Ringmaster

by Aurelia T. Evans

  “If it were guys he was interested in, I’d think Lars and Seth would do the trick,” Jane muttered.

  “It could be just Victor, then,” Joanne said. “Could be his first crush or something.”

  “Come on. The only love affair that guy has is with his whip. And with Maya, but only because she lets him use it on her on the regular,” Jane replied. “The man barely says two words outside the ring, much less try to hook up with anyone he can’t beat up to a bloody pulp all night.”

  “First time for everything,” Joanne mused.

  Kitty occupied herself with her beading and braiding and didn’t respond.

  Chapter Six

  The Ringmaster watched the rehearsals every morning. He still didn’t attend meals, and he disappeared at night the way he always did, but Joanne and Jane weren’t the only ones to notice the change in the Ringmaster’s usually written-in-blood-and-stone routine of staying away and pretending everyone else didn’t exist for most of the week.

  Even the other demons welcomed the Ringmaster’s avoidant tendencies, because they were just as keen to keep their distance from him as the humans. Having him around made them all nervous. However, as long as Bell was unconcerned by the Ringmaster’s presence, most of the cast gradually began to relax.

  Decades to centuries of staying out of the way of the customers, cast and crew of Arcanium, a demon had a right to change. Kitty had always wondered how the Ringmaster occupied his time alone, like a violent prisoner in constant solitary, except he had no soul to drive mad with loneliness. The performances were just six hours of a week. The punishment beatings were few and far between, and Maya’s sessions only fifteen minutes at most. His once-a-month encounters with Kitty lasted just one night and morning. The rest of the time was as mysterious to Kitty as it was to everyone else, with the possible exception of Bell.

  While Victor rehearsed, Kitty worked on her knitting, depending on her corset to support her back—just one of the reasons she wore corsets even on non-performance days. She was so adept at knitting at this point in her life that she could largely keep count and click her needles like a pro without looking down, so she was able to watch the rehearsals as much as she wanted without getting lost in the stitches.

  It was one of those things that occupied her free time and gave her something to do with her hands. She wore fingerless gloves when she worked with yarn or string of any kind. There was longish hair on her fingers, but not as long as the hair on the back of her hands, and with the gloves on, she was much less likely to get her hair caught in a stitch.

  Unless, of course, that’s what she intended. Arcanium sold some of her hair-woven crafts through their online oddity store and at one of the booths near Oddity Row during Halloween. Kitty sometimes let her head hair grow to her knees in order to have the right amount to work with.

  In addition, Bale reassembled little mouse and rat skeletons from the bones that he regurgitated and cleaned. Sometimes he went even further and made miniature monsters by playing with their tiny anatomy.

  Lady Sasha sold leather works. Maya once joked that Lord Mikhail should sell workout videos, but that idea had remained just that, a joke, with Lord Mikhail raising one thick eyebrow in distaste.

  The Ringmaster didn’t sell anything that he made. He just maintained the store and the website and answered questions people emailed to them. Kitty assumed he could approximate a human being enough to manage this. The website read like his voice in the ring, the kind of exaggerated enthusiasm that doubtlessly touched those who visited the site with the same tentative excitement as an audience.

  Kitty also sometimes sold corsets and ribbon skirts modeled after the ones she wore. She didn’t, however, sell her knitting. She donated the baby blankets that she made for preemie babies to hospitals all over the country.

  The Arcanium website had reluctantly explained this in the FAQs and the Pretty Kitty page after they’d received lots of questions about what Kitty knitted when she was in her tent. The demons weren’t keen on Arcanium being associated with charity, but Kitty had no interest in knitting blanket after blanket or sock after sock of things that wouldn’t be used by anyone. She made a blanket or a pair of socks for anyone in Arcanium who asked for them, but since most of the Arcanium cast made their own heat, she didn’t get a lot of requests.

  As far as Kitty knew, Arcanium was never in such dire financial straits that they needed to sell merchandise and specialty items from the cast, but Bell liked the exposure. He sold these things because they were expected to be sold and because people asked for it. That was all.

  Kitty finally started wrapping up her yarn and needles in her knitting bag when she smelled tonight’s dinner on the other side of the curtain.

  Caroline clambered down from the top of the bleachers with her tablet lit up, bright in the dimmed light.

  Kitty bit her tongue to keep from telling Caroline she was going to break her neck doing that. Caroline was more agile than Kitty had ever been, and even if she did fall, Bell could fix something that bad in a blink, or he could stop it from happening before it did. Besides, Kitty wasn’t anyone’s mother, not really. She could advise and stroke people’s heads after the fact, but the decisions people made were their own.

  “Victor!” Caroline called. “Victor!”

  Victor looked up from where Misha had been working with him on the timing of their sword swallowing and stabbing act. It turned out that Victor could deflect knives, with an arc of sparks like flint against flint, but he could also stab himself without harming himself in the process, as though the flesh turned into rock around the blade—and as the saying went, there was no getting blood from a stone.

  Sword swallowing was an impressive learned skill that Misha had had to develop by trial and error rather than innate knowledge like most of the Arcanium cast. He’d greatly angered Bell when he’d made his initial wish, and he’d been forbidden to die from any of his injuries, when death would have been a mercy many of the years Misha had been a part of Arcanium. But stabbing oneself with a knife would be viewed by an audience as one of those impossible illusions that Arcanium was known for. Right up there with Maya defying gravity on the high wire by apparently holding onto nothing as she fell to the side and sometimes in a full circle without a harness, as well as Seth’s and Lars’ inability to separate even when just their toes were touching during their aerial act.

  Other circuses had better production values, but no one could match Arcanium’s illusions, because they weren’t illusions. But no audience would ever know that.

  “What’s wrong?” Victor asked.

  Caroline stopped short when she reached the ring. “Um…” Then she handed Victor the tablet. “You’re, um, dead in a car crash. It’s all over your page.”

  Victor had been smiling and joking with Misha before Caroline had given him the tablet. Misha had even managed to crack a smile at least twice. As Victor scrolled through his personal news feed, any animation or humor drained out of his face. Because he could no longer show a flush or paleness, it was instead as though his otherwise human face had reverted back to stone.

  “Was that one of the requirements for becoming a part of Arcanium?” Caroline asked. “Or are you not this Victor? I wasn’t sure.”

  “I joined Arcanium because I was dying,” Victor said, distracted. “My presumed death was part of the deal of being cured. I just didn’t anticipate…”

  “Wow, harsh,” Caroline said. “You mean when you leave, you can’t go back to your old life at all?”

  Victor handed Caroline’s tablet back to her. Kitty could practically see the storm clouds amassing over his brow. He wasn’t mad at Caroline, and it wouldn’t be her he was really lashing out at, but Kitty set her bag aside in case she needed to intervene.

  “No. That Victor is dead,” he replied.

  Caroline finally sensed the quality of his tone and stepped back with her tablet against her chest, not out of fear but out of respect.

  “I’m sor
ry,” she said softly.

  “Why? I’m not dead,” Victor said.

  Bell stepped through the curtain.

  Kitty slung her bag over her shoulder and climbed down. She took one of Victor’s hands in hers, a gesture that preserved distance but also gave him a hint of her warmth. This was where Kitty almost always came in.

  “Is there something I can do?” she asked. “What do you need?”

  When he withdrew from her, she didn’t hold on. Victor clenched his hand around the handle of the knife that he’d been holding. Then he tossed it onto Misha’s table of sharp things before he did something with it that he might regret—or because there was nothing he could do with it.

  “I think I just need some time,” Victor said. “And space. I thought I’d be able to handle this. I thought I was handling this. But it wasn’t real. Not as long as I didn’t know what was happening at home…”

  Kitty looked over to Bell.

  She and Victor hadn’t stayed in her RV after that first night. Victor had been enjoying roughing it in her tent, wrapped in blankets on the cheap carpet she used to keep dirt from getting everywhere. The incubus and succubus hadn’t had a spike in their magic since his arrival, so there had been no pressing need for sex.

  Honestly, Kitty thought part of it was simply that he was tired. He had more energy than he used to, not to mention strength, but he’d been pushing his body to its limits just because he could. He enjoyed the effort of being physical without anything in his way anymore.

  Kitty had offered him the use of the RV and invited him to join her on her pallet, since there was room. He’d denied both. He just wanted to be close to her, he’d said. He didn’t want to smother her like she’d said she didn’t want.

  She hadn’t intended for him to forgo the luxury of a bed, but he’d reassured her that he was enjoying the camping-like arrangement for now. He’d probably join her in her bed during the performance nights, like he always had before, and maybe that would satisfy them both.

  But it looked like that might be off the table now.

  Bell came over to them, taking each step with a curious, graceful deliberation as he came closer, as though feeding on whatever feelings Victor kept hidden under his stone mask.

  “We’ve been talking about Victor having his own trailer,” Kitty said when Bell had come close enough. She kept her tone professional, the kind of straightforward that people in pain tended to like, because it meant someone else was taking charge of the details. “Since Caroline, Riley and Colm use mine at unpredictable times, it would be more convenient for him to have his own place to live.”

  Bell retrieved a set of keys from nowhere and handed them to Victor. “It’s next to Kitty’s RV, the only one that’s locked.” He tilted his head. Maybe Caroline and Victor couldn’t see the ghost of a smile in the subtle curve of his lips, but Kitty could. “I do not expect you to perform this weekend if you don’t think you can give your heart to it. Through next weekend at most. But I do expect you to showcase yourself on Oddity Row. Do we have an understanding?”

  Victor took the keys with a harsh clatter. He shoved them into his jeans pocket. Kitty had made him his rehearsal pants, but when he was working with Misha, he didn’t have to wear them.

  “We have an understanding,” Victor said.

  “This is what you wished for,” Bell said. “Exactly the sort of thing you wished for. It is rare that I follow a wish so close to the letter.”

  “I get it, man. I’m just… Whatever.” Victor strode out of the big top, through the entrance rather than the back.

  “Even when I give them what they want, they still blame me when it doesn’t go the way they want it to,” Bell said, crossing his arms. Someone who didn’t know Bell would think it was a defensive gesture, but Bell didn’t have it in him to be defensive.

  “No. He accepted the consequences. He just didn’t expect the consequences of the consequences is all,” Kitty said, looking after Victor even though there was no one left to see. “We’re mushy on the inside, Bell. Even the way you made him, he’s still mushy. He’s been riding high these past four days, but it doesn’t matter how much magic you have going on around here to keep people from falling—it still hurts like hell when you hit the ground. He’s just got to go through the process. Anger is a part of that process.”

  “I will never understand grief,” Bell murmured.

  Caroline either understood that this might be better as a more private conversation or Bell’s comment unnerved her. She made her exit through the red curtain for dinner—probably feeling like shit about Victor’s reaction, poor girl.

  “I gave him a death that will cause the least pain,” Bell said. “It was a terrible accident, but he was dead before he could suffer. He might have had four more years to live with his disease, but he would have died in two in another car accident that would have been far more painful than the one I gave him. There are worse deaths that I considered, that I was prevented from giving him per his request.”

  “It’s still a life cut short,” Kitty said. “At least for the Victor he left behind and that everyone else in his life knew. Not everyone gets the unique experience of witnessing their online funeral. They don’t have to see the pain in their wake.”

  “But he’s alive,” Bell said. “He’s not really dead.”

  Kitty patted his shoulder. “Don’t hurt yourself, Bell. It’s just one of those things.”

  Bell wasn’t unfeeling. Far from it, Kitty had learned over the years. He had different feelings than people, and he could be a cold bastard now and then, but what he felt, he felt deeply and passionately. As a psychic, he was also an empath of the first order. But there were some things that he couldn’t understand, even if he submerged himself in a person’s consciousness until he was indistinguishable from his subject. One of those things was the human response to death. He could feel the feelings and think the thoughts, but he simply couldn’t understand it.

  He was immortal. He wouldn’t die, and it was possible he couldn’t die. He couldn’t understand the fear of death, and he couldn’t understand grief because the world was even more temporary for him, the passage of time like scenery passing by. He was used to things slipping through his fingers in the temporal storm as he stood unmoved.

  It was an endless frustration for him—as though he could have the knowledge of the universe, but something out there didn’t permit him this knowledge, just to keep him humble.

  Bell gave her a look that was not quite a glare, only partly for her patronizing tone.

  “I will always win in a war of wits, my dear,” Bell said.

  “Which is why I will savor the battles in which I am victorious,” she replied.

  “You are fortunate I like you, little Kitty cat,” he said.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  Kitty dropped her knitting off at her tent. She almost went back to the big top for dinner, but Victor’s reaction to his obituary seemed to have done a number on her stomach as well.

  Kitty did what she could, but harder still was letting other people deal with things themselves and there being nothing for her to do but sense their pain. Not literally, not the way that Bell sensed it. It was more like a general awareness, even when it wasn’t right in front of her.

  Instead, she stepped out into the Row. She wouldn’t call the walk leisurely. She wasn’t doing it for leisure. She was doing it for a little peace of mind, staring up at the night sky. Not as many stars as there were in some of the other places they went. They were too close to the nearest city to see the full range of constellations. It was as though someone had dirtied the dome glass, smudging out all but the strongest light.

  But they still gave her comfort. Stars had never made her feel small—they made her feel part of something bigger. Like the universe. Which was a helluva thing to be a part of when a person got right down to it. Just one tiny cog in the cosmic clock tower, but still, what an honor.

  She curled her toes in the grass as
she walked. She relished the cold breeze stirring the exposed hair on her body and disturbing the hair that draped down past her waist, free from its braid. A person so often never just had a moment in Arcanium, surrounded by such a loud, large, boisterous family. Kitty liked the quiet. If the clowns were about, they knew her well enough to skirt around where she walked without letting her know they were patrolling.

  A hand closed around her wrist.

  Kitty turned around slowly in the darkness, thinking at first that it was Victor looking for a certain kind of solace that she was more than willing to provide.

  She should have known that Victor’s hand wouldn’t be so hot.

  Kitty jerked up the wrist the Ringmaster was holding, but the Ringmaster didn’t let her go. He yanked her back, clenching his jaw at the effort. His expression remained as passively baleful as ever.

  “What?” Kitty said. The Ringmaster never touched her outside her tent, not where someone could see them. And it was a bare week after their last encounter, not Halloween night yet. His hand was as heated as Victor with his fever. Hotter. But her hands suddenly went cold.

  The Ringmaster said nothing, just stared down at her with eyes black in the shadows of his sockets—but Kitty didn’t think that was the only reason.

  “What do you want?” Kitty insisted. She fought not to show fear. Fear was like a feast to a sadist. Even hers to him.

  The Ringmaster curled his other hand around her waist. The way he brought her hips against his, it felt like the start of a violent tango.

  “Don’t speak,” he rumbled in his deepest baritone. Anyone else might have thought it was distant thunder, not the voice of a man.

  Kitty couldn’t breathe as the Ringmaster walked backward, dragging her with him as he passed the exhibition tents and brought them between the back of Christina’s tent and the big top, shielded by canvas on both sides. It wasn’t completely private. Completely private would have been inside one of the exhibition tents, but the Ringmaster didn’t pull them in.