Kitty fell onto the chair, palms on her cheeks, but she couldn’t cover her eyes, even though she knew what was coming.
Bell slipped his arms around Maya’s waist and rested his chin on her shoulder as he peered into the crystal ball with her. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
In the clouded crystal, Derrick started riding his filly to the finish line as Kerry laid into her dog whistle, porn star cries.
Then Derrick went rigid and fell off her, and Kerry’s screams became real.
Derrick’s mouth gaped open in a rictus. Then it opened too far, the jaw coming out of joint and falling to the side of his neck as though he was a puppet who wished to be a real boy.
The bedroom and the fortune teller’s tent filled with the sound of redwoods falling in the forest. Derrick didn’t shout. He screamed as every large bone in his body wrenched broken, the ends poking out inside his skin like driftwood against tarp. His heart lurched against the cracked detritus of his ribs. Derrick’s eyes bulged, veins bursting until they looked like blood blisters in his sockets.
Kerry screamed and screamed and screamed like a tit chick in a horror film, falling off the bed with the sheets knotting around her legs and shifting Derrick’s limbs in the process. He shrieked, pulling back against it the tugging pain and shrieking again. Every part of him had cracked like twigs, and there was nothing he could do to make the pain stop. Anything he did made it worse.
“For God’s sake, stop!” Kitty pleaded. “Look what you’re doing to her.”
Maya didn’t know what Kitty was talking about. She’d been turned to stone, cold stone, all the way to the soul.
There was so much screaming, and the cracking didn’t end. The smaller bones now, Maya assumed.
“Stop! Don’t make her a murderer, Bell,” Kitty said, her hair swinging as she lunged forward and grasped his hand. “Please.”
Derrick suddenly became very still.
Kerry had gone white, whimpering and biting past her nails and chewing right on her fingers, drawing blood. She looked like a vampire.
“Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god,” Kerry muttered.
Derrick twitched. He was still alive. His heart still lurched, punching his broken ribs.
“Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god.” Kerry gave Derrick wide berth as she crawled along the edge of the room to grab Derrick’s phone and dial nine-one-one. “Hello? Hello? My name is Kerry Thomas, I’m at my boyfriend’s house. Something happened. He’s hurt. Something…I don’t know what happened, but all his bones… It was so awful… I can’t. Just come. Oh God. He’s dying. Oh God!”
Threads of blood dripped from Derrick’s nose and unhinged mouth.
The crystal clouded over, glowed white, then went clear.
Bell tucked a strand of hair behind Maya’s ear. “He’ll live,” he murmured. “If you can call it that. You’re welcome.”
* * * *
Maya was vaguely aware that Kitty asked her if she was okay as Maya walked out of the tent like a somnambulist. Either Maya managed to appear normal for a few seconds or Bell stopped Kitty from following her. It didn’t matter much either way. Kitty might have also called Bell a stupid fool. That didn’t matter either.
Random scenes from her three years with Derrick played before her eyes like a nickelodeon, interrupted by record scratches of his scarecrow-limp body as she wandered through the circus.
Early in their first year, before Maya had started spending more time at his place and had still been living in her own apartment, she’d called in sick to school for three days straight because of one of the worst flus she’d had in her life. By the time she’d reached adulthood, it was harder for her to get sick to a level past annoying, but when she did, it hit her with all the subtlety of a sack of bricks.
At that point, she had pretty much surrounded herself with all the things she needed— saltines, water, a bottle of Tylenol, a six-pack of Kleenex already half-used, two blankets, her phone, a Sue Grafton novel, and the TV and Blu-ray remotes. She would get up to go to the bathroom and sometimes to warm up a can of soup. Other than that, her head had ached too much, and she hadn’t wanted to move.
Derrick had still been in courtship mode, like a male bird displaying its plumage to a potential mate, but it had been sweet anyway when he’d arrived on her second day of sickness with a box of chocolates and a shaggy teddy bear. He had stayed and made her soup so she wouldn’t have to move that evening, got her 7-Up when she’d asked, opened another box of Kleenex, and kissed her fevered forehead before he’d left, even though she hadn’t showered in two days. Maya swore the affection in his eyes couldn’t have been faked.
A few months later, they’d played a friendly game of volleyball with some people from the local Protestant church, which had built a sand court near their campus. Derrick had been so mad at Maya for missing an easy serve her direction that he had slammed the volleyball on the wooden slats that kept the sand contained. It had sounded like a bouncing skull.
That one night in the Sonic drive-thru, Derrick had told her to do the most obscene things with her hot dog, then with the sundae. He had eaten his tater tots off her stomach, which didn’t sound all that erotic out of context, but it had been salty and he had used them as a kind of Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb path to between her legs. He’d taken pictures, and they’d left the windows down. She’d thought she’d heard skates go past the car at one point, but no one had bothered them. At the very least, no one had called the cops. Maya had thought it was the funniest, craziest, surprisingly hottest thing she had done up to that point.
He’d thrown a snow globe at the wall during one of their arguments about who was right about something unimportant, which really came down to who could claw their way to the top of the hill. Maya had grown up with four brothers. She was used to fighting for position. But Derrick had been wearing her down. Sometimes when he’d looked at her, he would grin like a clown at his luck, and other times he’d looked like he wanted to strangle her with his bare hands. Derrick was an only child. He didn’t fight because he’d always had to, like she did. He fought because he had to be at the top. Anything less would tear his world apart.
His mouth had been too wide, his tongue a wriggling, lolling slab of meat. His arms had bent in five places instead of two, popped out of the socket like a ball-jointed doll.
People walked around her, laughing, like they had the night Bell had trapped her in time, but she barely noticed them.
She passed the alehouse booth. All at once, the scent of roasted turkey and alcohol assaulted her. Maya gagged and stumbled behind the wooden structure, disturbing a group of college-age young men with the ghosts of recently deceased ales haunting their breaths. She threw up her breakfast, coughed the rest of it out. Then she heaved again. This time, nothing but foul liquid oozed out of her mouth.
“Hey, that sucks. Too much beer, sun and fun, huh? Here.” A guy in a shirt with the sleeves cut off handed her a bunch of napkins, which she took, but she stared through him as though he wasn’t even there.
“You okay, chica?” the guy asked, but she staggered away again.
His femurs, the strongest bones in the body, had cracked in half with the snap of a thousand wishbones, a sound like the clowns grinning.
Because she had wished it. Was that how she had been feeling? Broken not just in her heart, but through her whole, down to the core.
He had gone pale under the freckles she had loved. Then bruises had blossomed where the bones had perforated veins, purple blotches like spontaneous tattoos.
Because she had wished it. And her wish was her desire.
This was her fault. She hadn’t murdered him, but she had broken him into pieces like a china doll dashed on tile in a tantrum. He had betrayed her, ruined her outside life, strung her mother along, essentially stolen her things, condemned her to this purgatory. But he hadn’t earned that. Even so, she was glad. She was glad and she was horrified, and she couldn’t stop seeing it because she didn’t want to stop s
eeing it.
She had wished it.
There stood the swirling, far-from-pearly gates, swung open for faire folk—a tantalizing illusion for the lost souls of Arcanium.
Was she lost? Funny. The whole time, Maya had thought she’d been missing.
She stepped across the threshold and held her breath for the rip tide of pain that pulled her under until she couldn’t hold it anymore.
Maya had no way of knowing exactly how long she was there at the entrance of the circus, screaming and shaking on the ground as the fire burned beneath the surface of her skin. Claws tore through her throat. Her scream turned into nothing but a rasp, but she still didn’t stop.
This was what she had come here for, to burn all over under the sun as though a giant child had focused his magnifying glass directly on her, an insignificant insect.
When Derrick had wished her into Arcanium, Maya had been sure she hadn’t done anything to deserve this. Now that she had wished Derrick into a different kind of torment, Maya understood that she deserved this and worse, because unlike Derrick, Maya had known what might come of her wish. She’d known it would end in his pain, and she’d done it anyway, on purpose.
Strange how fast night seemed to be falling.
“It’s a seizure,” Bell said. He was a form on the other side of the ballroom, standing straight like a butler, but naked, and he wouldn’t look at her. “She’s epileptic. We’ll take her. We have her medication. Go about your business. We’ll take care of her.”
* * * *
“Why did you have to do that?” Bell asked.
Air-conditioning was sweet and cool on her forehead. He stroked her hair, which had pulled loose from its knot at one point.
Her vision cleared like the cloud in the crystal. She was in the RV on her sofa. The darkness outside the window showed that night really had fallen by now.
She prickled as though her entire body had fallen asleep.
“Don’t you realize I cannot save you from what comes next?” he said. He held her head in his lap, his jaw set. The golden brown in his hazel eyes seemed to burn brighter so close to her own.
Maya blinked. The action made a clicking noise, and she twitched. She was dry.
Bell handed her a glass of water as she sat up. She brought it to her chapped lips and drank.
“Don’t try to talk yet. You’ve strained your voice,” Bell said. “There are rules here, Maya. Rules that I have set. You cross the threshold once with a warning. After that, you belong to the Ringmaster. That’s why he is here. To mete out punishment. Do you understand? I cannot stop him.”
Maya set the glass down on the coffee table like a judge with a gavel.
“Good,” she rasped.
Bell narrowed his eyes. Anything he might have said or asked was interrupted by an authoritative knock at the door. The knock was a courtesy. The Ringmaster opened the door and stepped in.
Inside an RV, everyone appeared bigger than they were, even inside a luxurious vehicle like this one. The Ringmaster, already over six feet, loomed over Bell and Maya where they sat on the couch.
“The evening is over. Relinquish her to me,” the Ringmaster said. His distinctive, thunderous voice differed little from the electronic enhancement of his microphone in the ring. The glee in his expression in the ring, however, had disappeared in favor of an even more dispassionate mask than Bell’s, as it always did. “You can have her back when I am finished. If you require it, you may watch. But you promised, Bell. You promised they would be mine.”
“I did,” Bell said. He put a hand on Maya’s shoulder, tightening it when she started to get up.
“Give her to me.” The Ringmaster grasped her other shoulder.
She shivered. Bell opened his hand.
“You will come with me, child,” the Ringmaster said.
Maya didn’t say a word. The Ringmaster’s grip felt as though it was literally made of steel, and it propelled her forward, out of the RV, toward the ring. Light footsteps behind her alerted Maya that Bell followed them.
The ring was still lit for a performance, although the audience had already departed. In the center of the ring stood a plain wooden bench under a blinding spotlight.
“Stay out of the way,” the Ringmaster warned in Bell’s direction.
Bell abruptly turned into the stands and climbed to the top row, right next to the entrance. He leaned his forearms against his thighs, staring intently into the spotlight. The circus entrance tent flap swung closed on its own.
If Maya could feel anything other than the beating of her heart—and she didn’t even want to feel that—she might have been interested in the dynamic between the two. She had never seen Bell obedient before. His will ran Arcanium. Yet the hierarchy had shifted. Now the Ringmaster rose above Bell’s rule, at least temporarily.
“Take off your clothes,” the Ringmaster said.
Maya blinked, jolted ever so slightly from the morass. “What?” she asked.
“I will not ask you twice, girl,” the Ringmaster said. He dragged her into the spotlight until he was nothing but a wreathed shadow.
“What is it with all the gutter minds?” Maya asked, voice still rasping and catching on the words. “Don’t you people know how to do anything else?” She was disappointed and angry, although she didn’t quite know why.
“It is not your body that I want,” the Ringmaster said. “There is simply no need to ruin Sasha’s craft. I work better with warm flesh. When you are finished, straddle the bench and lie down on your stomach.”
Any other night, she might have asked why, might have protested, might have tried to run and maybe Bell would have talked her down and explained what was about to happen. However, tonight, all she needed to know was that he was going to punish her.
She unlaced the top of her dress and pushed the thick straps down her arms, then moved her hips from side to side to get the rest of it off. She held the limp leather in her hands, staring at it as though it had gained some new significance off her body. She didn’t know how long she stood there, but the Ringmaster did not rush her. He waited for her at the edge of the ring, his hands behind his back, balefully majestic in his ringmaster regalia.
When she could finally move, she draped the dress over the low barrier between the ring and the audience.
“You can leave the rest,” the Ringmaster said, nodding to her panties and her lace-up boots. “On the bench, girl.”
She returned to the spotlight and reclined face down on the bench. She pulled pins from her bedraggled hair and tossed them onto the ground until her hair curtained her face. The bench was low—her knees bent almost to the floor. When her arms hung limp, her knuckles dragged on the sawdust, so she wrapped her arms around the bench instead. It kept her anchored but gave her little comfort. She didn’t seek comfort. She was nearly naked and presenting herself for an unknown punishment to a cold, commanding demon, and nothing had ever felt less sexual to her in spite of her nakedness. She sensed the Ringmaster’s eyes traveling over her body as he circled her, but with less regard for the flesh than he’d give a hanging cow’s carcass.
“First infraction. Twenty lashes,” the Ringmaster said. “Count yourself fortunate, little one. In another lifetime, I used a three-tail whip with glass tied to the fall. Even this little instrument, if used correctly, can cut to the bone. But it takes many trespasses before I am permitted to strike so hard. Few have ever reached that point, alas.”
“I can take whatever you give,” Maya murmured. “I need…” Talking required too much energy, so she stopped.
“Yes. You will take whatever I give,” the Ringmaster said. “Shall we begin?”
Maya wasn’t going to answer, and the Ringmaster wouldn’t care either way.
The whip hissed through the air and snapped over her shoulder. Maya tightened her grip on the bench, flinching with a whimper.
The Ringmaster didn’t count the blows, nor did he order her to. He took his time between each strike of the whip, his boots
shuffling an endless beat in circles around her as he observed his handiwork. Sometimes he hit her longways over her back. Sometimes he struck short and specific on her thighs. He tore the fabric of her panties with a blow over her buttocks. Some of her welts split and bled cold down her side.
After the seventh strike, Maya lost track. It didn’t matter how many blows there were. The Ringmaster would finish the set punishment, but it wouldn’t erase the stain. The lash didn’t dig deeply enough.
“Get up,” the Ringmaster said. He used the handle to lift her head. Animation backlit his expression like a flame. There was no denying that he had enjoyed their session immensely. Maya had never seen such terrible love. “We are finished.”
Tears darkened the wood beneath her. Snot threaded slimy from her nose, and whining cries peeled from her raw throat. The muscles of her arms and thighs ached from the tension against the pain and holding her in place.
“Another,” Maya whispered.
“Excuse me?”
“Again,” she said.
His imposing boots shifted direction to the entrance. He was looking to Bell.
“Very well,” he replied. For the first time outside of a performance, Maya thought she heard a knife edge of excitement to his voice. “Another twenty lashes.”
Welts over the welts made flagellated crosses, tearing at raw flesh. Now she felt as though the Ringmaster had used the glass-tipped whip he’d mentioned, as though her back and legs were ground meat.
All the bones that could bend apart had bent. Jagged points on his skin. Bloody eyes that looked like they would pop like blueberries.
It wasn’t enough.
Maya drifted, her mind almost blank except for bursts of pain and its aftermath, her world narrowed to the stretch of torn flesh terrain on her back and her absolute, irrevocable need to correct what had been done. As she floated, suspended slightly above her body, she experienced a moment of the purest clarity—another wish. A wish to take it back.
But that collapsed almost as soon as she thought it. Bell wouldn’t let her take it back. He had wanted to do what he’d done. He had no regrets, no guilt, none of the responsibility that she carried like a pyramid stone on her ravaged back. If she wished for it to be taken back, he’d find a way to get what he wanted anyway.
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