Magic for Nothing

by Seanan McGuire

  I raised one hand in a wave. He waved back, and I slipped through the tarp, back into the carnival proper.

  Where I found the dead girl: that was pretty clearly the Scrambler, where Umeko had left poor Savannah’s body after frightening her to death. I walked down the corridor of rides, flinching from shadows, waiting for Robert to jump out at me. He didn’t. Ride jocks and carnies nodded in my direction as I passed them, acknowledging me as a part of the family without making a big deal of it; there was always the chance, after all, that I didn’t want to put up with townie attention right now, and they respected that.

  Not everyone who works for a carnival is a good person, any more than any group of people defined by a common shared trait will consist entirely of good people. But the sort of folks who wind up finding their homes under the big tent and in the bone yard understand the importance of privacy, even when that privacy is found in the middle of a crowd. They’d let me be. They’d gossip about whatever they happened to see, which made it important for me to keep things with Margaret as uninteresting as possible, but they wouldn’t interrupt.

  Margaret was next to the Scrambler with a stick of cotton candy in her hand, munching pink fluff as she watched the ride whip around and around. I stopped next to her and waited.

  “Did you know they call this stuff ‘cotton candy’ here?” she asked.

  “Um, yes, because that’s what it’s called,” I said. “Why, what do you call it?”

  “Candy floss. Makes more sense, if you ask me. Cotton’s not a food.”

  “Neither is floss.”

  “Fair enough.” She took another bite, still watching the Scrambler. “Is this ride safe?”

  “All the rides are safe.” The kids and teens who traveled with the carnival—all children of older carnies, who were very careful to keep copies of the paperwork that proved there hadn’t been a kidnapping close to hand—went under the rides every morning, hunting for pieces that had fallen off during the previous operating day. Then would come any necessary repairs and safety checks, which Emery took even more seriously than some of the shows I’d known. A little effort was better than a wounded townie. A wounded townie could spell the end of everything.

  “It doesn’t look safe.”

  “It’s not supposed to look safe.” Rides that looked too safe weren’t interesting to thrill-seekers. The Scrambler wouldn’t hurt anyone who didn’t have a preexisting medical condition, but it had that air of giddy danger that would attract local teens who wanted to know what it felt like to be shaken by a giant.

  “Huh.” Margaret took another bite of her cotton candy before she turned to me and asked, “Want to show me where you’re sleeping? I’m ever so curious about what our little Annie gets up to when we’re not around.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “My room’s in the bone yard—er, that’s carnival lingo for the camping area out back—and I can’t bring a townie there without getting in trouble. I’m still too new to have visitors over.” And no amount of people giving me space would extend to cover Margaret. If I walked back there with a stranger, we’d be swarmed, with Sam at the head of the pack.

  I hadn’t recognized him as yōkai when we first met. I also hadn’t had that much experience with yōkai in general, or with fūri in specific. Margaret . . . I had no idea what kind of fieldwork she’d done, or where, or what sort of cryptids had been involved. For all I knew, she’d spend five seconds in his presence and know exactly what he was. He’d been a jerk when we first met, but that didn’t mean he deserved to be stabbed to death by my Covenant handler. Being an asshole is not supposed to be fatal.

  “Fine, then,” she said, tone cooling. “Take me someplace we can have some privacy.”

  I hesitated, reviewing my options as quickly as I could. Then, in a resigned voice, I said, “Follow me,” and started across the avenue.

  Carnival rides come in four flavors. The thrill rides, like the Scramblers and the coaster, are designed to provide as much bang as possible for the townie buck, encouraging people to come running back. The kiddie rides, the bumper cars and the spinning cartoon animals, those are for the townies too young to ride anything else, and are usually set up near concessions selling brightly colored candy (for them) and even brighter booze (for their beleaguered parents). You’ve got the old standards, the Ferris wheels and the carousels and the bumper cars, the things everyone expects to see at the carnival, the things that are almost more noticeable when they’re absent. And then you have the dark rides.

  Dark rides are simple cars on fixed tracks, moving in infinitely repeating loops through meticulously designed environments intended to titillate, frighten, or delight. Or at least, that’s the idea. Most dark rides are just good places for teenagers to make out, drunk townies to pee over the sides of their cars, and people to get good and high. The average carnival haunted house contains as much free-floating marijuana as a Grateful Dead concert. But they’re pretty private, and unless it’s one of the rare rides with living carnies incorporated into the circuit, no one will hear a word that’s said inside.

  The Spenser and Smith Family Carnival’s Haunted House was run by a pair of bogeymen, and there was no way Margaret wouldn’t see through their thin layers of Cover Girl foundation to the grayish skin beneath. So I steered her in a different direction, until we stood in front of the Tunnel of Love: a carefully assembled artificial canal system in which boats floated, separated by giant rubber duckies, to make sure every couple could feel confident about their privacy. Someone must have realized the duckies weren’t exactly romantic, because they had big red hearts for eyes, adding that little touch of absolute ridiculousness that really made the ride a tourist destination.

  But this was the middle of the day. Even the darkest parts of the Tunnel were filled with grainy gray light, destroying the fragile illusions created by the Christmas lights and tulle-filled dioramas. Once the sun went down, the place would be hopping. Until then, the ride jocks were lounging, trying to look like they expected people to ride when they actually didn’t.

  One of them was doing her nails when we approached. Her eyebrows rose at the sight of me, and rose farther at the sight of Margaret, who had finished her cotton candy and was now licking the residue off of her fingers.

  “Okay, gotta say, not what I was expecting, Annie,” said the ride jock, and put her nail polish aside. “You want to ride?”

  “Please,” I said. “What do you mean, not what you were expecting?”

  “Sweetcheeks, if you have to ask, there’s a disappointed string of boys behind you stretching from here to Canada.” She nimbly unhooked the rope intended to keep drunk townies from falling into the canal—it had happened, and more than once, during my short time with the show—and beckoned toward the nearest swan-shaped boat. Maybe that was part of what made the ducks seem so ridiculous. With their heart eyes and open mouths, they looked like they were eternally lusting over the oblivious swans. Waterfowl romance isn’t the sort of thing that turns most people on.

  “Your chariot to the balmy fields of Cupid’s regard awaits,” said the ride jock.

  I wrinkled my nose at her as I walked past and got myself seated in the slightly sticky chlorine-scented swan. Margaret followed. The ride jock flipped a switch and the ride’s gears engaged, pulling us forward, into the heart-shaped maw of love.

  Margaret waited until we’d traveled about fifteen feet before she asked, in a low voice, “Are we being watched?”

  “Security cameras cost money; waterproof security cameras cost more,” I said. “No one’s watching. Or listening. Most of the things that happen inside a Tunnel of Love aren’t things anybody wants to hear.”

  “There’s a whole industry built on proving you wrong about that one, but we’ll let it pass for now,” said Margaret. She turned to face me. The dimness of the tunnel’s interior kept me from seeing her expression, but her posture was enough to tell me
I needed to take her seriously. “Robbie’s worried you might be going native. To tell you the truth, after today, so am I. Have you been compromised, Annie? There’s no shame in it. I told them you weren’t ready for fieldwork.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘compromised,’” I said. “Are you asking whether I’m happy? Yeah. I am. This is . . . this is what I know. This is sequins and rope burns and uncomplicated choices, and I’m good at it. It doesn’t make me work harder than I want to. It doesn’t make me think about what happened to my family. But if you’re asking whether I’m a traitor, the answer’s no. I haven’t broken any promises, to anyone. I’m here because we need to know how many of these people are innocent, and how many of them knew about the monster they were harboring.”

  The words were like an oil slick on my tongue, bitter and poisonous. I sounded like a Covenant member. And sure, I could tell myself I was just playing a part, saying the things she expected to hear, but how many times could I say them before some sliver of me started to believe them? We are our words as much as we are our actions.

  “I find it difficult to believe that these carnie folk of yours could have been traveling with a giant spider and not noticed.”

  “She changed,” I said earnestly. “I saw it myself. She looked like an ordinary woman, until she didn’t. If she’d never changed in front of them, they would have had no reason to know.”

  “She changed in front of you.”

  “She was trying to kill me, because she didn’t think anybody would care. I was new. They’d just assume I’d gotten bored when the carnival life wasn’t all glitter and glamour, and she’d have a full belly without risking anything.”

  Margaret kept looking at me. I kept my face as composed as possible. I didn’t think she could see me, but lighting was unpredictable in the Tunnel of Love; maybe I was better lit than she was. Finally, she asked, “How much longer do you think you’ll need? We came here for a purge, not to twiddle our thumbs in motels.”

  “I thought you came here to observe and determine what needed to be done,” I said. “What do you mean, you came here for a purge?”

  Margaret was silent.

  “They didn’t know, Margaret. They didn’t do anything wrong. They thought she was human like them.”

  “Like them?” Margaret chuckled darkly. “Oh, this was a mistake. Annie, there are at least three monsters hidden in this freak show. Maybe you can’t see them, but we can. The fact that they’re pulling the wool over your eyes about what they are means they’re probably fooling you about other things. Like whether they knew.”

  “Three monsters?” I squeaked, heart racing. “I didn’t . . . I mean, I haven’t seen . . . I don’t think they’re lying to me, Margaret. I just need a little more time to be sure.”

  “I’m not happy that you haven’t spotted them,” she said.

  There was something in her tone that made me think I might have a chance. “So let me try,” I said. “I can keep investigating, and I can look harder. Please, I just don’t want anyone innocent to get hurt.”

  “You mean you don’t want your trapeze boy to get hurt.”

  I went very still.

  “Don’t worry, Annie. He’s as human as they come, and if you’re sure he’s innocent, I’m willing to defend him to Robbie.” Margaret patted me on the shoulder. It was strangely comforting. She was family, after all, even if she didn’t know it. “All right. I’ll tell him you’re still working with us, and that you’ll have the answers we need soon. But, Annie, when this carnival moves on, you’re not going with it. Wherever it’s going.”

  It was hard not to hear that as the threat it was. I forced my voice to stay light as I said, “Thank you. I won’t let you down.”

  “No. You won’t.”

  The mouth of the Tunnel was ahead of us, dazzlingly bright after the dimness inside. We drifted out into the afternoon, bumping our way down the narrow canal to the exit, where we stopped. The ride jock appeared, opening the rope, and Margaret hopped out, walking away without looking back.

  The ride jock—I suddenly wished I knew her name, so I could think of her as something other than a title—looked at me quizzically. “You okay? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “Ghosts aren’t nearly as scary,” I said, and stood, stepping out of the swan, back onto stable ground.

  The ride jock rolled her eyes. “Tough girl. Right.” She snapped the rope back into place. “I hope you got what you wanted.”

  “That was never an option,” I said, and walked away, vanishing into the carnival.

  Eighteen

  “Don’t wait. Waiting is for people with time to spare, and baby, that’s never going to be us.”

  —Frances Brown

  The Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, heading for the bone yard, between a rock and a hard place

  THE SKY NO LONGER LOOKED like a promise of rain as I made my way back to the bone yard: it looked like a promise of apocalypse. The world was going to burn. The only question was how much of it I could save.

  There was no way I could let the Covenant take the carnival. These people had done nothing but welcome me since I’d walked into their bone yard. What Umeko had done was unforgivable, but Umeko was no longer here to be forgiven. She had paid for what she’d done, and two of her victims had gone safely back to their families. It was cold comfort for the ones we’d buried with her, whose parents would never have the closure they needed, but at least she wouldn’t hurt anyone else. All the others, Emery, Ananta, the bogeymen at the Haunted House, Sam . . . they were innocent. Species didn’t matter.

  There was no way I could stop the Covenant from taking the carnival. They knew it existed; I was here because it was on their radar. I could kill both Robert and Margaret in cold blood, walk away from them with family blood drying on my hands, and it would just convince the rest of the Covenant that these people were a threat, because they’d assume the carnival had done it. No way a trainee could take down two of their operatives without help, right? I’d turn myself into a murderer for nothing more than a stay of execution. That wasn’t right either. None of this was right. And I didn’t have a solution.

  I stopped about ten feet from my trailer. The door was closed; it didn’t look like anyone had been there since I’d left. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched.

  Experience has taught me that when I feel like I’m being watched, I almost certainly am. “I know you’re there,” I said. “You can either come out or go away. I’m not in the mood.”

  There was a soft thump behind me, and Sam said, “Annie? You okay?” He sounded oddly anxious, like he’d been waiting and worrying since I’d walked away from him before.

  I turned. He was only a few feet away, and he looked as human as I did. That alone was enough to be unusual. He didn’t like maintaining human form when he didn’t have to: it was tiring, and it was necessary enough of the time that he shed it quickly when he got the chance. But here, now, he was just a barefoot boy standing in a bone yard, looking at me with worried eyes.

  It was funny. I’d thought he was average-looking when I’d come to the carnival. Ordinary, even. But now, I looked at him and saw one of the handsomest men I’d ever known.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Who was that woman?”

  The thought of coming up with another lie was suddenly exhausting. I was so tired of lying to everyone. “I can’t tell you,” I said. “I wish I could, I really do, and I hope you’ll let me have this. Please don’t push.”

  Sam blinked slowly. “Are you in some sort of trouble?”

  My laughter was bitter. From the look on his face, it surprised him as much as it had surprised me. “I guess you could say that. I’ve been in trouble for a long time.” My fingertips were heating up. I shook my hands, hard, trying to chase the heat away.

  Sam reached out a
nd grabbed my wrists. I froze.

  “I won’t push,” he said gently. “I don’t want to push. I just want to be sure you’re okay. You’d tell me, right? If there was anything I could do, you’d tell me about it?”

  “If there was anything you could do, you’d be the first person I told,” I said solemnly. His fingers were familiar by this point, and having him hold onto me like that was more comforting than I would have expected. He was the one who caught me when we flew, who made sure I wouldn’t fall. Why shouldn’t he be the one to catch me now?

  “Good,” said Sam. “Um. Annie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I—you—I was a real jerk to you when you showed up, and I’m sorry.”

  “I was making you stay human when you didn’t want to,” I said, making no effort to take my wrists back. Security was something I very much needed at the moment. “I’m not mad anymore. It made perfect sense.”

  “Yeah, but it didn’t make sense then, because I couldn’t tell you—I didn’t want to tell you, you were this weird human girl shoving yourself into places where you didn’t belong, I just wanted you to leave—and so I was a jerk for nothing. I’m sorry.”

  It seemed oddly important to him that I accept his apology, so I nodded and said, “It’s okay, Sam, it really is. If I was mad at you then, I’m not mad now. I forgive you. I forgave you the first time you saved my life, if I’m being completely honest. We’re good.”

  “We’re good?”

  “We’re good.”

  “Good,” said Sam, and smiled lopsidedly for a moment before the expression faded back into solemnity. “Because, you know, it’s been a while since I had a partner, and you’re smart and funny and you read comic books, even if you have terrible taste—”

  “Hey,” I protested. “The X-Men are a viable franchise that will rise again.”