Magic for Nothing

by Seanan McGuire

  Every roller derby league has a theme of some kind, even if it’s just “we robbed a Hot Topic and this is what we came up with.” The league I belong to, the Silver Screams, has a cinema theme. Consequently, there’s usually a movie playing during practice, for the teams that have finished their time on the track to enjoy and snark at. It’s a nice social thing. It would be an awesome social thing if there were, say, showers anywhere in the building. Since there aren’t, the enjoyment of the movie must be measured against the agony of sitting that close to a bunch of sweat-drenched derby girls.

  Today’s film was Night of the Creeps. A classic, but one I’d seen before. I settled for sitting at a safe distance and unpacking my lunch. We’d be doing league speed trials after the Concussion Stand and Block Busters finished their track passes, and I needed to keep my strength up. Also, I had cookies.

  “Hi, Annie,” said a sweet, wispy voice as soon as I had my mouth full.

  I grunted a greeting, turning to offer Fern a nod. I didn’t chew any faster. Fern’s my friend, but my mom’s cookies are amazing.

  Like the rest of us, she was still in her practice gear: there was no point in changing when she’d have to put her nasty, sweaty shorts back on in an hour. She’d removed her helmet and mouth guard, at least, revealing a face just as angelic as her voice.

  “You skated real good today,” she said, glancing around. Apparently satisfied that we were alone, she lowered her voice, and asked, “Has there been any movement from the you-know-who?”

  I swallowed. “No, Fern,” I said. “Just like there wasn’t any movement last week, or the week before. I promised I’d call you as soon as something changed, and I will. Right now, nothing’s changing. Thank God.”

  She crinkled her nose in a way that would have been adorable, if not for the obvious concern in her eyes. “Is that good? Maybe it’s taking so long because they’re going to do something really big and awful and we’re all going to die.”

  “Don’t get yourself too worked up, please.” I put down my second cookie and leaned over to touch her elbow. For me, that was a big deal. I am not the most physically demonstrative person in the world. “You know Elmira will notice, and then we’ll have to explain why you’re upset, and I’m getting tired of lying to her.”

  Elmira knows not all the girls in the league are strictly human. She calls them “skaters with diffabilities,” and tries not to ask too many questions. Amusingly, I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m one of them, since I’m right in the middle of things every time something goes wrong. She’s sort of right. Most people can’t light a match by thinking about it really hard. She’s also sort of wrong, because I’m not a cryptid. I’m a cryptozoologist.

  Just like my stupid sister, Verity, who had the incredible bad judgment to go on national TV—live national TV—and declare war on the Covenant of St. George, aka, “that global organization of zealous monster hunters.” When we were younger, she liked to say that cheerleading would rot my brain. Guess she was projecting. The most cheer ever caused me to do was spend a lot of money on spirit ribbons. She, on the other hand, took up ballroom dance, and it caused her to fight a snake god on the air. Yeah. I’m definitely the one with the brain rot.

  Fern kept looking at me anxiously. “I’m scared, Annie,” she said. “What if they come here? What if they come here and hurt me?”

  “That isn’t going to happen, okay?” I offered her my hands. After a moment’s hesitation, she took them. Her fingers were squishy; she was so nervous she was dialing back her density. I squeezed, and they firmed up as she remembered what the human norm felt like. “I am not going to let that happen. You’re my friend. Everyone here is my friend.”

  “Even Carlotta?”

  “Maybe not Carlotta.” Carlotta is the captain of the Concussion Stand. She’s also my cousin Elsie’s ex-girlfriend, and a definite security risk. She’s not a member of the Covenant. She is aware of the identity of half the cryptids in the league, and that worried me. If someone came around promising to get rid of the “monsters” . . .

  We’d cross that bridge when we came to it. For the time being, I focused on Fern, trying to look as encouraging as possible.

  “Verity did what she did because she didn’t have a choice,” I said. That was the official family line, and maybe it was true. Once you’ve battled a titanic snake live on television, it’s pretty hard to maintain anything resembling a cover. The fact that she didn’t have to go on TV in the first place seemed to have missed everyone but me. Verity’s selfish. She always has been, she always will be, and she should never have been on that show. Still, I kept smiling. Fern didn’t need to know about my personal problems. “Maybe she scared the Covenant away. I mean, they did see her take down a snake god almost single handedly. So maybe they’re not coming. If they are coming, maybe they’re not going to come here. The show was filmed in Los Angeles. The cryptids down there are very good at hiding. I don’t think you have anything to be worried about.”

  “Thompson!”

  That’s not my name, but I’ve been answering to it for long enough that I turned automatically. Elmira was standing by the track, hands on hips, frowning. I let go of Fern.

  “I think that’s my cue,” I said, keeping my voice as light and unconcerned as I could. “You want the rest of my cookies? Cookies always make you feel better.”

  “Okay,” said Fern, with a quick, almost shy smile.

  I left her sitting on the bleachers and munching her way through the last of my mother’s cookies. Bribery is sometimes the solution to all the world’s problems.

  Elmira lowered her hands when I was close enough to talk to without shouting, and said, “Your cousin’s here.”

  “What, Elsie?” I looked around, but didn’t see her. Technically, I have three cousins, but Artie almost never leaves his house, and Sarah has been in Ohio for the last two years. If she was well enough to travel, someone would have told me. “Where?”

  “Outside,” she said. “She didn’t want to come in, since Carlotta’s here.” Elmira grimaced. “This is why you shouldn’t shit where you eat, or date where you skate. It makes everything awkward.”

  “At least Elsie’s not a skater.”

  “No, but she used to be one of our best volunteers and cheering sections, and now we only see her when she’s coming to pick you up or drop you off. She’s had breakups in the league before. I don’t get why this one is so different. She even went to Cherry’s wedding.”

  “Look, Carlotta’s your friend and Elsie’s my family, so I don’t think there’s any way for us to have this conversation without someone coming off as a biased asshole,” I said. “Did you tell her practice wasn’t over?”

  “I did,” said Elmira. “She said to tell you it’s not an emergency, but there’s a family meeting about your grandfather, and your parents want you there. You’re free to go as far as I’m concerned; it’s sort of refreshing to hear that the two of you aren’t the Boxcar Children or something.”

  “Points for the retro reference,” I said, mouth running on autopilot as my brain raced to process this information. The league knows Elsie is my cousin mostly because she’s the one who convinced me to go out for the team: by the time I’d realized I might want a better cover story, it was already too late. That was all they knew about my family, and since Elsie and I don’t look a damn thing alike, it was possible they thought one or both of us had been adopted, which was fine by me. Keeping people from figuring out more about my family than they need to know is part of my job. “It’s really okay if I leave early?”

  “It’s fine,” said Elmira. She smirked a little. “But I’m going to need you to help me work on my apex jumps.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said, and skated for the locker room.

  Here’s the 4-1-1—which is another retro reference that’s probably going to be incomprehensible before too much longer, thank you march
of technology. “Here’s the top Google result” might be a better opening. Anyway:

  My name is Antimony Price. My friends call me “Annie,” my siblings call me “Timmy,” the people I do roller derby with call me either “Annie Thompson” or “Final Girl,” and if I had a therapist, they’d probably call me on the brink of a serious identity disorder, given all the names I have to juggle on a daily basis. I’m not James Bond or Black Widow. I didn’t go to spy school. I went to something much worse. I went to the Price Family Academy of Hiding in Plain Sight Because Assholes Want to Kill You.

  As you can probably guess, our graduation ceremonies are a lot of fun.

  See, either two or four generations ago, depending on which branch of the family you start counting from, we were part of an organization of asshole monster hunters called, wait for it, the Covenant of St. George. Yes, the same assholes my sister declared war on while she was live on the air. The Covenant felt, and presumably still feels, that anything they considered “unnatural” should be wiped from the face of the planet, preferably with extreme prejudice. (A lot of their rationale is based on the idea that if something wasn’t on the Ark—as in Noah’s—then it’s evil and bad and doesn’t deserve to exist. Which sort of begs the question of how they got a manifest for that particular voyage.) My great-great-grandparents decided they were done being professional assholes, and walked. Two generations later, my grandmother convinced a Covenant operative named Thomas Price that he was done being a professional asshole, and married him.

  Professional assholes do not take kindly to people walking out on them, especially when those people not only walk out, but use all their training and institutional knowledge to set themselves up as the competition. Where the Covenant kills, we protect. We nurture, we teach, and we try to find the delicate balance between the needs of the human community and the needs of the cryptid community. And because we’re not really excited by the idea of being assassinated for our beliefs, we do it all while keeping ourselves hidden from the world. Hence my having a different name when I’m skating. Hence my sister wearing a wig when she dances, and my brother going to the middle of nowhere and Clark Kent-ing his way through a herpetology degree.

  All of which Verity fucked seven kinds of up when she declared war. (Mom says I shouldn’t blame her, since it’s not like she decided to summon the giant interdimensional snake on live television. I say we still suffer from the Healy family luck we inherited from Grandma Alice. If Verity hadn’t been there, the snake wouldn’t have been there either.) See, up until that moment, we had mostly managed to convince the professional assholes that we were all dead—or, more accurately, that most of us had never been born, on account of Grandma Alice and both her children having been killed when the Covenant came after them in Michigan. It may have been the biggest hoax any member of our family ever successfully pulled, and it was all undone in an instant because Cryptozoologist Barbie just wanted to dance.

  For the last three months, my entire extended family has been on high alert, waiting to see whether or not the Covenant of St. George had access to either basic cable or the Internet, and more importantly, what they were going to do about Verity’s little stunt. Our code for Covenant action getting started?

  “It’s about your grandfather.”

  In other words, we were screwed.

  Elsie was waiting outside the warehouse, her little Honda snuggled up to the curb like the two of them were planning an elopement. As usual, her windows were down, but no bubblegum pop blasted from the stereo; the car was eerily silent. I approached cautiously.

  “Elsie?”

  “Get in,” she said, not taking her hands off the wheel, not turning her head. Her breakup with Carlotta had been ugly enough to have me and Artie quietly plotting about filling the other woman’s apartment with spiders until Elsie caught on and asked us to leave her ex alone. Since then, Elsie had stayed in the car when she came to pick me up, and never risked catching a glimpse of the woman who broke her heart.

  “Right.” I slung my gym bag into the backseat, where the stink would hopefully be a little less offensive, and slung myself into the front, taking slightly more care about where I landed. I used fumbling with my seatbelt as an opportunity to take a good look at my cousin, trying to get a read on the situation from her.

  Elsinore Harrington—“Elsie”—inherited what most of us think of as the Healy “look.” She’s short, curvy without being aggressively stacked, blonde, and adorable. Drop her in 1940s Hollywood and she’d be running the place inside of the week. She’d probably mourn the limited range of available hair dye shades, but then she’d lead the fashion color revolution a few decades early, and make it possible for the humanoid cryptids with naturally blue-and-green hair to come out in public much sooner. Today, the bottom two inches of her hair were dyed a shockingly bright aquamarine, subtly blending up into a soft blue-green before melding into her natural blonde. She was wearing a Slasher Chicks booster T-shirt and well-worn jeans, and she looked more somber than I’d ever seen her.

  “How bad is it?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know.” She put the car in gear, pulling away from the curb and hitting the button to roll up the windows in the same motion. Once we were moving, and she was reasonably confident we couldn’t be overheard, she said, “Verity called to check in.”

  Verity was in New York, helping to marshal the cryptids who lived there in anticipation of a Covenant attack, and making sure the local Nest of dragons—which included the last known living male of their species—was locked down. I don’t like my sister much, if at all, but I have a lot of respect for the way she does her job. If you want to prepare the cryptids in an urban area for disaster, she’s the girl to call.

  It doesn’t hurt that her husband, Dominic, is ex-Covenant, and knows all the tricks his former fellows might use to invade the city. (Although it does raise the question of whether the Covenant still thinks he’s dead. My cousin Sarah, the telepathic super-wasp, once used her powers to make a Covenant field team think Verity was an imposter Dominic had trained because . . . reasons, and that they were both deceased. Well, now they knew Verity was the real thing, and also alive. Did they know the same about him? Were they going to be looking for him?)

  “And?” I asked tightly.

  “And the Freakshow burned down last night.”

  I clapped a hand over my mouth, fighting the urge to gasp. The Freakshow was a bogeyman-owned burlesque club. Verity worked there for a while during her first stint in New York, and she’d talked a lot about the other employees when she came home. There were more than forty people working there, only a few of them human.

  “No one was killed, although there were injuries,” said Elsie. “Istas—the waheela—smelled gasoline, and the owner was able to evacuate the patrons out the front and the employees through the basement. None of them were seen leaving the club, which will hopefully slow the Covenant when it comes to figuring out who survived.”

  “We’re sure it was the Covenant?”

  “Dominic said the burn pattern and flash marks matched the methods he was trained to use if he ever had to burn out a monster den. Then he apologized about eleven times for using the word ‘monster,’ which would have been adorable, but . . .”

  “But you were trying to find out what was going on,” I said grimly. “So the Covenant’s in New York. Any idea how they got there without someone seeing them coming?”

  “Manhattan isn’t the only port in the country, assuming they even landed in America—flying into Canada might be safer if they’re coming from Europe. Touch down in Toronto, switch identities, and head down to New York. There are so many routes. We were fools to think we could cover them all.”

  Elsie sounded so resigned that I couldn’t say anything. I touched her shoulder lightly, trying to lend her my support. She smiled, sad and wry, and kept driving.

  I settled in my seat, trying not to let
my nervousness—or my anger—show. Mom kept saying a confrontation with the Covenant had been unavoidable all along: once they’d started taking interest in North America again, there was no way we’d be able to keep flying below their radar. And that was all well and good, but Verity didn’t need to out herself on video. She didn’t need to remind the Covenant that not only did a family descended from some of their greatest traitors still exist, but was likely to be actively working against them. Because as much as the human part of our family had to lose, the cryptid parts were in even greater danger.

  As far as the Covenant is concerned, none of my cousins are people. They’re monsters, horrific abominations of nature, put on this planet solely to be exterminated by the human race. I’ve read all Grandpa Thomas’ books on the Covenant, and I’ve read Great-Great-Grandpa Alexander’s diaries, and there’s not much leeway where things that look human but technically aren’t human are concerned. They go back and forth on the topic of magic-users, shifting them from “human” to “monster” as needed, but Sarah, who bleeds clear, or Elsie, who can talk almost anyone into almost anything thanks to a dose of persuasive telepathy, would always be the enemy. There’s no room for them in the Covenant’s view of the natural world.

  “They’re not going to come here,” I said.

  “You think they don’t know how to get on a plane?” Her voice was bitter. Unsurprising, but still painful to hear. “We’re fucked. We’re well and truly fucked.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Why, because you’ve got some genius idea to make everything better?” Elsie shook her head. “This is the real world. Verity screwed up, and now we get to pay for her mistakes.”

  Normally, I would have been happy to start up a healthy session of complaining about my sister. Under the circumstances, silence seemed like a better reply, and we sat quietly as we made the hour-long drive out of the city, into the woods, and through them to the house.