Three Slices (19 page)

The tyromancer was wrong. It’s not love that comes with ruby-red blood in the forest; it’s death. A boy’s infatuation almost got me killed.

“Is there more?” he asks.

Merissa laughs fondly. “It’s your caravan. You can have all the blood you want, can’t you?”

“Hurry back,” he says, settling into his pillows as she leaves by the front door.

And that’s my cue.

Time to take what’s mine.

11.

I
STALK
through the wagon to loom over the bed, but I’m just as surprised as he is when I get there.

“I already killed you,” I say.

The Great Phaedro coughs a laugh. “Then you didn’t do a very good job.”

“You look rather dead.” I drop my book, cross my arms, and eye him.

He’s not so great anymore, not that he was great to begin with. He looks like a corpse, waxy white with purple hollows under his eyes and cheeks and bloody spittle caked around his lips. A woolly scarf wraps around his neck, and the rest of him is a mound of blankets, skeletal white hands clutching a teacup of clotting blood over his stomach. He doesn’t seem scared of me, which is a good sign that he’s hiding something. Whether it’s a weapon or a defense, I can’t be sure. So, I do what any murderous monster would do at a time like this: I claw for his eyes.

His flesh parts like mud under my talons, an unsettling feeling that my body responds to with a second slash across his cheek. Bony fingers catch my wrist, hard as a manacle, and a death rattle of a laugh bubbles up out of whatever has become of Phaedro.

“If ripping out my throat didn’t work, did you really think blinding me would? Fool.”

As I watch, his flesh begins to knit. Not like normal skin, with pink edges and scabs and blood, because there is no blood. It pulls together with a sick squelch, as vile as the congress of slugs. The eye I destroyed shifts and puddles like black ink, and Phaedro laughs with the shriveled mouth of a corpse.

“A few more bodies’ worth of blood and meat, and you won’t be able to tell the difference,” he says, waving his other hand at the bucket of intestines. “I’m thus improved after draining and eating half of old Bailey, and he was practically a dead man before that. I’m thinking the little Fetchings girls would be delicious, don’t you?”

I pull away, disgusted. “The tightrope walker’s granddaughters? That’s monstrous.” I think of how tiny and bird-boned and innocent they are, dancing fearlessly like sparrows on their wire, and the blood rises in my gorge. “I’m a monster, but I’m not that kind of monster.”

“There’s only one kind of monster, Stain. And you clearly know nothing of necromancy. The purer the sacrifice, the farther it goes. If I ever want to look alive again, I’m going to need lots of young, fresh meat.”

Anger bubbles up, and with it, my beast. The dark room washes over in red, and I howl and lunge for his face with my claws, scoring his forehead in parallel slashes and ripping open one cheek. He starts whispering a spell, and I grab the scarf wrapped around his throat and shove the end of it down his throat. His body jerks, his hands scrabbling to clear his mouth, and I grab them, one by one, and snap his wrists as easily as kindling. It’s like fighting a possessed doll that shouldn’t be moving in the first place, unnatural and floppy and yet so persistently determined to keep slapping me away. He’s bucking under me, silently screaming around the scarf, flailing with snapped hands and fingers that can’t quite grab me.

Straddling him with a knee on each dancing arm, I unwind the other end of his scarf to find a grotesquely half-healed crevasse where his throat should be. The tubes have grown back roughly, weaving around in front of his spine, but the skin hasn’t quite made it back across. I reach into the wet, red-black mess, grab a tangle of veins and whatever the hell else makes up a man, and yank them out like I’m shutting down an automaton.

He just laughs.

Breathless, eyes black pits, broken and wet and flopping— he laughs.

I’m yanking off his lips when the door flies open and Merissa shrieks like a demon straight out of hell.

“What are you doing? What have you done? You bastard!”

She’s so lovely in her wrath that I almost forget that she’ll kill me if she can. The same instinct that made me go for Phaedro’s eyes has her claws arcing towards my face, and I snatch her fine wrists in both hands and want to laugh at how very breakable people are. She grunts and tries to yank away from me, tries to kick me, but she’s after all just a tiny thing and can’t even come close. The only part of me she ever hurt was my heart, and she can’t reach that anymore.

“You’ve been a very naughty girl,” I say. “You set out to capture more than just a horse that morning, didn’t you?”

The fight goes out of her, or she wants me to think it does. Her arms go to her sides, her hair falling over her face as she sighs like the wind in blood-spattered branches.

“No. I just needed another horse for my act and I’d heard there was a white one nearby.”

“Who told you?”

If I wasn’t watching her face so closely, I might’ve missed the fear that flashed in the green, glowing depths of her eyes.

“You know who told me. The tyromancer. She comes to everyone on their first day here. Told me I would get what I’d always wanted if I followed a rainbow to a birch forest and caught a white horse.”

“What you’d always wanted, eh? And to think you threw me away,” I say, bitterness dripping.

“It was never you, you idiot.” She tosses back her head and laughs, cutting me deep. “It was Phaedro. We’ve been planning it for weeks, but the timeline changed when you showed up and got in the way. Necromancy requires bodies, and it was past time for Bailey to disappear. All I wanted was to rule this caravan with Phaedro. And I did get it. For almost an entire day.”

She leans around me, yanks a hand away to touch his ruined throat.

“We can have it again, darling,” she whispers. “All is not lost.”

I step away, cold as ice and twice as hard. “You’re mad as a hatter, love.”

Merissa whirls on me, hands up in claws. “You wouldn’t know love if it called you by name, Stain.” I take a step back, and she presses forward. “And what will you do with me, eh? Chain me to your bed? Kill me and doom him? Hold us prisoner in this wretched boxcar of death?”

I step out of striking range and can’t help but laugh. “Look, lass. I’ve no use for an unwilling woman. Take your carcass of a necromancer and your matched white horses and go where you will.” She cocks her head at me and smiles as if I’m a stupid child, and I draw power and will around me like a cloak. “But do not make the mistake of assuming me soft and merciful. If I ever see either of you again, if you ever make a move against me or my caravan, I will destroy you both. For good.”

“You’re letting us go?” She steps back dumbly and sits on the edge of the bed. Phaedro’s ruined hand flops around towards her, and she takes it gently between both of her own and rubs the shattered bones tenderly.

“It’s all I wanted, really.” I shrug. “This caravan. Thought I wanted to rule it with you, but this’ll do.”

“You’re a very strange man, Criminy Stain.”

“I’m not a man. I’m a ringmaster. Now get the hell out of my circus, and take your broken monkey with you.”

12.

T
HEY’VE DISAPPEARED
before the stage lights go up, but no one seems to know any difference. The caravan has run like a rusty machine for so long that the show plays on as usual without Merissa and her Mesmerizing Mares. I simply close the doors on her wagon, and the audience ignores the empty spot and hurries on to the next lively show.

As for me, my stage has burned to the ground, my wagon now but a smoldering pile of timbers. Instead of drawing my own crowd, I wander among the flow of bodies, doing small shows and finding refuge, as ever, among the humans I consider so far below me. Their amazement, their wonder, their joy, their occasional unwarranted terror. Instead of choosing a girl in bloom, as I’d always done, I present flowers to an old maid in the crowd, making her withered cheeks blush. This time, there is no price tag on the gift, no taste or threat of the future.

I’m done with making women disappear.

T
HE NEXT
morning at breakfast, I walk into the dining car with Vil by my side, a notebook and pen in his hands and a smile on my face.

“Listen up, you lot,” I say in an ever-so-slightly charmed voice that requires no speakerphone. “Master Bailey is dead. Merissa killed him and ran off. You can find his remains hanging in her wagon, if you wish.” The whispering starts, and I hush it with a hand. “I’m taking over this caravan. I know how to run it, and you’ll find me a fair master. Everyone’s equal: Bludman, human, daimon, other, male, female, whatever. Everyone gets a raise, starting tonight—double what Bailey paid you. And I want to hear your ideas for improving the show as a whole. I’ll not hide behind a closed door and a speaker. I’ll help you raise the poles and chop the wood, and I’ll defend each of you, if you stay, with my life.” I cross my arms and drop my chin, pulling the mantle of a Bludman’s beast around me. “But if anyone—anyone—wishes to challenge me, fight me, sabotage me, or hurt me or any of mine, I assure you right now that you will die in a messier manner than Phaedro the Great. Any questions?”

The carnivalleros are weirdly silent...aside from the two youngest ones. The Fetchings girls are whispering fiercely, and the smaller one pushes the older one forwards through the crowd. She squeezes out in front of me in her slightly too-small, altogether too-bright costume.

“The name’s Emerlie Fetchings, sir. Found this sitting in the ashes of your old trailer this morning.” With trembling hands, she puts the familiar lamp on the floor at my feet, as if she’s afraid of touching me. “Everything else was burnt to a crisp, but it was sittin’ there, proud as you like. Thought you might want it.”

I pick it up, expecting it to be hot to the touch. But the pierced metal is as cool as ever, unmarred by fire or smoke, although the candle stub within has melted cleanly away.

The letter L is carved into the plate where a candle has always sat, and understanding and weirdness flood through me.

I have everything I want now but one thing, and the tyromancer promised me I would have that, too, one day. I had thought Merissa was mine, that she was my ruby-bedecked love, unafraid among the birches. She wasn’t, and I should have known it, and she’s gone forever, a younger man’s folly. And now that it turns out the caravan was on the shorter time frame, that means I have decades still to wait for my true love. And her name will be Letitia. And she will have dark, tumbling hair and fine blue eyes that match a portrait that only existed for a heartbeat in an old, broken locket given to me by a ghost in a wagon that’s now ashes.

My new quest is to figure out how to bring her here, to the hard-won circus that fulfills half my destiny. How to fix this locket and charm it and send it to draw her to me, as the tyromancer bade me do. If I can solve this puzzle, then perhaps one day I’ll find myself in another forest of stark black and white trees, but this time I’ll find my heart’s desire.

My hand goes to my breast pocket, where the necklace sits heavy and strangely warm, and I do wonder if we’ll be haunted all our days by a serious, dark-eyed little girl in a mysterious orange tent that only appears to welcome newcomers to the caravan. Or perhaps the tent and her memory burned down with my wagon, with the spoon and the knives and the brazier. Perhaps it’s time for this circus to find a new fortune-teller to go with its new fortune.

I shake off the fancy. There’s work to be done, and now.

“Good job, lass,” I say, pulling a copper from behind Emerlie’s cropped golden curls.

She snatches it with a gap-toothed grin but doesn’t back away or flinch, which tells me she’s going to be a pain for the rest of our days together, the bright little sparrowhawk.

“Also, sir, while you’re in a good mood...I’d like a wagon of me own.”

I chuckle and shake my head. “Not my circus, not my monkeys. In a few decades, maybe, once you’re a star. Once you’ve earned it. Until then, let’s get back to business, shall we?”

They file out the door, murmuring excitedly about the prospect of a raise, and I’m left in the dining car with no one but Vil.

“What’s your first order, sir?” he asks, quill poised.

“Repaint the tables and benches in here so that they’re all the same color,” I say.

He nods and scribbles. “Do I do that before I repaint your wagon?”

I put a hand on his shoulder, throw back my head, and laugh. “You’ll get a raise, too, lad. Paint
Criminy’s Captivating Caravan
on Bailey’s old wagon and get ready to burn most of his old things.”

“What next?”

I look around, mind spinning. “Sit down, lad. It’s going to be a long list.”

W
HEN
I step outside of my new wagon at dusk, I’m rewarded with the loveliest view: an enormous crowd of humans waiting at the turnstile.

“Who collects the admission?” I ask Vil.

He doesn’t even pause in his painting. “Whoever you wish, sir,” he answers, adding stars around the Y in my name.