Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

We love them. We believe in them. We will die for them and consider our brief lives well-spent, if only it makes them smile for a moment in our memory. We do what we must do, and we have no regrets. Those of us who are lost in service are never truly lost. They await us in the Halls of Heaven.

Mork, though . . . if his faith was wavering, I did not know whether death would carry him to those Halls, or whether he would find the holy light of some other object, some other ideal. I could not let myself be swayed from my devotion, not even for the father of the pups stirring in my belly. If he lost the way, he would be lost to me, and to his descendants, for all of time.

I stopped. Mork stopped with me, ears flat, eyes pleading.

“We must run,” he said. “There may be predators here.”

“I smell no such things, nor poisons, nor other dangers,” I said. “I must pray.”

Our names are things of scent and gesture, intended to be exchanged during catechism and ritual without disruption of the rites at hand. As I must recite this, I shall use the names given to us by the Precise Priestess, for they are meant to be spoken aloud, as part and parcel to the moment.

Mork wrung his paws and twitched his tail and said, “Prayer can wait. We must run.”

“The running will go better and more smoothly if you pray with me.” I looked at him gravely, hoping he would see the necessity in my actions. “Please. Let us remain united in our faith.”

His faith was weaker than mine, more frayed, and yet he was Aeslin: the lure of veneration was more than he could resist. He nodded, whiskers bristling.

“We will pray,” he said. “But we will pray quickly.”

“Yes,” I agreed, and bowed my head, and began: “When first the Precise Priestess was brought before us, She was red of cheek and furious of voice, and those who had been pledged into Her service before even Her mother, the Thoughtful Priestess, knew of her approach rejoiced, for they had a new Priestess to serve in glory—”

Mork echoed what words he could, and we huddled together in the drain that would lead us into the airport, and we had so far yet to go, with only our faith to protect us.



* * *





SAM


The first thing Sam saw when he reached the motel currently serving as a temporary home to the carnival folks was almost enough to make him turn around and keep on driving, choosing discretion as the better part of valor:

His grandmother, Emery Spenser, standing in front of the ice machine with her arms folded and a sour expression on her face. There was no way she could have known when he was going to get back, especially since he hadn’t exactly told her he was going. Which meant she’d been standing there for a while. Maybe for hours.

Which meant he was a dead man.

“At least I know there’s life after death,” he muttered, pulling into the first open spot. He was pretty sure Annie wouldn’t want to fool around once he was a dead aunt. But he knew Mary could touch stuff, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. It wasn’t like he had a choice, seeing as how his grandmother was about to murder him.

He was tired. The scrape on his forehead where the bullet had bounced off still hurt, and maybe it was vain of him, but every time it ached, he worried about whether it was going to scar, which just seemed to make it ache more. He’d been holding it together and human-looking for hours, and all he wanted to do was go to his room, relax, and take a shower long enough to qualify as a drought risk. Was that so much to ask?

Apparently. Because the second he stopped the engine his grandmother came stalking toward him, shoulders set and hands clenched in a way he knew meant trouble. Well, maybe she’d just call him “Samuel” instead of Sam, and—

“Samuel,” she said, through gritted teeth. “Coleridge. Taylor.”

She was using his middle name. He was screwed. “Uh, hi, Grandma,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. At least being yelled at would make it easier to stay tense and hence human. “How’s things?”

“You disappeared,” she spat. “I thought you were dead. Where the hell have you been?”

“Gosh.” He took an exaggerated look at the parking lot around them. Why was he spending so much time in parking lots? It wasn’t fair. Not even a little bit. “This sure is a big, exposed, public place. We should totally discuss family business here.”

Emery narrowed her eyes. “You think I won’t raise my voice to you in private, young man?”

“No, Grandma, I know you’ll raise your voice to me in private, but at least in private, I’ll feel comfortable raising my voice back.” There had been a few incidents, when he was younger, times when his anger had outweighed his ability to focus on the small flexion that kept him looking like a human being and not like a fūri.

(When Annie had asked him to describe the sensation of holding human form, he’d hemmed and hawed and finally said it was like carrying an egg in a spoon. Sure, it was easy enough to start, but the longer he had to focus on the egg, the harder it got to keep it balanced, and to keep himself from saying “to hell with it” and throwing it at the nearest window. Humanity was an effort. Sometimes more of an effort than it was genuinely worth.)

Emery paused before she said, grudgingly, “Come to my room.”

“Okay, Grandma,” he said, and ambled after her, all too aware of the curious eyes watching them through parted motel curtains. If all those eyes had belonged to carnival folk, he would have been a lot more comfortable. Sadly, while they had the numbers, and they had the initial insurance payout keeping them housed, they had yet to displace all the people who’d rented their rooms before the carnival came to town. As those rooms became available, more carnies would move into them, until eventually, they had the whole place to themselves.

This was never going to be more than a brief waystation, but Sam found himself counting the hours until checkout every morning, eagerly waiting to see how many unfamiliar faces would flicker in the lobby and then disappear forever, off to their lives, leaving him alone.

Emery unlocked the door to her room—ground floor, conveniently close to the ice machine and the lobby, where a continental breakfast of bad coffee and worse pastries was set out every morning—and waved Sam imperiously inside. He went, fighting the urge to duck his head and mutter like a naughty child.

As soon as she was inside and the door was closed he relaxed, allowing his body to shift into the form it preferred. The hair atop his head thickened as it became fur, and his tail, always an unwelcome absence, re-extended from his spine and snaked along his leg, finally wrapping tight around his ankle.

Emery watched this process with her usual grim patience—an expression he’d often mistaken for disapproval when he’d been young and stupid and afraid she loved him less because he wasn’t human. It wasn’t that she loved him any less, she’d explained, once she’d finally grasped the root of his concern; it was that she had less respect for the world because it couldn’t allow him to be himself.

“The world doesn’t know what it’s missing, my brave boy,” she’d said, and he’d never worried about being himself in front of her again.

“Samuel,” she said now, her tone filled with regret and disappointment. “Where in the world did you go that was so important you couldn’t tell anyone? Not even me?”

“The airport,” he said. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d say not to go.”

Her eyes grew wide. “The airport?” she demanded. “Sam, you know better! That sort of place—there’s cameras everywhere, government agents, the Covenant—”

“Annie wouldn’t have asked me to take her mice to the airport if the Covenant was going to be there.”

“Annie.” Emery’s voice was suddenly hushed. “You mean the girl who led the Covenant right to us, then burned down our carnival to stop them? The girl who lied to us about everything?”

“Not everything,” he muttered.

It didn’t matter: Emery was on a roll. “I found you bleeding, shot in the head, Sam. Do you know how easily you could have died? I could have been tracking your mother down right now to tell her that her only son was being dissected in some black ops lab, and all because of Annie.”