Page 90 of Magic for Nothing

“I can’t,” I said apologetically. “The bomb didn’t go off. They know something’s up. I need to distract them, and if necessary, I need them to think they saw me die.”

“So I’m making sure you don’t actually die,” he said stubbornly. Sam didn’t have any obvious weapons. He braced his feet in the sawdust, balling his hands into fists.

I stopped arguing. We waited.

The tent flap rustled just before a small object rolled into the room. My eyes widened. So did Sam’s, both of us realizing at the same time what it had to be. He was the first to react, naturally, his yōkai biology giving him the edge where reflexes were concerned. Almost too fast for the eye to see, he dove for the grenade, grabbed it, and chucked it back outside the tent. There was a shriek, followed by a boom that I felt all the way down to my bones.

“Okay, I take it back,” I said numbly. “You can stay.”

Sam raced back to my side, falling into a graceful, if uneasy, stance. Neither of us spoke.

This time when the tent flap opened, there was no grenade. Just the impression of a body racing for cover, followed by a gunshot. Hot pain blossomed on my arm. I glanced down long enough to be sure that I’d only been grazed—bleeding out would have ruined my plans for the day—and hit the ground on my knees, pulling the trigger on the crossbow and willing fire onto the bolt the same way I’d willed fire onto the dart.

Nothing happened. Naturally.

“This is not a good time to roll a fucking one,” I moaned, dropping the now-useless crossbow. It had seemed like such a good way to get fire onto the tent walls, and so much safer than my original plan. “Cover me.”

“Cover you while you do what? Annie—”

I was already on my feet, running for the ladder that would take me up to the trapeze. The rope array was connected to the entire tent, anchored in half a dozen places. If it went up without an accelerant, it would be a lot harder for the insurance investigators to claim arson.

If someone had asked me a year ago whether I’d wind up trying to fight the Covenant of St. George while arranging insurance fraud, I would have looked at them like they’d hit their head. Good thing no one ever asked me that. I ran. Behind me, Sam was taunting Robert, working his way into a string of monkey-related puns that were just plain bad. He had a real gift for being a dick in the middle of a serious situation. It was probably the fault of all those Spider-Man comics.

“God bless Spider-Man,” I muttered, and started up the ladder.

I had climbed a lot of ladders, under a lot of circumstances. I’d never attempted to climb all the way to a trapeze while my half-monkey maybe-boyfriend kept a Covenant operative distracted below me. It was a new, and bracing experience that I was in no hurry to have again.

But either Robert was the last Covenant operative in action or the other three were regrouping, planning their next attack. None of them were going to expect me to burn the carnival down around my own ears. I kept climbing until I reached the launching platform.

My hands weren’t chalked and my clothes weren’t right for this. I grabbed my swing from its hook anyway, taking a deep breath before I launched myself into the air. It was a smooth, easy arc from the platform to the center of the tent, where I let go of the swing. I had told Emery I didn’t do tightrope work, and I wasn’t lying about that, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t use the tightrope for other purposes. I grabbed it as I fell, hissing when the fibers bit into my palms, and hung there like a piece of washing drying in the wind. Closing my eyes, I tried to focus on calling fire into my fingers.

It didn’t come. My hands remained as cool as any human’s, perfectly ordinary, perfectly reasonable. I wasn’t going to set anything on fire with a touch—oh, no—not me. I kept my eyes closed, trying to chase my frustration down and make it do something useful for me.

On the ground below me, Sam bellowed in shock and pain. My eyes snapped open as the rope burst into flame, burning blue-white and far too fast to be natural. I was my own accelerant, when I was frightened enough.

I let go of the rope and I fell, straight down, into the familiar embrace of the net. I twisted at the last moment, landing on my side, and rolled to the edge as the rope array above me was being consumed by the fire. I only got glimpses of the scene I was about to enter: Sam on the ground, still in his natural form, face covered in blood. Robert standing over him, gun raised, preparing to pull the trigger again.

I pulled a knife from inside my shirt as I rolled. I didn’t think, I barely aimed; I just threw.

Before, in the Haunted House, I’d been asking myself whether I could kill another human. I’d managed to reach my twenties without killing a thinking being, and the idea of killing a member of my own species was horrifying and upsetting on a deep, visceral level, even when they belonged to the Covenant of St. George. I talked a good game, and I had the skills on paper, but could I do it in the real world?

My knife flew straight and true, embedding itself in Robert’s throat just below his Adam’s apple. His eyes widened, the gun falling from his suddenly nerveless fingers as he clutched at the hilt with both hands, trying to pull it loose. He couldn’t. He didn’t have the manual dexterity left to accomplish what he needed to do. Looking at me with silent accusation in his eyes, he folded forward, landing on his face in the sawdust.

The tent above us was taking its cue from the ropes, and beginning to burn. If we didn’t get out of here soon, we weren’t going to be getting out of here at all. I ran to Sam, praying silently that I wasn’t too late.

He’d landed on his back when he fell. The blood was coming from a shallow gash down the side of his head. Robert was too good of a shot to have miscalculated that badly, and at such a short range; there had to be something else going on. I dropped to my knees, fumbling for a pulse, and paused when I found it, not in the expected spot, but lower and off to the side. Sam’s anatomy wasn’t exactly human-normal. I knew from the way he jumped and swung me around that he had to have incredibly robust musculature. Incredibly robust musculature, in nature, often meant a denser skeleton, giving those muscles something to anchor against.

The tent was burning and Robert was dead and I still laughed through my tears as I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against Sam’s, not caring if I got blood on myself. “You big dumb ape,” I said. “You are literally too thick-headed to kill.” The bullet must have ricocheted when Robert pulled the trigger. It would have been a shock to both of them—in Sam’s case, a shock big enough to put him on the floor.

Sam groaned. I sat up, grabbing his arm and trying to tug him along with me.

“Come on, wake up,” I said. “This place is about to go up like a birthday cake.”

He groaned again, opening his eyes. He smiled at the sight of me. Something in my chest got tight and soft at the same time, like I was trying to sneeze with a mouthful of ice cream.

“Hey,” he said, in a dazed voice. “So I just got shot.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, laughing a little. It was better than crying. Those felt like my only options at the moment.