Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

It wasn’t like that in the boneyard. The carnival only ever put down shallow roots, clinging just hard enough to keep from being blown away. When they wore out their welcome they were gone, moving on to the next town, or heading for whatever rental property they were using for the winter. Permanence had never been the goal, not once.

Annie wasn’t like that. She hadn’t been willing to say much about where she’d grown up, which made sense, given the whole “actively being hunted by the Covenant of St. George,” but her calendar had been the opposite of his. Summers with the carnival, seeing as much of the world as she could from the boneyard and the midway, and the rest of the year spent under a fixed roof, with a view that never changed.

He rolled onto his stomach, wadding a pillow to support his chin. If their circuit had ever taken them further west, he might have met her sooner. Gawky teenage Annie hanging from the trapeze and criticizing his form. College Annie throwing things and telling him to get faster, what did he think this was, some kind of game? It was like there was a whole life they never got to have together because of stupid geography, and now they weren’t getting to have this life together either, because of the stupid Covenant.

Sam groaned and rolled over again, automatically whisking his tail out of the way so he wouldn’t pin it with his own leg. “This sucks,” he informed the empty room. “Everything about it is awful and I hate it.”

“You and me both, kiddo,” said a flat female voice.

Sam froze.

On the one hand, maybe not the best response to suddenly hearing an unfamiliar woman in his room, having somehow gotten past the locked door without him noticing: he was still in his natural form, after all, and even robbers with shitty ideas about where to look for the next score were likely to notice the giant humanoid monkey in pants. Monkeys did not normally wear pants, or have proportions this close to human, or—

He was spiraling. Great. Well, no. The opposite of great. He should have moved, should have bolted for the bathroom or leapt for the sound of that voice. There was almost nothing in the world as fast as a fūri, except for maybe another fūri. And while the universe could be cruel, he didn’t think it was cruel enough to throw a girl fūri at him while he was busy panicking about his missing, all-too-human girlfriend. That wasn’t funny. That was mean.

“I know you’re not dead,” said the voice, still sounding rather, well, obnoxiously disinterested in the whole situation. She was the one who’d started this. The least she could have done was sound like she meant it. “I have what you might call a second sense for dead people.”

Dead . . . Sam sat up, turned, and scowled at the white-haired woman sitting in the threadbare armchair next to the window. “You’re Annie’s dead aunt,” he accused.

“And you’re smarter than you act,” she replied, with a quick, frosty smile. “Hi.”

She looked younger than Annie, somewhere in her late teens, with long white hair and eyes that made him oddly uncomfortable, although he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why. There was something in the way they reflected the world—or didn’t—that made him want to turn and run and never look back. Humans were predators and so were fūri: he got a certain bloodthirstiness from both sides of his heritage. But this woman . . .

Something in him knew her for a bigger, better predator, and had no interest whatsoever in attracting her attention. Let her sit there in her jeans and yellow peasant blouse, looking utterly innocent. It didn’t matter. The part of him that had evolved to stay alive knew better.

“Uh,” he said. “Hi.”

“It’s Mary, in case you’ve forgotten. Mary Dunlavy.”

“Right.”

“I thought you might like to know that I’ve been keeping an eye on you, and that I’m still looking for Annie. But she’s not dead. I’d know it if she were. She’s out there somewhere, stubborn as ever, and I’ll find her soon.”

Just like that, he was off the bed and standing in front of her, tail wrapped tight around his ankle like he thought he could keep himself from coming untethered from the floor and floating away. He began to reach for her, to shake her until she told him what he wanted to know, but a glance at those eyes made him think better of the idea, and he froze again, hands only half-raised.

Mary looked amused. At least one of them was.

“Where is she?” he asked, somehow managing to make the question sound more like a plea than a demand. “She shouldn’t be out there by herself. She doesn’t even have her mice. She’s going to get hurt. So where is she?”

“Stop,” said Mary. There was ice in her voice, an avalanche packed into that single syllable. Sam shied back before he could stop himself, feeling the hair stand on end all the way along the length of his spine. “You can’t ask me questions, Sam, and you can’t ask me for things. Those are the rules. If you break them, you’ll be sorry.”

“What—” He stopped, catching himself, and eyed her warily. “It sure would be nice if I understood why that was the case, dead aunt lady.”

“Again, it’s Mary,” she said. “How much do you know about ghosts?”

“It sucks that you can ask me questions and I can’t return the favor,” he grumbled. “Ghosts. People leave them behind when they die, sometimes. Nobody really knows why for sure. They haunt houses and stuff, and Grandma has an umbramancer come by the boneyard once a year to make sure none of them have attached themselves to the show. Something about how phantom carnies really mess with insurance rates.”

“That’s a start,” said Mary. “Ghosts are like cryptids or yōkai: one name to describe hundreds of different things. It would take too long to list the things I’m not, so I won’t bother. I am a very specific kind of ghost. I don’t haunt a place: I haunt a concept.”

Sam hesitated. “When Annie introduced us back at the carnival, she mentioned the crossroads. Did she mean . . . ?” He caught himself and groaned. “Fuck I am not good at not asking questions.”

“That’s one of the few you’re allowed to ask.” Mary’s smile contained no pleasure. “You can’t deal with the crossroads if you don’t know what they are, which means the only debt you incur by asking about them is their attention. Normally, I’d say that was debt enough, but I’ve met you, and I know Annie well enough to know what kind of man she’d fall for. You’ll have the crossroads interested in you one way or another.”

“Because that doesn’t sound dire and horrible,” grumbled Sam. “What are the crossroads?”

“They’re where you go when you want something so badly that you’re willing to bargain everything you have against the chance that you might get it.” Mary looked at him calmly. “They’re where brave men sell their souls and good men sell their futures, and bad man sell everything they have. When you go there, when you’re taken there, you tell the shadows what you want. I’m the ghost who tries to talk you out of it.”

“Oh,” said Sam, in a voice that was suddenly small, yet seemed to be too big for the room around them. He felt like he was shouting. “I guess that’s an important job. I still don’t get why I’m not allowed to ask you questions.”

Mary actually smiled at that. “Nicely phrased. You’re catching on. Because I work for the crossroads, because I work through the crossroads, when you talk to me, you’re also talking to them, in a metaphysical sense. I don’t know where Annie is. At the same time, if you said ‘hey, Mary, where exactly is Annie,’ I could take you to the nearest crossing so they could tell you. All you’d have to do is make a deal. It’s just that some—most—of those deals aren’t nice.”

“So you’re the asshole rabbit from Madoka?”

“All right, I can see why Annie likes you so much, but no. The crossroads are the asshole rabbit from your little cartoon. They want you to make deals you can’t live with. They want you to give them everything—everything—in exchange for things you never really needed in the first place. It’s my job to take you to them if you ask. It’s also my job to make you reconsider. Leave the crossroads alone. They’re not for you.”

“Sort of seems like you’re saying they’re not for anyone.”