by Jordan Bell
I blinked, shook my head to clear it.
All the wonderful possibilities of the carnival, of the Magician, of everything I thought was supposed to be mine, unraveled, too.
“You win.” I reached behind my neck and pulled the key from beneath my t-shirt. He rose to his feet, crowding me, his hands catching himself on my waist when I swayed unsteadily. We stood too close, but neither of us pulled away.
“You said it was hidden.”
“I lied.”
“Let me,” he murmured and took the cord from my fingers. He pulled it over my chin, nose, and carefully threaded it from my bed-messy hair. His hands were gentle, different than the ones that had threatened me earlier.
He returned the key to his own neck where it lay stark against his white shirt. For the next minute, the next year, we lingered longer than was appropriate and with all my body I begged him not to leave me behind.
“I would have made an excellent member of Imaginaire, you know.”
“Maybe. But things are complicated right now. There’s no place for outsiders.” The Magician touched a finger beneath my chin and lifted it as he had behind his tent. I shivered at the touch, at the way he gazed down at me, his expression unreadable but intense. “Don’t look at me with your big, sad green eyes. It won’t work. I am unmoved by the manipulations of lion-haired girls. I cannot hire you, and wouldn’t hire you if I could. I assure you that despite what you think, Cora would not thank me for taking you with us. Likely she would have me murdered in my sleep. Violently and thoroughly.”
His skin felt warm and he smelled of chocolate and caramel, which seemed viciously unfair.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Things are different now.”
“I am not afraid, if that’s what you think.”
I could feel him breathing, that was how close we stood. He lowered both hands to my arms and for a moment I thought he might pull me the last inch into him. I wouldn’t have minded. It was too easy to be bewitched by him.
Instead he pushed me back, displaced me from his control. “Do not return to the carnival, Serafine. It is not for you.”
His words acted like ice water and I instantly chilled to his touch. He stepped away from me and headed for the door. It was difficult to turn and watch him go. At the door he hesitated, backlit by the hallway light, half the tube lights burnt out.
“This is no place for you, either. You should leave this miserable apartment and go somewhere brighter.”
He lingered a minute longer, gazing at me, at my shoulders and arms and naked legs. He ran his hand across his firm mouth as if he considered something important, but without giving it voice, he turned and was gone.
I closed the door. Locked it. I could feel the loss of his presence right away, cold on my skin and the smell of damp in the walls. Not even a hint of caramel popcorn. As if I’d made him up. Wished him into existence.
Thunder clapped and shook the old building, made the windows groan and the radiator whine. I got out a pair of cotton pants and pulled them on to guard against the new cold. He was right, of course, this was no place for me. I was tired of being here alone. Waiting.
I made it halfway to the couch when he knocked on the door. Proper this time. Two knocks. I stopped in my tracks, my heart catapulting against my rib cage. The cold retreated. The loneliness too. Before he could flee, I ran to the door and, shaking, undid all the locks.
“You came back. I didn’t think…”
The man in the doorway was not the Magician.
Though I didn’t realize it until he was shoving his way inside.
9
__________________
In a nothing neighborhood outside Boston, my mother and I lived for two weeks in July in a tiny motel where the doors all faced the parking lot and women in their bras smoked cigarettes off the balcony at two in the morning. I was sixteen and we’d just had another knockdown, drag out screaming match that had the neighbors banging on the paper thin walls and Cora crying in the bathroom when I slammed the front door, swearing I was running away for good.
I’d made it to the street, sweat soaking my hair, pooling down my back and thighs. I weighed more then too, so round I’d taken refuge in men’s clothes far too big for me. They hid the bump above my belly button and the bulges around my bra. Wearing the big men’s clothes made me feel thinner than I was, but I was still full of self-disgust because I was lonely and no one noticed me and I lived in a motel with a mother who treated me like her pet.
I walked far enough that I could only just see the motel lights when I froze. For the first time in my life I felt danger, the skin crawling, heart racing feeling girls get telling them that something very bad will happen if they take another step. I knew in the creeping sensation on the back of my neck that if I kept walking, I was never going to come back.
All the worst predators chased me down when I turned and ran for the motel, sick with fear. I didn’t stop until I’d shoved my way into the motel room and locked the door behind me. My panic sent Cora over the edge and we moved to Arundel, Maine the next day.
The face of the man in my doorway was the thing I’d run from that night. Vacuous yellow rimmed irises traced my face and body in that half second it took me to shove my door closed on him, but he was faster and stronger. He barreled into my apartment, cutting off my scream by clapping a hand over my mouth and across the back of my head. He shhhed me, flat lips forming a grotesque O and leaving spit dotted across my cheek until he had me against the wall.
In the light bleeding in from the hallway, another figure snaked in, then another, black silhouettes who were not quite men. Flashlights clicked on and as the yellow-eyed man fought to contain my wild struggles, the other two began to tear my apartment to pieces.
“Baby girl, baby girl, stop. Stop.” He pushed my head back, forced my head at an unnatural angle. I felt his fingers prod at my mouth. I clawed and fought, snarling, snuffling noises muffled against the palm of his hand. He shushed me kindly with eyes so dead they left me feeling rotten on the inside.
He pressed his barreled chest into mine until it was hard to breathe. “Baby girl, why don’t you make my night and tell me what the Magician wanted with a thing like you?”
Something behind him crashed to the ground and I heard plates shattering against the wall.
Please, please let someone come…
He slid his hand away from my mouth.
“Tell me. Tell me what he wanted.”
“Go screw yourself, you fucking psychopath,” I snarled and flailed at his face, fully prepared to gauge his eyes out with my nails.
I caught his cheek and ripped lines of red to his jaw.
He hissed, narrowed his eyes into snake-like slits and calmly grabbed me by the hair and face and cracked me solid against the drywall.
Pain blossomed across the back of my head, a brief and angry swelling that dulled and left me feeling dizzy and light headed.
I gasped, hating the taste of tears on my lips and the grainy, dirty flavor of his skin.
And then before he could strike me again, his hands were yanked off in a single grunt, the only sound he managed before the Magician struck him in the face with his fist. With the sound of bone breaking bone, he crumpled to my feet.
Without the yellow-eyed man holding me up my legs gave out and I slid down the wall.
“Stay,” the Magician ordered and then he turned to face the other two men ransacking my apartment. They came at him together, but it was clear very quickly that it was no match. The Magician opened his hand and sent one flying back into my fridge without even touching him. The other swung, but he blocked the punch, delivered one of his own, and in the dark I could hardly follow their street violent fist fight that left fine mists of blood on my walls. A flashlight spun chaotically across the hard wood, flashing on the yellow-eyed man every half second, highlighting the blood drooling from his nose and lip.
The second silhouette bent at the middle and fell fo
rehead first into the floor. The Magician stumbled back and twisted towards us in time to see the one he’d put into my fridge scramble out the front door and hit the stairs at a run.
“Dammit,” he swore, but didn’t go after him. Instead he slid to his knees next to me and captured my face in his hands so gently I hardly felt him. “Let me see. Are you hurt? Did he hurt you, Sera?”
“My head…” I touched the back of my head but there was no blood. “I’m ok. I think.”
He closed his eyes briefly. “I need you to pack some bags. Only what you can carry. Only what you need. As fast as you can. Can you do that for me?”
I gripped his arms as I got my balance. “What’s going on? Why did they come here for you?”
“Later, I promise. Others are coming and we have to go right now.”
Without arguing, I pulled down two of my mother’s powder blue suitcases and my backpack and started stuffing them too quickly for neatness.
It wasn’t hard to leave things behind.
The Magician stood sentry at the door. When I’d packed the box that contained my mother’s ashes in my backpack, put on shoes and my coat, I took one last glance around the dark apartment. I’d wanted to leave it so badly for so long, but not like this.
He took one of my suitcases, my hand, and pulled me down the stairs. Out into the empty street I hardly felt the rain and had to practically run to keep up with his long strides. He did not release his hold on me. We did not speak.
Who are we running from, I wanted to ask.
Why do they want you?
Why did you come back for me?
Instead I kept my head down against the rain and followed the path I’d taken earlier that night in much different circumstances to the el, a lonely glowing artifact in the dark. We climbed the stairs to the platform, the only souls going in either direction. We stood close to the tracks, as close as safety would allow. We said nothing. There was nothing to say.
The Magician watched our backs, spun at every sound. Every few minutes he’d reach out to make sure I was close enough to grab, tension like a bow ready to snap between us.
The subway squealed to a stop on the wet tracks. He put his hand on my back and urged me onto the empty car. We sat together, one suitcase between my feet, my backpack on the seat beside me.
When the train jerked forward and we were on our way, I finally felt the wet and the cold and the exhaustion. I slouched into the plastic bucket seats and let the train toss me about bonelessly as it clattered down the rails.
Without thinking, I leaned into his side to steal as much of his body heat as he’d let me.
Without asking, he took my hands, pale and icy in his grip, and rubbed life and heat into my fingers. He threaded his fingers through mine, raised them to his mouth, and cupping them in both hands, blew warm air across my skin that spread magically up my arms and into my chest to stop the shivering.
“I don’t even know your name.” I lowered my head to his shoulder and he relaxed physically. Even though we were the only ones in the car, I didn’t speak over a whisper. “And I mean your real name, no fake magician names like the Great Lamborghini or the Enigmatic Master Mystic.”
He ran his thumb along the back of my hand. If I wasn’t so tired and scared and sore, I might have felt that touch all over my body. Tomorrow I’d think about that touch. Not tonight.
“The Great Lamborghini?” he murmured against my hair. “Where do these mad thoughts of yours come from? You should be caged and studied.”
“You didn’t actually answer the question though, magician.”
He stayed quiet long enough that I started to drift sleepily between waking and dream, sure he had no intention of answering me. His warmth, the comfort of his body beside mine, was almost too good to be true.
A scratch of a warning whispered in my ear to ruin it. Don’t get too comfortable. This is not yours.
“Eli,” he said finally. “Eli Matteo. I’ve gone by other names, but I prefer this one.”
Eli.
My magician did have a name after all.
“How did you get into my apartment?”
“I am a magician, Serafine.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense. My door was locked. The window is three stories off the street.”
“I could saw you in half too, if you like. I know all kinds of tricks.”
I snorted. “No, thank you.”
He leaned his head back and I could feel his breathing even out. He sounded tired.
“That’s too bad.”
The train car lurched manically on its tracks, robbing us of our stillness. Lightning whiplashed across the sky outside, causing the lights to blink on and off while thunder rattled the sliding doors. Eli stiffened and peeled his fingers from mine, placed my hands in my lap as calmly as possible, and stood slowly. He stepped into the middle of the aisle, legs wide for balance, and looked carefully around our empty car.
“What is it?” I followed his gaze, but there was nothing to see. There was no one else.
Fear made my lungs hurt, made it difficult to stand. That predator feeling came back, that acute, primal knowledge that if I went another step I’d never return.
“Sera…” Eli warned and reached for me just as the train lurched sickeningly in one direction so hard I could feel us leave the tracks, briefly, long enough to feel my stomach bottom out. I stumbled, caught one of the vertical bars for balance to keep from going to my knees. I lost track of Eli as the lights strobed off and on, blinding and nauseating.
The man appeared at the end of the empty car, standing so still as if the lurch of the speeding train did not bother his equilibrium. The strobe effect made it impossible to see his details, the thing that made him more than an apparition.
When the lights flickered out and back on, the apparition seemed closer by a foot, head bent. It flickered again when the lights stayed on, he shifted closer another foot without ever moving his feet. Another foot. Like a bad radio signal. I could almost see through him when he shifted another foot closer.
“Eli…what…”
“Stay behind me,” he ordered and moved to block the aisle. He too seemed unimpeded by the shake and rock of the train car even as it seemed to go faster, impossibly fast, blowing through the next station without slowing.
The apparition flickered out again, left an empty train car and my imagination swearing it couldn’t have been real.
Then it reappeared inches from Eli’s rigid body, caught the right frequency, and snapped its head up.
“Castel!” Eli gasped in the moment the Other cracked his fist into Eli’s sternum and sent the Magician sailing down the length of the car to the opposite end. Impossible. No man had such strength. I knew this even as Eli lay unmoving in a pile on the floor too far away for me to reach.
The Other flicked his gaze from Eli’s body to where I’d been cowering behind the Magician.
He tilted his head, appraised me like a specimen he might buy in a secondhand store.
“Interesting.”
I didn’t see him disappear. He was there and he was beside me, a trick of the flickering lights or a result of my very real fear. He didn’t even let me scream.
A fist wrapped around my throat and yanked me off my feet. Fingers like vices held me aloft, like I weighed nothing, like there was no such thing as gravity. For a moment it was like being underwater, and as the fist tightened on my windpipe it also felt like drowning.
As black splots blotted out the face of the Other, he cracked my face violently into the window and let go.
Light bloomed behind my eyes, colors I didn’t know existed became stars. Rushing like water filled my ears and I fell in and out of my body as I slid wetly down to the plastic seats and rolled uselessly to the dirty floor.
I heard voices. Yelling and laughter. Eli. I moaned when I wanted to cry his name, but nothing made sense. Everything moved in nauseating slow motion. The lights faded in and out and that sensation of drowning fil
led my nostrils and throat until I could feel the water behind my eyes.
Darkness. Brief, beautiful darkness. And silence.
But not long enough.
The noise and light and motion snapped back like a rubber band. I opened my eyes and sucked desperately for air that burned my lungs and stung my eyes.
“Eli,” the Other said. “Is this any way to greet me after all these years?”
“You’ve been very busy lately, Castel.” Eli paced like a caged animal. “I do not approve.”
Castel on the other hand, swaggered to meet the Magician. He was leaner, smaller. Compared to the Magician’s stockier body and sinewy muscles, Castel looked like he might have been made of kindling.
“I assume you mean the late departure of our old friends. Yes, well, a boy’s got to have his hobbies. Better than hiding in disgusting apartments in Europe, drowning myself in liquor and women. But, then, that’s really your purview, not mine. I’ve got plans for you, Eli. It’ll be a show like you’ve never imagined.”
Eli shrugged easily.
“You’ve never had what it takes to impress me. I’m curious what took you so long. I figured I would have been the first stop on your serial killer tour.”
Castel laughed. “Too easy, Eli. You’re too easy. How can you be my audience if you’re dead?”
“What happened to you, Castel? This isn’t you. It was never you.”
Castel snarled. “You know damn well what happened to me. The worst thing happened to me. And I have you to thank for it.”
Eli’s dark gaze faltered and all this guilt poured it of those stormy grey eyes. He deflated. Suddenly seemed smaller than Castel when only moments before that wasn’t the case.
