Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

WE ARRIVED AT THE warehouse to find the Lakeland Ladies in the middle of practice, circling the track with a familiar rattle of wheels and exchange of breathless, amiable insults. Walking into that wall of sound was like a short, sharp slap. For a moment—only a moment—I was back in Portland, watching my own team get ready for a bout, and all I needed to do was strap on my skates and the world would start making sense again.

The moment passed. The skaters were strangers. The team banners on the wall were unfamiliar, local logos and local colors and nothing that belonged to me. Most importantly of all, Sam was holding my hand, fingers so tight that my own fingers throbbed a little from the lack of circulation. I didn’t pull away or ask him to lighten up. He was scared, confused, and in the company of a woman he didn’t know—Cylia, who was leading us across the warehouse, toward the stairs. If he needed to squeeze my hand a little too tight to get through this, I was going to let him.

A few of the skaters noticed us, and waved. Cylia waved back. “Just passing through!” she called. “Need to deal with some personal shit!”

“Did you bring us fresh meat?” asked one of the derby girls. She was looking at me assessingly, studying me with an expression that bordered on avarice. “She ever skate before?”

“Yes, she skates, and no, she’s not here to try out,” said Cylia. She didn’t slow down, and so Sam and I didn’t either. We needed to get out of this open, human-filled space before his lack of luck caused his cloak to snag on something and get pulled aside. “She’s an old friend, and we gotta go.”

“Aw,” chorused a couple of the derby girls.

“Come back soon, fresh meat,” called another.

“Why do they keep calling you that?” whispered Sam. He sounded half freaked-out and half annoyed, which was sort of endearing. It had been a long time since anyone had wanted to defend my honor.

“That’s what new derby girls are always called,” I said. “I haven’t been fresh meat for years. I’m old and tough and sort of spoiled now.”

“Best description of you I’ve ever heard,” said Cylia.

We climbed the stairs to her small apartment, which was standing unlocked. I gave her a curious look. She shrugged.

“I leave it open during practice. I know none of the girls would steal anything—I don’t have anything worth stealing except for my laptop, and if that went missing, the team captains would move Heaven, Earth, and Purgatory to get it back—and this way they have access to my shower if they need it. That’s always been the policy with the overhead apartments, which is part of why they try to only rent to derby family. No one wants to lose access to a hot shower.”

All that made sense to me. “Right,” I said.

From the look on Sam’s face, none of it made sense to him. He was smart enough not to argue. Under the circumstances, we didn’t have that luxury.

Cylia’s apartment was small enough to be compact, cozy, or cramped, depending on living preferences. The living room was about the size of my bedroom back home, with doors leading off it to the kitchen and even smaller bedroom. Everything was decorated in early thrift store, with a comfortable-looking, overstuffed couch given pride of place in front of the ancient television. It reminded me, in its piecemeal way, of home.

“Bathroom’s through there,” said Cylia, indicating the bedroom door. She closed the door, thumbed the deadbolt, and turned to Sam. “All right. Drop the cloak. Let me get a look at you.”

Sam shot me an uncertain glance. I nodded, trying to project encouraging vibes, and he unfastened the cloak, letting it fall from his shoulders.

Cylia frowned, scanning him up and down before looking him dead in the eyes and saying, “My name is Cylia Mackie. I am a jink, which means I’m as inhuman as you are, just slightly better at hiding it. I won’t say you can trust me, because I don’t know you well enough to make that kind of promise. I will tell you that Annie trusts me, and you wouldn’t be standing here, with her, if she didn’t believe I could help. Will you let me try to help?”

“Sure,” said Sam, uncomfortably.

I didn’t say anything. Cylia was right that we wouldn’t have been here if I hadn’t trusted her—although being trapped in Lowryland with no car and a boyfriend who had suddenly lost the ability to change shapes had made my definition of “trust” a lot more flexible. Cylia was nonhuman and could drive. Right now, that made her the most trustworthy person I knew.

Cylia stepped toward Sam, reaching toward him like she was approaching a skittish animal. At the last moment before she would have actually pressed her hand against his chest, she stopped reaching and swept her fingers downward, through the air a bare inch or so from his skin. She stepped back again, frowning, and stuck her index and middle fingers in her mouth.

“This is weird,” said Sam.

“Life is weird,” I said.

“It’s gone,” said Cylia, around her fingers. She pulled them out of her mouth, scowling, and said, “Your luck is gone.”

“That’s what you said in the car,” said Sam. “You didn’t explain what it meant then, and you’re not explaining what it means now.”

“I mean . . . oh, hell.” Cylia scowled for a moment before she said, “Neither of you is a jink, so neither of you can see luck. That means there’s going to be a certain amount of ‘take my word for it’ in what I’m about to say. Can you do that for me?”

“We can try,” I said.

“Okay. This sort of thing goes better when you have something to do with your hands. Follow me.” She turned and walked into the kitchen, where a card table was shoved up against the wall. There were three folding chairs already waiting there. Had this been anyone but Cylia, I might have thought she’d planned our visit. As it was, I knew that she’d just gotten lucky.

I settled with my back to the wall. Sam sat in the chair on the long edge of the table. After a moment, he scooted it around so that he was next to me, both of us crammed into a space that was barely big enough for one. I patted his knee reassuringly, and he responded by wrapping his tail around my ankle, holding me in place, keeping me where he was. I made no attempt to pull away.

Cylia went to the fridge and returned with a Tupperware pitcher filled with distressingly pink liquid and three matching glasses. “Hibiscus lemonade,” she said, putting the glasses down and filling them. “Drink. The sugar will help.”

“Can I get that in writing to show my grandmother?” Sam asked, taking one of the glasses. “She likes to say that having a grandson who can literally climb on the ceiling justifies keeping the sugar levels low in our house.”

“The sugar will help you regenerate your luck,” Cylia said. “I can’t speak to hyperactivity.”

“Oh.”

I took one of the glasses. The lemonade was tooth-achingly sweet, but tasty all the same. “What do you mean, the sugar will help regenerate his luck?”

“All right.” Cylia sat. “This is where we get into things that you’re going to have to take my word for, because you literally don’t have the senses to understand them.”

“Huh?” said Sam.

“Jinks and mara—their cousins—have an extra organ in their brains,” I said. “It’s sort of like the electroreceptor organs you find in sharks. It lets them see things that are invisible to the rest of us.”

“Like luck?” asked Sam dubiously. “That doesn’t sound like a real thing.”

“If everything that didn’t sound real would have the decency to stop existing, the world would be reduced to what could be reasonably detected by a jellyfish, and I wouldn’t need to pay my water bill,” said Cylia. “Jinks see luck. It’s everywhere, on everything. It . . . accretes like dust, sticking to whatever it touches until it rubs off, or gets used up, or blows away. Luck isn’t a thing you earn. It’s a thing you have.”

“Isn’t that distracting?” asked Sam.