Magic for Nothing

by Seanan McGuire

  There was a small ball next to the hook holding the swing for this side of the trapeze: cheesecloth filled with powdered chalk. I picked it up, beating it against my palms until they were white and dry. Sweat is the enemy of the flying trapeze. Lose your grip once you’re out there, and you could very easily become an interesting smear on the tent floor—not a fate I’ve ever aspired to.

  Sometimes I think my parents encouraged me to take trapeze classes because they thought it would bring me closer to my sister. Verity’s all about flirting with gravity and plummeting to her doom. It backfired. The more I learn about proper form and safety on the trapeze, the more I hate the way Verity risks herself for nothing more important than a temporary thrill and the joy of looking like Batgirl. It’s careless, it’s selfish, and it’s going to get her killed one day, which will probably result in my parents deciding I’m not allowed to climb anymore, since gravity is only allowed to claim one of their children.

  Verity never learned to appreciate how her actions could affect the rest of us. And now here I was, infiltrating a carnival under a false name for the benefit of the Covenant of St. George, all because Verity Price didn’t understand consequences. I loved my sister. I was never going to learn to like her.

  I took a deep breath, pushing thoughts of Verity and my family aside. Then I unhooked the waiting swing, locked my wrists into position, and jumped.

  Trapeze is never safe. All the bells and whistles in the world won’t save you if you screw up. That doesn’t mean it has to be dangerous, if it’s done correctly. There was a moment of beautiful, stomach-dropping freefall before the swing snapped tight beneath me, and then I was sailing in a hard, glorious arc toward the middle of the tent, where Sam, wide-eyed, was swinging my way.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded, before his swing carried him past me. He let go, flipped around, and swung back in the opposite direction.

  I laughed and did the same, hitting my remount as hard as I could to build up more momentum. The trapeze is sort of like a combination of the dreaded chin-up and the beloved swing set. It’s all about the shoulders and the core, but the legs can be used to make things faster or slower, depending on what you do with them. I wanted to synchronize with Sam, enough that I could talk to him.

  My swing carried me in his direction. Trying to sound casual despite the burn in my shoulders, I said, “You weren’t going to come down, so I came up. You okay?”

  “Not really.” There was another pause as our swings separated us. When they brought us together again, he continued: “One of my friends was a yōkai and I didn’t know it, so I didn’t help her.” Break, resume. “Now three people are dead, and she’s dead, and it sucks.”

  Break, resume. “I’m sorry. There was no way you could have known.”

  “There should have been!” Break, resume. Sam scowled at me. “How good do you think you are?”

  Break, resume. “I’m not bad.”

  “Then come over here. This is confusing.”

  I blinked, momentarily grateful for the momentum that was already taking me away again. Did I really want to do this? I’d known him less than a week, and he’d been an absolute jerk to me for more than half that time. He might drop me just for fun.

  And if he did, there was a net. I know how to fall. There was nothing to lose by trying, and quite a bit to gain. When my momentum carried me back to him, I let go of the swing, hands outstretched to grab hold. He caught them with his feet, which was a little odd, and proceeded to jackknife on the swing, bringing me up so that I could grab hold of it. We wound up face-to-face, our noses only inches apart, with my hands to either side of his. We were still swinging.

  “You weren’t kidding about having some trapeze training,” said Sam.

  “Nope.”

  “Your form’s shit, though.”

  His tone was goading—he was trying to pick a fight in whatever way he could—but that didn’t matter, because he was right. I shrugged as much as my current position allowed and said, “I haven’t been practicing much lately. Hopefully now that I’m working with the show, your grandmother will let me on the swings.”

  “Oh, yeah. The insurance thing.” Sam smiled a little. “I promise if you fall, I’ll totally lie and say you tripped over something on the ground.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that.” It was almost soothing, swinging back and forth like this, letting Sam be the one to compensate for our combined weight on a single trapeze swing. “I really want Emery to let me perform. Knives or trapeze or whatever.”

  “Why? What makes it so important to you?”

  Because it was something I couldn’t do at home; because it was something that would make me feel like I was a part of this show, and not a liar skating across the surface. Because it would let me burn off some of the nervous energy that writhed and twisted underneath my skin, turning every move I made into the rough action of flint against stone. The more restless I became, the more fires I set. I’d never even felt my hands heat up on the derby track. There had to be a correlation.

  Because I wanted to fly.

  “I want to be useful. I’m not a very good candy girl. I don’t like people enough for them to feel like buying things from me.”

  Sam snorted. “Okay, wow, ‘I’m a jerk’ is the best reason I’ve ever heard for letting somebody throw knives at people.”

  “I know my own strengths.” My shoulders were beginning to shake in a way that spoke of muscle fatigue. I grimaced. “Can you get us to the platform?”

  “Sure thing.” Sam pulled back, setting up the momentum for a harder swing. All the amusement was gone, replaced by a serene professionalism. No one screws around on the flying trapeze. That sort of thing gets people killed.

  Maybe it was the shift in our speed, or maybe it was just my arms finally giving up on my listening to them. Whatever the reason, my left hand slipped, dropping me into a one-handed grip. I barely had time to widen my eyes before my right hand slipped as well, and I was falling.

  Sam’s tail wrapped tight around my left ankle, jerking me to an abrupt stop.

  “Hey!” I yelped. “Watch it, Spider-Man!”

  “Calm down, I’m not going to Gwen Stacy you,” he said.

  I blinked. “You know Spider-Man?”

  “Uh, hello, not culturally illiterate here; also, a monkey.” Sam stopped working the swing. It lost momentum until we were hanging in the middle of the trapeze, his tail still around my ankle, keeping me from falling into the net below. Not that far below; the tent was thirty feet high, giving us a twenty-foot trapeze. Sam was six feet tall, and his tail extended about three feet past his toes, giving me an eleven-, maybe twelve-foot drop from where I dangled. Not too bad.

  “I think the only thing I read more than Spider-Man comics when I was a kid was this beat-up old version of Journey to the West that Grandma got for me,” he continued, before saying, “Brace yourself.”

  He let go of the swing.

  I yelped. Sam laughed. We weren’t plummeting; we’d stopped almost as soon as we’d started. I looked up. He had hold of the swing again, with his left hand only. The resulting slant in his body had dropped me easily another foot toward the net.

  As I was currently angled, I was going to land on my head. Well. That, at least, was something I could fix, and while my shoulders may have suffered during my Covenant-directed training, my core strength was still excellent. I sat up in the air, folding myself as close to double as I could manage in my current position.

  “All right,” I said. “Drop me.”

  Sam looked surprised, but did as he’d been told. I continued bending forward, wrapping my arms around my legs to make it more likely that I would land on my ass. Trampoline is great for teaching a person which parts of their unique body are best for landing on. In my case, all glory to the butt.

  Said butt slammed into the net with remarkabl
e force, given my short fall, and I bounced a few feet into the air. I released my legs, twisting around, and on my second impact, grabbed the net with both hands, preventing a third. Then I rolled to the side, making space for Sam.

  He didn’t fall so much as drop, landing with both feet and one hand gripping the net. His tail lifted, curling behind him in classic simian style, and if they’d wanted a poster image for him, that could have been it. See! The Amazing Monkey Man as he falls from great heights like it’s no big deal!

  “You okay?” he asked, and there was genuine concern in his voice. I wondered how young he’d been when he learned humans were breakable, that they couldn’t catch themselves the way he could. He’d probably given his grandmother dozens of panic attacks before she’d learned that the rules for him were different.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for the save.”

  “No problem,” he said, and took his hand off the net, offering it to me.

  I only hesitated for a moment before I took it. He pulled me easily back to my feet and smiled at me, a little shyly, like this was a point he didn’t reach with many people. I smiled back. We stood there on the net for several seconds, smiling at each other, me holding onto his hand.

  Then he let go, and took a step backward. “This is usually where new people start asking me awful questions. If you’re going to ask me awful questions, go ahead and do it.”

  “You’ve already revealed yourself as a Spider-Man fan, and I’m more of an X-girl, so I don’t think I have anything further to discuss with you,” I said, and walked toward the edge of the net. “Unless you’re about to reveal a secret passion for, like, peanut butter and bacon sandwiches. Which I can at least understand, even if I don’t share it.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have any questions about the whole monkey thing?”

  “Well, last I checked, being a yōkai was genetic, and Emery’s your grandmother, and you’ve already told me your dad was a fūri, and since therianthrope genes are usually dominant, you take after his side of the family.” I shrugged. “There aren’t that many questions to ask.” That was a lie. There were dozens of questions to ask. It was just that most of them were intrusive things about his biology, and I didn’t have a good explanation for why I’d want to know. “It’s for the family records” wasn’t going to cut it when I wasn’t using my family name.

  Sam raised the other eyebrow. “You are . . . really chill. Are you on drugs?”

  “Not enough of them,” I said, grabbing the side of the net and lowering myself down. “Nothing stronger than caffeine. Life is weird enough without needing to decide on the fly whether or not it’s really happening. Why? What do you think I should be asking?”

  “This is usually where people look all sympathetic and ask if my mom ran away because of the tail.”

  “Did you have the tail as a baby?”

  Sam nodded.

  I grinned. “I hope your grandma has pictures, because holy shit, that must have been adorable.”

  “Okay, there’s a script, and you’re refusing to follow it in any meaningful way,” said Sam. He scowled. “Mom didn’t leave because I was a yōkai, she left because she wasn’t ready to have a baby and my father had already fucked off to wherever it is monkey-men go when their tourist girlfriends get pregnant. She knew I was probably going to have a tail before I was born. And then Grandma told her about the Covenant, and she couldn’t deal, so she ran.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Got anything else you want to crankily clear up before I can not ask about it?”

  “I hate bananas.”

  “What, even banana splits?”

  Sam nodded grimly. “All bananas.”

  “Then you’re missing out, but I can’t say I blame you. People have probably been waving those things in your face since you were a kid.”

  “God, yes.” Sam hopped down from the net. “I don’t blame Grandma so much, because bananas are great for babies. Soft and easy to chew and shit. But then she saw me peel one with my feet and just lost it. For like the next three years, every time we had company, she was handing me a banana and waiting for me to do the cute thing. These days, even the smell is enough to make me gag.”

  “Legit,” I said. “I’m the youngest of three. My older siblings used to pick on me, because hey, that’s what baby sisters are for. So I got really, really good at fighting back, and then they went and told our parents I was picking on them. My mom tried her best to stay neutral, but my dad always sided with my big sister, even when he thought he wasn’t. My reactions to her are almost Pavlovian at this point.”

  Sam frowned. “I thought your whole family died with the carnival.”

  Crap. “They did,” I said. “I haven’t fully adjusted to that, I guess. Things you don’t talk about don’t seem real.”

  “Tell me about it.” He took a deep breath and rippled, simian features folding back into his body like someone had come along and revoked the rest of our CGI budget. In only a few seconds, he was the boy I’d met in the bone yard, with nothing to set him apart from anyone else except for his bare feet.

  Well. Maybe that was all. “Is there a hole in the butt of your leotard?”

  “And most of my pants,” he said. “It’s easier for me to get dressed like this and then relax, because my tail will go where it needs to be. Working jeans on over a tail is a special kind of torture.”

  “Relax . . .” I cocked my head. “This takes effort.”

  “Oh, yeah. Being human is . . . it’s not hard, because I’ve been practicing all my life, but it’s like trying to maintain good posture, you know? Part of you is always focusing on standing up straight, instead of on doing something important, like breathing or remembering where you left your phone.”

  “Huh.” Most therianthropes seemed to default to a human shape—or that was what we’d always assumed. All the therianthropes I’d ever had the opportunity to talk to had grown up among their own kind. Maybe staying human was an effort for them, too, and they’d never thought it was anyone’s business but their own. “If this is hard, why are you all human again?”

  “Because you got squirrely about talking about your family, which probably means you’re about to bolt, and I figured I’d walk you to the bone yard.” He shrugged. “Either the police have already come and gone, and I can relax, or there will be strangers there, and I hate trying to explain how I got my makeup to look so good.”

  “Heh,” I said. “Humans don’t like to believe what they see with their own eyes sometimes.”

  “If they did, I’d probably be in a government lab being taken apart right now.”

  “True.” I started for the bleachers, where I’d abandoned my shoes. “And you know they never warm the scalpels. It’s always ‘hello, nice to meet you, let me have your spleen.’”

  “Why the spleen?”

  “Because it’s fun to say.” I pulled my shoes on. “Thanks for catching me when I fell.”

  “Thanks for coming up to get me.” Sam smiled a little. That hint of shyness was back, coloring the edges of the expression, making them seem almost sweet. “I don’t get to fly with other people all that often.”

  “What, you’ve never worked with a partner?”

  “Sure. But most of them only stick around long enough to get really good, and then they move on to a circus or something else where they can make more money. The trapeze acts we get here are always closed units. They want to fly together, not with the owner’s weird kid.” Sam shrugged. “It is what it is, you know?”

  “Well, I’ll fly with you any time.”

  He smirked at me. “You just want to fly.”

  “Your point? We could have a lot of fun up there. Don’t Gwen Stacy me, and we’ll be fine.”

  “I wasn’t anywhere close to snapping your neck.”

  “Says you,” I said.

  We were still
laughing as we walked out of the big tent, into the afternoon air. The smell of popcorn was starting to drift from the midway as the show geared up for opening, and everything was perfect.

  Seventeen

  “Sometimes what matters isn’t the grand adventure, it’s the small adventures that happen when no one’s really looking.”

  —Evelyn Baker

  The Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, ten days later, camped outside St. Cloud, Minnesota

  THE SKY WAS A FASCINATING SHADE of slate gray, promising rain sometime in the next twenty-four hours. Because this was Minnesota, that rain could happen at any time. And because this was Minnesota, none of the locals gave a fuck. The midway had been packed with bodies since the gates opened. The lines for some of the more popular rides actually snaked all the way around the walkway, creating navigational hazards and keeping the ride jocks hopping. I looked yearningly at the spinning frame of the Ferris wheel. I hadn’t been able to take the time for a ride in three days, not since we’d finished setup and invited the crowds inside.

  Emery was thrilled, as well she should have been. We’d left Wisconsin terrified the authorities were going to shut the whole place down. But Savannah had been one of our own, and the teenagers we’d recovered from Umeko’s trailer had fallen over themselves swearing that they hadn’t been abducted by anyone associated with the carnival. Personally, I thought that was mostly because they didn’t want to think too hard about what had actually happened to them, but the outcome was the same: we were in the clear, and able to move on.

  (Savannah’s death had been ruled natural causes. Her heart had just stopped. It’s possible to die of fear if something is far enough outside what the mind can accept. As ways to go, it wasn’t among the worst.)