Wild Ride (29 page)

“Lover seemed like too much information,” Joe said, and kissed her, and she leaned against him and kissed him back. “So tonight—”

“Can I meet you later?” she said, cursing Glenda for having gotten to her. “Like at midnight? I promised Glenda I'd help her with something.”

“Sure.” He smiled down at her. “What are you helping her with?”

“Catching a demon.” Mab shook her head, still not quite sure she believed it all.

“Catching demons, huh? You need help?”

“I think Glenda likes to do it her way.”

“Don't we all?” Joe said, and kissed her again, and she laughed and said, “Come on, you can walk me to the Dream Cream,” and caught his hand, holding tightly—

—yellow light, a handsome man with curly hair and little horns, goat's legs, and a crooked smile, kissing a mermaid, tumbling in a sea of turquoise, shouting, a chalice, darkness—

“What?” Joe said, and Mab looked deeper and saw someone sleeping inside him, two spirits in there, one a human being and the other a yellow flame—

Frankie flew down to sit on her shoulder, as if he'd seen through her eyes what she'd just seen, and she dropped Joe's hand and stepped back, breathless. “You lied to me.”

“Is this about the demon hunter thing?” Joe said. “Look, you wouldn't have believed me—”

“You're not a demon hunter.”

“Well,” Joe began.

She backed away until she was behind her chair. “You're a demon. You're Fufluns.”

“Mab,” he said, and took a step toward her. “I can explain.”

“Really?” Mab said. “How?”

“Well,” he said, and frowned. “Yeah, I can't explain. You've got me.”

“I don't want you,” Mab said. “Get out. Get out
now
!”

Frankie cawed and flapped his wings, lowering his head to stare balefully at Joe.

No, at Fufluns.

“You don't understand,” he said. “I'm different with you. You're the only person I've slept with in this body since I got out.”

Mab lost her breath. “In that body.”

“Well, you know,” Fufluns said. “Dave.”

“Oh my god.” Mab sat down. “I've been sleeping with Drunk Dave.”

“No, no,” Fufluns said, coming closer to the table that separated them. “He's been out cold. He has no idea. Well, he has some idea, but only what I've told him.”

“You told him . . .” Mab looked up at the man she loved, dumbstruck. “My god.”

“He was all for it. His life has improved a lot since I started possessing him.” He began to move around the table to her.

She got up and moved, keeping the table between them.

“He's not drinking himself into a stupor every night, he wakes up relaxed, he's dressing better, he's doing great at work—”

“I can't believe this,” she said, keeping the table between them, and Frankie cawed his agreement.

“—women like him more, his hair is curlier, he's a lot happier, really, he's fine with it.”

“I'm not.” She looked at him, trying to separate the demon from the man, revolted by both of them and still wanting the combination. “Oh, god,” she said again.
“Go away.”

“Mab, I love you,” he said, switching directions to come around the
table to her, and she backed toward the door, Frankie sending up a racket now that Fufluns was moving.

“You've slept with other women,” she said louder, over Frankie's anger, feeling for the edge of the sliding door.

“Not in this body—”

“That doesn't matter,” Mab snapped. “Although it's also irrelevant
because you're a demon.
”

“Don't be a bigot.”

“I need to go now.” She slid the door open, and he tried to reach her, and Frankie let loose with a spine-rending caw, spreading his wings, ready to launch. “Don't piss off my bird, or Dave's gonna lose an eye.”

She backed out onto the midway, and he watched her from the doorway, looking truly sad for the first time since she'd met him.

“No,” she said, and turned and ran, Frankie flying behind her.

 

M
ab walked through the Dream Cream past Cindy, slinging ice cream to a full house, and upstairs to Cindy's living room. She sat down on the couch, shaking, while Frankie did his version of a comforting coo from her shoulder. Okay, so Joe was a demon and since he was Fufluns, the trickster, he'd probably been playing her and didn't love her at all,
duh
, and . . .

That was the part where she started to cry.

“You okay?” Cindy said, closing the door behind her. “You look like hell.”

Mab swallowed her tears. “Bad day.”

Cindy leaned against the window. “Want to talk about it?”

Mab frowned at her, trying to find irritation instead of grief. “Aren't you slammed downstairs?”

“That's what the student help is for. And you look like your dog died.”

“He did,” Mab said, her lip quivering. “The son of a bitch.”

Cindy sat down next to her. “Spill it.”

“Joe turned out to be Dave possessed by a demon, so I've been sleeping with a drunk all week. Joe, who is really a demon named Fufluns, has been
possessing other people and sleeping with other people the whole time, so there goes my great love affair. Delpha passed on her second sight to me—it was real—along with her bird, only I can't control it—the sight, not the bird—so I see things I shouldn't see, don't want to see. Half the time it's awful, the things I know, the things I have to tell them. That's how I found out about Joe. He came in to get me for dinner and I took his hand and saw . . . all of it. And I still love the dumb son of a bitch, so how pathetic am I?” She swallowed a sob. “Oh, and I think my uncle tried to poison me today, unless you sent me herbal tea.”

“No, I didn't,” Cindy said.

Mab nodded. “It's been a bad day.”

“Wow.”

“I know, I don't believe it, either.”

“I believe it.”

Mab turned to look at her in the dim light. “What?”

“Well, Joe did look an awful lot like Drunk Dave, but it wasn't Drunk Dave, so demon possession is a good explanation. And Delpha did have second sight, and she left everything to you, so it makes sense the sight would go to you, too. Joe cheating sucks, I thought he was better than that, but he's a demon, so the odds were always against you on that one. What else was there? Oh, Ray. Well, I always thought he was kind of creepy, but I never thought he was murderer.”

“Ray wants to inherit my share of the park,” Mab said. “Although to be fair, he tried to buy it first. You know, he's right, I should make a will. I'll leave everything to you. Then maybe he'll stop trying to kill me. Did you know the park was a demon keep?”

“A what?”

“A prison for demons. There are five of them imprisoned here. Were imprisoned. Two are out.”

“No, I didn't know,” Cindy said, looking a little stunned. “How did I miss that?”

“They haven't escaped in forty years. There was nothing for you to see.” She frowned. “Although I think Fufluns gets out more. He would.” She shook her head. “And Tura's out now, too. Plus the park is full of these
little ratty minion demons. You know what they call the five big demons? The Untouchables.
And I touched one.
”

Frankie cawed and stepped from foot to foot, digging lightly into her shoulder.

“Okay, let's be calm,” Cindy said. “You're starting to sound like that nut job who used to picket the park.”

“That was my mother.”

“Okay, so moving past that.” Cindy nodded. “Delpha's gone. That puts them down a demon fighter, right?”

“Yeah, and I'm supposed to step up.”

“And you don't want to?”

Mab started to say
I just want to be normal
, and then stopped. Maybe she didn't. Today had been awful, the whole week had been awful, but if somebody said, “Okay, you can hand it all over to somebody else now,” would she give up Frankie and the sight?

Give up Dreamland?

“I don't know.”

“Yeah, you do.” Cindy put her arm around her. “If you don't know, then you know. Because if you didn't want to, you'd say, ‘I don't want it.' You're always sure. So if you're not sure—”

“Oh, hell.” Mab put her face in her hands. “There's more stuff out there, Joe knows something he's not telling me. No, Fufluns knows stuff he's not telling me. I ran away from him, but . . . I should have stayed. I should have gotten some answers.” She sniffed. “Of course, he's a
liar
.”

“Makes sense. He's a demon.”

“Yeah, but he's
my
demon, the son of a bitch. And he owes me some answers.”

“So go get them.” Cindy drew back. “Unless you're afraid of him. I mean, you know,
demon
.”

“I'm not afraid of him,” Mab said. “I'm afraid of what he'll tell me. People have been telling me a lot of stuff lately, and none of it has been good.”

“Yeah,” Cindy said. “I'm not envying you so much anymore. Normal is looking good right now.”

Mab nodded. “Now that I've found out what love really can do, I'm not envying me, either.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I'm gonna go ask him what he's not telling me,” Mab said, and headed for the door, Frankie protesting on her shoulder.

 

S
ince the chances were excellent that Fufluns had gone where the easy people were, Mab headed to the Beer Pavilion and looked around until she saw Joe talking with Laura Ferris Wheel. Frankie flew up to sit on the edge of the roof, and she started toward Joe and then realized just from the way he moved that he wasn't Joe, he was Drunk Dave, dispossessed.

You've had some of the best times you'll never remember with me, Dave
, Mab thought, and then Dave looked up and saw her watching him and waved at her tentatively, and she realized he was sober, the glass in front of him just soda water.

Good for you
, Mab thought, and looked around the rest of the crowd. It was impossible, she'd never find Fufluns—

And then there he was, in a dark-haired guy in a blue-striped park shirt this time, leaning toward a dark-haired girl who was giggling. Mab wasn't sure how she knew it was him, but she did—maybe the crooked grin, the angle of his head, the way his body moved, maybe it was just because it was
him
—and she crossed the floor to stand in front of him and recognized the guy he was possessing: Sam, the maintenance guy from the front gate.

He looked up, that crooked smile on his face, and then he saw that it was her, and his face lit up.

“Mab!”

“I need to talk to you,” Mab said, tamping down any impulse to be glad that he was glad to see her. “Alone.”

He stood up so fast, the girl with him rocked back a little.

“Hey,” she said, losing her giggle to glare at Mab.

“Keep smiling, he'll be back,” Mab said, and turned and walked across the room and out through the archway Frankie was perched on, Joe—not Joe—following her. As he went past the jukebox, “What Love Can Do” started to play.

Funny
, Mab thought.
Real fucking funny.

When she got outside, the temperature dropped twenty degrees.
Good
, she thought, and turned around to find him right behind her.

“Let me buy you a beer,” he said, “and we'll—”

“No. This is not a social call. Hell, I don't even know what to call you.”

“ ‘Joe' works for me.”

He moved closer and she wanted to back away, but he was warm and the night was cold, so she stood her ground, even though Frankie cawed down a warning. “It doesn't work for me. You're not Joe. Joe was a lie. You're not even Sam. That was you that day at the gate with the statue, wasn't it? That wasn't Sam, that was you possessing Sam.”

“Okay, fine, go with Fun. That's what you called me when I first met you, when you came to fix my statue.” He smiled down at her. “That was when I—”

“Fun,” Mab said. “Wonderful. Listen, you demon bastard, you let Tura out, Glenda told me you let her out.”

He laughed. “All Tura wants is a good time.”

“She killed Dead Karl.”

“So? Nobody misses Karl. He was a liar and a cheat.”

“So are you.”

“Yes,” Fun said patiently. “But people would miss me.”

Mab bit back the impulse to say,
I wouldn't.
That would be a lie and there had been enough lies. People
would
miss him; the bastard radiated joy and happiness and . . .

“I don't want to lose you, Mab,” he said, and his voice sounded honest even though he wasn't. “I think—”

“What did you think you were doing?” she asked, hating it that there was so much hurt in her voice. “How could you tell me all those lies?”

He sighed. “Because saying ‘Hi, I'm a demon and I've been crazy about you since you spent a week painting every part of my body' didn't seem like a good approach.”

“But ‘Hi, I'm Dave's cousin, Joe, the demon hunter' did?”

“It worked.”

“Not for long.”

“I wasn't looking for long,” Fun said. “Although I didn't expect you to figure it out this fast.”

“I'm going to have to catch you—,” Mab said, her voice breaking.

“Honey, I'm not running,” Fun said, opening his arms.

Frankie sent up a rant as Mab finished, “—and put you in that damn chalice, I have to fix your chalice and put you back in it.”

“We should talk about that.”

He tried to put his arm around her, and Frankie flew down to her shoulder as she stepped away, hating how hard it was to step away.