“There’s only one kind of monster, Stain. And you clearly know nothing of necromancy. The purer the sacrifice, the farther it goes. If I ever want to look alive again, I’m going to need lots of young, fresh meat.”
Anger bubbles up, and with it, my beast. The dark room washes over in red, and I howl and lunge for his face with my claws, scoring his forehead in parallel slashes and ripping open one cheek. He starts whispering a spell, and I grab the scarf wrapped around his throat and shove the end of it down his throat. His body jerks, his hands scrabbling to clear his mouth, and I grab them, one by one, and snap his wrists as easily as kindling. It’s like fighting a possessed doll that shouldn’t be moving in the first place, unnatural and floppy and yet so persistently determined to keep slapping me away. He’s bucking under me, silently screaming around the scarf, flailing with snapped hands and fingers that can’t quite grab me.
Straddling him with a knee on each dancing arm, I unwind the other end of his scarf to find a grotesquely half-healed crevasse where his throat should be. The tubes have grown back roughly, weaving around in front of his spine, but the skin hasn’t quite made it back across. I reach into the wet, red-black mess, grab a tangle of veins and whatever the hell else makes up a man, and yank them out like I’m shutting down an automaton.
He just laughs.
Breathless, eyes black pits, broken and wet and flopping— he laughs.
I’m yanking off his lips when the door flies open and Merissa shrieks like a demon straight out of hell.
“What are you doing? What have you done? You bastard!”
She’s so lovely in her wrath that I almost forget that she’ll kill me if she can. The same instinct that made me go for Phaedro’s eyes has her claws arcing towards my face, and I snatch her fine wrists in both hands and want to laugh at how very breakable people are. She grunts and tries to yank away from me, tries to kick me, but she’s after all just a tiny thing and can’t even come close. The only part of me she ever hurt was my heart, and she can’t reach that anymore.
“You’ve been a very naughty girl,” I say. “You set out to capture more than just a horse that morning, didn’t you?”
The fight goes out of her, or she wants me to think it does. Her arms go to her sides, her hair falling over her face as she sighs like the wind in blood-spattered branches.
“No. I just needed another horse for my act and I’d heard there was a white one nearby.”
“Who told you?”
If I wasn’t watching her face so closely, I might’ve missed the fear that flashed in the green, glowing depths of her eyes.
“You know who told me. The tyromancer. She comes to everyone on their first day here. Told me I would get what I’d always wanted if I followed a rainbow to a birch forest and caught a white horse.”
“What you’d always wanted, eh? And to think you threw me away,” I say, bitterness dripping.
“It was never you, you idiot.” She tosses back her head and laughs, cutting me deep. “It was Phaedro. We’ve been planning it for weeks, but the timeline changed when you showed up and got in the way. Necromancy requires bodies, and it was past time for Bailey to disappear. All I wanted was to rule this caravan with Phaedro. And I did get it. For almost an entire day.”
She leans around me, yanks a hand away to touch his ruined throat.
“We can have it again, darling,” she whispers. “All is not lost.”
I step away, cold as ice and twice as hard. “You’re mad as a hatter, love.”
Merissa whirls on me, hands up in claws. “You wouldn’t know love if it called you by name, Stain.” I take a step back, and she presses forward. “And what will you do with me, eh? Chain me to your bed? Kill me and doom him? Hold us prisoner in this wretched boxcar of death?”
I step out of striking range and can’t help but laugh. “Look, lass. I’ve no use for an unwilling woman. Take your carcass of a necromancer and your matched white horses and go where you will.” She cocks her head at me and smiles as if I’m a stupid child, and I draw power and will around me like a cloak. “But do not make the mistake of assuming me soft and merciful. If I ever see either of you again, if you ever make a move against me or my caravan, I will destroy you both. For good.”
“You’re letting us go?” She steps back dumbly and sits on the edge of the bed. Phaedro’s ruined hand flops around towards her, and she takes it gently between both of her own and rubs the shattered bones tenderly.
“It’s all I wanted, really.” I shrug. “This caravan. Thought I wanted to rule it with you, but this’ll do.”
“You’re a very strange man, Criminy Stain.”
“I’m not a man. I’m a ringmaster. Now get the hell out of my circus, and take your broken monkey with you.”
12.
THEY’VE DISAPPEARED before the stage lights go up, but no one seems to know any difference. The caravan has run like a rusty machine for so long that the show plays on as usual without Merissa and her Mesmerizing Mares. I simply close the doors on her wagon, and the audience ignores the empty spot and hurries on to the next lively show.
As for me, my stage has burned to the ground, my wagon now but a smoldering pile of timbers. Instead of drawing my own crowd, I wander among the flow of bodies, doing small shows and finding refuge, as ever, among the humans I consider so far below me. Their amazement, their wonder, their joy, their occasional unwarranted terror. Instead of choosing a girl in bloom, as I’d always done, I present flowers to an old maid in the crowd, making her withered cheeks blush. This time, there is no price tag on the gift, no taste or threat of the future.
I’m done with making women disappear.
THE NEXT morning at breakfast, I walk into the dining car with Vil by my side, a notebook and pen in his hands and a smile on my face.
“Listen up, you lot,” I say in an ever-so-slightly charmed voice that requires no speakerphone. “Master Bailey is dead. Merissa killed him and ran off. You can find his remains hanging in her wagon, if you wish.” The whispering starts, and I hush it with a hand. “I’m taking over this caravan. I know how to run it, and you’ll find me a fair master. Everyone’s equal: Bludman, human, daimon, other, male, female, whatever. Everyone gets a raise, starting tonight—double what Bailey paid you. And I want to hear your ideas for improving the show as a whole. I’ll not hide behind a closed door and a speaker. I’ll help you raise the poles and chop the wood, and I’ll defend each of you, if you stay, with my life.” I cross my arms and drop my chin, pulling the mantle of a Bludman’s beast around me. “But if anyone—anyone—wishes to challenge me, fight me, sabotage me, or hurt me or any of mine, I assure you right now that you will die in a messier manner than Phaedro the Great. Any questions?”
The carnivalleros are weirdly silent...aside from the two youngest ones. The Fetchings girls are whispering fiercely, and the smaller one pushes the older one forwards through the crowd. She squeezes out in front of me in her slightly too-small, altogether too-bright costume.
“The name’s Emerlie Fetchings, sir. Found this sitting in the ashes of your old trailer this morning.” With trembling hands, she puts the familiar lamp on the floor at my feet, as if she’s afraid of touching me. “Everything else was burnt to a crisp, but it was sittin’ there, proud as you like. Thought you might want it.”
I pick it up, expecting it to be hot to the touch. But the pierced metal is as cool as ever, unmarred by fire or smoke, although the candle stub within has melted cleanly away.
The letter L is carved into the plate where a candle has always sat, and understanding and weirdness flood through me.
I have everything I want now but one thing, and the tyromancer promised me I would have that, too, one day. I had thought Merissa was mine, that she was my ruby-bedecked love, unafraid among the birches. She wasn’t, and I should have known it, and she’s gone forever, a younger man’s folly. And now that it turns out the caravan was on the shorter time frame, that means I have decades still to wait for my tru
e love. And her name will be Letitia. And she will have dark, tumbling hair and fine blue eyes that match a portrait that only existed for a heartbeat in an old, broken locket given to me by a ghost in a wagon that’s now ashes.
My new quest is to figure out how to bring her here, to the hard-won circus that fulfills half my destiny. How to fix this locket and charm it and send it to draw her to me, as the tyromancer bade me do. If I can solve this puzzle, then perhaps one day I’ll find myself in another forest of stark black and white trees, but this time I’ll find my heart’s desire.
My hand goes to my breast pocket, where the necklace sits heavy and strangely warm, and I do wonder if we’ll be haunted all our days by a serious, dark-eyed little girl in a mysterious orange tent that only appears to welcome newcomers to the caravan. Or perhaps the tent and her memory burned down with my wagon, with the spoon and the knives and the brazier. Perhaps it’s time for this circus to find a new fortune-teller to go with its new fortune.
I shake off the fancy. There’s work to be done, and now.
“Good job, lass,” I say, pulling a copper from behind Emerlie’s cropped golden curls.
She snatches it with a gap-toothed grin but doesn’t back away or flinch, which tells me she’s going to be a pain for the rest of our days together, the bright little sparrowhawk.
“Also, sir, while you’re in a good mood...I’d like a wagon of me own.”
I chuckle and shake my head. “Not my circus, not my monkeys. In a few decades, maybe, once you’re a star. Once you’ve earned it. Until then, let’s get back to business, shall we?”
They file out the door, murmuring excitedly about the prospect of a raise, and I’m left in the dining car with no one but Vil.
“What’s your first order, sir?” he asks, quill poised.
“Repaint the tables and benches in here so that they’re all the same color,” I say.
He nods and scribbles. “Do I do that before I repaint your wagon?”
I put a hand on his shoulder, throw back my head, and laugh. “You’ll get a raise, too, lad. Paint Criminy’s Captivating Caravan on Bailey’s old wagon and get ready to burn most of his old things.”
“What next?”
I look around, mind spinning. “Sit down, lad. It’s going to be a long list.”
WHEN I step outside of my new wagon at dusk, I’m rewarded with the loveliest view: an enormous crowd of humans waiting at the turnstile.
“Who collects the admission?” I ask Vil.
He doesn’t even pause in his painting. “Whoever you wish, sir,” he answers, adding stars around the Y in my name.
And tonight, for now, it will be me. I retie my cravat and settle my hat as I stride the beaten path to where the audience waits, barely breathing, for the excitement we alone can provide.
This is my circus, and these are my monkeys, but still, I am hungry for more.
Read more by Delilah S. Dawson
1. Now: The Bird Doctor Is In
AN UNGRACIOUS breath of air, a grunt, and Miriam’s eyes jolt open. Her face, tacky with saliva. Her skull pounds like a bouncy house full of rowdy kids. She pulls her face away from a pillow. Doesn’t know how she got here. Doesn’t even know where the fuck she is.
Room’s dark. She sits up. Tries not to make a sound.
Ahead: a rectangle of darkness lighter than the shadows around her. Gray, not black. A faint liquid shine to it—moonlight, starlight, something.
A window.
She feels her head. A light crusting of blood. Granular, flaky, like the charred end of a steak left too long on the grill. Her tongue tastes blood, too. Inside her mouth: a stinging pain. A cut on the inside of her cheek.
Her neck hurts, too. There her finger probes, finds a small wound.
A tranquilizer dart. She remembers coming up to the house, opening the door—something striking her in the neck. Then the world going topsy-turvy.
Her brain tries to catch up to her predicament. I came here. Where is this? Why did I come here? Shit, shit, shit. Think, dum-dum. Think!
Everything, a cloud. Thinking right now is like running in mud.
She stands. Bedsprings squeak. Her foot hits the floor and that squeaks, too, and suddenly she’s thinking, I’m making too much noise, and a whip of fear lashes back, catches her right on the chin, and suddenly she’s worried about alerting—who? Someone. Her stomach falls out like a broken elevator and her heart rate spikes like Pikes Peak and right, right—Colorado, she’s in Colorado. Collbran. She’s chasing—chasing the notebook, chasing the name, Mary Stitch, the woman Sugar’s mother met here, the woman who can help her, can cure her, or at least show her the way out of this curse...
But that’s all big-picture stuff. The little picture is: what?
Where is she?
What the hell happened to her head?
What hasn’t happened to your head? a cruel little voice reminds. Your head’s been knocked around so much, it’s like a battered wife. How many concussions is too many, Miriam? At what point does your brittle head crack like an egg and spill everything out—Humpty Dumpty won’t go back together again.
A tentative step forward. A small table. A lamp.
She reaches. Fumbles for a lamp chain. Cuh-click.
Light.
An attic. Unfinished. No drywall—blown-in insulation, exposed wood. Cobwebs. A big shape under a cover: a pool table, maybe. And some of it starts to come back to her: right, right, right, a modular house, two-story, set back on a property not far from the center of town, stuck way off one of those numbered nowhere roads here—58 and some fraction of a Road or something.
Then she sees it hanging by the door.
Every part of her goes cold. Her mind rushes backward through time, through memory, back under the river, in the gray churn of the rising waters—a young girl clutched in the hands of an old woman, bodies down there in the sweeping dark.
The river is rising...
Here, in this room right now, a living memory. Too real. Impossibly so. Hanging by the door, on a hook: a ratty brown cloak.
Attached to it, a mask. A hood. One she knows all too well. A long metal beak with nose holes punched out of it. Eyes are dead black goggles bolted into the leather. She can almost smell the funeral flowers burning. Can hear the man singing from inside the mask—“May this a warning be to those / that love the ways that Polly chose / turn from your sins, lest you despair / the Devil take you without care.” “Wicked Polly,” trilled by Carl Keener. The Mockingbird Killer—or one of them. Him and the whole Caldecott clan.
And there is his mask.
Downstairs: a man screams.
Then it’s swiftly silenced.
Miriam feels in her pocket for her knife. It’s not there. I have another one. I’m sure of it. Somewhere...
Footsteps coming closer.
It is what it is, Miriam thinks. And her hands curl into hard fists.
2. One Week Ago: The Bar Bet
THE MOON shines, captured in the waters of the Vega reservoir. Miriam sits at the bar, staring out the window at it, lost in the black waters, the white ribbons of light, the bands of clouds sliding over it all. She pops a chicken wing in her mouth—one of those funky ones with the two bones instead of one, where you have to navigate the gristle in your mouth—and vacuums the meat off it. The wing sauce is habanero hot, and it lights her up like a sacrificial pyre. After that, a sip of the margarita in front of her and a quick towel-off with a wet-nap before she takes a look down at the calculator watch on her wrist.
8 PM.
Late, late, late.
Of course.
You’d think a psychic would be on time.
There she sits. Idly kicking her boot-toe into the side of the bar. Behind her, the lodge is quiet—tables of dark wood, empty of guests. Still early in the season. Even though it’s spring, there’s still snow on top of some of the mountains, and up here, the chill in the air is something that crawls into you like worms using your skin for a blanket.
A far cry from Florida.
Florida. Jesus. Ashley Gaynes. Her mother. Not to mention the thing with Louis. That phone call...
Fuck. Shit. Shit fuck.
Grief sucks at her like a leech.
It’s good to be far away from all that. Because now she has a chance. A chance to change not just the fates of other people, but this time? Her own.
Movement next to her. Barstool groans against the floor as a man sits. He’s got a face like a hatchet—all sides of it leading to a sharp, pointy front: chin, nose, the silver peak of his close-cropped hair. Even his beard is shorn high and tight, so clean and crisp, it looks like it could cut paper if you slid a piece along it.
The bartender—a woman built like a plow ox—comes up, says, “Whaddya say, John?”
“Janice,” he says. Voice gurgly and growly. Once a smoker, maybe. Or just a guy who lived a rough life and gargled rocks. “Same old.”
“Whaddya drinking?”
He gives her a grumpy, incredulous look. She laughs, and then pours him a beer off the tap. Dos Equis. He sips a bit of foam off the top, licks it from his lips, then says, “Hey, get me an elk chili, will you?” She nods and he calls after her, “Unless you got a prime rib back there for me.”
She barks over her shoulder, “Keep dreaming, John.”
Then she’s gone through the kitchen doors.
He snorts: a hollow, maybe mirthless laugh kept to himself, for himself.
Miriam feels his eyes drift to her.
“You like prime rib?”
“Is this a dick joke? A come-on line?”
He’s taken aback. His head lifts as his neck goes straight. “What?”
“I say, Yes, I like prime rib. And then you grab your salt-and-pepper yambag and give it a little jostle before saying, Well, little lady, I got some prime rib right here. And then we laugh and laugh and you think I’m going to go home and give your old dong a young-girl go, and what’s really going to happen is I’m going to take my hot-sauce hands and smear them into your eyes, and then while you’re there crying, I’m going to kick the stool out from under you. You’ll fall like a sack of potatoes, maybe crack your head. And I’m going to walk out and the bartender’s going to laugh at you as you piss yourself. The end.”