Chapter Ten

 

 

 

“You’re making a huge mistake,” Kitty said.

But he still had a grip on her beard braid. He jerked it hard enough to almost wrench her jaw out of joint. She screamed, but the canvas of the tent seemed to trap the sound in. There was no guarantee anyone outside heard her.

Someone would come. Of that, she had no doubt, even though it wasn’t helping her fear at the moment. The trouble was whether someone would come in time before certain damage was done.

“You don’t get to talk, bitch,” the guy said. “You’ve done enough talking for one day, don’t you think? That fucking ugly mouth is getting you into all sorts of trouble.”

“You’re going to die,” Kitty whispered. The muscles of her jaw ached from the strain, as though they would cramp at any moment and lock her mouth shut.

“No,” the guy said. “My boy Larry’s out there to make sure the pussycat and me get our private time. And if you scream again, I’m going to break your mouth then stuff it with one of my socks. I’ve been told they don’t smell very good, and I’ve been wearing them all day. If you throw up with the gag in, you’re just going to have to swallow that shit right back down or choke on it. So this time, you’re going to do what your good friend Robert tells you. You got that, you ginger yeti?”

“Get out now, before you do something you can’t take back,” Kitty said. He already had, but she was stalling and hoping in vain that he’d clue in before he acted upon his sociopathic tendencies. The circus did tend to attract such stand-up citizens.

Damn it, Bell, where are you? More importantly, the clowns should have keyed in on them by now. So why weren’t they here?

Robert backhanded her. The blow whipped her head to the side. His grip on her beard whipped it right back.

Kitty lunged at him, blood salty on her tongue, to grab the boy by his hood and hair. She scratched at his cheeks, struggling against his foot planted on her skirt. There was a tear somewhere in her skirt, but this particular one was thick and well-constructed. It didn’t rip like the one the Ringmaster had gotten his hands on.

Robert laughed derisively, even when she got a good gash in his forehead. “We got ourselves a live one here, Larry!” he called.

Then he pulled a switchblade out of his hoodie pocket, opened it and brought it to her cheek, just below her eye.

“You do that again, and I swear I’ll make you so much uglier, even your freak friends won’t be able to stand to see you. Do you believe I’ll do it?” Robert asked.

She looked straight into his eyes, her teeth clenched and her lips thin, and nodded.

He led her to her vanity chair by the beard and with his knife to her face.

“You know, I was looking through all this shit,” Robert said. He dragged the upper half of her body forward as he moved his knife away but kept hold of her beard. He opened her makeup box and threw eye shadow, lipstick and mascara onto the vanity counter. “I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why you had it, since there’s zero help for a face and body like yours. But then I remembered you didn’t have any makeup on. It occurred to me all this isn’t for you. Good move. You may not have gotten it through your head that no one should have to see your hairy chest. You’re like a guy on the beach with moobs. But you’ve realized that when you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig. See?”

In the same hand that held the switchblade, he uncapped a dark purple lipstick and brought it near her face. Kitty wrenched away from the knife, but he yanked her back. The tip of the knife pricked into her cheek and dragged little lines into the flesh around her mouth as Robert smeared the purple lipstick over her lips. He made no effort to stay in the lines or make it clean.

He threw the lipstick away and leaned over her shoulder from behind the chair. He gave a manic grin for the mirror. “Well, would you look at that? If we put you out on a street corner without the skirt and as far away from a streetlight as possible, you might be able to lipstick a guy for twenty bucks, as long as he’s far-sighted.”

“I’m not even going to stop them from killing you now,” Kitty said. She couldn’t move her lips much if she didn’t want the knife digging in. Every part of her was trembling, but she barely felt her own fear or even her anger. She was perfectly numb.

“You hear that?” Robert asked, bring his knife to her ear.

There were a series of muffled shouts on the other side of her closed but unlatched tent flap. She thought she recognized one of them.

“Victor!” she called, but Robert lowered his knife to her throat.

“Uh-uh, lady gorilla. We’re not done,” he said. He trailed the tip of the double-sided knife down the cord of her neck to her cleavage. “You know, I think these tits need to go. It’s a travesty for hair to be all over tits like these. I mean, can you imagine sucking on one and getting hair between your teeth, like going down on an untrimmed hooker?”

“You’re just jealous you never had a pair like these yourself,” Kitty snapped. He was going to try and kill her anyway. He was going to fail. That gave a woman certain confidence she wouldn’t usually have in the face of a criminal lunatic.

“Oh, I got a brass pair, bet your hairy ass,” Robert hissed, bringing the knife back to her face.

She couldn’t help the cry when Robert pushed the knife deeper against her cheekbone, nearly hitting the bone.

“You humiliated me, cunt,” Robert said. “Now, I’m not going to kill you for that, but I am going to make sure that your perverted majesty is just as humiliated as I was every day for the rest of your life—even more than you are now, because you don’t have the sense to get it. No one’s going to save you, and everyone is going to see you for exactly what you are. More importantly, you are.”

He reached for a glass foundation container and threw it at the mirror, which shattered into a spider web pattern. Her reflection and his became jagged, broken.

“You ain’t no princess or queen. You’re a disgusting freak and a fucking monster, and it’s time to realize your place isn’t in my face, making people laugh at me,” Robert said.

“You seem to do just fine at that all by yourself,” Kitty said, wincing more. This time the knife reached bone. Blood caught in her facial hair and dripped down onto her chest.

“Bitch really doesn’t know when to stop talking, does she?” Robert said.

He whirled her off the chair and onto the rugs just as Victor and Larry fell through the loose flap into her tent. Victor was choking Larry, but when he saw Kitty and the state of her face, he struggled to his feet just in time for Larry to grab his ankle. Victor faceplanted, his forehead striking the edge of her vanity.

His stone flesh kept it from being a fatal wound, but it didn’t stop the blow and the fall from stunning him.

“Get him out of here!” Robert yelled at his friend.

“It’s like the dude’s really made of stone,” Larry said. His face was a special blend of swollen and multi-colored. “I can’t get at him long enough to keep him down.”

“You can shoot the fucker for all I care. I’m not done,” Robert snapped.

“Whatever. You owe me what’s left after this,” Larry said. He pulled a gun out of the waistband of his pants then grabbed Victor’s ankle and grunted as he dragged him toward the door again.

“Just do your job, asshole,” Robert said.

He punched Kitty when she tried to knock his knife arm away—after all, her face was already gouged, what difference did it make if it was scratched again an inch or two to the side?—and she hit the carpet face first. She tried to kick her legs, but they caught in her skirts when he tugged on those as well.

She froze when she heard the gunshot.

“I can’t even get it up for you,” he muttered as he climbed over her. “Damn hair’s everywhere. Makes me want to retch. But we’ll have some fun. I guarantee you that. There are so many other ways.”

“Get off me, you impotent bastard,” she said through clenched teeth, wriggling against him. “You’re only digging your grave deeper.”

He smirked, tracing over her smeared lipstick with the edge of his knife. “I should definitely do the tongue first. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place.”

Kitty was pretty sure what got them into this mess was a mixture of poor nurturing and nature gone bad, but she didn’t want to make his access to her tongue easier. A whimper escaped her lips.

She was on her stomach, covered by a maniac with a knife to her mouth, and there was nothing she could do.

After a sharp, violent snap, Robert suddenly screamed, the sound high-pitched and deafening.

Another snap.

Robert wasn’t on her anymore.

Kitty scrambled away toward her bed and wiped her mouth of the lipstick and some of the blood with her blanket before turning around.

Robert knelt, one arm held up by the Ringmaster, as though in supplication. The other was loose and bent in an impossible angle, bone tenting the hoodie sleeve. Robert blubbered like a weak coward, all the cruelty gone from his face and replaced with that of a petulant little boy in pain.

The Ringmaster glanced over at Kitty. Without looking down at Robert, the Ringmaster squeezed his wrist hard enough for Robert to drop the knife. Then the Ringmaster wrapped his hand near Robert’s elbow and snapped that forearm as though it was balsa wood.

Another ear-splitting scream.

Kitty flinched, only because the scream hurt her ears.

The Ringmaster seemed to wait for her to tell him to stop. When she didn’t, he dropped Robert’s broken arm then grabbed Robert’s shoes to pull his legs out from under him. Robert screamed again when he tried to brace himself on his broken arms, but he was unable to take any weight without straining the broken and torn flesh. The Ringmaster systematically broke both of Robert’s legs, as unaffected by Robert’s screams as if he were breaking branches for kindling.

Except for the slight, almost gentle smile on his face when he stepped back to admire his artistry.

“What the fuck, man? What’d you do to him?” Larry asked when Victor dragged him in with his arm around Larry’s throat. “Dude, man, you crazy! Let me go!”

When confronted by the Ringmaster’s handiwork, Victor muttered, “My God.”

“Not in the least,” the Ringmaster replied to Victor.

The Ringmaster bunched Larry’s shirt in his fist, and Victor let go of him. Maybe he thought the Ringmaster wouldn’t attack Larry so violently, since he wasn’t trying to get away and wasn’t as close to killing anyone like Robert. Larry’s gun had been a useless prop against Victor, after all.

The Ringmaster brought Larry over to Robert then kicked Robert’s side to get his attention in the midst of his wailing, sobbing and screaming.

“Watch,” the Ringmaster said.

Once Robert managed to look up, the Ringmaster abruptly twisted Larry’s neck. Larry crumpled to the floor.

“Hey, whoa!” Victor shouted.

“You’re going to wish I had done that to you,” the Ringmaster said to Robert, his voice dark velvet in its promise.

The Ringmaster grabbed Larry by his loose neck and Robert by the hood of his jacket. He dragged both of them out of the tent, one of them screaming bloody murder and the other conspicuously silent.

“Stop!” Victor shouted, running out and stopping in front of the Ringmaster. “What are you doing?”

“It is my task to protect those who reside within Arcanium and dispense judgment in Bell’s absence,” the Ringmaster said, disdain unmistakable. He looked down at Victor as though he were a clump of mud on his boot. “Get out of my way.”

“Get out of his way,” Kitty said. She used her bed to help her climb to her feet in spite of her shaky legs. Fear had finally caught up to her.

“But we can call the police now—” Victor protested.

“No police,” both Kitty and the Ringmaster said at the same time, the Ringmaster as he hauled his prey away from the tent.

Victor steadied Kitty as she tried to follow the Ringmaster while her legs threatened to give out underneath her.

“We can’t have police here,” Kitty explained. “It’s why we had to use magic to keep James from remembering you, in case he decided to bring the law into this. We have our own rules. Our own law.”

“Our own executioner?” Victor asked.

“More or less,” Kitty said. She pushed past him and stumbled into the darkness after the Ringmaster and the two men in his hands.

Victor ran after her. “How is that okay?”

“It’s for our own protection. No police. No trespassers. Appease the demons who we keep around for such purposes.” Kitty brushed absentmindedly at the blood still dripping, slow but steady, down her face from the worst knife wound.

The Ringmaster brought the screaming Robert to the clowns’ makeshift ring in the middle of Oddity Row and dropped him in the center with his dead friend, who stared unseeing up at the night sky with eyes like those of a doll. She was vaguely aware of the sensation of Victor’s palm applying pressure to her seeping cheek, but it didn’t seem as important to her as the Ringmaster standing above the crumpled bodies.

Robert’s screams were beginning to attract the attention of the ones who should have stopped him to begin with. For the clowns not to have noticed a trespasser, Robert must have gone into her tent while the circus had still been in full swing. He might have even gone in there right after she’d left with the coffee that the Ringmaster had brought her. The more she thought about it, Robert had probably expected her back sooner. Much easier to do terrible things to her to make her scream when there were other people milling about, shouting, laughing, screaming themselves, so that hers would have been indistinguishable from the rest.

“He’s already tortured,” Victor said. “And he deserves that. But…”

“But if we called the police, we would get embroiled in a court case that would trap Arcanium here and would put you, me and the Ringmaster on the stand. Bell would probably be able to make the case for him defending someone who needed help, but it’s very possible that the law would find the Ringmaster’s use of force excessive. None of us are worried about how he would do in jail. We’re more concerned about what he would do to other prisoners. I’m not even getting into the other kinds of bad attention Arcanium could get from us going to the police, not to mention the lies we’d have to tell,” Kitty said. “This is going to happen, Victor. This is as much Arcanium as the carousel and the Row. I’m not going to try to stop him.”

“You don’t want to try to stop him,” Victor said.

“No,” she replied.

“That’s not like you, even after what he did. I’d beat him within an inch of his life, but I wouldn’t take that last inch,” Victor said.

“That’s why neither you nor I are the Ringmaster,” Kitty said.

Victor removed his hand from her cheek. Kitty lifted her skirt and cleaned his hand off as best as she could. The skirt was ruined anyway—that seemed to be happening a lot, so it was a good thing she had an unlimited budget for material.

The clowns now crept over the wooden ring, stalking the squirming and unsquirming prey that the Ringmaster offered them.

“Oh my God,” Victor muttered.

“You don’t have to watch,” Kitty said.

The Ringmaster turned around and rested his gaze upon her, dragging Robert with him.

“But I’m staying,” she finished.

“Eat the dead one first,” the Ringmaster said dispassionately, but there was a violent flicker behind his black eyes, somehow brighter and fiercer than the yellow glow of the clowns’ irises. “Let this one see what will happen to him while he still lives.”

“You want to watch this?” Victor asked.

“I don’t want to. I need to.”

Victor clenched his jaw, but he stayed.

The clowns opened their mouths as they surrounded the dead young man. The edges reached quite a bit farther from the lines of their lips defined by their face paint.

“Jesus,” Victor whispered. “I knew they were scary, but…”

The clowns knelt and dug their rows and rows of sharp teeth into the dead guy’s stomach, ripping until they reached the guts. Kitty didn’t make a habit of viewing the clowns’ eating habits, and even now she feared she might throw up from the sounds they made, but she kept her gaze fixed on the Ringmaster, who barely moved as Robert struggled to get away from him in spite of his broken limbs.

Kitty was disquieted by the fact that, with all the noise Robert was making, more of Arcanium hadn’t come around. Usually, Arcanium preferred to keep the screaming level to a minimum in case anyone from the outside walked by for innocent reasons and heard it. That was why the clowns often went for the throat first, so that their victims could remain alive but not make a sound.

Victor put his arm around Kitty’s waist, giving her warmth in the cool night, offering himself to her if she wanted to hide her face in his shoulder. She leaned against him, but she didn’t hide.

Tragedy—the only woman in the clown trio, her face painted up in a horrifying tragedy mask to contrast with Comedy and Murphy—reared up. Some kind of organ hung from her mouth. She twitched like a clockwork bird of prey and stared longingly at Robert. Dead victims were no fun.

The Ringmaster crooked a finger at Tragedy in invitation, continuing to keep his gaze on Kitty.

No, Kitty realized—at the place where Victor held her.

Tragedy trilled in delight and leaped over Larry’s body to Robert, turning him over from where the Ringmaster had dropped him onto his stomach. She lunged to tear out his throat.

Robert’s scream was abruptly cut short.

The Ringmaster stepped away from Robert, who still thrashed wildly but was no longer his concern, no longer interesting to the Ringmaster now that he couldn’t scream.

“Can you not see that she doesn’t want you, boy?” the Ringmaster said.

“Excuse me?” Victor said. He jerked his hand away from Kitty’s waist.

“What more do you need her to do to understand that you’re not for her?” the Ringmaster continued. Now it was he who seemed to be stalking.

“Stop,” Kitty said. The wound in her cheek throbbed and stung as though it burned, but when Victor pulled away from her, the cold stole in like frost.

What the hell was the Ringmaster doing?

“What’s it to you?” Victor asked. He stepped slightly in front of Kitty, but he faltered when Kitty touched his elbow.

“You could not protect her. You cannot satisfy her. She is not for you,” the Ringmaster said. “You are a pathetic, mewling, small man making a fool of himself, thinking that he can protect her now when he could not protect her against these weak things bleeding into the ground. Even with Bell’s magic, you are nothing to me. And you can be nothing to her.”

“I thought you— I thought you didn’t care about…” Victor glanced between the Ringmaster and Kitty. “Anyone,” he finished, finally realizing his error.

“I care for no one,” the Ringmaster said. He lifted his whip from its place on his belt, his expression becoming more animated with each step and with every second he met Victor’s glare with his own. His wicked appearance accentuated the emerging anger.

“Sir, just stop,” Kitty said.

“You are not for him,” the Ringmaster said, pointing at Victor with the curled whip, his knuckles turning white around the handle. “When you are in Arcanium, you are mine. You have always been mine.”

“She’s not something you can own,” Victor protested, this time shoving himself in front of Kitty. “And she’d never touch something as evil as you unless you forced yourself on her.”

“Victor—” Kitty began, but she couldn’t find her words. She was too stunned by the fact that the Ringmaster had just spoken their relationship aloud. He was the one who’d wished the most for its silence all this time, even more than she.

“Is that why you…?” Victor gestured to the mutilated remains of the two young men. “Because you couldn’t stand the idea of someone else horning in on your cruelty?”

“I am not threatened by you, boy. I am not threatened by them,” the Ringmaster replied, continuing to advance.

“You stay away from her,” Victor said.

“Both of you, stop this right now!” Kitty said.

Victor was still in white-knight mode from his fight with Larry. This wasn’t like when Victor had gone off on James. That had been him attacking a distorted mirror, ostensibly fighting for her honor when he’d only been fighting himself, and Kitty in the process. This time Victor’s clenched fists really were for Kitty’s protection, but he still wasn’t listening to her.

The Ringmaster swung his whip free from its circle and snapped it directly next to Victor’s ear—a warning shot or a shot to start the fight, it was hard to tell.

Kitty leaned toward the latter when Victor darted forward. He landed a punch on the Ringmaster’s jaw, heedless of the Ringmaster’s greater size and obviously greater strength. Greater strength or not, Victor effectively drove stone into the demon’s face, throwing his head back and making him stagger.

The Ringmaster’s recovery was swift, though. He smiled, rubbing his beard where Victor had hit him. “Thank you,” the Ringmaster said. “That was what I needed.”

“Run!” Victor yelled at Kitty.

“No!” she shouted back. “This is ridiculous. You run. Just go the other direction before—”

There was another crack of the whip and a sound like a boulder breaking apart where the Ringmaster landed his blow on Victor’s chest. The stone flesh there had shattered in a jagged opening. But Bell hadn’t given him human flesh for the blow like he had during Victor’s last whipping. The wound sewed itself together again and didn’t seem to do anything but stun Victor.

Kitty grabbed for the end of the whip and yanked it away from the Ringmaster. She guessed that the only reason he relinquished it to her, however, was because it hadn’t been effective against Victor’s unique skin and thus carried no pleasure for him.

“If you’re going to fight over a woman, you might consider actually hearing what she has to say,” Kitty said to him. Then she looked over her shoulder at Victor. “No one here has been doing anything against their will.”

“If Bell hasn’t brainwashed you, then he has,” Victor said, holding his chest where he’d been struck, even though there was nothing to show for it.

“I do not fight over you,” the Ringmaster said, stepping toward her, menace quivering through his deep voice. “I do not fight for you. It is Arcanium alone that reaps my services. Not you.” He brought his eyebrows together in consternation, his lips curled in unfiltered loathing.

Victor started after the Ringmaster again, but Kitty held out her hand toward him, letting him know in no uncertain terms from her expression that he was to stay away.

“Then what are you doing, sir?” Kitty asked quietly, turning back to him.

“Teaching the boy a lesson he must learn,” the Ringmaster replied.

“And what lesson is that?” Kitty asked.

The Ringmaster’s mouth worked, but nothing came out. If possible, his black eyes seemed to turn even darker, darker than caves, darker than the dark expanse of space above them. For a moment, Kitty thought she saw ram horns blink in and out of existence. Whatever was happening to him, he was losing control of his human mask. And the Ringmaster did not lose control.

Kitty tossed his whip to the side. She held her hand out to him like she might to a large, strange dog.

“No one else has to know. No one else has to see this,” Kitty said. “You’ve done your duty. You protected me.”

The Ringmaster knocked her hand out of the air and grabbed her by the front of her corset, his knuckles digging into her breasts as he jerked her toward him, his teeth gleaming as he bared them down at her.

“I was not protecting you,” the Ringmaster said.

“You said you were,” Kitty responded. She didn’t flinch away from him the way she had with Robert. She showed him no fear. She wasn’t afraid. The darkest and most feared demon of Arcanium, and she wasn’t afraid of him at all.

“No,” the Ringmaster said. “I was protecting Arcanium. I am charged with protecting Arcanium. That means the pup. That means you. Do you understand that?” He shook her violently. Then he grabbed her throat, threatening to squeeze.

“How dare you,” he rasped. “How dare you suggest that it was you for whom I took revenge. You for whom I tortured the dead men. You for whom I came when Bell called me elsewhere tonight, because I heard you scream. I always want to hear you scream. I want to snap your neck as easily as I snapped the boy’s. I want…”

The Ringmaster lowered his head, breathing harshly through his nose before looking back into her eyes again. “I should kill you, Katharine. I should kill you right now.”

He landed a solid kick on Victor, who had tried to sneak up on him from behind. Groaning, Victor fell back against the wooden ring, breaking it with his weight.

“I should have known that you would be dangerous to me the first time I…” the Ringmaster murmured.

Kitty slowly, gently, closed her hand around the Ringmaster’s wrist near where he held her neck. She didn’t say a word—not because he was choking her, because he wasn’t.

“Look what you’ve done to me,” the Ringmaster growled. “I have no wish to save any human being. None. I do not show mercy. I do not feel love,” he spat, shaking her again like a ragdoll. “I do not feel. Why…?”

With the clowns behind him, Victor fallen to the side, and who knew who else around, the Ringmaster encircled her waist and pulled her to him. She yielded her mouth immediately, his hot tongue demanding submission, possession. He groaned low in his chest as he loosened his hold on her neck and slid his hand around to the back to cradle the delicate base of her skull. He could shatter it into pieces if it was his desire to do so, but all he desired now was to kiss her, to hold her tightly against his hard furnace of a body, his lust furious yet inescapably tender in spite of everything he might wish it were instead.

He crushed her against him. She felt as though she were melting, merging with him even though they were both as clothed as Arcanium cast could be. Kitty clutched at his hair, at the collar of his ringmaster jacket.

The Ringmaster pulled away slightly, panting.

He stared intently down upon her. He brushed blood away from her lips with his thumb. When she opened her mouth to beg him to come back, he slapped her wounded cheek. It was not a gentle slap, but it was also nothing like the back-handed blow that Robert had dealt to her other cheek. He slapped her again, with another bright flash of stinging pain that tingled in the aftermath, then sank his smeared fingers into her hair as he plunged back into her mouth, drinking her cries and holding her against the shiver that shook through her—as powerful as fear, as powerful as anger, but it wasn’t even close.

“I would lay nations to waste for you,” the Ringmaster moaned against her mouth between his kisses. “I would present you with the bloody hearts of all your enemies.”

“Don’t stop,” she pleaded.

He jerked her head back. She cried out as he artlessly ground his erection against her abdomen.

“Damn you.” His curse rolled over her in the soothing, entrancing waves of his baritone. Her skin pebbled with gooseflesh. Kitty gasped, her cunt soft, swollen, desperate, wanting, her clit throbbing so near where his heat permeated her clothes and her skin. She shook her head and thrust her hips right back against his.

She fell back as the Ringmaster let out a roar. He clutched his side where Victor had buried a knife all the way to the hilt. Stunned, Kitty could only watch as Victor took out another knife from his belt that he used for the act with Misha and in his exhibition tent to prove to circus patrons that he was truly a man made of stone. It was a double-edge, serrated blade, too large to be legal for anything but a profession that demanded it.

“No!” Kitty screamed as Victor stabbed the Ringmaster in the back before the Ringmaster could swing his arm around.

Here was where Victor’s shorter stature worked in his favor. He ducked away from the Ringmaster’s massive forearm aimed for his head. The Ringmaster staggered. He appeared more surprised than in pain, although Kitty had seen enough pain to recognize it in the rictus of the Ringmaster’s mouth, the arch of his back, the way he stumbled when the Ringmaster was usually nothing but graceful in spite of his size.

Victor tucked himself into a somersault—Kitty saw so much of Lennon in that move—and grabbed the whip Kitty had dropped near the edge of the makeshift ring. He grunted, clutching his lower ribs and hunched over as he darted after the Ringmaster. He couldn’t be stabbed, shot or whipped, but apparently his ribs could break with enough applied force.

The Ringmaster yanked the knife out of his side. The one in his back was more difficult to reach, but he clearly just wanted to have a weapon ready when he faced Victor.

Through the fury, Kitty swore the Ringmaster also displayed a touch of admiration. Kitty imagined it had been a long time since anyone had fought him on anything—or managed to get one knife into him, much less two.

She pushed herself onto her knees and reached for the Ringmaster’s hand that held the knife, staring up at him. “Don’t hurt him,” Kitty said. “Please.”

The Ringmaster hesitated, his temples twitching as he clenched his teeth. But he lowered the hand that she held.

Victor must not have heard her, just as he hadn’t heard her the rest of the time. Or maybe he’d heard her and thought she meant something else or believed she was under some spell. He took advantage of the Ringmaster’s hesitation, leaping onto his back and wrapping the whip around the Ringmaster’s neck, grunting and crying out at the strain on his injured ribs. But Victor was determined. He yanked both ends to tighten the leather braid like a noose.

The Ringmaster fell to his knees next to Kitty, digging his fingers into his neck to reach underneath the whip, but he couldn’t. When the Ringmaster fell, it allowed Victor to stand on solid ground over him, giving him a better foundation to strangle the demon.

The Ringmaster choked, gasped, struggled, things that the Ringmaster probably hadn’t done in a very long time, but Victor could try to cut off his air until kingdom come. The Ringmaster wasn’t going to die, and eventually he’d either tear the leather apart or rip Victor’s hands from his wrists.

“Goddammit, Victor, let him go!” Kitty said. She scrambled to her feet and shoved herself between the Ringmaster and Victor as well as she could.

This time, Victor finally seemed to see and hear her. Either that or she’d pushed against some of his broken bones and he retreated because of the pain.

“He was…hurting you,” Victor panted, clutching his lower ribs. “He was going…to kill you.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Kitty said. “He wasn’t going to hurt me. He can’t. He won’t.”

“Kitty…Bell isn’t infallible,” Victor replied. “Otherwise…he’d be here now. And I…wouldn’t have to save you.”

“I wanted it,” Kitty said quickly, offering her hand to the Ringmaster for him to stand.

He accepted it, although already he didn’t need it. Once he found his footing, he let go of her hand as though it burned him as much as he burned her. He adjusted his jacket, turning away from her toward the clowns, who had been eating and watching the fight like a demon’s version of dinner and a show.

Victor gaped at her.

“Don’t you understand?” Kitty said. “Everything he does, everything he’s done—I wanted it. I wanted him.”

“It’s not true,” Victor said. He stared up at the Ringmaster then back down at Kitty. He shook his head, as though the revelation had literally struck him. “It makes no sense. Anyone else would have made sense. Bell would have made sense. But him?”

“It’s true,” Kitty replied.

“Some kind of spell,” Victor protested. “Demon magic. Like the incubus and succubus. Gotta be. There’s no other explanation.”

“Do I look like a woman being forced by a spell?” Kitty said.

Victor stood there, holding his chest and wincing with every breath.

“You did,” he said finally.

“What’s going on?” came a female voice from Oddity Row.

Joanne and Jane edged their way toward the ring, tentative, wary with the Ringmaster and the clowns in such close proximity to each other. Jane had a black eye.

“I could ask the same of you,” Kitty said, immediately slipping back into her maternal role, relieved to have that mantle comfortably around her once again. She stepped over the wooden rails of the clown ring and gently brushed Jane’s bruise.

“Oh, you know, same old, same old,” Jane said, flinching. “The normals getting riled up by not-normals, taking it out on us for no reason.”

Kitty lowered her hand. “College-age boys?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Joanne replied. “About seven of them. We couldn’t find the clowns to dispose of them, so Lord Mikhail and Lady Sasha took a few and Bell’s imprisoned the others. Why, were they bothering you too?” She couldn’t see Kitty’s face like Jane could, otherwise the answer would have been obvious.

“To say the least,” Kitty said.

Robert had been more devious than she’d given him credit for. He’d told his friends to have fun with the others.

To provide a distraction.

Kitty regretted his death even less. Someone like him shouldn’t be allowed to freely roam the earth. If he hadn’t been eaten today, it wouldn’t have stopped with Kitty. Worse yet, maybe it hadn’t started with her. Things like this didn’t happen out of nowhere. There was usually some kind of progression. Evolution.

At least as killer clown food, he’d brought something beneficial to the world.

Jane mirrored what Kitty had done to her and brushed her fingertips against Kitty’s swollen eye then the knife wounds, which had since mostly dried. “No wonder Bell was pissed. I don’t think we’ve seen him this mad since that group went after Christina, Troy and Maya last year.”

“Jane…Kitty…” Joanne murmured, pulling against where she was joined to Jane at their lower backs. She gazed wide-eyed at the clown ring. Jane and Kitty followed where she was looking.

The clowns cowered, chittering against the wooden railing. The clowns didn’t cower. Kitty hadn’t known they were capable of it.

Victor hung in the air where the Ringmaster held him by the throat. Except Kitty couldn’t see the Ringmaster anymore, not as a man and not as the satyr demon that he became.

Darkness. Pure darkness, as beyond black as his eyes, had wreathed him like Death himself, curling and spreading like heavy smoke. It crept along the ground in a heavy fog until it reached within a foot of the clowns. They gathered their wits about them enough to clamber over the railing and continue running backward as the darkness continued to expand.

The smoke crawled up the Ringmaster’s arm and curled its black tendrils around Victor.

Which was when the new set of screaming began.

Kitty darted forward. Jane tried to grab Kitty to stop her, but she was held back by her connection to her twin.

When Kitty’s feet hit the smoke, it whirled up to surround her like the wings of a bat. The world fell away. There was no ground beneath her feet, no night sky above, no Arcanium around her. She couldn’t even feel herself. There was just the darkness. And the screams.

Did he just kill me? she wondered. Is this hell?

“No.”

“Ringmaster. Let him go.”

“He is the reason you and I are known. He must die. Everyone who knows or might know must die.”

“You’re going to kill an awful lot of people and demons.”

“What difference does that make to me?”

“You might as well kill me with the rest of them. I admitted it out loud too.”

“I cannot kill you. I cannot harm you.”

“You can’t harm any of the others either. You can’t harm Victor.”

“You are wrong about that. I can. The law of Arcanium says that I shouldn’t. But I very much can, Kitty.”

“Victor won’t spill the secret if I tell him not to. The clowns can’t talk to anyone but Bell, and he already knows.”

“More people will know. Every time I have you is a risk, and the need arises more often now. No one else must know. They must all die.”

“Is it such a bad thing?” Kitty asked.

The screaming stopped.

“They will no longer fear me,” the Ringmaster replied. His voice sounded thin, far away.

“I doubt that,” Kitty thought dryly. “But if they are that foolish, you can remind them why you are the Ringmaster when you next set the whip to them.”

“You do not fear me.”

“I’m not afraid that you’ll kill me. I’m not afraid that you’ll harm me. Even now. But yes, I fear you. As you fear me.”

There was a long period of silence.

“We should not be.”

“Yet we are,” she replied. “We shouldn’t work, but we do. We shouldn’t want each other. We shouldn’t need each other. It defies all logic, all common sense, all decency. But we do. When we were together in secret, the world didn’t spin off its axis because you and I broke some unwritten rule. The world also won’t end if it’s not a secret anymore. Arcanium doesn’t have to end. You came here long before I was even born, and you stay here for a reason. Arcanium is something that you need too.”

Kitty tumbled to the ground. The darkness pulled back into the Ringmaster as though into a vacuum. Victor winced and groaned at the Ringmaster’s feet.

But it hadn’t been the Ringmaster who had taken the darkness away. Bell stood in front of Joanne and Jane with his hand raised, glaring every last dagger on earth at the Ringmaster. Behind the twins, the rest of Arcanium had gathered, most of them looking the worse for wear as well.

“I am very disappointed,” Bell said. He lowered his hand. “Get up, Victor. To the ring, every last one of you. Now.”