The Immortal Circus (Cirque des Immortels) (20 page)

When I wake up again, I’m alone in the middle of the field. The sky is pink and orange and spread out wide above me, the cornfields alive with the sound of cicadas and wind. I push myself to sitting, try to force the ringing out of my ears. That’s when I realize I’m not actually alone. Lilith’s sitting on the edge of the circle, stroking Poe and watching me. Both of their eyes gleam in the fading light, Lilith’s green, Poe’s a dusty yellow. I feel like a victim in one of those horror movies, just woken up from a chloroform stupor to find myself in some basement-turned-torture-chamber.

“Where is he?” I manage to say. The words make my head throb.

“Kingston is searching for Melody,” she says. Her voice is so calm, so controlled. Poe mewls in her lap and she looks down and smiles. “Your vision told him where she is, and now he is gone. He will not return before sunrise. Melody is far, far away.”

“Why didn’t you go with him?”

“He told me to stay here. Keep you safe.” She looks at me and cocks her head to the side. “Weak, Vivienne. You are very, very weak.”

I struggle to standing and sway on the spot. I ignore her words and scan the field, though I can’t see anything past the edge of the circle.

“Where is he?” I ask again. “I have to find him.”

“You won’t,” she says. Everything in her voice says that this is precisely where she wants me to be. Dread creeps through my veins like ice. Is she teamed up with Penelope? Was this just some elaborate ploy to get me out of the way?

Lilith puts Poe on the ground and stands in one fluid motion. Even though she’s still in her white dress, even though she hasn’t grown and her hair is still tied back with a ribbon, she looks different, looks more in control of something I can’t place. And whatever that is, it’s terrifying. She steps right up to me, staring up into my eyes, pinning me like a serpent. “He told me to keep you here. Keep you safe. Safe with me.” She sings the last bit, the childish tune frighteningly at odds with her somber stare.

Rage boils inside of me, burning away the fear. Anger at him, anger at her, anger at all of them for fucking me over. Everyone’s been playing with me. Everyone. I’m not going to be played like this any longer. Fire burns.

I don’t think. I swing.

My fist connects perfectly with Lilith’s cheek, knocking her backward a couple steps. She staggers and Poe is hissing at her feet, but Lilith flicks a hand down in a
shut up
sort of gesture, and the cat goes silent. When she looks back at me, she’s actually grinning. The trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth makes her look positively demented.

“There’s the fire,” she says. “Let’s watch it burn.” She lunges forward and tackles me.

She knocks me to the ground and we roll. Stars flash across my vision as she punches me in the face. I gag as her knee connects to my gut. For having a twelve-year-old’s body, she fights like a heavyweight. But the rolling momentum carries and then I’m on top of her, slamming my fist into her face over and over before she flips us over and elbows me in the jaw. In one frighteningly smooth motion, she pins my arms to my chest. There’s more blood on her face, but she’s laughing. There’s a madness inside of her that makes my rage flicker. I know that look. There’s no amount of pain in the world I could inflict on her; she will always, always come back for more. Until one of us is dead.

“Oh, Vivienne,” she says. “This is why he’ll never choose you. You’re nothing. Mortal. Weak.” She sniffs and stretches her neck. “It would be so easy to fake your death, you know. A tragic accident. Wrong place, wrong time. He’d never even suspect.”

I try to swallow the blood in my mouth but the iron makes me want to gag. She leans in close to my ear. “You are very lucky we are currently on the same side. Otherwise it would be so, so simple to dispose of you.”

Poe hisses by our side and Lilith jerks her attention to the field. Something rustles in the undergrowth. Something chuckles. The sun has set, the horizon fading to hues of fiery pink and orange.

Then, something takes flight, a streak of fire that arcs high overhead. We both watch it fly, watch as it curves to the other horizon. There’s a flash of light when it falls out of sight and then another flies a similar path. Then another. Arrows.

Lilith and I look at each other. Her eyes go wide and the fire inside both of us vanishes.

The Summer Fey have arrived. We’re already too late.

W
e run through the corn, Lilith in the lead, me right behind her, cutting a straight line toward the tent. As we get closer, I can hear the screams. We burst from the field into a scene that makes my blood run cold.

The chapiteau is in flames.

Streaks of arrows are flinging down toward the tent like burning birds, the whistle and howl of arrow and flame growing louder by the moment. The grey and blue canvas is peeling and ripping as flames eat it alive. Lilith and I stop and stare in horror. Arrows are ricocheting off the trailers, sticking into the ground like fiery voodoo pins. Others have found flesh. There are two bodies in flames on the ground, but we aren’t close enough to see who they are. I don’t want to know. I don’t want those memories burned into my head.

Everything is chaos. Everything is fire.

Then I hear a voice, one that roars over the inferno and turns the air to ice.

“WHO DARES?”

Mab appears in front of the tent in a swirl of blue light and smoke. She hovers above the ground, easily three times her normal height, the top of her head level with the flaming pinnacle of the big top. Shadows swarm around her in a serpentine dance and her eyes are emerald coals. She is every nightmare combined. Just the sight of her pulls at the darkest corners of my imagination, makes my skin crawl and fills my blood with the need to flee. I nearly drop to my knees.

“WHO DARES ATTACK THE COURT OF QUEEN MAB?”

A gust of wind answers, the sound of chimes and summer breezes.

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, pinning me in a half-crouch. A naiad smiles at me, his waterlogged eyes red and bulging. He raises his scimitar over my bare neck.

The energy in my fingers turns to fire.

White light surrounds me, fills me, burns me with a thousand tiny suns. I see through half-closed eyes the vines disintegrating from my wrists and calves, see the shocked face of the naiad as he dissolves into nothing. Light fills me, blinds me, roars through me like the angry howl of a god. Bright, white, like a strobe illuminating the whole world, and then it’s gone.

I drop to my knees and shudder with newfound cold as the power leaves me. That’s when I realize that the mob of fey is gone. Only Lilith is still there, cowering in the alley between the trailers, arms wrapped around her head.

I stare at my hands. I swear I see faint traces of silver etched into the lines of my palm.

“What the fuck?” I whisper. Was this part of the contract as well?

I don’t have time to think. Another wave of Summer Fey bursts onto the scene, a new mix of dryads and will-o-wisps and creatures I have no name for. The bloodlust is gone. So is the tingling. I’m not about to test and find out if there’s enough power left over for round two. I reach down and grab Lilith by the shoulder, pull her up to standing, and duck into a trailer.

It’s not until I’ve slammed the door behind us that I realize where we’ve landed. Mab’s office.

It’s dark. The air has that cold, dry sensation of a cemetery on an autumn night. Lilith huddles at my side. I fully expect to hear the Summer Fey clanging against the aluminum door, but all is silent. Just the sound of me and Lilith breathing and the hammer of our hearts.

Then a light flares into being, and then another, cold blue candle flames that glimmer out of skull sconces. The office emerges from the dark like a beast surfacing from a midnight ocean — first the desk, then the chairs, then the bookshelves. And then another form appears in a wash of mist. We aren’t alone in Mab’s study.

Penelope.

She turns the moment she becomes visible, as though Lilith and I were the ones who just appeared from the gloom. In her hand is the book of contracts.

“Lilith,” she says. “I’d hoped Mab would send you here. Though I wasn’t expecting an escort.”

“What are you doing here?” I ask, my hands clenched at my sides. No tingling, this time, no power. And no chance of hurting her. She already saw to that.

“I could ask the same,” she says. “Though I’m pleased you’re here safe.”

“Auntie Mab won’t be happy,” Lilith says. She’s stroking Poe — I hadn’t even seen the cat get inside — with that distant tint to her voice. “She doesn’t like her book to be touched. No, no, not at all.”

Penelope shoots her a venomous glance.

“After this,” she says, “
Auntie
Mab won’t have a book.” When she looks to me, her eyes soften. “Vivienne, don’t you see what I’m doing? I’m saving you.”

I take a half step forward.

“
Saving
me? By bringing the Summer Fey here and getting us all killed?”

“I haven’t killed anyone,” she says. Her eyes go wild in that moment, as though I’m not the only one she’s trying to convince.

“You’re full of shit,” I say. “What about Sabina? And Roman? Hell, Melody’s probably dead now because of you!” The rage inside of me is growing, a white-hot anger I want to throw her way. But there’s still no power in my fingertips, no growing pulse of magic. Even if there was, I know there’d be no point. The very thought of harming Penelope is enough to make my chest constrict.

“I had no hand in their deaths,” she says. Her voice drops to a whisper. “My only task was to alter their contracts, to make them mortal again. I can only assume the Summer Court arranged for their execution. As for Melody, I have never touched her terms.”

“What about her illness, then? Why did she get so sick?”

She opens her mouth, but she doesn’t say anything. Not for a moment. “Melody’s fate is different from the other performers of this troupe,” she says. Her words are careful, as though every one is a chore. “She has always been mortal, and her fate has always been tied to the health of this show.”

“What did you do to her?”

“You already know,” she says. “I had her taken far, far away. The only things that can sever her bond to her duties are distance or death.” She pauses and looks at me. Her voice goes soft. “You may call me what you like, but I am no murderer. It was my choice to have Melody hidden away. Senchan would have had her killed. I saved her, so I could save all of us.”

“You’re insane,” I say. She’s completely lost it. She doesn’t seem to realize that outside the trailer, people are burning and bleeding — the very family of performers she’s deluding herself into thinking she’s saving.

“It was the only way,” she says. “It’s the only way we can be free. Our contracts will only be void when the circus is over. You and I, we should be working together. We’re the same.”