Page 6 of Magic for Nothing

“I think that’s my cue,” I said, keeping my voice as light and unconcerned as I could. “You want the rest of my cookies? Cookies always make you feel better.”

“Okay,” said Fern, with a quick, almost shy smile.

I left her sitting on the bleachers and munching her way through the last of my mother’s cookies. Bribery is sometimes the solution to all the world’s problems.

Elmira lowered her hands when I was close enough to talk to without shouting, and said, “Your cousin’s here.”

“What, Elsie?” I looked around, but didn’t see her. Technically, I have three cousins, but Artie almost never leaves his house, and Sarah has been in Ohio for the last two years. If she was well enough to travel, someone would have told me. “Where?”

“Outside,” she said. “She didn’t want to come in, since Carlotta’s here.” Elmira grimaced. “This is why you shouldn’t shit where you eat, or date where you skate. It makes everything awkward.”

“At least Elsie’s not a skater.”

“No, but she used to be one of our best volunteers and cheering sections, and now we only see her when she’s coming to pick you up or drop you off. She’s had breakups in the league before. I don’t get why this one is so different. She even went to Cherry’s wedding.”

“Look, Carlotta’s your friend and Elsie’s my family, so I don’t think there’s any way for us to have this conversation without someone coming off as a biased asshole,” I said. “Did you tell her practice wasn’t over?”

“I did,” said Elmira. “She said to tell you it’s not an emergency, but there’s a family meeting about your grandfather, and your parents want you there. You’re free to go as far as I’m concerned; it’s sort of refreshing to hear that the two of you aren’t the Boxcar Children or something.”

“Points for the retro reference,” I said, mouth running on autopilot as my brain raced to process this information. The league knows Elsie is my cousin mostly because she’s the one who convinced me to go out for the team: by the time I’d realized I might want a better cover story, it was already too late. That was all they knew about my family, and since Elsie and I don’t look a damn thing alike, it was possible they thought one or both of us had been adopted, which was fine by me. Keeping people from figuring out more about my family than they need to know is part of my job. “It’s really okay if I leave early?”

“It’s fine,” said Elmira. She smirked a little. “But I’m going to need you to help me work on my apex jumps.”

“It’s a deal,” I said, and skated for the locker room.

Here’s the 4-1-1—which is another retro reference that’s probably going to be incomprehensible before too much longer, thank you march of technology. “Here’s the top Google result” might be a better opening. Anyway:

My name is Antimony Price. My friends call me “Annie,” my siblings call me “Timmy,” the people I do roller derby with call me either “Annie Thompson” or “Final Girl,” and if I had a therapist, they’d probably call me on the brink of a serious identity disorder, given all the names I have to juggle on a daily basis. I’m not James Bond or Black Widow. I didn’t go to spy school. I went to something much worse. I went to the Price Family Academy of Hiding in Plain Sight Because Assholes Want to Kill You.

As you can probably guess, our graduation ceremonies are a lot of fun.

See, either two or four generations ago, depending on which branch of the family you start counting from, we were part of an organization of asshole monster hunters called, wait for it, the Covenant of St. George. Yes, the same assholes my sister declared war on while she was live on the air. The Covenant felt, and presumably still feels, that anything they considered “unnatural” should be wiped from the face of the planet, preferably with extreme prejudice. (A lot of their rationale is based on the idea that if something wasn’t on the Ark—as in Noah’s—then it’s evil and bad and doesn’t deserve to exist. Which sort of begs the question of how they got a manifest for that particular voyage.) My great-great-grandparents decided they were done being professional assholes, and walked. Two generations later, my grandmother convinced a Covenant operative named Thomas Price that he was done being a professional asshole, and married him.

Professional assholes do not take kindly to people walking out on them, especially when those people not only walk out, but use all their training and institutional knowledge to set themselves up as the competition. Where the Covenant kills, we protect. We nurture, we teach, and we try to find the delicate balance between the needs of the human community and the needs of the cryptid community. And because we’re not really excited by the idea of being assassinated for our beliefs, we do it all while keeping ourselves hidden from the world. Hence my having a different name when I’m skating. Hence my sister wearing a wig when she dances, and my brother going to the middle of nowhere and Clark Kent-ing his way through a herpetology degree.

All of which Verity fucked seven kinds of up when she declared war. (Mom says I shouldn’t blame her, since it’s not like she decided to summon the giant interdimensional snake on live television. I say we still suffer from the Healy family luck we inherited from Grandma Alice. If Verity hadn’t been there, the snake wouldn’t have been there either.) See, up until that moment, we had mostly managed to convince the professional assholes that we were all dead—or, more accurately, that most of us had never been born, on account of Grandma Alice and both her children having been killed when the Covenant came after them in Michigan. It may have been the biggest hoax any member of our family ever successfully pulled, and it was all undone in an instant because Cryptozoologist Barbie just wanted to dance.

For the last three months, my entire extended family has been on high alert, waiting to see whether or not the Covenant of St. George had access to either basic cable or the Internet, and more importantly, what they were going to do about Verity’s little stunt. Our code for Covenant action getting started?

“It’s about your grandfather.”

In other words, we were screwed.

Elsie was waiting outside the warehouse, her little Honda snuggled up to the curb like the two of them were planning an elopement. As usual, her windows were down, but no bubblegum pop blasted from the stereo; the car was eerily silent. I approached cautiously.

“Elsie?”

“Get in,” she said, not taking her hands off the wheel, not turning her head. Her breakup with Carlotta had been ugly enough to have me and Artie quietly plotting about filling the other woman’s apartment with spiders until Elsie caught on and asked us to leave her ex alone. Since then, Elsie had stayed in the car when she came to pick me up, and never risked catching a glimpse of the woman who broke her heart.

“Right.” I slung my gym bag into the backseat, where the stink would hopefully be a little less offensive, and slung myself into the front, taking slightly more care about where I landed. I used fumbling with my seatbelt as an opportunity to take a good look at my cousin, trying to get a read on the situation from her.

Elsinore Harrington—“Elsie”—inherited what most of us think of as the Healy “look.” She’s short, curvy without being aggressively stacked, blonde, and adorable. Drop her in 1940s Hollywood and she’d be running the place inside of the week. She’d probably mourn the limited range of available hair dye shades, but then she’d lead the fashion color revolution a few decades early, and make it possible for the humanoid cryptids with naturally blue-and-green hair to come out in public much sooner. Today, the bottom two inches of her hair were dyed a shockingly bright aquamarine, subtly blending up into a soft blue-green before melding into her natural blonde. She was wearing a Slasher Chicks booster T-shirt and well-worn jeans, and she looked more somber than I’d ever seen her.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“Oh, you know.” She put the car in gear, pulling away from the curb and hitting the button to roll up the windows in the same motion. Once we were moving, and she was reasonably confident we couldn’t be overheard, she said, “Verity called to check in.”

Verity was in New York, helping to marshal the cryptids who lived there in anticipation of a Covenant attack, and making sure the local Nest of dragons—which included the last known living male of their species—was locked down. I don’t like my sister much, if at all, but I have a lot of respect for the way she does her job. If you want to prepare the cryptids in an urban area for disaster, she’s the girl to call.