Page 36 of Tricks for Free

There was Wand Guy, standing behind me and about eight feet back, his wand in his hand. He was wearing a suit—big surprise there—and a quizzical expression.

“Yoga?” he inquired.

“Among other things.” I pushed myself to my feet, dusting off my knees before I turned to face him. “It helps to keep me calm.”

The corner of his mouth quirked upward. I’d guessed correctly about the idea behind putting me in this room by myself, then. “I see,” he said.

I offered him my biggest, brightest smile. “So what’s the plan? How are you going to teach me to avoid going full Carrie?”

“How much do you know about other sorcerers in your family line?”

The question was mild, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t have teeth. It’s always hard to know how people will react to the name “Price.” Some of them think we’re still with the Covenant, which makes us monsters. Others think we’ve long since sold the human race out in favor of the cryptid communities of the world, which also makes us monsters. And regardless of how he responded, telling him who I really was would compromise that whole “hiding” thing I had going on. So I kept smiling, and I lied.

“Not much.” So far so good. “It was my grandfather, according to our family ghost, and she didn’t see too much of what he could do—just knew that he could do it. He didn’t leave behind any instruction manuals. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any other family, so it wasn’t like we could go talk to them when I started smoking.”

“How much does your grandmother know? Having a family ghost is unusual enough that she must be aware of something.”

This was where I’d need to start treading carefully. So far as I knew, magic-users can’t detect falsehood any more than, say, routewitches, or babysitters. They can learn to read people, but they can’t hear a lie the way a trainspotter would. So I could tell Colin lies and be okay, as long as I constructed a chain that made logical sense and wasn’t likely to trip me up later. It was just that if he asked me to repeat any of this in front of the trainspotter, I was going to go down in flames.

Oh, well. I’d come too far to let one more possible disaster keep me from learning what I needed to know. “I didn’t know she was my grandmother when I was little. I thought she was my imaginary friend,” I said glibly. “She would appear after my parents turned the lights out. She told me bedtime stories and chased the monsters out of my closet before she went away. When I asked my mom about her, she always said there was no girl in my room after bedtime. Every kid has their own version of normal, you know? When other kids talked about their imaginary friends, I thought they could see them the way I could see mine.”

“I . . . see,” said Colin.

In for a penny, in for a pound. “She went away when I was nine. That was the year I found out Santa Claus wasn’t real, and neither were imaginary friends. She came back five years later, when I had a bad dream and set my pillow on fire. She’s been with me ever since.”

“And she couldn’t tell you anything else about your grandfather?”

“Just that he’d been an immigrant, so if he had any relatives, they were very far away, and he never liked to talk about them.” I looked at Colin, all wide eyes and innocence. If I’d had a bow to clip in my hair, I would have. Anything to make me look less like a potential threat. “I really hope you can help me. I’m so tired of being afraid everything is going to burn.”

“That isn’t a fear you’ll need to harbor for much longer,” said Colin. “Have you ever listened to a baby’s cry?”

I blinked. “Um, yeah. I’m a human being who works at Lowryland. My days are filled with crying babies.”

“Infants scream without concern for the damage they may do to themselves in the process. Their little throats are forever raw from the strain of howling their indignation to an uncaring world. As they grow older, they learn to use their voices for other things. They learn to speak, in some cases to sing, to modulate themselves. Would you say that speech is a better use for the voice than primal howls?”

“I guess . . .”

“That’s what I’m here to do for you,” said Colin, with more than a trace of smugness. “Right now, you are an infant. A powerful one, yes, but capable of nothing more complex than the magical equivalent of screaming because you want your diaper changed. You are a danger to yourself and others. As you learn to control what you can do—to speak, in a magical sense—you won’t be able to scream as loudly. Your body will learn its limits, and refuse to allow you to endanger yourself unless your life is on the line.”

I brightened. “No more fires?”

“Not unless you intend to cast them, and even then, they’ll require substantially more work than they do now.” He shook his head. “The Covenant of St. George has much to answer for. They’ve been the end of so many magical bloodlines—very nearly including yours, I’d wager. There’s no other reason for an adult sorcerer to leave his territory and move someplace where he’d have neither family nor familiarity to protect him.”

In a way, the Covenant had been responsible for the death of all my grandfather’s blood relatives. They had sent them, one after the other, into the face of danger, and when danger swallowed them whole, the Covenant had turned its eyes to other families, and other opportunities. The Price family was small now, but we were doing worlds better than Grandpa Thomas had been, back when he’d been the last branch of a dying family tree.

“All right,” I said. “Where do we begin?”

We began with concentration exercises. Colin would show me flash cards, asking me to memorize their contents in a matter of seconds, and hold them at the forefront of my mind as he asked me dozens of unrelated questions. He would recite poetry, only to stop and demand that I echo it back to him. He wouldn’t repeat a single word.

I drew circles and chanted riddles and focused and concentrated, and at the end of our three-hour session, I felt like I’d been running laps for the entire time. My head ached, my skin was too tight, and I was deeply aware of every ache in my ass from spending most of the lesson sitting on the hardwood floor.

Colin smiled at me. “How are your hands?” he asked.

I paused. “Cool,” I said finally.

“Good,” he said. “Your lessons start in earnest tomorrow.” Then he stood and walked away, into the window, into nothingness, and was gone, leaving me to stare after him.

Okay. This was going to be interesting.