Page 84 of Tricks for Free

I was a fool, and my friends were going to pay the cost.

“I still want to take his head off,” said Sam.

“Also, no,” said Cylia. “We don’t run out on our own.”

“That means you,” said Fern.

Megan didn’t say anything, but I heard the hissing of her hair, and knew that she was at my back with one hand on her glasses, ready to stun anyone who drew her attention.

I took a deep breath, looking for strength in the fact that I was not alone. I had never really been alone, because there were always people ready to have my back, if I was only willing to reach out and ask them. “I did not give you my magic when I allowed you to train me,” I said. “I certainly didn’t give you permission to use it against people who’d done nothing wrong. And you.” I turned to Emily, who raised one eyebrow, mouth pursed in an amused moue. “This is beneath you. This isn’t how a routewitch is supposed to behave.”

“You’re not one of us, so who are you to judge?” asked Emily. She spread her hands, indicating first the sumptuous boardroom around us, then her perfectly tailored Egyptian cotton business suit. “You think I should have agreed to live like some sort of trailer trash hobo because the highway speaks to me? Because road magic is somehow more ‘pure’ when the people who practice it have nothing? Please. Times have changed. The world has changed. If routewitches want to find ways to use our natural talents for a profit, we should be allowed to do exactly that. In summation, little girl, screw you.”

She moved her hand like she was throwing a ball. I realized what she was doing too late and flung my own hands up in a blocking motion, fingers spread, palms empty. There was no fire there to stop whatever she was casting. In that moment, it felt like there never had been.

A body slammed into mine from the left, rocking me to the side, and Cylia was there, her fingers moving fast, a complicated motion somewhere between macramé and braiding a friendship bracelet. The motion looked effortless, but the strain on her face gave her away.

“She’s trying to offload her bad luck onto us,” she said, through gritted teeth. “A little help, please?”

“If you think I’m looking at your gorgon, think again,” said Emily. She sounded almost gleeful, like this was the most fun she’d had in years.

“Wasn’t thinking that,” I said, as brightly and blithely as I could. I moved my own hands. There was nothing magical about what followed, only skill and practice and good American steel flying through the air on a straight, true path, heading directly for Emily’s shoulders.

A blast of fire from Colin’s wand caught my knives mid-flight, knocking them off target and sending them clattering harmlessly against the window. The smell of hot metal and hotter glass filled the air.

Sam moved.

He was fast and fluid like the artist that he was, launching himself into the air and impacting with the conference table in almost the same movement. He grabbed a fistful of papers in each hand, flinging them into the air to create confusion. Several members of the cabal shouted. One woman’s eyes went black, and the air around her darkened for a moment before she abandoned the attempt. Turning the lights out wasn’t going to hurt us any, and it might help us. After all, we were the ones with the target-rich environment.

“Witch,” I shouted, putting the name to her powers. I didn’t know how many of the others knew what it meant to be facing a witch, full stop, with no modifiers, although Cylia nodded, still braiding the air as quickly as her fingers would let her. “Sam! Get the wand!”

Colin whipped around, wand raised and already spitting fire. Sam wasn’t there anymore. He had leaped for the ceiling and was hanging from the light fixture, his weight pulling heavy on the bolts. They would only hold for a few seconds. That would have to be enough.

I threw another knife. This one caught Colin in the back of the shoulder. His grip on the wand faltered, if only for a moment. That was all Sam needed. He snatched it from the air with one foot, tossing it up and catching it with his free hand.

“Annie!” he shouted, and flung the wand at me.

I snatched it from the air, too relieved to think about what he’d said. Touching the wood was like touching the fire that had been stolen from me. Colin was shouting something, but I was too focused on the wand to care. It was filled with fire. I wanted that fire. That fire wanted me. We wanted each other, so badly that it ached in the pit of my stomach, in the marrow of my bones.

Quickly, before I could change my mind, I snapped the wand in half. The resulting backlash flung me against the window, through the glass, and out into the seemingly endless night, where I fell.

Well, crap.

Twenty-three

“Mercy is for the winners. When you’re losing, it’s the last thing you can afford.”

–Alice Healy

Falling

THE WORLD STUTTERED AROUND me as the space-warping spells on the interior met the reality of the outside world, finally settling on a compromise: my fall was not from as high as it should have been, given how far we’d climbed, but it was farther than it should have been, given that the window I’d crashed through was no longer there. Only the shards of glass falling in tandem with my body betrayed any sign that it had ever existed in the first place. I was going to hit the pavement in a spray of shards, a modern Tinkerbell who never really learned to fly.

An arm wrapped around my waist as something slammed into me from the side, and Sam and I crashed back into the building together, smashing through the nearest window. His body shielded me from the worst of the impact. When we landed, he turned me, so that I was looking into wide brown eyes set in a worried face.

“Are you all right?” asked Sam. “Did you know that was going to happen?”

“No,” I said, and clung to him. Heat flickered in my fingertips, too weak to be called real fire, reminiscent of the way it had been when the flames first started curling through me, before they had been fanned into a bonfire. My magic was coming back. Not fast enough to save me, but still. At least I was going to die in one piece. “Where’s everyone else?”