He frowns, rolling his eyes. “There’s a payphone outside.”
“A payphone?” I repeat. “You still have one of those things? I thought they were all gone.”
“If they were all gone, I wouldn’t be telling you there’s one outside,” he replies.
I level the snarky fucker with a look. He just shrugs and rifles under the counter, yanking out a business card for a cab company.
“Thanks.”
I quickly pay and stuff everything into my bag before heading out to find the phone. It’s off to the side, near the bathroom door, which is currently propped open and reeking of a digested burrito gone bad. “Fucking disgusting,” I mutter as I sidle up to the payphone podium. It’s covered in graffiti, one of them saying, “Help, I’m a millennial and idk how to use this thing.”
Shaking my head, I shove some change in and dial the number from the card and manage to arrange a pick up for ten minutes from now.
As I wait, I brave the bathroom, trying to hold my breath the whole time while I do my business and wash up. I don’t know where I’ll be sleeping tonight, but I have no romantic notions of finding a safe, nice place. So I grab a bunch of toilet paper and stuff it in my bag for safe keeping. I might have to pee in the wilderness for a few days, but I draw the line at wiping my ass with leaves.
Once outside, I slide my leather jacket on and prop my shoulder against the building to wait for my ride. I’m antsy to get further away. I don’t know if it really matters how much distance I gain between myself and Kaazu though. I don’t know that this feeling would ever go away.
Automatically, my hand strays to the collar around my neck. Cliff asked me if I trusted him, and I do. He’s the only person I’ve ever given my trust to.
But what if he’s wrong? What if the conjurer didn’t successfully break the collar? Kaazu could be tracking me right now, seething, eyes lit up with promised retribution.
There have been plenty of troupers who have tried to escape in the past. None of them were successful. And none of them lived past their punishment. I feel like a dead female walking.
But I also feel...lost.
I’ve never been out on my own before. I’ve always lived inside Kaazu’s bubble, never away from the troupe. The world suddenly seems both way too big and way too small, and I have no idea how to navigate it.
Kaazu took me from a human orphanage when I was one year old. One. I didn’t even have the luxury of sub-par human foster parents to contend with. No, I went right into the hands of a manipulative show master who takes rogue Canes and makes them into puppets that perform on his string.
My earliest memory was me when I was four, being made to stand on a broomstick for hours on end. If I fell, the bottoms of my feet would get smacked with a wooden switch. Three strikes to each foot, and then I’d have to get right back up there, and it would be three times harder than before, the pain intensifying the strain.
By the time I was seven, I was training in acrobatics, gymnastics, and dance, along with martial arts, boxing, and basic street fighting moves. When I was ten, I was put on the stage of Troupe Delirium for the first time. My first performance was spent high in the air, sitting on a metal ring like it was a swing, while my fellow troupers acted out their rhythmic dances and brutal fights.
Master Kaazu made Troupe Delirium into a mystic, ruthless enigma.
Unlike the typical fighting groups that travel around putting on shows for all the Canes in the world, Troupe Delirium is different. Master Kaazu doesn’t just set up a ring or a cage and let two Canes go at it in a fight. No, our troupe made it a goddamn art.
Set up like the stage for a play or a bewitching ballet, Master Kaazu gives his audience more than just brutal blood and vicious strength. He gives people a hypnotic show.
With dramatic lighting, calculated costumes, thrumming music, and just a taste of mind-influencing drugs that spill from the fog machines, he gives people something straight out of a hallucinogenic grandstand, complete with bloody brutality, sensual dance, and delirious infatuation.
His audiences eat the shit up.
He controls the troupers by the collars on our necks and the dominating power that roils from him like toxic smoke. Kaazu has magic in spades, and he knows exactly how to play his hand. I never thought I’d ever be away from that power or the mind-bending fog. Not alive, anyway.
My hand drops away from the collar, my ears perking up at the sound of an engine heading this way. I stand up straighter, my heart quickening its pace from a walk to a sprint. Maybe that’s Kaazu. Maybe he’s already found me.
I don’t try to run to the bathroom to hide. If it’s him, then my tracker is intact and there’s no point. The beat of my heart thumps in my ears like a drum. Th-thump, th-thump, th-thump.
The engine gets louder.
I could try to fight him.
I could try, but I wouldn’t be successful. I might be a damn good fighter, but he’s an even better conjurer. His power would take me down before I even got in a hit.
I have zero illusions about who would come out on top in that duel, but maybe by attacking him, I could piss him off enough to make my death quick.
When headlights appear down the road, my entire body tenses. I drop my bag to the ground, knowing it will only be another deterrent. When I see another car behind the one in the lead, resignation washes over me. It’s got to be my troupe.
The headlights come closer and closer and closer, and when they pull into the parking lot, all I can do is stare...at the yellow cab and the second car full of teenagers probably here to try and buy booze.
The cab pulls up right beside me, a pasty lump of a human male rolling down his window to talk to me. “You the one that called for the ride?”
I’m so stuck in shock that I’m not facing Kaazu or my own expiration date that I blink at him for a moment, unable to answer.
“Lady? You deaf or something?”
Shaking my head, I snatch up my bag from the ground and yank open the door before sliding onto the old stained upholstery. With my bag at my feet, I slowly get my heart to settle back down, and as soon as I do, it’s like all energy leaches out of me. I suddenly feel exhausted.
“Where to?” the man asks.
I look down at the cash still clutched in my sweaty hand. “As far as two hundred bucks will get me.”
His eyebrows go up in surprise, but then he shrugs and pulls away. “Alright.” I stay in the center of the seat, hunched down just in case. “You running away or something?” he asks, laughing at his own words as if it’s absurd.
“Yep.”
His laughter tapers off.
“You one of them people into that BDM stuff?”
I look at his reflection in the rearview mirror. “What?”
He nods, his eyes tipping down to my neck. “Your collar. Looks like one of them whips and chains kinks people are into.”
I huff out a stiff laugh. “You mean BDSM? Sure, man. We’ll go with that.”
He doesn’t catch on to my dry tone, and my shifter senses alert me to the fact that this news excites him. My lip curls up in a sneer.
“Thought so. So you like to be whipped and shit?”
For a motherfuck’s sake.
“Nope. I do the whipping,” I say with a shrewd grin.
His eyes instantly skate away from me and go back onto the road. With an awkward cough, he shuts up. Guess he’s not interested in being at the mercy of a dominatrix. Pity.