Chapter Seven

 

 

 

He kept his voice low, the musical baritone it had always been. He’d been so good singing in the choir, although he’d been shy singing solo.

Valorie hesitated, practically frozen.

“Please tell me I don’t know you,” he added. The whites of the eyes behind his glasses were red, as though he’d either not gotten any sleep or he’d given himself something to help him sleep.

If she were kind, she’d pretend she was confused. She’d tell him, ‘Move along, mister. I don’t know you and you’re blocking the view.’ If she were kind, she’d pretend he hadn’t spoken, a hint to take a hike, Mike. Scram, Sam. Leave, Steve. Sorry, Charlie.

If she were kind. But no one had ever called Valorie kind.

She unfolded herself. “Hi, Charles.”

He staggered back.

“That’s…that’s…that’s i-impossible.” Charles’ hands clenched and loosened, searching for something to hold him up, but there was nothing. He managed to keep from falling.

“I’m going to need you to move along,” Valorie said, standing. “I have work to do.”

“But you…you’re…you’re still young. It’s impossible.”

“Charles, I need you to leave,” she insisted, although she kept her volume low.

“I’m not going to—” Charles started.

“Good morning, sir,” Bell said, coming around her tent as nonchalant as could be. All he needed was a pimp cane to complete the image. “Is there a problem?”

“That’s my… That’s my…”

Valorie didn’t blame Charles for his inability to articulate. He couldn’t possibly believe his eyes, but he also couldn’t deny what he was seeing. Such was the dilemma of anyone who entered Arcanium. What they’d never know was that, yes, it was all real. That was Arcanium’s biggest trick—convincing the public that their tricks were illusion and skill rather than magic and power. The horror happened when the veil lifted, the curtain closed and nothing changed—nothing except souls. But the magic never ended, and the reflections stayed the same. Could a person really grow when nothing changed?

“She’s indeed a spectacular young woman,” Bell said. “But she’s working at the moment, sir, and I’m going to ask you to not take up her time.”

“You don’t understand,” Charles protested.

“Oh, I do.”

Charles stopped stammering, stumbling over his words, searching for a handhold in reality. Before him was a man solid and immovable as an idol. He carried his power quietly because he was certain at any given time that he was the most powerful being within the borders of his Arcanium. He didn’t need to resort to puffing himself up and declaring his dominance. That was for men who were small, cowardly, lacking. For men who needed to compensate. Bell needed to compensate for nothing. The quietest predators were almost always the most deadly.

When Bell spoke, even when he lied, what he said had power. Charles didn’t understand what was going on, but he visibly recoiled.

“We can discuss your trouble during her break. If you could come with me, sir, I have somewhere you can wait,” Bell said. He smiled, placing a hand on Charles’ shoulder, and swayed into a welcoming gesture that beckoned Charles to join him, as though they were old friends.

If his guidance was a little forced, only Valorie would be able to see it. The crowd would believe that Bell was taking care of a troublesome patron. Perhaps the professorial man was an admirer or a stalker. No matter the circumstance, the crowd either ignored the scene or paid it little mind. They had better things to look at.

Charles’ confusion allowed him to be led, but he kept looking over his shoulder at her, twenty years of pain and bewilderment deepening the lines on his ashen face.

Bell raised two fingers while Charles’ attention was on her. Then he led Charles beyond where she could see him.

The implication was clear—two hours of work. He wanted her to give him two hours of work. Valorie couldn’t imagine why when the last thing on her mind was grace, poise and flexibility—especially when the latter was the reason for this fucking mess in the first place. It wasn’t so he could have time to think. The bastard had obviously known this was coming.

For the first thirty minutes or so, Valorie’s head filled with visions of what Bell could be doing with Charles while she was otherwise occupied. Maya was the only one who voluntarily took a front seat to Bell doing his work and granting his wishes. No one else had the stomach for it, and most of the human souls of Arcanium preferred not to think about anyone’s wishes but their own. It was the only way to handle living with Bell, accepting his affection and even his love—and yes, he felt both, as varied and textured as the same emotions in humans. One might argue his ran deeper, like veins buried within a mountain from shifting lands over geologic time.

That didn’t make him merciful, if mercy wasn’t his whim. He could be feeding Charles to Lady Sasha right now, although Valorie hadn’t felt a spike in the constant, low-level sexual tension of the circus. He could have invited the clowns into the big top ring and let them feast upon Charles’ body, though they preferred younger meat. He could have granted a wish that left Charles bound to Arcanium like Valorie—leaving behind a wife and two children instead of a fiancé as she had. He could have granted a wish that doomed Charles in any of a hundred thousand ways. By silently demanding that she work, he could have ensured that Valorie stayed out of his way while he disposed of or dealt with the potential threat.

So why was she doing it? Why was she staying in her safe little tent and performing like a music box doll moving to the violins coming from her speakers? It certainly wasn’t because she was obedient.

And she didn’t want anything bad to happen to Charles.

Did she?

Had part of her done what she’d been told so that when she returned to Bell, there would hopefully be no trace left of her ex-fiancé? No trace, no man, no problem.

It made her sick to her stomach.

Somewhere around the thirty-minute line, though, those fears and anxieties faded.

The comfort of routine and the ordinary endorphins from exercise, even when that exercise was magically enhanced, put her into a sort of trance—the autopilot of normal. Normal for her, at least. She went from position to position, song to song. Time ceased to have meaning. The clenching of her stomach subsided. Her brain went delightfully blank.

When John walked through Oddity Row and raised his remaining eyebrow because she hadn’t left her tent yet for one of their joint routines, she just kept dancing and contorting, the burn in her muscles one of continued effort and the early stirring of weariness. She didn’t usually go a full two-hour stretch without at least taking a walking break.

What he was really curious about, she thought, was the fact she hadn’t leashed him up and paraded him around like a damn dog, as though that was something to look forward to. She passed her gaze over John the same way she passed it over the rest of the customers.

Besides, she felt good. Correction, she felt nothing, which was good. She didn’t want to disrupt all her work by bringing John into this. He’d look at her with those dark, puppy dog eyes and kicked puppy expression and puppyish eagerness for a walk, and she’d have to feel all these things she really didn’t want to deal with right now.

Unlike Charles, John could take a hint. When she didn’t do much more than blink at him before turning her attention to the small crowd gathered before her tent, he spun his fire fans in irritation and continued on his way. If there was a pang somewhere in her chest region, she dismissed it as quickly as it occurred, returning to the Zen of her routine.

 

* * * *

 

She overshot the two hours by about fifteen minutes. It took her stomach growling for her to realize that it was well past noon and she was allowed to take a break.

Nonsensically, the side of her head that had taken over during the performance to keep her calm and steady whispered, I hope this doesn’t take long. Breaks aren’t supposed to last forever, and I have things I need to do.

The less brainwashed side of her head took that other side to task effectively and efficiently. She could spare the time to meet with the man who was supposed to have been her husband. Bell could spare the time. And John could give her time off for one fucking day. She was the one in charge of him. He didn’t yet have the right to demand a damn thing.

Valorie put up the placard explaining her absence and made a quick exit, maintaining her performance persona until the last minute. She kept her leather duster in the back these days in case she got cold. She pulled it on now. Some patrons walked the circus in costume, especially if Arcanium was attached to a Halloween park, a festival, a kink convention or a medieval faire of some kind, but they were doing a solo event this time, so there were fewer customers dressed up. Nevertheless, the more skin she covered, the less likely people would feel entitled to her.

The coat worked, as did her determined gait. Nothing beat looking like she knew exactly where she was going to dissuade people from getting in the way. Except maybe being a black girl in leather who looked like she’d take a one of Misha’s blades to anyone who tried. People tended to avoid both freaks and black girls in leather, so she had those in her favor—if one could call that favor. At the moment, she did. She had no use for normals except the one with whom Bell was presently keeping company.

Valorie stopped outside the fortune teller tent. The flap was open. When she peeked in, she half expected to see it empty or with Charles’ crisp white dress shirt soaked Christmas red, portions of him missing or slit open in a bloody murder scene that Bell had hidden from anyone else entering for a fortune.

Instead, Bell sat in his usual spot, with Charles in the short armchair that Maya usually inhabited. He looked uncomfortable, his long legs unsuited to something made for a much shorter woman. Naturally, Bell had kept him safe and unharmed—as far as she could see—but hadn’t gone out of his way to make Charles comfortable. Had gone out of his way to ensure that Charles was mildly inconvenienced, in fact—the wait, the chair, the company, like a doctor’s office.

“Come in,” Bell said. He twirled his crystal ball on one finger as though it didn’t cost hundreds of dollars. Then he rested it back on its pedestal next to the runner as Valorie entered.

Charles had to work to get up from so low to the ground.

“And here I thought Maya’d be sitting on his lap when I came in,” Valorie said.

“I’d wanted such a tableau for you, my dear,” Bell replied. “Maya thought you wouldn’t appreciate the humor.”

“You have many fine qualities,” Valorie said drily. “Your humor isn’t one of them.”

“What the heck is going on?” Charles asked.

The tent flap fell and tied itself closed. Charles clutched the back of the chair, once again shaken. Valorie’s stomach sank. Bell had shown his magic. She didn’t know whether that was ever a good thing with an outsider.

Then again, his power had been revealed the moment Charles had recognized her, which wasn’t any better.

“Have a seat, sir. You can sit with me now. I needed him in my sight but out of the way of the customers. I told them he had received some bad news and was taking some time to recover. Charles was kind enough to go along with my little falsehood. Maya has occupied herself elsewhere for now, so you needn’t worry yourself that she has an eye to steal another man of yours.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Valorie replied.

“You didn’t have to,” Bell said. “She did. Please, sir, join us. We have some things to discuss. It’s why you came.”

“I didn’t come here to talk to you,” Charles said, keeping his distance.

“No, but you’ll have to speak to me because anything you discuss with her concerns me,” Bell said, unshaken and unfailingly polite.

“Because you’re the one holding her hostage. That’s what this is, isn’t it? Valorie wasn’t a contortionist, of all things, when she disappeared. And that’s what she did. She disappeared. They couldn’t ever find her, not even a body. After a year and no trace, they told me they had to move on to other cases, especially since you were young and had a reputation for being impulsive,” Charles said.

He edged toward the table, but not because Bell wanted him there. He kept coming closer to Valorie, as though he couldn’t believe his eyes, not even now.

“You’ve done something to her. Torture, conditioning, threats, rape… You’ve done something to her. You’re the reason I lost her.”

“You’re not entirely wrong, sir,” Bell said.

Charles lunged at Bell.

Bell raised his hand, perhaps to make Charles freeze where he stood, maybe to do something more forceful. Valorie jumped from her chair and grabbed Charles first, holding him back by his shoulder.

“Stop,” Valorie said quietly. “Just sit down, Charles, and maybe we can start to explain.”

“We? What’s this we? Tell me it wasn’t what you wanted, Valorie. Tell me you didn’t throw in with him from the beginning. Or that you haven’t thrown in with him since, if he did take you away. Tell me.” He struggled against her, not sure which of them to go after first, his fear turning to anger.

Valorie was well-versed in that particular transformation. She saw it in the circus’ victims, yes, but she’d also experienced it in herself. Anger was her weapon as well as her shield. Charles had been a tempering influence, a pacifist to keep her tamed and give her perspective. But this wasn’t an ordinary situation, and there had been twenty years since that idealistic young man had been her fiancé. This wasn’t quite the same man. All she had to do was look at him.

To Valorie, he was the man she’d left and the man he was today. She could see them both at the same time, but she had trouble reconciling the two images, one before her and one in her mind—like watching a 3D movie without the glasses.

And she wasn’t quite the same woman either.

“I didn’t torture her to change her mind,” Bell said. “She did nothing to be brought into my circus except say the wrong thing at the wrong time. I had no desire to hurt her, but the pain caused was inevitable once I brought her in.”

“That’s so much bullshit,” Valorie said, wrestling Charles to the spindly chair next to hers. He collapsed into it, all of a sudden not strong enough to hold himself up in spite of the fight he’d had in him seconds ago.

Bell waited for her to elaborate, as though he didn’t already know what she’d meant. He’d heard these arguments before, and he still insisted on spewing this kind of crap. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he liked being called out.

“You didn’t have to do it the way you did it,” Valorie said. “You could have just made me flexible, and I would have figured it out at some yoga class or with some experimental sex position with my fucking husband—”

“Valorie!” Charles said, suddenly scandalized. But Valorie was so beyond scandal.

“You could have had my boss give me the flexibility I asked him for, either for the rest of my time at that company—which would have made my job much better—or just that day so that I could enjoy the circus like I’d wanted to. I remember that day so vividly it could have been yesterday,” Valorie said. “There were literally hundreds of ways you could have handled the wish. You took my words and twisted them because you wanted me in your circus. Nothing more, nothing less. You saw something you wanted and you took it, because you don’t know any other way. I’ve come to accept that part of you, as much as a person can, but don’t pretend you’re just a victim of circumstance like the rest of us.”

She sat down at the conclusion of her rant, unafraid of any repercussions. She didn’t know why he bothered to lie like this. Was it delusion, or was it his usual inability to understand himself as humans saw him, distanced as he was from being human? His mask was just another lie, but the question had always been whether he understood how much that mask was a lie or whether he’d fooled himself from all the times he’d looked into the mirror.

“I don’t understand,” Charles said. “Did he force you into this or didn’t he?”

“He forced me in,” Valorie replied. She set a hand on Charles’ shoulder again so he wouldn’t jerk right out of the chair again. “But after a while, he didn’t force me to stay.”

“They have a name for that,” Charles said.

“They can shove a summer sausage up their rectum. They didn’t have to go through what I had to go through or what any of us go through,” Valorie said. “If there’s a phrase that they might use, it only makes them feel better about themselves. I eventually decided to stay. It wasn’t to make him happy. It was because I was happy with where I was, and going back would have caused more problems than it would have solved.”

“What are you talking about? You would have been home,” Charles began.

“Look at me!” Valorie shouted. She stood up and spread her arms. “It wasn’t a trick of the light, Charles. It’s not a really good makeup artist. A woman can look ten years younger to strangers or acquaintances, maybe, but to my family? The friends who knew me well? And now…I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to. How can I turn up looking twenty years younger without someone wondering who I sacrificed my firstborn to?”

Charles flicked his gaze from Bell—who sat with his legs crossed and his hands clasped on his thigh as though bored at a business meeting—to Valorie. He squinted through his glasses. It wasn’t his prescription that failed him. Even so, he removed his glasses and cleaned them on the edge of his jacket. Then he slipped them into the inside pocket.

He took her hand.

What he could deny with his own eyes, he couldn’t deny to the touch. She could see signs of age in his hands, the more prominent veins, the way the fine geometric lines of his skin had become more pronounced, the gathering of flesh around the knuckles of each finger, the quality of his nails.

He traversed his thumb over the back of her hand, testing the texture, the undeniable smoothness, although the skin of her palms was tougher than it used to be, just as her body was a little sleeker. These were changes that were beneficial for her new profession, changes Bell had encouraged in her body.

Charles studied her nails as though they held the answer to immortality. Sure, she had the answer to that one. Make a wish in front of a jinni who happened to grant wishes and hope that he or she liked the idea of having the person around for a while.

Charles slowly drew her back down to her chair. He was tentative, unfamiliar with such familiarity after so long. Valorie tried not to shiver when he tucked the loose part of her hair behind her ears to get a better look at her face. He brushed the pad of a one finger over the paint, but he didn’t smear it once he determined it wasn’t intrinsic. Same with the rhinestones she’d attached near her eye makeup. He leaned close to see past the paint and color. With the brushes of his fingers and palms, Valorie had a simultaneous fear and longing that he would kiss her.

But that was unfair. To him. To her. To his wife.

It wasn’t unfair to Bell. If it got him jealous, tough shit. This was his bed. He had to lie in it.

“How is this possible?” he asked, his breath warm on her lips.

“Magic,” Valorie said.

“No, seriously.”

“I wasn’t being flippant, Charles. It’s magic.”

He jerked his hands away as though her skin burned him.

“The exact thing I said to my boss before I got pulled into this place was, ‘I wish you’d give me a little more flexibility on this.’ That was the wording that Bell needed,” Valorie said.

“What does the wording— You said ‘wish’. You mean the wording of the wish? You can’t be serious, Valorie. Stop fooling.”

“Do I look like I’m fooling?” Valorie said. “Scratch that. Do I sound like I’m fooling?”

“No,” Charles said. “But you also sound like when you’re telling a good lie. I could never tell.”

“You could always tell. I just had stories that seemed like they should be lies,” Valorie replied.

“So you’re…you’re not lying now,” Charles said slowly.

“No.”

“It’s magic.”

“Yes,” she said.

He processed that, his expression blank but his eyes bright. Then he turned toward Bell, more cautious than before. Trying to attack Bell had been uncharacteristic. This was the Charles she knew better. “It’s you. You’re the one with magic. And you forced her in here with magic—with her wish. So you’re what, some kind of genie?”

“Yes,” Bell replied. No adornments. No obfuscation. No lies. No more hiding.

“You expect me to believe that?” Charles said.

“I have no interest in convincing you of anything. The only way to know for sure is to wish and see if it comes true,” Bell replied.

“No,” Valorie interjected quickly. Was he trying to torture her now that she was thinking of leaving? Was that what this had been about the whole time? “No. We don’t use the ‘wish’ word unless we mean it, and even then we shouldn’t most of the time. Don’t let him rope you into his games.”

She glared at Bell. His demeanor remained unchanged. He really was infuriating sometimes, but he wasn’t usually this infuriating with her, which made the conversation even more frustrating.

“I never said he should,” Bell responded. “I merely said it would be the only way he could know for sure. People rarely believe in magic until it happens to them, especially in a place like this.”

“I can’t tell whether y’all are bats crazy, pulling my leg or telling the truth,” Charles said. He leaned down to bury his head in his hands and rub them against his face. “I’m not sure which one I want to be true. I’m leaning toward crazy, because crazy can be fixed.”

“Sorry. It’s true. I wished for more flexibility. That’s what I got. And Arcanium got a spanking new contortionist to add to Oddity Row and the evening set list. I was a prisoner then. Yes, Charles, I was kidnapped. I was held captive. I couldn’t have contacted you if I tried, and I did try to run away—several times. There are things that happen to us when we try—”

“What? Do you get flogged or something?” Charles said.

“Well, yes, but that’s not the only thing keeping us here. It’s physically painful for us to leave when we’re being kept,” Valorie said. “I went through that enough before I gave up. I probably went through it more than a normal person would.”

“Y-you do that to them? Whip them? Cause them pain?”

“My rules are few but very clear, my punishments effective. As a result, I rarely have to punish,” Bell said.

“That’s…that’s…”

“I know what you think it is,” Bell replied. “What you think is irrelevant. My enforcer is happy, and my people who test their boundaries learn what lines they cannot cross—for the safety of the circus as well as themselves. And it is my circus. My people.”

“They don’t belong to you,” Charles said.

“And yet they are mine.”

“It’s not important,” Valorie said, before Charles could get into a full-on slavery rant that Bell probably deserved. It wasn’t the same. This wasn’t a man enslaving another man. That damn mild-mannered alter ego fooled people every time.

“What do you mean ‘it’s not important’?” Charles snapped.

“Can you stop him from doing it? No. Are you going to remember this conversation in thirty minutes? Who the fuck knows?” Valorie said. “You’re here because you recognized me when you weren’t supposed to ever see me again. And because you saw me, you recognized there were serious questions that needed to be answered. You have those answers. It’s up to you to accept them. Now what?” She directed that last question to Bell. This was his court in the end, for good or ill.

“Now, I must silence him,” Bell said. “I’m sorry, Valorie, but I cannot let him leave without some kind of assurance he will not sound the alarm on Arcanium.”

“Sorry, my ass. Even if you didn’t see him coming the first time, which I doubt, you definitely saw him coming the second time, and you could have changed my appearance or something to make me seem different enough. You’ve done it before.”

“Wait, when you say ‘silence’ me, what exactly does that mean?” Charles asked, holding up his hand to interrupt Valorie and Bell’s side of the conversation.

“It entails a number of possibilities,” Bell replied.

“You are not killing him to punish me,” Valorie said. “You’re not going to do that to me, not after everything I’ve done for you, Bell. Not after what we had. You are not going to kill him because of your fucking mistake or something that you wanted to happen.”

Charles stood up and backed away from the table, but there was nowhere to go. There were shelves of fortune teller trinkets, the armchair, rugs and pelts on the ground and a latched tent flap. Above, there was nothing to weaponize but beads, feathers and scarves. He could try to crawl under the tent canvas, but it was well staked and taut. Bell could stop him if he wanted to, or the clowns could be waiting for him, patrolling the exterior of the tent. All Bell had to do was say the word.

“If you were going to kill me, why didn’t you do it earlier?” Charles asked.

“Because he wanted to see your reaction when you were told the truth,” Valorie said.

“And this is the man you’ve thrown your lot in with?” Charles asked, gesturing emphatically at Bell as though he were the devil himself.

“He has his bad qualities,” Valorie said.

When dealing with an outsider, it seemed a weak justification. But Charles hadn’t been here for all these years. It took time and a treasure map to find the good, but once people did, it was no wonder many of them stayed in the sanctuary Arcanium could provide. She didn’t know how she could explain that to Charles.

She could try. “You’ve got to understand, Charles, he’s not human. Once that sinks in and you stop expecting him to be human, he starts making more sense.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Charles argued. “Even the angels are subject to His will.”

“Because the angels have no will,” Bell said. “Your religious arguments amuse me. You think you can argue theology with someone who was there at the beginning of creation, before any of the creatures of the earth crawled from the dust?”

“Then you know right from wrong, and you know what you’re doing is wrong,” Charles insisted.

“I know my place in this universe, sir, better than you know your own,” Bell said. “Perhaps you should consider this before accusing me of stepping out of my place. If I wanted to kill you, I’d be well within my boundaries. The laws of your people are not my laws, man. Not even the laws of your reality are mine. Remember that. But I don’t have to kill you for your silence. Your former fiancée said that I could wipe your memory. The risk in that is that you could always come back and rediscover Valorie, and this entire headache would occur once more.”

“It’s your headache, Bell. I have zero sympathy,” Valorie said. She crossed her arms over her chest to conceal how her abdomen had decided to twist itself into knots without her. “I gave you the simpler option. You chose complicated. Congratulations.”

“But then I would have never found you,” Charles said. “I would have never known what happened to you. You still would have been missing. Do you know what that did to me?”

“Yeah, I noticed how choked up you still are about it when we met while you were with your lovely family,” Valorie said.

“What was I supposed to do? Wait forever?” Charles asked, holding his hands out in supplication. “Janice is a good woman, and I love my kids.”

“No, I didn’t want you to wait. I wanted you to never find me…ever.”

“I didn’t know if you were flaky, in danger, in a desperate situation or whether you were dead,” Charles said.

“How’s knowing working for you? Because it sucks over here, Charles.”

Charles abruptly closed his mouth. “How have you been, really?”

“Peachy.”

“Valorie.”

“Started out a little shaky, ended up transcendent for a majority of the time, recently turned shaky for different reasons. The contortion part doesn’t suck, though. How about you?”

“Why can you never take things seriously?” Charles asked, deflating a little.

“What makes you think I’m not taking this seriously? I was summing up twenty years. What did you expect?” Valorie asked. “A bedtime story?”

He sank back into his seat. “Fine. I guess the sum of my life was covered by what you saw, then. Good catching up with you.”

“You too.” Being cold to him again hurt like ice picks stabbing her all over. But making him regret ever seeing her might be the only thing that could save him. A girl had to do her part.

“Do you have to kill me if I just try to…forget? Assume she left me for another man and go with that? My wife doesn’t know I’m here. I told her I had to go back in to work. She had no reason not to believe me. I can just leave, go to work, go home and pretend this never happened. You don’t have to do anything to me. I won’t tell a soul. Who would believe me if I did?” Charles laughed a little. “I’m not sure whether I believe it myself, even now.”

“If you believed it, I would be less worried,” Bell said. “Those who do not doubt me don’t cross me. But I can hear the truth in your words. I see the truth in your mind. You will not tell your wife. You will not tell your pastor. You will not tell the police. You will keep these memories for a while. Then they will fade by your choice. I can accept this end.”

He stood. With Charles sitting, this was one of those few times that Bell would be taller than him in his human form, but perhaps Charles got a flicker of what Bell carried inside him, a glimpse of the intensity barely contained in the man who he walked around as—a power that was effortlessly charismatic, a power not to be reckoned with. And all in the way that he carried himself when he looked down upon the two humans in the small room.

“But only this end,” Bell emphasized. “If you speak of the real Arcanium to anyone—if you think of speaking of the real Arcanium—I will be there. My power is not limited to this circus. I can punish you here, and I can punish you in your home. I assure you, you do not want me to punish you in your own home, sir. Your family would be quite upset.”

“Don’t you dare threaten my family. It’s bad enough you did what you did to Valorie. And I’m still not sure whether you did something her mind too or not. But don’t go near my family,” Charles said.

Now he stood again. If he’d hoped his height would faze Bell, he was disappointed.

“I won’t threaten or harm your family if you give your word that you won’t threaten or harm Arcanium and the people in it,” Bell replied.

Charles glanced down at Valorie as though expecting her to protest in some way, interfere on his behalf. But what Bell was offering was a risk, a bigger risk than Bell usually made when it came to his precious circus. Valorie kept her suspicions to herself, however. She didn’t want to get in the way of Bell’s generosity.

“It’s a good deal, Charles. Believe me,” Valorie said. She bent one leg against her chest and wrapped her arm around it. “You should take it. Take it. Run. And don’t come back.”

“But…” Charles tried to continue, but sound didn’t come out of his mouth.

“No. Don’t come back. Don’t make this more complicated than it already is. Forget about it. Forget about me,” Valorie said.

“Is that how you handled it? You forgot about me?” Charles asked. He fussed with his jacket and finally shoved his hands in his pockets like the young man he had been with her. It was funny how a person regressed like that when confronted with their past.

“I didn’t forget,” Valorie said. “I just…put you aside. There was nothing I could do then, and there’s nothing you can do now except protect yourself and your family. And let’s face it, Charles, we were almost family. We weren’t family.”

“Doesn’t mean I didn’t lose something just as precious to me,” Charles said quietly. “You’ll never know what it was like when you disappeared.”

“Neither will you,” Valorie replied.

Charles looked down where he toed at the rug with his dress shoe. His throat worked as he fought to swallow.

“I’ll take the deal,” Charles said. “I give you my word, but I won’t like it. I don’t like any of this. It stinks to high heaven, Valorie. If you can find a way out of here, I suggest you take it.”

“It’s my business now, Charles,” she said. “Not yours. That ended a long time ago. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it’s just the way things are.”

He nodded, still not looking at her. “Can I leave now?” he asked Bell. His gaze landed on Bell for a bare second before flitting away. It seemed like scared or sullen behavior, but Valorie recognized it as another sign that he was mulling on something.

The tent flap unlatched.

“You’re free to leave. Would you like your ticket for today refunded?” Bell asked, back to the consummate professional.

“You’d do that?” Charles asked, glancing up again.

“Of course, sir,” Bell said, pulling a twenty-dollar bill from his leather bag. “You didn’t come for the circus. You came for a personal visit. And I kept you here in my tent so that you couldn’t avail yourself of our attractions even if you’d wanted to enjoy them. It would be unacceptably dishonest of me to not refund your ticket.”

“‘Unacceptably dishonest’,” Charles said drily. “That’s a unique bit of wordsmithing.”

“Well, the carnival booths use a certain amount of trickery,” Bell replied. “And we lie by pretending truth is illusion. It’s what the customers expect. It’s what they want. Many professions involve such acceptable dishonesty, as you should be aware.”

Charles gave a side-nod of concession. He accepted the money that Bell gave him.

“So now I just forget. Somehow,” he said. The glance he gave her took a few more seconds, as though committing the woman he now knew was her to memory.

“It’ll get easier with time,” Valorie said.

She got up and enveloped him in her arms, although she was careful not to press her cheek against his chest. The makeup would smear on his jacket or his pristine white shirt. That would be a trick to explain to Janice. At first, he stiffened. Then he relaxed and embraced her as well, although he tried to keep it detached. It was a fool’s errand, but Valorie appreciated that he’d tried.

“It’ll get easier?” he whispered in her ear.

“I promise,” Valorie answered, curling her fingers into the cheap material of his jacket. “Eventually, it’ll all seem like a dream. Best to think of it like that.”

Charles stepped out of her arms. He took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m going.”

“Have a good day, sir,” Bell called after him before Charles ducked under the tent flap.

Valorie clutched the back of her chair. “Are you proud of yourself?” she snapped at Bell. “What the ever-loving fuck, Bell?”

Bell walked around his small table. “I don’t know what you mean. I made this all work out perfectly. Better than I could have. You understand that more than most.”

“You’re playing a game, and I’m going to figure out what it is,” Valorie said.

“There’s nothing to figure out,” Bell said. He kissed her lips warmly. He wouldn’t smear her face paint like Charles would have.

Valorie jerked her lips away and stepped out of his arms. “You’re lying. If you hurt him, Bell, I’m out. I’m so out of here you won’t even get two weeks’ notice. And I know you’ll tell me if you hurt him, because otherwise you wouldn’t get the satisfaction of my broken-hearted meltdown. Besides, what does it matter if you drive me away? There are a lot more where I came from, aren’t there?”

She stalked out of the tent before Bell could say anything more or placate her with his charms. The Zen from the morning was gone, but a contortionist’s work was never done. She still had to give the rest of the day to Arcanium. And if she had to curse Bell’s name the whole time in order to get through it, she’d do that.

Somehow, she got through it. She always did.