Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“How did the Covenant ever find you?” I blurted. I felt bad about it immediately, but I didn’t try to take the question back.

Cylia shook her head. “People think we’re thieves. People are always happy to tell the authorities about thieves, even when they don’t trust the authorities either. I don’t steal good luck from people. I can lure free range luck toward myself, but there are consequences. Look at what happened to Tav.”

“Yeah,” I said uncomfortably.

“So someone told the Covenant ‘hey, those people over there, I think they’re witches,’ and one of us got cut open, and someone figured out we weren’t absolutely, perfectly human, and suddenly we were on the public enemy number one list, along with all the other species whose camouflage was too good.” Cylia looked at me with cold, flat eyes. I suddenly wondered how much of my situation she knew about—and how much of it she was planning to hold against me. “If you look human and you’re not human, you’re worse than a manticore. At least a manticore isn’t going to seduce a good Covenant soldier away from the path of righteousness.”

“My family’s human, and we do that all the time,” I said weakly.

“The jury’s still out on that,” said Cylia.

Right. We were getting too far afield from the original topic, and I was getting more and more uncomfortable: it was time to get back to basics. “Fern, you said we needed to talk when I asked you why bad things kept happening near me,” I said. “Why?”

Fern looked at Cylia. Cylia looked back, raising one eyebrow, and shook her head. Fern sighed and turned back to me.

Having watched this little interplay with increasing dubiousness, I asked warily, “What?”

“It’s aftershocks,” said Fern.

“Of what?”

“Of me spending a whole lot of luck so we’d all wind up in the best possible position,” said Cylia.

I stared at her, slow fury building in my gut. “You mean this is . . . you caused this?”

“No,” said Cylia immediately. “This was going to happen, no matter what, just like you were already heading for Florida by the time Fern told me we needed to get you. The accidents have nothing to do with me. But when I bent your luck to put you into proximity of good things—us—that had to be balanced, and the universe is balancing it by putting you into proximity of bad things. It’s only because I started with so much good luck that you’re winding up close enough to help without getting seriously injured. The aftershocks won’t last forever. They’re the cascade effect that always follows a major adjustment. And this isn’t your fault, and it isn’t mine.”

Colin could be an aftershock. Having a teacher drop into my lap when I was in a position to learn and leave, rather than being tied to him for the rest of my life, was almost the definition of luck. Still . . . “Is this going to cost me anything?”

“No.” Cylia looked at me. “I already paid.”

The blankness in her voice made me want to apologize for the world, for things I’d never done and would never dream of doing. I swallowed the impulse, and asked instead, “Do you both skate here?”

“I don’t have time to be on a team, and I don’t want to skate if you’re not skating with me,” said Fern. “We’re the best. Slasher Chicks forever.”

“I don’t have that sort of misplaced loyalty, and a girl needs something to do with her free time,” said Cylia. “I’ve been working on Fern.”

“I am an uncrackable fortress,” said Fern serenely.

I looked at the track. It looked just like every other regulation flat track in the world, smooth and polished and beckoning, and I was so tired. So damn tired. My life kept flipping upside down, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to make it stop.

“Let’s skate,” I said.

Fern smiled.



* * *





The track was smooth as silk beneath my wheels, with none of the cracks or irregularities that could turn skating at Lowryland into the bad kind of adventure. Falling would still hurt, but it would be the good, clean hurt of an impact well earned, and not the slightly offensive hurt of a fall I shouldn’t have taken.

(It’s funny, but pain seems worse when it’s unreasonable. When I broke three ribs falling from the top of a pyramid during cheer practice, I was totally cool with that, but when I broke an arm falling into one of my own pit traps, I was a lot less sanguine.)

Fern, as always, skated like it was an excuse to play keep-away with the laws of physics. There was no one here to put on a show for, and so she was varying her density as she whipped around the track, bleeding it off when she was on the straight stretches, pulling it on when she was zipping around a corner and needed to keep herself from overbalancing. If I hadn’t known what she was doing, I probably wouldn’t have jumped directly to “density manipulation,” but it was easy to tell that she was doing something, which was why she skated straight when we were in the middle of an actual bout.

Cylia was a better skater in many ways. She knew the track. She knew her body and its capabilities. She was taller than Fern, but when the sylph wasn’t tinkering with her mass to gain momentum, Cylia was actually faster, because Cylia knew how to position her body to reduce wind drag. She’d never been in a position to cheat the way Fern could. Her potential cheating was of a more subtle sort—and she never did it on the track. Luck changing without warning was the way derby girls got hurt.

I fell somewhere between them, skill-wise. I had to work harder than Fern, which meant I had a better idea of the actual techniques a good skater used. I couldn’t make myself lighter to avoid a fall, or heavier to keep someone from knocking me over. But Cylia had been skating for a lot longer than I had, and once you get past the base levels of a person’s natural athleticism, practice is what makes perfect. Back home in Portland, we were both jammers, and she was one of the ones I had to look out for when we were skating against each other.

There was no competition on the track tonight. Just three people circling, doing all the stupid and impulsive shit that could get somebody seriously injured during an actual game. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this removed from my troubles, or this close to the girl I’d been for most of my life. I missed her. Almost as much as I missed my mice, and my family, and Sam.

There had been a night—after Verity had returned from her first season on Dance or Die, before she’d left for New York—when I’d come downstairs to make myself a midnight sandwich and found her sitting with Alex at the kitchen table, both holding mugs of cocoa, talking quietly. My older siblings had always been closer to each other than they were to me, capable of opening up when they were alone in a way that enthralled and frightened me. I liked being the baby, but there had been times when I wished my parents would decide to have another baby, so I could be somebody’s Alex, so I could have the kind of friend my siblings seemed to effortlessly be for one another.

“I felt like I was forgetting myself,” Verity had said, eyes on the marshmallows melting in her cocoa, shoulders hunched. She’s been shorter than me since I was twelve, but in that moment, she hadn’t looked short. She’d looked small, beaten down and human, and for the first time, I’d realized that my sister was as mortal as I was.

Alex hadn’t said anything. His eyes had darted toward the stairs, and I’d held my breath, willing him not to notice me. Either he hadn’t, or he’d decided this was something I should hear, because he still hadn’t said anything. He’d just looked back to Verity.

“Being Valerie was easy,” she’d said, spitting the word out like it was bitter. “All I had to do was dance. Valerie didn’t care about anything else, and for me to be her, I had to stop caring, too. It was easy, and it was tempting, and if I’d won . . .”

“You didn’t.”