Page 38 of Tricks for Free

“What do you want me to do?” demanded Mary.

I looked quickly around. No one was looking at us. Anything that happened now was likely to be written off as shock, a hallucinatory aftereffect of seeing something this horrible happen in a place that was supposed to be all about happiness and joy.

“Go under the float,” I said. “See how many dead we’re dealing with. If there are any ghosts, see if you can convince them to go away. I’m going to take care of the kids.”

Mary nodded and was gone. I kept running until I reached the sidewalk and the first of the sobbing, somehow left behind children.

Please, you were with an older sibling who forgot about you, I thought desperately, picking up a weeping little girl with one arm and grabbing a baby carrier with the other. The girl wailed and buried her face against my shoulder. I was a stranger, sure, but I was a stranger in a Goblin Market costume. She was wearing a sparkly Princess Laura dress. Having someone from what was probably her favorite movie come to rescue her must have been the only thing that made sense right now.

There was blood on the lacy edge of her dress. Please think it’s jam, I thought, and ran until I reached a bench, where I plopped both child and carrier down.

The little girl didn’t go easily. She grabbed for me as soon as it became apparent what I was trying to do, making a keening noise in the back of her throat, like a distressed puppy. I offered her my brightest Lowryland smile.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Melody. What’s your name?”

“Ginger,” she sniffled.

“Is this baby with you, Ginger?”

She shook her head.

“Okay. I have a big job for you, princess. Do you think you can do a big job for me?”

“I want my mommy,” she whispered.

I understood the sentiment better than I’d ever thought I would as an adult. I wanted my own mommy so badly that it hurt. “I know, princess,” I said, smoothing Ginger’s hair back from her face. “But I need to help some more people before we can go find your mom, and I need you to be brave and strong like Laura, and watch this baby for me, okay? I can’t take a carrier with me while I make sure everyone else is okay.”

Everyone else was not okay. There was too much blood for that, and too much screaming, even now that most of the guests had fled. A lot of people were never going to be okay again. I kept looking at Ginger and kept smiling, listening to the sirens getting closer and the wailing of the wounded.

Finally, sniffling, she said, “Okay,” and leaned against the baby carrier. The pressure of her body caused it to rock, and the wailing infant stopped, apparently startled into silence.

“I’ll be right back,” I said solemnly, before turning on my heel and sprinting back into the chaos.

Mary was there, her hair standing out like a banner against the blood and smoke. Sometimes I thought she had someone with her, but whenever I tried to look closer, they were gone, fading back into the landscape. She was gathering ghosts, the newly-dead who were still too close to the twilight to be visible to the living. That was . . . that was not great. I mean, it was great in the sense that Lowryland might not wind up more haunted than it already was, and yet. It would have been nice if no one had died.

It would have been wonderful.

I plucked four more children off the sidewalks and ran them back to Ginger, who was taking enthusiastically to her new role as “person who was keeping an eye on everyone else.” I would drop them off and run again as she started to explain the situation, that I was one of Princess Laura’s helpers, and I was going to find all their mommies and daddies just as soon as I was finished finding everyone. She made it sound like a game. That was probably at least half shock speaking, keeping her from fully understanding what was going on.

A little shock would have been nice. A little shock would have been great, as I moved aside a sheet of fallen plastic to reveal the actress who played Laura. Had played Laura. She wasn’t going to be playing any roles after this one, save perhaps—after the mortician finished working on her—the role of beautiful corpse. Lizzie’s actress had gotten off easy with her broken arm. Laura’s actress had a broken neck, and a wide swath of skin had been scraped off the side of her face, exposing muscle and bone.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, and placed the plastic gently back across her body, so none of the remaining guests would accidentally see her and realize what had happened.

She wasn’t the only casualty. She wasn’t even the worst of them. I was trying to convince a weeping man to let go of his boyfriend’s hand and move away from a structurally unsound piece of the float when the sirens suddenly got much closer, and I turned to see the full Lowryland security team rounding the corner. A knot in my chest let go, allowing me to breathe again. They were here. I wasn’t alone anymore. I wasn’t alone.

A glance at the flower clock next to the gift shop told me that it had been less than ten minutes since the float collapsed. It felt like it had been so much longer. I straightened, trying to shake off the feeling that time was broken, that something had somehow gone horribly wrong and caused everything to stretch out like taffy.

A child was crying. An adult was still screaming. The Lowryland security team was running for the float, while the handlers they’d brought with them were working to clear the remaining guests away.

A hand touched my elbow. I flinched and whipped around. There was Mary, now wearing the uniform of a Fairyland staffer. It made sense. She didn’t do it often, for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention from management, but with the chaos around us, no one was going to be pointing fingers at a single unfamiliar face.

“Come on,” she said, getting a firmer grip on my arm and tugging me backward, toward her, away from the chaos. “You need to stop staring and come on.”

I looked at her blankly, not resisting, but not helping her either. That shock I’d been wishing for felt like it was finally settling in. Yay. “What? Why?”

“Because people are snapping out of it, and they’re taking pictures, and you’ve been behind smoke or behind ghosts until now, but the number of cameras is about to skyrocket, and I can’t keep your ugly mug off the news forever.” Mary looked at me grimly. “Run or get outed to the world.”

I chose “run.”