Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“You’ve got some balls on you, kid,” said Emily. “Big brass balls. Or should that be big crystal ones?” She barked brief laughter at her own joke. The sound was utterly humorless.

“I have no idea what’s happening right now, and I would like to leave,” I said, in the prim, tight voice of an unhappy child. I heard that voice a hundred times a day from children who wanted to sit down, or go to the bathroom, or do anything that would allow them to feel like they had some influence over their own lives while in a place that was supposedly designed to cater to their every whim. Sometimes I thought their shrill demands for the latest Princess Thistle loom or Princess Laura storybook were born less out of greed and more out of the need to assert that they were still people who walked in the world; they were something other than the projection of their parents’ desires for a perfect vacation scrapbook and “making memories.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have wandered into a crime scene,” said Emily, making the suggestion sound almost amiable. “Look, I get it. You’re stressed out, you’re afraid I’m getting ready to blow the whistle on you, and you’re apparently setting things on fire, which is a nice trick. Let me set your mind at ease.” Her hand dipped into the pocket of her blazer. When she pulled it out again, she was holding a deck of cards. She held them out to me, fingers easing them into a fan.

Emily smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes. It barely reached her lips.

“Pick a card,” she said.

Something in her tone told me this wasn’t a request. Hesitantly, I reached out and pulled a card from the middle of the fan.

“Show it to me,” she said.

“I thought you were supposed to guess,” I replied. I was stalling for time, hoping Sophie would come back or Fern would wander out of whatever room they were holding her in. Anything that could get me away from this cold statue of a woman, with her card tricks and her freezing eyes.

She would have been lovely, if it hadn’t been for the chill coming off her in waves. She had the sculpted bone structure and porcelain coloring of an original edition Emma Frost—and all the good humor and friendliness that went with that particular comparison, which was to say, none at all. Her blazer and skirt fit so well that they had to be bespoke, and her shoes were black leather kitten heels, elegant and subtle and not so high as to leave her unable to keep up with someone moving at a brisk pace. Whether she’d shaped herself to the environment or whether the environment had shaped itself to her didn’t matter. She was here, she was flawless, and she was poised to kill.

Meekly, I showed her my card. This time, her smile was more obvious, and far easier to read.

“The three of hearts,” she said. “You’re a sorcerer. Not a sorceress. There’s no need to gender power. Power simply is, and it does what it will. But you haven’t been trained, have you? No, barely at all—wait.” She plucked the card from my hand, making it disappear. “That’s why you reek of ghost. It’s all about the bloodline.”

My own blood felt like it was burning and freezing at the same time. My fingertips were as hot as they had ever been. If I’d touched the duffel bag now, it wouldn’t have been scorched: it would have been engulfed in flame. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sorcerers and routewitches have one thing in common,” she said. The rest of the cards followed the three of hearts, slipped back into her pocket and out of sight. “They run in families. Where you find one, you’re likely to find a line of them, stretching all the way back to caveman days. Something in the genes. You’re being haunted by someone who’s trying to make you understand what you can do before you burn down the world, aren’t you?”

Slowly, I forced myself to straighten, forced the tension out of my shoulders and the terror out of my eyes. I couldn’t force the fire from my fingers. Like she said, it was in the blood, and right now, my blood was singing, stinging, demanding that I let it defend me and, by extension, itself.

So I stopped trying. I let the heat rise until she could feel it from where she stood, keeping my fingers well away from anything I might accidentally ignite. “She’s my grandmother,” I said coolly. Making Mary a blood relative was the best way to deflect suspicion, and my actual grandmother wouldn’t mind. Better to make it seem like I was the last of my line. “She knew the last person in our family who had my little . . . problem, and she’s been trying to help. She can’t help. Not really. Now it’s your turn. Who the hell are you, and how did you know about her?”

“Routewitches always know,” she said, and smirked like this was some sort of amazing revelation. Which I guess it would have been, if she hadn’t decided to treat me like a cat toy first.

My head throbbed. Fern was still somewhere in this building, possibly without a clean shirt, definitely without a clean pair of undies. Every minute that passed was another minute where I wasn’t working, and even if there wasn’t going to be a black mark on my record that anyone could see, everything has consequences in a place like Lowryland. It didn’t matter how many times management said my absence had been forgiven: management wasn’t a jury of my peers. The people I was supposed to have been sharing my shift with wouldn’t necessarily remember all the times I’d covered their butts, but they’d sure remember the day I didn’t bother to show up. I’d be paying for this for months. The fire in my fingers wasn’t backing down, and for maybe the first time since I’d retreated into the comfortable identity of Melody West, former high school cheerleader and woman in hiding, neither was I.

“That’s swell,” I snarled, and was rewarded by her smirk fading, just a little, as she remembered that in the hierarchy of humans who can bend the forces of nature to their will, she was well below me. Or would have been, if I’d had any actual training.

Still, I could burn this building down around our ears if I felt threatened enough. That was something.

Routewitches are the most common kind of human magic-user, and they’re tricky. Most of their powers have to do with distance and the road. Somehow—don’t ask me why—this also translates into a certain amount of access to the afterlife, which they call “the twilight.” They can talk to ghosts. Some of them can bend ghosts to their will, or ban them from areas. They do what they do and they do it well. It’s just that what they do is limited to parlor tricks, compared to what a true magic-user can accomplish.

Taking Emily’s fear as a sign to continue, I asked, “Why are you telling me this? I thought protocol was that we nod to each other and continue on without making a fuss. Sorcerers and routewitches don’t fight over territory.”

“No, they don’t; that’s true,” she said. “Will you please come with me, so I can show you I mean you no harm? That I only want to help you?”

I eyed her warily. “I’m going to need a second.”

“Of course.”

I took a step back, putting some distance between me and Emily, before I closed my eyes and tried to focus on happy, soothing thoughts. Thoughts that didn’t make me want to burn down the building, and fry myself along with it.

Me, and Sam, and the flying trapeze. He was relaxed, in his furry, fūri form, and he was holding onto the bar with his feet, reaching for me with his hands, primed to snatch me out of the air. My own bar was swinging high, and when I let go, I wasn’t falling; I was flying, soaring across the tent toward him—

The fire in my fingers guttered and died, extinguished by the memory of better times. I opened my eyes.

“All right,” I said. “Show me.”

Emily smiled.



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