Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“But it ought to be,” she said. Turning to the others, she continued, “Melody is almost entirely untrained, and has spent no time working with anyone else of her kind. She’s strong enough that I could feel the heat coming off her from feet away. This kind of power can do a great deal of damage—or a great deal of good.”

Heads started nodding all around the table. I glanced at Emily, alarmed, and took a step to the side, putting some distance between us. It was mostly symbolic, given how close our quarters were, but it was a start.

“No,” I said. “No, and no, and hell no. I’m not looking for my own personal Emma Frost, thanks.”

“What?” she asked blankly.

“She’s the headmistress of the Massachusetts Aca—you know what? Never mind. Just assume that I’ll talk about comic books when I’m nervous, and you won’t be wrong, which means you won’t need to understand what I’m talking about.” I focused on Wand Guy. He seemed to be the one in charge. “I’m not looking to be recruited.”

“Most neophytes aren’t,” he said. His glare was fading, replaced by a cool satisfaction that was actually substantially more unnerving. “Let’s see. Your hands started getting hot some time ago. It was slight enough at first that you dismissed it, and then flammable things—paper, cotton, even hair—started to char when you touched them, until you set your first fire. It may have happened while you were sleeping. Many of our kind wake to ruined sheets and fire alarms blaring.”

I said nothing.

“Perhaps you’ve made a few small objects float, or have moved something from one place to another. Perhaps you think you have things under control, that you can walk in the world as a living violation of the laws of physics and the world will be forgiving. I am here to tell you that you’re wrong. There are people who hunt those like us. They call themselves ‘the Covenant of St. George,’ and they’ll cut you down as a monster as soon as they’ll look at you.”

That wasn’t entirely true. The Covenant has always had a tradition of captive magic-users, people like me and Grandpa Thomas who’ve been bent to the goal of making the world safe for a very specific idea of what it means to be human. I still did my best to look shocked and horrified, widening my eyes and slackening my jaw just that fraction that people usually read as sincerity.

“So why are we here?” I asked. “If there’s people hunting us, we shouldn’t all be together.”

“Oh, she’s adorable,” said a woman in an orange jacket. “I want to swallow her whole.”

“No, thank you,” I said quickly.

The woman laughed as Wand Guy shook his head. “We’re safe here,” he said soothingly. “Lowryland is under our protection. We keep the Park healthy and thriving in the face of all the challenges thrown up by the entertainment industry, and in exchange, it provides us with the psychic and magical cover we need to remain hidden. You knew, didn’t you, that placing yourself amongst so many people would keep you from being detected?”

“It even kept you from being detected by us,” said Emily. “That’s a bug in the system.”

“My ghost said that if I went where there were lots of people, it would be harder to track me,” I said carefully. I needed to avoid lies. The trainspotter would hear it if I lied. I didn’t know how charged he was, but there were sufficient trains in and around Lowryland that I had to assume he was running at full power. That made him more dangerous than a polygraph, and a hell of a lot more effective.

“Your ghost. How quaint.” Wand Guy smirked. “Your ghost was correct. People confuse the universe. All that thinking, all those changes to their ideas about the world. People can power anything, if you allow them the room to do it. You could stay here for a hundred years and the Covenant would never find you.”

“A hundred years. Got it, thanks. Can I go back to work now?”

Wand Guy looked at Emily. “Is she not very bright, or is she damaged in some way?”

“I just met her,” protested Emily. “I brought her to you because you needed a say in what was done with her, and because I had her. I didn’t want to come up with an excuse to get my hands on her again.”

“Wait,” I said, holding my hands up in front of me. My fingertips were hot again. I realized all six of the people in the room were watching me intently. Some of them looked downright nervous. They knew what I might be capable of, maybe even better than I did. “Let’s stop, okay?”

“Stop what?” asked Wand Guy.

“Stop preening and flexing and pretending we’re all bad-asses. I sell souvenirs for a living. I’m . . . really not sure what you people do up here, but I’m betting it’s above my pay grade. Why am I here? What do you want from me?”

“It’s simple,” said Wand Guy. “You’re here because I want to teach you how to be a better version of what you already are.”

I stared at him, and for once in my life, I didn’t have anything to say.



* * *





Magic is real. Call it physics we don’t quite understand or really complicated math or an annoying way to cheat the rules—those descriptions come from Grandpa Thomas’ notes, my cousin Sarah, and me, by the way—but it doesn’t matter how it’s described, because changing the description doesn’t make it go away. Magic is real, magic has always been real, and some people can do magic.

Not all people, sadly. It’s like having brown eyes or being left-handed: most forms of magic use are genetic, and people are either born with it or not. Routewitches can be made according to my Aunt Rose, but she’s always really cagey about how that can happen (and to be honest, none of us have ever wanted to press the issue). Everything else runs in families, which means cases like mine, where the person who should have been doing the training is sadly unavailable, are more common than anyone wants them to be.

Without someone to teach me, I’d keep setting things on fire and bumbling through, becoming an increasing danger to myself and others, until I finally got caught. Whether I was caught by normal policemen who thought I was a dangerous arsonist or the Covenant didn’t really matter, because the end result would be the same: imprisonment, and probably death.

A teacher would fix everything. A teacher would change my life, and make my future a hell of a lot brighter, since my other option was joining my grandmother on her endless quest for my probably-dead grandfather.

But a teacher would also know me better than I wanted anyone outside the family to know me, ever, and on the rare occasions when I’d considered looking for someone, I certainly hadn’t been thinking about a man who looked like the ADA of the week on one of the Law & Order clones.

“Teach me,” I said carefully. “You’re a sorcerer.”

“The nineteenth of my line,” he said, with the kind of pride that always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Most people who take that much pride in being the nineteenth anything in their family are the kind of folks who look down on girls like Fern and Megan for having the audacity to be born inhuman, and on girls like me for being common.

Trust me. If girls like me were common, we’d have a totally different class of problems. “What’s the wand for? I thought sorcerers didn’t use wands.”

A few of the others exchanged looks, like I’d just committed the ultimate faux pas. Wand Guy stood straighter, narrowing his eyes.

“It’s a focusing tool,” he said. “You may find a wand of use once your studies have progressed beyond brute force. My offer is simple: let me train you. Work with us for the betterment of ourselves and of Lowryland. Refuse, and I’m afraid your employment will need to come to an end. We can’t have untrained sorcerers running around the property. It’s untidy.”