by Kim Smejkal
Lilac had swept out of Vincent’s room in tears. “I’m worried about dosage! I don’t know what I’m doing.” Then she was gone, seeking rest with the other exhausted, red-eyed members of the troupe. The Mob had taken short shifts watching over Vincent, everyone wanting to help, no one strong enough to do it for long. Seer Ostra had changed him out of his shredded Palidon costume and into a clean shirt and pants in the time it normally took her to don one earring.
Celia foolishly thought she’d outlast them all. She rested her cheek against Vincent’s stomach and looked up at his face: bluish pallor to his skin, tight swell of his lips, sharp juts of his hollowed cheekbones.
“Hold on,” she whispered. “It’ll be okay.”
His heartbeats ka-thumped with decades in between.
Celia almost fell asleep between those ka-thumps, each one tapping her back to full consciousness like a clock tick.
“We wrecked her.”
Celia recoiled at Vincent’s words, his voice hoarse. She bolted to the curtain to get Lilac, but more hoarse words stopped her. “She was so good, before.” He hadn’t opened his eyes, his lips barely moved, and despite the gravelly crackles in his voice, he spoke with a measure of lucidity that shouldn’t coexist with the Touch. Something in the jipep seeds had steadied him, even as he swam through a void. One tear formed in the corner of one closed eye, hanging on, refusing to let go.
Celia went back to him, grabbing his hand and leaning in close. “You have to be strong, Vincent. There’s someone who can help you.”
His whimper tugged the tear loose. “We didn’t deserve her when she was good, but we deserve everything she gives us now.”
She followed the tear from his eye to his cheek, until it fell to the blanket. Then another, then another. Nothing she said could make them stop. Everything he said made her tremble. His heartbeats ticked on, counting down.
Celia fled like a coward shortly after Georgio came to check on him.
When she found Anya, she learned that the timeline of their plan had moved up. Vincent’s screams had proven Diavala’s instability. Even trying their best not to anger her hadn’t kept Vincent safe in the end.
As the plague doctor approached Celia and Anya where they paced a rut in front of Vincent’s wagon, Celia’s stomach churned. “We have no choice, Cece,” Anya reminded her. “We need more help.”
Celia nodded. “I know.” She still felt like throwing up.
The plan to flip the show would have to happen much sooner than they’d expected, before Diavala had a chance to move against them again. They needed someone to fill the void after they were gone and lead the troupe through the dangerous aftermath. The plague doctor already suspected the storm that swirled around Celia; now it was time to arm him for facing it.
But if dealing with Diavala had been complicated before, it was even more so now that they didn’t know where she was. If she caught even a whiff of their scheme, it was over.
Celia’s infuriating bees whispered, If she’s inside Kitty Kay, it’s over already.
And if she’s inside the plague doctor, she’s about to get a giant clue.
Celia swallowed; she hadn’t forgotten that the plague doctor rendered verdicts for a living.
Dozens of times onstage, she’d been overtaken with the rest of the Mob by his final, jubilant destruction. Not good enough, he silently declared over and over again. Part of the show, an invitation for revelers to return, a hint of danger to make them question the line between fantasy and reality.
It felt fated that he should pass judgment on all her lies.
As Anya slipped away into Vincent’s wagon to join Georgio and make sure that Vincent stayed dosed, Celia tried to match the plague doctor’s smile. “Ah, plague doctor, brace yourself.”
“For what?”
“I’m going to use words to tell the truth instead of twisting it. You want a spark? I found one I’m chasing straight to hell.”
He nodded, then led her away with the kind of slow, measured walk that was the silence before thunder. “It’s a wonderful thing that you’re finally ready to remove your mask,” he said. Tight words, tight smile. He tilted his head to the clouds and bellowed, “Finally, she’s ready!” Then he chuckled in a way that ripped into her and burned her from the inside out. “But I need a good, deep drink and a whole lot of shisha before I’ll be able to hear you without wanting to strangle you. So away we go.”
Celia found herself sitting on the plague doctor’s cot in the crawlspace under the stage. His bedroom gave no hint of the chaotic jumble stacked outside the fabric panels that separated his space from the rest. A neat tower of books rested in a corner. A lantern. A hairbrush and a toothbrush on a small dresser. Sparse and undecorated, as if the plague doctor led a perfectly mundane existence.
Until you noted the velvet pouch, cinched tight and sparkling, hinting at the magic of his purple and blue flame. Or the garment rack, where black leather and feathers competed for space, pressed together close, as if nature demanded that they exist together. Or the map tacked to the far wall, with indecipherable notes and arrows pointing to places Celia couldn’t even pronounce. The neighboring country of Kinallen, a small green space on the map, drew her gaze. It had been her and Anya’s promised land for years; a fairy-tale place starring in every daydream. Profeta remained a fringe religion outside Illinia, but with the way the Mob’s popularity had grown—devils, angels, and strange, unexplainable occurrences at the forefront of everyone’s mind—Celia now believed there was a real chance that Diavala’s plan to spread the ink further could work. If they took Mob fever to Kinallen, if ink began staining skin . . . Kinallen had always seemed impossibly far, but there it was, only a few finger spaces west of where they were. The border now felt woefully arbitrary.
Good thing they were stealing that plan from Diavala’s fingertips.
It was Griffin, not the plague doctor, who sat in front of her, a hookah between them, at home in the middle of his nest. It shocked her all over again to see him without a beak and beady eyes. She’d begun to believe she’d made Badidea up. She stared at the constellation near his eyes as she tried to muster the courage to speak.
But he spoke first. “How did you become an inkling in the first place if you’re not a believer? I thought it was impossible unless you proved your loyalty in some mystical, foolproof way.”
She sucked in a breath, her secret flung out into the heavy air. Just. Like. That. His words swirled around them with the passionate red of the shisha smoke.
“How long have you known?” she asked.
“Since Asura. How . . .” He paused to chew on his anger while Celia sputtered. “How is this surprising to you?”
“Because you didn’t say anything!”
He pinched the bridge of his nose, as if dealing with her were a unique brand of torture. “You’re admitting it now only because I’m taking your choice away. For weeks I’ve given you every reason imaginable to trust me. To trust the troupe. Honest question: Is your opinion of us that low, or is your opinion of yourself that high?”
She swallowed and almost threw up. This wasn’t how she’d expected the conversation to go. Again. But perhaps this would be easier.
“Well, it’s impossible to be an inkling unless you pass a special test.” Not a denial, not an admission. A political response that acknowledged the truth without dipping into details: she shouldn’t have passed, she’d wormed her way through a loophole.
“Onstage, how do you make the ink fade?”
So he knew that, too. Kitty Kay hadn’t known until they’d told her. Even Diavala herself hadn’t yet pieced together how they did their show. But, Celia supposed, a born-and-bred illusionist with curiosity must have a keen advantage. She bit back her question and said, “Another impossibility.”
He took another drag from the pipe and puffed the smoke out in a thin stream. As it rose in tendrils, it tinted the world red. “This isn’t starting well.”
A smile lit her li
ps, as sharp as shattered glass. Diavala had bested her again. Confessing, talking truths without fear, was an impossible thing for her to do on a good day. But now she found herself in the strange predicament where she couldn’t, even though she wanted to.
Diavala could very well be on the other side of the gates, in one of the dozens of mistico, in one of the hundreds of fans, in one of the thousands of fervent believers who invented miracles to compliment the ink staining their body. But Diavala could also be within the troupe.
She could be sitting across from her.
So Celia had to walk another tightrope: tell enough truth so he had his answers and could lead his people when Kitty Kay could not, but not enough to reveal anything of their true plan.
“I’m going to start with the most important thing.” She inhaled. “Anya and I had to execute those Divine orders for the Mob. If mistico interrogate you about them or about us, you need to make sure that everyone pleads total ignorance. Of course no one knew about the two stupid runaways, let alone that we were inklings.”
“But no one really responded to the messages. How do we explain that?”
She waved a hand in dismissal. “Mind games. It doesn’t matter how people respond as long as they do. There is no right way. All Profeta wants are followers, worshipers.”
She stared at him deeply, needing him to hear her. “Do you understand? Sooner or later, mistico will descend. You have to lead your people through the maze of temple bureaucracy by pretending you know nothing about us. Whatever you say about the ink doesn’t matter, but about our presence here, that will have to be the performance of a lifetime.”
Not at all alarmed about anything she’d voiced, Griffin nodded. “Tell me the rest.”
“The rest is big and horrible.”
Though Vincent’s screams had stopped, the sounds had crept under floorboards and through the walls of the wagon, the memory of them tickling along their spines.
“The rest will explain what’s happening with our friend.” Griffin’s sentence sliced through the smoky air. “I need it.”
Celia started with Fiona’s bruise and the fresh tragedy that had haunted Celia for the past few days, of Fallan’s lost chance to have a child. Why Celia and Anya hated the ink. Why they’d run away.
And she told the plague doctor about Vincent. About Diavala using his body. About the true danger.
Griffin had closed his eyes for her story, swallowing the new information and filling in the gaps between what he’d known before, but his eyes opened now and pierced her. “We have a shitload more problems than mistico who ask questions.”
His blunt assessment almost made her laugh. He still didn’t know the half of it.
Then, with hard swallows and a bit of shisha, she told him about inking her initials in her work. In stutters and stops, the confession fell. “I did this unprecedented thing . . . She took notice. All of this . . . because of me. She wants to use the Mob’s fame—the Devil in the Bell Jar’s fame—as a steppingstone to take Profeta outside of Illinia.”
Griffin listened. He listened some more. She could read nothing in his body language—whether he believed her or not, whether he wanted to run or tell everyone, whether he hated her or pitied her or was only thinking of Vincent. He didn’t even react upon hearing that his own mother was tangled up with them.
Immobilized in silence, she waited for him to process everything. Waited for his verdict.
He put his hand on her thigh. She would have liked it if it hadn’t felt like a confrontation. He smiled his smile, and she had a fleeting moment where she doubted who was sitting across from her. “That’s not everything. Tell me what you’re plotting from here.”
A sob hitched in Celia’s throat, and she had to look away. Back to lies. “There’s nothing we can do. The show has to continue as normal.”
Griffin clenched his jaw, grinding his teeth. Exactly as Anya always did when she knew Celia was lying.
“Damn it,” he hissed. “Even when I understand why you keep secrets, I don’t understand it.”
Celia forced herself to look at him. Her eyes blurred with salty water.
After being motionless for so long, his movement startled her. She flinched back, expecting a strike, if not with hands, then words. How can you ask me to trust you after all these lies? But he leaned forward to cup his hands around her neck. Pushing his hands into her hair, he pulled her close so they sat scrunched angry forehead to scrunched angry forehead. “You keep ignoring the fact that there’s only one person here who isn’t on your side, compared with the many who are. And it’s always been so. From the moment you stepped onto our stage in Asura, it was your stage too.”
His thumbs stroked gentle lines on her throat. The warmth of his hands pulsed down the front of her and the back, spilling over like water, settling in a deep blush. Everywhere. But she didn’t know whether it was lust or fear. The fever rose in his eyes too, some deep want balanced with a loathing for it. He pulled back just enough, his face filling the entire frame of her vision.
After wanting it for so long, she cursed that he’d taken off his mask. The plague doctor held allure as a fantasy, but the reality of Griffin pulled her in real ways that fantasy couldn’t compete with. Her personal dagger.
His gaze, still blazing with a fury she loved and hated at the same time, went from her lips to her eyes. His touch was so out of sync with the look on his face, she didn’t know whether to move closer or pull away.
The two of them existed in frozen time, the air between them pulling and pushing. Their chests moved too fast for people at rest. His dark gaze roamed her face in a slow dance, always, always returning to her lips, as if they were the treasure at the end of the trail. A treasure he either wanted to bury and burn or savor and save.
He spoke we, he spoke us.
Us—her biggest fear—because the more alone you are, the less you have to lose.
And losing was inevitable.
His gaze met hers and held on tight. As dark as bitter coffee, his eyes swallowed her. His exhale, hot and hard, fluttered against her hair. So lost in the darkness of his eyes, the feeling of his hands on her neck, she barely heard his whisper, “Just when I think you’re my beginning, I find out you’re my end.”
Chapter 25
The fans returned in numbers at dawn. The screams emanating from behind the gates had died—the devil was contained again—and their feverish lust for the show burst past all reason. They ripped apart the CLOSED sign themselves, as if they were doing the Mob a favor.
Eerily calm, the plague doctor informed them—hovering over them with his wings outstretched and surrounded by purple fire—that they would get one final show and then they would leave peacefully.
Or, instead of passing judgment on the show, he would judge them.
They clapped and cheered and pressed their hands over their hearts, Pia and Fallan included. For a moment Celia thought a mass swoon might happen.
But the plague doctor’s announcement caused a ripple of confusion to spread through the Mob.
Wait, we’re performing?
The show continues?
But what about Vincent?
Celia and Anya broke off their whispered planning as Marco, Ravino, and a few others called for an explanation. The plague doctor glanced over, offering Celia his sharp, beaked profile, and even in its melancholy Celia’s heart ka-thumped. Diavala had called him ruined. If so, his ruin matched hers.
It felt real for the first time, that this night would be the end of everything she and Anya might have found with the Mob.
Marco put the Mob’s spreading frustration to succinct words as the plague doctor approached: “We can’t go on as if everything’s fine.”
“Oh, I’m sure we would all agree that nothing’s fine.” The plague doctor swept a grand arm toward the gates, then toward the wagon where Vincent lay, drugged. “But unless we want a full-scale riot, we can’t remain closed, and unless we want to squash hun
dreds of people under our wheels, we can’t leave. Malidora’s demanding that we take the stage.”
“Kitty Kay won’t agree to this,” Marco said, and most of the people around him nodded.
“Diavala was irritated about your initials, about your escape, about your dally into Malidora,” Kitty Kay had said to Celia the night before. “But she didn’t get angry until you used the ink in a way she didn’t like. She knows you have power. Remember that. Tomorrow night, onstage, when you’re pushing toward the end and it feels like what you’re doing won’t make a difference, remember her fear.” Matching Vincent’s slow breathing, she’d hugged herself, closed her eyes. “Take strength from that. She hurt Vincent because she’s terrified that you’ll find a way of using her own ink against her.”
Kitty Kay had opened her eyes, met Celia’s gaze, and viciously hissed, “As she should be.”
As she should be.
At Marco’s words, a big part of Celia wondered if Kitty Kay’s revenge red would lift the shroud of her leftover act and her daytime persona would fall away like a moth-eaten cloak she’d worn too long.
But Kitty Kay remained her same reaper-gray self. Their staunchest ally, their most aggressive partner, would be around only when night fell.
“Kitty Kay isn’t available to make this decision, so you know it falls to me,” the plague doctor said, wearing a new smile now—a wild one edged with desperation.
Ravino wrapped his arm around Milloni’s shoulders and they backed away a step.
“Maybe we should vote,” Ravino offered.
“No. One final show is a necessary compromise.”
“This is madness.” Marco clenched his fists, red with frustration. “You’re too stubborn for your own good.”
The plague doctor laughed. “Well, you’re not wrong.”
“This is just like the time with the cat,” Marco muttered, then looked up at Celia and Anya. “I bet the plague doctor never told you how he died?”
All they knew was that he’d fallen. Celia liked to imagine the plague doctor scaling balconies to save someone from a fire or jumping from a runaway wagon with a Kid in his arms.
