“Need something, lad?” I ask, not exactly unpleasantly, but in a way that says I’m not on duty as an act yet and won’t stand for quite so much staring.
“I’m here to paint your wagon, sir,” he says, holding up two pots of paint.
I nod and smile. “You’re a bit young, aren’t you?”
“My name is Vil, sir, and I’ve the steadiest hand outside of London. Do the odd jobs for Master Bailey, you see.” With both hands and a grunt, he hefts his leather bag and drops it with a clank.
“Go on, then.” He leans the ladder against the wagon and quickly sets to work with his brushes and far more concentration than I expected of one so young. “Tell me, Vil. You ever seen Master Bailey?”
“No, sir. No one has. Not in ten years gone. But we get paid regular through his window and no one gets beaten, which tells me it’s much better here than elsewhere.”
We lapse into a professional silence as he works, and I go back to rummaging through Phaedro’s trunks. All the best things I’d hoped to find are gone. No grimoires, no potions and powders to keep my stores healthy. A proper magician should have a cabinet of supplies, but all I find are props, cheap tricks, and clever illusions—nothing of substance.
“Bugger,” I growl to myself, knowing there must be something more.
“You don’t like the color, sir?”
My annoyance fades when I look up. “No, lad. The color’s fine. Looks much better with Phaedro’s name painted out.”
With a sigh of relief, the boy clambers down from his perch with his pot of paint in hand and wet brush in his mouth. Without asking for any help, he tugs his ladder to the other end of the wagon and starts a series of glorious curlicues that magically connect into my name. Pride rushes into me, and I allow myself a grin before tamping it back down again. It doesn’t pay to look cocky when contemplating a hostile takeover.
“What else should it say, sir?”
I look up. Criminy the Great scrolls across the wagon in a shower of stars.
“It’s perfect, lad,” I say. And it is.
For now.
I’ll be a little more explicit when I have him repaint Bailey’s wagon for me.
AT LUNCH, I venture to the other side of the dining car and move among the carnivalleros. A few of the more skittish humans shudder when I touch their shoulders and look directly into their eyes, but soon, I’ve got them all smiling, laughing, divulging their secrets. Casca needs better weights; one of the freak tents is so worn through that people are getting a free show. The flea circus lady heard there was a traveling apothecary who kept an entire wagon filled with jars of wonders and terrors, and for the right price, he might let it go. And I agree that we must acquire it.
A master must never forget that listening is his best weapon. People who feel they aren’t heard start to yell, and then it’s a lot harder to shut their mouths and open their hearts. Bailey’s been hiding too long, and his speakerphone is a one-way street. I mentally catalog their grievances, tie them to faces and names and acts and wagons. This little kingdom is so very in need of a king.
All I have to do is kill the old king.
But first, I owe a visit to my prospective queen.
With enthusiastic goodbyes, I leave the dining wagon, fairly sure I’ve made many friends and the requisite few enemies. Those who hunger for ambition always do, and it does keep me on my toes. I scroll through my mental list of what needs doing around the caravan, aching for a pen and paper and fairly certain that when I’m in charge, Vil will serve as my secretary.
Merissa’s wagon is open, a pile of manure and straw by the wide door on the horses’ side. Kali and Fausta are picketed in the field, each dining on what looks like half of a pig’s carcass, crunching the bones with their huge, flat teeth. I pat their elegant necks, admire their gleaming coats. The scent of blood draws me closer to the open section of Merissa’s car, and I find the rest of the carcass hanging from a hook, the skin stripped off. The smell is pleasant, and I’m curious what cultivated flesh tastes like, but there’s barely any blood left, and I won’t win Merissa back by stealing from her pets.
“Stain? What are you doing?”
Oh, but she’s beautiful when she’s angry, hands on her hips and fine curves clad in a gentleman’s work clothes, ratty and blood-stained. Her hair is in a long braid, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows. I want to throw her in the straw and take her right here, right now, with the door open and the meat perfuming the air.
“Looking for you, love. Although Kali and Fausta are looking handsome today.”
She rolls her eyes. “They’re handsome every day. You found me. Get out of my wagon and tell me what you want.”
I hop down lightly and curl my hands around her waist, leaning in to nip at her lips. She goes stiff for a moment, then melts into my kiss. I take my time before pulling away to guide a stray lock of hair behind her deliciously elfin ear. “Darling, I love you when you’re imperious and cruel. But I wanted to enlist your help. Unless you’d care to muss your hair a bit more?” I jerk my chin at the wagon and quirk an eyebrow.
She shoves me away roughly, but the kind of rough that makes a man's heart beat faster. “I’ve no time for this, Stain. I’ve work to do. As do you. Are you ready for your act tonight? Have you practiced? Do you need assistants? You’ll have to negotiate with Tess if you want to cut her in half, you know. She’s well aware of her value.”
I grin and shrug. “There’s time. And I don’t play with party tricks. My magic is real.”
“Oh, and Phaedro’s wasn’t?”
“Not from what I’ve seen in his props. But perhaps you knew him more...intimately?”
It tugs at me, how I remember Phaedro watching her as she worked her horses, how she stood so close to the stage on the night we dueled and tried to stop me with her whip. She’s biting her lip now, pulling away from my hot hands and turning to touch Fausta like the horse is her only lifeline and she’s drowning. I want her to touch me like that, too. I step close behind her, and she lets me wrap my arms around her. When my lips land on her neck, she quivers and twitches out of my grasp. It’s a strange dance that I’m not sure yet how to follow, the way she pushes and pulls me, yet I only want her more.
“Ah, the Great Stain. You think you know everything, but you know nothing of this place. Every caravan is a different world, and every person within it their own universe. So, play house in your new wagon and craft your new act and try to find your place, but don’t throw the past in my face again.”
“Or else what, my lovely philosopher?” I ask, all silky smooth, because I’m not one for taking orders, not even from women I want to love.
She whips around to face me, and her braid snaps in the breeze, and she’s the most ferocious little creature I’ve ever seen, and I almost, almost want to worship at her feet. “Or else you’ll lose your place entirely. The caravan takes care of its own.”
It’s an old adage, and one I fully support, unless it means I’m the one who’s tossed to the moors and never found again. But I suppose she’s right. I do want to find my place. And my place is in Bailey’s wagon, breathing new life into this broken-down catastrophe of a circus. I’ll show her an act she’ll never forget.
“As you wish, my lady.” I give her a bow that she ignores and return to my wagon to plan my next move.
IT’S ALMOST time to rehearse my show, and I’m brushing my hair by candlelight in a very masculine manner when I first smell smoke. It’s a warm day, which means the ashes in my own fireplace are cold. I drop the brush and spin, hunting for flames. They’re easy to find. My closed door is on fire.
My ewer is empty, and when I turn the faucet, nothing comes out. Which either means I was never connected to the aquifer or someone was rather invested in me not having enough water available to put out the fire that’s devouring my only door. With a growl, I snatch the coverlet off my bed and hurry to smother the fire before it spreads.
It doesn’t work. The flames lick at my co
at, and I back away, the beast inside me recognizing one of the very few things a Bludman must fear. I can live to be three hundred, I can go days without drinking blood, I can turn soft, easily broken humans into strong, fast-healing Bludmen like myself. But fire will burn me as easily as paper, and the door is a wall of flame.
The air is going bad and thick and heavy, and I tuck my family grimoire into the back of my trousers, drop to my hands and knees, and crawl like a dog to the opposite end of the wagon, where the trapdoor waits. I push over the armoire with one hand and tug at the clasp, but the damned thing won’t open. No matter how hard I pound with my fists or my boots, the door is surely stuck. Even close to the floor, the air is unbreathable, and I run claws along the seams of the boards, all the way to the wall. Phaedro was a magician; there must be another trapdoor, a hidden wall, a loose board—anything that will get me out of this conflagrating tomb.
The crackling builds as I tear the wallpaper with my claws and find only more wallpaper, all the way down to the orange. I dash the bed to bits against the heavy wall and hurl an empty trunk across the room, but these old wagons are built to last. My eyes sting and it’s hard to see now, and more than the door must’ve caught. But no one is screaming on the other side of the wall, and no one is hacking into the wood with an axe to save me, and if I don’t find a way out, no one will suffer for doing this to me.
Because it can’t be an accident.
Doors don’t catch fire on their own.
And trapdoors don’t magically seal themselves from the outside.
That’s what drives me, keeps pushing me to fight. I look up at the ceiling, hands in fists to scream my rage, and that’s when I see it.
Ah, yes. Of course.
There’s a square cut into the ceiling with a hatch.
A hatch that I can’t reach.
I pull a table over, pile on a trunk, balance a chair, and shimmy up. My work with the acrobats has paid off. The air is no clearer up here, and I cough as I unclasp the door and push it open on a bright blue afternoon that smells like hope and revenge. With a heavy kick, I push up to my waist and crawl out onto the wagon’s curved top. I drop my grimoire with a thump and flop over on my back, inhaling deeply. The sky above is clear and fine. Even the smoke billowing from my trailer is picturesque.
When I stand and look down, I see nothing. No crowd, no bucket brigade. The caravan is eerily silent. Judging by the sun, they’re likely in the dining wagon for dinner, damn them.
I count the cars to a bright red one. Master Bailey’s car.
There are no witnesses, and everything I own is on fire, on this roof, or in the jacket on my back.
Might as well get on with it. The tyromancer said decades, but maybe she was being pessimistic.
10.
WITH A running leap, I land on the next wagon. A few strides later, and I’m on the third. Before a minute has passed, I’m on the wagon before Master Bailey’s, a grass-green one that’s seen better days. I’m not even breathing heavily, but I’m lit from within, as if the flames someone set to my door crawled into my heart.
A caravan where people go around setting each other on fire needs a firmer master.
Bailey’s wagon is the biggest, naturally, with a windowed cupola on top. The brass clasp on the side of the biggest window suggests I can pop it open and climb inside. I do a final check of the weapons in my coat: powders, potions, poisons, a garrote. I’ve never seen this Bailey fellow, and so I have no idea how to best him. I can only hope that a man so frightened of the world that he never goes outside—well, I’m hoping he’s a great aged slug without much fight left in him.
Maybe it’s a bit underhanded, but I’m beyond morality at this point, and I’ve already admitted I don’t fight fair. I pull a small bag out of pocket thirty-one and sprinkle some ash-like powder on the soles of my boots and the palms of my hands. When I leap onto Bailey’s trailer, there is utterly no sound. With a few drops of oil, no telltale squeal of a window’s latch breaks the silence. Thanks to the powder, the loudest noise I’m making is the hammering of my heart, the beating of my pulse urging me down into the dark, stuffy stillness of the caravan master’s inner sanctum.
Instead of wasting my time on the rungs, I leap lightly to the ground and land in a crouch, the grimoire held in my hand like a club. The wagon is dark and cluttered, and the smell is well-nigh unbearable. The stale reek of unbathed human flesh hangs heavily over the more welcome scent of old paper and tobacco, and underneath it all lurks the deep, wet rot of abandoned human food. I can smell past fires, heaps of coppers, perhaps the tang of a dog long gone. The man must live like a doomed dragon, winding among these heaps of refuse, towering piles of paper, boxes of hoarded coins, and a minefield of spittoons.
And yet...I don’t smell a living human, as I did when visiting his window twice before.
Just an overabundance of a human’s blood, fresh and insistent.
Which isn’t quite right.
Something creaks, and I hear whispered voices.
The first is raspy and rough and low. “I need more.”
“I brought it. Here. Take mine, too. Does it hurt much?”
My heart shatters when I recognize Merissa’s whisper. There’s a sweetness, a worry, a vulnerability that I’ve never heard from her, and disgust floods me. I thought her a haughty equal, but if she’s in love with a filthy, cowardly human, I obviously was deeply wrong. No wonder she wouldn’t help me take over the caravan, if she’s secretly in love with Master Bailey.
I creep closer on silent, enchanted feet. The scent of warm blood dominates the air, and I salivate and have to wipe my lip. As my eyes adjust, I see a lump on a bed, huddled under blankets by the light of a banked fire. Potion bottles and herb packets and powders are scattered around the floor, all of the magic supplies I’ve been hunting since I took over my wagon. A bucket filled with wet red and pink meat sits by the bed, and I think I see intestines and a finger in the puddled muck.
Merissa is wrapped in a dark cloak, putting a steaming cup into clammy white hands and guiding them towards the figure. Is she feeding Bailey blood? Is that why he hides in his wagon, so his employees won’t know he’s become a predator like us?
This scene...makes no sense.
“Is it working?” she asks with a frown, the back of her hand to his brow.
The blanketed figure resettles. “Yes. But it hurts.”
“My poor love.” She leans forward to embrace him, and he sighs in contentment, and I want to rip out his heart with my claws.
“Did you take care of him?” the figure asks. The voice is nothing like what I remember through the speaker, but that’s the whole point of a speaker, isn’t it? He sounds broken, all gargles and burbles.
Merissa waits until he’s done coughing and gives a ravishing smile. “It’s done. And they haven’t even left the dining car yet. The wagon will be a pile of cinders by showtime.”
“I hate to lose a wagon...”
She shakes her head. “Sometimes, you throw the baby out with the bathwater, darling. It’s better this way. I couldn’t stand the way he touched me.” When Merissa shivers in disgust, I grow cold. To think I brought her love and intimacy, and she tried to immolate me in my own home. I’m a little impressed and mostly hateful, and I finally understand why my mother once told me, “Love lies, but so does fear.”
The tyromancer was wrong. It’s not love that comes with ruby-red blood in the forest; it’s death. A boy’s infatuation almost got me killed.
“Is there more?” he asks.
Merissa laughs fondly. “It’s your caravan. You can have all the blood you want, can’t you?”
“Hurry back,” he says, settling into his pillows as she leaves by the front door.
And that’s my cue.
Time to take what’s mine.
11.
I STALK through the wagon to loom over the bed, but I’m just as surprised as he is when I get there.
“I already killed you,” I say.
The Great Phaedro coughs a laugh. “Then you didn’t do a very good job.”
“You look rather dead.” I drop my book, cross my arms, and eye him.
He’s not so great anymore, not that he was great to begin with. He looks like a corpse, waxy white with purple hollows under his eyes and cheeks and bloody spittle caked around his lips. A woolly scarf wraps around his neck, and the rest of him is a mound of blankets, skeletal white hands clutching a teacup of clotting blood over his stomach. He doesn’t seem scared of me, which is a good sign that he’s hiding something. Whether it’s a weapon or a defense, I can’t be sure. So, I do what any murderous monster would do at a time like this: I claw for his eyes.
His flesh parts like mud under my talons, an unsettling feeling that my body responds to with a second slash across his cheek. Bony fingers catch my wrist, hard as a manacle, and a death rattle of a laugh bubbles up out of whatever has become of Phaedro.
“If ripping out my throat didn’t work, did you really think blinding me would? Fool.”
As I watch, his flesh begins to knit. Not like normal skin, with pink edges and scabs and blood, because there is no blood. It pulls together with a sick squelch, as vile as the congress of slugs. The eye I destroyed shifts and puddles like black ink, and Phaedro laughs with the shriveled mouth of a corpse.
“A few more bodies’ worth of blood and meat, and you won’t be able to tell the difference,” he says, waving his other hand at the bucket of intestines. “I’m thus improved after draining and eating half of old Bailey, and he was practically a dead man before that. I’m thinking the little Fetchings girls would be delicious, don’t you?”
I pull away, disgusted. “The tightrope walker’s granddaughters? That’s monstrous.” I think of how tiny and bird-boned and innocent they are, dancing fearlessly like sparrows on their wire, and the blood rises in my gorge. “I’m a monster, but I’m not that kind of monster.”