Magic for Nothing

by Seanan McGuire

  Swell. That was just what I needed. “I am not trying to trick you, Tyler,” I said firmly. “If I were trying to trick you, I’d have brought . . . shit, I don’t even know. I have no idea how to trick a kid your age. I don’t even like kids. I never have.”

  He blinked. I had apparently gone far enough off-script to confuse him. “You were a kid once.”

  “And when I was a kid, I was not my own biggest fan,” I said. “Kids are sticky by default, and annoying almost all the damn time. I am not the person you choose to trick a kid. Look, I’m running out of novel ways to say this, but I’m here because I want to help you. That starts with you helping me. You help me by not throwing that damn dresser at my head again. I am mortal, I am breakable, I do not want to be broken.”

  Tyler scowled. “If you want to help me, where are my parents?”

  “They’re gone. You died and they moved away, because they couldn’t handle the pain of living here and knowing you weren’t ever going to grow up, or come back, or be their little boy again.” They’d also moved away because he’d scared the pants off them when he started haunting the place, but saying that seemed a little impolitic. Tyler had just been doing what his new instincts told him to do. It wasn’t his fault that those instincts sort of sucked.

  “You’re lying!” he howled, face distorting until it was less that of a preteen boy and more that of an unspeakable nightmare. I prepared to brace for impact.

  Artie burst in through the front door and thrust a rectangular object at Tyler.

  “Hey,” he said, panting slightly. “You wanna play RoboRally?”

  The nightmare bled back out of Tyler’s face, replaced by an expression of deep, profound confusion. I could sort of understand where he was coming from. This wasn’t exactly normal procedure.

  I put a hand over my face and groaned. “I asked for backup, not a comedy routine, Artie.”

  “This is backup,” he said, sounding stung. “I was an eleven-year-old boy and you weren’t, and I’m telling you, this is backup. C’mon, Tyler. When’s the last time you sat down and played a game?”

  My cousin is an enormous nerd—and when I’m the one saying that, it means something. After all, I’m the girl who shares her room with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf full of X-Men trades, and who once stayed up for three days straight to organize an attack plan for the Comic-Con hotel lottery. Somehow, despite all that, Artie out-nerds me.

  But he’s got good instincts. I lowered my hand. Tyler was looking thoughtfully at the box in Artie’s hands.

  “Is this a trick?” he asked. “When you open the lid, will it be a Ouija board or something?”

  Artie looked hurt. “I don’t screw around with the spirit world,” he said. “Aunt Mary would hit me in the head.”

  “Damn right,” said Mary, appearing next to him. “And you shouldn’t believe all the press about Ouija boards. They can’t be used in an exorcism. Trivial Pursuit can, but that’s another story. Come on, kid. What can it hurt?”

  Tyler looked at Mary, frowning. Finally, he heaved a heavy sigh and said, “I guess. But I get firsts.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  The four of us sat on the floor around the board, which Artie had laid out with the utmost care, as fussy as if he were getting set up in a clean, well-lit game store, and not in a decrepit house that would probably be condemned as soon as it stopped being haunted. (Most construction firms are sensibly hands-off about really haunted houses, even if they don’t like to admit that ghosts are real. There’s making a profit and then there’s getting possessed. Only one of them is good for business.) I was going to need a six-hour shower when we got out of here, after all the things I’d touched without meaning to.

  On the plus side, the game seemed to be helping. Tyler was still blue and faintly transparent, but at least he looked like a kid again, and not the sort of thing that had been designed to give me nightmares for the rest of my life.

  Our little robots were making good progress through their robotic death factory, even if Tyler never touched the cards or pieces. He just looked at them and they moved. There was a good chance he was cheating, since he could presumably control which card he pulled from the deck, but it didn’t seem worth pointing out, especially since we were supposed to be calming him down, not getting into a weird family game night fight. Besides, it wasn’t like he was hurting anyone.

  Unlike Tyler, Mary used her hands when it was her turn to move, pulling her cards with relish, leaning across anyone who got in her way in order to reach her avatar. Like Tyler, she had allowed herself to grow less and less solid, until she’d become transparent enough for me to see right through her. It seemed to be helping him calm down. He kept stealing little glances in her direction, like he couldn’t believe another ghost would take this sort of interest in him. Or that anyone would take this sort of interest in him. Like most poltergeists, he’d been confined to the house he was haunting since his death. And he was lonely.

  The more relaxed Tyler got, the more he talked, going on and on about shows he liked to watch and movies he was looking forward to seeing. He didn’t seem to realize that it was all four years out of date. Most of his shows had been canceled; most of those movies had not only been released, they had come out on DVD and been consigned to the bargain shelf. He was a boy without a country in more ways than one.

  Artie caught my eye and grimaced. I wrinkled my nose in apology. Artie and his sister Elsie are only half-human. Their father, my Uncle Ted, is an incubus. Artie inherited his father’s empathic abilities, which would be a neat superpower to have if we lived in a world where wearing spandex out of the house was not only socially acceptable but magically automatically flattering. Instead, poor Artie gets to pick up the emotional state of every living person around him, whether he wants to or not. Since Mary and Tyler weren’t alive, they weren’t putting off emotions he could read. But I was. And I was feeling so much pity for Tyler that it must have been like swimming through treacle.

  “Sorry,” I mouthed.

  “’S okay,” he mouthed back.

  “What are you whispering about?” asked Tyler suspiciously.

  We hadn’t been whispering—we hadn’t been making a sound—but it was a good opening. “Whose turn it is to do the dishes. It’s Artie’s. He always tries to get out of it.”

  “So do you,” said Artie.

  I stuck my tongue out at him. Tyler giggled.

  He was starting to sound like a real kid again. “What did you want to be when you grew up, Tyler?” I asked, trying to make my tone light.

  He glanced at me through the translucent fringe of his hair. “A football player. Or maybe a fireman. I was trying to make up my mind when I got hit.” His lips drew downward. “I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” said Mary. “I know some ghost kids who still like to play football. Best part? You can’t get hurt when you’re dead. So they can just tackle and shove and do whatever they want, forever. And it’s never time to go in for dinner, and there’s never homework to make them stop playing.”

  “Yeah?” asked Tyler. “What if I wanted to be a fireman?”

  “You’re a poltergeist, right?” asked Artie. “I mean, if you figured out how to control what you can do, and you decided what you really wanted to do with your time was fight fires, I bet you could. You could get the water and the foam deeper into the building, you could move smoke away from kids who are trapped . . .”

  “You wouldn’t be the first,” said Mary. “There are lots of constructive ways to haunt.”

  “Yeah?” asked Tyler again. He seemed more solid, and almost hopeful. Then he flickered, becoming a cellophane boy. “What about my parents?”

  “Not everyone becomes a ghost,” said Mary. “Mostly only people who feel like they’re leaving something behind. Because you died so young, they’re likely to hurry on to whate
ver comes after this world, looking for you. I’m sorry. You probably won’t see them until you decide to move past haunting. But maybe you will. Sticking around to see can’t hurt anything, and it might make you feel less like you got cheated out of everything you should have had.”

  “But I did get cheated,” said Tyler. That horror movie mask was starting to ooze around the edges of his face again, darkening the whole room. “That man shouldn’t have been driving. I was being good. I was following the rules. I just wanted to go home.”

  The game board began to shake. Artie looked alarmed. Right. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being the youngest of three, it’s how to throw a good tantrum—and how to defuse one.

  “You got screwed,” I said amiably. Tyler’s face stopped shifting toward the horrific and snapped back into little boy innocence as he turned to gape at me. I shrugged. “It’s true. You got screwed over. That asshole stole every year you should have had. Your high school, dating, college, kids if that’s what you wanted, everything, he took it, because he couldn’t take a taxi home after slamming back a few beers. God, that sucks. I’d be mad, too. I don’t know if I’d be ‘haunt the house I lived in, throwing the furniture at people’ mad, but who knows? It didn’t happen to me. Even if you brought the roof down on my head right now—”

  “Uh, maybe don’t give him ideas?” said Artie, with a nervous glance at the ceiling.

  “—I would still have lived longer and done more than you ever got to, and I am sorry, and that is fucked up, but throwing shit at us is not going to make it better, and it’s not going to make you alive again.” I gestured to Mary. “She wants to take you someplace where you can meet other kids who got screwed like you did. You can make friends. You can do stuff. And, yeah, you can wait to see if your parents come to join you. You’re a ghost. You’ve got time. Maybe this isn’t what you would have chosen, but it’s what you’ve got, so make the best of it.”

  Tyler gaped at me for several seconds before he turned to Mary and asked, “You can really take me someplace better?”

  She nodded. “I can. It’s why I’m here.”

  “And I can wait to see if my parents come?”

  “You can. I can’t promise they will, but Annie’s right: you can at least have a good time while you’re waiting. You’ve been alone for too long. You don’t have to be alone anymore.”

  Tyler bit his lip and nodded. I realized he was trying not to cry, screwing his eyes tight the way my brother always used to when he was upset but didn’t want to show it.

  “Hey.” I leaned over, putting my hand on the air where his shoulder seemed to be. It was a little chilly there, but there was nothing for me to rest against. Ghosts are not always concrete companions. “It’s okay to cry. Like I said, you got screwed.”

  Tyler sniffled, tears starting to roll down his cheeks, and turned to offer Mary his hand. “Can you take me?” he asked.

  “I can,” said Mary, and took his hand, and they were both gone. There was no flash or displacement of air: one moment they were there; the next they weren’t.

  I looked at Artie. Artie looked at me.

  “Wasn’t she our ride home?” asked Artie.

  “Yeah,” I said, and leaned forward, starting to reset the board. “Guess we’re going to play another round.”

  “I want to be the yellow one.”

  Mary came back just before dawn. As usual, she didn’t want to talk about where she’d been. Despite being with my family for three generations, she’s managed to do a remarkable job of not spilling secret ghost business. My Aunt Rose isn’t as good at keeping her mouth shut, but she’s a different sort of ghost, so maybe she doesn’t have secrets that are quite as important.

  (Aunt Rose is a hitchhiker, the ghost of someone who died on the road and is still trying, in her own idiosyncratic fashion, to find her way home. She’s harmless, as the dead go. Aunt Mary, on the other hand, is a crossroads ghost. She serves something greater than most of the dead, and none of her gifts comes without a price. We can love her. We can offer her a place at the table and a profile on the family Netflix account. We can be her family forever. But we can’t ask her for favors, because that’s when the crossroads come into play. If we ask, if her little internal counter deems the request to be big and important enough, she might have to call her bosses. No Price has gone down to the crossroads since Grandpa Thomas, and we’re all pretty determined to keep the streak going.)

  “You two ready?” Mary asked, prodding me with the toe of her foot. I opened my eyes and smiled sleepily up at her. I had fallen asleep with my head on Artie’s leg; he was using the RoboRally box as a pillow, which was as adorable as it was impractical. Sometimes family is awesome.

  “Do you feel like making a stop for donuts?” I asked.

  She laughed.

  This is my life.

  I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

  Two

  “It’s important to have things you care about outside of the family. Insularity is always a risk, and it’s the first step toward total isolation. Be an island, but build bridges, not walls.”

  —Evelyn Baker

  A nondescript warehouse in Northeast Portland, Oregon, three days later

  THE SLASHER CHICKS CIRCLED the track like sharks, and, like sharks, we were constantly in motion. To stop moving was to die, or at least to learn the hard way what it feels like when you get hip-checked to the floor by one of your own teammates. We were all wearing our practice uniforms, “bloodstained” tank tops and green running shorts with “CAMP SLASH-A-LOT” blazoned across the butt. It made for a fascinating dash of uniformity in a group that was otherwise intentionally un-uniform. Derby girls are not cast from a single mold, unless tattoos and hair dye are somehow genetic. (For some species of cryptid, they are.)

  The other three teams in my home roller derby league—the Concussion Stand, the Block Busters, and the Stunt Troubles—lounged on the bleachers or stretched the kinks out of their legs as they waited for their metaphorical turn at bat. I didn’t spare them much thought. This was a practice run, but even during a practice run, paying attention to the track is key: take your eyes off the prize and you’re eating floor. It didn’t help that the other jammer currently skating was my team captain, the lovely and sarcastic Elmira Street, who knows exactly what I’m capable of when I apply myself.

  Of the two of us, I’m more nimble, more innovative, and better at turning momentum into crowd-pleasing tricks—an artifact of my high school cheerleading days. Elmira has an edge on me when it comes to raw speed; the only person on the team who can reliably beat her in a race is Fern, better known as “Meggie Itwasthewind,” and Fern doesn’t jam. She’s a blocker and she’s content to stay that way, despite Elmira’s repeated attempts to get her to change positions.

  (Fern is fast and Fern is good and Fern is never going to be a jammer, because a large percentage of Fern’s speed comes from the fact that she’s not human. She’s a Sylph, a humanoid cryptid capable of modifying her own body density, which makes her ultra-fast when she’s ultra-light, and an incredible blocker when she’s ultra-heavy, since people slam into this skinny little slip of a girl, expecting to knock her out of the way, only to discover that they’ve actually run into an immovable object. It’s comedy gold every time. But if someone hit her like that when she was moving at full speed, she’d literally go flying, and that’s the sort of thing we want to avoid if possible.)

  “Look alive, Thompson!” shouted Elmira as she lapped me. I wrinkled my nose at her and kept moving. I couldn’t shout back, thanks to my mouth guard: it was one of the heavy-duty ones, intended to keep me from racking up the kind of dental bills that would make my parents weep. Elmira’s mouth guard was equally impressive, when she bothered to use it; as our captain, she has a tendency to take it out during practice, and trust the rest of us not to bounce her head off the track more than strictly necessar
y.

  It’s nice that she has that sort of faith in us. Misplaced and a little stupid, but nice.

  Before I became a derby girl, I spent four years as a cheerleader at Lewis and Clark High School. People make a lot of assumptions about cheerleaders, like that we’re all plastic airheads who just want to jump high and look pretty. But it’s sort of like the whole Ginger Rogers thing, where she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels. A good competitive cheerleader does everything a gymnast does while wearing a pleated skirt and never letting themselves stop smiling. Cheerleading is the leading—no pun intended—cause of injuries among high school and collegiate athletes, and the fact that no one takes it seriously is part of why people keep getting hurt. When you say cheerleading deserves the safety standards and funding of football, you’re likely to be laughed right off the team.

  But cheerleaders have their tricks. I crouched to lower my center of gravity as I approached the inside curve of the track. My team has skated with me long enough to know my go-to moves, and a few blockers tried to get into position to stop me, but they were too slow. I sped up, tensing for what I was about to do.

  In flat track roller derby, when a skater touches space outside the lines defining the track itself—whether they skate into the center or get hip-checked into the bleachers—they’re considered “out of bounds,” which is a penalty and annoying and disruptive and can mean losing valuable time. But that’s only if you touch the ground. An apex jump carries a skater over a portion of the inside of the track. As long as no wheels touch the forbidden ground, it’s still clean and there’s no penalty. I jumped, and suddenly I was ahead of the pack, leaving all eight of my own team’s blockers behind me and skating for the fences.

  “Cheater!” shouted Elmira amiably.

  I held my hands out behind me like a little kid playing bird, and showed her my middle fingers, just in case she missed the point. Her laughter was better than Red Bull when it came to giving me wings, and I skated onward, for freedom, for glory, and for bragging rights. Sometimes those are the only things that matter.