Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

In short order, the lights of Lowryland were so far behind us that they were barely a smudge on the horizon, and Cylia was pulling into an unfamiliar parking lot, in front of a building that was equally unfamiliar but still felt like coming home. It was a big warehouse, the sort that made sense when America did all its own manufacturing—the sort that have been sitting empty or finding new uses over the last thirty years. Some of them turn into storage, or office space, or live-work lofts. Some of them wind up in the hands of dragons looking for a place to start a Nest, or filled with communities of mixed cryptids who’d rather shut the doors with humanity on the outside for a change.

And some of them, the ones that are too oddly shaped or awkwardly located to be good for anything else, wind up getting turned into roller derby venues. A banner stretched across the front of the structure informed anyone who drove by that this was the home of the Lakeland Ladies. A smaller banner underneath gave their website and suggested roller derby would make a fun night out for the family looking for something to do after they’d exhausted the joys of licensed theme parks.

The thought of some of the families I saw wandering through Lowryland stopping in for a night of roller derby was almost enough to bring a smile to my face.

“There’s no practice tonight, but I have a key,” said Cylia, parking right in front of the warehouse. “Either of you got your skates?”

“No,” I said, as “Yes,” said Fern. I turned to look at her.

She shrugged, sheepish. “I always have my skates, and I usually have yours too, just in case,” she said. “I hoped you’d want to skate tonight.”

“Thanks,” I said. The word wasn’t enough. The thought of a real track under my wheels was intensely appealing, enough to make my eyes burn with the beginning of tears. I was so tired. Having something normal would be . . . it would be the world.

But it wouldn’t change the fact that Cylia was here, and shouldn’t have been. I gave her a sidelong look. “How come you have a key?”

“This area is technically zoned as residential. There are two crappy little apartments above the warehouse, and as long as they’re being rented, the space we use for our track is a really big ‘community room,’ and we don’t get torn down by the people who think we’re making a mockery of the tourist trade. Right now, I’m renting one of the apartments.” Cylia’s smile was quick and wry. “I’ve gone from team captain to alternate junior jammer, but hey, at least I have a place to sleep. Sometimes life works out like that.”

“Especially for people who can influence probability,” I said, and promptly regretted it.

Cylia shrugged. “We work with what we have,” she said, and unlocked the door, slipping through it into the dark warehouse on the other side.

Even the smell of Lakeland Ladies warehouse was familiar, sweat and wood oil and WD-40 and bleach and dried beer. I paused at the threshold to take a deep breath, allowing my spine to straighten. Aromatherapy works. It’s just that not everyone finds lavender and roses to be the most soothing things the universe has to offer. Some of us have a different definition of “smells like home.”

There was a clunking sound, and the high overhead lights began flickering on in stages, staggered to reduce their draw on the local power grid. I stayed where I was, watching the familiar, unfamiliar landscape reveal itself one piece at a time.

There was the track, polished wood flat against the ground, more than half-cupped by the bleachers, which were all on rollers in case they needed to be moved in a hurry. The rest of the trackside space was reserved for standing-room tickets, which cost less, and kept the space fluid. There were the closed-up food stalls, probably connected to a makeshift kitchen, where snacks and beer would be peddled during the games themselves—and yes, there was the almost obligate disco ball, dangling from the ceiling like an invitation to better times ahead.

Cylia walked back to where Fern and I waited, and offered me a slightly off-kilter smile, asking, “Are you done being suspicious? Can I get a hug?”

“No, and yes,” I said, and hugged her. “I have no idea why you’re here, but it’s good to see you.”

“She’s here because of me,” said Fern.

I let Cylia go and turned, blinking. “Excuse me?”

Fern looked uncomfortable but held her ground, looking at me levelly as she said, “After you went away, I asked Elsie if she’d tell me if anything happened to you. I was so scared, and no one would really say where you’d gone, and I wanted to help. If there was any possible way, I wanted to help. You’re my best friend.”

“Okay . . .”

“Um.” Fern paused. “Don’t be mad at her, okay?”

“People keep asking me not to be mad.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “It’s starting to piss me off.”

“Elsie called me when you didn’t come home and she said you’d run away because the Covenant of St. George was trying to find you and it wasn’t safe and she was sorry but she didn’t know where you were and maybe you needed a miracle,” said Fern, rapid-fire.

I lowered my hand and stared at her. “What?”

“I knew I had to find you. I knew you’d try to do everything alone if I didn’t, and I knew you’d get hurt. Probably really, really hurt. You’re just human, Annie. You can’t save the world without help.” Fern looked at me earnestly. “Don’t be mad.”

“I . . . but you . . . how did you find me?”

“That would be me.” Cylia raised her left hand. The overhead lights glittered off her wedding ring. “She told me what she needed. She needed you to be safe. She needed to be able to be where you were, and to be in a position to help. As for me, I needed a change and I had an excess of bad built up, so I cashed in my chips and moved across the country to help a friend. I’ve done more for less.”

“An excess of—” I caught myself mid-sentence, but not fast enough to see Cylia’s smile go tight around the edges. Damn. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Me, too,” she said. Her hand dropped back down to her side. “It was a heart attack. Tav was older than me—not quite cradle robbing, but close enough to make some people uncomfortable. That’s how it has to be when your species is on the way out the door, you know? You meet somebody you think you could be happy with, and you grab on with both hands, because there’s every chance in the world that you’re not going to get a second shot at being happy like that. He loved me. God, he loved me. He never let me be the one to spend the luck to keep us safe. He never told me how much he was spending, either. I guess it turned out to be too much, because he was walking out the door, heading for work, and then he was gone—dead before he hit the ground. The sort of big, catastrophic failure that ends everything. But he left me his life insurance, and no debts, and the memory of being loved by someone who cared so much that he was willing to use his heart as collateral against the future. How do you get mad at somebody like that? You don’t.”

All of this must have happened after I’d left for the Covenant. I remembered Cylia’s husband as a smiling figure in the stands on the nights when the Slasher Chicks had skated against the Rose Petals. He’d always worn his wife’s team colors, proud in pink and glorious in green, and he’d cheered louder than anyone when the Rose Petals had pulled off a particularly clever bit of skating. I’d never actually met the man, but he’d seemed like a nice guy, and Cylia had clearly loved him.

Fern looked between us, timid as I’d ever seen her, and said, “After Elsie told me you were in trouble, I asked Cylia if she could find you. If she could take me where you were. She said . . .”

“I said the luck doesn’t work that way, because it doesn’t, but that I could get us to where we’d be able to do you the most good, even if it used up most of what the world owed me for taking Tav away.” Cylia shrugged again, less expansively this time, like she was talking about something easier and more everyday than the death of a spouse. “I grabbed. I twisted. And for the next three days, every channel I got was showing a Lowry film, even the ones like CNN, and when I threw my map of the USA across the room, it fell open to Lakeland. So I figured we needed to be here. We got here, this place was open, Lowryland needed a Princess Aspen . . . the luck knew where it wanted us.”