Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  The road appeared, and because a road is nothing without someone to travel it, a woman walked along the center line, her jeans faded asphalt-gray, her hair white as corn silk or cobwebs, her eyes echoing the scene again in miniature, in microcosm, until she became a Ferris wheel that turned for nothing good, part of a carnival whose tickets were too dear to buy with anything but dreams.

  “I told you not to call unless you had to,” she said, and her voice was sorrow, her voice was shame, and there were tears on her cheeks, tears for me, the first of her charges in three generations to call upon the crossroads. “Dammit, Annie, I told you.”

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Mary,” I said. “I tried, and you said that if it was this or the cemetery . . . I tried so hard.”

  She sighed. “I know, baby. I know.”

  What she didn’t say was that she’d always known it might come to this, the youngest of the family looking at the oldest—oldest still walking in the world, anyway—and requesting the kind of help that hurts more than it heals. I was the one who’d spent the most time with her, the Price girl who’d never outgrown her babysitter. She’d stayed with me because she liked me, and because I was lonely, until the situation had changed, and she’d started staying with me because I needed her again. With that kind of exposure, that kind of familiarity leading to contempt, it had always been almost inevitable that I would one day ask for something I’d have to pay for.

  “Are we there?” I could talk, I could breathe—or maybe I didn’t need to breathe; it was hard to say—and I could feel fire in my fingers. This could be the crossroads.

  “Almost.” She looked at me solemnly. “As your representative in this negotiation, I sincerely recommend that you rescind your request. Change your mind, baby girl, before it’s too late. Walk away from this.”

  The world was still drowning in darkness, when I focused my eyes to look past the golden light and the corn. The water was still there, no matter how hard the crossroads worked to conceal it. Nothing had changed. Everything was changing. “If I do that, am I going to survive?” I asked. “Is Sam?”

  Mary looked away, but not before I saw the flicker of regret in her empty highway eyes. “I can’t tell you that one way or another. Not for sure.”

  “The water—”

  “Is a natural death. If it takes you, you go down free.”

  The idea that she would let me drown, let me die, when she could have done something to save me . . . it burned. She was my Aunt Mary. She was the woman who had wiped my runny noses and kissed my bruised knees, all while teaching me the strange, careful rules that dictated her existence among the living. She loved me. I knew she loved me. She wasn’t supposed to be willing to stand back and let me go. Even knowing that she had no choice in the matter couldn’t stop my heart from aching.

  “You told me to call you if I got into trouble,” I said softly.

  Mary turned back to me. Her hair was starting to move of its own accord, not writhing like Megan’s snakes, but rising off her shoulders until it surrounded her head in a luminous cloud. She was glowing. When had she started glowing?

  “You called,” she said. “I came. Antimony Price, you stand before the crossroads, where all things are possible, where all things are forbidden. What is your purpose here?”

  The water should have been pinning me to the ceiling of the tunnel. Instead, my feet drifted down to the meet the road, and all that there was above me was sky, endless, dust-colored sky, stretching out from hope to horizon. I flexed my fingers again, calling the fire closer to the surface. I might not be able to see or feel the water anymore, but I was cold. I was so damn cold.

  Death is cold. “I need to live. I need Sam to live. I need to save my friends.”

  “‘Need’ is a big word, little girl,” said a voice—a new voice, buzzing and sharp as a cicada’s whine, devoid of all humanity. I turned.

  Behind me stood a figure made of absence. It was neither light nor shadow, neither form nor void: instead, it was nothing at all, a bend in the landscape that somehow created the impression of a person. Only it was more substantial than that at the same time, pulling tricks of the horizon into itself, becoming present in a way that should have been impossible. I wanted to step back, away. I wanted to flee. Every animal instinct I had was screaming at me to do exactly that, to risk death by water rather than whatever this figure had in store.

  But Sam was out there somewhere, marooned in the drowning dark. He needed me. Fern, Megan, and Cylia were out there, captives of people who would never have known they existed if I hadn’t intervened. They needed me. Running away might have been the instinctive option, but it wasn’t mine. Not anymore. I had given that away once I started assembling people who depended on me. My parents had raised me to survive, but not at the expense of my allies.

  Guess there’s something to being the one who comes after the heir and the spare. Even if I fucked up bad, the family would endure.

  “I’m here to make a deal,” I said.

  The shape that was and wasn’t a person somehow smiled. “I thought you might be,” it purred. It looked past me to Mary, smile blossoming into a triumphant grin. “We get another one. You kept your precious pets away from us for generations, and now we get another one. How’s that make you feel, Mary-girl? You feel like moving on yet? Let us get another ghost. You’re about used up.”

  “It makes me feel like I’m still needed, and like I’ll be damned before I leave my family alone with you,” snapped Mary, stepping up and resting her hand on my shoulder. There was an electric current in her skin that crackled and burned where it touched me. It was oddly reassuring to have her there, like her presence meant nothing was going to touch me without going through her first. “I am her advocate in this negotiation. I speak for her.”

  “Seems to me there isn’t going to be much of a negotiation,” said the shape. It was still smiling. Even looking at that impossible expression hurt my mind. “She’s already told me what she needs. She’s a greedy one, asking for three things when most people come here asking for one.”

  “She’s only requesting two,” said Mary, shooting me a look that warned me not to argue. “The lives. She can perform the rescue herself, as long as she survives.”

  “His survival and mine are the same thing,” I said, picking up the thread of her argument. “The water took us both.”

  The shape turned its eyes on me, smile fading, and I revised my earlier impression of its smile as the most terrifying thing about it. Its calm regard was a hundred times worse.

  “No,” it said. “You haven’t drowned yet. You’re light, buoyant—you’re human. The man you ask after is different. His own bones weigh him down. He’s further gone than you are, Healy child, Price girl, and he hasn’t much time. Don’t let your friendly ghost trick you into a slow negotiation. She has her own agenda as much as you or I do, and she’ll only stop you from saving him.”

  Mary’s hand tightened needlessly on my shoulder. I recognized a trick when I heard one. Still, it took everything I had to draw a shuddering, impossible breath, and smile, keeping my expression as close as I could to serene.

  “I think it’s important that we do this the right way,” I said.

  The shape continued to look at me. “Your grandfather sold his future for your grandmother’s breath, you know,” it said. “People have probably been telling you how much you remind them of him your whole life. How surprised they’d be, to see you here! Or maybe not surprised at all. Maybe they knew this was inevitable from the moment you first cried. You were always going to come to us. You were always going to walk the road already drawn for you. We only wonder why you took so long.”

  “You didn’t have anything I needed,” I said. “I need to live. I need Sam to live.”

  “Ah,” said the shape. “But what will you pay?”

  “I brokered the deal between Thomas Price and the cross
roads for the life of Alice Healy,” said Mary. “I witnessed its clauses. You are not allowed to take back what has been given. Her life is not a part of this deal.”

  I glanced at Mary, startled. She didn’t look at me. All her attention was on the shape, jaw set, expression grim. She looked like she was fighting a battle I wasn’t equipped to understand, and I realized I didn’t want to understand it. I wanted to survive it. I wanted to save my friends. That was all.

  The shape glared at her without eyes, irritation crackling in the air around it. “Fine,” it said sullenly. “Alice Healy’s life is off the table. Still. The latest apple of her orchard requests two boons of us—three, if you’d let her. We have the right to demand payment.”

  “Not in blood,” said Mary.

  “Not in her blood,” corrected the shape.

  “Not in Sam’s blood either,” I said. They both turned to me. It was hard to shake the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to open my mouth during this discussion. I swallowed hard and said, “I’m not bargaining for his life just so you can kill him afterward.”

  “No blood from you, no blood from him . . . why should I give you anything at all?” The shape sneered. “Our little maidservant reminds me that we can’t kill your grandmother, however much we may want to. So? All I have to do is refuse to deal and you’re dead, drowned and gone and washed away. That would be plenty. We could have our revenge without raising a finger.”

  “Not a very satisfying revenge, though,” I said. “I mean, really? Your revenge on my grandfather is letting me drown? Not proving him wrong by making a deal with me and tormenting him in the great beyond?”

  The shape seemed amused as it asked, “The great beyond? You mean the afterlife?”

  “Yes.” I paused. “Wait—do you mean he isn’t dead?”

  “Your grandfather’s fate would be a different deal, and a much dearer one.” The shape took a step closer, suddenly predatory, suddenly crackling with menace. “Would you prefer it?”

  “No,” I said firmly. “I need to live. I need to save Sam.”

  “She will not pay in blood,” said Mary. “Remember that.”

  The shape shot her a sour look. “We erred when we saved you from the shade,” it said. “Yes. I remember. She will not pay in blood. But she is a child of her bloodline, isn’t she? I can feel it in the air around her. She allowed her magic to be half-severed and removed from her once before . . .”

  The shape didn’t have to finish its sentence for me to know what it was going to charge me. Instead of alarm, I felt . . . relief. All I did with my magic was destroy things. I was a menace without someone to teach me, and look what had happened when I’d accepted an offer of education. At least if the crossroads stole the fire from my fingers, they wouldn’t be setting up a funnel to drain the energy of everyone around them. Mary wouldn’t let it happen.

  Mary frowned. “Not forever,” she said.

  The shape looked amused. “Why not, little ghost? What possible reason could you have for such a restriction?”

  “She’s not asking for immortality. Taking her magic forever when her life is constantly in danger would go against the spirit of the agreement—or do you want it known that you would cheat those who petition you?” The corner of Mary’s mouth twitched in the beginnings of a smile. “You would, of course. Everyone knows you would. But knowing and having proof are very different things.”

  The shape’s amusement faded into irritation. “Very well. We will give her what she asks—her life, and the life of her lover—in exchange for her power, as collateral against a task to be performed later, at our discretion. We will decide what to ask of her when the time arises.”

  Mary grabbed my arm. I turned, startled, to find myself looking directly into her empty highway eyes. They were darker than usual, like an accident had happened just beyond the edge of her irises, sending smoke billowing into her impossible internal sky.

  “If you take this, if you do this, you won’t be able to refuse them,” she said, voice low. “When the crossroads call, you’ll have to answer, and if you try to say ‘no,’ they’ll have the right to make you pay. Do you understand? They can enforce your obedience. They’ll have your magic, and that means they’ll have you, no matter how far you run from the road.”

  “But I’ll be alive,” I said. “Sam will be alive. We can save the others.”

  She nodded minutely. Then, to my surprise, she smiled.

  “You people,” she said. Her voice was sad, and fond. “If I hadn’t died before I met you, I’d expect you to be the death of me.”

  “Love you, too,” I said.

  Mary turned back to the shape. “Antimony Price will accept your offer of her life, and the life of Samuel Taylor, in exchange for her magic to be held as collateral against a future task to be set by the crossroads and communicated through me, as her advocate and representative. Once the task is performed, her magic will be returned. Should she fail the task, her magic may be withheld indefinitely. Her life, however, cannot be revoked, nor can the life of Samuel Taylor. Do we have an accord?”

  With a predatory smile, the shape extended what could charitably be referred to as a hand. “We do,” it said.

  My skin crawled from the proximity to the whatever-it-was. It was difficult to resist the urge to step backward, well out of its reach. Mary nudged me.

  “Shake,” she said. “That seals the bargain.”

  Of course, it did.

  I reached out and took the shape’s hand in mine. There was no substance to its fingers, and yet somehow, they were entirely unyielding, refusing to bend or give under the pressure of my own. It grasped my hand firmly, still smiling as it shook.

  “The compact is sealed,” it said. “You’ll live.”

  The fire in my fingers blazed, going from an ember to a forest fire in the matter of a moment. I cried out, trying to pull away, and the shape gripped me even harder, pinning me in place until the flame died, leaving me cold and empty. Then it pushed me away, and the country road was gone, and the sunlight was gone, and Mary was gone, and the water—which had never really disappeared, only faded into inconsequential distance—came surging back, and I was gone, just like everything else.

  I was gone.

  Twenty-five

  “Oh, my sweet girl. I will always love you, no matter what. Now get out there, and kick their asses back to the Stone Age.”

  –Evelyn Baker

  Lowryland, about to have an even worse night, which is sort of an accomplishment right now

  I WOKE UP PRESSED against the base of the bronze Laura and Lizzie statue at the center of the Fairyland hub, my left arm pinned under my body, one leg slung up onto the statue itself, leaving me in an inelegant spread-eagle position that made me incredibly grateful for the existence of jeans. I groaned. The sound awoke a pounding in my head that was almost worse than the tingling in my arm.

  Pain meant I was alive. The crossroads had kept their side of the bargain. With the thought came the realization that I couldn’t feel my magic anymore. There was no fire in my fingers and no void in the pit of my stomach for Colin to use as a drain. Regret grew heavy in my chest. My magic had been so happy to see me when I had stepped through the broken mirror. It had stopped hurting me as soon as I had apologized, and now I had sold it to something I didn’t understand but knew enough to be afraid of. I didn’t deserve to get it back. Even if I did whatever the crossroads would eventually ask of me, I didn’t deserve it.

  That was a moral dilemma for later. Right now, I needed to find my friends. I needed to find Sam. If the crossroads had saved me, they should have saved him, too—but I had a lifetime of Mary warning me about the kind of tricks they liked to pull. They were a malicious genie trapped in a bottle that spanned the globe, and they would cheat if they had the opportunity to do so. They might save Sam from drowning, only to leave him washed up on the roller
coaster tracks, ready to be crushed to death when the trainspotter tried to pull another fast one. They might do almost anything. I had to move.

  That was easier said than done. What felt like every muscle in my body protested as I levered myself away from the statue and off the ground. The last time I’d hurt this much, it had been because I’d been hip-checked into the rail around the track by a blocker twice my size. She’d gotten a trip to the penalty box. I’d gotten a bruise that ran the length of my right thigh, black and yellow and blooming like a flower.

  The thought reminded me of something else: when the wall had cracked and the water had come crashing down, I’d been wearing my backpack. I wasn’t wearing it now. I looked around, finally spotting the nylon strap in the bushes to my left. I couldn’t run, but I could walk quickly, and that was exactly what I did.

  Like everything else, the backpack was drenched. Anything paper that had been shoved in there was ruined now. My skates were soaked. They were still skates, and they still fit my feet, even wet. Hell, the rest of me was so wet that I barely even noticed the discomfort as I kicked off my sodden shoes and yanked the skates on over my equally sodden socks. Everything squelched. I tied the laces tighter. The blisters I was going to get from this were tomorrow’s problem. Right now, I had bigger things to worry about. Like Sam.

  Stopping to put my skates on might have felt like a waste of time, but it was actually anything but. Skating bruised and battered is what derby girls do. I might not be able to walk faster than a hobble for the next few days, and that was fine, because I could still skate like the top jammer of the Slasher Chicks.

  “I’m the Final Girl, you fuckers,” I muttered, and pushed off, steadily gathering speed as I began to skate through the area, looking for my boyfriend.

  Sam was a big guy; he wouldn’t have been thrown into any trees, or at least he wouldn’t have stayed there once the water rolled back. If he’d been knocked out—which wasn’t a bad assumption—he would also be in his heavier fūri form. That was what really worried me. Monkeys have denser bones than humans do, and as a yōkai, Sam had more in common, physically, with the simian side of his heritage. The water had pinned me to the tunnel roof, but Sam? He would have sunk like a stone. There was no telling how much water he’d inhaled while I was bargaining with the crossroads for our lives.