39. Chapter 39
Evie
The Ferris wheel towers over the field like a brightly lit threat.
“It’s tradition,” Maddie points out.
“It’s a death trap on a rotating arm.”
“You said this year.” She squares her shoulders. “And I was going to ride it with you, but honestly?” She looks at Milo. “I think he should.”
His head turns toward the wheel. The structure dominates the far end of the fairground, its iron spokes revolving above the rooftops while the gondolas rise in a slow procession, chains creaking whenever the wind catches them.
Milo follows one carriage from the loading platform to the highest point, where it hangs over Brindlewood with nothing beneath it but distance.
His mouth parts slightly, the violet in his eyes deepening as he watches.
All I can see is how badly he wants something he never believed would be his to experience.
“Can we . . .” He glances my way, hope still plain on his face until he reads mine. “Never mind.”
“You want to ride it?”
“I do. But I can look at it from here. It’s probably not that impressive once you’re up there.” He gives a careless little shrug that doesn’t fool me for a second. “We could do something else. There were caramel apples back there, or the hayride.”
Of course he’d make himself content with watching. Milo came to Brindlewood with one purpose: to take my soul. Instead, he’s spent every day finding reasons not to. He wanted an evening at the festival and to ride the Ferris wheel.
If he pushed, I could say no. If he wheedled or teased or made it a challenge, I’d plant my feet and refuse with complete conviction. But he doesn’t. He starts dismantling his own excitement instead.
That quiet surrender hurts more than persuasion ever could.
I glance up. The ride is tall, creaking and lit with bulbs that are starting to glow as the sky dims. Its metal frame cuts black lines through the evening, each carriage rocking as it clears the treetops.
Even from the ground, the height makes my stomach contract and leaves a cold film across my palms.
Then I turn to Milo.
He’s trying not to peer back at it. Eight days from now, he’ll be gone. After that, this will be one more human thing he may never see again. One more pleasure Hell has no use for. I care about him enough that the fear no longer gets to make this decision alone.
I can do this.
“We’re riding it.”
His face lifts. “Are you sure?”
“No, but we’re doing it anyway.”
Maddie extends both arms. “Plushies. Give them here. I’ll be right at the bottom.”
It’s barely a setup, honestly. A folding table, a cash box, and a perforated roll long enough to hang a man, staffed by a kid who’s uninterested in my existential crisis.
A sign taped to the front reads 2 TICKETS TO RIDE in bubble letters.
I peel off what I owe and shove them across the scarred surface.
Milo catches up in two strides. His hand finds the small of my back as we file into the line, and I lock onto the warmth of it. Not the metal skeleton wheeling around above us.
It advances too fast. I want twenty more people crammed in front of me so I can stand here on the ground and pretend I’m exercising patience rather than negotiating with death.
“We really don’t have to do this,” Milo says, tipping his head close to mine.
He tucks a stray curl of my hair behind my ear and lets his hand trail warm down the column of my neck.
“I’m perfectly content observing. I’ve decided the wheel is a marvel of human engineering and also a colossal mistake, and I’m at peace with both truths. ”
“I’m getting on the ride.”
He turns me by the shoulders. “If you change your mind in this line, we walk away. No questions. I’ll act like it was my idea to leave.”
“I’m not changing my mind.”
“Okay.” He hums and threads his fingers through mine.
The line advances. My hand skims along the cold barrier as only one couple remains between us and the loading platform.
An empty gondola swings into position beyond them, its painted door knocking against the frame while the operator reaches to steady it.
Whatever instructions he calls disappear beneath the mechanical din.
“Last chance,” he murmurs.
“Get in the gondola.”
The attendant opens the gate and waves us in with a boredom that feels criminal given the circumstances.
Up close, the carriage is smaller than it looked from the ground, little more than a narrow bench suspended inside a shallow metal shell.
Scuff lines appear around the edges of the painted panels.
A dark smear of grease stains one hinge.
Above the door, a single locking pin sits between me and several stories of open air.
Milo ducks inside first, folding his long legs into the cramped footwell before reaching back for me.
His hand closes over mine, the other bracing my waist as I step across the narrow gap between the platform and the carriage.
The gondola shifts beneath my weight. My fingers clamp onto his shoulder.
“I’ve got you,” he says, drawing me down beside him.
There’s barely room for both of us. His knees take up most of the footwell, one thigh pressed along mine, his shoulder tight against my right side. Usually, I’d appreciate every inch of that arrangement. The contact is the only part of the carriage my body trusts as solid.
The operator slams the door shut. He drops the latch, tests it once, then pulls the safety bar across our laps until it locks with a blunt click. The sound makes one fact horribly final: I’ve surrendered control to a machine built from aging steel and somebody else’s judgment.
Milo’s arm settles around my shoulders. His other hand covers mine where I’ve locked it around the bar. “You’re okay.”
A chain catches with a heavy jolt, jerking the gondola forward. My stomach drops before the carriage rises a full yard.
The festival fractures into isolated sensations beneath us.
The chain grinds through the drive wheel with a coarse, tooth-by-tooth drag.
Steel shivers through the carriage. Fasteners chatter against their housings, and the pivot above my head releases a thin, abrasive shriek whenever the gondola corrects its balance.
Panic turns each ordinary vibration into evidence.
That rattle becomes a bolt working loose.
The hitch in the mechanism becomes metal beginning to shear.
Every groan sounds structural, every tremor deliberate, the entire ride broadcasting its imminent failure in a language only my body seems capable of understanding.
The carriage swings through the first curve, tipping my weight.
Milo’s grip closes around my upper arm, firm enough to hold me against his side.
I fix my attention on the fastenings opposite us.
Four bolts secure the panel to the frame.
One quivers more than the others. I watch it until I can’t tell whether the bolt is vibrating or my vision is.
Below us, the platform recedes. The operator’s head disappears behind the railing, and those waiting in line compress into shoulders, hats, and upturned faces. The gap beneath the carriage keeps widening, every new foot of distance registering somewhere deep in my body.
My breathing narrows into careful portions. In through my nose. Hold. Out without letting it shake. The pattern demands all my concentration, but the gondola continues climbing whether I breathe correctly or not.
“Oh,” Milo says, leaning forward. “You can see the whole river from here. I hadn’t realized how far it continued past the bridge. And from up here, the farms divided into perfect rectangles.”
The wheel makes a high-pitched whine.
“I need you to not describe things that are below us.”
He straightens immediately and turns all his attention back to me. “Sorry.”
My fingertips have gone bloodless around the bar, the knuckles bleached and rigid, yet I can scarcely register the metal under my grip.
Sensation has withdrawn from my hands and gathered everywhere else: the violent beat at the base of my throat, the pressure cinching my ribs, cold perspiration slicking my skin under my sweater.
Brindlewood has flattened beneath us. Tents compress into colored squares.
The midway becomes a narrow seam threaded between them, crowded with people reduced to moving specks.
Even the music has lost its shape, rising in warped fragments before the wind tears it apart.
I make the mistake of following one of those tiny figures across the grass and become nauseatingly aware of the distance separating their feet from mine.
The wheel carries us higher.
The gondola pauses while passengers board near the platform. My grip convulses. The mechanism engages and hauls us through another short ascent.
It stops again. A mild roll beneath our bodies. Then upward again.
Each interruption becomes harder to endure because I can’t anticipate the next movement. My body braces for ascent during the stillness and for collapse when we begin to climb.
Then the wheel halts. One moment we’re rising; the next, the gondola jerks against its suspension and hangs near the crown. The sudden check drives the bar into my abdomen. Our carriage swings forward, reverses, then settles into a shallow oscillation that refuses to disappear.
A voice carries up from the platform, distorted by height and wind. I catch only fragments at first. Brief hold. Stay seated. Then one word arrives with perfect clarity.
Malfunction.
Heat floods my face while the rest of me turns glacial. The edges of my vision begin to recede, darkness pressing inward until the painted panel opposite me becomes the only stable object left in the world.
I try to inhale and manage only a thin scrape of air. Another attempt catches halfway down. Pins and needles spread across my mouth, then into my cheeks. My heartbeat comes so fast there’s barely space between one beat and the next.
I am trapped.
Milo’s been talking to me, but the words won’t reach.
I catch the shape of my name on his mouth and the strain pulling at his jaw, yet everything dissolves under the blood thundering in my ears.
His palm cups my cheek and turns me toward him until his face fills the little vision I have left: violet eyes, wind-mussed curls, worry drawn tight across his features.
Before dread can haul me back to the drop, he kisses me.
Warmth breaks through first. Not thought or reason—only the startling heat of his lips against my cold, numb skin.
He holds the kiss with a steadiness that gives me something immediate to inhabit: the plush give of his mouth, the taste of cinnamon, the faint scratch of stubble.
The sensation seeps through the static until terror has to budge over and make room for him.
His lips ease, coaxing mine apart, and I manage a thread of air.
He breathes into me, and my body answers before my mind catches up to the trick he’s pulling.
The gondola sways. Panic sparks hot through every nerve, but he angles deeper, trading the sickening lurch for a headier dizziness.
It gathers in the drag of his lower lip, the unhurried sweep of his tongue, the low hum snagged in his throat when my fingers finally quit the bar and fist his shirt instead.
By the time Milo eases back, only a sliver of space separates us.
His glasses have shifted crooked across his nose, and his mouth has flushed from mine.
He keeps me close while his thumb moves slowly beneath my ear.
My lungs draw in one unsteady breath, then another, each one a little fuller than the last.
“Kissing me was your rescue plan?”
“It appeared more effective than trying to reason with you.” He looks faintly pleased with himself. “Look above the wheel for me.”
I lift my eyes past the black lattice of spokes and the gondolas suspended around us.
The cloud cover that has pressed over Brindlewood all afternoon has finally broken.
Vast openings stretch across the western sky, flooded with copper, rose, and bruised violet.
The setting sun burns along the ragged edges of the clouds and pours through the gaps, gilding the river where it winds through the valley.
Fields extend beyond town in broad bands of amber and deep green, their distant boundaries dissolving into the darkening hills.
At this height, the horizon seems to have drawn farther back, revealing miles of landscape concealed from the streets below.
For the first time since the gondola left the platform, the distance offers something other than danger.
“Most people only look down from a height,” Milo says quietly.
“They measure the fall. Watch the world shrink beneath them and mistake that for the complete view. It never occurs to them to lift their heads.” His fingers tighten in my hair as the carriage shifts beneath us.
“But there’s always something up here that only exists because you were willing to climb.
The terror and the beauty keep the same altitude. You can’t reach one without the other.”
The wind cools the sweat at my temples, carrying the scent of fried sugar and woodsmoke up from the fairground.
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
The certainty in his answer makes me turn.
He isn’t looking at the sky. The last of the light lies gold along one side of his face, and all his attention is on me, as though he’s already decided he can miss the horizon behind him.
His finger follows the corner of my mouth, lingering where his kiss has left my lips tender.
“I need to tell you something.” His smile is small and serious. “Milo isn’t the name I was born with.”
“I figured.” I study his face. “It doesn’t exactly scream ancient demon of the underworld.”
“That was rather the point.” He shifts, his knee pressing into mine. “Demons don’t give their true names freely. In the wrong hands, it can become a means of control.”
“And Milo?”
“Something I chose because it held no consequence.” His thumb passes over his palm, searching for the rest. “I only intended it as an alias. But here with you it feels more real than my given name. And I like Milo a whole lot better than the thing I was born to be.”
“I want to tell you part of my name,” he says. “I’d like you to have it.”
“You don’t owe me that.”
“I know I don’t. But it’s Zavian.”
I slide my hand from his chest to the back of his neck and kiss him, my fingers tightening in his curls as heat gathers wherever his thigh presses into mine.
“Zavian,” I murmur against his mouth.
His hand tightens in my hair, and he kisses me with sudden, ravenous intensity. His other hand grips my thigh, fingers spreading possessively over the denim as he pulls me closer within the narrow space.
If we were anywhere but this high in a metal box, I know where this would lead.
The wheel jolts back into motion.
We break apart as the mechanism catches and the gondola begins its descent, rotating back through the arc toward the ground.