Ringmaster

by Aurelia T. Evans

  Kitty wished it could last forever, but she had no more wishes to be granted, and if she let herself be used all night like this, she wasn’t sure there would be anything left of her by the end. He’d fuck her until she’d given him everything, every last bit of her—heart, body and the soul.

  She thrashed through her orgasm, screaming. The way she clutched his neck would have paralyzed a lesser man. The Ringmaster bit hers, squeezing her breast too hard, plucking the nipple until it hurt, and thrust through her orgasm. He didn’t let her come down from it, instead shifting his angle slightly and bringing it higher and higher until she slumped over his arm and he lunged forward, a knee on the cot, with her scrabbling to grab the edge of the pallet to keep from falling or being crushed by him. He growled as though in pain or anger as he pushed in as far as he could, to have her whole cunt wet and clutching around his burning cock when it released his hot cum into her.

  The Ringmaster could have waited hours before coming. He could have stayed hard and taken her every way he could imagine until she sobbed and begged for respite. He could have turned this ravaging gift into a curse, just another torment from his underworld repertoire that he’d brought to the surface, to the living.

  But that wasn’t what this was about. That wasn’t what this was for. What she was for.

  The tent filled with their heavy breathing and the scents of sweat, fur and sawdust—bucolic and ones that she associated with the circus. Good things. Entertainment. Hard work. Satisfaction.

  The Ringmaster sat back on the pallet, slipping out of her dripping cunt. Kitty gave a little cry, but the Ringmaster stroked her pussy lips to gather the moisture onto his fingers and ease the shock of his sudden absence. He licked his fingers clean one by one as she climbed off the cot and put things to rights in her tent. She turned off the lights and lanterns and opened the tent flap that revealed starlight through the square, down onto the wild visage of the Ringmaster in his true form.

  His eyes glittered with the reflection of the dark, deadly expanse of space above. He crossed his heavy hooves over the foot of the cot, but he lay down and opened his arms for her.

  She crawled back into bed, not minding the sticky heat of their bodies entwined. This was Arcanium to her, this scent, this embrace, this night. Kitty stroked the hair on his chest and soothed herself as she drifted toward dark dreams the way cottonwood seeds rode a breeze.

  One night a month. In Kitty’s tent. In her bed. They didn’t speak a word. They didn’t have to. Things were simpler that way.

  This was their secret.

  * * * *

  Before dawn, her phone chirped. Kitty got up because she thought it was her battery dying, and she wanted to turn it off before she lost her mind from its beeping.

  When she checked it, she saw that it was a text message.

  I’m doing it. Saying my goodbyes. Be there Sunday.

  For some reason, even though she’d been the one pushing for him to do it, the final decision made her feel like someone had shoved a glassful of ice chips down her throat. It was no small thing, choosing a life apart while almost everyone who ever loved or knew him would think he was dead…

  Kitty understood that, for Victor, it was just a matter of the death being sooner and less of a total-sum financial and emotional burden on his friends and family. To stay with them was only to prolong the grief and the strain, to force them to watch the worst of it before finally succumbing and leaving them with no solace. Just massive debts, empty spaces where he had once been, and deep, numbing grief that couldn’t be quenched by claims of a better place. Most of it was going to happen anyway. But the things he could control—the when and the cost—he’d decided to take into his own hands.

  He’d accepted the responsibility. Part of it was selfish, yes. He wanted to live. He wanted to live well. He was willing to sacrifice his family and friends and his home for the rest of the years that Bell might give him. But it was no less selfish than the people around him who would want him to hold on, to stay strong and stoic just a little bit longer so they wouldn’t have to grieve yet.

  It hadn’t been an easy choice. Kitty wouldn’t diminish him by suggesting he’d taken an easy way out. None of it was easy.

  But the decision had been made.

  There was still a chance to back out. It was only Wednesday. Kitty didn’t think he would, though. For the rest of the week, it would be about making the right memories, saying the right words, building up the reserves to handle the loss. Victor was going to survive his funeral, but after he left his old life behind, Victor would, in many ways, die. He’d be reborn as a cast member of Arcanium of as yet unknown origin.

  It had been ages since someone had called Kitty ‘Katharine’, and even when she recognized people from her past, they rarely recognized her, even though she was hard to forget. Kitty suspected willful ignorance paired with Bell’s magic had something to do with it. The same would be true for Victor. Eyes passing over and not seeing—as though Victor were a ghost and his body just the vessel for it.

  Even though she didn’t text and he knew she didn’t text, she wrote back, Be well. Goodnight.

  She turned her phone off. Anything else could wait till morning.

  Kitty returned to her bed. The Ringmaster’s eyes were open, his expression as unreadable as ever. He lifted his arm for Kitty to climb back against him.

  She closed her eyes, but no matter how deep the Ringmaster’s heat reached, the cold feeling didn’t go away for a long time.

  * * * *

  Kitty woke up with the Ringmaster still there in her bed with his arm around her like a child with a teddy bear—although probably not so innocent, since they were both as naked as a pair of hirsute Arcanium cast members could be.

  Sometimes the Ringmaster stayed through morning. Most of the time he didn’t, but staying wasn’t so unusual that Kitty was surprised he was there. She rolled onto her back from where she’d rested against his chest and stretched the aches out of her body.

  When she relaxed, the Ringmaster’s eyes were open again, silently staring at her. After eight years, it was no longer disquieting.

  She wasn’t sure whether he slept or just rested with his eyes closed during the night. The Ringmaster didn’t volunteer such information. Kitty thought it was better to leave many things about him a mystery, since he seemed to prefer it that way.

  “The boy, will he stay?”

  Kitty blinked. That was unusual. She could probably count on two hands the number of sentences that the Ringmaster had spoken inside her tent after that first time.

  “Looks like it,” Kitty replied slowly. “It’s up to him and Bell to figure out how it’ll go.”

  The Ringmaster sat up on the pallet. His massive back blocked his face from Kitty’s view, not that his expression would give anything away.

  Then he stood, shrinking into human form as he reached the place where he’d left his clothes. He dusted them off and pulled them on, methodical and deliberate in every action. Just because he wasn’t talking or looking or interacting with her didn’t mean he was ignoring her. Most of the time, his very presence was a sign of something other than indifference.

  Before he left, she thought she saw a twitch or two at his temple. But he ducked under her tent flap so quickly, it could have been nothing at all.

  Chapter Five

  On Sunday evening, sometime around six, Maya showed up at the tent with a note in her hand, her face as expressionless as the Ringmaster’s. Bell had taught her quite a bit about how to conceal her more mercurial nature from the view of the public. The less the customers knew about how she felt, the more easily they could be influenced.

  Kitty had been expecting news. If Maya was holding a note and was emotionally compromised in some way, that note was worth ripping open.

  Your lover is here, his wish made. You have the rest of the evening off to tend to him through his early hours. Maya and Valorie can take over your duties for the evening. Please be quick. I have thi
ngs to do tonight. Bell

  Kitty nodded to Maya then turned off the lights to her small stage.

  “Sorry, folks. I have to go,” she apologized to the small crowd of gawkers staring up at her. “There’s been a family emergency.”

  She jumped down from the stage and left the crowd behind, no doubt with deep thoughts about how it had never occurred to them that she or any of the others had a family.

  After bursting through the fortune teller tent entrance, Kitty stopped short.

  Victor writhed on the ground, shaking violently, his teeth chattering as though he was cold.

  Kitty lifted her purple mermaid-style skirt and fell to her knees next to him. She hovered her hands above his body, unsure what might hurt him or how she could help.

  “What did you do?” Kitty said, shooting daggers at Bell as though she’d mentally borrowed some from Misha. And maybe she’d send Bell some of the nails that the sword swallower liked to shove down his throat now and then too.

  “I granted his wish,” Bell replied. He appeared unfazed both by Victor’s state and Kitty’s anger. “The boy won’t be harmed. I gave him what he wanted. What you wanted.”

  “Then what do you call this?” Kitty asked, gathering Victor into her arms, the top half of his body in her lap. She managed to subdue some of the shaking.

  “Death is a strenuous process. As is birth. And rebirth,” he replied, checking his fingernails. “It’s temporary.”

  “You are so full of it,” Kitty snapped. He’d done this to Victor not out of any sense of the poetic but because he’d wanted to. It was that simple.

  She jerked her hands back, though, when they touched his upper arms where his sleeves met skin. It felt funny. Too hard, too rough.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry. Just part of the transformation process. He’ll be nice and pliable for you when he’s finished. You should be able to walk him to your RV. I understand you have a bed vacancy in there.”

  Kitty thought about throttling him, and Bell knew that she was thinking about it, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of doing anything about it. She patiently helped Victor to his feet.

  “One step at a time,” Kitty said. “Come on. We’re getting you out of here.”

  There was no avoiding other people noticing the circus’s Bearded Lady walking a very sick-looking man past the big top and toward the trailer caravan. But no one bothered them on the way, perhaps concerned that it was catching.

  Her RV was small but serviceable and clean. She was rarely in it, so it had none of the lived-in clutter of the back of her tent. Even though they moved every two to three weeks, things had a tendency toward entropy in the places one called home. The tent was home. The RV was transportation. She’d never liked living in it.

  She lowered Victor onto the military-corners bed. He still shivered, but his skin was hot and strange wherever she touched it—like touching the desert ground during a high drought. But otherwise, nothing seemed to be wrong.

  “Do you need anything? I can make tea. Or soup. Or hot cocoa,” Kitty said.

  “Not cold,” Victor said, teeth chattering. “Just shivering. Fever.”

  “Tea it is,” Kitty muttered. There were no partitions in the RV, aside from the one to the bathroom—just the bed, the kitchenette and a small seating area, each descriptor more generous than the last. She didn’t have to leave very far to warm up some water and let the teabag steep. Kitty added honey and milk before bringing it to him.

  She held the mug for him while he drank.

  “Better?” she asked.

  “In my mind? Yes. Rest of me, not so much. Not your fault. Mine,” he said.

  “What was it that you wished?” Kitty asked. “Tell me exactly.”

  “I was very specific, even though he can fix it to become anything he wants anyway,” Victor replied. He was able to sit up and wasn’t shaking as much. The tea must have helped a little. “I guess he did, didn’t he?”

  “It’ll end well. I trust Bell when he says it’s going to be what you wanted and what I wanted for you,” Kitty said, stroking his hand. The texture there was just as strange as on his arm, although it looked the same as it had before. “Who knows why he decided to do it this way instead of painlessly? To prove he can’t be seamlessly manipulated into granting the wishes that people want, a warning to the rest of the cast… Who fucking knows? But it’ll get better.”

  “Promise?” he asked, his plea reaching past the pain in his eyes.

  Kitty swallowed. She wanted to promise him. She remembered Bell petting her hair, her head on his chest. But being one of his favored people didn’t mean that everything would go her way—even if he’d said it would.

  “Wish I could,” she said with a half-shrug and a wincing laugh.

  “I get it,” Victor said, peering at her through half-lidded eyes, red with fever. “I do. Consequences of my actions. Consequences of trying to go against a jinn kind of guy. I wished that I could join Arcanium in the way he best saw fit on the condition that my cystic fibrosis was cured and not replaced with an illness of similar or worse severity or symptoms. And on the condition that my apparent death to the outside world not cause undue pain to the people I leave behind, like suicide or a murder. I was worried about him doing that to my family.”

  “It was a good wish,” Kitty said.

  “He didn’t tell me what I’m going to be.” Victor coughed, the same hacking cough that he’d had before. He furrowed his brow as he tried to get control of the fit. “I thought that would be gone.”

  Kitty covered her eyes and thought very bad thoughts in Bell’s direction that would likely amuse him more than anything. “You didn’t say when you were supposed to be cured.”

  “Well, damn.”

  “Yeah.” She set the cup on the small set of drawers next to the bed and climbed over Victor to lie down next to him. “He’d better keep his side of the bargain. There’s not really an or-else in there, so it’ll mostly be my treatment of him that will suffer if he torments a voluntary to an unnecessary degree. He’s getting someone without a struggle. That’s supposed to mean something.”

  “What’s the world come to, when demons don’t honor their word?” Victor said with a coughing laugh.

  Kitty closed her eyes against his sleeve and laughed with him. Better to laugh than cry. Kitty had never been much for tears. They made the hair on her cheeks all damp and unpleasantly stiff with salt, and crying gave her headaches.

  “Rebirth,” she murmured. “He called it a rebirth. Could take minutes, could take hours, could take days. But birth, while painful, eventually ends. I’ve got to trust him, Victor. He’d totally string it out for you, but he wouldn’t do this to me. I refuse to believe that he would do this to me.”

  They rested there on her bed that she rarely used except during travel, which would be sometime after midnight tonight. The golem assigned to her RV would do all the driving, thank goodness. Kitty liked to drive, but she was all too human. Driving for hours at night was never a good idea.

  About two hours later, the magic attached to her exhibition tent made all her things appear around them in the limited available space. She didn’t like the golems or anyone else touching her things. She had a system, and she liked to be able to find things again rather than try to figure out where someone else had hid them.

  “Do I want to know?” Victor asked, looking around at the things that had popped up around him between blinks.

  “Just more magic,” Kitty said. “It knows you’re here and won’t drop a makeup box on your head.”

  “It all still hurts like hell, but I’m not shivering as much. I feel hot, less sensitive to cold,” Victor said. “That’s good, right?”

  “You want me to turn on the air conditioning?” she asked.

  “It won’t be too cold for you?”

  “I’m a miniature Sasquatch, Victor, remember? I’m rarely too cold unless it’s below freezing.”

 
Kitty pushed herself off the bed and gingerly climbed around her vanity in the aisle by sliding over the kitchenette so that she could switch on the air.

  “You want some music, or do you just want to rest?” Kitty asked. “I can sleep with it on.”

  “Music would be nice. I don’t think I can sleep.”

  When she climbed back over and back into bed, Victor turned his back to her, but he covered her hand on his hip and guided her closer until she spooned against him.

  “I left all my medication and my machine behind,” he muttered.

  Kitty pressed her face against his back, tightening her embrace.

  “Bell, I swear, if you screw this up, it will be years before I do anything for you again.”

  “It’s like you have no faith in me, Kitty,” he replied, a little voice in her head.

  “Just know you too well.”

  “Why did you bring the boy to me if you expected me to do what I do best?” Bell asked.

  “Human stupidity,” she replied.

  His chuckle was a tickling caress along the shell of her ear.

  Insufferable bastard.

  * * * *

  “Kitty?”

  “Mmm?” Sometime while she had been unconscious, she’d rolled away from Victor, although she couldn’t get very far with the vanity crowding them in.

  “We’re moving.”

  “It’s just the golem. We’re traveling. It’s what the trailers are for. Go back to sleep.”

  “I wasn’t asleep. I feel strange.”

  She pushed herself upright. Men were supposed to be babies about being sick, but Victor’s chronic illness would make him less prone to dramatics, so in spite of her reflexive annoyance, he probably had a legitimate concern. Kitty fumbled for the nightstand light.

  In spite of her years of Arcanium experience, she gave a small cry when the lamp illuminated him. She was still half-asleep, all her emotional shields dismantled, and what she saw in front of her wasn’t the same man that had been there the last time she’d closed her eyes.