“Or maybe you just scare them so much they don’t want to argue about refunds,” Maya said.
“If you want a small part for the evening performance, all you have to do is ask,” Bell said. “I’m sure we can find something to occupy you while I finalize my design.”
“I’m fine,” Maya said. “I just wanted to ask in case I was roped into a sword box before anyone warned me what was happening.”
“When I rope you into something, you will have warning,” Bell promised.
“Comforting.” Maya sat on one of the delicate chairs, crossing her legs.
Bell might not have been human, but he was still a man, because he followed the movement of her legs, took in the length of her exposed thigh before looking back up at her eyes. However, unlike the average human male, he didn’t linger for the slightest discernible second on her cleavage.
“So I’m backstage again tonight?”
“You can join the audience if that is your preference,” Bell said. “I wanted you to see the show from our perspective at least once before you take the stage with us. I won’t be there to accompany if you join the audience, though, so I’d advise you to return to the RV immediately after the performance and not wander about in the dark.”
“Is that when the ghosts and goblins roam the deserted streets?” Maya asked.
“It’s when my people roam the not-so-deserted streets,” Bell replied. “A time and a place when it is best for souls to return to their homes.”
“This isn’t my home,” Maya said, crossing her arms.
This time Bell looked, briefly swiping his hungry gaze over her. Maya couldn’t uncross her arms without signaling she was embarrassed by the substantial cleavage she’d created.
“It is now,” he said.
* * * *
The performance that night was much the same as the one she’d watched from the wings, but sitting in the audience again, the cast played to her once more.
And she couldn’t help it—when Lady Sasha and Lord Mikhail emerged from behind the curtain, this time she glanced surreptitiously at the crowd. It was like strolling through Lover’s Lane after ten o’clock on a full moon. Those without partners shifted uncomfortably in their seats. The men had a harder time hiding their reaction, especially if they’d gone the costume route, with loose trousers that made miniature big top tents over their erections or leggings that hid absolutely nothing.
At least this time she got to see the whole performance from everyone’s good side rather than their backsides.
True, pretty much everyone but Sandra and Arnie had great backsides, which wasn’t so much their fault. She’d never tell them, because they already knew how they looked and what people thought about them, but Maya still couldn’t look at either of them without her dinner coming up in her throat.
On the surface, Maya attributed it to the health teacher in her, but underneath that, Maya understood now that she was just as bad as those who walked Oddity Row. She still saw monstrosity in all the wrong places. After all, Lady Sasha and Lord Mikhail—and Bell, infuriating bastard—were insanely attractive. Even the Ringmaster used his devilish good looks to his best advantage. But it was the Fat Man and the Human Skeleton that crossed the line for her.
And boy, was that a hard revelation to swallow.
Watching the tumbling, contortionist and aerial acts cleansed the palate of her soul, at least temporarily.
Idly rubbing her wrists where the scrapes and chafing had healed into rough, scaly scabs, Maya exited the tent with the rest of the audience following the performance. She expected there would be some darkened cars rocking in the parking lots before they left the faire proper.
In spite of the heat, Maya took a slow walk around the circus’s perimeter. There was a breeze, which didn’t necessarily cool things down, but it made the heat less thick, and she liked the quiet. Quiet was hard to come by while the faire and circus were open. She savored the night’s silence the way she savored an empty school.
Her thoughts were blissfully quiet to match the meditative, sluggish summer evening as she returned to the RV.
There weren’t just rocking cars in guest parking. So many trailers were moving to the rhythm of the night that there could have been a mini-earthquake going through the faire. Including under Bell’s RV.
Maya heaved a sigh. Whenever Bell and Valorie entered the RV after she’d already settled in, she didn’t have the energy—or the pants—to leave, and she’d have to endure the unstifled noises they’d make. Maya might as well be in the room with them. In fact, she could hear them now, muffled through the exterior of the RV.
Well, they hadn’t trapped her in with them this time. She’d give them another twenty or thirty minutes. A few more loops around the circus wouldn’t hurt. It wasn’t like the circus served the most nutritious food, and thin, skintight leather was unforgiving. Maya would have to request something leafy green for the fridge the next time they hit a store.
She was in the middle of lazily composing a grocery list when she walked past the midway booths and noticed the colorful hair of the clowns. Their neon-orange mohawks would be far less out of place in a haunted theme park as opposed to a medievalized circus. Maybe Bell had trouble convincing them to shed those particular punkish personas.
It was the most random and irrelevant of thoughts, because her mind didn’t immediately process the rest of the scene.
First she saw the neon orange, like crazy safety cones. Then she saw the red. So much red that she could see it in spite of the darkness of the color in the shadows, outside the reach of the lot lights and Christmas strands.
Her feet brought her closer, although her first impulse was to run before she could see what had caused such a splatter. It was almost fashionable—a splash of crimson among the drab sepia tones of the tents and trailers.
Now she knew why the clowns kept their mouths closed.
Many of the demons of Arcanium concealed their predator’s teeth under whatever glamour made them appear human. Or like Bale, they deliberately displayed them as though they’d been filed or as though they were some kind of prosthetic.
However, if the clowns had ever parted their lips, no one would have been able to dismiss their broad mouths and rows of razor teeth as amazing props. If anything, the lips themselves might have been latex, made to create the illusion that their mouths were those of human beings. But their greasepaint told a truer story, especially that of the clown whose face had been painted to look like a monster.
When their mouths opened, it was like their faces had been sliced from ear to ear, blood mingling with the red paint. They no longer looked even remotely human from the neck up, with that rip of teeth.
One of the things at their feet gurgled. Horror dusked upon her. Those crumpled shapes were people, limbs twisted in ways that limbs should not be twisted, things hanging out of them and from the clowns’ mouths that could only have come from inside.
And the people were still alive.
The closest person coughed a short fountain of blood as he turned his head to her. With the little strength he had left—How does he have strength left at all? His insides are outside and there’s so much red—he uncurled his arm and reached for her. His fingers twitched, imploring. The clowns’ eyes were black holes rimmed with a lantern glow, but Maya saw the abyss in his, an endless, blank nothingness that turned glassy. His hand went slack, fingers still curled, as his stomach exploded and hissed acid over the female clown’s costume. It didn’t eat through her skin, however.
The boy couldn’t have been more than sixteen.
Well, they warned him. All those signs. Her thought-voice was almost calm, but she detected hysteria just beneath it. She thought she’d left that behind after she’d encountered the cast of Arcanium the first time. Once a person got confirmation of the existence of demons, it was easy to think there were no more surprises.
Nothing could have prepared her for this trio of victims, practically children, or the mon
sters feasting on their flesh. Monsters for children. Grinning, painted faces. Pratfalls and petticoats. Bright and colorful, and all of them the artists of this carnage—the shatter and twist of bone and sinew, a Pollack and Bacon remix of Craven proportions.
The monster clown—the one who painted himself as a monster—fumbled along his victim’s face with cracked nails until he found the eyes. The boy under his hands tried to scream. His throat had been torn open, and all he could manage was a bubbly wheeze, but Maya could make out the words. Don’t. Stop. No. No.
The monster clown plucked the boy’s eyes as though they were grapes. The boy’s screams inflated his exposed lungs from under shattered ribs.
All three clowns paused in their feed then whipped around like hyenas protecting a kill.
Without the clowns’ slavering and snarling over the meal, Maya heard herself whimpering, her mouth moving as though creating words, but nothing recognizable came out.
The clowns grinned simultaneously. It sounded like spines popping.
She screamed as though it was her own throat that had been torn, a cry strangled into a sigh, as her knees gave and she stumbled back. Maya fell but kept trying to run, scrambling on the ground like a crab until her legs found their strength. She ran as fast as she could around the big top. She thought she heard rapid footsteps behind her, wolves in the forest running after the lost girl. Her mind froze on the image of herself on the ground, opened like an autopsy exam as one of the clowns, perhaps the happy clown, bathed his face in her abdomen.
As she passed through Oddity Row, she dared to look over her shoulder, expecting to see the clowns in hot pursuit.
There was no one there.
Maya slowed down, gasping for breath. Her throat had tightened to what seemed like the size of a straw, and her breasts hurt like a motherfucker. She thought she would have come across someone by now or that her cries would have alerted someone to the vicious murder going on behind the ring, but no one came. Not even the golems, who had mysteriously disappeared, their work done.
“Someone, please,” Maya whispered. Her toes dragged in the grass as she jerked her head back and forth, searching for movement, for sound, for someone, someone who could help, someone who would stop this madness. Someone who would rescue her.
There was nothing but canvas and shadows. Not a soul but hers.
At the end of the Row, she passed two of the food booths and finally heard something, people’s voices.
“Help,” she whispered, still barely aware that she wasn’t screaming.
She turned the corner around the booths, getting a whiff of meat and ale right before she came to a halt before a whole new tableau.
Lord Mikhail clutched a fair, blonde woman against his chest. He thrust into her as he held her against the wall, groaning, and he met his partner’s mouth with his own. The woman didn’t just pant. She hyperventilated, undulating her hips to drive him deeper inside. She kissed Lord Mikhail as though he provided the air that she needed.
On the ground, Lady Sasha rode a young man with fogged-up glasses. He gasped, clutching at her hips, her waist, her breasts. His face twisted with what appeared to be pain. Lady Sasha stroked his chest in affectionate reassurance before throwing her head back and moaning as she accepted the young man’s engorged cock into her. The young man shouted when Lady Sasha dug her nails in, getting a grip on him as she took him faster and faster and faster. And to the same frantic rhythm, Lord Mikhail pistoned into his woman with the strength and speed one would expect from such a cut specimen of male physique.
Lady Sasha screamed, pleasure that transformed into the predatory shriek of a hawk. The young man underneath her convulsed with his own climax, shouting through each wave. His muscles tensed so strongly that his torso lifted off the ground.
Then he fell back. The heaving of his chest abruptly stopped, and the narrowness of his face became hollower. His mouth was slightly parted, his lips colorless. Lady Sasha, however, gleamed golden like a lioness, and she purred as she rose off him and stood, stretching on her toes.
Right across from Maya, Lord Mikhail grunted through his climax, animalistic sounds that went straight to Maya’s cunt and clenched it with longing that cared nothing for her terror. He kissed his woman’s orgasmic screams until they went silent, her lips slack. She started to fall to the side, but Lord Mikhail grabbed her before she could. Lord Mikhail took her in his arms and turned, preparing to set her down next to the young man, when he noticed Maya.
“Run,” he growled.
Maya thought her ovaries might burst. Who knew that a pair of trousers made such a difference? With the trousers on, he was Hercules. Without them, he was a full-blown god. She could spend hours just studying the firm, defined lines of his thighs. She wasn’t poetically inclined, but she could write sonnets to his triceps. Did arms like that even exist? She reached out to touch him, that golden honey skin.
Lord Mikhail abruptly shifted, and Maya’s fingers tangled in the blonde girl’s hair, like walking into a spiderweb. The girl was already cold, all vitality sucked out of her. The pale, drawn skin crinkled like parchment when Maya brushed against it.
She jerked back, her full consciousness returning with the reality of the situation. Mikhail was holding a dead girl. A girl he’d just killed.
“Go. Now, stupid girl. Go!” Lady Sasha shouted, pointing away. She insinuated her insanely beautiful body between Lord Mikhail and Maya.
Taking Lord Mikhail out of her line of sight helped Maya realize how close she had come to walking off a cliff to get a close-up of the pretty scenery. She’d nearly stepped straight into the mouth of the beast.
It was only the fact she was a part of the circus now that kept her safe. This beautiful beast didn’t want her.
“Go!” Lord Mikhail roared again, backing away. His influence hit Maya once more, like a breaker at high tide, clearly against his will if he didn’t want to kill her. Maya touched her lips as lust imbued her body with its heat, a sheen of new sweat appearing on her skin. Lord Mikhail’s spell affected Lady Sasha as well, tightening her nipples and turning her eyes red, the pupils dilated to an insane degree.
“Leave or I’ll kill you myself,” Lady Sasha said. “The lashes will be worth the end of your foolishness.”
However, it wasn’t anything Maya could convince herself to do or anything that the incubus or succubus told her to do. It was the unhappy female clown coming around the corner, draped in intestines and gnawing at an organ. She didn’t appear to be in any hurry. Why would she? Where was her prey going to go?
That sound when she smiled…
Maya turned tail and ran, weaving between the Row tents in case the clowns had chosen to spread out and surround her. Panic followed the paths lust had carved until they flowed side by side, and Maya didn’t know where one ended and the other began.
This is what madness is. It had finally found her, ravaging her mind before the clowns could get to her. It was amazing how easily she had fallen into its net.
When she ran into someone, a larger someone, this time she had enough wherewithal to scream.
He covered her mouth to stifle it.
“It’s me, Maya,” Bell said. He removed his hand from her mouth but still cradled the back of her neck with the other, steadying her.
“They’re coming,” Maya whispered frantically. “They’re coming after me. They’re dead. They killed them.”
“Who killed whom, and which ones are chasing you, the dead or the killers?” Bell asked.
This was no time to sound so fucking amused.
“The clowns…they killed…children—three boys—and the boys were…everywhere,” Maya stuttered. The memory interrupted her speech as she looked around her.
Bell slipped an arm around her waist to anchor her, but she kept searching over her shoulders for bright orange movement.
“And Lady Sasha, Lord Mikhail, they were… I walked in on… The people they were having sex with died. They murdered…”
&
nbsp; “Well, yes. That’s why I don’t permit them to screw the cast. I’d have to replace cast members every few weeks, and that’s not conducive to a stable work environment,” Bell said.
“You…you know?” Maya asked.
“Of course, Maya. Do you think I’m not aware of what goes on in my own circus? Or of whom I employ?” Bell replied.
“But the clowns…they…”
“Will not hurt you,” Bell said. “You startled them. They were following you to investigate whether you were another potential meal. If you hadn’t run, they would have eventually recognized you.”
He raised a hand, and Maya whirled her head around. The unhappy and happy clowns stood together in the middle of the Row, wreathed in the fruits of their slaughter. They cocked their heads as they looked between Bell and Maya. Then they jerkily went back around the big top, those terrifying open grins still on their faces.
“You see?” Bell said gently. He guided her face back to him. “Tragedy and Comedy have no quarrel with you. Murphy has a quarrel with everyone, of course, but he doesn’t take it out on us.”
“But they killed those boys,” Maya said. Whatever had shuddered out of alignment in her head slowly vibrated back into place, away from madness and into full understanding. She wasn’t sure whether this state was any better.
“The boys were trespassing,” Bell said. He stroked a line down her jaw.
“I didn’t realize that was punishable by dismemberment,” Maya said.
With the prospect of imminent disembowelment decreased, she could focus on what was right in front of her instead of what was chasing after her. When she’d run into him, she’d stopped herself with her hands against his chest, and she hadn’t moved very far from there, even when she’d been looking behind her.
Someone who could speak of murder and mayhem with such insouciance shouldn’t feel so soft over his firm muscles—or so warm.
“There are dangers everywhere, even in the most peaceful of havens,” Bell replied. “A boy sniffs in a flesh-eating amoeba from a tranquil lake. A man strolling through the Florida brush gets bitten by a water moccasin. A pack of feral dogs attacks a woman in a city park. My dear, predators exist hidden all around. All the more reason for humans to stay wary, always wary.” He slid his fingers into her hair, which had been shaken partially loose from her ponytail.
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