Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

Fighting to keep it together, I pressed my ear against his chest, relaxing only when I heard the distant, steady beat of his heart. He was unconscious. He wasn’t dead.

“Hey.” I sat up, gripping his shoulders and giving him a shake. His head lolled, but he didn’t respond. I shook harder. “Hey. Wake up. We need to go fight a bunch of asshole Harry Potter wannabes to get our friends back.”

Still he didn’t respond. I sighed.

“I didn’t want to do this,” I said, and slapped him.

Hitting your friends without their consent is generally not a good idea, and is a good way to end a friendship. Hitting your significant others without their consent is the sort of thing that leads to breakups and restraining orders. Under the circumstances, and in the absence of smelling salts, I figured he’d forgive me.

Sam groaned. I slapped him again. He groaned louder. I pulled back my hand for one more hit, and stopped as something grabbed my wrist—something wet and hairy and flexible. A glance confirmed that it was Sam’s tail, and I felt something in my chest unsnarl, even before I turned to look at him. His eyes were open. He looked confused, but his eyes were open, and he was looking at me, and he was alive. The crossroads might have tried to cheat. They hadn’t quite succeeded.

“Annie?” he said, bewildered. “What the fuck . . . ?”

“Their trainspotter threw a roller coaster at us.”

He blinked. “I hate that those words made sense in that order. But it does explain why I feel like I’ve been hit by a train.”

“Because you were.” I stood, bracing myself to keep from rolling away before I offered him my hands. “Up. We have to move. They probably think we’re both dead, but that’s only going to last until their routewitch talks to the paths, or someone thinks to come out and look for a body.”

“More hate,” said Sam. He took my hand, wobbling as he got his feet under himself and slowly, awkwardly stood. Then he shook himself, sending drops of water scattering in all directions. When he was done, he was dryer, and fluffier than I had ever seen him.

It was enough to make me smile, if only for a moment. “Nice hair.”

“You’re one to talk.” He ran a hand over the top of his head as he looked around, tail curling and uncurling anxiously behind him. “You know this place better than I do. Where do we go?”

“This way,” I said, and pointed before I started to skate.

Neither of us was at our best, but I’m a good enough skater that I was able to build up a good head of steam, and when something went whipping by to my left, it was no surprise to see that it was Sam, using the lights and overhanging tree branches to travel through the Park at an impressive speed. He was holding back, circling me, allowing me to be the one who guided us to the goal. I flashed him a thumbs-up and turned, heading down a narrow side path toward the Midsummer Night’s Scream.

Their trainspotter had been strong enough to wrest the Sea Dragon off its tracks, but that would have taken a lot out of him, and unless they were running a coaster somewhere else in the Park—which I was pretty sure I would have been able to hear—he was still going to be drained. That was good. He couldn’t hit us with another train. That didn’t mean Emily was at anything other than full strength, and while routewitches are more defensive than offensive, they’re still dangerous.

With the two witches dead, we were down to a routewitch, an ambulomancer, a trainspotter, and a sorcerer. Not the sort of spread that seemed like a good time, but at least none of them were particularly complementary. Their powers weren’t designed to work together. The witches had probably been able to bridge the gaps, making the cabal more cooperative, less competitive. Now they were gone, and we were racing toward a four-way boss fight.

“Sam!” He stopped swinging and waited for me to catch up, moving more slowly to keep pace as I said, “Joshua’s the trainspotter. Don’t get between him and anything with more than four wheels. Emily’s going to have trouble getting a fix on you if you stay off the ground.”

He looked concerned. “What about you? You’re on the ground.”

“I’m hoping the roller skates will confuse her.” It was a foolish hope. Wheels have never confused a routewitch before. I was more hoping I could deliver an elbow to her chin before she had a chance to do anything.

“Nope,” said Sam, and grabbed my shoulders with his feet, wrapping his tail around my waist for good measure before he resumed his forward momentum. “Not going to go on a hope. Going to go on a ‘definitely and also we’re going to survive.’ Now tell me where to turn.”

I thought about arguing, and decided against it just as quickly, gripping his ankles to stabilize myself as I said, “Head left. The coaster will be right ahead of us.”

“Got it.” He didn’t seem to be weighed down by my extra mass at all, and kept swinging smoothly onward, expression grim. “What else do I need to know?”

“Without his wand, Colin has a lot of technique, but not that much raw power. I think that’s why he was siphoning mine.” A sorcerer who didn’t have the strength to back up his threats would be easy pickings in the wider world—unless he surrounded himself with allies and occasionally tricked a younger, stupider magic-user into doing something that they shouldn’t. I had made him stronger. I had made him legitimate.

I had never felt so foolish in my life.

“What about the other lady?”

“She’s an ambulomancer. She draws power from distance traveled, but only when she does it on her own two feet.” I hated trying to unsnarl the delicate distinctions between the different types of magic-users. The fact that Sam wasn’t slowing down and I had to keep pulling my legs up to keep from slamming into things wasn’t helping. “A routewitch gets power from distance, period. Roller skates, bare feet, cars, whatever. As long as they’re on the ground, they’re gaining strength. An ambulomancer gains power faster, but has to keep their feet anchored.”

“What do they do?”

I was about to answer when Sam swung into an invisible barrier, losing his grip on the branch he’d been using and sending us both toppling toward the ground. I only had a few seconds to figure out my landing. Calling on everything I’d learned from gymnastics and cheerleading—and a few things I’d learned from roller derby—I bent my knees, braced my shoulders, and hit hard.

Dropping eight feet onto pavement in roller skates may never rank among my top ten favorite activities. At least I was in footwear designed to protect my ankles. I’ve seen my sister do similar drops in high heels, and somehow her legs are not shapely sacks of gravel barely held together by her muscular system.

Sam dropped next to me, landing harder, but with a little less visible pain. He gave me a wide-eyed look. “Assuming that’s what they do,” he said.

I nodded. “Yeah. Barriers. Ambulomancers are the reason that sometimes a road goes on forever, and sometimes it’s like a quarter of a mile long.”

“So how do we fight it?”

Normally, this was where I would have called for Mary, or better yet, Rose. Normally, I wasn’t also dealing with a routewitch. I frowned at the nothingness in front of us before saying, “They want us there. They want us to come to them. So there has to be a way in.”

“Won’t that be like running into a blind canyon because the villain wants you to?”

“It would be, except that it’s not possible to have only one way in. That would mess up the pressure.” I looked wildly around, finally spotting the charred wall near the site of the first accident in my recent chain. “This way.”

I skated for the employee door with Sam on my heels. When I found it locked, I pulled one of the knives from inside my shirt—how I hadn’t been shredded by my own weapons when the water pinned me to the ceiling, I had no idea—and slammed it down on the hasp, breaking the cheap padlock. Sam blinked, looking impressed, and didn’t say anything. He just followed.

We made our way across the employee walkway to the first tunnel door. Unlike the gate, it wasn’t locked. I pulled it open, and Sam grinned, a sharp, virtually feral expression.