Then there were those who just stood there, staring—some slack-jawed, some with their hands in their pockets as though she wouldn’t know what they were doing when they moved like that. She felt forced into another man’s fantasy—an object, not even a participant. It was cheap, dirty, reductive in the way she’d always feared.
She’d tried telling a few of them to stop, but they never did. If anything, that made them more brazen. However, with the Gentleman’s help, none of the voyeurs stayed with her long enough for the sight of hands all over her to bring them to completion, and the subsequent horrors in the funhouse were hopefully enough to deflate what they’d managed to grow.
Even so, it was as though she was slowly being stripped away to a body alone. It resembled the way she’d felt when the strongman had touched her, except this was her own sexuality rather than incubus magic grating her down. It left her raw as a scraped knee by the time the hands released her at the end of her shift.
The hands had fallen off her dress after the first day in the collective. Now, when she left the funhouse, she tied up her hair and walked to the food court in just the jersey dress. More often than not, people didn’t make the connection unless they got a good look at her makeup. Sometimes they asked to take selfies with an off-duty circus performer, and she’d smile—tired but genuine, as long as they didn’t get grabby—but they usually left her alone when she was in civilian clothes.
And when they didn’t, the Gentleman would come out from the funhouse. He was even freakier outside it because he didn’t look any more normal under less atmospheric lighting. Or the chef would come out from his booth with a meat cleaver. Or Kitty would interfere, putting herself between Neve and any man who thought that she was available just because being touched was her job and she had cleavage for days.
Honestly, even though she was ready to have sex with just about anyone after her shift, she was so overstimulated and tired of hands on her, she wouldn’t have been able to stand most anyone actually touching her. The idea of some random Joe squeezing her tits like bike horns and shoving his dick in her wasn’t appealing at all.
Neve thought it was a good thing that just because her libido had been switched to high, she wasn’t willing to literally fuck anyone. Bell hadn’t made her some kind of unicorn—a living, breathing woman who would never say no. If she could still say no, she was still more or less herself.
Even so, she slept a lot when Arcanium was closed. The sex dreams were getting ridiculous—more and more graphic, more and more weird—but she slept as much as she could, until long after the sun had crossed the zenith of the sky.
While awake, she balanced on a blade’s edge of sexual explosion, fighting to keep from falling back into the infidelity that had drawn her into Arcanium. Tears gathered in her eyes like a river behind a dam. Most days she could hold it back, but the littlest thing could set it off—a girl holding her father’s hand, a happy couple staring at each other with that honeymoon gaze she remembered well, the rare old couple conversing with casual ease.
She usually only got like this after too many nights of not enough sleep. She’d had no idea how nonessential biological urges could have such a toxic effect on a person. It gave her a little empathy for her husband wanting to dissolve the marriage, but blue balls still didn’t excuse everything.
Neve found herself thinking more about her husband to pass the time, going over everything from courtship to cheating in sequence through the filter of new experience—weighing her unintentional crimes against his, weighing his needs and desires against her incompatibilities, searching for a way to make his infidelity make sense. She saw signs Maya might not have been the first, but if she were honest, those few incidents were far from unquestionably damning.
She kept thinking of her husband and what he’d done, what she’d done, in part because Lord Mikhail kept showing up in the food court after his evening performance. She was equally afraid of him and of herself when she started seeing him out of the corner of her eyes more often in the shadows, steam rising from his body and his breath catching the light. Sometimes steam was all she could see, but she’d know he was there. The iron needle inside her pointed to him every time, quivering the closer he came. He didn’t approach, but it was bad enough he haunted her periphery.
Then Neve caught sight of the fingerprints and handprints—large ones—in the dust on the edge of her trailer roof.
She closed the trailer door and stepped back. Christmas lights were strung on posts all around the caravan. The angle and quality of light gave her the perfect view of every smudge in the dust all around her trailer, densest around her bedroom window. He wouldn’t be able to see anything through the blinds, but just being there…things he might have heard her doing to herself…
Neve spun around, but no one else was there except Lennon having a smoke behind his trailers and Carlo walking with Misha. Both human men bore obvious erections, which may have been the reason they were walking as quickly as possible. Carlo got around just as fast as anyone else on his arms. At some points he outstripped Misha.
Neve blushed anew when she thought of why they might be so eager.
“I know you’re there.” She didn’t have to shout, and she didn’t want to call attention to herself from the rest of the cast. “Come out.”
Lord Mikhail emerged from around Troy’s trailer as though he hadn’t been hiding. His trousers contained his cock far better than Misha’s or Carlo’s—another point in the magic leather column.
Neve put her hands on her hips. “You need to stop this.”
“I’m well within the rules. I haven’t overstepped them once.” Lord Mikhail came closer, slow out of caution rather than deliberation. “I haven’t forced myself upon you, haven’t forced you into my bed, haven’t so much as touched you.”
“You’ve been stalking me. It was one thing when it was just in the food court. That’s a public space, and you have as much right to be there as me. But how often have you been on top of my trailer?”
His silence answered her question.
Neve covered her face with her hands. “Oh my God. Really, you need to stop. You need to stop following me, and you need to stop calling to me. You think I can’t tell? It’s like a rope around my spine pulling me to wherever you’re waiting. You might as well be whispering in my ear.”
He crossed his impressive arms. “If I were pulling you in, you’d be certain of it, because you wouldn’t be able to resist. But I’m not trying to call you, and you’re calling me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you think this has been any easier for me? To be told that there’s a woman who I can’t kill within my grasp, and then that woman won’t look at me because I assumed I would kill her?”
“Was I supposed to not be offended by that?”
“I was born ravenous, like the rest of my kind. There are so many who walk this world hungry, Neve. You haven’t the slightest idea what it is to be immortal and always hungry.”
When he tried to look her in the eye, his gaze wandered lower, almost tangible. Her body couldn’t hide under a dress the way he stared at her.
“Bell harnessed us perfectly, little girl,” he said, forcing himself to look away. “You’ve experienced my touch. I am in your skin, in fiber and bone. You cannot shake me off like water from your hair. I can’t stop calling to you any more than you can stop yourself from breathing. It’s my state of being, nothing conscious or deliberate.”
“You may not be able to help what you are,” she said, “but neither can I, and a victim will never be okay being a victim. And as your almost-victim, I’m not going to let you touch me ever again.”
His eyes were burning dark coals behind the curtain of his hair. “It is in a victim’s nature to die. You should have died that night. It would have freed you. Don’t look at me with such hatred. This torment doesn’t only ensnare you. Your death would have freed me as well—to move on, to form new attachments, to crave new bodies. But no matter wh
ere I go, no matter how I satisfy myself, as soon as I return to Arcanium, your scent permeates the circus. It calls to me wherever you are. The more you need sex, the more inexorable the call. I’m drawn to your scent as a starving man to cooking meat.”
She crossed her arms under her breasts, eyes narrowed slightly in suspicion. “If you can’t die, you can’t starve.”
“You know nothing of desire that carves its way through your belly like acid, lust that dries your mouth and brings your cock up hard to your abdomen without relief for months…years…an ache as deep as the mouth of hell. You think I enjoy the way the fire forged me? Neither Sasha nor I took well to the slaughter of seduction. Born from the same flame, we shared the same weakness, yet we still must feed. The Creature and the Gentleman may do so with impunity, but Sasha and I must abstain? Would Bell refuse his precious humans their food for weeks at a time without respite?”
He faced her again, opening his arms until there was nothing about his body that was hidden. “Then to bring you into the circus, calling to me like a banshee in a cave, even louder than the Spider, yet I am no longer permitted use my influence to convince you to let me into your bed.”
Neve wiped sweat from her temple, over her upper lip. She was surprised her nipples hadn’t poked holes through her dress. Every time she tried to tell him to back away, her tongue weighed heavy, arousal a hot stone between her thighs.
“I’m married,” she managed to whisper. As though he were like the other men who propositioned her in the food court and pretended to not see her ring.
“That didn’t stop you before. That hasn’t stopped you from being Bell’s good little girl, satisfying him with your subjugation. And that didn’t stop your man from submitting to Sasha’s magic, releasing himself deep within Bell’s woman instead of you.”
When someone else said it so baldly, Neve’s chest panged so hard she worried she was having a heart attack. “Stop talking.”
“Let me in, Neve. You torture us both.”
“You torture yourself. I’m not your spitted feast, your long pig, something you can discard the bones of when you’re done. I can’t have sex with just any man, knowing he doesn’t give a damn about anything but his own release, knowing he’d kill me a thousand times if he could, without hesitation.” Neve backed away. “You don’t even know me. You just want to fuck a hole. Well, find another one. And stop haunting my trailer. You’re making it difficult to sleep.”
“It’s an invitation that brought me to your bed in the first place, Neve, so don’t lose your temper with me. That was your trespass, not mine.”
“And I deserve death because you make it near impossible to resist? Does anyone say no when you do that?”
“Sometimes. But the ‘no’ always changes.”
The darkness in his eyes glowed dark red, almost imperceptible in the black. She didn’t know how he called darkness into his eye sockets, because the angle of the light didn’t support such shadows. She could only guess what the coal glow within meant. Born of fire, indeed.
“You called me out here,” he said. “I would have stayed in the shadows and continued to wait, as is my right. Because it’s a matter of time, woman. It’s only a matter of time. How much more frustration do you think you can withstand?”
“I’m saying no. You don’t get to have me.”
“Then why are you coming closer?” His deep voice had become a purr. “Why do you reach for me?”
She looked down. Somehow her feet had taken five steps forward without her knowing. And her hands were creeping forward in the air, fingers stretched to meet him.
“Stop,” Neve whispered. She fought to keep herself from touching him, stumbled backward and used that momentum to fall against her trailer, three arms’ lengths from him.
“I can’t,” he said, emphasizing each word. “I will always call to you, as you will always call to me, and the call will get stronger the closer we are. That is my nature as lure and yours as prey.”
He was a celestial body, drawing her into his orbit, gravity screaming at her to come closer, that he would finally satisfy. Angels and demons weren’t supposed to be too far off, one breaking off from the other—at least according to her religion’s theology, which didn’t account for jinn. Hers only had demons, angels, the Nephilim if you squinted. And if her theology was wrong about the origin of demons, about jinn, what else did it fail to account for?
He wasn’t just getting to her body. He was getting to her mind, and that she hadn’t expected. He’d been all charm at her bedroom window. Now he’d shed his charm and replaced it with substance—prickly and desperate, but substance nonetheless.
She hated when people assumed she wasn’t intelligent. She hadn’t assumed he wasn’t because of his looks but because of what he was. What need did an incubus have for intelligence? Yet despite the distraction he had to be experiencing, as keen as her own, he was keeping up with her. Given that men’s faculties tended to drop as their cock hardened, Neve wondered whether he’d surprise her even more when he wasn’t frustrated.
“You can tell me to go away,” Mikhail said, “but I’m not bound to your requests for greater proximity. I’ve been here much longer than you. I know my boundaries. Do you?”
“Fine.” She was vaguely aware she was scratching her arms like a dope fiend in withdrawal. Walking away from him and toward her trailer door was like walking away from a dealer. God, how pure what he offered was—in the sense that it wasn’t pure at all, in the sense she’d never felt dirtier, happy as swine to smear herself with the filthiness of every inch of his temptation. “But you can’t come in unless invited, right? Like vampires. Well, I can’t stop you from hovering like a lovesick psycho, but you can’t follow me in.”
She stepped up into the trailer, clutching the frame against the almost pain of turning her back on him.
“I do not know why your kind denies what it needs, especially when there is no danger to you. How much more peace could you have if you simply let yourself be, if you understood how pathological your need to control yourself is, when you were never meant for chains?” It was as though he spoke right next to her ear, but when she looked over her shoulder, he was still a respectable distance.
“Fine sentiments from someone who bound himself to Arcanium, where Bell starves you like an ascetic.” The sides of the door groaned under her grip. It made her think of mattress springs and rocking cars. Her legs shook so badly that she stepped back into the grass.
“That’s different. It’s not temptation I seek to avoid, but death. I can’t eliminate it, but it can be limited—reserved for those who trespass on this circus, performed as a function rather than a need.”
“I didn’t trespass. So why was I punished?” She wanted to strip off her dress, too tight, too constricting, the slight bit of skin still covered in desperate need of air.
“You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said quietly. “Or rather, Bell put you there. He set me free in your direction. He made you the perfect beacon. The women and some of the men of this circus scream for me every night, too. I can barely sleep for the clamor. But only Sasha can share my bed, and that doesn’t ease the ache. I followed the sound of your cries from afar, as piercing as any of the cast of this circus. You haven’t stopped calling me, Neve. You’re begging. You know what you want more than you’ll allow yourself to admit, or else you wouldn’t be backing up to me now. You wouldn’t want me to fill you deep, spread through your body, my pleasure coursing through your bloodstream, your pleasure bursting in your brain. I would take your words, little girl, and yield my own to you. No more talking when I can barely think. Grant both of us that grace.”
“Stop doing this.” Her feet rasped over dead grass. Breath came in short gasps that clouded the air in front of her. Tears threatened to burst through the dam. Everything on edge. Everything pulling her to him. She blamed him, but she was the one holding the rope and hauling herself backward.
“I can’t.” H
e sounded as though her rope had closed around his throat. “This isn’t me, little girl. This is you and me together, and I don’t think we can fight it…much…longer. It’s inevitable, Neve. Please. Please don’t make us suffer anymore. Just…let me…”
Her head fell back from a sharp wave of pleasure through her body and hit his chest.
The contact was electric, violent as sparks where they met. She slumped, boneless, against him and moaned, “Yes.”
Whether intended as permission or exclamation didn’t matter.
He smoothed massive hands down her shoulders, and with them, the straps of the dress. He exposed her shoulders, folded down the jersey until it slipped over her breasts and snapped back underneath them. She covered his knuckles as he palmed her breasts. An ever-shrinking part of her mind attempted to push him away, but his touch was magnetic. She thought she’d die if he stopped now, that he would tear skin away if he tried to remove his hands from her.
They could have been the cluster of humans from the haunted funhouse, surgically sewn limb to limb, or the aerialists cursed together. With their contact came clarity, primitive complexity in the drumbeat of their hearts pressed close, his chest to her back, his pulse in his palms over her breast.
Neve thought she heard other sounds, other shouts through the caravan area, some muffled through walls, but soon all she could hear was the rushing in her ears and the rumble of his moan when he dipped his head to kiss up her neck. Their legs tangled as they moved forward to the open door of her trailer. She stumbled but he kept her up, lifting her from the ground and holding her up against him by her breasts alone.
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