Valorie’s eyes flew open.
And as she feared, Bell leaned against the big top not twenty feet from them, casual as the devil Charles believed him to be, his arms crossed as he took in his contortionist and her ex-fiancé wrapped around each other after he’d told Charles to stay away. Charles had promised, and though what he was doing wasn’t intrinsically damaging—he wasn’t telling anyone about Arcanium, for instance—Bell might take offense to the broken word.
Bell was here for the wish. He’d known that Charles would make it. He’d gone out of his way to be near them for it. This was bad. This was very, very bad.
“I wish this had never happened to you, that we could go back to how it was before you ever came to this circus and got trapped, that it could have been how it was supposed to be,” Charles murmured into her ear, the turmoil of twenty years thick in his voice.
“No,” Valorie whispered, but it was too late. She pushed Charles from her, as though she could take back the wish by pretending the last few minutes hadn’t happened—the way he had wished away the last twenty years. “No, Bell, whatever you’re thinking, don’t. Don’t do this to me. Please. Don’t do this to me.”
“You don’t even know what I’m going to do yet,” Bell said. He pushed off the big top canvas with his shoulder and approached them.
Charles whirled around when he heard Bell, struck with a bolt of horror. His expression was almost comical, masklike in its exaggeration. But Valorie knew that any fear associated with Arcanium was far from exaggeration. If it appeared exaggerated, it meant that the person understood perfectly what he was in for.
Then Charles froze—and not from fear.
The world around them went quiet, not so much as a breath of wind.
Valorie turned from side to side, breathing deeply because it seemed like whatever she took had to struggle to get into her. There was the golem manning the souvenir table. And when she turned to her right, another pang of the guilt she hated sliced through her.
John stood a few tents down. It looked like he’d been heading for her tent when he’d seen her with Charles. From what she could tell, he’d been caught between continuing toward her as though it didn’t matter—when it clearly did, judging by the shine in his pretty eyes—or staying put and forcing himself to witness Valorie with another man.
But the golem and John were just as frozen as Charles.
“What did you do?” Valorie asked, whipping her head back toward Bell. Her hair, free today, swept over her shoulders.
“I took a moment,” Bell replied. “You might get lightheaded, but you can breathe, my dear. I recommend you do so.”
“You were lying in wait,” Valorie said. She stepped away from Charles and met Bell in the middle. “I’m tired of your games, Bell. You’ve always played them, but I hate it when you play me like you have been lately. You did it with me and Maya too, and we were not amused.”
“I already show my favorites their special bit of favor,” Bell said. “It would truly be unfair of me to spare you from everything. Besides, you weren’t the one to make a wish.”
“I can’t make another wish,” Valorie said.
“So I obviously couldn’t grant yours,” he replied.
Sometimes she could just throttle him.
“The wish is made,” Bell continued.
“What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do to us?” Valorie asked.
“What would you like for me to do for you?” he asked back.
“It’s annoying when therapists turn questions back. It’s twice as annoying when you do it,” Valorie said. “Especially when I know what’s at stake if you…if you twist it somehow.”
“Do you really think I’d hurt you just because you’re no longer in my bed, Valorie?” Bell asked. He flipped a lock of hair away from her face like peering through a curtain. “My favor isn’t only for my lovers, as you’re well aware.”
“Anything you do to hurt him will hurt me,” Valorie said.
“I know.”
“Then what are you going to do?” she demanded again.
“What do you want me to do?” Bell repeated.
Valorie tried to slap him. He caught her wrist before she could connect with his cheek, and she hadn’t been pulling any punches. She would have walloped him a good one if he hadn’t seen it coming.
His smile was frightening and attractive at the same time. The Ringmaster was his whip, his demonic enforcer, but Bell was ever the real ringmaster in the shadows of Arcanium. Valorie tried to remember that at all times. Bell always seemed tame as a trained lion. It was so easy to settle back into when she’d been the queen at his side, not having to worry about the whims of the king.
He wasn’t tame.
It was times like this, gazing into those eyes that could hold whole worlds if she peered deeply enough, that Valorie wondered for the millionth time whether he’d driven her mad and she just couldn’t tell. She should fear him more than she did, even now.
Old love died hard. With three of her four most significant lovers in the tent alley between Oddity Row and the big top, this was all too apparent.
“I thought your little pet might be what you needed to stay here with me a little longer,” Bell said, “but we wouldn’t be here now if he was truly enough. This is your chance to leave. Do you want to go back as though it had never happened? As though you’d never entered my circus at all?”
“Is that possible?” Valorie asked, too stunned by what he was saying to process it.
“It’s difficult. There are threads in the tapestry of time that must be altered in order to keep the outcome of the present as close as possible to what it is now. You can go back if that is what you wish. You could have been called into work before arriving at Arcanium for the first time. That part is simple.”
“You’d do that?” she asked weakly. The weight of time lifted, making her dizzy. “You’d do that to me?”
“For you,” Bell said. “I’d do it for you. It’s your ticket out of here, if you want it. Or I could alter Charles’ age. The both of you could start over together as though your wishes had never happened, simply in the present rather than the past.”
“You’d take him from his family,” Valorie said.
“Just as I took you from yours.”
“He’d hate me.” The exhilaration of finding her would fade. Valorie had resented Bell for a long time, but she’d eventually let that resentment go because it didn’t faze him, only her. However, Charles’ resentment would hurt both of them. Valorie knew this as if she’d already lived it.
“It’s still your choice, my dear,” Bell said.
Valorie glanced over her shoulder at where Charles stood stock-still, a most realistic waxwork.
“I can’t do that to him,” she muttered.
But he’d made the wish. He’d made the wish and now Bell had to grant it, whether he wanted to or not—and he always wanted to.
Her plans to leave had been nebulous at best. She hadn’t pinned down when, where and how, and now the choice was before her. Valorie might not get another perfect chance like this to leave and have someone to go with her.
Then there was the what-if, the classic question of what her life would have been like if she had never entered Arcanium.
She turned to Bell, her lover of over seventeen years. She might as well have been married to him and amicably divorced.
She turned to John in the background, her little dragon puppy pet, her firebrand, her fire-eater.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I want.”
“That’s okay,” Bell said, caressing her chin affectionately, that half-dark smile still curving his lips. “How about I give you time to think where you won’t be disturbed?”
He blinked. The world around them started up again.
Charles stumbled around when he saw that Valorie had disappeared from in front of him, stammered in confusion at where she’d ended up in what seemed to him like no t
ime at all.
Bell gently led Valorie over to him.
“I can give you what you ask for, sir,” Bell said. Charles flinched when Bell touched his shoulder. “I can give her to you for as long as you stay in that tent. But as soon as you leave…”
He stared at Valorie. The gold in his hazel eyes almost glowed with the magic he was using to grant the wish, little more than a glint like sun on mica, but Valorie would recognize it anywhere. He didn’t have to speak in her head for her to understand.
A moment. A moment to see what things could have been.
And whether they could be that again. Because she still had a choice ahead of her.
“I don’t understand,” Charles said quietly as she took his hand and guided him to her tent.
Valorie met John’s eyes across the distance then lowered them, a quiet acknowledgment and maybe an apology. She didn’t want to think about John right now, not when Charles was here. Not when his hand was warm in hers and the branding of his kiss still on her lips and neck. She craved more. She craved him as though years of lonely nights missing him had returned to her all at once, with the strength of a wife whose soldier husband had returned from war, even though she was the one who felt like she’d been strung out through the battlefield. She hadn’t realized how much until Charles had seen her like this—in the den of the devil and wearing the costume of her enslavement, so thoroughly integrated that she didn’t even realize she was a slave anymore.
Had she hit rock bottom and just grown used to the view, as Charles had implied? Or had she ascended long ago, thrown off the shackles for the invisible crown she pretended she wore?
Where they were going, did it matter, as long as it was something she chose and a choice that she owned?
“Come with me,” Valorie said, lifting the flap to her tent. “You’ll understand soon.”
Revelation dawned. “Oh God, I said it,” Charles said. “I said the W-word. You warned me, and I—”
“Don’t worry, Charles,” Valorie said. “This won’t hurt at all.”
The last thing she saw of the outside world was Bell’s smile. Valorie let down the tent flap, latched it and turned around to face Charles’ wish.
She couldn’t help her gasp. She brought a hand to her mouth in a belated attempt to muffle it.
The doubling of Charles, the Charles of her vision and the Charles of her memory, suddenly snapped into a single man—the one she’d left behind that summer day, when he’d wanted to stay home and she’d wanted to go out and she’d eventually gone on her own, as she often had.
They were in an apartment, the same apartment where they’d been living together while they’d searched for a house before the wedding. The front door was a tent flap, but that was the only indication they hadn’t really stepped back in time.
It was a small place, sparsely furnished, sparsely decorated—although Valorie had added her little touches here and there, plus a few coats of paint. Small, but cozy—it had been home. Valorie hadn’t needed much more than that. They’d only been in the market for a house because they’d wanted to expand as a family after the wedding. She’d been looking forward to the point when she could stop taking her birth control.
Valorie wondered if the pills would be in the right bathroom drawer where she’d left them.
“Is this real? Is this happening?” Charles asked.
“Look at yourself,” Valorie said. She struggled against the tears that threatened to pour over the edge of her lower lids.
His reaction helped. Now she fought against laughter when Charles did a double take at himself and ran out of the living room into the single bathroom. He was wearing a pair of jeans that had been cool in the nineties, although now it showed itself for the relic that it was. His shirt, though, was a classic plaid, nothing to be alarmed about. The grooves in his face had smoothed out, the salt in his hair had darkened and his close buzz had grown out about an inch of dense curls.
Valorie checked herself while he was out. She was wearing the same T-shirt she’d left in. It stopped short of the waistband of her tight high-rise jeans. Her giggles sounded giddy to her. She was pretty sure she was close to hysterical, but she was too distracted to be alarmed.
Her hair no longer brushed her shoulders, smooth and straight. When she touched her head, she could feel the permed curls that she’d tucked into a ponytail higher on her head than she could do these days without being ironic. Her arms, chest and hips were unadorned, not a single tattoo in sight.
And when she bent down to untie her sneakers, she realized that she couldn’t just bend from the waist to reach them. She had to bend her knees.
The contortion flexibility was gone.
Her laughter cut off all at once, as though she’d slammed the switch down.
“Are you okay? Aside from some atrocious wardrobe choices I made in my youth, I think I’m doing all right, but you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Charles said, coming out from the bathroom, his face painted with all the wonder and awe Arcanium tried to inspire. Not often it happened in a place as normal as this.
“Maybe I have,” Valorie said. She managed to keep her voice from shaking.
“Tell me about it,” Charles replied. He wasn’t wearing shoes. He was near silent as he approached her in bare feet and took her in, the Valorie he remembered—impeccably her from head to toe, without anything sparkly or colorful to get in the way.
Yet in his eyes, she could see the man he’d become, not the man he had been. She thought he saw the same in her. This place, this illusion-reality, it was like Valorie hadn’t been stolen into the circus, but it was simply an elaborate masquerade. A fantasy. One that seemed real in every way but the years that they carried in their minds.
“I thought you were going to the circus today,” Charles said.
It took Valorie a second to figure out what Charles meant.
“I was,” she replied slowly. “But I decided that if I had to go alone, I didn’t want to go at all. That kind of place isn’t a solo scene. And if I can’t share it with you, then I’d rather do something together that we can share.”
“I didn’t think I’d ever hear anything so sweet from you, little sister,” Charles said, hooking a finger in one of her belt loops.
“You’ve been rubbing off on me,” Valorie said. She grinned as he tugged her toward him.
“Not yet,” he said huskily. “But I will. ‘Cause I can think of a few things we can be sharing right now instead of that circus. How about you?”
They were both laughing when his mouth met hers, kissing through their grins. Charles turned them around, and they stumbled toward the bedroom. It had been a long time since they’d had to find their way blind through their apartment. He knew every inch of her body and she his, but he’d forgotten that chair was there.
She tumbled into it, still giggling madly. She gave a cry when he swept his arms under her and picked her up. Valorie was all flailing, coltish limbs. Her sisters had called her too skinny, bony in the hips instead of curvy, no boobs until she was eighteen and finally filled out her small bra cups, but Charles had always said that made it easier to hold all of her at once instead of piece by piece. He had pillows for softness, he’d used to say, and her for sexy. His gaze had strayed when a curvy girl had walked by, but he’d still made Valorie feel like the prettiest girl in the world.
Now was no exception. He carried her to the bedroom, kicked the door open then kicked it closed again behind them. He was less rough with her. He lowered her to the unmade bed as though she was delicate, precious.
When he climbed over her to lie down next to her, something in her belly shivered. For such a long time, all she’d had of him were memories. She’d remembered the way he’d made her feel when he was above her, as though she were some adult Little Red Riding Hood meeting a wolf with a different kind of appetite. But it had faded, as memories did, the edges blurry and the feelings like words on a page instead of experienced. Reliving them…it was like getting h
it with waves on the beach, toppled back each time with the unexpected strength.
“Charles, are you sure about this?” Valorie asked, breaking the role play.
“Yes,” he said with vehement conviction. “I wasn’t before, to tell you the truth. I had shame all the way down in my soul for coming here and kissing you. But when I walked in here, it all went away. I’m not married here. Look.” He raised his left hand. No golden band on his finger. “The man in this bed is your fiancé. God may smite me down for having sex with you before marriage—and I was never a hundred percent sure on that, as you know—but he’s not going to smite me for cheating on a wife I wouldn’t have had. I’m confident in that. I don’t know why, because it’s all being orchestrated by a devil man, but I am. So as far as I’m concerned, my conscience is mostly clear. Clear enough to be with you in this moment. Because this is all there is, isn’t it? We’re not going to disturb the neighbors or your circus’ customers or run out of cheese in the fridge, are we?”
Valorie stroked the brush of his hair, solidifying more memories.
“I think it’s just us. As the song says, we’re all alone,” she said. “When we’re here, it’s twenty years ago. And we’re going to get married in less than a year. Planning is driving me crazy.”
“It’s your mother driving you crazy,” Charles corrected with a broad, boyish grin.
“It’s my mother driving me crazy.” Valorie rolled toward him to kiss his bottom lip as he smiled. “But as far as we’re concerned, the people in the apartments all around us are on vacation and we have a grocery gnome.”
“How long do we have?” Charles asked, tentatively sliding his hand over her hip to the bottom of her shirt. He seemed unsure whether he was allowed to touch her skin after so long.
“However long we need. Two hours, two days, two weeks, two hundred years,” Valorie said. She covered his hand and urged him upward. “He’s very powerful. But don’t think about that. Just feel. Touch me, Charles. You haven’t touched me in what feels like forever.”
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