by Jordan Bell
“Jobs within the carnival are by invitation only and as we’ve already established…”
“No, I have an invitation. Look.” I pulled the folded postcard from my pocket, smoothed it flat between my fingers, and handed it to him. He snatched it from my hand, gazed at the name on the front vellum, then he raised his green eyes to meet mine.
“This invitation isn’t for you.”
The air in the wagon heated suddenly, thickened until I could hardly breathe inside my coat. Their stares were too hard, too unforgiving. They watched my every move, waited for me to do something I shouldn’t. The pressure, the heat, the worry, it all felt too much very fast. Without being asked, I dropped myself into the seat in front of his desk and pulled at the collar of my coat until all the buttons had been hurriedly undone. The carnival director raised a single eyebrow but did not stop me.
“It’s true that my name is not the one on the invitation. It’s addressed to Corazon. The Corazon.” When he didn’t react, I exhaled, though the next words hurt when I said them. “My mother. And she died two years ago.”
Alistair Rook shot to his feet and before I knew what was happening the Magician had me dragged out of the chair by my wrist like a disobedient child.
“You’re a liar and I’ll see you thrown out myself.”
“No,” I gasped and twisted in his grip. “It’s true. I swear. You’ll break my arm, please!”
The director ignored us, his eyes going unfocused as he stared across the wagon. He fingered the invitation, rubbed the letters that spelled out the name of the dead fortune teller. It seemed to take all of his composure to sink back into his chair, his hands visibly shaking.
“Let her speak,” he said finally. “Please let her speak. To my knowledge Corazon did not have children.”
“Well, I did not appear by magic,” I snarled. “I assure you I am quite real and hers.”
The Magician shook me loose and thrust me back into the seat he’d yanked me from. I rubbed my aching wrist and frowned between the two men. The Magician breathed heavily, hands drawn into angry fists. He paced, panting, growling under his breath.
Alistair’s sorrow was obvious and catastrophic. He hid his eyes behind his hand for a moment to collect himself. When he dropped his hand back to the desk top, his eyes swam with unshed tears.
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Serafine Moreau.” I shifted uneasily when his eyes widened a notch. “I assure you I belong to Cora Moreau.”
“Cora Moreau?” The Magician stopped his pacing and something passed between the two men I could not decipher. Alistair waved a dismissive hand as if to drop their silent conversation.
“I believe you, Miss Moreau. How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-two, though I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”
“Twenty-two,” he repeated and shook his head. “As long as the carnival has been dark. Tell me what happened to her. If you can.”
Answering him was harder than I expected. “She was strangled. With a length of rope he left behind. He approached the tent, paid me his fee and went inside. A few minutes later I heard her body fall into her card table.” I touched my fingertips over my heart without thinking.
The Magician retreated to the back of the wagon and sat down out of my view. I wanted to see his reaction. I wanted to understand why her passing seemed to affect these men so much when they hadn’t been in her life as long as I’d been alive.
“And did the police catch this man?”
I shook my head. The great mystery and the greatest failure of justice. “No. When I ran in after her, he’d vanished. He must have gone under the tent.”
“You ran in?” The Magician snapped. “When the man was still inside?”
“I wasn’t thinking. I just…” I shrugged and sulked deep into the cushions. I hadn’t had to tell this story since the police stopped looking for the man and everyone stopped asking. That day at the market, in my mother’s tent…it seemed like a very long time ago.
“But he’d vanished,” Rook repeated.
“Yes.”
“Where was she buried?” He touched her name on the invitation again.
“Buried?” I laughed, but without much humor. “If you think I’d stick her in a hole in one place for the rest of eternity, you didn’t know my mother very well. She would never have forgiven me. Her ashes are in a box in my living room.”
“Forgive me, of course.” Alistair stood. I saw now that he wore a three piece suit, a little threadbare on the edges, but clearly expensive once upon a time. He ran a hand down his tie before speaking. “Thank you for coming here tonight, Miss Moreau, but I am afraid I cannot give you a job. I don’t hire outsiders. I have no jobs for you.”
I stood, startling both men. “You need a fortune teller.”
“A thing which you are not. You’re a liar and a pretender. I need a teller of fortunes. Someone with the gift. You have no gift.”
It sounded so much worse when he said it that way. You are a liar. You are a pretender. The way he said it sounded like something I should be ashamed of even if I was only following in my mother’s footsteps. Even if I was just trying to pay rent. It hurt, like being struck.
“I can do things. I have other talents.”
I hated that my voice sounded too much like begging.
“I don’t need you. I am sorry. Please find your way out of the carnival, Miss Moreau. Please do not come back.”
With that, he tore the invitation in half and disappeared it beneath his desk.
The Magician’s fingers wrapped around my wrist once more.
“No,” I repeated stubbornly, desperation melting through my voice. “I was brought here. The signs were left for me to find my way to you. That wasn’t an accident. The dwarf, the orchid. You even sent a giant to make sure I’d get here!”
The carnival director’s brows knitted and he glanced at the Magician. “A giant?”
“A colossus,” I corrected. “I followed them. I’m here for a reason. You’re supposed to give me a job.”
“Colossus,” he repeated, but not to me. “No one told me he’d arrived. When you’ve seen Miss Moreau out, find him.” Then, to me, he said, “I’m afraid fate has played a cruel joke on you, Serafine. You’ll have to forgive its ugly humor. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors, though if you are anything like Cora, you will not need something so arbitrary as luck.”
“No, wait…”
“Time to go.” The Magician manhandled me out the door onto the steps. This was not what I’d imagined would happen. I was supposed to ask my questions, get answers, stay with these people who were as close to family as my mother might have ever had. They grieved for her loss as deeply as I did. These people were home and I could not let them get rid of me so easily. I was meant to be here. I knew that.
I twisted in his arms so that he had me clutched against his chest or risk dropping me down the stairs.
“Serafine,” he admonished and squeezed my arms tight to stop me from fighting him. When I was done pretending, I shoved from his grasp and tumbled off the stairs to the ground, catching myself on my hands and knees.
He looked at his empty hands as if not really sure how he’d managed to lose me.
“I had no intention of hurting you. You did that to yourself.” He waited for me to get up, to respond, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction. Finally he retreated. “I am sorry. About Cora.”
I closed my fist slowly in the dirt beneath me. I listened for him to clomp back up the stairs and shut the door behind him. When I was sure I was alone, I crawled to my feet, brushed myself off. My knee felt skinned, the heel of one hand, too.
I’d live.
I opened my left hand and gazed at the object settled in my palm. My last card. The last trick up my sleeve.
The Magician’s key.
8
__________________
Time did not catch up to me until my apartment door clicke
d shut and I sank my exhausted body against it.
The aches in my thighs and calves didn’t overwhelm me until I dropped the dead bolt and fought the chain into its slider.
And it wasn’t until I sought for the light switch in the dark did I really feel like a lifetime had been collected from me at the gates of the carnival.
I flicked the switch once. Twice. Three times.
Of course. The electricity bill sat unopened on the coffee table taunting me. I’d had to skip it twice in order to make rent.
I sighed and pulled the buttons on my coat, each one more tedious than the last. Somehow I shrugged out of it and left it to pile on the floor. Then my boots came off, kicked randomly into the dark. I managed my socks and pants before collapsing face first into my pillow and without opening my eyes I flailed for the blanket, drew it up to my chin and huddled beneath it. I shivered from the cold but also from something else, from bone weariness and emotional toil.
Behind my eyelids blue and silver tents soared into the clouds. I could see a magician with messy black curls creating roses in the palm of his hand with a mouth that tasted like caramel apples. Around me danced beautiful courtesans and juggling acrobats.
I could smell popcorn.
It was all there waiting behind my eyes. Real. Not real.
Whatever had happened to me tonight, I’d face it tomorrow. Tomorrow when I knew the Magician would come for his key and we’d deal. For a job. For answers.
* * *
Two abrupt knocks yanked me from my sleep and I launched myself upright gasping for air I couldn’t quite suck into my lungs, the taste of cotton candy thick at the back of my throat. I couldn’t tell what time it was or where I was except to think that no, oh no. Not again.
Silence stilled my apartment. A growl of thunder rattled the window panes while rivers of rain blotted the street outside. I could smell the damp in the walls. Neon lights from a bar across the street undulated a pattern of color across my living room floor. Red. Green. Red. Yellow.
It was thunder that woke me, not someone knocking at the door. I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes and rubbed them awake. Water. I’d grab a glass of water then go back to sleep.
I kicked free of the blankets, but when I went to stand I bumped the edge of the coffee table with my knee. Half my tarot cards slid free and tumbled onto the floor.
“Damn.”
My mother would have considered this a bad omen, a warning from the cards that something was about to happen and my attention was needed immediately.
I never prescribed to such superstations. Cards didn’t have magic of their own. They weren’t imbued with supernatural energies. I’d bought them in a bookstore at a mall, for crying out loud. And yet…
A prickling sensation climbed my spine. I knelt to collect the cards, then spotted the last just out of reach beneath the table. I stretched to retrieve it, the slick texture making it hard to grip, but finally I dragged it out from the shadows.
The Magician.
I jerked my hand away and scrambled to my feet. The card fluttered back to the floor face up in a pool of street light cast from the open window.
The broom hanging in my kitchenette slid free and struck the linoleum like a cannonball.
Broom falls, my mother’s voice in my head warned. Company’s coming.
“Oh,” I breathed and clutched the pile of cards against my knotting stomach. “Oh crap.”
“Serafine.”
I flung the cards and shot for my apartment door without even looking towards the voice. The husky voice I recognized intimately.
The voice that should not have been inside my apartment.
I threw the deadbolt and yanked the door, but it stuck on the chain.
His hand shoved the door shut hard enough to crack the frame and I screamed once. His other had gripped my wrist and spun me to face him.
It was over like that, a half second to catch my breath and then I was pinned, the wood cold against the back of my knees. He pressed my captured hand to the door beside my head and I stared into an unfamiliar face I knew quite well.
As my thoughts raced through a million terrible ideas, one realization filtered inappropriately to the surface.
This was the Magician, without his mask and face paint and he was as handsome without his armor as he had been with. Thick black eyelashes framed his stony grey eyes and the familiar dark circles of an insomniac.
A curl of black hair, shiny in the dim light, hung over one eyebrow. He had warm colored skin, eyes slightly narrowed and overhardened by time and a lot of anger. He looked European, the way they looked in movies, romantic and distant and unamused.
“Serafine,” he repeated with mock charm and sugared, terrifying sweetness. “You have something that belongs to me. Return it to me right now or I will turn you into something small and reptilian and then feed you to something large and mean. Do I make myself absolutely clear?”
“Very.” I swallowed. “It’s just that…”
“No. The key.”
“I can’t give it to you.”
Wrong answer. Fury lit his grey eyes and for one terrible moment I thought he’d let it smother his reason. One by one he peeled his fingers from my bicep and leveraged his hand on the door so that I was caged within his arms. I swallowed and searched his shadowed eyes for some hint of the man on stage, of the one who’d almost kissed me behind the tent. The man who created magic.
“Where,” he exhaled slowly, “pray tell, is it?”
“I hid it.” He tensed immediately and I put my free hand to his chest to stop him. Through his shirt I could feel his pulse racing out of control. “Wait! Before you turn me into something awful, hear me out. Please.”
“You’d better be very good at convincing me to spare you.”
“I knew you’d come,” I rushed on. “I hid it so you’d have to listen to me if you ever wanted it back. I belong with the carnival. I was supposed to find you. You take me back with you and I’ll give you back your key.”
For a moment the fury evaporated into incredulity. He pulled away, took two big steps back.
“You’re blackmailing me?”
I fidgeted. “Not exactly.”
“For a job I can’t even give you?”
“You have sway. Your opinion clearly means something to--”
“You’re blackmailing me?”
“I can’t stay here anymore!” I closed my fists and clutched them against my abdomen. “I know how to read cards and people. I know how to pick locks and pockets. And those aren’t exactly things I can put on a resume. My mother meant for me to be a part of the carnival. I know she did. It’s the only thing that makes any sense to me.”
The Magician shook his head in disbelief. Then, like a light switch, anger. “You’re mad. I cannot give you a job and to hell with it, I wouldn’t give you one even if it were within my power. You stole from me and you will give it back and you will get nothing in return!”
The boom of his anger left quiet in its wake. Only the rain went on while we both stood staring furiously at each other.
Somewhere above us someone got out of bed, woken by our raised voices perhaps. He blinked first.
“Enough games.” He shoved his hands into his coat pockets. “You’ll give me the key and because of my long respect for Cora, we will pretend like this didn’t happen. It was just the stupid, desperate actions of a foolish little girl.”
Little girl.
Not a girl someone kissed in the dark behind tents. Not like the Courtesan or the assistant or any number of other necessary women. I’d known better and still, still there was disappointment. Would I never learn?
It was dumb to let this stranger whose name I didn’t even know make me feel so small and ridiculous.
But he did.
“That’s not true. About me.”
The Magician scuffed his palm into his hair and then did something strange -- instead of yelling or ordering me about, he dropped into the corner
of the couch. The Magician looked very tired all the sudden. Deflated. He set his hands on his knees and stared straight ahead.
“If anything has happened to it…”
“It’s safe. I promise.”
“If I don’t have it, it’s not safe.”
“It’s just a key.”
He exhaled his impatience, but I noticed his fingers dig into his thighs. “Even if it were just a key, it is mine and that should be enough. You don’t know what you’re messing with.”
I scowled. “Because I am a foolish little girl?”
The Magician leaned forward, propped his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. A black snake tattoo wrapped his left bicep, its beautifully scaled coil just peeking out from beneath his rolled sleeve.
“It was a mistake to return,” he said to himself, quiet enough to sound like a regret, not an accusation.
Guilt edged in. I fidgeted. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything.”
His response didn’t surprise me. I could have said, I think the sky is blue and he’d have answered, but why is it snowing? Such was the sense made of magicians and fortune tellers.
I bit my lip and tugged at the edges of my t-shirt, wishing badly for pants though if his gaze strayed, I didn’t notice.
“Take me with you. Hire me as your assistant. I’m useful.”
“No,” he tsked. “You’re a menace.”
“Please don’t leave me here.”
“If you do not give back what you stole I will have to take it back by force. You, nor I, wish for that ending.” He leveled me with his steel gaze. The truth was in his exhausted expression - I would not win this battle, or any, against the Magician. “Please, Serafine, bring this abominable night to an end.”
Please, Serafine. All the strings holding my heart in place unraveled one at a time. I came to him, very aware of his eyes following me all the way to his parted knees. He leaned back, mouth open in surprise, and reached for me instinctively. I almost climbed into his lap, almost, the fleeting but smothering desire for the Magician’s approval overwhelming my better senses. His fingertips brushed the back of my bare thighs. His eyes darkened when I inhaled and he pulled back sharply, breaking the moment.
