Fortune

by Aurelia T. Evans

  She covered her nose as she clambered over the dumpster cover. She slipped on the incline but managed to keep her balance.

  The jump over the iron fence spikes was only a foot. Maya leaped, legs stretching like a gazelle. She made it over the spikes without trouble.

  Then something invisible threw her back. With speed and force greater than her jump, she flew head over heels over the dumpsters and fell onto her side in the rough grass. Rocks ripped into her arm. She cried out through her gasps.

  Her skin tingled near her feet and hands. Maya looked down, expecting to see that she had fallen—no, been flung—into an anthill, because that would totally be her luck. She didn’t see anything, but the feeling continued, an unbearable itching that spread up her arms and legs as though she was being swarmed by ants.

  It was impossible. There was nothing on her, yet something was happening to her.

  Right now she couldn’t care less about logic, though, because she was covered with invisible ants, even on her face and her lips and inside her mouth. She tried swiping them off, slapping her arms and thighs and face. Nothing deterred them.

  Then they began to bite.

  She thought her screams would bring the hounds of hell down on her head—or at least some faire security. But as the little pinpricks of fire all over her body, under her clothes and under her skin intensified, no one came.

  Until the hand on her bare shoulder, where her thrashing had pushed her shirt away. His skin was cool against her fever. From his touch, the coolness spread. The fire ant bites dissipated like ash.

  She frantically brushed at her arms again as her wits returned to her, but her skin was clear—no inflammation, no insects, just her limbs as they had been before, nothing wrong except the scrapes from her fall and from the ropes. When she looked around her, she saw that the morning light was about the same. So she couldn’t have been writhing and screaming on the ground long, although it had seemed like forever.

  She didn’t want to, but it happened anyway. She tucked her legs up, buried her face in her skirts and burst into tears.

  That soothing hand stroked her back as sobs wracked her body and ripped through her already abused throat with all the gentleness of sandpaper. Was this what the freak—the real freak—wanted from her? To break her down so he could comfort her, gain her compliance? Bastard had something else coming to him, as soon as she could get a hold of herself again.

  She was just so tired.

  “I told you you couldn’t leave,” Bell said. “I trust there will be no repetition of this foolishness.”

  Maya wiped her damp face on her filthy skirt, which probably made her look like a street urchin or a peasant. At least she fit in with the local color. When she was as decent as she was ever going to be, she nodded.

  “Okay. Stand up. You’re perfectly able. The spells are not meant to irreparably harm.”

  “I told you not to touch me,” Maya said, wrenching her shoulder away from him when she’d managed to get to her feet.

  “If I hadn’t, the fire would still be in your skin,” Bell replied. “Would you like me to refrain from touching you again in the future under similar circumstances?”

  Maya held her arms around her chest, clutching her upper arms, although she wasn’t cold. She avoided his gaze. There was no one else around them, no delayed response to her screams. Just the forest, the tan-colored tents, the faux-medieval signs pointing to the various attractions and to remind guests that only adults over eighteen could stay after eight.

  “Will you try anything like that again?” Bell asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I think that would be very wise. If you do anything else that threatens to expose us, it will not be I who chastises you,” Bell said.

  He began to walk away. When she didn’t follow, he hesitated, but he didn’t turn around. “Follow me, Maya. I will not wait for your hysterics to pass. Those are not the conditions of the wish. You are to follow me now.”

  “You’re speaking English, but I feel like I need subtitles,” Maya said. “I don’t understand a thing you’re saying.”

  “I think you will understand better if you see,” Bell replied. “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.”

  “Okay, that’s not English,” she said. “And see what?”

  He did not respond, merely continued as though he expected her to follow. And because she had nowhere else to go, she did.

  The first thing she saw when she passed through the red curtain backstage was Bale, the Lizard Man, ripping the head off a dead rat with his alligator teeth.

  Lady Sasha and Lord Mikhail sat with him. Lady Sasha was dressed in a medieval noble’s gown instead of a leather bikini, but she still wore one of her albino serpents draped over her shoulders like a feather boa. She held another rat, its neck snapped and ready for Bale for when he’d finished the one he was eating.

  Lady Sasha met Maya’s wide eyes with indifference, her eyes a deep red, deeper than the blood dripping from the rat’s body. Lord Mikhail ignored Maya entirely, but he shared Lady Sasha’s uncommon eye color. Bale just smirked at her, the rat’s blood staining his teeth.

  Maya backed away, fingers trembling as she pointed at Bale and tried to speak.

  Everything in her head that had cracked over the last twelve hours now began to shatter.

  She fell into the lap of a small but firm man—at least he looked like a man, with his shoulder-length black hair, pale skin and blue eyes. Then he shimmered like a mirage over hot tarmac. His hair became black tentacles, his skin a sickly chartreuse and his sharklike teeth as sharp as Bale’s. Maya screamed and struggled against the creature’s surprisingly strong arms as he laughed a high-pitched giggle in her ear.

  He pinched her neck and cheeks to make her shriek before letting her go at just the right time so that she spun into the legs of a tremendously tall man, easily over eight feet. She gazed up the long, broad length of his body to the eyes, black as pitch, as though they had been dipped in ink. A short fellow followed behind him with the same black eyes, and when he smiled, his teeth were also sharp.

  The tall man gazed down at her, his frying-pan-sized hand cradling her head. His jaw and the bite of his teeth were pronounced, like a werewolf in mid-transformation. If he, too, were to smile wickedly at her like the others, his teeth would appear just as lethal, the interlocked fangs of a predator.

  The tall man made no move to stop her, though, as she slipped under his massive hand and careened straight into the arms of a tall woman—average-sized tall—covered head to toe with hair. The long, lustrous, reddish hair from her head and full mustache and beard mingled with the slightly darker hair on the rest of her.

  Maya screamed again, and although she was too rattled to notice it then, she would remember it later—the twitch of sorrow mingled with humiliation in the woman’s expression. But the woman simply wrapped her arms around Maya and pressed Maya’s head against her breast.

  “It’s okay,” the woman murmured. “Shhh. It’s okay.”

  At such a soft, gentle voice, Maya stopped struggling and held onto the woman, gasping for breath and grasping for sanity, but sanity didn’t come.

  “Do you always have to be so dramatic?” asked the woman holding Maya as Bell strode between the creatures.

  “No business like show business,” Bell replied.

  Valorie snorted into her coffee.

  Maya peered around the woman to the other plastic tables set up backstage. Human eyes met hers, none of their teeth sharp, all their faces solemn, knowing. There were the conjoined twins, Joanne and Jane, although there was no way for her to tell which one was which. Beside them was an Asian woman—Maya thought Chinese—without arms or legs. One of the twins was helping her with her food.

  Valorie sat next to a tattooed man, who was studded and inked in all the possible places a man could be stuck with a needle.

  Across from them was a pair of sporty young men—one white, one African-American—their fore
arms pressed together as they ate their morning scramble.

  Another man, scrawny and pale, sat next to them, toying with his breakfast. He wore a scabbard at his side. Next to him was a man without legs, but unlike the Asian woman with the twins, he had big beefy arms that he used to turn himself around on the bench to face her, like a gymnast on a vault.

  At another table, the Human Skeleton, Sandra, sat with the Biggest Man, Arnie, each with a substantial plate of food in front of them.

  In the back were two large animal cages labeled for the big cats. Neither of them carried animals, though. Instead, two naked humans lounged behind the bars, eating their food as well.

  “She’s terrified,” the woman holding Maya said to Bell, her tone chiding.

  “You do recall what this place is, right, Kitty?” the man with the tentacles for hair said. He sounded Cockney to Maya, but she had never been good at placing accents.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “And that’s bad enough without scaring her before she even knows what’s going on. Come on, sweetheart. We’ll get you something to eat. Lennon’s a pain in the ass, but he’s just a mischief demon. He doesn’t do anything more malicious than the equivalent of a whoopee cushion,” she added, glaring at the tentacled demon.

  “I resent that,” Lennon replied. He popped a raw egg into his mouth and swallowed. It made a bulge in his throat as he did so. He grinned at Maya again and blinked back into his more human appearance.

  Maya broke away from Kitty. “I don’t want to eat. I want to know what the fuck is going on. Is this hell?” The question slipped from her lips before she could find it ridiculous.

  “An apt question, my dear,” Bell said. “The simple answer is ‘not quite’. You are alive. Your soul is your own. You’re just lost, like the rest of them.”

  “Thank you kindly for your riddles, Bell. I’ll take it from here,” Kitty said. She sat down on one of the table benches and gestured for Maya to sit down with her. Maya nearly fell onto the bench, her shaking legs unable to hold her up anymore.

  Bell settled on the other side of the table, watching Maya intently.

  Kitty stroked Maya’s hair. Maya found it difficult to meet her gaze. It was hard to look past the long, but neatly trimmed beard. Her facial hair didn’t appear as coarse as a man’s, but it was still thick and…well, there.

  “Think back,” Kitty said. If Kitty took offense at Maya avoiding her eyes, she didn’t indicate it in her voice, which remained gentle. “Did you or anyone around you make a wish?”

  “What?” Maya’s brain wasn’t playing with a full deck. A few face cards were still distracting her around the breakfast tables.

  “Her boyfriend,” Bell replied.

  “Great,” Kitty said. “So she’s not even here because of her own wish? Jesus, Bell, really?”

  “A wish was made, and she was the subject. I was bound,” Bell said.

  “You were there,” Maya accused. “It was like you were following me.”

  Kitty raised her impressively bushy eyebrow.

  Bell shrugged, unintimidated. “I saw that her future was with us, which meant that a wish would have to be made. I had to be there to hear it.”

  “Sounds like the very definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You didn’t even try to stay away,” Kitty said.

  “Why would I try?” Bell asked.

  “Do you remember?” Kitty asked, sighing and turning back to Maya. “Do you remember your boyfriend making a wish? Think hard. The wording is important.”

  “I don’t… I vaguely remember something about…” Maya tried to recall the last moments before Derrick had abandoned her and her personal time had slowed to a snail’s pace. She couldn’t remember anything exact. He had been so completely off base, she couldn’t be expected to have paid attention to every single wrong thing he’d said. “Something about how selfish I was, making everything about me.”

  Bell parted his lips. Maya jerked at the sound of Derrick’s voice coming from Bell’s mouth.

  “I just wish someone somewhere could get it through your thick skull that it’s not always about you.”

  “Delightful,” Kitty said. She rested her hand on Maya’s. “I take it you and your man had a fight.”

  Maya nodded. “And then we had a break-up, but I didn’t have the chance to do it officially before…before I got pulled down the rabbit hole.”

  “A wish was made,” Bell said.

  “You went out of your way to make sure you were there when a wish was made,” Kitty said. “Don’t play coy. Not with me.”

  “My power is in the wish. I am bound to fulfill it, and Maya is now bound to me until the wish is fulfilled,” Bell replied evenly. “I decide how and when it is fulfilled.”

  Kitty sighed at Bell then returned her attention to Maya. “You’re not the only one cursed, sweetie,” she said.

  “This isn’t possible,” Maya said. She yanked her hand out from under Kitty’s and pushed herself back on the bench. She was shivering, she told herself, not trembling. “This isn’t real. None of this can be real.”

  “Oh, it’s real,” Kitty said. “Welcome to Arcanium, Circus of Lost Souls. The long and short of it is we’re a cast of demons and humans, some of us slaves, brought in, controlled and contained by Bell, a jinni with the power of the wish.”

  Maya was speechless for a beat.

  “Huh?”

  Chapter Three

  “Permission to leave the circus grounds and enter the faire?” Kitty asked Bell. “I think we could use a walk, just us girls.”

  “Do you do that often?” Maya asked. “Walk around the faire with everyone else?”

  If the situation had been different and she hadn’t been raw from the layers of shit that had been flung upon her, she might have thought of a more diplomatic way to say that.

  “Very often,” Kitty said, accepting Maya’s faux pas with equanimity. “I like the change of pace.”

  “I can’t go outside the fence. Wait, you can?”

  Kitty lowered her eyes. “I can’t leave the circus permanently, but I have no chains keeping me on the grounds. I’m here voluntarily.”

  Maya’s mouth dropped open. “Why would anyone want to be here, with…?” Maya gestured at the demon side of the room. Any word she tried to say tasted too unreal.

  “Where else do you think I could go?” Kitty asked.

  “A non-demonic circus comes to mind.”

  Lennon and Bale snickered.

  “This one has its charms,” Kitty said. “But that’s my life, my decision—not yours. In any case, I’m pretty sure you’d appreciate an explanation from someone other than Mr. Cryptic.”

  “It’s my curse,” Bell said. He kissed Kitty’s cheek and circled around them. “You are temporarily permitted onto the faire grounds, Maya. Speak to no one from the outside about your captivity, and do not separate from Kitty. You must always be in contact or else the pain will return. This time I would have to pass you to the Ringmaster for punishment. I hope you can make the weight of that threat clearer to her, Kitty, unhampered by my crypticisms.”

  “I don’t know,” Kitty said dryly. “You seem to speak clearly enough when you’re giving orders rather than explanations.”

  “Giving orders in riddles means nothing gets done right,” Bell replied.

  He beckoned to Joanne and Jane, who brought Maya two breakfast tacos. They walked with an odd lack of synchronicity, moving forward by walking to the side and not completely at the same pace—an almost drunken gait alternating between one twin sidling more forward, then the other, a cross between a spider and a crab. Yet they managed to get where they were going without much trouble.

  It felt even ruder for her to stare at an oddity when that oddity wasn’t on display. The twins’ eyes and the corners of their mouths turned up in a kind of natural smile, the apples of their cheeks high and rosy. However, so close to Maya and noticing how she was trying not to stare, their cheerful exterior faltered, revealing resignation undern
eath.

  “Thanks,” Maya said, with nothing else to say.

  “You’re welcome,” they both replied in tandem.

  That wasn’t creepy at all.

  Maya couldn’t help a shudder, but she smiled weakly. Her smile muscles had forgotten how to function, so she might have only managed a grimace.

  This wasn’t the kind of person she was. She wasn’t supposed to be insensitive. Workshops and conferences had effectively beaten that out of her with blunt objects, and she hadn’t had the greatest of years in middle school herself, so she knew how much mean things hurt. Maya dealt with teenagers on a daily basis. There used to be nothing she couldn’t deal with, considering she could handle those hellions in a class they didn’t think was important, interesting or necessary.

  If only she’d known how easily she would break.

  Then again, everything was new, dark, despairing, colored with the memory of pain and not twenty-four hours had passed. She shouldn’t be expected to bounce back from a kidnapping and a curse just like that. Maya wouldn’t say that her humanity had disappeared so much as wavered. But she needed to be stronger, braver, better—all those things she’d thought she was, dammit.

  She was going to try to figure this thing out without being cruel or stupid anymore, and she was going to find a way to escape, Bell be damned. The demons could all go to Oklahoma.

  Kitty tucked Maya’s arm into the crook of her elbow and led her out of the big top. Maya felt the others’ eyes on her as they left.

  “So you go out in the faire a lot?” Maya asked.

  “I often get my picture taken with guests. It advertises for the circus better than a sandwich board,” Kitty said. The summer sun was already warm enough for them to sweat where their arms met, but Maya didn’t dare let go of her. “You’d be surprised, Maya, what I get up to outside the circus before I have to come back. There are quite a few follicularly inclined people out there. Or at least follicularly curious. Curiosity can be quite an aphrodisiac.”

  “Okay, I totally didn’t ask that question,” Maya said. Under different circumstances, she might have laughed, but laughter had fled along with the laws of physics and biology.