The Immortal Circus (Cirque des Immortels)

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I know how unfair Mab can be, but she’s just scared.”

“I’m not the killer,” I say. At least, I don’t think I am. “I almost saw them, last night.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, I don’t think you’re the killer either.”

I open my eyes and look at him. He’s looking right at me, his face only a few inches away. How many times have we been like this? Half a step away from leaning in and kissing, a second away from doing what my heart’s been begging me to do since I first laid eyes on him. If I wanted to, I could end the streak; I could lean in and kiss him here and now.

“Why not?” I ask.

“Because,” he says. His comforting smile turns wicked. “You’re too much of a wimp to kill anyone.” He taps my nose with one finger and pulls away, hops off the table, and stands, stretching back like a cat. I can feel myself blushing. Another moment lost. I'm hoping it's not some sort of karmic trend.

“I better be off,” he says. “Mab would skin me alive if she knew I was still waiting around.”

He turns to go and then stops, looks back.

“Keep yourself out of trouble,” he says. His face is serious. “I mean it.”

“You too,” I say.

He winks. “Me? Never.”

Then he’s walking away, and I’m left with a cooling cup of coffee and the sense that nothing’s going to get easier to deal with, not anytime soon.

* * *

“How is your practice going?” Penelope asks. We’re once again in her trailer as the rest of the crew does the grunt work. I can see the tent from the window; Mab is out there with a few Shifters. They’re carefully folding up the ripped panel like a flag. It doesn’t touch the ground once.

“What?” I ask, not looking away. There’s a steamer trunk at Mab’s feet, and the two Shifters are gently placing the panel inside of it.

“Your juggling practice. I assume you’ve been training night and day.” She talks as though that’s clearly the only thing I should be concerned about, as though there’s nothing going wrong. Maybe she really does spend all of her time secluded away in her trailer, lost in her own little world. I can’t really blame her for it. Outside, Mab closes the lid and latches it.

I turn my focus back to the computer. Penelope’s at another laptop, figuring out losses and gains and ticket sales. Once more, Mab’s refunding the tickets for tonight’s show and donating to nonprofits so people won’t be too pissed for missing the sold-out performance. And I’m the one sending out the notification emails, each one personally addressed because Mab likes things to have that personal touch.

“Practice? Not good,” I say. “I wasn’t made to juggle.”

Penelope sighs and taps away at her keyboard. She looks tired, like the rest of the troupe, with a light layer of makeup and a faded Cirque des Immortels hoodie. I hate to admit that she makes even that look attractive.

“Mab’s always like that,” she says. “I should know. Always making rash decisions she can’t get out of later.”

I shrug and go back to emailing Mr. Carson, apologizing to him and his two lovely daughters for having to refund the tickets but promising to donate to St. Jude’s to offset the harm done. Somehow, Mab has more than just his contact details on file. There’s a full paragraph of his family history, his employment status and income, and even a line at the bottom that I hope is a joke. What the customer dreamt of becoming as a child. Mr. Carson, apparently, wanted to be an astronaut. Now he’s the general manager of a local Taco Bell. If she has this much information about her customers, I can’t help but imagine what she has on file for the rest of us. Which makes me wonder…

“That memory you showed me…you said that you were with her before that, before the circus got started?” I ask.

“Indeed,” Penelope says, not looking up from her work. “I was with her for the very first show. It was just her and me on tour, then. I was but a child. The Only Living Fiji Mermaid, she called me.” Penelope looks up at me. “Not exactly the way a girl should grow up, though there was some glamour on the road. When we weren’t at Court, she and I would stand on the busiest boulevards in the biggest cities: London, Paris, Berlin. She would erect a fish tank and set me inside of it. I would wave and smile at the crowds and she would collect the gold.”

“Why did she need gold?” I ask. Mr. Carson’s been sent out, and now I’m staring at a photo of Miss Jessica Meyers, thirty-two, who once wanted to be a ballerina.

“She didn’t,” Penelope says. “It was the attachment she needed. People gave us money because we had inspired something within them, got them dreaming of the impossible. That infused what they paid us. It was, if nothing else, a very crude beginning to the Trade.”

How long has this been going on? But that’s not what I really want to ask her.

“So how long is your contract?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer right away. She looks at me for a long moment, seeming to study whether or not I’m worthy enough for the answer.

“Life,” she finally says, her voice filled with a resolute sadness. The word fills the room.

“But I thought…I thought we couldn’t die? It’s in the contracts.”

“Now you’re finally catching on to the way Mab works.” She looks back down at the computer.

“So…you’re here forever.”

“Perhaps,” she says. “There’s always an exit clause.”

“What is it?” I ask.

“If you’re trying to keep your head down after being accused of murder, my dear, asking about the termination of people’s contracts isn’t the way to go about it.”

I blush and look back to my screen. I start tapping in Miss Meyers’s name, apologizing for the horrible inconvenience, and saying we’ve booked her a ticket for the ballet that’s coming through next month. I can feel Penelope’s eyes still settled on me.

“Besides,” she finally says. She goes back to typing. “What you should really be worried about is your own exit clause. No one wants to run away forever, not really.”

“I don’t know it,” I say. “I don’t remember what I signed, or why I even did it. It must have seemed worth it at the time.”

Another pause.

“You remember nothing at all?” she asks.

“No. But apparently it was enough to make Mab suspect me of killing everyone.” I hadn’t said it aloud before this, but the words spill from my lips and hang in the air like bloodstains. It’s like signing my own death warrant, and I can’t help but wonder if telling this to the gossip queen of the troupe is a terrible mistake.

“Interesting,” she says. She gives me a considering glance. “You don’t strike me as the murderous type.”

“Try telling her that,” I say. I lean back in the chair and try to block out everything swarming around in my head. There’s no way in hell I’ll be able to get a juggling act together for Friday, no way I’ll be able to clear my name even if I do. The only way around it is to find the real killer, which isn’t going to happen with Penelope as my new guardian. And there’s another reason I need to find the killer. I need to make sure it’s not me. I mean, I know I overheard the Summer Court dude talking to someone else. It can’t be me. But a small part of me is saying that stranger things have been happening.

“Mab wouldn’t listen to me,” Penelope says. “You know how she is.” A brief pause. “We all have pasts we wish we could run from, Vivienne. The trouble is, they always manage to catch up with us in the end, no matter the magic attempting to keep it at bay.”

“What are you saying?” I ask. There’s a nervous quake to my heart, like maybe she knows more about me and my history than I do, which, I’m starting to realize, wouldn’t take much.

“I’m just observing,” she says. “As I said, I’ve been with the troupe from the very beginning. I’ve seen