Tricks for Free

  Sam followed my gaze, and shook his head. “No. I might be able to climb to the top. I could probably even carry one of you. But I can’t carry everyone, and I’m not leaving all our backup behind. Not going to happen.”

  “I thought you were letting me lead this,” I said.

  “Only as long as I’m also keeping you alive,” he replied firmly. “Keeping you alive is the most important thing I’m doing right now.”

  “I’m touched, really,” said Cylia. Her tone was dry, but her expression was sympathetic. “Although I care more about my own skin than the monkey seems to, he’s not entirely wrong. We’re not doing anything that ups our chance of being slaughtered.”

  “Do they know we’re still alive?” asked Megan. “If I’d dropped an elevator on somebody, I’d figure they were dead.” Her snakes were standing on end, tongues flicking constantly. That, more than anything else, told me how much rage was behind her calm exterior. Megan was a medical resident who just happened to be a gorgon. She’d never been thrown down an elevator shaft before. She was pissed.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

  Megan nodded. “Then we take the stairs.” She looked around at the rest of us, neutral expression melting into a scowl that Medusa herself would have admired. “Nobody drops me down a hole.”

  I smiled.

  Twenty-two

  “Tired is for after the battle ends. Tired is for winners. Losers get to sleep a lot longer, and they don’t wake up again.”

  –Jane Harrington-Price

  Climbing up a lot of stairs

  THE STAIRS DID NOT go on forever. That would have been impossible. If routewitches had been able to extend mundane stairways past the limit of the Earth’s gravity, like some Phineas and Ferb nightmare science adventure, they would have found a way to boost the space program decades ago. Roads crisscrossing the solar system, distances that planet-bound routewitches could only dream of . . . oh, they would never have let us stay within the grasp of gravity. No matter how much they enjoyed using it as a weapon.

  The stairs did, however, go on for a long, long time. Cylia, Fern, and I were all used to skating for hours, and while we weren’t exactly thrilled by the climb, we managed with relative ease once Fern figured out the exact balance she needed to strike between density and injury. I took point, a knife in each hand and fingers aching for fire. Cylia was close behind me, ready to pull me out of the way if something loomed.

  Sam brought up the middle, Megan slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She wasn’t protesting. The gorgon was in reasonably good shape, but she was also a med grad student, and this sort of thing wasn’t part of her daily rounds at the hospital. Letting her walk would have slowed us down considerably, and Sam didn’t seem to have a problem carrying her.

  Fern finished our procession, stepping light—so light that she frequently launched herself several feet into the air, landing on a higher step as gently as a feather drifting back to earth. She was moving slower than any of the rest of us but still keeping pace through the sheer dint of taking the steps so many at a time.

  Every time we reached a landing we would stop, tensing, while I cracked the door open and looked through. For the past eight floors, what I’d seen on the other side was the same hallway. The exact same hallway. Emily could bend space and distort distance, but routewitches can’t actually create what isn’t there. The strange other-space I had walked through the first time I’d come to this building had been the creation of one of the other magic-users. That was worrisome. Of the members of the Lowryland cabal, the only ones I was absolutely sure of were Emily, Colin the sorcerer, and Joshua the trainspotter. The others were a nebulous mass of faces and ill-defined abilities.

  Belatedly, I realized that should have been another warning sign. Yes, I was Colin’s student. Yes, it was reasonable that he was my primary contact with the rest of the cabal. But when I’d joined my roller derby team, there had been a big mixer for me and the rest of the fresh meat, so we could understand what we were getting ourselves into. When I’d joined the cheerleading squad, we had all gone out for pizza to get to know each other, because the people in charge understood that without the pom-poms and spirit fingers, most of us would never have been friends. Even my employment as a low-level Lowryland cast member had started with team building exercises.

  If the cabal had really wanted me as a member of their team, they would have treated me like a member of the team, not shunted me into a corner where Colin could keep an eye on me. I had been so blinded by the possibility of getting myself under control that I hadn’t paid attention to the parts of the narrative that didn’t fit, the ones designed to keep me on the outside and out of the way.

  Saying this was all my fault would have been sheer arrogance, untrue, and unhelpful. These people had been spinning their spells and doing their damage long before I’d come on the scene. But I’d made them stronger, whether I’d intended to or not, and I had been a part of the damage they’d done since I’d agreed to let them have access to me. I needed to fix this.

  We were approaching another landing. I motioned for the others to stop, eased the door open, and peeked through the crack into the wood-and-mirrors training room. We were here. We were finally, after so many stairs, here.

  I looked over my shoulder and nodded. Sam put Megan down. She stepped forward, joining Cylia at my back, and reached for her sunglasses. She didn’t remove them—not yet—but with her hand on the frame, she was armed and dangerous.

  No more waiting. No more walking. It was time to move.

  I pushed the door open, and we stepped through.

  * * *

  The room where Colin had conducted the bulk of my training was empty. We moved to the center of the floor, which seemed the least likely location for a trapdoor, and stopped, looking carefully around.

  Back home, I had a reputation for digging pit traps and otherwise making my siblings’ lives difficult. I studied the walls and floor, looking for places where the woodgrain didn’t line up the way it should have, or where an angle seemed ever so slightly wrong. I didn’t find them. Either there were no traps in this room, or they were too well hidden for me to see them.

  Or something else was going on. I looked at the mirror. Our reflections looked back at me, Megan still mercifully wearing her sunglasses. Stunning myself with friendly fire would have been one hell of a capper on an already lousy evening.

  “Everyone, get ready,” I said, drew a knife, and flung it as hard and as true as I could toward the dead center of the glass.

  The sort of throwing knives we used at the carnival are light, designed for distance more than damage. They can travel a long way, but if you’re aiming for something solid, you’re more likely to blunt your blade than you are to actually break anything.

  If you’re aiming for something solid. My knife hit the glass and the mirror shattered, shards falling harmlessly to the ground to reveal a concrete box of a room, more basement than anything else, with a set of gridded steel stairs leading downward. My heart leaped into my throat. It was the room Emily had led me through on my first visit, and that meant those stairs ended in the conference room.

  “We’re almost there,” I said, flexing my fingers again. There was still no fire, but the heat of my anger made up for it. “Mind the glass.”

  Shards of mirror crunched underfoot as I walked toward the opening I’d created, pausing only to retrieve my knife. When I reached the edge of the mirror, I paused, turned, and motioned for the others to stay back.

  “Give me a second,” I said. “Sam, be ready to pull me out.”

  He nodded. Megan looked confused.

  “Pull her out?” she asked. “Why?”

  “In case it’s booby-trapped,” said Fern cheerfully, like she was explaining a particularly clever derby maneuver. “It probably is. It would be if it were my dark creepy room behind a big gla
ss sheet.”

  Megan’s mouth dropped open. She looked to Cylia for support. Cylia shrugged.

  “This is life outside a gated community,” she said. “It gets weird.”

  We could banter for hours. That was nice—banter is comforting, which is probably why Spider-Man does it so much—but it wasn’t getting us any closer to done. Sam was the fastest person I’d ever met, human or cryptid. If anyone could get me out of the way before some deathtrap slammed closed over my head, it was him. And I trusted him to do it. I trusted him completely.

  Maybe this was what love felt like. Smiling despite myself, I turned to face front, took a deep breath, and stepped over the base of the broken mirror, into the dark basement.

  Which promptly burst into super-heated flame around me.

  I screamed. Much of my training focused on powering through sprains and even broken bones, learning how to walk on a twisted ankle without making a sound that might give away my position, but my parents—hard-nosed as they sometimes were in the pursuit of preparing us to survive in a world filled with dangers—had never actually set me on fire. I’d never even set myself on fire before, not really. I’d scalded my arms and blistered my palms, but I had never burned from head to toe. I had never been consumed.

  I wasn’t being consumed now. I couldn’t be. The thought hit like a blow. If there was as much fire as I could feel around me, I wouldn’t have had the time to scream. I would have been reduced to ashes in an instant, and I’d be either gone or a ghost—and ghosts don’t burn. I looked at my arms, struggling to swallow the screams rising in my throat. They were untouched, perfectly smooth and fine. The heat felt real. The fire felt real. My skin did not agree.

  I looked back. Sam was slapping at the flames in the opening, trying to get through the fire to get to me, fighting his own instincts. He wasn’t calm enough to see that his hands were as untouched as mine—when he pulled them out of the illusion of the flame, it was only to shove them back in again, struggling to save me.

  He was crying. He was fighting and he was crying, and I wondered what he saw when he looked at me. It couldn’t be an anguished but intact woman, or he wouldn’t be fighting so hard. We had both seen stranger than someone walking untouched through fire, and he’d seen me set myself alight more than once without ill-effects, although my fire could hurt me, and only danced when it was still connected to my skin . . .

  To my skin. I turned back to the flames, looking at them with wide eyes. The pain was receding. Either the nerves responsible for relaying sensation were giving up in the face of an enemy too great to be described, or the fire was changing.

  The fire was recognizing me.

  “Sam, can you hear me?” I called.

  “Annie?” There was a clattering sound, followed by a hiss, and an anguished, “I can’t reach you! Annie, are you all right?”

  “What do you see, Sam?”

  A hitching indrawn breath, and then a soft: “I can’t reach you.”

  That answered the question of what he saw when he looked at me. “I’m fine, Sam. I was surprised, and I was in pain, but I’m not hurt. The fire isn’t really burning me.” Because the fire was mine, and once it had realized that, it had started pulling back.

  It wasn’t intelligent, as such. Fire knows how to burn, and not much more than that. But it belonged to me, it belonged with me, and it wanted to come home. I looked at the flames dancing all around me, licking at the air, and I knew they wanted to come home. I just didn’t know how to let them.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, holding out my hands, fingers spread, palms toward the ceiling. The heat was entirely gone now, replaced by a pleasant coolness. Sam was still fighting the illusion of the fire, but not as hard; he could hear me. Even if he couldn’t quite believe me, he knew I was at least intact enough to talk. “I thought I was learning to control you, and instead, I was letting someone take you away from me. I should never have done that. Can you forgive me?”

  The flame burned blue, pressing in closer, until everything was fire, and there wasn’t room in the world for anything else. I kept my eyes and hands open.

  “I don’t know how to take you back,” I said softly. “If you know how to come back on your own, come home. If you don’t, please, pull back. Let my friends help me, and we’ll make the bastard who put you here put you back where you belong.”

  This room wasn’t real. I’d known that the first time I’d stepped into it. The water table was too high and the walls were too thick. Magic had made this place, and magic was sustaining it, and it only made sense that they would put the pieces of my magic that they weren’t using in what was effectively the largest bell jar they had available to them.

  The flames froze for a single heart-stopping moment before they sank back into the floor and were gone. I could still feel them, the way I’d always been able to feel them lurking in my fingers, but . . . distant, like they and I were both swaddled in a whole roll of bubble wrap.

  I didn’t have time to think about what that meant, as Sam slammed into me from the side the instant the flames faded, literally sweeping me off my feet and carrying me easily four feet deeper into the room. Not a good idea, from a trap-avoidance standpoint, but then he was kissing me, and I had other things to worry about, like kissing him back while his tail wrapped around my waist and pulled me closer, until I was in danger of having the breath squeezed right out of me.

  Cylia cleared her throat. “Excuse me,” she said, sounding amused. “It’s fun watching you two try to suck each other’s faces off, and I am very aware of what danger does to the hormones, but do you think we could put this on the back burner until we’re not supposedly using stealth to sneak up on the people who want to hurt us? Just as a thought? Because this is not what I want to die for.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Sam, and put me down.

  Finally free to look around the room without fire or fūri getting in the way, I turned in a slow circle, studying my surroundings. The mirror had broken inward, covering the floor in shards of glass. There were scorch marks on the walls. Interesting. The fire hadn’t harmed me or Sam, but it had been trying hard enough to get out at one point that it had been able to burn concrete.

  The char was thickest on the wall around the mirror. My stomach turned. If the magic had flowed from me into this space, that would have been where it realized we were no longer together. It might be nothing but instinct and power. That hadn’t stopped it from understanding that something was wrong while I was running on intellect and denial. I shook my hands. My fingers were still cold.

  They weren’t going to stay cold for long.

  “Follow me,” I said, and started for the stairs.

  Our descent was fast compared to everything else we’d already been through. In what seemed like not nearly long enough, I was in front of one last door. Megan was behind me, ready to remove her glasses, and Sam was behind her, out of the line of visual fire. I took a deep breath.

  I opened the door.

  The Lowryland cabal, seated around their conference table, dressed in their impeccable business clothes, turned and looked at us. Emily was the only one who looked even remotely worried. Colin, especially, seemed utterly and completely calm, as if this were the sort of thing he dealt with every day. As if he had been expecting it. Which he probably had. He was a sorcerer. He had to know that eventually, I would put two and two together.

  I felt like a fool for letting it take this long. That feeling propelled me forward, over the doorframe, into the conference room. “You’ve stolen something of mine,” I said coldly. “I want it back.”

  “Ditto,” said Sam. He paused. “That sounded cooler in my head.”

  “Yes, by all means, impress us with your ‘coolness,’” said Colin. He sneered on the last word, and he didn’t stand. “I’ve stolen nothing from you, little apprentice. I’ve taken only a tutor’s fee. Can I be blamed
if you didn’t read the fine print before you signed?”

  “You people really love your fine print, don’t you?” I flexed my fingers, this time not trying to call fire, just to relax them enough for the knives to come easily. “You’re hurting the guests.”

  Emily’s eyes widened. “Are you genuinely telling us you’re here for them? Don’t be ridiculous. They’re mindless tourists looking for a good time. They spend more money than some people make in a year just for the opportunity to touch a fictional princess and pretend that makes everything okay. They’re sheep. We’re farmers.”

  “One, that should be ‘shepherds,’” I snapped. “Two, no you’re not, and also ew, and what the fuck is wrong with you? People have been killed. This has to stop.”

  “Your power is settling down,” said Colin, in what was probably intended as a soothing voice. I was not soothed. “Now that I know how to control it, we’ll be able to adapt. The accidents were regrettable growing pains. I assure you, they won’t happen again.”

  “Can I pull his head off?” asked Sam conversationally. “I bet it would be easy. Can I try? I think I’m gonna try.”

  “I’m fascinated by how quickly you were able to raise an army of monsters,” said Joshua. He stood, and I had to fight the urge to take a step back, away from his prying, scrying eyes. “I wouldn’t have expected it. None of these people are human, are they? Only you. Why is that?”

  “She has unusually good taste in friends,” said Cylia. She managed to sound nonchalant, which was no mean feat, given the situation. We were surrounded. Half these people were unarmed, and it didn’t matter, because they were the weapons.

  Joshua could look into our eyes and see every plan we’d ever sketched, whether we planned to act on it or not. He was a trainspotter at the height of his power, fully charged by the motion of the roller coasters and the monorails, and I didn’t know enough about what he was capable of to be properly terrified. Colin might need a wand to access his magic—and maybe that had something to do with the kind of control he’d been trying to teach me, or maybe it was a statement on how limited his power would have been without the tools of his trade—but wand or no, he could certainly ruin our day. Emily had already shown her capability to steal luck and distance, both of which were key to getting out of this alive. The rest of them . . .