Ringmaster

by Aurelia T. Evans

  “Can you not see that she doesn’t want you, boy?” the Ringmaster said.

  “Excuse me?” Victor said. He jerked his hand away from Kitty’s waist.

  “What more do you need her to do to understand that you’re not for her?” the Ringmaster continued. Now it was he who seemed to be stalking.

  “Stop,” Kitty said. The wound in her cheek throbbed and stung as though it burned, but when Victor pulled away from her, the cold stole in like frost.

  What the hell was the Ringmaster doing?

  “What’s it to you?” Victor asked. He stepped slightly in front of Kitty, but he faltered when Kitty touched his elbow.

  “You could not protect her. You cannot satisfy her. She is not for you,” the Ringmaster said. “You are a pathetic, mewling, small man making a fool of himself, thinking that he can protect her now when he could not protect her against these weak things bleeding into the ground. Even with Bell’s magic, you are nothing to me. And you can be nothing to her.”

  “I thought you— I thought you didn’t care about…” Victor glanced between the Ringmaster and Kitty. “Anyone,” he finished, finally realizing his error.

  “I care for no one,” the Ringmaster said. He lifted his whip from its place on his belt, his expression becoming more animated with each step and with every second he met Victor’s glare with his own. His wicked appearance accentuated the emerging anger.

  “Sir, just stop,” Kitty said.

  “You are not for him,” the Ringmaster said, pointing at Victor with the curled whip, his knuckles turning white around the handle. “When you are in Arcanium, you are mine. You have always been mine.”

  “She’s not something you can own,” Victor protested, this time shoving himself in front of Kitty. “And she’d never touch something as evil as you unless you forced yourself on her.”

  “Victor—” Kitty began, but she couldn’t find her words. She was too stunned by the fact that the Ringmaster had just spoken their relationship aloud. He was the one who’d wished the most for its silence all this time, even more than she.

  “Is that why you…?” Victor gestured to the mutilated remains of the two young men. “Because you couldn’t stand the idea of someone else horning in on your cruelty?”

  “I am not threatened by you, boy. I am not threatened by them,” the Ringmaster replied, continuing to advance.

  “You stay away from her,” Victor said.

  “Both of you, stop this right now!” Kitty said.

  Victor was still in white-knight mode from his fight with Larry. This wasn’t like when Victor had gone off on James. That had been him attacking a distorted mirror, ostensibly fighting for her honor when he’d only been fighting himself, and Kitty in the process. This time Victor’s clenched fists really were for Kitty’s protection, but he still wasn’t listening to her.

  The Ringmaster swung his whip free from its circle and snapped it directly next to Victor’s ear—a warning shot or a shot to start the fight, it was hard to tell.

  Kitty leaned toward the latter when Victor darted forward. He landed a punch on the Ringmaster’s jaw, heedless of the Ringmaster’s greater size and obviously greater strength. Greater strength or not, Victor effectively drove stone into the demon’s face, throwing his head back and making him stagger.

  The Ringmaster’s recovery was swift, though. He smiled, rubbing his beard where Victor had hit him. “Thank you,” the Ringmaster said. “That was what I needed.”

  “Run!” Victor yelled at Kitty.

  “No!” she shouted back. “This is ridiculous. You run. Just go the other direction before—”

  There was another crack of the whip and a sound like a boulder breaking apart where the Ringmaster landed his blow on Victor’s chest. The stone flesh there had shattered in a jagged opening. But Bell hadn’t given him human flesh for the blow like he had during Victor’s last whipping. The wound sewed itself together again and didn’t seem to do anything but stun Victor.

  Kitty grabbed for the end of the whip and yanked it away from the Ringmaster. She guessed that the only reason he relinquished it to her, however, was because it hadn’t been effective against Victor’s unique skin and thus carried no pleasure for him.

  “If you’re going to fight over a woman, you might consider actually hearing what she has to say,” Kitty said to him. Then she looked over her shoulder at Victor. “No one here has been doing anything against their will.”

  “If Bell hasn’t brainwashed you, then he has,” Victor said, holding his chest where he’d been struck, even though there was nothing to show for it.

  “I do not fight over you,” the Ringmaster said, stepping toward her, menace quivering through his deep voice. “I do not fight for you. It is Arcanium alone that reaps my services. Not you.” He brought his eyebrows together in consternation, his lips curled in unfiltered loathing.

  Victor started after the Ringmaster again, but Kitty held out her hand toward him, letting him know in no uncertain terms from her expression that he was to stay away.

  “Then what are you doing, sir?” Kitty asked quietly, turning back to him.

  “Teaching the boy a lesson he must learn,” the Ringmaster replied.

  “And what lesson is that?” Kitty asked.

  The Ringmaster’s mouth worked, but nothing came out. If possible, his black eyes seemed to turn even darker, darker than caves, darker than the dark expanse of space above them. For a moment, Kitty thought she saw ram horns blink in and out of existence. Whatever was happening to him, he was losing control of his human mask. And the Ringmaster did not lose control.

  Kitty tossed his whip to the side. She held her hand out to him like she might to a large, strange dog.

  “No one else has to know. No one else has to see this,” Kitty said. “You’ve done your duty. You protected me.”

  The Ringmaster knocked her hand out of the air and grabbed her by the front of her corset, his knuckles digging into her breasts as he jerked her toward him, his teeth gleaming as he bared them down at her.

  “I was not protecting you,” the Ringmaster said.

  “You said you were,” Kitty responded. She didn’t flinch away from him the way she had with Robert. She showed him no fear. She wasn’t afraid. The darkest and most feared demon of Arcanium, and she wasn’t afraid of him at all.

  “No,” the Ringmaster said. “I was protecting Arcanium. I am charged with protecting Arcanium. That means the pup. That means you. Do you understand that?” He shook her violently. Then he grabbed her throat, threatening to squeeze.

  “How dare you,” he rasped. “How dare you suggest that it was you for whom I took revenge. You for whom I tortured the dead men. You for whom I came when Bell called me elsewhere tonight, because I heard you scream. I always want to hear you scream. I want to snap your neck as easily as I snapped the boy’s. I want…”

  The Ringmaster lowered his head, breathing harshly through his nose before looking back into her eyes again. “I should kill you, Katharine. I should kill you right now.”

  He landed a solid kick on Victor, who had tried to sneak up on him from behind. Groaning, Victor fell back against the wooden ring, breaking it with his weight.

  “I should have known that you would be dangerous to me the first time I…” the Ringmaster murmured.

  Kitty slowly, gently, closed her hand around the Ringmaster’s wrist near where he held her neck. She didn’t say a word—not because he was choking her, because he wasn’t.

  “Look what you’ve done to me,” the Ringmaster growled. “I have no wish to save any human being. None. I do not show mercy. I do not feel love,” he spat, shaking her again like a ragdoll. “I do not feel. Why…?”

  With the clowns behind him, Victor fallen to the side, and who knew who else around, the Ringmaster encircled her waist and pulled her to him. She yielded her mouth immediately, his hot tongue demanding submission, possession. He groaned low in his chest as he loosened his hold on her neck and slid his hand
around to the back to cradle the delicate base of her skull. He could shatter it into pieces if it was his desire to do so, but all he desired now was to kiss her, to hold her tightly against his hard furnace of a body, his lust furious yet inescapably tender in spite of everything he might wish it were instead.

  He crushed her against him. She felt as though she were melting, merging with him even though they were both as clothed as Arcanium cast could be. Kitty clutched at his hair, at the collar of his ringmaster jacket.

  The Ringmaster pulled away slightly, panting.

  He stared intently down upon her. He brushed blood away from her lips with his thumb. When she opened her mouth to beg him to come back, he slapped her wounded cheek. It was not a gentle slap, but it was also nothing like the back-handed blow that Robert had dealt to her other cheek. He slapped her again, with another bright flash of stinging pain that tingled in the aftermath, then sank his smeared fingers into her hair as he plunged back into her mouth, drinking her cries and holding her against the shiver that shook through her—as powerful as fear, as powerful as anger, but it wasn’t even close.

  “I would lay nations to waste for you,” the Ringmaster moaned against her mouth between his kisses. “I would present you with the bloody hearts of all your enemies.”

  “Don’t stop,” she pleaded.

  He jerked her head back. She cried out as he artlessly ground his erection against her abdomen.

  “Damn you.” His curse rolled over her in the soothing, entrancing waves of his baritone. Her skin pebbled with gooseflesh. Kitty gasped, her cunt soft, swollen, desperate, wanting, her clit throbbing so near where his heat permeated her clothes and her skin. She shook her head and thrust her hips right back against his.

  She fell back as the Ringmaster let out a roar. He clutched his side where Victor had buried a knife all the way to the hilt. Stunned, Kitty could only watch as Victor took out another knife from his belt that he used for the act with Misha and in his exhibition tent to prove to circus patrons that he was truly a man made of stone. It was a double-edge, serrated blade, too large to be legal for anything but a profession that demanded it.

  “No!” Kitty screamed as Victor stabbed the Ringmaster in the back before the Ringmaster could swing his arm around.

  Here was where Victor’s shorter stature worked in his favor. He ducked away from the Ringmaster’s massive forearm aimed for his head. The Ringmaster staggered. He appeared more surprised than in pain, although Kitty had seen enough pain to recognize it in the rictus of the Ringmaster’s mouth, the arch of his back, the way he stumbled when the Ringmaster was usually nothing but graceful in spite of his size.

  Victor tucked himself into a somersault—Kitty saw so much of Lennon in that move—and grabbed the whip Kitty had dropped near the edge of the makeshift ring. He grunted, clutching his lower ribs and hunched over as he darted after the Ringmaster. He couldn’t be stabbed, shot or whipped, but apparently his ribs could break with enough applied force.

  The Ringmaster yanked the knife out of his side. The one in his back was more difficult to reach, but he clearly just wanted to have a weapon ready when he faced Victor.

  Through the fury, Kitty swore the Ringmaster also displayed a touch of admiration. Kitty imagined it had been a long time since anyone had fought him on anything—or managed to get one knife into him, much less two.

  She pushed herself onto her knees and reached for the Ringmaster’s hand that held the knife, staring up at him. “Don’t hurt him,” Kitty said. “Please.”

  The Ringmaster hesitated, his temples twitching as he clenched his teeth. But he lowered the hand that she held.

  Victor must not have heard her, just as he hadn’t heard her the rest of the time. Or maybe he’d heard her and thought she meant something else or believed she was under some spell. He took advantage of the Ringmaster’s hesitation, leaping onto his back and wrapping the whip around the Ringmaster’s neck, grunting and crying out at the strain on his injured ribs. But Victor was determined. He yanked both ends to tighten the leather braid like a noose.

  The Ringmaster fell to his knees next to Kitty, digging his fingers into his neck to reach underneath the whip, but he couldn’t. When the Ringmaster fell, it allowed Victor to stand on solid ground over him, giving him a better foundation to strangle the demon.

  The Ringmaster choked, gasped, struggled, things that the Ringmaster probably hadn’t done in a very long time, but Victor could try to cut off his air until kingdom come. The Ringmaster wasn’t going to die, and eventually he’d either tear the leather apart or rip Victor’s hands from his wrists.

  “Goddammit, Victor, let him go!” Kitty said. She scrambled to her feet and shoved herself between the Ringmaster and Victor as well as she could.

  This time, Victor finally seemed to see and hear her. Either that or she’d pushed against some of his broken bones and he retreated because of the pain.

  “He was…hurting you,” Victor panted, clutching his lower ribs. “He was going…to kill you.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Kitty said. “He wasn’t going to hurt me. He can’t. He won’t.”

  “Kitty…Bell isn’t infallible,” Victor replied. “Otherwise…he’d be here now. And I…wouldn’t have to save you.”

  “I wanted it,” Kitty said quickly, offering her hand to the Ringmaster for him to stand.

  He accepted it, although already he didn’t need it. Once he found his footing, he let go of her hand as though it burned him as much as he burned her. He adjusted his jacket, turning away from her toward the clowns, who had been eating and watching the fight like a demon’s version of dinner and a show.

  Victor gaped at her.

  “Don’t you understand?” Kitty said. “Everything he does, everything he’s done—I wanted it. I wanted him.”

  “It’s not true,” Victor said. He stared up at the Ringmaster then back down at Kitty. He shook his head, as though the revelation had literally struck him. “It makes no sense. Anyone else would have made sense. Bell would have made sense. But him?”

  “It’s true,” Kitty replied.

  “Some kind of spell,” Victor protested. “Demon magic. Like the incubus and succubus. Gotta be. There’s no other explanation.”

  “Do I look like a woman being forced by a spell?” Kitty said.

  Victor stood there, holding his chest and wincing with every breath.

  “You did,” he said finally.

  “What’s going on?” came a female voice from Oddity Row.

  Joanne and Jane edged their way toward the ring, tentative, wary with the Ringmaster and the clowns in such close proximity to each other. Jane had a black eye.

  “I could ask the same of you,” Kitty said, immediately slipping back into her maternal role, relieved to have that mantle comfortably around her once again. She stepped over the wooden rails of the clown ring and gently brushed Jane’s bruise.

  “Oh, you know, same old, same old,” Jane said, flinching. “The normals getting riled up by not-normals, taking it out on us for no reason.”

  Kitty lowered her hand. “College-age boys?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Joanne replied. “About seven of them. We couldn’t find the clowns to dispose of them, so Lord Mikhail and Lady Sasha took a few and Bell’s imprisoned the others. Why, were they bothering you too?” She couldn’t see Kitty’s face like Jane could, otherwise the answer would have been obvious.

  “To say the least,” Kitty said.

  Robert had been more devious than she’d given him credit for. He’d told his friends to have fun with the others.

  To provide a distraction.

  Kitty regretted his death even less. Someone like him shouldn’t be allowed to freely roam the earth. If he hadn’t been eaten today, it wouldn’t have stopped with Kitty. Worse yet, maybe it hadn’t started with her. Things like this didn’t happen out of nowhere. There was usually some kind of progression. Evolution.

  At least as killer clown food, he’d brought somet
hing beneficial to the world.

  Jane mirrored what Kitty had done to her and brushed her fingertips against Kitty’s swollen eye then the knife wounds, which had since mostly dried. “No wonder Bell was pissed. I don’t think we’ve seen him this mad since that group went after Christina, Troy and Maya last year.”

  “Jane…Kitty…” Joanne murmured, pulling against where she was joined to Jane at their lower backs. She gazed wide-eyed at the clown ring. Jane and Kitty followed where she was looking.

  The clowns cowered, chittering against the wooden railing. The clowns didn’t cower. Kitty hadn’t known they were capable of it.

  Victor hung in the air where the Ringmaster held him by the throat. Except Kitty couldn’t see the Ringmaster anymore, not as a man and not as the satyr demon that he became.

  Darkness. Pure darkness, as beyond black as his eyes, had wreathed him like Death himself, curling and spreading like heavy smoke. It crept along the ground in a heavy fog until it reached within a foot of the clowns. They gathered their wits about them enough to clamber over the railing and continue running backward as the darkness continued to expand.

  The smoke crawled up the Ringmaster’s arm and curled its black tendrils around Victor.

  Which was when the new set of screaming began.

  Kitty darted forward. Jane tried to grab Kitty to stop her, but she was held back by her connection to her twin.

  When Kitty’s feet hit the smoke, it whirled up to surround her like the wings of a bat. The world fell away. There was no ground beneath her feet, no night sky above, no Arcanium around her. She couldn’t even feel herself. There was just the darkness. And the screams.

  Did he just kill me? she wondered. Is this hell?

  “No.”

  “Ringmaster. Let him go.”

  “He is the reason you and I are known. He must die. Everyone who knows or might know must die.”

  “You’re going to kill an awful lot of people and demons.”

  “What difference does that make to me?”

  “You might as well kill me with the rest of them. I admitted it out loud too.”

  “I cannot kill you. I cannot harm you.”