t be tempted to start carrying it again.

  I knelt. I pulled the box out. I looked at the heap of throwing knives—two full sets, one provided by the Covenant as part of my cover story for the carnival, one provided by the carnival once I had started working there—and other, slightly more makeshift weaponry, marbles and sharpened jacks and hand-braided wire garrotes. I took a deep breath. That didn’t seem like enough, so I took another, focusing on the homecoming those knives represented.

  No more Timpani Brown, Covenant trainee. No more Melody West, ex-cheerleader and Lowryland employee. Just Antimony Price, Annie, the girl I had been born to be, the girl with fire in her fingers and no real sense of where she stood in the structure of a family that had an heir and a spare and her, youngest child who didn’t know who or what she should grow up to be.

  Or maybe I wasn’t that Annie anymore either. I knew who I wanted to grow up to be. I was going to protect my family, and I was going to protect my friends, and I was going to learn how to use what I’d inherited from my grandfather, even if it meant joining my grandmother in her endless, quixotic quest to bring him home. I had a purpose now. Maybe it wasn’t the purpose I’d been expecting, but . . . it was mine. That made it more than good enough.

  One by one, the knives vanished into my clothing, settling against my skin in the old, familiar patterns, made new again by time and distance from the last time I’d been allowed to strap them on. I wrapped the garrote around my wrist like a friendship bracelet and filled my pockets with problems for other people to deal with. When I was done, I was fifteen pounds heavier and felt a hundred pounds lighter, like I had borrowed Fern’s shifting relationship with density.

  The last thing I did was pull the knife from under my pillow and slide it into my sock, and I was back. I was myself again.

  The others turned to look at me when I returned to the living room. I held up my hands, turning them back and forth to show that they were empty.

  “Nothing up my sleeves,” I said. A flick of my wrists and I was holding a pair of throwing knives, balanced between my thumbs and forefingers. We live in a world where magic is real and monsters lurk under more than a few beds, but there will always be a place for sleight of hand.

  Sam grinned. “Does this mean you’re ready to get angry?”

  “I guess it does,” I said. The knives disappeared back into my clothing. “I guess it’s time for all of us to get angry.”

  The doorbell rang. Megan sat on the couch, picking up the towel she kept there and wrapping it around her head in a quick, practiced motion. The snakes, apparently conditioned to keep still in the dark, coiled and stopped moving, which was good, since otherwise the towel would have been pulsing like something out of a horror movie.

  “Actually, it’s time for us to eat pizza,” said Cylia, walking calmly past me to the door. Sam got up and darted down the hall to my bedroom, out of sight.

  I offered Fern a quick, tight smile, and went to the kitchen for plates.

  * * *

  The thing about riding gallantly into battle is that unless something is actively trying to kill you right now, it’s probably a good idea to eat first. We fell upon those two pizzas like we were starving—which, to be honest, several of us were. It had been a long time since our gingerbread at Lowryland, and baked goods do not a balanced diet make.

  Megan, despite having mouse-eating snakes attached to her head, is a vegetarian; out of respect for her dietary needs, one of the pizzas was a virtual garden of plants that can be baked in an oven without turning completely disgusting. The other pizza was a meat-lover’s special. Megan ate the first, Fern ate the second, and I slapped two pieces together to form a perfectly balanced sandwich, a trick which Sam and Cylia quickly emulated.

  (Cylia had also been smart enough to order several two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew to go with the food. Cylia was rapidly approaching the status of “my favorite.”)

  For a little while, there was no room for conversation: there was only room for chewing, something that’s universal across all species, no matter what their diets entail. Megan stole bits of sausage from the meat-lover’s pizza and fed it to her hair while chewing on her own veggie-enriched slice; Sam double-fisted his pizza slice sandwiches, eating with a speed and efficiency which I frankl
y admired, even as I kept a hand free for my drink.

  The pizzas were nearly gone when Sam paused, hiccupped, and turned human again. We all blinked at him.

  “Huh,” said Cylia, who had only seen him in his fūri form. “You’re actually kinda cute.”

  “Thanks?” said Sam.

  “I think he’s cute both ways,” I said, earning myself a quick grin.

  “Does this mean my luck’s back to normal?” asked Sam.

  “Not quite,” said Cylia. “I know you’re going to glare at me, but if I were you, I’d avoid touching Annie for a while longer. Give it a day. Most of the luck I lathered onto you was good, because why the hell bother starting someone out with a big load of bad—seems to me you’ve got enough bad going already—and now you’re starting to pick up ambient luck, which is more mixed. Once your shell gets back to normal, you’ll be safe to do whatever you want.”

  “By then, hopefully I won’t suck as hard,” I said.

  Fern choked on her pizza.

  I blinked at her before I felt myself turn bright red. “Oh, my God, you have a filthy mind,” I squawked, and threw a napkin at her.

  That was the trigger. We were tired, we were tense, and we were about to go into a fight against people whose abilities we didn’t fully know or understand. People get weird when they’re looking down the barrel of something like that. Fern batted the napkin away and threw her pizza crust at me. I snatched it out of the air and threw it back, only to be hit in the side of the face by a pillow flung by Megan. She was laughing, and her snakes seemed to be doing the same, their mouths gaping open in silent serpentine smiles.

  Cylia grabbed another pillow, holding it in front of herself and doing an admirable job of compacting her long limbs into a complicated curl. “I’m fragile!” she yelped.

  Sam hit her with an empty soda bottle.

  The living room descended into chaos. Fern grabbed a pillow in each hand and bounded into the air, dropping her personal density until she was practically floating. Sam’s tail wrapped tight around her ankle, and she yelped before she realized that he was swinging her at Megan. Her yelp transformed into a maniacal laugh, both pillows raised to strike. Megan ducked but still got a mouthful of upholstery for her trouble, Fern aiming low to avoid hitting her glasses.

  I laughed too, dropping to the floor and beginning to chuck wadded-up napkins every which way, keeping the air full of projectiles, which Fern kept batting aside in her determined quest to smack Megan a second time. Cylia flicked her fingers every time it looked like my napkins were going to hit her, sending them careening in odd directions as some gust of wind from Fern’s flight or other atmospheric disturbance knocked them out of true. My aim hadn’t been that bad since I was a very small child, but I didn’t manage to land a hit on her once.

  It was fantastic. Play is an essential part of learning what the body is capable of, and while we were all just blowing off steam, I was learning more of what our group was tactically capable of than I could possibly have asked. The only factor that was missing was Megan’s stony gaze, and even when Fern was hitting her with the pillows, she was being careful not to knock our resident gorgon’s glasses off. Which mattered.

  “Time-out!” I called.

  Sam stopped swinging Fern. Robbed of her momentum, she drifted slowly down toward the floor. Cylia peeked out from behind her pillow.

  “Truce?” she asked.

  “Not quite,” I said. “Megan, I know you can’t paralyze Fern. What about Cylia and Sam?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, blinking at me as she wiped a smear of tomato sauce off one cheek. Her hair writhed and settled, a few locks drawing back in curious curves. “I’ve never looked directly at a jink or a fūri before.”

  “Got it.” I looked at Sam and Cylia. Cylia, who in her own weird way knew more about the cryptid community than Sam did—he had been raised by his human grandmother, who had always done her best, but who had been missing some essential facts about his biology—grimaced.

  “I don’t know either,” she said, in a tone which implied that she really wasn’t looking forward to the next part. “I don’t suppose we can say ‘probably’ and leave it at that?”

  “Not the best plan,” I said. “If we need to get you sunglasses, we should probably know that before things get messy.”

  “I won’t turn you to stone unless I’m making an effort, and I promise not to make an effort,” said Megan, in a tone that was probably meant to be reassuring, and missed the mark by about a mile.

  Sam unwound his tail from Fern’s ankle, suddenly seeming to realize what we were talking about. “Hold up a second here,” he said. “I don’t want to be turned to stone.”

  “Megan is a Pliny’s gorgon,” I said. “She can stun or petrify, depending on what she’s trying to do, and whether or not her hair is uncovered.”

  “Can’t petrify if the snakes can’t bite you,” said Megan cheerfully. “My wigs double as a safety measure. I’ll be taking them off before I try to freeze the bad guys.”

  “This isn’t helping,” muttered Sam.

  “Unless Megan’s life is actively threatened, she’s unlikely to be trying to turn anyone to stone,” I said. “But we need to know if you need sunglasses, and whether she needs to be as careful around you as she is around me.”

  “My mother was human,” said Sam. “If she can stun you, she can probably stun me.”

  “It might be tied to the form you’re in,” said Megan.

  Sam opened his mouth to protest again. Then he closed it, sighed, and said, “You’re going to do this no matter what I say, aren’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “If you don’t consent to her looking at you, she won’t look at you.”

  He and Cylia both relaxed.

  “But,” I continued, “if you don’t consent to her looking at you, you have to agree to stay here while I take her and Fern and go to face the cabal.”

  Sam’s eyes narrowed. “No.”

  “Then she looks at you.” I shook my head. “We need to know. You don’t go into a fight without all the relevant information, and this is super-relevant.”

  “This feels a little bit like blackmail,” Sam informed me.

  I shrugged. “So it’s a little bit like blackmail. I’m okay with that if it means you don’t get stunned in the middle of a bad situation.”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” said Megan. “It’s more like going to sleep and not dreaming for a little while. We can even stun each other, if we work at it.” She glanced at me. “It’s how we get around the lack of anesthesia in most of our hospitals.”

  Being a cryptozoologist sometimes means learning something new every day. I managed to keep the surprise out of my face as I nodded and said, “That makes sense.”

  “Fine,” said Cylia. I turned to look at her. She shook her head. “I want to be involved with this fight about as much as I want to gargle a mouthful of spiders, but people are screwing with luck, and that sort of thing paints a big target on the jink community. Even if we don’t have anything to do with it, this is going to get a bunch of us killed if it doesn’t stop. So fine. Stun me.”

  “Sam, close your eyes,” I said. “One at a time.” I closed my own eyes, putting my hands over them for good measure.

  “I’m taking off my glasses,” warned Megan. There was a soft hissing sound from her hair, and then a thud as—presumably—Cylia hit the floor.

  “She’s out,” reported Fern.

  “Sam?” I asked.

  There was a pause before he said, “I’m not letting you do this without me.”

  Several seconds ticked by. Nothing happened.

  “Sam?” I asked again.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m going to try something.” There was a faint stretching sound. I’d heard it before. It was the sound of fur retracting and muscles moving to fit a human�
��s musculature, rather than a fūri’s. It was followed by a much louder, more distinct sound: that of a body hitting the floor.

  “He’s out,” reported Fern.

  “I’m putting my glasses back on,” said Megan. “It’s safe.”

  I opened my eyes. Both Sam and Cylia were sprawled on the floor, unconscious. Sam was unconscious in his human form, which was strange enough to be unnerving. Since fūri was his default, he normally couldn’t stay human when he wasn’t awake.

  “I think we need you as the anesthesiologist if we ever have to take him to a human hospital for some reason,” I said.

  Megan’s smile was half-feral, and very full of teeth. “My rates are reasonable, and I’m not the only Pliny’s gorgon working in the medical field.”

  “That’s good to know.” I stood, beginning to gather the wreckage from our pizza party. Fern got up and joined me. “How long are they going to be out?”

  “No more than ten, maybe fifteen minutes,” said Megan. She didn’t get up to help us. Maybe she felt like she’d already done her part. Even her snakes seemed calmer, twining around themselves in a serpentine parody of a braid. “I didn’t put a lot of oomph behind it.”

  “Can you modify the, ah, ‘oomph’ on the fly, or is this one of those things where you have to call your attacks before the GM rolls?” I asked.

  Megan blinked at me slowly before she snorted. “Sometimes I forget how much of a nerd you are,” she said. “I have to ‘call my attacks,’ as you put it, before my target’s eyes are closed. So if you point me at someone and say they need to be out, make sure not to get in the way.”

  The thought of winding up a lawn ornament because I got in the path of one of my own allies wasn’t appealing. I nodded. “Got it. Can human magic-users deflect your gaze?”