Wild Ride

by Jennifer Cruisie

  Afghan insurgents couldn't kill him, but his mother was probably going to.

  Gotta get the demons put back, gotta get a fIghting team .... He drifted off to sleep, but his last thoughts were of how he could make contact with the man in black.

  And how much he wanted a drink.

  Mab yanked back from Joe. “You're a what?”

  “Demon hunter,” Joe said. “It's a hobby.” He opened his arms to her. “Come here.”

  “Wait a minute.” Mab pulled her coat around her tighter. “You knew there were demons in the park? And you didn't tell me?”

  “Everybody knows there are demons in the park. The legends have been around for years.”

  “Yeah. Legends. Not real blue-green fog that tries to kill you.” Mab wrapped her arms tighter around herself. “My mother told me there were demons in the park, hell, she told everybody there were demons in the park, it's why the Brannigans have always been outcasts in Parkersburg, it's why I left home and didn't come back until now, because my mother was a freaking nutcase. Except now I find out that she wasn't.” Mab thought about it. “Well, yeah she was, just not about the demons. The demons are real. My mother was right. Which means everything I believed about my life here, growing up, about ... reality, it's all wrong. There really are demons.” Her lungs still hurt from trying to breathe, and her heart ached. “There really are demons. My god, my god.”

  Joe sighed and moved closer to her. “You're okay, Mab. Hell, you should be proud. You just stood off a demon possession. How many people can say that?”

  “Okay,” Mab said. “Okay. Just let me get my head around this. Demons are real, and you knew about it and didn't tell me, and oh yeah, I almost died. Crap.” She jerked her head up. “Ashley - the demon has her -”

  “Ashley will be all right."

  “I'm not all right.”

  “You're fine.” Joe pulled her back to him again and she let him, really needing something to hold on to. “You even stayed conscious. Most people don't. They wake up later and think they've had a blackout.”

  Mab pulled back. “That bitch was trying to kill me!”

  Joe shrugged. “Or they don't wake up later.”

  “Is that what killed Karl?” Mab had a thought and pulled open her coat to look at her chest. A faint wavy mark curved over her left breast. “Damn it. Does this wash off?”

  “Well, we could certainly try,” Joe said, staring.

  Mab pulled her coat closed. “Okay. Okay. So. You hunt them? Here? They come here? To Dreamland?”

  “Sure, they come here,” Joe said. “They eat funnel cake, ride the Dragon, possess people. Why don't we talk about this later?” He looked around the Dream Cream. “Is there anything to eat? I'm starving.” He stood up and went behind the counter. “You want anything?”

  I want this not to have happened. I want it to be an hour ago when I was all warm and happy.

  Should have known that wasn't going to last.

  He opened the freezer. “There's chocolate and something pink and something yellow. What do you want?”

  “The pink is a love potion and the yellow is an antidepressant.” She put her hand over her breast and rubbed at the mark, hating it.

  “How about if I put all three in?”

  “Whatever.” Stop feeling sorry for yourself Mab thought. Get organized.

  FIX this. “Okay, first things first. Is anybody else in the park in danger right now?”

  “The park is closed, so I'm guessing no.” Joe found a bowl and put it on the counter. “My guess is that the demon gave up and Ashley's probably on her way home now, really tired. She'll sleep for hours and wake up fine.” He rummaged in a drawer and pulled out an ice cream scoop and started dishing ice cream.

  “No, she won't,” Mab said, remembering. “She was hurt. There was a cut on her stomach, like a circle. Her shirt was cut and there was blood.” She looked up to see Joe had stopped scooping and turned around. “Do you know what that was?”

  “No,” he said. “Tura doesn't wound people. Somebody else must have done that.” “It was a circle about this big . . .” She held up her hands to show him, making a circle that was about bracelet size, and then she remembered. "Ethan got hit by the same thing. It was a circle with barbs on it, made of iron.

  Joe looked even more uneasy as he shut the freezer case. He dropped the ice cream scoop in the sink, put two spoons in the bowl, and brought it around the counter to her. “Iron is bad for demons. So if somebody shot something iron at Ashley -”

  “They were trying to get the demon.” Mab picked up a spoon. “So that means somebody else is here hunting demons besides you and the Guardia. The Guardia are the park's demon hunters.” She dipped her spoon into the lemon and let the cold tangy cream melt on her tongue. It did make her feel better. “Whoever shot that thing, they're high tech.” She stopped again. “Wait. High tech. Ethan said there was a man in black in the park. I bet it's him.”

  “Man in black?”

  “He called him black ops. Like, super-secret government ... demon hunters.” Mab felt the edges of reality evaporating again and put down her spoon. It was one thing to hold on to reality by getting practical and organizing her information; it was another thing entirely to get practical and organize information about demons,

  “So the Guardia is hunting demons,” Joe said, “the government is hunting demons, and I'm hunting demons. Almost makes you feel sorry for the demons.”

  “Are you crazy? That bitch killed Dead Karl -”

  “I am not going to mourn Dead Karl.”

  “- and I think the other bastard ran me down inside the FunFun statue. Ethan mentioned him and so did Delpha. Fufluns.” She frowned. “Fuuluns. FunFun. Whoever named that clown FunFun knew about the demon Fufiuns.” She ate more lemon ice cream, needing it now. “Which means these demons were around when the park was built in 1926. They've been here forever.”

  Joe kept eating ice cream.

  “Doesn't this bother you?” Mab asked him.

  “No. But I've known about it for a while. Try the pink love potion stuff, it's really good.”

  “I'm not in a loving mood.”

  “That's why you should try the pink stuff.”

  “So you hunt demons,” Mab said, her thoughts finally organized. “How does that work?”

  Joe shook his head. “Eat your ice cream. We can talk demons later if you still want to, but right now you're just revving yourself up.”

  Mab rubbed her forehead, and he dropped his spoon in the bowl and put his arm around her. She put her head on his shoulder and said, “I don't want to believe in demons.”

  “I know, baby.”

  “But now! have to.”

  “I know.”

  “My world is so fucked.”

  “Not really. It's a whole new world. The old one is gone. You haven't had time to fuck this one up yet.”

  “I liked the old one,” Mab said miserably.

  “Did you?”

  "Yeah. I had plenty of work and it was interesting and.

  “You didn't have Dreamland.”

  “I don't have Dreamland now. I leave the day after Halloween.”

  “You didn't have me.”

  “You're leaving the day after Halloween, too.”

  “Mab,” he said, and she looked up to see him staring down at her, serious for once. “Do you have something against happiness?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It doesn't last.”

  “Well, of course not. If it lasted, you'd be happy all the time and then you wouldn't know you were happy.”

  Mab frowned, trying to follow that.

  “Live in the moment, babe,” Joe said, smiling down at her with immense affection. “It's all you've got.”

  “My moment has demons in it,” Mab said. “So frankly, I'd like to move on.”

  “Good idea.” Joe put his arms around her. “Play your cards right and you'll get possessed again. By me.” He kissed her on the neck. “Come on, lighten up.”
/>
  “I have to call somebody. Delpha. I have to tell Delpha there's a demon.” Mab pushed his arms away and got up and went behind the counter to the phone. She punched in Delpha's extension, written on the list on the wall. Then she turned and watched Joe while she let it ring, thinking,

  I trusted him and he lied to me, but really, if he'd said, “I'm a demon hunter,” would she have believed him?

  The phone rang on and finally Mab hung up. “She's not answering. She must be with Glenda.” Joe got up as she picked up the receiver again to call Glenda and came around the counter and took it from her.

  “Nothing happens in this park that Glenda doesn't know about,” he told her. “She knows the demons are out. It's way past midnight. You can talk to her in the morning.”

  He hung up the phone and she hesitated.

  “Do you want me to go?” he said. She started to say yes because he'd lied to her, and then he added, “Do you want to be alone tonight?” and she said, “No.”

  He put his arms around her again. “We'll work this out. Tomorrow, you can talk to people and organize meetings and do research and make a plan for the future. Now you need sleep. And somebody to watch over you and make you smile again.”

  “Okay,” she said, because that sounded good.

  “Then let's go to bed,” he said, and kissed her again, and she let him, and after a minute she kissed him back.

  I wouldn't have believed him if he'd told me he was a demon hunter, she thought. I probably wouldn't have told me, either.

  Maybe that doesn't count as a lie,

  “Come on,” he said, and she followed him up to bed.

  Mab woke up late the next morning and found Joe gone, which was a relief. The people she wanted to talk to were Cindy and Delpha, not him. Common sense and supernatural sense - that's what she needed, not somebody trying to get her to laugh about a demon infestation.

  She got dressed and went downstairs, but the Dream Cream was full of the early lunch crowd, including Ashley telling everybody about the enormous blackout she'd had the night before - two nights in a row, could you believe it? - and how she really had to stop drinking. Skinny and Quentin from the Pavilion were there, too, Skinny still talking - “Now, the most popular ice cream flavor is vanilla, second is chocolate, but vanilla beats it by a mile. Then strawberry is third, but it's tied with butter pecan, and what's up with that?” - and the guy in the Coke-bottle glasses was sitting at the counter again, on his cell phone this time. There was one seat left on the end next to him, and he had his trilby hat on it, but when he saw Mab, he moved it.

  “Thank you,” she said, and sat down, dropping her work bag on the floor between them as Skinny moved into high gear behind her.

  “But the fifth flavor is really a killer: Neapolitan. You know what I think, Quentin? I think it's for people who can't make up their minds about the first three. That's what I think. Go with vanilla, that's what I say. Twenty-nine percent of Americans go with vanilla, and that's good enough for me,”

  “Chocolate,” Quentin said.

  “Okay,” Skinny said.

  Cindy came down the counter to Mab, looking almost annoyed. “Those guys are driving me crazy. Tell me about last night and talk loud so you drown out the skinny one.”

  “Can we go in the storeroom?” Mab said, not wanting to share her bad news with Quentin and Skinny or the guy with the glasses and the hat, who was getting out his notebook.

  “That good?” Cindy turned and called down the counter to her college help, “Emily, yell if you need me.”

  Emily looked at the packed shop wide-eyed, and Mab detoured around the Coke-bottle glasses guy to follow Cindy into the storeroom. She turned to close the door and found the guy with the glasses watching her, his eyes cool behind the thick lenses.

  Demon?

  He smiled at her. It was a brief smile, disappearing as fast as it came, but still a good smile, straightforward and nondemonic.

  “Mab?” Cindy said.

  She closed the door and said, “What do you know about that guy with the glasses?”

  “He comes in every day. His wife, Ursula, calls a lot. He doesn't like her.” Cindy put her hands on her hips. “So, young lady. I saw I was down some condoms. You weren't making water balloons, were you?”

  Mab took a deep breath. “I was possessed by a demon.”

  She pulled back. “Whoa, he's that good?”

  “No,” Mab said. “Well, yes, but -”

  Cindy threw her hands up. “You've, like, won the life lottery. Robot clowns and legends coming true and now a guy who's a demon in the sack. I've been making ice cream here for fifteen years, and nothing like that has ever happened to me.”

  Mab stopped. “Fifteen years?”

  Cindy nodded. “I've worked in Dreamland longer than that, but I started making ice cream when I was eighteen. And in fifteen years, I never had anything like you've had in the past three days.”

  “You've been here for fifteen years? And you never noticed the demons?”

  “Well, I got married once and moved to Columbus. But the only place I could find work was Baskin-Robbins, and it just wasn't the same. So I came back here. And then about five years ago, this fancy restaurant in Cincinnati offered me some big bucks to make ice cream just for them, so I went for it, but two months later I had to come back. They liked the ice cream just fine, but I knew it wasn't right. This is the only place I can make truly great ice cream. Like you restoring amusement parks. Once you find what you're meant to do, you have to do that.”

  “Okay,” Mab said. “Did you miss the part about the demon?”

  “Joe as a demon in the sack?” Cindy said, refocusing.

  “No, real demons. There are real demons in the park.”

  Cindy blinked at her.

  “They're real. Demons. They're real. One possessed me last night. It had Ashley and she knocked on the door and I let her in and then the demon flowed out of her and into me and tried to stop my heart and lungs. They're real. Joe knows about it. He came here to hunt them. And Delpha and Glenda and Gus, they're the Guardia, they -”

  Cindy pulled over a step stool and sat down. “Demons.”

  “They're real. I swear, they're real. They possess people. They can be anybody. Maybe that guy with the glasses out at the counter. Anybody.”

  Her voice rose at the end, and Cindy got up and shoved the step stool over to her.

  “I'm still a little upset,” Mab said, sitting down.

  “I ... yeah,” Cindy said. “Demons. Okay.”

  “You believe me?”

  “I think you're the only person I would believe. You're not ... fanciful. You don't joke around. If you say there are demons, there are demons. Wow. So now what?”

  “I go talk to Delpha.” Mab nodded, even surer now that she'd said it out loud. “She tried to tell me about them, but I wouldn't listen. Now I'll listen.”

  “Good.” Cindy nodded. “Delpha's good. Go talk to her. And take notes and then come back and tell me because this is really. ”Unbelievable?"

  “Kind of exciting,” Cindy said. Assuming, you know, nobody dies or anything."

  “Dead Karl,” Mab said.

  “Nobody else.” Cindy straightened. “And look on the bright side. You're sleeping with a demon hunter.”

  “Yeah,” Mab said.

  “And what's wrong with that?”

  “He lied to me. Well, he didn't lie to me, he just didn't tell me he was a demon hunter. That's kind of big.”

  Cindy frowned. “I don't think that's the kind of thing you drop on a woman you're trying to get into bed.”

  Mab thought about it. “That's a good point. But -”

  “Did he say 'I'm not a demon hunter'?”

  “No.”

  “Did he say he was something else?”

  “No.”

  “And he's good in bed."

  “Yeah,” Mab said.

  “Might want to lower your standards there,” Cindy said.

  Emi
ly knocked on the door of the storeroom and said, “Cindy?” in a high voice that meant Help, and Cindy opened the door and then turned back to Mab.