Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

Fern finished our procession, stepping light—so light that she frequently launched herself several feet into the air, landing on a higher step as gently as a feather drifting back to earth. She was moving slower than any of the rest of us but still keeping pace through the sheer dint of taking the steps so many at a time.

Every time we reached a landing we would stop, tensing, while I cracked the door open and looked through. For the past eight floors, what I’d seen on the other side was the same hallway. The exact same hallway. Emily could bend space and distort distance, but routewitches can’t actually create what isn’t there. The strange other-space I had walked through the first time I’d come to this building had been the creation of one of the other magic-users. That was worrisome. Of the members of the Lowryland cabal, the only ones I was absolutely sure of were Emily, Colin the sorcerer, and Joshua the trainspotter. The others were a nebulous mass of faces and ill-defined abilities.

Belatedly, I realized that should have been another warning sign. Yes, I was Colin’s student. Yes, it was reasonable that he was my primary contact with the rest of the cabal. But when I’d joined my roller derby team, there had been a big mixer for me and the rest of the fresh meat, so we could understand what we were getting ourselves into. When I’d joined the cheerleading squad, we had all gone out for pizza to get to know each other, because the people in charge understood that without the pom-poms and spirit fingers, most of us would never have been friends. Even my employment as a low-level Lowryland cast member had started with team building exercises.

If the cabal had really wanted me as a member of their team, they would have treated me like a member of the team, not shunted me into a corner where Colin could keep an eye on me. I had been so blinded by the possibility of getting myself under control that I hadn’t paid attention to the parts of the narrative that didn’t fit, the ones designed to keep me on the outside and out of the way.

Saying this was all my fault would have been sheer arrogance, untrue, and unhelpful. These people had been spinning their spells and doing their damage long before I’d come on the scene. But I’d made them stronger, whether I’d intended to or not, and I had been a part of the damage they’d done since I’d agreed to let them have access to me. I needed to fix this.

We were approaching another landing. I motioned for the others to stop, eased the door open, and peeked through the crack into the wood-and-mirrors training room. We were here. We were finally, after so many stairs, here.

I looked over my shoulder and nodded. Sam put Megan down. She stepped forward, joining Cylia at my back, and reached for her sunglasses. She didn’t remove them—not yet—but with her hand on the frame, she was armed and dangerous.

No more waiting. No more walking. It was time to move.

I pushed the door open, and we stepped through.



* * *





The room where Colin had conducted the bulk of my training was empty. We moved to the center of the floor, which seemed the least likely location for a trapdoor, and stopped, looking carefully around.

Back home, I had a reputation for digging pit traps and otherwise making my siblings’ lives difficult. I studied the walls and floor, looking for places where the woodgrain didn’t line up the way it should have, or where an angle seemed ever so slightly wrong. I didn’t find them. Either there were no traps in this room, or they were too well hidden for me to see them.

Or something else was going on. I looked at the mirror. Our reflections looked back at me, Megan still mercifully wearing her sunglasses. Stunning myself with friendly fire would have been one hell of a capper on an already lousy evening.

“Everyone, get ready,” I said, drew a knife, and flung it as hard and as true as I could toward the dead center of the glass.

The sort of throwing knives we used at the carnival are light, designed for distance more than damage. They can travel a long way, but if you’re aiming for something solid, you’re more likely to blunt your blade than you are to actually break anything.

If you’re aiming for something solid. My knife hit the glass and the mirror shattered, shards falling harmlessly to the ground to reveal a concrete box of a room, more basement than anything else, with a set of gridded steel stairs leading downward. My heart leaped into my throat. It was the room Emily had led me through on my first visit, and that meant those stairs ended in the conference room.

“We’re almost there,” I said, flexing my fingers again. There was still no fire, but the heat of my anger made up for it. “Mind the glass.”

Shards of mirror crunched underfoot as I walked toward the opening I’d created, pausing only to retrieve my knife. When I reached the edge of the mirror, I paused, turned, and motioned for the others to stay back.

“Give me a second,” I said. “Sam, be ready to pull me out.”

He nodded. Megan looked confused.

“Pull her out?” she asked. “Why?”

“In case it’s booby-trapped,” said Fern cheerfully, like she was explaining a particularly clever derby maneuver. “It probably is. It would be if it were my dark creepy room behind a big glass sheet.”

Megan’s mouth dropped open. She looked to Cylia for support. Cylia shrugged.

“This is life outside a gated community,” she said. “It gets weird.”

We could banter for hours. That was nice—banter is comforting, which is probably why Spider-Man does it so much—but it wasn’t getting us any closer to done. Sam was the fastest person I’d ever met, human or cryptid. If anyone could get me out of the way before some deathtrap slammed closed over my head, it was him. And I trusted him to do it. I trusted him completely.

Maybe this was what love felt like. Smiling despite myself, I turned to face front, took a deep breath, and stepped over the base of the broken mirror, into the dark basement.

Which promptly burst into super-heated flame around me.

I screamed. Much of my training focused on powering through sprains and even broken bones, learning how to walk on a twisted ankle without making a sound that might give away my position, but my parents—hard-nosed as they sometimes were in the pursuit of preparing us to survive in a world filled with dangers—had never actually set me on fire. I’d never even set myself on fire before, not really. I’d scalded my arms and blistered my palms, but I had never burned from head to toe. I had never been consumed.

I wasn’t being consumed now. I couldn’t be. The thought hit like a blow. If there was as much fire as I could feel around me, I wouldn’t have had the time to scream. I would have been reduced to ashes in an instant, and I’d be either gone or a ghost—and ghosts don’t burn. I looked at my arms, struggling to swallow the screams rising in my throat. They were untouched, perfectly smooth and fine. The heat felt real. The fire felt real. My skin did not agree.

I looked back. Sam was slapping at the flames in the opening, trying to get through the fire to get to me, fighting his own instincts. He wasn’t calm enough to see that his hands were as untouched as mine—when he pulled them out of the illusion of the flame, it was only to shove them back in again, struggling to save me.

He was crying. He was fighting and he was crying, and I wondered what he saw when he looked at me. It couldn’t be an anguished but intact woman, or he wouldn’t be fighting so hard. We had both seen stranger than someone walking untouched through fire, and he’d seen me set myself alight more than once without ill-effects, although my fire could hurt me, and only danced when it was still connected to my skin . . .

To my skin. I turned back to the flames, looking at them with wide eyes. The pain was receding. Either the nerves responsible for relaying sensation were giving up in the face of an enemy too great to be described, or the fire was changing.

The fire was recognizing me.

“Sam, can you hear me?” I called.

“Annie?” There was a clattering sound, followed by a hiss, and an anguished, “I can’t reach you! Annie, are you all right?”

“What do you see, Sam?”