by Chant, Zoe
“Sounds like an awkward family Thanksgiving,” Dali said.
“That’s exactly what it’s like. The circus is like a giant, crazy, semi-dysfunctional family. That dresses up in sequins and clown paint, turns into animals, and steals.”
Dali chuckled. “Got it. Want to set up some kind of signal so if it’s getting too awkward, I’ll know to drag you off?”
“Yes. Yes, I would like that. If I cough and touch my ear, find something you really want to do somewhere else.”
“Gotcha.”
She was so thoughtful and understanding, it put Merlin at ease. Maybe he’d been blowing his circus issues out of proportion. Anyway, now he had an escape hatch. Everything would be fine.
But I want to shift, protested his raptor. I want to show off how big I can get! And how small! And swing from the trapeze and play with the lions and try on the ringmaster’s hat and roll around in the sawdust and drive the clown car and eat cotton candy. ALL the cotton candy!
A little too loudly, Merlin said aloud, “Everything will be fine!”
CHAPTER 7
The wizard-scientist Morgana needed better minions.
She leveled a cold stare at the one who stood before her, a reputable and highly paid tracker. He maintained his usual stone-face, but she caught the tiniest nervous twitch of his hands.
“So,” she said. “Let us review. I hired you to retrieve an escaped magical beast and any person with whom it came into contact. You found the beast with a person—so far, so good—and then you allowed them both to escape.”
He made no excuses for his failure, which she appreciated, but did say, “They haven’t escaped for long. I tracked the woman who found the kitten to a local security agency, Defenders...”
Of course, Morgana thought as he continued his report. Such is the working of fate.
The grand plan of the wizard-scientists required both the magical beasts and the kidnapped humans whom the wizard-scientists had intended to forge into their Dark Knights. But both beasts and humans had escaped them. And the humans had drawn together into the Defenders, while one by one, the beasts were drawn to bond with the Defenders and the people close to them.
On the one hand, that did make them easier to find. On the other hand, it made them harder to defeat. Humans were so much weaker when they were alone and isolated.
If only I had been in charge from the beginning, Morgana thought. She felt sure that if she had, both humans and beasts would still be secured within the lab, in their solitary cells.
“...so I thought you’d want me to consult you before proceeding,” concluded the tracker.
“Yes,” Morgana said absently. “I’ll let you know if I want you. Dismissed.”
As he left her presence, she gave careful thought to the problem of recapturing the beast and recruiting her chosen Dark Knight. Unlike the last wizard-scientist who had attempted that task, she would proceed with planning and cleverness, not brute force.
Poor stupid Gorlois had charged in with all guns blazing, bringing out his chosen Knight’s protective instincts. He’d only succeeded in deepening the bonds between his Knight and others. Gorlois’s attempt had gone so badly that the ability to form a mate bond, which was supposed to have been destroyed in all the potential Knights, had activated. No wonder he had been killed!
But Morgana would not make the same mistake. She had studied her chosen Dark Knight well, and she knew his weaknesses. Rather than repeat Gorlois’s mistakes, she would use a more subtle approach. Morgana intended to systematically strip Merlin of everything he loved. And then, when he was without friends, without family, without animal companion, and certainly without mate...
Then she would make her move.
And Merlin, in his loneliness and despair, would have no choice but to accept her offer.
“Checkmate,” murmured Morgana to the empty room.
CHAPTER 8
Merlin’s absurdly tiny sports car was absurdly fun to ride in. He drove with the pizzazz that seemed to be his trademark, zipping in and out of traffic while talking a mile a minute. Once Dali got over thinking they were going to be squashed by an SUV at any second, she relaxed and enjoyed the ride.
She also enjoyed Merlin. With at least some of his attention on the road, she could look her fill without feeling like he’d catch her staring. His hair had dried to a striking gold that caught the sun, a perfect match for his sky-blue eyes. His tan showed off his lithe musculature, and his gestures were as graceful as a hawk’s flight.
Summer man, she thought. He’s all sun and sky and freedom. Light as a bird. Nothing weighing him down.
If she pursued the metaphor, that would make her the winter woman. Black hair like the bare earth under snow, brown eyes like a leafless tree, heart like a hearth where the fire’s gone out. And all the weight of loss she was carrying, like snow piled so heavily that it cracks the roof.
But Merlin’s lightness must have lifted her. It was as if the sheer amount of things that were impossible yet somehow real—pigeon thieves, flying kittens, velociraptors, shifters, Dali all dressed up for a trip to the crime circus—had knocked her loose from everything that pinned her down, leaving her in free fall. It was a scary feeling, but freeing, too. Anything might be possible.
Maybe Grandma was right. Maybe Dali did have her whole life ahead of her.
“...and that’s how the white rat married the elephant,” Merlin concluded.
Dali, who had been so deep in her own thoughts that she’d lost track of his story, only belatedly remembered that he was talking about shifters rather than actual animals. “The white rat is the ringmaster, right?”
Merlin nodded. “Maximilian Doubek. He’s from Prague. His wife, Renu, is from India. We performed once in her home city, Hyderabad, but unfortunately there was a little incident involving the mayor’s wife’s diamond earrings, a runaway camel, and some local cobra shifters that got us banned. It all began when one of our performers, Zillah Zimmerman, who turns into a calico cat—all the Zimmermans are cat shifters—climbed a palm tree and got stuck halfway...”
His voice trailed off as he pulled into a crowded parking lot. The big top loomed ahead, a gigantic red and gold tent surrounded by fairground stalls. Dali reached for her door, but Merlin didn’t move. He was staring at the big top, his hands frozen on the steering wheel, with an expression she couldn’t interpret: nostalgia or longing or dread, or maybe all of them at once.
“You okay?” Dali asked.
Her words broke the spell. Merlin gave a start, and the ambivalence vanished from his face, to be replaced with a bright smile. “Absolutely!”
Dali doubted that, but she wasn’t sure she had the right to pry into his emotions, especially since he obviously didn’t want to share them. It wasn’t as if they had a relationship. She was his client, and nothing more.
It was ridiculous of her to wish for more.
“I’ll keep watch, of course,” he assured her. “But you should be safe here. The wizard-scientists aren’t likely to try anything with this many people around.”
That hadn’t been exactly what she’d meant, but she nodded. Then a thought struck her. “Hey, Merlin? If no one’s supposed to know you’re a shifter now, then I probably shouldn’t know shifters exist, right? Or is that something you might have told me because of how my necklace got stolen?”
“Oh. Oh, man.” Merlin ran a hand through his hair, rumpling it. “I’m so glad you thought of that. No, normally I wouldn’t have told you. So pretend you have no idea the circus animals are anything but animals, and say I’m investigating whether someone here trained pigeons to steal. They’ll know what I really think.”
With that, he sprang out of the car, ran around to the side, and opened the door for her. Dali was about to tell him her prosthetic could open doors, then realized that he was being a gentleman. It made her smile. She got out, and together they walked to the circus.
As they approached the ticket booth, he said, “We’ll watch the sho
w first—that’ll give me a chance to see who’s still here and who’s new. Then we’ll talk to Natalie. She was—is—my best friend from when I was here. You’ll like her.”
“What kind of shifter is she?”
“Natalie’s not a shifter,” Merlin said. “She’s an acrobat and a target girl.”
“A what?”
“A target girl. It’s a term in the impalement arts—”
“The WHAT?”
“The impalement arts. Stuff like throwing knives at people, shooting apples off people’s heads, stuff like that. I know, the name is weird considering that the object is not to get impaled.”
Dali snorted. “It’s like if you called parachuting and hang gliding ‘the plummeting to your death sports.’”
Merlin laughed. “Anyway, not everyone who works at the circus is a shifter. The ticket takers and food stall cooks and so forth are locals we hire while we’re in town. Most of the permanent company are shifters, but not all. Sometimes non-shifters get born into shifter families. Max and Renu’s daughter Kalpana is like that—her dad is a white rat and her mom is an elephant, but she can’t shift.”
“Was that hard?”
“No, it was actually lucky for her. Kalpana loves the circus but she has terrible stage fright. If she’d been an elephant she’d have been pressured to perform, but what she’s really good at is behind the scenes stuff. So she only does that, and everyone’s happy! Actually, I bet you’d get along with her too. She’s our stage manager, which is sort of a yeoman-equivalent. I’ll make sure to introduce—”
Dali held up her hand, cutting off his flow of chatter. “I meant, was it hard for you to grow up in a shifter circus without being a shifter yourself?”
“Oh, here we are! I’ll buy your ticket.” Merlin rushed to the ticket booth, wallet in hand, leaving Dali to wonder if he was deliberately evading her question or if he was just distractible.
He rejoined her with the tickets. She thanked him, and they went through the gate. The air carried the sound of laughter and calliope music, and the smell of cotton candy and buttered popcorn. Little kids were running amok, waving corndogs on sticks and blowing noisemakers and throwing Ping-Pong balls to try to win a goldfish.
“Skip the games,” Merlin advised Dali quietly. “They’re rigged.”
“You guys cheat little kids?” Dali exclaimed, then lowered her voice.
“Nope,” Merlin said with a grin. “Kids don’t have money, remember? We cheat rich adults. Want to see how?”
Much as she disapproved, her curiosity got the better of her. “Okay. But I think I need to be fortified with food first. Nothing dishonest at the food stalls, right? No selling tofu as pork or pork as tofu or saying things are gluten-free when they aren’t?”
“Good Lord, no,” Merlin replied. “The food is exactly what we say it is. It’s good, too. Not good for you, of course. But tasty.”
As they headed to the food stalls, she noted him scanning the grounds. He’d ramped up his usual awareness, and she couldn’t help wondering if it was because it would be more difficult to spot a stalker in this crowded chaos, or because he was counting down to the moment when someone recognized him.
She decided not to distract him, and instead checked out the food stalls. It was hard for a working woman to have time to eat well, but she did her best. She avoided junk food, didn’t drink soda, and generally tried to treat her body well. Besides, Grandma’s Sunday dinners, while absolutely delicious, were heavy on pork and deep-fried things, so Dali tried to make up for them during the rest of the week.
She stopped dead at the food stalls and parked food trucks, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of deep-fried and sugar-coated everything. Grandma would love it.
Merlin, mistaking her hesitation, suggested, “Want me to order for us both, and we can share? There’ll be enough choices that you’ll definitely like something.”
Throwing health and responsibility to the winds, Dali said, “Go right ahead.”
He darted from food truck to food truck and food stall to food stall, pulling her in his wake. He bought cotton candy in pink and rainbow flavors, boxes of peanuts (salted and candy-coated), lemonade and horchata and Coke, funnel cakes doused in powdered sugar, and huge soft pretzels with mustard. Just as she was about to protest that they would keel over from an overdose of salt and sugar and no real food, he went to a stall selling skewered everything and bought a giant selection of grilled meat and vegetables on sticks.
She offered to help carry the food, but he waved her away, explaining, “I’ll need your hands free to unload it.” She watched in amazement as he deftly balanced cotton candy stick holders on peanut boxes atop soda cups on takeout boxes until he was holding a Jenga tower of food in each hand, steady as a rock.
He laughed at her expression. “I used to help the seals with their balancing acts.”
“Of course you did.” Dali followed him to an unoccupied bench and table beside a roulette game.
Merlin didn’t spill a drop of soda or a crumb of funnel cake, or even a grain of powdered sugar. She couldn’t help wondering what else he could do with those clever hands of his and the incredible physical control he had over his entire body. He had to be amazing in bed. Not that she’d ever find out.
She set out the food, and they helped themselves to a little of everything. Dali started with the most meal-like of the options, the grilled meat and vegetable skewers, which were a little charred, very juicy, and nicely seasoned. But then Merlin waved a funnel cake under her nose, and the aroma was irresistible. She took it from his hand and took a bite. It was crisp-fried dough buried under a blanket of powdered sugar, hot and sweet and greasy and good. Then next thing she knew, she’d inhaled the entire thing.
“Got a bit of sugar there,” Merlin said. He reached out toward her face.
Dali could have told him she’d get it herself, but she said nothing. His deft fingers brushed the tip of her nose, her cheek, and finally her lips. They felt burning hot, and even after he pulled his hand away, she could still feel his touch on her skin.
“Are we going to watch some crimes?” she asked softly, to distract herself from wanting to touch him in return.
“Absolutely,” Merlin said, also speaking quietly. He indicated the roulette wheel, which was operated by a glamorous woman in her forties with sleek black hair in a 1920s-style bob. “That’s Renu Doubek.”
“From Hyderabad, India,” said Dali, remembering Merlin’s story. “The elephant who married a rat.”
She realized then that he had carefully selected their table so they could see the roulette wheel, but a tree blocked them from being seen by anyone standing at the wheel. He obviously didn’t intend to reveal himself to his old partners in crime until he was ready.
“Good memory. Now, see him?” Merlin gestured at a man walking toward the roulette wheel. “He’s the mark.”
“The what?”
“The mark—the person who has enough money to be worth cheating him out of some.”
“How can you tell?” Dali asked. The mark wore a T-shirt and jeans, and didn’t look particularly rich to her.
“His clothes are cheap, yeah. But look at his shoes.”
“They’re sneakers,” Dali said, puzzled.
“They’re three thousand dollar sneakers,” Merlin said.
“What?!”
“Really. And a five thousand dollar watch. Also...” Merlin grinned. “He looks like a jerk.”
It was true. The mark had a distinctly punchable face, set in lines of bad temper and contempt. But as he came closer, it became clear that he wasn’t headed for the roulette wheel after all, but was only going to pass near it.
“Too bad for the crime circus coffers,” Dali said, enjoying Merlin’s snicker at the phrase. “Doesn’t look like he’s playing.”
“Oh, we—they—can fix that,” Merlin assured her. “Watch.”
As the mark came closer, Renu called out, “It’s rat roulette time, ladies and gentlemen!
Rat roulette! We can match bids of up to five thousand dollars! It’s rat roulette!”
At the words “five thousand dollars,” the mark turned his head. Renu stooped behind the table and lifted up a white rat. It sat tamely in the palm of her hand, its beady black eyes blinking and its pink nose twitching.
“And that’s her husband, Max,” said Merlin.
Dali had to bite her lip to not burst out laughing.
“What the hell is rat roulette?” shouted a thuggish-looking man in the crowd of onlookers. “And who the hell bets five thousand dollars at a goddamn circus?”
The mark stopped walking to watch.
“The mark is a man who doesn’t like women,” Merlin murmured in Dali’s ear. “So a man yelling at a woman will get his attention. Just like a greedy person’s attention will be caught by mentioning a lot of money. So Larry got him twice over.”
“Larry’s the man who looks like he walked off the set of The Sopranos?” Dali whispered.
“Uh-huh. He’s Larry Duffy, one of the Duffy brothers. They don’t appear in the show, so no one will recognize him later. He’s what we call a plant: someone we plant in the audience.”
Renu raised her voice so the entire crowd—and the mark—could hear. “Rat roulette is when the rat picks the number instead of the ball. And as for who’d bet that amount of money... Are you feeling lucky today, sir?”
Larry Duffy sneered and made a dismissive gesture.
“Let’s start with a small bet,” suggested Renu. “Five dollars? Any takers?”
A little girl begged to her parents, “I want to see the rat pick the number!”
“Just so long as you don’t expect to win anything,” said her mother with a smile, handing Renu a five. “This is only for fun.”
“Are they plants?” Dali whispered, fascinated.
Merlin shook his head. “Nope. Someone will always think it’s worth five dollars to see a rat play roulette.”