Page 40 of Magic for Nothing

Someone landed beside me in the net. I glanced to the side, confirming that it was Sam, completing an unsafely swift dismount. I couldn’t blame him. I would have dismounted in a hurry if this woman had been yelling at me. Speaking of which . . .

“Young lady, you’d best get down from there this instant. Our insurance doesn’t have a line for stupid townies breaking legs on our equipment.” She came to a halt next to the net, folding her arms and glowering at the two of us.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Sorry, ma’am.” I’ve done my share of graceless dismounts, from my share of equipment. No dismount will ever be as graceless, or as swift, as my dismount from that net. I landed on my feet. That was about all that anyone had any right to ask of me, given the circumstances.

“And you!” Her wrath switched to Sam, who dropped down to stand next to me. “What were you thinking? Oh, no, wait, never mind, you weren’t thinking. Really, Samuel, I expected better from you. This is . . . this is . . . I don’t even have words for what this is!”

“Sorry, Grandma,” said Sam.

Since her attention was on him, I took the opportunity to mouth “Coleridge?” at him, raising my eyebrows.

He glowered at me. ‘Shut up,’ he mouthed.

I grinned.

“As for you,” she said, turning back to me in a motion swift enough to effectively smack the smile off my face, “I don’t know where you’re from, but you can go right back there, and tell your little friends that we don’t need your kind here.”

Wait. Crap. This wasn’t what I’d been trying to accomplish. “No, ma’am, I think I’ve managed to give the wrong impression—”

“I don’t,” said Sam.

“—I’m not a townie. I mean, I’m not from this town. My name’s Timpani. I used to be with the Black Family Carnival. I came here looking for a job.”

The woman stopped for a moment, frowning as she looked at me. Finally, she said, “The Blacks, eh? You don’t have that look to you.”

“I’m a Brown, ma’am. I was a knife-thrower and trampoline artist with the show. I wasn’t there when the accident happened, and it took a while for me to, well . . . there was a little money, and I didn’t feel up to dealing with the road, so I didn’t hurry.”

“But now the money’s running out, and you’re getting tired of having the same roof overhead every night, is that it?” she asked. I nodded. She shook her head. “We can’t help you. We’re a full house, and we don’t have room for wild cards.”

“Please, I’m begging,” I said. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“And I’m telling you I’m sorry, but we can’t help you,” she said. “This isn’t a show for dilettantes. I don’t know what you’ve been doing since your show closed, but whatever it was, you can go back to it. Get out of the business, or wait until someone’s hiring.”

“But—”

“Go.” She pointed an unshaking finger toward my things, waiting abandoned next to the bleachers.

I looked at her bleakly, then turned and started back toward where I’d left my shoes. This was dandy. I didn’t know how the Covenant would react when I told them the carnival wouldn’t have me; I couldn’t imagine it was going to be good, for me or for the show. I could tell them why I was really here, blow my cover and explain the situation, but what if the Covenant was watching? More, what if these people were the reason those kids had disappeared? I could tip them off when they really deserved what was coming to them. Or I could refuse to tell them when they were innocent.

Fieldwork was too damn hard for me. I wanted to go home, put my skates back on, and put all this behind me.

My backpack was lying on its side. The top zipper was open. Not a lot; just a few inches. More than wide enough for an adventurous mouse to have squeezed through. “Shit,” I whispered, opening the zipper wider and sticking my head into the bag. I didn’t see any mice. That didn’t mean much. It was a pretty full backpack. Trying not to look like a crazy townie girl who was talking to her dirty underwear, I whispered, “Hey, are you still in the bag? I need you to show yourselves, because I’m getting kicked out.”

No mice answered the call. There was a distinct lack of mouse-ness from the backpack.

“Excuse me, young lady? I need you to put your clothing on and get out of my carnival.”

I pulled my head out of the backpack, shooting a panicked look at the woman, who was closer now than she’d been a few seconds before. “Er,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow.

I could probably leave and trust the mice to find me: Aeslin mice are remarkably good at tracking down the things that matter to them, like cheese, cake, and members of the family. Or I could gamble on the fact that carnies are carnies the world over, and carnies who don’t know about the cryptids they share the road with are rarer than hen’s teeth. (Since female basilisks are also called “hens,” and most definitely have teeth, that’s pretty damn rare.) There was no way the Covenant had eyes in this tent. They wouldn’t need me if they did. Hell, if I played my cards right, this might save me. I took a breath.

“Just one thing,” I said. “Professor Xavier is a jerk.”

“HAIL!” squeaked two tiny voices, running out of the dark beneath the bleachers. One of them—Mindy—clutched a piece of pink circus popcorn in her front paws. Mork was empty-handed, but had added a piece of bright green ribbon to his evolving ensemble, knotting it twice around his tail before tying it off in a festive bow. They ran straight to me, and then up me, scaling my body as easily as if I were a flat surface.

When they reached my shoulder I straightened. Sam was staring at me. So was the woman.