by Chant, Zoe
Janet—you know, I’ll just call her Mom now that you know who I’m talking about—is the circus boss, but she’s something else too. She’s the alpha. It’s unusual for shifters of different species to have a single alpha, but it can happen when they’re all working together. That means that she can overrule them all in a way that goes way beyond being able to fire them. She can dominate them, like an alpha wolf in a regular wolf pack.
Normally, new members who aren’t born into the circus are only accepted by a vote of the entire company. Two-thirds of them have to vote yes, and Mom’s vote doesn’t hold any more weight than anyone else’s—though her recommendation does, of course. But there had been times when she’d held a vote and had been overruled.
The decision on me had to be made fast, because it’d be less than 24 hours before my parents would notice I was missing. Mom didn’t want to chance me being voted down as not a shifter and too much of a risk of attracting police attention, and she thought it would make everyone angry if they voted against me and then she overruled them. So she didn’t hold a vote. She just announced her decision, and she used her alpha dominance to stop them from arguing. That had a lot of repercussions later on.
But that night, I stuck by her side while they packed up everything, dismantled the rigging and the tent, and loaded it all into a couple of train cars. I tried to help, but mostly I just got underfoot.
The circus travels on its own train. The “pie car” is the kitchen and cafeteria. They have cars with animal cages and food. Mostly they’re empty, but every now and then someone will request to inspect them to make sure the animals are treated right, and then everyone shifts and gets in them until the inspector leaves.
I was not only going to live in a circus, I was going to live in a circus train.
The living quarters were small but cozy, with beds that folded out from the walls at night and folded up during the day. Janet unfolded one, made it up, and put me to bed. In the morning, I woke up in a different state, with a different name, a different life, a different family, and a different home.
I’d never been happier.
I caused a lot of trouble behind the scenes, because they not only had to scramble to come up with fake papers for me, they had to head off a high-profile missing child investigation. First they had me call my parents to say I was spending another night at the friend’s house, to buy some time. Then they tracked down my dad’s sister, who was an off-the-grid survivalist who was estranged from the rest of the family, and had me call again to say I’d run away and was spending some time with her.
They finally made up one of the lion shifters to look like her—it’s amazing how much you can do if you’re really good at stage makeup—and did a video call with both of us in blurry video with me doing most of the talking, where I said I was staying with her and she said she’d teach me the important things in life. To be honest, it was a plan that could only work if I was right that my parents really didn’t care about me and would be just as happy to have me gone.
It worked perfectly.
I wasn’t so much sad as relieved. I’d always thought they didn’t want me, and it turned out that I’d been right all along. It sounds awful, but it was a kind of awfulness I’d been living with my whole life, and now I knew that I wasn’t crazy and the problem was them, not me.
And now I had a mom who loved me so much that she’d taken one look at me, and turned her entire life upside down for me. Mom had never married or had kids. But she moved me into her train car quarters, gave me half her space, and never ever made me feel like she didn’t want me there.
Nobody had to sit me down and explain to me that it was a crime circus. If I hadn’t figured it out from how they already knew how to create fake identities, I would have the first time I saw the rat roulette trick. I just thought it made them even cooler. Especially when I was learning how to do stuff like pick locks and be a lookout for jewelry-stealing sparrows.
And that wasn’t all I learned. I couldn’t shift, but I got to try everything a human could do. I was best at acrobatics and trapeze—I might not have wings, but I could still fly through the air—and I couldn’t wait to be old enough to be the human partner for rat roulette.
I don’t want to sound like everything was perfect. The flying squirrel boy, Fausto Fratelli, couldn’t stand me and the feeling was mutual. We got in fist-fights, I’d play pranks on him, and he’d break stuff and try to pin it on me.
It was too bad because there weren’t a lot of kids my age—most of the rest were a couple years older or younger. The only other one was Kalpana Doubek, Max and Renu’s daughter. That was the girl with black braids who Mom had looked at when I asked if I could learn to shift. Everyone thought she and I would be best friends because we were the same age and we both couldn’t shift. That didn’t happen. She was super nice but a lot more mature than me. She was kind to me in an older-sister way, not a buddy way.
A couple months after we joined, near the end of our US tour, I saw a girl my age sneak in without paying. She was really clever about it, too. She tagged along with a big family, and joined them and got away from them with perfect timing so neither they nor the ticket taker noticed. But I noticed.
After the show, I went up to her and struck up a conversation. We hit it off right away, like kids do sometimes. Her name was Natalie, and she had sort of a similar background to the one I’d made up. No getting locked in closets, but she really was an orphan, and she really had run away from a group home—though just for the day. She was planning to go back after the performance. I asked her if she liked it there, and she said no, but she had nowhere else to go.
I told her all about the circus—everything but that they were shifters—and she asked if I could talk my mom into letting her join too. So I took her to Mom and asked.
Mom was less thrilled than I was with the idea, but she asked Natalie what she thought she could do that would be valuable to a circus. Natalie did some backflips and cartwheels, which were pretty good considering she’d never had any actual lessons. And of course Mom saw how well we got along. So she said she’d present Natalie to the company for a vote.
I begged Mom to just tell everyone Natalie was in, like she had with me. But Natalie said no. She was only a kid, but she understood social stuff a lot better than I did. She’d had to, from growing up in a group home. She told Mom it would be better if she went ahead and did the vote.
That was when Natalie won Mom over. The two of them put their heads together, and they decided to say that Mom had discovered her, not me. I was a little put out—like I said, I didn’t understand people like they did—but I agreed.
Mom called the company together and presented Natalie to them. She told them how she’d spotted her sneaking in like a pro, and had her demonstrate her acrobatics. She said that if Natalie disappeared, everyone would assume she was just another runaway. And she said Natalie and I were already friends and we could keep each other company... maybe for life, wink wink nudge nudge.
That convinced some of the company who hadn’t liked how Mom had strong-armed me in. If they were stuck with a non-shifter from a non-shifter family, they’d rather have him grow up to marry another non-shifter than into one of their families.
That wasn’t going to happen. Natalie and I were close, but like siblings, not childhood sweethearts. I’m pretty sure Mom knew that from day one. But she was good at saying the right thing to make the company vote like she wanted. They did a private ballot with bits of paper, and she got in.
And then they told her about shifters. Well, Mom showed her. That was fun.
I could talk all night about what it was like growing up in the circus, but I’ll save it for later. Short version is Natalie became an acrobat and a target girl, and I was an acrobat and a jack of all trades.
Everything was great until I turned twenty-one. And then everything fell apart.
Mom was in good health but she was old when she adopted me. She wanted to eventually retire fr
om running the circus, and just keep doing her fortune teller and psychic parrot acts. But she needed someone to take over, and she’d never named an heir.
She named me.
The circus blew up. Half the company either agreed with her decision or didn’t but was willing to respect it, and the other half was absolutely dead-set against it. As alpha, she would normally have the absolute right to name her heir. But the circus had never had a non-shifter as its leader.
The other problem went all the way back to when I’d first joined. I was the only person who’d ever joined without the company getting a chance to choose me, and some of them still resented it. Fausto Fratelli got his entire family and some friends to petition for him to be the heir, which is also something that’s not done and only pissed Mom off even more.
I went to Mom and told her I was happy being a trapeze artist and assistant clown and so forth, and to pick someone else. Preferably not Fausto. She refused. Said it was her decision and she was sticking with it and I shouldn’t let myself be intimidated by a bunch of squirrels.
The entire Fratelli family threatened to quit. The Richelieus—they’re the French poodles—said they’d go with them and start their own circus. Zack and Zara Zimmerman, who were twelve at the time, snuck into the Richelieus’ train car in cat form and peed on their pillows.
It was a disaster, and it just kept snowballing. Our performances were suffering. The Duffy brothers got careless stealing jewelry and we had to break them out of a birdcage in a high rise.
I realized that I was endangering the entire circus. I got in a huge fight with Mom. I told her if she didn’t name someone else as heir or at least take back that it was me, I’d leave. She said she wasn’t going to allow me to be peer-pressured out of my rightful position and I’d be glad later that she hadn’t let me.
I thought I could force her hand if I left. I thought once I was gone for a while, she’d have to name someone else, and then I could come back and just be an acrobat and a squirrel ring holder and so forth. But she stuck to her guns.
I even joined the Marines, so she’d know I’d be gone for at least four years. But she wouldn’t relent. Said I could come back and take over the circus once my term of service was over. Every time I see her, we get in a huge fight over that goddamn heir thing. I can’t go back until she drops it, and she refuses to drop it.
And now...
I guess I have a circus to inherit. If I decide to take it.
CHAPTER 13
Dali and Merlin had been lying with their arms around each other the entire time he’d been talking, but when he finally stopped, she squeezed him tighter. It was not only to give him comfort, but to satisfy her own impulse to hang on to him. He’d told her part of his story before, but it was only now that she fully understood how much the circus had meant to him. Why wouldn’t he take it, now that he finally could?
I only just met him, she thought. How can it hurt this much to know that I’m going to lose him?
Part of her didn’t want to discuss it. But the other part, the part of her that would always be a veteran even if she wasn’t in the military now, refused to let herself shy away from a necessary task just because it was difficult and painful.
“You’re a shifter now,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “Would it still split the company if you went back?”
“I doubt it,” Merlin replied. But he didn’t sound as overjoyed at the prospect as she’d expected. “Some of them will still be pissed off because they don’t like me or they’re still seething over how I got in, but those weren’t the objections they actually stated. ‘He bugs me’ isn’t a good enough argument.”
Dali made herself ask the question. “Do you want to go back?”
“Yes, but...” He ran his fingers through his hair until they hit the bandage. “Ouch.” He looked into her eyes and seemed to search for something, then dropped his gaze with a sigh. “I don’t know. It’s complicated. I was telling the truth when I said I hadn’t decided.”
Dali hated it when she’d geared herself up to do something hard, and then it turned out to not actually resolve anything. She liked it when she knew where things stood. Now she felt even more unsettled than before.
He gave her a bright smile. “Hey, I feel a lot better now that I’ve rested a bit. If I make some hot chocolate with marshmallows, would you share it with me?”
“I don’t think I’ve had hot chocolate since I was...” Dali searched her memory. “Eighteen. My grandma would fix it for me when I came home from school in the winter.”
“Did you like it then?”
“Yeah, I used to love it.”
Merlin sat up, then stood. Dali watched him closely, ready to catch him, but he seemed much more steady on his feet. “Want to find out if you still do?”
“Sure.”
She followed him into the kitchen. It was distinctly homey, and reminded her a bit of her grandmother’s until she looked more closely.
In addition to canisters of regular coffee, he also had chicory coffee from New Orleans and canisters whose handwritten labels read “elderflower-rose hip infusion,” “fireweed tea,” and “purple corn drink.”
A magical pet trap was hidden behind the tackiest wine holder Dali had ever seen—not that she’d seen a lot of wine holders, to be fair—which was a rooster lying on its back and clutching the bottle in its claws.
A basket of apples and oranges also contained a bizarre fruit like a cross between a lemon and a tentacle monster.
“What in God’s name is that... that citrus squid?”
Merlin chuckled. “It’s a Buddha’s hand. You use it like lemon rind, for zesting or marmalade. Or you can candy it.”
He indicated a little bottle labeled “candied grapefruit peel” on a wooden spice rack. The rack contained all the usual spices and herbs, plus some she’d never even heard of. What were chervil, idli podi, and za’atar? Then she spotted one she hadn’t seen in years.
“My mom had this,” Dali said, indicating a bottle of pandan leaves. “She used them to flavor cakes and puddings and things like that.”
“Oh, nice. I love Filipino desserts.” He opened the bottle and offered it to her. “Smell.”
Dali inhaled the scent of pandan, that unique aroma like vanilla infused with herbs. She could almost see her mother beating cake batter in the kitchen. Dali rarely talked about her childhood, but Merlin had shared so much, she wanted to share something in return.
“Dad was in the Navy,” she said. “He met Mom when he was stationed in the Philippines, and took her back to America. He was gone most of the time, so she raised me by herself. In the Philippines, she’d had this big family she was really close to, but in America, she was alone on a Navy base with a bunch of Navy wives she had nothing in common with. When I was eleven, she got divorced and moved back home.”
“Eleven,” Merlin said. “The start of a new life for both of us.”
She gave him a wry smile. “You liked yours better than I liked mine. The way Mom felt about America was the way I felt about the Philippines. Where she lived was really rural. It was too different. I couldn’t adjust. I look like my mom, so people were always surprised and disappointed on some level when I acted like a foreigner. But I was a foreigner. And I was always going to be. I felt completely alone.”
“That sounds so hard.”
“I stuck it out for a year, and then I begged to go back to Dad. I absolutely idolized him—wanted to be just like him. Only he was on a ship most of the time. He and Mom worked it out so I could go back to America and live with his mother. I’m still really close to Grandma. She’s gotten a bit frail, so she’s in retirement housing, but she can still cook and we always have dinner together on Sundays.” Dali hesitated, not wanting to remind Merlin of his awful biological parents, then said, “They all loved me a lot, to get that to work out. I never doubted that.”
Merlin, intuitive as always, heard what she wasn’t saying. “But...?”
“But I e
nded up not seeing much of Mom and Dad. I love them, but they’re more like distant relatives than parents. Literally distant. When I think of my family, really it’s Grandma. She was more of a mother to me than my own mother. Like you and Janet, I guess.”
“And she made you hot chocolate.”
Dali smiled. “Just like Janet. Are you making me the same hot chocolate you got?”
“Nah. My tastes changed a bit when I got older. It’s just my raptor that’s still hung up on pure sugar.”
“Is he really your subconscious? Or is he more like your inner child?”
“A little of both, I guess. Though... I think maybe he’s starting to grow up.”
He took a slab of chocolate and a metal container from a shelf with a wild variety of unusual snacks. Dali spotted chocolate-dipped potato chips, guava cookies, elk jerky, and multiple flavors of Pocky before he closed the cupboard.
Catching her expression, he said, “Want any of that? My snacks are your snacks.”
“No, thanks.” Then, unable to resist at least mentioning it, she said, “Chocolate-dipped potato chips, seriously?”
“They’re delicious. Salty and sweet. Like salted caramel ice cream.” As Merlin tried to convince her to try the potato chips, he proceeded to make the fanciest hot chocolate she’d ever seen. He melted the chocolate over a double boiler, then whisked it into heated whole milk, sprinkled in spices, and finally asked her, “What flavors do you like with chocolate, if any? Peppermint, orange, raspberry, more chocolate, vanilla, hazelnut, chili pepper...?”
Dali was tempted to say “more chocolate,” but there was nothing she loved more than mint chocolate chip ice cream. “Peppermint.”
Merlin opened the container. She peeked inside and saw a rainbow of marshmallows, large and clearly homemade. He selected a bright pink one and topped her hot chocolate with it. “There you go.”
“You didn’t make those yourself!” she exclaimed.
“Sure I did. It’s not that hard so long as you make sure not to try it when it’s raining. The air gets too damp and they don’t solidify. I learned that the hard way. It was pretty gross, like rainbow-colored Elmer’s glue.” Merlin selected a red marshmallow and topped his own drink with it.