Page 55 of Magic for Nothing

I blinked. “You mean you really didn’t?” It had been a shot in the dark, intended to deflect. I hadn’t been expecting to hit anything.

Emery sighed. “Umeko was with the show for years. Years. She never seemed to get any older. I assumed, I suppose, that she was some sort of yōkai, something that aged slowly if at all, but it wasn’t my place to ask. We respect the privacy of our performers, as long as they do no harm. There are worse things in the world than spider-women and talking wasps, Annie. You’re young yet, and you’ve been lucky enough not to run afoul of anything truly terrible. If you had, you wouldn’t be here.”

“She means the Covenant of St. George,” said Sam. He shivered, the fur on his head puffing out a bit, like the early stages of a threat display. “They’re zealots and killers, and they’re part of why my mom couldn’t deal with the idea of getting too attached to me. They wouldn’t care that your mice are adorable. They’d just care that they’re too weird to exist, and they’d kill them dead. And you, too, for ‘consorting with demons.’”

“What swell people,” I deadpanned. The tingling in my feet was fading. I sat up in the bed, beginning to massage my right wrist with my left hand. It had been a while since I’d been hurling knives with quite that combination of speed and force. “I don’t know much about Jorōgumo, but it’s possible they have a sort of . . . larval stage where they can pass for ordinary humans. A lot of yōkai go through something like that. So maybe she looked human for so long because she sort of was.”

Emery’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know so much if you’re just a girl from a carnival that got wiped out by wasps?”

“We had a family of kawauso with the carnival for a while. The kids were too young to hold human form very long, so everyone sort of knew, even if most people pretended it was just a really weird otter show. I like to talk to people. I learned some stuff about yōkai. Inasmuch as you can learn stuff about yōkai that applies to more than one type. I mean, the word is sort of Japanese for ‘cryptid,’ but with a lot of other cultural stuff appended.”

Sam and Emery were both staring at me. Well. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Umeko was pretty nasty to me, and I remembered she had a boyfriend, so when I saw her leaving with a townie boy who didn’t even look like he’d graduated from high school, I figured I’d follow and make sure she understood that the night after a death on the grounds was not the time to go messing around.” I paused, and my next question was laden with genuine concern: “Is he okay? Were we fast enough?”

“He is,” said Emery. “We think she had some sort of paralytic in her saliva. She put him to sleep. He was about half-webbed when we opened the RV.” She looked away at the end, eyes darting to the side. Not toward Sam, either: she was avoiding us both.

I took a deep breath and asked, in as gentle a tone as I could manage, “He wasn’t the only one, was he?”

“No,” said Emery, looking back to me. “There were five others, including her boyfriend, Pablo. I didn’t even notice that he was gone. He’d been webbed up in there for so long that he’d become a mummy; we had to identify him by his tattoos. I don’t know what we’re going to do with the bodies. We can’t dump them, or someone will connect them to the carnival. But that boy you saw her take . . . all the others were about the same age. She took teenagers. Their parents must be worried sick.”

“The carnival is still the common factor if you find a way to dump them.” I hated those words. I hated them as they were leaving my mouth, and I hated them even more when I saw them strike home. Emery’s lips turned down in a pained frown that had nothing to do with disapproval, and everything to do with understanding what I was about to say. “Maybe the local police departments will put together that the carnival was in town when the kids disappeared and maybe not, but Umeko is dead, and she’s not going to be taking any more kids. But if they’re all found in the same place . . .”

“Then people are going to ask questions, and we’re not going to have any good answers for them,” said Emery grimly. “They have to be runaways. If they’re found, we’re painting a target on our backs, and we won’t survive whatever comes after.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I could spin this. I could tell the Covenant Umeko had acted alone, and that the rest of the carnival hadn’t known they were harboring a monster; I could tell them I’d killed her myself. Although . . . “What did you do with Umeko’s body?”

“Shoved her in the RV with her victims, so she wouldn’t scare the shit out of people when they came to see what all the screaming was about,” said Sam.

“Language,” said Emery.

“Sorry, Grandma.” He ducked his head, tail twisting around his ankle in a gesture that I immediately translated as shuffling his toes in embarrassment.

“What are you?” I blurted.

“Um,” he said. “Human, on my mother’s side. Fūri, on my father’s.” He looked at Emery for support.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to ask such blunt questions?” she asked.

“He’s a monkey, and a giant spider-woman just tried to kill us both,” I said. “I think the trauma excuses a little rudeness.”

“I don’t mind, Grandma,” said Sam. “She didn’t scream or freak out or anything when I showed up. That’s pretty cool. I’m okay if she wants to ask questions.”

Oh, I wanted to ask questions. I wanted to ask about a hundred questions, and then a couple hundred more follow-ups. yōkai are plentiful in Japan and China, but not many have made the move to North America, which has its own cryptids, not all of whom are friendly to newcomers. The name fūri was familiar in that “I probably saw this once in a book” sense, but it didn’t come with any details.

“Maybe later,” I said, and pushed back the blankets, swinging my feet around to the floor. I was wearing someone else’s flannel pajamas, easily three sizes too big for me. They had a drawstring waist, pulled tight to keep them from falling down. That was a nice touch. I leaned down to roll up the cuffs, running my fingers along the skin of my ankles in the process. It was red and slightly inflamed, like I’d managed to acquire a bad sunburn in the middle of the night.

“You’re going to peel,” said Emery.

“Probably,” I agreed, and stood. My legs supported me. Since that was their job, I was pleased. “Did you throw away my shoes?”

“They were sort of ruined,” said Sam. “You got giant spider-lady guts everywhere.”

“Yeah, well, I was out of knives and options,” I said. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Are you going somewhere?” asked Emery.

I nodded grimly. “Jorōgumo don’t eat much in their spider forms, which is how any of them have managed to survive. I don’t know if they’re cross-fertile with humans, but some therianthropes are—”