Page 93 of Tricks for Free

I had never felt so foolish in my life.

“What about the other lady?”

“She’s an ambulomancer. She draws power from distance traveled, but only when she does it on her own two feet.” I hated trying to unsnarl the delicate distinctions between the different types of magic-users. The fact that Sam wasn’t slowing down and I had to keep pulling my legs up to keep from slamming into things wasn’t helping. “A routewitch gets power from distance, period. Roller skates, bare feet, cars, whatever. As long as they’re on the ground, they’re gaining strength. An ambulomancer gains power faster, but has to keep their feet anchored.”

“What do they do?”

I was about to answer when Sam swung into an invisible barrier, losing his grip on the branch he’d been using and sending us both toppling toward the ground. I only had a few seconds to figure out my landing. Calling on everything I’d learned from gymnastics and cheerleading—and a few things I’d learned from roller derby—I bent my knees, braced my shoulders, and hit hard.

Dropping eight feet onto pavement in roller skates may never rank among my top ten favorite activities. At least I was in footwear designed to protect my ankles. I’ve seen my sister do similar drops in high heels, and somehow her legs are not shapely sacks of gravel barely held together by her muscular system.

Sam dropped next to me, landing harder, but with a little less visible pain. He gave me a wide-eyed look. “Assuming that’s what they do,” he said.

I nodded. “Yeah. Barriers. Ambulomancers are the reason that sometimes a road goes on forever, and sometimes it’s like a quarter of a mile long.”

“So how do we fight it?”

Normally, this was where I would have called for Mary, or better yet, Rose. Normally, I wasn’t also dealing with a routewitch. I frowned at the nothingness in front of us before saying, “They want us there. They want us to come to them. So there has to be a way in.”

“Won’t that be like running into a blind canyon because the villain wants you to?”

“It would be, except that it’s not possible to have only one way in. That would mess up the pressure.” I looked wildly around, finally spotting the charred wall near the site of the first accident in my recent chain. “This way.”

I skated for the employee door with Sam on my heels. When I found it locked, I pulled one of the knives from inside my shirt—how I hadn’t been shredded by my own weapons when the water pinned me to the ceiling, I had no idea—and slammed it down on the hasp, breaking the cheap padlock. Sam blinked, looking impressed, and didn’t say anything. He just followed.

We made our way across the employee walkway to the first tunnel door. Unlike the gate, it wasn’t locked. I pulled it open, and Sam grinned, a sharp, virtually feral expression.

“Got it,” he said.

“Good,” I said, and stepped into the tunnel.

The thing about road witches, whatever their type, is that they’re limited. Roads and feet and trains. Boats and planes and once, when we were more dedicated to sending people down into the bowels of the earth to bring back armfuls of riches, mines. An ambulomancer could no more wall off a tunnel than a trainspotter could read the story of a road. But the tommyknockers have been rare or entirely gone for decades now, outside of places like Kentucky, where the coal mines still thrive. Colin didn’t have one. His ambulomancer didn’t have the employee passageways.

Sam didn’t have any of that background. He just knew that I’d gone for the tunnels, and he trusted me enough to follow me underground. It was a humbling thought, knowing that he trusted me that much. I was going to do my best to make sure I deserved it.

It was hard to follow the twists and turns in the dark. I had been working mostly in Fairyland for long enough that I knew the way I had to go, and after only two false starts, we were standing at the door that would take us into the landscaping of the Midsummer Night’s Scream.

I put a finger to my lips in an exaggerated hushing gesture. Sam nodded. Then he leaned in, pushed my finger aside, and kissed me.

His lips tasted like chlorinated water, and he smelled of wet fur, and I grabbed his arms and clung to him, counting off the seconds I felt we could afford to spend on this small, utterly self-indulgent gesture. When I reached ten, I let him go, offered a tight smile, and opened the door on the dark tangle of the bushes that hid it from casual view.

The voices reached us immediately.

“Joshua should be back by now. Are you sure you didn’t make your shell too strong?” Colin. He sounded peevish and unnerved, which was fine by me. The more off-balance he was, the better our odds were.

“Something hit it,” said a female voice. The ambulomancer. I wished I’d taken the time to learn her name. I’d been too trusting. I’d allowed them to lull me into a false sense of security—and I’d done half the work for them, treating Lowryland as some sort of magical, uncrackable safe haven against all the people who would do me harm. I’d been so focused on the threat of the Covenant that I had never considered the possibility of danger from within.

“That’s what happens to shells,” said Emily.

“Yes, but something hit it without shattering it,” said the ambulomancer. “Your little apprentice is probably walking around the edges, looking for the door I left her. She’ll be here soon, or she’s unconscious on the ground and Joshua will bring her back. Either way, I did my job, and either way, she’s only still a threat because you did your part wrong. She should be loyal by now.”

“You enjoyed her power as much as the rest of us,” snapped Colin. “Don’t be a child, Andrea. If I’d drained her any faster, she wouldn’t have been able to regenerate for years, and we would have lost all the good she’s done us.”

I turned to Sam and pointed upward. He nodded, catching my meaning, and I barely had time to take a breath before his hands and tail were around my waist and he was propelling himself nimbly into the air, carrying us past the brush in a single powerful leap. We landed in front of the cluster of magic-users, him with bent knees, me standing as straight and seemingly effortless as any pom-pom girl since the dawn of cheerleading time. Sometimes it’s all about making an entrance.

Emily jumped. The ambulomancer—Andrea—clapped a hand over her mouth to stop a shriek. And Colin, whose back was toward us, went ramrod straight and tense, his shoulders forming an iron bar beneath the jacket of his tailored suit.

“I asked you to teach me, not rob me,” I said coldly. “Give back my friends and this can be over.”