Page 58 of Magic for Nothing

Sixteen

“I don’t care what else you do. Just come home to me.”

—Alice Healy

The Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, outside the RV that used to belong to Pablo and Umeko

SAM WAS STILL A MONKEY when I trotted up to Umeko’s RV. The ground around it was shredded and torn, commemorating our battle, and a large patch was stained with grayish sludge. That must have been where I’d smashed through her body. The grass there was dead. The grass immediately around it was dying. Just the sight was enough to turn my stomach.

“Who was calling?” demanded Sam. Apparently, my brief time in the safe harbor of his good graces was coming to an end, and we were once again sailing the choppy seas of him being a total asshole all the goddamn time. That was almost comforting. I’d only been with the carnival for a little while, but I had a lot more experience with Sam being a dick than I did with him being nice to me.

“Insurance,” I said. “I’m the sole survivor of the family carnival, which doesn’t come with all that much in the way of money, but does come with a lot of ‘hey, we want to make sure you’re not secretly a serial killer.’”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Good to know.” Sam looked at the closed RV door. The weird cottony stuff still covered the windows. In the daylight, it was much easier to tell that it was webbing, piled thick and tight against the glass. “How did we miss this?”

“You knew her. Them. They were friends of yours. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time waiting for my friends to turn into killers.”

“You said ‘killers.’” He turned to look at me. “Don’t you mean ‘monsters’?”

Ah. So this was what had taken us back to Assholeville, where Sam was mayor and I was a threat to his way of life. “No,” I said. “I meant ‘killers.’ Umeko wasn’t a monster. If she’s been with you for years and seemed human all that time . . . maybe she didn’t know how to be a Jorōgumo without hurting people. I’d probably freak out pretty hard if I woke up one morning with four extra limbs and no hands. There was no one here to tell her it was normal and teach her what to do.”

Sam stared at me. “You’re serious.”

“I am. I mean, I’m sorry Pablo died, I don’t know if he was like your BFF or something, although I guess probably not if it’s been this long without you noticing. But it wasn’t Umeko’s fault that she didn’t have a guidebook for being what she was. She was killing people. That’s a choice she made, and I’m not sorry she paid for it. I am sorry she wound up in that situation in the first place.” I shook my head. “If I were an actual spider-centaur, I’d go to Comic-Con as the Stalk from Saga and get my picture taken with every famous person I could find.”

Sam was still staring at me, looking increasingly dubious. “Were those actual words, or did you get nervous and vomit up a bunch of random syllables?”

“It’s good to know that even when you’re uncomfortable, you can still be a dick,” I said. “I get why you’re uncomfortable. I’d be uncomfortable, too, if our positions were reversed. And I sort of get why your grandmother is letting me look into this with you.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think you like humans much, and that’s sort of dangerous, given how outnumbered you are.” I left Sam gaping at me as I walked up the steps to Umeko’s RV. The door wasn’t locked. It probably should have been. I took one last breath of fresh air, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.

Being a two-person unit, this RV was substantially larger than mine, although it followed most of the same structural notes: there’s only so much that can be done with a house on wheels. The door was connected to the main living space, the front room and kitchen, while a short hall at the back led to the bedroom and chemical toilet. At least, I assumed that was where it went: it was sort of hard to tell, on account of all the webbing.

It wasn’t just the windows Umeko had covered in thick, cottony strands. It was the walls, and the ceiling, and the furniture, creating a silken tunnel leading where the hall had been. It looked like a tarantula’s burrow. It looked like the sort of thing that would make a Jorōgumo feel safe when everything was falling apart around her.

The floor was relatively free of webbing. I picked my way carefully across the room to what looked like a bookshelf, based on the shape it made through the thread, pulling a knife from inside my shirt and beginning to slice my way inside. The webs here had been exposed to the air long enough that they’d lost most of their stickiness; this wasn’t a hunting burrow. It was home.

Cutting through the silk was unsurprisingly difficult. The stuff was thick and sturdy, intended to form a permanent barrier. I kept working until I reached the bookshelf, peeling sheets of webbing aside as I looked at the titles. There were several books on Japan, and a bestiary I recognized from our library at home. I worked it free, flipping through until I found the entry on the Jorōgumo. Umeko had scribbled notes in the margins all around the description of the yōkai, culminating in an inky scrawl.

“‘My skin is not my own,’” I read aloud. “‘Things are moving inside me. How do I make this stop? Help. Help.’ Sam?”

“Yeah?” His voice came from right behind me, gruff and heavy with suspicion.

I hadn’t heard him enter: calling his name had been an educated guess. It’s always nice to know that I can still predict the movements of my enemies. “Did Umeko know?” I turned to face him. “About you?”

He raised an eyebrow. It was impressive, given how low his hairline currently was; the expression caused the eyebrow to effectively disappear, turning his entire face into a quizzical look. “I don’t think she could have missed it,” he said. “People who don’t like the fact that the boss’s kid is a monkey don’t last long around here.”

“She still thought she was totally alone.” I handed him the book, and watched as he read Umeko’s notes. His eyebrow dropped back into its original position. His whole face fell a moment later, leaving him looking despondent and ashamed. “I guess monkeys still being mammals meant she didn’t feel like she could come to you when she started to change.”

“I had a crush on her when I was a kid,” he admitted. “She was pretty, and she laughed a lot, and I thought maybe she’d be my girlfriend. She told me she was too old for me and too different from me, and one day I’d meet a nice fūri girl and settle down. So she knew the name for what I am. I don’t know why she wouldn’t ask for help.”

I did. My family is accepting of all the differences in the world. No one batted an eye when my grandparents adopted Sarah, and Johrlac are commonly accepted as the most dangerous cryptids in the world. We have two dead aunts, my cousin is half-incubus, my other cousin is half-succubus, and our walls are full of talking mice. And I still hadn’t told them when my fingers started getting hot, or when I’d accidentally set fire to my sheets in the night. Some things are a step too far. They’re terrifying and personal, and telling people about them would make them real. Worse, telling people about them might make those people look at you differently. It might make them change the way they treat you. I wanted to be Antimony Price, little sister, roller derby girl, and journeyman cryptozoologist, not Antimony Price, living fire hazard. So I’d kept my mouth shut in the beginning, and the more time that passed, the more impossible it had felt to tell.