Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

This time, Sam and I turned to look at her. She shrugged.

“He’s too clean, or was, until I flicked some of my own luck onto him. Whatever took his luck took it all, and took it within the last few hours. After that, it would only have been a matter of time before the energy that fuels his transformations ran out, if he was touching you.”

Sam had been touching me all day, from the time we got to Lowryland until he’d swept those kids out of the path of yet another collapse. I was starting to think Lowryland had an infrastructure problem. . . .

Or maybe it had a luck problem.

“Do inanimate things have luck?” I asked.

“I told you, it’s like dust. It sticks to everything. You’d think a table wouldn’t have much cause for being lucky, but everything wants to exist. Everything wants to be treated well, to be remembered, to endure, even if the wanting isn’t what we’d recognize as conscious. This glass isn’t alive.” She held up her drink. “That doesn’t mean breaking would be good for it. So on some level, the glass ‘wants’ to be unbroken. If it has good luck, when I drop it, it’ll land on the carpet—and if it misses and hits the linoleum, and I have good luck, I won’t step on any of the shards.”

“Luck is a lot more complicated than I expected it to be,” I complained.

Cylia gave me a look that was half sympathetic, half entertained. “We tell jink kids luck is like math. You start by learning to add the good and subtract the bad, and then you learn how to keep the sums from ever getting too negative or too positive, and then you start doing calculus.”

“I should introduce you to my cousin Sarah,” I said, slumping in my chair. “She thinks the world is made of math, too.”

“Because it is,” said Cylia. “Yes, things have luck. Why?”

“We’ve been having weird equipment failures at Lowryland lately,” I said. “There was the parade that Fern and I told you about. There was the deep fryer that blew. And the reason Sam shifted forms was to save some kids from getting squished when one of the fake trees collapsed. Those things are supposed to be unbreakable. If something’s messing with the luck . . .”

“Pulling enough luck off of the inanimate could make it vulnerable,” said Cylia thoughtfully. “Or it could be the sinkhole effect.”

“Please don’t use fancy terms like you think we’re supposed to know them,” said Sam sourly. “I just met you. I’m not hugely comfortable with any of this, and I really don’t want to need a phrasebook to know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Cylia sighed, putting her glass down. “Okay. Something stripped all your luck away. We’re agreed on that, right?”

“Yes,” I said, before Sam could say anything else. He was in a bad mood, and I couldn’t blame him. I was in a pretty rotten mood myself. But I’d known Cylia long enough to trust her, and he hadn’t. Right now, that was making all the difference in the world.

I missed the feeling of his tail around my ankle and his hand in mine. I would have felt a little less unmoored, I thought, if something had been holding me down. I also missed the fire in my fingers. If anything should have brought it surging back, it was this . . . but it wasn’t coming because it wasn’t there. Because someone had been stealing it away from me.

If that someone was Colin, or anyone else from his little magical nursery school, I was going to show him that there was more than one way to set somebody on fire.

“When luck is removed, it creates . . . Zeus, I don’t have the words for this shit. It creates a blank spot. And for a little while, the shock of the removal will keep that blank spot blank. Hence you still being effectively a null-luck zone when you got here. Your body hadn’t had the time to recover and start gathering luck again. With me?”

“Sure,” said Sam. “Why the fuck not?”

Cylia didn’t look like she appreciated his answer, but she pressed on. I silently vowed to buy her ice cream or something. “Once the shock wears off, the system will panic and begin gathering luck from any place that it can find it.”

“Which means bad luck, right?” I asked.

“Yes and no.”

For a moment, Sam and I were united in glaring at her. Cylia grimaced.

“I told you this was complicated,” she said. “Look, if you’re talking free-range luck, the bad kind is infinitely more common, and hence infinitely easier to find. But someone who has no luck won’t just suck up the free-range stuff, they’ll start pulling it off things that can’t fight back. Inanimate things.”

“Hang on,” I said. “So what you’re saying is that if what happened to Sam has happened to other people, and those people went to Lowryland, they might have pulled the luck off of parts of the Park trying to rebuild their own?”

“If they stayed long enough, yes.” Cylia looked grim. “Which would mean those things would start gathering free-range luck, since they’d lack the self-awareness to go looking for intentional replacement luck, and they’d wind up with a big load of badness.”

I rubbed my face with one hand. “I need to go.”

“Where?” asked Sam. “I still can’t transform.”

“I know,” I said. “But I need to get back to Lowryland.”





Eighteen




“Never gamble with anything you’re not willing to lose. The house doesn’t always win, but there are some chances not worth taking.”

–Mary Dunlavy

Lakeland, Florida, at the warehouse home of the Lakeland Ladies

“NO,” SAID CYLIA CALMLY, taking another swig of her lemonade. She swallowed, sighed, and added, “I wish like hell I could risk something stronger, but you know what they say about day drinking. Once you start, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to waking up one day as a bartender in some crappy coastal tourist resort, shaking your denim-clad rear for tips. I like bartenders. I like denim miniskirts. But wow, do I hate tourists.”

Sam and I both stared at her blankly. Finally, in a hesitant tone, Sam said, “I don’t think anyone says that. Like, ever. I don’t even believe that you’ve said that before just now.”

Cylia shrugged. “Yet here we are.”

My temper was beginning to boil. I narrowed my eyes, looking down the length of my nose at her, and pictured how nice she would look on fire. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean ‘no.’” Cylia looked back at me. “I will not drive you back to Lowryland. I will not tell you which bus to take to get to Lowryland. I will not let you run out of here and ditch me with your fuzzy boyfriend while you go and get yourself killed. This is not a good idea. This is a bad idea.”

“What makes you so sure I’m going to go and get myself killed?”

Cylia rolled her eyes so hard that for a moment, they looked like they were going to pop out of her head and roll away across the floor. “Please. First, I’ve met you. Second, you’re currently a weird energy sink, and third, you have some of the most bizarre luck I’ve ever seen. You could get yourself killed walking to the 7-11 for chocolate milk. If you run out of here without a plan, you’re going to end up dead, and how am I supposed to explain that to Fern?”

“I’d be more worried about how you were going to explain it to me,” said Sam dourly. “Annie, why do you want to go back to Lowryland? It sounds like whatever’s going on started there and . . . crap. I just answered my own question, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did.” I looked at Cylia. “How much do you know about human magic-users?”

“Enough to know that I don’t know jack,” she said. “They make magic, they use magic, sometimes a lot of things wind up on fire because of their magic, and there’s never been a jink who could do what they do.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “Humans can’t see luck the way jinks can.”

“Everyone can move luck, but only we can see it.”

I paused. “Uh, Cylia?”

“Yes?”

“Are you cool with dead people?”

Cylia blinked. “There are about a hundred different ways I can interpret that question, and none of them actually make any sense,” she said. “What do you mean, exactly?”

“Annie has dead aunts,” said Sam.