Magic for Nothing

by Seanan McGuire

  There was a pause, broken by a soft gasp and Emery saying, “Oh, that poor girl. That poor, poor girl.”

  I pulled away from Sam, who didn’t try to stop me; at the first sign of resistance, he just let go. “Who is she?”

  “Savannah. She’s one of the other candy girls. Didn’t you meet her last—no, you wouldn’t have. You came in so late. Damn.” Emery scrubbed at her face with both hands. She was wearing jeans and a patchwork jacket that looked like something out of one of the crunchy granola hippie catalogs Aunt Jane sometimes received. The thought brought on another wave of missing the security of my family. “There’s still makeup on her cheeks. She must have been out here all night.”

  “Is she . . . ?”

  Emery nodded, the bleak look on her face filling in the missing pieces. “We’ll have to contact the local authorities. We’re her only family. The poor thing.”

  “Did someone hurt her?”

  Sam went still beside me, and Emery did much the same, both of them freezing in place. Then, with a sigh, Emery said, “There’s no blood, and her clothing is intact. She may have just collapsed. Regardless, the police will want to know. Sam . . . ?”

  “On it,” he said, and turned and walked away.

  I watched him go before turning back to Emery, a silent question in my eyes. She sighed again. “I’m sure there were people with your original show who wouldn’t have taken kindly to the police showing up without warning them. He’s not going to help a murderer hide, if you’re worried about that, but there are always those for whom involving the authorities will be a step too far. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” I said meekly. “I’m sort of one of them. Can I . . . ?”

  Emery nodded. There was no surprise in her expression. If anything, she looked relieved that the new girl was running away when the police were on their way, rather than standing her ground and demanding to be a part of the investigation. “Go back to the bone yard. Be in the mess tent when I need you.”

  Which really meant “go to the mess tent and stay there, since there’s no telling when I’ll be done with the townie police.” That was fine by me. It meant Emery was planning to discuss the event with me, not just push it to the side, and would put me in the perfect position to watch the other members of the carnival finding out about the death. Losing one of their own wasn’t the same as townie kids disappearing—in some ways it was better, in a lot of ways it was worse—but that didn’t mean the two things didn’t have the same origin.

  I didn’t see Sam as I made my way through the canvas flap and across the bone yard to the mess tent. There were a few people there, nursing cups of coffee or getting into position early for the best shot at lunch. I grabbed a mug and a bunch of grapes and took a seat at one of the tables near the back, where I’d be able to see anyone who came in.

  Almost anyone. I’d only been sitting there for a few minutes when Sam demanded, from behind me, “What did you see?”

  I jumped enough to slosh hot coffee onto my hand. I stuck my scalded fingers into my mouth and turned to glare at him.

  Sam looked briefly repentant, but only briefly. “The coffee’s never hot enough to do any real damage; people get mad sometimes, things get thrown, and we don’t provide free weapons. What did you see?”

  I took my hand out of my mouth. “I saw a hand under the Scrambler, and when I looked closer, I saw it was attached to a body. I screamed, you came, your grandmother told me to come here and wait for her.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did I scream, or why did she tell me to wait here?”

  “Both.”

  “I screamed because I saw a body.” I kept my voice tightly measured, swallowing the urge to yell. It wasn’t going to make things better. It might make things worse. “I came here because I don’t want to talk to the police. I don’t want to talk to the police because if you’ll think way, way back to yesterday, the Black Family Carnival was wiped out in a freak accident, and if they ran a background check on me, they might decide ‘freak accident’ is another way of saying ‘Annie did it.’”

  Sam looked at me suspiciously. “Did you?”

  “What? God, no. And if I had, would I really be like ‘oh, yeah, I killed everyone, guess I couldn’t resist the opportunity to do it again.’” I glared at him. “Fuck you for even asking.”

  To my surprise, Sam looked abashed. “Sorry,” he said, running a hand through his hair and dropping into a seat. “I didn’t think before I opened my mouth. That happens sometimes.”

  I forced myself to relax, giving him a sidelong look as I measured his reaction. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt again, and again, he had no shoes. “Don’t your feet get cold?”

  “Nah, I spend enough time sticking them in my mouth that they never get the chance.”

  I snorted. “Was that a joke? Did you actually make a joke?”

  “I’m not completely humorless,” he protested. “Just . . . Grandma says I’m mildly xenophobic. I like people fine when they’re ours. I’m not too big on people from the outside.”

  “Meaning me,” I said.

  He nodded. “Meaning you. Outsiders are more trouble than they’re worth.”

  “I guess you’re not wrong,” I said. “I mean, I’ve been here, what, twenty-four hours? And I’m already finding corpses on the midway.”

  Sam grimaced. “Something like that. I know you didn’t hurt Savannah.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I would have seen you.”

  I blinked. “You realize that’s basically an admission that you’ve been following me around.” And I hadn’t noticed. That was . . . worrisome.

  “Yeah, but Grandma knew I was doing it, so it’s okay.” He shrugged. “You’re new, I get nervous, she doesn’t care if I watch you for a few days while I decide whether or not to demand you go. Those damn mice screwed everything up. Without them, I would’ve been able to ask her to get rid of you yesterday.”

  “You are taking talking mice remarkably well.” I gave him a searching sidelong look, trying to find some sign that he wasn’t human, that he’d been touched by the cryptozoological world. I didn’t find one. He looked like an ordinary, if tall, Asian man in his mid-twenties. He wasn’t exactly what I’d call break-the-bank handsome, but he wasn’t unfortunate to look at either, and when he was on the trapeze, looks didn’t matter nearly as much as the strength of his arms and the grace of his turns. “Have you seen Aeslin before?”

  “No,” he said. “I thought they were just, you know, a myth. But there they are. With you. Why are they with you?”

  “They’ve been with my family for generations. We have a responsibility to them, to keep them safe. I can’t do much, but I figure I can protect two mice that really and truly need me.”

  “I hope so,” said Sam. “A lot of things need protecting.” He sat up a little straighter.

  I followed his gaze to the mouth of the mess tent, where Emery was entering, accompanied by several people I didn’t recognize. None of them were wearing police blue. That was a relief. They looked like the sort of pitch men, ride jocks, and carnies that any good owner could collect during a walk along the midway, and not one of them looked happy.

  Emery clapped her hands, bringing the conversations in the mess hall to a screeching halt. “Everyone, if I could have your attention for a moment? By now, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the police currently canvassing our rides. There’s been an accident. Savannah is gone.”

  A few gasps, a few mutters, but on the whole, silence: people were listening. More were coming in through the open door, drawn by the sense of something important happening, and they were quiet also, letting Emery speak.

  “Right now, it looks as if she died of natural causes. The police are going to look into the matter. As we were already confirmed in this location through the end of the w
eekend, they’re not asking us to do anything out of the ordinary, just stay where we are, try not to impede their investigation, and not leave without clearing it with them. As long as nothing unusual comes to light during their examination of her body, we’ll be able to leave as normal. The Scrambler will be closed tonight, for obvious reasons.”

  Mutters broke out around the room. No one asked their questions loudly enough to be answered, and that, too, was only to be expected.

  Carnivals exist in a strange sort of twilight where the law is concerned. A lot of crimes get blamed on carnies—thefts, vandalism, the sort of thing that’s likely to be bored teenagers letting off a little steam; by pinning it on someone from outside the community, people can avoid painting their own children as criminals. Sometimes it backfires spectacularly, allowing future killers to fly under the radar, never held responsible for their own actions. Other times, it ends with innocent people rotting in townie jails, pinned down under fixed roofs that they’d spent their lives avoiding. Because of that, a lot of carnies don’t trust the townie law, and will do whatever they can to keep from getting outsiders involved.

  A few people cast hostile glares in my direction, and that, too, was only to be expected. I was the new thing here, and the night I’d come to the show, one of their own had died. Sam wasn’t one of the ones glaring, which was new and also a little weird. Maybe finding a body had been the icebreaker we needed. In which case, wow, was I staying the hell away from him. Some ice is not meant to be broken.

  “Thank you, all,” said Emery, and started across the tent to where Sam and I sat. It took her a while to reach us—people kept stopping her to talk, and to her credit, she listened with her full attention every single time. When she did reach us, she looked at me, not her grandson, and said, “It looks like a heart attack. I thought you should know, since you found her.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’ll help me sleep tonight.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “No, it won’t,” I admitted. “But it does help. At least a heart attack probably means she went quickly.” Although what had she been doing under the Scrambler? That part didn’t make sense. Collapsing in the middle of the walkway would have increased her chances of getting found while there was still something that could be done to save her. Instead, she’d gone into the dark, alone, and she’d died there, alone. Something didn’t add up.

  “Probably,” agreed Emery, and I saw shadows in her eyes that matched the one in my own. She had her own suspicions. But I was the new girl; it wasn’t my place to ask her for them. And she was a relative stranger; even if she’d asked me, I wouldn’t have told her.

  We looked at each other across a bridge of all the things we couldn’t safely say, and neither one of us said anything at all.

  Fourteen

  “Secrets are like bricks. Sometimes you need them if you want to build a wall. Other times, they’ll only weigh you down.”

  —Enid Healy

  The Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, that night

  THE BIG TENT WAS PACKED WITH BODIES, so many that even the standing room spaces at the top of the bleachers were filled. There weren’t many kids, either: these were adults and teenagers, following the scent of blood on the wind as they strained to catch a glimpse of a murderer. Whether Savannah had died of natural causes or not didn’t matter to them: they were here looking for excitement, and they were—by God—going to get it.

  “One of ours dies, it’s a miracle for business; one of theirs dies, and they run us out of town on a rail,” said Ananta, pushing past me with a Burmese python the length of a car draped around her shoulders. Around us, the townies cheered as Sam took to the flying trapeze. “Watch yourself tonight.”

  I nodded, acknowledging her warning before I went back to chucking overpriced candy to bloodthirsty townies. We’d been instructed to take them for every cent they had. With the police investigating Savannah’s death, most of the local parents were going to stay away, thus showing that the desire to protect children sometimes looked a lot like common sense. We’d have one night of incredible crowds, maybe two, and then they’d be gone, melting back into their lives without a second thought for the supposed “murder carnival.” That was bad for long-term business, but meant we needed to make a week’s profits in two nights. We could do that. If we were fast and ruthless, we could do that.

  After the tent shows were done, I was supposed to scrub off my makeup, switch my sequins for street clothes, and wander the midway teasing townies into winning plush toys for their significant others. I was looking forward to learning the scam on some of those games. It seemed like a good way to kill an evening, and maybe if enough of the pitch men vouched for me, Emery would let me switch to throwing knives sooner than later.

  One nice thing about being considered for a knife-throwing act: I wasn’t unarmed anymore. I’d managed to talk Emery out of a set of throwing knives, which she expected me to chuck at a piece of plywood near my RV, keeping myself in practice. And I was going to do that, because no skill, ever, has been so perfectly developed that it doesn’t need to be maintained. It was just that I was also going to conceal knives all through my clothing, tucking them into the seam folds and natural pockets of the hems. Every knife made me feel a little safer, and a little more like myself.

  It was nice to feel like me again. I’d been starting to worry about forgetting who that was.

  The fire dancers were taking the floor. Umeko was as bright and vibrant as she’d been the night before: if Savannah’s death had impacted her in any way, she wasn’t allowing it to show in her performance. I paused to admire the artistry of their movements, feeling the heat rise and sparkle in my fingertips. I forced it back down as best as I could, and it must have been pretty decent, because I didn’t catch fire, and neither did any of the remaining candy in my tray. Of which there wasn’t much. A townie boy with more money than sense flagged me down, buying my last two bricks of pink popcorn and my last pack of peanut butter cups, and I was out.

  The walk under the bleachers was easier tonight: at least now the way was familiar, and I knew what I was and wasn’t likely to trip over. It would have been even easier in roller skates. If Emery was going to insist I keep playing candy girl, maybe I could convince her to let me do it on wheels. It would add a little flash and glamour to the job, at least as far as the townies were concerned, and impressing them was the whole point of the exercise, right?

  I made my way to the supply closet, trading profits and empty space for a fresh load of candy. The bored-looking teenager who counted me in and counted out my restock didn’t talk to me, except in quickly muttered numbers that seemed to matter more to her than made any sense. She didn’t offer, and I didn’t ask. People run away to join the carnival for all sorts of reasons.

  The smell of sweet cedar smoke hung in the air outside the supply closet. I took a step toward the big tent, and stopped when the tarp twitched. Someone else was about to come out.

  Pure instinct drove me into the shadows next to the wall, melting back and pressing myself flat until I was nothing but shape and potential. There was little light back here, and my sequined top was barely an afterthought in a night filled with flashing rides and the gleaming halogens inside the tent. That’s why, when the door opened, I saw them, and they didn’t see me.

  Umeko was the first out, cheeks still bright with heat and eyes sparkling with the joy of the performance. Next out was not one of her dancers, but a townie boy, no more than nineteen, staring at her with enormous moon-calf eyes, like he’d never seen anything so beautiful in his life. It was an understandable reaction—she was a gorgeous woman, and she was in the best of her element in that moment—but something about him seemed off, like a few essential functions had been disconnected before he’d walked out of the tent and into the night with a stranger.

  I could have stepped out of my shadow and confronted them. I could have asked whe
re she was going, veiling my demand for information in concern, or in a newbie’s casual violation of personal space. I didn’t. I held myself still until the two of them had passed me, and then I carefully removed my tray and set it flush to the wall, where no one was likely to see or steal it. My costume was glittery, but it didn’t have anything on it that would jingle or chime to announce my presence. This was as good as it was going to get.

  Umeko and her boy walked on. And I? I followed them.

  She knew the carnival as only someone who’d lived here for years could. Utterly unconcerned, her hand resting on the boy’s arm, she walked down the back of the midway, behind the games, where no one was likely to see or suspect her. She led him past the games, through the shadow of the motionless Scrambler. He didn’t even look at it. That was when I knew something was truly wrong. No townie who’d come to a carnival the night after someone had died there would have been able to walk past the well-publicized site of the body discovery and not at least look at it. Human nature is many things. “Predictable” is first among them.

  She led him through the tarp wall and into the bone yard. I hung back for a count of ten, and then went through after them.

  The bone yard was dark, the lights turned down to keep from attracting too much townie attention. For a moment, I thought I’d lost them. Then a rectangle of light opened to my left—an RV door being unlatched—and I turned in that direction, trusting logic to win out over coincidence.

  There was a sound. It wasn’t a scream, more like a sigh of resignation; a giving up, a giving in, a deciding not to fight any longer. I broke into a run.

  The RV where I assumed Umeko had taken her townie boy was dark, the windows covered by sheets of what looked like tin foil. It was large enough for two people, and I remembered belatedly that Umeko had moved out of the space where I was now living because she was sharing living space with her boyfriend. I hadn’t met him yet. Still, if she had a live-in lover, it was even stranger for her to be wandering off with townie boys. I moved closer.