Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

Sam recovered first. “So how do we fix this?”

“Seed luck. I can spare a little. Annie . . .” Cylia squinted at me. “She can spare a little less, maybe, but still, she can spare some. It’s the difference between a worm in her apple and no worm in her apple.”

“Which is the bad one?” asked Sam.

Cylia shrugged. “I don’t judge. Anyway, if we give you some seed luck, you should be able to start rebuilding it on your own. Hell, you may wind up luckier than you started, since you’ll be starting with mostly good luck.”

Sam blinked. “What do you mean, ‘mostly’?”

“No luck is pure.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m happy to give some luck to the cause of Sam not getting creamed by a bus. What I want to know is, why does not having luck stop him from shifting shape?”

“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. We’ll deal with that next.” Cylia licked her finger, leaned over the table, and wiped it on Sam’s bare arm. He made a disgusted noise, recoiling, and she answered it with a sunny smile. “Suck it up, buttercup. That’s some luck for you. Good luck, high-octane stuff. Enjoy.”

“Did it have to come with spit?” Sam demanded.

“Yes.” Cylia turned to me, licking her finger again. “Give me your arm.”

Wrinkling my nose, I did as I was told. “Soap,” I said. “Soap and hot water and ew.”

“You people are such babies,” said Cylia, and swiped her finger down my arm—or started to, anyway. Midway through the motion she froze, eyes widening and face paling, until she looked like something out of an amateur theater company’s haunted house.

“Cylia?” I asked warily.

She made a pained whimpering noise.

Right. That’s the sort of thing that has never meant anything good. I yanked my arm back, breaking the connection between us. She slumped backward in her chair, breathing heavily through her nose.

“Cylia?” I asked again. “You okay?”

“Fuck me,” she said. Her voice was huskier than it had been before, pitched so low in her throat that it was almost a rumble. She reached for her glass of lemonade, hand shaking so badly that she nearly knocked it over in the process of getting a grip on it.

Sam and I watched in silence as she lifted the glass, took a deep drink, and closed her eyes, her breathing slowly returning to normal. After more than a minute had passed, she put her glass down and opened her eyes, looking at us gravely.

“It’s you,” she said, jerking her chin toward me. “You’re the reason he can’t shift back.”

“What?” I asked, and “What?” Sam demanded, and neither of us moved, and I was so grateful for that that I could have cried. If he had jerked away from me, I would have understood the reasons—how could he not want to pull away, if his current condition was my fault? How could he want to be anywhere near me?—but I would never have been able to forget that it had happened. I would never be able to let it go.

“Okay.” Cylia moved her first two fingers to her temples, rubbing briskly. “Okay. I . . . okay. Luck is not the only thing that exists and is invisible and intangible and moves around the world. You can’t bottle gravity. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said numbly.

“But if you do things right, if you set things up correctly, you can steal gravity. Make it weaker in one spot because you’ve made it stronger somewhere else. It’s like moving luck, only harder, because luck is free-floating, while gravity is internally generated.”

“I don’t think that’s how physics works,” I said.

Cylia shot me a wry look. “Yeah, well, I didn’t get a degree from metaphor school, all right? I had the luck stuff prepared. Tav and I wanted kids someday, and we knew I’d have to be able to explain it to them. This is uncharted ground for all of us.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, with a quick shake of her head. “We’re sticking with luck and gravity, because I don’t feel like dealing with anything else. If you take all of someone’s luck, they’re screwed. They won’t make more. They’ll have to walk around luckless until enough of it sticks to them to give them a baseline again. If you take all of someone’s gravity, on the other hand, or even most of someone’s gravity, they’ll make more, and they’ll keep making more, which means you can harvest more. You can pull their gravity away again and again and again, because they’ll always generate another batch. It’s a renewable resource.”

“What does this have to do with me not being able to switch back to human?” Sam demanded.

“Someone’s harvesting her gravity.” Cylia switched her attention to him, which felt like nothing so much as mercy. She was giving me space to absorb what I was about to hear. “When you lost your luck, you lost your barrier against whatever’s funneling away her gravity—or something. I don’t know what they’re taking, but they’re taking something, and whatever it is, it’s similar enough to the energy you use to transform that when it felt you, it took that too. The good news is that it’s an energy you generate on your own. If you stop touching her, it’ll grow back.”

“How long?” asked Sam gruffly.

Cylia shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Sam, let go of my ankle.” He turned to look at me, eyes going wide. I smiled wanly. “Your tail. It’s wrapped around my ankle. You need to let go. You’re still touching me.”

“But . . .” He stopped, catching himself, and unwound his tail, whisking it out of my reach.

I felt suddenly unmoored. I leaned away, pressing myself against the wall. If Sam hadn’t been between me and the rest of the kitchen, I would have gotten up and started pacing. “Cylia, why did you react like that when you touched my arm?”

“Because whatever’s sapping your energy and his energy tried to take mine. Only I pulled back, and it didn’t know how to deal with it. It was tug-of-war with something I don’t know and couldn’t see, and I did not like it.” Cylia shook her head. “Not one damn bit. Whatever trouble you’re in this time, I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“But—”

“I’m a jink. If you break your luck, I can help. If you press your luck, I can at the very least point and laugh before the great gray cloud of karma settles around your head and devours you whole. I don’t do weird unseen mystery energy-sucking bullshit, which is what this is.” Cylia leaned back in her chair, a little farther away from me. “You need help. Not from me.”

“Wait.” Sam looked deeply frustrated. We both turned to him. He looked at me, then at Cylia. “I want to be sure I have this right. You’re saying someone . . . someone did something to Annie that makes her some sort of energy vampire?”

“Yes, and no,” said Cylia. “She’s not the one who’s sapping energy, and she’s not keeping it either. She’s more like . . . like a funnel attached to a vacuum cleaner than the vacuum cleaner itself. All the energy is passing through her and going somewhere else.”

“And losing my luck is why this started happening now when it wasn’t happening to me before?”

Cylia nodded. “Luck is like the body’s ozone layer. It protects us from a lot of the ambient energies in the world. This . . . funnel, it’s inside Annie, under her luck, sapping her energy. It couldn’t reach you until your luck was gone. That’s part of why jinks are dangerous. If someone could take all the world’s luck away, we’d just be ghosts walking around in bodies we hadn’t figured out how to put down yet.”

Ghosts . . . I sat up a little straighter. “Can ghosts see luck?”

“Jink ghosts can,” said Cylia. “They are nasty when they decide to haunt somebody. Human ghosts can’t.”

“So Mary wouldn’t have noticed Sam’s luck going away,” I said. “It could have disappeared last night.”

“No, it couldn’t have,” said Cylia.