Алекс Калер - The Immortal Circus (Cirque des Immortels)

But that was the trouble. It was just a moment. Moments were easy to erase or change. How long would he let me keep this before he turned around and blanked it out? A large part of me didn’t want to trust him, wanted to be pissed at him for toying with my past. But the rest of me knew. I had asked for that. I’d signed the contract. It was the things I hadn’t asked for that sent me reeling, the things he could take away at any moment. How long did I have before he got tired of me and made me believe I was tired of him? I kept closing my eyes, reliving the moment over and over, waiting for the inevitable shoe to drop.

So when Kingston knocks and lets himself in, it’s almost a relief, almost like stepping up to the executioner’s block. I know what he’s going to say. And I’m not going to wait around for it.

“Kingston, listen,” I say, “about today — ”

“Not now,” he says, walking past where I’m sitting on the bed to stare out the window. Then he steps back and closes the curtain. “They’re back.” There’s panic in his voice that makes my skin go cold. Everything I wanted to say drains in an instant.

“Who?”

“The troupe,” he says. It’s almost a relief. We’re not under attack by the Summer Court or anything horrible. Just the troupe back from the watering hole.

“Oh.”

He must note my relief, because his hands clench at his sides and when he speaks, there’s more anger than before.

“No, not oh. They’re back. But Melody’s not with them.”

“Maybe she got lucky?” I start, but this clearly isn’t the time for jokes. “Come on, Kingston, she’s not a kid.”

“No, she’s not. She knows not to leave the troupe.” He’s pacing back and forth. “This is bad, this is really, really bad.”

“Why? She can take care of herself.”

Then he stops and takes a deep breath. “If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you,” he whispers. He turns to face me.

“Melody’s not like us. Remember when I said she was human? Well, it’s more than that. She doesn’t have the same immortality clause that we do, and she’s only twenty-two. Like, actually twenty-two. And without her, we’re all fucked.”

“What are you talking about?” I say.

“I can’t explain,” Kingston says. “Contractual obligation.” He runs his hands around his neck, as though the very thought of telling me is choking him — a feeling I know all too well.

“So let’s go find her,” I say.

“We can’t,” he says. “We have no idea where she is and no way to find out. And if we tell Mab, she’ll go after her herself.”

He slouches down on the chair.

“Would you just tell me what’s going on?” I say. “Why is it a bad thing if Mab looks for her?”

He makes a noise that sounds like gagging and shakes his head, looking up at me with a sad grin.

“Damn these contracts,” he says. “Don’t you see? This is precisely what they want.”

“Who?” I’m getting tired of this cat and mouse game of information.

“The Summer Court. They took her. They must have. I can’t tell you why, but I know they did. And you’re one of the few who understands the danger.”

“I do?”

“Don’t be stupid,” he says. “You saw it. You saw Lilith on the field, you saw her kill Senchan and the other Summer Fey. One of them must have escaped and told their king. They know about Lilith. They know what she is. The Blood Autumn Treaty is broken. Now, we’re at war.”

“Why would they care about Lilith? She’s just…” But I can’t finish the sentence because she’s clearly not just a little girl.

“Do you remember Sheena?” he asks.

I nod. It’s hard to forget watching a purple-haired girl turn into a floating orb of light.

“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.