Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“Okay,” I said. “Shoot.”

“First, you call for me immediately after every session you have. I may not always be able to come. I’ll hear you, and I’ll know that you’re all right.”

“Deal.”

“Second, if you wind up alone with that trainspotter—with any trainspotter, at any point—you run. I don’t care if you have to abandon everything you own, you run. There’s too much about you that no one needs to know.”

I looked at her and nodded silently. Mary will protect me to the ends of the Earth and beyond. I’ve always known that about her. But if it’s a choice between just me and the rest of the family, she’s going to take the option that saves the most of us. She has the luxury of knowing that death is not the end. If she had to leave me in the path of a moving truck to pull both my siblings to safety, she’d just get to spend a few years teaching me how to be a better ghost. Not the worst thing that’s ever happened.

“Third . . .” Mary took a deep, unnecessary breath, held it for a moment, and let it out before saying, “You don’t have enough backup. You need more. You need to let me tell Sam where to find you.”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “Out of the question. I ran away from him so he wouldn’t be in danger.”

“Oh, and not because you were afraid that Antimony Price, the Ice Queen, might be starting to thaw?”

Fern put her hand up. “Who’s Sam?”

“A friend,” I said, as Mary said, “Annie’s boyfriend.” We stopped and glared at each other across the counter, which wasn’t doing nearly enough to provide either one of us with cover.

Fern blinked. “Annie has a boyfriend?”

“Yes,” said Mary, and “No,” I said, again at the same time, again followed by glaring.

“Huh,” said Fern. She paused before asking, more delicately, “Has he actually met you when you were being you, or did he only ever meet you when you were pretending to be somebody else? Because you can be really sweet when you’re pretending to be somebody else.”

I threw a biscuit at her.

Fern laughed as she dodged. “You’re only angry because it’s true.”

“No, it’s not; I was myself the whole time I knew Sam.” Or at least a version of myself. A version who didn’t have anything to worry about beyond the borders of a carnival, and a boy who might have loved her, if he’d only been given the time. “And we’re not calling him here. It’s not safe.”

“It isn’t safe for anyone,” said Mary. “Not Fern, not me, and certainly not you. Why should it be any different for Sam?”

“Because . . .” I hesitated. “Because he didn’t ask for any of this.”

Mary’s smile was small, and sad. “Oh, peaches,” she said. “You think any of us did?”

The phone rang. We all turned to look at it.

It was a small idiosyncrasy in the Lowryland housing rules that every household had to include a fixed landline. We could all have cellphones—we were expected to, and those of us who lived on-property but had bad or absent credit could finance them through Lowry, Inc.—but we had to keep a landline, in case of emergencies. That way, no matter what happened, the company could say they had at the very least made a good-faith effort to contact us.

“You’re closest,” said Fern meekly.

I was also the one with the wrapped-up hands. I decided not to mention that as I turned and pawed the receiver off the wall, managing finally to get it wedged between my cheek and shoulder.

“Hello?” I said.

“There’s a ghost in your apartment,” said Emily.

I glanced at Mary, who was looking at me with both eyebrows raised. “Yes,” I said.

“Do you want it there?”

The question was casual, but the many things it meant were anything but. Emily was a routewitch. She could ward my home against Mary in a heartbeat. I didn’t know whether she could do it from a distance. I had to assume yes. Routewitches are all about distance, and this one was short enough to be effectively null.

“Yes,” I said firmly. “It’s the relative I told you about.”

Mary’s eyebrows climbed higher.

“Do you know what kind of ghost it is?”

There was the five-million-dollar question. If the Lowryland cabal was on my side, my answer wouldn’t change anything: a dead aunt was a dead aunt, even if I was pretending she was a dead grandmother, and all dead relatives were worth preserving. If they were secretly the bad guys, having access to a crossroads ghost would be a temptation too far.

“Road ghost,” I said. “That’s all she’s ever been willing to tell us. She died on the road, and now she’s a road ghost.”

“Ah,” said Emily. “Colin was very displeased to hear that you’d been injured. Your shifts for tomorrow have been cancelled due to medical reasons. He expects you at his office by nine AM.”

The line went dead. I hung the phone up gingerly, turning to fully face the others.

“Guess I’ve got class in the morning,” I said.

“Guess I’m going to talk to a man about a monkey,” said Mary, and disappeared.

My eyes went wide and my fingers went hot. “Mary?” I squawked. “Mary!”

She didn’t reappear.

I covered my face with my hands. Fern patted me awkwardly on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Maybe he won’t come.”

I groaned.





Ten




“Believe me, I want to be here even less than you do. Now, are we going to fight like civilized people, or am I going to stand here and taunt you?”

–Jane Harrington-Price

The Public Relations building of Lowryland, at way too goddamn early in the morning

EITHER COLIN DIDN’T TRUST me or he didn’t trust the Lowryland train system, because when I opened my apartment door at eight-thirty, there was a sleek black car idling at the curb. Fern and Megan clustered in the doorway behind me, staring.

Megan made a clucking noise with her tongue. “Whoever he is, marry him and keep us in the style to which we’d like to become accustomed.”

“He works in Public Relations.”

“Whoever he is, murder him and make it look like an accident, but make sure you get away with his wallet,” Megan amended.

“Thanks for the vote of murder-confidence,” I said.

She flashed me a bright, toothy smile. “I always have faith in you when it comes to murder.”

Fern tugged on my arm. When I turned to face her, she reached up and pulled me into a hug with suddenly heavy arms, effectively trapping me long enough for her to whisper, “Be careful,” in my ear.

She let me go. I nodded, trying to show that I understood, before I stepped into the humid morning air and walked down the path toward the waiting car. The sky was bruised black along the horizon, speaking of a storm to come. When I opened the car’s rear door, a blast of air-conditioning nearly rocked me back on my heels.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Melody West. Are you here for me?”

“Get in,” said the driver gruffly.

I got in.

The car’s interior was real leather, and smelled buttery and rich, like I was wrapped in a cocoon made of nothing but the idea of money. I sank into it, trying not to do the math on how long this car could have paid for my groceries, and failing.

My family isn’t poor. We do a lot of work for the cryptid community, and while they may not all pay in money as humans understand it, the barter system can turn into money easily enough, and we have really good accountants who truly understand the process of making our income look believable. But my parents believe we should know how to be hungry, because things like that can be a disorienting shock to the system otherwise. I could balance a budget by the time I was sixteen, and I’d spent enough summers eating elbow macaroni and stewed tomatoes with the Campbell Family Carnival to genuinely respect how much easier money made things.