Page 23 of Tricks for Free

Wand Guy looked at Emily. “Is she not very bright, or is she damaged in some way?”

“I just met her,” protested Emily. “I brought her to you because you needed a say in what was done with her, and because I had her. I didn’t want to come up with an excuse to get my hands on her again.”

“Wait,” I said, holding my hands up in front of me. My fingertips were hot again. I realized all six of the people in the room were watching me intently. Some of them looked downright nervous. They knew what I might be capable of, maybe even better than I did. “Let’s stop, okay?”

“Stop what?” asked Wand Guy.

“Stop preening and flexing and pretending we’re all bad-asses. I sell souvenirs for a living. I’m . . . really not sure what you people do up here, but I’m betting it’s above my pay grade. Why am I here? What do you want from me?”

“It’s simple,” said Wand Guy. “You’re here because I want to teach you how to be a better version of what you already are.”

I stared at him, and for once in my life, I didn’t have anything to say.

Magic is real. Call it physics we don’t quite understand or really complicated math or an annoying way to cheat the rules—those descriptions come from Grandpa Thomas’ notes, my cousin Sarah, and me, by the way—but it doesn’t matter how it’s described, because changing the description doesn’t make it go away. Magic is real, magic has always been real, and some people can do magic.

Not all people, sadly. It’s like having brown eyes or being left-handed: most forms of magic use are genetic, and people are either born with it or not. Routewitches can be made according to my Aunt Rose, but she’s always really cagey about how that can happen (and to be honest, none of us have ever wanted to press the issue). Everything else runs in families, which means cases like mine, where the person who should have been doing the training is sadly unavailable, are more common than anyone wants them to be.

Without someone to teach me, I’d keep setting things on fire and bumbling through, becoming an increasing danger to myself and others, until I finally got caught. Whether I was caught by normal policemen who thought I was a dangerous arsonist or the Covenant didn’t really matter, because the end result would be the same: imprisonment, and probably death.

A teacher would fix everything. A teacher would change my life, and make my future a hell of a lot brighter, since my other option was joining my grandmother on her endless quest for my probably-dead grandfather.

But a teacher would also know me better than I wanted anyone outside the family to know me, ever, and on the rare occasions when I’d considered looking for someone, I certainly hadn’t been thinking about a man who looked like the ADA of the week on one of the Law & Order clones.

“Teach me,” I said carefully. “You’re a sorcerer.”

“The nineteenth of my line,” he said, with the kind of pride that always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Most people who take that much pride in being the nineteenth anything in their family are the kind of folks who look down on girls like Fern and Megan for having the audacity to be born inhuman, and on girls like me for being common.

Trust me. If girls like me were common, we’d have a totally different class of problems. “What’s the wand for? I thought sorcerers didn’t use wands.”

A few of the others exchanged looks, like I’d just committed the ultimate faux pas. Wand Guy stood straighter, narrowing his eyes.

“It’s a focusing tool,” he said. “You may find a wand of use once your studies have progressed beyond brute force. My offer is simple: let me train you. Work with us for the betterment of ourselves and of Lowryland. Refuse, and I’m afraid your employment will need to come to an end. We can’t have untrained sorcerers running around the property. It’s untidy.”

Two things were immediately clear. First, that he really, really wanted me to agree to let him train me. All of them were looking at me with avarice in their eyes, like dogs considering a platter of steaks on the way to the barbecue. They were a cabal of grown adults with control over their powers, and for some reason, adding an untrained baby magic-user to their ranks was the best idea any of them could come up with. That unnerved me.

The second thing was even more unnerving. Specifically, that there were five of them—six if I was counting Emily—and only one of me, and Florida is a state rich with swamps and alligators, aka, “Nature’s body disposal service.” If I refused them, my employment might not be all that was terminated.

“What do I have to do?” I asked.

Wand Guy smiled.

Fern sat in the corner of a small, unwelcoming room. The walls were painted electric yellow, and there was a vending machine packed with Lowry-branded snack offerings next to her chair, but those were the only concessions to the location: the room itself could have been part of any DMV or government office in the country. It was the sort of featureless, windowless place where people were sent to be forgotten about.

Her head snapped up when the door opened, and her whole face brightened when she saw that it was me. Then it closed off, leaving her wary and displeased. “An—Melody!” she said, barely catching herself in time. “I told you that you didn’t need to come.”

I winced at the first syllable of my real name, resisting the urge to look over my shoulder and check Emily’s expression. If she didn’t realize Fern had been starting to call me something else, I might get out of here without any more awkward conversations. That would be a nice change.

“Of course I came,” I said, and held up the bag I’d been carrying since leaving the house. “I have my post-shift change of clothes if you want to borrow them. Also, I have a hairbrush.”

“You are my favorite,” said Fern, and lunged for the bag. She was exhausted from being up all night: when she moved, it was with the odd floating quality that only really kicked in when she’d started lowering her density to keep herself from falling down.

“I try.” This time I did look over my shoulder at Emily. “Is this an okay place for my roommate to change, or should we head for a bathroom?”

“I’ll be outside,” said Emily. “Ms. Vargas-Jackson will be giving both of you a ride the rest of the way to the Park, and I’ll get those time slips for you.”

“Thanks,” I said, with all the sincerity I could muster. It was more than half a mile from here to the employee entrance to Lowryland—even the backstage areas were enormous, thanks to the scope of the Park they supported. Getting a ride rather than catching a tram would probably shave half an hour off the trip.

(We weren’t lazy. Lazy people don’t work at Lowryland. But we were about to go and spend what remained of our shifts on our feet, and there was a non-zero chance our respective managers would ask us to stay late and make up what we’d missed, official note from the PR department or no. Any walking we didn’t have to do was a good thing.)