Page 86 of Magic for Nothing

“Seriously, Leo?!” I pushed him away. I didn’t have to feign my shock or dismay as I demanded, “What are you doing here? You don’t do fieldwork!”

His expression softened, melting into a sort of sympathetic understanding. I fought the urge to slap that look clean off of his face. “Ah, of course. Annie, I know this must be all very confusing for you. Robert called the rest of the team in three days ago. We’re going to help wipe this demon-infested traveling carnival off the face of the planet.”

“But . . . but I thought we were going to let them go once we knew that they weren’t hurting anyone,” I stammered. “Margaret said . . .”

“Margaret didn’t want to upset you. It was only natural for you to sympathize with these people. They’re much like the ones you lost, aren’t they? But the ones you lost were human.”

“So are the people here.”

“No,” said Leonard, and his voice was poisonously gentle, filled with a conviction I could hear but never share. It was the sort of voice people use with children who don’t understand how the world works, and I hated him for it, even as I was obscurely grateful. If he was talking to me like this—if he was talking down to me like this—it was going to be a lot easier to kick his ass. “They’re traitors to their own kind. They’ve harbored monsters. People have died. It’s time for all of this to end.”

I had one more card to play. It wasn’t a good one. It was better than murder. “I thought you had to keep a low profile in North America, to keep those Price people from coming for you. Wiping out a whole carnival isn’t keeping a low profile.”

“They’ll never know it was us,” said Leo reassuringly. “I promise you that. We’re quite good at covering our tracks. We’ve done this before. A little resistance was never enough to make us turn our backs on the people who needed us.”

I stared at him. He smiled, clearly mistaking my dismay for surprise.

“Your job is done, Annie. We’re not going to make you help with the cleansing, not as a trainee—not unless you wanted to.” He held out his hand, beckoning me. “I’d be happy to show you what to do.”

“What to do?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure I know what an invitation from the Dark Side looks like, thanks.”

“What?” His smile melted into dismay. “What are you talking about?”

“And you didn’t even offer me cookies,” I spat, and punched him in the nose.

Leonard Cunningham was an experienced operative of the Covenant of St. George, trained in all the ways to fight and evade the “monsters” he’d dedicated his life to destroying. He had not, apparently, been trained in the way to fight or evade being punched in the nose by a woman he regarded as a harmless trainee. He went down like a sack of potatoes. I turned and ran like hell for the other end of the midway.

There was no way Reginald Cunningham would have allowed his grandson and heir to come to the States without backup: three people might be enough to cleanse a carnival, but not when one of those people was going to inherit the whole shebang. I had to assume there were at least four agents active and on the ground in the carnival now—maybe more, depending on how seriously they’d taken this incursion, and whether or not they’d really been expecting me to help them take out the carnival.

There were over a hundred people working here. What could they possibly have been planning that would take out that many noncombatants with less than an army?

The lights had come on without warning, and the rides all activated at the same time. That was more than a glitch; that was sabotage, pure and simple, the sort of thing that would normally have brought half the show running. The engineers would have been at the front of the pack, followed by the lookie-loos who wanted to be the first to see what was broken and carry the gossip back to the rest of the carnival.

Pop quiz: what do you call a distraction that draws people in, rather than pushing them away? Answer: a trap. You call it a trap.

Wishing for Sam’s speed or my roller skates or at least dry ground—anything to increase my speed just that tiny fraction—I ran, head down, arms pumping. If I’d encountered another member of the Covenant field team during that run, I wouldn’t have hesitated to kill them. Maybe it was murder and maybe it was a form of existential self-defense, or maybe they had actually managed that tiny sliver of indoctrination, and made me stop thinking of the people who opposed me as human beings. Whatever the reason for my change of heart, I was still grateful when no one appeared to make me prove it.

This was a field when it didn’t have a carnival in it: it didn’t have the infrastructure to run the midway, much less a bunch of power-sucking beasts like the Scrambler and the little coaster. The solution was simple enough, and was universal to carnivals the world over now that even the smallest traveling show boasted electric lights and moving machines—a generator array had been established in the ride alley inside a shed disguised as a supply booth, tucked between the Scrambler and the Centrifuge, a giant spinning bowl that plastered people to its sides with the power of physics. Any power tampering would start there.

The door was open when I came skidding down the aisle, feet slipping in the mud and breath catching in my throat. I barreled onward, catching the edge of the door and swinging myself into the darkened shed.

The blinking digital display on the bomb was more than bright enough to catch my attention.

“Shit.” Flipping the light switch struck me as a singularly bad idea. If I’d been trying to get a bunch of carnies to blow themselves up, wiring the light switch into the trigger mechanism would have been the best way to go about it. I didn’t have a flashlight, but I had the fire in my fingers, and I had the bright banners hanging from the outside of the shed, camouflaging it as just another part of the scenery. I leaned out and yanked a strip of fabric down, wadding it into a ball and focusing on it as hard as I can.

Come on, I thought. Come on, come on, this is a stupid, pointless skill, and I’m going to get some use out of it now, so come on.

The wadded-up fabric burst into flame. I managed not to drop it, which might have put out the fire, and instead set it on the muddy ground, trusting the dampness to keep the fire from starting too soon. The light it cast wasn’t much, but it was enough to let me see what they’d done. The shed was wired to blow, with the timer mechanism and blasting caps both connected to a massive block of what looked like bright yellow modeling clay. That color and that shape could only mean one thing: Semtex. Because that was exactly what I needed tonight.

I’ve played with Semtex before, under controlled circumstances. It’s pretty stable, as plastic explosives go, and it packs one hell of a kick. That block would be enough to vaporize anyone within twenty feet of the blast, and to damage a hell of a lot more than just that. I was right. This was a trap.

Only three wires connected the Semtex to the rest of the device. They weren’t colored—that would have been too easy—and at least one of them was going to be a dummy. Cutting it wouldn’t do anything, but could lead me to think I’d defused the bomb when I really hadn’t. That left me two “live” wires. Cut one and save the day; cut the other and blow myself to smithereens. It would almost have been better if the bomb had been more sophisticated. The more moving pieces a bomb has, the easier it is to get an idea of how the manufacturer thought, and how to break what they spent so much time on making.

(Sure, it’s also easier to blow yourself up, but there’s a reason most police departments have access to a dedicated bomb squad. It’s always easy to blow yourself up. I’m an amateur who mostly plays around with black powder and dynamite—the Looney Toons of explosive weaponry. Anything more elaborate than that is trending toward “out of my league.”)

I stared at the bomb, all too aware of the open flame behind me and the fact that time was passing. They might have put the blasting caps on a timer, in case the carnies were too slow getting here. Or someone might have refused to evacuate when Emery told them to go, and be on their way to find out why the rides were on. I needed to do something.

There were three wires. Cutting any of them could mean either salvation or a death sentence. There was one block of Semtex.