Ringmaster

by Aurelia T. Evans

  “Even you, you sadistic son of a bitch?” Victor asked.

  “I’m not the sadistic one,” Bell said, unaffected by Victor’s ire. He nodded to the Ringmaster. “He is. The longer you resist, the more impatient he becomes. The more impatient he becomes, the deeper and more lingering the lash. You can’t hope to escape, so I suggest you do what must be done and get it over with. You might even find it…liberating.”

  “Liberating?” Victor said incredulously. “Are you fucking serious? Are all of you fucking serious? This isn’t the nineteenth century. Is no one going to do anything?”

  “They’re not going to do anything for you, boy, not even Kitty over there,” Bell said. “They might pity you, but they know not to interfere. They know that these rules and the repercussions for breaking them are for the safety of us all. Now, you can keep fighting and earn the wrath of everyone here for drawing it out when they would like to return to their beds to prepare for tomorrow. Or you can be a good boy, take your medicine and go back to your own bed as well to speak the truth to yourself in the dark. If you don’t do this, I shall allow the Ringmaster to force you as he sees fit.”

  “Victor,” Kitty said. She tried to keep any emotion from her voice. “I never hid anything from you. I didn’t hide this side of Arcanium from you either. Fighting him is like fighting the wind.”

  “It’s medieval torture,” Victor shot back.

  “If I were permitted to use medieval torture, that would indeed be a glorious night,” the Ringmaster said, his voice rumbling through the tent, rich and resonant even without a microphone. “I am limited to this mild, crude instrument. I satisfy myself as I can.”

  Victor leaned away from the Ringmaster with his lip curled in disbelief and contempt, but it didn’t matter how physically strong Victor was in his new body. The Ringmaster was bigger and stronger. Victor might be the man made of stone, but the Ringmaster could make mountains tremble if he dared look with those black eyes in their direction.

  “I’ll never forgive you,” Victor said quietly to Kitty.

  “There’s nothing for you to forgive, Victor,” Kitty said, steeling the iron cage around her heart to keep it from aching as she met his gaze. “Bell is being generous. He’s been nothing but generous to you.”

  “This is generosity? What he’s made of us?” Victor asked. “Living museum curiosities for the world to poke and prod, mock and laugh at, gaze upon in slack-jawed wonder—kept in cages covered with luxury curtains.”

  She thought she was beginning to understand at least part of where this was coming from. It didn’t excuse his behavior, but regret was a terrible, terrible feeling, worse than the henchmen of anger and denial that accompanied it. He was bargaining now, but he would lose, like everyone else.

  She stood up and walked into the spotlight with him. “Kept like animals in a zoo—the ones that can’t survive in the wild anymore, too vulnerable to predators because they’re injured, albino, too used to human beings. That’s his generosity. Do you realize what he could do to us if it was his wish to do so? Do you realize what the Ringmaster could do to you if he was given free rein?”

  She didn’t look at anything else but Victor in the brightness of the spot. She took his hand. “It is a privilege to serve Arcanium, Victor. It’s a job like any other job. There will be things about it that will leach the humanity from your marrow. But it’s still a privilege to be nurtured to thrive instead of broken into submission. Arcanium is not such a bad place.”

  “You’re lost like the rest of us,” Victor said. “You just don’t know it. Why else would you have to go outside Arcanium to reassure yourself of your own humanity? To convince yourself that you’re not the freak. To be told you’re beautiful by men who either care too much or don’t care at all about what you look like. You never had to be here.”

  “I chose to be here,” Kitty said. “Just like you. For my own reasons. Just like you. You’ll understand that one day, understand it better than most.” She touched Victor’s cheek. “Now, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to take off your trousers and lie down. It’ll be over very soon. I’ll be here when it’s finished to heal the wounds. But then you’ll go back to your trailer and sleep it off, Victor. I’m not unsympathetic, but I’m still fucking furious. You told me you needed space. You still need it. We’ll talk when you’ve learned not to take your feelings out on unsuspecting bystanders like a child.”

  Victor clenched and unclenched his fists. The muscles of his forearms bulged. But his shoulders slowly loosened and lowered in a slump, the fight bleeding from him into defeat she’d never meant for him to experience.

  “Everything has a cost,” Kitty said quietly, withdrawing her hand. “But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have an end. This too will pass. And you know I don’t revert to platitudes because I can’t think of anything better to say. I say it because it’s true.”

  Victor took a deep breath, avoiding Kitty’s eyes, but he reached for the front of his trousers and undid them. Kitty backed out of the light to her seat once more. Someone rested a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t look to see whose.

  The sound of the whip was brief, sharp and painful on her ears. She flinched with every crack. The Ringmaster was in fine form, the fall arcing through the air as he laid into Victor’s back and buttocks, making the five lashes last. It was such a paltry number for him, hardly worth the build-up or the work, which was clear from the set of his jaw when he had to stop too soon.

  Kitty re-entered the ring, and Bell unfurled his fist to hand her the healing potion. The Ringmaster wrapped his whip, slightly stained by Victor’s blood, around his jacketed arm once more. Five lashes weren’t enough to paint it as red as he would like.

  The rest of the cast that had stayed gradually trickled out when the Ringmaster left the ring through the backstage curtain. There was no condemnation in their glittering eyes, nothing but exhaustion and a touch of empathetic pity, but Kitty doubted Victor could see that or anything else.

  He hadn’t made a sound beyond a gasp to hold in his cries as the Ringmaster had whipped him. Now he stared unseeing into the too-bright light of the spot.

  During the beating, his stone skin had gone tan and undeniably human to allow the whip to do its work. Now the gray took over once more, but his blood was as colorful as it had ever been. The grooves of the lashes were inhumanly pale, setting off the blood even more.

  With her hands in her lap, Kitty sat next to where his legs straddled the thin wooden bench—an undeniably vulnerable and humiliating position—until he acknowledged her presence.

  He shifted, winced. Then he looked over his arm where he’d rested his head and met her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Victor said, almost too quiet to hear.

  “I know,” Kitty replied simply. “Ready?”

  He nodded.

  Kitty poured the electric blue potion into her hand and smoothed it over every welt. She’d seen bone and torn muscle before. It could have been so much worse.

  “It wasn’t what I expected,” Victor murmured.

  “You mean it didn’t hurt like you thought it would?” Kitty asked.

  Victor snorted then winced again. “You really haven’t been punished like this, have you?”

  “Different people have different tolerances, and they take different things away from it,” Kitty said as the potion absorbed into him and started stitching him back together.

  “It hurt. It hurt like hell. Like my worst coughs ripping through my chest times ten,” Victor said. As soon as he could, he pushed himself upright and accepted his trousers when Kitty handed them to him. “But it was…temporary. And I don’t mean because of that potion you were using. It burned after it hurt. Then the burning spread, became less. And after it was over…”

  He shook his head. “My head is fuzzy. I’m going to go to my trailer now. Get some clarity. Maybe break down in an unmanly fashion.”

  Kitty rested her hand on the back of his neck, one of t
he places that hadn’t been hit by the blows. “I think that would be a good idea.”

  “But, Kitty, I want to talk. Tomorrow, maybe. I’ll be civil, I promise.”

  “As long as you keep that promise,” she replied. She stood. The golems would take care of the bench. They were probably itching to come in and clean up the bleachers too. “Goodnight.”

  “Night,” he said. He walked gingerly. The delicate, beautiful curve of his skull accentuated how he hung his head, weighed down by whatever would fester in his mind and his heart till morning.

  Kitty left the potion bottle on the bench. The golems would see that what was left was returned to Bell. She didn’t want to stop by his RV. She just wanted to go back to her tent and sleep. Caffeine could only do so much against the bone-deep exhaustion of Halloween days.

  The ambient incubus and succubus magic hovered like a fog through the circus. In spite of the buzz on her skin and warmth held low in the cradle of her hips, Kitty believed most of the cast would just delay their need until Sunday night or Monday, resorting to quick, frantic sex if they couldn’t wait. Nothing slow. Nothing elaborate. Not when sleep was far more important this time of year.

  Kitty left via the backstage exit to go through Oddity Row the back way. Her eyes were dry and wide open, but her body and her mind were weary. All she wanted at this juncture was a strong drink and her bed.

  She was just about to duck between her tent and Joanne and Jane’s when she noticed something not right out of the corner of her eye.

  At first, she thought she might have stumbled across the clowns in the middle of a feed. But when she turned toward the shadow, she realized that couldn’t be right. The clowns wouldn’t be so still. The man standing in the middle of the makeshift wooden ring the clowns used for their outdoor tumbling shows was as unmoving as a tombstone. Kitty would recognize the silhouette anywhere, no matter how dark the night, no matter how far away he was. He might as well be in his real form, so distinctive was his shadow to her.

  “What now?” Kitty called across the Row.

  There was silence. He continued to stand there, the moon gleaming in his black hair.

  “Sorry you didn’t get the beating you wanted him to have,” Kitty said, exhaustion making her snippy. “Maybe next time.”

  “Come here.” That was all, just those two words. There was no mistaking the imperious tone. It would brook no refusal.

  But there was nothing the Ringmaster could do to her if she decided to refuse.

  “What do you want?” Kitty asked.

  He didn’t repeat himself. He just held out his hand to her.

  Kitty looked all around, checking for the clowns, for Lady Sasha or Lord Mikhail, for anything to give her an excuse not to go to him—because a place inside her wanted to, and she wanted nothing more than to crush that part of her until it died.

  Something was different about the Ringmaster, this man of unvarying routine. The Ringmaster was a comfort, in his own way, because a person could depend on him to appear only when needed and become violent only when ordered. Once the Ringmaster lost his predictability…all bets were off. Every last one of them.

  Kitty was a practical, sensible person of sound mind. Her lapses with the Ringmaster were supposed to be few and far enough in between not to bleed into the rest of her life in Arcanium. There were already unspoken questions that kindled in the cold corner of her warm heart when she was with him once a month. She didn’t need any more.

  He continued to beckon to her until she took her first step toward him. She wished she could say that it was an unthinking step, completely involuntary, the product of some kind of spell. But even when influenced by magic, everything she had ever done in Arcanium had been a choice.

  As soon as he knew that she would come to him, he turned toward the midway. The implication was clear, as though spoken inside her head with the same imperious voice.

  Follow me.

  There was no one around. Her bed and her whiskey bottle called her name, but stronger still was his call to her.

  She followed the distant shadow into the midway. The steampunkesque décor had been horrorfied with skulls in eye patches and skeletons wearing frilly, frothy Victorian dresses that she’d sewn. When the circus was open, black lights or dim golden lanterns illuminated many of the structures, but everything was dark for the night, the golems hidden from view in the back of each booth like toy soldiers that had wound down.

  The Ringmaster disappeared into the skull toss booth. She lost him at that point, but the sound of clinking chains drew her attention as he opened the curtain to the booth and turned on the lanterns. The shadows on his face made what was already wicked practically diabolical.

  “Come in here,” he said.

  “I don’t understand,” Kitty replied. Where she stood, he couldn’t reach her over the booth partition. There was still space for her to run.

  “It is easy to understand. I want you in here,” the Ringmaster said.

  “I don’t understand why.”

  “Because I told you to,” he said.

  Kitty shook her head. “That’s not an explanation. We never agreed to this. I don’t know if—”

  “Katharine, I need you to come in here now. I will not ask again.”

  No reassurance. No promises. No request that she trust him, as other men might try to lure a woman. He wasn’t other men. He wasn’t a human being at all. He couldn’t reassure her. He would make her no promises. And she couldn’t trust him beyond their established arrangement.

  She stepped behind the booth to enter. When she reached the front, he had removed his jacket, baring his torso. He hid it so often, most people never saw that he was as built and well-sculpted as Lord Mikhail. He gave no one a chance to lust for him. He was the Master of the Ring, for no one else’s enjoyment but his own. He wanted control, not admiration from those he would consider beneath him.

  Yet when he turned around to meet her, he didn’t change to become what he really was. He presented her with the man. Kitty could see the demon in the appearance that he’d chosen to show to the world, but she rarely saw him as a man for this long.

  “Just like that. When I tell you to come in, you do it. Why did you do it?” the Ringmaster asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kitty said. “Because I don’t know why you wanted me to.”

  “Such a cat, Katharine,” he said. Already, he’d spoken to her more now than he’d spoken to her alone in five years.

  “So I’ve been told,” she replied warily.

  He took a step toward her, his boot crunching in the dirt. She fought not to flinch.

  “Do you trust me?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t have come.” Another step.

  “Then why did you tell me to?”

  “To see if you would.”

  “We share a feline weakness then,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t play cat games unless you have claws,” the Ringmaster said.

  Then he grabbed her by the top of her corset and yanked her fully into the front of the booth. She hit the partition hard enough for her hip to sing.

  “Ow! What was that for?” Kitty exclaimed.

  “You talk too much,” the Ringmaster said.

  “And you don’t talk enough,” Kitty said, refusing to relent. She held her hands in front of her, the universal gesture of ‘stop right there, don’t come any closer’. “Now, what is going on? That’s all I want to know.”

  The Ringmaster tilted his head to the side, his gaze crawling over her at his patient leisure. The lanterns were electric but had an illusion of flame. They flickered over the planes of his chest and flat abdomen, setting the valleys and his dark hair in sharp contrast. He had discarded his jacket, but he kept his whip tucked into the crook of his elbow.

  He crossed his arms.

  “Turn away from me and put your hands on the partition,” he said.

  “Why?” Kitty asked.

/>   “Because I told you to, Katharine.”

  Why was it that every time he said her real name, something inside her went weak? Every time. She didn’t like it. It made her feel the way a person did after a good massage, everything loose and warm where the knots had been worked out. Except this knot was somewhere in her head and connected to another place just under her ribs.

  Those were not feelings a person was meant to have with the Ringmaster, and she didn’t think it was the feeling that the Ringmaster intended for her to have when he used her name like that.

  With more light in the booth than outside it, the night on the other side seemed that much darker. She squinted into the darkness to see if there was any sign of Bell coming to stop the Ringmaster from doing something he wasn’t supposed to—not that he was doing anything too bad right now, but Bell occasionally interrupted violence before it occurred.

  Only two things would keep him from doing so—something was preventing him, such as a customer or another pressing matter that he simply couldn’t leave, or he didn’t want to stop it before it happened. A person couldn’t be punished until after they had done something. Sometimes he dearly wanted to punish the person who had broken his rules.

  The night outside was quiet, no movement except the lantern light.

  Kitty glanced back up at the Ringmaster, who loomed over her like some kind of underworld god.

  She turned around and placed her hands on the top of the partition, which was practically a table. It was where they kept the skulls for tossing and helped maintain the customers’ distance from the moving bins, so there was plenty of wooden space.

  “Farther,” the Ringmaster said.

  She slid her hands farther down the wood.

  “Farther,” he demanded.

  “You want me to bend over the partition, then,” Kitty said.

  “I want you to do as I say,” the Ringmaster said.