Page 93 of Magic for Nothing

He didn’t mean that—people never mean it when they say “anything”—but it was still nice to hear. “I need you to get my mice to an airport.”

Sam blinked. “Come again?”

“If you get them to an airport, they can catch a flight to where the rest of my family is. They’re good at sneaking onto airplanes. They’ll be fine.” The mice were also good at finding unattended phones. They’d fly to Portland, phone the house, and get picked up. They could tell my family what had happened. They could help them prepare.

“Why aren’t you taking them yourself?”

I began applying butterfly closures to the wound on his forehead. “Because I need to go somewhere else. Someplace where no one can find me.”

“What? Annie—”

“The Covenant knows my name and my face and where to look for me. Killing everyone who came here wouldn’t have changed that; it would just have made me more of a target. I was careful, but they have things I’ve touched. I sweated in their training room. I bled—fuck, they did blood tests on me. They could have vials of the stuff, and they have witches. There’s a chance they’re going to track me, and if they do, I’m not leading them to my family.” If I’d been able to slip away, I might have been okay, but I hadn’t done that. I’d stayed, and I’d fought, and now they knew I wasn’t just a trainee who’d chosen to run. It didn’t matter if my reasons had been good and my choices had made sense at the time. They knew too much.

I had to disappear.

“I’ll come with you.”

I put the final butterfly closure in place before pressing my hand against his cheek and smiling at him. He smiled back, tentatively. I leaned in and kissed him, trying to put everything I had—every explanation, every apology, every scrap of affection I had—into the contact. His lips tasted like blood. Mine tasted like ashes. Together, we were a world on fire, and we never stood a chance.

Finally, I pulled back and said, “No, you won’t. You’ll find your grandmother. Help her start a new show. And get my mice to that airport.”

“Annie . . .” He stopped. Looked at me. And finally said, “I don’t love you yet. But I could have.”

“Same here,” I said, and kissed him again, and reached into my backpack. When I pulled my hand out again, Mork and Mindy were on my palm. I set them down beside him. Neither of them said a word. No cheering, no psalms, nothing. I nodded to them. They nodded back. Then I turned and walked away.

I didn’t look back. Sometimes not looking back is the only mercy the world has left to show.

Epilogue

“Family is family, no matter how far away you run. Their ghosts will always find you.”

—Jane Harrington-Price

A small frontage road near Gainesville, Florida

Three weeks later

IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY, and no one wanted to pick up a hitchhiker. I kept my thumb out anyway as I walked, trying not to look like the humidity was killing me. It was a lie. I felt like I was going to melt. (Portland is not a high-humidity city. Humidity takes too much commitment, and Portland virtually never commits to severe weather.)

Another car went zooming by. I did not flip them off. I thought I deserved some sort of reward for that—like maybe, I don’t know, a ride?

It had been three weeks since I’d walked away from the carnival, and bit by bit, the road was killing me. The Covenant didn’t know all my IDs, but my cousin Artie did, which meant I didn’t dare use any of my credit cards. I’d hit the first ATM I’d seen, pulled out the maximum, and thrown the card away. That cash had seen me across seven states, onto several buses, and through a delightful assortment of diners, each a little more questionable than the last. But the money was running out, and hitchhiking was my best option, if I wanted to stretch it as far as possible.

“I’d kill for a new pair of shoes right now,” I muttered.

“Be careful where you say that sort of thing.”

I turned. Mary was behind me, her hair loose and blowing in the slight afternoon breeze, so that it formed a cottony corona around her head. I looked down, and winced. We were standing at a crossroad.

“I didn’t mean it,” I said quickly, looking up again.

Her smile was thin and sad, a skeleton of an expression, painted on the face of a ghost. “I know,” she said. “You didn’t do all the flowery bullshit that makes it a real request. You should still be careful. The crossroads know your name.”

“Because of what my grandfather did.”

“Among other things.” She crossed the distance between us in four long steps, wrapping her arms around me before I could react. “We’ve all been scared witless, Annie—”

“You can’t tell anyone you’ve seen me.”