Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

(I hate working in Lowry’s Welcoming World. I hate it. The shops are too diverse for the area to have a cohesive theme, and while that might seem like a good thing, in practice it means that anyone wearing a Welcoming World uniform can be grabbed by a guest at any time to help them find a pair of earrings or shorts in their size or whatever piece of useless crap they’ve decided they need to make their theme park-loving lives complete. Which, hey, fine. I am a nerd, I understand that sometimes life isn’t worth living if you don’t have the commemorative tchotchke of your dreams. It’s just that people want to do their shopping after midnight, when they have poor impulse control and—frequently—worse manners, and their feet hurt, and they’re exhausted, and they tend to take it all out on the poor cast members who have to explain that no, they don’t control the prices, no, they can’t give a discount because there was a long wait to see Lindy the Lion in Candyland, no, they don’t know where their managers are. Give me the rest of the Park, with its safe, sane closing hours, and leave the retail to the masochists and the heroes.)

The lights went out in the ice cream stand as the final food service employee booked it for the safety of behind-the-scenes, where no guests would be able to grab them and request one last double-dip cone. The glittering white fairy lights twined through the oversized toadstools and climbing morning glory flowers continued to twinkle, creating the illusion that tiny fairies were everywhere, watching everything that happened in their slice of Lowryland. I sipped my milkshake and let myself sink deeper into my seat, enjoying the sound of the area atmospherics. Crickets, and droning cicadas, and the occasional distant chime of bells: all the sounds Lowry’s engineers had decided would say “Fairyland” to their young guests.

I couldn’t say it had been a bad day. Sure, there’d been a few rude guests, including one asshole who decided that screaming at a clerk in a shop filled with children was a great idea, and sure, there’d been the usual assortment of incidents, ranging from shoplifting to overly excited toddlers peeing in the middle of the store when they saw Oberon and Titania walking by with their handlers, but that was all pretty standard for Lowryland. I couldn’t say it had been a good day either. Good days . . .

Good days were rare. Good days were the ones where I somehow managed to convince myself that Melody West was a real person, and that I wouldn’t be wearing her name tag and her uniform if she wasn’t me. Melody West didn’t have any dark secrets to run away from, and she wasn’t hiding from people who wanted to hurt her; she was just a woman with a job that wasn’t too hard and wasn’t too easy and came with free admission every day to one of the most magical places in the world. Melody West didn’t have to worry about setting things on fire if she lost her temper. She didn’t cry herself to sleep at night wondering whether she’d ever see her family again, or whether she’d walked away from the best shot she’d ever have at a relationship with someone whose jagged edges matched her own. Melody could be happy.

When Mary came to visit, it got harder to hold onto Melody, because Melody wasn’t the sort of person whose dead aunt would haunt her. So while I was always glad to see Mary and the connection she represented to home, I resented it at the same time. As long as I couldn’t let myself go and melt into Melody, I’d keep remembering how much I hated it here.

“Freedom!” announced Fern, dropping into the chair across from me with more force than should have been possible for such a diminutive figure. Ah, the varying density of the sylph. She could mostly control how dense she was, but she tended to get lighter when stressed and heavier when tired. There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere.

“You still have glitter in your . . .” I paused to give her a quick once-over. She was back in street clothes, and her fine blonde hair hung limp around her shoulders, pressed flat and lifeless by a day crammed inside her Aspen wig. Most of her eyeshadow was gone, but the ghosts of it haunted the creases of her face, sparkling in the fairy light. “Okay, you have glitter in your everything. You are a testament to the power of glitter.”

“I’m like a slug,” said Fern blissfully. She was holding a milkshake cup of her own, and took a long, snorting slurp before leaning back into her own chair. “How was retail?”

“Soul-destroying. How was the life of a fairy-tale princess?”

“Eh.” She made a seesaw motion with her hands. “Most of the kids were okay. Adults, too. There were a few creepers who tried to grab our butts and got escorted out by Security, but it was mostly just people who loved the movie when they were little and wanted to tell us how much. They were harmless and sweet.” She paused.

I recognized that pause. It was the sound of a “but” on the horizon, coming closer all the time. I frowned. “What happened?”

“There was a family. Two women holding hands, and two little girls who looked so much like them that it was . . . you know.” Fern looked down at her milkshake. “I don’t think they were human people. I think they were maybe dragon people.”

“Could be,” I said carefully. Dragons are notoriously cheap. For them, all money is potentially gold, and they need gold for both their physical and mental well-being. Lowryland isn’t cheap. For a pair of dragons to bring their daughters here, well . . . it seemed unlikely.

But kids are kids, regardless of species, and kids love glitter and spectacle and rides designed to fling them into the sky while keeping them safely confined by straps and harnesses. Dragon mothers love their daughters as much as human ones do. Why shouldn’t a pair of dragons bring their little girls for a day in a world that didn’t really exist? If one of them worked for the Park—and quite a few dragons work for the Park—they could get in for free. Between that and their employee discounts, the trip would be a lot more reasonable than it seemed on the face of things.

There’s no bad blood that I’m aware of between the sylphs and the dragons. They fill different slots in the global ecosystem, and they don’t compete for resources. There are always surprises, though, and so I was even more careful with my tone as I looked at Fern, sidelong, and asked, “Did they do something to make you uncomfortable?”

“I couldn’t tell them,” said Fern simply.

“Oh,” I said, as understanding dawned.

The easiest assumption in today’s world is that anything that can pass for a human is a human. For me, as a human, the numbers said I was probably in the right. Humans are very, very efficient predators when we want to be. Life evolved on this planet in hundreds of forms, a daunting number of them intelligent, and it only took us a few centuries to put ourselves firmly at the top of the food chain.

For Fern, as a nonhuman, rational threat assessment said it didn’t matter whether she was in the right. She needed to see everyone as a human until she was told otherwise, because humans were dangerous, and letting her guard down around the wrong people could get her killed. Even other kinds of cryptids could be dangerous. Some of them we’d hunted because they were predators, not because they were competition for the top billing on the world’s list of intelligent species. A ghoul would devour someone like Fern as quick as they’d devour someone like me, and with even less concern for getting caught. A lot of cryptids won’t call the police when something bad happens to one of their own. Too many of the cops are human, and sometimes the risk of exposure isn’t worth the hope of justice.

I went very still as it struck me that, right now, I was living like a cryptid. I was hiding from people who wanted to do me harm as much because of who I was as because of anything I’d done. That was normal—being a Price meant I’d had a bounty on my head from the day I was born—but the isolation that came with it was new. The need to view everyone around me as a potential danger, to hide, it was all new, and it burned. There were dragons working all over Lowryland, and while none of them were part of my personal clique of Mean Girls, none of them knew my name either. It wasn’t safe. It might never be safe again, not until we’d found a way to end the danger posed by the Covenant—and that was something we’d been trying to accomplish for generations.

Fern nodded gravely. “You understand,” she said, and took another sip of her milkshake.