Summer Days and Summer Nights (42 page)

“Mephit!” I called. “Mephit, dinnertime!”

Lucas looked horrified, though to his credit, he stood his ground. “You're going to
feed
me to the demon?”

“Don't be ridiculous,” I said, as Mephit uncurled from the depths.

It's hard to describe a demon—they all look different, and they all look like nothing else on earth. Mephit most closely resembled a giant hairless cat with huge blue eyes and triangular ears. If, you know, a hairless cat had a snout full of fangs and black bat's wings and a long, scaly tail that slapped the ground impatiently. I held out the red slushie. Unlike the others sold in the Snack Shack, this one really was made with blood. Cow blood, but Mephit didn't mind. As long as it was cold, he liked it fine. His tongue shot out like a frog's and nabbed the cup from my hand. He swallowed it in one gulp, crunching the bloody ice between his teeth, and grinned.

“Whoa,” Lucas said, as I scratched Mephit between the ears. He felt like warm rubber. Mephit had been around long enough that he'd developed a fondness for humanity. Lucas edged closer. “Can I … pet him?”

“Sure,” I said, surprised. I backed away, and Lucas approached Mephit, rubbing him gently on the nose and between the ears. A purr rose up like the sound of a rusty motor. Blazing sex appeal
and
Mephit liked him? I was in trouble.

*   *   *

We were late to Uncle Walter's big speech in the main tent, and I could feel his glare as Lucas and I arrived. The carnival staff sat in the bleachers, looking grim. Otto winked at me, but I could tell he was in a bad mood. The clowns were holding each other and crying. Strombo was crouched on the floor with Throckmorton. Ariadne glanced over at us and gave Lucas an appraising look.

Walter stood before an enormous square that was covered in a velvet drape. “And so,” he was saying, “this is the beginning of a brand-new day for Walter's Darke Carnival of the Unnatural, Unreal, Frightful, and Grotesque.”

Reggie raised his hand.

“Yes, my good man?” Walter asked. I was beginning to suspect that he called everyone that to avoid remembering their names.

“That's great and all,” Reggie said hesitantly, “but how will we get that much power? I mean, you're talking big stuff, really evil stuff. It's out of our league, you know? You'd need the demon equivalent of a ten-ton generator.”

Walter smirked. “Fortunately, we have just that.” He whipped the cover off the cage. It was a real carny gesture, I'll give him that. “Meet Azatoth!”

Lucas put his hands on my shoulders as if he was worried I would scream. I didn't, though his hands felt nice and warm.

The thing in the cage wasn't that huge, but it was sleek and slippery and sharklike in a subtle, unpleasant way. Unlike most demons, it didn't have claws or stingers or anything like that, just featureless steely-gray skin and a body that ended in a head that was all mouth. The teeth looked like they'd been found in a dozen different places. Jagged teeth, pointed teeth, teeth like ice picks, teeth made out of broken glass. Its eyes were black and dead as pits on the moon. They made me feel dizzy. Dizzy and a little sick.

Otto stood up. “No.”

Walter gave him a dark look. “What do you mean,
no
?”

“That's a Keres demon.” Otto picked up his jacket, slung it on. “No good ever comes from running a carnival on that kind of energy. There's dark, and then there's evil, and they ain't the same.”

I thought of my dad.
But the price you pay for that kind of evil, Lulubee … that's a high one.

Walter's face soured. “Does anyone else feel that way? Because you're quite welcome to follow Mr.—”

“Otto,” Otto said.

“Mr. Otto right out that door,” he said. “Just don't expect to ever come back.” There was something slippery and cold in his voice. As if he'd learned to talk just like his demon looked.

A few people scrambled to their feet. Ariadne rolled her chair out, her head held high. Strombo followed Otto, carrying Throckmorton. Overall, though, it was fewer people than I would have thought. Most everyone stayed put. Curious, maybe—or maybe, like me, they didn't have anywhere else to go.

*   *   *

Lucas walked me back to my trailer. The rest of the staff shambled off to their own trailers and tents, looking like zombies.

As we crossed the midway, I saw Walter in the distance, leading Azatoth on a long, black metal leash that shimmered in the moonlight. He ushered him toward the structure I'd noticed earlier, the weird brushed-metal dome near his trailer that gleamed like a spaceship.

“Where did your dad get Azatoth?” I asked.

“Not my dad,” Lucas said. “My stepdad.” There wasn't any hostility in it, though; he just sounded sad. “I don't know. After my mom died, he was restless. He drove around a lot, disappearing at night. I thought maybe he was depressed. Then he came home with Azatoth. Said he wanted to get back into the carnival business. It was the first time he looked happy since she died.”

“Was that before my dad left?” I asked.

He nodded. “Walter was looking forward to setting up his own show, but when he heard about your dad, he said we should come back here, make sure you were okay. He said he'd always loved this place.”

I knew I ought to feel grateful. But I couldn't. Everything was changing, and not in ways I wanted it to change. “I'm sorry about your mom. My dad, he's still alive but—I know what it feels like to lose someone.” I swallowed, and the next words spilled out of me. “Having somebody leave you like that on purpose, you end up asking yourself what you did. To make them go.”

His eyes softened. “Nothing. You didn't do anything.” He paused. “Is this your place?”

We'd reached my trailer. It wasn't hard to spot. Otto had spelled out
Lulu
in gold glitter paint along the sides. I had a brief urge to invite Lucas in, maybe sit and talk, but he was already turning away.

“Night, Lulu.” He touched my arm lightly and disappeared into the shadows.

*   *   *

The carnival changed a lot over the next few weeks.

Carnivorous mermaids were installed in a massive tank, with a sign that read “Brand-New Attraction.” Our happy evil clowns were replaced by clowns who carried carving knives and had a murderous gleam in their eyes. Walter hired a hag with bleeding cheeks and a howling screech to roam the carnival warning people about death. Couples emerged from the Tunnel of Terror looking groggy, bite marks on their necks. Ticket prices were jacked up one hundred percent. We were making money—lots of money—but it didn't feel good.

I stuck to my job at the Snack Shack, but I started to see something different about the customers buying hot dogs and Cokes. Their hands shook. There was a genuinely haunted look in their eyes. Some of them were crying, especially the ones who'd staggered out of the Museum of Mirrors.

As they exited the carnival, trembling and shocked, they'd pass Walter, who would grin and hold out a hand to shake. “You had a good time,” he'd say. “Tell your friends.” And they'd nod, looking convinced, their eyes as blank and dark as Azatoth's.

These days I was keeping a stack of college brochures under the counter. I'd always planned to enroll in business classes online and then take over the carnival from my dad. I wanted to update it, brighten the place up, maybe bring in some fireworks and dancing and technology—nothing too weird, just a little modernization. But now I was wondering if I'd have anything to come back to. The smiling young people on the brochure covers seemed to mock me—would they get where I'd come from? Would they think I was weird? How would I fit in with them? And, even more importantly, who would pay for me to go?

There was only one bright spot in the summer. Every night, Lucas came with me to feed Mephit. Walter hadn't tried to move Mephit, but now that Azatoth was powering the carnival, there wasn't much for our old demon to do. Lucas and I would scramble into the merry-go-round and climb down to Mephit's pit with his cup of icy blood. He would open his glowing blue eyes and stare at us sadly, like he missed being the heart of the fair. Like he missed Dad and how things used to be.

I would pet him on the nose. “You're not the only one.”

After that, Lucas and I would go and talk. It wasn't a planned thing, but something about having him around made me realize how much I didn't know what normal teenage girls were like. Sometimes, when they watched their boyfriends lose games on the midway and stamp and swear, they'd look over at me, and our eyes would catch for a rueful second. Then I liked them, and I'd think about what it would mean to go to high school in a real building and not online.

But I didn't long for it. I'd grown up in the dust and smell and music of the carnival, and that was home to me. It was why those college brochures scared me so damn much, but it was also why I looked forward to the nights, when I could talk to Lucas.

We'd sit on the dry grass under the big summer moon, eating shaved ice from the Snack Shack, or sticky-sweet cotton candy. We had an unspoken pact not to talk about anything related to our parents or the carnival. We talked about music—I knew some, because it blared from the speakers of the rides—and about the places we'd been. I'd been all over America, seen every state, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Tappan Zee.

Lucas had been all over the world. He told me about the Eiffel Tower and I told him about the Paris casino in Las Vegas. He told me about Stonehenge and I told him about Carhenge. He told me about eating lemon gelato on the Amalfi Coast and I told him about the oil spill I'd seen on the Gulf Coast. I found out that he laughed a lot, actually, and he was good at making me laugh, too. Enough that I didn't mind that sometimes we were up so late I'd see the sunrise.

I was fighting off a yawn while dishing up snow cones on a Wednesday night when I heard a yell. It sounded like a yell of pain. A
familiar
yell.

I dropped the paper cone full of ice and dashed past my puzzled customer toward the midway, where the yell had come from.

It was Lucas.

Walter had been giving him all the crappiest jobs—cleaning up after shows in the Big Top, washing down the merry-go-round, Windexing the Museum of Mirrors.

Tonight he'd been the “victim” in the dunk tank, and a lot of town girls had lined up to drop the hot guy into the water. I didn't blame them. I did, however, blame the carnivorous mermaid who'd been hiding in the tank. She'd bided her time and then taken a bite out of Lucas's ankle.

By the time I arrived, people were shouting and Lucas was climbing over the side of the tank. He'd yanked off the collapsible seat and used it to fend off the mermaid. She was drifting around, holding her elbow and glaring.

“Everything's okay, folks! Nothing to see here!” I called as I helped Lucas to his feet. His ankle was bleeding, though it was hard to tell how much, since the blood had mixed with the water. He looked dazed. “Come with me,” I hissed, and steered him away as fast as I could toward my trailer.

*   *   *

Lucas sat on a pile of towels on the end of my bed as I put the finishing touches on his bandage. He'd used up the rest of my towels drying himself off, and his black hair stuck up like duck fluff around his head.

“Walter's going to be pissed,” he said, as I stood up, dusting off my hands. It was an unwieldy contraption of Band-Aids and gauze, but I figured it would hold.

“He'll be glad you're okay,” I said, surprised. Lucas glanced around my trailer. It was strange for me to realize that he'd never been inside it before. It was my sanctum, my private space, where no one could bother me. A velvet bedspread covered the bed, and everywhere else there was cloth and tape and sewing supplies. When you're always on the move, it's hard to buy clothes, so I had learned to make my own. That night, I was wearing a fifties circle skirt with pink poodles and a short red sweater.

I wondered if Lucas thought it was weird, not like a normal teenage girl's room. After all, it was a caravan, meant to be hitched to a truck and dragged along the highway. Then again, if Lucas didn't realize by now that I wasn't a normal teenage girl, he never would.

He shook his dark head. “My stepdad doesn't care. Not really.”

I sat down on the bed, not too close to him. “I'm sorry he's been giving you the crap jobs. But that doesn't mean he doesn't care about you.”

He turned toward me. His eyes reminded me of lime snow cone syrup. “Can I tell you something no one else knows?”

I nodded.

“My mom didn't die. She ran off and left. Abandoned me and Walter.” He studied the bandage on his ankle. “It was years ago, but she's never tried to call or see how I'm doing or anything.”

I was shocked silent.

“I've been a burden to Walter since then. All he wanted was to get back into the carnival business. But he had to wait for me to be done with high school. I graduated in May.”

“So … you're going to college in the fall?”

“I don't know. I haven't decided.” His eyes had darkened. Now they were more the color of pine needles.

I reached out and took his hand. “You couldn't be a burden to anyone. I've seen how hard you've been trying to help out—taking those jobs and all. No one who was a burden would do that.”

Our eyes locked. He leaned forward, and I leaned forward. Our lips were a millimeter apart. I could feel him breathing. I couldn't move. It felt like my whole body had locked up in anticipation.

He made an impatient noise. “Come here.” He pulled me into him, and then we were kissing.

I closed my eyes and saw carnival lights. Lucas tasted like sugar and water. His mouth moved over mine, sweet and hot. I reached up a hand to cup his cheek. It was soft, with just a hint of scruff under my palm. I stroked my fingers down to his shoulder, and we drew away from each other, shaky and smiling.