by Rachel Caine
All I have to do.
“Come on, Christopher, run!” shouts Patricia, and the man—Christopher, my father—changes direction, moving toward the sound of water. I hear a car door slam ahead of us, and suddenly it all comes clear. They knew they might be followed; they expected to run with me. So they hid a car down by the lake, where the old man wouldn’t see it, intending to carry me off and disappear.
If they reach the car, I am never going home.
We’re running alongside the water now; I can smell it, can see it glittering in the sunlight. I have been good for my whole life. I have stayed dry.
Maybe that will be enough.
Christopher isn’t worried about me escaping; he’s bigger than I am, and I’ve been tied to a bed for the last day. I twist around and bite him on the ear, bringing my teeth together until cartilage crunches and hot blood fills my mouth. He bellows, the guttural cry of a wounded bull, and I fall to the ground as he loses his grip on me. The impact bruises my tailbone.
There isn’t time to worry about that. I’m already up and on my feet, running as hard as I can for the mirrored surface of the lake. It’s so close. I can smell the water. A voice shouts in the distance, and I twist around to see Duncan running toward us, Uncle Chester and a half dozen others close behind him. But Patricia and Christopher are with me, between me and any escape, and there isn’t time, there isn’t time.
Please, let me have stayed dry for long enough.
I jump, and the arms of the water open wide and take me home.
—
I DON’T KNOW how long I’m there, in the deep blue wonder of the lake. I swim deep and far, until time is something that happens to other people. Everything is twilight-dark, like the midway when the lights go down. My feet ache, and I twist until I can grab them and rub the hurt away. My clothes make it hard to swim right, and so I shrug them off and leave them floating among the waterweeds. They deck the bottom of the lake like banners deck a carnival midway, fluttering in the wind that moves within the water.
It’s beautiful down here.
Fish dart past me, and crawdads with their ruddy shells. I grab them and shove them into my mouth, greedy greedy greedy, and nothing has ever tasted so good, nothing has ever been so right. I should have done this years ago. But I stayed away from the water. I stayed away—
Why?
I don’t remember why I stayed away from the water. I stop swimming and let myself drift, trying to think. My thoughts are slippery like fish, and they squirm away from me.
Something round falls past me, sending a plume of mud rising from the bottom of the lake. I look up. There’s a boat in the water, and someone on the boat is dropping things. I dive, retrieving the object. It’s a baseball with a weighted bottom. The kind we use in the midway games.
Midway games . . .
I clutch the baseball to my chest and rise, my head breaking the surface beside the boat. A man is sitting there, looking down at me, waiting. His hair is black as the bottom of the lake. Mutely, I offer him the baseball.
“Thank you.” He takes it. Then he takes my hand. The webs between my fingers are pale against his skin. “Do you remember who I am?”
“No.”
He nods. His eyes are sad. “That’s all right. I’m your Uncle Chester. Do you remember your name?”
“I . . .” I stop, and frown. Finally, I venture, “Ada?”
“Good girl.” He reaches down, and because I trust him somehow, I reach up, and he pulls me into the boat. The sunlight glitters off my scales. It’s beautiful. I giggle. He looks sadder. “Ada, I have a question for you.”
“What, Uncle Chester?”
“Those people who took you . . . they won’t hurt you anymore. They won’t be hurting anyone anymore, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I didn’t keep them from hurting you.”
I smile at him, uncomprehending. Maybe he’ll start making sense soon. Even if he doesn’t, the sun is shining, and it’s nice to be here in the warm autumn daylight.
“Ada. Focus, now.”
I blink, and frown. “On what? You haven’t asked a question yet.”
“I’m sorry.” He shakes his head. “I forgot that you couldn’t . . . I’m sorry. Do you want to go home?”
The baseball is rolling around the bottom of the boat. They’ll be missing it back on the midway. They need the baseballs if they want to play the game, even if I’m not sure what the game is, or why anyone would want to play it. I nod solemnly. “It’s autumn. Autumn’s carnival time.” The words feel right.
Uncle Chester finally smiles, although it doesn’t take the sad away.
“Good girl,” he repeats. Then he starts to row, heading for the shore.
I wonder what a midway is.
I wonder if I’ll like it there.
I don’t look back.
About the Authors
RACHEL CAINE is the New York Times, USA Today, and #1 internationally bestselling author of more than forty novels, including the Morganville Vampires, Weather Warden, Outcast Season, and Revivalist series. She has also been featured in many anthologies, including Many Bloody Returns, Hex Appeal, and Shards and Ashes. Visit her online at www.RachelCaine.com and @RachelCaine.
DELILAH S. DAWSON is the author of Wicked As They Come and Wicked As She Wants, the first two Blud novels in her steampunk paranormal romance series with Pocket Books, and two e-novellas set in the enchanting land of Sang, The Mysterious Madam Morpho and The Peculiar Pets of Miss Pleasance. She is at work on a young adult series for Simon Pulse. Delilah lives with her family in Atlanta. Visit her at www.delilahsdawson.com and @DelilahSDawson.
JENNIFER ESTEP is a New York Times bestselling author prowling the streets of her imagination in search of her next fantasy idea. Spider’s Bite, Web of Lies, Venom, Tangled Threads, Spider’s Revenge, Thread of Death, By a Thread, Widow’s Web, Deadly Sting, and Heart of Venom are the other works in her red-hot Elemental Assassin urban fantasy series for Pocket Books. Jennifer also writes the Mythos Academy young adult urban fantasy series and is the author of the Bigtime paranormal romance series. Visit her at www.JenniferEstep.com and @Jennifer_Estep.
KELLY GAY is the author of the Pocket Books urban fantasy series featuring Charlie Madigan, which includes The Better Part of Darkness, The Darkest Edge of Dawn, The Hour of Dust and Ashes, and Shadows Before the Sun. She is a two-time RITA Award finalist, a 2010 finalist for Best First Book from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, and a recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council fellowship grant in literature. She also writes as Kelly Keaton and can be found online at: www.KellyGay.com and @KellyHGay.
KEVIN HEARNE is the New York Times bestselling author of the Iron Druid Chronicles. He’s a middle-aged nerd who still enjoys his comic books and old-school heavy metal. He cooks tasty omelets, hugs trees, and paints miniature army dudes. He lives with his wife, daughter, and doggies in a wee cottage. Online at www.KevinHearne.com and @KevinHearne.
MARK HENRY gleefully twists urban fantasy into extremes of comedy, filth, and horror. He also writes young adult horror and fantasy (as Daniel Marks), spends way too much time glued to the internet, and collects books obsessively (occasionally reading them). He’s been a psychotherapist for children and adolescents, a Halloween-store manager, and a cafeteria janitor (gag), and has survived earthquakes, volcanoes, and typhoons to get where he is today, which is to say, in his messy office surrounded by half-empty coffee cups. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Caroline, and three furry monsters with no regard for quality carpeting. None. Urban Fantasy for the Twisted: www.markhenry.us and @Mark_Henry.
HILLARY JACQUES is an up-late, Alaska-based author of speculative fiction. She has a love of words, travel, small-plate dining, and action movies. Sometimes her husband and son allow her to play grown-up. She has worked jobs as diverse as carnival vendor and federal contractor. She is drawn to risk management occupations because she wants to make the world a safer place. Also, because she gets paid to figure
out how things can be blown up. Her urban fantasy Night Runner series is published under the pen name Regan Summers. Find her online at hillaryjacques.blogspot.com and @HillaryJacques.
JACKIE KESSLER writes about demons, angels, and the hapless humans caught between them; superheroes and the supervillains who pound those heroes into pudding; ghosts; and, in her pseudo-secret identity as YA author Jackie Morse Kessler, witches and the occasional Rider of the Apocalypse. She also had a stint in the Buffyverse, writing a short comic for Dark Horse. She lives near Albany, New York, with her Loving Husband, Precious Little Tax Deductions, and a sweetly psychotic cat. For more about Jackie, including the full bibliography of the Hell on Earth series, visit her at www.jackiekessler.com and @JackieKessler.
SEANAN MCGUIRE comes from good carnival stock and had her first Ferris wheel–related injury when she was seven years old. Both she and the Ferris wheel recovered nicely and are currently in good health. She attended UC Berkeley, where she majored in folklore and mythology. These two things go a long way toward explaining why she now writes urban fantasy.
Seanan is the New York Times bestselling author of two ongoing urban fantasy series, the InCryptid and the October Daye series, and she also writes under the name Mira Grant. She is a founding member of the Hugo Award–winning SF Squeecast, and her short fiction has appeared all over the place, sometimes including on the floor of her bedroom. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2010 and was the first woman to be nominated for four Hugo Awards in a single year.
It is widely rumored that Seanan doesn’t sleep. The rumors are pretty much true. She lives in a crumbling farmhouse, which she shares with her collections of books, horror movies, and creepy dolls, as well as her three ridiculously large blue cats. Seanan is happiest when at a carnival or in a cornfield, and she collects machetes. This tells you everything you need to know. Her online homes are www.SeananMcGuire.com and @SeananMcGuire.
Born and raised in southern Delaware, KELLY MEDING survived five years in the hustle and bustle of Northern Virginia, only to retreat back to the peace and sanity of the Eastern Shore. An avid reader and film buff, she discovered Freddy Krueger at a very young age and has since had a lifelong obsession with horror, science fiction, and fantasy, for which she blames her interest in vampires, psychic powers, superheroes, and all things paranormal.
Three Days to Dead, the first book in her Dreg City urban fantasy series, follows Evangeline Stone, a paranormal hunter who is resurrected into the body of a stranger and has only three days to solve her own murder and stop a war between the city’s goblins and vampires. Additional books in the series include As Lie the Dead, Another Kind of Dead, and Wrong Side of Dead.
Beginning with Trance, Kelly’s MetaWars series tells the story of the grown-up children of the world’s slaughtered superheroes who receive their superpowers back after a mysterious fifteen-year absence, and who now face not only a fearful public but also a vengeful villain who wants all of them dead. Other books in the series include Changeling, Tempest, and Chimera. See her online at www.kellymeding.com and @KellyMeding.
ALLISON PANG is the author of the Abby Sinclair urban fantasy series from Pocket Books as well as the online graphic novel Fox & Willow. She spends her days in northern Virginia working as a cube grunt and her nights waiting on her kids and cats, punctuated by an occasional husbandly serenade. Sometimes she even manages to write. Mostly she just makes it up as she goes. She loves Hello Kitty, sparkly shoes, and gorgeous violinists. www.heartofthedreaming.com and @Allison_Pang.
NICOLE PEELER received an undergraduate degree in English literature from Boston University and a PhD in English literature from the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. She’s lived abroad in both Spain and the UK, and all over the United States. Currently she resides outside Pittsburgh, teaching in Seton Hill University’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program. When she’s not in the classroom infecting young minds with her madness, she’s writing the Jane True series for Orbit Books and manga for Yen Press, and taking pleasure in what means most to her: family, friends, food, and travel. www.NicolePeeler.com and @NicolePeeler.
ROB THURMAN lives in Indiana, land of cows, corn, and ravenous wild turkeys—the rural velociraptor at large. Rob is the author of the darkly gritty Cal Leandros urban fantasy series: Nightlife, Moonshine, Madhouse, Deathwish, Roadkill, Blackout, Doubletake, and Slashback; the Trickster novels Trick of the Light and The Grimrose Path; and the thriller-suspense novels Chimera, Basilisk, and All Seeing Eye.
Besides wild, ravenous turkeys, Rob has two rescue dogs (If you don’t have a dog, how do you live?). Both were adopted from the pound (one on his last day on death row). They were fully grown, already house-trained, and grateful as hell. Think about it the next time you’re looking for a Rover or a Fluffy. For updates, teasers, deleted scenes, social networking (the time-suck of an author’s life), and various other extras, visit the author at www.RobThurman.net and @Rob_Thurman.
USA Today bestselling author JAYE WELLS writes urban fantasy novels with grave stakes and wicked humor. Raised in bookstores, she loved reading from a very young age. That gateway drug eventually led to a full-blown writing addiction. When she’s not chasing the word dragon, she loves to travel, drink good bourbon, and do things that scare her so she can put them in her books. Jaye lives in Texas with her husband and son. For more about her books, go to www.jayewells.com and @JayeWells.
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Gallery Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors’ imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Painted Love” © 2013 by Robyn Thurman
“The Three Lives of Lydia” © 2013 by Delilah S. Dawson
“The Demon Barker of Wheat Street” © 2013 by Kevin Hearne
“The Sweeter the Juice” © 2013 by Mark Henry
“The Werewife” © 2013 by Jaye Wells
“The Cold Girl” © 2013 by Roxanne Longstreet Conrad
“A Duet with Darkness” © 2013 by Allison Pang
“Recession of the Divine” © 2013 by Hillary Jacques
“Parlor Tricks” © 2013 by Jennifer Estep
“Freak House” © 2013 by Kelly Meding
“The Inside Man” © 2013 by Nicole Peeler
“A Chance in Hell” © 2013 by Jackie Kessler
“Hell’s Menagerie” © 2013 by Kelly Gay
“Daughter of the Midway, the Mermaid, and the Open, Lonely Sea” © 2013 by Seanan McGuire
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First Gallery Books trade paperback edition July 2013
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Designed by Davina Mock-Maniscalco
Cover design by Tony Mauro
ISBN 978-1-4767-1415-8
ISBN 978-1-4767-1433-2 (ebook)