Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“They did,” said Fern, and pushed open a narrow, unmarked door, revealing a slice of Florida sky. It was still light, but it wouldn’t be for much longer; the sun was riding low, casting everything in that shade of gold that hundreds of horror movies set in middle America have conditioned me to think of as the color of apocalypse.

There was a car idling next to the sidewalk, the sort of hefty American muscle car that looked like it could drive through a wall and not really notice. It was painted avocado green, which had to be intended as ironic, since I refused to believe there had ever been a time when someone would find that attractive. Fern trotted toward it, leaving me with no choice but to follow if I wanted all of this to start making sense.

The window rolled down as we approached, and a familiar face appeared in the opening. She looked a lot like Fern, but with the color balance adjusted until she seemed less like she had spent the last twenty years hiding in a basement from the terror of the sun. Her skin was slightly less pale, accented both by a spray of freckles across the nose and the sort of artful smoky eye that has no business existing outside of a music video. Her hair was dark blonde, and her smile was achingly sad, like she’d been waiting for this moment for a while.

“Hi,” said Cylia. “You might as well get in.”

I stared.



* * *





Here is a thing I have learned, after spending my life surrounded by ghosts and talking mice and the ever-present threat that some people my great-great-grandparents pissed off will show up and go all Montagues and Capulets on my ass: there is no such thing as a coincidence. Things that look coincidental are almost always tricks or traps, or some combination of the two. When Cylia told me to get in, I took a big step backward, wishing I had a weapon, wishing I hadn’t allowed Colin to extinguish the fire in my fingers, wishing I had anything that could help me out of this.

“You’re here,” I said.

“Yes,” said Cylia.

“You’re in Florida.”

“Yes,” said Cylia again, and looked at me with a mixture of fondness and frustration. “Do you really want to do this on the sidewalk?”

I did not. Then again, I didn’t really want to do it anywhere. I wanted to return this entire day to the factory and get a replacement, one with less fire and screaming and unexpected death. “No,” I admitted sullenly.

“Then get in the car, and we’ll do this at the warehouse.” Cylia Mackie, captain of the Wilsonville Rose Petals, shook her head. “I haven’t killed you up until now. Why would I start?”

“There are so many reasons I can’t even list them all,” I muttered darkly, and got into the back. A car this old wouldn’t have child locks, and if I was going to bail while the car was in motion, I preferred to do it out the back, where I’d have more opportunity to roll away before she could swerve to hit me.

Cylia sighed as Fern got into the front passenger seat. “Were you this suspicious of Fern?”

“. . . no,” I admitted, after a lengthy pause.

“Maybe you should’ve been. She’s from Portland, too, after all. Wasn’t it a big coincidence that she wound up here right about the same time you did?” Cylia hit the gas. The big muscle car rumbled to life, waking like the beast it was, and rolled down the street. “The air-conditioning doesn’t work, but you won’t be able to hear a damn thing we say if you roll down the windows. It’s your call.”

“Right.” This was getting confusing. I didn’t like it. “Nice, uh. Nice car.”

“Isn’t it? Bought it on Craigslist the day I hit town. Well, bought most of it. Poor thing didn’t run. It was missing an ultra-rare engine piece that hasn’t been manufactured since the dawn of the dinosaurs, and it was basically just sucking down garage space for this kid who’d inherited it from his grandfather. And wouldn’t you know it, some collector who didn’t know what he had put that same engine piece on eBay the very next day.” Cylia laughed, less amused than keeping up appearances. “Funny how the world works sometimes.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Funny.”

Cylia Mackie. Roller derby captain. Personal assistant, of the sort who does all their work over the phone and via email, which meant that her job, at least, could come with her to Florida. And jink. Which meant she could be ally, threat, or both at the same time.

The jink is a hominid cryptid of unknown evolutionary origin. We know they’re closely related to the mara, and that’s about where our cheat sheets run out. We know that my honorary uncle Al, in Vegas, is a jink, which is why my family’s scant available information is viewed as being incredibly detailed and complete by people who don’t have access to an actual jink. Like many of the more human-appearing cryptids, they’ve survived through secrecy, isolation, and luck. In the case of the jinks, that luck has been more active than it’s been for most. Because jinks?

Jinks manipulate luck.

No one’s sure how they do it, and that includes the jinks themselves, who usually describe the process by shrugging, waving their hands, and asking pointed questions like “How do you breathe?” and “What is the process by which your body turns food into energy?” In short, it’s inborn and indescribable, and after my training with Colin, I had a lot more sympathy for that sort of thing. I couldn’t explain the exact mechanism by which I’d been setting things on fire, and now that I wasn’t doing it anymore, I couldn’t explain the exact thing that had caused me to stop.

The trouble is, when I set something on fire, I wasn’t removing fire from somewhere else in the world. Fire was an infinitely expanding resource. The same can’t be said for luck. When a jink tweaks their own luck to be better, there’s always bad luck down the line. If that same jink tries to stave off the consequences of their own actions by stealing good luck from someone else, that person will get to enjoy all the karmic balancing of something they never did in the first place.

Cylia met my eyes in the rearview mirror and said, with perfect calm, “I didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

Her laugh was low, throaty, and bitter. “Don’t, okay? I’ve been a jink my whole life, and I’ve been around humans my whole life, and I’ve seen the way people look at me when they think I’m getting something I don’t deserve. If your luck’s too good, everyone thinks you stole it. If your luck’s too bad, everyone thinks you earned it. So don’t. I didn’t steal your luck. I’m not the reason you’re here. But you’re the reason I’m here, so if you could stop looking at me like that, I’d really appreciate it.”

I blinked, sinking back in my seat. “I wasn’t,” I said, and my voice sounded weak and unsure to my own ears, and I had no idea where we were going, but I knew it was going to be a long drive.

It was clear Cylia knew Lakeland from the way she drove: not with the brash aggression of a tourist or the timidity of a newcomer, but with the calm, assertive speed of someone who’d memorized the location of the speed traps and dangerous intersections. Her great beast of a car cornered like a dream, which was impressive in and of itself, given how big the thing was. The fact that it was ugly couldn’t possibly have impacted its speed, but it felt like it should have, like anything this hideous should have crept along, not raced.