Funhouse Read online

  “You’re going to be all right,” the Bearded Lady said. “You’re probably hungry. The golems should be bringing you food here soon. You’ve slept all day and evening.”

  Neve’s stomach growled at the mention of food. But bringing her arm down to press against her belly shifted the negligee over her skin all over again. Neve made a fist against the prickly feeling she recognized now as touch starvation, touch sensitivity, a burning desire to have all the men in the room open their trousers and bring their cocks against her skin, because that would at least gutter the flames.

  Thoughts that had never considered entering her head for the vast majority of her life intruded upon her with a manic intensity that made her feel insane, even more so with all the attention on her.

  What are they waiting for?

  “I don’t know whether we met when you were last in the circus, but I’m Kitty,” the Bearded Lady said. “I know you need a lot of time to adjust to what’s happening to you, but Bell’s on his way, so I’m just going to say this now and hope you retain some of it before he gets here. You wished yourself in. Since you’re the very picture of confusion, I don’t think you meant to. You made a wish, Bell granted it and now you have two wishes left. Whatever you do, don’t try to wish yourself out or wish punishment on anyone here. Bell won’t let you go, no matter how you word it, and he won’t take kindly to any wish that might hurt his people. But you’re one of his people now.”

  Kitty stroked her hair in a comforting, maternal gesture, but she misconstrued why Neve pulled away from her again. She held her hands up and away from Neve as though calming a spooked mare. “So although you won’t feel all right, you are. Okay? Just don’t make another wish for a while, or you may like what happens even less than this time.”

  “And what exactly happened this time?” A short, slight man with pale skin and long black hair twirled a chair around, straddled it like a Fosse dancer. “She’s a pretty little thing, but she doesn’t look much like our sort. What kind of special talents are you hiding under that dress, little girl? Not that it hides much…unless that’s your talent.”

  The Short Man snorted.

  A rock struck the pale man’s shoulder.

  “Ow. What gives, Spider?”

  The Human Spider brushed the dust from her hands. “Last I checked, that kind of talent was common as corn around here. No need to be vulgar.”

  Neve would climb back onto the bed, but she’d have barely any clothes on, surrounded by other half-naked people and on a bed while her body overheated and clamored for relief, so she didn’t think that was a good idea. However, surrounded as she was, every potential exit was easily blocked by someone from the circus.

  “Someone mind telling me what the hell is going on? Nothing’s been right since I came to Arcanium, and I have no idea how I got back or why.” Or what happened before that.

  The last twenty-four hours were either a dream or a blur, and she wasn’t positive what was happening now was real either. She didn’t feel like herself. The heavy threads of arousal pricking like dull sewing needles through her again only enhanced that feeling.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  There was no mistaking that voice, the smooth darkness of it as much a caress as anything his hands had done.

  The strongman emerged from the shadows near the red curtain opposite the exit.

  Her body recognized him just as much as her brain did, but it had none of the same caution. Her breasts hurt in want of his hands. Her clit remembered his mouth and throbbed at the sight of his beautiful form moving through the shadows and low, golden light of the lanterns.

  “You. You did this to me.” Neve looked around for something to protect herself with as he came toward her.

  She took a cue from the Spider, grabbing a larger rock from the ground. Most everything was covered with a biodegradable layer of sawdust, but the ground underneath was discernable through it—brown grass, dirt and rocks.

  “Woman, I didn’t mean to—”

  The Spider wasn’t the only one who knew how to throw. Neve had pitched all through college and for the Sunday school softball team. She could have won her own stuffed animal in the midway, but she liked it when her husband won her things she knew she could get for herself.

  The rock hit squarely at the base of the strongman’s sternum. He grunted, clapping his hand on the imprint of sawdust where the rock had hit him. When he pulled his hand away, blood had smeared over the skin and on his palm. The strongman looked up, but he wasn’t mad. If anything, he looked impressed.

  “Ho! Strike one!” the pale man crowed from his chair. “I could watch that all day. And she hasn’t even had training. Want to make it three strikes, princess?”

  She ignored the pale man, took a few steps toward the strongman and picked up another rock. “You didn’t mean to what? What exactly were you apologizing for?”

  She didn’t wait for him to answer. She wound the pitch and threw.

  The strongman caught the rock just before it hit his chest. He clenched his fist, muscles and tendons flexing, veins bulging. When he opened his hand again, the rock trickled out as coarse sand.

  “Neve… That’s your name, isn’t it?” The strongman continued toward her, no longer concerned about being thwarted.

  But despite the display with the rock, she didn’t feel threatened. She just felt angry. A little scared. But mostly confused, and angry because of it. “What the hell is going on?”

  Kitty regarded the strongman with visible caution. “Mikhail, I’d keep a good distance if I were you.”

  “Bell!” The conjoined twins were close to the big cat cages, and both of them were looking over their shoulders at Neve, at the strongman coming for her, with identical fear in their eyes—the sort that came from experience, like realizing someone was standing too close to a hornet’s nest.

  “Stay away from me. Don’t touch me. I want to know what’s going on. Why did you bring me here?” Neve crouched to find another projectile, but when she stood again, the strongman was close enough to reach her.

  “Mikhail, don’t!” Kitty shouted.

  He took Neve’s wrist and twisted it—not to break the bones but to make her drop the rock she’d found. Then he yanked her against him, her whole body flush to his, hands and forearms on his chest, her cheek just above the blood she’d drawn.

  “I need you to calm down,” he rumbled above her head. She hadn’t understood how tall he was until now, since she’d first seen him on an elevated platform and last experienced him horizontally.

  If he had been anyone else, she would have pushed herself away. But once she was against him, she couldn’t bear the thought of not having his skin on hers when it was everything she’d needed since she’d woken up.

  In the golden light, far more of him was illuminated, from the way he appeared carved from redwood to the tattoos that crisscrossed his chest and arms and the parts of his legs she could see. His long hair was thick, blacker than the ink on his body, and he wore even less than most of the other men, the leather briefer on his legs to display his musculature. And based on what she’d seen of him, he was either significantly smaller while not erect or something else managed to conceal him. Like, say…magic. It was difficult not to consider that possibility at this point, although she was open to more likely ones—any other reason why she couldn’t take her hands from his chest, mesmerized by actually seeing the hard planes she touched. Her anger hadn’t dissipated, but now lust flared up to match it.

  She ran her tongue over his salty skin, raising herself on her toes to lick up the sternum to the hollow of his throat. She caught his Adam’s apple between her teeth in frustration, but she couldn’t hurt him too long, not with his hot, broad hands heating her through her thin nightgown until it was as though it wasn’t there.

  Something like a growl vibrated through where she sucked at his skin. He tightened a fist in her hair to ease her head back then dipped down to kiss her. Their hips slot
ted perfectly together, his cock struggling to grow against her. A combination of really tight pants and magic, she concluded hazily. That had to be what kept the extent of his size hidden. It was the only explanation.

  “Oh, bollocks.” A curse and a groan in equal measures from the pale man, but it wasn’t the only one she heard—just the only one she could discern out of the sounds from both men and women in the room.

  “Get away from her.” Nails painted dark red closed around the strongman’s neck and pulled him back with strength as preternatural as his own.

  The snake charmer tore him from Neve’s arms and threw him toward the bed. The strongman somersaulted onto his knees then leapt to his feet before he reached it.

  The charmer wore little more than a tiny leather bikini and a python over her shoulders like a feather boa—the same thing she’d been wearing when Neve and Joseph had visited. She, like the strongman, was taller than Neve had thought. Without the heeled gladiator boots, she would have been a few inches taller than Neve, but with them, she stood eye to eye with the strongman. Her long brown hair and her skin tone were lighter than his, but there was something similar about them, about the way they held themselves, the discernable strength in their figures—not simply superhuman, but exaggerated timeless elements of what was considered feminine in the charmer, masculine in the strongman. They could have been Adam and Eve, the Man and the Woman. And now Neve was starting to understand why her husband had been so smitten with the snake charmer.

  Even so, Neve tried to dart around her to go after the strongman again. Without him, the hunger had returned, and she wrapped her arms around herself against the pangs. She wouldn’t die from them by any means, but if she didn’t know better, she’d think something was seriously wrong with her.

  This is not normal.

  Kitty grabbed Neve’s shoulders to hold her back. “I know you want to, but you can’t go to him.”

  “Don’t touch me.” Neve wrenched away from her.

  Kitty held her hands up again, wincing at her misstep, but she kept herself between Neve and the strongman. “He’s dangerous.”

  “How?” Neve stopped trying to go to him, but not because she didn’t want him anymore. “How exactly is he dangerous?”

  “He’s an incubus.” The snake charmer fixed her gaze upon the strongman as she answered. “If he touches you, he has you. If he has you, he’ll fuck you. If he fucks you, he’ll eat you—which means he’ll kill you. And we don’t touch Bell’s people, not without his permission and without extreme care to protect them, do we, Mikhail?”

  Mikhail shook his head like a lion shaking his mane. “She invited me in. I touched her. I had her. I fucked her. I fed upon her. Yet she’s still alive.”

  “So you came to my bedroom window to kill me?” Neve looked around for bigger rocks. She wasn’t used to pitching at a head—well out of the strike zone—but she could certainly try. “That’s all it was? A lot of pretty words to…what? Get me to serve myself to you on a silver platter?”

  The snake charmer looked down at her. She narrowed her hazel eyes, more like Bell’s than Mikhail’s, peering over Neve as though searching for an answer in what was exposed of her body. “That’s what we are. It isn’t personal.”

  “Well, it is to me. Doesn’t anyone have anything I can hit him with?”

  “How did you survive?” The charmer turned from Mikhail to face Neve more fully. “You shouldn’t have survived, not with the way Bell starves us.”

  “Sure she’s not succubus herself, Lady?” The pale man bit his fist in theatrical agony. “With the two of you in the room, bit hard to pinpoint where the lust is coming from, and she’s quite a piece.”

  The charmer tilted her head. “I don’t smell anything from her except her own desire. She’s no demon. How did she survive? Mikhail should leave none alive.”

  The python around the snake charmer’s shoulders slithered through her shampoo-commercial hair. It stared at Neve from the side as though imparting its own suspicions.

  Neve loved snakes, but she respected them. And when both woman and snake stared at her like that, like predators sizing up prey, Neve knew to back away and make no sudden movements. She crossed her arms over her breasts, which did nothing for the cleavage showing but at least hid the press of her nipples against the silk.

  But the charmer didn’t attack. She whirled away at the shuffle of Mikhail’s feet across the sawdust and pointed her painted nails at him. “You stay away from her. You think I can’t feel how you pull at her, how you’ve wrapped your spell around her so tightly she hurts? She can take her pleasure from any other man in this circus, but I’ll punish you myself if you take another step closer. I thought we were past this, Mikhail. Past these dangerous obsessions—obsessions you know will have you under the Ringmaster’s lash and possibly under Bell’s guillotine.”

  “Am I really supposed to believe that you’re incubus and succubus? Actual demons?” Neve said. “Are you serious?”

  But when she peered back into the previous night, dreamlike and ragged though the memories were, calling the strongman an incubus made too much sense.

  She’d known deep into her tangle with the strongman that what he’d been doing to her wasn’t natural, even if she wasn’t sure what normal was. Then there’d been her final orgasm, the way he’d scratched and scraped her insides raw, hollowed her out with his fullness, pulled from her like a fisherman removing the organs from his catch. There’d been the moment when everything ended. Then there’d been the leap from the window, his bare skin in the dead of winter without any fear of frost.

  Neve believed in evidence. The evidence told her that either this entire circus was colluding on the greatest practical joke in the history of illusions, all to fool one person they’d chosen at complete random, or that the strongman and the snake charmer were what they said they were—which meant the fortune teller was what he’d said he was. And not all the people in the tent around her were what they seemed to be—or maybe they were exactly how they seemed to be.

  “Deadly serious,” Bell said from behind her. “But like I said, Neve, you’re a smart girl. A healthy skeptic, not a skeptic for skepticism’s sake.”

  Neve stopped backing away, stopped covering herself, stopped looking for a weapon, but she didn’t turn around. “Why would you do this to me? Because the rest of the world doesn’t suffer like this. It can’t. And why would you do that just for him to kill me?”

  “I didn’t want him to kill you,” Bell said. “I wanted to prove that he couldn’t.”

  “But he thought he was going to.”

  “You shouldn’t judge him too harshly for that.” He was closer to her now, the coolness of his breath on the back of her neck. “He starves because I deny him free rein with any woman he chooses. I restrict my demons from calling police attention upon the circus, so I can’t allow them to form a pattern of deaths. It was easier to find you by making you easy for him to find, easier to explain that he could slake his lust on you and you could slake your lust on him without fear of death. The pain you feel now isn’t because of me, Neve—or at least not directly. You have no idea how safe you were before you asked to change. The pain is from him. In that way, I’m afraid you suffer the same pangs of desire as my incubus and succubus—and several of my humans.”

  “Kitty said I made a wish.” She was usually quiet, but some things needed to be processed aloud. “She said it with significance, implying that you granted wishes. Whether sorcerer, demon, jinn or witch in disguise, wish-granters in the stories need a spoken wish. I don’t remember making one—or at least I don’t remember saying that I wished something, unless your brand of wish-granting only requires you to pull from someone’s spoken desires.”

  “I require an explicit wish, but you don’t remember it because you made it idly, as so many do.” He combed his fingers through her hair, pulling it back behind her shoulders.

  Neve struggled not to close her eyes from the sweetness of the feeling,
less primeval and raw than how the strongman made her feel.

  “You may not remember the wish,” he said, “but I do. I’ll remember it long after you’ve left Arcanium, my dear. Shall I refresh your memory?”

  “Please.”

  “I do appreciate politeness.” He stroked the curve of her ear to the lobe. She bit her lip.

  Then she heard herself, as though speaking into her own ear. “I wish I could enjoy sex the way he wants me to.”

  “If you had simply wished you could enjoy sex, you might not be here now,” Bell said. “I might have left you with an average woman’s sex drive as a gift—not an improvement on who you were, just a change. But your choice of phrase made it impossible for me to resist. Not just enjoying sex, but enjoying sex the way he wanted you to. And he wanted you to enjoy sex the way almost any man would want a woman like you to. I’ll admit, several of my own people inspired the execution—the Spider, the sex demons themselves, my Maya.”

  The Spider sat up at the mention of her name, one set of arms crossing over her corset, the other set of hands clenching into fists. She didn’t say anything, but she stood from the chaise longue and left without looking back.

  Neve couldn’t dwell too much on the Spider or on the incubus and succubus. Bell’s own curious word choice distracted her. “Your Maya?”

  When Neve turned to face Bell, she was somehow still surprised to see Maya there, taking his hand when he stepped back from Neve. She wore the same red corset Joseph had pushed down from her breasts. A different skirt, though, black tulle instead of feathers, with fishnet stockings and the same heeled ruby shoes, same red and black falls, same Queen of Hearts face makeup, no longer smeared. She met Neve’s eyes without any semblance of shame.