by Hart, Callie
“All right, then. Maybe we can call a locksmith. They’ll open the lock for us and let us down there if we pay them.”
“They’re not allowed to just open locks and give people access to places whenever they feel like it. You can only have the locks on your own legal property opened. They ask for proof, your ID or whatever, and we can hardly pretend to own this massive hole in the ground now, can we?”
Sarah scowls. She doesn’t want to hear problems; she only wants solutions. “Do you remember why we came here in the first place, Zara Llewelyn? You dragged us here, so we could find that little boy, and now all you’re doing is throwing up roadblocks.”
“I didn’t want to come here! I wanted to leave this to the cops. You talked me into this!” I object. “I’m also not throwing up roadblocks. I’m just pointing out the obvious. And besides, have you thought about what we’re going to do if we manage to break the padlock of this thing, get down into the subway, search through a system of dangerous tunnels in the pitch black, and we do find someone down there? A man capable of potentially killing a teenager, and then taking a little boy? What are we going to say to him? ‘Oh, hello there, sir. We know you probably have plans for Corey Petrov, but we were wondering if we might just take him home now. His folks are mildly concerned about his whereabouts.’ You think that would work?”
“All right, all right. No need to get tetchy.” Sarah narrows her eyes at me. “When we go and buy something to cut the chain, we can arm ourselves, too. A couple of axes. Maybe a baseball bat.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” I spin around, looking up at the sky. Where the fuck are they? There has to be a couple of hidden cameras around here somewhere. This is all one big, terrible, tasteless joke, and whoever has set this up must have paid Sarah to pretend she’s lost her fucking mind.
It’s beginning to rain; I feel the light kiss of drizzle on my cheeks. Spokane doesn’t do weather by halves. It’s either hammering rain, or it’s bone dry. It’s either blazing hot, or blisteringly cold. We have about five minutes to get inside, or we’re going to get soaked to our skin when the heavens inevitably open.
A guy wearing a bright orange jacket hurries across the street, tucking what looks like an old school CD Discman into his pocket. He’s young, maybe only seventeen, his hair a riot of dark curls. I think for a second that he’s going to walk right into me—he hasn’t looked up once as he crossed the road—but at the last minute, as he steps up onto the curb and veers around me as if he’s known I was there all along.
He walks right up to the grate covering the disused subway station entrance, and that’s when he finally peels his gaze from the floor. His eyes are cornflower blue, the color of bright spring mornings and the ice over a frozen winter lake.
“Wouldn’t stand here if I were you,” he says, his voice carrying the words on a strange, lilting accent. Sounds almost Irish, but not quite. “Tonight’s a busy one. Gotta keep the way clear, y’know?” He’s wearing in-ear headphones, and the cable that comes down from the ear pieces themselves, plugging into the Discman sticking out of his pocket, is stripped of its plastic in at least three places, revealing the frayed copper wires inside. There’s no way they work.
“I’m sorry. A busy one?” I ask. “What’s going to be busy?” Rochester Park is bustling, sure, but the intersection of Cross and De Longpre is actually pretty damned deserted.
“The fair, stupid,” the boy answers. “What time is it?”
“What?” Sarah seems stunned by the boy’s very existence.
“What time is it? Right now?” he repeats. “I forgot to put my watch on before I left. Patrin’ll kill me if I’m late.”
I check my cell phone, while Sarah and Garrett eye the boy suspiciously. “It’s eleven twenty,” I tell him.
“Right, then. I mean, you can wait here forty minutes, then you’ll be first in. It won’t be worth it, though. Patrin always overcharges the first bunch of people down the stairs, and he’s in a shit mood tonight. He won’t be nice to any of you. Better to go off and get yourself a drink somewhere and come back in an hour. He’ll have remembered how to smile by then, and you might save yourselves a bit a’ money.”
Blinking, I try to process the boy’s words. His accent isn’t that strong, in fact it’s quite lovely and melodic, but I still can’t understand what he’s saying to us. “I’m sorry. But, are you trying to tell us that a fair will be opening up down there? In forty minutes?”
The boy releases a bark of laughter. “Aye, that is what I said.” He rummages in his jeans pocket, producing a bunch of keys. Quickly, he has the padlock open, the grate lifted high enough for him to slip down the dark stairway beyond, and to drop it closed behind himself. We watch in surprised silence as the kid slips his hands back through the grate’s bars and closes the padlock up once more.
“Remember,” he calls up to us. It’s so dark down there, I can barely make out the shape of him; only his blue eyes, his pale, white face, and his orange jacket are visible amongst all of the black. It looks as though the shadows are eating him alive. “Your fancy plastic money won’t work down here. We do not accept PayPal, Venmo, and no Apple Pay, neither. What I’m tryin’ to say, as politely as possible, naturally, is that you better line those pockets a’ yours with some green paper, otherwise Patrin’s gonna get himself all worked up again, and, well…I suppose he’s just an angry man all round, really. But still, better to come prepared! Never know. You might see something that takes your fancy!” His words echo as he descends down the stairs, until he’s finally gone. Sarah, Garrett, and I all bend over the grate, peering down into the darkness, squinting after him.
“Well, that was strange,” I say. “A fair in a disused subway station. A fair. They can’t have any rides. There can’t be enough space, surely?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah mumbles.
“A fair’s a hell of a lot safer than a bunch of empty, rat infested, dark tunnels, though. I think it’d actually be smart to go down there now. It’d make sense to go ask the people who work down there if they’ve seen Corey.”
“Nope.” Sarah stands up, turns, and begins to walk off down the street, away from the corner of Cross and De Longpre.
I exchange a confused look with Garrett. “Did she just leave?”
He shrugs.
“Sarah! What the hell!”
She doesn’t turn back, and she doesn’t stop. She’s a block away by the time we catch up with her. “Sarah! Why the hell are you fast-walking down the street like you need to find a public restroom?”
“I can’t go down there,” she says.
“It’s just a fair, Sarah. You’re not scared of clowns, are you?”
“No.”
“Acrobats?”
“No.”
“Cotton candy?”
“No, of course not. Don’t be stupid.”
“Then what’s the big deal. A second ago you were chomping at the bit, ready to charge down there, just the three of us, without a flashlight, to take on a violent criminal. Now you’re practically running away from the prospect of a stupid, very lame fairground attraction.”
Sarah grinds to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk, teetering a little on her skyscraper heels. Her lips are parted slightly, her skin pale and covered with a sheen of sweat. She looks suddenly ill.
“God, Sarah. Are you okay?”
She swallows, looking back the way we’ve come, and for a moment it looks like she is about to rip her heels off and start sprinting back toward the car. “I’m not afraid of fairgrounds, Zara, but that is no regular fair ground. I can’t believe I didn’t realize…”
“You’ve been there before?”
A hard light glitters in her normally soft, warm eyes. “A long, long time ago. It was above ground back then. It’s…it’s a dangerous place, Zara. Nothing good will come of it if we go down there.”
She’s terrified. I’ve never seen her look so frightened. I’ve definitely never heard her voice tremble with panic. “How c
an you possibly know it’s the same fair?”
She shakes her head, her hand moving to the sun pendant around her neck. She pulls on it, as if the damn thing is choking her. “Because there is only one. That is the Midnight Fair.”
10
PASHA
SHELTA
I sit in the Mustang, watching people race down Cross street, considering my options. Option number one: I start the engine, bail out of the parking lot, tires squealing, rubber burning, as I abandon this entire stupid plan and I go home, where Shelta and my other family members can’t lay the guilt on so thick that I feel like I’m being smothered by it.
Option number two: I can go down there, tell my mother to go fuck herself, refuse to speak to anyone, and then walk away. I can leave, and I can never go back.
Option number three: I can go down there, and I can try and make peace with Shelta, as Patrin suggested. I can try and think of a way to get Sam and Jamus out of the hot water they currently find themselves up to their necks in, boiling to death, and then I can get the fuck out of dodge. I can tell them that I’m done, I don’t want anything else to do with the clan, and that they should all seriously lose my number.
I fidget in the driver’s seat, uncomfortable and ill at ease. Being this close to the fair is making me feel really fucking weird. There was once a time when I couldn’t have comprehended walking away from my family. Not even for a second. I hated being sent away to school when I was a child, and then as a teenager, too, and I was always so damn desperate to make it back to the vitsa.
Things were different by the time I found myself banished. Being cast out for your crimes is one of the most shameful, terrifying prospects for any member of a Roma family, but life within the Rivin camp had already been tarnished for me by then. When I realized that I was being sent away, that it was really, truly happening, and for such a long period of time, too…I was actually relieved.
I try not to think about the night that I stabbed my uncle. I try to suppress the vivid, stark memories of the knife in my hand, and the string of profanity that spilled from his mouth as he looked down at his own stomach and realized what I’d done. I don’t feel any guilt. I don’t feel ashamed of what I did. The only true emotion I experience whenever I relive that night is regret. Regret that I didn’t do it sooner. Regret that I didn’t drag it out, and make the bastard suffer.
My mother’s face is still burned into my mind, searing itself into the backs of my eyelids every time I close them. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past three years picking apart her reaction. On the surface of it, her panic and hysteria had come across as if she was worried about me. She’d hurried me, wanting to get me out of the encampment as quickly as possible, while it was still pitch black and everyone else was still fast asleep in their vardos and campers. She’d told me to keep my mouth shut, to not breathe a word of what had happened to anyone. She’d told me that if anyone directly asked me what had happened to Uncle Lazlo, I was to deny even being at the camp that night, and she’d told me to say that I knew nothing of what had transpired.
All of it, the money she’d thrust into my hand, the fact that she’d taken the knife and promised to dispose of it, her constant reassurances that no one would ever find out what had happened to Lazlo—it had seemed like she wanted to keep me out of trouble. That she was concerned about me and wanted to protect me.
Very quickly, I’d learned the truth of the matter. She’d pretended to be worried about me, when all she’d really cared about was my standing within the clan. My father was king for five short years before he died of a heart attack. I was fifteen when he keeled over at the dinner table, clutching his chest, lips turning blue, flopping around and gasping for air like a fish out of water. I’d watched him puke all over himself as he died, and no one had been able to do a thing to save him.
From then on, as mother to the next heir to the Roma throne, Shelta held the ultimate position of power within our community. Until I turned twenty-one and found myself a wife, I couldn’t be crowned, and essentially, she was the one ruling over the entire clan. When I eventually celebrated my coming of age, she was far from sad when I didn’t seem interested in gettingAA married right away. She defended my decision not to marry and have a family—highly unusual for a member of any Roma vitsa—and told everyone I was waiting for the perfect Roma girl before I chose to accept my role as king.
Very convenient for her. Very convenient for me. I didn’t care about the power that came with that title. Didn’t give a shit about it, and, frankly didn’t want it, even back then.
My actions that night threatened every luxury, and every comfort, and every modicum of respect and adoration my mother had become accustomed to, and she wasn’t about to let anything threaten that. So she secreted me out. She gave me money. She told me to act surprised when news of Lazlo’s death traveled like wildfire around the camp the next morning. And all of it so she wouldn’t be disgraced and have to hand over the keys to the kingdom.
There was just one problem: Lazlo hadn’t died. Or at least, the fucker was still alive in the morning when everyone had gathered around his blood-soaked body and tried to save what was left of him. Plenty of time for him to tell everyone who was responsible for his injuries. And plenty of time for my mother to change her tune and demand that I be brought to justice, regardless of our blood connection.
It had been a mess.
It had been fucking brutal.
And no one had cared that Lazlo had raped a little boy.
Feels like I’m glued to the driver’s seat as I watch Leo, Patrin’s nephew, pop up out of the stairwell that leads down to the Midnight fair. He raises the iron grating that covers the entrance and chains it to the bolt in the wall behind him. We’ve always been told not to wear bright colors, or at least it was believed we should always wear dark clothing back in the day, but Leo’s jacket screams like a beacon in the dark—bright orange and garish. I grin at the sight of him and find that I’m actually a little excited to talk to the kid again.
Last time I saw him, he was thirteen years old. Now almost seventeen, he’s grown nearly a foot and his shoulders are broader, back straighter—the posture of a young man on the brink of transcending puberty, only to find himself struggling through the first confusing years of manhood.
A group of people approach the kid, and Leo must tell them they need to wait; they shift over to one side and begin to form a line, which slowly begins to grow as Leo bobs up and down the stairs, bringing up a stool, a small side table, a small wire basket, and then a black jacket that he drapes over the stool. Finally, he brings up a flashlight and sets that down on the table next to the wire basket. I’m amused as I watch him fuss over the arrangement of the item; it’s always been Patrin’s job to guard the entryway into the fair, and Leo is obviously setting up for him now, trying to make sure everything’s perfect for his uncle before he comes lumbering up those stairs.
If there’s anything I’ve missed about the clan in the last three years, it’s the kids. Leo, and Marissa, Joy, and Selena and Pauli. I have no clue how many babies have been born since I’ve been gone, but as of right now, there are bound to be at least four or five new members of the vitsa that I don’t even know exist.
I’m not a sentimental person. Not over emotional. In fact, the only girl I dated for more than a couple of months out of the last three years was kind enough to tell me that she suspected I was a sociopath and had absolutely no feelings whatsoever. So I’m a little stunned by the pang of sadness that aches in my chest as I watch Leo disappear down the stairs again, for what looks like the final time.
Once I leave… once the fair runs its course here and the Rivin family move on, there’s very little chance that I’ll see any of the kids again. Or Maria, Lavinia, Mercy, or any of the other women who helped raise and guide me, when Shelta was too busy conducting her affairs of state.
As it begins to drizzle, light droplets of water falling to mist the windshield, distorting the world on th
e other side of the glass, I labor against the possibility that there might be a fourth option open to me here. But no… I shake the thought clean out of my head.
There’s no fucking way.
I can never be their king.
Fury ripples through me as I grab my leather jacket and climb out of the car. I should never have allowed such a stupid idea to form, to even half form inside my head. I should know better than that by now.
The night air is damp and cold, but thankfully not even a flutter of wind disturbs the fallen leaves that have gathered in the gutters as I jog over Cross Street. Eight or nine prospective fair goers grumble at me, telling me to join the back of the line when I approach the mouth of the stairwell that leads down into the fair, but I wave them off. “Calm your shit, people. I’m not skipping your precious line.”
When I was thirteen years old, I was in a state of panic. Everyone else at the boarding school Shelta had packed me off to seemed to be growing facial hair, their bodies changing, developing muscle where there had been none before, and I started to feel a little left behind. I was still kinda scrawny and short, and my balls were still a bald as the day I was born, but one morning, I woke up and when I spoke…
There was no awkward cracking voice for me. No hilarious high pitched, then suddenly bottomed out deep oscillation to the timbre of my voice when I spoke. I simply opened my mouth and out came this dark, deep, low raspy growl of a voice, and suddenly I was Pasha.
Two of the men standing in line instantly look away when I open my mouth and that dark, deep, raspy growl comes out. If they were dogs, their tales would be tucked so far up their own asses right now that they wouldn’t be able to take a shit for a week. One of the women blushes—a pretty chick in her early twenties, with lust written all over her face.
See, this is what I’ve learned about my voice: it polarizes people. It will either turn them on or scare the living shit out of them, and which camp you fall in generally depends on your sex. Women, for the most part, find the gruff, sharp edge to my voice to be the most sexual thing they’ve ever experienced in their lives. Meanwhile, men generally find it to be threatening, some sort of challenge to their own masculinity. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. There have been plenty of women who have been terrified of me because of my voice. Plenty of guys who have propositioned me because of it, too.