Page 61 of Magic for Nothing

“There should have been!” Break, resume. Sam scowled at me. “How good do you think you are?”

Break, resume. “I’m not bad.”

“Then come over here. This is confusing.”

I blinked, momentarily grateful for the momentum that was already taking me away again. Did I really want to do this? I’d known him less than a week, and he’d been an absolute jerk to me for more than half that time. He might drop me just for fun.

And if he did, there was a net. I know how to fall. There was nothing to lose by trying, and quite a bit to gain. When my momentum carried me back to him, I let go of the swing, hands outstretched to grab hold. He caught them with his feet, which was a little odd, and proceeded to jackknife on the swing, bringing me up so that I could grab hold of it. We wound up face-to-face, our noses only inches apart, with my hands to either side of his. We were still swinging.

“You weren’t kidding about having some trapeze training,” said Sam.

“Nope.”

“Your form’s shit, though.”

His tone was goading—he was trying to pick a fight in whatever way he could—but that didn’t matter, because he was right. I shrugged as much as my current position allowed and said, “I haven’t been practicing much lately. Hopefully now that I’m working with the show, your grandmother will let me on the swings.”

“Oh, yeah. The insurance thing.” Sam smiled a little. “I promise if you fall, I’ll totally lie and say you tripped over something on the ground.”

“I’m going to hold you to that.” It was almost soothing, swinging back and forth like this, letting Sam be the one to compensate for our combined weight on a single trapeze swing. “I really want Emery to let me perform. Knives or trapeze or whatever.”

“Why? What makes it so important to you?”

Because it was something I couldn’t do at home; because it was something that would make me feel like I was a part of this show, and not a liar skating across the surface. Because it would let me burn off some of the nervous energy that writhed and twisted underneath my skin, turning every move I made into the rough action of flint against stone. The more restless I became, the more fires I set. I’d never even felt my hands heat up on the derby track. There had to be a correlation.

Because I wanted to fly.

“I want to be useful. I’m not a very good candy girl. I don’t like people enough for them to feel like buying things from me.”

Sam snorted. “Okay, wow, ‘I’m a jerk’ is the best reason I’ve ever heard for letting somebody throw knives at people.”

“I know my own strengths.” My shoulders were beginning to shake in a way that spoke of muscle fatigue. I grimaced. “Can you get us to the platform?”

“Sure thing.” Sam pulled back, setting up the momentum for a harder swing. All the amusement was gone, replaced by a serene professionalism. No one screws around on the flying trapeze. That sort of thing gets people killed.

Maybe it was the shift in our speed, or maybe it was just my arms finally giving up on my listening to them. Whatever the reason, my left hand slipped, dropping me into a one-handed grip. I barely had time to widen my eyes before my right hand slipped as well, and I was falling.

Sam’s tail wrapped tight around my left ankle, jerking me to an abrupt stop.

“Hey!” I yelped. “Watch it, Spider-Man!”

“Calm down, I’m not going to Gwen Stacy you,” he said.

I blinked. “You know Spider-Man?”

“Uh, hello, not culturally illiterate here; also, a monkey.” Sam stopped working the swing. It lost momentum until we were hanging in the middle of the trapeze, his tail still around my ankle, keeping me from falling into the net below. Not that far below; the tent was thirty feet high, giving us a twenty-foot trapeze. Sam was six feet tall, and his tail extended about three feet past his toes, giving me an eleven-, maybe twelve-foot drop from where I dangled. Not too bad.

“I think the only thing I read more than Spider-Man comics when I was a kid was this beat-up old version of Journey to the West that Grandma got for me,” he continued, before saying, “Brace yourself.”

He let go of the swing.

I yelped. Sam laughed. We weren’t plummeting; we’d stopped almost as soon as we’d started. I looked up. He had hold of the swing again, with his left hand only. The resulting slant in his body had dropped me easily another foot toward the net.

As I was currently angled, I was going to land on my head. Well. That, at least, was something I could fix, and while my shoulders may have suffered during my Covenant-directed training, my core strength was still excellent. I sat up in the air, folding myself as close to double as I could manage in my current position.

“All right,” I said. “Drop me.”

Sam looked surprised, but did as he’d been told. I continued bending forward, wrapping my arms around my legs to make it more likely that I would land on my ass. Trampoline is great for teaching a person which parts of their unique body are best for landing on. In my case, all glory to the butt.