Алекс Калер - The Immortal Circus (Cirque des Immortels)

I turn around to see a golden apparition floating above the cornfield, a man made of liquid light with a halo of brilliance behind his head. His eyes are sapphire, and when he speaks, I feel my veins pulse with life, feel the very earth shiver with expectation.

“I am Oberos, prince of the Summer Court. I am here on the king’s behalf to deliver this message: Queen Mab — you and your Court are under direct violation of the Blood Autumn Treaty. You have knowingly harbored the daemon known as Kassia. As such, the Treaty is broken, and your Court shall pay in blood until Kassia is released or killed.”

Kassia. I glance at Lilith as things click. Lilith in flames. Lilith losing control. And Mab trying so, so hard to keep her out of sight. Why the hell is she so important? Lilith glances at me. She’s no longer in control. Her eyes are vacant and Poe is clutched in her arms, his fur sticking straight up.

“IF IT’S BLOOD YOU WANT, IT’S BLOOD YOU SHALL HAVE. WE WILL NOT REST UNTIL THE FIELDS ARE SOAKED IN SUMMER’S TEARS.”

The sky above us darkens at her cry.

“So be it,” Oberos says. The fields erupt in screams and howls.

More arrows fly through the air, but Mab’s on top of things this time. She raises a hand to the sky, flames of blue shadow leaping from her fingertips and dancing above the tent. The arrows strike the shield and vanish. A second later she disappears from the sky, appearing in front of me in the blink of an eye.

“Where is she?” she asks.

“Who?”

“Melody!” she yells. Her face is pale as a skull and her teeth are razor sharp. I want to curl up and die.

“I don’t know,” I say. A Summer Faerie leaps out of the corn behind us, humanoid and stick-like, a sickle in its hands. I duck as it swings for my head, but in a flash of light, Mab freezes it solid. It shatters in a thousand pieces when its foot hits the ground. “Kingston…he went after her. He used my visions to find her.”

Mab’s eyes flare in anger and I wait for the finishing blow. It never comes.

“We’ll speak of this later. If you survive,” she hisses, and then vanishes.

Next thing I know, there’s another mob of Summer Fey scrambling from the corn behind me. I don’t wait another second; I run. Lilith’s right ahead of me as we gun it toward the trailers and the illusion of safety, though I have no doubt in my mind that we are royally fucked. The Summer Court is closing in on all sides, fey of every sort running toward the troupe with bloodlust in their eyes. They take all shapes, from centaurs and twiggy dryads to floating balls of light and winged pixie girls. Even the ones that look like they should be stuck in someone’s garden have bloodlust in their eyes and make my blood run cold. We’re outnumbered. Horribly.

Mab floats high above, locked in combat with the glowing form of Oberos. He wields twin scimitars of liquid sunlight, she her whip that slices the sky in lashes of midnight. Every stroke of her whip sounds like thunder, every slash of his swords blinds like lightning. They are twin titans, and they are nearly impossible to see in the light of their fury. Lilith and I run past the pie cart, where a small huddle of our troupe is forming.

The Shifters are the first to leap into action. One girl drops to all fours and quivers. Scales erupt from her flesh, her entire body twists and contorts and grows, and leathery wings sprout from her spine. With a roar that sounds like every nightmare I’ve had come to life, she leaps into the air as an enormous red dragon, flames dripping from her maw like lava. The other Shifters follow suit, twisting themselves into every manner of mythical creature: three-headed chimera, twenty-foot-tall medusae, and a monstrous, lumbering cyclops that rips one of the telephone poles from the earth and wields it as a grisly club. I race under the body of a thirty-foot-tall tarantula that had once been a concessionaire, and notice a few other performers leaping into the fray, wielding powers I never knew they had.

Vanessa and Richard stand side by side, throwing daggers of ice that materialize from thin air. Maya, the tightrope walker, hovers a few feet above the ground. For a moment, she just floats there. Then her eyes glow blue and she lets out a scream that flings the approaching fey back a hundred yards. Lilith and I duck behind a trailer and lean against the side, panting. The sky is roiling above us and all I hear is screaming, the sounds of the dead or dying. We’re outmatched, there’s no question. We’re going to die. We’re all going to die.

Then something new comes crawling forth, something definitely not mortal and definitely not from the Summer Court. The shadows beneath the trailers quiver, ooze like oil. Then they change. Dark shapes pull themselves from underneath, their forms indescribable save for the terror they send reeling through my chest. One shadowy creature stretches out by my feet — a beast half-spider, half-man, with talons and fangs and hundreds of darting black eyes. I nearly scream. It stands and regards me, and I hear its voice hiss in my head: We fight for the same queen, Oracle. You need not fear us. The creature does a jerking sort of bow and then runs off, joining the other throng of black nightmares that stream toward the Summer Fey. I don’t have time to wonder what they are, but something tells me these are the Night Terrors Mel warned me about.

Oracle?

Blood pounds in my ears as the old fight or flight response wells up inside of me. This time, though, there’s a new sensation, a tingling that makes my fingers ache. A power like an electrical surge races along my skin. My hands feel alive with energy. Lilith chatters at my side, barely comprehensible over the roar of fire and screams.

Our solace doesn’t last.

I’ve barely caught my breath when a group of Summer Fey appears at the end of the trailer. Half of them look like walking saplings, with sprig-like appendages and berries for eyes. The other half are more sinister: drowned-looking things with seaweed for hair and long, rusted scimitars. They spot us and rush forward, yelling a gibberish battle cry. Lilith drops to the ground in the fetal position with her hands over her head. There’s nothing around to use as a weapon, and as they run toward me I want to close my eyes and just let it happen, pray that it will be a quick death.

But then something takes over, something that I can’t control. The tingling in my fingers courses through my blood, fills my limbs. I crouch low as the fey approach, adopting some sort of battle stance, all the while screaming inside my head. What the hell are you doing? Run! Run! But I don’t run, I just wait for them to crash upon me, a smile slashed across my face.

The first dryad reaches me, one clubbed arm raised to smash against my skull. Before it can splatter my brains across the trailer walls, I lunge forward, driven by a feral hunger that turns my world red.

I grab the creature’s arm and spin, snapping it in two and ripping the wooden appendage off entirely. The dryad screams, but not for long. As I rotate, I bring the severed arm up and over my head, shattering it against my attacker’s skull. The dryad explodes in a burst of leaves and butterflies, but my victory is short-lived. The others are upon me. I duck under the blade of a naiad and toss the dryad’s arm aside, sweep one leg out to knock over my opponent and smash my fist into another dryad coming in from the side. I grab the scimitar from one of the water-monsters and make to slash off another head, only to have my thrust blocked by a vine that bursts from the ground. More tendrils snake from the earth and twine themselves around my calves and wrists, pin me in a half-crouch. A naiad smiles at me, his waterlogged eyes red and bulging. He raises his scimitar over my bare neck.