Carniepunk Read online

  “Ask Madame Laida,” I said. “She knows everything.”

  I didn’t look back as I left him.

  —

  JAMIE’S HOUSE WAS a quiet ranch-style place with floral curtains and neat hedges, and as I came up the walk, I left footprints of slick white ice behind me. The hedges turned into a lacework of silver and glass and shattered at a touch from my thin white fingers. The window frosted over as I drew closer, and behind me the tree branches hissed and rattled and writhed.

  I shattered his window with a whisper and climbed inside.

  Everything turned blue and white, frosted with my rage, my despair, and on the bed Jamie’s breath fogged up white like steam as he shivered and burrowed beneath his covers. It did no good. The blankets turned to hard sheets of ice and locked him down, and as his eyes opened in terror, I leaned over him.

  “Hey, baby. You miss me?”

  He screamed, but it came out as a thin scratch of sound, and I breathed it in and added it to the screams that were already inside me, echoing in my voice.

  I leaned forward and brushed his lips with mine. His turned frost blue, and when he tried to speak they cracked and bled. I licked the sweet crimson away, and my tongue left trails of ice behind.

  He tasted so good. So good. So warm.

  I froze the skin over his wrist and shattered it with a tap so that his blood fountained out, warm and desperate to escape. It made dark icicles where it dripped from his arm, and I broke them free and ate them like frozen treats.

  Jamie was stiff with terror in his bed, and I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever thought he was anything but pathetic. Less of a monstrous threat, he looked like a scared little boy. His own evil ate away inside him like cancer, eroding every good thing that had ever been there.

  He was seventeen years old, and he was lost. There was something broken in him that would never be fixed, ever.

  “Kiley,” he whispered. Blood dripped from his frozen lips. “Please, Kiley, please don’t hurt me.”

  I licked red drops from his skin. Where my tongue touched it, the flesh turned brittle and dead. He tried to scream, but I put a hand lightly over his throat and froze that too. “I think I said that to you when you were killing me. I think that other girl tried to say it while you were choking her to death.”

  His frozen lips whispered something that looked like Please.

  I pressed my palm against his chest. “You broke my heart,” I said. “And now I’m breaking yours.”

  Then I plunged my needle-sharp teeth into his throat and drank out his hot, salty, bitter life, and as I drank it turned cool in my mouth, cold in his veins, and his heart froze and broke inside of him.

  Jamie died, quietly, with frost on his lips. It was a moment of perfection, of cold and silent peace . . . but it was broken by something strange.

  I felt a jolt of warmth.

  I was melting.

  I looked at my fingers. They were thin now, translucent as icicles. Fading. All of me was fading.

  “No,” I said. “No, not yet.” I stumbled back to the window and out, falling into the grass. I put my back to a tree and felt heat coming from the sky, a blast of intense warmth that brought only pain. The tree limbs clattered together in the wind, and icicles rained and shattered on the blacktop like breaking chimes.

  The sun was coming up.

  No, I did it, I drank—

  I ran, fast as the winter wind; I blurred past the trees, the grass, past the empty swing where Matt had been sitting. I ran through the empty streets and over the blacktop. Impossibly, the carnival’s lights were still on, its music still blaring, and ahead, ahead was the ditch, and the horizon was pink now, pink and soft and ready to burst with morning . . .

  The Cold Girl rose up out of the ditch and gave me her death-sweet smile. “Is it better now?” she asked. I could hear my own unvoiced scream in there now, distinct as a bell. “Is it?”

  “You said—” I was struggling to breathe now, and I felt sick and faint with remembered pain. “You said if I drank I’d stay with you!”

  She plucked a falling icicle out of the air. It became a white rose in her hand that shattered into a million pieces, too fragile to survive. Like me.

  “You have to be colder.”

  “But I am!” I said. “I am cold, I want to be cold! Please!”

  “Then why didn’t you take the boy who offered himself to you? You had compassion. You felt for him.”

  The pain was back, aching and hot, real and horrible. I wanted to run away from it. I wanted to be winter, locked in ice. Safe.

  The carnival went suddenly silent, and all the lights went out, and I could see Madame Laida standing next to the Cold Girl now, smoking another cigarette. She gave me a bitter smile.

  “Come on, kid. You want to be one of us?” she asked me. “A cheap bed in a tent, a carnival that never stops moving, looking for just the right victims? Because that’s what you are, honey. A victim. You’re just looking to trade one monster for another, and you’ll never get away from this one.”

  The Cold Girl gave her a look, and Madame Laida shrugged and walked away, back toward the silent carnival.

  “Your choice,” she called back to me. “But once you’re hers, it’s forever. She’s giving you a choice. Make it.”

  I struggled to think. The pain was back, so intense it was like burning alive, and the sun was just bursting over the horizon, and I had no time, no time at all. . . .

  “I just want to stop hurting,” I wept. “Please, let me stop hurting.”

  “Ah,” the Cold Girl sighed. “Then you cannot be mine. Because we may be cold, we may be immortal, but we never stop hurting. That is our curse.”

  She bent and touched her lips to mine, a kiss of ice-cold peace, and then she faded into a stinging mist of blown crystals.

  In the dirt I opened my eyes and took my last conscious breath. The darkness came over me just as the sun turned the dirt pink around my head.

  Turns out, the darkness was but a shadow falling over me, and then there was a shout, and sirens, and so much noise it made me tired.

  —

  WHEN I WOKE up in the hospital, I felt nothing but absolute surprise. How could I be alive?

  It was Matt, the boy from English class. They told me that he’d searched all night, and at dawn he’d woken up the carnival and demanded to see Madame Laida. Whatever she told him, Matt headed for the road.

  He’d found me at dawn in the ditch and he’d carried me all the way back to town wrapped in his black hoodie, protected against the chill. He wouldn’t put me down at the hospital until they made him. I’d stopped breathing a couple of times along the way, they said, and he’d managed to revive me with CPR.

  Madame Laida had told me the truth: I’d died, all right. But I’d been saved.

  For a week I slept and dreamed of the cold, and Matt never left my side. When I awoke, his was the first face I saw—pale, regular, nothing like Jamie with his flash and beauty and cruelty. Matt was holding my hand in his, and his smile—his smile was fragile, and sad, and warm.

  So warm.

  “Hey, Kiley,” he said. “I promised I’d find you. Remember?”

  I thought I remembered the warmth of his arms around me, out there in the night. Of him bringing me back here, to pain, and to life.

  “Jamie had a heart attack,” he told me, very quietly. “But . . . I guess you know that?” He seemed a little afraid to say it, but I liked that he didn’t look away.

  I nodded, just a little.

  “The police said he killed somebody else too. If he’s the one who did that to you, I’m glad he’s dead.”

  I felt so warm inside now, so warm. And I knew, as sure as the slow beat of my heart, that I’d never see the Cold Girl again.

  And I’d never need her again.

  “Matt?” My voice was just a thread of sound, but he heard it, and his smile was like sunrise. “Stay with me.”

  He raised my fingers to his mouth, and the touch o
f his lips made me shiver, but not from the cold.

  Not ever again.

  I fell asleep then, and I dreamed about the carnival, with its ride operators and ticket sellers, roustabouts and fortune-tellers. They’d all made a bargain with the Cold Girl over the years—victims, every one of them, taking immortality in exchange for revenge. Now they’d never stop moving, never stop hunting for their next recruit. Their next paying customer marked for death.

  But it wouldn’t be me.

  I heard a whisper of tinny music, a glitter of lights at the edge of my vision, and I shivered just as sleep took me away.

  It wouldn’t be me, this time.

  “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 decades. 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.

  I find my violin case on one of the crates and swing it over my shoulder as Nobu opens the lift gate. Once outside he knocks on the window of the driver’s-side door in some sort of dude-bro Morse code.

  *Gig soon. Don’t take too long.*

  A moment later a middle finger presses against the inside of the window.

  “Asshole.”

  “At least they’re in the front this time.” Brystion wasn’t exactly known for his tact when it came to finding fuck space. “Why do we keep him around, again?”

  “Because he brings the ladies. And it’s his band.” Nobu smiles wryly and tips his head to where Marcus slouches on a nearby tree stump, his fingers picking out a fiery Spanish melody on an acoustic guitar. He’s in human form, complete with jeans and a wool skullcap, but there’s a feral gleam in the werewolf’s eye when he raises a brow at us.

  Scarlet shimmers in my head as the music hits my ears, whisks me away into a flamenco-filled haze. I shut my eyes against it, but the colors continue to swirl.

  Synesthesia.

  Both help and hindrance, my own special oddity ensures I see music in the form of colors, each note and chord blending into some new hue.

  “Come on.” Nobu nudges me away. The others in the band know about this particular “skill” of mine, of course, but none of them really understand it. At most, it’s a parlor trick I can trot out onstage. I can always be counted on as a sort of living tuning fork.

  But it also makes me far more sensitive when things are played off-key.

  Years upon years of training, always searching for perfection. To suffer the indignity of anything less was anathema. One doesn’t get into Juilliard on “almost good enough,” after all.

  Before we’d joined the band, Nobu and I busked together on the streets—me on my battered acoustic violin and him on his electric Jordan Holoflash. Pretentious fucking instrument. It suited him, even though I’d never be caught dead playing it. But it was easy, the two of us meshing with a simple grace that filled me with joy.

  Joining the band changed all that.

  After several weeks of me butting heads with Marcus and Brystion on arrangements and never quite finding a groove, Nobu took me aside and suggested I ought to tone it down a bit. Which in my case meant no more solo playing. No showing off. Learning how to be a supporting member or some such bullshit. I do my best, but sometimes it chaps the hell out of my hide. I’m better than they are. To hold myself back merely to fit in is so far counter to everything I’ve been taught.

  But I’ve been on the stage nearly my entire life. I know how to hide behind a smile.

  I give the restrooms a sour side glance as Nobu and I approach the fairgrounds. If we could just manage to swing real showers on a regular basis, I’d be all set. The romanticism of making music on the open road certainly has its appeal—but so does hot water.

  Nobu chuckles when he sees where my gaze is headed. He pushes his violet tea shades onto his forehead. “All in good time, little bird.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I mutter. “You always look good.”

  And he does. Nobu is a fallen angel—a sin-eater, to be specific. Most of the time he looks as though he stepped out of the pages of some bishōnen manga. Between the copper tint of his skin and the ebony hair spiking from his head, dyed in a multihued brilliance, there is something about him that nearly makes my eyes burn.

  Sometimes I marvel at it. That such a creature deigns to travel with me. Teaching me. Protecting me. Loving me.

  Tonight his hair is shades of aqua and emerald. He’s a gorgeous leather-clad peacock, even if the feathers of the wings he sometimes displays are of the darkest night.

  “I still wouldn’t mind a real shower.” I stretch my arms to the evening sky.

  “Soon.” He presses a quick kiss against my forehead and leads me through a second field where a small oasis of cars are parked, heading for the CrossRoads fairgrounds.

  Nerves run in soft waves down my spine. As gigs go, I’ve never played openly for so many OtherFolk before, and the unfamiliar anticipation leaves an odd taste in my mouth, gritty and dank. Even if we’re mostly doing covers this time. I pat my violin case out of habit, my fingers suddenly eager to showcase my talent among them. To show them all what I can really do.


  Nobu’s lips quirk and he chuckles, the sound soft and low. “If your mother could only see you now,” he muses. His wings fade away beneath a Glamour as the glaring lights of the midway hit us.

  My mouth compresses into a bitter smile. My mother would be aghast at how her little prodigy had escaped her, eschewing the propriety of Juilliard for lessons learned upon the road. “No need to guess there. She’d garrote me with my own violin strings.”

  Abruptly, he kisses my palm and then my cheek, his mouth brushing over my jaw to linger on the sweet spot where I lean against the chin rest of my violin.

  The violinist’s hickey.

  Nobu often kisses me there. Some sort of manly claiming ritual, I suppose, but I don’t mind.

  I shiver. “How much time before the show?”

  “Not enough,” he says, regretful. “Come on. Let’s get the lay of the land, shall we?”

  Clasping our hands together, we emerge from the shadowed safety of the trees into a gaudy world constructed of hot fluorescents and creaking metal, screaming children and come-ons from the ride barkers. The scent of cotton candy and funnel cakes floats over the breeze.

  “I would have thought there would be something more exotic here,” I note as we approach a cluster of small stands proclaiming the world’s best hot dogs. “Chocolate-covered Faery wings? Deviled Ding Dongs?”

  The sin-eater shrugs. “We crave mortality and its trappings, though most of us deny it. Besides, there are enough humans in attendance to make things awkward should we choose to call attention to ourselves that blatantly.”

  Part of me wonders why it would even matter in a place like this, but I already know I won’t get any answers from Nobu about it. OtherFolk business is their own, of course.

  I tug on his obnoxiously scarlet snakeskin jacket with the high collar and no sleeves instead. “Attention, eh?”

  “Makes two of us,” he murmurs, poking at our reflection in the fun-house mirror. His fingers run up the center of my dark blue corset, lingering on the leather eyelets. My face is distorted, monstrous, but my hair flares in fiery curls from my head, and my rainbow thigh-high socks pool from beneath my loose-fitting skirts like a bowl of melting Lucky Charms.