He watched, utterly entranced, as Melanie ate fish after fish, although after a while the ones he gave her no longer wriggled.
As soon as he took a few for himself, Valorie realized he really wasn’t coming back to her RV tonight. Valorie wasn’t partial to the smell and taste of raw fish. He’d completely forgotten about his promise. She wanted to slam the door shut and take care of herself as best as she could for the night, preferably by imagining how she was going to get him back for bailing.
In spite of that, she remained. Neither Melanie nor Lennon were going to notice, engaged in their fishy feast as they were. If they did notice, Valorie didn’t particularly care. Lennon was the one who had something to apologize for. Valorie was part of the contingent in Arcanium who still shunned Melanie and her original companions—all part of the process when new cast members were brought in under…inauspicious circumstances.
Not that Melanie, John and Shawn were companions much anymore. Melanie’s limitations meant that she spent most of her time isolated. Shawn might have been her boyfriend before they’d become a part of the circus, but he was dealing with his own shit, as was John. They suffered alone, the way Bell had intended.
Except for Melanie, who apparently got Lennon, which could be considered either a blessing or a curse. With that short, arrogant bastard, it was kind of hard to tell.
Once the container of fish was empty, Lennon set it on the bench. Then Melanie submerged herself, lanky, wet hair becoming lustrous underwater. She clasped her hands between her breasts, bare in privacy and bobbing up and down independently from the rest of her body as she curled into the corner. She watched Lennon through the glass, not trying to run away from him but waiting.
Afterbirth from a perforated asshole, Valorie swore to herself as Lennon brought his hands to the front of his black, skintight leather trousers. His erection hadn’t waned in the slightest since Valorie had stroked him to hardness. If it had, it had reared back up with a vengeance as he’d fed Melanie fish one by one, like an ordinary man feeding his lover strawberries.
But Lennon wasn’t an ordinary man—not in the same way that Melanie was no longer an ordinary woman. Lennon had never been a normal man.
His teeth, like Melanie’s, were often thought to be prosthetics by circus-goers. His eyes could be special contacts. But there was no way for someone to explain Lennon’s skin changing from near white to a sickly chartreuse, nor his black hair dreading and writhing into suckerless tentacles, black anemones that moved over his shoulders like Melanie’s hair in the water.
It was little effort for a tumbler like Lennon to vault from the metal edge of the tank into the water without splashing. He sank to the bottom, able to breathe through his mouth and nose underwater as easily as above. The dark red flush of his cock contrasted with his greenish skin, which didn’t appear so sickly against Melanie’s cyanotic cast.
They seemed made for each other. Melanie might not have been thrilled about the attentions of a demon, but she didn’t resist anymore.
If she’d once denied him, she now actively welcomed his ability to rub the itch that the incubus and succubus, Lord Mikhail and Lady Sasha, gave the circus. The desire grew even more intense during performance nights, when the sex demons actively sent their magic out. It sometimes turned excruciating if they also fed on afterhours trespassers, as the guard dogs of Arcanium—like the clowns, except not quite so gruesome in their killing.
Lennon stroked Melanie’s wild seaweed hair. His trill rippled and bubbled the water as Melanie leaned into his touch then pushed herself up to kiss him. They cupped each other’s faces with their long fingers, the webbing between more pronounced than in the average human being. Lennon had been predator longer than Melanie. It was he who seemed to devour her, pushing her against the side of the tank as her tail lashed around his legs like ribbon.
Valorie couldn’t hear much beyond the lapping of the water against the top of the tank from their movements inside. Lennon was a rough-and-tumble kind of man who screwed a woman the same way he did his routines. He didn’t mind getting dirty, and he was still incredibly skilled. It didn’t hurt that he was demon and, by virtue of his heritage, could seduce a businesswoman to part with every hard-earned cent of her salary in a heartbeat if greed struck his fancy.
Valorie felt very strongly that a girl never really lived until she had a demon cock inside her. Ciàran and Bell in his true form had been impossibly, frighteningly big. As humans, they’d cause damage, and Valorie knew they could cause damage if that was ever their intention. But most of the time in Arcanium, pleasure was the aim—and even when pain and torture were a part of it, the subject of the attention didn’t always complain.
Valorie wasn’t quite as depraved as that. She’d never been much for masochism, and she didn’t like obedience. If a demon was going to tell her what to do, she’d better get something better than just pleasure out of it. And if she told them what to do—if they’d earned that honor—they needed to give her the same courtesy that she showed them.
The demons couldn’t take the humans in Arcanium against their will. And the incubus and succubus couldn’t have them at all, for obvious reasons—Bell liked keeping his cast around, even the ones he wanted to suffer. They were his alone to curse, the Ringmaster’s to punish if they broke the circus rules, and not for any of the other demons to play with, at least not without the human’s enthusiastic permission.
So Valorie didn’t like Lennon, but she’d respected him and liked him inside her. She’d thought he respected her too, respected the honor she’d given him—at least enough to keep his promises.
He made his way down from Melanie’s mouth to her breasts. His teeth had left behind flushed marks where he hadn’t broken the skin. Melanie’s face twisted as though in pain, her mouth gaping open, but it was her gills that flapped with gasps of air.
Lennon gripped the frill on her hips that ran down to just below her abdomen. Her tail showed signs of the thighs that had once been, but with her legs forever closed in her new form, alterations had had to be made.
Valorie didn’t know whether mermaids really existed or if Bell had just made Melanie into what people thought a mermaid could look like. If they did exist, Valorie couldn’t speak to the accuracy of Melanie’s mermaid anatomy, but it seemed logical to her. A flap of thicker scales acted like a kind of loincloth where the apex of her thighs would have been. As Lennon moved his hands in toward it, the scales retracted and parted like a curtain to reveal Melanie’s pussy, the delicate clam of folds leading up to her pretty pink clitoris.
Valorie wouldn’t have been surprised if Melanie had played with her new self in her early days plenty despite her terror and disorientation, especially with the incubus influencing her from afar, able to see her own bits for the first time. Valorie remembered doing the same. It was quite different touching oneself when one could see the equipment. No wonder men liked playing with themselves all the time and didn’t understand why women didn’t.
While Valorie had literally been homicidal when Maya had taken Bell away, Valorie wasn’t mad at Melanie for letting Lennon at her, shunned or not. He was as relentless as he was generous when he wanted something. It was no wonder she’d eventually caved. But Valorie was fucking furious at Lennon. There was no reason his attention span should have been so short, even with the lure of a water woman.
Unless he really was finished with Valorie. She wasn’t heartbroken. Bell had broken the heart she hadn’t known she had, not Lennon. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have feelings and that they weren’t hurt. The demons couldn’t physically harm humans, but damn, they could still offer a girl the world and stab her in the back with a shattered globe.
Now he slithered his inhumanly long tongue through Melanie’s furrow and into her pussy as he rubbed frantically at her clit, making her arch, arch, arch almost horizontal in the water, her cry bubbling from her gills in a torrent. Lennon didn’t give her any relief, his tentacles caressing her tail and her sto
mach and his tongue sliding farther into her, twisting, licking, probing until Melanie thrashed with both sets of her eyelids closed.
Lennon climbed up her body and bit the cord of her neck as he thrust his dark cock into her pussy, the folds stretching around him, clinging to the shaft as though grasping and pulling him in the aftershocks. With the novel angle of the mermaid’s anatomy, Valorie could see everything, every thrust. Nothing was hidden.
Valorie had to watch as Lennon took the woman, thrusting into her at a furious, frantic, forceful pace that Valorie wanted for herself. Her latex clung to her like a second skin, warm from arousal, wet between her legs, and she wanted cock so badly. If frigging herself would do any good against incubus magic, she would have sworn everyone else off entirely after being ousted from Bell’s bed, but a girl still had needs when the sex demons spread their magic like a constant pulsating mist over the circus. Dealing with it herself only worked for a little while.
She’d never had to go very long without sex. She didn’t know how some of the others did it, waiting days, weeks or even years between sexual encounters. While Melanie regularly got some, Valorie was pretty sure that John and Shawn didn’t, and until last year the two men on the carousel had gone years to decades without so much as a touch. It was a wonder they hadn’t gone batshit nuts, the way she felt right now.
Valorie slammed the door shut, not bothering to pretend she hadn’t been there. Let Lennon know why she locked her door against him. He could stay in his shack of a trailer or sleep with his pretty fish if that’s what he really wanted.
The evening performance concluded, the audience was leaving out the gates in bulk. People, her people, were returning or had already returned in broken groups, usually couples. Any of the ones she’d accept in her bed were already paired off, sometimes twice. She wouldn’t want any of the ones left over.
She wondered if she was allowed to deputize a golem, the mindless drones that made up the circus crew. They were technically zombies, but they were well-preserved and obedient to Bell. A few of them were even attractive. She was sure she could convince Bell to let her have one as a toy for a while.
But that made her feel even cheaper. She was no slouch in the bedroom. She knew it. Everyone else knew it. It was difficult to be bad in bed in Arcanium. Part of it was just another side effect of the sex demons’ influence, but she’d also had enough experience and variety in her life to please any man with a taste for women, even outside the circus’ boundaries and influence.
Valorie wasn’t looking for a husband or a life of domesticity. She’d already had that. She wasn’t looking for forever when nothing but a demon could promise that with a straight face. She wasn’t looking for true love. She was only looking for consistent sex and a man to make her feel good, like a queen instead of just another fucking princess.
So why was she going home alone yet again?
John abruptly stopped to avoid running into her on the way to his trailer.
“What are you looking at, Freddy?” Valorie snapped.
A good portion of his face gleamed with mostly healed burns. The circus often received comments about how strange it was to have a fire-eater with such a severely wounded face. When he performed in the ring, the Ringmaster introduced him as the victim of a terrible fire accident in his youth that had led to his new obsession. His features weren’t melted together like in some other burn cases, but the skin on about three-fourths of his face had the appearance of dark, partially melted candle wax. His eyes were bright and too beautiful to be allowed. One eye even still had its eyelashes.
However, she hadn’t forgotten the reason he got to have his pretty face burned and healed over and over again. John, like the other two, had seemed to learn his lesson and his place in Arcanium within a year. Separate from his friends and under the knuckles of his curse, he’d become far more placid. But that didn’t let him off the fucking hook, and he should have known better than to stare at her like she was still a freak in her exhibition tent.
John shrugged, flinching from the bite of her tongue. He could speak now without burning his throat, tongue and lips every time, but he turned his head away from her to continue past Lennon’s trailer and out of Valorie’s line of sight.
Again, she didn’t bother holding back as she slammed her RV door and jerked the locks closed.
She peeled the latex off and left it on the floor like a serpent’s shed skin. She grabbed the bar that Bell had mounted into the ceiling and slipped her legs over it, hanging naked, upside-down like a vampire, blood rushing to her head. It was supposed to calm her down, but it just made the roaring in her ears worse.
If she’d had any of her wishes left, she’d visit Bell in a bare second to wish for a man to exorcise this need, someone she could have on the regular instead of jumping from man to man, bed to bed. Kitty might be equipped for that kind of life. Caroline, the carousel engineer and a mostly normal girl, might be equipped for handling two men at once. But Valorie just wished she could feel loved again, even if she hadn’t really been loved by Bell the first time. She just needed something.
As long as she didn’t get to the point where she’d take anything.
That’s what scared her.
Chapter Two
It didn’t matter that she was hornier than a teenage boy when she woke up. She still had to get her makeup back on, her purple and black catsuit pieced together and zipped up, and her hair smoothed down in time to climb into her suitcase for the beginning of the exhibition on Oddity Row—the area of the circus that formed a crescent around one half of the big top tent. It was exhibition tent after exhibition tent of freaks on display, and from opening to evening performance, she was one of those freaks.
From opening to evening performance—with breaks for a snack and a drink and to walk around the circus, showing off her skills up close and personal if the mood struck her. That had comprised her Fridays and weekends for almost twenty years.
Oddly enough, those moments in the closed suitcase before the gates opened and the customers found their way to the Row were her most peaceful, limbs folded and wrapped and her head against her foot, mouth close to some of the air holes that lined the side so she wouldn’t suffocate.
If someone had told Valorie twenty years ago she was going to be a contortionist in a circus full of demons and trapped souls that was run by a wish-fulfilling jinni—and that she’d be mostly okay with that—she would have never believed it. For one thing, it sounded like a mash-up of fairy tales and horror stories gone wrong. For another, before being brought into Arcanium, Valorie hadn’t been able to touch her own toes, much less bring her head all the way between her knees and climb out the other side.
Arcanium consisted of three types of beings. There were the demons. Then there were the humans who had signed on voluntarily—although they might not have known at the time that roughly half the cast were actually monsters, and not always the ones they would have expected. Then there were humans who had been brought in against their will.
Among the involuntaries, some had been brought in because of a wish they’d made that Bell had twisted for the express purpose of adding another oddity or act to his line-up. Not all of the people he cursed became a part of Arcanium—which could be a good or terrible thing, depending on the wish. The other subset of involuntaries were the ones harshly cursed into Arcanium as punishment for some sin they’d committed against the circus and its people.
Valorie had been cursed in by a casual wish. She’d since transitioned into a voluntary cast member, which meant she could step outside the wrought-iron fence without excruciating pain followed by a few lashes of the Ringmaster’s whip. It also meant that she could leave permanently if she chose. She could terminate her unwritten contract, return to the world of normal.
She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to take her ability with her, but she felt Bell owed her that much. He wasn’t human, and though he was telepathic, that didn’t mean he always understood the emotional afterma
th of his actions. He could see into the past, present and future, which was the reason he was Arcanium’s fortune teller. But a being that could see out in both directions didn’t always understand that the space between present and future could be littered with shrapnel. Kitty and Maya tried to help him understand, with little success. Valorie hadn’t had as much of a problem with it until she’d become the collateral damage in his foresight games.
That probably made her a bitch, but Valorie didn’t have a problem with that either. Most of the newbies hadn’t been here more than a few years. Valorie had done her time. She was the human who’d been here the longest, even longer than Kitty. She’d had to claw from struggling against the inevitable to accepting her fate to actively embracing it, and she didn’t think it was Stockholm syndrome that kept her here, the way it was for some.
She didn’t see the demons as anything more or less than they were. No one liked where they were, what they did and who they had to do it with all the time. A person learned to handle their life or change it, and she liked hers enough now not to change it, even though Bell wouldn’t deny her if she tried.
The key was to not resist it for a few years. The more a person resisted, the tighter Bell held them in with the reins of their wishes. A human being needed to give their service to the circus long enough to enrich it, like an indentured servant paying a debt. And those cursed in for punishment needed to wait like prisoners through the full length of their sentence, which was usually longer than just a few years. Jinn were immortal. In addition to having a long memory, Bell knew how to bear a grudge and had a profound sense of retribution.
It was best not to piss jinn off. A demon was just a jinni who had gone all dark, who sought destruction in all its forms, especially against humanity. Jinn were less one-sided. But with all their power, especially Bell, they were still dangerous as hell and capable of evil things. Just like humans with missile silos
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