Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

My tormenter straightened, back on comfortable ground. Her cronies giggled behind their hands. I wanted to tell them they were acting like children, but that would have been an insult to children everywhere. Bullying isn’t tied to age. It’s tied to who a person is, and sadly, these people were more interested in being ugly assholes than they were in being decent human beings.

“Did you hear that raccoons got into the dumpsters out back again?” she asked, all wide-eyed and innocent.

A place as big as Lowryland makes a lot of trash, and it can’t all be burned on-property. There’s recycling, and sorting, and disposal to be dealt with. When a guest throws something away, it’s carted off by custodial and added to the mountain of debris we dispose of daily, bussing it—literally—to the dumpsters. They’re concealed from all public view by a concrete corral nearly half a mile from even the employee parking, where the garbage trucks can come and go without being seen.

It was no surprise when raccoons got into the damn things. If anything, it was a surprise when the raccoons didn’t. “No, I hadn’t. Thanks for the update. Does custodial know?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, and thrust a brown paper bag at me. “Here.”

I didn’t take the bag. I’m not that stupid. “What’s this?”

“We just thought that if you had someone to bring you a lunch, you wouldn’t need to go diving in the garbage anymore,” she said, eyes wide. She dropped the bag onto the bench. The rest of the girls burst into triumphant laughter as she turned and sashayed away.

I watched her go, clenching my hands to keep myself from burning the whole damn place down. It’s not that I hate my job. It’s that I hate the people I have to do it with.



* * *





Fortunately for my sanity, none of the mean girls were assigned to my part of the Goblin Market, at least not this morning, and it wasn’t like they’d risk their usual shenanigans in front of the guests anyway. Fighting amongst ourselves is fine, as long as we do it where no one could see. Upsetting a paying customer, now, that’s grounds for immediate termination, no take-backs, there’s the door. So I stood in Fine and Fair, helping guests find genuine Lizzie and Laura dolls, assisting lost children, and generally doing whatever needed to be done at any given moment.

“Excuse me,” said a familiar voice. “Do you have this in a medium?”

I turned, already smiling, to face my Aunt Mary. “I’ll check the back,” I said.

She returned my smile. As was usually the case when she appeared at my work, she was dressed to blend in: jeans, sneakers, and a dark purple shirt she’d probably copied from a Hot Topic store window, with an art nouveau Lizzie surrounded by a border of pomegranate flowers stenciled down the side. Her long white hair was pulled into a braid. There was nothing she could do about her eyes, which looked like a hundred miles of empty highway, exit markers marching off toward the horizon, but most people either wouldn’t notice them or wouldn’t allow themselves to think too hard about what they’d seen. The dead walk among us. Denial keeps that from becoming too big of a problem. Usually.

Mary Dunlavy isn’t a blood relative, but she’s absolutely a member of the family, because family is more than blood. My Uncle Ted isn’t a blood relative—not of me—but he’s married to my Aunt Jane, and he’s the father of two of my cousins. Mary didn’t live long enough to marry in. She just babysat for my grandmother and my father and my aunt and my siblings . . . and me. She only crossed the country, traveling miles from her own grave, to stay with us and make sure we were safe. She’s always a crossroads and a call away, and while there are rules that govern what she can and can’t do, being a ghost who chooses to exist primarily among the living, she does as much as those rules allow.

She was also the only member of my family who knew where I was hiding. Because she wasn’t a blood relative when she was alive, her presence wouldn’t tip the balance toward the Covenant being able to find me, and because ghosts go wherever the hell they want, her showing up wasn’t going to trigger any alarms.

“Thank you,” she said, and leaned closer. “How you doing, kiddo?”

Being called “kiddo” by someone who looked like she hadn’t even finished high school—mostly because she hadn’t; she’d been dead before graduation—would have been amusing, if it hadn’t been Mary. As it was, being called anything else would have seemed strange. Normal is what you make it.

“Getting by.” I started walking through the store. She trailed behind me, still projecting the overall impression of a girl who wanted to know whether we had her size. As long as I kept smiling and kept my voice low, no one would notice anything out of the ordinary. That’s what I was aiming for. “How’s everybody else?”

Mary frowned. She didn’t like it when I refused to give her the details on my life, saying that as my only aunt with access, it was her duty to keep an eye on me. She wasn’t wrong about that. If she hadn’t been able to check in, I would probably have been even twitchier than I already was. Mary was my last connection to home. I was holding on with both hands.

“Worried about you,” she said. “Your mother wants you to call.”

“My mother always wants me to call.”

“Yes, and she’s got the right idea. There are ways—”

“We don’t know what resources they have. I wasn’t there long enough, and I was only in one facility. They could have a whole division of Arties all tapping away, looking for ways in.”

Mary gave me a disapproving look. “You don’t believe that.”

“Does it really matter what I believe?” Being a Lowryland Cast Member had done a lot for my ability to keep smiling even as the life drained out of my voice, leaving me a pleasant, amenable robot designed to please the guests without letting on that I was miserable. “It’s not safe. Mom knows that, or she would already have threatened you with an exorcism to get you to tell her where I am. She tells you she wants me to call because she knows that’s what a good mother would do, not because she expects me to do it.”

My mother is a good mother. She has three kids and two kids-in-law, and she loves us all with the fierce protectiveness of a mama bear trying to keep its cubs alive. She’s also a pragmatist. She wasn’t raised by humans—my maternal grandparents are a cuckoo and a Revenant, and try explaining that when it’s time to draw the family tree—and they taught her early that sometimes, when the door closes, the people on the outside are on their own. The survival of the whole matters more than the survival of the individual pieces. If bringing me home meant endangering the rest of the family, she would let me stay away. She would trust me to take care of myself. But she would keep asking me to call because that’s what a human mother would do.

Mary sighed. “I don’t like this.”

“I know. I don’t expect you to.” We had reached the short corridor between the store and the backroom, where additional stock would be found, if we had any. I stepped into it. Mary followed me, coming as far as a guest reasonably could, while I hovered at the edge, out of the view of any cameras. There were no listening devices—yet. Give corporate a few more years and they’ll figure out a way to cram those into their surveillance system.

Hopefully, I’ll be long gone by then, having figured out a way to safely thwart the Covenant and return home. That’s the trouble with going into hiding to escape from a multinational organization with unknown resources and capabilities. I don’t have an exit plan. What I knew to do began and ended with “run.” I’d run. I’d found a place to hide. Now I got to live with it.

“My hands are heating up again,” I told Mary, keeping my voice low. We could get away with maybe five minutes of unauthorized break, assuming none of my managers wandered by and decided to ask why I was spending so much time on one guest instead of keeping the whole floor happy. “I’ve managed not to set anything on fire, but it’s getting harder.”

“You should do a controlled burn,” said Mary. “On your next day off, find a trash can and just let loose.”