She left the tent in a daze, his hand on her arm. He bent to kiss her forehead and then slipped away, leaving her alone in the icy wind, save for the handful of dark forms moving soundlessly between the tents.
* * *
The next day was a kaleidoscope of colour and form. With Rideau’s blood in her system, everything was somehow magnified. Bella’s appetite had faded. She had to force down her bran flakes and orange juice, and they churned in her stomach.
Boris was attentive and rested at their practice, anxious to make amends, but Bella no longer cared. This was her last day with Circus Renaldi. After tonight, she would leave this existence behind. The last swing, the last time she’d hear Carmen echoing from the tent walls, the last time she would have to endure Boris’ pungent smell as his calloused hands gripped hers. The puncture wounds throbbed under the hidden bandage on her neck – but it was a pleasant throb, a throb of pleasure, not of pain.
Franco approached her backstage as she wiped the chalk off of her hands with a damp rag. “You look different today, Bella,” he said. “Are you all right?”
She pulled him over towards the side of the tent, away from the other performers. “I’m going to the Cirque,” she whispered. “I auditioned last night, and they offered me a job.”
“Bella, that’s amazing!” he said in a low voice. “Do they have room for me?”
She took a breath, about to tell him the price of admission. That after tonight, she would never see the sun again. That she might soon be forced to take a life in order for her own to continue. That she had no idea what the circus consisted of – or even what she would be paid. For a second, the spell of the vampire’s blood wavered, and she felt a deep unease.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
He sensed her hesitation; the hurt flashed in his eyes.
“It’s complicated,” she said, not sure what else to say. She thought of the feel of the silk against her body, the heat of Rideau’s gaze. It might be crazy to run away to the circus, but she couldn’t think of anything she wanted more. Besides, she’d already done it once, hadn’t she?
“I understand,” he said, although it was obvious he didn’t understand at all. She watched him retreat, shoulders slumped in his red-and-white silk costume, and felt her heart contract a little.
Then she shrugged it off and went back to her trailer to take off her costume for the last time.
* * *
The taxi arrived an hour before the night-time performance was to begin at Circus Renaldi. The driver helped as she loaded her trunks. She ignored the burning gazes of her former co-workers, but knew the news would be all over the lot within minutes. Bella felt a stab of guilt – she would be leaving Boris without a partner. And as for Franco – she’d tucked a note under the door of his trailer, and would try to get back to see him before she left town. She knew it would hurt him, but she did not want his soul on her head. As for her own . . .
Her excitement grew as they crossed town. The vampire blood in her veins had dwindled as the day progressed, but the street lights still had an unusual shimmering quality, seeming to dance beyond the clouded windows of the cab.
It wasn’t long before the blue tent of the Cirque de la Nuit came into sight, glowing blue and silver under the spotlights, the parking lot lined with cars.
“Please wait here for a moment,” she said when the driver let her out at the front gate. “I need to see where to take my things.”
There were people in the lot, but their numbers were few, the women clad in expensive furs, the men in dark overcoats, their polished shoes gleaming. Among them were the Cirque’s staff members – hunters in a swarm of prey, Bella realized.
She walked up to the nearest vampire, a tall man, cheeks tinged with pink – from the cold, or from blood? – and touched his arm.
He whirled around with a speed that startled her.
“I’m looking for Mr Rideau,” she said. “I’m a new performer.”
The vampire raked his eyes over her, a cold, appraising glance. “Go back to where the trailers are,” he said. “Someone will tell you where to go.”
“Thank you,” Bella said, and hurried off past the big top to the knot of silver trailers in the back of the lot. Anticipation thrummed through her; she could not wait to see Rideau again. Could not wait to taste his blood, to feel that intense bond yet again . . .
But there was no one there.
Frustrated, she turned to go back to the front gate, to ask again. Then she heard a noise, a scuffle, and what sounded like a moan.
It was coming from one of the trailers.
She hurried over to it, mouth open to enquire about Rideau, and stopped suddenly.
A man and woman stood, locked in what appeared to be a passionate embrace. Only they weren’t kissing. His mouth was attached to her neck.
The man’s back was to Bella. All she could see was the woman, her fur-clad arms draped over the man’s broad back. Her face was pale in the silvery moonlight, her head lolling at an unnatural angle. A brief moan escaped her glossy lips. She was beautiful, Bella saw, with high cheekbones and a small, straight nose. Then her mouth fell open, her eyelids fluttered, and her body went limp.
The man bent over her a moment longer, holding her tight. Then he raised his head and let her go. As Bella stared, the beautiful woman crumpled to the cold, hard ground. The man who had held her so tightly now stepped away from her as if in disgust, pushing her away with the tip of his shoe.
Bella stood frozen for a moment, then started to turn. She scuttled backwards, pressing her body against the side of the trailer, fighting to still her ragged breathing. A moment later, the man walked past her, straightening his lapels. She caught a glimpse of his face in profile.
It was Rideau.
She waited until he had passed, striding towards the big top, and then slid around the trailer. The woman was dead, her large eyes staring sightlessly at the moon, her fur coat lying open, her neck smeared with blood.
Blindly, Bella turned and ran, her only thought to get back to the cab, to get away from the Cirque de la Nuit as fast as possible. She passed the trailers, passed the blue and silver glowing tent, passed the women in furs and greatcoats. She had almost reached the front gate when a hand grasped her arm, pulling her back.
“Bella.”
He was there, filling her field of vision, his eyes dark with lust.
“No,” she said, struggling to go. “I can’t.”
He bent down and kissed her then. She could taste the woman’s blood on her lips and, despite the horror of what she’d just seen, found herself hungering for more. Then he was drawing her away from the crowd, into a dark corner, away from the waiting taxi, peeling back the scarf from her throat, lowering his lips to her neck . . .
She was lost again, drowning in the pull of him, the feel of his mouth on hers. When he tore his own skin again, she locked her mouth to the gash, and drank until she could drink no more.
The silks clung to her like a lover – like the eyes of Matthieu, who stood, as always, just beside the curtain, watching her every move, devouring her with his dark eyes. The eyes of the audience followed her too. She had found her target already. He was in the third row back, muscled shoulders, pale blue irises, a shock of blond hair like corn. She dropped to the mats, preened for the audience. A standing ovation again. She locked eyes with the blond young man for just long enough before strutting off the stage.
She found him right where she expected to, lingering by the side of the tent, hoping to catch even a glimpse of the woman who had seduced him as she hung between the silks. Bella smiled, beckoned him to follow her. She let her hips sway as she led him deep into the forest of trailers behind the big top. She could hear his breathing, feel his desire. When she could stand it no more, she turned, arms open in submission, and waited for him to come to her.
He was in her arms in a second, smelling of soap and sweat and young, virile male. She savoured the feel of him for a moment,
the urgency of his mouth against hers, then traced her tongue along his neck, feeling for the throb of his pulse, quickened by her presence. Then, slowly, slowly, she let her teeth penetrate the skin of his neck, let his blood fill her mouth, let the ecstasy wash over her. He gasped slightly, but did not pull away as she sucked, locking him tight in her arms, the most intimate embrace, until finally he was drained.
She stepped back, and his body dropped to the ground – empty, of no use to her, or to anyone. A soft laugh sounded behind her. It was Matthieu. He was waiting for her.
“Bella,” he said, opening his arms. She went to him then, kissed him, the blood mingling on their lips. And together, arms entwined, they walked into the night.
Perdition
Caitlin Kittredge
From the personal files of Mr James Priestly, being a record of the events that occurred at Perdition, Arizona, on or about May 18 1888.
I beg you not to call me mad. I know that what I have set down here may seem like fancy, or the whiskey ravings of a drunk.
I was that in the spring of 1888. I admit it freely. But what I saw in that town, that mean dusty town hunched against the desert like a starving coyote waiting for a beast to die – that is the honest, clear and sober truth, best as I can recollect it these many years gone.
I was twenty-one years old that spring, going no particular direction but West and having been ejected from every respectable town along my route, I came to find myself in Perdition. A more aptly named township there never was, for it was the definition of Hell – no water, barely any whiskey, suspicious eyes and full up with the worst scum that Arizona Territory had to offer.
One of them myself, with three bodies to my credit through Kansas and Texas, I hunkered in and resolved to move on as quickly as I could gamble my way to a fresh horse.
The saloon didn’t have a name, or if it did, the sign was long weathered away by the ever-moving dust of the desert, which stripped paint and skin with equal fastness, crept into every crevice and compounded my misery by finding its way to the bottom of my glass. The man I sat down to gamble with had nearly white eyes – I thought at first that he was blind and this would be a neat and profitable game indeed. But he looked at me, and he did not blink when he shoved the dog-eared deck in my direction.
“Cut the cards.”
I did as he bid, and his hand came out fast, like a rattlesnake, and took them back. It was all bones, that hand, but it didn’t shake. The man was just a bag of skin, but he didn’t appear ill or malformed in any way as he dealt and threw his ante onto the table. I had the coins in my hand to return when the door of the nameless place swung open and a woman appeared.
She wore breeches, like a man, with a man’s jacket over a woman’s shirt. Her hair was falling out of its pins and streaked over with dust, but I judged it to be darker underneath. She wasn’t pretty, too old for that, with too many sun lines wrought into her face, but she was striking. That’s a word my mother used often – striking – and I’d always taken it, as a boy, to mean something more than merely pretty.
The woman arrested me with her square, open face, sure enough, but the Winchester rifle in her hands caught my eye a deal more.
My poker partner stopped moving, and breathing, as she stalked through the place and came to my shoulder. She said to the man, “You look like my John.”
And then she shot him.
Arizona Territory,
1888
Kate Elder’s horse died twenty miles from Perdition. The animal had been foaming and stumbling for at least ten more, so Kate didn’t fault it much. Water was scarce, and if she hadn’t filled her canteen when she left Prescott, she’d be in the same boat as the flea-bitten roan.
There should be water. Even in the desert, there’s water if you know where to look. John had taught her that. He was an adaptable creature, John was, and he knew the desert as well as he knew the swamps and backwoods at home.
Known. John had known the desert. Kate didn’t catch herself clinging to the dead, never had. Even calling him “John” inside her head instead of his nickname was a way of blocking him out, putting him in the past where he belonged.
She couldn’t see the town when she picked up her pack and started walking. The Winchester seven-shot thumped against the back of her thigh, counting off steps and feet and miles. Perdition hunched at the base of a mesa, she knew that. Always in the shadow of the rocks, as the sun set behind it.
The sky was red, and she hadn’t gone but six or seven miles at most. Kate tucked her jacket around her and kept walking. There would be no predators in this desert at night. Not when they could smell what spread its foulness and filth out from the little smear of dust road and shanty-house that made up Perdition.
John had called these places Death’s acre, the spaces around the night creatures that no man, wildcat or coyote ever wanted to encounter. He did have a colourful way of putting things, John. He liked words, he liked names. Liked to hear himself talk.
“Why do they call you ‘Big-Nose Kate’?” he asked the first time they spoke.
“The same reason they call you ‘Doc’, I suppose,” she’d answered. “To differ you from all the other sawbones knocking around out there.”
“I’m a dentist, truly,” he said, and he smiled. Kate would learn later this wasn’t a common occurrence, unless he’d had a few glasses of whiskey. “Got any molars troubling you? Bicuspids overstepping their bounds?”
“Don’t mind him,” said Doc’s big, slow-spoken friend Wyatt. “He’s drunk.”
“So tell me, Kate with the prominent proboscis,” Doc said. “How many other Kates are there?”
She’d blushed, which wasn’t something she made a habit of. Blushing just gave men the wrong idea in a town like Griffin, tucked away in rough-and-tumble cattle-droving Texas. “Truthfully, Mr Holliday, there’s just me.”
Kate blew down the seams of her gloves, warming her hands. You wouldn’t think a desert would get a chill at night. You wouldn’t think a woman who should be well past roaming around in one would be out in it, either, but here she was, nearly forty years old and trudging through the brush towards what would probably be the last bad idea she’d ever get a chance to indulge herself with.
If only John hadn’t called her here. If only he’d been strong in the end.
But John wasn’t anything. John was dead.
And Kate Elder had eleven more miles to walk.
Fort Griffin, Texas
1877
Kate sees him first, across a room full of drovers who smell like dust and cowhide. He is dressed in dove grey and dealing faro with a concentration most men bring only to fighting or fornicating.
She is not in Exeley’s Beer Hall to meet a man. She is in this mean, dirt-floored little place to seek employment. Exeley doesn’t hire sporting women, but he does hire honest workers. At least, that’s what the word at the train station was. Kate isn’t proud. Not any more. She’ll sweep and clean glasses, boil wash and do mending. She’ll empty spittoons and carry the leaden trays of beer and whiskey bottles to and from the gambling tables.
She’s stronger than most women her size, and she’s got a good head. She can handle the drunken cowboys pressing in around her as if they were part of the herds they drive up to Kansas on the Chisholm Trail, handle them just fine.
Kate threads her way towards the barkeeper, the bald-pated Exeley.
She doesn’t make it. A drover loops his arm like a lasso around her waist, pulls her against him so she can smell his sweat now, too. “And how much are you?” Cheap mash breathes into her face, chokes her nose and mouth.
Kate puts her hands on his barrel chest and shoves. “I’m not.”
The drover’s rheumy grin widens. “You’re free? Must be my lucky day.”
Kate feels like she’s drowning in his stink and his heat. She can’t get free. She can’t lift up her leg and deliver a knee to where it’d hurt. She can barely breathe as his trail-hardened arm clamps down on her ribc
age, his other hand pawing at her only decent dress.
Through the cacophony of hoots and shouts, a voice comes, flat and hard as a thunderclap.
“Why don’t you leave the lady alone?”
Her head snaps, nearly catching the drover on the chin. He’s staring. All of his friends are staring. Kate would know the face anyway, from the tintypes they sold in Dodge City and the penny novels hawked at every stop between Dodge and Fort Griffin. The down-turned moustache, the eyes that could fell you like a fist, the tall wide forehead and the nose crooked from breaking and resetting and breaking again.
Wyatt Earp has just saved her skin.
The drover lets go of her like her flesh is hot iron. “Sorry.”
“Sorry, what?” Earp’s eyebrows draw together like a storm front. The drover’s eyes flick between Kate and the Marshal as his fear claws its way through his drunken stupor.
“Sorry, ma’am, for any offence I may have caused you.”
“That’s better.” Earp waves him to the door. “Go on, get out.”
Wyatt sits her in an empty seat at the faro table, asks her if she wants a drink. Kate asks for whiskey.
The faro dealer smiles. “A woman after my own heart.” In all the places where Earp is broad and imposing as the landscape beyond the doors of Exeley’s, the faro dealer is slight and quicksilver. Kate looks back at Earp, watches the crowd part as he walks through it.
“He’s married, you know.” The faro dealer collects his cards and his money and shuffles for a new hand. He doesn’t watch his fingers. He’s watching her.
Kate feels red sneaking up her neck. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“I only tell you because his wife’s a mean one. They’re man and woman in every way but legal, and that just makes her meaner. And you’re too pretty to get a laudanum bottle in the head.”
Laughter bubbles out of her throat, that this man should not only presume so much but be telling tales about the great Marshal Earp in the same breath. The faro dealer taps the deck into shape. “See, I was right. Much too pretty.”
Love Bites UK (Mammoth Book Of Vampire Romance2) Page 11
