Page 9 of Tricks for Free

“Getting by.” I started walking through the store. She trailed behind me, still projecting the overall impression of a girl who wanted to know whether we had her size. As long as I kept smiling and kept my voice low, no one would notice anything out of the ordinary. That’s what I was aiming for. “How’s everybody else?”

Mary frowned. She didn’t like it when I refused to give her the details on my life, saying that as my only aunt with access, it was her duty to keep an eye on me. She wasn’t wrong about that. If she hadn’t been able to check in, I would probably have been even twitchier than I already was. Mary was my last connection to home. I was holding on with both hands.

“Worried about you,” she said. “Your mother wants you to call.”

“My mother always wants me to call.”

“Yes, and she’s got the right idea. There are ways—”

“We don’t know what resources they have. I wasn’t there long enough, and I was only in one facility. They could have a whole division of Arties all tapping away, looking for ways in.”

Mary gave me a disapproving look. “You don’t believe that.”

“Does it really matter what I believe?” Being a Lowryland Cast Member had done a lot for my ability to keep smiling even as the life drained out of my voice, leaving me a pleasant, amenable robot designed to please the guests without letting on that I was miserable. “It’s not safe. Mom knows that, or she would already have threatened you with an exorcism to get you to tell her where I am. She tells you she wants me to call because she knows that’s what a good mother would do, not because she expects me to do it.”

My mother is a good mother. She has three kids and two kids-in-law, and she loves us all with the fierce protectiveness of a mama bear trying to keep its cubs alive. She’s also a pragmatist. She wasn’t raised by humans—my maternal grandparents are a cuckoo and a Revenant, and try explaining that when it’s time to draw the family tree—and they taught her early that sometimes, when the door closes, the people on the outside are on their own. The survival of the whole matters more than the survival of the individual pieces. If bringing me home meant endangering the rest of the family, she would let me stay away. She would trust me to take care of myself. But she would keep asking me to call because that’s what a human mother would do.

Mary sighed. “I don’t like this.”

“I know. I don’t expect you to.” We had reached the short corridor between the store and the backroom, where additional stock would be found, if we had any. I stepped into it. Mary followed me, coming as far as a guest reasonably could, while I hovered at the edge, out of the view of any cameras. There were no listening devices—yet. Give corporate a few more years and they’ll figure out a way to cram those into their surveillance system.

Hopefully, I’ll be long gone by then, having figured out a way to safely thwart the Covenant and return home. That’s the trouble with going into hiding to escape from a multinational organization with unknown resources and capabilities. I don’t have an exit plan. What I knew to do began and ended with “run.” I’d run. I’d found a place to hide. Now I got to live with it.

“My hands are heating up again,” I told Mary, keeping my voice low. We could get away with maybe five minutes of unauthorized break, assuming none of my managers wandered by and decided to ask why I was spending so much time on one guest instead of keeping the whole floor happy. “I’ve managed not to set anything on fire, but it’s getting harder.”

“You should do a controlled burn,” said Mary. “On your next day off, find a trash can and just let loose.”

“Arson is not a good thing.”

“No, but until we find someone who can train you, it’s a little bit inevitable, so we may as well make the best of it.” Mary shrugged. “I’d help more if I could. I’ve been looking for books. Turns out, most magic-users don’t like to share.”

“Tell me about it.” I’d been working from my grandfather’s books when I was still at home. Grandpa Thomas had been a magic-user and a member of the Covenant of St. George. Somehow, he’d managed to conceal the first from the second for long enough to get away alive, which was no small feat.

There were days when I wished, more than anything, that he’d been as good at avoiding crossroads bargains and being sucked into dimensional rifts as he’d been at escaping from the Covenant. Maybe then he would still have been around to train me, and I wouldn’t be living in fear of the day I went all Firestarter on my friends. Having most of my potential futures come straight out of Stephen King books is not reassuring.

Mary looked at me with concern. “Don’t,” she said.

“I wasn’t going to!”

“No, but you were starting to think about it, and every time you do that, I’m going to tell you not to.”

I glared at her. “You’re not the telepath in this family. You don’t get to tell me what I’m thinking.”

My cousin Sarah is the telepath in the family. Our reunions are a lot of fun.

“No, I’m not the telepath.” She folded her arms. “I’m just the girl who’s been serving the crossroads since before your parents were born, and I can tell when someone’s starting to think that making a deal would be good for them. It wouldn’t be good for you. It’s not good for anyone. So I’m going to tell you no over and over again, until you learn to listen.”

“Mary . . .” I paused, and sighed. “I wouldn’t do that to you. You know I wouldn’t do that to you. And there’s no way the crossroads would send anyone else to broker a family deal, which means that even if I’m tempted, I can’t do it.”

“Good,” she said coldly. Then she thawed a little, and said, “I saw Sam.”

“What?” My voice broke at the end of the word, hitting a note too loud and too shrill to be safe. I looked guiltily around before leaning toward her and asking, “How is he? Where is he? He’s not looking for me, right? He’s smart enough that he’s not looking for me?”

“The show has settled at a rented training facility in Indiana while they wait for the insurance money; they should be able to replace everything they’ve lost and be back on the road by the beginning of next season,” said Mary. She paused, looking at me carefully before she added, “The Campbell Family Carnival is there with them. They’re helping to get the show back on their feet, and making sure no one loses their edge due to idleness.”

“But the Campbells—”

“Are family, yes. Not blood family. No one’s going to have a tracking charm that can link them to you, or use them to hurt your friends. Breathe. You’re not the only person in this family with a brain in their head. You can trust us to not fuck up completely just because you can’t make all the decisions.”