Page 94 of Tricks for Free

“Demanding as always,” said Colin. He turned slowly, looking first at me and then at Sam. His lips pulled back in a sneer. “Beauty and the Beast indeed. Have you considered what the children will look like? It’s a disgrace.”

“Nah,” I said broadly. “My family will be cool with it. We’ve been cool with stranger.” Now was the moment to put that dramatic entrance to good use. I took a step forward, Sam’s tail obligingly uncoiling from around my waist, my eyes fixed on Colin and my hands spread by my sides like the fire was still there.

Cheerleading and roller derby have this much in common: image and attitude are sometimes everything. You’re going to eat grass and track no matter how good you are. What people will remember is how you get back on your feet. So I advanced on those people like Dany emerging from the fire, like Jean stepping out of the Phoenix Force, like . . .

Well, like me. Antimony Price. The girl who burns and does not die.

“I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced,” I said. My hands moved, plucking knives from the waistband of my wet jeans and holding them low against my hips, as deadly as the fire I had given to the crossroads, and a lot harder for unethical sorcerers to steal. “My name is Antimony. Antimony Price. Maybe you remember my grandparents?”

Andrea went white, taking a quick step backward and almost tripping over one of the low decorative walls used to shape the walkways. “You’re a Price?”

“It’s hot when your name scares the shit out of people,” Sam observed.

“She’s lying,” said Colin dismissively. “Don’t listen to this foolish little girl who thought she could take advantage of our kindness and wound up in over her head. She’s not a Price. They’re all dead.”

“She stinks of travel and the grave,” said Emily. Her tone was uneasy, and she was looking at me with a new intensity. “Alice Price grew up among ghosts, and her godmother was an ambulomancer. We knew her very well.”

“Thomas Price was a fool who chose to fritter his potential on a farm girl,” snapped Colin. “He died childless.”

“He disappeared the father of two, after making a deal with the crossroads for the life of his wife, my grandmother,” I said, keeping my voice calm, keeping my hands steady. “I take after him in so many more ways than you can imagine. If you’re not with me, you’re against me—and I don’t think you want that, do you?”

“She’s bluffing,” said Colin—but there was a note of unease in his voice now, like he was reviewing every interaction we’d had, and finding at least a few of them questionable.

I took another step forward. Andrea took another step back.

“No,” she said, voice clear and only shaking a little. “She’s not. I’m out. I don’t have the chops for this shit.” Then she turned and fled, racing off into the darkness of the Park.

Colin scowled. “Is this your plan, child? Say dire things and frighten us all away?”

“No,” I said, and raised my right hand.

The knife flew straight and true, embedding itself in Colin’s left shoulder before he had a chance to realize what I was about to do. He bellowed, pain and rage and shock all mixed together into a single primal sound. That was Sam’s cue. He leaped straight upward, crashing down on Emily while she was still gaping, wide-eyed, at the blood soaking into Colin’s sleeve. She went down like a sack of potatoes, Sam crouching on top of her, pinning her to the ground. He rolled his lips back, showing his teeth. She froze. Smart girl.

Colin grasped the knife in his shoulder, yanking it loose and flinging it to the ground. “You ungrateful little wretch,” he snarled. “How dare you? Don’t you know who I am?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re the guy whose ass I’m about to kick.”

Stan Lee is a human dude from New York. I don’t know whether he’s ever met a superhero in real life. (He’s definitely met a cryptid—the cryptid population of New York and New Jersey is staggering—but that doesn’t mean he knew it was happening.) Still, there’s one thing he got absolutely right: if you can quip and joke and one-liner your way into a fight, the odds are good that it will throw your opponent off at least enough to make them forget about a few things.

Like the fact that I was on roller skates.

I threw myself into the motion, crouching low and skating as hard as I could across the concrete, smoothed and evened out by the feet of a hundred thousand tourists, maintained nightly by the Lowryland staff. Colin barely had time to realize what was happening before my shoulder slammed into his stomach. At the same time, I punched him hard in the stab wound I had created, taking him down to the ground with my arm forming a bar across his throat. He landed even harder than Emily had. I couldn’t feel bad about that.

He glared at me, eyes burning with hatred and with flickering, deep-buried magic. His lips moved as he tried to speak. No sound emerged. I had knocked the air completely out of him, leaving him temporarily silent.

Good. I jabbed him again in the stab wound before hissing, “Last chance, asshole. Where are my friends? Give them back to me, and maybe you walk away from this.”

Colin glared at me. He knew I was lying. I knew I was lying.

I knew how this ended.

Colin and his cronies had been hurting people, using Lowryland as the engine of their mischief, for a very long time. Losing the boost from my magic wasn’t going to stop them. It might slow them down a little, but they would start up again. Andrea was gone. She was also an ambulomancer. She couldn’t do this sort of thing without someone to help her. Emily was going to have other things to worry about as soon as Rose told the Queen of the Routewitches what she’d been up to. Colin . . .

Colin was a sorcerer. Colin wanted power more than he wanted to survive. If we walked away and left him breathing, he’d start the whole thing up again as soon as he had a new wand. There was no other outcome. I had to kill him.

Behind and above us, there was a snarl as the Midsummer Night’s Scream rumbled to life. I glanced up, shocked. Colin laughed. When I looked back down, he was smirking.

“Where are your friends?” he asked. “About twenty seconds from dying.”