Page 79 of Magic for Nothing

“Because if you don’t, everyone in this carnival is going to die.”

The words fell between us, heavy and unwelcome, almost seeming to have a physical presence in the room. Then Sam moved.

I’d seen him before, when he was on the trapeze alone, or when he was running to get somewhere and didn’t need to worry about being spotted by townies: he was one of the fastest living things I’d ever encountered. I’d been assuming I knew how fast. But I’d never seen him angry. One second he was at the table. The next, he was grabbing me by the throat and slamming me against the wall of the RV. It was like he’d flickered through the intervening space, ignoring it as inconvenient. I had the time to go limp, letting as much of the impact flow through me as possible, before I was hitting metal hard enough to make the whole RV rock.

“You’re threatening us?!” he snarled. I’d never noticed how sharp his canine teeth were in this form. They didn’t distort his speech at all; they had seemed somehow unimportant. But monkeys bite, and if he bit me, I was going to be in a world of hurt. “You come here, you lie, and you’re threatening us?!”

“Can’t . . . breathe,” I wheezed. I didn’t struggle or grab for his hand. That was just going to make him angrier, and under the circumstances, I didn’t want to make him angrier. It was starting to really sink in that I was unarmed and he was faster than I was. I should have come up with an excuse to find out how strong he was. Too bad I’d missed my window.

“Samuel, put her down,” said Emery.

“She lied to us,” said Sam. He didn’t take his eyes off my face. “She lied to us, and she snuck into our home, and she made us trust her. I’m not going to put her down.”

And I’d kissed him. That was a second layer of anger and betrayal: I could see it in his eyes. Maybe if I’d just kissed him when he was human, but no, I’d had to go and be the first girl who didn’t care what species he was, because either way, he was Sam. My parents had done too good a job of teaching me that people were always people. The fact that he sometimes had a tail didn’t make him any less a person than the fact that, say, Sarah was essentially a wasp with boobs.

The fire was building in my fingertips again, strong enough that I expected to start setting things ablaze any second. Which gave me an idea. Maybe it was a bad one, but it was better than nothing: I grabbed Sam’s wrist with both hands. The smell of burnt fur filled the air as he swore and dropped me. I landed hard on my ass, and scrambled backward as fast as I could, away from the wall and the enraged yōkai.

Emery put a hand on Sam’s shoulder, stopping him from coming after me. “Samuel. Be calm.”

“She burned me!” he exclaimed, holding up his arm.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I couldn’t breathe,” I said, virtually babbling. I pushed myself off the floor, climbing to my feet. “It just happens sometimes, when I’m upset.”

“A nascent magic-user,” said Emery. She sniffed. “No wonder they’re willing to risk you. By the standards of the Covenant, you’re little better than the innocent people you destroy. How does it feel to know that they’re going to turn on you any day now? Is that why you lingered here so long?”

I rubbed my face. “I’m not Covenant,” I said. “I mean, my family isn’t Covenant. We quit over a hundred years ago. We’ve been independent cryptozoologists for four generations, and people won’t stop thinking that because we were Covenant once, we’re Covenant forever.”

“So why are you here?” demanded Sam.

I lowered my hand. “The Covenant sent me.”

Silence fell, thick and dangerous. Finally, in a low voice, Emery said, “You can’t have it both ways, girl. Either you’re Covenant, or you’re not. Either you’re a monster, here to kill us for the crime of being different, or you’re not. Pick a side.”

“See, we like to say that sort of thing like it means something, but it doesn’t, because the real world is complex and contradictory and it doesn’t do ‘pick a side’ like it’s easy,” I said. “Do you remember what happened on Dance or Die last season?”

Sam blinked, his anger fading into confusion. “Are you seriously asking for a reality TV recap in the middle of a fight?”

“There was a fight,” said Emery slowly. “I don’t watch the show, but I heard about it. A group of snake cultists summoned their god live on network television. A bunch of people died. Including most of the snake cultists. And a girl who claimed to be a member of the Price family declared war on the Covenant of St. George.” She gave me a critical look. “Supposedly the girl was blonde. And petite.”

“Whereas I am a tall brunette. Yes, the world is very confusing, and I don’t look like the rest of my family,” I said. “That was my sister Verity. She blew our cover. The Covenant was supposed to think we were dead and gone forever, not claiming to own an entire continent. Now they know we’re back. We needed to know what they knew. We needed to know what they were planning. And I, as you so graciously noted, don’t look like a Price.” Or rather, I did, and no one remembered what a Price was supposed to look like, because the Healy genes are so dominant.

Dealing with people who treat heritage as a sign of virtue was exhausting. Punching them all would have been a lot more fun.

“I saw that,” said Sam. “It was a trick. The Covenant trying to lure us out. Why else wouldn’t they have cut the camera feed?”

“No, it was my sister, and she’s not smart enough to come up with a plan that elaborate,” I snapped. “She’s a ballroom dancing cryptozoologist who wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now I get to clean up her mess. And they didn’t cut the feed because I’m pretty sure no one knew what to do until it was too late.”

“I am not following this at all,” said Sam. “Can I hit her now?”

“They sent me undercover,” I said, before Emery could give him permission. I didn’t know who would win in a knockdown fight between me and Sam now that I knew he was coming, but one or both of us would be severely hurt in the process, and I . . . I didn’t want to hurt him.

God. Having feelings for people who aren’t part of my family sucks.

“Who sent you undercover?” asked Emery.

“My family. They gave me a new name—technically a name I already owned, so if the Covenant had any psychics or routewitches working for them, they couldn’t catch me in a lie—and an identity that matched my skills, and they sent me to the Covenant to find out what I could about their plans for North America. We’re afraid there’s going to be a war, and there aren’t that many of us. Even if we managed to save ourselves, a lot of people would be hurt.” We could disappear—we’d done it before—but the cryptids of North America hadn’t been subjected to a full Covenant purge in over a hundred years. They wouldn’t be ready. We wouldn’t be able to save them.

“Your name is really Timpani?” asked Sam.