Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“What’s wrong?” I demanded.

“I don’t know.” He gave me a half-panicked look. “I keep trying to go back, and I can’t. It’s like that part of my brain isn’t working anymore.”

“Okay. We can deal with this. We’re out of range of the cameras, we’re—”

“How are we going to deal with this?” he snapped. “You can’t even start a fire!”

I gave him a hurt look. “Sam, I’m trying to help. Please don’t yell at me.”

“Sorry. I’m—I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to do.” He rubbed his face with one hand. “This has never happened to me before.”

“Getting stuck?”

He nodded, face still covered. I realized that he hadn’t looked directly at me since we’d landed here, not even when he was snapping at me.

Stepping slightly forward—we were in close quarters, but he’d still managed to put distance between us when he put me down—I gently gripped his wrist and tugged. He was stronger than I was. He could have resisted me. He didn’t. Instead, he let me lower his arm, revealing the anxious, almost trapped expression in his eyes.

“Hey.” I didn’t let go of his wrist. “We’ll fix this.”

“What if we don’t? What if this is something that happens to fūri eventually, and nobody told me, because my dad is off in China somewhere, and my mom didn’t leave a forwarding address or instructions on where to find him? What if I was supposed to start hiding from people months ago, to keep from being surrounded when the switch snapped?”

“Okay, breathe. If fūri got stuck in one shape or another, it would have been in my family’s records, and it’s not. Grandpa Thomas wrote about visiting a whole neighborhood of fūri in Hong Kong before he settled in Michigan, and he didn’t say ‘but the grandparents never changed shapes, so I guess they couldn’t,’ and that’s not the sort of detail he would have missed. This isn’t just something that happens.”

“Then why is it happening now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why can’t I set things on fire? Something’s wrong. But Sam, if you were going to get stuck, this is the best place in the world to do it. All we have to do is avoid Security. Any guests who see you will think you’re with one of the shows.”

Sam didn’t look impressed by my logic. He twisted his wrist out of my grip and I let him go, although not without regret. His body language was hunched, closed down, and the anxiety in his eyes was quickly mounting toward a full-blown panic. I had never regretted the difference in our species more. Maybe if I’d been a fūri, I would have known what to do, what the little, difficult to articulate touches were that would let me unlock the door to his fear and let the shadows out.

Or maybe I did know. I’d been scared for a long time about someone discovering the fire in my fingers, alternately wishing it away and wishing it on everyone else, wishing for an X-Men world where we’d all have weird powers and no one would be different.

(And knowing that it wouldn’t have changed a damn thing, because we already do live in an X-Men world. Artie is an empath with pheromones that make him endlessly attractive to anyone who likes guys and isn’t a close relative, which is why he spends all his time locked in his basement. Elsie is a persuasive telepath, and her blood makes people horny and possessive. Sarah is . . . Sarah is Sarah. Add in the dead aunts and the dimension-hopping grandmother and we’re already a comic book, and it’s never made anything easier. Not for a second.)

“Sam.” I reached for him again, this time resting the back of my fingers against his cheek. He closed his eyes, leaning into the touch. Thankfully. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d recoiled from me. “We’ll figure it out.”

“And if you can’t?”

“Then we’ll figure out a way to get you safely back to Indiana, and I’ll come for you as soon as I can.”

His eyes snapped open. “What?”

He looked so startled that I actually laughed, which could have been the exact wrong thing to do. I hesitated. He didn’t pull away. I risked a smile.

“What, you think you can get rid of me just because you stopped shaving? Please. My cousin Artie is one of my best friends, and he hasn’t seen the sky without coercion in years. Literally years. If you took him outside at noon and didn’t slather him in sunscreen, he’d probably burst into flames.” I kept smiling. “I’ve never asked you to stay human before I would kiss you, have I? It’ll mean spending a little more time apart, but whatever. It’s not like we don’t know how to do that. I think it’s most of what we’ve done so far.”

Relief flooded over Sam’s face. His tail wrapped tight around my waist and he pulled me toward him, virtually yanking me into an embrace. I didn’t resist, not then, and not when he started kissing me, hands against the sides of my face, tail tightening as if to make absolutely sure that I knew better than to try going anywhere.

When he finally pulled back, he rested his forehead against mine and said, “Thank you.”

“It’s okay,” I assured him. “We’ve been through enough. I’m not letting you go over something this small.”

“You call this ‘small’?” He held up one long-fingered hand. “This is all of me.”

“That’s what I said.” I grinned briefly before sobering. “But it’s all of you that we need to get out of here. Lowryland doesn’t allow adults to wear costumes.”

Sam snorted. “Good thing I’m not wearing a costume, huh?”

“Yeah.” I turned to look thoughtfully at the maintenance door. “I have an idea. Ever seen Alien?”

Sam blinked.



* * *





It’s technically a violation of, oh, several dozen Lowry Entertainment, Inc. rules to take non-employees into the tunnels under the Park. Punishable by immediate termination, fines, black mark on your record, yadda, yadda, everything is awful. But at the end of the day, they’d have to catch me before they could do anything about it.

The tunnels leading to Fairyland were largely deserted, since maintenance still happened at night, even when there were closures on Park property. The process of restoring the street to its pre-accident condition would be swift, efficient, and most of all, unseen. Anything that could break the illusion that Lowryland was a magical kingdom where nothing ever went wrong would be concealed from the eyes of our paying guests, because without them, the Park might as well burn.

I inched in first, looking around to be sure I was alone before beckoning for Sam to join me. The sound of the door closing behind him seemed impossibly loud. I winced, waiting for footsteps to come running in our direction. When they didn’t, I relaxed marginally and pointed upward, indicating the supports and pipes running across the ceiling.

“Most of those should hold your weight,” I whispered. “If something seems unstable, move on to the next one, and keep moving. As long as you don’t fall . . .”

“You’d make a hot space marine,” he said, and kissed my cheek before jumping nimbly up to the ceiling, catching hold of the pipes with hands, feet, and tail. He had to pull himself into what was virtually a crawl, rather than dangling with bent knees, but once he was done, he was far enough up that no one was going to see him by mistake. I hoped.

I blew him a kiss and started walking.