Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“Do you even get wrinkly, or do your magic monkey powers keep that from happening?”

This time Sam didn’t freeze, even though that might have been the safer response. He yelped, jumping, and yelped again as his feet tried to go out from under him. Flailing wildly, he grabbed the shower curtain, which promptly came off in his hands, leaving him soaking wet, stark naked, and holding a sheet of opaque plastic over his genitals.

Mary, sitting on the sink and filing her nails with a bright pink file, offered him a tight-lipped smile. “Don’t worry, buddy, I’m not here to check out your junk. Your modesty is safe with me.”

“Bathroom,” Sam squeaked.

“Yup. It is.” Mary went back to filing her nails. “I’m glad you have that down. I’d be really distressed if you didn’t know what a bathroom was. Carnie childhoods can be weird, but you should still know about showers.”

“If I throw the soap at you, do I somehow piss off the unspeakable eldritch entity that you serve?”

“Nope.” Mary studied her thumb. “But I do disappear, and then you have nobody to talk to.”

“I don’t like to have conversations while I’m naked.”

“I’ll be sure to let Annie know.”

Sam threw the soap.

Mary disappeared.

Sam waited for a count of five before letting go of the shower curtain and turning off the water. Even if he’d trusted her not to reappear, which he didn’t, the moment was gone; all the tension he’d been trying to wash away was back, and it had brought some friends along, to make sure it didn’t get lonely. At least now he was clean.

Rehanging the shower curtain was tricky and annoying, and much of the bathroom received a thorough dousing before he was done. Including his clothes, and the towels. Sam looked down at himself, groaned, and hopped back into the tub before tensing in that so-specific way and shifting back into his human form. The water that had been trapped in his fur—which wasn’t plentiful, but was dense—dropped to the floor with a loud splatting sound and ran down the drain.

“Everything about this day can die,” he muttered, getting out of the tub a second time and scanning for something dry enough to cover himself. The options were slim at best.

“Oh, I am going to regret this,” he said, and gripped the doorknob before saying, loudly, “Mary, if you’re out there, please leave for like, five minutes so I can cover my ass. Literally.”

When he opened the door, there were no visible ghosts in the room. He supposed she could be there and invisible, as could any number of her friends. There could be a whole ghost convention going on, all of them snickering behind their phantom hands and pointing at—well, pointing at stuff. Stuff he didn’t want ghosts to be pointing at. He hurried to the dresser, digging out a pair of sweat pants and yanking them up over his waist before letting out a relieved breath.

“Okay,” he said. “I can do this. I can deal with this.” He looked down at himself. If he was already walking around looking human, he might as well take advantage of it and visit the vending machines.

Ananta was there when he came strolling up, a half-filled cooler in her hands, kicking the ice machine to keep it spitting out ice. Sam stopped, raising an eyebrow.

“Are you gonna build a snowman?” he asked.

“I’m cold-blooded, Sam,” she said, and kicked the machine again. “If I built a snowman, I would slip into a state of hibernation, and no one would get me out of it until next spring. No, I am not going to build a snowman.”

“There are these things called ‘gloves,’” he said. “You wear them and your hands stay warm, and then you can build all the snowmen you want.”

“Asshole,” she said fondly. “My room doesn’t have a fridge, so I have to keep the dead rats on ice. And we go through a lot of rats in my room.” Her room, and the trailer she kept parked right outside of it. CAUTION: LIVE REPTILES was stenciled on both sides and the rear doors, and Sam was pretty sure it was the safest vehicle any of them had. No sensible car thief would go straight for the one thing on wheels that was guaranteed to be full of snakes.

“Doesn’t that get, you know, old?” Sam asked uncomfortably, thinking of the mice and the way they had bowed to him, their clever little paws that were really hands cast in a very different scale. There were so many things in the world that could hurt them, or devour them, and he had put them down and walked away.

“If you have a suggestion on how to convince my brothers to eat pizza, you have my attention.” Ananta kicked the ice machine again. Another spray of cubes flew out. “As it is, I’m lucky when I can get them to eat their rats. They want hamsters all the time, spoiled little brats that they are.”

“Okay, well, I know that this is both your culture and your biology, but I’m a mammal, so this is taking a sharp left into Creepytown for me,” said Sam, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Ananta. “I can eat pizza.”

“Yeah, but you put raw chicken gizzards on top.”

“It’s still pizza. That is, in fact, the beauty of pizza.” Ananta lifted the cooler onto her hip, giving Sam an assessing look. “What brings you out here? Your grandmother was ready to murder you earlier. I figured you’d be on house arrest.”

“We talked it out.”

“You mean you yelled it out.”

“Same difference.” He moved toward the soda machine, digging in his pocket for the quarters he’d snatched off the dresser. “We’re cool. We just had to have the Annie talk. You know, the whole ‘I am not abandoning my . . . Annie because you don’t like her family, and it’s not reasonable for you to expect me to’ thing.”

“Uh-huh,” said Ananta. “This makes what, round twelve?”

“I think fourteen.” He jabbed the button for a Pepsi. The machine made a clunking sound. Sam scowled at it. “I think maybe we’re cool now, though. She really seemed to be listening.”

“Uh-huh. Didn’t she seem to be listening last time? And the time before that? And the time before that?”

Sam hit the machine. His soda still did not appear. “She’s going to have to admit that I’m an adult eventually. It’s sort of scaring her. After Mom, she’s way worried about me disappearing.”

“That’s good, because you’re going to.” When Sam shot her a wounded look, Ananta shrugged. “It’s true. No shame in it. Young things grow up and run away to find a place where they can be adult things without being treated like they’re never going to understand the world. When I finish escorting my brothers around the country and settle them somewhere, I’m going to go home to my parents, and they’ll treat me like an adult, because they had that break between me leaving as a child and me returning as a woman.”

“Oh,” Sam said. He hit the machine again, hesitated, and asked, “Why are you going back to them?”

“Lots of reasons, chief among them that I’m too old to marry.” Ananta’s smile was brief and wry. “Biology is not on our side when we’re forced to live the way we are now. For me, my window to meet a boy and decide he was the one for me closed with puberty. I needed time to acquaint myself with his venom. Not to become immune to it—I’m immune to all venom, wadjet or no—but to teach my own to sing in harmony with his. Otherwise, no eggs.”

Sam paused. “Uh.”