Wild Ride
Wild Ride
WILD RIDE
Jennifer Crusie
& Bob Mayer
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The wildest ride at Dreamland isn’t the roller coaster.
Lots of women think they’ve fallen in love with a demon. Mab Brannigan really has . . .
Mary Alice Brannigan doesn't believe in the supernatural. Nor does she expect to find that she’s the newest recruit in the Guardia, an elite team of demon fighters formed centuries before to guard the five Untouchables, the most powerful demons in the history of the world, now imprisoned right there in the Dreamland amusement park. That would be bad enough, but there’s a guy she’s falling hard for, and there’s something about him that’s not quite right . . .
Then there’s Ethan Wayne, a former Green Beret who’s come home to Dreamland to die. Ethan has his own problems including a bullet in his chest inching closer to his heart, a true love who shoots him on sight, and a mother who drags him into the Guardia after he’s possessed by a crazed killer mermaid demon. Between ducking his mother’s attempts to reform him and dodging the bullets of a secret government agent he’s pretty sure is his soulmate, Ethan really doesn’t have time for demons, touchable or not.
But rocky romances and demented demons aren’t Mab and Ethan’s only problems: they’re also coping with a crooked politician, a supernatural raven, a secret government agency, an inexperienced sorceress, a betrayer within the Guardia, and some mind-boggling revelations from their own pasts. As their personal demons wreck their newfound relationships and real demons wreck the park, Mab and Ethan find out that the Untouchables have escaped and opened the gate to hell on earth. Now they’re facing down the Devil himself and finding out what everybody who’s ever been to an amusement park knows: the end of the ride is the wildest.
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Copyright
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously.
WILD RIDE. Copyright © 2010 by Argh Ink, LLC, and Robert J. Mayer. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
? HYPERLINK “Www.stmartins.com” ??Www.stmartins.com?
Map by Rhys Davies
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crusie, Jennifer.
Wild ride! Jennifer Crusie & Bob Mayer. - 1st ed. p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-53377-9
1. Demons-Fiction. 2. Amusement parksFiction. I. Mayer, Bob, 1959- II. Title.
PS3553.R7858W56 2010 813'.54-dc22
First Edition: Match 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 32
2009040091
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Dedication
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THIS BOOK IS FOR
the amazing Calliope Jinx
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Acknowledgments
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We would like to thank
Our beta readers, Brooke Brannon, Heidi Cullinan, Rachel Plachcinski, Lani Diane Rich, and Anne Stuart,Debbie-for being Bob's better half,Kennywood for giving us a place to start thinking about Dreamland,Joss Whedon for Buffy, the Argh People who brainstormed the fortunes, especially Carolyn T. (“Someone close to you has a secret to share”), McB (“That's not a good look for you,” “It's going to get worse before it gets better”), and Karen F. (“He loves you all he can, but he cannot love you very much”), Mollie Smith for putting together the Crusie-Mayer website and up with us, Amy Berkower and Jodi Reamer of Writer's House and Meg Ruley of the Jane Rotrosen Agency for also putting up with us,and Jennifer Enderlin for being the best editor any writer could hope for.
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Wild Ride
1
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Mary Alice Brannigan sat on the roof of the Dreamland carousel at twenty minutes to midnight and considered her work in the light from the lamp on her yellow miner’s hat.
It was good.
FunFun, the redheaded wood clown sitting cross-legged next to her on the roof’s peak, was fully restored and authentic again. Of all the clowns in the park, including the Fun-head-topped waste cans and the eight-foot iron-clad Fun at the Dreamland entrance, this one was her favorite: exuberantly happy, one yellow-gloved hand pulling back his striped blue-green coat to show off his orange-and-gold-checked waistcoat, the other flung above his head, reaching into empty air for the gold pan pipes he’d lost long ago.
“Don’t worry, baby,” she said to him, patting her work bag between them. “I got your pipes right here.”
He grinned crookedly down at her, or at least down toward the ground as a breeze picked up, biting with the chill of the Ohio October night. Mab pulled her bulky canvas painting coat closer around her and looked out over the newly restored jewel-box of an amusement park. It had taken her thirty-nine years, but now she was not only in the park, she’d saved it. Once I finish the Fortunetelling Machine, I will have put this place back the way it was at the very beginning. I will belong here. I rock.
And the best part was that she was surveying it all at night, beautiful, peaceful night, with no--
“You up there, Mab?” Glenda yelled.
-people around to spoil the moment.
“Stop what you’re doing and come down here,” Glenda called, the cheer in her voice sounding as platinum bright as her hair and about as authentic. “We’ll walk you back to the Dream Cream, see you get upstairs to bed. You need your sleep, honey."
Mab gritted her teeth. This was what she got for taking a break to gloat over her work: people showed up and shouted at her.
She pulled her bag closer and took out the pipe, careful not to scratch any of the five little golden cylinders that were carved together in one block. Then she fished a tube of fast-set glue out of the bag, stood up carefully, and reached to glue the pipe back into the FunFun’s empty fingers, tilting her head back so the light from her miner’s cap shone on the hand.
A small black raven swooped down and perched on the clown’s head.
“Beat it, Frankie,” she whispered to the bird, trying to brush it away without dropping the flute or the glue or falling to her death.
Frankie flapped his wings and rose above the clown and then settled down on the up-flung hand, cawing at her like a cheese-grater dragged across a fire escape.
Cinderella got bluebirds doing her hair, Mab thought. I get ravens screwing with my work.
From below, Mab heard the raspy voice of Glenda’s friend Delpha, an echo of Frankie’s: “She’s up there, Glenda. Frankie knows.”
“I know, too,” Glenda said, and then she raised her voice and said, “I’m not kidding, Mab, stop whatever you’re doing up there right now.”
Mab leaned in, holding onto the glue with one hand and the flute with the other, and looked Frankie right in the
eye.
“This flute is going in that hand, bird,” she told him, serious as death. “Do not get between me and my work.”
Frankie watched her for a minute, his eyes steady and bright with intelligence, and then he cawed again, the sound going down Mab’s spine like a rasp, and flapped off.
“Okay, then.” Mab checked for the side of the flute with the broken metal rod on it, reached up and squirted a generous shot of glue into the hole in the FunFun’s palm, and slotted the broken rod into it. She held it for sixty seconds, ignoring demands to quit from down below, and then wiggled it a little to see if it had set.
The flute clicked, the sound sharp in the night, as if the metal rod had moved into place, engaged a gear or something.
What the hell? she thought.
“Okay, that’s it,” Glenda said, the brightness gone from her voice. “I’m coming up there.”
At fifty-nine, Glenda was probably in better shape than Mab was at thirty-nine, but it was dark, and Glenda liked a cocktail or three after six, and while she was often annoying, Mab didn’t want her dead, so . . .
“Hold on.” Mab capped her glue and put it in her paint bag and eased her way down the turquoise and blue striped carousel roof to peer over the edge, gripping the gold scalloped trim as insurance.
Glenda stood on the flagstone below in the spotlight cast from the lamp on Mab’s hat, one hand on her capri-clad hip, the other waving a cigarette, her spiky white hair glowing over her pink angora sweater. Beside her, ancient, black-eyed little Delpha looked up from under lowered brows, her improbably black hair slicked down on both sides of her sunken face like two strokes of black paint over a skull, the rest of her swathed in a dark blue shawl that blended into the night.
Frankie flapped down to sit on Delpha’s shoulder.
Death’s parrot, Mab thought. “Glenda, I’m almost done--”
“Done?” Glenda smiled up at her, clearly tense for some reason. “But honey, you shouldn’t be doing anything up there--”
Somebody staggered out of the night and lurched into Glenda, who bumped into Delpha, who stumbled back and dislodged Frankie, who went for the staggerer, who screamed and batted at him.
Frankie flapped up to sit on the edge of the carousel roof beside Mab, and the guy looked up.
Mab saw brown hair, bleary eyes, and a dense five-o-clock shadow over an orange Bengals’ shirt: Drunk Dave, one of the beer pavilion regulars who should have been out of the park when it had closed forty-five minutes before. He’d probably stumbled off to pee in the trees that rimmed the island and gotten lost. Again.
“Whassat?” Drunk Dave squinted up at her, and Mab realized that to him, she was just a big light in the black sky.
“This is God, Dave. Go home, sober up, get a job, and never get drunk again. Or you’ll go to hell.”
Drunk Dave’s mouth dropped open, making him look even more slack-jawed than usual.
“Go home, Dave, the park’s closed,” Glenda said.
“Okay,” Dave said, and staggered on.
“Come down, Mab, and we’ll walk you back to the Dream Cream,” Glenda said. “It’s not safe for you to wander around alone.”
“I’ve been walking around this park alone for months, and now you tell me it’s not safe?”
“Well, there’s Dave.”
“I can take care of Drunk Dave with one hand wrapped around FunFun.”
“And there’s danger.” Glenda waved her cigarette around vaguely. “It’s . . . October.”
“Right. The dangerous month.” Mab shook her head, which made the light from the lamp on her hat swing wildly, and then she crawled back up the striped metal roof. The park people were just odd, that was all there was to it. It probably came from living on the grounds. You lived fulltime in Dreamland, you got strange.
“Mab, get down here right now!”
“I’m coming!”
She fastened the flap on her work bag, made her way back to the ladder on the opposite side of the carousel, and climbed down to the flagstones that covered most of the park. Tomorrow she’d come out in the daylight and see the carousel wood FunFun in all its finished glory, and then she’d move on to the Fortunetelling Machine—
Something hard ran into her, and she lost her hat as she went down and smacked her head on the stone. “Ouch!” she said, and grabbed her hat and put it back on so that the light on it would stun the moron who’d knocked her down. “Damn it, Dave—”
Huge turquoise eyes gleamed down under iron-hard red-orange curls. A stiff turquoise-striped coat loomed over her, metal protesting as it bent. Then the thing brought its red-orange lips together slowly and ground out “Mmmm” and then spread them apart with the sound of rending metal to say, “ab,” its smile widening and its cheeks splitting as it jerkily held out its yellow iron-gloved hand to help her up.
“FunFun?” Mab said faintly.
The thing nodded, its head moving slowly up and down with a metallic squeaking sound.
Mab screamed.
Ethan John Wayne stared across the causeway at the locked iron gates that led to to Dreamland as the sound of his taxi faded into the darkness. Something was missing on the other side of the gate, but it had been a long time since he’d been home, and he couldn’t figure out what it was. Well, maybe they’d moved something. A lot of things changed in twenty years.
He rubbed his chest, feeling the scar that covered the Taliban bullet pressing on his heart. Dreamland was as good a place to die as any, and he had family here, which counted for something. What, he wasn’t quite sure.
He dropped his rucksack to the ground, pulled out a leather flask, and tilted it up to his lips, taking a good, long slug. Then he put the flask back and squared his shoulders to go back into the park. It wasn’t much of a home, he thought, but at least it was peaceful, no people around to--
A scream rent the night, coming from somewhere inside the park. Ethan threw his vest on, grabbed his .45 caliber pistol from the pack, and sprinted for the entrance. He leapt as he reached the ten foot high wrought iron gate, free hand grasping for a cross-bar just below the top, feet scrambling for a hold, and fell right onto his butt.
Cursing, he got to his feet and approached climbing the gate while factoring in his inebriated state. Mission planning, sir. He tucked the gun inside his Kevlar vest so he could use both hands. It took longer to climb the damn thing than it should have, and when he got to the top of the gate, he tottered and almost fell, but then he lowered himself and dropped the few remaining feet to the ground, narrowly missing the line of golf carts parked there. He drew his gun and went running across the causeway and down the midway toward the carousel where he could see three people gathered.
He came to an abrupt halt when he saw his mother standing with her arm around a woman dressed like a bag lady in a long, bulky, paint-splotched coat and a yellow miner’s hat.
“What’s going on?” he demanded.
His mother turned and her face lit up like it was Christmas. “Ethan!” she said and flung herself at him, hugging him so tight that he couldn’t get a breath. “What’s this?” she said, pulling back and knocking her knuckles on his chest, testing out his body armor and making him wince since she was banging right over his bullet. “Oh, I don’t care, you’re home!”
She flung her arms around him again, and Ethan patted the back of her fuzzy sweater and looked over her shoulder to see Delpha staring at him, with Frankie on her shoulder staring, too. “So you have returned,” Delpha said. A flicker of a smile touched her thin lips, gone as quickly as it had appeared, but for her, it was like Glenda’s bear hug.
“Yep,” Ethan said. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw old Gus come limping up from the back of the park.
“Bout time you came home,” Gus said gruffly in an overly loud voice, but he pounded Ethan on the shoulder just the same. “Good to see you, boy. You’re just in time.”
For what? Ethan wondered.
Glenda raised a tear-stained face. “How
long can you stay? You have to stay a long time.”
“I quit the Army. I’m staying,” Ethan said, and Glenda looked startled, but then she must have decided not to look a gift son in the mouth because she let go of him and patted his chest again.
“I’m so glad.” Her eyes welled up again. “Oh, I’m so glad. We even have a job for you! You can help Gus with security!”
“I don’t want a job, Mom. I just want some peace and quiet.” He looked around at them. “Who screamed?”
“I did,” the bag lady said. “Sorry. Usually I’m very calm, but I got run down by a clown.” She touched the back of her miner’s hat gingerly. “I hit my head.”
Wild Ride Page 1