Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

One application of my employee discount later, I was sitting in one of the outdoor break areas, protected from the rest of Fairyland by a tall, comforting wall. Our side of it was bare wood occasionally blazoned with signs reminding us to wash our hands, smile, and embody the Lowryland spirit. The Park-facing side was a lush maze of thorny tangles and artificial branches, making it look like an extension of the deep dark wood that ran all through Fairyland, helping to create the illusion of isolation that allowed us to exist separately from the rest of the Park.

My salad, a limp, dressing-soaked concoction from Mustardseed’s, was about as appealing as eating cardboard. But it had calories, and nutrients, and I needed both those things if I wanted to survive the rest of my shift, especially since taking my lunch so early meant that I wasn’t going to get another break today. I picked up my fork. I took a bite. Mustardseed’s and their ability to ruin anything with too much vinaigrette came through again: it was like filling my mouth with someone’s faintly bitter perfume. Apparently, “dressing on the side” was a concept they had never heard of. I chewed, swallowed, and repeated the action, trying to put my body on autopilot before I threw down my salad in disgust.

There was a distant bang. Someone screamed.

I threw down my salad, not in disgust, but in my hurry to jump to my feet and run toward the sound. As I ran, I spared a thought for the fact that my parents raised me to be the first one dead in any horror movie—the girl who runs toward danger is a hell of a lot less likely to survive than the girl who gets the hell out of the situation.

The thought that yes, good, something was happening, something I could potentially hit . . . that was a lot stronger, and accompanied by a sudden, triumphant heat in my hands, like the fire lurking in my blood wanted to be invited to this party as much as the rest of me did. I kept running, finding a little extra speed in my legs and applying it to the sprint. I might not have been doing my job recently—my real job, that is—being too busy hiding to seek out and get to know the local cryptid community, but I’d been staying in shape, laying in reserves against the inevitable day when the Covenant found me and decided it was time to bring me to justice. When that happened, I’d do no one any good if I wasn’t in top form.

The screaming continued, getting higher and shriller, until it had almost become a keen. Before, it had been the shocked sound of someone being hurt. Now it was the shriek of someone in an intense amount of pain. I whipped around the corner—

—and stumbled, nearly toppling over as I took in the scene in front of me.

The woman who was careening around, trying to reach for her face, was wearing a Fairyland zone uniform: she must have been like me, on her break during the lull, going to grab a snack or a drink to tide her over until the next time she got a moment to herself. Unlike me, she had walked behind the Hill and Dale Fried Chicken Shop.

One of the fryers had exploded. I didn’t know how that was possible. There should have been a thousand safety precautions to keep that sort of thing from happening, and to keep it contained inside the shop if it happened anyway. Fire extinguishers and sprinkler systems and foam baffles should have come into play. And they hadn’t. Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong, resulting in a jet of boiling oil being forced through the thin back wall of the shop, where it had doused this poor woman from head to toe in heat.

Her hair was on fire. So was the back of the shop, and the nearby wall. Her hair seemed like the biggest problem at the moment. A few other cast members were hovering around the edges, some pointing, some shouting, at least one with their cellphone out, hopefully calling 911 or Park Security—Security would get to us faster—but none of them were helping her.

I recovered my balance and kept running, whipping off my apron. The flames on her head were small. That was the only good thing about this situation. She was more than half-coated in sizzling oil: if those flames reached the edge of the stain, she’d go up like a candle. This was going to hurt her. I was pretty sure being on fire would hurt her more.

When I was close enough, I whipped my apron onto her head, smothering the flames. She screamed again, agonized and confused. The fire in my hands surged, responding to the heat and the horror of the moment. I pulled the fire back as hard as I could, reining it in.

This was no time for hesitation. I hesitated all the same. If I could pull the fire already in my hands into myself and damp it out, why couldn’t I pull more than that? I had no training. I had no preparation. I had to try.

Still using the apron to smother the flames on her head, I pulled harder, focusing on the way it felt to smother my own nascent fire in my own flesh. It was difficult to push and pull at the same time, like the old joke about rubbing your belly and patting your head, but I narrowed my eyes and bullied on through, refusing to allow for the idea of failure.

If it gets hot enough here, the second oil boiler will go, I thought, and pulled.

If I don’t get the heat out of her skin, she’s going to keep cooking under the weight of all this oil, I thought, and pulled.

If this place really catches, we’re all going to die, and I refuse to die like this, I thought, and yanked, feeling the thermal energy around me surge and flow, finally obedient, into my waiting hands. There was too much of it. I yelped and dropped my apron, dancing back from the still-smoking, still-keening woman. My hands felt like they were on fire. Not literal fire, the way they sometimes were: so much heat that they were cooking. I could see blisters forming on my fingers. I waved them wildly, trying to make the heat disperse. I couldn’t swallow any more of it, not without igniting, going up like the back of the fry shop, all fire and ash and—

Someone grabbed my hands and bore down hard, so that I felt my blisters burst. I turned a startled glance toward the face of the Emma Frost lookalike who was squeezing my fingers.

“Give it to me,” she hissed.

I let the heat go.

Emily’s hair frizzed out around the edges, blown upward by the heat, but her skin didn’t redden, and her hands remained cool against my singed fingers. The only sign that this was any sort of challenge for her was in her eyes, which narrowed incrementally. The whole process only took a few seconds. Then she was letting me go, turning toward the injured woman, and shouting, “Somebody go tell the EMTs where to go! And for the love of God, someone get a flash mob going!”

Half the other cast members dispersed, seeming relieved to have clear instructions. I could hear murmurs on the edge of my awareness; guests, clustering outside the wall, trying to find the source of the screaming. Give them one of the biggest playgrounds in the world and they would still go looking for the things that they weren’t supposed to see.

The woman who’d been injured wasn’t screaming anymore. She was sobbing, her hands occasionally fluttering toward her face, but stopping shy of touching it, like she was afraid feeling the damage would make it real. Her burns were so bad that she was unrecognizable. I’d probably shared shifts with her for months, but I didn’t know who she was.

I was struck by the sudden, terrible thought that this might be my fault. My magic, such as it was, was entirely uncontrolled, and responded to my anger. That boiler shouldn’t have exploded. If this was Robin . . .

No. Her undamaged nametag said her name was Cathy. I hadn’t done this. The realization allowed me to relax fractionally—which caused the pain in my hands to come surging back, as bright and electric as it had been when I was burning myself. I yelped and blew on them, trying to soothe the damaged skin and seared tissues.