Annie closed the back door, turning the bolt before heading to the front. The barker currently on duty was Martin, the boy who’d gone to the woods to bring them back a deer for the previous night’s supper. He was leaning against the wheel, trying not to look like boredom was crushing the life from his body.
“I’m going to close up for an hour, check on Delly and get myself something to eat,” she said. “If you’d like to get something for yourself—”
“I’ll see you in an hour,” said Martin, already straightening and starting to leg it away into the twilight.
Annie smiled to herself. Everyone with the show knew that Martin was stepping out with Sophia, and that the two would probably be married in the spring, assuming a baby didn’t force their hands before then. They were a charming pair, and she wished them well. Everyone did, so far as she was aware. There were jealousies and petty betrayals within the show—they were all only human, after all—but love was love, and it was a pleasure to see.
Carefully, she stepped out onto the wagon steps, closing and locking the door behind her. The oddities were weapons, in their own ways, and they were to be treated as such when the circus was stopped: unless she or Adeline were present, the doors were never to be left unlocked. Many of the things she cared for would die if they were released; the nibblers would choke on the air, the corn stalker would freeze in these unfriendly climes. But others would survive, at least long enough to take the slow and the foolish with them to Hell. An unlocked door on a wagon such as this was an invitation to an early grave.
The moon was cold and so was the evening, feeling more like early winter than early fall. Annie drew her shawl tight around her shoulders as she walked toward the boneyard. Roustabouts and barkers waved in her direction and she nodded back, not stopping or slowing. She hadn’t seen her daughter since the show had opened. She was consumed with a sudden strong need to gather Adeline in her arms and cover her face with kisses until she squirmed and tried to break free. Motherhood was a long trek from the coast of childhood to the territory of independence, and while she had traveled some of that distance, she was in no hurry to finish the journey.
The door to their shared wagon was open. The lights were out inside. Annie paused, frowning. Adeline rarely chose to go to sleep early, and when she did, she almost never remembered to extinguish the lights before taking her medicine.
“Delly?” she called, trying to tell herself that the sudden dread circling her heart was only foolishness, brought on by too many hours in the company of her oddities.
Nothing moved inside the wagon.
Annie climbed the steps and peered inside, searching the pooled shadows for a flash of pale hair, or the shape of a little girl curled beneath a coverlet. No such signs presented themselves. Adeline was not there.
Well. That didn’t necessarily mean anything was wrong. Adeline was as strong-willed and stubborn as her mother, and on show days, she would sometimes run from tent to tent for hours at a time, peeking at things she wasn’t meant to see for years yet, taking advantage of the fact that few of the barkers ever wanted to chase the gentle, silent girl away. Barring that, she might be in the mess tent, or playing with the circus orphans out behind the boneyard. There were so many options. There was no cause for concern.
Adeline was not in the mess tent. Half the circus orphans were, and when she asked them if they’d seen her daughter they shook their heads and answered with shy “no”s, their eyes still mainly on their meals. Most of them were wary around parents, as if they had been treated so poorly by their own that they could not trust anyone else’s.
Adeline was not out back. Nor was she in the other show wagons, nor peeking at the dancing girls. Adeline was gone.
Half an hour later, when she had exhausted every option, and a few more beside, Annie felt that there was every cause for concern in the world. She stumbled toward the big tent, heart hammering against her ribs, trying to keep her face composed. Showing distress in front of townies simply wasn’t done. It muddied things and could cut into profits. And while she remembered all those things, it was difficult to find it in herself to care.
Mr. Blackstone would be in the tent. He would be able to tell her that she was being silly, that Adeline’s father had not managed to somehow track them down and snatch her away while Annie was distracted. He would be able to fix this.
The boys who had been in the wagon earlier, prodding Tranquility with sticks, had joined another group of boys and were near the show tent, snickering and kicking something back and forth on the ground in front of them. Annie slowed, eyes widening. Then she charged toward the boys, catching their leader by the ear and yanking.
“Ow!” he howled. “Let me go!”
“Where did you get that?” she demanded, pointing at the object on the ground. It was a hide ball, battered and patched many times, until it was difficult to tell its original color. She gave his ear a vicious twist. “Where?”
“From a little dummy who wanted to play with us,” said one of the other boys, his mouth running ahead of his brains. His eyes went wide when she turned on him, his friend’s ear still clamped between her fingers. “I mean, there was … this girl, she said that we could…”
“Where is she?” demanded Annie.
“We said she could have her ball back if she went in the woods and brought back a pinecone we could kick around!” simpered the third boy. “Please, miss, we didn’t mean any harm!”
Annie gave the lead boy’s ear one more hard tweak, causing him to wail, before letting him go and snatching the ball up off the ground. “All of you, get out of my sight,” she hissed.
“I’m telling!” shouted the first boy, clapping a hand over his injured ear. “I’m telling!”
“Please,” she said. “I look forward to telling your parents what you did to my daughter.”
The boys, who remembered her as the mistress of monsters, exchanged a glance and fled. Annie watched them go, helpless. Then she turned her eyes toward the trees.
Adeline was out there somewhere.
She needed to bring her home.
Chapter Eight
Everything was darkness in the trees. The light from Annie’s lantern cast a pale circle around her, not seeming to penetrate more than a few feet in any direction. If she held it as far from her body as possible, she could almost see through the trees ahead—but if she did that, the darkness closed in around her, enveloping her like a blanket, thick enough to carry a terrifying illusion of weight.
Annie had never been afraid of the dark. Even when she’d lived in Deseret, the plaything of a man who cared little for her needs or desires, the dark had been a friend. In the dark, she could scowl or weep, and no one would see her. Becoming the mistress of oddities had done nothing to change how comfortable she was in shadows. They thrived best in perennial twilight. They needed the dark, and it was on her to give them whatever they needed to stay alive. But here, now …
Darkness was not supposed to have weight. Darkness was not supposed to be cottony thick and smothering, like walking through cobwebs suspended from the sky. Darkness was supposed to be feathery and soft, like the air that it was comprised of. It was absolutely not, under any circumstances, supposed to push.
This darkness pushed. This darkness was doing everything in its power to eject her from the forest, to shove her back into the open—and beyond. It was difficult not to feel as if this darkness would happily push her off the bluff, leaving her to tumble end over end into the bowl where The Clearing waited, surrounded by its protective shell of ordinary night. Somehow, they had carved themselves an exception from this profound dark. In this moment, walking through the trees, she envied them as she had rarely envied anything in her life.
“Adeline,” she called. “Adeline, it’s your mother. Come to my voice, darling. You’re not in any trouble. Only come to me, and we’ll go home.”
There was no response. Despair washed over her, as hot and harsh as it had been on the day when she ha
d realized that her husband had stolen Adeline’s voice with a slip of his scalpel. The child had been born howling as lustily as any babe in Deseret, and now she made no sound, ever, not even when her life was in danger. If Adeline needed her mother—if she had stepped in a rabbit hole or trapped her leg under a branch or, sweet Lord forbid, fallen into a hole—she would have no way of making her dilemma known.
All Annie could do was walk through the wood, desperately looking for her daughter, and pray that her steps would happen to parallel Adeline’s own.
Something glimmered on the forest floor, pale as bone. Annie stopped and bent to brush the pine needles away, revealing a smooth white stone. She picked it up, thoughts of Hansel and Gretel flashing through her mind. Adeline knew the story; she had read it to the girl herself, on the long nights when the circus was in motion from one place to another. If Delly had gone into the wood, she might have marked her way, to be sure that she could go out again.
(And Delly had gone to the wood: of that much she was absolutely sure. The girl was absolutely fearless. She had to be, to survive in a world where strangers waited around every corner, ready to make fun of her for things she had no control over. If those boys had promised her acceptance in exchange for a pinecone—and no doubt tempered their promises with mockery, implying that Delly wasn’t brave enough or strong enough to survive in their woods—then there was no question. She had gone. She wasn’t visiting friends in another wagon or watching a show from some hidden corner that Annie had failed to find. She was in the wood. Once Annie had accepted that, everything else had followed.)
Carefully, Annie set the stone down again. If it was a coincidence, meaning nothing, there was no reason to burden herself. If it was a sign of Adeline leaving a trail for herself, then it could serve as a trail for Annie as well. She could follow the stones out of the darkness, once she had found her little girl.
There was no question of her leaving the wood without her daughter. That was not going to happen. It was not. Protecting Adeline had always and ever been her only purpose.
“Adeline, darling, it’s your mother,” she called, and pressed on into the devouring dark.
Annie and forests were never going to be friends. She was a daughter of Deseret, born to the salt lakes and the high desert. She had been planted in sandy soil, and she had blossomed there, believing herself in the right environment. Some poor souls wilted in the unrelenting heat and the salty desert winds, which stripped the moisture from their skin and left their hair limp and lifeless. Not Annie. She had been a beautiful child, salt-scoured into pearlescent perfection. The heat had set her curls, rather than stealing them away, and the wind had soothed her skin, keeping it free of blemishes. She was still lovely away from the desert, but in the desert, she had been divine.
That was what had attracted the majority of her suitors. Not her beauty—beautiful women were a dime a dozen in the cities and the houses of the wealthy, where the latest tonics were available for the purchase—but the clear connection between that beauty and the world around her. Like the lizards in the rocks or the hawks in the sky, she thrived in the desert. Her children would, of necessity, be equipped to do the same.
Maybe that would have been true had she married a different sort of man. A man who was more willing to sit back and let nature take its course. A man who would never dream of subjecting his pregnant wife to the terrors of his brilliant, broken mind. She had been unwise in her choice of suitors, and everything else had spun from that.
But it had given her Adeline, and it had given her the circus, and if leaving the high desert behind had stolen a certain degree of the luster from her skin or a certain volume of curl from her hair, that was a small and easy price to pay. Annie had never worked to become a beauty. It had simply happened, like dawn, or winter. When something unearned went away, there was no point in mourning it.
The trees pressed in on all sides, their spindly branches snatching at her shawl and hair. The light from her lantern was enough that she had yet to walk face-first into one of them, but it was hard to believe that trees could grow so close together without killing each other. Surely their roots were tangled together, choking one another off. The entire forest had to be on the verge of death at all times. Annie swallowed hard, forcing down her fear, and walked on.
Adeline was not like dawn, or winter, or the desert wind. Adeline was not something that had simply happened, unavoidable and unearned. Adeline was hers, and she had fought for every minute of every day that they had spent together. Out of everything she had accomplished in her life, Adeline was the thing that she was proudest of, because Adeline had nothing to do with her being beautiful, or well-bred, or mannered. Adeline was about blood and sweat and effort. Adeline was mistakes and triumphs and fumbling her way through motherhood one day at a time. She was perfect. She was irreplaceable.
She was going to come home.
“Delly!” called Annie, and paused as the light from her lantern found another small white stone. They were too regular to be accidental; someone was leaving her a trail to follow. Whether it was her daughter or something else in these trees didn’t matter right now. They would see her out again when she needed it, and that was enough. She began to walk faster.
When the trees dropped away and she found herself walking into the open, it was enough of a shock to her system that she stopped dead, one foot already raised. She was trembling. The air still felt heavy, but now it felt empty as well, like some essential, intrinsic element of its character had been stripped away, replaced with nothingness.
At the center of the clearing, at the absolute limit of her lantern’s reach, something gleamed white. It was too large to be one of the little stones: it was the size of a fallen deer, or of a little girl with white-blonde hair.
“Delly?” whispered Annie, throat suddenly dry, tongue feeling too large for her mouth. Even forming that most familiar of words was a trial.
If that is her, if she’s hurt, she needs me, Annie thought, and forced her foot to continue its forward motion, carrying the rest of her with it. That single small motion was enough to break the spell on her. She was walking again, and then she was running, casting caution to the wind as she raced toward the center of the clearing.
Stones turned under her feet, trying to trip her. She somehow turned her fall into more forward momentum, never quite losing her balance, racing onward until she dropped to her knees a few feet away from the white shape, breath rasping in her throat, and struggled to stop herself from screaming.
The white was bone, the cathedral curve of a rib cage stripped almost entirely clean of meat. Beneath that, blending into the dark ground, was only blood, and the glistening colors of flesh and offal, like the painted walls of a circus tent, promising wonders within. They were not wonders she had any desire to see. She pressed a hand against her mouth, keeping the growing whine in her throat contained. It would do her no good. It would do her no good, and so she would not let it out.
The body was not Adeline’s.
It was human: of that, there was no question. The shape had been undeniable even from the trees, even shrouded in shadow. It was a young man, lithe of limb and gold of hair, his neck bent hard to the side and his open eyes staring up at the stars with no comprehension, like a discarded ventriloquist’s dummy. The hand that was closer to her was open, spilling a fan of polished white stones out onto the ground. It was his trail that she had been following, and not Adeline’s at all.
Somehow, that discovery was almost worse than the discovery of the body itself. He wasn’t circus folk: she didn’t recognize anything about him. A town boy, then, or a hunter from some other nearby settlement—were there other nearby settlements?—who had been caught out in the wood after the sun went down and had failed to realize the danger that he was in.
His belly appeared to have been opened by one swipe of some vast clawed paw, so large that it made Tranquility’s saucer feet look dainty. Another swipe had removed his throat, while some inter
nal pressure had cracked his chest. She had watched Tranquility bring down deer, on the rare occasions when the circus had camped far enough from civilization that it had been safe to let her lynx run free. The big cat liked to shove her head up under the ribcage, shattering the sternum from within. That appeared to have happened here. Annie couldn’t imagine how large the creature that killed him would have needed to be to do that to a human chest, which was broader and tougher than a deer’s.
A bear, then, or a catamount. Something vast and terrible and streaked in human gore that stalked these woods even now, feasting where it would, taking what it wanted. Annie looked quickly around, feeling the full force of her exposure. The things that hunted by night had better eyesight than she did. They could be watching her, concealed by the trees, aware of her presence in a way that she would never be aware of theirs.
She scrambled to her feet, pine needles sticking to her hands and the fabric of her skirt. Adeline was out there somewhere, with this predator, this unseen danger. She had to find her daughter.
This boy was dead. She had to tell the town. They were all in danger, and she was no closer to finding her little girl than she had been when she left the circus. She shouldn’t have run off without raising a search party to help her; she saw that now. She should have brought every able-bodied adult the circus had, and however many they could recruit from the town. It was those boys who had sent her daughter into the woods. It was only right that their parents should help her bring Adeline home.
Haltingly, she made her way back toward the trees. She wanted to be back with her people, surrounded by light and hope and the knowledge that she was not the only woman left in the world, more than she had wanted almost anything in her life. The word “almost” was what betrayed her. She wanted nothing if she had to have it without her daughter.
The white stones had been a false trail, lain down by a man who had already died for the crime of trespassing in these trees. Very well. It would still lead her back to the beginning, and then she could begin again, finding Adeline’s trail, letting Adeline be the one to lead her through the dark. She held her lantern close as she made her way through the trees, watching for the gleam of white stones against the dark ground.
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