Wicked as They Come

by Delilah S. Dawson

  Funny. The life he was offering me, the one I resisted so strongly, was based on freedom. We both wanted the same thing, yet he didn’t seem to understand that love was itself a cage, and I wasn’t ready to hear that gilded door snap shut. I reached out a hand, tentative, and barely brushed his arm. He smiled at me and leaned to kiss my glove.

  “Don’t mind me, love. Getting all philosophical. I’ve never had someone to talk to before. I’m glad you’re here.”

  I smiled, too. It was a tender moment, a peek behind his mask. And a glimpse at what my life would be like outside of his caravan. Unlike in my world and my time, I had to admit to myself that in Sang, a woman couldn’t be both independent and safe, whether she was full of blood or hungry for it. And then my confined stomach grumbled, making him laugh.

  “But enough of philosophy,” he said. “Let’s feed you.”

  It was noon, and the dining car was crowded with hungry carnivalleros. Little booths lined both sides of the long wagon. At one end, a short buffet served stew, bread, and little crabapples. At the other end sat a small table, covered with a cloth of mauve paisley. A mysteriously smoking black cauldron squatted on the cloth, and I watched as Criminy reached in for a small glass tube of red liquid.

  Blood.

  “Is that all you eat?” I asked.

  “Mostly,” he said mysteriously. “Two vials a day, when possible, but I can subsist comfortably on one, as long as it’s human. With animals, it takes much more to satisfy. Without any blood, I could last a few weeks if I had to, although I’d be weak and peevish and eventually wither to nothing.”

  “How do you know it’s not diseased?”

  “What’s diseased?” he asked.

  “Surely you have diseases here?” I asked, dumbfounded. “Colds, flu, rickets, measles. Plain old infections. Any sort of sickness?”

  “If a person doesn’t eat or drink, he gets sick. Is it different, in your world?”

  I, a nurse, had landed in a world without viruses or bacteria. Was that even possible?

  Carrying my tray, he guided me to a larger, curtained booth in a corner. We slid in, one on either side of the table, and he fiddled with the curtains until we were in a cozy little nook lit by a buzzing orange lamp, the thick velvet muffling the sounds outside. The king’s table.

  I had forgotten to get a drink and started looking around for something, but Criminy smiled and said, “You’ll be wanting wine, won’t you? Just a moment, love.”

  As he left me alone in the private nook, I pondered a world without illness. How was I going to describe modern medicine to a blood drinker living in a world of clockwork machines and magic?

  Goblet in hand, he slid back into our booth.

  I took a sip of sweet red wine and said, “Where I come from, people get sick with diseases caused by tiny, invisible monsters called viruses and bacteria. But there are no blood drinkers and no magic.”

  “Invisible monsters but no magic,” he said, thoughtful.

  He removed the cork from his vial and poured it into his own goblet, swirling it around. The thick red liquid clung to the glass, and he sipped it politely. My gorge rose, and I dropped my eyes to my stew, which smelled divine.

  “No magic,” I agreed. “But lots of science. We have huge buildings called hospitals where doctors work, and they can do all sorts of surgery and fix people on the brink of death. When a person loses a lot of blood, they can replace it with someone else’s donated blood. And you can get sick by sharing diseased blood.”

  He seemed charmed. “That’s fascinating,” he said. “A world where people go around giving each other blood, but no one wants to drink it.” Then he gazed at me, a soft light in his eyes. “Were you happy, where you came from?”

  “I was starting to be,” I said, “although there were always challenges. What about you?”

  “I was maybe a little sad, before,” he said quietly. He reached out to stroke my hand, a gesture so fast and light that I wondered if I had imagined it. “I’m one who always yearns, in any case.”

  We ate for a while in companionable silence. Or I ate, and he occasionally sipped at his glass, his lips stained bright red.

  “You know, in my world, blood drinkers are storybook monsters,” I said.

  “Really?” he asked, delighted. “That’s marvelous!”

  “There are stories about blood drinkers called vampires, who are supposedly dead. Some people think they can turn into bats or fly and that they’re afraid of crosses and mirrors and garlic.”

  “So that’s what you called me earlier. But that sounds nothing like a Bludman, apart from the drinking blood bit,” he said, then grinned slyly. “Of all the things you could accuse me of, being dead is definitely not one of them.”

  I sputtered a little and changed the subject. “This stew is delicious,” I said. “Do you know what’s in it?”

  “Vegetables, of course,” he said. “Potatoes. And bludbunny. They’re the easiest things to catch. Cook just takes off a glove and stands around, and they come running. Bop ’em on the head, and dinner’s on the table.”

  My spoon clattered to the table.

  “So I’m eating something that might have eaten a person?”

  “Well, yes. Not that it matters. Everything eats living things. Bludbunnies mostly eat each other, when they aren’t mating to make more bludbunnies, which is what they do most of the time. Blood is good for the constitution, pet,” he said.

  I should have been more grossed out, but I wasn’t. Maybe it was the hunger talking, but the stew was wonderful, fragrant and thick. If I hadn’t been wearing a very restrictive corset, I would have gone back for seconds. As it was, I finished chewing a hard, tart apple as he drank the last drops of blood from his glass, and we smiled.

  “The wine is lovely, too,” I said. “Sweet, like berries.”

  “It’s a special vintage,” he said. “A gypsy secret.”

  I noticed that before he flipped the curtains back, he did that same move where he shook like a wet dog throwing water, and his entire persona changed from the open, curious, tender but dark man I saw in private to the sly, hard-edged, imperial gypsy he appeared to be in public.

  “Right,” he said wolfishly. “Time to shine.”

  As he stood in front of the assembled carnivalleros in the grass outside, I was amazed at the change in his figure. He wasn’t actually a large man, but he now seemed larger than life, a born showman. He paced for a moment, lithe as a jungle cat, inspecting the crowd, then stopped, facing us, and threw something invisible onto the ground.

  Purple smoke enveloped him, and the audience rustled around me where I stood, front and center. But no one gasped. They were carnies. They weren’t easy to impress.

  When the smoke cleared, he stood on a colorful pedestal in a sequin-spangled coat, high collar, and tight black breeches, the perfect ringmaster. He removed his top hat, revealing Pemberly the clockwork monkey sitting on his head. She doffed her fez, and fireworks erupted from underneath, showering us with streamers and glitter.

  The people around me dusted the little bits of paper off their shoulders with a grumble, but as the paper fell to the ground, each piece flickered into a butterfly. The swarm of color rose around us, quivering, and then flickered into the afternoon sky, spelling, “Welcome Lady Letitia, Fortune-Teller.”

  The crowd laughed and clapped, and the people around me patted me on the back with gloved hands. Mrs. Cleavers gave me a push, propelling me toward Criminy, who gave me a hand up onto the pedestal. I smiled nervously.

  “Friends,” he said, his voice booming. “Allow me to introduce Lady Letitia, glancer extraordinaire and world traveler.”

  Technically, I suppose, it was the truth.

  My eyes roamed the crowd, trying to take in all the strangeness. Everyone I had met so far was there, smiling in welcome. There were probably thirty of them, all told, and I had many people left to meet. Oddly, I didn’t have a bit of stage fright. Standing before them seemed natural, and
I struck a pose, hands in the air, and flashed my most brilliant smile.

  And then everything went black.

  8

  My eyelids fluttered, fighting to stay closed. So hard to wake up. Impossible.

  The world faded to black. An awful, sulfury smell made my eyes water, and then Criminy’s concerned face swam up against the blue sky.

  “Letitia, love, where are you?”

  Then blackness descended again. I heard an annoying song like mad puppets playing the kazoo. I hadn’t asked Criminy—were there fairies or gnomes or other magic creatures roaming around Sang? And if so, did any of them play kazoos?

  My body shook, and my teeth chattered together. I needed to find the gnomes with the kazoos and smash them.

  Something dug into my chest and prickled before I could breathe again. It was a familiar feeling, and I realized that Mr. Surly had just jumped off of his favorite sleeping perch: me. And in the background, still the maddening music kept repeating.

  I blinked again.

  My cell phone. Nana’s special ring.

  The familiar outlines of my bedroom materialized from the darkness. The foot of the bed, the lamp, the overly large numbers on the alarm clock. 2:21 a.m.

  Ring, ring.

  I rolled over and groped on the night table for my phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Tish, are you OK, sugar?” came Nana’s worried voice.

  Why was she worried about me, when she was the one calling at 2:21 in the morning?

  “I’m fine, Nana,” I mumbled. “What’s wrong?”

  “I had a nightmare,” she said. She sounded as if she was annoyed with herself. “And I woke up with heart palpitations. Do I need to worry about that, do you think?”

  “It’s pretty normal to wake up from a bad nightmare feeling like your heart is hammering,” I said, trying to sound patient and not worried. When someone was as old as Nana and in such poor health, almost anything could be a bad sign. But I never wanted her to know that. I needed to take her mind off her heart, help her relax. “What was the dream about?”

  “Oh, sugar, you were lost, somewhere far away,” she said. “And you were lying on a road in an old dress, and these big red rats were eating on you. It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”

  A shiver crawled over my skin. I hadn’t asked Criminy what color bludrats were, but now I could guess. I had also never asked him if glancing—or other sorts of prognostication—ran in families.

  “Well, Nana, I can give you a one-hundred-percent guarantee that I’m safe in my apartment, asleep with my cat,” I said. “I’m just fine. And you’ll be fine, too. Do you think you’ll be able to go back to sleep?”

  “If I could only get up,” she said peevishly, “I’d go make me a cup of chamomile tea.”

  “I’ll make you one first thing in the morning,” I said.

  “Won’t need it then,” she grumbled, but I could already hear the sleep sneaking up on her. I didn’t tell her, but I always slipped a little Ambien in with her nightly meds to help her sleep. “Night, night, sugar,” she said, her voice fading.

  “I love you, Nana,” I answered. “Sleep tight.”

  As I closed my eyes and tossed the phone onto the comforter, I heard myself say, “And don’t let the bludrats bite.”

  “She’s coming around,” someone said.

  I opened my eyes. The glare was blinding, and I put up a hand to shield myself from the sun. I couldn’t breathe, and I clutched at my belly. My hand crashed against brocade, the stiff stays of my corset threatening to puncture me as I gasped.

  “I forgot to hang up,” I said stupidly, trying to swim back into whichever reality seemed easier.

  “Letitia, love, are you with us again?”

  A shadow loomed over me. It was Criminy Stain, his stark face whiter than usual and his eyes frantic and fierce with concern.

  “I think so,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Give us space,” he barked, and the circle of curious faces hovering over me disappeared. “Go back to practice, you lazy lot.”

  His eyes traveled up and down my body, checking for damage. I wiggled my toes for him before I realized that he couldn’t actually see my toes.

  He stroked my face with a gloved finger, saying, “You scared me, pet. You fainted and fell.”

  “That would explain why my arm is bruised,” I said, rubbing my elbow.

  In hindsight, I think that was when I finally understood that I wasn’t dreaming. You don’t get bruises in dreams. You don’t ache. And you definitely don’t sit around talking about where you went when you wake up, afterward.

  “We thought you were asleep, but we couldn’t wake you,” he went on. “You came back for a moment with Mrs. Cleavers’s smelling salts, but your eyes rolled back, and you were gone again.”

  “I think I remember that,” I said. “But it’s all fuzzy. Something stank.”

  He smiled tenderly and said, “I’ve never seen anything like it. But you’ve cemented your flair for the dramatic. The nosy buggers think you went into a glancing trance and will wake up with tidings of doom.” Then he whispered, “Where did you go?”

  “Help me stand,” I said. “I need air.”

  He scooped me up as if I weighed nothing and placed me on my feet. I wobbled a bit. We attempted a dignified stroll toward his trailer. He was mostly carrying me, actually.

  “No,” I said. “Put me down. I need to walk. My feet are all pins and needles.”

  He set me down and waited for me to stop swaying, then offered his arm. We set off for the open field in the opposite direction of the wagon tracks. My skirt tangled around my legs, and I had to kick it to make a trail through the grass.

  When we were well away from the caravan, I said, “I was back home.”

  “Back in your original world, you mean?” he asked.

  “Yes, in my own bed, in my pajamas, with a big fat cat on my chest, waking from a dream at two twenty-one in the morning. As if this was a dream.”

  “What woke you?”

  “My phone was ringing.”

  “Your what?”

  “Phone. It’s a machine for communicating. My grandmother thought she was sick. It was hard to open my eyes, though, and it felt like this world was trying to tug me back. I saw you here, for just a second, but then I was there again.”

  “So the salts worked,” he said to himself. “What did you do?”

  I laughed. “I did what I had to. Assessed the situation as a professional, made Nana feel better, and promised to make her tea in the morning. And then I was here.”

  “Curious.”

  “Yep.”

  We walked for a while, each lost in thought, a light breeze stirring the ringlets that had fallen from my hairdo when I collapsed. At one point, he stopped to remove his sequined coat, revealing the black one I had worn earlier underneath. With a coy smile, he folded the sequined cloth again and again until it was the size of a handkerchief, and then he stuffed it into one of the inside pockets of the black coat. I grinned, as delighted as a child, knowing that his magic would never seem quotidian to me, no matter how accustomed I became to his strange world.

  “So the real question is, why did you go back?” he finally said.

  “No, the real question is, how do I get back to stay?”

  “Do you think that’s possible?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that both worlds are real. If every time I sleep here, I’m awake there, and every time I sleep there, I’m awake here, I’m going to go crazy. If there are no real dreams, if my brain can’t rest, it’ll be torture.”

  I kicked a rabbit that was sniffing at my boot. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I hugged myself and turned away from him.

  “It’s not so bad, love. We’ll find a way,” he said gently, moving close to draw me into a hug. With my back against his body and his arms around me, I relaxed a little. Whether it was his smell or
just the closeness of another person, I couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out, couldn’t help unburdening myself of what I was feeling.

  “I’m not crying because I’m sad. I’m just so relieved. If it’s back and forth, that means I’ll still see my grandmother. I was so scared that I would be trapped here forever, and my grandmother would worry about me and mourn me and die alone. But it looks like I get to live both lives, even though it makes no sense and will probably make me completely insane.”

  “Insanity isn’t too bad.” He chuckled. “I know plenty of mad people, and they get on fine.”

  “But there are so many questions,” I said, sobbing. “If I die in this world, do I die in that world? What if I go unconscious while driving? What if I’m asleep there, and a patient dies because I’m here?”

  “I don’t know, pet. But I’ll try to find out. I’ve got some old books I can check,” he said. “Perhaps this has happened before.”

  “There’s no magic in my world,” I said. “But there’s a disease called narcolepsy. People just fall asleep standing up wherever they are for no good reason. Maybe this is where they go. Maybe I’m a narcoleptic.”

  “One might think it’s the best of both worlds, no pun intended,” he said carefully.

  “But I want a choice,” I said.

  I jerked away from him and stumbled, and when he tried to steady me, I swatted him away.

  “Look, I have commitment issues, OK? I had a fiancé, and he almost destroyed me. He treated me like a child, or a doll. He hit me. I was barely a person. And then I decided to fight back, never to be controlled again. And now here I am, trapped.”

  He watched my outburst with concern, hands in pockets and mouth drawn down. I kept expecting him to interrupt and tell me how to fix my problems, the way Jeff would have. Instead, he just listened.

  “What if I like it here better? Nothing’s ever equal. What if I spend all my time there longing for Sang and every moment in Sang feeling guilty for not wanting to go back to Earth? What if I start to care about someone, what if I start to care about you? I could never make the choice to stay here. My grandmother needs me. Without me, she’ll quit fighting, just give up and die. It would rip me in half!”