Tricks for Free Page 7

  Close enough that I could see the oddly shaped splotch on the right side of her shirt, just below her collarbone. Close enough to see that it was blood. I gasped, the sound going from horror to relief as I realized there was no corresponding hole: she’d fallen into something that was already there, she hadn’t hurt herself. Cold terror followed on the heels of relief. If it wasn’t her blood . . .

  “Annie, please, you have to go,” pleaded Fern.

  I didn’t listen. I started my legs moving again, skating closer until I saw the pallid curve of limbs behind Fern, the arc of a broken neck, and worst of all, the beaded drops of arterial spray painting the flowers. This time, when I stopped, I actually managed to brake, freezing myself in place. My eyes were so wide they hurt, and it felt like there was a rock in my throat, preventing me from either speaking or swallowing.

  “He’s dead,” said Fern miserably. “I screamed. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have screamed, but you have to go, Annie, you have to go—”

  The reality of what she was saying slammed into me with all the force of the ground closing in after a bad fall. Someone was dead, murdered on Lowry property, and the way the body had been discovered meant Security was on the way. And I was right next to the crime scene. Me, with my paper-thin alias that had never been intended to stand up to more than casual scrutiny, currently hiding from an organization with the power to reach across continents.

  Lowryland was enough of a psychic bruise on the landscape to scramble any attempts to scry for me or track me down telepathically. My picture being taken in conjunction with a murder victim wouldn’t have any such protections. It would go into a computer, and someone, somewhere, would find it and use it against me. The Covenant knew my face. They had my fingerprints, thanks to the amount of time I’d spent on their home ground, and they had samples of my blood. If I was spotted here, they would find me.

  “I have to go,” I said, through numb lips.

  “Yeah,” said Fern. “Get Megan to drive you home. Go.”

  I turned, feeling like a coward, and skated back for the twisting little path through the trees as fast as I could go, while behind me, my friend stood alone and covered in someone else’s blood, waiting for Security to arrive.

  Five

  “People will tell you death is just the beginning. They’re sort of right, but they’re mostly wrong. Death is an ending. Whether a new start comes after, it doesn’t change the fact that something had to stop.”

  –Mary Dunlavy

  A shitty company apartment five miles outside of Lakeland, Florida, waiting for the sky to fall

  MEGAN SAT ON THE threadbare couch, watching me pace through the smoked lenses of her glasses. She looked as worried and weary as I felt. So did her “hair.” It writhed around her shoulders and snapped at the air, never keeping still.

  “Are you going to do that all night?” she asked.

  “If I have to,” I replied, hit the wall, and turned to walk the other way across the room, which seemed too large and too small at the same time, like a coat that didn’t fit properly.

  Megan had still been outside the ice cream shop when I’d come racing back down the path. Her first clue that something was wrong had been Fern’s scream, but her second clue had been my silence. When Fern and I skated through the Park, we were never silent. We laughed, we shrieked, we traded insults when we were close enough to do it without calling down the wrath of Security, but we never held our tongues. It was a safety precaution. By making noise, we made sure anyone else in the area knew where we were, and we avoided collisions. For me to come skating silently out of the dark was a bad sign. For me to grab her arm and whisper, “Run,” was a disastrous one.

  So she’d run, and I’d skated ahead of her, and together, we’d managed to make it out of the Park without anyone putting two and two together and wondering why one girl on skates had stumbled over a body while the other got away clean. From there, it had been a short hop back to the apartment, and the dubious comfort of worrying about Fern.

  I glanced at my phone, plugged in and charging on the kitchen counter. There had been no incoming texts or calls since leaving the property. It had been hours.

  “Seriously, you’re making me anxious.”

  “Then we can both be anxious,” I said, but I stopped walking and stood in the middle of the living room, back so straight my spine ached, vibrating slightly, like a taut bowstring. Megan’s gaze turned wary. Humans and gorgons are both predators, but humans are hunters and gorgons are trappers. Even coming from such similar backgrounds, we were so different, and we were always going to be.

  Silence spread between us, filling the air until it seemed to drip down the walls. I held my tongue as long as I could, and when I couldn’t anymore, I blurted, “I should move out.”

  “What?” Megan frowned, one sketched-on eyebrow rising. “Why?”

  “If the Covenant decides to come here—”

  “Then they’ll kill me and Fern just as dead for being cryptids as they would for being your friends. I don’t want to go back into the roommate lottery, and I don’t want to deal with Fern moping around the place for the next, oh, forever.” Megan shook her head, snakes hissing. “Stop, okay? Just stop. Eat some ice cream, or read a book, or sharpen all the knives, but stop. You’re not leaving. Fern would have my hide if I let you leave.”

  “Fern takes team spirit a little far sometimes.”

  Megan smiled wryly. “Says the former cheerleader who got her job through nepotism.”

  “We do what we have to.” I glanced at the door. “She should be back by now.”

  “She wasn’t . . .” Megan paused before continuing, sounding suddenly nervous, “She wasn’t arrested for doing it, was she?”

  “What? No. Lowry Security wouldn’t let that happen, even if they had a way to pin things on her. It doesn’t work that way in the real world.” Television procedurals have a lot to answer for. They make it look like being within fifteen feet of a dead body gets people arrested for murder—which, to be fair, it can, but there are hundreds of other factors to be considered. Fern was a Lowry employee, carrying no weapons or obvious means of harming a person, and when she wasn’t tinkering with her own density, weighed ninety-five pounds soaking wet. She might be suspected if the man had been shot and there was gunpowder on her hands, but since he’d looked stabbed and her hands were clean, she was going to be fine.

  She was going to be fine.

  She had to be fine.

  “So what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know.” I gave the door another look, willing it to open, willing Fern to appear.

  Neither thing happened. Instead, my phone rang. I lunged for it with barely a glance at the clock—three AM, swell—and swiped my finger across the screen to answer. “Hello?”

  “Um, hi? It’s, um. It’s Fern.” Her voice was shaking, and she sounded like she was on the verge of tears. That didn’t necessarily mean anything beyond “had a long day” and “landed on a corpse.”

  I hoped it didn’t. “Hi, Fern,” I said, glancing at Megan. She sat up straighter, snakes once again hissing wildly. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at Security. The main office. They, um, already called my shift supervisor to say I was going to be off work tomorrow. I have to go over everything with them, and then I have to talk to some people who are in charge of public relations. They don’t get here until eight, so I’ll be home sometime after that.” Her voice quavered even harder on that last word.

  I closed my eyes. “You probably can’t answer this with anything but a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ but have they let you change your clothes?”

  “No.”

  Meaning she was still covered in a stranger’s blood. That was dandy. “Find someone in charge. Someone who looks . . . who looks like they pay a lot of attention to their clothes.” Someone like my mother, who would have clucked her tong
ue and given Fern a new shirt hours ago, recognizing that no one really enjoys the feeling of blood drying on their skin. Not even Grandma Alice is that far gone. “Ask them if they have something else you can wear. They should get you a new shirt, at the absolute least.”

  “Oh,” said Fern, voice going small. “Can you ask Megan if she works tomorrow?”

  Fern knew my work schedule, and knew I had to be on-shift. Megan’s was less predictable, thanks to the hours the hospital kept. “One of us will call in sick.”

  “Not you,” said Fern. The steel in the words was enough to take me aback. She continued: “You have too many absences this quarter. I don’t want to see you getting docked a vacation day for absenteeism. How can we go to Key West this year if you don’t have the vacation days?”

  I had no hobbies. I had no local family. Apart from Megan and Fern—and Mary, when she popped in—I had no friends. Put all this together, and I was possibly the most reliable employee Lowry had. I’d been late for work several times, but never late enough to get written up for it; most of the time, my managers didn’t even notice, since years of cheerleading and roller derby and carnival work have left me incredibly efficient when it comes to getting ready. As long as I was standing where the guests could see me when I was supposed to, they didn’t care. Fern didn’t want me there for another reason.

  “Fern,” I said carefully, “are the police still with you?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning, okay? Tell Megan I’m fine.” Then she hung up, leaving me with only the sound of empty air.

  I lowered the phone and turned to the agitated gorgon. “She says she’s fine,” I said. “I think she’s lying, but not too much. She’s freaked out, not panicking, and not under arrest. She wanted to know if you were working tomorrow.”

  “I seem to have come down with a cold,” said Megan, and coughed weakly into her hand. “Oh, no. That sounds serious. Better stay in bed.”

  “Uh-huh.” I gave her a dubious look. “Can gorgons get human colds?”

  “Nope, which is why I’m one of the only residents not to have had at least one sick day this quarter. My supervisors will be annoyed but understanding. Maybe even relieved.” Despite her weariness and worry, Megan managed to twinkle. “They were starting to suspect I wasn’t human.”

  Somehow, I found it in me to laugh.

  Megan’s smile faded. “Now you, on the other hand, are human, and you have to work tomorrow. Go to bed, Antimony. I’ll make sure our girl is okay when she gets home, and you’ll go to work like nothing happened.”

  “Because nothing happened, because I wasn’t there,” I said, with a quick nod.

  Megan tapped her nose. “Bingo. Now sleep.”

  I flashed her a relieved smile and walked back to my room, where I stripped, checked that the knives beneath my pillow were where I needed them to be, and sank onto the mattress. I’m not ashamed to say that I was asleep almost instantly. When your entire childhood is spent training for a war that may never come, losing sleep over a little blood is not in the cards.

  I dreamed of the carnival, walking down the midway to the distant sound of calliope music, and I knew that everyone I loved was somewhere nearby, trapped in the Hall of Mirrors or drowning in the Tunnel of Love, and I knew I could never save them, and I knew it would kill me to try. I tried anyway.

  When my alarm shouted me back into the waking world, there were char marks on my sheets and tears on my pillow, and somehow, that was exactly what I’d been expecting.

  * * *

  With Megan staying home and Fern still waiting to talk to public relations, I had to take the train by myself. I compacted my body into the confines of one seat, trying to look like I was half-asleep as I hugged my bag. Feigning unconsciousness wasn’t a difficult trick. Between our after-hours roller skating and the time I’d spent pacing and worrying about Fern, I’d managed to get slightly less than five hours of sleep. Not enough sleep deprivation to kill me, but my breaks today were going to be spent sucking down coffee and praying I could avoid a fatal caffeine overdose.

  My apparent doze meant the people around me didn’t feel any need to keep quiet in my presence. If anything, I was encouraging the conversation, since I was Fern’s roommate, and hence a constant reminder of her absence. By keeping my eyes cracked just a hair, I could see how many of them were glancing in my direction before they continued gossiping.

  “So I heard from Eddie in Security that the little blonde one got arrested last night.”

  A gasp. “What did she do?”

  “Murdered a man. A guest.”

  It was difficult to understand why murdering a guest would be worse than killing a cast member, but it was written plainly in the speaker’s tone: by supposedly killing a guest, Fern had committed a mortal sin in the eyes of not just the law, but the entire Lowry entertainment complex. I swallowed the urge to snort derisively. Right now, it was too important that I listen.

  Gossip is toxic, especially because it’s often so much more interesting than the truth. The truth is provable, and dull, and difficult to change. Gossip, though . . . by the time there was a statement about the body that cleared Fern of all wrongdoing, she would already have been convicted a hundred times over. The man would be her lover, her brother, her blackmailer, her illicit son. Speaking up would only make things worse. The slightest attempt to defend her would be read as proof of her guilt, since innocent people don’t need to be defended.

  Again, sometimes I want to take a walk through the writers’ rooms of all those police procedurals, and see how well bullshit television tropes can burn.

  There were three good things about the situation, if I could call them “good.” First, Fern was genuinely innocent. Being convicted in the court of public opinion might annoy her, but it wouldn’t impact her life in any meaningful way. None of these people were her friends. She had me, she had Megan, and she had her bowling league every other Wednesday night. That seemed to be enough. Humans are among the most social of the world’s various intelligent species. What would have been unbearable for me—what was unbearable for me—was just fine for Fern.

  (Humans aren’t the most social. I’m not sure who gets that label, but I’m betting on the dragons. They live in Nests that can contain hundreds of individuals, all piled on top of each other like a garter snake mating ball, and they seem perfectly happy that way. Which is good for them, given the cost of real estate in some areas.)

  Second, and more importantly where Fern’s job prospects were concerned, cast members don’t gossip with guests, no matter how hard some guests may try to make us. It’s not snobbery, although it can seem that way. It’s a matter of drawing a hard, firm line between work and play. The fact that Lowry sometimes sends “secret shopper” guests into the Park to see whether we’ll rise to the bait and start talking trash doesn’t help. Even if the rest of the cast thought Fern was a murderer, she’d never be outed to the guests, and her job wouldn’t be in danger. Princess Aspen would continue untainted, as she always had.

  Thirdly and most importantly, at least for me, none of the people on the train were saying my name. Fern’s instinct to shoo me away had been exactly right, and I’d managed to get out of there fast enough that no one was connecting me to the scene of the crime. I’d be able to keep my head down and stay out of the spotlight, and honestly, that was exactly what I needed.

  The train pulled into the stop for the employee parking lot. I “woke up” and followed the others onto the platform, not bothering to conceal my yawn. When playing a role, it’s best to fully commit.

  The platform fed into two stairways and one escalator, with an elevator at the far end. I yawned again and joined the crowd thronging at the escalator entrance. I always tried to leave the elevator for people who needed it—hard to fit a wheelchair on the escalator—but I didn’t feel up to stairs. Not with the night I’d had, and my balance as
shot as it was. I’d try to descend normally, trip, fall, and spend the day trying to come up with an explanation for my stitches that didn’t make me sound like a total klutz.

  Someone grasped my elbow as I stepped off the escalator. My hands balled into automatic fists, fingers instantly red-hot. I clenched them and forced a smile as I turned to see who was touching me. Punching is frowned upon at Lowryland, and we had technically been on company property since stepping onto the train.

  Setting people on fire is also frowned upon at Lowryland, which was a problem, since my hands were only getting hotter. I was going to start leaving blisters on my own skin soon, and that was never easy to explain.

  Sophie smiled at me, the expression not reaching her eyes, and let go. “Melody, so glad I ran into you,” she said, in the exact tone she had once used to call freshmen girls to task when they showed signs of buying into the bitchy cheerleader stereotype. It wasn’t a tone I’d heard directed at me in years, and it still made my skin crawl and my clothes suddenly feel three sizes too tight. “Can I give you a ride the rest of the way to work?”

  Translation: she needed to talk to me, preferably in private, and her “offer” was really a command veiled in a thin veneer of free choice. Oh, sure. I could refuse, but then she’d have to press the issue, and we both knew who was going to win that one.

  As always, Sophie made me feel like an absolute mess just by existing. Her hair was perfectly groomed, and today’s pantsuit was a shade of burgundy that made her skin seem to glow from within, tan and healthy and filled with wholesome goodness. The contrast it made against her cream silk shell top was almost criminal. I, on the other hand, was wearing Lowryland sweatpants and a black tank top, and hadn’t bothered brushing my hair before leaving the apartment, since I’d need to style it in the locker room anyway. Goblin Market meant sausage curls for the long-haired girls, hairsprayed to within an inch of their lives to make sure they would never be knocked out of place.