Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

I did the only thing I could. “Run!” I shouted, and grabbed Sam’s hand, sprinting for the end of the tunnel.

We almost made it before the train slammed into the tunnel’s glass wall, and the air was gone, replaced by the crushing force of a tsunami filled with shards of shattered glass. Sam’s hand was ripped out of mine.

Everything went black.





Twenty-four




“We don’t decide to win. We don’t even decide to play. But sometimes we decide to lose.”

–Mary Dunlavy

Drowning

THE TUNNEL WAS NARROW enough that the first swell of water slammed me into the ceiling and held me there, shards of glass cutting my arms and legs as the artificial currents buffeted my body. There was no light. There was no air. There was no way for me to know where Sam was, whether he’d been swept entirely away or whether he was only a few feet from me, struggling to find a way to renew our connection.

I closed my eyes. They weren’t doing me any good, and the last thing I needed was to get a piece of glass embedded in my cornea. Blinding myself wouldn’t improve the situation.

It might not make the situation worse. I was trapped in crushing darkness, and while I have reasonably good lung capacity, I was going to run out of air soon. Sam was . . . Sam was somewhere. That was as far as I was willing to let myself go. Sam was somewhere, because the alternative was accepting that Sam might be dead, and if Sam was dead, I was going to burn this whole goddamn place to the ground, fire in my fingers or no. Magic is nice, but napalm is reliable.

No one kills my people. No one but me.

My fingers were heating up again. It wasn’t enough. Even if my fire had somehow been back to its full strength, it wouldn’t have been enough. I couldn’t produce the kind of flame necessary to boil away this much water, not when there was no air for me to burn. I couldn’t do anything.

Well. I could do one thing. Water still buffeting me against the top of the tunnel, I forced myself to relax as much as I could, wishing I had the ability to take a deep breath—wishing I had time to think about this. There wasn’t time. In the end, I guess there never is.

I didn’t have much left in the way of air. I had enough to open my mouth against the frigid, bitter current and spit the words into the water:

“All right, Mary,” I said. “I want to make a deal.”

The water stopped. It didn’t recede, it didn’t disappear: it stopped. It didn’t freeze, either. Freezing would have implied that it had suddenly become colder, suddenly turned hard, and it hadn’t done that. It was water, fluid and free and motionless, holding me effortlessly up. I couldn’t breathe. That didn’t matter, because my lungs didn’t hurt anymore, and while I would have sworn my eyes were closed, it seemed that I could see a little better, like the world was becoming suffused with golden light. It was the sort of light that shines on country roads when the sun is going down, slanting through corn husks and glittering with dust motes, rural and rare and impossible to replicate in any other situation. It was an old-fashioned kind of light, a dustbowl dream, and it was getting stronger by the second.

Maybe this was what drowning did. Maybe when people said they’d had a near-death experience and seen the light beckoning them home, they’d really been dreaming of farm country, of corn and wheat and the sickle and the scythe. But I didn’t think so. This felt too personal, like it was something intended only and entirely for me.

The light shone, and because light is nothing without something to illuminate, it shone on a mile of empty country highway, asphalt cracked and broken from spending decades baking in the summer sun, shoulders choked with nettle-bush and briars. Past the shoulder came the corn, and it grew tall and lush and somehow terrible, as if whatever watered it had less to do with what I was drowning in and more to do with what I was keeping, hot and captive, in my veins.

The road appeared, and because a road is nothing without someone to travel it, a woman walked along the center line, her jeans faded asphalt-gray, her hair white as corn silk or cobwebs, her eyes echoing the scene again in miniature, in microcosm, until she became a Ferris wheel that turned for nothing good, part of a carnival whose tickets were too dear to buy with anything but dreams.

“I told you not to call unless you had to,” she said, and her voice was sorrow, her voice was shame, and there were tears on her cheeks, tears for me, the first of her charges in three generations to call upon the crossroads. “Dammit, Annie, I told you.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Mary,” I said. “I tried, and you said that if it was this or the cemetery . . . I tried so hard.”

She sighed. “I know, baby. I know.”

What she didn’t say was that she’d always known it might come to this, the youngest of the family looking at the oldest—oldest still walking in the world, anyway—and requesting the kind of help that hurts more than it heals. I was the one who’d spent the most time with her, the Price girl who’d never outgrown her babysitter. She’d stayed with me because she liked me, and because I was lonely, until the situation had changed, and she’d started staying with me because I needed her again. With that kind of exposure, that kind of familiarity leading to contempt, it had always been almost inevitable that I would one day ask for something I’d have to pay for.

“Are we there?” I could talk, I could breathe—or maybe I didn’t need to breathe; it was hard to say—and I could feel fire in my fingers. This could be the crossroads.

“Almost.” She looked at me solemnly. “As your representative in this negotiation, I sincerely recommend that you rescind your request. Change your mind, baby girl, before it’s too late. Walk away from this.”

The world was still drowning in darkness, when I focused my eyes to look past the golden light and the corn. The water was still there, no matter how hard the crossroads worked to conceal it. Nothing had changed. Everything was changing. “If I do that, am I going to survive?” I asked. “Is Sam?”

Mary looked away, but not before I saw the flicker of regret in her empty highway eyes. “I can’t tell you that one way or another. Not for sure.”

“The water—”

“Is a natural death. If it takes you, you go down free.”

The idea that she would let me drown, let me die, when she could have done something to save me . . . it burned. She was my Aunt Mary. She was the woman who had wiped my runny noses and kissed my bruised knees, all while teaching me the strange, careful rules that dictated her existence among the living. She loved me. I knew she loved me. She wasn’t supposed to be willing to stand back and let me go. Even knowing that she had no choice in the matter couldn’t stop my heart from aching.

“You told me to call you if I got into trouble,” I said softly.

Mary turned back to me. Her hair was starting to move of its own accord, not writhing like Megan’s snakes, but rising off her shoulders until it surrounded her head in a luminous cloud. She was glowing. When had she started glowing?

“You called,” she said. “I came. Antimony Price, you stand before the crossroads, where all things are possible, where all things are forbidden. What is your purpose here?”

The water should have been pinning me to the ceiling of the tunnel. Instead, my feet drifted down to the meet the road, and all that there was above me was sky, endless, dust-colored sky, stretching out from hope to horizon. I flexed my fingers again, calling the fire closer to the surface. I might not be able to see or feel the water anymore, but I was cold. I was so damn cold.

Death is cold. “I need to live. I need Sam to live. I need to save my friends.”