In her early days, Valorie had felt the vengeful lash of the Ringmaster’s whip, although not as often as Maya. No one got lashed more than Maya, but that was because she asked for it, crazy woman that she was. In time, though, Valorie had become acquainted with and accepted Bell’s colder side, and she’d accepted the terrible things the demons did as long as they didn’t do them to her. Demons could be whipped too if they stepped out of line, and it hurt them just as much.
After her third session with the Ringmaster and hearing too many badly worded wishes, Valorie had learned to be more careful and color within the—albeit unconventional—lines. It had been over ten years since her last whipping session, but that was only because Maya’s second wish had stopped her from incurring the worst of Bell’s wrath. Valorie probably wouldn’t have had a back to speak of for months, and she would have lost Bell anyway. Even now, she probably wouldn’t have completely healed. Bell was powerful enough that he could keep a wound around for a long time.
That was his power—the power not just of wishes but of his whim, within the framework of a wish. He could make one wish last centuries if the logic was sound.
Valorie could still remember the day Bell had granted her first wish.
She hadn’t been in Bell’s fortune teller tent like most of them. She’d been walking past it, wearing jeans she wouldn’t be caught dead in now.
Valorie had been enjoying one of the days off she’d jumped through all the right hoops to get, and she’d arranged for co-workers to cover for her if anything came up. Because, damn it, she’d wanted her week-long vacation. She hadn’t used all of her vacation days since getting the job, and this had been her third year in. She’d sacrificed her plans the last two years. She wasn’t sacrificing this time.
So when her boss had called her right before she’d decided to get a turkey leg for lunch—fuck her diet—Valorie had silently fumed. She’d been about ready to throw away her bulky nineties mobile phone and live off the land by the time her boss had told her he wanted her to come back in. She had been three hours away from work and four hours away from home, but her boss had told her it didn’t matter if she had to return in her casual clothes for the afternoon. She just needed to come in. It had been an emergency, sure, but it had been an emergency that other people in her part of the office could have handled.
She’d realized at that point how much of a prick her boss was, but she couldn’t tell him that.
What she’d said within Bell’s hearing was, “Look, sir, I wish you’d give me a little flexibility on this.”
After that, she hadn’t had to go back to work anymore.
As far as everyone knew, Valorie Cain was a missing person, presumed dead after seven years. Valorie didn’t know what her boss or her co-workers had thought happened to her. Probably nothing flattering. It wasn’t them or the work she missed. It had been a job, something to give her income and benefits until she found something better, and damn straight she’d been looking.
But being kidnapped into Arcanium hadn’t exactly been the escape route she’d had in mind.
She’d started out doing standard and not-so-standard contortion in her tent. That had been all Bell had required of her as she’d adjusted to her new life and the fact that she couldn’t run away from it, no matter what she tried. Craft and cunning couldn’t measure up to magic.
After a month, Bell had given her a circular platform in the middle of the ring during the weekly rehearsals and told her she had to perform the following weekend. In the early days, he’d given her direction, shown her how far her body could go—which was farther than it ever should have gone.
Valorie had no medical training, but she was pretty sure some of the shit she did wasn’t supposed to be possible without grievous bodily injury, even for the most flexible contortionist. She wouldn’t know. The only training she had was from Bell, not from dancers or kinesiologists or people familiar with the limits of human anatomy. Bell didn’t know limits. If he could have reasonably pushed her body further and not had people think it was a trick rather than a feat, he would have done that to her. Fortunately, it never hurt.
In some ways, she had to thank him. There were monks in Tibet who hadn’t contemplated their own navel as much as she had. She could spend a week focusing on all the things she could do with one toe. That was how attuned she was. Most people—her old self included—went through their lives as though their bodies were merely vehicles. Or enemies. Because of all the time Bell had spent with her in those early days, coaxing her, molding her, Valorie had a much better grasp of how she was her body as much as her brain.
A virile man like Bell didn’t put his hands on a lovely, flexible young woman every day while a pair of sex demons made the joint sexy without the woman finally putting her hands on him.
A few years later, Valorie had wished for a bigger, more luxurious trailer than Bell’s, which had been shockingly modest and dated for the real man in charge. Bell had yielded his old trailer to the pool to be modified for someone else and joined her bed on a permanent but open basis. She hadn’t been jealous of his one-offs any more than he’d been jealous of hers. They tended to happen in Arcanium. Sparks flew, people got naked, marvelous shit happened.
Maya had been different because it hadn’t been a one-off, and everyone else around them had known it.
The other thing she’d wished for soon after getting the RV—and the fact that she’d used all her wishes was the only reason Maya was still alive today—was to make her hair more manageable to dye, straighten and style, either by Kitty or by an outsider. Part of it was practical for the circus—a way to distinguish herself from normals and make herself more a part of the circus as an oddity rather than just a performer like Seth and Lars or Maya.
But after some years had passed, she’d pulled a brush through her hair and wondered whether that had been the right wish to make. She wasn’t sure she’d have the hair her mother gave her ever again. And when she looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the woman she saw there as either herself or part of her family’s history, Valorie mourned what she had lost.
Bell’s magic kept them from aging. It didn’t keep them from changing.
When Valorie was packed in a suitcase like this, the past always seemed to creep up on her. It didn’t help that she could probably lock herself in, drink smoothies brought to her by golems by using a straw through the air holes, and no one would miss her.
She could be abrasive, caustic, ball-busting and snide, but she wasn’t evil, and most of her worst qualities weren’t intended badly. She had her defense mechanisms, same as everyone else. She’d brought a knife to the Maya fight, sure, but that was an anomaly—an anomaly that had been taken care of.
However, for the first time since a year or so after becoming a part of Arcanium, her future had gone blank. Not in the ‘blank canvas’, ‘look at all my options’, ‘I could do anything’ sense.
In the ‘I have no idea what’s left for me here, but I don’t know what’s left for me out there’ sense.
At the first murmur of customers milling outside her tent, Valorie pushed the suitcase open with her elbow and waved to the crowd. Already she heard the clink of change in the tip box.
How generous.
Maybe it was time for her to leave Arcanium. If she retained her abilities, she could take a job as a contortionist with a regular circus or freak show. She could do erotic performance art. She could strip.
But she’d still be alone. She wouldn’t be able to return to her family and friends, twenty years older than the last time she saw them. Valorie didn’t even know which of them might have died. Maya, Caroline and Kitty all had ties to the outside world and reasons to keep in touch with them through their electronic devices. But there was no explanation for the fact that Valorie hadn’t aged and no explanation for having run off and joined the circus without telling anyone. After twenty years, Valorie had run out of excuses. She couldn’t go back to where Bell had taken her from. That
Valorie might as well be dead.
So this Valorie was, for all intents and purposes, alone. Leaving wouldn’t solve her problem.
But it didn’t matter how big the bills that men stuffed in the tip box were when she lay on the floor, spread her legs into the vertical splits over her curled-up body, and touched both toes of both feet onto the wooden platform. It didn’t matter that she liked contortion or that she didn’t mind being gawked at. Art didn’t exist in a vacuum. It liked an audience, and Valorie functioned better with public acknowledgment.
However, working here had lost its luster. Staying wouldn’t solve her problem either.
She needed a change. Taking on solo work again was a change, but it wasn’t progressive change. It was just going back to how things used to be, as though she’d hoped to reclaim the old glory, the old love and loyalty for Arcanium—for Bell. Wonder of wonders, the adrenaline high of the performance was nice and all, but there were only so many times she could walk like a pretzel before it became mundane.
Maybe it really was time for her to leave. She hadn’t thought it was Bell keeping her here, but there was no denying that she’d expected to last here a lot longer—fifty years, seventy-five, always looking twenty-three, distancing herself year by year from the rest of her old world until she could step back into it and never be recognized, caught.
But once she’d had to strike out on her own, Lennon was a poor substitute for what she’d once had, and he didn’t even want her enough to keep a thirty-minute-old promise instead of visiting his underwater partner. Nothing made a girl feel rejected like a demon passing her over for an imprisoned mermaid, no matter how pretty her curves—a woman who couldn’t wrap her legs around his neck, a woman as slimy in the tail as the fish that he enjoyed eating.
But Valorie wasn’t bitter or anything.
She crawled over her stage armchair like a woman possessed, her back bent as far as it could go and her head twisted around like an owl. She snapped her head over to look at a group of three girls. They squealed and laughed.
There was a reason why Bell had invited her to join the haunted funhouse when he eventually set it up—and with a horde of slaves he wasn’t using trapped in the carousel, he had the means to follow through on his plans soon. Nothing said unsettling like body parts in all the wrong places. That would be a change too. Not the kind of change she needed, but it was something.
The truth was, she’d done everything she thought she could do. And that was also considering Bell had been incredibly generous in his granting of her spell over the years—giving her all kinds of flexible skills, from contortion, dance and gymnastics to the more complicated aerial acrobatics and tightrope walking. Basically, short of dislocation, Valorie wasn’t sure where to go from here—on so many levels.
When Valorie decided it was time to take a break for the afternoon, Bell was waiting for her in the back of her exhibition tent with a glass of sparkling white.
The back of Kitty’s tent was practically a small apartment, because that was where she preferred to live. It was bigger on the inside, perfect for the dressing and makeup room that it had also become. But the backs of everyone else’s tents were fairly spartan, with a cushioned ottoman and a small table in case they wanted to eat. Her display platform was more comfy than her private backstage, but here she could get away from the eyes.
“You’ve been thinking traitorous thoughts very loudly, my dear,” Bell said. He held his hand out to her, and she accepted. He guided her into his lap like an impish Santa and gave her the wine.
He’d always known just what she needed.
He was a touch shorter than she was—when he was wearing his human form, that was, and he’d only shrugged out of that for her once. Not as ripped as Victor or Lord Mikhail, but his strength was substantial in his more compact form, his skin golden tan, his hair coarse, dense, cinnamon shot with honey, a touch of curl in spite of how short he kept it. He had the perfect combination of undeniable masculinity tempered by a touch of fae in his grace and the prettiness of his cheekbones. His was an unaggressive strength, his voice like Scotch, his skin warm to the touch.
It was no wonder that he was so successful as a fortune teller, even though he didn’t always tell happy fortunes. He appealed to men and women alike, putting them at ease with his very presence—or if they were ill at ease, it was the kind that came from such an enticing, satisfying enigma.
Looking at him, interacting with him, one would never guess what he was and what he was capable of.
Short of Maya and perhaps Kitty, not a human in the world knew him better than Valorie—his worst and his best, the terrible and wonderful things that he had done and would do, those amber eyes calm and the fire in his head burning slow and long, caged from laying waste to everything around him. Bell was a man in control. If he wasn’t omnipotent and omniscient, it was only because he chose his own limitations. He could shed them at any time.
Just being near him, held against him, was like dispensation from a prince. He kissed her neck as she drank, but although his touch was familiar, comforting, it wasn’t like it used to be. He kept his lust at a distance—not of his own volition but because Valorie had been the one to let him go.
Bell would have been happy to satisfy both her and Maya. But Valorie needed to be the center. She couldn’t share the spotlight the way that Colm and Riley shared Caroline. If Bell missed her as much as Valorie missed what they’d had, he didn’t indicate those feelings to her. His affection now was affection alone. He was as demonstrative in some ways as he was aloof in others. Touch had never been one of his more aloof traits.
“I’m not a traitor. What a melodramatic thing to say,” Valorie replied after downing half the glass, sip by sip. It flushed her cheeks and made her mellow.
“I? Melodramatic?” Bell said.
“Say it ain’t so,” she agreed. “They were just idle thoughts.”
“They’re not idle when I can hear you thinking all the way from my tent,” Bell said.
“So I have strong idle feelings. So what?”
“Do you want to leave, Valorie?” he asked, his countenance shifting ever so slightly from playful to serious. His expressions were almost always subtle like that, but anyone could discern what they meant—transparent yet obscure. Bell was paradox made flesh, and that was the way he liked it. “Is there not enough here to satisfy you?”
“I’m between satisfactions,” Valorie said. “Don’t suppose you could peek into the future and tell me when I can stop being frustrated?”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
“Or tell me whether I’m going to leave?”
“That’s for you to decide, Valorie.”
“You’re sometimes an infuriating douche. You know that?”
“It has crossed a few minds,” Bell said, unaffected by the insult.
“Then let me make this simple,” Valorie said. “I told you I’d stay unless I got bored. I’m not bored yet, but I might be getting there if there’s nothing but my job to stay for.”
Bell stroked her lower lip with his thumb, gazing at her as though, for a few seconds, he would gladly devour her. The moment passed. “Lennon is a jackass.”
“Not so much of a jackass,” Valorie said grudgingly. She took more than a sip of wine this time. “Well, okay, he’s a jackass of the first order, but not for dumping me for a mermaid. It was a temporary deal between us. I’d totally poison his coffee, but I wouldn’t do it because I hated him. He just needs a stomachache now and then.”
“I like it when you’re diabolical,” Bell said.
“Only because you think you rubbed off on me, you narcissist,” Valorie replied. She grinned as she climbed off his lap and stretched her legs. “I’ll have you know I was already this bitchy before you got to me.”
“I know,” Bell said. “Your solo performance last night was inspired. You’ve lost none of your touch. It pleased me to see you return to center stage, and I don’t want to see you go.”
“Is that your wish?” Bell asked.
“I don’t have another wish, Bell. You know that,” Valorie said. She finished her wine. Bell accepted the empty glass and set it on the table next to him. She still planned on stretching her legs the normal way, walking through the circus, occasionally doing a routine on a booth counter or picnic table to please the customers.
“That doesn’t mean I can’t still grant some of them,” he said, crossing his arms. “In other ways.”
“No, that’s not my wish. Don’t abduct someone on my account. I’d rather you abduct them on yours. Keeps my conscience clean.”
Bell raised an eyebrow. He could host an international race with that eyebrow.
She may have been watching more TV on the small screen in her living room after Bell had left.
“Cleaner,” she amended with a grin.
“Poor woman,” Bell said, stroking her face, his fingers trailing into her hair.
He slowly turned her around and undid the twist of braids that lined her head until her hair hung free over her shoulders. Valorie wanted to pinch the bridge of her nose at the thought of Kitty having to put them back in again tomorrow.
But if Bell was undoing her hair, it was because he wanted to see how it looked that way for the rest of the day and the evening performance. Ever since she’d had it changed, she hadn’t liked it loose. It made her look young, as young as her body was, which felt too young for her mind. Immortality was all well and good to keep the wrinkles at bay, but Valorie sometimes wished she could age the good ways at least. It was strange to be pursued by people in their late teens and early twenties when they seemed entirely too young for her now. Valorie wouldn’t call herself mature, but when she spent time around her usual outsider prospects, she felt like a wise woman in comparison.
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