Page 73 of Magic for Nothing

The Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, the next day

THE PROMISE OF RAIN the sky had been making for days was finally being fulfilled. The clouds had ripped open shortly after midnight, forcing an all-hands rush for the midway to close down games, cover concessions, and tent the rides, which now lurked, plastic-covered monstrosities presiding over a sea of mud.

Most of the carnies were either in the mess tent, playing cards and yelling at each other, or hiding in their RVs to avoid playing cards and yelling at each other. I fell into the latter category. I’d spent most of the morning helping the Aeslin mice remodel and expand their little house, enjoying the opportunity to sit around in my pajamas without worrying about someone asking me to do something.

There was a knock on the RV door.

I turned to look at it, unable to stop myself from considering how flammable the person on the other side was likely to be. This was supposed to be a day off to think about how I was going to keep the Covenant from screwing everything up. The rain said so.

The person knocked again. I sighed, stood, and walked the three steps necessary to open the door.

Sam, standing barefoot in the rain with a large umbrella in his hands and his tail wrapped around his own waist, presumably to keep it from getting wet, smiled cautiously up at me. The faint smell of damp fur accompanied him. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was oddly unexpected. “Hey,” he said. “You’re up.”

“Yeah, but not dressed,” I said. “Did you want to come in? The mice are singing hymns about home repair.”

“Hail!” squeaked Mindy.

“No, I’m good,” said Sam. “I’m going to be heading into town around noon to get supplies and stuff. I figured you might want to come along.”

“What made you think that?”

“The part where I’ve known these people for my entire life, and being rained in with them still makes me want to scream and claw my eyes out.”

“Fair.” I glanced over to where Mork and Mindy were carrying stacks of Popsicle sticks gleaned from the midway around their house. “Can we stop at a craft store? I need to pick up some wood glue.”

“Sure. See you at my place at noon?”

“Sure,” I said, and matched his smile with one of my own. He went squelching off into the mud. I closed the door, took a step backward, and sat down heavily on the bed.

“Priestess?” I looked up. Mindy had moved to the edge of the counter and was looking at me with concern. “Are you well?”

“Everything is very confusing right now, Mindy, that’s all.”

Mindy bristled her whiskers at me. Behind her, Mork was continuing to check the length of the Popsicle sticks against the walls of their house. He wasn’t as comfortable addressing me directly as she was. He probably never would be. The branch of the family we’d left in England had a lot to answer for. “Because of the Work You Do, or because of the Work You Want?”

Aeslin mice are always truthful, but not always perfectly literal. I smiled at her, sadly. “A little of both, with a side order of I think I really like a guy, and I can’t possibly have him, because he’s part of the work I want, and the work I’m doing is just going to put him in danger.”

“Is it not tradition to travel to carnivals and fall in love under false pretenses? Did not the Violent Priestess ride a white horse and love the God of Unexpected Situations in a place very much like this one?”

“Yeah, but Great-Grandpa Jonathan didn’t tell Great-Grandma Fran nearly this many lies.” Living with the Aeslin mice means being more in touch with our ancestors than the people we went to school with. It’s necessary, to understand the twists and bends of their oral tradition. “Sam isn’t going to forgive me when he finds out who I really am. I can’t even be mad at him for that. I wouldn’t forgive me either. So I can’t have him, and that means I shouldn’t like him more than I already do.”

“But you can save him.”

“Yes,” I said, with a firm nod. “I can save him, and that’s going to have to be enough. No matter what I want, no matter how much I wish I could do this differently, that’s going to have to be enough.”

Mindy looked at me solemnly. “We will have so many sad songs to sing when we go home.”

“Yeah, I guess we will.” I stood. “Figure out what you want from the craft store while I get dressed. I’ll even bring you rhinestones, if you want them.”

If there’s one thing in this world that I know I can rely on, it’s the joyous cheering of the Aeslin mice.

An hour later, I walked up to the RV shared by Sam and Emery, feeling oddly like I was wearing some sort of costume by going out in jeans, a plain black hoodie over a roller derby tank top, and hiking boots. They were the kind of clothes I wore every day when I was home, when I was Antimony, but here, I was a girl who wandered around in sequins and fishnets, and this seemed too plain. The rain had stopped at some point, although the sky was still dark with clouds, and the mud sucked at my feet with every step I took.

Then the door opened, and Sam was grinning at me, and my outfit didn’t feel like such a big deal. Especially since he was wearing jeans and a Spider-Man shirt under the denim jacket he’d had on the night before. He was in his human form, probably because of the shoes on his feet: toes took more kindly to being squashed than the semi-fingers he normally sported. Also, it was a lot easier to go shopping with a man than with a monkey.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

“Born ready,” I said. “Sometimes at night, I weep because I’m not lost in a Target at that very moment.”