Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

The shape’s amusement faded into irritation. “Very well. We will give her what she asks—her life, and the life of her lover—in exchange for her power, as collateral against a task to be performed later, at our discretion. We will decide what to ask of her when the time arises.”

Mary grabbed my arm. I turned, startled, to find myself looking directly into her empty highway eyes. They were darker than usual, like an accident had happened just beyond the edge of her irises, sending smoke billowing into her impossible internal sky.

“If you take this, if you do this, you won’t be able to refuse them,” she said, voice low. “When the crossroads call, you’ll have to answer, and if you try to say ‘no,’ they’ll have the right to make you pay. Do you understand? They can enforce your obedience. They’ll have your magic, and that means they’ll have you, no matter how far you run from the road.”

“But I’ll be alive,” I said. “Sam will be alive. We can save the others.”

She nodded minutely. Then, to my surprise, she smiled.

“You people,” she said. Her voice was sad, and fond. “If I hadn’t died before I met you, I’d expect you to be the death of me.”

“Love you, too,” I said.

Mary turned back to the shape. “Antimony Price will accept your offer of her life, and the life of Samuel Taylor, in exchange for her magic to be held as collateral against a future task to be set by the crossroads and communicated through me, as her advocate and representative. Once the task is performed, her magic will be returned. Should she fail the task, her magic may be withheld indefinitely. Her life, however, cannot be revoked, nor can the life of Samuel Taylor. Do we have an accord?”

With a predatory smile, the shape extended what could charitably be referred to as a hand. “We do,” it said.

My skin crawled from the proximity to the whatever-it-was. It was difficult to resist the urge to step backward, well out of its reach. Mary nudged me.

“Shake,” she said. “That seals the bargain.”

Of course, it did.

I reached out and took the shape’s hand in mine. There was no substance to its fingers, and yet somehow, they were entirely unyielding, refusing to bend or give under the pressure of my own. It grasped my hand firmly, still smiling as it shook.

“The compact is sealed,” it said. “You’ll live.”

The fire in my fingers blazed, going from an ember to a forest fire in the matter of a moment. I cried out, trying to pull away, and the shape gripped me even harder, pinning me in place until the flame died, leaving me cold and empty. Then it pushed me away, and the country road was gone, and the sunlight was gone, and Mary was gone, and the water—which had never really disappeared, only faded into inconsequential distance—came surging back, and I was gone, just like everything else.

I was gone.





Twenty-five




“Oh, my sweet girl. I will always love you, no matter what. Now get out there, and kick their asses back to the Stone Age.”

–Evelyn Baker

Lowryland, about to have an even worse night, which is sort of an accomplishment right now

I WOKE UP PRESSED against the base of the bronze Laura and Lizzie statue at the center of the Fairyland hub, my left arm pinned under my body, one leg slung up onto the statue itself, leaving me in an inelegant spread-eagle position that made me incredibly grateful for the existence of jeans. I groaned. The sound awoke a pounding in my head that was almost worse than the tingling in my arm.

Pain meant I was alive. The crossroads had kept their side of the bargain. With the thought came the realization that I couldn’t feel my magic anymore. There was no fire in my fingers and no void in the pit of my stomach for Colin to use as a drain. Regret grew heavy in my chest. My magic had been so happy to see me when I had stepped through the broken mirror. It had stopped hurting me as soon as I had apologized, and now I had sold it to something I didn’t understand but knew enough to be afraid of. I didn’t deserve to get it back. Even if I did whatever the crossroads would eventually ask of me, I didn’t deserve it.

That was a moral dilemma for later. Right now, I needed to find my friends. I needed to find Sam. If the crossroads had saved me, they should have saved him, too—but I had a lifetime of Mary warning me about the kind of tricks they liked to pull. They were a malicious genie trapped in a bottle that spanned the globe, and they would cheat if they had the opportunity to do so. They might save Sam from drowning, only to leave him washed up on the roller coaster tracks, ready to be crushed to death when the trainspotter tried to pull another fast one. They might do almost anything. I had to move.

That was easier said than done. What felt like every muscle in my body protested as I levered myself away from the statue and off the ground. The last time I’d hurt this much, it had been because I’d been hip-checked into the rail around the track by a blocker twice my size. She’d gotten a trip to the penalty box. I’d gotten a bruise that ran the length of my right thigh, black and yellow and blooming like a flower.

The thought reminded me of something else: when the wall had cracked and the water had come crashing down, I’d been wearing my backpack. I wasn’t wearing it now. I looked around, finally spotting the nylon strap in the bushes to my left. I couldn’t run, but I could walk quickly, and that was exactly what I did.

Like everything else, the backpack was drenched. Anything paper that had been shoved in there was ruined now. My skates were soaked. They were still skates, and they still fit my feet, even wet. Hell, the rest of me was so wet that I barely even noticed the discomfort as I kicked off my sodden shoes and yanked the skates on over my equally sodden socks. Everything squelched. I tied the laces tighter. The blisters I was going to get from this were tomorrow’s problem. Right now, I had bigger things to worry about. Like Sam.

Stopping to put my skates on might have felt like a waste of time, but it was actually anything but. Skating bruised and battered is what derby girls do. I might not be able to walk faster than a hobble for the next few days, and that was fine, because I could still skate like the top jammer of the Slasher Chicks.

“I’m the Final Girl, you fuckers,” I muttered, and pushed off, steadily gathering speed as I began to skate through the area, looking for my boyfriend.

Sam was a big guy; he wouldn’t have been thrown into any trees, or at least he wouldn’t have stayed there once the water rolled back. If he’d been knocked out—which wasn’t a bad assumption—he would also be in his heavier fūri form. That was what really worried me. Monkeys have denser bones than humans do, and as a yōkai, Sam had more in common, physically, with the simian side of his heritage. The water had pinned me to the tunnel roof, but Sam? He would have sunk like a stone. There was no telling how much water he’d inhaled while I was bargaining with the crossroads for our lives.

They’d promised me he would live. They hadn’t promised immortality, or indestructability, or even that he’d still be in one piece when I found him. Even with Mary there to keep me from screwing up completely, the situation had been too dire to allow for the sort of careful negotiation that had really needed to happen. I skated faster, my heart hammering in my chest, my mind spinning out every dire scenario it could come up with—and there were quite a few of those. The curse of an active imagination.

The most active imagination in the world couldn’t prepare me for coming around a bend in the path and finding Sam sprawled, motionless, in the middle of a flowerbed.

“Sam!” I skated to his side as fast as I could, dropping to my knees before I’d come to a complete stop. I immediately regretted my lack of kneepads as the pavement stripped away several layers of skin. That was going to sting. And it didn’t matter, because he still wasn’t moving.