Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)(31)

The drop propelled us faster through the tunnel. Bone-shaking fast. My teeth clacked together and the little girl in the boat ahead was crying. As the glow-in-the-dark Halloween scenery blurred by, the whole thing spiraled into some warped Willy Wonka nightmare.

The second, steeper drop was just around the corner. The boat ahead creaked and groaned as it tilted down into the darkness. Lon threw one arm around me and the other around Jupe. I clung to the handrail as the boat plunged over the falls. My stomach lurched. A surge of water flew over us in an arcing sheet that crashed behind our heads.

Soaked from crown to sole. Every goddamn one of us.

Worse, the boat made a horrible cracking noise when it realigned at the bottom of the waterfall, rocking as it screeched along the rails through the final straightaway.

The ride’s exit doors arced open, but not fast enough. The family ahead ducked down low in their seats, covering the head of their child as they passed through. Crack!—the front of the boat clipped the doors and splintered a couple of inches off the edges.

As we whizzed through behind them, light erupted from the loading area. Three park employees were clamoring around the control panel. A buzzer sounded. The family in front of us came to a grating stop. Screams ripped through the air.

Now us, now us. . . . I blinked. We weren’t stopping.

Our boat zoomed, splashing red water onto the people at the front of the ride queue. My mind went blank as I prepared to crash. I closed my eyes and steeled myself.

The buzzer sounded.

Our boat skidded to a jolting halt, metal shrieking in protest, water splashing. The teens’ boat slammed into ours. My body whipped forward, then back. We all sat in the boat, dazed, for several beats before coming to our senses.

Lon and I pulled Jupe out of the boat at the same time the teens behind us jumped onto the platform. Half a dozen park employees flocked to the platform to check on all of us. It was the little girl in the boat ahead that I was concerned about, but she appeared to be okay. Just scared out of her mind.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry . . . so, so sorry!” Jupe said to the parents as the little girl sobbed in her father’s arms. The mother patted Jupe on the shoulder. She then turned to the park staff and launched into a tirade against poor Henry, using words like irresponsible, phrases like could have killed us all, and ended with a rousing “demand that he be fired or we’ll sue your asses to the moon.”

To our surprise, the formerly dour and rule-abiding Henry argued back vehemently, yelling that the ride was better faster.

Somber and weary, we drove out of the Village to the outskirts of town and made the steep climb on the private back road to Lon’s clifftop home. No one said much. Lon asked Jupe a few restrained questions, like exactly how long he’d known about his knack, and who he’d used it on, and whether he could also hear people’s emotions (which he couldn’t). I was prepared for Lon to lay into the boy—and prepared to stop him—but he was surprisingly calm. Defeated, I supposed.

After a shower, Jupe curled up in my lap on the couch, with Foxglove tucked into the empty space behind his knees. His hair smelled pleasantly of chamomile and coconut oil. I gently detangled his stubborn curls in sections with a wide-toothed comb while the TV chattered in the background. Apart from a few mumbled words, he was quiet—the quietest I’d ever seen him. I tried to cheer him up, but he just clung to my leg and sighed. It hadn’t been so long ago that I’d been uncomfortable with Jupe’s huggy-touchy lack of boundaries. Now, with his head heavy in my lap, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. To him, too, I suppose. He fell asleep on me long before his usual midnight bedtime. Lon had to wake him up to get him upstairs into bed.

“What the hell am I going to do with a kid who can manipulate people to get whatever he wants?” Lon asked me a few minutes later as he padded into the kitchen.

I opened the dishwasher and flipped my glass upside down on the top rack. “You can manipulate people.”

“Only if I’m transmutated. Only if I’m touching them. And changing someone’s emotions isn’t half as dangerous as being able to walk around in broad daylight, making people do your bidding.”

“I’m not sure it’s quite that dramatic,” I said.

“And my emotional influence only lasts for a minute. I can’t permanently alter people’s feelings. Did you see the look on that ride operator’s face when we left? He still believed the stuff that Jupe had pushed inside his head.”

“Yeah, that the ride was better faster. But you don’t know how long Jupe’s influence lasts. Maybe it wore off Henry an hour later?”

“Maybe.”

“I thought Earthbound kids always inherited one of their parents’ powers.”

“Me too.”

“This isn’t from Yvonne, then?”

His shook his head slowly and sat down on one of the barstools at the kitchen island. I dried my hands on a towel and leaned against the countertop a few steps away. Waiting. When Lon and I first became involved, he told me he didn’t want to talk about Yvonne’s knack. He said he would, in time, but I’d definitely waited long enough. I watched his face as he wrestled it out of his mouth.

“Allure.”

“Allure,” I repeated. “Like a glamour kind of thing, or . . . ?”

After a few moments, he spilled the rest of it. “Yvonne always claimed that she didn’t have a knack. I met her on a photo shoot in Antigua. I guess she was a year or two older than you at the time. She was at the height of her modeling career, and I’d heard stories about her from other photographers. It was no secret that she was wild. Liked to party. So I knew better than to get involved with her, but when I met her . . .”