by S. W. Clarke
Actually, my jaw may have slipped open. And I may have had to use my own hand to set it back in place.
And while I wasn’t typically one to objectify men, this guy was playing an unfair game.
You see, he had some sort of robe on his upper half, but it wasn’t secured across his chest, so I got a prime view of his pecs and abs. They were so well-defined I might have gulped and tried—and failed—to divert my gaze. Because this guy’s body had an almost gravitic pull on the eyes.
“No, sister. You misunderstand,” Seleema said. “Not that kind of special treatment.”
From behind the screen, a second young man appeared. This one was equally as handsome as the first. “Four hands?” he asked with his beautiful, chocolatey voice.
I blinked between the two guys and Seleema. “Wait, that’s a thing?”
“Again, no,” Seleema said, her voice firm.
“Well,” I began, “I don’t mind …”
Seleema huffed and turned to me. “If you wish to experience multiple soul-quenching orgasms that will cause you to cry to the heavens because they are inspired by the hands of an angel, perhaps you can do so after we save Annabelle.”
Frank cleared his throat, and even I felt a blush start up my neck. To this point in my life, I didn’t even think I could blush.
Before I could respond, Seleema turned back to the receptionist and lowered her voice. “We wish to see.”
“Ahh,” said the receptionist. Her whole demeanor changed, her lidded eyes widening, her pouty lips suddenly settling into firm place. She called another word I didn’t recognize into the back of the parlor, and the two young men disappeared.
In their place appeared an ancient woman in a floral dress—the kind you’d see on Sundays after church—with a spine as curved as a question mark. Her eyes were glazed with cataracts, and yet she scanned every face in the room with unnerving clarity.
Last of all, those blue, milky eyes fell on me. “How far back do you wish to see?” Her voice was like gravel tossed in a burlap bag.
Well, shit. I was about to get four hands, and now I was getting this.
And yet I felt compelled to speak. Something about her eyes on me made all pretense fall away, as though she would see right through my southern delicacies. As though, like Seleema, she could see my soul through my skin.
But it was more than that.
It was as though, in the second she’d looked at me, I knew exactly which moment I needed to see.
But I didn’t want to go back there. I didn’t ever want to go back.
“Five years ago,” I whispered. “The night the gods left.”
Chapter 10
In the darkness, I lay on my stomach with my head in the cradle. Above me, the old woman set her hands on my back as though my bare skin was an altar. Her fingers were surprisingly warm, and they began a kneading motion along the muscles of my spine.
“Tell me your name,” she said.
“Tara Drake.”
“Your real name.”
“My real …” I cleared my throat. “Is this necessary?”
The kneading paused. “Do you wish to see?”
“Sure I do, but …”
The woman’s feet shifted in an impatient way. “But?”
I could tell she wasn’t interested in excuses. And, worse, there was no way out of this but straight through.
I sighed. When I opened my mouth, I found my lips wouldn’t obey at first. My tongue seemed fat and disinclined to curl the right way.
I hadn’t spoken my name in years.
“Patience.”
“And the rest?”
“Schwein—” I began. “Schweinsteiger,” I finished in a whisper. In German, Schweinsteiger means “pig climber.” Nothing glorious, or even good.
The kneading resumed. “Close your eyes, Patience Schweinsteiger.”
It was twice as uncomfortable hearing my name from someone else’s lips, like listening to your voice on a recording. Against all my trained instincts, I closed my eyes. I had never been in a massage parlor, never had to strip down to nothing and lay with just a towel over my body. I’d never made myself so vulnerable to a stranger.
But here I was, doing those things. And I’d waded so far in, it would be a shame now to head back to shore.
“Five years ago, how old were you?” she asked.
My voice came high and breathy. “Fourteen.”
“And what did you want?”
“Want?”
She didn’t answer me. Instead, the kneading continued, as though she knew my answer had been a deflection, and she was waiting for the truth.
I swallowed. “I wanted to get away from the circus.”
“Away from it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I was tired of it. I was born into a circus family, raised in it, spent every day of my life putting on shows and moving around. I just wanted to be free of it all.”
“Remember that feeling. Remember the edges of it. Hold it in your hands. Remember being fourteen.”
I bit my tongue against a smarmy reply. Instead, I concentrated on doing what she asked.
When I was fourteen years old, I was a girl who thought she was a woman. I dressed too old, could apply my makeup with my eyes closed, knew the words for things I shouldn’t yet know.
That was part of the circus life—it was a strange combination of childish gaudiness and barren reality, walking around all day in the churned-up dirt. Seeing a million faces and never knowing any of them except your circus family. Seeing the country and never really understanding it except in glimpses, in trips to the local diner or the grocery store in whichever town you were encamped outside.
I loved it and I hated it, in the way that all fourteen-year-old girls love and hate the familiarity of their lives. They want more. They want what they don’t and cannot have.
“Patience,” came the woman’s voice from above me, “do you remember?”
“I remember.”
“Return to that day. The day the gods left. When you woke up that morning, you smelled something. Remember it.”
When I woke up that morning, it was in my family’s trailer. All the families had trailers, and we drove around in a circus caravan from city to city. Our family had to fit two girls and two adults into our tiny camper, and so I always slept on the narrow bunk beside my sister.
When I awoke that morning, I smelled dung.
We had arrived in Houston the day before, and a herd of longhorn steer were our neighbors. They smelled to the high heavens, but only in the mornings, when the winds seemed determined to blow westward.
My sister was already awake. I’d climbed down from the bunk and found her and my mother preparing breakfast. Even the scent of bacon couldn’t overwhelm the dung.
“Morning, Tara.”
Tara. My mother had always called me that—a nickname from when I was a very little girl and always fell in the dirt. Or the “terra,” as the Italians would call it. She was a doting mother and always picked me up, cleaned me off, stroked my hair when I cried.
I sat down to breakfast with her and my sister. “Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“The man’s off training,” my mother said, passing around flatware and milk. My dad was always off training in the mornings, and my mom always called him “the man.”
“Will we get to see Bonnie and Clyde tonight?” my sister asked, a milk mustache on her face.
My mother, beautiful and strawberry-haired, smiled as only a circuswoman could. “If you promise not to cry during the heist. There’ll be a lot of knives flying.”
“I won’t.” My sister’s face, freckled and determined, sat vividly before me. To my dismay, she’d gotten the blue eyes, and I’d gotten the green.
After breakfast, we spent all day preparing for the night’s show. I spent three hours daily with the whips, cracking fruits and dancing them in constellations around my body. And then, too, I got to practice with the throw
ing knives, because my parents were training me to join the Bonnie and Clyde performance.
As the night drew near, I helped with whatever was needed. Arranging toys in stands, helping the stilt-walker get his jacket on, cleaning the benches in the main tent.
It was exhausting. It was the only life I knew.
When I saw the boy outside the main tent, I had just emerged with a rag in hand. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him at the circus—he’d come on opening night, too—but it was the first time he’d stared at me so openly.
He was handsome. He seemed so confident in the way he looked at me. In the way he came up to me and said, “I swear I’ve never seen a girl as pretty as you. What’s your name?”
“Patience,” I said at once, because I wanted to inhabit his confidence. I wanted to be the pretty girl he desired.
“How old are you, Patience?”
I didn’t hesitate; circus life had made me good with non-truths. “Sixteen.”
He’d smiled. And when he did, I knew I would let him walk with me around the grounds, let me show him the different sideshows that were my life—the fat lady, the strong man, my own show: the girl who could make sparks fly with her whips.
And when we were alone in the shadow of the main tent, I knew I would let him kiss me.
I just didn’t know he would bite.
↔
I had never kissed a boy until I was fourteen. That was part of the circus life, too—you didn’t stay in one place long enough to go to proper school, to get to know the local kids.
People were just faces. Towns were just places.
So when I kissed this boy in Houston, I had spent so much time imagining what it would be like that I hardly felt it happen. There was wetness, and lips, his hands running up my back as he stepped so close I could feel him breathing against me.
I thought, He seems awfully experienced. His hands weren’t hesitant, nor his lips. He held me like he’d kissed so many girls. It was in the way his hand traveled up to my shoulder, along my collarbone … to my throat.
He cupped my jaw with his fingers, and his lips left mine.
I gasped in the darkness beside the tent as his kisses trailed to my cheek, toward my neck.
“Stop,” I might have whispered. Or maybe I just wanted to whisper it, because I had begun to feel so far out of my depth I couldn’t even find the bottom anymore.
But he didn’t stop. His hand angled my head aside, and for some reason, I let it happen. I felt sluggish, enveloped in a strange and intoxicating perfume.
“Oh, Mariana,” he murmured into my skin, “I have missed you.”
That wasn’t my name.
My name was Patience.
I tried to jerk my head up, but I only managed to lift it a few degrees. My eyes drifted to his dark hair, and a noise came sharp and grating to my ears. Not him kissing my skin—but it did come from inside his mouth.
It sounded like his teeth moving against one another.
I tensed, and his grip tightened on me. I was in the vise of his arms, and a thorn pricked my neck in the same moment a voice echoed through the clearing.
“Step away from my daughter.”
My father. Even his voice was powerful and deep.
One of the circus torches illuminated, blinding me with flames. The boy and I came into relief. The boy turned his face, but didn’t let go of me. “She is not yours.”
“Until she turns eighteen she damn well is,” my father shot back. His boots sounded over the dirt, the torch’s fire bobbing closer, and the boy’s arms tightened on me until I gasped.
My father grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt, dragged him through the mud. I didn’t know then why the boy let go of me, or why my father managed to overpower him in that moment.
Maybe it was my father’s supreme belief in himself. Maybe it was because the boy knew he only needed to bide his time. Maybe he liked playing with humans, letting them think they had power.
But somehow, my dad landed a punch that connected with the boy’s jaw.
I ran after as my father dragged him out of the grounds, predictably embarrassed. “Dad, don’t hurt him! It was my fault.”
When they got to the entrance, my father pushed the boy outside the circus grounds. “You’re not welcome here.”
I ran up to my father’s side, and his arm went out to stop me. I felt a strange compulsion to protect the boy, even as I felt a revulsion after the way he’d touched me. After I’d heard his teeth slide against one another.
The boy staggered a few feet outside the cone of the torch. When he stopped, he straightened. Turned. Stared only at me.
As a daredevil and carnie from birth, there was very little that got my adrenaline going. But that boy’s eyes did it. They were so dark I couldn’t even distinguish the pupils from the irises. I couldn’t even see the white of the sclera.
His eyes hadn’t always been that black. Had they?
“Did you hear me?” my father asked.
The boy didn’t answer. He just kept staring at me.
“Don’t you dare come back. You won’t like our security when they’re angry.” My father’s arm went around my shoulder. “Patience, come on.”
I went with him, feeling more childlike than I had in years. As soon as we turned and the boy’s gaze was broken, it was like a spell had left me. I took a deep breath, my neck still tingling where the thorn had pricked it.
“Dad,” I began, even as my fingers rose to my neck and touched the pricked spot. I couldn’t feel anything there.
“I can’t right now, Patience. I just can’t.” His cheeks were all ruddy with anger, and I knew not to press him. “We’ve got the show in half an hour. We’ll discuss this afterward.”
I swallowed. My father never hit me, but his words were enough. I couldn’t bear his disappointment. So I walked with my eyes down, mollified in only the way a parent could make a child feel.
An hour and a half later, every seat in the main tent was occupied. And there at the center of it my mother and father stood with the confidence of gods, both of them doing what they did best.
Bonnie and Clyde.
They’d replaced guns with knives, and they were brilliant. My sister and I sat high in the stands, watching with our elbows on our knees and our faces in our hands.
I was riveted. I always was, when it came to them.
“On your left!” my mother called, dropping to one knee at the center of the ring and launching a pair of throwing knives at two men rushing through the doors of the makeshift bank.
The knives flew in a V, catching one man’s sleeve and pinning him to the doorframe. The other one took the second man right in the heart, and he fell to his knees with fake blood running from the spot.
My father spun around, launched his own knives at the pinned man. They peppered his chest in a line, and he groaned—“Augh, augh, augh!”—with each one.
Next came three men.
Or at least, three men were supposed to barrel into the ring. My father had already extended his hand to my mother, helping her to her feet. They were preparing for the climax, the grand finale.
But only one man stepped into the ring. And he wasn’t part of the show.
He stepped into the light with his own knife. And it wasn’t one of ours; it was too long, too fat. Too sharp.
He lifted it, aimed, threw it straight at my mother. And that knife embedded itself right into her neck.
Chapter 11
This blood wasn’t fake. It was my mother’s arterial blood. Her life blood.
My heart might have stopped then. Maybe it never truly restarted after that moment, even if it eventually resumed pumping.
The audience gasped as she screamed. They didn’t cheer; they were too riveted by the spectacle, what they believed to be a mirage of light and sound.
I shot to my feet, grabbing my sister’s hand. I cried something out, but I can’t remember what it was, only that it left my throat hurting and raw. “Mommy!” I
heard my sister cry out.
I pulled her along, and we struggled past people who didn’t want to move for us, who didn’t want to stop watching the show.
But by the time we had gotten a few steps, someone else was screaming.
It wasn’t my mother.
It was my father.
I caught a glimpse of him holding my mother in his arms. I caught a second glimpse of more men entering the ring.
And then, like a candle snuffed, the illusion fell away. People understood the truth in that scream, and the audience fell into pandemonium.
The stands rumbled around me as a mass of people stood, scrambled their way out, out toward the flaps and into the humid Houston air. My sister and I were pushed and jostled and too small to fight back.
And as hard as I tried to keep hold of her hand, I couldn’t.
I lost her. I lost her grip in the moment I fell back against the tent and behind the stands.
I slid down the tent’s side, hit the hay-strewn ground with a thump. And that was likely what saved my life; I probably would have been trampled by the audience if the men in the ring didn’t kill me.
I landed in a crouch, screams around and above me. I heard ripping, slashing, gurgling.
And laughter. Somewhere, I heard laughter.
When I heard the laughter, the shock set in. I couldn’t process the absolute and primal terror of what I was experiencing, and so my brain only fixated on one thing.
Get your sister. Find Thelma.
Do the logical, right thing.
“Thelma!” I yelled out. “Thelma, where are you?”
But she didn’t respond. I couldn’t see her up in the stands, either.
I ran toward the edge of the tent, where the mass of people were trying to climb over each other to get out. They didn’t even see me as I stood there in the darkness beside them—they only saw the moonlight at the tent’s edge. They only saw the promise of life outside.
And, of course, they didn’t see the men killing them one by one.
