Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“And she couldn’t tell you anything else about your grandfather?”

“Just that he’d been an immigrant, so if he had any relatives, they were very far away, and he never liked to talk about them.” I looked at Colin, all wide eyes and innocence. If I’d had a bow to clip in my hair, I would have. Anything to make me look less like a potential threat. “I really hope you can help me. I’m so tired of being afraid everything is going to burn.”

“That isn’t a fear you’ll need to harbor for much longer,” said Colin. “Have you ever listened to a baby’s cry?”

I blinked. “Um, yeah. I’m a human being who works at Lowryland. My days are filled with crying babies.”

“Infants scream without concern for the damage they may do to themselves in the process. Their little throats are forever raw from the strain of howling their indignation to an uncaring world. As they grow older, they learn to use their voices for other things. They learn to speak, in some cases to sing, to modulate themselves. Would you say that speech is a better use for the voice than primal howls?”

“I guess . . .”

“That’s what I’m here to do for you,” said Colin, with more than a trace of smugness. “Right now, you are an infant. A powerful one, yes, but capable of nothing more complex than the magical equivalent of screaming because you want your diaper changed. You are a danger to yourself and others. As you learn to control what you can do—to speak, in a magical sense—you won’t be able to scream as loudly. Your body will learn its limits, and refuse to allow you to endanger yourself unless your life is on the line.”

I brightened. “No more fires?”

“Not unless you intend to cast them, and even then, they’ll require substantially more work than they do now.” He shook his head. “The Covenant of St. George has much to answer for. They’ve been the end of so many magical bloodlines—very nearly including yours, I’d wager. There’s no other reason for an adult sorcerer to leave his territory and move someplace where he’d have neither family nor familiarity to protect him.”

In a way, the Covenant had been responsible for the death of all my grandfather’s blood relatives. They had sent them, one after the other, into the face of danger, and when danger swallowed them whole, the Covenant had turned its eyes to other families, and other opportunities. The Price family was small now, but we were doing worlds better than Grandpa Thomas had been, back when he’d been the last branch of a dying family tree.

“All right,” I said. “Where do we begin?”



* * *





We began with concentration exercises. Colin would show me flash cards, asking me to memorize their contents in a matter of seconds, and hold them at the forefront of my mind as he asked me dozens of unrelated questions. He would recite poetry, only to stop and demand that I echo it back to him. He wouldn’t repeat a single word.

I drew circles and chanted riddles and focused and concentrated, and at the end of our three-hour session, I felt like I’d been running laps for the entire time. My head ached, my skin was too tight, and I was deeply aware of every ache in my ass from spending most of the lesson sitting on the hardwood floor.

Colin smiled at me. “How are your hands?” he asked.

I paused. “Cool,” I said finally.

“Good,” he said. “Your lessons start in earnest tomorrow.” Then he stood and walked away, into the window, into nothingness, and was gone, leaving me to stare after him.

Okay. This was going to be interesting.





Eleven




“You can’t do this alone. Nobody can. Nobody should have to.”

–Alice Healy

Lowryland, three weeks and eighteen lessons later, trying to stay awake

MY BREAK FROM WORK only lasted for three days—paid, of course, since I’d been wounded in the course of trying to show the “true Lowry spirit,” and since my new mentor held some undisclosed but apparently terrifying position in the corporate hierarchy—before I was shoved back into the workforce, hands still bandaged to keep the healing damage from freaking out the paying guests.

(I was doing better than poor Cathy. Lowry, Inc. was covering her medical bills, since it was their deep fryer that had experienced a mechanical fault at the exact wrong time. That was the least of her problems. She was going to have a long road to recovery, one that would involve multiple skin grafts to rebuild her face. Every time someone mentioned her in my presence, it was all I could do not to blurt out the location of the last Caladrius-run hospital I knew of in North America. The avian cryptids can heal almost anything, given sufficient time and resources. They could put Cathy’s face back together, or at least back into a shape that wouldn’t hurt every time she tried to open her eyes. Some secrets must be kept. That doesn’t make keeping them any less painful.)

Every morning I got up and went to the PR building, where I spent hours with Colin, studying, reciting, and working my way through the long, slow process of learning to control the gifts I’d never asked my genes to give me. When I was done with that, I would shower, change, and get a ride to the employee gate, usually arriving just in time for my shift to start. Not exactly the sort of schedule that leaves a lot of time for a social life.

Not that my time mattered. I’d been assigned to Fairyland on a permanent basis after telling Emily it was my preference within the Park. Having friends in high places paid some useful dividends, even if half the people I worked with now looked at me like I was a corporate spy, while the other half scurried around in silent terror, having somehow convinced themselves that I’d shoved the unfortunate Cathy into the fryer under the mistaken assumption that she was Robin.

I had never been popular at work, but this was rapidly approaching ridiculous.

And yet.

I hadn’t started a single fire, intentionally or otherwise, since I’d started working with Colin. He’d asked me to pull the heat out of several candles and a handful of bright, spitting sparklers, turning fire into smoke into nothing at all, and I was starting to feel like that was the sort of thing I could learn to enjoy, the point where my body somehow converted the kinetic potential of the world into a beautiful sort of stillness.

If I really tried, I could hold that same stillness under my breastbone, comforting and soothing me when my coworkers left me standing by myself in the middle of a guest-clogged store. I was clinging to that stillness now, as the afternoon parade floated majestically by outside the gift shop. The Goblin Market float was parallel to our window, and Princesses Laura and Lizzie ran wildly from one side to the other, dodging marauding goblins. Every time the music hit a crescendo they would grab one of the large plastic vines that had been provided for their use and swing themselves out over the adoring crowd, waving and blowing kisses before they turned around and did it all again.

Other floats had other princesses and other routines, which meant that Fern was probably enjoying her lunch right about now. The princesses in the parade weren’t the ones who did the meet-and-greets with the guests: their costumes were usually sparklier, less screen-accurate, and designed for a different range of motion. Since only one iteration of each character could be loose in the Park at any given time, the photo princesses were getting a well-deserved break.