Chapter Forty

Emma

I throw my leg over the edge of the car, hunting for purchase with my foot. My fingers grip into the metal edge of the door until I feel it digging into my skin. The breeze plays along my bare legs as I climb out, whipping my skirt around, threatening to tangle it between my legs. The night air is cool, and when the realization hits me, I stumble over nothing and have to struggle to keep from falling.

I can feel again.

The metal beneath my fingers cuts into my softening flesh, the line of bulbs that outline the skeleton of the ride give off a halo of warmth. Pine and sugar ride the air and fill my lungs. My heart pounds in my chest, each thumping beat a reminder of what Ben is losing. Because Ben is wrong; he’s either dying down there or he’s cursed.

And if either of those things is true, I’ll never be able to forgive myself.

I stretch from strut to strut, picking a path down the Ferris wheel’s frame. One step down. Then another and another. That’s when I hear Fabrizio yelling below me.

“That dumb asshole,” Fabrizio says. Benjamin cries out in pain, and my head fills with images of Fabrizio kicking Ben, torturing him while he’s dying on the ground.

The Ferris wheel lurches, and I wrap my arms around the struts to stay on. It moves slowly, putting me closer to the ground, closer to the two waiting brothers. Fabrizio watches the passing struts as though timing them, and then leaps aboard. He’s much quicker than I am, climbing around toward me as I try to climb down. That’s when I feel it.

At the center of my chest, where my heart has been pounding again for the last minute, something cold and heavy settles and spreads like poison. And then I know—I know—Ben is dying because I haven’t transferred the curse.

Antonio waits at the base of the Ferris wheel, ready to grab me if Fabrizio doesn’t reach me first. I don’t know what they plan to do, but I can’t let them catch me, because if they do, I might not get to Benjamin in time. So I hook my arm around the strut and wait for the Ferris wheel to curve closer to the ground. Then I jump.

It’s too much like that first night, falling into nothing. But it’s over much more abruptly. I crash into Antonio and we hit the ground hard, the tumbler bearing the brunt of my fall. We’re a tangle of limbs and knees and elbows. When I stumble away, my right leg crumples beneath me, but I can limp over to Benjamin faster than the Morettis, who are still sprawled in the dirt.

Benjamin’s glasses are broken. Dirt flecks the lenses, and the sight of them, normally so pristine, sends me over the edge. I don’t know what I’m going to do if he doesn’t make it. My fingers slip around to the back of his neck. I can feel every hair prickle my palm, the ridges on the collar of his T-shirt. The way his chest is barely rising and falling against mine. The pool of too-warm blood that’s gathering around my knees. The hot trail of tears streaking down my cheeks.

I lean over and kiss him.

For a moment, all I can think about is how I can finally actually feel him and not some approximation of what his skin might feel like. How he feels warm and not burning hot. That this is what a kiss should feel like, soft and gentle. But…was this how it was when Sidney turned me? Hadn’t I already started to lose some of these bits of my humanity? Did the transfer not work?

Fabrizio yells behind me, and I pull away. Benjamin is impossibly still. There’s nothing, not even the jagged rise and fall of his chest. I grab his hand, hoping to feel the blood pulsing through it, but I can’t.

I failed.

There’s a buzz and the pop of shattered glass, and my head whips away from Benjamin’s unmoving body, searching for the source of the noise. The bulbs on a line of lights running between booths are bursting, a shower of sparks drifting to the ground. The futile hum of generators trying to accommodate the power surge is almost drowned out by the popping of more lights around the carnival and then, as everything goes dark, the night falls silent.

“What did you do?” Fabrizio asks quietly.

I whip around and stare up at the tumbler. He must have jumped off the Ferris wheel when I wasn’t looking. The moonlight curls silver into his hair, onto his shoulders. From where I sit on the cold ground, he’s impossibly tall.

I hold Ben’s hand tighter even though there’s nothing he can do to help me now.

“Let me ask you again,” Fabrizio says. He moves forward, with the menace of a shark in still waters. “What did you do?”

His fingers clench into fists and release over and over. There’s a fluttering in my chest and my breathing threatens to trip and falter, but he can’t scare me. Nothing, nothing is worse than what lies motionless in the dirt beside me.

“Nothing that concerns you,” I say, staring into the hollows where his eyes should be. Behind Fabrizio, his brothers are closing in.

“You’ve ruined every good thing about this miserable carnival, so I think it does concern me,” Fabrizio says. His fingers curl up again, and this time, his fist draws back.

A silver glint races between us, and he screams. One of Marcel’s throwing-knives is lodged into the toe of his boot to the hilt, blood spurting up through the leather.

Katarina’s voice booms like a thunder. “You will not touch her.”

Katarina stands at the line of tents, Marcel beside her with a fist full of knives. Running to join them are Gin, one arm in a sling and carrying a metal post in her good hand, and Whiskey, armed with a bucket of baseballs from one of the gaming booths. In the shadows behind them are the twins, Duncan pushing his sister away from the fray.

Antonio rushes toward my friends, dodging the baseball thrown at his head but unable to avoid the throwing-knife now lodged in his thigh. He pushes onward, but I can’t worry about them. Fabrizio is much closer.

He pulls the blade from his foot and swings it, the small knife whistling as it slices toward me. I throw myself to the ground and roll, springing to my feet. A hot flash of pain runs up my leg but I ignore it, and I put myself between Fabrizio and Benjamin’s body. Blood squelches from Fabrizio’s wounded foot every time he takes a step, and as he nears, I dart out to stomp his wounded foot underneath mine, putting all my weight on it.

Fabrizio yells, drowning out any other noise. His fingers crush my arms and he shoves me to the ground before dropping to his knees beside me. He draws a heavy fist back, but before he can throw his punch, a baseball cracks into his nose.

Spatters of his blood drip down onto me, and before I get out from under him, Gin swings at his stomach with her post, sending him flying backward. Whiskey helps me to my feet as Gin stands over Fabrizio, ready to hit him again if he makes another move.

He doesn’t.

I let go of Whiskey’s hand and go back to Ben. He hasn’t moved. I drop down in the dirt beside him as a fresh wave of hot tears line my eyes.

After a few seconds, a swath of gauzy skirts comes into my view. Katarina joins me in the dirt, one frail arm around my shoulders, the other gently placing an old-fashioned iron lantern on the ground beside us.

She cradles Benjamin’s face in her palm, and when I see the extreme gentleness with which she handles him, I start to sob. The world blurs, and rather than be amazed that I’m actually crying and not making that stupid gasping hiccup-y noise, I just want it to stop so that I can see him while I still can.

Katarina looks at me, the lines in her face ghoulishly lit up from below by the lantern’s flickering flame. That same slightly amused smirk from the night we met is back on her face, and I want to scream at her for smiling. “Didn’t he tell you what he was going to do?” she asks.

After months of being a husk, I suddenly feel like the sloppiest, mushiest thing ever. I’m an armful of sopping wet towels. I push the flood of tears from my cheeks with my palms before I answer. “Not until right before he threw himself from the stupid Ferris wheel.” Gin’s slender, strong arms snake around me, along with a tangle of silvery hair. Whiskey wraps herself around both her sister and me and sobs quietly into my neck.

Katarina’s many layers of necklaces clatter as she cranes her neck to look up at the massive Ferris wheel. It shifts with a heavy metallic groan, as though its girders can no longer support it. Farther away, there’s the sound of collapsing wood and several startled shrieks. Finally, she turns that cryptic gaze back to me. “Benjamin was perhaps a bit…overzealous, shall we say.”

Her hands hover above his body, straightening out his arm, fixing the grotesque angle of his leg. “I’m not saying that he didn’t do the right thing, but—”

“What do you mean?” Marcel asks. He stands over all of us, knives at the ready, as though he expects more trouble. Wet tracks curve down his cheeks, and a fine tremor shakes his shoulders.

Katarina gives Marcel a wry smile. I want to smack her, wouldn’t even mind if she cursed us all into oblivion. “He threw himself from a goddamned Ferris wheel. I don’t know how bad the damage is, but it’s guaranteed he broke some bones and he likely has internal bleeding. Magic can do a lot, but magic works on its own timetable, not ours.”

I draw a ragged breath into my expanding lungs. Ever since my mom left, I’ve felt like the only thing worth fighting for was my old life. But I know I’m wrong. I don’t have to go back to that. I can make a life I want, and right now, what I want includes Ben. I want Ben. “What are you talking about? He’s dead, and—”

Yelling at the edge of the carnival cuts my hysterics short. “There she is!” One of the cooks steps out of the shadows. A woman who works in one of the gaming booths screams, “This is her fault!” It seems as though half the carnival has found their way to us, pouring out from among the tents and booths. Some of them are confused. Some of them bear cuts and the beginnings of bruises, as though caught in the way of the self-destructing carnival. Every single one of them is furious.

Gin and Whiskey stand. Gin pushes her tears away with the back of her hand before shifting her grip on her metal post. Marcel’s gaze darts from face to face, trying to determine who is a friend and who is a foe. We are terribly outnumbered.

All around us, rides collapse into heaps of bent tubing and screaming metal, tents faint to the ground in dizzy twists of fabric as people rush to the safety of open air. There is so much screaming. “The carnival is falling apart because of her!” the guy from the cook shack yells. Somewhere far away but edging closer, police sirens wail into the night. The mob surges forward with a roar.

A massive voice rises over the ruckus. “Stop!”

Lars, his flaming-orange hair visible over the heads of everyone else, draws in a big breath, as though readying himself to fight the crowd off single-handed. But in the silence following his roar, I hear the one woman capable of stopping this riot.

“Anyone who hurts my employees will answer to me.” Like a flipped switch, the angry crowd goes from feral tigers to day-old kittens. They part, and Leslie walks into the clearing.

Her blond curls are frizzy from sweat, and her stage makeup is smudged. A gash runs halfway across her forehead, blood drying in dark red lines down her face. “The carnival is falling apart because we’re lazy and ungrateful. But more importantly, this carnival is mine, and if I want to let it fall to ruin, so help me, I will. The keepers of the curse have given up more than any of you here, and I will protect them with my last breath. As it is, I will make it my mission to see the Morettis rot in jail for what they did tonight. Anyone who has a problem with anything I just said has ten minutes to get off this property.”

A dejected sort of mutter runs through the crowd. The man from the cook shack and several others melt into the darkness. More than a few hostile glances are directed at me, at Leslie, at anyone who dared to help break the curse, but all my friends hold their ground.

I want to marvel at Leslie’s strength. At the way the crowd obeys and begins to disperse. At the fact that Whiskey looks as though she could keep a hundred attackers at bay with a bucket of baseballs. At this family I made, when I felt like I didn’t fit in with the family and friends I had.

But I don’t get to do any of that.

Because right then, Benjamin’s hand twitches in mine.