“Don’t,” I say. I want to. I want to fall into his arms and I want to trust him. I want all of this to go away, to forget it all because I was happier not knowing. But I can’t. I can’t go back to that. I can’t keep hiding, even though I wish I could.
“Trust me,” he says. I feel the first brush of magic easing the pain away…
“I said don’t!” I shove him aside and push myself up to standing. The fire in my head is raging and screaming and I want to rage and scream as well, I want to tear this all apart.
“You lied to me,” I growl, backing against the trailer like a cornered dog. “You lied to me all along. I fought for you. I wanted you, and you fucking lied!”
He’s standing now, hands raised in defeat. I expect someone to come around the corner and see what’s wrong, for someone to see what all the shouting’s about, but no one does. It’s just me and him and the inevitable breakdown.
“You knew all along,” I say. “You knew everything about me — my past, my contract — hell, you know more about me than even I do.”
His eyes are wide and his hands are dropping, and I know I’m hitting my mark, so I dig deeper. There’s too much pain in me, too much for one person. In that moment, I want nothing more than for him to feel it as well.
“How can you live with yourself?” I whisper. “Three hundred years of fucking everyone over, messing with their minds. How many people have you manipulated like that? How many people have you forced into loving you?”
And I’m sick with myself for saying it, but I can’t help it. I was fine knowing I’d run from my past, was fine thinking Mab knew more than I did. But I’m not okay with this, with knowing that Kingston had changed everything around in my head and had made me forget that he’d done it in the first place.
Worse, I hate knowing that I was most likely right. How could I trust my feelings for him when he had been playing in my head? How could I trust anything anymore? I close my eyes and squeeze my hands against my temples. The ringing won’t stop. I wish I could force it into him, make him see how it felt.
“I had no choice,” he whispers. His words barely cut through the din in my head. “You asked Mab to erase it, all of it. You signed the contract. I had to do it.”
“You didn’t have to lie about it.”
“About what?”
I want to sink into the side of the trailer, want to disappear entirely. The rage in my head is dying down, sinking back below the surface, but the ache is still there. I’m tired, so tired, and this feels like a fight I’ll never win.
“Liking me,” I manage.
There’s a long pause before he speaks.
“You think I lied about that?”
I don’t respond, don’t even move. The images in my head are still warring for control, still trying to piece themselves back into place.
That’s when I feel his hand on the side of my face. His touch is cool, tingling. It melts the pain away, even though I know he isn’t using any magic. It takes everything I have not to reach out and touch him as well, not to pull him close and lose myself in that touch. The rage allows me to keep that one small dignity intact.
“You’re right,” he says. My heart knots. He lied. He lied about everything. No one could love you. No one would want you to stay.
“I told you I didn’t need someone,” he continues. His hand traces my jaw and I want to break apart. “I played with you because you were cute and funny. But you fought for me when no one else would. No one does that around here.” He laughs softly to himself. I feel like I’m a yo-yo. Just that sad little laugh makes me want to hold him, even if it is all a lie, even if he was just using me. In the middle of all this crashing pain, the idea of comfort is intoxicating. I force the feelings down as he continues.
“You were my savior. When Senchan had me, you tried to save me when everyone else stood and watched the show. And then I had to erase that from your mind, too.” He sighs. “Do you know what that feels like? Knowing you tried to save my life and would never remember? That I’d never be able to repay you because you wouldn’t know of my debt?”
I can’t open my eyes. I know there are tears straining to come through but I won’t let it happen. I won’t. This is just a game, too. I did remember, and this is how you repaid me. I reach up and take his wrist, gently, and draw it away from my face. I don’t want to — no way in hell do I want to — but I refuse to be toyed with. I’m done being the fool.
“How do I know?” I whisper. “How do I know this isn’t another lie? How do I know this isn’t because you need me to do something for you?”
He sighs.
“I do need you,” he finally says. His words break apart the shell around me. “But not like that.”
Then his hands are once more on my face and I open my eyes to see his lips inches from mine. His brown eyes are like coffee, like mocha, and in that one glance, I know that he’s telling the truth. I can see the hurt and desire, and I reach up and thread my fingers through his long black hair. He closes his eyes and smiles and then his lips are on mine. The world melts away.
His kiss is soft and hard and tastes like cinnamon and need. His hand slides behind my head and my hands are reaching around his neck and I’m kissing back as all the fury and fear turns into something else, some great passion I can’t control. I pull him close and he leans in and every inch of my body is pulsing with heat and electricity and desire. The beast inside of me is roaring for a different reason. I could fall into this fire and burn forever.
“No.”
The word, that one word, and he tenses up. We both freeze. Then he pushes me away, wipes a hand across his mouth like that could make her unsee everything.
“Lilith,” he says.
But it’s not just Lilith. Penelope stands behind her, her hands on Lilith’s shoulders. Her expression is impossible to read, but Lilith’s is plain — rage and hurt. She looks at me, and I can’t help but flinch, remembering the fire that flew from her fingertips only nights before.
“You,” she says. “You’re as bad Senchan. You try to take him. You cannot take him. I love him.”
I take a deep breath and wait for the flames to come. I wait for her to kill me, to burn the whole world down. But she doesn’t. Her head drops when she’s done talking and then she runs off, hiding somewhere out of sight.
“Well,” Penelope says. “That was...unexpected.”
Kingston stands and takes a half step forward.
“You knew,” Kingston says. “You knew how she felt about me. Why would you do that to her?”
“I was merely bringing her back to Mab,” Penelope says, holding her hands up in defense. “She had run off. Again.” She turns her gaze to me. “And I have enough on my hands keeping this one out of trouble. Which is clearly not working.”
“You’re a heartless bitch,” Kingston says. Then he runs off in the direction Lilith went, calling her name.
Penelope looks at me.
“You were supposed to be practicing,” she says.
“I was.”
She sighs. “You mustn’t let your emotions get the best of you,” she says. “In this world, show any sign of weakness, and it will be turned against you.”
“What are you talking about?”
She smiles one of her sad, lost smiles. “Let’s just say, for people like you and me, love, freedom, happiness…well, unless we’re very specific from the beginning, they just aren’t in the contract.”
She turns and begins walking away. But as she goes, I catch her mumble something. It sounds like for now.
I close my eyes and slide against the trailer. I can still taste Kingston’s kiss on my lips, can still feel the tingle of his fingers in my pulse. Underneath it, though, is an anticipation, a sort of fear. The way Mab paused, the catch in her words. The sudden rage. Someone’s been messing with my contract.
Someone is targeting me.
EPISODE FIVE
Chapter Sixteen: Monster
It’s dinner
time when Kingston comes and finds me again.
I’m in my trailer, reading a book and trying not to think of everything that happened that afternoon, which isn’t really working because now that I know my memory’s been tampered with, that’s all I can think about. How much did Kingston hide from me, and why the hell did I want it hidden in the first place? Why the false memories? Why the grand illusion? And, perhaps most importantly, what landed me here to begin with? I try to think back and am met with only haze and grey and patchwork moments that could have been pulled from anyone’s life: walking to school, watching movies with friends whose names I can’t remember, eating dinner with my mom whose voice I can’t hear. Nothing remarkable. Nothing that would put blood on my hands and visions in my head. Nothing spectacular. What was I?
The worst part was, every time I closed my eyes, those weren’t the only thoughts coursing through my mind. Every blink, every moment of darkness, and I felt his lips on mine, tasted the cinnamon of his tongue and felt the heat of his breath. Every blink, and I was back, crushed against his chest. Every blink, and I wished it would have lasted longer.
But that was the trouble. It was just a moment. Moments were easy to erase or change. How long would he let me keep this before he turned around and blanked it out? A large part of me didn’t want to trust him, wanted to be pissed at him for toying with my past. But the rest of me knew. I had asked for that. I’d signed the contract. It was the things I hadn’t asked for that sent me reeling, the things he could take away at any moment. How long did I have before he got tired of me and made me believe I was tired of him? I kept closing my eyes, reliving the moment over and over, waiting for the inevitable shoe to drop.
So when Kingston knocks and lets himself in, it’s almost a relief, almost like stepping up to the executioner’s block. I know what he’s going to say. And I’m not going to wait around for it.
“Kingston, listen,” I say, “about today — ”
“Not now,” he says, walking past where I’m sitting on the bed to stare out the window. Then he steps back and closes the curtain. “They’re back.” There’s panic in his voice that makes my skin go cold. Everything I wanted to say drains in an instant.
“Who?”
“The troupe,” he says. It’s almost a relief. We’re not under attack by the Summer Court or anything horrible. Just the troupe back from the watering hole.
“Oh.”
He must note my relief, because his hands clench at his sides and when he speaks, there’s more anger than before.
“No, not oh. They’re back. But Melody’s not with them.”
“Maybe she got lucky?” I start, but this clearly isn’t the time for jokes. “Come on, Kingston, she’s not a kid.”
“No, she’s not. She knows not to leave the troupe.” He’s pacing back and forth. “This is bad, this is really, really bad.”
“Why? She can take care of herself.”
Then he stops and takes a deep breath. “If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you,” he whispers. He turns to face me.
“Melody’s not like us. Remember when I said she was human? Well, it’s more than that. She doesn’t have the same immortality clause that we do, and she’s only twenty-two. Like, actually twenty-two. And without her, we’re all fucked.”
“What are you talking about?” I say.
“I can’t explain,” Kingston says. “Contractual obligation.” He runs his hands around his neck, as though the very thought of telling me is choking him — a feeling I know all too well.
“So let’s go find her,” I say.
“We can’t,” he says. “We have no idea where she is and no way to find out. And if we tell Mab, she’ll go after her herself.”
He slouches down on the chair.
“Would you just tell me what’s going on?” I say. “Why is it a bad thing if Mab looks for her?”
He makes a noise that sounds like gagging and shakes his head, looking up at me with a sad grin.
“Damn these contracts,” he says. “Don’t you see? This is precisely what they want.”
“Who?” I’m getting tired of this cat and mouse game of information.
“The Summer Court. They took her. They must have. I can’t tell you why, but I know they did. And you’re one of the few who understands the danger.”
“I do?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he says. “You saw it. You saw Lilith on the field, you saw her kill Senchan and the other Summer Fey. One of them must have escaped and told their king. They know about Lilith. They know what she is. The Blood Autumn Treaty is broken. Now, we’re at war.”
“Why would they care about Lilith? She’s just…” But I can’t finish the sentence because she’s clearly not just a little girl.
“Do you remember Sheena?” he asks.
I nod. It’s hard to forget watching a purple-haired girl turn into a floating orb of light.
“Lilith’s…Lilith’s like that. Kind of.”
“She’s a Summer Faerie?”
He shakes his head.
“No. Different. But the Summer Court…they want her dead. And if they know she’s here, they’ll kill everyone around her ’til she’s gone. That’s why they took Mel. Why Mab can’t go. That’s what they want — they want us to be weak.”
There’s no clashing outside, no fires or screams. The only noise is the rest of the troupe laughing, the sound of music as the chefs finish up the evening meal. It doesn’t sound like war.
“Now do you understand? If Mab leaves, we’re more defenseless than…” He coughs. “Guess I’ll just leave it at that. Mab can’t know. But the barriers between this world and Faerie are weakest at dusk. If we don’t get Mel back before then, we’re dead. The Summer Fey will kill us all.”
“So what do we do?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Mab will find out soon enough, but…there’s something we’re not getting. There’s something missing.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighs and runs his hands through his hair again.
“We’ve been set up,” he says. “The deaths, the tent, all of it. They weren’t just warnings, they were trying to weaken us. But that should be impossible. Contractually, we can’t die. We can’t be weakened.”
“That’s it,” I say. Mab’s reaction is suddenly making sense, the widened eyes and accusing stare. “The contracts.”
“What?”
I stand up and walk past him, pacing because it feels like the right thing to do.
“Before we…before I saw you, Mab was showing me my contract. She got pissed off and yelled at me for something. Said I’d changed it. I hadn’t thought about it ’til now — ”
Kingston stops me.
“You changed your contract? How?”
“I didn’t,” I say. “But she thinks I did.”
Kingston’s nodding, now. “That makes sense.” He chews the inside of his lips as he thinks. “Someone’s been changing the contracts. Little changes at first, so we wouldn’t notice. An injury here, an accident there.”
He snaps his fingers, a small spark igniting and burning out.
“That’s it. That’s how people are dying. Someone’s changing the contracts to make them vulnerable. It all makes sense.”
“But how?” I say. “The contracts are in Mab’s trailer. She’d never let anyone touch them, let alone rewrite them.”
Kingston’s face darkens.
“Of course,” he whispers. He pushes past me and opens the door, but I grab his arm before he can pull it open.
“What?” I ask.
“Who does Mab trust above all others?” he says. “Who’s been with her the longest?”
Realization dawns.
“Penelope,” I whisper. The woman chained here for life.
He nods.
“Bingo. That’s why she placed you under Penelope’s care. It wasn’t so she could watch after you, it was so you’d keep an eye on her.” He pulls open the door. “So let’s go find
that mer-bitch and make her talk.”
We jog to Penelope’s trailer, past the troupe now standing in line for dinner. We don’t knock, just pull open her door and rush inside.
She’s sitting in front of her mirror, brushing her long red hair and staring into the placid depths of glass. She doesn’t even start when we burst in, just keeps brushing her hair.
“If you are looking for a new place to fornicate, I suggest picking a trailer that is unoccupied,” she says.
“You have one minute to talk before I burn you to a fucking crisp,” Kingston says. As if to accentuate the point, the air around his palms shivers with heat.
“It is quite rude to enter someone’s trailer without knocking,” Penelope says, as though she’s oblivious to the fact that Kingston’s on the edge of burning the whole trailer down. “And even more rude to threaten their life. Tell me, to what should I be confessing?”
She watches us from the reflection in the mirror. The heat from Kingston grows and I step a little to the side.
“Don’t play dumb,” Kingston says. “I know you’ve spent your life pretending to be a daft bitch, but I’m on to you now. You’ve been changing our contracts. You’re the reason everyone’s dying.”
“That, my dear, is an awfully strong accusation.” She draws the brush through her hair one more time, then sets it down. “Do you have any proof?”
Kingston opens his mouth, then closes it.
“Precisely,” Penelope says. She reaches for a tube of lipstick and glides it over her lips, making the perfect pucker in her mirror. “I suggest you come back when you have more concrete evidence. Or evidence of any kind, for that matter. ” She sets down the tube and turns around in her chair. The fire in Kingston’s hands is simmering, but I can tell he feels precisely as I do; there’s no doubt that Penelope did this. If anyone in the entire troupe would be looking for a way out, it would be her — it explained her reaction to seeing Senchan in the field, her talk of finding an exit clause. But who would believe it? She was just so perfect.
She stands and walks over to us.
“If you don’t mind,” she says. I don’t step aside. I want to punch her.
The Immortal Circus (Cirque des Immortels) Page 17
