Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

There was no sign of Sophie or the rest of the PR team as we moved deeper into the building, past posters, playbills, and framed cels that were worth more money than I’d ever seen in my life. Emily saw me looking and raised an eyebrow.

“I wouldn’t have taken you for a true believer, with the way you were carrying on back there,” she said. “This building is a priceless trove of Lowry artifacts.” That you were threatening to burn down, came the silent accusation.

“Then you shouldn’t have been threatening me in it,” I said coolly. It was getting easier to maintain my reserve now that I was past the initial shock of confrontation. All I had to do was pretend Emily was my older sister and I could match every scrap of her smugness with a sneer. Better yet, my fingers were staying cool. Today’s bout of wild magic was apparently finished, and not a second too soon.

“I suppose that’s fair,” conceded Emily. She kept walking, leading me through candy-colored halls toward what might well be my doom.

All the bright paint and childish posters aside, the building where Lowry housed their PR team could have belonged to any corporation in the world. We walked past offices, kitchenettes, and open floor plan work areas where clerical staffers typed, answered calls, and illicitly checked their email on company time. The air-conditioning and dehumidifiers were working overtime, so that even though it was a hot Florida morning outside, some of the people in here were wearing sweaters. Living the American dream of heavy-duty climate control that someone else has to pay for.

And I’d come within a panic attack of killing them all. My fingers stayed cool, but my cheeks grew hot as blood rushed to my face. I ducked my head, turning slightly away. If I hadn’t been able to get my fire under control—

This had to stop eventually. It had to. Grandpa Thomas didn’t leave a trail of char and embers behind him during his journey from England to Michigan, and according to his diaries—at least the ones I had access to—he’d never had a dependable instructor. He’d put most of the rules of what he was and what he was capable of together on his own, and if he could do it, so could I. I refused to consider any other option.

Emily stopped in front of an unmarked white door, pulling a key from her pocket. Really, the existence of pockets in such an artfully tailored skirt was more impressive than her card trick.

“I’ll make sure your management knows you were with me; that will carry more weight than any excuses Ms. Vargas-Jackson may have offered,” she said, sliding the key into the slot and turning it hard to the left. The air crackled with the sudden taste of ozone, like I was biting down on tin foil. Emily turned the key back to its original position. “I’ll also send you with a book of free time slips for your shift mates. It wouldn’t do to damage your social standing simply because you had the bad luck to find a corpse.”

“I wasn’t there when Fern found it,” I said automatically.

Emily shot me an amused smile. “Please,” she said. “Lies between us would be pointless and petty.” She pushed the door open, gesturing for me to walk through.

There was a choice here. I could do what she wanted. I’d already come this far. Or I could do the smart thing for once, and not allow the creepy, overly secretive routewitch to get me into a room I didn’t know the dimensions of.

But she knew what I was. She knew I wasn’t trained. She wasn’t family: if she said she could help me, the Covenant couldn’t use her to track me down. If I didn’t get myself under control soon, I was going to do some serious damage—the sort of thing that couldn’t be covered up by lighting a candle or spraying some Febreze.

I stepped through the door.

The room on the other side was a small, featureless white square. Emily stepped through after me, pulling the door gently closed. “Five,” she said. “Four, three, two, one.”

“Because that’s not the sort of thing that freaks people out,” I said flatly.

She gave me a small cat that ate the canary smile and turned back to the door, producing another key. When she opened the door this time, it revealed, not the colorful hallway of the PR building, but a set of industrial chrome stairs descending into the dark of a basement that Florida’s high water table should have rendered functionally impossible.

(Dig a hole in a place with a high water table, the water comes in to say howdy. All of Lowryland’s underground ride structures are equipped with an incredible assortment of pumps, barricades, and dehumidifiers. That’s part of why the Park has such a robust generator system. If the power ever went completely out for a substantial period of time, the flooding damage would be measured in the millions.)

I must have made a sound to register my disbelief. Emily’s canary-eating smile widened.

“It’s safe,” she said. “You have my word. I swear by the Ocean Lady that no harm will come to you while you are in my company.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded pretentious, and when dealing with routewitches, that’s usually enough for me. They tend to be the Hot Topic sort, fond of catchphrases and ritual weirdness. I can’t really blame them. When magic introduces itself into the world in the form of a highway deciding to strike up a conversation, it’s probably natural to go full-on mall Goth as a response.

Emily would have made an excellent mall Goth in her teen years. She had the bone structure for red eyeliner and glitter lipstick. Picturing her that way made her less terrifying, and I held tight to the image as I stepped through the door, down onto the impossible steps.

They held. They might be impossible, but that was no excuse for them to be structurally unsound. The walls were concrete, and the handrails had been bolted solidly into place, preventing accidents. The stairs themselves were gridded metal, the kind I’d encountered in a hundred gyms and auditoriums, and walking down them was dismayingly like walking back into my own past, descending the risers at some unfamiliar school’s athletic field, ready to throw myself back into the fray.

Emily’s steps echoed behind me, delicate tap, tap, taps as her heels impacted with the metal. I’d seen dozens of teen queens and derby spectators get their heels caught in stairs like these, sending them sprawling and suddenly shoeless, like Cinderella fleeing from the ball. Thinking of Emily eating stair was even better than the mall Goth thing, at least where it came to keeping me from freaking out. And keeping me from freaking out was essential. I wasn’t sure how real this basement was, but I was damn sure I didn’t want to be in it if it suddenly decided that being on fire was more fun than the alternative.

The stairs went on for a hell of a lot longer than was safe or possible in Florida, until they ended at a door. I looked over my shoulder to Emily. She nodded, smiling encouragingly, which was terrifying. Once again, it occurred to me that maybe going into a strange, potentially nonexistent room with a routewitch I didn’t know was a terrible idea.

That didn’t matter. It was go with Emily or run from Lowryland, and I was so tired of running. Sitting still was killing me, a little bit at a time, but my family didn’t raise me to run. I was a Price. I needed ground. I needed someplace to stand.

I opened the door.