Magic for Nothing

by Seanan McGuire

  “Great.” I smiled sunnily. “Tell me about the way the carnival’s insurance is set up.”

  Twenty-two

  “You won’t get everything you want in this world. That’s a good thing. What you do get will matter more, because you’ve earned it.”

  —Evelyn Baker

  The big tent at the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, sitting on the edge of the net, waiting for the sky to fall

  THE RAIN WAS STILL COMING DOWN in buckets, turning the ground into a swampy mess and keeping the townies at bay. It was a blessing in disguise. No one was there to see the carnies sneaking away in ones and twos, packing themselves into carefully-selected RVs and rolling off down the road. Ostensibly, if anyone stopped them to ask, they were heading for our next site, checking to see whether it had better protections against the weather than this one. In reality, they were getting as far as they could from what was going to be one hell of a fight.

  Emery hadn’t wanted me there when she addressed the show; said my presence would be a confusing distraction, would keep people from focusing on what was important about the situation. I was pretty sure she just couldn’t stand the sight of me, but didn’t have a good way of getting rid of me, not without endangering the people we were both struggling to protect. So she’d gathered the rest of the carnival in the mess while I’d wandered down the deserted, muddy midway to the big tent. That had been more than an hour ago. The only person I’d seen since then was Ananta, who had stopped in on her way to get the rest of the snakes from her tent.

  “Did you get your things out of the RV?” she’d asked, and I had nodded. My suitcase was packed and hidden in the field; the tiny house where Mork and Mindy had spent their rodent honeymoon was in a box. Mork and Mindy were with me, curled in my backpack, talking about whatever it was Aeslin mice discussed when there were no humans around to hear them. It might have been safer to leave them in the field. It might not. If my suitcase got stolen, so what? If my backpack got stolen . . .

  Any additional risk was worth it for the security of knowing where they were.

  Ananta had paused, sizing me up. Finally, she’d said, “A lot of people around here are going to hate you. I’m not going to tell them they’re wrong. But I’m not going to join in, either. Maybe we’ll see each other again someday. You could introduce me to your brother.”

  “Sounds only fair,” I’d replied. “I’ve met two of yours.”

  She’d smiled, and I’d smiled, and we’d only looked a little pained. Then she’d vanished back into the rain, to finish packing her snakes into great plastic tubs and carting them to the RV. She was gone by now, I knew, joining the quiet exodus. I hoped she could drive far enough to escape the Covenant’s attention. I hoped she could be safe.

  I hoped that for all of them.

  At least I was armed now. Timpani Brown was buried, and with her went the need to seem like an ordinary trapeze artist. The throwing knives I’d borrowed for my act were tucked into my clothes, providing a comforting layer of metal against my skin. I’d also swiped a handful of darts from one of the midway games, reasoning that their absence would never be noticed, but it’s always good to have a few more things to throw.

  A shovel would have been better. A shovel, and time to dig about a hundred pit traps, and maybe some C-4. It was nice to be armed again, but dynamite would have been even nicer.

  There was a flicker of motion from the bleachers. I turned wearily toward it. “You may as well come out, whoever you are,” I said. “I’m not going to get any less cranky.”

  The motion resolved itself into Sam as he stepped out of the shadows and walked to the edge of the ring with deliberate slowness. My heart jumped into my throat and hung there, perfectly suspended, while I forgot how to breathe.

  Finally, in a choked voice, I asked, “Did Emery send you?”

  “No,” he said. “She’d probably have told me not to come, if she’d known. She thinks I’m at the RV, packing my things. She wants me to ride out of here with the Knowles twins.”

  “The Knowles twins . . . ?”

  “They run the Haunted House, usually. They own half of it. Well, right now they do. After the insurance pays for us to get a new one, they’re going to own the whole thing. That was their price for going, instead of staying to fight. Not that they wanted to stay and fight. They just wanted to own the Haunted House.”

  “They’re probably not related,” I said automatically.

  Sam paused, confusion rippling across his face and chasing away any anger lurking there. For a moment, he looked at me like I was just Annie, the girl he flew with, the girl he kissed, the girl who sometimes said things that made no sense at all. “What do you mean?”

  “Bogeymen stay home until they get married, so they can pay into the family; odds are good they’re either a young married couple or engaged and trying to earn enough to pay for each other. Owning their own carnival attraction, and all its profits, would go a long way toward securing them a wedding.” Bogeymen never like to feel like they owe anyone anything. There’s a lot of reciprocity in their culture, and a lot of very detailed accounting.

  “Okay, that’s weird,” said Sam. The confusion faded, replaced by stony coldness. I ached to see it go. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “So talk. Unless ‘talk’ is your way of saying ‘beat the shit out of you.’ You’ll need to get in line for that.”

  He grimaced. “I guess I deserved that.”

  “You think?”

  “I overreacted before. I shouldn’t have hit you. But you shouldn’t have burned me.”

  “I burned you because you hit me.”

  “I guess that’s fair,” said Sam, looking down at his feet. “I’m better at holding a grudge than I am at apologizing. Can we be done with this part? Please?”

  “I’m a pretty good grudge-holder myself,” I said, thinking of Verity, thinking of slammed doors and icy silences. “Sure. Let’s say just this once, the two grudges cancel each other out.”

  “Cool. Thanks.” He looked up. “Do you think this plan of yours will work?”

  I closed my eyes. “As long as we’re careful. I think the Covenant will come looking for me when I don’t call, because they consider me one of their own. We’ll fight them. We’ll lose. And we’ll burn the whole place down around our ears.” The inevitable arson investigation would find no accelerants; just the aftermath of an electrical fire that had started in the big tent and managed to spread despite the rain, destroying everything. Emery had shown me the carnival’s insurance paperwork. They were covered thoroughly enough that they’d be closed for six months, tops, while they found and repainted their replacement rides. They might even wind up better off. Buying new would allow them to get equipment that needed less repair than their current worn-down rides and attractions.

  Yes, they’d lose the memories and history associated with what they already had. But they’d be alive to make new ones. That had to be good enough.

  “Grandma thinks I’m leaving.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  I opened my eyes. It was somehow unsurprising to see that Sam had crossed half the space between us. He was standing there, tail twining and untwining around his left ankle, watching me with that same cold flatness. I thought back on all the times he’d glared at me, or looked at me like I didn’t matter, and realized, with a small flare of hope, that he was nervous.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because I’m not my mom,” he said. “I don’t run out on people just because things get hard and I might get hurt if I stick around.”

  “Sometimes staying is a lot harder than running away,” I agreed quietly.

  “Annie . . .” He paused. “Is it still okay to call you that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s ‘Antimony,’ remember? My Great-Aunt Laura was an ambulom
ancer. She made a prediction that could have applied to either me or my cousin Elsie, about needing to disappear under a name that was ours but wasn’t at the same time. My parents named me ‘Antimony Timpani,’ and Elsie’s parents named her ‘Elsinore Norelle,’ to make sure we’d be able to do what we had to, when the time came.” I laughed bitterly. “When we were kids, we used to bet each other on who it would be. I never thought I’d win.”

  “Your parents named you to fulfill a prophecy?” Sam sounded dubious. I didn’t blame him in the least. “Who are you, Anakin Skywalker?”

  “I have not brought balance to the Force.” I looked at him. I didn’t feel like I had the right anymore, but that didn’t change the wanting. That’s the real problem with me. I always want something. I want my parents to be proud of me. I want to do things my siblings have never done, things that would make me something more than just the troublesome baby of the family. I want to skate. I want to be right.

  I wanted Sam. Life would have been so much easier if I hadn’t. But he’d kissed me, and I’d kissed him, and for a few crystalline moments, everything had seemed like it made sense. Everything had seemed right.

  “No, I guess you haven’t.” He stayed where he was, looking at me. “I knew something was wrong with your story. Some of the things you’d said to me didn’t track.”

  “I’m not the best liar.”

  “I know. All the good parts of what you said . . . those were the true parts. I should have known something was up when you didn’t freak out at the idea of kissing a guy with a tail.” His lips twisted into something dark and wry. “Even the carnie girls don’t like to kiss a monkey. They say it’s kinky in the bad way.”

  “Then they’re short-sighted. You’re a much better kisser when you’re not tense.”

  Sam’s bark of laughter was so abrupt that it startled us both, creating a sort of stunned silence. He recovered first. “I shouldn’t have left you in that parking lot. I was pissed, and I had the car keys.”

  “I deserved it. I shouldn’t have lied.” I shook my head. “Or maybe I shouldn’t have taken you anywhere near a roller derby game. But I don’t feel like that’s a strong enough moral. ‘To keep lying to your boyfriend, avoid beloved locations and pastimes.’”

  “You really thought I was your boyfriend?”

  I froze. The word had been an accident—but there are no accidents, as Elsie has always been so happy to remind me. The subconscious always makes itself known. I shrugged a little, looking down. “I thought you might be. Guess we’ll never know now, huh?”

  “Guess not.” Sam looked around the tent. “Grandma’s always been a stickler for fire safety. She says this place would go up like a candle.”

  “That’s the hope.”

  “How long . . . ?”

  “We have about an hour before I’m supposed to check in. I won’t. They’ll come looking for me, and when they do, I guess they’ll find me.” I shrugged again. “After that, we’ll see what happens. Either I win and the carnival burns and you all get away, or I lose and the carnival burns and I go back to England to answer for my family’s sins.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “You keep saying that, but you’re wrong. You have to go.”

  “No, I don’t. Grandma says I do, but I’m an adult, and this is my home. I get to stay and defend it if I want to.”

  I slid off the net, holding my hands beseechingly toward him. “There’s nothing to defend. We’re letting it burn, remember? The Covenant thinks you’re human. Margaret said so explicitly. We can’t kill them all, even if we wanted to try, so we need this to work. We need them to think everyone died or scattered, and is no longer a problem either way.”

  “So what, you think I’m just going to run off and let you do this by yourself?”

  “That was the idea.”

  The corner of Sam’s mouth twitched. “That would make me a pretty shitty boyfriend.”

  “Since everything I’ve said to you was a lie, I think you’re allowed.”

  “Not everything.” He moved toward me with that unnerving speed, taking my still-outstretched hands and twining his tail around my waist, pulling me close to him. “Pretty sure you think I’m cute.”

  “Sam—”

  “You lied to us. I’m not thrilled about that. I was pretty pissed, actually, and if we had more time, I still would be. We don’t have more time. I’ve lied to everyone who’s ever thought I was human. I’ve told stories to protect myself. And you never hurt anyone here who didn’t try to hurt you first. I’d be sort of stupid to let this screw things up for us.”

  “Sam . . .”

  He leaned in and kissed me, tail tightening around my waist as his hands tightened on mine. The heat was back in my fingertips, but it wasn’t burning this time, more warming them to a slow boil. Together, we wrapped ourselves around each other under the big tent, and we let everything else go for a few minutes. There was no future for us. The girl he’d been kissing before didn’t exist: this was the first time he’d kissed me and known my name, who my family was, where I came from. When this place burned, he’d disappear in one direction and I’d disappear in another, and we’d never see each other again. But oh, sometimes the future is a very long way away, and sometimes the present matters more than anything that might be coming down the line.

  There was no hesitation in him now. The way he kissed me told me his thoughts were mirroring mine, at least on some level. He knew this was the last time, and while he might not have forgiven me fully for my lies, he was smart enough to know he’d regret it if he didn’t give me a proper farewell. I let go of his hands, using mine to pull him closer, threading my fingers into the furlike hair atop his head. He responded by sliding his hands under my shirt . . . and stopped, pulling away, and bursting into laughter.

  I blinked. My breasts had garnered a lot of responses since they’d started making an appearance back in middle school. Some of those responses had been more welcome than others. But I’d never had a guy get his hands on them and start laughing before.

  “Excuse me?” I said, bemused.

  “How many knives do you have under there?” asked Sam.

  The mystery was solved. I grinned and said, “About thirty.”

  “How do you not cut yourself?”

  “Practice.” I leaned back, trusting the tether of his tail to keep me upright. “What are we doing?”

  “Making out.”

  “I thought you were mad at me.”

  “I am, and I’m not, and it’s confusing, and maybe if we had more time I’d be all sulking and broody and trying to work through my feelings about the situation, but we don’t,” said Sam. “You’re going to burn down the world and then you’re going to disappear and I’m never going to see you again. I’m not ready to never see you again.”

  “Hey, I have to be punished for my hubris somehow,” I said, and leaned in, and kissed him.

  We only had a little time left, he and I and the shadow of the big tent, where we’d learned to fly with each other, instead of only always flying alone. What we did there, in that quiet, shadowy space, would have to be enough to balance out everything that we weren’t going to have. And by God, we tried. No matter what else we may have done, we tried.

  When we rolled away from each other, straw and sawdust stuck to our backs and—in Sam’s case—to the thin line of fur that ran from the base of his tail up to the nape of his neck, outlining his spine in bristling brown. I rolled further, reaching for my phone, abandoned in the welter of knives and clothing that I had shed.

  According to the readout, it was 10:25 PM.

  “I missed my check-in,” I said, putting down the phone and reaching for my bra. “You need to go. You need to make sure everyone else is already gone. They’re coming.”

  “You can’t be sure—”

  “My handler as much as told
me they were getting ready to move. They’re coming. They’ll either think it’s a rescue mission—that I screwed up and got myself caught—or that I’ve gone over to the wrong side and think I can save you all. Either way, it’s to my advantage, because they don’t know how much training I actually have. Now go. Make sure everyone else is out of the line of fire. Please.”

  Sam looked at me gravely. “I want to stay.”

  “I know. Doesn’t change things.”

  “It never does.” He kissed me, so quickly that I didn’t have time to react, and then he was gone. He took his clothes with him. I hoped he had some practice at dressing while he ran, or else the members of the carnival who hadn’t managed to evacuate yet were going to get one hell of a surprise. I know a naked monkey man would catch my attention.

  I dressed slowly, taking the time to secure every knife and dart in its proper position. Margaret and Robert were staying in town. If they’d left the second I failed to check in, they’d be here within the next ten minutes. Assuming their backup was already here, they’d need to rally the troops; I probably had until eleven or so before things got really ugly.

  “Stay quiet,” I said to my backpack as I slipped it on. It didn’t respond, but I knew the mice would hear me, and obey. Obedience in the face of dire danger is an Aeslin survival trait.

  Calmly, forcing my steps to remain even and my shoulders to remain loose, I walked to the tent door and stepped out onto the moonlit midway. The rain had stopped. The sky was clear, dominated by a vast, gleaming Minnesota moon. I looked up at it and kept walking.

  The highest point in the carnival was the Ferris wheel. With no one to tell me it was dangerous or ask me to get down, it was an easy thing to climb the outside of the structure, using the struts and counterbalances to give me the traction I needed. I kept climbing until I reached the topmost swing, and stopped there, removing my backpack and tucking it under the seat. The mice would be safe. No one would find them unless they turned on the ride, and the Ferris wheel itself was basically fireproof. The controls might melt. The wheel would remain.