Page 63 of Magic for Nothing

“Oh, yeah. Being human is . . . it’s not hard, because I’ve been practicing all my life, but it’s like trying to maintain good posture, you know? Part of you is always focusing on standing up straight, instead of on doing something important, like breathing or remembering where you left your phone.”

“Huh.” Most therianthropes seemed to default to a human shape—or that was what we’d always assumed. All the therianthropes I’d ever had the opportunity to talk to had grown up among their own kind. Maybe staying human was an effort for them, too, and they’d never thought it was anyone’s business but their own. “If this is hard, why are you all human again?”

“Because you got squirrely about talking about your family, which probably means you’re about to bolt, and I figured I’d walk you to the bone yard.” He shrugged. “Either the police have already come and gone, and I can relax, or there will be strangers there, and I hate trying to explain how I got my makeup to look so good.”

“Heh,” I said. “Humans don’t like to believe what they see with their own eyes sometimes.”

“If they did, I’d probably be in a government lab being taken apart right now.”

“True.” I started for the bleachers, where I’d abandoned my shoes. “And you know they never warm the scalpels. It’s always ‘hello, nice to meet you, let me have your spleen.’”

“Why the spleen?”

“Because it’s fun to say.” I pulled my shoes on. “Thanks for catching me when I fell.”

“Thanks for coming up to get me.” Sam smiled a little. That hint of shyness was back, coloring the edges of the expression, making them seem almost sweet. “I don’t get to fly with other people all that often.”

“What, you’ve never worked with a partner?”

“Sure. But most of them only stick around long enough to get really good, and then they move on to a circus or something else where they can make more money. The trapeze acts we get here are always closed units. They want to fly together, not with the owner’s weird kid.” Sam shrugged. “It is what it is, you know?”

“Well, I’ll fly with you any time.”

He smirked at me. “You just want to fly.”

“Your point? We could have a lot of fun up there. Don’t Gwen Stacy me, and we’ll be fine.”

“I wasn’t anywhere close to snapping your neck.”

“Says you,” I said.

We were still laughing as we walked out of the big tent, into the afternoon air. The smell of popcorn was starting to drift from the midway as the show geared up for opening, and everything was perfect.

Seventeen

“Sometimes what matters isn’t the grand adventure, it’s the small adventures that happen when no one’s really looking.”

—Evelyn Baker

The Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, ten days later, camped outside St. Cloud, Minnesota

THE SKY WAS A FASCINATING SHADE of slate gray, promising rain sometime in the next twenty-four hours. Because this was Minnesota, that rain could happen at any time. And because this was Minnesota, none of the locals gave a fuck. The midway had been packed with bodies since the gates opened. The lines for some of the more popular rides actually snaked all the way around the walkway, creating navigational hazards and keeping the ride jocks hopping. I looked yearningly at the spinning frame of the Ferris wheel. I hadn’t been able to take the time for a ride in three days, not since we’d finished setup and invited the crowds inside.

Emery was thrilled, as well she should have been. We’d left Wisconsin terrified the authorities were going to shut the whole place down. But Savannah had been one of our own, and the teenagers we’d recovered from Umeko’s trailer had fallen over themselves swearing that they hadn’t been abducted by anyone associated with the carnival. Personally, I thought that was mostly because they didn’t want to think too hard about what had actually happened to them, but the outcome was the same: we were in the clear, and able to move on.

(Savannah’s death had been ruled natural causes. Her heart had just stopped. It’s possible to die of fear if something is far enough outside what the mind can accept. As ways to go, it wasn’t among the worst.)

Margaret and Robert were still following the show, now holed up in a rental apartment nearby, keeping an eye on the locals and replying to my nightly updates. Neither of them had set foot on the grounds, thankfully. There were some secrets I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep if they saw the people I was spending all my time with. Like Ananta, the wadjet, or the giggling bogeyman twins who ran the Haunted House dark ride. Most of the carnival was made up of humans, but there were exceptions, and those exceptions were, near as I could tell, harmless. They just wanted to make people happy. They weren’t doing any harm.

I had no idea how I was going to get the Covenant to leave them alone.

Drawing the knot on my gown a little tighter, I walked down the narrow alley separating the rides from the back of the big tent. We were doing three shows today, answering local demand with a gleeful expansion of our offerings. The main trapeze act, the Amazing Johnsons, had already flown at the morning show and would be flying again in the evening, taking to the swings for the delight and edification of what was estimated to be our largest crowd yet. They were good, and they were flashy, and most importantly, they looked like what people expected to see on the flying trapeze, two perfectly matched bodies launching themselves into the air without giving a damn about whether or not they hit the ground.

Sam and I were a bit less standard. He was stiff when he flew in human form—and he always flew in human form for an audience—while I was tall for a trapeze girl, with boobs that required a lot more scaffolding than the norm. We were still death-defying and high off the ground, but we weren’t as fast, ironically.

We were, however, one of the only trapeze acts I knew of to incorporate knives into the process. So there was that.

I slipped into the tent, walking under the bleachers to where Sam was waiting for the cue to go on. He took in my fluffy pink dressing gown with a smirk. “Are you a pretty princess?”