Magic for Nothing

by Seanan McGuire

  Sam slipped his hand into mine as we walked toward the shopping area. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend I was back in Portland, safe among my own people, with a boy I liked beside me. That was about as close as things got to perfect.

  The shopping area lived up to my first impressions of it: a square in the middle, formed by shoving tables together, and longer rows of tables around the outside, mixing derby gear and the souvenir booths for the respective teams with local nonprofits, bakers, and advertisements for the junior derby league. Their advertising featured a lot of screenshots from the Ellen Page movie that came out a few years ago, and while it was hard not to see that as dated, it was also a nice try at attracting the attention of any teenagers who happened to wander through.

  I bought a snickerdoodle cupcake with bacon sprinkled on top, and was nibbling at it as Sam thumbed through a stack of discount derby T-shirts.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  The voice was familiar enough to be an icepick in my heart. I almost dropped my cupcake before I turned to face the woman standing behind me. She wasn’t one of the skaters, but she was wearing a Rockville tank top, this one for the Clockpunchers. She was part of the same league. Her hair was snowy white, cut in a harsh bob that framed her face like she was a character out of Tron, programmed to be perfect, never a thing out of place. Even her eyeliner was flawless, blending seamlessly into the gold corona of her eyeshadow.

  She looked like something from a movie about the American derby scene, and her name was Adrienne, and I was in a lot of trouble.

  “Just shopping,” I said, as lightly as I could, trying to force back the heat rising in my fingertips and slow down my heartbeat at the same time. Neither worked. My body was betraying me, too caught up in its panic to listen. “Nice to see you found a new league to skate with. I won’t keep you.”

  “Why not, Final Girl?” She stressed my derby name as she stepped closer to me, a smile curving up the edges of her perfectly painted mouth. “You don’t have any aconite on you tonight. We could have a rematch, on my home ground. Want to try me? You could find out once and for all why cheaters never prosper.”

  My fingertips got even hotter. My throat was dry; I couldn’t speak.

  Once, Adrienne had been a skater for the Wilsonville Rose Petals, and once, I had helped to drive her out of town and out of our league, because she was a mara, a sort of energy vampire, and she had gotten some good skaters injured with her careless feeding. She knew where I was from. She knew I had no business here.

  She could ruin everything.

  “Annie?” Sam stepped away from the T-shirts, putting a hand on my shoulder and doing his best to loom as he glared at Adrienne. “Is this girl bothering you?”

  Adrienne’s eyes widened. She looked from Sam to me, eyes lingering on the logo on the front of my shirt—the logo that said nothing about where I was from, who I skated with, who I was. Slowly, delightedly, she looked up to my face, and asked, “He doesn’t know, does he?”

  “Don’t,” I said, through gritted teeth.

  “Oh, because you listened to me when I asked you to stop? When I asked what gave you the right? You decided I was a monster, and you were the Final Girl, and you chased me away from my life without even answering me.” Adrienne took another step toward me, but her eyes were on Sam. “Better watch yourself, before she decides you’re a monster, too.”

  “You were hurting people,” I said.

  Adrienne didn’t take her eyes off of Sam. “I was hungry,” she said. “When you’re hungry, you got to eat. I bet the pigs think you’re a monster. I bet the cows tell their children stories about you. Nobody died.”

  “That isn’t the only measuring stick.”

  “It is for me.” Adrienne shifted positions, angling her body toward Sam. “Do you know who your girlfriend really is? I didn’t. She said her name was Annie Thompson. Said she was a skater, just like me. The Final Girl. The one who doesn’t drink or smoke or swear, and makes it out of the movie alive. But she’s not a damn thing like me—or like you.” She dropped her voice so she wouldn’t be overheard by the people moving around us, shopping, trying to mind their own business in the face of what looked like a personal dispute. “I know you’re not human. I can taste it when I inhale. Better be careful with her, because all she’s ever done is lie to you.”

  Sam didn’t say anything. But his eyes darted toward me, a quick, confused gesture, and I knew that he was listening to her, and I knew that I was screwed.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, grabbing for his hand. “She’s just fucking with you.”

  “I’m warning him,” she snapped, looking back to me. “I asked about you, after you drove me out of Portland. I asked everyone I knew if they had any idea who you were, because normal people don’t have aconite and unicorn water lying around, waiting to be used on an innocent mara who just wants to eat. Normal people wouldn’t know where to begin. And you know what I found out? ‘Thompson’ isn’t even your last name.”

  “Please don’t,” I whispered. It was a small, futile thing: it did nothing. But once she’d approached us, there’d been nothing I could do. Once she’d spotted us, targeted us, I’d been trapped. Sure, I could have decked her, started a scene and run, but that wouldn’t have changed the fact that Sam would have questions now, and once he had questions, it was all over but the answering. And the crying. That was going to be a factor, too.

  “Why? Don’t you like paying for what you’ve done? Funny, that, given who you are.” She turned to Sam. “Meet Annie Price. As in, those Prices. As in, I’d watch myself, if I were you. She’s probably out to screw you the way she screwed me.”

  I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Adrienne was beaming at me, smiling bright and vivid as the morning.

  “Nice seeing you again, Final Girl,” she said. “I guess this time, the monsters won.” Then she turned, and walked away, leaving me staring after her.

  My shock only lasted a moment. “Sam, I’m sorry—” I began, turning to face him.

  He was already gone.

  The rain was bucketing down outside, and Sam had our only umbrella. I caught up with him halfway across the parking lot, my hair already plastered to my head and my clothes sticking to my body. “Sam, wait,” I cried.

  “Why? So you can tell me more lies?” He stopped walking, shoulders rigid, and didn’t look at me. I started to reach for him. The rain struck my fingertips and sizzled, turning to steam. I pulled my hand back.

  “It’s not what you think,” I whispered.

  “Oh, it’s not?” He finally turned around. The way he looked at me . . . it was like he was seeing a stranger, someone he didn’t know and didn’t want to. “Because I watched you when she was talking, Annie. You looked scared. You looked like the jig was up. And now I’m pretty sure that’s because it was. Or are you going to tell me she’s the liar here?”

  I didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t have believed me. I’ve always been good at setting things up so that people will believe what I need them to believe, but I’ve never been a very good liar. The two skills are not the same.

  “That’s what I thought.” He gave a small shake of his head. “I trusted you. We all trusted you. I kissed you. And you were lying the whole time. You were sneaking around, lying to us, for what?”

  “I had to.”

  “You had to.”

  “Yes. Sam, please, this isn’t what you think. This isn’t—”

  “It’s not what I think? It’s not what I think? Because I think it’s someone from a known Covenant family sneaking around and telling lies about who she is. I think you killed Umeko. Did that have to happen? Or did you just tell us more lies to make it okay?” He took a step toward me, seeming suddenly much larger than I was. “I think you make me sick.”

  “Sam—”

  “Don’t talk to me. Don’t look
at me. Find your own damn way back to the show, and you better pray my grandmother isn’t waiting outside with a shotgun.”

  He turned on his heel and stalked away across the parking lot, leaving me standing alone in the rain, while cheers erupted from the warehouse behind me. I had never felt more alone, or farther away from home. And I had no idea what I was going to do.

  Twenty-one

  “‘I’m sorry’ is not a magic spell that makes everything better. I wish to God it were.”

  —Alice Healy

  The edge of the field where the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival is camped, waiting for a miracle

  I FORKED OVER THE COST OF MY RIDE, and the cab drove off. It vanished in the rain, leaving soaked, sobbing girls and the question of the carnival behind, and for a moment, I envied the driver like anything. He was going home to a life that probably made a lot more sense than mine did, and he was never going to need to look back. It felt like these days, looking back was all I ever did. That, and looking over my shoulder for the disaster I knew was coming.

  My time with the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival began with me walking across a field toward the bone yard. There was a certain beautiful symmetry to ending it the same way. The rain poured down, drenching every inch of me, and the mud sucked at my boots so badly that I got bogged down several times, winding up with my arms pinwheeling and my feet anchored to the ground. If the Covenant realized my deception and came for me, there’d be nothing I could do to stop them. But maybe that was true anyway. I’d been so focused on working with them that I hadn’t been focusing on finding a way to make them go away. No matter how I looked at this, I’d failed someone, even while I was doing the best that I could.

  My real mistake had been in thinking, even for a second, that I could get through this unscathed; that I was having my first big adventure, not interacting with real people in the real world, where there were real stakes. People who weren’t going to behave like the NPCs in my video games and just disappear when their part in the story was over. People who wanted things.

  For a little while, Sam had wanted me, and I’d wanted him right back. Maybe that was the worst thing, out of all the terrible things I’d done, because if I’d told the truth—if we’d met when I was Antimony, not Timpani or Annie or any of the other people I’d been pretending to be—we might have had a chance. I was going to have to live with that. For the rest of my life, I was going to have to live with that.

  The bone yard looked exactly the same as it had when we left, even down to the truck, parked back where it always was. Something shifted underfoot as I passed it. I looked down. One of the roller derby programs had fallen in the mud, soaking up the rain. I hadn’t even realized he’d taken one with him. I stopped there, rain dripping from my hair, blinking back the tears that were threatening to rise and overwhelm me. Then, leaving the ruined reminder of a ruined evening behind, I walked on.

  The lights were on in the RV Sam shared with Emery. I stepped up to the door and knocked, as firmly as I dared. My fingertips were hot, but my body felt weak, wrapped in a cocoon of sorrow and regret. I didn’t like feeling this way. Probably no one did.

  The door opened. Emery was standing there, expression icy. There was no welcome there, no indication that forgiveness was even possible, much less going to be offered.

  “Well,” she said. “I suppose you’d better come inside.”

  “Thank you,” I said. It was small, and silly, the response of habit and all the good manners my parents had been able to beat into me, but under the circumstances, there was nothing else I could have said. If not for the rain, I would have expected to come back and find the bone yard gone, following the carnival into parts unknown. Can’t safely dismantle a roller coaster in a rainstorm.

  Sam was already there, back in his natural form, sitting at the small folding table in the kitchen. The fur on his cheeks was slicked flat, and his tail was wrapped so tightly around one of the table’s legs that I wasn’t sure whether he was going to hurt himself or rip the table apart. Maybe both. He had the strength for it, and he certainly had the anger.

  Emery closed the door before turning to face me, folding her arms, and asking, in an almost reasonable tone, “Why should we let you leave here alive?”

  “Because if you don’t, everyone in this carnival is going to die.”

  The words fell between us, heavy and unwelcome, almost seeming to have a physical presence in the room. Then Sam moved.

  I’d seen him before, when he was on the trapeze alone, or when he was running to get somewhere and didn’t need to worry about being spotted by townies: he was one of the fastest living things I’d ever encountered. I’d been assuming I knew how fast. But I’d never seen him angry. One second he was at the table. The next, he was grabbing me by the throat and slamming me against the wall of the RV. It was like he’d flickered through the intervening space, ignoring it as inconvenient. I had the time to go limp, letting as much of the impact flow through me as possible, before I was hitting metal hard enough to make the whole RV rock.

  “You’re threatening us?!” he snarled. I’d never noticed how sharp his canine teeth were in this form. They didn’t distort his speech at all; they had seemed somehow unimportant. But monkeys bite, and if he bit me, I was going to be in a world of hurt. “You come here, you lie, and you’re threatening us?!”

  “Can’t . . . breathe,” I wheezed. I didn’t struggle or grab for his hand. That was just going to make him angrier, and under the circumstances, I didn’t want to make him angrier. It was starting to really sink in that I was unarmed and he was faster than I was. I should have come up with an excuse to find out how strong he was. Too bad I’d missed my window.

  “Samuel, put her down,” said Emery.

  “She lied to us,” said Sam. He didn’t take his eyes off my face. “She lied to us, and she snuck into our home, and she made us trust her. I’m not going to put her down.”

  And I’d kissed him. That was a second layer of anger and betrayal: I could see it in his eyes. Maybe if I’d just kissed him when he was human, but no, I’d had to go and be the first girl who didn’t care what species he was, because either way, he was Sam. My parents had done too good a job of teaching me that people were always people. The fact that he sometimes had a tail didn’t make him any less a person than the fact that, say, Sarah was essentially a wasp with boobs.

  The fire was building in my fingertips again, strong enough that I expected to start setting things ablaze any second. Which gave me an idea. Maybe it was a bad one, but it was better than nothing: I grabbed Sam’s wrist with both hands. The smell of burnt fur filled the air as he swore and dropped me. I landed hard on my ass, and scrambled backward as fast as I could, away from the wall and the enraged yōkai.

  Emery put a hand on Sam’s shoulder, stopping him from coming after me. “Samuel. Be calm.”

  “She burned me!” he exclaimed, holding up his arm.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I couldn’t breathe,” I said, virtually babbling. I pushed myself off the floor, climbing to my feet. “It just happens sometimes, when I’m upset.”

  “A nascent magic-user,” said Emery. She sniffed. “No wonder they’re willing to risk you. By the standards of the Covenant, you’re little better than the innocent people you destroy. How does it feel to know that they’re going to turn on you any day now? Is that why you lingered here so long?”

  I rubbed my face. “I’m not Covenant,” I said. “I mean, my family isn’t Covenant. We quit over a hundred years ago. We’ve been independent cryptozoologists for four generations, and people won’t stop thinking that because we were Covenant once, we’re Covenant forever.”

  “So why are you here?” demanded Sam.

  I lowered my hand. “The Covenant sent me.”

  Silence fell, thick and dangerous. Finally, in a low voice, Emery said, “You
can’t have it both ways, girl. Either you’re Covenant, or you’re not. Either you’re a monster, here to kill us for the crime of being different, or you’re not. Pick a side.”

  “See, we like to say that sort of thing like it means something, but it doesn’t, because the real world is complex and contradictory and it doesn’t do ‘pick a side’ like it’s easy,” I said. “Do you remember what happened on Dance or Die last season?”

  Sam blinked, his anger fading into confusion. “Are you seriously asking for a reality TV recap in the middle of a fight?”

  “There was a fight,” said Emery slowly. “I don’t watch the show, but I heard about it. A group of snake cultists summoned their god live on network television. A bunch of people died. Including most of the snake cultists. And a girl who claimed to be a member of the Price family declared war on the Covenant of St. George.” She gave me a critical look. “Supposedly the girl was blonde. And petite.”

  “Whereas I am a tall brunette. Yes, the world is very confusing, and I don’t look like the rest of my family,” I said. “That was my sister Verity. She blew our cover. The Covenant was supposed to think we were dead and gone forever, not claiming to own an entire continent. Now they know we’re back. We needed to know what they knew. We needed to know what they were planning. And I, as you so graciously noted, don’t look like a Price.” Or rather, I did, and no one remembered what a Price was supposed to look like, because the Healy genes are so dominant.

  Dealing with people who treat heritage as a sign of virtue was exhausting. Punching them all would have been a lot more fun.

  “I saw that,” said Sam. “It was a trick. The Covenant trying to lure us out. Why else wouldn’t they have cut the camera feed?”

  “No, it was my sister, and she’s not smart enough to come up with a plan that elaborate,” I snapped. “She’s a ballroom dancing cryptozoologist who wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now I get to clean up her mess. And they didn’t cut the feed because I’m pretty sure no one knew what to do until it was too late.”