Magic for Nothing

by Seanan McGuire

  Sam opened his mouth to answer. Then he stopped, and grimaced, and said, “Too late.” There was a pained note in his voice, like he was doing his best to hold himself together. I took a half step backward and leaned to the side.

  Margaret was behind him, a pistol in her hands. The barrel was digging into Sam’s spine. He was fast—maybe the fastest living thing I’d ever encountered—but he wasn’t fast enough to dodge a point-blank shot.

  “Evacuation?” she asked, meeting my eyes and shaking her head. Unlike Sam, she made no effort to keep her voice down. She wanted the other people in this haunted house to come and find her. Everyone here was her backup, and my ending. “Oh, Annie. Robert said he was afraid you’d turn against us, but I never expected anything like this.”

  If she pulled that trigger, Sam was either dead or crippled for life. Neither option was acceptable. But if I could surprise her enough . . .

  “You should have been expecting it,” I said sweetly. “I was worried when I met you at Penton. I thought, ‘Oh, shit, my sister said she was a smart one, she’s going to see right through me.’ But you never did. You kept thinking I was on your side. It’s no wonder we always win when we go up against the Covenant. You’re too stupid to beat us.”

  Margaret frowned, looking perplexed. “What are you talking about?”

  Sarah brain-blasted Margaret back in New York, wiping the memory of her encounter with Verity from her mind. We were never sure how complete that wipe was, or whether Verity’s appearance on television would open cracks in Margaret and Robert’s memories. Everything I’d seen so far told me that it had been pretty damn complete . . . but nothing is perfect.

  “Verity Price,” I said. “Pretty, blonde, showed up on live television with a gun in her hand and blood on her cheeks. Remember her now?”

  “You’re talking nonsense,” said Margaret.

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m talking about my sister. But then, we’ve never been properly introduced, have we? Hello, cousin. I’m Antimony Price, and you deserve everything that’s coming to you.”

  Margaret’s eyes widened, searching my face, cataloging all the little points of similarity that could be family resemblance or could be genetic coincidence. She lingered on my hair, where my henna-free roots were growing in the same chestnut color as her own. With a shout of rage, she pulled the gun away from Sam and aimed it at my face. Sam’s tail wrapped around her wrists before she could pull the trigger, yanking her arms toward the sky. I punched her in the throat. She went limp, and he dropped her.

  “Now what?” he hissed.

  I looked at Margaret’s motionless body. She was family. She was the enemy. I needed to kill her. I’d never killed a human being before, much less one who was unconscious and unable to defend herself. For all that I had spent most of my childhood tormenting my siblings out of a twisted desire to make them love me, I had never wanted family blood on my hands.

  But if we left her here, when the plan moved into its next stage, she was going to burn to death. How was that any better than a quick, clean pull of the trigger? I bent, retrieving her gun from the floor. It fit easily into my hand. I took aim on her head, thumbing off the safety as the world seemed to slow and narrow to that single point. Sam didn’t say anything. I think he knew how difficult this was, and how much either answer would hurt me.

  A gunshot rang out, the bullet whizzing past my head, close enough that I felt the wind of its passing. What felt like a rope was suddenly wrapped around my waist, yanking me out of the line of fire. I realized what it was a split-second later: Sam’s tail. I took aim on the shooter, trusting Sam not to drag me into anything that would get me hurt. The gun jumped in my hand when I pulled the trigger. There was a shout from the shadows ahead. I’d managed to hit something. It was so much easier when the person I was shooting at was actually trying to kill me.

  “Not a good place!” said Sam, and pulled me farther back, out of the mirrored chamber, into the artificial swamp. I looked over my shoulder at him. He nodded and unwrapped his tail from my waist.

  “Come on,” he said, offering me his hand. “We need to get out of here.”

  Robert would find Margaret. He would get her out of the Haunted House before it burned. I nodded, taking Sam’s hand, and didn’t fight as he swept me off my feet and jumped for the ceiling. It wasn’t that high—maybe ten feet—and he was able to hook his free hand on one of the retaining bars holding up the scenery. He dangled as I shoved on the panels above his head, opening a “door” into the drop-ceiling where the mechanisms that ran the special effects and lighting were stored. Sam hoisted himself up, taking me with him into the dark.

  The drop-ceiling was only a few feet high. He let me go, and together we crawled for the nearest exit. This had clearly been designed by the two bogeymen who owned the attraction: it assumed a level of skinny flexibility that most humans couldn’t come anywhere near. Sam had to go human again, just to fit through some of the tighter spaces. By the time we reached the panel that would lead us to the roof, I was giving serious thought to becoming claustrophobic.

  “When we get out of here, you need to run,” I whispered.

  Sam cocked his head, seeming to consider it. “Nope,” he said finally.

  “Asshole,” I grumbled, and pushed the panel open.

  It was a relief to be back in the fresh air after being squashed inside the Haunted House for so long. It was less of a relief when the bullets started whizzing by our heads. It wasn’t that Robert was a lousy shot; we were at a bad angle, and he had Margaret slung over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry, which had to be throwing off his aim. I yelped and ducked. Sam grabbed me around the waist—with his arm this time—and flung himself off the roof, back in full monkey-mode, leaping from the Haunted House toward the Scrambler. Which was still moving.

  I screamed. I’m not ashamed of that fact. We were diving straight into the arms of a carnival ride that looked a lot like Lovecraft’s idea of a blender, and we were probably going to die.

  Only we didn’t. Sam landed solidly on one of the rotating cars, grabbing hold with feet, tail, and free hand, and grinned at me. “Still want me to leave?” he asked.

  “I am going to murder you myself,” I snarled.

  “Thought so!” he said, and jumped again, landing on the ground on the other side of the Scrambler. He put me down. I took his hand, and together, we ran deeper into the carnival, heading, whether by instinct or by design, for the big tent.

  All around us, lights twinkled, music played, and the ghost town that was the carnival went through its paces, not seeming to notice the absence of the people who should have been there, filling it with light and life. The carnival didn’t know that it was about to burn. A figure stepped around a corner up ahead of us. I had time to register who it was; then I was diving for the ground, yanking Sam out of the path of Chloe’s crossbow bolt just before it scythed through the air where his head had been.

  “Another friend of yours?” he demanded.

  “Old roommate,” I replied, rolling to my feet and pulling a dart from inside my shirt. The shaft was wood. The tip was metal. I tried to focus on the feeling of fire in my fingers, like I’d done in the shed, like I’d been doing unintentionally for months, and I threw.

  The dart burst into flames in midair. It was still burning when it hit Chloe’s shoulder. She yelped and dropped her crossbow, trying to beat out the fire with her hand.

  “I want it!” I told Sam, and started running again, trusting him to catch up.

  He did, easily, the crossbow in his hands. “First the gun, now whatever the hell this is—is this how you normally rearm yourself?” he asked. “You punch people and take whatever they drop?”

  “It works in video games!” Chloe was now behind us, presumably no longer on fire, and definitely pissed off. I’d be pissed off, too, if someone I thought was an ally set me on fire and stol
e my stuff. I kept running.

  There were four Covenant operatives at the carnival—at least. The bomb had clearly been their big plan, the thing that was supposed to turn the tide in their favor. They hadn’t been expecting it to be defused, and they definitely hadn’t been expecting me to evacuate the place before they could get down to the business of killing people. That was good. The element of surprise was no longer on my side. After knocking two of them on their asses and throwing a flaming dart at a third, any chance I might have been able to sneak up on them was well and truly spent. That was fine. “Subtle” has never been my specialty.

  We ran until we reached the big tent and ducked inside. “Crossbow,” I said, holding out my hand to Sam. He dropped Chloe’s crossbow into it. There was already a bolt in the channel, waiting to be notched. Convenient.

  “You said there was a bomb.”

  “Not the time.”

  “It’s always the time when there’s a bomb involved.”

  “They’re going to catch up with us any second. Chloe’s furious. Robert’s . . . well, he’s probably more furious. Mega-furious. You need to get out of here and let me work.”

  “You need to tell me where the bomb is.”

  I lowered the crossbow and frowned at Sam. “Have you ever worked with explosives? Do you know how to defuse a bomb? Can you recognize Semtex when you see it?”

  He scowled. “No. I still want to know where the bomb is.”

  “I got rid of it.”

  “How?”

  “I gave it to my Aunt Mary.”

  “Yes, you did, and we are going to talk about that right now, young lady,” said a stern voice. I winced. Sam stared.

  “Hi, Aunt Mary. This isn’t a good time,” I said, turning around and trying to see her the way Sam did. White hair and highway eyes that never seemed to settle on a color, but always gave the impression of looking at pictures of a road trip. She had somehow managed to get stuck in the 1970s where fashion was concerned, which probably felt very modern to her, since she’d died in the 1950s: she was wearing bellbottoms and a white peasant blouse with stalks of wheat embroidered around the neckline. And then there was the whole “suddenly materialized out of thin air” thing to consider, which probably made the rest of her appearance creepier.

  “Annie, I do not mean to alarm you, but I think your aunt is dead,” said Sam in a strangled voice.

  “Anyone can have a dead aunt,” said Mary cheerfully, before laughing at her own joke. The merriment only lasted for a second; then she was back to glaring at me. “You threw a bomb at me.”

  “You caught it. I needed it to go away.”

  “You could have given me a little warning!”

  “No, I really couldn’t have. Not unless I wanted to wind up in debt to the crossroads or exploded and haunting this field for the rest of eternity.” I gestured between Mary and Sam. “Sam Taylor, meet Mary Dunlavy, one of my two dead-but-still-here aunts. Aunt Mary, meet Sam. He’s the carnival owner’s grandson. Now, if we’re done with the niceties, the Covenant is outside, they’re coming here, and I need to get back to work.” I paused before giving Mary a hopeful look. “My mice . . .”

  “Sweetie, you know it doesn’t work that way,” said Mary. She looked genuinely regretful. She’s been with the family since my grandmother was born, and if anyone loves the Aeslin mice, it’s her. “Nothing living can go into the twilight with me and come back out again. If I took them out of here, they’d die. At least with you, they’ve got a chance.”

  “Great.” I shook my head. “Can you at least scout the Covenant for me?”

  “You know better than to ask me for useful things.”

  Her calm declaration hung between us, bitterly cold and absolutely true. It was the difference between my two dead aunts. I would never have chucked a bomb at Aunt Rose without asking first. With Aunt Mary, I would never be able to ask.

  “All right,” I said. “Then I’m asking you to be useless. You can’t fight and you can’t help and I don’t have any more bombs to throw at you. You need to go. The Covenant is coming. This isn’t your fight, but it’s mine, and I need to finish it.”

  “Okay, baby.” Aunt Mary disappeared. She reappeared next to me, planting a kiss on my cheek and whispering, “You have no idea how much you remind me of your grandfather.” Then she was gone entirely, leaving only the distant scent of baked asphalt in her wake.

  “How normal is she for your family?” asked Sam. “On a scale of like, one to fucking weird?”

  “She’s about a three.” I resumed aiming my stolen crossbow at the entrance to the tent. “You should go. Your grandmother will kill me if I let you get hurt.”

  “I should stay. I’ll never forgive myself if I run. Or we could both go.”

  “I can’t,” I said apologetically. “The bomb didn’t go off. They know something’s up. I need to distract them, and if necessary, I need them to think they saw me die.”

  “So I’m making sure you don’t actually die,” he said stubbornly. Sam didn’t have any obvious weapons. He braced his feet in the sawdust, balling his hands into fists.

  I stopped arguing. We waited.

  The tent flap rustled just before a small object rolled into the room. My eyes widened. So did Sam’s, both of us realizing at the same time what it had to be. He was the first to react, naturally, his yōkai biology giving him the edge where reflexes were concerned. Almost too fast for the eye to see, he dove for the grenade, grabbed it, and chucked it back outside the tent. There was a shriek, followed by a boom that I felt all the way down to my bones.

  “Okay, I take it back,” I said numbly. “You can stay.”

  Sam raced back to my side, falling into a graceful, if uneasy, stance. Neither of us spoke.

  This time when the tent flap opened, there was no grenade. Just the impression of a body racing for cover, followed by a gunshot. Hot pain blossomed on my arm. I glanced down long enough to be sure that I’d only been grazed—bleeding out would have ruined my plans for the day—and hit the ground on my knees, pulling the trigger on the crossbow and willing fire onto the bolt the same way I’d willed fire onto the dart.

  Nothing happened. Naturally.

  “This is not a good time to roll a fucking one,” I moaned, dropping the now-useless crossbow. It had seemed like such a good way to get fire onto the tent walls, and so much safer than my original plan. “Cover me.”

  “Cover you while you do what? Annie—”

  I was already on my feet, running for the ladder that would take me up to the trapeze. The rope array was connected to the entire tent, anchored in half a dozen places. If it went up without an accelerant, it would be a lot harder for the insurance investigators to claim arson.

  If someone had asked me a year ago whether I’d wind up trying to fight the Covenant of St. George while arranging insurance fraud, I would have looked at them like they’d hit their head. Good thing no one ever asked me that. I ran. Behind me, Sam was taunting Robert, working his way into a string of monkey-related puns that were just plain bad. He had a real gift for being a dick in the middle of a serious situation. It was probably the fault of all those Spider-Man comics.

  “God bless Spider-Man,” I muttered, and started up the ladder.

  I had climbed a lot of ladders, under a lot of circumstances. I’d never attempted to climb all the way to a trapeze while my half-monkey maybe-boyfriend kept a Covenant operative distracted below me. It was a new, and bracing experience that I was in no hurry to have again.

  But either Robert was the last Covenant operative in action or the other three were regrouping, planning their next attack. None of them were going to expect me to burn the carnival down around my own ears. I kept climbing until I reached the launching platform.

  My hands weren’t chalked and my clothes weren’t right for this. I grabbed my swing from its hook anyway, taking a
deep breath before I launched myself into the air. It was a smooth, easy arc from the platform to the center of the tent, where I let go of the swing. I had told Emery I didn’t do tightrope work, and I wasn’t lying about that, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t use the tightrope for other purposes. I grabbed it as I fell, hissing when the fibers bit into my palms, and hung there like a piece of washing drying in the wind. Closing my eyes, I tried to focus on calling fire into my fingers.

  It didn’t come. My hands remained as cool as any human’s, perfectly ordinary, perfectly reasonable. I wasn’t going to set anything on fire with a touch—oh, no—not me. I kept my eyes closed, trying to chase my frustration down and make it do something useful for me.

  On the ground below me, Sam bellowed in shock and pain. My eyes snapped open as the rope burst into flame, burning blue-white and far too fast to be natural. I was my own accelerant, when I was frightened enough.

  I let go of the rope and I fell, straight down, into the familiar embrace of the net. I twisted at the last moment, landing on my side, and rolled to the edge as the rope array above me was being consumed by the fire. I only got glimpses of the scene I was about to enter: Sam on the ground, still in his natural form, face covered in blood. Robert standing over him, gun raised, preparing to pull the trigger again.

  I pulled a knife from inside my shirt as I rolled. I didn’t think, I barely aimed; I just threw.

  Before, in the Haunted House, I’d been asking myself whether I could kill another human. I’d managed to reach my twenties without killing a thinking being, and the idea of killing a member of my own species was horrifying and upsetting on a deep, visceral level, even when they belonged to the Covenant of St. George. I talked a good game, and I had the skills on paper, but could I do it in the real world?

  My knife flew straight and true, embedding itself in Robert’s throat just below his Adam’s apple. His eyes widened, the gun falling from his suddenly nerveless fingers as he clutched at the hilt with both hands, trying to pull it loose. He couldn’t. He didn’t have the manual dexterity left to accomplish what he needed to do. Looking at me with silent accusation in his eyes, he folded forward, landing on his face in the sawdust.