I shifted so I could beam at both of them at the same time, each out of one corner of my mouth. “We’ve damaged their power. They’re going to go where the heart of their empire lies. They’re going to go to Lowryland.”
* * *
The nice thing about old cars is how easy they are to hotwire. Cylia was probably going to be pissed that I’d cracked her steering column. I’d make it up to her. Not being dead would be an awesome start.
Sam sat in the passenger seat, still in his human form, clutching the grip above the door with white-knuckled fervor. The gauze I’d found in the glove compartment stood out starkly white where I’d covered his scrapes and bruises. Mary was in the back, occasionally flickering out of existence when I took a curve too fast, only to reappear a second later, keeping easy pace with the car. From the way Sam rolled his eyes at her, I guessed her impermanence wasn’t helping.
Oh, well. There’d be time to worry about my boyfriend’s nerves later, when we weren’t racing an unspoken deadline for the lives of our loved ones. I kept my foot down and tried not to think about how much I hate driving, or how I didn’t have a license, or how easy it would be to crash into something big and solid and die horribly. (Okay, I was failing at not thinking about any of those things, but I could pretend. Boy, could I pretend.) In what felt like no time at all, we were rocketing into the virtually deserted employee parking lot, rolling past the cars of security staff and janitorial workers to park as close to the doors as I could get us.
Mary grimaced as soon as the engine died. “Bad news, kiddo,” she said, through gritted teeth. “I can’t get out of the car.”
“What?” I twisted in the driver’s seat to frown at her. “Why not?”
“Your routewitch has apparently decided you don’t get any more help tonight. She doesn’t want me even this close to her territory, but this car has a lot of miles on it, and it’s shielding me from her repulsion charms. At least a little. If I tried to get out, I’d find myself slammed back into the twilight before I could say ‘boo.’”
“So don’t get out,” I said. “Stay here. I’ll send anyone we find to the car, and if the charms collapse, you’ll know we’ve managed to take Emily down.”
“Annie . . .” She paused, looking faintly ill before she said, “If it’s a choice between the crossroads and the cemetery, you call for me. No routewitch can keep me out when there’s a bargain to be made.”
“It’s not going to come to that,” I assured her, got out of the car, and walked toward the gate.
Sam was close behind me. He pulled up by my side, matching his steps to mine, and asked, “Do you have a plan?”
“Not so much.”
“Do you have enough knives?”
“Never.”
“Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
I glanced at him. He looked earnest, faintly confused, and determined. I sighed. “Go ahead.”
“What’s with Mary? She told me what she could when she was keeping me updated on you, but . . . I feel like there’s a lot she had to leave out.”
“You don’t ask small questions, do you?” I exhaled. “Do you know what the crossroads are?”
“Yeah. You go down to the crossroads when you want to make a deal.”
“Just like that. Only you don’t normally need to go anywhere; the crossroads can find you, if they’re interested enough. Some people go to the physical place where the crossroads are currently manifesting, and those are the people who want. Most folks stumble into a deal. Bad bargains, sold souls. The usual.” I shook my head. “Not a good plan. I don’t recommend it.”
“I’m picking up on that. So Mary . . . ?”
“Was human, was dying, and made a deal with the crossroads to stay on as a ghost and serve them for as long as they want her. See, when you make a deal at the crossroads, it’s sort of like an episode of Law & Order. You get the defense, and you get the prosecution. Mary’s the defense. Mary’s the one who tries to argue the crossroads into giving you what you want, instead of what you technically asked for. She’s the good guy.”
Sam frowned. “Even though she’s working for them?”
“When you have a choice between Godzilla and Cthulhu, you take Godzilla every time. At least the King of Monsters isn’t actively out to destroy humanity. Mary . . . Mary isn’t cruel. She doesn’t make bargains with family if she has any choice in the matter. She reminds us that while crossroad bargains may seem like a cheap and easy way out of a tight spot, there’s always something else that can be done. And she makes brownies using my great-grandmother’s recipe, which is pretty amazing.”
There was a lot else I could have said, like how people like us have a tendency to trip and stumble up against the spirit world, and how having her around made sure we never did it by accident. How she’d been able to successfully keep any member of the family from calling on the crossroads since Grandpa Thomas—and how she never let us forget what he’d done, or what he’d paid for doing it. How much we needed her, and by extension, how much she needed us, because having a family to worry about kept her from falling into the trap that waits for all the world’s ghosts. As long as she had us, she couldn’t forget that she’d been one of the living, once. She couldn’t forget that the living were small, and soft, and worth worrying about.
We were going to keep reminding her forever, if I had any say in the matter.
We had reached the gate to the Park. It was locked, but that was no real barrier: not to people who’d trained on the trapeze and didn’t care about getting busted. Sam formed a basket with his hands and I stepped into it, one knee pulled toward my chest in a classic cheerleading pose. If not for the humidity and the darkness and the fact that we were about to commit an act of breaking and entering, it would have felt just like old times. He boosted me up. I grabbed the top of the gate and hoisted myself over it, dropping down into the Park proper.
Sam appeared next to me a second later, having leaped over the gate. He offered me my backpack. I shook my head as I took it and slung it over my shoulder, smiling at him fondly.
“Show-off,” I said.
“Hey, I have to keep you interested,” he replied.
“Trust me; keeping me interested is not going to be the problem,” I said. “Keeping me breathing may be, but so far you’ve been up to the challenge.”
“Planning to stay that way,” he said.
The Park was deserted, lit by the minimum number of bulbs and glowing fixtures. It would have made more sense to light the place up like midday for the sake of the janitorial staff, but that would also have attracted attention. Insomniacs and teenagers were attracted to Lowryland’s rare midnight openings like moths to a flame, following the blazing lights of the complex across the freeways of Florida. Maintenance and cleanup happen in the dark, lest they be seen, lest they be noticed.
They’re not the only things that happen in the dark. I shook my hands and felt the ghosts of flame in my fingers, still too drained and distant to reach. I breathed in the familiar, irreplaceable scent of Lowryland, that mixture of plastic reality, real sweat, fried sugar, and sunscreen, and felt regret welling up in my chest, stronger than the flames but fanning them at the same time. This was my last walk through the Park. By the time the sun came up, we’d be gone.
The skeleton twist of the Midsummer Night’s Scream loomed ahead of us, rendered eerie and organic by the shadows surrounding it. I pointed.
“There,” I said. “That area’s been closed all day, so janitorial will be staying clear, and the maintenance should be done by now. That’s where we’re going.” It felt right. It felt true. That was where we’d agreed to meet our people, and the cabal was running scared, drawing power from their routewitch and their ambulomancer, both of whom were tied to the narrative logic of the road. Add in the trainspotter, who would want to be someplace where he could recharge himself if the need arose, and i
t was the place in the Park that made the most sense.
That made me nervous. Things that make sense aren’t necessarily unreal. What they are, frequently, are traps.
I glanced at Sam. He was moving easily enough, despite the blood on his shirt, and if he was doing this well while concentrating on looking human, he was probably close to top form in his natural shape. It was the “close” that was the problem. Every time we ran into each other, I seemed to put him in danger.
Except no. Except he’d known when he came looking for me that being in my presence was likely to mean bullets and bloodshed and the occasional bout of arson, and he’d shown up anyway. He’d made the choice this time, putting himself in harm’s way for the sake of my company, and I’d be damned before I took that away from him. If Sam wanted to be here, then here was exactly where he belonged.
“The security cameras are on even at night, but once people start flinging impossibilities around, it should be okay,” I said, voice low. “There’s no way cryptids haven’t been caught on film before. The folks who see them either say ‘this is a hoax’ or ‘this is outside my pay grade,’ and it doesn’t get out. Lowryland isn’t going to want to be associated with something that looks like a B-grade horror movie. They’ll bury it.”
“You seem pretty confident.”
“My family’s been doing this for a long time.”
I felt, rather than saw, Sam’s glance in my direction. “Do you miss them?”
“More than anything.” I even missed the ones I don’t like very much, like Verity. My family shares my context. They know my education, my experiences, where the bone-deep bruises on my psyche are. We have secrets from each other—God, do we have secrets from each other—but even those secrets are built upon a shared foundation of loss and loneliness and duty. Those things aren’t unique to our weird little community. People have been forging alliances and pledging fealty based on those things since there have been people in the world. But the specific recipe that we follow, the blend, that’s all us. That’s unique.
Something warm and soft touched my skin. I looked down. Sam’s tail was looped in a tight knot around my wrist, providing an anchor without slowing me down.
“You’re not alone,” he said.
Warmth seemed to flow through my veins, a cousin to the fire that lingered in my fingers, but different, more diffuse, less dangerous. “I know,” I said, and we kept walking, a human disaster and a fūri heading toward the inevitable, leaving safety in the rearview mirror, as we had already done so many times before.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been in Lowryland after dark—far from it, in fact; my first nocturnal roller skating expedition had followed my employment by less than a month—but it was the first time the Park had seemed actively hostile. The shadows were too deep and the edges were too sharp, as if painted by an inimical hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see light flashing off window panes and bits of polished plastic, seeming more like the eyes of hostile creatures than any simple trick of light and shadow.
“Shades of Lovecraft,” I muttered.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
We were approaching the gate that would take us out of the backstage employee areas and into the main body of the Park. It wasn’t locked. What would have been the point? Once someone had made it into Lowryland, locks would only give them incentive to break things. Locks were for areas where guests could get seriously hurt or do substantial amounts of damage, not for the great expanse of open space and twisting trails that made up the majority of the Park’s real estate.
“You ready?” I asked, looking back at Sam.
He unwound his tail from around my wrist, knowing I was going to need my full range of motion. I nodded appreciatively and pushed the gate open, revealing the gleaming chrome and low nighttime lighting of Metropolis, Lowryland’s answer to Disney’s World of Tomorrow. Loosely themed after the futuristic utopia of 1927’s (thankfully public domain) Metropolis, the Lowryland version owed less to Weimar, Germany, and more to the pulp covers of silver age science fiction novels. During the day, robots, androids, and space explorers roved the neon walkways, delighting guests and luring them onto the sleek, chrome-plated rides.
At night, Metropolis was less a dream of a future that had never come and more a graveyard of ideas that had never been able to come to fruition. The spidery legs of launching pods and “spacecraft” seemed menacing and vaguely animate in the shadows, like they could reach for us at any moment.
I didn’t say anything, only pointed to my right, indicating that Sam should follow me along the walkway to the Deep-Down. He nodded, letting me lead the way.
As we walked, the Park became less futuristic, more drowned and damaged, worn away by the forces of time and entropy. Atlantis skirted the edge of the two sections, blending them in a way that delighted the Park’s designers and horrified the marketing department. It was hard to explain something so high-concept that it required the shared themes of two entire areas to shore it up. But the kids loved it, and the merchandise sold, and so no one messed with Atlantis, and no one messed with the Deep-Down.
It wasn’t my area. That’s the only excuse I can give for forgetting that a roller coaster runs right through the heart of the Deep-Down, slicing through the Kraken’s Lagoon in a self-contained tunnel. It’s called the Sea Dragon, and it’s the largest, most powerful coaster the Park has, utilizing every trick the engineers know and a few dozen I would have sworn they didn’t to get the job done.
We were halfway through the glass-walled tunnel to Fairyland when a roaring sound reverberated through the water around us, magnified by the liquid until it seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. Sam jumped. I froze, fire surging into my fingers, hands balling automatically into fists.
“Uh, Annie? What—”
The sound was getting steadily louder, and closer at the same time, filling the world. The water was dark, but I could still see the movement through the glass—and it wasn’t sticking to the outline of the tracks as it raced toward us.
I did the only thing I could. “Run!” I shouted, and grabbed Sam’s hand, sprinting for the end of the tunnel.
We almost made it before the train slammed into the tunnel’s glass wall, and the air was gone, replaced by the crushing force of a tsunami filled with shards of shattered glass. Sam’s hand was ripped out of mine.
Everything went black.
Twenty-four
“We don’t decide to win. We don’t even decide to play. But sometimes we decide to lose.”
–Mary Dunlavy
Drowning
THE TUNNEL WAS NARROW enough that the first swell of water slammed me into the ceiling and held me there, shards of glass cutting my arms and legs as the artificial currents buffeted my body. There was no light. There was no air. There was no way for me to know where Sam was, whether he’d been swept entirely away or whether he was only a few feet from me, struggling to find a way to renew our connection.
I closed my eyes. They weren’t doing me any good, and the last thing I needed was to get a piece of glass embedded in my cornea. Blinding myself wouldn’t improve the situation.
It might not make the situation worse. I was trapped in crushing darkness, and while I have reasonably good lung capacity, I was going to run out of air soon. Sam was . . . Sam was somewhere. That was as far as I was willing to let myself go. Sam was somewhere, because the alternative was accepting that Sam might be dead, and if Sam was dead, I was going to burn this whole goddamn place to the ground, fire in my fingers or no. Magic is nice, but napalm is reliable.
No one kills my people. No one but me.
My fingers were heating up again. It wasn’t enough. Even if my fire had somehow been back to its full strength, it wouldn’t have been enough. I couldn’t produce the kind of flame necessary to boil away this much water, not when there w
as no air for me to burn. I couldn’t do anything.
Well. I could do one thing. Water still buffeting me against the top of the tunnel, I forced myself to relax as much as I could, wishing I had the ability to take a deep breath—wishing I had time to think about this. There wasn’t time. In the end, I guess there never is.
I didn’t have much left in the way of air. I had enough to open my mouth against the frigid, bitter current and spit the words into the water:
“All right, Mary,” I said. “I want to make a deal.”
The water stopped. It didn’t recede, it didn’t disappear: it stopped. It didn’t freeze, either. Freezing would have implied that it had suddenly become colder, suddenly turned hard, and it hadn’t done that. It was water, fluid and free and motionless, holding me effortlessly up. I couldn’t breathe. That didn’t matter, because my lungs didn’t hurt anymore, and while I would have sworn my eyes were closed, it seemed that I could see a little better, like the world was becoming suffused with golden light. It was the sort of light that shines on country roads when the sun is going down, slanting through corn husks and glittering with dust motes, rural and rare and impossible to replicate in any other situation. It was an old-fashioned kind of light, a dustbowl dream, and it was getting stronger by the second.
Maybe this was what drowning did. Maybe when people said they’d had a near-death experience and seen the light beckoning them home, they’d really been dreaming of farm country, of corn and wheat and the sickle and the scythe. But I didn’t think so. This felt too personal, like it was something intended only and entirely for me.
The light shone, and because light is nothing without something to illuminate, it shone on a mile of empty country highway, asphalt cracked and broken from spending decades baking in the summer sun, shoulders choked with nettle-bush and briars. Past the shoulder came the corn, and it grew tall and lush and somehow terrible, as if whatever watered it had less to do with what I was drowning in and more to do with what I was keeping, hot and captive, in my veins.