by Chant, Zoe
Mr. Varnham whipped around, spilling his coffee, and beckoned urgently to Dali. She handed her purse to Merlin and went to the inspector.
Merlin put the purse over his shoulder and stuck his hand inside it, feeling Cloud’s soft, wriggling body. The kitten clearly wanted out. Petting her, he went to the cat cushion and murmured, “Don’t all meow at once. One or two at a time. And not all the time. We don’t want to hear you onstage, just here.”
Mr. Zimmerman nodded, a very un-cat-like gesture that Merlin really hoped was blocked by his own body, then nudged the nearest kitten, who obediently gave a soft meow. Cloud gave a louder one.
Merlin straightened up. This time he avoided the clown car and instead ducked behind a scenery flat, which was also for the clown show and was painted with custard pies flying through the air. Dali joined him behind it.
He whispered, “Sorry. The kittens got a bit over-enthusiastic.”
“It’s fine,” she whispered back. “I told him we’d been training them as a cat chorus and they thought they’d gotten a signal. Thanks for getting them in place.”
We make such a good team, Merlin thought.
“I’ll go check out the left tun—” he began.
“Merlin! Dali!” Tirzah waved at them frantically. She was waiting in the wings for her entrance in a desk-and-chair set bedecked in artfully draped cloth to ensure that anything in her lap would be hidden. She wore an equally voluminous psychic’s robe plus several scarves, one of which was wound around her head in a sort of sorcerous turban.
They hurried over. Tirzah beckoned them in close, indicating her lap. Nestled amongst the cloth were her phone and the furry black shape of her flying kitten. Batcat peered up at them with her enormous yellow eyes and let out a loud meow. It was instantly echoed by a chorus of meows from the kittens backstage.
“How’d she get—” Dali began, then broke off. “The same way Cloud did, I guess.”
“One of you has to take her,” Tirzah whispered. “I’d hold her in my lap, but she might meow onstage.”
A burst of applause signaled the end of the juggling act. Roland and Zane Zimmerman, who had stayed human for the night in case his emergency medical skills were needed, went to carry Tirzah and her desk onstage. They were trailed by a pigeon shifter carefully holding her crystal ball.
The lights dimmed to blue for the scene change. Tirzah whipped off her head covering, wrapped it around Batcat, and thrust the wriggling bundle into Merlin’s arms. The stagehands carried her onstage, leaving Merlin clutching a very angry Batcat.
He and Dali once again took refuge behind the custard pie flat.
“I can’t put her in my purse with Cloud,” Dali whispered. “They’ll fight.”
Merlin glanced onstage at Tirzah, who was trying to look wise and mysterious as Max introduced her as the world’s greatest psychic. “I’ll stay here until Tirzah’s done. She’s only doing Madame Fortuna, so she can take Batcat and go outside after that.”
Searing pain lanced into Merlin’s thumb. His grip on the bundle loosened involuntarily before he realized that it had only been Batcat biting him. But in that split second, Batcat clawed away the head wrap and zoomed out of it. Merlin made a lunge for her, but wasn’t quite fast enough. Batcat triumphantly flew upward and out of their grasp.
“Oh my God!” Dali blurted out.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Merlin said, though he didn’t feel at all confident that it was. “She’s trained to be invisible in public. You can only see her if you already know she exists.”
“Oh. Right.” Dali let out a huge breath. “I swear, that damn cat took years off my life.”
They peered upward. In the shadows overhead, all they could see were a pair of disembodied, demonic yellow eyes.
“Looks like she’s perched in the rigging,” Merlin said. “I guess she just wanted to watch Tirzah do her thing.”
Onstage, Tirzah had one hand raised dramatically and one unobtrusively in her lap. To the audience, it looked like she was gazing down into her crystal ball rather than at the cellphone in her lap.
“I see someone in the audience who just became the aunt of a beautiful baby girl,” Tirzah intoned. “Her name is... it starts with an S... it’s not Susan... it’s not Shelley... it’s Sofia! I won’t say her last name, for the sake of privacy, but can her lucky aunt Allegra please stand up?”
A woman stood up, calling out, “She’s right! Little Sofia was just born—”
“Wait!” Tirzah called. “She was born three days ago, at 6:00 AM. Her older sister Emma was disappointed that she couldn’t be there for the birth, but she got over that fast once she saw her baby sister.”
The woman in the audience gasped. “How did you know?”
“I am the Marvelous Madame Fortuna,” Tirzah said loftily. “I know all!”
Merlin grinned. The advent of credit cards made that kind of scam so much easier. People literally handed over their names when they paid. And then they posted online about their lives.
“Looks like Tirzah and Batcat are doing fine,” Dali whispered. “You stay here. I’m going to take a look in the tunnel.”
Merlin peered toward it again. It still seemed empty. “No, don’t go alone. If there’s anything dangerous, I want to be there with you. How about you go ask Ransom if he knows any more details—”
Batcat swooped down from the rigging, making a beeline for Tirzah. Though Merlin knew intellectually that the kitten was invisible to the audience, it was nerve-wracking to see her flying right there in the ring. Tirzah gave a startled yelp, her eyes jerking upward, and flapped her hand in a shooing gesture.
Batcat veered off, and Tirzah recovered herself, saying, “Ah! I had a very sudden, very strong vision. One of you recently became the first person in his family to graduate from college. Congratulations to James, who got his BA with honors in—”
The winged kitten dove down, landed on Tirzah’s shoulder, scrabbled in the mass of fabric, and fell off, dragging one of the long scarves with her. Tirzah reached for it, but Batcat ran off. The scarf, tangled in her claws, dragged after her. The audience murmured excitedly.
I wish I was an audience person, said Merlin’s raptor. It must be fun to see a scarf move by itself.
A flicker of utter horror crossed Tirzah’s face, then she nodded wisely, saying, “The spirits are strong tonight.”
The audience gasped when Batcat launched herself from the floor, her furry wings beating hard, and flew several circles around the ring with the scarf dangling from her claws. On her third circle, Tirzah reached up and snatched the scarf out of the air.
Merlin, seeing what was coming, gestured at the cats. They began loudly meowing, covering Batcat’s yowl as Tirzah unpicked her claws from the scarf. Then she firmly held down Batcat with one hand and rewrapped the scarf around her throat with the other, ad-libbing, “And now you know why psychics always wear so many layers.”
The audience burst out laughing, then into delirious applause.
Dali ran for the headset, no doubt to suggest that they end the act on a high note and also get Batcat the hell offstage, but Kalpana was ahead of her. The lights blacked out on Tirzah, then went to the dim blue for the scene change. Roland and Zane hurried out to collect her.
As Tirzah was carried out, she passed close to Mr. Varnham. The inspector held up a hand, stopping the procession, and whispered, “I could see how you did the psychic bit, but how did you make the scarf levitate? I was sitting here watching from backstage, and I couldn’t see a thing.”
Tirzah winked at him. “Magicians never tell.”
Her wheelchair had been parked in a corner backstage, so no one would trip over it. Merlin followed Roland and Zane as they set down her desk-chair beside it.
“That scarf trick was great,” Zane said, then took off to change into his clown suit.
Roland said, “Merlin, I’ll help Tirzah. You go check out that tunnel. Ransom thinks it’s important.”
Merlin spotted Ransom changing out of hi
s juggler’s costume and into a stagehand’s all-black outfit. Someone raised in the circus could do that sort of change in fifteen seconds, but Ransom was doing a reasonable, if slower, job of it.
“Great act,” said Merlin. “I especially loved the flaming chainsaws. What’s with the tunnel?”
The exhilaration of Ransom’s performance faded as he let out a sigh of frustration—more with himself than at the question, Merlin thought. “I don’t know. I’d go down with you, but I have to help Roland with the next set change.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Merlin said.
But when he turned to go, he found that his path was blocked. The entrance to the tunnel from backstage was narrow to begin with, and since no one needed to use the tunnel to get onstage for a while, someone had used it as a convenient location to store some heavy scenery. Renu was waiting there as an elephant, so he couldn’t either move the scenery or ask her to move—there was nowhere else she could stand. The only way to get in was through the ring.
Merlin glanced onstage, where his mother was delighting the audience with her talking parrot act.
I can be small, said his raptor. Tiny. So tiny no one will ever see me!
Unless his raptor could get down to the size of an ant, Merlin very much doubted that an audience would fail to notice even the smallest velociraptor as it zipped across a brightly lit circus ring.
But that gave him an idea. When Mom’s act ended, the lights would dim to blue, and the stagehands would set out the backdrop for the performing sea lions. Merlin knew how that scene shift worked, so if he shrank as small as possible, he could stick behind the scenery as it was moved onstage, and so dart across the ring and into the tunnel, completely unseen.
Well, unseen by the audience. Anyone backstage would be able to see him.
Merlin hurried to Dali, who was getting off the headset with Kalpana. Apologetically, she said, “I had to tell her about the magical pets. She knew that wasn’t a trick.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Merlin said hurriedly. “I was going to show off Blue eventually anyway. Listen, I have to get across the ring as a velociraptor during the next scene shift, can you distract the inspector so he doesn’t look onstage?”
And that was one of the many, many things about Dali that made him love her: she blinked a few times, but didn’t argue or demand an explanation that he didn’t have time to provide. Instead, she simply said, “Of course.”
She whispered briefly to the nearest person, who was Bobby Duffy. He grinned and nodded. Bobby picked up a cup of coffee in one hand and scooped up an armful of extra seal balls with his other, and began to hurry on a course that would lead him near the inspector. Just as before he got there, he dropped one of the balls, made a grab for it, and spilled the entire mug of coffee over the inspector’s desk. Dali snatched up a handful of napkins and rushed over, mopping and apologizing.
It was beautifully orchestrated, but Merlin had no time to appreciate it. The scene shift lights came on, and he ducked behind the piece of heavy wheeled scenery being shoved along by a cranky-looking, black-clad Carter. Matching his pace with Carter’s, he shifted.
As he did so, he realized three things: he was the size of a hamster, which was as small as he could get; he not only hadn’t needed to fight with his raptor to get to that size, he hadn’t even needed to ask; and he had forgotten to inform Carter of what he was doing.
Carter stared down at him—his head looked as big as a hot air balloon—then shook his head. “I’m not even going to ask.”
Merlin kept pace with Carter as he pushed the scenery onstage, waiting for the moment when it would briefly overlap with the flat Roland was moving so he could dart behind that. Merlin saw moving feet, and darted...
...but Roland wasn’t carrying a flat. Instead, he had an armful of seal balls.
Horrified, Merlin realized his fatal error. Roland and Carter had been hurriedly trained to take the place of seasoned stagehands who were currently cats or squirrels or sea lions. They knew what needed to go onstage, but not the order in which it normally was placed.
And so Merlin was stranded in the middle of the stage as a tiny velociraptor, with no cover and the lights about to go up.
He started to make a mad dash for the tunnel...
...and the lights came up.
A wall slammed down in front of Merlin, and the light dimmed to a reddish glow. He had no time to stop, but ran into the wall at full tilt. Instead of bouncing off it, the wall moved with him. Bewildered, he kept on running, pushing the wall in front of him. He was vaguely aware of a burst of laughter and applause, and then the light dimmed again and he smacked into another wall. That one didn’t move.
Merlin blinked hard, trying to figure out where he was and what had happened. Then the light brightened again as the wall and ceiling fell away. There was a loud buzzing sound, and he looked up at an enormous, furry, bright blue face. An equally enormous tongue came out and licked him from head to toe.
“Yecch!”
Merlin leaped backward. Now everything came into focus. He was in the tunnel. With Blue.
Merlin became a man again. A rather damp man. Resignedly, he petted Blue. “I can’t leave you anywhere, can I? At least you stayed here instead of rushing out to find me. Good boy.”
Blue’s tiny wings buzzed and he wagged his stumpy tail as he licked Merlin’s hands.
Merlin glanced around the tunnel. It was equipped with a small table, so performers could drink coffee and water before they went onstage, then collect their cups when they finished their act. It also had a couple chairs so they could sit down while they waited.
And there, under the table, was an overturned red plastic bucket from the sea lion act. Someone must have popped it over him the instant that the lights came up, so all the audience saw was a plastic bucket scurrying across the stage all by itself. No wonder they’d laughed!
He rubbed Blue’s ears as he tried to figure out what to do with him. The other end of the tunnel was still blocked by scenery, and Merlin couldn’t risk leading Blue backstage unless he arranged for another inspector distraction first.
Still, it wasn’t a bad place to be stuck, and not a bad time to be stuck there. He had a great view of the ring, and enjoyed watching Dali in her one and only onstage performance, in which she wore a red spangled dress and threw balls to the sea lions. She’d only agreed to go onstage on the condition that she didn’t have to speak, so she just threw the balls while the ringmaster did all the patter.
But despite her stage fright, she looked like she wasn’t having a bad time. The tight dress displayed her luscious curves, and her skin seemed to glow under the warm lights. Much as he normally enjoyed the sea lion act, he couldn’t look at anything but her.
Which was why he spotted Cloud flying behind a flat, making a beeline for her. With admirable presence of mind, the ringmaster whipped off his top hat and captured the kitten in it before anyone in the audience could see. Max kept the hat pressed to his chest for the rest of the act. Merlin heard faint yowls, echoed by backstage meows, and could tell from a certain tightness around Max’s mouth that she must be struggling to escape.
I wonder what’s gotten into her, Merlin thought. She doesn’t normally insist on being with Dali every second of the day.
When the sea lion act ended, the ring went dim and stagehands began clearing out the scenery—all the scenery, since the elephant act was next.
Let’s go now, his raptor suggested.
Merlin automatically started to say no, then realized that his raptor was on to something. If he walked out carrying the bucket, he’d appear to be just another stagehand. And since the scene change lights were blue, anyone seeing Blue would assume he was a big dog or small bear who’d be white in ordinary light.
“Keep your wings flat,” he said, pressing them down with his hand.
Blue obediently flattened them, panting eagerly. Merlin led him across the stage, his heart thumping. But there was no particular react
ion from the audience beyond a few kids murmuring, “Look, a baby bear!” and their parents saying, “No, honey, it’s a big dog,” and other kids saying, “Look, a big dog!” and their parents saying, “No, honey, it’s a baby bear.”
Merlin led Blue backstage, edging behind pieces of scenery that blocked them from Mr. Varnham’s view, and stepped into the men’s dressing room. The looks on everyone’s faces when they saw him were priceless.
Everyone began exclaiming things like “What IS that?” and “Is that a bugbear, like in Janet’s stories?” and “I always thought they were a myth!”
Merlin couldn’t help enjoying the moment. Not only was everyone admiring his marvelous magical pet, but he’d vindicated his mother.
“You should always believe everything my mother says,” Merlin said. “She doesn’t make things up, and neither do I. Mostly. His name is Blue, and he’s my pet. Can you please make sure he stays here? He likes dog treats and getting his belly rubbed.”
Blue promptly rolled over with all four legs splayed out in the air like a dead bug. Larry Duffy rubbed his furry belly, and Blue’s stubby tail wagged.
“Great, thanks! I’ll collect him once the inspectors are gone.” Merlin dashed out, then remembered that he needed to change into his acrobat’s outfit anyway. He dashed back in, did a quick-change, and dashed out.
He headed straight for Dali. She was standing beside Tirzah, both of them watching Caro ride Renu the elephant, standing on her back in a sparkly leotard and waving at the crowd. She did a flip and landed on her feet. Renu trumpeted, and the crowd applauded.
“Does Pete know she’s doing acrobatics on an elephant’s back?” Merlin asked.
“No, and neither did I.” Tirzah ran the hand not holding Batcat through her curly hair, leaving it a wild mess. “She and Renu must have cooked that up at the last minute. When she said, ‘ride an elephant,’ I thought she meant like a horse!”
“No, elephant riders always stand. It’s more...” He swallowed the word ‘dramatic’ when Tirzah glared at him, then protested, “I thought you and Pete knew that! But I didn’t know she was going to do any flips.”