Magic for Nothing

  Three

  “Sometimes a change of scene means more than just going someplace new. Sometimes it means becoming somebody new at the same time. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not necessarily a good one, either.”

  —Frances Brown

  A small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon

  THE DRIVEWAY WAS PACKED when Elsie pulled through the gate and up to the house. Mom and Dad were both home. Aunt Jane’s station wagon was parked at an angle, the bumper dangerously close to Mom’s herb garden. Elsie pulled in between the station wagon and Dad’s truck, killing the engine before letting her head fall forward against the wheel.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” she said mournfully.

  “Your brother’s probably already in there,” I said. “Is it really fair to leave Artie alone to deal with this shit-show?”

  “He stole one of my Barbies when he was like, six, and I’ve been holding it against him ever since,” she said. “I’ll text and tell him all is forgiven if you don’t make me go in there.”

  “Tempting, but no,” I said. “This is a family meeting. You’re part of the family, and that means you’re part of the family even when things are rotten. And it’s really not fair to leave Artie in there by himself, so let’s shortcut the part where I talk you into this and go inside.”

  “I hate you,” said Elsie.

  “I know,” I agreed amiably and got out of the car, pausing to retrieve my gym bag from the backseat. Elsie was being a brat, but that didn’t mean she deserved the sort of punishment that comes from leaving used derby gear in a hot car.

  When my parents moved to Oregon, it was with an eye toward establishing a permanent home for our family—one that wouldn’t have the bad memories associated with our previous family home in Buckley, Michigan. One big enough to support us all, if necessary. They’d started by buying an oversized house originally built by a would-be lumber baron who’d decided he didn’t like living in the middle of a big creepy forest that environmental regulations kept him from cutting down. The house was positioned in the middle of a large patch of already-cleared land, and they’d been able to get the whole thing, if not for a song, then for a cover album of Journey’s greatest hits.

  Their first move had been building a wall around the whole thing. Their second move had been building a large guesthouse in the back, and a smaller gatehouse in the front, and then to really start digging in. By this point, it’s been almost thirty years of constant innovation and improvement, and we could house thirty people for up to a month without anyone getting stabbed. It’ll be a few more generations before we have that many family members, but my parents think ahead.

  Of course, if the Covenant came for us tomorrow, all the thinking ahead in the world wouldn’t save us. Uncle Ted and Artie are noncombatants. Elsie can hold her own in a bar fight, but not much more than that. Dad, Aunt Jane, Mom, and me would be the only ones prepared to fight. We couldn’t stand against Covenant numbers. Calling Alex and Verity home, even with their respective significant others, wouldn’t tip the balance in our favor. About the only thing that could help would be—

  The front door opened. The heavily tattooed, short-haired woman in the doorway beamed at me, her frilled apron entirely at odds with her combat boots, cut-offs, and tattered khaki shirt.

  “Grandma!” Elsie and I broke into a run at the same time, and we both slammed into my maternal grandmother. Alice laughed, putting her arms around us and squeezing us tight.

  There’s something about grandma hugs that puts the world into perspective. Alice held us for a count of ten, long enough that it qualified as a good, solid embrace, but short enough that we weren’t blocking the doorway long enough to get yelled at. Then she let go, stepping back so we could come inside.

  “Hello, my darling girls,” she said, still beaming. “Oh, Annie, haven’t you grown? Elsie, dearest, I love your hair.”

  “I’d have dyed the tips red if I’d known you were coming,” said Elsie, almost shyly.

  Alice beamed. “It looks lovely as it is. Now come on, both of you. We have cookies, cocoa, and battle planning to get to.”

  “Yes, Grandma,” we chorused dutifully, and filed inside. I hung back, trying to get a good look at the tattoos on her arm and shoulder. They change every time I see her, and while some of the same designs show up over and over again, they’re almost never in the same place. I’d been studying Grandpa Thomas’ books as closely as I could, and I was starting to puzzle out the meanings behind some of the tattoos. They’re not just art. They’re pictographic representations of the spells and runes in his notes, inked on flesh and turned into something practical.

  My grandmother being a living spellbook isn’t nearly as weird as the fact that she looks roughly the same age as Elsie. She spends most of her time in parallel dimensions, searching for her husband. She ages—I saw her looking almost as old as Mom once—and then she somehow runs the clock backward, keeping herself young enough for the strain she puts her body under. The rest of the family is pretty sure Grandpa Thomas is long dead, although no one wants to say it to her face.

  I’m still reserving judgment. After all, if she can survive out there, maybe so could he.

  We stepped into the living room. The mice on the coffee table started cheering, causing the people who were already there to stop what they were doing and turn to look. And the kids I used to go to school with thought their families were weird.

  “HAIL!” shouted the mice. “HAIL THE RETURN OF THE PRECISE AND POLYCHROMATIC PRIESTESSES!”

  “Oh, goodie,” said Elsie.

  “HAIL THE GATHERING OF THE FIVE PRIESTESSES!” continued the mice.

  “At least they can count?” I said.

  “HAIL!” said the mice.

  Elsie groaned.

  Aeslin mice look basically like normal, nonintelligent, nonreligious rodents. They have a tendency to clothe themselves in scraps of paper, candy wrappers, fabric, and whatever else they can find, and their front paws are more like hands, but apart from that, if seen from a distance, there’s really no way to tell the Aeslin mice from something the cat might drag in. Until they open their mouths. Aeslin mice are highly prone to religious mania, and like to share their worshipful joy at every possible turn. Our colony worships the family. So yeah, that’s fun.

  “Did Elsie fill you in?” asked my father. There was a large whiteboard in the center of the room. He was standing next to it, a marker in his hand. It looked like they were trying to work out what sort of resources we had available to us in case of an attack that didn’t give us time to call in reinforcements. The little columns were dauntingly short.

  “She said there’d been an attack.” I walked over to the stairs, throwing my gym bag as far up the steps as it would go. “On a scale of one to ‘we’re all about to die,’ is there any chance I can stop to take a shower?”

  “Not just yet, dear,” said my grandmother, appearing at my elbow and guiding me toward the rest of the family. “We need to talk to you.”

  I blinked at her before turning to really look at the front room. Dad was next to the whiteboard; Artie was on the couch with Uncle Ted, looking like he was about to be physically ill. Mom and Aunt Jane had set up a folding card table, and were drawing on what looked like a map of North America. Their placement coincidentally put as much distance as possible between Grandma and Aunt Jane. They don’t get along. It looked pretty normal for an impromptu family gathering . . . except for Artie. He never looked that upset unless Sarah was in danger, or he had to leave the house and interact with girls he wasn’t related to.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “What’s going on?”

  Mom and Dad exchanged a look. She shook her head.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “This is your plan. This is your fault. You get to be the one who tries to sell it as a good idea, instead of a good
way to get our baby killed.”

  “Uh, hello?” I said. “I’m standing right here.”

  Dad grimaced and said nothing.

  “Annie, look at me,” said my grandmother. I obligingly turned to look at her. “Who do I look like?”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “Every other woman in the family.” If there’s a Healy mold, it was struck using my grandmother as the model. She’s short, blonde, and curvy—just like her daughter, my sister, and my cousin. Even Mom and Shelby fit that general description, like Dad and Alex both went out and found girls who reminded them of dear old mom. It’s a little creepy, if I think about it too hard: family resemblances are one thing, but I like to think a family should have slightly more genetic variation than your average hive of bees.

  “That’s right. Your grandfather always called it the ‘Carew look’— said we took after my grandmother’s side of the family. My mother was also short and blonde, so I suppose we started reinforcing it early.” Alice reached out and cupped my chin in her hand. I would have pulled away from almost anyone else, including Mom, but something about the sadness in her eyes kept me from moving. “You, though . . . you look just like your grandfather.”

  “Not seeing how that’s any better when the Covenant comes calling,” I said.

  “Thomas was the last of his line. He thought the Price name would die with him.” Alice’s smile was bitter as she released me. “They probably have a picture of him in their files somewhere—those bastards never let go of anything—but there’s no ‘Price look,’ not the way there’s a ‘Carew look.’ You could walk past a strike team on the street and they wouldn’t stop looking for the Price they’d heard was in the area.”

  I stared at her, slow horror uncurling in my chest as I realized what she was getting at.

  It’s true: I don’t look like any of the other women in my family. They’re all dainty, petite blondes, and I’m a tall brunette with the sort of ass that comes from spending years working on your lower body strength. Technically, I suppose my tits are proportional, but since I’m bigger, so are they. Even my face doesn’t match up with theirs. They tend toward these sweet pixie bone structures, while my cheekbones could be used to slice bread. When I was little, I used to think I’d been adopted, or maybe rescued from a swarm of ghouls after they’d devoured my real parents.

  I’d say I was an imaginative child, but when your family outings consist of “okay, kids, try to find your way out of these woods without being eaten by a bear,” sometimes the thought of having a different, better, less murderous family gets really damn tempting.

  “Thanks to Dominic, we know the location of three Covenant recruiting facilities in the United Kingdom,” said Aunt Jane, looking up from her map. “None of them will take you without a strong background and a referral, but those are easy enough to arrange. The referral doesn’t even have to come from a standing member. They’re so wedded to their ‘knights errant’ self-image that if you show up and say an old man told you to go there to fulfill your destiny, they’ll take it.”

  I gaped at her before turning to gape at the rest of my family. Gaping seemed like the only real answer. If they were going to have to identify my body by my dental records, I was going to make sure they all got a good look at my teeth.

  Mom looked apologetic but unwavering. Artie just looked miserable. Being in this room had to be causing him physical pain. Dad wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  I started getting angry.

  “So wait, you got your heir and your spare, and they’re both doing a dandy job of lining up the next generation, since Verity’s married and Alex is about to be, so I’m extraneous to needs? Is that what’s going on here?”

  “Antimony,” said my father sharply.

  “No, Dad, don’t you ‘Antimony’ me! Unless I’m reading the situation completely wrong, your response to Verity fucking up on national television is going to be sending me—your other daughter—to the Covenant of St. George to get killed by the professional assholes we ran away from a hundred fucking years ago. Well, you can—”

  “Antimony.”

  It was rare enough for him to take that sort of tone with me that I stopped, giving him a wide-eyed, wounded look.

  Dad shook his head. “You’re not wrong, Annie. We’re asking if you’ll help us infiltrate the Covenant of St. George. And sadly, you’re our only option. Elsie looks too much like a Carew, and Arthur is still trying to get his abilities under control. We’d talked about sending Sarah—”

  Artie’s head snapped up, eyes narrowing as he suddenly engaged with the conversation in a whole new way. Whenever the discussion of sending Sarah had taken place, Artie had not been a part of it.

  “—but she isn’t strong enough yet, and she’s not as equipped to take care of herself as you are. We know you can get in and get out with the lowest odds of getting hurt. You always say we don’t take you seriously enough, that we treat you like a child. Well, Annie, this is us taking you seriously. This is us treating you like an adult. You are the only one who stands a chance of finding out what we need to know to keep this family safe—to keep this continent safe.” My father looked at me solemnly. “We need to know what they know. We need to know what they’re planning. That means we need someone on the inside, someone they won’t spot on sight.”

  “Someone who isn’t one blood test away from being revealed as nonhuman and hence suitable for extermination,” said Elsie.

  She’d known. When she came to pick me up from the warehouse, she’d already known what they wanted me to do. It was oddly difficult not to see that as a betrayal. She was my cousin and my friend. She was supposed to be on my side.

  “You could’ve asked before you started making plans that involved sending me to my doom,” I muttered.

  “We’re asking now,” said my mother. She moved to stand next to Dad. “Annie, will you do this? For the sake of our family, for the sake of our community, will you do this?”

  The only person who hadn’t said anything was my Uncle Ted. I turned to him. “What do you think I should do?”

  He shrugged. “Annie, I’m the only person in this room with no human blood at all. These people have been treating my kind like vermin for centuries. I’ve lost relatives to their European field teams. I want to see them dead. All of them. I don’t say that when your sister’s home, because I know she loves her husband, and I’m sorry, Mrs. Price-Healy, but it’s how I feel.”

  “No offense taken,” said Alice.

  “They’re monsters. They call us monsters, but that’s because they’ve never looked in a mirror. Do I want to leave you alone with them? No. But do I need, all the way down to my bones, to know what’s going on? Whether I should be grabbing my family and running as far as I possibly can? Yeah. So I’m sorry, baby girl, but I’m on board with this idea. We need a miracle. Maybe it’s you.”

  I looked at him silently for a long moment before turning to my parents and saying, in a subdued voice, “Yeah. I’ll do it. I’ll go to the Covenant for you.”

  Silence fell over the room. The mice didn’t cheer. Some things, apparently, were too serious even for that.

  Swell.

  The conversation continued for more than two hours, my parents updating their map and whiteboard while Aunt Jane took notes and Grandma Alice contributed everything she’d ever been able to glean about the Covenant of St. George. Most of it was corroborated by the information we had from Dominic. The Covenant is made of traditionalists, which is another way of saying that they’re set in their ways. If something isn’t broken, they don’t go out of their way to fix it.

  Fascinatingly, being traditionalists working off of a centuries-old model doesn’t make them sexists. The Covenant of St. George has been recruiting women since the Middle Ages, apparently recognizing that sometimes the most effective warriors are the ones no one would see coming. My gender wasn’t going to be an imp
ediment. My background, on the other hand, was.

  “They don’t get many North American recruits, because they’ve never been able to establish a strong presence here,” said my grandmother. “They mostly operate by sending strike teams, purging whatever cryptid presence they find, and retreating back to Europe to lick their wounds. This continent has never offered them fertile soil on which to plant their specific flavor of hate.”

  “Which is amazing, because it’s not like America has been quick to reject all the other kinds of racism people have tried to encourage here,” said Artie in a low voice. His mother shot him a sharp look. I tried not to snicker.

  I failed.

  “Most of the North American recruits they do get are people who’ve been harmed by cryptid activity in some way,” said Mom. I looked back to her. “We have a cover story for you. Remember the Black Family Carnival?”

  “Apraxis wasps, right?” I asked. “They took out the whole company.”

  “As of right now, they took out all but one,” she said. “We’re setting you up as a daughter of two of their acrobats, who was in New York taking your SATs when the wasps hit the carnival. You finished college, but you never stopped thinking about what happened to your family. You want revenge. You heard a rumor about a group that could help you get it.”

  “Carnie brat,” I said. “Okay. That’s something I can do.” Before roller derby, I was a cheerleader, and before I was a cheerleader, I was a tumbler, spending my summers training with the Campbell Family Carnival, otherwise known as “Great-Grandma Fran’s side of the family.” I’d loved it there. It had been clear almost from the start that I wasn’t going to have the right build for competitive gymnastics, so we’d moved me into circus classes, teaching me trampoline and trapeze routines, all performed with a dizzying array of safety precautions standing by to keep me from breaking anything I might need later.