She had her head back on her shoulders again, and she couldn’t stand for this. She couldn’t fraternize with a demon who sanctioned the slaughter of mostly innocent bystanders, who accepted killers into his circus on purpose, knowing the havoc they would wreak. A demon who had no regrets, no concern but for his own will.
Bell pulled back and pressed his cheek to hers as he unlaced her corset.
“At any given time in the world outside Arcanium, ten percent of the visible population is composed of jinn. We are foot soldiers of chaos, all with our individual quirks and needs, serving the purpose of instigating curious coincidences, freak accidents, terrible and unexplainable tragedies. Some human souls serve the same master, but they do not have the same pattern of purpose woven into their nature that the jinn carry. We are not human. We cannot be not held to the same standard,” Bell said.
Once her corset had been discarded, he worked down the small buttons of her blouse.
“You may take issue with my people here, but they are subject to me, not you. They cannot hurt you, nor can you interfere with them. You cannot inform outsiders of your presence here, much less tell them what my people do. Even if you did, we leave no traces, no tracks. In the morning, it will be as if nothing had happened, and the victims will be filed missing. In a few years, that label will change to ‘presumed dead’. It will forever be a mystery. These kinds of mysteries have always been and always will be. You gave yourself to an ordered purpose for so long, but chaos has as much a place in this universe as order. Some might argue it has more.”
Bell ran his hand through her hair, tangling and tousling it, before pulling her closer to bring her body against him in full.
“Your alliance has changed. I have changed it. Chaos has no compass, no trajectory, no laws, no limits. Submit to me. Shed the order of your former life. Submit to chaos, Maya. I am chaos.”
This time, when he drew her down for another kiss, she didn’t stiffen. Bell was bigger than her. Arcanium was bigger than her. And there was nothing she could do but pull a screen over the horror and give herself something else to occupy her thoughts.
Or erase her thoughts completely.
Chapter Six
Maya rummaged through the fridge for an apple while Bell drank a mimosa. Maya would smack the glass out of the arrogant prick’s hand if she weren’t part of the cause of that satisfied smirk.
“Not that it’s any of my business,” Valorie said as she emerged naked from the bedroom. “But you mind telling me where you’ve been off to at night? Usually I can’t have a decent night’s sleep without your hands on me, and now I swear I lie awake until four before you come in. Then you go right off to sleep. And I know it’s not because you can’t get it up.”
“I didn’t want to disturb you,” Bell said. “You need sleep more than I. And no, it isn’t any of your business.”
He didn’t yell at her or even raise his voice. Nothing about his demeanor suggested that he was angry Valorie had asked, only that he wasn’t willing to share. Whether the mystery he cultivated was intentional or not, Maya couldn’t say, but it was annoying as hell, and Maya knew what he’d been doing. Namely, her.
She always got back to the RV before he did. She had no way of knowing what else he did to occupy his time for the next hour or two that he didn’t return, but unlike Valorie, Maya didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to know what any of the demons got up to in the dark of the night. Carnage out of sight was carnage out of mind, and she had to live with these people.
Maya also apparently had to continue living with Valorie, because Bell hadn’t offered Maya an alternative—unless the exhibition tents counted as bedrooms. That could have been the reason why he’d stayed out, to diffuse suspicion that Maya was the cause of his lateness. However, Maya doubted that Bell was so altruistic.
Maya found the apple she was looking for and took a bite.
When she straightened, Valorie was right next to her, holding a knife.
“Oh, sorry,” Valorie said, not sounding sorry at all. “I thought you might want to cut your apple up.”
“No, I’m fine just using my teeth,” Maya said. “That’s what they’re for.”
Valorie put the knife back into the holder and bumped Maya’s shoulder as she passed by her to put on her costume in the bedroom. It was truly astounding how quickly Maya had gotten used to sporadic nudity from her fellow cast members, and about eighty percent of that nudity she’d stumbled upon actually had nothing to do with sex.
Maya stepped over Bell’s feet and sat down on her sofa-slash-bed. He toasted her. Then he returned his attention to the ether, or wherever his mind went when he wasn’t corralling circus cats.
The truth was, she wished he really would go back to Valorie. It would make her mental turmoil so much tidier.
They’d moved from the previous faire—and whatever murders had been committed—to here without incident, no sirens or swirling police lights, not even a courtesy interview. Arcanium seemed suspicion-proof, in spite of the disappearances and murders that must have followed wherever it went.
Maybe that was the problem right there. No one noticed a circus. It was there and gone, ephemeral as a dream and just as fantastic in the fading recollection. The cast and crew had no permanent residence, no ties but to each other. They might as well have been ghosts moving in and out of worlds, wondrous and intangible, echoes of a time long past.
And almost every night in this waking dream, Bell found her, wherever she was. Not all nights were as sex-demon-charged as others, but she still found it impossible not to touch him, not to drown in the pleasure he offered every night he came to her. Maya had never had such fantastic sex with such regularity, nor had she slept this well in years, if ever.
Yet deliberately avoiding the issue of what else could be happening in Arcanium while she and Bell occupied themselves with each other didn’t make the issue go away.
Then there were the wishes…
Not Maya’s. Maya had been careful not to express any of the potential driftwood wishes passing through her head.
But Bell’s clients took no such care. Why should they? Dreams were fantasy and wishes were harmless. Nothing to be lost or gained by expressing them to the handsome, sensitive gentleman in his private tent, right?
As soon as Maya finished her apple, she headed down to the big top for a more substantial morning meal, something with protein—probably eggs. The golems were good with eggs.
Then she brought her corset down to Bell’s tent, where he always laced her in, the act somehow as arousing to both of them as taking it off again. When he was finished, he turned her around and pulled her against his chest, always soft and firm and warm and comforting to Maya, in spite of everything.
After a kiss, Maya settled in a corner of the tent, sitting on the short, compact, absurdly comfortable armchair Bell had created for her.
If a client asked, Bell told them she was an apprentice, his lovely assistant new to the circus and learning the ropes. Maya wasn’t unaware that Bell also used her for those whom Bell couldn’t put at ease with his own manner and attractiveness.
She didn’t understand how she managed to do that, since she hadn’t been anything close to a calming influence with Derrick.
Well, it wasn’t exactly the same situation, Maya thought dryly as the first customers entered the tent—a pair of young men who clearly appreciated the exposed length of leg and her breasts over her corset. The first customers of many for the day. In here with Bell, she didn’t say anything. She just looked good. And for most straight men who came in, alone or with girlfriends, that’s all they wanted from her. Maya usually welcomed this kind of attention. She did not, however, enjoy being eye candy and nothing else. If Bell had wanted a mannequin, maybe he should have turned her into one.
He did call her his apprentice, though. He hadn’t given her an ounce of psychic ability or advice on how to con a mark, and as an immortal being, it wasn’t like he was going to be replaced any t
ime soon. However, she was learning. About people. The kind of people who talked to fortune tellers. And about Bell and how he operated. How he granted wishes.
The wishes that crossed Bell’s table were disturbingly similar and selfish, more often than not. Most people didn’t bring their anxieties about the state of world affairs into a fortune teller’s tent. They entered to hear about their fortunes, the advancement of their personal lives. Getting their fortune told was fun and frivolous. What it always seemed to come down to, with little variation, was looking better, being with someone hot and getting paid more money for less work.
Bell called them his bread and butter. He had an almost infinite number of variations on how to grant those wishes. He barely had to blink after his clients voiced their throwaway desires. His smile would twitch a little deeper, then he would go on with the reading.
Maya rarely saw the actual impact right after the granting of the wish. Bell would wait until they left the tent before he’d tell Maya what he had done.
If Maya didn’t know any better, she’d think he was showing off.
If that was his intention, then he was doing a piss-poor job of impressing her with anything but branded threads of fear under her skin when he would return his attention to her after the evening performances.
Today alone yielded a handful of granted wishes that he handed out like a Vegas loan shark.
“I wish my boss would understand that I’m living paycheck to paycheck here, and I deserve more,” a beleaguered man shared without hesitation.
“His boss will understand and will promise a small raise, only to be transferred and the promise abandoned,” Bell told Maya the second the man had left the tent.
“I wish I could lose five pounds. That’s all I want.” A woman, wearing impractical shoes.
“Someone will steal her purse and shoes in the parking lot.”
“Mom keeps telling me that I have my whole life ahead of me, but I don’t know if I’m ever going to get another chance,” said a teenager with a zit on her chin and last summer’s fashions. “I wish there was a guy out there who liked me, who just grabbed me and kissed me right on the lips. A little romance is all I ask for.”
“People think that strangers grabbing and kissing them is romantic…until it happens,” Bell said after the girl had left with a slight spring in her step. She’d had a good read.
“For God’s sake, Bell, she’s thirteen, maybe fifteen,” Maya whispered angrily. “What does she need to be punished for?”
“She’s not being punished,” Bell replied. “She’ll learn better what she wants after her experience.”
“If she doesn’t kill herself first,” Maya said.
“If she survives,” Bell agreed, unmoved by the fate to which he had condemned a teenage girl. She concerned him no more than a twenty-something young man or a sixteen-year-old girl or a thirty-five-year-old woman and her husband or two college-age young men…
Maya didn’t need a priest to tell her that letting bad things happen was as bad as doing them herself. Worse, she didn’t try to warn anyone. She didn’t stop them when she saw the dreaded ‘w’ word form on their lips, and she didn’t attempt to thwart the restrictions on her. She didn’t submit to torture in the name of all that was holy and good to save a few souls.
Instead, Bell offered her his asylum and the creature comforts that accompanied accepting the status as quo. She preferred not being in terrible fire-ant-bite pain, and she didn’t like the way that that Ringmaster sometimes looked at her and everyone else in Arcanium except Bell. One punishment and the threat of more was enough to make her betray everything she’d thought she believed in. And when the sun went down, she would conveniently forget everything she had witnessed during the day.
Even more baffling than her apparent defection to the legion of evil—or at least the very dark morally gray—was Bell’s decision to seduce her to his side at all.
After today’s wishes, there would be new bodies in hospital beds, new statistics in new police files, many tears shed, existential questions asked, faith lost…but not one new member of Arcanium, not even a circus zebra.
So what was it about her that had inspired him to assimilate her into his freakish flock? He didn’t have a dearth of women or men to choose from. Kitty seemed keen to sing his praises and had no particular male attachments at the moment, to Maya’s knowledge. Even if he wanted sexual variety outside the current circus selection, a man like him should have had no trouble picking up women, shameless flirt that he was.
Not to mention he already had a woman in his bed who could stand up and fellate him upside down at the same time and who apparently didn’t care that he was a demon like Maya did. Moral qualms weren’t enough to keep Maya from taking off her clothes with him or divesting him of his, but at least she felt bad about it.
“I can hear you, you know,” Bell said, leaning back in his chair between customers.
“If you can hear my thoughts, then you know I have questions, and you deliberately choose not to answer them. So there’s no point in you pointing out that you can hear my thoughts in the first place, except to make me uncomfortable,” Maya said, inspecting her nails with nonchalance she didn’t actually feel. “Or to make me think harder about the things I don’t want you to hear me thinking, which of course only guarantees that I think about them more.”
“I have an idea,” he said.
By not replying to anything she’d just said, he acknowledged that all of it was true. Douche nozzle. “That doesn’t sound promising.”
“I’m still creating the act for the ring, so you needn’t worry about stage fright just yet,” he said. “After the performance, stay backstage instead of going on your usual wandering tour of places you’ve already been dozens of times.”
“I can’t tell if you’ve always been dry or whether I’m rubbing off on you,” Maya said.
“So many things to say. So many,” he murmured, dialing up his charming smile as customers walked in, a young teenage boy and girl who looked like a couple.
Maya kept her mouth in a thin line, practically biting her tongue when the girl gazed starry-eyed between Bell and her boyfriend—one a supposedly harmless physical attraction and the latter a strong case of puppy love—and said, “Do you read palms? I totally wish Ryan and I stay together for the rest of our lives. Do you see that in my love line?”
Ryan appeared a little scared off by the girl’s fervor, but he nodded, along with his girlfriend.
God, they looked like children. The girl didn’t realize what she’d just condemned them to. A long life of a loveless marriage. A very short life that ended with a car accident on the way home. Two life forces attached so that, when one died, the other wasn’t long to follow. Maya got the picture.
“I need some air,” she muttered, standing from her chair. She pushed through the tent flap. She hadn’t been lying. She gulped the midsummer heat as though it was the first cool breeze of autumn.
She retrieved her phone out of the small bag Kitty had made for her that attached to a black belt around her waist like Bell’s. She checked the messages. Nothing. Not so much as a text message from her mother.
Her thumb hovered above the call button. One click and three little numbers. That’s all she’d need to call in the cavalry.
“It won’t work, you know.” Kitty came up behind her and lowered Maya’s wrist to keep her from giving in to the impulse.
“What, the phone?” Maya asked.
“Using it to call out,” Kitty said. “Your phone doesn’t give a signal in here. Arcanium’s like a black hole for involuntaries’ electronics. You’re lucky yours is even working so you can see and hear everything incoming.”
“God, is there anything in this circus that isn’t attached to a spell of some kind? How does he keep it all going all the time?” Maya asked, fighting the impulse to throw her phone at something or someone.
“It’s like the golems. He sets up the spells and then lets them go, twe
aking here and there when necessary. Arcanium is a giant spiderweb of spells,” Kitty explained. “Bell’s the spider, adding or taking away strands of spell silk as needed.”
“If Bell’s the spider, what are we?” Maya asked.
“We’re the flies he chooses to keep alive,” Kitty said.
“So, if we’re the flies he keeps alive and other flies die, what are the demons?”
“They’re the toads that eat the leftovers Bell tosses to them.”
“Metaphors aside, you really don’t like them, do you?” Maya said. “I mean, I thought you seemed okay with them, but…”
Kitty glanced down at where she played with the thick end of her braid. “Even if they look human, it’s foolish to expect them to be us. They aren’t. When you stop expecting that, they’re easier to understand and easier to handle, but you still have to be careful. That’s all.”
* * * *
Maya definitely noticed a difference in the way that the Arcanium cast viewed her. She supposed it would have been too much to ask that such a big secret stay kept. For a while, she thought only the demons would know and keep it for their own personal amusement. But then she started noticing the humans noticing her, Lennon whispering in Joanne’s and Jane’s ears, Moss talking with Christina and Carlo, and from their lips to everyone’s ears.
Except Valorie’s. Everyone seemed to be keeping the secret from Valorie, including the demons, which explained why Valorie only suspected and didn’t know. And that only made Maya’s stomach twist just a little bit tighter.
Misha and Christina gave her wide berth once they knew. They didn’t curl their lips or express any revulsion at her, simply seemed to avoid her for the company she kept. Joanne and Jane, however, liked coming into Kitty’s tent when Kitty was playing with Maya’s hair, and sometimes Maya stuck around while Kitty worked on Joanne and Jane and helped them put on their costumes.
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