Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

Sam looked between us, and scowled. “Now’s where someone explains this to me in small words, or I get pissed.”

“When you took the ticket, you gave Lowry permission to take your luck.” Rose stepped forward and snatched the ticket out of my hand—or tried to, anyway. In the absence of a coat, her fingers passed straight through the paper. She scowled. “Mary!”

“I’m not your maid,” said Mary. She moved to stand next to Rose, gesturing for me to hand over the ticket. I did. Rose transferred her scowl to the other ghost.

They’re both dead, but the rules governing them are very different, and while I wouldn’t want to be the one to say that one was better off than the other, watching Rose struggle to interact with the living world when she didn’t have a coat was sometimes a strong vote in Mary’s favor. Although unlike Mary, Rose doesn’t answer to a malicious and sometimes predatory force of the universe. Checks and balances in all things, I suppose.

“Is that going to take Mary’s luck now?” asked Sam.

“No; the ticket’s nontransferable,” said Rose, sounding distracted. She leaned forward, scowling at the words for a moment before straightening, shaking her head, and announcing, “You work for assholes. You know that, right, Timmy?”

“‘Timmy’?” asked Cylia.

“My full name’s ‘Antimony,’” I said, frowning at Rose. “I sort of know that, but why do you say so?”

“Because taking one of their theme park tickets grants them unlimited consent to take your luck whenever you’re on Lowry property. Do you know how much shit Lowry owns? They’re no Disney, but I’m pretty sure they own an airport. You’re fucked. You take one of these and stuff it in your wallet as a pretty souvenir and it doesn’t matter if it’s six years later, they can activate it and steal whatever they want from you.” Rose shook her head. She looked disgusted. She also looked distantly impressed, like she was fighting her own desire to admire their work. “A routewitch didn’t write this, but a routewitch helped. It’s very close to the standard distance exchange. I give you this, you give me that, everybody walks away happy.”

I put my head in my hands. “When Sam took the ticket, he agreed to the fine print, and now Lowry gets to take his luck.”

“Not if we burn the ticket,” said Mary calmly.

I lifted my head and peered at her. “Aren’t you worried about your luck?”

“It’s nontransferable, and I’m dead,” she said. “I have a different kind of luck now. Isn’t that right, Cylia?” She turned her open highway eyes toward our hostess.

Cylia sucked in a startled breath, sitting up a little straighter. “Yes, ma’am,” she said. Any incongruity in a woman nearly ten years my senior addressing a teenager as “ma’am” was washed away by the empty roads of Mary’s eyes. “No living jink can touch ghost luck. Dead ones can touch living luck, but we don’t talk about them much.”

“You shouldn’t,” Mary agreed. “If you did, even the people who ought to be your allies would join the Covenant in hunting you down. Some power shouldn’t belong to anybody. Annie?”

“Yes, Aunt Mary?”

“You need to get the hell away from Lowryland. Whatever these people are doing, it’s not right, it’s not good, and it’s going to get a lot more people hurt than it already has.”

“You’re right,” I said. “But I’m not going.”

Everyone stopped. In the case of Mary and Rose, they stopped so perfectly, so completely, that they might as well have been pictures painted on the air. Sam and Cylia just froze. They were still alive, and I took comfort in that fact. Sometimes it can be awkward, being the only living person in a room.

Sam recovered first. “If I were allowed to touch you right now, I’d be slinging you over my shoulder and running for the door,” he growled. “Why the hell don’t you want to leave?”

“Because you’re not allowed to touch me right now,” I said.

He looked at me blankly. So did the others. I sighed.

“The luck-theft doesn’t target employees,” I said. “We don’t get tickets like guests do. We have our passes, and we’re supposed to keep our ID badges on us at all times. I’m willing to bet that there’s some kind of a counter-charm built into the plastic to keep us from being affected if we do pick up a ticket for some reason, or we’d be dealing with a rash of dead janitors.” They couldn’t be stealing luck from employees. There was no way they’d have been able to cover for that many accidents.

“So?” said Sam.

“So employees are getting hurt. It started recently, and it’s getting worse. People died in the parade collapse.” I took a deep breath. “This began when Fern found the dead man outside the Midsummer Night’s Scream. The people who would know said that . . . they said he’d been unlucky. The cut that killed him was a fluke. So call him a possible consequence of the normal luck theft. He got his luck swiped, and then he got into a fight, and what should have been a pretty standard tussle turned into murder.”

“This isn’t explaining why you need to stay, sweetie,” said Mary, sounding more like my babysitter than she had in years. “If anything, this is explaining why you need to go.”

“Because it was after that man died that the cabal running Lowryland found out I existed,” I said. “They’re stealing my magic. They said they would train me, and instead, they’ve been using me like a battery. Employees didn’t start getting hurt until I waltzed in and dropped an untrained, uneducated magic-user in their laps. They’re using me to boost their effects, and people are dying. We can’t leave until I figure out how to stop them and get my magic back.”

I had lived for years without fire in my fingers, and when it had started to develop, I’d wished it gone with everything I had. Now I finally had someone willing to take it away from me, and all they wanted in exchange was more than anyone had the right to ask me to give.

Lowryland owed a lot of people a lot of luck, and I was going to make sure the bills were paid. I owed the dead that much. They had been hurt, however inadvertently, because of me.

Mary sighed. “Why the hell did I instill a sense of responsibility in you? Biggest mistake I ever made.”

“You wanted me to be the best that I could be,” I said.

“Well, the best you can be is a pain in my ass,” she said.

I turned to Cylia. “Can Sam stay here? Until his strength comes back and he can shift again?”

“Yes, of course,” said Cylia, and “Fuck that idea,” said Sam, at the same time, so their words piled on top of each other in a complicated heap.

I frowned at him. “You can’t be near me until your luck comes back.”

“No, I can’t be near you and human until you stop being a magical energy vacuum cleaner, but you keep saying you don’t need me to be human, so who the fuck cares?” Sam gave me a pointed look. “Unless you were lying.”

I didn’t hesitate. I leaned forward and kissed him, deeply enough to get my point across. Sam kissed me back, and I would have been a fool not to feel the relief in the action, or the way his shoulders relaxed, letting his body settle a little deeper into his chair, making a space for me to fall into.

Mary cleared her throat. “I’d say ‘get a room,’ but you might,” she said. “Can we focus?”

“Sorry,” I said, sitting up.

Sam beamed at her. “Not sorry,” he said.

“Didn’t think you were,” said Mary. “Sam, you understand that it’s not safe—”

“If it’s not safe for me, it’s not safe for her,” he said. “I don’t have to go out in public. Both her roommates know I’m not human. I can sleep on the couch if I need to, give my luck time to grow back and shield me from the sucking. Whatever. What I can’t do is walk away and leave her alone again. Don’t ask me to.”

“And this way you don’t have to feel bad about not calling my parents,” I said. “I’ll have backup. Cylia can even drive us back to the apartment. Maybe Megan and Fern will have some luck to spare.”