Good. I jabbed him again in the stab wound before hissing, “Last chance, asshole. Where are my friends? Give them back to me, and maybe you walk away from this.”
Colin glared at me. He knew I was lying. I knew I was lying.
I knew how this ended.
Colin and his cronies had been hurting people, using Lowryland as the engine of their mischief, for a very long time. Losing the boost from my magic wasn’t going to stop them. It might slow them down a little, but they would start up again. Andrea was gone. She was also an ambulomancer. She couldn’t do this sort of thing without someone to help her. Emily was going to have other things to worry about as soon as Rose told the Queen of the Routewitches what she’d been up to. Colin . . .
Colin was a sorcerer. Colin wanted power more than he wanted to survive. If we walked away and left him breathing, he’d start the whole thing up again as soon as he had a new wand. There was no other outcome. I had to kill him.
Behind and above us, there was a snarl as the Midsummer Night’s Scream rumbled to life. I glanced up, shocked. Colin laughed. When I looked back down, he was smirking.
“Where are your friends?” he asked. “About twenty seconds from dying.”
The whole scenario unfurled like a terrible flower, each piece leading seamlessly to the next as it all came together. I shoved myself away from Colin, looking over my shoulder to find Joshua standing there, his eyes glowing faintly, like a cat’s, and his hands raised above my head.
“Shit,” I hissed.
Joshua was a trainspotter, and while he might be almost out of juice after his trick back in the Deep-Down, he could still whisper his wanting to the trains—to any train—and be answered in the affirmative. He could turn the coaster on from a distance. He had turned it on. And Colin was a sorcerer. Which meant that blood sacrifice would make him stronger.
Colin’s smirk grew, becoming an outright grin. “I think you’ll find I’ll have a new wand in no time,” he said.
The train would crush Fern, Cylia, and Megan, imbuing the train, the wheels, everything around it with the trauma of their intentional and carefully orchestrated deaths. Colin would be able to take his pick of materials, crafting a new wand capable of channeling his mystical energy. Everything we’d done would be for nothing. The cabal would be back in business without missing so much as a step.
“No,” I said, and skated toward Sam, moving fast, trusting him to know what I wanted.
There are advantages to having a preternaturally strong, incredibly swift boyfriend. Sam saw me coming, saw the lights coming on along the roller coaster’s tracks, and knew what I wanted him to do. If he had issues with it—if he didn’t like the idea of flinging me headlong into danger while he stayed with the danger we already had—there wasn’t time to discuss it. He stood, making a basket with his hands, and when I was close enough, I jumped, knees together, wheels spinning against the empty air.
Sam’s hands grasped my calves for only a second before he was flinging me upward as hard as he could, away from the remnants of the cabal, toward the distant but rapidly nearing shape of the Midsummer Night’s Scream.
Guess it was time to come up with a plan.
Twenty-six
“The survivors decide how well the show went. Always survive.”
–Frances Brown
About to slam into the side of a massive roller coaster
THE MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S SCREAM was built in the 1990s, after the first wave of wooden coasters but before they became trendy again. As a consequence, the only wood involved is in the structures surrounding the track, most of which are actually plastic and steel, both of which require substantially less maintenance. I had never approached the train from this angle, and I didn’t have much time to decide where I was going to land.
When all else fails, go for the path of least resistance. I braced myself as best I could, and when I reached the sculpted metal “trees” next to the mouth of the big tunnel, I grabbed on, feeling the metal edges of the “branches” bite into my palms. My momentum died with a bone-shaking jolt, and I was suddenly hanging there, as vulnerable to physics as anyone.
The train was still snarling and growling in its launching bay. It hadn’t started moving yet. Why hadn’t it started moving yet? It would have made sense to tie my friends to the coaster track, and I knew Colin would want them all to die at the same time, for the sake of grinding their last moments as deeply into the structure as possible—
But that didn’t mean they had to be tied at the same point. I had to think about this logically. Normally, riders would wind slowly up a wooded path, traveling deep into “goblin territory” before joining Laura and Lizzie on their lightning-swift journey to freedom. Maintenance crews could ride the ADA-mandated elevator or climb up the stairs built into the structure. That gave three access points, and that would probably have felt like two too many to Colin and his flunkies. They’d want something that could only be reasonably accessed one way. Via the track.
The train was still warming up. Turning on a modern, high-tech roller coaster with nothing but magic probably wasn’t easy. That didn’t mean I had much time. Pulling myself up with shaking arms, I swung my feet over, onto the track. My skates, formerly an advantage, made it virtually impossible for me to get my balance back. I ground my teeth and kept trying until I felt steady enough to let the tree go.
The track had been built to be maintained, thankfully, and there was room for both my feet. I caught my breath, testing the faint downward slope of the hill’s ledge. Then, with a silent prayer and a lot more silent cursing, I lifted my toes, releasing my brakes, and let go.
Fun facts about roller skates: the only brakes they have are the ones on the toes. Otherwise, physics does most of the hard work. Which meant that when I released my toe stops at the top of a coaster hill, gravity kicked in and kicked my ass, pulling me down what felt like a sheer drop until my hair was whipping straight out behind me and my lungs ached with the effort to keep myself from screaming. All my focus was on staying on the tracks, keeping myself yoked to the great steel structure that had never been designed for something as soft and squishy as a human being.
I’m going to die, I thought, as I hit the bottom of the hill and started up the next one, propelled by nothing more or less than my own momentum. I’m going to hit the loop-de-loop, and there’s going to be nothing to keep me on the track, and I’m going to die. I’m going to—
A dark hole loomed up ahead of me, lit by a flickering rainbow sheen, like bioluminescent fungus. This time, I gave up and screamed. I’d been so concerned about the big loops that I’d forgotten the goblin caverns at the bottom of the ride.
I dropped into the darkness, my skates suddenly soaked through again as I hit the artificial lake at the bottom. It wasn’t deep, designed to kick up water and delight guests, but it was there.
And it gave me an idea. I threw myself to the side, abandoning the track for the water, and splashed down hard, sliding a few feet before the water finished absorbing the shock of my landing. I came up gasping, no longer bound to the structure of the track—and no longer aided by its merciless progress, either. That was fine. I needed some control over where I was going, given what was likely to come next.
From here, the track rose up into the darkness, the flashes of rainbow light becoming less frequent, while never quite stopping altogether. Total darkness was terrifying: near darkness was exhilarating. I wiped my wet palms against my wetter jeans, and started climbing.
I was almost to the top of the first hill when my hand hit something that wasn’t metal. It was soft, yielding, and mammalian. I paused, considering the silence of the something, and touched it again, more intentionally.
“Fern?” I whispered.
“Annie?” She sounded hopeful but wary, like she knew this couldn’t possibly be anything but a trick. “Is it really you?”
“W
hy didn’t you make a sound when I touched you?”
“I thought you were them, and I thought they’d leave me alone if they thought I was still knocked out.” Fern’s voice was even wispier and softer than it usually was. She was clearly fighting to remain calm. “Are you here to save me?”
“Well, of course, I am. Couldn’t leave a teammate, could I? Slasher Chicks forever.” I felt along the edge of her body, finding the ropes that bound her to the track. I had knives. What I didn’t have was a good way of catching her. “Fern, I need you to reduce your density as much as you can, all right? When I cut you loose, you’re going to fall. You need to be ready to fall.”
“I’m ready,” she said bravely, and I had never loved her more, or felt worse about sucking her into my fight.
It only took a few seconds for me to slice away the ropes that bound her. Fern dropped immediately, knocking against me as lightly as a balloon before slinging herself over the track’s edge and hanging on by her fingertips.
“Now what?”
I took a breath. “Now I find the others.”
I couldn’t see Fern, but I could hear her concern as she said, “I don’t know where they are. I woke up here.”
“I know they’re on this track.” I knew that Colin wanted their deaths to be painful, swift, and grouped together—but when I was talking about something that moved as fast as a roller coaster, as long as hitting Fern didn’t derail it, it would be able to finish climbing the hill in a matter of seconds. “Sam’s outside. Go help him.”
“But I—”
“Please.” The coaster would finish powering up soon. I needed Fern clear.
She lightly touched the top of my hand. “Be safe,” she said, and was gone, drifting down to the dark waters below.
I resumed my climb.
I hadn’t gone far when a new sound entered the equation: a faint but steady hissing. Megan was tied to the tracks in front of me. I stopped where I was, unwilling to reach out when I didn’t know where those snakes were. “Megan.”
No response.
“Megan.”
A faint moan, this time, like a larger snake stirring in its nest. (Not that snakes actually moan, outside of SyFy Original Movies.)
“Wake up and tell your hair not to bite me, before the roller coaster crushes us both.”
There was a sharp gasp then, before Megan asked warily, “Annie?”
“It’s me. Where’s your head? Keep talking so I can cut you free.”
“What the hell is going on? Where are we?” The snakes continued to hiss angrily as she spoke. At least now I could tell where they were. That was a nice, potentially nonvenomous change.
“You know the Midsummer Night’s Scream?” I asked, as I started to cut.
“Of course, I know the—no. No.” Megan sounded rightly horrified. “You are not telling me that.”
“I am.” I cut another rope. “You’re going to need to climb down once you’re loose. I still have to find Cylia, and their trainspotter is working on getting the coaster moving.”
There was a pause. “I hate that that was a sentence.”
“I’m getting that a lot today. I think this is the last rope. Hold onto something.”
“It is.” There was a rustle as Megan grabbed the track. I sliced through the rope. “You humans need better night vision.”
“I’ll put it on the mad science wish list. Can you get down?”
“Do I have a choice?” Megan began climbing past me. I felt a snake’s tongue caress my cheek, light as a whisper, and then she was gone, descending toward the water. That would have been the smart thing to do.
I started climbing up instead.
Light was beginning to seep into the tunnel, flowing through the hole where the train would emerge, triumphant, from the animatronic underworld, when I found Cylia. Her eyes were open, scanning the darkness below her. She relaxed slightly when she saw me.
“I was wondering whether the cavalry was coming,” she said.
“We don’t have much time,” I replied, and grabbed the first loop of visible rope. “Hold on, I’m getting you out of here.”
From behind us, the sound of a train whipping along the track made it clear how little time we actually had. Cylia closed her eyes.
“Wake me when we’re dead,” she said.
“No,” I snarled, and kept cutting. “No, and no, and no.” We were maybe thirty feet above the artificial lake, which I knew got deeper around the tracks, for the sake of the illusion. If we fell right, if we were lucky—
The rope gave way. I grabbed Cylia, flinging both of us away from the tracks, dropping like rocks into the dark below. Cylia shrieked. The Midsummer Night’s Scream passed by harmlessly overhead, a great rocketing mechanism of sound and steel and mayhem. And we were falling, and there was nothing I could do but close my eyes and let it happen.
The shock of hitting the water knocked my eyes right open. Cylia and I were driven below the surface, and my feet hit the bottom before I kicked and pushed us up again, sputtering and soaked, into the drier dark. Cylia clung to me. I clung to Cylia. Then, in relief and surprise, we started to laugh.
“We’re alive!” she shouted.
“Yes!”
“We didn’t die!”
“No!”
“We . . .” Cylia stopped. “Is this over?”
“No,” I said again, my own levity fading. “But it will be soon. Come on. Let’s find a maintenance door.”
Dripping, shaking, and exhausted, we made our way toward the edge of the lake, moving one step closer to safety. We had a long way yet to go.
* * *
When we emerged from the maintenance door in the side of the structure, we found ourselves faced with the usual nest of tangled landscaping and complicated design, intended to keep guests from stumbling over anything they shouldn’t. We climbed over it all, Cylia helping me when my skates made it difficult to balance, until we reached the fence to the queue area. After hopping that, it was a simple matter to head back to the front of the ride.
Sam was still there, standing on Emily’s shoulders, keeping her pinned down. Fern and Megan were behind him, looking warily at Colin and Joshua. I didn’t know why they hadn’t run away. I would have run, if one of my enemies had been planning to come back with reinforcements.
Maybe they had more loyalty in them than I’d expected. Maybe they had stayed for Emily.
“It’s not too late,” said Colin, his eyes clearly fixed on me. “I hurt you; now you’ve hurt me. With your power, and my skill, we could find a cleaner way to accomplish all our goals. You could help me truly realize Lowry’s dream.”
“Okay, one, if Lowry was a sorcerer, I don’t want to know,” I said. “Two, I am not working with you. And three, I don’t have any power to offer. I sold it for the chance to beat you.”
I’d sold it for so much more than that, but my little white lie was absolutely justified by the look of horror and disgust that crossed his face. “Impossible. No one would give up that kind of power.”
“I don’t know. Sailor Moon did, at least twice. I will diminish and go into the west, but not before I kick your ass.”
Colin sneered. “You’ll fail. You and your little collection of monsters can’t possibly—”
He froze. Literally. Both he and Joshua stopped where they were, not moving, not visibly breathing. I started to turn.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said Megan wearily. “Let me get my glasses back on.”
“Why did they let you keep those, instead of just blindfolding you?” asked Sam. He glanced at me and smiled, just a little. “Hey. Missed you.”
“Well, you know. Places to go, people to save.” I shrugged extravagantly. “I lived.”
“What did you mean about selling . . . ?”
“Later.” I offered what
I hoped was an encouraging smile. “I’ll tell you later.”
Sam nodded. “I’ll make sure you do,” he said.
“How about you can the sweet moment and let me up?” demanded Emily. “You can’t keep me here forever.”
“No,” I said. “We can’t. But you’re probably going to wish we had.”
She didn’t have an answer for that.
* * *
Getting Emily to drop the shields keeping the dead out of Lowryland wasn’t really an option, and so we did the next best thing: we walked. Sam used his tail to pin her arms to her sides and Cylia and Fern carried her, while Megan walked alongside as a constant reminder of what would happen if she tried too hard to escape. The memory of what had happened to Colin and Joshua after Megan got close to them was clearly very fresh in Emily’s mind, because she didn’t fight.
(The gaze of the Pliny’s gorgon doesn’t petrify; it only stuns. But their venom is one of the strongest petrifying agents known to man, and the snakes on their heads make an excellent delivery agent. I had been trying to figure out how I was going to find the will to kill two men. Megan had just walked up to them and allowed her hair to bite them. In the morning, the groundskeepers were going to find two really weird new statues. I didn’t know how to feel about that yet. I was pretty sure I was going to be okay with it. I was equally sure that that would mean there was something wrong with me.)
Mary and Rose were waiting just outside the Park gate. Both were wearing what I thought of as their funeral clothes, Mary in a knee-length skirt and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, Rose in a green silk prom gown. Emily, who had been quiet up until that point, started to kick and scream when she saw them.
“No!” she shouted. “No, no, no! Turn me to stone! Kill me! I don’t care! Not this!”
“You earned this,” said Mary, in a voice like a tomb door swinging closed, and there was nothing else to say, and no other way for this to end. Rose and Mary each took Emily by an arm, taking a step backward. The air grew hazy around them, creating the impression of a long road running off to nowhere.
Tricks for Free Page 36
