Page 10 of Tricks for Free

“Intellectually, I know you’re right. Emotionally . . .” I paused, unable to put what I was feeling into words. It was like the words didn’t exist. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe I’d finally discovered the unspeakable.

Sam Taylor wasn’t the love of my life. He wasn’t even my significant other, whatever that meant, or my boyfriend, although he’d kissed me like he was, against a burning carnival sky, when everything had been crashing to an end. And then I’d walked away from him, because it was the only way to keep him safe. I didn’t love him—at least I didn’t think I did—but I might have, if we’d been allowed to take the time to figure out who we were to one another. We’d both been lying from the start of our relationship, and that sort of thing can take some time to get past.

God, I wished we’d had the time.

Unfortunately, while Sam wasn’t blood family—and hence wasn’t a target for tracking charms, and should have been able to safely come find me—he was something the Covenant viewed as even worse: he was a cryptid. A fūri, to be specific, a kind of yōkai therianthrope originally from China. He was a virtuoso on the flying trapeze, because when he wasn’t forcing himself to look human, he had a prehensile tail and feet that could do double duty as hands, and he was one of the most beautiful men I’d ever met. Maybe not when he was standing still, but in motion . . .

I’ve always been about the motion. Whether it’s the cheering field or the derby track, motion is where beauty lives. When Sam moved, he was a poem, and I wanted to memorize the whole damn thing, and for his sake, I could never see him again, and that sucked harder than I could say.

Mary leaned over and touched my arm. “I’ll tell your family you’re okay, and that you still don’t need them to come get you. But you say the word . . .”

“I know,” I said. “Thank you, Aunt Mary.”

“Any time, kiddo,” she said, and she was gone.

I wiped the tears from my cheeks and stepped out of the alcove, pasting my Lowry-approved smile back into place. Time to get to work. After all, this was my life now.

Four

“Loving too much is just as bad as not loving at all. Maybe it’s worse. People who don’t have anything to lose never have to worry about the inevitable.”

–Alice Healy

Lowryland, eight hours and about sixty thousand inane questions later

I SAT AT A TABLE outside the Midsummer Night’s (Ice) Cream Shoppe, back in civilian clothes, my glittery eyeliner scrubbed away, and wondered whether I would ever feel like standing up again. My feet were one solid ache, one that I could feel pulsing in time to the beating of my heart. In a way, the pain was a good thing, since it was distracting enough that I wasn’t worried about setting anything on fire. And if that isn’t the definition of making lemonade out of life’s lemons, I don’t know what is.

The Park was winding down around me. Parents dragged exhausted, weeping children in mass-produced costumes toward the trails that would take them out of Fairyland and back to the central hub, which was themed after Lowry’s idea of a perfectly bucolic American town, half Ray Bradbury and half Lake Wobegon (without actually coming close enough to owe copyright acknowledgment to either, naturally—the man was a genius at dancing the thin line of public domain). I silently toasted them with my milkshake, wishing them luck at getting past that dazzling arcade of shopping and concessions and final opportunities to spend all their money. Lowry’s Welcoming World was designed to be a flytrap for wallets, and it stayed open a full hour after the rest of the Park shut down, making sure it would have time to suck out every last dime.

(I hate working in Lowry’s Welcoming World. I hate it. The shops are too diverse for the area to have a cohesive theme, and while that might seem like a good thing, in practice it means that anyone wearing a Welcoming World uniform can be grabbed by a guest at any time to help them find a pair of earrings or shorts in their size or whatever piece of useless crap they’ve decided they need to make their theme park-loving lives complete. Which, hey, fine. I am a nerd, I understand that sometimes life isn’t worth living if you don’t have the commemorative tchotchke of your dreams. It’s just that people want to do their shopping after midnight, when they have poor impulse control and—frequently—worse manners, and their feet hurt, and they’re exhausted, and they tend to take it all out on the poor cast members who have to explain that no, they don’t control the prices, no, they can’t give a discount because there was a long wait to see Lindy the Lion in Candyland, no, they don’t know where their managers are. Give me the rest of the Park, with its safe, sane closing hours, and leave the retail to the masochists and the heroes.)

The lights went out in the ice cream stand as the final food service employee booked it for the safety of behind-the-scenes, where no guests would be able to grab them and request one last double-dip cone. The glittering white fairy lights twined through the oversized toadstools and climbing morning glory flowers continued to twinkle, creating the illusion that tiny fairies were everywhere, watching everything that happened in their slice of Lowryland. I sipped my milkshake and let myself sink deeper into my seat, enjoying the sound of the area atmospherics. Crickets, and droning cicadas, and the occasional distant chime of bells: all the sounds Lowry’s engineers had decided would say “Fairyland” to their young guests.

I couldn’t say it had been a bad day. Sure, there’d been a few rude guests, including one asshole who decided that screaming at a clerk in a shop filled with children was a great idea, and sure, there’d been the usual assortment of incidents, ranging from shoplifting to overly excited toddlers peeing in the middle of the store when they saw Oberon and Titania walking by with their handlers, but that was all pretty standard for Lowryland. I couldn’t say it had been a good day either. Good days . . .

Good days were rare. Good days were the ones where I somehow managed to convince myself that Melody West was a real person, and that I wouldn’t be wearing her name tag and her uniform if she wasn’t me. Melody West didn’t have any dark secrets to run away from, and she wasn’t hiding from people who wanted to hurt her; she was just a woman with a job that wasn’t too hard and wasn’t too easy and came with free admission every day to one of the most magical places in the world. Melody West didn’t have to worry about setting things on fire if she lost her temper. She didn’t cry herself to sleep at night wondering whether she’d ever see her family again, or whether she’d walked away from the best shot she’d ever have at a relationship with someone whose jagged edges matched her own. Melody could be happy.

When Mary came to visit, it got harder to hold onto Melody, because Melody wasn’t the sort of person whose dead aunt would haunt her. So while I was always glad to see Mary and the connection she represented to home, I resented it at the same time. As long as I couldn’t let myself go and melt into Melody, I’d keep remembering how much I hated it here.

“Freedom!” announced Fern, dropping into the chair across from me with more force than should have been possible for such a diminutive figure. Ah, the varying density of the sylph. She could mostly control how dense she was, but she tended to get lighter when stressed and heavier when tired. There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere.

“You still have glitter in your . . .” I paused to give her a quick once-over. She was back in street clothes, and her fine blonde hair hung limp around her shoulders, pressed flat and lifeless by a day crammed inside her Aspen wig. Most of her eyeshadow was gone, but the ghosts of it haunted the creases of her face, sparkling in the fairy light. “Okay, you have glitter in your everything. You are a testament to the power of glitter.”

“I’m like a slug,” said Fern blissfully. She was holding a milkshake cup of her own, and took a long, snorting slurp before leaning back into her own chair. “How was retail?”

“Soul-destroying. How was the life of a fairy-tale princess?”

“Eh.” She made a seesaw motion with her hands. “Most of the kids were okay. Adults, too. There were a few creepers who tried to grab our butts and got escorted out by Security, but it was mostly just people who loved the movie when they were little and wanted to tell us how much. They were harmless and sweet.” She paused.

I recognized that pause. It was the sound of a “but” on the horizon, coming closer all the time. I frowned. “What happened?”

“There was a family. Two women holding hands, and two little girls who looked so much like them that it was . . . you know.” Fern looked down at her milkshake. “I don’t think they were human people. I think they were maybe dragon people.”

“Could be,” I said carefully. Dragons are notoriously cheap. For them, all money is potentially gold, and they need gold for both their physical and mental well-being. Lowryland isn’t cheap. For a pair of dragons to bring their daughters here, well . . . it seemed unlikely.

But kids are kids, regardless of species, and kids love glitter and spectacle and rides designed to fling them into the sky while keeping them safely confined by straps and harnesses. Dragon mothers love their daughters as much as human ones do. Why shouldn’t a pair of dragons bring their little girls for a day in a world that didn’t really exist? If one of them worked for the Park—and quite a few dragons work for the Park—they could get in for free. Between that and their employee discounts, the trip would be a lot more reasonable than it seemed on the face of things.

There’s no bad blood that I’m aware of between the sylphs and the dragons. They fill different slots in the global ecosystem, and they don’t compete for resources. There are always surprises, though, and so I was even more careful with my tone as I looked at Fern, sidelong, and asked, “Did they do something to make you uncomfortable?”