Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

In the end, she took a half-step back, removing herself from temptation, and offered a toothy smile. “If I was hoping you’d share something you’d been so blatantly flaunting, can you really blame me?”

“No,” I said. Her smile broadened. “But that doesn’t mean I was planning to share with you.” That same smile froze, while her eyes screamed silent confusion. I offered a smile of my own. “You’re a bully. You’re mean to people you don’t need to be mean to, and you push people around whenever it suits you. You can’t even get my name right. I was given these so I could offer them to my shift mates as apology for any inconvenience my absence caused them, but see, I know you, and I know my absence didn’t cause you any inconvenience. Any extra work that tried to land on your shoulders would have been shunted off to whoever didn’t dodge fast enough.”

Robin’s smile finally flickered and died. “You little b—”

“Excuse me, but do you have this in my size?” The guest appeared at my elbow like she’d come from out of nowhere, probably because she had. Ghosts aren’t always good about following the rules of linear reality.

Robin jumped, squeaking in surprise. I turned. There was Mary, back in her Hot Topic shirt and jeans. I guess once a ghost figures out the right outfit for a haunting, they like to stick with it. She was holding one of the newer Laura and Lizzie designs in one hand, having probably snatched it off a shelf at random.

I offered her a bland, corporate-approved smile. “Let’s go check,” I said, and walked deeper into the store, away from Robin, who stared after me like I’d just drowned her puppy in the well.

Mary waited until we were well clear of my coworkers before dropping her voice and asking, “Where were you this morning?”

“Home, then I had to stop off at one of the admin buildings for a while, and then here. Why? Were you waiting for me?”

“No, I . . .” Mary paused, waving her free hand in frustration as she tried to toe the line between what she knew and what she was allowed to say to one of the living. I looked at her and forced myself to wait patiently. It wasn’t always easy.

Having ghosts in the family means knowing the afterlife is absolutely, no question, real. Some people stick around after they die, continuing to interact with the living world—although how much interaction is normal is sort of up in the air, since our ghosts have been with the family since Buckley, where Mary and Rose both died, and the average man on the street is a lot less likely to believe in a haunting than we are.

Having ghosts in the family also means knowing that someone is probably always looking out for you—literally, in the “I can see it when you touch yourself” sense. When I was a kid and Mary was my babysitter, I used to be convinced that she was secretly Santa Claus. The white hair helped.

In the present, Mary finished her attempt to put a sentence together and said, “I don’t always know where you are, but I always know that you are. I know when a member of my family dies.”

“We’re not blood relations.”

“That doesn’t matter. If it did, people couldn’t haunt their spouses. Your family is who you tell the twilight belongs to you, and I told the twilight—and the crossroads—that I was a Price-Healy. You’re mine. I’m yours.”

I frowned. “If you know whenever one of us dies—”

Mary held her hand up. “Don’t ask. I know what you’re thinking about asking me, and I’m telling you, don’t. You’re not allowed to know. Not unless you want to take this to the crossroads.”

Of course, it couldn’t be that easy. If it was, Grandma Alice would have asked Mary years ago whether or not Grandpa Thomas was alive, and we wouldn’t be in our current mess. Either we’d have them both back, or we’d have a whole different Grandma Alice-shaped mess to deal with.

“Sorry,” I said. “You were saying?”

“I was saying that for about an hour and a half today, you were gone. You weren’t alive. I didn’t feel you die, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.” Mary gave me a worried look. “You scared me.”

I took a quick look around, making sure that none of my coworkers were lurking to try to score something they could use to blackmail me into giving up my time slips. Then I leaned closer and said, “You need to come to the apartment tonight. Something happened.”

It was clear from her expression that she wanted to ask for details. It was equally clear that she knew better. Mary nodded, handed me the shirt she had been holding, and disappeared. Her timing was good, as always: immediately after she shuffled off her visitor’s pass to this mortal coil, my supervisor came around the corner, looking uncomfortable as only a grown man in a wine-colored velvet vest could look.

“Melody,” he said, striding toward me. “Robin has made a complaint against you.”

“Has she, now?” I folded the shirt Mary had handed to me and returned it to the nearest shelf. “What a coincidence. I was just trying to decide whether I should make a complaint against her.”

My supervisor raised his eyebrows, looking at me expectantly.

No one liked Robin, except for the people who liked her too much, the ones who scurried along at her heels and agreed with everything she said. It wasn’t hard to decide what I should do:

I told him everything.

Oh, not everything-everything. I didn’t mention magic-users, or routewitches, or being with Fern when she found the body. But I told him about going to the PR building to help my roommate, and how I’d been given a ride by my hiring manager, who wanted to encourage me to show the real Lowry spirit even if she had to haul me by the hand every step of the way. I pulled the book of time slips out of my pocket, showing him the six and the fact that all the coupons were still in place.

“I’m supposed to share these with the people my absence inconvenienced, to avoid hard feelings that might impact our ability to do our jobs,” I said. “I didn’t want to do it until our shift ended, because distracting other workers to make myself feel better isn’t right. Robin came over and tried to strong-arm some of them out of me.”

“She says you called her a bully.”

“Only after she tried to bully me.” I looked at him calmly. “Did she tell you she called me a bitch? If we’re playing the name game, I think she wins, which means she loses.”

He frowned . . . but his eyes were still on the book of time slips in my hand. Right. “You know I’m supposed to pass all formal complaints along to management.”

“But in this case, given the circumstances, you’d be willing to let it slide as long as I gave you one of these, huh?” I tugged one of the slips free. The paper was heavy, slick, and ridged in places with the careful swirls and indents of the watermarking. It felt rich. I offered it to him.

He made it disappear. “I’ll tell Robin I can pass her complaint along, but that doing so would require me to pass yours along at the same time. I expect she’ll change her mind. Is there anything I can say that might help to mend the bridge between you two?”

“No,” I said. He blinked. I shrugged. “She’s awful to me. She always has been. I have something she wants right now, but that’s not going to be true forever, or even for very long. I could give her the whole book and she’d still be awful to me as soon as she realized I didn’t have a second one. You can tell her my name is Melody, not ‘Mel.’ That might mend my bridges.”

“All right.” He started to step away. Then he hesitated, and said, “You should take your lunch.”

“I just got—”

“I’ll see you in an hour.”

He walked away, leaving me staring after him and wondering what I’d missed.



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