Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“I grew up with a traveling carnival.”

“Then you’re going to be fine.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Are all ghosts jerks, or just you?”

“All ghosts who willingly associate with the Price family are jerks, because we’re trying to keep up with the rest of the group. And don’t roll your eyes. They’ll stick that way, and you’ll start swinging into things.”

“I’m not Spider-Man,” grumbled Sam.

Someone knocked on the door.

Both Sam and Mary froze before turning, slowly, to look at the door. Sam straightened, tail vanishing as he shifted back into his human form. “Uh, who is it?” he called.

“Samuel? Who are you talking to in there?” The voice was Emery’s.

Sam winced. “Uh, no one? I have the TV on.”

“Don’t you lie to me, young man, I know the difference between a commercial and a conversation.”

“Shit,” muttered Sam. He looked to Mary. “If you’re going to vanish, this is when you do it. Like, right now.”

“No, no, this is way more entertaining,” said Mary. She flickered, disappearing from the chair and reappearing next to Sam. Her clothes had changed during the transition, becoming grayscale—gray jeans, black sneakers, white peasant blouse with crows and tombstones embroidered around the neck and wrists. She beamed at him. “Think I look believably dead?”

“I think you look believably like me getting grounded,” said Sam direly. Emery knocked again. He sighed. “Coming, Grandma!”

Sam barely had the door open before Emery was pushing her way inside. She stopped dead when she saw Mary.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello.”

Mary smiled. Not brightly, but sadly, with the weight of a whole lot of very long roads weighing it down.

“Hi, Emery,” she said. “Long time no see.”

Sam looked back and forth between the two of them, eyes going wide as he added two and two together and came up with a number that was something like four and something like “oh, fuck.” Finally, he managed to squeak, “You two know each other?”

“Your grandmother came to the crossroads a long time ago,” said Mary, voice gentle, like she was trying to explain some terrible idea to a child. “She was worried about a lot of things. Her own daughter, mostly. This was before you, Sam, before you were even a shadow on the horizon. She wanted to purchase a guarantee of a happy future. And I talked her out of it.”

Emery burst into tears and ran the last few feet to Mary, throwing her arms around the other woman’s neck and sobbing into her shoulder. Sam blinked.

“I feel like I’m missing like, two-thirds of this story, and it’s the part that makes it okay for you to make my grandmother cry and say you talked her out of buying a happy ending, so it would be awesome if someone could tell me why I’m not supposed to be angry right now.”

“Because, silly boy, she would have been narrowing her life from a highway to a side street,” said Mary, patting Emery on the back. “No more questions, no more choices, just a single pre-determined path that she would have had no choice but to follow. You, for example. I can guarantee you wouldn’t exist, because you’re way too much of a wild card for the crossroads to be comfortable having in their deck. A half-fūri trapeze artist? Please. You’re a nightmare to any organized plan. Buying a future means selling the ones you didn’t use. That’s a lot of power to waste on making yourself miserable.”

“But she said happy ending,” protested Sam.

“Uh-huh. Ever done drugs?”

Sam froze, looking guiltily between Mary and Emery for several seconds before he said, “I, uh, smoked some weed with Ananta once. She offered, and I was curious, and the carnival wasn’t open. Um. Sorry, Grandma.”

“How did it make you feel?” asked Mary, before Emery could say anything.

“I don’t know. Floaty. Sort of silly. My feet were fascinating, which was good, since I couldn’t tense enough to change forms. Which freaked me out, once I realized it, and then I got into an argument with one of the cobras over whether I was being insensitive for being angry that I couldn’t pass myself off as human anymore.”

“How do you get into an argument with a cobra?” asked Mary.

“The tips of their tails are really flexible. They can use a stylus, and wow, do they know how to swear.” Sam shook his head. “The whole thing made me feel really stupid and sort of trapped, like I didn’t get to decide what I was going to do, I just did it.”

“Great,” said Mary. “Now magnify that feeling. Imagine waking up every morning and just doing things, going through the motions of your life without making any actual decisions. You wouldn’t go to the store because you looked in the pantry and realized you were out of noodles, you would go to the store because your feet had you halfway there before you noticed you were out of bed. Everything would be kismet, which sounds great until you realize that you haven’t decided to do anything in years. Everything happens. You can’t make it stop.”

Sam grimaced. “Okay, that sounds really awful.”

“That’s why she talked me out of it,” said Emery. She reached up and touched Sam’s cheek lightly. “My silly little ideas of what it meant to be happy could never hold a candle to this world.”

“Glad to help,” said Mary. “Now can we talk about how you went and got old? Hen’s teeth, Emery, last time I saw you, you were the hottest thing in six counties. Now you’re down to like, three.”

“Last time I saw you, my daughter was three years old, and I was terrified that raising her on my own would do something to hurt her,” said Emery. “Between her and Sam, I’ve been a mother twice over. That sort of thing ages a body. You don’t look any deader.”

Mary grinned. “Good thing, too. I never did feel much like rotting.”

“What brings you here? Are you—” Emery’s expression hardened, shuttering itself, until her face had become a fortress. “Absolutely not. Samuel Coleridge Taylor, I forbid you to have any dealings with the crossroads.”

“I wasn’t,” Sam protested. “I didn’t even know they existed until Mary showed up and started lecturing me about leaving them alone. Can you please only yell at me for things I’ve actually done?” He realized his mistake too late, and winced.

“You mean like sneaking away to take some girl’s Aeslin mice to the airport?” Emery asked.

“Wait,” said Mary, holding up her hands. “You’re mad at him because he helped the mice? Antimony’s mice? You’re serious?”

“You know her?” asked Emery sharply.

“I’m her babysitter,” said Mary. “I’ve been the Price family babysitter since shortly after I died, back when they were still the Healys, and still believed the rest of the world would eventually allow them to put the Covenant behind them. You’re honestly mad about this? For the love of Hades, Emery, that girl did nothing but save you—”

“She burned my carnival!” Emery snarled.

“You have insurance! You’ll get it back, you’ll get it all back, and she saved you, as surely as I did, by doing her job. That little girl—that child, because they are always children to me, Emery, the only children I’m ever going to have—risked her life on your behalf, and this is the thanks she gets? You berating her boyfriend because he dared keep his word to her? Come on. I thought better of you. Honestly, I’m astonished that you didn’t think better of yourself.”

Mary’s glare had an almost physical presence. Emery held up under it for a few seconds before she wilted, shoulders slumping, and turned her face away.