Page 63 of Tricks for Free

All the adults died. There was too much bad luck, too much backlash, and not a single one of them was able to get lucky enough to run.

“One of the reasons people don’t always like jinks, no matter how hard we try to be good neighbors, is because we can see luck, which means we can move it. Say I looked at Annie and thought ‘wow, she has so much good luck, she doesn’t need all of that,’ and thought I could make better choices with her luck than she could. I could take it.” Cylia shrugged. “If I were being kind, I could take a little bit, and luck isn’t only dollars: it’s pennies, too. If I steal a penny from every person I see over the course of a day, I’ll wind up with plenty, and none of them will notice the difference. An ethical jink will never damage the community around them.”

“What about an unethical one?” asked Sam.

“An unethical jink could rip away every scrap of good luck you have and leave you with nothing but bad,” said Cylia. “Like attracts like, which means more bad luck would come, and you’d probably catch that bus you were running for when it ran you over.”

“So are you saying an unethical jink stole Sam’s luck?” I asked.

“I wish I were,” said Cylia. “We could deal with that. Look, if I took your good luck, I’d leave the bad behind, and vice-versa. If I tried to take both, at the same time, it would be more than I could hold. I’d start bleeding back onto you. It is impossible for a jink to take all your luck, good and bad, at the same time—and even if a team decided to play some sort of fucked-up luck con on you, there’d be dust on you by the time they were done. Luck is a natural force of the universe, like gravity. It’s everywhere. It’s in the air. And you, my friend, have been scrubbed as clean as . . . I don’t even know. As clean as something very, very clean.”

“Okay, hang on,” I said carefully, while Sam was still gaping at her. “Can we fix this? Because not having any luck sounds like a bad thing.”

“It’s not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s a perfectly neutral thing, which is why it’s going to turn into a bad thing.”

Now both of us looked at her blankly. Cylia sighed.

“Okay. Say you open a door that has a fifty-fifty chance of triggering a booby-trap. Good luck, it doesn’t happen. Bad luck, it does. Well, Sam is currently a third variable. He opens the door, nothing happens, not because he got lucky, but because the trap has somehow failed to register his presence. Which sounds like good luck, sure . . . until someone with mostly bad luck comes into the building and all the traps go off at once. Or someone with mostly good luck comes into the building and the trap goes off, with Sam between it and its potential target. He’s not even an inanimate object right now. He’s a null spot. Other peoples’ luck is going to use that.”

“My head hurts,” complained Sam. “How does this explain why I can’t change back to looking human?”

“I have no idea, but I’m betting it has something to do with your luck being gone,” said Cylia. “Good luck would have shielded you from the negative effects of whatever you were exposed to. Bad luck would have made you shift back to your normal form at the worst possible time. The fact that you were able to get out of Lowryland without an angry mob in close pursuit tells me that it’s not a matter of the second.”

“I changed to keep a couple of kids from getting hurt, and then I realized I was stuck,” said Sam slowly. “I don’t know that anyone saw me.”

“Neutral situation,” said Cylia.

“Okay,” I said. “So why is this a bad thing?”

“Because we don’t know why it happened, for one,” said Cylia. “Because it’s not natural. Everyone has luck, like everyone has gravity. Suddenly losing one of the basic concepts of the universe? Probably not a good thing. Most of all, because right now, he’s clean, but luck collects on everything, and bad luck is more common, as a free-floating element, than good luck. People hoard good luck and do their best to let go of the bad. So statistically, whatever luck he rebuilds from here is more likely to be the bad kind. If you hadn’t come to see me, I’d say he would have been a total bad luck bear inside of the week.”

I stared at her.

Sam recovered first. “So how do we fix this?”

“Seed luck. I can spare a little. Annie . . .” Cylia squinted at me. “She can spare a little less, maybe, but still, she can spare some. It’s the difference between a worm in her apple and no worm in her apple.”

“Which is the bad one?” asked Sam.

Cylia shrugged. “I don’t judge. Anyway, if we give you some seed luck, you should be able to start rebuilding it on your own. Hell, you may wind up luckier than you started, since you’ll be starting with mostly good luck.”

Sam blinked. “What do you mean, ‘mostly’?”

“No luck is pure.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m happy to give some luck to the cause of Sam not getting creamed by a bus. What I want to know is, why does not having luck stop him from shifting shape?”

“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. We’ll deal with that next.” Cylia licked her finger, leaned over the table, and wiped it on Sam’s bare arm. He made a disgusted noise, recoiling, and she answered it with a sunny smile. “Suck it up, buttercup. That’s some luck for you. Good luck, high-octane stuff. Enjoy.”

“Did it have to come with spit?” Sam demanded.

“Yes.” Cylia turned to me, licking her finger again. “Give me your arm.”

Wrinkling my nose, I did as I was told. “Soap,” I said. “Soap and hot water and ew.”

“You people are such babies,” said Cylia, and swiped her finger down my arm—or started to, anyway. Midway through the motion she froze, eyes widening and face paling, until she looked like something out of an amateur theater company’s haunted house.

“Cylia?” I asked warily.