The Immortal Circus (Cirque des Immortels)

“Lilith’s…Lilith’s like that. Kind of.”

“She’s a Summer Faerie?”

He shakes his head.

“No. Different. But the Summer Court…they want her dead. And if they know she’s here, they’ll kill everyone around her ’til she’s gone. That’s why they took Mel. Why Mab can’t go. That’s what they want — they want us to be weak.”

There’s no clashing outside, no fires or screams. The only noise is the rest of the troupe laughing, the sound of music as the chefs finish up the evening meal. It doesn’t sound like war.

“Now do you understand? If Mab leaves, we’re more defenseless than…” He coughs. “Guess I’ll just leave it at that. Mab can’t know. But the barriers between this world and Faerie are weakest at dusk. If we don’t get Mel back before then, we’re dead. The Summer Fey will kill us all.”

“So what do we do?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Mab will find out soon enough, but…there’s something we’re not getting. There’s something missing.”

“What do you mean?”

He sighs and runs his hands through his hair again.

“We’ve been set up,” he says. “The deaths, the tent, all of it. They weren’t just warnings, they were trying to weaken us. But that should be impossible. Contractually, we can’t die. We can’t be weakened.”

“That’s it,” I say. Mab’s reaction is suddenly making sense, the widened eyes and accusing stare. “The contracts.”

“What?”

I stand up and walk past him, pacing because it feels like the right thing to do.

“Before we…before I saw you, Mab was showing me my contract. She got pissed off and yelled at me for something. Said I’d changed it. I hadn’t thought about it ’til now — ”

Kingston stops me.

“You changed your contract? How?”

“I didn’t,” I say. “But she thinks I did.”

Kingston’s nodding, now. “That makes sense.” He chews the inside of his lips as he thinks. “Someone’s been changing the contracts. Little changes at first, so we wouldn’t notice. An injury here, an accident there.”

He snaps his fingers, a small spark igniting and burning out.

“That’s it. That’s how people are dying. Someone’s changing the contracts to make them vulnerable. It all makes sense.”

“But how?” I say. “The contracts are in Mab’s trailer. She’d never let anyone touch them, let alone rewrite them.”

Kingston’s face darkens.

“Of course,” he whispers. He pushes past me and opens the door, but I grab his arm before he can pull it open.

“What?” I ask.

“Who does Mab trust above all others?” he says. “Who’s been with her the longest?”

Realization dawns.

“Penelope,” I whisper. The woman chained here for life.

He nods.

“Bingo. That’s why she placed you under Penelope’s care. It wasn’t so she could watch after you, it was so you’d keep an eye on her.” He pulls open the door. “So let’s go find that mer-bitch and make her talk.”

We jog to Penelope’s trailer, past the troupe now standing in line for dinner. We don’t knock, just pull open her door and rush inside.

She’s sitting in front of her mirror, brushing her long red hair and staring into the placid depths of glass. She doesn’t even start when we burst in, just keeps brushing her hair.

“If you are looking for a new place to fornicate, I suggest picking a trailer that is unoccupied,” she says.

“You have one minute to talk before I burn you to a fucking crisp,” Kingston says. As if to accentuate the point, the air around his palms shivers with heat.

“It is quite rude to enter someone’s trailer without knocking,” Penelope says, as though she’s oblivious to the fact that Kingston’s on the edge of burning the whole trailer down. “And even more rude to threaten their life. Tell me, to what should I be confessing?”

She watches us from the reflection in the mirror. The heat from Kingston grows and I step a little to the side.

“Don’t play dumb,” Kingston says. “I know you’ve spent your life pretending to be a daft bitch, but I’m on to you now. You’ve been changing our contracts. You’re the reason everyone’s dying.”

“That, my dear, is an awfully strong accusation.” She draws the brush through her hair one more time, then sets it down. “Do you have any proof?”

Kingston opens his mouth, then closes it.

“Precisely,” Penelope says. She reaches for a tube of lipstick and glides it over her lips, making the perfect pucker in her mirror. “I suggest you come back when you have more concrete evidence. Or evidence of any kind, for that matter. ” She sets down the tube and turns around in her chair. The fire in Kingston’s hands is simmering, but I can tell he feels precisely as I do; there’s no doubt that Penelope did this. If anyone in the entire troupe would be looking for a way out, it would be her — it explained her reaction to seeing Senchan in the field, her talk of finding an exit clause. But who would believe it? She was just so perfect.

She stands and walks over to us.

“If you don’t mind,” she says. I don’t step aside. I want to punch her.

“Melody is missing,” Kingston says through clenched teeth. “If you have any humanity left, you’ll tell me where she is.”

A look crosses Penelope’s face, the mildest of concern.

“I assure you,” she says, “I have no clue where Melody is. But the tent’s still in one piece. Take comfort in that.”

Then she steps past us and opens the door. It slams behind her, leaving us alone and aimless.

“Fuck,” Kingston says. He punches the trailer wall, making the whole thing shake.

“What do we do?” I ask.

“She’s right,” Kingston says. “There’s nothing we can do. We have no proof.”

I glance around the room and something clicks.

“Maybe we do.”

He looks at me in confusion as I walk across the room to Penelope’s nightstand. I’m praying that she didn’t think ahead, that she wasn’t thinking we’d storm in here like this. I open the drawer. There, nesting in a little brass bowl, is the necklace. The black diamond glints like a raven’s eye.

I pull it out by the chain and hold it up.

“What is that?” Kingston asks.

“I don’t really know,” I say. “But according to Penelope, she can store her memories here. If what we need is a confession, it’s probably in here.”

Kingston’s eyes go wide as he crosses the short space between us.

“You’re a genius,” he says. I blush. A beat passes and I’m staring at his eyes as he stares at the necklace. “How do we use it?” he asks.

I take his hand and turn the palm up.

“I think we just ask,” I say, and drop the diamond into his palm, clasping both our fingers around it at the same time.

The room spins.

* * *

Shadows are everywhere.