Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(114)
DARK RIDES
It was probably inevitable I’d get around to writing about carnivals and Morganville, right? Yeah. I thought so, too. But this one is unique, even so, in that I have Michael and Eve off on a mission together, from Amelie. Hijinks and life-threatening danger may ensue. Also, a brand-new vampire character that I really need to explore more, because I liked him a lot.
Fun factoid: I used to work in a haunted house—not a carnival but one of those seasonal death traps that was set up fast and taken down faster, run by virtual amateurs. Working as a character in them is fine for me, because I’m in on the mystery and the joke, but I am completely unable to handle haunted houses any other way as “fun.” They really do creep me out. Also, I got stuck in one of the secret passages of that seasonal haunted house once, and nobody notices or cares if you’re banging on the door and yelling for help when everyone is screaming already. (Yes, I intend to write that murder mystery someday.)
There’s something deeply creepy about an unlit Ferris wheel in the dark. It looks like the skeletal remains of something large that once rolled across the earth scooping up screaming victims in its buckety jaws. Or at least, it looked like that to me, but I naturally have a pretty macabre imagination. “Wow,” I said, looking up at the outlines of the black girders against the fading dark blue of the sky. “You take me to the nicest places. I am so lucky to have a guy like you.”
“Eve! Shhhh,” whispered Michael, my significant sweetie, as we crouched down between a blown pile of trash and the iron-shuttered side of some kind of cheesy win-a-toxic-stuffed-animal booth. This one specialized in rabbits. They all looked manic and a little diseased. I couldn’t help but fill in the old-time Elmer Fudd voice in my head. We’re hunting wabbits. It made me giggle a little breathlessly, with a nice knife-edge of terror, because we were in a closed amusement park, looking for a vampire, and hey, who doesn’t get the giggles now and then under those circumstances?
Don’t answer that.
Michael was giving me his I’m concerned and a little disturbed look, which was adorable. I’m not a fragile flower. Hell, I was born and raised in Morganville, Texas, which is likely the only place vampires can call home; if you grow up human there, you learn how to deal with life-threatening danger the way other, luckier people learn to deal with those annoying telemarketers. I don’t eat danger for breakfast, because it’s really just a tiny little bite-sized snack in hometown terms.
Michael, meanwhile, was the same . . . but different. He’d also grown up human in Morganville, but unlike me, he’d had the seriously bad misfortune to actually be bitten, almost two years ago. It hadn’t gone well for him, and now, my all-time best guy ever was . . . well, fanged. But fighting to stay the Michael I’d always loved, which was nice, because we were, well, married now. Fangs and all.
He couldn’t have looked less bloodsucker-y, really. Gorgeous blond hair, clear blue eyes, the face that in earlier ages they would have put on a really hot marble angel—not vampire material, generally. He even dressed as if he were a regular dude who was looking forward to being of legal drinking age. . . . I wondered if he ever lamented the fact that he was going to be carded for all of his immortal life. Probably.
Me, I looked like I was aspiring to be what he actually was, what with my Goth black hair (temporarily streaked with electric blue, because, why not?), and the baggy black cargo pants and stomp-’em boots. My shirt was tight, sheer, black over black, and had a particularly cool dark-blue-on-black embossed skull on it. Fighting clothes, although Michael had just shaken his head when he’d seen what I decided to wear for our middle-of-the-night tour of the scary carnival grounds. He just didn’t know what was stalking-appropriate, obviously. Men. No fashion sense.
“Over there,” Michael whispered, and nodded toward—of course—the haunted ride. It was what the carnies called a dark ride, which I thought was awesomely appropriate, especially tonight, what with all the creepy skulking around. The structure featured an absolutely gigantic Grim Reaper leaning over the top of it, gripping his scythe in one bony hand as the other reached down for the would-be riders. It probably looked super cheesy in the daylight, but tonight, I could practically see those black, flowing robes ripple in the cold wind.
If I believed in omens, that would probably be a really bad one.
“We’re looking for Death? Found him,” I said. I got another look, but also a smile. “Right. Stealth mode, engaged.” I made a zipping motion across my mouth. He did me the favor of not quite rolling his eyes.
We crept from the cover of the toy shed to that of a greasy-looking shack that dispensed hot dogs of doubtful meat content (oooh, but they had funnel cakes!), and then made it to the shadows next to the dark ride itself. The roller coaster was making a thin, high, creaking sound in the wind, and across the way, a shadowy carousel’s painted horses leered at me with wild eyes.
God, I loved this place. I wondered how Michael would feel about running away to join the circus.
Michael had paused, listening, doing that vampire-senses thing; I was content to wait for him to get back to me with a plan. I was just glad he’d asked me to come along as his backup. Usually our mutual buddy Shane got that job; to be fair, Shane was big, strong, and built for quality mayhem, but he was trying to cut down on the fighting, and I was happy to help that along. I’d seen all of us wearing sporty black and blue too much lately. Not the Goth kind. The bruise kind. Much tougher to accessorize.