Flesh Circus

Idiots, Mikhail had often sneered. They think we do this for them. Is only one reason to do, milaya, and that is for to quiet the screaming in our own heads.

He was right as far as it went—he always was. But sometimes, in the long dark reaches of the night when nothing much is happening and I patrol looking for trouble, I follow the logic out a bit further. I think becoming a hunter was preordained for me, but not in any Calvinist way.

There was no grace to save me from these works.

I slouched in the seat, weapons digging into my flesh as I shifted, and watched the city go by. She was doing at least thirty over the limit, and it was too goddamn slow.

When I say it was preordained, I mean that there was nothing else for me to do but die in a snowbank, and I wasn’t ready for that. I’d reached the end of my normal life, and I was taken over the edge and into the nightside by Mikhail, for no reason I ever heard him explain. I never even considered doing something else, or taking the other bargain he offered me—therapy and a fresh start. The bargain offered to every apprentice.

No, as soon as I figured out what he was doing, I wanted in. Or maybe not precisely. I just wanted to do what would make him proudest of me. I wanted to please him.

I wanted to be worth whatever had made him pull me out of that snowdrift.

I had probably been moving toward him—and this—all my short unhappy life. I could have taken a detour anywhere, I suppose. Free will means as much.

But there’s free will, and then there’s being made in such a way that you can only do what you must. There’s no law against choosing a different path, and I suppose you could if you wanted to—but that isn’t how you’re made. It isn’t how you are.

If the clay cuts the potter’s hand, who is to blame—the clay, or the Great Potter who created it? It was an old riddle, and one I was no closer to solving. I was as I’d been made, and I was doing what I was made for.

It was as simple as that. And she wasn’t anyone who needed more of an answer from me.

Maybe Saul does. We haven’t fought over this in a while. Maybe he’s just waiting for me to bring it up. He’s probably waiting for me to bring something up.

We hit the freeway. It would take less than five minutes to get me to the Chesko exit, and then poor Judy could go back to her rounds. It would take me a short while to work around one edge of the barrio and get to Zamba’s, and the night was getting old.

“Can I ask you something?” I stared out the windshield, watching traffic slide easily aside, pulling over. It was so much easier with a set of red and blue lights, instead of the usual intuition-tingling run through the streets.

“Shoot,” Garland said, and probably wished she hadn’t.

“Why do you do what you do?”

I caught her momentary half-shrug. Was she wishing she hadn’t opened her mouth, or was she shrugging because she hadn’t thought about it?

The road zoomed under the car. We were only a few feet above the concrete. Such a small distance.

“I guess it’s what I was supposed to do,” she said finally. “There’s all sorts of reasons why people work this job. Too many for each person. Otherwise we’d be doing something else.” The exit loomed, she braked, and we began the long slow bleedoff up the hill. The barrio pulsed, and her radio crackled, squawking at us.

The light at the head of the exit was green. She rolled to a stop, the reds and blues dappling the run-down gas station and the arching soar of the overpass. This far down Chesko she wouldn’t have to worry about her car getting shot at, and she could get right back on the freeway. It all worked out.

“Exactly,” I said, and bailed out of the car, slamming the door behind me. I was already two blocks away, the scar tingling as I pulled etheric force through it, by the time her engine roused again. I didn’t look back.

Exactly.

The queen of the voodoo scene in Santa Luz lived in a ramshackle split-level on the edge of the barrio. The houses on either side were abandoned—nobody would stay in them long enough to pay rent or a mortgage. I often wonder if real estate agents have a clue why certain places don’t sell.

The house had a three-car garage, an overgrown jungle garden full of spiny, smelly plants, and a zigzagging, cracked concrete walk up to the spindly porch, concrete stair-slabs laid in an iron framework that looked far too frail to hold them.

I stood across the street, in the shadow of a closed-down convenience store with blind, boarded windows. The area hadn’t been so depressed and run-down last time I’d been through, but the edge of the barrio is a no-man’s-land. It was a wonder everything hadn’t been closed down before, but Zamba’s presence had given the place a facsimile of liveliness.

Which brought up, again, the question of just what the hell was going on here now.

The shadows drew close. The night was getting too old, and the streets had no cover. Even the barrio was winding down, its pulse taking on the tired thump of the long dark shoal of three to five A.M., when the old or the critically injured often slip over the edge into deeper darkness. When the parties are winding down, the bars are closing up, and people just want to get home.

Of course, there’s also the people who just want to fuck someone up this time of night, too. But they’re easy to avoid, and if they haven’t caught anyone by this point, they’re probably not going to. This is the time when nightly fun and games switches over to alcohol and fatigue-related traffic fatalities and code blues, instead of domestic free-for-alls or substance-fueled fights.

This is the time of night when the scar always turns hot and full, and I wonder if Perry’s thinking of me.

It’s anyone’s guess.

High wispy clouds scudded over my city, and the swelling moon played peek-a-boo. I watched Zamba’s house and thought about all this, breathing slowly, my pulse smooth and deep, silence drawn over me like a quilt. It smothered the little sounds that could give away my position—jingles of silver charms, the creak of leather, the subliminal sough of oxygen being taken in.

That silence is the first thing an apprentice learns, and the most thoroughly applied lesson imaginable. Sometimes you’ll be deep in thought, and look up when you realize you’ve been making someone else uncomfortable. The quality of stillness in a hunter can verge on the unca

It never bothers Saul, though. And really, cats can be just as still.

That was a distraction, and I didn’t need a distraction inside Zamba’s walls. That was officially a Very Bad Idea. The only Worse Idea was being distracted when dealing with Perry.

It’s just a night for thoughts we’d rather not have, isn’t it, Jillybean. I breathed soft and easy, considering Zamba’s house. The peeling white split-level was completely dark. Blind windows watched the empty street.

I checked the moonphase again. No festivals in this particular part of this particular month, at least none that I could pin down off the top of my head. There was no reason for Zamba’s house to be lit up, but there wasn’t any reason for it to be dead dark either. And she wouldn’t be a very good voodoo queen if she didn’t have an idea that something was going on and I was likely to show up.

Then again, the sorcerous ability of a hunter usually means that you don’t see us before we show up to knock you on your lawbreaking ass.

But I’d asked Galina to give her a ring.

It was the umpteenth time tonight I was feeling hinky as hell. Either the successive shocks were making me jumpy, or it was thirteen o’clock around here.

Although it’s always thirteen o’clock around Zamba. She’s been around as long as Mikhail has, and she’s always been the big power on the voodoo scene. If someone had taken her out and was messing with the Cirque as well…