Funhouse Page 10

  “I see the future as it could be, as well as the future as it will be. There’s plenty of room for error. And some slices of the future I’m not permitted to see.”

  “Was Maya hitting you in one of those slices?”

  She didn’t expect him to answer, but he glanced down at his boots and said, “No. It was fixed in the tapestry. Unchangeable.”

  “But knowing it would happen, you could have ducked.”

  “I know how this works, Neve. Very few humans do. It all seems so simple to you because you experience time as progressive, linear, the effect of each moment created by all previous causes. That’s not how I experience it. A great deal of the future is flexible, but there are things I cannot change, though I can cause them.”

  “You’re right. That makes no sense to me.”

  “I’m not a man, Neve. By which I mean I’m not human, in case you were in doubt. I look like a man, more so than most of the others, but I’m not. I’m jinn.”

  “Under what mythology? Arabian demons, genies, some kind of angel…”

  That earned her a proper smile, nearly guileless. “I do like it when I don’t have to explain everything. We exist in most mythologies under different names, but I’m no demon. All demons are jinn, but not all jinn are demons. I’m fireborn, not hellborn.”

  “The distinction is important to you.”

  “It’s important to you. Believe me, Neve, you don’t want a demon running Arcanium.”

  Some of the trucks, trailers and RVs were newer models, the kind of vehicles Neve would expect Bell and other demons to demand for themselves, but a surprising number of them were modest, some downright small or beat-up, like they were on their last legs. Kitty implied that Bell could conjure whatever vehicles he wanted for transport. Neve would be curious to know why he chose the ones he did, whether it because of some internal pecking order between humans and demons, whether it was just a way to camouflage themselves—if they appeared too rich, they could attract thieves—or whether there was a different logic that determined his choices. This time, Bell didn’t answer her unasked question.

  He led her to a relatively small trailer, clean and new. He opened the door then gestured her in.

  “This will be yours. I’ve provided you many books on subjects I believe you’ll like, but people brought into Arcanium against their will aren’t permitted the use of a phone or computer, at least unsupervised. And you cannot step outside the borders of Arcanium, as defined by the fences. To do so will result in an extremely uncomfortable, paralyzing sensation and five lashes from the Ringmaster’s whip. He’s not like your husband with a flogger, my dear. His hand is merciless. While Arcanium is on the move, you must stay within your trailer. Once it’s set up, the circus is free to you, but the fence is as far as you can go.”

  The interior of the trailer was paneled in dark wood like an old-fashioned study. A tiny kitchenette and living area faced the equally tiny shower and water closet.

  Those spaces were small to accommodate the large, surprisingly luxurious bed in the back. Bookshelves, constructed with barriers that would keep the books inside while the trailer was moving, lined the walls on either side of the bed, and cabinet wardrobes were built into the partition.

  “Kitty already warned you not to test my patience by attempting to use one of your last two wishes to leave Arcanium or hurt anyone under my protection. No matter how intelligent you are, there is no way to outsmart me—like, say, wishing you’d never come to Arcanium or wishing I’d never been born. I’ve been granting wishes for centuries. I’ve heard every attempt to thwart me, Neve, darling, and you’re not going to be the one who comes up with the perfect word selection. I’ll find every loophole and make you regret wasting a perfectly good wish.”

  Neve’s attention kept returning to the bed and why Bell had given her such a good one.

  He was behind her, his breath cool on her shoulder, and she was tingling again, knowing how close he was. Regardless of what he had done to her, what he could have done or the way he’d offended everyone else, none of that affected how he could kiss, how his body had felt against hers. And since she wouldn’t let Mikhail near her again…

  “Tomorrow, we’ll be traveling. A golem will bring you dinner tonight and take care of you until we arrive at our new destination. You won’t have to worry about being a part of the circus until next Friday. Nothing too strenuous. I actually didn’t bring you in for Arcanium so much as the Funhouse season approaching.”

  “Isn’t your haunted funhouse up all year? I didn’t get to go through…” Neve stopped talking. She didn’t want to think about why she hadn’t visited the haunted funhouse.

  “I’ll explain more when you’ve had your chance to rest, adjust and get your bearings.” His voice had gone husky. She wasn’t the only one who wanted in that bed. “You’re safe here, Neve. I need you to know that. But it won’t always be easy to do what I need you to. No, you don’t have to respond. I know how much you hate me right now, despite what your body wants and what it feels I can offer, but I like you, Neve, and have no desire to torture you. I’d rather you view this as an opportunity.”

  “An opportunity?”

  “To experience something new, something you would never have had if you hadn’t wished it. There was nothing wrong with what you were, but there’s nothing wrong with what you are now. It’s just new.” He pressed a kiss to her shoulder then withdrew before she could whirl on him, either to take a page from Maya’s book or draw him to the bed. “And as a scientist, don’t you want to explore?”

  Chapter Four

  She searched every inch of her trailer during that first night.

  No doubt Joseph had reported what had happened to the police. The logical progression from there was academic—either the police would believe she ran off with the stud she’d cheated with or they’d believe he abducted her. She wasn’t concerned about Joseph right now—she wasn’t there yet. She mostly worried about how her friends and family would suffer, not knowing what had happened.

  But while there were all kinds of things in her trailer, a phone or computer weren’t among them. She could put a note on the window saying she was kidnapped, but Neve already saw the futility of that, and she wasn’t in the practice of doing things she knew would fail just for the sake of doing something. No, she wasn’t really looking for escape, because she doubted she would succeed. She just wanted people to know she was okay—relatively speaking—not dead in a ditch somewhere or trapped in some maniac’s basement. Maybe she could tell them she went on a self-discovery pilgrimage, contact her work and leave on good terms so she could get another job in the future without burning valuable bridges.

  There was nothing in the trailer to help her, not that she believed Bell would overlook any means of communication, given how meticulously he’d furnished the small home for her. She’d mostly just needed something to do while unable to sleep, some form of active meditation to not think about where she was, why she was here and what Bell had planned. There was a place for everyone else as performer or oddity in Arcanium, but aside from some ballet until she’d gone curvy, she didn’t have much in the way of natural circus-specific talent. And she really didn’t want to think about what Bell wanted to do with someone made to enjoy sex, given the reputation of the performing arts throughout history.

  Bell had told her that consent still mattered, but there was no ignoring how he’d fundamentally altered her willpower. How many of the yeses she’d given already and would inevitably give in the future would be because of what Bell had changed her into? She was going to have to figure out where she stood on that and soon, because her body and skin were just as restless and needy now as they had been before Mikhail had arrived in her bedroom window.

  Going through her trailer and getting to know her space provided a modicum of distraction.

  The book selection on the fortified shelves was eclectic but mostly to her taste. When she was in bed, the left wall held books meant to stimula
te her brain, keep her learning, questioning—works by journalists, political scientists, economists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, historians. To the right were works of fiction—some of literary merit, some mindless. There was also a whole row of old and new romance and erotica, a pair of genres she’d mostly dismissed. She wondered whether her new interest had also changed how she consumed a typical romance plot, which seemed dependent on readers rooting for a relationship because they put themselves in the place of the heroine—something she’d never quite been able to do. It would be an interesting experiment, but she was thankful Bell acknowledged the other parts of her so thoroughly.

  The left wardrobe held other gowns like the ones she wore, nothing that could be called proper clothing. She checked the drawer underneath and found entirely impractical underwear. She’d been going to work in scrubs and lounging in yoga pants for years now, but there wasn’t a pair of sweats or a cute oversized T-shirt to be found, just negligees with varying necklines and hemlines, a few with sleeves and a few without. The only thing of comfort was a large, thick terrycloth robe, which she put on now, although the cold wasn’t bothering her the way it had before Mikhail had come into her bedroom and made her forget about it.

  Lingerie, silk and lace, all meant to show off her body, but nothing seemed Arcanium’s style—too light, too sweet. She didn’t think any of it was intended for her to wear in the circus, although it disquieted her that Bell thought she should wear it as casual, off-duty clothing.

  Then she opened the right wardrobe and got a look at some of the costumes Bell had in mind. She immediately shut the door again. They weren’t much better than the lingerie, and at least one of the costumes was comprised of dozens of hands groping the body they’d cover.

  Don’t want to know. Don’t want to know. There’d been some deep red velvet, some black leather, but they’d been so spare, she wasn’t sure they were still street-legal. She’d worn fetish gear before, but that had been in private. There wasn’t anything private about circus exhibitionism. Still, she was more disturbed by her body’s reaction to the thought of everyone viewing her as a different person than she was—a woman who made herself up for the purpose of their admiration—than she was at the shocking lack of modesty, even for Arcanium.

  But that was part of the problem, wasn’t it? She used to avoid cleavage like the plague unless it was for the benefit of her husband. Was this new excitement hers—the kind she’d have if she’d come by her sexuality naturally—or Bell’s? Or was it Joseph she could blame for this, since she’d framed her wish around his desire, not hers? Had he wanted her to flaunt herself more?

  Whether or not the desire was hers, it made doing anything in that little traveling cabin difficult. She tried taking a shower, but though she felt better emotionally after all that hot water—in a stall barely big enough to hold her hips but somehow just big enough for her to maneuver without sticking a limb out in the process—a shower still left her naked, with a large bed to fill and nothing but sexy clothing to wear.

  She compromised with the terrycloth bathrobe, although she still felt very naked underneath it, and she’d been this close to inviting the staff person who came with dinner up into the cabin if he hadn’t looked completely dead inside. Neve wondered how long the crewman had been there if he’d grown that indifferent. Still, his lack of interest kept her from making a fool of herself.

  The more she mulled about it over dinner, the more she thought the question of whether her desire came from Joseph or from Bell was likely moot. She’d done everything she could to change her asexuality, but what she’d wanted had no more bearing on her sexual sensitivity than it did now. One was given to her by the Creator, the other by a jinni. Either way, her sexuality had always been out of her hands. That hadn’t changed.

  The only option for her, as she saw it, was to adapt—adapt to Arcanium, adapt to the changes wrought upon her. She was partial to stability, not change, not chaos, but if she didn’t adapt, she was going to lose her ever-loving mind and probably get punished with the business end of the Ringmaster’s whip. She didn’t want that. Ergo, she wasn’t going to step out of line unless she saw a genuine out, unlikely though it was.

  She put the dishes on the kitchenette until she figured out where to take them, but on the way back to bed, she caught sight of a long plastic tub under the frame. Neve knelt to pull it out.

  “Oh.”

  Neve had owned plenty of marital aids, but the collection here dwarfed hers—in more ways than one. She didn’t know whether to be amused, offended, touched or excited. Her body seemed to know its opinion on the matter. Her folds grew more sensitive, thickening with a rush of blood flow. Her pussy clenched out a new draught of wetness to cool in the errant breezes through the robe. There were a few standards in the container, like a plain, trusty vibrator, a rabbit vibe, a wand, but the rest…

  Neve wasn’t used to blushing this hard when she was by herself. She’d bought far more realistic toys that fostered equally realistic expectations between her and Joseph. When a girl had trouble wanting sex, more extreme options didn’t seem prudent.

  She didn’t even have names for some of the things in the tub, wasn’t sure where some of them were supposed to go or what they were used for. What made her blush the worst were the toys she knew exactly what they were for, though she’d never considered anything quite so esoteric. For instance, she’d never needed dildo models of dragon or werewolf cocks before, and tentacle porn had never been her fetish. But there they were, lovingly wrapped with the other extra-large toys, nestled next to a convenient saddle to which she could attach them.

  Only two days ago, the thought of some of these toys anywhere near her would have made her cross her legs in protection. She didn’t know what to do with herself when she was brought to a keen edge just by imagining herself setting one of those exotic toys onto the saddle and sinking down over it, imagining herself taken by monsters instead of toys, remembering how afraid and fascinated the strongman’s cock had made her.

  She didn’t know how long she knelt at the foot of her bed, trapped in a loop of her own weird, down-the-rabbit-hole fantasies. She picked up the plain vibrator. It would have been her go-to for taking care of herself before. But her clit made its preference known when she set the plain jane down and trailed her fingernails over to the other side of the tub, the intimidating side.

  The strongman had intimidated her. She hadn’t thought he would fit, and in reality, he shouldn’t have. Simple physics and biology should have prohibited it. She didn’t know whether the same magic that made Mikhail’s cock fit inside her would do the same for three-inch-wide dildos. Hell, that dragon cock had a base of four inches, if she wasn’t mistaken. But she didn’t have to take it all in. She’d had to go half with Joseph for most of their marriage, using positions to make sure he didn’t go too deep.

  She wasn’t used to this much physical anticipation unless she’d put in a late-night pizza delivery order. The more she dwelled on the toys in front of her, and the more her fingers trailed over the hyperdetailed ridges and veins of both the anatomically human and anatomically not, the more her mouth watered. Firm silicone yielded a little under pressure, and the matte finish gave them a velvety texture. Holding them made them warm. Add lubrication, and they might as well be real. Even better, she didn’t have to sacrifice her dignity to ask anyone to fuck her so soon into being brought into Arcanium when she didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction of watching her submit so soon.

  She had to be better than that. Surely she could be better than that. Surely, if consent mattered to Bell, she could control when and with whom she made herself vulnerable—and not based on some primal urge or an incubus’ magic calling her in like a siren.

  She’d waited until marriage before having sex and not all of that was because she wasn’t positive she was going to enjoy it. Sex was special to her. Closeness was special. It had always been rare, a precious commodity for her to give, as valuable as the ring she
still wore. No matter what her clit and cunt were telling her, she didn’t want to screw her way through Arcanium to find the right person to settle down with. The very thought made her horny as hell, but it also made her feel cheap, the very thing she’d fought against for most of her life, when she’d wanted to be taken seriously for her brain but people kept looking at her body and assuming she had only one thing in mind. Half of the men she’d tried to date in high school and college hadn’t actually realized she knew four-syllable words in addition to the four-letter ones they liked to use with her.

  Neve lifted out a nine-inch, bright purple dildo, one with a thin layer of what felt like jelly on the outside. She stroked over it, caressed it. Then, before she could lose her nerve, she fitted it over a vibrator that attached to the saddle. Her ears felt like they were on fire, but her mouth watered so much, she couldn’t resist anymore. She slid her lips over the head of the dildo, moaning as she took it in, her hands on her floor, as though she were fellating someone sitting in front of her.

  In the past, when she’d made that sound while sliding inches into her mouth, it had been a performance. But there was no one here with her now. Anything she did, she did for herself. Now was the time to determine what she wanted when no one else was around, without pressure to be what someone else wanted or needed her to be. She probably wouldn’t be able to unlearn her impulse to perform, but the pressure was definitely gone, which left her feeling lightheaded, unusually embarrassed, unusually giggly and more than a little excited.

  Slowly, with the terrycloth rasping over her skin like sandpaper in comparison to the silk, she untied the robe and slid it down her arms, leaving herself naked. Already, her breathing had grown shallower. Although she was still tentative, she wrapped her slender fingers around the shaft, testing how it gave over the firmer vibrator underneath. She moaned again, twisting her mouth over the head of the dildo until it reached her throat. She swallowed, expecting a gag reflex, but none came.