Page 78 of Magic for Nothing

My shock only lasted a moment. “Sam, I’m sorry—” I began, turning to face him.

He was already gone.

The rain was bucketing down outside, and Sam had our only umbrella. I caught up with him halfway across the parking lot, my hair already plastered to my head and my clothes sticking to my body. “Sam, wait,” I cried.

“Why? So you can tell me more lies?” He stopped walking, shoulders rigid, and didn’t look at me. I started to reach for him. The rain struck my fingertips and sizzled, turning to steam. I pulled my hand back.

“It’s not what you think,” I whispered.

“Oh, it’s not?” He finally turned around. The way he looked at me . . . it was like he was seeing a stranger, someone he didn’t know and didn’t want to. “Because I watched you when she was talking, Annie. You looked scared. You looked like the jig was up. And now I’m pretty sure that’s because it was. Or are you going to tell me she’s the liar here?”

I didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t have believed me. I’ve always been good at setting things up so that people will believe what I need them to believe, but I’ve never been a very good liar. The two skills are not the same.

“That’s what I thought.” He gave a small shake of his head. “I trusted you. We all trusted you. I kissed you. And you were lying the whole time. You were sneaking around, lying to us, for what?”

“I had to.”

“You had to.”

“Yes. Sam, please, this isn’t what you think. This isn’t—”

“It’s not what I think? It’s not what I think? Because I think it’s someone from a known Covenant family sneaking around and telling lies about who she is. I think you killed Umeko. Did that have to happen? Or did you just tell us more lies to make it okay?” He took a step toward me, seeming suddenly much larger than I was. “I think you make me sick.”

“Sam—”

“Don’t talk to me. Don’t look at me. Find your own damn way back to the show, and you better pray my grandmother isn’t waiting outside with a shotgun.”

He turned on his heel and stalked away across the parking lot, leaving me standing alone in the rain, while cheers erupted from the warehouse behind me. I had never felt more alone, or farther away from home. And I had no idea what I was going to do.

Twenty-one

“‘I’m sorry’ is not a magic spell that makes everything better. I wish to God it were.”

—Alice Healy

The edge of the field where the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival is camped, waiting for a miracle

I FORKED OVER THE COST OF MY RIDE, and the cab drove off. It vanished in the rain, leaving soaked, sobbing girls and the question of the carnival behind, and for a moment, I envied the driver like anything. He was going home to a life that probably made a lot more sense than mine did, and he was never going to need to look back. It felt like these days, looking back was all I ever did. That, and looking over my shoulder for the disaster I knew was coming.

My time with the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival began with me walking across a field toward the bone yard. There was a certain beautiful symmetry to ending it the same way. The rain poured down, drenching every inch of me, and the mud sucked at my boots so badly that I got bogged down several times, winding up with my arms pinwheeling and my feet anchored to the ground. If the Covenant realized my deception and came for me, there’d be nothing I could do to stop them. But maybe that was true anyway. I’d been so focused on working with them that I hadn’t been focusing on finding a way to make them go away. No matter how I looked at this, I’d failed someone, even while I was doing the best that I could.

My real mistake had been in thinking, even for a second, that I could get through this unscathed; that I was having my first big adventure, not interacting with real people in the real world, where there were real stakes. People who weren’t going to behave like the NPCs in my video games and just disappear when their part in the story was over. People who wanted things.

For a little while, Sam had wanted me, and I’d wanted him right back. Maybe that was the worst thing, out of all the terrible things I’d done, because if I’d told the truth—if we’d met when I was Antimony, not Timpani or Annie or any of the other people I’d been pretending to be—we might have had a chance. I was going to have to live with that. For the rest of my life, I was going to have to live with that.

The bone yard looked exactly the same as it had when we left, even down to the truck, parked back where it always was. Something shifted underfoot as I passed it. I looked down. One of the roller derby programs had fallen in the mud, soaking up the rain. I hadn’t even realized he’d taken one with him. I stopped there, rain dripping from my hair, blinking back the tears that were threatening to rise and overwhelm me. Then, leaving the ruined reminder of a ruined evening behind, I walked on.

The lights were on in the RV Sam shared with Emery. I stepped up to the door and knocked, as firmly as I dared. My fingertips were hot, but my body felt weak, wrapped in a cocoon of sorrow and regret. I didn’t like feeling this way. Probably no one did.

The door opened. Emery was standing there, expression icy. There was no welcome there, no indication that forgiveness was even possible, much less going to be offered.

“Well,” she said. “I suppose you’d better come inside.”

“Thank you,” I said. It was small, and silly, the response of habit and all the good manners my parents had been able to beat into me, but under the circumstances, there was nothing else I could have said. If not for the rain, I would have expected to come back and find the bone yard gone, following the carnival into parts unknown. Can’t safely dismantle a roller coaster in a rainstorm.

Sam was already there, back in his natural form, sitting at the small folding table in the kitchen. The fur on his cheeks was slicked flat, and his tail was wrapped so tightly around one of the table’s legs that I wasn’t sure whether he was going to hurt himself or rip the table apart. Maybe both. He had the strength for it, and he certainly had the anger.

Emery closed the door before turning to face me, folding her arms, and asking, in an almost reasonable tone, “Why should we let you leave here alive?”