Chapter Thirteen

 

 

 

The prisoners didn’t do anything to try to bother her, which was probably helped by the fact that Hank no longer haunted the funhouse. Now that he and Kevin graced Oddity Row, Elizabeth wouldn’t have to see them most circus days.

But the number of men who came through looking for her had increased, and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like that the Gentleman had to work so hard to keep them moving through the halls, didn’t like their phones pointing at her, didn’t like the way they clutched at the front of their pants or slipped their hands underneath. Unlike the red tent, the funhouse was dark, and there were far fewer disapproving glances in their direction.

It was worse, though, when the strobe lights and the soundtrack of spooky music and screams turned off, when the ropes released her so that she could lower herself to the floor. After leaving from the entrance now rather than the exit, she didn’t have anywhere to go.

She couldn’t go to the prisoners’ trailer, which was what she’d always done after the funhouse closed. And she hated her RV, hated the clink and fumes of whiskey bottles, hated that she still took what Bell offered.

She had the Creature, but did she have anything else? Did she have anything human?

The Creature waited for her above the funhouse entrance when she came to him after picking up her dinner. This time she didn’t have to climb. He reached down to take her hand, lifted her as though she weighed nothing.

When he stroked the moths on the side of her head, she tucked herself against him but turned away. “Do you mind if we don’t…”

“Of course. Whatever you need.”

“You can feed, but I don’t think—”

He pressed a chaste kiss to her neck. “Elizabeth, you don’t have to justify your reluctance to me.”

He wrapped his wing around her like a blanket, sometimes feeding from her, sometimes just sitting back against the cushions as she ate. Then she settled back to sleep against him—her giant, terrifying guardian angel to keep her safe in the night.

 

* * * *

 

She lay in the glass coffin, Goliath climbing happily over her abdomen. His prickly paws tapped her breasts as he considered approaching her face.

A boy and girl, both roughly between ten and twelve years old, were transfixed with wonder. Kids’ fascination was contagious, and she wasn’t nearly as distressed by having Goliath there as she once had been. Fear was still present, no doubt, but she’d much rather have the arachnophobia and the kids staring at her than one of the anonymous guys who didn’t know how to treat a lady in a box when he saw one.

As though on cue, a pair of larger men came in behind the kids’ mother. They weren’t muscle, per se, but they had plenty of it—muscle that men like them built to feel powerful. The way her body immediately distracted their attention, she knew that power wasn’t meant for other men, no matter how tight their T-shirts were.

There was something sensitive, though, in their eyes.

She used to be surrounded with men like that.

Which meant she wasn’t entirely surprised when Dez sauntered in. He pulled the curtain closed behind him, shutting away the bright outdoor shopping mall on the other side.

“Hello again, love.” He made no effort to conceal the unmistakable sexual warmth that colored his greeting, even with the children and their mother there.

Elizabeth swallowed. The restraint that usually kept her from talking had been lifted, although she wasn’t quite sure when. Even so, she knew she shouldn’t call for help. She’d already used up her free chance.

Dez nodded at the other two men. Perhaps they all worked out together, because they had the same build, the same walk, the same sweetness to their eyes, as though they’d built their muscles to form the right breadth of shoulders for a woman to cry on.

Elizabeth fought to stay calm—no need to alarm the children or their mother unduly. But the boy seemed to notice her tension. The line of his eyebrows drew in, and he looked back at the three men looming behind him.

They weren’t menacing or intimidating the guests, but their very presence so close and fixed upon Elizabeth apparently made the mother nervous. “Come on, Collin, Darya. We still have some stuff to get. Do you want a pretzel?”

“I don’t want to go shopping for Darya’s clothes. I want to check out the bugs,” Collin said.

“No, we’ve been here for twenty minutes already. We should give some other people a turn to look through.”

So small, and the boy already had a little bit of the hero inside him… But he was young, and his mother was still in charge. He was apologetic as he left, which nearly broke Elizabeth’s heart. He didn’t even know why, but somehow he knew and wanted to help, but he couldn’t. Looking at Collin, she could almost imagine what Todd would grow into.

Thinking about the Bishop children hadn’t become any less painful over time, even thinking about the monster—who was, after all, just a teenager. And while still ambivalent about demons, Elizabeth had grown rather fond of a monster or two while in Arcanium.

She waved at the boy as he left. Then she slowly sat up, adjusting her right arms for Goliath to tuck into the crook of her elbow. “Hello, Dez. I was hoping I’d never see you again.”

“Could have fooled me. I’m surprised that woman let her children in here with you looking that delicious. Are you cold, or are you just really happy to see me?” He smiled as one of the other men eased his hand out of his leather duster, pulling out a bolt cutter.

“Are you fucking serious?”

“Oh, we’re not going to do a foursome here in the middle of a public tent, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m more than willing for us to go back to being just us for a little while.”

“You mean me being yours. Exclusively yours. Purely yours.”

“You haven’t been pure since I found you, Lizzie. Don’t make my friends laugh.”

Elizabeth wasn’t positive his friends knew how to smile. “But keeping me was a kind of purity, wasn’t it? It meant you could make me think anything was normal, right, nice, pleasurable, exhilarating, just by being my first and keeping me from anyone else. I was untouched, uncharted. If you think we can go back to being that again…”

“There’s more than one way to chart new waters.”

He nodded again at the man with the bolt cutters. The man handed them to Dez. Then, as though given a signal, the two muscled men left the tent, leaving her alone with Dez. There were the insects and spiders, of course, but they were a relatively passive audience—although they seemed to be getting restless, their little feet whispering over the ground in their terrariums, tapping against the glass, the Madagascar hissing cockroaches growing louder in agitation.

“This is quite a place.” Dez flexed his fists around the rubber handles of the bolt cutters as he approached her. “You used to lose your mind every time a tiny spider with the tiniest hairy legs showed up in the bathroom. You’d consider burning down the house just to kill one if you couldn’t get me on the phone. And now look at you. Cockroaches, spiders, ants… What on Earth still keeps you here, trapped in a glass box with this kind of company?”

“Between the cockroaches and you, Dez, I’ll take the motherfucking cockroaches every time,” Elizabeth said.

He smiled, a dazzling, brilliant smile that should have belonged to a Prince Charming. How cruel God could be, to create such a man. But tradition said that the devil had been the most beautiful angel. And here he was before her now—or at least devil’s spawn several times removed.

“I like it when you have a tongue on you, and not just when you talk dirty to me. When did that start?”

“About the time I started mentoring teenagers. When did you start being a grade-A douchenozzle? Or has that always been a side hustle?”

“If you keep doing that, Liz, we might just have a go of it in the tent before we leave.” He tapped the end of the bolt cutters against the padlock.

“What exactly are you planning to do?” She couldn’t hold Goliath much tighter. Oddly sweet though he was, he wasn’t a kitten or a teddy bear. He was a spider and thus easily crushed. He required gentle handling, especially since he couldn’t harm her in retaliation. Elizabeth pressed herself to the farthest side of the glass from Dez, but that still wasn’t a lot of space between them, and the giant tarantula also wasn’t too keen on the man tapping the padlock. He climbed up Elizabeth’s arm and shoulder to the wig, where he settled like a Halloween fascinator, legs tucked close to his fat body.

“The Arcanium gates and fences are surprisingly hard to get through. And the other times my people came through to figure out how we could take you, you’re either bound in a funhouse with layer after layer of security, or you’re here all alone, but locked in the box.”

“You’ve had people scouting Arcanium?” He was a fastidious planner, a psychological genius in his own way, but she hadn’t quite thought him capable of being a criminal mastermind, much less with minions.

“Brace yourself. This is going to be loud.”

She cried out when the bolt cutter snapped through the padlock hook. The padlock fell to the grass with an impotent thud.

“What are you doing?” she repeated. Goliath was scurrying now, and that had her phobia rearing its head on top of her incredulity. She cowered against the glass, eyes closed as she waited for Goliath to stop prickling her, afraid he was going to crawl across her face, poke his feet into her mouth, climb into her…

“You’re a freak in bed, Lizzie, but you’re not a freak. You aren’t meant to be here. You’re wasted on this place. You were meant to be displayed, of course, but you’re a work of art. That’s how you need to be displayed—as art. As my art. Skin deep, soul deep, you’re mine, and I’m not going to let some two-bit carnie turn you into a Spider Woman when you were always enough woman for me.” His sunny smile darkened. “And I’m not going to have that two-bit carnie getting you dirty with sawdust and greasepaint. You need silk sheets. You need city lights, babe, and that diamond collar I had you wear… Nothing but the diamond collar.”

Dez slid what was left of the hook out of the latch, then slowly opened the lid.

Goliath was no fool. He recognized an out when he felt the breeze of it. He bolted for the side of the coffin, picking his way over the air holes to gain some traction that the glass otherwise wouldn’t provide him. He launched himself over the edge, then quickly crawled toward the back of the tent.

“Do you know what you just did? Do you think Goliath birdeaters grow on trees?” Elizabeth was actually worried. He was her responsibility. If he got out of the tent and someone hit him with a broom because all they saw was a spider, Bell would be furious.

“Well, I’m stealing you right now. A spider’s not going to rate in comparison. You’re the goldmine he doesn’t know how to use. I always thought I’d find you in some strip joint or on a cam site once your religious rebound lost its grip again. But running off to join a circus? Why the dramatics, love?”

“It wasn’t my choice, and you’re not stealing me.”

“This isn’t your choice either. Give me your hand now, or I’ll make sure your carnie loses more than a spider.”

“He’s not my carnie.” Believing Bell was her lover was the last thing she wanted Dez to think, lest Bell find it amusing—after he was through torturing her for losing his birdeater. “He’s my boss.”

“I’m your boss.”

He used that voice. That voice. The one that made her spine straighten and her body want to cringe away from whatever implement he might bring out to strike her with. The voice of a master prepared to punish a wayward, submissive servant. He’d had her switch for some of his clients, but she could only ever play that part well because she was his submissive in the end.

She’d always been a puppet, one way or another, and always to powerful, charismatic men who knew exactly how to control women like her.

“I’m your man, Liz. I’m the one who makes you feel like no one else, and if anyone else gets close, it’s only because of what I did to you. You belong with me. You belong to me. Every inch of you is mine. You gave it to me to mark, to brand, and no one else is going to use what’s rightfully mine. Now, come with me.” He held out his hand to her.

“I… Dez, I can’t.” The sight of his hand made her remember his touch as though she’d never left him, as though ten years hadn’t passed and he was the only man to damn her. She would go with him if she could—despite self-loathing and lessons learned with the prisoners, she would still go with him. He would take her away, steal her back to his home and keep her like a princess in his tower, and eventually, he would hold sway over her once more, have her craving him as much as she craved sex.

“If you’re worried what your ‘boss’ will do if he finds out, LaVon and Brady are guarding the outside. If he tries to stop us, I’ll let him know how little I like people touching my things.” He brought his hand close to her, running his fingertips over her cheek with gentleness as painful as his violence. She leaned into him, her mouth parting when he nudged her lower lip, smearing the black lipstick. “There’s my girl. Come here, Lizzie. That’s right, on your knees.”

She raised herself up on her prime legs, following his touch to just short of his mouth. He breathed her in, angled his head, parted his lips as though prepared to enter her, slow and inexorably sexual, as much a penetration as his cock between her legs. But he didn’t. He smiled, arrogance like cologne emanating from his pores.

“Do you think I could get half this kind of response from the usual girls I use in my shoots? They play at innocence, sweetheart, but they can’t fake what the camera captured in you. After all these years, you still have it. You’re irreplaceable. How many girls escape from repressive cults every year for me to sweep up?”

“I’m not nearly as special as you say I am. The only thing that made me special was that I stayed…until I didn’t. And I can’t go back with you.”

“Can’t or won’t?” He slid his hand down to her neck, brought it around her throat just under her chin, but he didn’t squeeze, though he had before.

But she was still breathless, panting shallowly. “Can’t.”

“Of course you can. Just take off those prosthetics and come with me.” He parted his lips again, and this time, when she responded as he’d trained her to, he met the tip of her tongue then slid into her, possessing her mouth. He tightened his grip around her throat enough to scare her. Light-headedness swayed her forward to clutch at his arms.

Once she got her hands on him, she couldn’t stop. His shirt was soft, thin, his jacket leather, and underneath, he was more human to the touch than the Creature. She tucked her arms under his jacket, bringing herself against his chest.

The glass blocked their hips from meeting, but that didn’t stop his free hand from roaming familiarly over her back, down to her ass. Its path took him over the places where her secondary thighs emerged near her hips, with their own musculature integrated into her lower back and her buttocks.

He curled his hand around the secondary thigh, no doubt thinking it was some kind of silicone fake, bound to her with latex and glue or something else explainable. But as he searched for a seam and couldn’t find it, she twitched from the probing of his fingers. One particularly forceful scratch made her whimper.

He pushed her away from him with the hand around her throat, squeezing reflexively. She choked, bringing one of her secondary hands up to claw at his fingers. He let go, confusion a surprising expression on his beautiful face. He looked young like that, as though he hadn’t experienced the emotion enough times in his life for it to grow with him.

“What are you looking for, Dez?” Elizabeth lowered herself to her heels, holding her neck. “The catch? The edge of the latex? Does it look like there’s anywhere for me to hide a zipper?”

“How do you take that thing off?”

Elizabeth laughed, flashing her filed teeth. Dez must have felt them when he kissed her, but he still stepped back at the sight.

She didn’t care if she sounded hysterical. Her mind and body were a series of maelstroms coming together. She was afraid of what would happen when they did, but there was no stopping it now. “That’s the secret. I can’t.”

“I don’t get it, but it’s time to go before someone starts sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong. Take it off.” He’d said that to her so many times, but never with this kind of impatience, this kind of frustration—frustration that wasn’t entirely aimed at her.

Dez was used to understanding how things worked. He was an artist, a photographer, an autodidact. He’d studied anatomy while teaching himself how to draw so that he could better understand line, light, shadow, the composition of a body underneath what the camera could see. She’d been lying down the last time he’d been in here, and when she sat up, it was easy to dismiss the movement of her secondary limbs as perhaps connected to fishing wire or something similar. But now that she was moving more freely, he had to notice that the extra arms and legs weren’t acting like those of a marionette, and in her string halter and low-cut bikini bottoms, Dez’s art flawless across her bare skin, there wasn’t the slightest harness for even the most observant eyes to discern.

“Lizzie, what did you—”

“Said a few things I shouldn’t. Trusted someone I shouldn’t. Story of my life, isn’t it? And it’s why I can’t leave him like I left you, babe, even if you thought a Human Spider could be even more special than a girl who climaxes on cue.”

“You can’t be serious.” With confusion so unfamiliar to him, he defaulted to what he knew, and that was his hands on her. He grabbed her shoulders, forced her onto her hands and knees. He pushed, pulled, prodded at the scant secondary arms his needle had never touched until he couldn’t deny that each secondary finger, each secondary wrist, each secondary elbow functioned as an individual, independent unit from her prime limbs. He snatched at her secondary thighs, parting them with an insistence that would have been lewd if it hadn’t hurt so damn much.

She struck him away with her secondary arms. He recoiled.

“What’s the matter? Never seen an eight-limbed woman before?” There was that hysteria again. Tears threatened to fall, even though she wasn’t sad, wasn’t angry, wasn’t sure what was building in there behind her eyes, pressing against its thin layer and ready to burst.

“At no point during our well-documented seven years did you have more than two arms and two legs. I know your body better than anyone else. You’re not an eight-limbed woman.”

“Are you sure?” She raised herself up again, using the side of the coffin to help her climb out.

“What did you—”

“You keep thinking I did this to myself. I’ve heard of people getting tummy tucks and boob jobs over a bad break-up, even shaving their heads.” She carefully removed the wig, tossed it into the coffin. Her scalp was smoother than freshly shaved, no grain to cling to her palm. It had never been this smooth with Dez. “But, darling, I don’t think there’s added appendages in any plastic surgeon’s revenge repertoire.”

Dez shook his head, took a step back when she advanced. “I don’t get it.”

“There’s nothing to get.” She closed all twenty fingers over the sides of his jacket, then pulled him closer. “Don’t be afraid, Dez. It’s just real.”

“No, I…” He trailed off as he curled his hands over the smaller wings of the added shoulder blades. She rested her cheek against his chest while he probed with much gentler fingers over the seamless transitions.

“This isn’t even surgical work, Liz. This is… People don’t just sprout arms the way trees sprout branches. There’s no stitches, no scars.”

“This is why I can’t go with you,” she murmured into his shirt. He was warm, and, though instinctive fear had soured his scent slightly, underneath it was the Dez she remembered. And he was distracted by her body in a whole new way that she preferred. How much better it was to be a freak to him, a science project, a Frankenstein’s monster, instead of a woman whose will he had to crush under his thumb.

But Elizabeth could almost hear the gears in his head turning, the way she could hear his heart beating beneath her ear.

“We can get them removed. Or—”

He was already starting to think like Bell, think how he could use it. From the cock stirring against her, she thought he still wouldn’t mind her in his bed—freak and all. He slid one palm up between both sets of shoulder blades to the tie of her leather halter. With one pull, it loosened, folded away from her breasts. With one more pull to the string underneath her secondary arms, it fell to their feet. Dez leaned back to peer down at her with calculation, the heated glimmer of lust in his eyes.

“This really isn’t possible, Elizabeth,” he muttered. He brought his fingers to her mouth again to lower her snake-pierced lip and inspect her teeth. Those, at least, could be explained—a valid mod, although not a part of his preferred culture. “Use them, your hands—the other ones. On your breasts. Show me they’re yours.”

She tucked her primary hands behind her neck, stroking the bats and moths and tingling under his intense, darkening gaze as she brought her secondary hands to her breasts. They weren’t as gravity-defying as they used to be, but her nipples tightened the way they always had, the same surprisingly dusky brown against her pale skin, a flush making them almost purple as she caught them between her thumbs and forefingers.

“Fine.” He was too proud to adjust himself, but he rolled his shoulders. “We’ll take you as you are. My fans already know this is where you’ve been. I can still give them the circus girl. I’ll rig up a special harness for you.” He replaced her secondary fingers with his, rougher, pulling her forward by her nipples until her hips were against his again.

“You can do whatever you want to me in this tent, right now,” Elizabeth said. “God knows I can’t stop you. I’m not capable of not wanting you. But I can’t leave Arcanium, and you can’t steal me from it. Believe me… I’d go with you if I could, if just to run away from you again.”

“Yes, love, you certainly look like a girl who wants to run away from me.” He twisted her nipples, and her hips jerked forward to meet his erection.

“I told you. Anything you want to do with me, Dez. But I’m not yours anymore. Someone worse than you has his invisible chains on me. I couldn’t run away from him if I tried.” She shoved his jacket down his shoulders. He had to let her go to shrug it off. “So if you want me, this is it.”

“All this talk about how much you hate me… You’re sure insistent on getting me out of my clothes.” His belt clinked like the padlock opening as he removed it.

She backed up to the coffin. As he came after her, Elizabeth saw instead the strange, beautiful form of the Creature as he’d been so many nights when he’d released her from this godforsaken coffin. A place near the realm of her heart panged so hard, she thought something was physically wrong.

“I hate what you did to me, the original freak you created. I hate that you’re here and that I’m salivating. I hate you, Dez, but I can still have sex with you if it’ll get you out of my life, if it’ll get me out of your system. Then you need to leave Arcanium and never come back, and you and your goons have to stop stalking me like some little bitch—”

He struck her across the face with the smooth end of the belt. She shouted in surprise, whipping to the side while holding her cheek. The skin seemed to split right under her palm from the swelling. The welt wasn’t an inch from her eye. He could have done serious damage without a thought.

“I don’t like it when you lie, Lizzie. And I don’t like it when you cheapen what you and I had. What we still clearly have.” With expert precision, he looped the belt over her head and tightened it around her neck like a noose. “I don’t need chains, sweetheart. I don’t need our special collar or an engagement ring. You belong to me. Now, I’m going to take you home and fuck you every way I can think of until you’re on all your hands and knees, begging me to let you come one more time. What’s our record? Fifteen in one night? So many times that it hurt, but you still begged. You’re going to come with me because you don’t have a choice. You’ll come when I fucking say so. You always have.”

He jerked her away from the coffin, flinging her to the ground.

“What? Are you going to drag me out there, a shopping mall filled with families and me with barely anything on, a swollen eye and a fucking belt around my neck? Are you skull-fucked?” She cringed when he lifted his hand.

But this time, he just wanted the cringe. He smiled again, gathered himself to appear composed. Normal. Charming. “I’d call it performance art. And people would believe me.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. He’d talked his way out of every shady situation he’d put them in, even with people who would usually be suspicious of someone like him. He could convince butter into an oven.

Dez inclined her face up to him with the buckle under her chin. The angle alone partially closed off her throat. He brought his hips close to her mouth, the denim over his erection brushing her lips.

“Is your mouth watering yet? If I sank into you, could you take me all the way in on your first try? Would you drip down your chin in your eagerness?”

She remembered kneeling in front of the Creature much like this then the Creature kneeling in return before he could take her mouth. It seemed more of a betrayal to him to perform fellatio for an old lover than it was to just let that lover fuck her. She closed her lips and turned her head, but Dez tightened the belt and jerked her back with a click of his tongue.

“If you can’t be nice, I’m not going to make this easy for you,” she rasped, lightheaded. The red tent seemed to spin, the fury of the hissing cockroaches rattling in her ears.

“You’ll ride my cock like it’s the first and last cock you’ve ever had, no matter if I have to tie your legs apart to do it. There’s no reason to fight, Lizzie. It hurts you more than it hurts me.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

Dez whirled around, making her gag as he dragged her with him.

Bell had entered the tent, accompanied by the last person Elizabeth expected to see at that moment—and a sight that immediately filled her with so much shame she nearly threw up right then. If Dez hadn’t been throttling her, she might have. Her cheeks flamed, and Elizabeth brought all four of her hands to herself to hide what she could, crossing her secondary arms over her breasts and her prime arms over her bowed face.

“I know you.” The man’s voice had the same warmth and charm as Dez, but none of the guile—deeper, the kind of voice made to cut through silence and noise with equal ease. He’d been the whisper in her head all her life.

Elizabeth dared to peek through her fingers at her biological father, afraid that the anger that tarnished his words was directed at her.

But Thomas Petros—wearing the plain, sober attire common to Petrosian men and sporting a modest but cared-for beard streaked with white—wasn’t looking at Elizabeth. She didn’t think she’d ever seen his face contorted like that. His congregation had witnessed righteous anger, devastated grief, concern, but nothing as ugly as the hatred that charged his rigid, knotted expression when he stared at Dez.

“Walk away,” Dez said, as though he was doing Bell and Petros the favor. “You don’t understand.” Trust me, his tone hissed underneath. This isn’t anything close to what it looks like, although I understand how you might assume something terrible. Trust me.

“I’d love to, but that’s my employee you have in your…belt,” Bell said mildly. “And you see, I’m not fond of outsiders hurting my people.”

“So you’re the one who put her in the glass box.” Dez stroked her head as though she were a frightened dog, holding her closer to his leg. “I’m afraid there’s been a mistake. This one belongs to me. I signed my name all over her skin. I don’t care how much of a freak you made her, or what you had to sacrifice to whom. She’s mine.”

There was a vicious, hollow snap as Thomas Petros slammed his fist into Dez’s face. Dez let go of the belt, teetered like a cartoon villain then fell back. He wasn’t unconscious, but he gazed around, eyes out of focus.

“Beautiful right hook, Father,” Bell said, just as mildly.

“I know you.” Petros stood over Dez with both fists clenched. “You’re the defiler, the corrupter, the filthy snake who first got his hands on her. You’re the one she escaped.”

Dez slowly regained his bearings, covering his swelling, bleeding nose with his hand, although that did little to stop the flow. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m her father.”

“Which one? The accountant or the fanatic who screwed her mother?” He laughed, sending a thick spray of blood between his fingers.

Petros raised his fist again and started for Dez. Bell stopped him with a hand on his arm just as the Creature burst through the curtain. The tent wasn’t really made for five people, especially when one of them was an eight-legged woman and three of the men were quite large.

Dez staggered to his feet, rounded the coffin and grabbed the first terrarium he could reach—the hissing cockroaches. He threw the terrarium at Bell. The glass shattered at Bell’s and Petros’ feet, sending the hissing roaches scurrying. Elizabeth screamed, jerking back into the Creature’s waiting arms. Though Petros reversed as fast as he could in an automatic response to giant cockroaches roaming freely in a small space, Bell barely blinked, not even when Dez grabbed the common American cockroach farm and flung that one at them, too.

The resultant cockroach explosion nearly made Elizabeth’s mind shut down, but the Creature wrapped his arms around her, enveloping her as though to remind her that she was safe, even when the smaller roaches scurried over her feet. But she wrenched against his hold, shaking her head, too panicked to even scream.

“Come on, Elizabeth. We’re going,” Dez snapped. “I can get you out of here. I can get you away.”

“I, like you, don’t appreciate it when people take what’s mine,” Bell said. “At least I don’t destroy other people’s property in the process. Do you think my own cockroaches scare me, Desmond? Do you think you scare me?”

Bell beckoned to the horde of small brown roaches as well as the massive hissing cockroaches at his feet. They stopped running every which way and instead climbed up his body until they covered him like a suit. The hissing cockroaches floated from his hands into the reconstituted terrarium that Bell then lowered into the glass coffin. Before their eyes, the thousands of pieces of glass that had made up the more intricate cockroach farm came together as well. Bell funneled the many insects through the air back into their home.

Dez stared with wide eyes but thinning lips, no doubt making those same calculating connections that had led to him accepting Elizabeth’s transformation. Her father avoided looking at Bell, but he appeared utterly unsurprised by the swarm of obedient insects and the recreated tanks.

Elizabeth stopped struggling in the Creature’s hold. He wasn’t embracing her, just bracing. He let her go as she found her footing again. She yanked Dez’s belt off her neck, but she covered herself again as soon as she could. Petros quickly shed his jacket and held it out to her.

“Thank you,” she muttered. She took the jacket with one hand and covered her front with it before turning her back to Petros to pull it on.

She couldn’t fit both pairs of arms into the sleeves, but her secondary arms were used to being on the inside of her robe. She buttoned the jacket over them and tucked the collar closer together before daring to turn back. Just the fact that her father could see her at all made her hunch over, clutching the jacket, ashamed to even raise her eyes.

Petros didn’t let that keep him away. He gave her a chance to refuse, but when he guided her away from the Creature and into his arms, his beard bristly against her scalp, Elizabeth allowed it. Neither of her fathers had been particularly affectionate, nor had her mother been, but she found herself needing what his embrace meant. More than any other man in her life, an embrace from him would go nowhere else, an end in itself.

Something that had been clenched tight in her for so long that she couldn’t remember when it started suddenly released. She wrapped her arms around his waist, still hunched over as she closed her eyes against the hot, stinging tears. She couldn’t cry like she had when she had been a child. But tears managed to find their way out, as they always did, soaking through his humble shirt.

“Let’s go,” Petros said softly.

She didn’t resist when he led her back to the curtains.

“Don’t you walk away from me, Lizzie!” Dez started after her. “Running to the circus, hiding behind the baby daddy… I’m the fucking only one who makes you feel alive. You never have to hide from me. If you just—”

The curtain fell closed behind her, cutting off his words as though by magic. She’d stepped out into Arcanium. Maya was there with Kitty, standing a few tents away with her fingers laced through the other woman’s. The smoking man was also there, sitting on the top of a tent with yet another cigarette.

Elizabeth closed her fingers over the fabric of Petros’ shirt.

“Tell me you didn’t break in,” she whispered.

“Of course not. I came in at the gate. The redhead with a beard invited me in. I apparently had only one crime in me to commit today. God forgive me, I think I would have killed him with my bare hands if you hadn’t been there, if you hadn’t needed me.”

Her throat was thickening from Dez’s abuse and obstructed by the rush of emotion. She let out a choked, coughing sob that was supposed to be a sigh of relief.

“There now. You’re out here, and he’s in there. You never have to see him again.” Petros stroked her head as though he didn’t notice there wasn’t any hair, as though he hadn’t realized she had extra appendages, as though nothing had changed since last he saw her in clothes as sober as his, silent next to her family in the pews of the Petrosian sanctuary.

“You knew him.” Elizabeth raised herself up, wiping under her eyes. Her makeup was probably already scary enough to belong in the haunted funhouse. Nothing smeared onto her fingers, but she tried to stay careful. “That’s what you said. I never told Mom or Dad where I’d gone. I never confessed to you. How did you know him?”

“God never saw fit to tell me where you’d gone after you ran away, and I trusted his judgment, though I prayed for you without ceasing.” He gently nudged her hands away from her face to use his own sleeve, dabbing her cheeks and around her eyes, careful where Dez had left his mark. “It wasn’t until after you’d returned that a member of our congregation came to me with his computer to show me what he’d found.”

“What was he doing that he found me?” Elizabeth asked, more than a little annoyed.

Petros gave a wry smile. “He showed it to me to admit to his sin.”

“And to bring you down to his level.”

Petros shrugged to concede the point. “I’m only human. God’s most favored people riddle the Bible with their sins. Anyone who tries to use you to control me will fail. I’ve repented and been forgiven for my sins, but you are not one of them, child. You never were, no matter how much some tried to make it so. And I hope they never tried to make me yours.” He kissed her forehead like a baptism. “When I saw what the saint wanted me to see, I was mortified, of course. But you came back to us with the same shame I see painted across your face now. I finally understood why you were so afraid that you would return so much later than our other prodigal sons and daughters, that you would drape yourself in our attire and hide as though in a convent.”

“You give me too much credit.” More composed, Elizabeth withdrew from her father, crossing her arms over her chest where the lapels opened too far. “I went willingly with him for years, and I never said no until the day I left. If ever there was a cautionary tale…”

“There are many ways to a yes, Lizzie—some of them good, some of them evil. There’s evil in that man. I’ve watched it haunt you all these years. He tried to contact me soon after the saint confessed. He sent pictures and links to attempt to discredit you in the eyes of the church, including one in the body of the email that showed him with you. But I deleted them, the rest sight unseen. He tried calling me, but I deleted his messages and blocked his number. I’m sorry that you thought I would see the ink on your skin and condemn you, that you never felt you could confess to me. I’m sorry you had to suffer like this. But you don’t have to suffer alone.”

“Do Mom and Dad know?”

Petros had responded with pity and compassion, but Elizabeth was pretty sure her mother wouldn’t be able to look at her, and her dad would probably never speak to her again. He had six other daughters he could praise, six other daughters he could call his own. What was the loss of one that wasn’t even his?

“I wouldn’t divulge something that wasn’t mine to share, any more than I sought your confession before you were ready to provide it,” Petros said gently. “It’s up to you whether you want them to know. Either way, you have a home with us.”

“I’m pretty sure the Bishops don’t want me back.” She laughed—no trace of hysteria now, nothing but bitterness. “Without their reference, no one else will ever hire me again. Even if I wasn’t a freak. Even if I could go back.”

“You’re a child of God. It doesn’t matter what happened to you or why. You called me for help, and I wouldn’t deny you that. What kind of saint would I be to deny you sanctuary?”

Elizabeth glanced up at him warily. “It’s not just the tattoos, Father. It’s not just what Dez did. Do you know where you are? Do you know what I’ve become?”

“God doesn’t show me everything, but he shows me some.” Petros looked over his shoulder at the tumbler sitting on the tent. The pale man appeared thoroughly entertained, nursing his cigarette like a bowl of popcorn. “Whatever controls this place does well containing it, but as soon as I came in, I sensed demonic influence through everything, like cobwebs in an attic.”

“Is it evil?” Elizabeth asked slowly, just above a whisper. “Is it all evil?”

Petros returned his attention to Elizabeth. He placed his hands on her shoulders. “No. Evil is here, but it isn’t in everything. Your soul is still yours and God’s. It always has been. You’re not lost.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it.” She stepped back with a deep breath. “Bell keeps me lost, and I don’t know how long he’ll keep me. I can’t just leave him like I did Dez.”

“Bell… The man with magic in his hands who led me to the tent?” Petros asked.

Elizabeth tilted her head. “You said you saw evil, that you could see the demonic. Could you not see him?”

“There are as many kinds of demons as there are humans, Liz. There’s a pronounced mark of evil upon the magician, but his power dwells in chaos. Long before God made light from the chaos, he resided in its darkness. These things are not evil in and of themselves.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she muttered. “Forgive me. I just… This circus… He was the one who…” Elizabeth rubbed her temples. “He’s not like the Ringmaster. He’s not a demon. But he’s jinn, and he’s not good. He never touched me like Dez, never forced me to fuck him—not asking forgiveness for that one—but he did this.” She gestured to her transformed body. “He forced me into this.”

“He’s why the phone cut off when you called me, isn’t he?” Petros lowered his eyes, but he didn’t let go. He’d seen the mark of evil upon her, yet he didn’t recoil from touching it. “He’s the reason you called. Not the man I struck, but the one with whom I walked in.”

“This place is woven through with evil. It’s sewn into the very fabric of it.” Elizabeth breathed in, breathed out, found speaking her fears aloud easier to do than she would have thought. “It’s sewn through me. I don’t know whether I’m evil because of this place or whether I was just…born to kneel at the feet of the devil. But if I have to be trapped here, maybe evil is what I need to be.”

Petros stopped her before she could turn back toward the tent. “You’re not evil, Lizzie, no matter what you do. No one with the pain you carry can be as evil as the darkest shadows of this place.”

“I won’t let him sin against me again, so I’m going to have to go sin some more, Father. I hope you can forgive me.”

Elizabeth bowed her head as Petros kissed her forehead again, the brush of his beard achingly familiar.

“It’s not for me to forgive,” he whispered against her brow. “That was never for me, nor is it for me to judge my saints. Perhaps you weren’t meant for us, but that doesn’t mean you have to be lost.”

But as long as I am, I think it’s time to embrace this darkness. Perhaps it’s the part God called good. Her spine was a vibrating coil, and her fingertips were cold with fear, but she forced herself out of her father’s embrace again.

“Don’t leave Arcanium yet.” Elizabeth backed toward the tent, already loosening her hold on the coat. “I don’t think this will take long.”

“I love you. I’ve always loved you,” Petros said. “No matter what has been done to you, no matter what you do, I always will.”

Elizabeth wanted to say that she loved him, too, that he’d been more a father to her than her own, regardless of the labels that her family had created. But if she tried to speak, she was afraid she’d scream and the monstrosity of her would become all too apparent. She couldn’t go into the tent like that. She needed her heart cold.

When she pulled the curtain back to duck through, the sound of another person screaming hit her ears so hard they ached, and she had to rush in to contain the sound.

But Bell wasn’t the one torturing Dez.

The Creature held Dez off the ground by his neck, his mouth open and teeth bared, the red liquid in his eyes swirling like whirlpools. Dez squirmed, kicked, wrenched against the Creature’s hold, but he couldn’t shake him, nor did any blow faze the Creature. And no matter what he did, Dez couldn’t tear his gaze away.

Elizabeth hadn’t known that a man could look so terrified.

Bell was off to the side, idly offering his arms for Goliath to climb on as he watched the Creature and Dez with voyeuristic fascination. He smiled when she joined him.

“Your father isn’t what I expected.”

“You can read my mind. How could you not expect him?” Elizabeth asked.

“There’s a vast canyon between the way a person is perceived and the way he is. I had your perception of him—a pious pulpit pounder, a holy man prone to indiscretion in his youth, the false prophet of your cult.”

“I never said he was a false prophet.” It wasn’t easy talking over a man screaming bloody murder, but she and Bell were close enough to each other, and Bell pitched his voice lower to counteract Dez’s piercing cries.

“I’ve lived many lifetimes, Elizabeth, and psychotics and confidence men pretending to be prophets are an all-too-common phenomenon. Then your father crosses the threshold of Arcanium. I’m so partial to creating the illusion of hoaxes, it’s a rare treat to encounter something real in a rawer form.”

The ground seemed to drop away, and her stomach followed. “I thought he was just sensitive, that he attributed acute intuition to divine intervention.”

“Oh, there’s a touch of that, too. All the real prophets suffer delusions of grandeur to accompany the actual grandeur with which they’ve been gifted. It’s the curse of the blessing.”

He relinquished Goliath to her when she held out her hand for him. She gently placed him back in his quiet terrarium. He hadn’t deserved any of the commotion from the day.

“Petros is undeniably real. I like him. It would be a shame to have to kill or imprison him,” Bell said.

“You had no trouble imprisoning me.”

No smirk should appear so attractive on an arrogant man’s face, but Bell defied all shoulds. “Arcanium would drive a man like him mad. But a little darkness, a little chaos, does wonders for a woman like you. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Elizabeth latched the top of the terrarium harder than she would have otherwise. “You’re not cute when you listen in on conversations. I hope you know that.”

“You and Maya would get along so well if you opened yourself up to my side of the circus.” Bell held his hand out to her on the other side of the table and brought her around back to him, like a gentleman leading his lady to a dance. “Have I mentioned how magnificent your Creature is? I’m glad I was patient and kept him long enough to see what he was capable of.”

“What is he doing?” She spoke so softly she almost couldn’t hear herself.

“After feeding on so much of your fear, he’s releasing it all into your ex. Every bit of it. Like that scene in The Exorcist, but unfiltered horror instead of pea soup. Perhaps, as its ultimate origin, the Creature thought it belonged with him.”

“I didn’t know he did that.”

“Neither did he. How does it feel to see your fear on his face?”

Elizabeth undid the buttons on the jacket, emerging from its cocoon with only the slightest quiver of trepidation. Watching Dez cower strengthened her resolve. Bell’s appreciative gaze lingered on her when she handed the jacket to him.

“I thought so,” he murmured.

Elizabeth came up behind the Creature, curled her fingers over his shoulder. His wings didn’t allow her to press against him the way she could an ordinary man, but she stood on her tiptoes to rest her cheek on the back of his neck. “You can let him go.”

The Creature dropped Dez to the floor without ceremony.

Dez dug grooves into the ground trying to crawl away, but he shook too hard, his limbs twitching too violently for him to get very far before he crumpled in a heap.

When the Creature faced her, his eyes still swirled furiously. Elizabeth sank into the red hole down which the Creature had led her ex-lover. It didn’t affect her quite the same. After all, she was used to the dark places her brain took her.

The Creature caught her face in his hands, blinking to break the spell. “I’m sorry. I did not intend to share that with you.”

Elizabeth covered his hands with hers. “You shouldn’t apologize. I can’t tell you what this means to me. But I should have taken care of this myself over ten years ago. Can you go back into the circus and watch over my father, make sure nothing hurts him?”

The Creature peered down at the fetal man partially hidden under the insect and arachnid tables. “If that worm so much as thinks—”

“Bell will make sure he doesn’t do any more damage. Or he’d better, since he promised no one could hurt me, and I have significant evidence to the contrary.”

“Have I mentioned that your line is much more generous to those who hurt you than mine?” Bell said, inspecting his nails.

“Will you make him bleed?” the Creature asked, his growl harsh, metallic.

Elizabeth raised herself on her toes again, this time to take his lower lip between her teeth as she kissed him. The hard set of his jaw slowly eased.

“We’ll see,” she whispered into him.

“I would stay to see that.”

“I can’t do this with you here,” she said, “just like I couldn’t do it with my father here. You don’t need to see what I am with him.”

His wings spread slightly, granting them the briefest privacy. “And Bell?”

“He already knows.”

The Creature caressed the hollow under her cheekbones with the claws on his thumbs. “I know. I’ve tasted it, little Spider.”

“I need you to protect Father. I trust you to do that more than Bell.”

He folded his wings in again. “To that I will concede.” He kissed her one more time, as lingering and intense as Bell’s attention upon them. Then he swept around the glass coffin and out into the circus.

Dez was starting to come around, the whimpers under the table more infrequent and his movements more coherent. He struggled to his hands and knees, bumping the table and threatening the ant farm.

Bell took her right prime hand in his. “Are you ready for your armor, Lizzie?”

She didn’t know what he meant by that, but she nodded, tightening her other hands into fists as she watched Dez squirm—this big, strong, handsome, hardcore sociopath, squirming like a kicked toddler.

“Oh, it’s nothing much, really. You’re still difficult to dress,” Bell said. “Just something to make you feel a little more…powerful.”

Leather and metal emerged from her like scales. It wasn’t a second skin, not part of her like her extra arms and legs—more like something that surfaced on the still lake of her skin.

Gloves covered all four arms from knuckles to elbows, leaving her fingers free—and on the tips of those fingers, her nails thickened and sharpened into something like claws. The metallic blades that lined the gloves provided additional weaponry.

A specialized harness, no doubt similar to the one Dez had envisioned, wrapped around her waist and around her chest and arms. The thick, strapped corset granted slightly more modesty over her breasts than nothing at all. Reaching to just above her knees, her boots matched the gloves, with arachnoid spikes and blades down the front. The boots on her secondary limbs had an additional heel so she could stand steadily on all four feet at once with her weight focused on her prime legs.

He was right. As armor went, it wasn’t much—more like the armor she might see in some of Todd’s friends’ video games—but Elizabeth understood it wasn’t armor to protect her. Arcanium was her protection, and where Arcanium needed help, bit by bit Bell had transformed her to protect herself. The armor was just another part of the Spider that Bell had made her, the Spider he wanted her to be.

Only when she was sure the armor wasn’t fused to her skin did Elizabeth let go of Bell’s hand. Balancing herself with her back legs, she crouched down where Dez had finally managed to recover from the worst of the Creature’s force-feeding.

“What the fuck, Lizzie?” he gasped. “What the actual fuck?”

Elizabeth straightened his shirt. “I’m awfully sorry you had to meet my new lover that way.”

He jerked away from her at first then settled, staring at her as though she was a lifeline. She watched the sanity return to him, and with it, his anger. In this case, she didn’t blame him, but she couldn’t allow sympathy to sway her. She already had her own warped responses to contend with without adding pity into the mix.

“He’s usually a perfect gentleman,” she said. “I’m afraid you touched a nerve by touching me the way you did. He thought he’d give you a dose of your own medicine. You showed me a side to him I’ve never seen, and you’ll always have my gratitude for that.”

“That? You fuck that? That monster? That…god-fucking demon thing that looks like a cross between a gargoyle and a rat? Are you telling me I broke you so much you’d spread your legs for that thing?”

“Yes. All four of them. Or do I have to remind you that I’m kind of a hybrid monster these days, too?” Elizabeth tapped her fingers on her knees, unconcerned with how unladylike her present stance was. Dez had seen her in much less, and he’d brought her much lower. There were no depths to which she hadn’t sunk for him. Hard to feel ashamed of something as innocuous as crouching with her legs open.

“You’re different,” Dez said.

“So people keep telling me. What’s different about me? The fact I have tits and a cunt?”

“That’ll do for a start.” Dez got to his knees, used the table to pull himself to his feet. Elizabeth raised herself up with him.

“No matter my anatomy, Dez, facts are still facts. I can’t go with you. You physically cannot take me from Arcanium. If you actually managed it, I’d be tortured by some kind of spell until you brought me back. But since the world outside that curtain is different now than when you first came in, you wouldn’t actually be taking me out of Arcanium. You’d be bringing yourself right into it. And the people here aren’t keen on men like you. So my original offer stands.”

She slowly unbuckled the straps that held her corset on. In spite of everything that had happened to him, Dez fixed his attention not on the insects next to him or Bell in the wings, but upon the skin she bared, as though he’d never seen it before. Her eyelashes fluttered as she discarded the stiff leather on the table. Then she stepped toward him, against him. She slid her primary hands up his shirt while working her secondary fingers over the front of his jeans.

“You can have me here, one more time. Then you can go out there and tell all your friends and fans and followers that I’m not who they thought I was, that I’m someone else—a devotee of your art, perhaps, sickening as that is. But I’m not Lucy Lewd, because I can’t be. Not even the best surgeon could have done this to her.”

He grew in her hand, his erection swelling from the stimulation, but he also seemed newly enchanted by her words, by the lips shaping them.

It occurred to her for the first time that in conditioning her to respond to him, to need him, he might have accidentally done the same thing to himself. The sex demons weren’t giving out enough magic to make him respond like this after what the Creature had done to him, after everything he knew. But though his face still showed the haggardness of fear—a drawn quality Elizabeth had seen all too often in the mirror—he stared at her like a starving man offered a feast.

“Go on. Touch me. I’m giving you permission this time. Or does that turn you off?” She nipped his jaw, ran her tongue over his meticulously shaped beard. “What’s the matter, Dez? Isn’t this what you wanted?”

Her sudden change of heart must have made him suspicious, because he was more tentative to kiss her back, to press his mouth to her neck where his belt had left her tender. Hesitant to bring his palms up to her breasts, to test their weight and movement in his hands.

“Not quite how I remember them, babe,” he said with the early stirrings of a grin.

“You want me to list all the ways you got older, too?” She bit the firm curve of his ear harder than she might have otherwise.

“Ow.” He batted at her face, but she just smiled. She tasted blood and wondered whether it had stained her teeth.

“Let’s face it. Neither of us is the same as we were ten years ago. But at least we’re still pretty, right?”

She undid his jeans, licked her secondary palm, took his cock in a firm fist, twisting him as sharply as he’d twisted her nipples. He grunted from discomfort, but she ran her tongue over his Adam’s apple, catching it with those same teeth that had drawn blood. She hummed with pleasure at his sharp intake of breath, a moment of fear that was all his own.

“Good genes on both sides,” she said, “despite all my drinking, despite your occasional smoke. Aren’t we just…so…lucky?”

She punctuated each word with a kiss to his neck and a rough stroke over his cock. He bucked into her grip then abruptly gave in, wrapping his arms around her, one hand on her smooth head and the other stroking down her spine between her secondary legs. He tightened his fingers over her head to guide her to his lips for a kiss. She clung to him, opening her mouth and taking him in until she melted from the inside.

“Imagine,” she murmured against his mouth when he let her breathe on her own. She dipped a fingertip into his slit, tantalizing the sensitive opening while smearing pre-cum over him. “Imagine all the things you get away with because you’re so damn pretty.”

“Goes both ways. I’d never have let you get away with half the things you did if you weren’t a fucking demon in the bedroom and a succubus for the camera. Fuck, babe.”

That chuckle she heard wasn’t from Dez.

She held his cheeks in her prime hands as she showed appreciation for how good he looked to her, how well he kissed, how fine his cheekbones were. “And no one ever believes that you do anything wrong because of that beautiful face, that angelic artist’s face.”

Her secondary hands went harder over his cock and balls, just the kind of rough and needful that he craved. He drove them against the glass coffin, his hands all over her body, his claim on her mouth, his cock fucking her hands. Elizabeth kept at that pace until he started to groan, getting so close. All she had to do was stroke him up and over…

“Imagine,” she whispered, “what might happen if you weren’t pretty anymore.” She licked the corner of his mouth then reared back and struck, extending her teeth with that audible click in her skull. She sank her fangs into his cheek, the mirror to hers that had swelled up to block the lower part of her eye.

At the same time, she kept him too weak to stop her by wringing him into completion. Semen struck her stomach in thick strings over and over and over, lasting longer than she expected, even as she pumped her poison into him—like a small orgasm from her mouth. It was a release of her own, each sweet taste of her venom shivering through her body.

As soon as Dez overcame the weakness of his orgasm, he tried to push her away, but she still had a grip on his cock, albeit a more slippery one, and her teeth were still in his flesh. Pushing her away meant hurting himself more.

But finally she couldn’t stop the manic giggles from bubbling from her mouth, and she let him go, using her extra legs to keep her from falling back when he shoved her away, shouting for a whole new reason.

She wiped blood and venom from her lips while Dez tried to do damage control to the bleeding from his cheek and the light bleeding at the base of his cock where she’d accidentally scratched him with her claws.

“What the fuck did you just do?”

“It’s not only arms, legs and armor that make me a Spider, Dez. But I have to give you some of the credit. You’re the one who made me want to be the black widow.”

She doubted Dez could appreciate the nuance, not as his face started to swell, and much faster than her own. His cheek puffed up to the size of a pear as the toxins infiltrated his flesh.

“What the fuck?” It was the phrase of the hour, the subtitle to Arcanium, and Elizabeth could stand to hear it more.

She bared her teeth in a smile wider than she could remember smiling before. Then she lowered herself to her knees and grabbed his balls between her claws, threatening him with castration if he tried to pull away. Slowly, with relish, she ran her tongue over his softened, messy cock, his blood flavoring the cum.

He kept hitting her the way a girl might try to hit a mouse with a broom, but he knew better than to do anything too hard in case the hand holding his balls spasmed closed. He shouted at her, whimpered like a terrified teenage boy, like the prisoners in the haunted funhouse. And for a moment, Elizabeth understood how the Ringmaster could hear that all day and never grow tired of it.

Yet Dez’s cock started to grow in her mouth. Even at his age, even with part of his face now swollen to the size of a small pumpkin, he couldn’t resist her mouth any more than she could resist his. She was flushed with power instead of shame, wet against the leather over her pussy, her clit twitching with instinctive appreciation every time he jerked his hips to fill her.

He stopped trying to push her off in fear, pushed her down over his cock instead.

Men. There wasn’t enough room in her head for that kind of contempt.

She looked up at him, rolling his sac in the cage of her hand, and sank down to the base. He shoved his cock deeper, which made her gag, but he was the one who’d taught her how to repress her urge to retch—and wasn’t he just enjoying that lesson at this very moment? He savaged her mouth and throat, not allowing her more than a bare second here and there to get some air—still trying to regain control, still trying to assert his dominance, even when his balls were in her claws and his cock between her teeth.

“You’re going to pay, you stupid bitch,” he said as silkily as he could with part of his mouth too swollen to work. His face had to be on fire, but God knew he was getting off on asphyxiating her with his own erection, getting off on the bear trap set around his genitalia because he was confident it wouldn’t spring, that she wouldn’t fucking dare.

He grabbed her head with both hands to force himself as deep down her throat as he could, groaning in pain and in pleasure.

She started to panic, gasping for breath and getting nothing, tightening her claws into the wrinkly hanging flesh above the sac, but Dez was too far gone into the power trip. Maybe he wasn’t even feeling the pain anymore, not when he could murder her for what she’d done, murder her for daring to leave him, for attacking him—for making him question his strength, his power, his control over her and anyone else he called his. She struggled, lost her grip on his balls in her brain’s more immediate need to get his cock out of her throat. She scratched at his thighs, tore ribbons from his skin, and still he wouldn’t let her go.

“I’m here.”

He wasn’t inside her like he’d been in the semi-trailer, but Bell whispered in her head, two words to tell her that he wouldn’t let this go too far, that he was waiting for her to do what she needed to do, what he so wanted her to do. She sensed his desire for her violence even through the alarms blaring through her head, the graying of her vision, the desperation with which she choked on her own saliva and his pre-cum.

And the sad part was that this wasn’t the first time Dez had done this.

With the last of her strength, she looked up at him, peered into those blue eyes that dared her, fucking dared her, to do the same damage to his cock that she’d done to his face. Did he really think his penis was so important to the world that she’d spare it? Oh, it was a lovely cock as cocks went, as sculpted and perfect as the rest of him. But she thought about how many women he’d tortured with it, what he could still do with it in the time he had left.

No, this wasn’t the first time he’d done this to her. But in the name of God and all his devils, it would be the last.

She sank one venom-filled canine into him. She couldn’t do both at the same time, but one was all she needed. The venom from the other hissed against his skin like acid, filled her mouth around him. He jerked back, which tore her tooth through the shaft, but she kept pumping him with her venom until she blacked out.

She came to after only a few seconds or so, opening her eyes to the sight of the base of his cock and his balls swelling into thick, bruised, rubbery skin. His cock had grown to twice its size, but it was no longer nearly as pretty. Dez howled, both hands covering himself in a belated sense of self-preservation.

Elizabeth coughed, clutching at her raw throat.

Bell’s hand was there when she looked up, and without hesitation, she took it, struggling to her feet against the lightness in her head.

“Goddamn rotten cunt!” Dez screamed. All traces of the beautiful man—beautiful even in anger—had transformed, distorted, under the effects of her venom.

“What are you shouting about?” Bell said with only a little exasperation, as though Dez was a slightly annoying toddler rather than a grown man. “If it had been me, I would have ensured a long, slow, painful death. As it is, you’ll recover. You’ll be scarred, and your dick won’t work as well as before—in fact, I think you’ll think twice or thrice before sticking it into another woman’s mouth, knowing that even teeth without poison might do damage. But you’ll live…unless Lizzie decides you should die. Would you like for him to go to the clowns? I don’t think I could inflict him upon Lady Sasha, and I have more prisoners than I can handle. However, I could always curse him to the carousel.”

“It doesn’t make a difference to me anymore.” Elizabeth reached for the corset off the table, waved to the huntsmen in their long tank. She used the tablecloth to wipe the thickening semen from her abdomen, then put the corset back on.

“No. No, please. Don’t kill me. Please. Fix me. Fix me, you fucking bastard! I know you can.”

Bell curled his lip in disgust as Dez reached for him, poised to grab Bell’s neck.

Elizabeth whipped around and raked the blades on her right arms over Dez’s chest without any care for how deep the wounds were.

Blood spilled like the red velvet curtains themselves down Dez’s chest. Dez stumbled back, stunned.

Bell blinked. “Of course, I can give you the honor of slitting his throat, if you prefer.”

“No. He shouldn’t die. He doesn’t deserve to die.” Elizabeth ran her tongue carefully over the blades so that she didn’t slice herself while she cleaned them. She was vehemently opposed to cruelty to animals, but the cruelty she tasted now was a small price to pay for all the cruelty he’d dealt.

Bell ran his thumb over her chin with surprising tenderness to catch where blood had spattered against her. He sucked on the pad as he made the entire mess fade until it was as though she’d never been stained at all, by blood or by seed. For a moment, he looked like he wanted to taste what he had left in her mouth for her. But he didn’t.

“What’s your poison, then?” he asked.

“I don’t suppose you can hang him from a cross and open up his ribs for the vultures to peck at. Would that be too many mythological references for one man?”

“Alas, little Spider, the Rotting Man is about as graphic as we allow to walk the circus, and I’m afraid that’s too much even for the funhouse. We can lop off limbs and suggest amateur surgery, but we can’t just leave a man so opened up for anyone to look at too closely.”

“Pity. But I do like the idea of him in one of the smaller funhouse rooms. Shall we inject him with spider venom regularly to ensure he stays so wonderfully deformed? I don’t think I have it in me to bite him every week, though. I want nothing more to do with that…thing over there.”

“Oh, you won’t have to lift a finger. He’ll be sequestered from the rest of the circus until he learns not to fight back against me, but even when he is free one day to walk the circus, you’ll never have to look over your shoulder. I won’t let him near you. As far as you are concerned, he will cease to exist.”

Elizabeth didn’t remember Bell’s eyes quite that color amber before, like dark honey. “Thank you.” She owed him nothing, but she thanked him just the same.

“Don’t concern yourself with this one any further. Please take your father to the fortune teller tent. I will meet you there.” He lifted his hand again as though to stroke her cheek, but he passed it over her forehead instead, like a benediction. “He saw a goldmine and a diamond choker to put on it, but you’re worth so much more than that, Elizabeth. Do you see that yet?”

Elizabeth took his hand from where it rested on her forehead. The air charged around them. She felt it like electricity over her skin, like the sudden dampness of a thick fog.

For a moment, she would have let him if he’d asked. A different kind of fear crept underneath her skin from the way he wanted her. She wondered if this was what Maya felt. If so, Elizabeth understood how a mortal woman could bind herself to him, no matter how awesome and terrible the power contained in such an unassuming man.

But he released her, determinedly turning back to Dez.

Elizabeth had to pause for a second near the hissing cockroaches in the glass coffin. Then she gathered herself again and stepped out of the tent, leaving what was inside it for Bell to handle.