The Fortune Teller's Daughter (11 page)

…and
reappeared standing over me.

Eli sent the
blades whistling through the air.

Castel
grabbed me up, his arms around my throat and shoulders, and spun to meet the
knives head on with me struggling as his human shield.

Eli’s stormy
eyes widened and his outstretched hand went rigid to call the knives back.
Instead they veered and embedded themselves one after another into the plastic
seats to our right.

My Magician
held up his hands in surrender.

I have
nothing up my sleeves.

Castel kept
one arm cinched across my shoulders and cradled me against his chest. With his
other hand he grabbed my face, grasped so hard his fingertips indented my
cheeks. I clutched his arm for balance as he walked me awkwardly closer to Eli.

“Not as
pretty as your usual toys,” Castel murmured, “but she’ll do.”

“What do you
want, Castel? Name it. I’ll trade.”

I met those
grey eyes. They searched my face, shifting so quickly between thoughts I
couldn’t follow. His brows drew together and for a moment I saw the most
pronounced of all his emotions.

Fear. Real
fear.

“Pathetic.” Castel
shook his head. “You used to have more fight in you. What a sad place for the
Great Dragon to end up. Barely a shadow of your former glory. It makes
destroying you a little underwhelming, really. You know what I want. Toss it
here.”

Eli
hesitated, his right hand coming to his chest and I knew.

The key.

“No,” I
gasped, though I did not know why it seemed suddenly imperative that this man
not take control of it. I couldn’t have explained why I knew it was a trade Eli
could not make. “Don’t give it to him. Don’t you dare.”

“Silence,
you.” Castel squeezed, strangling off my next words. “You can only have one.
The key or the girl. Unlock us or I will snap this pretty white neck, I swear
on the carnival I will squeeze every shred of life from her. Every tear.”

Eli
faltered, flicked his gaze from mine to Castel’s. He squeezed his fist around
the silver key and for a second I thought he’d rip it free.

But then he
shook his head a fraction. A half answer. Regret was quickly replaced by bitter
self-loathing.

“I cannot.”

My heart
constricted.
Don’t be afraid
, I told myself.
Don’t be afraid of this
monster
.

I was so
afraid.

Castel
growled through clenched teeth. “So much for your white hat.”

And then the
man dropped his hand to my throat, wrapped around my windpipe and cinched. I
struggled, clawed at his wrist pathetically as something in his look changed
from anger to wicked pleasure.

He dragged
me to his mouth and kissed me.

Kissed me
like a reptile, wet and glassy. His tongue pushed beyond my lips, forced my
mouth impossibly wide.

Overhead
bulbs exploded in a shower of sparks and burning gas, plunging us into darkness
but for the red alarm lights, and with it a roar I felt in my bones and up
through the squealing metal and gears propelling us to our end.

Castel’s
body seized up and released me, a silent scream frozen on his mouth. The slate
grey eyes saw nothing, as if he were being frozen. His hand jerkily came to his
heart and he clutched it as if he were having a heart attack. I stumbled back a
step towards my magician.

Eli’s hard,
handsome face had been turned into a terrifying thing of revenge. His rigid, outstretched
hand squeezed and Castel made the most horrible, strangling noise as he clawed
at his chest, jerking unnaturally, like a puppet on strings. His face turned a
shade of blue reserved for dead things.

“Stop,” I
reached for Eli, afraid to touch him. “Eli. Stop.”

No response.
Both men stared into each other as if they existed somewhere I did not.

Any other
man would have been killed, but Castel clung to his survival. His body stood
frozen fast, pupils overwhelming his slate irises. But he didn’t die.

Eli broke
down first and fell to his knees, weakened and shaking badly.

The circuit
snapped and for one morbid moment awareness flooded Castel’s eyes.
Powerlessness and betrayal.

“Sera!” Eli
yelled and fisted his hands in front of him. He tore them outward and at the
same time the subway doors screamed open, sparks flaring in the dark rushing
space beyond the train car. The wind howled and sucked at my hair and skin,
whistling as we passed another station without slowing. “Now!”

Before I
could second guess myself, I shoved Castel from the train.

His body
disappeared in a flash. He didn’t scream. I looked to my hands and back to the
space where the other magician had stood moments before.

I felt
nothing. It should have frightened me at least what I had just done, but all I
felt was relief.

“Sera.”

The
Magician’s voice was an aching thing I could not deal with. I turned and
stumbled for a chair and fell into it, braced an arm across my midsection, and
felt all the places in my body that hurt. My face felt slick and warm with my
own blood, coagulating now and drying. It clotted in my hair, made my clothes
feel stiff. I felt nauseous. I felt like I had drowned and this was the world
that lay at the bottom of the ocean.

My magician
came to me, knelt before me even though I couldn’t see more than the silhouette
of him in the red darkness, but I could feel him. With my free hand I pushed
his sweaty hair from his eyes and he stilled when I touched him, then responded
by turning his nose into my palm and taking a deep, crushing breath.

“Serafine.”

He sighed my
name, clutched my hand to his face as if he were afraid I might pull away. We
were in bad shape, the two of us.

“Are you
ok?” he said into my wrist, his lips brushed against my pulse. I gripped him
tightly.

“Not even a
little bit.”

I could feel
the train slowing its suicidal trajectory. I wondered if he was doing it,
somehow, but I no longer thought it mattered. I could not bring myself to
question the impossibility of who he was.

“At least
he’s gone now.”

“He’s a
magician.” He pulled away from my touch, even as I reached for him. “That would
not have killed him.”

I gaped. “I
pushed him from a moving train into the side of a subway tunnel!”

“We’re
tougher than we look.” He groaned and prodded at his own hurt body. “Castel
likely disappeared before he ever hit the ground.”

I shook my
head. The train slowed a little more and ahead of us I could see the lights of
a station crawling closer.

“Who was he,
Eli?”

We were quiet
together for a long time with only the sound of the wind and the clattering of
metal on tracks between us. It did not seem to be the easiest thing he’d had to
do all night, answering this question.

“Castel used
to be a magician for the carnival.” He climbed to his feet, but kept his hands
in contact with me as he slid into the seat beside me. “We were an act,
together, for a very long time.”

“You were
friends.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry.”

The train
groaned, a broken sound, as it pulled into the empty station. 

He covered
his face against the bright lights and leaned forward onto his knees.

“Not
exactly,” he said, his voice muted and haunted and far, far away. “Castel’s my
brother. My twin.”

__________________

Eli

The Magician
charmed the officer at the edge of the subway station parking lot into
searching for his bad guys elsewhere. It was an easy trick, something Eli could
do without thinking. After a few drinks. Blindfolded.

But that was
before Castel had tasked him almost to ruin. When the cop blinked dumbly into
the Magician’s face, there was a second when Eli thought the charm wouldn’t
work and he’d have to resort to knocking him out the old fashioned way and
making a run for it. But then the officer turned and wandered off towards the station
where his comrades were fanning out. As soon as the officer’s attention led him
elsewhere, Eli took Sera’s hand and dragged her away into the dark, wet
streets.

The wound on
her face was ugly, a broken star beside her left eye that wouldn’t stop bleeding
no matter how many times he stopped them and held pressure to the wound. She
swayed in his arms as if she were dancing to music he couldn’t hear, murmuring
about the ocean. Confessing her fear of drowning.

He did not
want to admit that all her blood scared him.

Eli had
never enjoyed Chicago, but that night he liked it even less. They’d gotten off
the train too soon and the distance to the train yards seemed insurmountable.
It might as well have been on the other side of the world. He needed to get her
help, needed to get both of them within the safety of the gates where Castel
couldn’t reach them. Even if Sera didn’t believe he could have survived being
pushed off the train, Eli knew better.
He
knew how he’d survive the fall
that would kill a normal man, and if he could do it, Castel could as well, and
probably faster. They were the same after all.

Twice they
stopped so Sera could get sick. He knelt next to her, captured her wet red
curls in his hands and held them away from her face while she retched. It would
be later, in the middle of the night when he watched her sleep restlessly in
his bed that he’d wonder about this moment. He’d wonder why he held her tightly
against his chest, trembling and tearlessly sobbing. He could not remember ever
holding someone’s hair back before, could not imagine tolerating the smells or
the sounds, both of which were maybe the worst smells and sounds in the world.

Worse, he
couldn’t stop thinking that if he did not hold her hair back and comfort her as
she got sick on her knees in some back alley, no one else would, and that made
him so damn angry.

Amazing that
this girl had shown up in his life only hours ago when it felt, oddly, that
she’d always been there, waiting patiently to be noticed. Hours ago when she
tripped security, he’d been ordered to distract her, waste her time, and then
escort her out the back gates after he’d figured out why she was there in the
first place. And now he was holding her shoulders as what sounded like a horde
of demons tried to escape hell by way of her mouth.

Weirder
things had happened in his life, but not much weirder.

It was
almost dawn when they reached the train yard. Yellow, like an old bruise,
colored the horizon beyond the surrounding copse of trees. It struck the top
tents.
Home
. He’d bedded Russian ballet dancers in Moscow, artists in
Paris, and princesses in the East. At the height of his legends he’d performed
for the royal family in London, the Tsar before the last fall, and deep within
heady, smoke-thick clubs of New York City in the 20s, high on hedonism and the
occult.

None of
them, no matter their wonders and beauties, their riches and rare treasures,
made him ache the way
Imaginaire
could.

Sera made it
only a few steps into the tall, dead grass. She swayed, her lovely green eyes
unfocused, one dilated, one not. She inhaled his name,
Eli
, like a
question. Like she couldn’t remember if she got it right or if he’d hear her or
if he’d care.

Then she
went down.

He caught
her before she hit the gravel. She was pale anyway, but her cheeks looked
bloodless, dark circles, like thumbprints, in the hollows of her eyes. She
shook her head as if to clear it, then snuck her arms around his neck.

The Magician
pressed his face into her hair, scraped together the last ounce of strength he
had in him.

“I’ve got
you,” he promised. “I’ve got you, Sera.”

 He didn’t
believe that any more than it was true. He’d proven that already when he let
Castel within a mile of her, when he’d lead Castel’s men to her doorstep. She
could have lived anonymously for the rest of her life, never crossing into his
brother’s knowledge, until he’d screwed that up.

Eli left her
bags, lifted her into his arms, and carried her the rest of the way.

Meer, an
effeminate scale-skinned member of the Strange troupe, stood when they
approached. That the least intimidating member of the crew had guard duty on
the front gate proved how little anyone took Castel’s threat seriously. 

He was
within shouting distance before Meer even reached for his keys. Fool.

“Open the
goddamn gate.”

“Eli what…”

The look he
gave the Strange silenced all remaining questions. Meer fumbled with the
elaborate lock mechanism; a thing deliberately designed that it could not be
picked by even the most skilled thief also meant that it could not be opened
quickly. Her body was heavy in his arms and her hold around his neck weakened
as she slipped in and out of a fog he was almost certain was caused by a
concussion.

She moaned
softly and buried her face into his chest. He squeezed her against him.

The lock
snapped open and Meer shoved the gate wide enough for Eli to maneuver Sera
inside.

“Send
Georgianne to my tent. Wake Rook. Wake everyone. Don’t fucking stand there.
Run
.”

The lizard
slid in the dewy wet grass and scampered off into the darkness between tents,
caterwauling loud enough to wake the long dead.

Usually dawn
at
Imaginiere
was Eli’s favorite time, after the crowds had gone and
there was only the faint scent of popcorn and pink cotton candy on the air. He
could walk the paths between tents and spend hours hiding on the top tier of
the harlequin carousel working through the physics of a new trick. Alone. It
was the thing he missed most when the carnival went dark and they scattered.
More than his stage. More than the applause.