The Immortal Circus (Cirque des Immortels)

I reach out and grab his arm, force him to stop. He turns. His eyes burn and I nearly let go. But I don’t. I’m not going to just stand around and wait for someone to include me. I don’t know where this inner fire came from, but I’m not going to fight it. After all, it already saved Lilith’s life. Maybe it’ll save someone else’s, like a heroic sixth sense.

“I’m part of this troupe,” I say. “What’s going on?”

I can see the frustration in his eyes, the immediate desire to push me away. I steel myself for the outburst, but it doesn’t come.

“Summer,” he finally says. “They’re here.”

If this wasn’t clearly a serious situation, I’d make some witty comment about it being obvious it was summer, seeing as how it’s eighty degrees even after dark. He must notice I’m clueless because he doesn’t wait for me to say anything.

“The Summer Court. Mab’s rivals. They’re here. They’re interfering.”

“You think they tried to kill Jillian,” I say. Pieces are clicking together in my head.

“I think they’re trying to make a point. Which means we need Mab. Now. Before they make any more.”

He turns to go but I grab him again. Touching him is addictive and, in this instance, allowed.

“How do you know?” I ask. “What if she just fell?”

“That doesn’t happen,” Kingston says, not even turning around. “Besides, even I could smell Summer magic at work. I just needed Jillian’s confirmation.”

We’re nearly to Mab’s trailer when he turns around.

“Please, Vivienne. Stay out of this. You don’t need any more attention. Just go back to the show.” His eyes are pleading, and he doesn’t give me time to refuse. He turns and heads around the corner of a trailer. I don’t follow.

Instead, I turn around and head back toward the front of house. I don’t stop until I catch sight of the blond-haired guy who was sitting across from me. He didn’t make it hard; he’s standing at the concessions booth right in front of the tent, looking over our DVDs with the mildest amount of interest. He’s tall and thin — taller than me — in a grey pinstripe suit that makes him even more angular. I stand on the other side of the promenade and watch from the popcorn queue. The man keeps glancing around, but he doesn’t seem to notice me noticing him.

Mab comes out from the crowd before I reach the cashier. The man in the suit puts down the brochure he was pretending to read and smiles, but it's not even close to friendly — it's the grin of a man looking forward to a conflict. Mab doesn’t even return the forced affection. She strides right over to blond guy with a grim look on her perfectly painted face. A few people stop and stare and make like they’re about to approach her for an autograph, but there’s a darkness to her presence, something that radiates don’t fuck with me. And the whip at her waist only pushes that point home.

The two share a look, but I don’t see their lips move. Instead, she turns and escorts him away from the booth, behind the picket fence separating backstage from the front. I know that following her would be suicide, but something in me can’t resist the temptation. I don’t know why the hero thing has taken over, but the very thought that this guy might be the one trying to hurt someone in my troupe — my home — makes my blood boil. No one messes with my family. In that moment, I realize it doesn't matter that I've felt like I'm still on the edge of this place. These people took me in. If nothing else, I'm indebted.

I watch her take him away from the chapiteau — not toward the backstage tent and not toward the trailers. I grin in spite of myself. She’s taking him to the freak show.

Without hesitating, I head toward the makeshift wooden sign and enter the tunnel of freaks.

Chapter Five: Freak Show

On my second night in the troupe, I was gathered around a bonfire with Kingston and Melody and a few others, listening to stories of past shows and the wild adventures people had experienced off-site. Some had gone skinny-dipping in the Arctic. Others reminisced about buying out an entire town’s stock of glazed donuts. Kingston sat next to me, our arms brushing as he laughed. He kept waving his hand over the thermos being passed around, magically refilling it with unknown booze. I hadn’t really grasped that at the time. There were mostly Shifters with us, and they could hold their drink. Most of them, anyway.

That’s when they started playing Outfreak the Freak.

It was Melody’s idea, probably because I’d just asked her why members of the tent crew were called Shifters.

It started by her daring Stephanie to turn into Mab, which made the girl crow with laughter and ask which incarnation? Mel just smiled, said, “Present.”

Stephanie stood up, brushed herself off, and cleared her throat.

“Presenting,” she said, “the most feared faerie in history. The one, the only, Mab!” With that, her features melted and stretched, melding into a perfect likeness of Mab. If not for the fact that Stephanie was wearing shorts and a hoodie — something I doubt Mab would ever get caught dead wearing — she pulled it off spectacularly.

“Fail!” Melody yelled.

Mab/Stephanie glared at her.

“Mab’s eyes are more hunter green. I’d call yours mint.”

Stephanie kicked sand in Mel’s face and sat down, promptly shifting back into her normal pink-haired Goth self.

“Let me try,” said Heath, a heavily tattooed man with thick round glasses. He stood up and gave himself a shake as his blond hair turned black and wild, his features angling up into a vision of Mab that was frighteningly realistic. Minus two things.

“Boobs are way, way too big,” Roman said.

“Not big enough,” countered another guy.

Moments later, every Shifter around the fire was doing their best impersonation of Mab — some aiming for exactness, others just going wild. There were snake-headed medusae and Mabs with red skin and devil horns. Others had two heads or five breasts. It just got worse from there, as they deviated from impersonating Mab into creating the weirdest creatures they could think of. Soon, the campfire was surrounded by bleeding harpies and twelve-foot-tall stick men and — strangest of all — a round blob of human flesh with no eyes or appendages, just a giant mouth filled with broken-syringe teeth.

“That, my friend,” Melody laughed, “is why they’re called Shifters. Shapeshifters, if you want to be precise.”

“How the hell do they do that?” I asked, watching the blob slurp itself back into the form of a tiny girl with a green buzz cut.

“Lineage,” Kingston said. “You know all those stories about gods mating with mortals?” I nodded, thinking of Zeus and all his bastardized offspring. “Yeah, well, replace ‘gods’ with ‘faeries’ and that’s what you get.”

I watched as Heath — at least, I thought it was Heath — mutated into one giant blue breast.

“Not as refined as the stories, eh?” Melody laughed.

“Never is,” Kingston said.

* * *

Roman is the first guy I recognize in the throng, though it takes me a moment to connect the guy I’m looking at with the heavily pierced, blue-mohawked guy I’m used to. This new, changed Roman is wearing a three-piece suit that looks like it was in at least a dozen pieces before he resurrected it. Patches are fraying off the elbows and I can’t tell if it’s mostly brown or tweed or black pinstripe. He’s also at least seven feet tall, with thick black tattoos curling around his bare wrists and tunnel plugs in his ear that are big enough to pass a tennis ball through. His general face shape is still roughly the same, albeit pointier, a bit more elfish. But he still has the blue mohawk.

“Vivienne,” he says. His voice is much deeper than usual, rumbling in the depths of his chest. “Enjoying the show?”