“So are good women,” he said. “Goodnight, Kitty.”
* * * *
Bell found Kitty under the picnic table lights with another beer. He conjured his own over and sat down next to her.
“How do you think it went?” he asked.
“I think he’s strongly ambivalent about joining the circus,” she replied. “He should be more ambivalent about me.”
“For a man not cursed in against his will, he accepted Arcanium’s premise quickly,” Bell said.
“I guess he chose to believe I wasn’t lying or crazy. Besides, it’s easier to believe it when you’re here. The natural magic of a circus. He might not believe it anymore when he wakes up tomorrow morning with a sex magic hangover and the sun in his eyes.”
Bell reclined next to her in silence for a while. They sipped their respective beers at staggered intervals.
“Do you want me to give him the worst attack of his life? A bad infection, maybe?” Bell asked.
That coaxed a grin out of her. “You know I can’t wish anymore.”
“I’ve got so much more power than wishes can account for, especially if what I do induces a wish.”
“I know,” Kitty sighed. She massaged her forehead. “No, don’t do anything. I don’t want him to make the decision out of fear—well, more fear than he has on his own. What are you doing here anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be with Maya, especially after a whipping?”
“She’s healed. Tied up. With a toy. I told her to wait for my permission to come,” Bell said.
“And if she can’t?” Kitty asked.
“I’m sure I’ll come up with something.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“She understood that I was coming to see you for a good reason,” he said.
“And what reason is that?” Kitty asked. “It’s not my decision.”
“It matters to you, though. And you matter to me, because you’re one of mine. Never forget that,” Bell said. He stroked her braid where it draped over her far shoulder.
“Does he know?” Bell asked suddenly.
She didn’t move her head to look over at him. She kept her face carefully schooled. It was useless to lie to a mind reader, but that didn’t mean she had to feed his unique appetite.
“What’s there to know?” she replied.
“Interesting,” Bell murmured.
“No, it’s not.”
She slowly let herself lean to the side to rest her head on his chest. He continued to pet her hair.
Finally, she pushed herself back up and found the strength to stand. She stared at the empty beer bottle in her hand.
“Is he going to do it?”
Bell stood up with her. He kissed the corner of her mouth and lingered there. “Now, Kitty, you know I won’t tell you that.”
Chapter Four
After that, it was radio silence from Victor.
Most of the days, Kitty could let it go. Radio silence was par for the course. She didn’t call or text unnecessarily as a rule and only contacted him four or five times a year at best.
The parts of the days, however, when her mind obsessed over the lack of communication—not even a stray question or a note to let her know that he’d decided to go another direction with his life—Kitty had to keep telling herself that he needed time and space, regardless of which decision he made. He didn’t need her hounding him, cluttering up his inbox and voice messages with something she’d get an answer to by next Monday. If he decided to leave with Arcanium, he needed those precious seconds with his family. If he decided to stay home, she needed to cut the threads that bound her to him anyway, the way she always did.
And it had always been so easy until the prospect that she might not have to cut those ties had come along.
But as best as she could, she tried to go about her life as…well, normal.
* * * *
One of the wonderful things about being the Bearded Lady of Arcanium was that she didn’t have to perform. She mostly just had to be. However, this meant that when the circus wasn’t open, she didn’t have a lot of official business to do. Sometimes she was assigned to create, alter or mend costumes, but the circus didn’t have enough turnover for her to have much to do on a weekly basis.
Still, she had a place in Arcanium beyond her exhibition stage or in front of the brightly lit vanity in the back of her tent before evening performances.
Bell was the central nervous system that kept Arcanium alive, active and magical. The Ringmaster was the iron fist. Kitty thought of herself as its heart, a duty she’d gradually taken on since she’d first become part of Arcanium. And she welcomed and loved her role as circus den mother.
It wasn’t as though the Ringmaster was going to cook someone chicken soup when they were sick—sick in the way that only the most cursed could become. And Bell delighted too much in his wishing games to stroke most of his people’s hair when they were sad, especially if he didn’t like them. He liked Kitty. He knew how important she was to him, even if she’d only taken the role of his lover once.
Cats weren’t worshiped to quite the same degree as they had been in the age of the Egyptian empire, but they did rule the Internet, so Kitty considered herself in good company. Spending her time with jinn only reminded her that, in other cultures, she might have been considered a goddess because of the way she looked, instead of just another freak.
Curiously, the jinn in Arcanium sometimes treated her as though they agreed, although she was pretty sure she had been born of flesh, not fire. She had the birth certificate to prove it. Maybe it was because she’d never been afraid of them—not really. After being perceived as inhuman for most of her life, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to believe in and accept those who weren’t human at all. They might as well have been human oddities to her, even those who refused to hide some or all of their demon appearance.
Bell was indistinguishable from human, and he was probably the only one Kitty hadn’t seen without his human mask. For others, the Ringmaster was included in that number.
The Ringmaster, who obsessively wore humanity like a cape without understanding it. He passed so easily within the world of humanity, but one could never confuse him for humane. No one had ever seen him out of his human disguise, yet he was the least human among them—a cold-hearted demon through and through, with a demon’s penchant for dealing pain.
One might even argue that cold-hearted was too generous.
Heartless.
Oh, he was a sadistic psychopath from boots to pointed beard. Kitty wasn’t naïve. And as hard as it was for a man to change, a demon was nigh impossible. The Ringmaster enjoyed his work—would like to have more of it—as much as someone like him could enjoy anything. Cold-hearted, yes, sometimes cold even to himself.
Kitty thought that was why, out of all the men and women of Arcanium, the Ringmaster came to her.
Sitting before her vanity mirror, Kitty watched him enter, tying the tent closed behind him. He could whip a girl in the middle of a crowded stadium without flinching, but he refused to let anyone know that he came to her.
Bell knew about them. She assumed he’d known from the beginning, since there was precious little he didn’t know. Maya was the only one who might understand, since she gave the Ringmaster the pleasure of whipping her every Saturday evening, but not even Maya knew.
From the first time he had approached Kitty a little over eight years ago, his visits had never ceased to mystify her. But more mystifying than the Ringmaster choosing Kitty was that Kitty had never stopped him, never once denied him.
It wasn’t as if she was desperate and the only man she could get was a hellborn demon who would hightail himself hellbound when he tired of Arcanium’s dearth of viable torture subjects. Victor was just one example of how she rarely lacked for company in her bed when she wanted it.
But the last day of every month, here the Ringmaster was in her small tent, with its vanity, two chairs, the rolling costume racks hidden under blankets,
and a cot and pallet where she slept. Above, there was another flap on the roof of her tent so that she could sleep under the stars if the whim crossed her mind.
She didn’t say a word when he turned back to her. She simply stood up from the stool and met his eyes through the mirror. He didn’t like her to talk, and he didn’t say a word either, not about Victor, not about what he’d been thinking when he’d watched them. Not a word.
He excelled as an announcer, when the exaggerations and lies spilled from his wicked tongue as though it were forked. When he had his hand around the handle of his whips or any other weapon, he commanded the same respect as his deep, resonant voice. But outside the ring and out of character, he rarely spoke. Their first encounter had been an exercise in stilted, awkward questions and declarations, mostly uncomfortable on his part.
He shrugged off his jacket and tails, scarlet embellished with gold like a phoenix or a matador. With no preliminaries, he unbuttoned the front of his trousers to peel the skintight fabric away, kicking off his boots as he did so.
Kitty undid her thick braid, unweaving the soft waves of her hair until it splayed over her shoulders and back, framing her bodice—at least until Kitty brought her hands to the top of her dress and untied the bow. She slowly guided the ribbon out of the eyelets. The fabric unfurled from her breasts like petals of a flower.
The Ringmaster grabbed her waist and yanked her against him, making her gasp and her eyelids flutter. Her ass pressed against the burning steel girder of his erection. The hotter the flames from which the jinn were forged, Kitty had discovered, the more irresistible their attributes. His palms burned through her dress. She received a momentary reprieve when he knocked her hands out of the way to undo the rest of her bodice himself.
He took care not to harm the dress, but he was none too gentle removing it until he could hold her naked against him, arms wrapped around her shoulder and belly, staring with pleasure at the image they made in the mirror. He had such striking features, intentionally devilish, strong bone structure too aggressive to compare with Bell’s more delicate strength.
The Ringmaster stroked the thick hair that grew over her chest and stomach. The early autumn night was cool, and she had her fan on, but it wasn’t enough to overpower the Ringmaster’s relentless heat or the mirage shimmer of arousal inside of her.
Anticipation had done most of the work for him. She had known he would come to her tonight, and her body had been slick and soft since the afternoon. It had been excruciating to wait, to bite her tongue, to stroke her clit through her skirts without scratching the itch away entirely because she’d wanted to be ready.
For him. Not the man in the mirror, but the thing he would become.
The man in the mirror wasn’t the one who wanted to fuck her, nor the one she wanted inside her tonight. No, the one she wanted now emerged.
The first thing anyone would notice was that the demon was much bigger than a man. He maintained his possessive embrace, but now he had to crouch, a pronounced spine visible between the wings of his shoulder blades.
From his black hair sprouted the smooth, tan horns of a mountain goat, curling around his ears then taking a less typical path. The left horn flourished down the curve of his neck to his shoulder, and the right grew out along the line of his jaw, stopping where his trimmed goatee began. Both horns ended in tips that he kept honed and sharp.
The Ringmaster ran one wicked-looking nail down her cheek in a veiled threat that felt like a caress then stood to his full height and stepped back. He towered over three heads above her, not quite as tall as Ciàran, but broader. A thatch of black, curly hair matted his chest down to his navel, thickening and expanding farther down before flaring out along the V of his hips. Strong, furred legs extended to the ground, where the Ringmaster’s massive hooves shifted in the dust. The angrily flushed erection was brought up tight against his stomach and bumped against his navel.
Some might call him the devil. Others would call him a satyr, horny and mischievous as Pan prowling in the modern world. Both labels separately didn’t begin to cover what he was. As far as Kitty could tell, he was both—a satyr with a darker side than even those that had roamed the Greek and Roman countrysides, those rutting, raping fools with more balls than brains and a taste for nymphs.
No, the Ringmaster was more than that. He craved something other than sexual satisfaction—or rather, he found it in ways unexplained by his satyr roots. Satyrs, like centaurs, were historically uncaring about the consent of their women, but their voracious appetite was supposed to be sexual alone, and the Ringmaster’s wasn’t. In fact, Kitty didn’t believe he ever indulged beyond these monthly encounters.
Satyr though he appeared, Kitty didn’t think that was what he really was. Except with her.
That cock, pre-cum down the sides like melting candle wax, throbbing with the rapid, strong beating of his virile heart. Those deep, black eyes. Those hands, large and calloused from the whips, lightly furred on the backs. Empty. He wasn’t permitted to hit her, hurt her, hold a whip against her unless Bell declared a punishment. Besides, the Ringmaster had Maya now to help exorcise the most destructive of his desires. He had Kitty for his…curiosity?
The Ringmaster tilted his head to the side, staring at her body in the mirror. He twirled his finger in the air as though stirring coffee, and she turned around for him. She shook her hair behind her shoulders as best as she could, standing before him like Venus emerging from the sea. The hair on her neck and arms stood on end while his gaze crawled over her, lingering on every curve, every shadow, the darker hair between her legs.
He raised her chin with a finger and lowered himself to kiss her. His kiss was soft but somehow not tender, the edge of a blade over flesh without cutting through. Kitty caught her breath. She grasped his shoulders as he brought her against him again.
He lifted her from the ground, groaning as she opened her mouth to him and welcomed his teeth on her lip, her chin, her jaw, her neck. The hair on her body mingled with his. She stroked the coarse fur over his buttocks and thighs with the soles of her feet to feel the strong, flexing muscle beneath. He was a hell of a specimen, a fine piece of flesh, as impressive as he was terrifying.
This demon, the fiercest of them all, hellfire in his blood, and he’d chosen her.
He grunted and growled like an animal as he assaulted her neck and shoulder. A month indulging other needs and one night for him to indulge these, Kitty buckled under the attack. She ground against his erection, smearing pre-cum over the hair on her stomach. She tasted his neck too, biting the cord. When he tossed his head back, she laved the prominent, strong Adam’s apple before catching it between her teeth. His mouth dropped open, and he groaned without restraint at the tent ceiling.
The Ringmaster collapsed on her pallet, making the cot underneath protest at the weight, but neither of them cared. If it broke, it could be repaired, but this moment… This moment was theirs. He couldn’t take his hands off her, and she couldn’t stop burning herself on him, her skin flushed with his heat and her own arousal.
He slammed his hooves onto the ground on either side of the cot and ripped Kitty away from him. The Ringmaster held her in the air like a ragdoll, turning her around until her back was at his chest again.
The rough bristle of his beard and moustache combed through the hair on her shoulder as he breathed dragon-hot into her, his chest heaving. He bruised her arms with his effort to keep from hurting her more, control the Ringmaster so rarely had to call upon. She braced her feet against his massive legs, gasping for her own tenuous control as he brought her cunt down to the head of his cock. Gravity and her will did the rest. He continued to hold her, his powerful grip a support against her trembling thighs, until she had seated herself upon his cock.
Then he maneuvered her arm around his neck to hold herself, grasped her legs, and jerked them back so that she fell, grinding against the base. She cried out, her long hair swinging forward and draping over her breasts and stomach. She
didn’t have a lot of strength in her legs at this angle. Her knees didn’t reach the cot, and although she could tighten her calves over his hips, it gave her no leverage.
She was completely at his mercy. She’d known that already, but now she felt the helplessness of her body impaled upon his, the vulnerability, the depth to which he had a hold inside of her.
In the temporary beds she sometimes warmed, her men took their time to explore her, to experience the novelty of her, to commune with her oddity like a pilgrimage to an obscure deity or alms to a priestess.
But the Ringmaster was her cartographer, knew her contours better than she, explored, conquered and now subjugated her and bent her to his will. She was the furrowed land that capitulated to his rapacious plundering. Yet never had she had a greater spiritual experience than in his hands—not transcendent but primitive, to the root, the origin, the core of what she was, what they all were when a demon slipped in and stripped everything else away.
This was what she was, and she didn’t know what to make of that which the Ringmaster revealed—that this was the woman she really was, the consort to a psychopath, the mistress of a sadist, the lover of a demon and that she loved it more than she would ever say to anyone, even him—especially him.
And what exactly did that make her?
She didn’t examine the question too closely, couldn’t with the way he slammed up inside her. The Ringmaster was tireless, could whip a disobedient rebel for two hours straight without his arm going tired, and now he pounded into her, pawing at her breasts with one hand, bracing himself on the bed with the other. She rocked her hips to meet him and hung on like a drowning woman to a passing ship. Her arousal plowed through her as though she were a punching bag, tightening and drenching around his magnificent erection. He was rough, harsh, raw—and as always, unrelenting.
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