Carniepunk: Parlor Tricks (Elemental Assassin) Read online

  “Painted Love”

  Rob Thurman

  Love is a bitch.

  There’s no getting around it.

  But I’ll get to that later.

  First . . . first came Bartholomew.

  On any given day someone can be a hundred different people. I’m not talking Sybil here, and no voices in the head, but no one is singular within themselves. They’re good . . . help a little old lady with her groceries. They’re bad . . . steal a magazine from a newsstand. Sometimes they’re smart, sometimes stupid. Sometimes loving as they give their child a kiss on the cheek and murderous in the next minute when they jack a car and kill a man in the process. People are people. Hateful and peaceful. Content and miserable. Honest and deceitful. With all of that inside fighting for control every minute of the day, it’s a wonder everybody’s not banging their heads against the wall. And those around you—even you yourself—aren’t ever quite sure what they’re going to get from moment to moment.

  I knew that just like I knew from watching him that Bartholomew was nothing like that—the exception that proved the rule. Bartholomew wasn’t at war with himself or his darker emotions. With Bartholomew it was all about Bartholomew. What he wanted and what he’d do to get it. Love wasn’t a bitch to him, because he loved himself inside and out.

  All the best sociopaths do.

  It wasn’t just my luck to hook up with one—it was an occupational hazard. I’d seen more of the world than most and it wasn’t by drifting. I always had a plan. I’d long found that the best way to travel was to find someone who was going somewhere you wanted to be, stick with them, and keep your mouth shut. You’d be surprised how little they minded, mostly because if you picked the right ones, they were entirely self-centered. They were generally puzzled to one day realize they’d picked up a buddy, wonder how you’d slithered in under their radar and become a fixture in their lives. But that’s another thing about people: they didn’t want to ask too many questions. Some people didn’t like to look stupid, some people didn’t like to make waves, and some people—the smartest people—generally didn’t want to know the answer.

  And the ones like Bartholomew—they ultimately couldn’t bring themselves to believe someone had put one over on them. After all, that’s what they did, not what was done to them.

  I was good at it, what I did. Maybe you could say I used people, but I did it out of harmless curiosity. My talent for hanging around by blending into the background was useful, but I didn’t put it to the same use Bartholomew did his. He worked at a carnival, which was what had interested me in the beginning. I’d seen a lot of things as I made my way around the world, and a carnival was more or less next on my list. I came across Bart on a week away, whoring and drinking mostly, heard his glib stories about where he worked, and there found my opportunity.

  His ego was my ticket to ride.

  “The Three Lives

  of Lydia”

  A Blud Short Story

  Delilah S. Dawson

  Lydia woke to the curious sound of a calliope. Opening her eyes to a swaybacked, star-studded sky, she shivered. Something was deeply, deeply wrong, as if she had just fallen out of a nightmare, heart pounding and head spinning, limbs still too numb to run away. A chill breeze played over her naked skin, making the tall grass around her whisper and sway. She sat up and contracted into a ball in one breath. Running a finger over the crooked heart tattooed on her left wrist, she inhaled the scent of crushed grass and cold iron and waited for something to happen.

  “Am I dead?”

  Her voice was overloud in the moon-bitten night, and she suddenly felt like an extra in someone else’s movie. The background sounds descended with a vengeance: the cheery calliope, squealing metal, an excited burble of voices overlaid by the amplified shriek of a barker, like at an old-fashioned carnival. The tall form rising above her turned out to be a train car, one of a wide circle of wagons enclosing a cluttered meadow. Lydia was on the inside of the circle, and the warmth and laughter were all on the outside. Crawling to the dark wall, she put a hand against the freezing enamel, curious as to why the wagons were circled, why the inside of the ring was abandoned while the outside was full of life. From under the wagon’s belly, warm light flickered and twitched, beckoning her close with curling fingers.

  She parted the grass and jerked her head back when she found a gleaming coil of razor wire. Just out of reach, hundreds of people swarmed through the brightly lit space. Lydia’s eyes danced with leather boots, the hems of jewel-colored gowns, gaily striped parasols, and tapping canes from another century. It couldn’t be real. This had to be heaven or hell or purgatory. It had to be a dream, and a beautiful one. The vision was too lovely to inspire terror, even if every cell of her body knew it was wrong.

  “The Demon Barker of Wheat Street”

  An Iron Druid Chronicles Short Story

  Kevin Hearne

  (This story takes place six years after Tricked, the fourth book of the Iron Druid Chronicles, and two weeks after the events of the novella Two Ravens and One Crow.)

  I fear Kansas.

  It’s not a toe-curling type of fear, where shoulders tense with an incipient cringe; it’s more of a vague apprehension, an expectation that something will go pear shaped and cause me great inconvenience. It’s like the dread you feel when going to meet a girl’s father: Though it’s probably going to be just fine, you’re aware that no matter how broadly he smiles, part of him wants you to be a eunuch and he wouldn’t mind performing the operation himself. Kansas is like that for me. But I hear lots of nice things about it from other people.

  My anxiety stems from impolitic thinking a long time ago. I am usually quite careful to shield my thoughts and think strictly business in my Latin headspace, because that’s the one I use to talk with the elementals who grant me my powers as a Druid. But once—and all it takes is once—I let slip the opinion that I thought the American central plains were a bit boring. The elemental—whom I’ve thought of as “Amber” since the early twentieth century, thanks to the “amber waves of grain” thing—heard me and I’ve been paying for it ever since. The magic doesn’t flow as well for me there anymore. Sometimes my bindings fizzle for no apparent reason, and I know it’s just Amber messing with me. As a result, I look uncomfortable whenever I visit and people wonder if I’m suffering from dyspepsia. Or maybe they stare because I don’t look like a local. I’d fit right in on a beach in California with my surfer dude façade, but at the Kansas Wheat Festival, not so much.

  “The Sweeter

  the Juice”

  Mark Henry

  The fruit cart vendor on the curb is persistent if not articulate. He alternates shouting “All da lovely ladies love da frew-its” into his PA system with slapping his palm against his Plexiglas surround.

  “You!” he pleads, his voice echoing. “You take. You try!”

  He’s annoying me, and I’m already edgy from three days dry off the Jimmy. This can only end in bloodshed.

  The drawer embedded in the side of the cart’s guard glass slams out toward me, a slice of mango glistening inside. The dark fruit rests not on a polite napkin but directly on the greasy metal bottom. A red smear of juice sets it off like a gory still life, makes it pop . . . and makes my stomach turn.

  I wave my hand, shake my head as apologetically as I can fake.

  As I pass, I notice the body in the gutter. A woman’s, perhaps. The pink bouclé Chanel knockoff suit appears part of its flesh, the body’s rot seeping through the weave of the fabric, turning it a murky green in spots, sludgy. There’s a hole in its dimpled forehead, and a sliver of mango dangles between its still-twitching fingers.

  I hear a sharp tapping and look up to see the vendor rap a Glock against the Plexi. “Samples for customer who pay-ay!” he says into his mic, and gives me a big gummy grin.

  He’s clearly known for his comic banter. Or at least
he thinks so.

  Zombies don’t pay for fruit any more than they do for dry cleaning. A shame. The suit was actually cute at one time. But worse than a fashion tragedy, the thing’s thin hips and sturdy legs belie a truth I’d rather deny.

  The dead woman was a Sister of Perpetual Disappointment.

  And by sister . . . I mean the kind with a penis.

  The order is strictly my terminology. Don’t get me wrong, at times I feel like a nun, but there’s no convent, unless you consider all the transgendered gathering around Dr. Bloom’s office cloistering.

  When death became passé, none of the Sisters expected the harsh toll the epidemic would exact on our small community. The hospitals were hard hit by the infected; doctors and nurses and worse—plastic surgeons specializing in gender reassignment surgeries—were some of the first casualties of the plague. It’s hard to maintain a practice from the inside of a zombie’s intestinal tract.

  Go figure.

  Needless to say, a heavy blow to transsexuals everywhere. It’s no wonder I took up the Jimmy.

  “The Werewife”

  Jaye Wells

  Brad should’ve turned around and left the minute he saw the kitchen. His first hint of danger was the penicillin growing on the plates. Annie never left dirty dishes in the sink, much less piled on the counter. He glanced at the wall calendar next to the phone. There he saw what he’d been dreading—a huge red X over that day’s date.

  Oh, shit, he thought, it’s that time of the month.

  Work had been crazy and he’d been out of town for a couple of days dealing with a crisis at the Bridgeton warehouse. Still, that was no excuse for forgetting. With Annie, you always had to be careful.

  He cupped his balls as he walked into the den—just in case. Annie lay on the couch with an arm covering her eyes. Tiptoeing through the room, his silent feet dodged dirty clothes and empty dog treat boxes. He prayed she’d just ignore him.

  “You’re late,” she barked. “Did you get the steak?”

  Brad winced and turned slowly. No sudden movements, he reminded himself.

  “Sorry. I forgot.” Like he hadn’t had enough on his mind with the business trip. Why couldn’t she have gone to the store herself before nightfall? He swallowed the question when he saw her ferocious scowl and knew he’d never win this argument. “I’ll go now.”

  Her eyes glowed in the dim room, a predator’s stare.

  “Don’t bother.” She swiped a furry hand through the air. “I’ll eat out tonight.”

  Brad felt the blood leave his face in a rush. “But, honey, last time—”

  His words died as she hunched over, grabbing her belly. Sympathy and terror duked it out in his gut. Then she got on all fours and let loose an unholy growl.

  Screw sympathy, he thought. The last time he let it influence his actions, he’d ended up pissing blood for two weeks.

  As he ran the usual path toward salvation, Brad took some comfort in the fact that he was near the basement this time. He hadn’t always been so lucky and bore the scars to prove it.

  “The Cold Girl”

  Rachel Caine

  It took me two days to die. On the first night, I met Madame Laida, and on the second night, I met the Cold Girl.

  And this is how it happened.

  This is me. I’m Kiley. I’m sixteen, and I have good taste in clothes and mostly crap taste in boys; I’m kinda pretty, I guess, but that never mattered really, because I’ve been in love since I was about eight with Jamie Pierson.

  Oh, Jamie’s pretty, too, in that boy kind of way: glossy black hair, really blue eyes, perfect skin. When he first smiled at me, I fell head over heels in love. It took me about two years to convince him to even hold hands with me, but by twelve we were kissing, and by fourteen we were officially In Love, with all the doves and bells ringing and sparkles from heaven. Cue the music, bring up the credits, the story’s over and we all live happily ever after.

  Or at least, I thought that was the story. I mean, not that my friends didn’t try to tell me. Marina, she was my best friend until I was fifteen, but we had a blowup slap fight about Jamie and how he was treating me. I thought she just didn’t understand him. I thought she was a liar when she said he was a douchebag. By then, Marina was my last friend; everybody else had already shrugged, moved on, figured me for a lost cause.

  Smithfield isn’t exactly a metropolis; it’s stuck in the middle of nowhere, and any kind of diversion is welcome. Still, the arrival of a creaky, ancient carnival was something new. I’d thought Smithfield had long been scratched off all the traveling-show lists, but this one looked to be just barely surviving anyway. Even the flyers for it posted around town looked old, not just in design, but even the paper they were printed on.

  Still, some of us didn’t care about quality; when word went around school that day that a carnival was setting up outside of town, the quality of the entertainment was the last thing on our minds. We just wanted a good time: some cotton candy, some rides, some screams, some cheesy fun.

  At least, I did. And I texted Jamie instantly from my last class of the day. CRNVL 2NITE?

  And Jamie texted back thirty seconds later: Y.

  So. It was a date.

  I called my mom to tell her that I wouldn’t be home until late because I was going to the movies with Marina. (She never checked; she just assumed that once a friend, always a friend, and I was careful to never use Marina for anything that would bring on awkward parental phone calls.) Mom didn’t worry. You didn’t much in Smithfield. Little town, comfortable, boring, nothing ever going on here, right? Why do you care if your sixteen-year-old goes to the movies with a friend?

  You don’t.

  But I’m here to tell you . . . maybe you should.

  “A Duet with Darkness”

  An Abby Sinclair Short Story

  Allison Pang

  The spotlights shine upon my face, but I barely notice, caught up in the way my fingers rock over the strings, my thoughts nothing more than a blur of white as the music converges into a single strand of color. As always, something dances below my consciousness, a perception that no matter how good I am, no matter how hard I try, there is more to come if I only dare reach for it.

  I crack an eye open during a slight pause in the beat, my vision drawn to the man in the front row. Sitting next to my mother, her white coat a shining pearl of righteousness. But who the man is, I’m not sure.

  He stares right up at me from the center front, his spiky hair glowing silver and orange, one brow arched as my fingers caress the strings.

  You can do better than that, those glittering eyes say. Stop toying with me.

  A jolt thrums through my arms at his smugness. His rebellion burrows into my bones until all I want is to leap from the stage and out the door. To run.

  To fly.

  But instead, I finish my set, my mother’s cold, fish-belly gaze sliding over me. Never good enough for her.

  Inside my skin, an inferno burns.

  When I exit the stage that night, I do so without the intention of ever coming back. I leave the girl I was by the roadside, sloughing off her life, her very skin. I slither out of her like a dying snake, only to emerge into a world I somehow always belonged to.

  And I know about them. This strange affliction that allows me to see music, to lock it into a tawdry rainbow of pure, aching color—it allows me to see them as well. The very words they speak, those wonderful syllables—they drip from their mouths and ring through my bones. Their presence assaults me, teases me, taunts me with what I can never have.

  Nobu says most mortals have to be awakened to the presence of the OtherFolk. To recognize the existence of the CrossRoads.

  But not me.

  THE VAN STINKS of fried chicken and musty clothes. Bong water. Stale sex. Dried sweat. A shag carpet that probably hasn’t been cleaned in d
ecades. Elizabeth tries to air it out from time to time, but the Thai sticks she lights do little more than give everything a vague patchouli odor. Like spritzing a pig with Chanel, I guess. The flavor of the road and a handful of bodies slumbering in close quarters has a way of clinging to the skin.

  Nobu and I share a joint in the back, surrounded by a Stonehenge of amps and monitors. In the front, Elizabeth’s head bobs up and down in Brystion’s lap. It’s all panting breath and wet sucking sounds as the incubus’s fingers fist through the golden blond curls at the nape of her neck in a desperate clawing motion.

  Nobu snorts and takes a final puff before flicking the roach into a plastic bag. A long, masculine groan echoes from the driver’s side and I roll my eyes, inclining my head toward the rear door of the van.

  Not that we all aren’t used to it. Traveling with an incubus leads to certain eventualities, and copious amounts of sex is apparently one of them.

  “Recession of

  the Divine”

  Hillary Jacques

  The fire had ridden up an unfinished four-by-four wooden post and melted the red rubber covering of the gaming booth. Olivia Sarkis snapped photos of all four sides, then crouched to survey the contents. The roof slumped like a gritty tongue and, in the murk beneath it, cheap, once-plush toys lay about, charred and disfigured.

  “Holy thunderballs, what happened to those little bastards?” a woman asked, so close that the humidity of her breath invaded Olivia’s ear.

  Olivia jumped to her feet. Beside her a young woman, red hair short and spiked, stuck her thumbs into her pockets and rocked back until she achieved a gravity-defying angle. She was angular where Olivia was curved, short while the other woman loomed, and ethereal where Olivia was solid flesh. An avatar that well rendered, probably even touchable, could only be the result of centuries on the earthly plane.