by Trudi Jaye
Sam nodded. Now that his block was gone, there was nothing stopping him from taking care of Veronica. He just had to make sure he was the first person to find her, once Indigo worked out where she was hiding. He could wait a little longer.
“I’ll keep searching,” said Indigo. “There must be something that will tell us where she is. So far, she’s gone to ground rather successfully.”
“We’ll find her,” said Sam. It was a promise.
Chapter 6
Celestine peered around the end of the rollercoaster sign. There was no one there. It was late; the Carnival’s opening night was long-since over and the last of the punters had been ushered out the gates. Everyone else in the Carnival was snoring in their beds, sleeping off the night’s activities. Overhead, an almost full moon gave enough light for Celestine to make out shapes in the darkness. Nearer the rides, the muted night-time security lights glowed. Awkwardly, she maneuvered her crutches into position and swung herself toward the rollercoaster. She pulled off her glove and touched the metal of the main thrill ride.
Nothing but good thoughts and happy vibes. Excellent.
She continued along her usual path through the rides, touching each one with her bare hand, and making sure she couldn’t feel any bad futures. It was draining work, but she was determined to help in whatever way she could. She’d been horrified when she learned about all the terrible things that had been happening to the Carnival right under her nose. She’d kept herself in a bubble, protected from the rest of the world by cloaking herself from head to toe, and avoiding all possible contact.
No one had come to her because she’d cultivated her reputation of being a fake so well. They didn’t think she could actually help.
She was haunted by the thought that she could have saved Abba, if only she’d touched his arm in passing. She would have seen what was coming, clear as day. She knew it. He’d been so good to her, had taken her in when no one else would. She didn’t even know why he’d done it. She’d never told him the truth about her powers, that she could see a person’s future just by touching them skin to skin. He’d been a good man who’d understood that she was desperate and needed a place to call home.
So now she was determined to make sure the Carnival didn’t experience any other mishaps. It was too little, too late—but it was better than nothing.
She finished with the thrill rides and moved over to where Alfie kept the animals. Their enclosures had been set up on the far side of the Carnival, away from all the people. The Beastmaster always insisted that the welfare of the animals came before anything else, including the comfort of the Carnival folk. She swung along on her crutches until she was in front of the first stall. Two horses moved over to her, snuffling at her pockets for the apples they’d become used to getting from her.
“Alfie would probably have a heart attack if he knew I was feeding you as well,” she whispered, reaching up one hand to scratch the horse’s long nose.
The horse nickered, as if to disagree.
She kept moving, the crutches making her nightly rounds slower than normal. Her arms were sore from where her skin rubbed against the old-fashioned wooden frames and her swollen ankle ached. She slowly passed all the animals, touching as many as she could to make sure they were healthy and hale.
She came to the enclosure of the trio of tamarin monkeys that Alfie had recently been given when their owner died. She paused yet again. Two of the tiny creatures had been seriously ill, and Alfie had carefully nursed them back to health using his considerable talent with animals. One reached out its fingers, and she touched it. She knew immediately that the monkey was pregnant. With twins.
“Oh, congratulations, little one,” she whispered. She wondered if Alfie knew. She would have to think of a way to tell him without his realizing it.
She kept walking, gliding her fingers gently over the equipment and concentrating on the whispers of energy she received back. It all seemed normal.
Until she came to the dog enclosure.
They were a mixed group. Alfie couldn’t bear the thought of only having one breed of dog, and only being able to rescue one type of animal. She’d heard him describe the circumstances in which he’d acquired every single one of the fourteen dogs that now performed in the show, from the funny little mongrel, Squirrel, to the large Samoyed-German shepherd mix, Sash, and the Great Dane, George.
Her hand touched the edge of kennels, and she was immediately hit with images of the dogs escaping, running and barking excitedly as they chased each other through the Carnival. It wasn’t a disaster, but it was certainly something that would cause a problem for Alfie and his team of animal trainers.
She ran her hand along the outside of the kennels until she found it. George had been worrying at the back of his kennel, digging at the wood until it was lose and weak. It wouldn’t be long before the large animal would be able to get himself out. She wasn’t entirely sure how he managed to get all the other dogs out, but she was pretty sure it had something to do with their act, where George unlocked the kennels behind the back of their trainer in the ring. It got huge laughs from the audience, but it had obviously given George ideas.
Celestine stood for a few moments, contemplating her options. She put her hand out toward George, letting him sniff her hand before she scratched him behind his ear. He pushed against her, wanting more. He was a young dog, probably not even fully grown yet, despite being so large. He had floppy ears and was a beautiful grey-blue color. He was so friendly, she had never felt concerned by his size, but now she realized he had been growing faster than his trainers had given him credit for. He was too big for his bed.
She could leave it. It wasn’t a disaster. When all the dogs escaped, they’d figure it out as soon as they got them all back home.
But it would take time and effort that could be better spent elsewhere. She sighed and went around to the back of the kennel, investigating the problem. A couple of boards and a few nails was all that was needed.
Fixing the hole was a start, but she would also need to sort out George’s problem. He was too big for this kennel now, and it was causing him anxiety and frustration. She would have to try to let Alfie know somehow.
Celestine let out a frustrated breath of air. It was actually quite difficult to tell people their future without letting them know that was what she was doing. She’d been doing it on and off for the last few months, and while she was getting better, she still found it exasperating. Just telling them would be so much easier.
But people could never keep secrets. She’d learned that early in life. If she told even a single soul, word of her whereabouts would get out. And then her brothers would find her, and her life would go back to the drudgery and constant fear that it had been before.
No.
She would find a way to talk to Alfie about it, without letting him know.
But first she had to fix George’s kennel. There was an equipment van that sat alongside the animal enclosures where Alfie stored everything he might need to look after the animals in his care. That was bound to have something useful.
It didn’t take long before she found a piece of particle board at about the right size and a glue gun, which would be better than the noise of hammering in nails.
George whined at her while she went to work, but she ignored him. It was for his own good. She was just finishing the last line of glue, when a noise behind her made her freeze.
“What do you think you’re doing?” asked a voice.
Celestine let out a breath of air. It was Sam.
She turned slowly, holding the glue gun behind her back. Her mind searched for answers, trying to think of an explanation that would make even a modicum of sense. Nothing appeared. “I... uh...” Nope. Total blank.
Sam was wearing jeans and a shirt, but his feet were bare. His hair looked mussed with sleep. “Why are you here?” His tone was accusatory.
“I was... uh... just visiting George. I couldn’t... uh... sleep.” Celestine sh
ifted nervously, gripping the glue gun tightly behind her back.
“Why were you messing around with the kennel?” He stepped forward again, trying to peer over her shoulder at what she’d been doing.
“I was saying hi to George. He gets lonely.”
“I don’t believe you.” Sam moved quickly forward and grabbed at her arm, pulling the glue gun out of her hand. “What’s this?” He held it up in front of Celestine’s face.
Celestine’s brain froze and then unfroze on the truth. “George’s kennel is broken. I was just trying to fix it for Alfie.” She wanted to hit her forehead with her palm, she was so annoyed at the way she blurted it out. She was normally a lot more subtle than this. Something about Sam made her break all her usual rules.
“You realize that it’s three o’clock in the morning, right?” He was standing close to her, his hand still wrapped around her upper arm. It wasn’t tight, just a warm presence she could feel through the material of her jacket. He wasn’t much more than a shadow in front of her, but she saw his eyes sparkling in the darkness. She wondered what color they were.
“I couldn’t sleep. I was taking a walk.”
“You know that the Carnival has been targeted by sabotage, right?”
Celestine felt her face start to flush with heat. Who did he think he was? He’d been with the Carnival for five minutes, and he was interrogating her like she was the newbie? “Look, it’s fine. I wasn’t doing anything. I was just heading back to bed.” She tried to get him to break his grip on her arm, but he didn’t let go. The crutches made everything awkward, and she struggled to maintain her balance, even as she pulled away from him.
“Let me go, or I’ll scream,” she said.
“Would you really? I would have thought you’d want as few people to know about your late night escapades as possible.” His voice was as hard as she’d ever heard it.
Celestine shivered. “I’m not doing anything wrong! I couldn’t sleep and I came out for a walk. End of story.” She gave another jerk on her arm, and this time he let her go. She stumbled backwards and almost lost her balance. Sam reached out and steadied her with both hands. Without thinking, she put her bare hand up to help with her balance against his bare arm.
Straight away, everything around them went still, and Celestine cried out. She wasn’t ready; she couldn’t handle seeing another vision for Sam. She didn’t want to see his dead body. But it didn’t matter what she wanted. Lights sparkled across her visions, the rainbow of colors from the gods. Celestine sighed, reveled in the moment of happiness before she was thrust into Sam’s future.
This time he was alive. Barely. He was tied to a chair, and the same woman who had shot him in her previous vision was looming over him. The rattling sound of a train shunted past, and she stood waiting for the noise to settle down. “So you thought you could take me on, did you, Sam?” She smiled, a strange lopsided affair that sent chills along Celestine’s spine.
“Let the others go, Veronica. They’ve done nothing to you. It was all me, all my idea.” Sam spoke through swollen lips; blood leaked out his mouth and down his chin. His eyes were almost completely swollen shut.
“Don’t try to be heroic now, Sam. It’s too little, too late. You were with me through all those years. You were by my side, helping me to gather power from those people. We decided who lived and who died. You can’t escape your fate by one little moment of heroism.”
Sam leaned back in the chair. “Why me? Why did you have to do that to me?” he whispered.
Veronica leaned in until her face was barely inches from Sam’s. “Because you enjoyed it,” she said with a smug smile.
Sam jerked as if he’d been struck. “I never enjoyed it. Not once, in all the time you had me trapped there.”
“Then why didn’t you leave? The block on you wasn’t that strong.”
“I didn’t know how. I didn’t know...” Sam’s words trailed off, and a haunted look appeared on his face. “Could I have broken that block on my own?” he asked in a whisper.
“Of course you could have. Your magic is strong. But instead you sat back and wallowed. You wanted to stay with me.”
“I didn’t know. You never told me.”
“You knew. Don’t tell me you never knew. It was obvious to me from the moment you entered The Experiment.”
“I wish I’d never attended that show.”
“It’s too late for regrets now, Sam. Far too late.” Veronica lifted the gun, and pointed it at Sam’s head.
She pulled the trigger.
Celestine jerked back into the real world, her heart racing and sweat dampening her body. Her first instinct was to wipe off the spatters of blood and gore that had exploded from Sam’s body as he’d been shot. She’d lifted her hand to do just that before she realized she was safe, on the ground, her head cradled in Sam’s lap. There was no blood and Sam was still alive. She let out a breath.
Sam was staring down at her, his expression unreadable. Celestine tried to sit up, but she was too weak, her arms unable to hold her weight. The vision still ricocheted around in her head, the words jumbled together, the images of Sam and Veronica caught up together. She was dizzy and disorientated. “Who’s Veronica?” she asked softly. “Why does she hate you so much?”
Sam said nothing for a moment. “She’s my former employer. I helped kill her brother.”
Celestine nodded. “You need to watch out for her. Promise me that you will be careful, Sam.” The image of Veronica pulling the trigger was burned into Celestine’s mind.
“She needs to pay for what she did. I can’t promise anything.”
“Then you’re going to die, Sam.” Celestine pushed herself up again, and this time it worked. She moved so she was sitting next to Sam on the ground.
“I can’t let her get away with it. There are too many people, too many lives at stake.”
“That’s important to you? All those people?”
“I helped her....” Sam’s face was bleak.
“You were forced to help her. That’s different.” Celestine shut her mouth tightly as soon as she’d said the words. She knew she’d said too much, and she could see Sam had picked up on her mistake straight away.
“How could you possibly know anything about it? I’ve never mentioned it.” Sam’s eyes were focused on her like a hawk on a mouse.
Celestine wracked her brains. “Someone must have told me.” She swallowed. “The rumor mill around the Carnival is pretty active.” It was; she just wasn’t friendly enough with anyone to be part of it.
“Jack says you’re a fake fortune-teller,” he said abruptly.
Celestine blinked. Indignation swirled in her chest and she wanted to tell him she was actually a damn good fortune-teller. She opened her mouth, paused, and then snapped it shut. Remembered where she was and what she was doing here.
“Yeah, that about sums me up,” she said softly.
Chapter 7
He saw the hesitation, the desire to say something else. He recognized it from his years with Veronica. But he also knew he wasn’t going to get her to admit anything in the dark at three o’clock in the morning, just after she’d had some kind of seizure.
“I think we’d better get you back to your place,” he said. He stood up and gathered up her crutches, which had fallen when she’d started to shake and shudder.
He put out his hand to help her up, but she shook her head. “I can do it myself,” she said.
He stood with his arms crossed over his chest while she struggled to stand up. He let out an exasperated huff of breath as she tried for the third time to stand and stepped in, put his hands under her arms and pulled her to her feet.
She let out a cry of indignation and glared at him once she was standing. He shrugged. “You couldn’t get up.”
Every time he saw her, Celestine was doing something he didn’t understand at all. Why had she been walking in the mountains early in the morning when she sprained her ankle? With a goddamned mountain cat, for cr
ying out loud? What was she doing out at this time of night?
None of it made any sense. “I’ll walk you back to your trailer,” he said.
“That’s okay. I’ll be fine.” She backed away from him on her crutches.
“It’s my duty as a doctor to make sure my patient is okay,” he added.
Her eyebrows came down. “What, right after you accuse them of sabotage?”
“I didn’t say it was you. I just said it was suspicious.”
“Which is an accusation.”
Sam sighed. He didn’t think she was suspicious or a threat to the Carnival. But what on Earth was she doing wandering around like this? “I’m sorry. I was concerned. Jack and Rilla have been filling me in on what has been happening around here. I guess I’m a little jumpy.”
“We’re all a little jumpy. No one likes it when the Carnival is attacked. But I wasn’t doing anything suspicious. And I can walk myself back to my place.”
Sam shrugged and continued to walk beside her as she awkwardly swung herself along on her crutches. “It’s on my way.”
“I thought doctors were supposed to be good listeners,” she muttered.
“I’ve been out of the profession too long.” Sam smiled. He liked it when she grumbled at him. Everyone else was on tenterhooks around him, worried about his fragile emotional state. Celestine didn’t know or care about that. It made him feel a little bit normal again.
“If you’re a fake fortune-teller, why did you join the Carnival?” he asked. He watched the emotions flit across her face before she controlled them. Irritation, frustration, fear.
“A girl’s gotta make a living, right? I grew up on the circuit. I know the lifestyle, and I do a decent act.”
“But why this Carnival?” Did she know and understand about the magic that swirled around them? Something in her story didn’t quite add up.
She glanced at him, her eyes unreadable in the darkness. “I’d heard about Abba. People said he was a strong leader, who protected the people in his employ. And the Carnival itself is amazing.”