Magic for Nothing (InCryptid, #6)

by Seanan McGuire

“Every time I think my family has plumbed the depths of stupidity, somebody goes and finds a goddamn shovel.” —Jane Harrington-Price

“It’s better to act than it is to react. Acting gets you in trouble. Reacting all too frequently gets you dead.” —Alice Healy

People make a lot of assumptions about cheerleaders, like that we’re all plastic airheads who just want to jump high and look pretty. But it’s sort of like the whole Ginger Rogers thing, where she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels. A good competitive cheerleader does everything a gymnast does while wearing a pleated skirt and never letting themselves stop smiling. Cheerleading is the leading—no pun intended—cause of injuries among high school and collegiate athletes, and the fact that no one takes it seriously is part of why people keep getting hurt. When you say cheerleading deserves the safety standards and funding of football, you’re likely to be laughed right off the team.

“As we said before, the Covenant currently has no presence in Manhattan,” said Dominic, in what was probably meant to be a soothing tone, but mostly made him sound like a condescending asshole. I considered telling him that. I decided it wouldn’t do much to help maintain the already tenuous current peace. See? I can have self-control. I can.

The devil’s in the details, and so is the hook. Good deceit begins at the molecular level, and works its way up from there.

I WAS DONE. No. That wasn’t quite right. I was a hundred miles past done, cresting into the Fjords of Nope, heading for Fuck-That-Ville.

Sometimes the urge to punch tradition solidly in the nose is the only thing that keeps me going.

She spoke like a rational person, like the things she was saying made perfect sense. Of course they’d have arranged marriages, because who else would understand? And of course they’d go along with it willingly, for the sake of the children as yet unborn, the ones who would inherit a better world built on bones. It was a perfectly reasonable way to look at things. It was disturbingly close to the way we’d always looked at things. It bore a striking resemblance to my family’s expectation that one day, you’d go on a job and come back with a fiancé, someone who’d seen how bad things could get, someone who would understand. And of course we’d raise our children with smiles on their faces and knives behind their backs, because the Covenant was out there, lurking, a faceless, amorphous monster in the night. We had to be prepared to defend what was ours. We had to be ready to die for a better world.

“No,” I said. “I meant ‘killers.’ Umeko wasn’t a monster. If she’s been with you for years and seemed human all that time . . . maybe she didn’t know how to be a Jorōgumo without hurting people. I’d probably freak out pretty hard if I woke up one morning with four extra limbs and no hands. There was no one here to tell her it was normal and teach her what to do.” Sam stared at me. “You’re serious.” “I am. I mean, I’m sorry Pablo died, I don’t know if he was like your BFF or something, although I guess probably not if it’s been this long without you noticing. But it wasn’t Umeko’s fault that she didn’t have a guidebook for being what she was. She was killing people. That’s a choice she made, and I’m not sorry she paid for it. I am sorry she wound up in that situation in the first place.” I shook my head.

Instinct took over. She loved him, and she killed him, and after that, there was no way she could tell anyone what was happening to her. They would have looked at her like she was a monster.” I hadn’t known her, but I could absolutely understand why she hadn’t wanted that to happen. And then she’d become a monster, because that was how she’d been thinking of herself. Sometimes we change in terrible ways without even realizing it.

I was out of practice, and I was probably going to pay for this tomorrow. That was okay. I’ve made a long habit of writing checks against my future, and so far, I’ve always been good for them.

I loved my sister. I was never going to learn to like her.

“When someone judges you for something you can’t help, try to forgive them. They don’t understand. And if they keep doing it, knock their fucking teeth in.” —Jane Harrington-Price

put the final butterfly closure in place before pressing my hand against his cheek and smiling at him. He smiled back, tentatively. I leaned in and kissed him, trying to put everything I had—every explanation, every apology, every scrap of affection I had—into the contact. His lips tasted like blood. Mine tasted like ashes. Together, we were a world on fire, and we never stood a chance.