Carnival of Hearts: BBW Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance (8 page)

By Scarlett Rhone

Several hours after the carnival closed for the night, after the crowds had dispersed and the lights of the big top had flickered out, Kat liked to climb to the top of the Ferris wheel. It had been two months and three small towns since she’d helped Marcus Zane escape her adopted father and his carnival, and her punishment had been six weeks of being confined to her trailer each night. Now, at last, her punishment was ended and she found herself atop the Ferris wheel against at last, looking out at a West Virginian landscape of forest and, in the distance, mountain. She breathed easier up here than she had in weeks. The tension in the carnival since Marcus had left was nearly unbearable, thick and silent, and it globbed between them all like black tar, sucking them in and keeping them apart at once.

Kat had never rebelled against D’Orfeo before. That was no doubt why it had been successful, because he hadn’t expected her to ever turn against him. Those were the words he’d used:
You turned against me
. It lanced into her heart, pain and guilt a wound there now, but also a bloom of independence that she hadn’t realized she’d never felt before. Her whole life revolved around D’Orfeo and the carnival itself; her experiences were walled in by those two things, all of them. She couldn’t remember a time when her life had not been in the shadow of the big top.

The Ringmaster had found her abandoned on a Georgia beach when she was three years old, alone, crying. The carnival had heard her shrieks as it passed by, and D’Orfeo had halted the entire caravan to investigate. He said he’d found her dressed in a little pink jumper, no parents or basket or blanket or anything else in sight, and that she’d grabbed onto his coat when he’d picked her up. That was the moment, he told her, when he had known that he wasn’t going to drop her at a church or a shelter, that he was going to keep her with him and raise her himself, as his daughter. Her life would have been completely different had he made another decision, but Kat couldn’t say that it would have been better or worse. Just very, very different. For very impressive starters, she knew the mysteries of the carnival itself, including its origins.

Marcus had been something of an anomaly, his captivity and forced servitude unique within the history of the carnival. More than half of the carnival members were shifters, but unlike Marcus they had not been taken as a kind of prisoner of war. Rather, they had been abandoned by their respective tribes, or lost. They’d been alone, and Kat understood that shifters were creatures who needed others like themselves. Packs, dens, prides. Few of them could survive on their own. The Ringmaster had pulled them together, given them a home and work and a family, given them somewhere to belong. He had kept them safe. He’d found and saved them just like he had Kat, a myriad and colorful array of shifters and plain old weirdos. A carnival of dreams and oddities and magic. After Marcus left, D’Orfeo gave every member of the carnival the option of leaving as well. Nobody else did.

Kat loved her father, and she loved the carnival, but Marcus had been right to challenge D’Orfeo, and Kat knew that too. Her punishment would likely have been shorter had she repented, but she refused to back down. She refused to lie. Everyone should have the right to stay or go, and she wouldn’t take back what she’d done, setting Marcus and his human woman free.

She was human herself, after all. She had no gifts, could take no other shape. Freeing them had been as much about saving them as it had been about showing her father that she was not a child any longer, that she would make decisions independent of him, and that eventually, maybe, she would want a life beyond the carnival. And he had reacted just about how she had thought he would, the same way he had when, at sixteen, she’d taken one of the caravan trucks for a joyride through the Texas hill country. He’d done the exact same thing to her then, confining her to her trailer after the carnival went dark for the night, and that told Kat that he
still
saw her as a little girl that he needed to control. But she was a grown woman now. And she was going to have to show him that somehow.

Kat thought the carnival felt more alive when it was dark. Maybe because there was no show, no flashing lights. It was simply home. The dotted, disconnected puzzle pieces of their strange little family, arranged in a circle around the big top in the same formation, no matter where they ended up. The light was still on in her father’s trailer, dim, just his reading lamp, perhaps. Moonlight glinted off the chrome surface of the old caravan Mabel preferred, with its little porthole windows decorated by frilly lace curtains. Liam always pitched a tent, preferring to sleep on the earth. Sometimes he didn’t even bother with the tent, just rolled out a sleeping bag and drifted off on his back, with his face tilted to the stars. Her uncle Baptiste always parked his trailer near the front of the carnival because he felt it was his duty to maintain security, to be sure nobody tried to sneak in and vandalize anything.

The roadies, Liam’s people, were all bears who slept together in one trailer by the big top. The twins, who performed the dance of serpents, were snake shifters and kept to themselves. Everyone, despite their great differences, worked together to keep the carnival prosperous and safe and together, and Kat thought that was the real power her father had. The ability to keep them all together. Traveling carnivals were rare these days, and yet they had never been turned away or broken up, in all the years that Kat had lived among them. But, for her, it was a double-edged sword. Nobody ever left the carnival either. And she was beginning to feel trapped.

Other girls her age were in college, or at least living independently of their parents. They were creating lives, looking towards bright futures. Kat wondered if D’Orfeo expected her to stay and work at the carnival for her entire life. Mabel had educated her in her little chrome trailer, but Kat knew there was more to the world than the education that Mabel and the carnival could give her. She wanted to see it, to experience things that normal people did, but D’Orfeo wouldn’t have it.

He wouldn’t let her go to school, he wouldn’t let her live somewhere else, he wouldn’t let her get a job of her own. It was too dangerous, he’d always say. He didn’t want to leave her alone while the carnival traveled, he’d say. This was her world, he’d say. But it wasn’t. It was
his
world. She sat at the top of the Ferris wheel, looking out at all the possibilities she couldn’t touch, and felt herself begin to resent him.

She stood up in the Ferris wheel’s car, feeling it wobble slightly beneath her feet, to get a better view of the mountain in the distance. Moonlight struck its snowy peak in shades of silver, a pale cap above a drift of wispy clouds that faded across the embroidery of sprouting trees that blanketed the decline into the valley below. It seemed to echo the shape of the big top in the fore, and Kat wondered if everything, for the rest of her life, would just be a shadow or an echo or another kind of reminder that she could not escape the carnival.

With a sigh, she swung her leg over the side of the car, reaching her bare toes towards the wheel’s frame to begin climbing back down. But movement by the tree line caught her eye, and she went still, squinting, trying to see more clearly through the darkening nighttime shadows. She saw movement. Several dark blots lumbering between the trees.

And then she heard the unmistakable howl of a wolf rise up from the tree line, and all those dark blots came together and burst out of the forest, darting towards the perimeter of the carnival. Panic seized Kat’s heart and she started clambering down the Ferris wheel’s frame as quickly as she could, bellowing for Liam and Baptiste and her father.

“Wolves!” she shrieked, and even as she screamed, another howl lifted to overpower her voice. She struggled not to fall off the Ferris wheel on her way down, but she saw lights flicker on around the carnival as its denizens came awake. And then Baptiste’s bullhorn blared; either he’d heard the howling or Kat herself screaming, but either way, the call to action sounded. She scrambled down and ultimately dropped, hitting the grass and rolling, but the Ferris wheel was just at the edge of the carnival’s lights and she could already see dark figures racing across the clearing towards her. She shoved herself to her feet and went sprinting towards the closest structure: the fun house.

The fun house itself was actually a refurbished school bus that led into a series of tents built of black velvet fabric to block out the light. All the pieces of the carnival had to be mobile and easily broken down, and the fun house was no different. The lights and mirrors that separated each section gave the illusion of everything being bigger or smaller, thinner or wider, and Kat knew each twist and turn, each tricky mirror and each hiding spot. She couldn’t fight a wolf or outrun one, but she could probably hide from one in the fun house.

They’d been attacked before, but usually they knew it was coming. This wolf pack hadn’t made it clear that they were passing into someone’s territory; if there had been signs and markers, Kat couldn’t remember her father pointing them out. And he always pointed them out to her, so that she knew precisely what to look for. Or in some cases
sniff
for.

If the land was contentious, that was all the more problematic; the carnival might have gotten stuck in the middle of a feud. Mistaken for enemies. Or maybe these wolves just wanted to kill them. Some shifters gave themselves over so completely to the beast in their hearts that there was very little human left. Instinct took over. D’Orfeo did not allow those types into his carnival. He said they were too dangerous, too unpredictable, and the only law they recognized was dominance.

Kat didn’t know what these wolves were after, but she knew that she didn’t want to get pinned to the ground and ripped to shreds by one of them. Already she could hear the others fighting as she ran. The roar of a lion lifted above the din and she knew her father had joined the fray. Bears bellowed and wolves howled; she heard the crack of Baptiste’s whip and thought maybe she recognized the heavy thunder of Mabel’s sawed-off shotgun. She didn’t dare look behind her, though. She stared straight at the mouth of the fun house and ran with all the energy and strength her legs could summon. Just as she felt her muscles begin to burn and cramp, she slammed through the fun house door, right between the gaping, smiling jaws of a laughing clown.

As it was after hours, the fun house was completely dark, but Kat stumbled up the steps and through the body of the old bus, bursting out the back end and into the maze of mirrors. Even as she ducked behind one of the velvet partitions and behind a tall mirror, she could hear the mad scrabbling of claws across the bus’s metal floor as a wolf barreled into the fun house after her.

She crouched down, trying desperately to stop gulping down air, and willing her heartbeat to slow so that she could hear anything other than its pounding in her ears. In the quiet, she could hear the wolf slow as it entered the mirror maze, and its footsteps on the carpeted floor were hard for her to make out. Then, across the alleyway of mirrors, she saw one of the crew exits and thought that if she could make it there, she might leave the wolf lost in the mirrored corridor for long enough that she could escape to someplace more secure. Because anywhere was more secure than being trapped in close quarters with a freaking werewolf.

She heard, in the distance, another sharp boom from Mabel’s sawed-off, and it was like the first shot of a race. It sent her sprinting forward across the narrow alley between mirrors. In the corner of her eye, she spied a blur of movement, dark fur and sharp claws, and heard the ripple of a snarl as the wolf saw her and gave chase. But it slammed into one of the mirrors, disoriented, and the glass burst out of its frame, shattering all over the floor and all over Kat and the wolf itself.

Though she lifted her arms to cover her head as she ran, she stumbled and her bare foot snagged on a sliver of glass. With a yelp and a curse, she went down, hitting the shard-strewn carpeting on the corridor floor. She heard the wolf let out a pained noise as well and scrambled, hands patting around for a shard big enough to use to defend herself. But when she rolled onto her back and sat up, the wolf was a whining lump across the hallway from her, all fur matted with blood and breathing hard. It must have ended up rolling in the glass.

Kat shoved up to her feet, still clutching a wedge of glass, and winced when she put weight on her one foot. There must have been some glass digging into the underside of her heel. She was quiet a moment, listening, but she didn’t hear another shot from Mabel’s sawed-off, or any more roaring. She began inching towards the crew exit, keeping one eye always on the lump of wolf on the floor, her glass knife aimed right at it. It didn’t try to get up, though. She shoved the canvas door open wide, letting some moonlight into the darkened hall of mirrors, and stepped half out into the night, listening for sounds of fighting. That’s when she heard her father calling.

“Kat!” he was shouting from somewhere nearby. “Kat, where the hell are you! Kat! Kitty girl!”

Relief flooded through her, but she didn’t go running to him. Between her foot and the fallen wolf, she just stood where she was and called back to him.

“Dad, over here! I’m by the fun house side entrance! I caught one!”

Well, caught was being generous, but she was still alive and the wolf was effectively felled, so she didn’t feel like she was lying, exactly. The wolf was caught. She turned back towards the creature, looking at it anew. Even lying wounded and bloody as it was, with moonlight striking its dark fur in glints of silver, it was a magnificent-looking beast. There were no wolves in the carnival, and Kat had never been this close to one. It shifted a little where it lay, one dark eye ticking slightly upward to look at her. She froze, but when it didn’t struggle to its feet, she found her curiosity began to overwhelm her caution. As she took a tentative step towards it, the Ringmaster came charging around a corner of the fun house, tugging a t-shirt on over his head.