“Speaking for the exclusives, like I said,” Valorie said. “So you’re just going directly to pain tonight, huh?”
“If the monsters want me, they know where to find me afterward.” Now she was almost as naked as Neve, wearing only underwear again. Kitty brought her a pair of silver shackles, and Maya snapped them around her wrists in front. Kitty hooked the leather leash to the chain between the shackles.
“Is it just me or are we suddenly overdressed?” Valorie quipped to Caroline.
“What exactly happens now, aside from female human sacrifice?” Neve asked.
“Maya goes first.” Kitty helped Maya put her hair up—a whip that left welts could also cut hair. “Bell gets them all to participate in counting her blows, gives them a taste for the blend of violence and sex they’ve come to expect.”
“That doesn’t sound very healthy,” Neve said.
“Remember that they think it’s fake.” Maya winced every time the flesh of her back pulled on where the rings had pierced through. “Plenty of healthy people enjoy fake violence. Hell, plenty of healthy people enjoy real violence when it’s contained, controlled. If the Ringmaster wasn’t intending to draw blood, would you still question it?”
Given her background and own enjoyment of stinging things, Neve shrugged to cede the point.
“Once the Ringmaster drags Maya off,” Kitty continued, “Lady Sasha does a snake dance to warm everyone up. Lord Mikhail is usually a part of that dance, but tonight, he’s working the crowd from the seats. Seth and Lars will do a version of their aerial act. That’s as close as they’re okay with us going homoerotic, as long as it’s athletic—very Greek of them. Then Bell will bring out the wheel of chance, and whoever it lands on, he’ll introduce. Then you pick a door, which selects a monster.”
“Then you do the monster,” Valorie said.
Kitty nodded. “Depending on how long each performance takes, Bell picks either two or three women. Bell will close it out with a hypnosis session that puts members of the audience with each other to humiliate and thrill them, because as you said, Neve, nothing brings people together like collective humiliation. And nothing keeps them quieter about it outside the party. It usually ends with some kind of orgy. Then we retire to our cots or our own clandestine meetings back here or out there with them.”
“Then the golems wake us up with everything ready for us to leave, just in time to arrive at the circus and eat breakfast before it opens,” Caroline said. “At least you didn’t come into Arcanium during the Halloween season. That can be brutal.”
“Sounds like fun.” Neve scratched her scalp. Even though she’d been magically cleaned, she wanted a shower. She wanted her own bed, empty. And she still wanted a movie night with comfort food and comfortable clothes. “So is it just the three of us or are you coming back for something else, Maya?”
“I’m just the whipping girl tonight,” Maya replied. “Sometimes Kitty participates.”
“But exhibitionism isn’t my kink at all.” Kitty started combing Caroline’s hair. “I’ll sometimes go out to the audience and invite someone to a booth, but I’m not a performer. Even people who think it’s hot to fuck me tend to point and laugh at the Bearded Lady in public because they think they’re supposed to. After all, what’s funnier than a hairy woman getting some love? I’m not interested in playing jester. One of these days, I might have more options.” She tugged at the braids of her beard. “But for now, I prefer to take my sex in private, where my partner doesn’t feel compelled to pretend they don’t want me.”
“Usually the twins perform, but I don’t see them anywhere. Oh, here they come.” Maya raised her hand in greeting. “Now it’s an actual game of chance for the rest of you. Is Christina playing tonight?”
“Not tonight,” Joanne said. She and her twin wore filmy beige fabric wound around their bodies like a sarong to show where they were bound and that they were clearly not wearing underwear. “She and Troy are shacking up on one of the cots, at least once Troy’s through with his part.”
“Christina plays maybe once a year. Sandra used to play sometimes, too. People kept expecting the demons to break her like a twig,” Valorie said. “Then our Skeleton wished herself out healthy and took the Fat Man with her as a bonus for being such a good voluntary, so Bell’s been on the lookout for both. Be thankful you didn’t wish to lose weight. It would have been a real shame to lose all this.”
Valorie pinched Neve’s side. Neve danced away from her, laughing because she was deathly ticklish, not necessarily because she thought it was funny.
“If the menfolk could play, it would be an even better game,” Valorie added, “but alas, we’re not yet at a time when straight men won’t catch the gay by looking at a man touching another man’s dick.”
“So we’re all that’s left to sex up the demons and monsters of Arcanium,” Caroline said brightly. “It’s a terrible burden to bear.”
“And the rest of you are okay with random Arcanium demons, not ones you pick?” Neve asked.
“Sure, why not?” Caroline said, shrugging. “They still follow the rules and you’re guaranteed a good time, no matter how creepy they get. I mean, you know how it is, having sex with a demon, right?”
Kitty didn’t yank on Caroline’s hair the way she had with the twins, but she nudged Caroline’s head.
“Whatever.” Caroline dialed down her enthusiasm a tick. “From what I understand, they have the power to make it really fucking bad or really fucking good, and the way Bell has it set up here, it’s always the really fucking good—for our benefit and to keep them from doing too much damage. Because now I’m thinking about how it would be to take Ciarán without magic. Yowch.”
“And they’re pretty good about making the scene about whoever you want to.” Maya lowered her head. “You know, doing a show for your person—or people.” She nodded at Caroline and the twins in acknowledgment. “Me, I mostly just like Arcanium’s demons. Even the clowns have kind of warmed up to us, which is weird as hell after avoiding them all these years. I guess we have you to thank for that, Caroline.”
“Except for Murphy. Murphy’s still a grouchy bastard who doesn’t want to play outside the hive, bless him.” Caroline waved at Comedy and Tragedy as they went through the door with the rest of the monsters.
Valorie gave Caroline a slight push as though to test that she was a human being and not a robot. “You’re weird. Must be to make up for the fact that you’re the most normal woman in Arcanium.”
Valorie’s hair was already in braids and loose from its bun, so Kitty came up behind Neve and started brushing her hair then twisted it up and wrapped it around a comb.
“Trust me.” She patted Neve’s shoulder. “The necklace is worth showing off, and you won’t have to worry about it catching on the collar or getting tangled.”
“Thank you.” It was odd to thank Kitty for preparing her as a symbolic sexual human sacrifice, but Neve admired practicality.
Kitty let two stray locks frame Neve’s face so she didn’t look too done up, diamonds or not. “Are you sure about this?”
Neve suspected Bell had a hand in Kitty doublechecking.
“Not in the least. But I’m not going to get any less frayed tonight, even if I do nothing. The only way for me to know if I like this is to try. I don’t appear to have a choice in being a nymphomaniac, but if I have to be, I think I want to be the best damn nymphomaniac in this circus.”
Maya dissolved into a fit of laughter that she tried and failed to turn into coughs.
Valorie crossed her arms with a crooked grin. “You have some fierce competition. You ready for it?”
“Bring it, Contortionist Barbie.”
That just made Maya laugh harder. Kitty slapped her rear, but she couldn’t hide her own grin.
Caroline narrowed her eyes in contemplation. “How do you even measure that?”
“Believe me,” Neve said. “I’ll come up with a way.”
* * * *
N
eve couldn’t see anything from backstage. All she could do was listen to Bell announce each act.
The Ringmaster had a rich, booming voice, rounder and more resonant than Lord Mikhail’s, though similar. Bell had none of that. He spoke quietly, intimate and seductive, hypnotic without soothing his audience to sleep. He brought the same intensity to the microphone in his role as emcee as he did to his fortune teller readings. Every person in the audience probably felt like he was talking to them.
Neve pressed her forehead against the partition concealing the monsters in an attempt to cool her skin when Bell called Lady Sasha to the stage. Since the beginning of the show, the sex demons had subtly increased their magic—only those who knew it was magic would recognize the building excitement and arousal for what it was. Once Lady Sasha took her place, however, and the harem music began, she took firm hold of everyone she could reach, and Lord Mikhail apparently did the same. There were moans coming from the audience, and moans behind her from the cast who had retired for the night but who’d found a partner to while the magic through.
Kitty had ushered the Ringmaster—who’d carried Maya offstage with him like a child—away with her somewhere private to tend to Maya’s wounds. It had been strange to see the Ringmaster hold someone so tenderly and show a modicum of kindness, although his face still appeared to be stone-carved malice. There’d been no other way to carry her, though, with thirty blows applied to her back and thighs, rings ripped out and flesh torn to shreds. She’d been in no shape to walk. Her eyes had been half open in a daze that hadn’t been anywhere near an expression of bliss.
Neve didn’t understand the impulse to be struck like that, especially in front of an audience. It went well beyond the realm of S&M, so unrelentingly sadistic Neve couldn’t wrap her head around why it was allowed at all. Whipping someone into shock had to be harm by anyone’s standards, no matter if it was voluntary or not. But the other women, while concerned, didn’t appear frightened by the extent of Maya’s injuries.
It wasn’t Neve’s back, though, so she let it go to deal with the snake pit in her abdomen. She’d already had sex in front of everyone, so she didn’t know what the big deal was in her brain, why this was different just because it included a demonic partner rather than living props that looked and felt like multiple demonic partners.
Lady Sasha left the stage and stepped into the green room where the rest of the cast milled about, her cobras entwined in new patterns around her. Cast and crew skittered away from her, as much from the smoldering frustration in the set of her jaw and burning red eyes as from fear of touching her. Naked, she strode to where the golems had laid out the cots, separated into small rooms by curtains like in hospitals—privacy by sight rather than by sound and presuming most people wanted to sleep.
After Seth and Lars’ performance, they exited the stage with Lars’ hand on Seth’s shoulder as they rushed into the back. Joanne and Jane grinned. It was hard to believe they’d ever been successfully closeted, especially given the states of their tight, elastic pants, which concealed nothing. Theirs had to have been one of those secrets everyone knew but kept for the boys’ sakes.
“Well, my dear friends,” Bell said into his microphone, “I think it’s time we move on from foreplay. What do you say?”
Applause followed.
“Would you like to play a game?”
Louder applause, more individuals discernable through the din—presumably from those who had been to one of these events before and knew the game in question.
Misha rolled out a primitive contraption most people would recognize from any cheap carnival—a wooden wheel outlined in metal pegs, which the arrow would click against when the wheel was spun. The circle had been split into four wedges, each with a drawing of one of the women available—presumably done by Troy on the fly, since each event would have a different cache of women to choose from. He managed to capture each of the girls in a sketch, in a style that suggested he’d done most of his own tattoos.
“Who shall we see first, hmmm? Ma’am, please come up here. Tell us your name—no last names, let’s pretend we’re anonymous here—your sign and your most secret kink, please.”
The audience laughed, but so did the woman who took the microphone.
“My name is Ingrid. I’m a Leo, and I love a good massage.”
“Come now, Ingrid,” Bell said. “A good massage isn’t a kink. It’s a given.”
More laughter, but also a female groan that suggested Bell was giving her one.
Neve licked her lips, her body suddenly aching. She clenched her teeth against the desire. The more she fought, the worse her arousal would become, but then again, that would get her in just the right place to take whatever random monster was assigned to her, if any.
“Share with me, Ingrid.” God, he sounded like quick sex in a closet. “What’s your secret fantasy?”
“I want to be blindfolded,” Ingrid said, hesitant, but urged to divulge both by applause and by Bell’s natural influence. “Blindfolded in a strange place, so I don’t know who’s taking me.”
“Maybe we can arrange that tonight. One of my girls is going to have a stranger in a stranger land here soon, too. Why don’t you give that wheel a spin, Ingrid, love?”
The tick of the arrow on the pegs was too fast to be Neve’s heartbeat but felt like it anyway.
“Ah, our spirited twins. Joanne, Jane, it’s time to come out and face your fate.”
“See you on the other side.” Jane saluted the other girls as she and Joanne pushed against each other’s backs in order to stand.
Neve sighed, but she could only be so relieved when not being selected meant she had to deal with the anxiety a little longer—or a lot longer. She didn’t know how long the twins would last.
“Our wonderful audience may wonder why the girls are pictured together, other than the obvious,” Bell said. “I could be cruel and have only one of them ravished while the other is spared, but let’s face it, folks, that just wouldn’t be fair. Where one goes, the other follows, and I simply can’t bring myself to separate them from the monster in store. All the more for him, yes? My creatures can more than satisfy them both until all four legs can’t hold the two of them up.”
Enthusiastic applause. Wolf whistles. The early sounds of moans again, like the maze and haunted funhouse soundtrack. Some people were already getting started just at the sight of the twins and the suggestion of what was to come.
“Ladies, you know what you have to do. Our strongman is here to keep you from trying to run. Wave to them, Lord Mikhail.”
Oh God. That meant Mikhail would be close to the stage, maybe even in the front row. She wouldn’t be able to ignore him. Neve brushed her hand over her breast, cupped herself, rolled her nipple between three fingers but forced herself to stop.
“You have two doors. Behind each door is a monster, but it’s up to you the kind of monster you choose. Some are downright sweet, I’m sure.”
Laughter.
“Go on, Joanne, Jane. Choose. There’s nothing left to do but choose.”
The lights dimmed. Music rose up to meet the anticipatory silence.
“The music is cued to match the monster,” Caroline whispered. “They all have different rhythms, different personalities.”
Valorie closed her eyes to listen better. “They got Ciarán and Moss. Damn it. I was hoping for them.”
“Wait, both Ciarán and Moss?” Neve said. “You can’t separate Joanne and Jane, but how come the twins gets both?”
“They don’t separate either,” Valorie replied. “They do everything together. It’s similar to Seth and Lars’ curse, if I had to guess, except it’s not a curse.”
“I always thought they were… What do you call it? Some kind of symbiotic relationship,” Caroline said.
Valorie snorted. “More like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ciarán’s the kindly, horny old superego and Moss is the nasty bastard id.” She shrugged when Neve raised an eyebrow. “They grow on you. And
though Moss is a nasty bastard, he’s not awful or anything. He’s the one to go to if you like dirty talk.”
“I like dirty talk,” Caroline said happily.
Valorie gestured at Caroline. “Exhibit C on why Resident Nymphomaniac is a difficult title to win.”
“I have an edge,” Neve said.
“Which is?”
“It’s what Bell made me.”
“Well, he’s very good at that, isn’t he?” Valorie said.
“Fishmonger,” Neve muttered.
Valorie laughed. “That’s putting it kindly. I’ve read Hamlet, too.”
“Thank God,” Neve muttered.
“Don’t thank God. We get so very bored around here sometimes. The Complete Works of Shakespeare was something I challenged myself to read in a year. It took me a little over that, but I’d already read some of them in middle school and high school, which helped.”
“Do you still have it?” Neve asked hopefully.
“It’s a doorstop, but yeah. You’re more than welcome to borrow it. I probably won’t read through it again.”
“Do you have thoughts on it?”
“You mean, does good William give me the feels? Sure he does, sometimes. Why? You want to start a book club?”
“Hell, yes,” Neve moaned, resting her head against her forearm, unable to distract herself enough from the sounds of what was going on during the performance and in the audience. There were vibrators. Vibrations and moans and groans and sighs and grunts and growls, and a steady stream of profanities from Moss.
Valorie bit her lip against a grin. “Well, when you put it like that, I suddenly feel like a bookworm.”
“Me, too. I actually took a class on Shakespeare in college. I was going to take another one, but Arcanium happened.” Caroline spread her arms. “As Arcanium happens.”
Valorie rubbed Neve’s shoulder. “You going to make it there, Nymph?”
Neve nodded, let out the shaky breath she’d been holding. “It would help if you would tell me what to expect, what monsters might be waiting for me behind those doors.”
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