“Be quiet, Cora.”
His warning killed her words in her throat for once. He prowled toward her, drawing out the moment as long as he could, his steps silent on the packed dirt of the tent. As he drew close to her, she was reminded of how tall he was. How easy it was for him to tower over her.
There was a bare inch or two between them as he cradled her face in his hands. She wondered if he was going to snap her neck. There was no rage on his features, but she could feel it crackling in the air like lightning, like the invisible electricity before a storm.
She wanted to beg him to stop whatever it was he was going to do. But he had told her to be quiet, and, for once, she thought it might be a good idea to listen to him.
“It is the duty and the honor of a Sponsor to show their new Family member their tent. It is their honor and their right to see them take their stage or their booth for the first time. It is their right and their pleasure to see them through their first few moments as fully one of us. And that thing behind me”—he jabbed a finger to point at Clown where he cowered on the stage—“sought to take that away. He wished to steal it from me. And now you wish to tell me he was merely being kind?”
“I—”
“Shush.” His hand returned to her cheek. “Cora, Cora, Cora…what am I to do with you, hm?” He tilted his head to the side by a few degrees as he seemed to ponder the question. “I will tell you where I’ll start. Have you ever seen someone christen a boat?”
“I—I think so?”
“How do they do it, Cora?” He asked her like he was talking to a child and he was the inscrutable schoolmaster.
His tone made her skin crawl. Like she was walking on the edge of a knife, and, at any point, she was about to be gutted like a fish. His temper was at an end, and one wrong move from her would end poorly for everyone. “They…I think they break a bottle of champagne on the hull…?”
“Correct.” He smiled sweetly. It was almost childlike. “Very good.”
He picked up his hand from her cheek and flicked his fingers.
And Clown collapsed to the ground.
In two dozen pieces or more.
Simon’s strings had diced the man into chunks instantly. Clown hadn’t even had the time to react. It sent blood gushing down the steps of the grandstand in an explosion of red as all the liquid in the man’s body sought to free itself in a few seconds.
“Oh—Oh, God!” Cora tried to pull back from Simon, but there was still no escaping the strings that held her tight. “Please, stop—let me go.”
“No. Not until you understand!” Simon shifted his hand to grasp the hair at the back of her head, fisting it in his fingers, yanking her head back to look up at him. “I Sponsored you. I am responsible for you. I am your mentor, and no one else.”
“I—I don’t belong to you—”
He sneered. “Don’t you, though?” He leaned his head down to hers, instantly capturing her in a kiss. She couldn’t argue. She couldn’t look away. She couldn’t do anything but stand there, frozen in space, caught by his strings, as he took from her what he wanted.
Never again.
She bit his lip as hard as she could.
He pulled back from her with a howl, his hand pressed to his face. The strings dropped away from her, and she regained control of her own limbs. She tasted blood in her mouth. Good. She didn’t bother wiping it away as he looked at her, his eyes barely visible but wide behind his sunglasses.
She took two steps up to him and slapped him with everything she had. His sunglasses fell to the dirt beside him, and when he looked back to her, she could see his shock unobscured. “You do not own me, Simon Waite. You do not control me. I am not your pet or your property. If Clown knocks on my door and asks me to go with him and I want to? I will. If Aaron, or Jack, or anybody wants my company and I give it to them? I will. And you will shut your fucking face about it.”
Simon went to open his mouth, but she didn’t let him do it. She shoved him again, sending him sprawling onto the first bench of the bleachers. She stepped close to him, his thigh between her knees. She grabbed his necktie and cinched it tight up to his throat.
It earned her a startled “hurk” sound from him, and that made her grin more than it probably should have.
She held the knot firmly in her hand. “And if you come to my door and knock on it and ask for my company, and I want to give it to you? I will. And if I don’t? You’ll walk away and leave me alone. I was used by a man once before, Simon Waite. And I won’t let it happen again. Not even if it’s the devil himself who tries to do it.”
For once in her life, Cora let her urges lead her decisions. She acted on instinct alone. It was all she had left. Ration and reason had been abandoned the moment she stepped through the Dark Path. She took a fist of his hair in her hand so tightly that he winced, before she yanked his head back. And then she kissed him. She took everything she wanted from him. For now, anyway.
Then she walked away.
Clown was dead—for the moment—a pile of mincemeat and running crimson liquid. She stepped around the puddle as she left. She knew he would be fine. She didn’t know how long it would take, but he’d be back up and normal again.
As for Simon?
She didn’t know what she had done to him. But he had let her walk away silently, without any comment or sound. That meant she had done something that was, at the very least, unexpected. She didn’t know where she had gotten the nerve. She didn’t know if she had ever owned the courage required to do what she had just done. But as she stepped out of her tent and walked toward her boxcar, she felt something equally unexpected.
For one of the very first times in her life, she was proud of herself.
She smiled.
3
Simon did not quite know what to do with himself.
The first thing he did was loosen the knot at his throat so he could draw enough breath to cough. That was not his body’s only instinctual reaction to what Cora had just done, however. The other one was far more problematic, insomuch as it wasn’t as easy to relieve.
Well, that wasn’t quite true, but he suspected a manual release was not going to solve the issue. His physical reaction to her sudden show of fire was a symptom, not the disease. He ran his hand over his face slowly, the proverbial gears in his head clicking quickly in circles as he tried to come up with a plan.
This was not a tenable situation.
It couldn’t continue much longer.
He might actually burst into flames if it did. To her credit, it had looked as though she was attempting to do that to him with the power of her mind alone. He was glad she didn’t have that particular talent. Immolation was not his favorite way to die.
What am I going to do with you, Cora?
He had asked her the question, although he wasn’t honestly expecting an truthful answer. He swept his hand through his hair, doing his best to tidy it. He didn’t know why he tried. It was unruly on the best of days. Leaning down to pick up his sunglasses, he cleaned them off and slipped them back on.
Clown’s severed head was lying on the dirt near him. Staring at him with glassy, lifeless eyes.
“She is being utterly unreasonable about this whole thing, don’t you think? It’s clear she wants me. Yet she refuses to give me what I want—what we both want. Why?” He threw up his hands in frustration and stood from the bench where she had placed him with her violent shove.