Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  (When Annie had asked him to describe the sensation of holding human form, he’d hemmed and hawed and finally said it was like carrying an egg in a spoon. Sure, it was easy enough to start, but the longer he had to focus on the egg, the harder it got to keep it balanced, and to keep himself from saying “to hell with it” and throwing it at the nearest window. Humanity was an effort. Sometimes more of an effort than it was genuinely worth.)

  Emery paused before she said, grudgingly, “Come to my room.”

  “Okay, Grandma,” he said, and ambled after her, all too aware of the curious eyes watching them through parted motel curtains. If all those eyes had belonged to carnival folk, he would have been a lot more comfortable. Sadly, while they had the numbers, and they had the initial insurance payout keeping them housed, they had yet to displace all the people who’d rented their rooms before the carnival came to town. As those rooms became available, more carnies would move into them, until eventually, they had the whole place to themselves.

  This was never going to be more than a brief waystation, but Sam found himself counting the hours until checkout every morning, eagerly waiting to see how many unfamiliar faces would flicker in the lobby and then disappear forever, off to their lives, leaving him alone.

  Emery unlocked the door to her room—ground floor, conveniently close to the ice machine and the lobby, where a continental breakfast of bad coffee and worse pastries was set out every morning—and waved Sam imperiously inside. He went, fighting the urge to duck his head and mutter like a naughty child.

  As soon as she was inside and the door was closed he relaxed, allowing his body to shift into the form it preferred. The hair atop his head thickened as it became fur, and his tail, always an unwelcome absence, re-extended from his spine and snaked along his leg, finally wrapping tight around his ankle.

  Emery watched this process with her usual grim patience—an expression he’d often mistaken for disapproval when he’d been young and stupid and afraid she loved him less because he wasn’t human. It wasn’t that she loved him any less, she’d explained, once she’d finally grasped the root of his concern; it was that she had less respect for the world because it couldn’t allow him to be himself.

  “The world doesn’t know what it’s missing, my brave boy,” she’d said, and he’d never worried about being himself in front of her again.

  “Samuel,” she said now, her tone filled with regret and disappointment. “Where in the world did you go that was so important you couldn’t tell anyone? Not even me?”

  “The airport,” he said. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d say not to go.”

  Her eyes grew wide. “The airport?” she demanded. “Sam, you know better! That sort of place—there’s cameras everywhere, government agents, the Covenant—”

  “Annie wouldn’t have asked me to take her mice to the airport if the Covenant was going to be there.”

  “Annie.” Emery’s voice was suddenly hushed. “You mean the girl who led the Covenant right to us, then burned down our carnival to stop them? The girl who lied to us about everything?”

  “Not everything,” he muttered.

  It didn’t matter: Emery was on a roll. “I found you bleeding, shot in the head, Sam. Do you know how easily you could have died? I could have been tracking your mother down right now to tell her that her only son was being dissected in some black ops lab, and all because of Annie.”

  “At least then you’d know where she was,” said Sam.

  “Don’t talk about your mother that way,” snapped Emery. “We’re discussing your shortcomings, not hers.”

  “Right,” said Sam, and scowled. His mother had taken one look at her bouncing baby boy—complete with prehensile tail and sideburns at two hours of age—and run for the hills, leaving Emery to clean up her mess. His grandmother always said he shouldn’t blame her, that his mother had known too much about the difficulties he was going to face living as a yōkai in a world dominated by humans, and she hadn’t been able to handle it.

  If she’d been that concerned about him, why hadn’t she insisted his father wear a condom, or gone and gotten herself knocked up by some nice, run-of-the-mill human guy? He couldn’t imagine wanting to be anything else, but no one in his life had ever managed to make him feel like as much of a monster as his own mother had.

  “Honestly, Sam, what were you thinking? You could have been seen. You could have been taken.”

  “I was thinking Annie didn’t lead the Covenant to us, Umeko did. Remember Umeko? The one who was killing people? As soon as she started doing that, the Covenant knew who we were and that we were harboring a threat. An actual threat, Grandma, not just the Covenant being weird about us because we were monsters.” Sam shook his head. “If Annie hadn’t been there, we would have all died. The purge would have happened, and they would have burned our bodies. Instead, we got another shot. We can rebuild the carnival, and we can start over. Annie did that for us. We owe her our lives.”

  “She still lied. She still hurt you.”

  “I’m a big boy. My heart can handle it.”

  The look Emery gave him was quietly disbelieving. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

  “Because I’m not eight years old anymore, for a start.”

  “Samuel—”

  “She lied to us. She apologized. She did everything within her power to make it right. She saved my life. She probably saved all our lives, since she’s the reason we had any idea at all that the Covenant was coming.” Sam raked a hand through his hair, frustrated. “Did she mess up? Yeah. She messed up a lot. But I’m pretty glad she did, since otherwise, I’d think she was too good to be true.”

  Emery opened her mouth to reply. Then she paused, giving her grandson a narrow-eyed look, and said, “You still like her.”

  Sam’s cheeks reddened. “Uh, well. She’s okay, I guess. She doesn’t mind the whole ‘monkey’ thing I’ve got going on, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re not exactly dripping in fūri around here. So that’s a point in her favor. She’s pretty good with knives, too.”

  “She’s a Price, Sam. Do you understand what that means?”

  “Not really.” He shrugged. “I don’t think you do either, though. Because what she says about her family and what you say about her family doesn’t exactly match up. You’re the one who taught me that when you have two conflicting stories, the truth is usually somewhere between them.”

  “They were Covenant,” Emery said.

  “They quit. A long time before Annie was born. That part’s consistent in both your story and hers. The Prices quit, and now the Covenant wants them—and by extension, her—dead almost as much as they want people like me dead, which seems like a good way to be sure we’ll always have something to talk about.” Sam shrugged again, more vehemently this time. Something about arguing with his grandmother always made him feel like a sullen kid. “She asked me to get her mice to the airport, I told her I’d do it, I did it. I don’t understand why this has to be some kind of federal case.”

  “Because I can’t lose you, too!” Emery clapped a hand over her mouth, looking stricken.

  Sam was silent.

  It was no secret among the carnies that Emery felt she’d failed her only daughter. Delilah’s rebellion had taken the form of running away to join the business world, as far from the lights and sawdust of the carnival as she could get. Presumably, she was still out there somewhere, sitting in boardrooms and wearing pencil skirts and trying not to think about the world of monsters and midways she had left behind.

  Sam tried not to think about her when he didn’t have to. He didn’t hate her—not anymore, anyway; not since he was eight years old and realized that if she’d tried to keep him with her, he would have been her little secret, always stuffed into his human form, always hiding—but he didn’t like her either. She was the woman who’d taken one
look at him before giving him away. That sort of thing was kind of tricky to forgive.

  Finally, carefully, he said, “You’re not going to lose me just because I like a girl, Grandma, or because I try to keep my promises. You raised me better than that. But if you try to keep me from doing what I know is right, that’s where we’re going to have some problems.”

  “You scared me,” said Emery in a small voice.

  “It’s a scary sort of time,” he allowed, and gave her a pleading, almost sheepish look. “Now can I have a hug?”

  “Of course you can, sweetheart,” she said, and went to him, and held him like her life depended on it. “Of course you can.”

  Sam, watching the wall over her shoulder, knowing how close he was probably going to come to breaking her heart, didn’t say anything at all.

  * * *

  MINDY

  Prayer helped us both, as prayer always does: Mork ran alongside me with more serenity now, his tail brushing against mine in peaceful solidarity. We did this for the sake of our gods, long may they watch over us in all things, and for the sake of the Precise Priestess, who walked now as none among our family had walked in years beyond measure.

  She walked alone.

  If Aeslin live in the halls of believing, our gods live in the halls of memory. It is our duty, and our honor, to remember all that happens to them, preserving it against the ravages of time. We codify history into ritual and rite. When the Thoughtful Priestess, long may she light the way, asks for the stories of those who came before her, we are eternally prepared.

  Mork and I ran because we were burdened with a sacred duty: to carry the last months of the Precise Priestess home to the rest of the colony, that they might never be forgotten. That the word “last” can mean many things had not escaped either one of us. These months might be one side of a gap, a place where the catechism would grow vague, suitable for enthralling generations of scholars, teasing them with the unclear. When we are present, we can be sure every detail is perfect, that nothing is left behind. Without us, we would be bound to human recollection, and what a human—even one as glorious as our Priestess—saw fit to share.

  These months might also represent the final entries into her litany, the pieces that would cap and conclude her too-brief time upon this world before she transcended flesh and left us for the heavens. The thought was enough to raise the fur along my backbone. We know the gods can die. We know the priestesses must, in their time, do the same. We know also that our time with them would be longer were their mission not so essential. They must fight, and all who fight must one day fall. We treasure our time with them all the more for knowing that it might end.

  The Precise Priestess was young, and strong, and clever. She would not allow herself to be lost to us. It was upon me, and Mork, to carry her words and warnings home.

  The drainpipe leveled out for a long stretch before it began climbing upward, sloping and slanting below the airport’s foundations. We ran until the good greasy smell of frying potatoes addressed our noses. Then we stopped, in perfect tandem, whiskers twitching. My stomach growled.

  Mork looked first to my face and then to my belly, where the pups we had gotten together waited to be born. “You must eat,” he said.

  “We can eat once we have achieved our goal.”

  “No,” he said, firmly. “For did not the Precise Priestess say, lo, You Can Eat Once We Get Past Security? We have passed the checkpoint of the humans. Now is the time of eating.”

  “All praise her wisdom,” I murmured. Absent our usual tools and clever carrying devices, we were as mice, unable to lay in stores against the journey. I had never taken a plane from Minnesota to Oregon before. It could be hours before we landed, and there was no way of knowing whether there would be provisions upon the plane.

  “I will go,” said Mork. He bristled his whiskers against mine, and then he was gone, darting along the length of the pipe and disappearing into whatever waited beyond.

  My belly rumbled again. I pressed my paws against it, feeling the pups move inside me, and waited for his return, straining my ears for any sound and my nose for any scent more powerful than that of frying potatoes. None came to me.

  Once, according to the oldest rites, the litanies of faiths long marked as heretical and abandoned, Aeslin colonies were plentiful. We found the objects of our worship in field and forest, building our homes around them, and when we grew great enough in number, we would experience a religious schism. Half the colony would go, off to find and follow a new god, and they would be forgotten to the rest, marked anathema and untouchable. It was necessary in those days, to forget. Many who went out into the world to find a new faith would not survive the journey.

  Still, we flourished. Still, we walked in a world filled with wonders, and we worshipped as we saw fit, making of creation our cathedral. Yes, we were preyed upon, sometimes by larger beasts, sometimes by our own gods, but we were Aeslin. We were quick and we were clever, and we endured.

  Until the coming of the Covenant, may they never know peace nor the company of their own corrupted gods. They beheld us at our devotions and marked us as devil-born, creations of purest evil, and they set themselves against us. We, who were but mice in comparison to them, who were small and soft and defenseless. We would have worshipped them, had they but asked us to. We would have built shrines in their honor and become keepers of their history, preserving it against the ravages of time. But no. Such was not suitable for their ideals. They slew us where they found us, and as they knew us, they found us with ease.

  I was raised knowing that my colony, our shared faith, might be the last vestige of the Aeslin in this world, with all others gone to their scattered afterlives, nevermore to be united. Might: we knew there was the possibility of another, if they had been clever. If they had been quick.

  When the Precise Priestess had come to her clergy and requested one of us accompany her across the great sea, reversing the voyage of the Patient Priestess and the God of Uncommon Sense, we had seen our opportunity. She thought well of me, for I had volunteered, and it will forever be my own small shame that she may not know the reasons for my eagerness. She knows we suspected the presence of the Lost Colony, and does not resent us for keeping that knowledge from her.

  She does not know that I was chosen because I was young, and likely to be fertile, and unmated. Mork knew before he bedded me. Mork understood. When there are so few Aeslin left in the world, we cannot allow anything to prevent the making of more.

  Had he proven unsuitable, I would have left him in England when my Priestess carried me away, and I would have taken our pups with me, and my colony would have grown greater for my labors. But he was not unsuitable. His colony has labored in secret and in shame all this time, and finally, finally, they are ready to come home.

  All praise to the Precise Priestess, who carried me across an ocean and returned me home with my mate by my side. All praise to her, who understood that while she would miss us, carrying word of the Lost Colony home mattered as much as her own journeys. We had, in that moment, two sacred duties, to our gods and to our species, and she saw the conflict with clear and open eyes. She chose its resolution.

  May all those who came before her guide her and keep her safe, for we can do so no longer.

  I stood in the dark, paws pressed against my belly to feel the movement of both hunger and young, and waited. If Mork wished to betray me—if he was loyal to the Covenant’s gods—this would be the time. He could run for the familiar. He could lead them to me, and unveil all of my family’s secrets. It is the Aeslin way to have faith in the divinities which guide our lives. In this time, in this moment, I was choosing the hardest path of all. I was choosing to have faith in him.

  The sound of paws running through the pipe ahead of me pulled me from my contemplations. I tensed, ready to run or fight, if either proved necessary. Even without a weapon, I have trainin
g and awareness, things lacked by common predators. I could not defeat a cat, however hard I fought. A mouse, on the other hand, would find me a troublesome foe.

  Mork scurried into view, body low to the ground, a French fry clutched in his jaws. I relaxed. He ran faster, stopping in front of me and sitting up on his hind legs, dropping the fry into his paws and holding it out to me as if in offering.

  “The pipe empties into a space of flame and grease,” he said. “It is a restaurant. None saw me, for I was quick and clever. If we are quick and clever together, we may transverse their floors and make our exit.”

  “Where would we go?” I asked, before taking the fry and beginning to delicately nibble.

  “There were two ways. One to a place of carpets, where many people walked, and another to a place of stone floors and few people.”

  The front and back of the airport, public area and staff halls, then. That was useful to know, even if it required entering a kitchen. Humans can be odd about mice in their cooking spaces. Years of raiding hotel kitchens during the Precise Priestess’s conventions and field missions had trained me to face the most aggressive of chefs, but we did not wish to attract attention if we could help it.

  Thoughtfully, I chewed my fry. Finally, I swallowed and said, “We must find the holy Departures Board. It will tell us where the planes are going, and more, which will take us closer to our goal.” Portland was our final destination. Seattle would work almost as well. Planes flew between the two all day, on what were known as “commuter hops.” If we could reach one, we could reach the other.

  “Where is this holy Board?” asked Mork.

  “I know they are located in the passenger areas, but we are more likely to cause a Hue and Cry there,” I said. “Let us first search the staff area. Will you lead me?”

  Mork pressed a paw over his heart. “It would be my honor,” he said gravely.

  We ran through the pipe, our flanks brushing, and I had never felt more free, nor more in tune with what it means to be of the Aeslin. We were serving our gods and our colony, and we were doing it together. Oh, what bliss. Oh, what joy, to be born into the never-ending spiral of true faith. How small the worlds of those who did not believe seemed to me in that moment, as we ran on.