Chapter Nine

 

 

 

As soon as the web released her, she went straight to her RV and cleaned herself of sweat, cum and the memory of gazes crawling over her. She hung the latex outside her door. Either Kitty or Lady Sasha would have it like new for her by the next morning. Elizabeth didn’t know who did it, and she didn’t care.

All that mattered was the bottle of whiskey left for her on the counter, like it always was.

She was a fifth of the way through before the thought hit her.

What the hell am I doing?

It was a question that encompassed a number of her problems and didn’t even get into what other people were doing to her.

She’d agreed. She hadn’t signed up for being ogled while doing it, but she’d agreed to web sex with her latex bodysuit half falling off. She’d agreed to let him touch her, kiss her, fuck her, without having adrenaline and desperation to blame for it. She’d felt guilty that her ambivalence in the aftermath wounded his feelings. And the truth was, he really did seem to have them.

Then there was the drinking itself. She usually didn’t start before accompanying the prisoners to their semi-trailer to help them lick their wounds, figuratively speaking. She wouldn’t be much use to them like this, but that didn’t stop her from taking another two pulls from the bottle. She’d betrayed them anyway by accepting the Creature the way she had—in public, without fear to blame. She’d compromised for comfort, exactly what she’d said she wouldn’t do.

No more hangovers, but she could still get plenty shitfaced. Ever since Bell had given her license to do so—no babies to wake her up in the middle of the night, no early mornings to get the children ready for homeschooling, in which she’d have to thoroughly participate without looking trashed—she’d been drunk most nights. Full-on sea-legs drunk, which she hadn’t been since entering back into the Petrosian fold.

Only getting drunk wasn’t helping anything. Add an unhealthy dose of conscience to the whiskey, and she had a perfect storm of dark thoughts floating around her head.

She groped around next to the couch for one of the empty bottles. Grasping it by its neck, she struck it against a handy corner. She didn’t bother worrying about glass. There were so many bottles by now, she wasn’t walking barefoot over that area any time soon anyway. Glass in her feet wouldn’t matter anyway.

She brought the broken neck to her arm.

“Come on,” she said into her quiet little home. “Are you telling me no one’s ever tried this before? No one ever thought, ‘Hey, I’d rather be dead than your psycho art project’?”

“Isn’t suicide against your code?”

“So you do watch us. Nothing better to do than watch the dancing bears and laugh your fucking head off.” The tip of the broken glass pressed against her wrist, just above where the ink began. She’d never done this before. Some vague memory told her that going across the wrist wasn’t the most effective way, but it’s not like she could look up YouTube videos on the subject.

“I have plenty better to do—namely, a circus performance. But I know when my people are planning a dramatic exit that I haven’t approved. You don’t think I’d leave such an escape hatch open, do you, my dear? Do you really think death gets in my way?”

“You telling me you can bring me back from the dead?” She dented her skin until the strange curved beauty of the glass pierced through.

“I’m telling you I can keep you from bleeding.”

The single drop that had welled up, thick and dark, sank back into her body.

“And I can take away the weapon.”

In the span of a blink, the broken neck had become a whole bottle once more, as though she hadn’t broken it at all. She dropped it among the other bottles, but it didn’t shatter again.

Elizabeth covered her face with her hands, tears seeping through the cracks between her fingers.

“If I need to take the drink away, I will. I only tolerate your desire for oblivion inasmuch as the oblivion is temporary. You’re no use to me dead.”

“Just go to hell, you son of a bitch.”

“I never wished this for you, Lizzie.”

“You know what you can do with your wishes,” she muttered back thickly before downing another swallow from her mostly full bottle.

Somewhere between liquor and tears, she had the idea that she should probably take a shower. The bathroom accommodations were surprisingly spacious in an RV that barely had a kitchen sink. There was enough room for all of her limbs to turn around in the stall without catching and enough room for her secondary legs to hang over the sides of the toilet, though she was pretty sure most RVs this size were supposed to have airplane-type facilities.

She resented that she could find anything to like about her situation, but a good bathroom was something a woman appreciated. And hot water was a blessing, even if it came from the devil. She didn’t come out more sober, but she came out more clean.

Once she’d pulled on her oversized robe, she felt a little better. Hungry, but being clean and letting her skin breathe did wonders.

The audience would still be in the big top tent. Not that they usually wandered in the direction of the caravan, but a girl couldn’t be too careful about being mostly naked under something that could be undone with a simple sash. She staggered out of her RV. She considered bringing along her whiskey, but if she was going to work a needle and thread, the prisoners didn’t need her tipsier than she already was. She could get drunk as piss when she returned.

Hank opened the trailer door when she knocked. He’d been given the crazed chainsaw role this weekend, which meant he was physically unharmed, and his psyche didn’t appear to have scarred in response to lopping off limbs a few hundred times. It was probably easier for a person to accept doing that when they knew no one would die.

“Jesus, Spider Woman, you smell like a brewery.”

“Suck it and gag, Hank. Let me in.” Talking like an inebriated sailor seemed to be the password for the night, because he offered his hand to steady her against the pitching of the Earth’s axis as she climbed up.

“Good thing you aren’t sewing me up tonight,” Hank said. “Don’t walk into the cut-open person. They usually don’t like that.”

“The world’s a little off, but if I had only two legs I’d be able to walk in a straight line. Shut the fuck up and stop helping.”

Elizabeth used the air holes along the side of the compartment to work her way around the bloody vomit that tended to accompany prisoners with organ damage. Nothing else to be done for them, but the small triage center for the rest had already been set up at the far end of the trailer. They didn’t need her sewing skills to be perfect, just a decent suture to get them through the night.

Bell provided them with the basics to bind and cover anything that seeped. No antibiotics or hydrogen peroxide, a corollary to Bell’s no-disease promise—in the prisoners’ case, no cross-contamination, no matter how many open wounds swapped fluids. The only disease the prisoners could suffer was the necrotizing fasciitis from the post-contagion tableau, but it wouldn’t kill them. Like Bell had said, the prisoners weren’t any use to him dead.

Kevin was one of the unfortunate souls from that particular tableau this time. One of the few female prisoners who wasn’t Blondie—Elizabeth wasn’t even sure if that was her real name or whether people just called her that because they didn’t know her name either, and she couldn’t exactly talk or even write—was blotting the suppurating flesh at his shoulder while he applied some cooling ointment on the back of one of the whipping boys.

Kevin’s nostrils flared as she sat down next to him. “Don’t suppose you have any of that to share.”

“As a nanny, I encourage the practice of mindful sharing, but anyone who tries to share my liquor ends up losing a few fingers,” Elizabeth said, pulling on a pair of white latex gloves.

Despite Hank’s sour disposition, he still sat down next to one of the whipping boys and started tending to him—in the hopes they’d be more likely to do the same in the future, no doubt. “I thought you were in some kind of cult. Don’t cults usually have rules about things like drinking?”

“Yeah, they do. They have rules about tattoos, too. And profanity. And excessive nakedness.”

“You still don’t belong here, but I’m starting to like you, Spider Lady,” Hank replied.

“That gives me a special warmth in my chest that has nothing to do with heartburn, I’m sure.”

“And fuck you, too.”

“He doesn’t let us have alcohol anyway,” Kevin said wistfully. “Guess he figures it would take the edge off.”

“Or make us more belligerent,” Hank said. Elizabeth was just impressed he knew such a multisyllabic word. “Either way, we don’t get to go by the booths for ale or beer or whatever they’re offering for wine these days.”

“I think, depending on the venue, they sometimes have cocktails, too,” Elizabeth said.

“Fruity,” Hank muttered.

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “Yes, we all know you’re an asshole. Do you have to try to convince us all the time?”

“Do you have to always convince us you’re a cunt?”

“At least I’m helpful.”

“I’m right here helping, too.”

Elizabeth settled with two of the contagion victims, using the same cooling ointment as Kevin. It would ease the pain, at least for a little while. Then she dried the poor boys’ backs and covered them with gauze.

Everyone worked quietly, sobered by the day, and every last one of them tired of screaming. It wasn’t as though anyone had a radio or something they could listen to, nothing to distract or entertain but a few magazines and books. And God only knew if Bell rotated those things out or whether they had to suffer the same literature over and over during the full sentence.

Most everyone had their wounds tended to by the time three golems arrived with dinner. They were accustomed to bringing hers along as well with whatever the prisoners received—at least for those who could eat without food emptying into their abdominal cavity, and Blondie could only drink a chocolate protein shake with the aid of a straw. Bell granted the rest of the prisoners a good deal more than just bread and water, sometimes even pizza or sub sandwiches, but most of them only ate by force of habit. They didn’t get fed all day and being tortured took a lot out of them, but also it didn’t do much for their appetite.

Because of her specialized diet and because Bell cared to indulge it, the golems usually brought her a wrap or sandwich and a ginger ale. Hank gave his usual sour expression at the favor shown her, but hummus, avocado, spinach, beansprouts, tofu and vegan cheese weren’t much more appetizing to him than what the golems offered. It tacked one more reason to hate her onto his shit list, but at this point, he seemed to enjoy hating her. As long as he didn’t get fresh with her again, Elizabeth was content to keep pissing him off.

Eating took away what tipsiness still lasted after tending to people’s wounds. As soon as they finished with their respective dinners, the prisoners retired one by one to their pods. The general rule was top row for those who could climb, bottom row for those who couldn’t, and middle row for those mobile but not hale and hearty enough for more than the shorter climb.

Kevin was one of the latter, but he crawled into an unused bottom pod. He winced as he tried to lie down.

“You okay?” Elizabeth asked as she packed up the leftover gauze, ointment and thread. She was used to organizational tasks like this—not much different than picking up toys at the end of the day. “Sorry, bad question. You just seem to be flinching more than usual.”

“Disease kind of reached a sensitive area,” Kevin said.

Due to the effect of the sex demons, the prisoners had a few of their own self-imposed rules. Elizabeth was sure the few girls got propositioned when she wasn’t there, if the boys felt strong enough for sex. But the prisoners, like the rest of the circus, were held to the same standard that demanded absolute agreement from both parties. The matter was especially touchy among the prisoners, though, considering the reason most of them were in Arcanium was because they’d broken that rule.

Apparently, they’d spent the early months avoiding anyone else’s touch and suffering too much alone, but for everyone’s sake, they’d eventually agreed to conditional contact when it was in the realm of amateur nursing. And such tending sometimes required a certain amount of nakedness. Only the prisoners who had been the subject of multiple amputations and medical experimentation were allowed to be completely naked, since clothes could be painful and they weren’t in any state to become aroused.

The pods didn’t offer much in the way of privacy, and Bell didn’t provide blankets, but when they were on their own, everyone was expected to keep their clothes on so no one would feel threatened or tempted, even in the dark. Stripping down to underwear was permitted. Beyond that, if no one else was willing to tend to certain areas and the person couldn’t tend to it themselves, it was just another tough break from Bell’s box o’ torture.

Elizabeth slid over to the edge of his pod. “If it’s nothing prurient, I can still take care of it, if you need.”

“It hasn’t reached that far. But it’s close.” He winced again with the certainty that it was just a matter of time. “If you have any more of that cooling ointment nearby, I wouldn’t say no.”

Elizabeth crawled back to the first-aid pile then brought a pot of ointment and a soft washcloth over to him. The line of his sight was pretty obvious to her, although he darted his gaze away as soon as he realized he was looking down her robe and that she could see him doing it.

She settled on the edge of his pod again, adjusting her robe. Her cheeks burned almost as much as his, and she didn’t have a fever to blame. Bell still hadn’t provided her with everyday clothes for her new body, and she wasn’t going to wear leather or lace in the semi-trailer after spending the entire day in latex. It was bad enough everyone in the compartment knew she wasn’t wearing anything underneath the robe.

Kevin couldn’t quite meet her eyes. “Thanks.”

There was something terribly innocent about him. Elizabeth understood how deceptive that was, because he was in Arcanium at all. But the way he avoided looking at her and the way he shifted reminded her of simpler times before she’d run away from the Petrosian Church, when ‘courting’ had actually been a thing that boys did, with the shy gallantry of someone who really wanted church-approved, post-marital sex with someone.

Oh, those boys had probably wanted more, but sex had featured either first or quite high on the list at that age. And although it hadn’t been demure to admit as a woman of the church, it had been quite high on her list as well. Dez hadn’t needed to work too hard to get her into bed. Once she’d made the conscious decision to discard sacred laws, there had been nothing to stop her from satisfying the urges that had dirtied her thoughts for so long.

Innocence, even the semblance of innocence, wasn’t something she’d thought about in a long time. To have that sort of innocence—not necessarily lack of sin but a lack of experience or confidence in that experience—endeared him to her in spite of her wariness.

When her four legs shifted under the robe, parting it slightly, he glanced down to catch the sight before once again looking away.

Elizabeth fingered the edge of the thick terrycloth, then slid it back to expose two of her legs. The light from the pod hit the tattoos just right to bring out the vivid intensity with which Bell had imbued them.

Kevin swallowed thickly, but he still made every effort to avoid peering too closely. “You may want to turn around. I don’t have to go full commando, but I’m going to have to push down the waistband.”

Elizabeth ducked her head, smiling a little, but she turned around, wrapping her prime arms around her prime legs and letting the secondary legs splay in front of her. She had more grace these days, learning from Bell positioning and maneuvering, but there were still angles and positions where she had to relinquish elegance. Sitting on the ground or near the ground was one of them.

The sound of Kevin pushing his boxer shorts down seemed unnaturally loud in the close quarters of the pod. At his hiss, she reacted before she could stop herself—or maybe she just told herself that.

There was nothing to see, not really. Not directly. The deep patch of necrosis had dug into his hip right along the line between his abdomen and leg. But the angle of his thin shorts revealed a dusting of hair, and the outline of his cock was plain to see from the way the fabric bunched on either side.

She didn’t know why she’d care about his cock when there was a patch of necrotic flesh right in front of her. On the same note, she didn’t know why he’d be so self-conscious when there was a patch of necrotic flesh this close to eating his junk. Maybe both of them had become inured to the horror. After all, he was looking at her tangle of legs without being thrown by the fact there were four.

In such close quarters, the prisoners were accustomed to bare skin, disease and despair, sex arising from sheer desperation, but not with outsiders. And though they’d let her in, she was still one of those outsiders, if not necessarily one of Bell’s people. Prisoners didn’t ask non-prisoners to meet their desires when those desires had damned them in the first place.

For a while Kevin tried to keep his composure. He used the soft washcloth to dab ointment over the slowly disintegrating flesh, sighing as the coolness gave him temporary relief.

But she could tell he sensed her attention, because his movements slowed in distraction, and his cock steadily responded to her, to the rasp of her thighs moving over each other, the whisper of her robe on her skin. And when he glanced up, she could imagine what he saw. The parting top half of her robe would show almost as much as the open bodysuit, and though she kept her legs closed, she slid the bottom half of the robe back farther.

He opened his mouth to say something. He wanted to ask her. She recognized desperation as well as she recognized desire. How long had it been for him? Had any of the women in the compartment ever offered? She couldn’t see why not, unless they knew something she didn’t. He was sweet, slender but cute. Cute. That wasn’t the adjective she’d use to describe the men who’d had her. Dez didn’t do cute. The Creature didn’t do cute. Bell certainly didn’t do cute.

She wasn’t the woman for this. She was older—not quite cougar territory, or at least she hoped not. But she didn’t do cute either. Cute was what she could have had if she’d stayed in the Petrosian Church, if she hadn’t practically tattooed a giant, scarlet ‘A’ over the anatomical heart on her chest. Sweet was what most of the boys in the youth group had been.

She was neither cute nor sweet nor young.

Her stomach churned as she rested her prime hand on his thigh near the edge of his shorts. She eased herself deeper into the pod. There was nowhere for Kevin to retreat, but he showed no sign of wanting to.

Now the more obvious indication of his interest caught her eye. There was no denying the bulge that twitched against the thin fabric every time she moved, when she delved her fingers just under the leg of his shorts. He didn’t grow with the speed of the Creature, but he certainly grew quickly.

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

She avoided the patch of disease on his hip and trailed her fingers along the fabric to where his erection curved upward along his uninfected hip.

“Oh God.” His breath hitched at the sensation of her fingernails running along the length of the erection. His head fell back when she closed her hand around it through his shorts.

Her vision went cloudy before she realized that, while he was breathing hard and fast already, she wasn’t breathing at all. She abruptly let go of him and brought her hand to her forehead, as though she could hold herself upright that way. Her skin was hot to the touch, her cheeks flaming.

It wasn’t like this was her first time by any stretch of the imagination, but something was off about what she was doing, and she couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t the lesions or the people milling about the pods around them, the light on that meant anyone passing by could see. For some reason, it wasn’t that. Was it him? Was it her?

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. It’s okay.” Kevin stroked her head as though she were a kitten. He’d probably never petted a bald woman before and didn’t know how to touch it or react to what it felt like. She’d been there before. When she’d had hair, men had pulled it like reins. After she’d shaved the hair off, they’d touched her bare scalp like it was a Fabergé egg. “You don’t have to… But…please, God, this place doesn’t make it easy, and I… Please.”

He took her hand. He didn’t grab or yank, just guided it slowly to his cock again, giving her time to withdraw if she chose. But she didn’t.

“Whatever the spells are, they require contact with another person. You can rub yourself off all you want, but that doesn’t make it any better. And it doesn’t matter what Bell’s done to us. When that damn succubus starts sending her magic out…with no relief in sight… Just another way to torture us.”

She cupped him when he urged her. He fell quiet again, his hips twitching and chest heaving as he tried to control himself. But he covered her hand with his, tightened her grip.

“Is that what I am to you?” she asked. “Convenient?”

“You’re a fucking hot woman is what you are, Elizabeth. And I like you.”

He continued to harden in her palm. She started to pump him like that, with his shorts tightening and bunching against the head. His pre-cum dampened the fabric.

“Is that what I am?” She shrugged one side of her robe off her right shoulder, freeing her right secondary arm as well as exposing her breast to him. What the hell. She’d already done that to perfect strangers today.

“Oh God.”

She pulled the waistband of his shorts down. Kevin braced himself on the pallet as she cupped his scrotum with her secondary hand while she spat and licked her prime palm. He looked chafed, but she could probably jerk him off with sandpaper and he’d still choke back a groan like he did when she took his cock in both right hands.

He groaned more loudly when she squeezed him harder while bringing herself even closer. Her extra legs didn’t really fit in the pod, but he twisted his hips to give her more room. The next time he stroked her head, it wasn’t as tentative, though he stayed delicate.

His sandy brown hair was tousled, his lips pale but wet from wanting her. She leaned in, not quite committing. He strained to kiss her, but she swallowed, her throat clicking with dryness, and turned her head at the last moment. His kiss was needy and left a smear on her cheek.

“Did I…” He bucked in her hand with a gasp. “Fuck, you’re good at that. I didn’t expect you to be this good.”

“You were expecting something?” This time she didn’t withdraw when he pressed his lips to the corner of her mouth, his breath like a burst of air from a furnace.

“What do you expect? I just told you you’re really hot. And I think you know it. Damn, I want to come so bad, but I didn’t want to come this quickly. It’s been building—”

“How long?” She brushed her lips against his cheek, flicked her tongue against his ear. His cock jumped in her hand with every little thing she did.

“Haven’t been tallying up the days or anything, but not since before you were here. Fuck.” He found her anatomical heart, slid his hand down to her breast, squeezing hard. She’d never understood why men did that, squeeze rather than knead, but it didn’t bother her. She wouldn’t have exposed herself if she hadn’t been willing to let him touch. Dizziness had her leaning her forehead against his. Her breathing was too shallow, but at least she was breathing.

Her stomach lurched. She coughed, ducking back and flushing, cold and hot behind her cheeks. Her strokes over him stilled.

This time he jerked her chin over to him and kissed her hard, less like a shy boy and more like a man. She opened for him immediately, his groans muffled inside her. He thrust into her firmer grip.

She spared him no mercy, her prime hand a relentless blur while her secondary hand held him steady, squeezing in little pulses at the base.

Cum struck his abdomen then ran in rivulets down her hands. He still kissed her, but more gently, easing back from the bruising crush of his eagerness. She slowed her strokes until he couldn’t cum anymore.

She released him, hovered her filthy hands over him, uncertain.

“Sorry. Sorry, I was just…” Kevin shook his head, laughing a little. “I was just so close. I couldn’t stop.”

She didn’t want to use her robe to wipe her hands. The only thing in the pod she could use was the cloth with which he’d soothed his lesion. Elizabeth shivered. It was one thing to play nurse with latex gloves, but it was another entirely to put her bare hand so near a gaping wound seething with bacterial infection. And it wasn’t just his hip. His shoulder, parts of his arms, legs, neck, the early boils in the corner of his eye… In the contagion room of the funhouse, his skin peeled off and melted like wax to join with the skin of the other infected. All of that sloughed off when their evening was through, leaving the gaping wounds, but he’d touched the others. Their disease was all over him.

She knew the infection wasn’t contagious. But now that the urge to let him take her had passed with his completion, her fears returned, just as they did when she was with the Creature. Except when the Creature was there with her, he made her feel safe in spite of her fear, whether the feeling was artificial or not.

Kevin wasn’t the Creature. He wasn’t even Bell. He was a twenty-something young man who was tortured, desperate, victimized and briefly in the grasp of rare satisfaction. Control wasn’t always high on a young man’s abilities, especially with the influence of sex magic and enforced celibacy. Her extreme ambivalence tested even the Creature’s patience. She was the very definition of mixed signals, so she didn’t blame Kevin for bringing her closer when she’d tried to retreat. But she suddenly didn’t feel safe—not in that trailer, not with herself.

Elizabeth carefully folded the washcloth so the damp side was covered and used the dry side to wipe her hands. If she insulted Kevin by the thoroughness with which she scrubbed all traces of him off her fingers, he didn’t show it. Instead, her tattoos appeared to fascinate him, distracting him from her nervousness. He stared over every detail of the bees and the honeycomb, Troy’s intricate spider web lace over her secondary arm.

As she scooted back toward the opening of the pod, he curled his fingers in her robe. “Come on. You don’t need to go yet. I know that was a little fast, but I promise I can make it up to you.”

She eased her robe back over her shoulder, though the front gaped open enough to show most of her tits and the mourning corset. When his diseased arm brushed the terrycloth, she flinched, but he didn’t push her robe open or grab at her breast again, just caressed her jaw with his thumb and kissed her chin, her lips.

There was the glimpse of the man he could be—more patient, more eager to please. She met his tongue with hers, angled her head and slipped into his mouth to make him shiver like her—although she doubted it was for the same reason. When she pulled back, sure enough, his softened cock was already stiffening again.

“Doesn’t matter what the funhouse does to us. Unless we’re the doll—and the less said about that, the better—it’s easy to get hard when the temptation’s right. Stay a little longer.”

He didn’t push the robe from her breasts, but he nudged it aside from her legs, fingering Dez’s spiderweb along her right thigh before hooking his grip under her knee. “God, you’re beautiful. Your robe hides most of the tattoos, but they’re amazing. And you’re amazing with them. Stay.”

He kissed her again—or she kissed him again. She was too confused to tell which. Only that she guided him with her hand in his hair, the light stubble on his chin scratching her face, and she parted her two sets of legs over his thigh as she kissed him down onto the thin pallet. One of her knees pressed against his scrotum, and he canted his hips up toward her as she stretched her legs alongside his.

His hiss of pain jolted her from what she was doing. Her head was dizzy and light again, unpleasantly so, as though she were under the influence of something that compelled her do these things that made him feel good, made her feel good, made her feel sick.

It didn’t matter that Bell made everything sterile. Somehow, she understood that even if that weren’t the case, she’d still be all over Kevin, needing him more than she wanted him, and that terrified her as much as the bacteria festering in the wound just a few inches below her cunt.

The moment she lowered herself enough for her folds to brush against one of the deep lesions on his leg, fear finally overtook arousal.

She shuddered all over, shook her head violently as she crawled back. The sight of her must have been exceptionally ungraceful, but she couldn’t breathe in that little pod. She gasped in the scent of ointment, talcumed gloves, cheap soap, the fresh cold air coming in through the air holes.

Kevin’s forehead furrowed as he followed her out, his cock jutting out from the crinkle of hair at the base. “Wait. What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I should go.” Her skin crawled as though Bell had put spiders underneath the robe, which now had to be washed or burned or something—which she should probably do to herself as well at this point. Maybe the fire-eater would be so kind…

He reached for her, rubbed her hips soothingly through the terrycloth. “Hey, it’s okay. I don’t know what spooked you, but it’s okay. Is it the wounds? We kind of stop seeing them after a while, and they’re not dangerous. You’re safer here than anywhere else in the world.”

Kevin drew her closer to the pod, lowered himself to the floor on his knees to gaze up at her. When she met his eyes, he leaned forward and kissed her thigh above the inked spider, then ran the tip of his tongue up the thread of silk toward the spiderweb. “Please, I can make it good for you, too. Please don’t go.”

“Keep it down out there,” someone called from a dark pod.

Elizabeth used her secondary legs to brace herself as she crouched in front of him. “Why are you here?”

He blinked. Hesitated. “What?”

She brought herself close to him, her lips pulled just enough away from her teeth for him to be able to see the filed edges. Maybe that spooked him a little, too, because he leaned back, crawled back into the pod. She followed him in, pursuing him until his hand slipped on the dirty cloth, and he fell back on the mat. She held herself over him on her hands and knees, this time neither kissing nor caressing, although his cock still twitched with arousal. Seemed he liked his women both passive and aggressive.

“What I asked, soldier, is why are you here?”

He licked his lips at the husky sound of her voice, stretched up to meet her lips. For a moment, she let him have her then she shook her head again—more for herself than for him.

“I know why I’m here,” she said. “I told you why. I have a general idea why the rest of you are here, but you were cagey when I asked last time. I trusted you had a good reason and didn’t push, but now I need to know.”

“You know why.” Kevin couldn’t meet her eyes again, and he couldn’t quite hide how it wasn’t just because he had better things to look at.

“I know you were naughty. I know you were young, foolish, caught up in the moment. Sounding familiar, Kevin?” She crawled her nails down his chest, visibly denting the skin on the way.

“If I tell you, you’ll probably never come back.”

She trilled a little purr as his abdominal muscles twitched away from her touch. “It’s possible. I might not come back for a while, but if you tell me, there’s a much better chance I’ll come back at all. But a woman wonders what a boy like you would really miss…good company or a pussy to sink into? Because if you’ve been playing me, Kevin…”

“No, no, no,” he protested quickly. “I like you. I like you. Sure, that makes me want you more, but I haven’t been playing you. I just… It sounds exactly as bad as it is when I say it out loud. That’s why none of us talk about it.”

She tapped her nails just above the line of his hip where the disease began. “Start talking.”

He swallowed then fell back against the mat with a sigh. He rested his arm on his forehead, shielding his eyes from hers. “The Bearded Lady, Kitty, called one of my friends out for being a dick. So he decides we’re all going to go in and fuck with the freaks, because what’s the worst thing that could happen, right? Circus folk and gypsies… They’re entertaining, but they’re weird, and no one likes them enough to let them stay. I mean, Arcanium has fans, but people get a serious case of ‘not in my backyard’ when a circus like this sticks around, when the freaks mingle where they don’t belong.”

Kevin briefly raised his arm from his face to add, “I’m not saying that’s what I think. Just saying that was my friend’s thoughts, and enough of us agreed. Hell, I thought it would be fun, fucking shit up without anyone getting on our case about it. Much beer and coke was had, and we were loaded for bear to do whatever we wanted once we snuck in. Long story short, my friend is very dead, thanks to the Ringmaster, because he doesn’t like it when people fuck with his girl, and some of my other friends were eaten by the clowns. The rest of us ended up in the funhouse.”

Elizabeth lowered herself until she was kneeling, straddling his legs but not touching anything that might seep onto her. She curled her fingers into loose fists—not to threaten, but to counteract the tension calcifying her spine.

“Yeah, I got most of that from your last confession, Kevin. That’s what your little group did. But that’s not what I asked.”

“We all did different things. Went after different people. My friend and his wingman went after Kitty, of course, but the rest of us weren’t picky. Most of the circus people were in the caravan area, their guard down. None of us was boneheaded enough to go after Mikhail, but the rest of the circus was fair game. The fairies who do that aerial act, the chain-smoking tumbler, the conjoined twins, the fortune teller, the high-wire girl with the tits… They all seemed kind of fragile. Nimble, but small, you know? Hit ’em with a two-by-four and you can do whatever you like.”

“Charming.” If she’d been fighting between arousal and queasiness before, her stomach definitely leaned toward queasy now.

“I told you, that’s not necessarily what I was thinking. Truth is, I wasn’t thinking much at all. Coke, booze, mob mentality, pheromones… I was fucking high and feeling good. Chris and I went past the caravan toward the carousel, where the peacock girl lives. We thought she was such a cocktease—innocent face, guilty body, that kind of thing, working those levers of hers, corset and tight leather pants. We didn’t know there were two guys on the carousel who came to life at night. Still, Chris had a hammer and I had a knife. Knocked the wiry one out cold, and the big one was surprisingly not much of a fighter, even for his girl.”

He blew air out in a rush and slid his arm away from his eyes. “If it hadn’t been for Bell, we would’ve lost it on the girl. Caroline. Her name is Caroline. After it was all over and we’d been here a few weeks, I went to her. Riley, the big one, gave me some good bruises for it, but I apologized. Sucky as it is to say, I apologized. I’m a prisoner to make up for things with Bell, but there’s no way to make it up to her, and I know that. But I still had to apologize, even if it didn’t balance any scales.”

Kevin sat up, sliding his legs from under her. She lifted her hips to give him enough room. Somehow, in spite of his confession, he was completely hard again and showed no signs of waning.

“She forgave me,” he said. “She told me she knows what it’s like to take the whip all the time, because apparently she’s this saint who tries to protect children from the clowns, which is weird, because the clowns kind of hang around her a lot… But it’s easier to talk about her than about me. So now you know. In here, we get a little cabin-fevered, and the sex demons keep it tense, but we deserve it. I’m not sure if we deserve this much and for so long.” He held up his arms, inspecting where the boils had burst around the gaping lesions. “But we deserved Bell.”

Elizabeth lowered her head. “I think I need to go now.”

Kevin followed her out of the pod, falling once again to his knees and hooking his hands around her primary thighs. “Please, don’t. I can take care of you, I promise. It’s been over a year since we wished in, which means it’s been a lifetime. I’m not that guy anymore. Just please don’t go.”

Elizabeth laughed without humor. “Honestly, it’s not even that. Believe it or not, you’re not the worst kind of guy I’ve had sex with, not by a long shot. I shouldn’t have touched you to begin with. Shouldn’t have gotten you off.”

It complicated everything. But even now, she had to convince herself not to push his face between the sides of her robe and let him eat her like the ex-would-be-rapist that he was. After having her share of men who went all the way, she’d really be moving up in the world.

“But you did. And you seemed to like it. Didn’t you? I wasn’t just making it up to feel better, right?” Kevin rubbed her flanks, digging his fingers in to massage the knotted muscles.

“Either talk louder and take off the robe or quiet down and go back into the pod,” Hank called. “Some of us are trying to sleep, but I’ll settle for jerking off.”

Kevin’s hands fell back to his sides, and he rolled his eyes. “Not the most romantic of venues, I’ll give you that. It’s okay if you think less of me for what I did. I do.” His cock didn’t, but he seemed to take his renewed erection as a matter of course.

“I already knew. Now I know better.” Elizabeth touched his hair, but it was only comfort for him. She felt like she was stroking him with filth, even if it was filth he’d passed to her. “I really need to go.”

She pulled away from him before he could reach for her or protest again, climbed down from the trailer into the night air and empty spaces where she could breathe properly, not that her lungs got the memo. She stumbled around the semi-trailer.

Elizabeth wrenched off the robe. If anyone in the compartment were to peek out through the air holes, they’d see her, but they didn’t make a habit of looking out. She used the inside of the robe to wipe her hands, her legs, her head, everywhere she could before she’d used up all of the inside. Wheezing, vision blurry with panicked tears, she threw the robe over the iron fence into the trees on the other side.

Whoever found it would be at no more risk than she was, but she just couldn’t stand the idea of what she’d done, what she’d touched, everything Kevin had told her running through her head. She couldn’t tell what disgusted her more—what he’d almost done or all the things she had done. She scratched at her skin as though the wolf spider’s babies had decided to use her as a playground. In some places, she scratched so hard it drew blood.

She didn’t like grass, especially when she was naked, so she crouched against the fence, using her secondary legs to brace herself. Elizabeth rocked against the iron, still scratching at her arms and legs and waiting until the hysteria died down enough for her to walk, shaky-legged and weaving, back to the caravan. If she was going to be this zigzagged, she wanted to have a better reason.

Elizabeth staggered into her RV, vision nearly obscured from the mist of panic.

God, what she wouldn’t give for the Creature right there with her now, taking her fear away, taking whatever was broken inside her and patching it with duct tape until the next shattering. She hated that she needed him, that she needed and wanted but shouldn’t have done either.

But if the Creature felt her fear, he didn’t come to relieve her, and she didn’t blame him. Why should he waste his appetite on a woman who didn’t want to want him?

She couldn’t rest, couldn’t linger, couldn’t use anything around her to hold her up as her panic spiraled her down. She could feel the disease on her skin, felt it brush from her like ash to contaminate everything that was hers. As soon as she calmed down, she’d be taking antibacterial wipes to every accessible surface—and recycling those damn bottles. The part of her left arm with the illustration that looked like torn skin had, ironically, received a good deal of scratches. Her own blood smeared over her from her attempts to quell the phantom itch.

She’d never be clean. Sins unforgiven were like oil, leaving invisible, indelible marks on the body as well as the soul. Bell teased those deficiencies to the surface in Arcanium. They poisoned, sickened everything they touched. She was the spider, the vermin, the infestation—and always had been, with no hope of relief.

Elizabeth took the rest of the whiskey into the shower with her this time.