They’d promised me he would live. They hadn’t promised immortality, or indestructability, or even that he’d still be in one piece when I found him. Even with Mary there to keep me from screwing up completely, the situation had been too dire to allow for the sort of careful negotiation that had really needed to happen. I skated faster, my heart hammering in my chest, my mind spinning out every dire scenario it could come up with—and there were quite a few of those. The curse of an active imagination.
The most active imagination in the world couldn’t prepare me for coming around a bend in the path and finding Sam sprawled, motionless, in the middle of a flowerbed.
“Sam!” I skated to his side as fast as I could, dropping to my knees before I’d come to a complete stop. I immediately regretted my lack of kneepads as the pavement stripped away several layers of skin. That was going to sting. And it didn’t matter, because he still wasn’t moving.
Fighting to keep it together, I pressed my ear against his chest, relaxing only when I heard the distant, steady beat of his heart. He was unconscious. He wasn’t dead.
“Hey.” I sat up, gripping his shoulders and giving him a shake. His head lolled, but he didn’t respond. I shook harder. “Hey. Wake up. We need to go fight a bunch of asshole Harry Potter wannabes to get our friends back.”
Still he didn’t respond. I sighed.
“I didn’t want to do this,” I said, and slapped him.
Hitting your friends without their consent is generally not a good idea, and is a good way to end a friendship. Hitting your significant others without their consent is the sort of thing that leads to breakups and restraining orders. Under the circumstances, and in the absence of smelling salts, I figured he’d forgive me.
Sam groaned. I slapped him again. He groaned louder. I pulled back my hand for one more hit, and stopped as something grabbed my wrist—something wet and hairy and flexible. A glance confirmed that it was Sam’s tail, and I felt something in my chest unsnarl, even before I turned to look at him. His eyes were open. He looked confused, but his eyes were open, and he was looking at me, and he was alive. The crossroads might have tried to cheat. They hadn’t quite succeeded.
“Annie?” he said, bewildered. “What the fuck . . . ?”
“Their trainspotter threw a roller coaster at us.”
He blinked. “I hate that those words made sense in that order. But it does explain why I feel like I’ve been hit by a train.”
“Because you were.” I stood, bracing myself to keep from rolling away before I offered him my hands. “Up. We have to move. They probably think we’re both dead, but that’s only going to last until their routewitch talks to the paths, or someone thinks to come out and look for a body.”
“More hate,” said Sam. He took my hand, wobbling as he got his feet under himself and slowly, awkwardly stood. Then he shook himself, sending drops of water scattering in all directions. When he was done, he was dryer, and fluffier than I had ever seen him.
It was enough to make me smile, if only for a moment. “Nice hair.”
“You’re one to talk.” He ran a hand over the top of his head as he looked around, tail curling and uncurling anxiously behind him. “You know this place better than I do. Where do we go?”
“This way,” I said, and pointed before I started to skate.
Neither of us was at our best, but I’m a good enough skater that I was able to build up a good head of steam, and when something went whipping by to my left, it was no surprise to see that it was Sam, using the lights and overhanging tree branches to travel through the Park at an impressive speed. He was holding back, circling me, allowing me to be the one who guided us to the goal. I flashed him a thumbs-up and turned, heading down a narrow side path toward the Midsummer Night’s Scream.
Their trainspotter had been strong enough to wrest the Sea Dragon off its tracks, but that would have taken a lot out of him, and unless they were running a coaster somewhere else in the Park—which I was pretty sure I would have been able to hear—he was still going to be drained. That was good. He couldn’t hit us with another train. That didn’t mean Emily was at anything other than full strength, and while routewitches are more defensive than offensive, they’re still dangerous.
With the two witches dead, we were down to a routewitch, an ambulomancer, a trainspotter, and a sorcerer. Not the sort of spread that seemed like a good time, but at least none of them were particularly complementary. Their powers weren’t designed to work together. The witches had probably been able to bridge the gaps, making the cabal more cooperative, less competitive. Now they were gone, and we were racing toward a four-way boss fight.
“Sam!” He stopped swinging and waited for me to catch up, moving more slowly to keep pace as I said, “Joshua’s the trainspotter. Don’t get between him and anything with more than four wheels. Emily’s going to have trouble getting a fix on you if you stay off the ground.”
He looked concerned. “What about you? You’re on the ground.”
“I’m hoping the roller skates will confuse her.” It was a foolish hope. Wheels have never confused a routewitch before. I was more hoping I could deliver an elbow to her chin before she had a chance to do anything.
“Nope,” said Sam, and grabbed my shoulders with his feet, wrapping his tail around my waist for good measure before he resumed his forward momentum. “Not going to go on a hope. Going to go on a ‘definitely and also we’re going to survive.’ Now tell me where to turn.”
I thought about arguing, and decided against it just as quickly, gripping his ankles to stabilize myself as I said, “Head left. The coaster will be right ahead of us.”
“Got it.” He didn’t seem to be weighed down by my extra mass at all, and kept swinging smoothly onward, expression grim. “What else do I need to know?”
“Without his wand, Colin has a lot of technique, but not that much raw power. I think that’s why he was siphoning mine.” A sorcerer who didn’t have the strength to back up his threats would be easy pickings in the wider world—unless he surrounded himself with allies and occasionally tricked a younger, stupider magic-user into doing something that they shouldn’t. I had made him stronger. I had made him legitimate.
I had never felt so foolish in my life.
“What about the other lady?”
“She’s an ambulomancer. She draws power from distance traveled, but only when she does it on her own two feet.” I hated trying to unsnarl the delicate distinctions between the different types of magic-users. The fact that Sam wasn’t slowing down and I had to keep pulling my legs up to keep from slamming into things wasn’t helping. “A routewitch gets power from distance, period. Roller skates, bare feet, cars, whatever. As long as they’re on the ground, they’re gaining strength. An ambulomancer gains power faster, but has to keep their feet anchored.”
“What do they do?”
I was about to answer when Sam swung into an invisible barrier, losing his grip on the branch he’d been using and sending us both toppling toward the ground. I only had a few seconds to figure out my landing. Calling on everything I’d learned from gymnastics and cheerleading—and a few things I’d learned from roller derby—I bent my knees, braced my shoulders, and hit hard.
Dropping eight feet onto pavement in roller skates may never rank among my top ten favorite activities. At least I was in footwear designed to protect my ankles. I’ve seen my sister do similar drops in high heels, and somehow her legs are not shapely sacks of gravel barely held together by her muscular system.
Sam dropped next to me, landing harder, but with a little less visible pain. He gave me a wide-eyed look. “Assuming that’s what they do,” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah. Barriers. Ambulomancers are the reason that sometimes a road goes on forever, and sometimes it’s like a quarter of a mile long.”
“So how do we fight it?”
Normally, t
his was where I would have called for Mary, or better yet, Rose. Normally, I wasn’t also dealing with a routewitch. I frowned at the nothingness in front of us before saying, “They want us there. They want us to come to them. So there has to be a way in.”
“Won’t that be like running into a blind canyon because the villain wants you to?”
“It would be, except that it’s not possible to have only one way in. That would mess up the pressure.” I looked wildly around, finally spotting the charred wall near the site of the first accident in my recent chain. “This way.”
I skated for the employee door with Sam on my heels. When I found it locked, I pulled one of the knives from inside my shirt—how I hadn’t been shredded by my own weapons when the water pinned me to the ceiling, I had no idea—and slammed it down on the hasp, breaking the cheap padlock. Sam blinked, looking impressed, and didn’t say anything. He just followed.
We made our way across the employee walkway to the first tunnel door. Unlike the gate, it wasn’t locked. I pulled it open, and Sam grinned, a sharp, virtually feral expression.
“Got it,” he said.
“Good,” I said, and stepped into the tunnel.
The thing about road witches, whatever their type, is that they’re limited. Roads and feet and trains. Boats and planes and once, when we were more dedicated to sending people down into the bowels of the earth to bring back armfuls of riches, mines. An ambulomancer could no more wall off a tunnel than a trainspotter could read the story of a road. But the tommyknockers have been rare or entirely gone for decades now, outside of places like Kentucky, where the coal mines still thrive. Colin didn’t have one. His ambulomancer didn’t have the employee passageways.
Sam didn’t have any of that background. He just knew that I’d gone for the tunnels, and he trusted me enough to follow me underground. It was a humbling thought, knowing that he trusted me that much. I was going to do my best to make sure I deserved it.
It was hard to follow the twists and turns in the dark. I had been working mostly in Fairyland for long enough that I knew the way I had to go, and after only two false starts, we were standing at the door that would take us into the landscaping of the Midsummer Night’s Scream.
I put a finger to my lips in an exaggerated hushing gesture. Sam nodded. Then he leaned in, pushed my finger aside, and kissed me.
His lips tasted like chlorinated water, and he smelled of wet fur, and I grabbed his arms and clung to him, counting off the seconds I felt we could afford to spend on this small, utterly self-indulgent gesture. When I reached ten, I let him go, offered a tight smile, and opened the door on the dark tangle of the bushes that hid it from casual view.
The voices reached us immediately.
“Joshua should be back by now. Are you sure you didn’t make your shell too strong?” Colin. He sounded peevish and unnerved, which was fine by me. The more off-balance he was, the better our odds were.
“Something hit it,” said a female voice. The ambulomancer. I wished I’d taken the time to learn her name. I’d been too trusting. I’d allowed them to lull me into a false sense of security—and I’d done half the work for them, treating Lowryland as some sort of magical, uncrackable safe haven against all the people who would do me harm. I’d been so focused on the threat of the Covenant that I had never considered the possibility of danger from within.
“That’s what happens to shells,” said Emily.
“Yes, but something hit it without shattering it,” said the ambulomancer. “Your little apprentice is probably walking around the edges, looking for the door I left her. She’ll be here soon, or she’s unconscious on the ground and Joshua will bring her back. Either way, I did my job, and either way, she’s only still a threat because you did your part wrong. She should be loyal by now.”
“You enjoyed her power as much as the rest of us,” snapped Colin. “Don’t be a child, Andrea. If I’d drained her any faster, she wouldn’t have been able to regenerate for years, and we would have lost all the good she’s done us.”
I turned to Sam and pointed upward. He nodded, catching my meaning, and I barely had time to take a breath before his hands and tail were around my waist and he was propelling himself nimbly into the air, carrying us past the brush in a single powerful leap. We landed in front of the cluster of magic-users, him with bent knees, me standing as straight and seemingly effortless as any pom-pom girl since the dawn of cheerleading time. Sometimes it’s all about making an entrance.
Emily jumped. The ambulomancer—Andrea—clapped a hand over her mouth to stop a shriek. And Colin, whose back was toward us, went ramrod straight and tense, his shoulders forming an iron bar beneath the jacket of his tailored suit.
“I asked you to teach me, not rob me,” I said coldly. “Give back my friends and this can be over.”
“Demanding as always,” said Colin. He turned slowly, looking first at me and then at Sam. His lips pulled back in a sneer. “Beauty and the Beast indeed. Have you considered what the children will look like? It’s a disgrace.”
“Nah,” I said broadly. “My family will be cool with it. We’ve been cool with stranger.” Now was the moment to put that dramatic entrance to good use. I took a step forward, Sam’s tail obligingly uncoiling from around my waist, my eyes fixed on Colin and my hands spread by my sides like the fire was still there.
Cheerleading and roller derby have this much in common: image and attitude are sometimes everything. You’re going to eat grass and track no matter how good you are. What people will remember is how you get back on your feet. So I advanced on those people like Dany emerging from the fire, like Jean stepping out of the Phoenix Force, like . . .
Well, like me. Antimony Price. The girl who burns and does not die.
“I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced,” I said. My hands moved, plucking knives from the waistband of my wet jeans and holding them low against my hips, as deadly as the fire I had given to the crossroads, and a lot harder for unethical sorcerers to steal. “My name is Antimony. Antimony Price. Maybe you remember my grandparents?”
Andrea went white, taking a quick step backward and almost tripping over one of the low decorative walls used to shape the walkways. “You’re a Price?”
“It’s hot when your name scares the shit out of people,” Sam observed.
“She’s lying,” said Colin dismissively. “Don’t listen to this foolish little girl who thought she could take advantage of our kindness and wound up in over her head. She’s not a Price. They’re all dead.”
“She stinks of travel and the grave,” said Emily. Her tone was uneasy, and she was looking at me with a new intensity. “Alice Price grew up among ghosts, and her godmother was an ambulomancer. We knew her very well.”
“Thomas Price was a fool who chose to fritter his potential on a farm girl,” snapped Colin. “He died childless.”
“He disappeared the father of two, after making a deal with the crossroads for the life of his wife, my grandmother,” I said, keeping my voice calm, keeping my hands steady. “I take after him in so many more ways than you can imagine. If you’re not with me, you’re against me—and I don’t think you want that, do you?”
“She’s bluffing,” said Colin—but there was a note of unease in his voice now, like he was reviewing every interaction we’d had, and finding at least a few of them questionable.
I took another step forward. Andrea took another step back.
“No,” she said, voice clear and only shaking a little. “She’s not. I’m out. I don’t have the chops for this shit.” Then she turned and fled, racing off into the darkness of the Park.
Colin scowled. “Is this your plan, child? Say dire things and frighten us all away?”
“No,” I said, and raised my right hand.
The knife flew straight and true, embedding itself in Colin’s left shoulder before he had a chance to real
ize what I was about to do. He bellowed, pain and rage and shock all mixed together into a single primal sound. That was Sam’s cue. He leaped straight upward, crashing down on Emily while she was still gaping, wide-eyed, at the blood soaking into Colin’s sleeve. She went down like a sack of potatoes, Sam crouching on top of her, pinning her to the ground. He rolled his lips back, showing his teeth. She froze. Smart girl.
Colin grasped the knife in his shoulder, yanking it loose and flinging it to the ground. “You ungrateful little wretch,” he snarled. “How dare you? Don’t you know who I am?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re the guy whose ass I’m about to kick.”
Stan Lee is a human dude from New York. I don’t know whether he’s ever met a superhero in real life. (He’s definitely met a cryptid—the cryptid population of New York and New Jersey is staggering—but that doesn’t mean he knew it was happening.) Still, there’s one thing he got absolutely right: if you can quip and joke and one-liner your way into a fight, the odds are good that it will throw your opponent off at least enough to make them forget about a few things.
Like the fact that I was on roller skates.
I threw myself into the motion, crouching low and skating as hard as I could across the concrete, smoothed and evened out by the feet of a hundred thousand tourists, maintained nightly by the Lowryland staff. Colin barely had time to realize what was happening before my shoulder slammed into his stomach. At the same time, I punched him hard in the stab wound I had created, taking him down to the ground with my arm forming a bar across his throat. He landed even harder than Emily had. I couldn’t feel bad about that.
He glared at me, eyes burning with hatred and with flickering, deep-buried magic. His lips moved as he tried to speak. No sound emerged. I had knocked the air completely out of him, leaving him temporarily silent.
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