by Jordan Bell
“It was an accident, Castel, and I’m sorry. I will always be so sorry.”
“Not sorry enough. Never enough.” Castel did something strange then. He placed his fists together at the thumbs in front of him. As he pulled them apart a silver rapier appeared between them, its guard an elaborate, beautifully coiled sweeping cage. “Do you remember this trick? It was one of your favorites.”
Magicians. They were both magicians.
Eli did not blink, but his weakness hardened over and he straightened. “What do you want then, Cas, if not to kill me?”
I peeled my face off the floor with a wet, sucking noise that turned my stomach. The ocean sloshed behind my eyes and I fought my nausea as I pushed as far as my hands and knees. I rocked back and held onto the seat beside me for balance.
Castel ignored Eli’s question. “You would set it on fire, and as the flames spread up the blade to lick at the hilt, you’d swallow the sword whole. If the flames and twists of smoke rising from your mouth weren’t impressive enough, you’d spread your arms and levitate a foot off the ground. The audience would come to their feet and the applause would go on for ten minutes with such thunder the tent would shake.”
There was reverence in his voice.
Eli shrugged again and rolled his sleeves one at a time as if preparing for his show. “It was an excellent trick.”
His distracted indifference only seemed to infuriate the other magician.
“I wonder. If I ran it through you today, would fire pour from your body?” Castel tsked and swept the blade back and forth. “Are you still the dragon or a sad, miserable shadow of your former self? Have I made you fall so far, Eli?”
Before Castel could finish his sentence, Eli pulled a throwing knife from thin air and flung it at the other magician.
Impossibly, he snatched it out of the air an inch from the tip of his nose. Eli narrowed his eyes.
“Your grandstanding bores me. If you want to fight, Castel. Fight.”
Castel flipped the knife in his hand.
“If you insist.”
Castel swiveled and with a flick of his wrist sent the knife at me instead.
10
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“You fight me, Castel!” Eli shouted, but it was too late.
It happened so fast I didn’t feel it. I heard it rip my shirt and skin, the sound of paper tearing, and the knife thunked heavy into the floor.
I opened my mouth but no sound came out.
Oh. My brain stalled. It didn’t hurt at first. I was too busy seeing the stark red line across my skin, welling up quickly and sliding sticky and wet across my skin.
There was nothing in the world comparable to the sight of your insides showing up on the outside.
After the initial shock jump started my brain, the hurt rushed in. I clamped pressure against it and bit down the scream of pain that clawed up my throat. I didn’t think it was more than a graze but it bled so easily.
I forgot about the men in my delirious freak out, at least until Castel howled like a child when Eli struck his sword hand against one of the vertical support bars, the sound of breaking bones ominous and loud.
The rapier was released. It fell to the floor and rolled under a bench.
I tore my eyes from them to yank the knife from the floor. Despite the swishing, swashing waves behind my eyes I scrambled on my hands and knees down the car to take shelter behind the row of plastic seats beside the car door.
Castel created a shower of metal needles and hurled them at Eli, only to have my magician tumble out of the way at the last minute. I covered my head and screamed as they struck the polymer windows above me.
With Eli rolling to his feet several feet away, Castel materialized a ball on the tip of his fingers, the same as the one the juggler had used. Eli reached into the air to pull his next weapon from nothing, but Castel screamed “Enough!” and threw the glowing ball to the floor between them.
In the impossible seconds before the ball touched the ground, I could feel my heart beats slow. Eli closed his eyes and I closed mine.
There was no noise as it detonated, but I could feel the light and heat on my face, behind my eyelids and it left my ears ringing. It ripped me from my grip on one of the support bars and threw me back onto the floor.
I did not open my eyes until the bright white light faded.
Castel fell inches from my face. He looked at me, his mouth twisted into laughter like panic and disbelief. A little boy playing with fireworks, not expecting the explosion and delighted by his own fear. Slate grey eyes met mine, full of mirth and something else I couldn’t name. Didn’t recognize.
Something awful.
The red alarm lights went on but the train did not slow down.
We regarded each other for a long time.
Something about him seemed so familiar.
“Castel!”
Castel broke our stare first in time to see Eli pull throwing knives from the air. Before I could scream and with such impossible speed as to defy time itself, Castel disappeared…
…and reappeared standing over me.
Eli sent the blades whistling through the air.
Castel grabbed me up, his arms around my throat and shoulders, and spun to meet the knives head on with me struggling as his human shield.
Eli’s stormy eyes widened and his outstretched hand went rigid to call the knives back. Instead they veered and embedded themselves one after another into the plastic seats to our right.
My Magician held up his hands in surrender.
I have nothing up my sleeves.
Castel kept one arm cinched across my shoulders and cradled me against his chest. With his other hand he grabbed my face, grasped so hard his fingertips indented my cheeks. I clutched his arm for balance as he walked me awkwardly closer to Eli.
“Not as pretty as your usual toys,” Castel murmured, “but she’ll do.”
“What do you want, Castel? Name it. I’ll trade.”
I met those grey eyes. They searched my face, shifting so quickly between thoughts I couldn’t follow. His brows drew together and for a moment I saw the most pronounced of all his emotions.
Fear. Real fear.
“Pathetic.” Castel shook his head. “You used to have more fight in you. What a sad place for the Great Dragon to end up. Barely a shadow of your former glory. It makes destroying you a little underwhelming, really. You know what I want. Toss it here.”
Eli hesitated, his right hand coming to his chest and I knew.
The key.
“No,” I gasped, though I did not know why it seemed suddenly imperative that this man not take control of it. I couldn’t have explained why I knew it was a trade Eli could not make. “Don’t give it to him. Don’t you dare.”
“Silence, you.” Castel squeezed, strangling off my next words. “You can only have one. The key or the girl. Unlock us or I will snap this pretty white neck, I swear on the carnival I will squeeze every shred of life from her. Every tear.”
Eli faltered, flicked his gaze from mine to Castel’s. He squeezed his fist around the silver key and for a second I thought he’d rip it free.
But then he shook his head a fraction. A half answer. Regret was quickly replaced by bitter self-loathing.
“I cannot.”
My heart constricted. Don’t be afraid, I told myself. Don’t be afraid of this monster.
I was so afraid.
Castel growled through clenched teeth. “So much for your white hat.”
And then the man dropped his hand to my throat, wrapped around my windpipe and cinched. I struggled, clawed at his wrist pathetically as something in his look changed from anger to wicked pleasure.
He dragged me to his mouth and kissed me.
Kissed me like a reptile, wet and glassy. His tongue pushed beyond my lips, forced my mouth impossibly wide.
Overhead bulbs exploded in a shower of sparks and burning gas, plunging us into darkness but for the red alarm lights, and
with it a roar I felt in my bones and up through the squealing metal and gears propelling us to our end.
Castel’s body seized up and released me, a silent scream frozen on his mouth. The slate grey eyes saw nothing, as if he were being frozen. His hand jerkily came to his heart and he clutched it as if he were having a heart attack. I stumbled back a step towards my magician.
Eli’s hard, handsome face had been turned into a terrifying thing of revenge. His rigid, outstretched hand squeezed and Castel made the most horrible, strangling noise as he clawed at his chest, jerking unnaturally, like a puppet on strings. His face turned a shade of blue reserved for dead things.
“Stop,” I reached for Eli, afraid to touch him. “Eli. Stop.”
No response. Both men stared into each other as if they existed somewhere I did not.
Any other man would have been killed, but Castel clung to his survival. His body stood frozen fast, pupils overwhelming his slate irises. But he didn’t die.
Eli broke down first and fell to his knees, weakened and shaking badly.
The circuit snapped and for one morbid moment awareness flooded Castel’s eyes. Powerlessness and betrayal.
“Sera!” Eli yelled and fisted his hands in front of him. He tore them outward and at the same time the subway doors screamed open, sparks flaring in the dark rushing space beyond the train car. The wind howled and sucked at my hair and skin, whistling as we passed another station without slowing. “Now!”
Before I could second guess myself, I shoved Castel from the train.
His body disappeared in a flash. He didn’t scream. I looked to my hands and back to the space where the other magician had stood moments before.
I felt nothing. It should have frightened me at least what I had just done, but all I felt was relief.
“Sera.”
The Magician’s voice was an aching thing I could not deal with. I turned and stumbled for a chair and fell into it, braced an arm across my midsection, and felt all the places in my body that hurt. My face felt slick and warm with my own blood, coagulating now and drying. It clotted in my hair, made my clothes feel stiff. I felt nauseous. I felt like I had drowned and this was the world that lay at the bottom of the ocean.
My magician came to me, knelt before me even though I couldn’t see more than the silhouette of him in the red darkness, but I could feel him. With my free hand I pushed his sweaty hair from his eyes and he stilled when I touched him, then responded by turning his nose into my palm and taking a deep, crushing breath.
“Serafine.”
He sighed my name, clutched my hand to his face as if he were afraid I might pull away. We were in bad shape, the two of us.
“Are you ok?” he said into my wrist, his lips brushed against my pulse. I gripped him tightly.
“Not even a little bit.”
I could feel the train slowing its suicidal trajectory. I wondered if he was doing it, somehow, but I no longer thought it mattered. I could not bring myself to question the impossibility of who he was.
“At least he’s gone now.”
“He’s a magician.” He pulled away from my touch, even as I reached for him. “That would not have killed him.”
I gaped. “I pushed him from a moving train into the side of a subway tunnel!”
“We’re tougher than we look.” He groaned and prodded at his own hurt body. “Castel likely disappeared before he ever hit the ground.”
I shook my head. The train slowed a little more and ahead of us I could see the lights of a station crawling closer.
“Who was he, Eli?”
We were quiet together for a long time with only the sound of the wind and the clattering of metal on tracks between us. It did not seem to be the easiest thing he’d had to do all night, answering this question.
“Castel used to be a magician for the carnival.” He climbed to his feet, but kept his hands in contact with me as he slid into the seat beside me. “We were an act, together, for a very long time.”
“You were friends.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry.”
The train groaned, a broken sound, as it pulled into the empty station.
He covered his face against the bright lights and leaned forward onto his knees.
“Not exactly,” he said, his voice muted and haunted and far, far away. “Castel’s my brother. My twin.”
11
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Eli
The Magician charmed the officer at the edge of the subway station parking lot into searching for his bad guys elsewhere. It was an easy trick, something Eli could do without thinking. After a few drinks. Blindfolded.
But that was before Castel had tasked him almost to ruin. When the cop blinked dumbly into the Magician’s face, there was a second when Eli thought the charm wouldn’t work and he’d have to resort to knocking him out the old fashioned way and making a run for it. But then the officer turned and wandered off towards the station where his comrades were fanning out. As soon as the officer’s attention led him elsewhere, Eli took Sera’s hand and dragged her away into the dark, wet streets.
The wound on her face was ugly, a broken star beside her left eye that wouldn’t stop bleeding no matter how many times he stopped them and held pressure to the wound. She swayed in his arms as if she were dancing to music he couldn’t hear, murmuring about the ocean. Confessing her fear of drowning.
He did not want to admit that all her blood scared him.
Eli had never enjoyed Chicago, but that night he liked it even less. They’d gotten off the train too soon and the distance to the train yards seemed insurmountable. It might as well have been on the other side of the world. He needed to get her help, needed to get both of them within the safety of the gates where Castel couldn’t reach them. Even if Sera didn’t believe he could have survived being pushed off the train, Eli knew better. He knew how he’d survive the fall that would kill a normal man, and if he could do it, Castel could as well, and probably faster. They were the same after all.
Twice they stopped so Sera could get sick. He knelt next to her, captured her wet red curls in his hands and held them away from her face while she retched. It would be later, in the middle of the night when he watched her sleep restlessly in his bed that he’d wonder about this moment. He’d wonder why he held her tightly against his chest, trembling and tearlessly sobbing. He could not remember ever holding someone’s hair back before, could not imagine tolerating the smells or the sounds, both of which were maybe the worst smells and sounds in the world.
Worse, he couldn’t stop thinking that if he did not hold her hair back and comfort her as she got sick on her knees in some back alley, no one else would, and that made him so damn angry.
Amazing that this girl had shown up in his life only hours ago when it felt, oddly, that she’d always been there, waiting patiently to be noticed. Hours ago when she tripped security, he’d been ordered to distract her, waste her time, and then escort her out the back gates after he’d figured out why she was there in the first place. And now he was holding her shoulders as what sounded like a horde of demons tried to escape hell by way of her mouth.
Weirder things had happened in his life, but not much weirder.
It was almost dawn when they reached the train yard. Yellow, like an old bruise, colored the horizon beyond the surrounding copse of trees. It struck the top tents. Home. He’d bedded Russian ballet dancers in Moscow, artists in Paris, and princesses in the East. At the height of his legends he’d performed for the royal family in London, the Tsar before the last fall, and deep within heady, smoke-thick clubs of New York City in the 20s, high on hedonism and the occult.
None of them, no matter their wonders and beauties, their riches and rare treasures, made him ache the way Imaginaire could.
Sera made it only a few steps into the tall, dead grass. She swayed, her lovely green eyes unfocused, one dilated, one not. She inhaled his name, Eli, like a question. Like she couldn’t remember if she got it right or if he’d h
ear her or if he’d care.
Then she went down.
He caught her before she hit the gravel. She was pale anyway, but her cheeks looked bloodless, dark circles, like thumbprints, in the hollows of her eyes. She shook her head as if to clear it, then snuck her arms around his neck.
The Magician pressed his face into her hair, scraped together the last ounce of strength he had in him.
“I’ve got you,” he promised. “I’ve got you, Sera.”
He didn’t believe that any more than it was true. He’d proven that already when he let Castel within a mile of her, when he’d lead Castel’s men to her doorstep. She could have lived anonymously for the rest of her life, never crossing into his brother’s knowledge, until he’d screwed that up.
Eli left her bags, lifted her into his arms, and carried her the rest of the way.
Meer, an effeminate scale-skinned member of the Strange troupe, stood when they approached. That the least intimidating member of the crew had guard duty on the front gate proved how little anyone took Castel’s threat seriously.
He was within shouting distance before Meer even reached for his keys. Fool.
“Open the goddamn gate.”
“Eli what…”
The look he gave the Strange silenced all remaining questions. Meer fumbled with the elaborate lock mechanism; a thing deliberately designed that it could not be picked by even the most skilled thief also meant that it could not be opened quickly. Her body was heavy in his arms and her hold around his neck weakened as she slipped in and out of a fog he was almost certain was caused by a concussion.
She moaned softly and buried her face into his chest. He squeezed her against him.
The lock snapped open and Meer shoved the gate wide enough for Eli to maneuver Sera inside.
“Send Georgianne to my tent. Wake Rook. Wake everyone. Don’t fucking stand there. Run.”
The lizard slid in the dewy wet grass and scampered off into the darkness between tents, caterwauling loud enough to wake the long dead.
Usually dawn at Imaginiere was Eli’s favorite time, after the crowds had gone and there was only the faint scent of popcorn and pink cotton candy on the air. He could walk the paths between tents and spend hours hiding on the top tier of the harlequin carousel working through the physics of a new trick. Alone. It was the thing he missed most when the carnival went dark and they scattered. More than his stage. More than the applause.
