Vivian had expected more from Arcanium.

When she’d arrived at the Renaissance faire that the freak-show circus had paired with, Arcanium was little more than a collection of small tents and booths attached to the far edge like barnacles. The way her friends had described it the previous year, it was supposed to be the kinky steampunk party everyone needed in their life. But she’d been in the hospital again back then and hadn’t been released until after the circus had already moved on.

There were harnesses everywhere the eye could see, leather and lace, bustiers and kickass boots. The Spider Woman creature…thing…person was tied up in white rope, and to Vivian’s untrained eye, it looked authentic. But kink was more than outfits, and steampunk was more than cogs and gears, although there was a good bit of that, too.

And to Vivian’s disappointment, the big top that her friends had all talked about was nowhere to be found. Any tents set up along the perimeter were small, and any open-air performances were seemingly spontaneous and limited in scope. There was no sign of the hot, homoerotic trapeze artists Lupe had mentioned.

As Vivian slipped through the crowd in her flowy gypsy skirt and peasant blouse—the closest she had to appropriate for the venue, although if the circus had been actually kinky, she would have had a few other things to contribute, she noted the performance times were unpredictable and the offerings slim, but the freak show was fucking beautiful. The kink and steampunk nods in the circus were more perfunctory than devoted homages, but the parasitic circus’ enthusiasm for natural and unnatural weirdness seemed unmatched by anything she’d ever been to or seen before. Sure, she’d seen circus movies and shit, but those cheated enough that these freaks—the ones that were definitely real, at least—were worth a look.

But a look only lasted about fifteen minutes, and what else was she supposed to do with her time?

She abandoned the circus to return to the faire, where at least they had turkey legs she could pick at while watching falconers, wondering whether anyone would catch the irony. No one did, but the birds of prey kept her attention and the falconers weren’t too bad either. She supposed they’d seen plenty of pressed cleavage in their day, but she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and she wasn’t wearing a bra. After the act, that distracted the sandy blond with an overgrown but somehow sparse beard. She smiled, finished what she was going to finish with the turkey leg, which was a little dry and how the hell did a single person eat the whole thing without looking pregnant when they were done? Vivian had only chosen it for the irony, anyway, and if even the falconer couldn’t spot it, she needed to move on.

She was that close to throwing in the towel and leaving to drink heavily elsewhere—someplace where the pissy beers didn’t cost an arm and a turkey leg to buy—when she heard music. And not the usual Celtic crap that sounded like it belonged on one of those soundtracks found at souvenir gift shops.

Vivian abandoned the falconer without a thought to follow the siren song of rock and roll where it didn’t belong.

There was no stage, no curtains, nothing but a bare-bones set-up of amps, speakers and instruments next to the circus’ food court. On the bass drum, someone had painted ‘Skellies’ in spiky script. And on an easel, a sign with the same script read Karaoke—Auditions for Lead Singer.

“Seriously?” Vivian muttered.

“Seriously,” a man said behind her.

She could have sworn no one had been there, and as he stepped around her, the continued impression that he didn’t displace the air was the weirdest, most unsettling feeling. Even though he was pretty as sin, she leaned away.

Pretty, indeed. Gently toned muscles wrapped around his bones. He was shorter than her, but when he looked up, he didn’t seem to take it personally. He walked with absolute confidence as far away from arrogance as Vivian had ever seen on an attractive man who looked like he hadn’t met a weight machine he hadn’t tried.

Actually, there was fluidity to his strength that suggested something other than the gym. He wasn’t a bodybuilder, wasn’t absolutely ripped like the strongman. He was lean but not slender, like someone who could do all the weird fitness moves—a trapeze artist or a dancer, maybe. Since he wasn’t with anyone, she wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to be one of the trapeze artists she’d been looking for, although she was pretty sure one was supposed to be blond and the other black, while this man’s close, curly hair was on the brown side of auburn.

He wore nothing but a gold bracelet around his arm—which had to be fake, because this kind of circus couldn’t support that amount of real gold—and a pair of cotton pants that practically invited her to look. She couldn’t see detail, but with the light beige color of the pants, he certainly wasn’t wearing anything under them.

She didn’t hide that she was studying his body, and he appeared unfazed by the inspection. He didn’t preen or flex, didn’t glare, didn’t inspect her back—just sat down on one of the picnic tables that had been set up in front of the band. In spite of decent guitar riffs and beats coming from the practicing instrumentalists, people hadn’t congregated yet.

“I didn’t know circuses were in the habit of gleaning talent from their audiences,” Vivian said. “Seems kind of desperate, don’t you think?”

His hazel eyes looked a little sad—something in the set of his eyebrows—but he curved his lips in a grin. “Oh, it is desperate, in its own way. I’m afraid a good number of my performers had to leave en masse due to an illness that swept through my circus, with many lingering side effects. Now I’m working with a skeleton crew. I’d ask you to pardon the pun, but it just seems all too appropriate.”

Vivian raised her eyebrow. “Your performers?”

When he didn’t seem to mind her sidling closer, she climbed onto the picnic table and sat on the edge next to him—close enough to telegraph a certain amount of interest, although she wasn’t in heat or anything.

“My circus. My monkeys.” He raised his chin in acknowledgment to the guitarist, a pale man in a see-through shirt screened to look like the bones of a torso. He’d pulled back his long black hair, and when he glimpsed her talking to the shirtless man, he gave a too-wide smile. Despite his white teeth, he reeked of cigarettes from all the way where she sat. Yet she still couldn’t get anything but a visual off the man next to her, who crossed his legs like some kind of bohemian model.

“So you’re the one who’s desperate, then,” she said.

“I’m always on the lookout for talent, love. There’s no shame in soliciting, and our audience has some fun in the process.”

“You ever found anyone this way?”

The man nodded toward the acrylic drum sheet. “Shane, our drummer. Bringing her on allowed Lennon to take a permanent place as guitarist, which he much prefers.”

Shane transitioned into a new beat, shaking her bald head and clenching her teeth—at least the ones in her mouth. The place on the left side of her scalp, which Vivian had initially thought was a tattoo, was dimensional in the right profile. Vivian blinked, squinted to find where poreless latex smoothed into pored skin—because if Vivian didn’t know any better, a fang-filled mouth formed a crevice along Shane’s scalp, like some kind of science fiction brain surgery gone horribly wrong.

As Shane moved, twisting on her chair and closing her eyes to the music, she revealed other places where the eerily realistic mouths opened in wet, red gashes wherever the skintight, bloody, white latex dress cut away from her body—along her shoulder, slashed diagonally over her belly, in place of a navel. Her entire body seemed to have been prepared for a glimpse of horror from every angle. She was skinny, her jutting collarbone, hipbones, knees, elbows and shoulder blades accentuated by the light layer of makeup that made a suggestion of a skull on her face and bones over her exposed ribs and spine.

Vivian dwelled on the beautiful angles of her thin fingers around the drumsticks with more than a little envy.

“Like oddities, talent is everywhere if you’re willing to do what it takes to find it,” the man said. “Or create it for yourself. Arcanium is undergoing a much-needed transformation, and if we are to survive, it needs to be fast. Bell Madoc, fortune teller and illusionist, at your humble service, my lady. I don’t believe I caught your name.” He held out a hand for her to shake.

At least when she took his hand, his flesh was solid and warm, almost hot.

“Vivian. I’ve never heard Bell as a first name before.”

“It’s short for a number of names I have taken. I am the Bell, book and candle behind the magic of Arcanium, and it does as well as anything.”

Vivian turned back to the practicing band. A woman had stepped behind the keyboard and was fiddling with the volume. She wore a long black lace skirt and bralette that appeared to cover only what was absolutely necessary for legal reasons, all the better to show off the incredibly detailed body paint that created the illusion that the woman was only a skeleton.

Vivian was beginning to sense a theme.

Unlike Lennon, the guitarist, who only briefly nodded to the band’s name, and Shane, whose skeleton makeup was soft, like a faint overlay of a skeleton illustration, the keyboardist had gone all out, filling in her body with black where the bones hadn’t been painted on in minute anatomical detail. The woman wasn’t as slender as Shane, didn’t have the same skeletal structure already exposed. Instead, she seemed downright soft—which seemed to be coming back into fashion, but Vivian preferred angles to curves and bones to flesh. When she turned an envious eye, it was to women like Shane every time.

The keyboardist clearly had a background in belly-dancing, because she swayed sinuously to Shane’s beat as she joined the warm-up, her hips seeming independent of her spine.

A pair of similarly skeletonized women gradually took their places behind Lennon, one of them picking up a steampunked electric violin. They were even thinner than Shane—emaciated, with their skin tight on their bones. In comparison to them, Vivian felt bloated, the flesh over her stomach like gelatin, her hips too broad, her breasts heavy, her thighs pressed too tightly against each other.

She could starve herself for months and die less skinny than they were. With her arm pressed to her belly, which felt like rolls of fat to her, she fought against the grumbling in her abdomen telling her how hungry she still was. Her eyes burned, as though the hatred she felt for their skeletal bodies could literally shoot out through her sockets. No such luck. The two girls muttered to each other—the instrumentalist smiling, the backup singer not—and none of them spontaneously combusted.

“More stray talent?” Vivian asked.

“The violinist, Lily, answered a classified. It wasn’t what she’d thought she’d be using her classical training for, I’m sure, but she seems to enjoy the circus’ particular challenges. The other two were mined from auditions like this. Oh, they aren’t strictly auditions, Vivian. If you simply want to sing with my Skeletons, you’re more than welcome to take the mic.”

Vivian tore her gaze from the women of the band. “Okay, mind telling me why you’re buttering me up?”

If he’d been giving out any kind of signal for sex, she’d get it—maybe even be down for something somewhere private, since he was a lot more attractive to her than the falconer—and not just in the looks department. But he wasn’t signaling. In fact, despite the bare chest, suggestive pants and the way he sat too close for an acquaintance, he seemed to deliberately not send fuckboy vibes in her direction. But the performer-owner of a circus just deciding to cozy up to a random stranger in the middle of his barebones circus? It seemed like more than coincidence, even suspicious.

“Because you didn’t seem happy,” Bell said. “Happiness is certainly not guaranteed here, but boredom simply won’t do.”

“I followed the music, didn’t I? It sounds better than your average midlife-crisis garage band. What were the odds I’d find a good, hard sound at a freak show?”

“I thought I’d try something new.” Bell rested his chin on his fist and narrowed his eyes in the classic Thinker pose that somehow looked deliberate and unpretentious at the same time. “It’s definitely new. But test audiences like you seem to like it and so does my cast. The whole circus stops whenever they do their set.”

“No offense, but this isn’t a circus,” Vivian said.

“Oh?” Vivian expected him to get defensive, but his expression remained neutral, and she couldn’t tell whether he was hiding anything behind it.

She was used to understanding men. Men, like dogs, were easy. They wanted money, power, sex and a maternal figure. Period. All a person needed to do was figure out which one they needed to be at any given time. But Bell wasn’t giving away his position. Vivian twisted her skirt between her fingers and tried not to clench her teeth.

“This is a freak show with circus elements. If it can’t stand on its own, it’s not a circus. It’s circus kitsch.”

“Before my cast got sick, it was a circus.”

“Talk to me again when it doesn’t need a geeky craft fair pretending to be Renaissance to prop it up.” Vivian shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m here at the geeky craft fair, aren’t I? I didn’t come here to mock it. But just because I like pewter dragons on necklaces doesn’t mean everything’s okay. I came here for the Two Thousand Twenty-Second Cumming of Mick Jagger, but this is kind of just…Steven Tyler in his grandma’s wardrobe. It’s not that he can’t pull it off, but it’s not what I came here for.”

“I understand.” He rested a hand on her shoulder, his thumb brushing the edge of her collarbone. Warmth deepened his eyes, his hold the first stirring of something sexual. Not blatant, like a hand to the thigh or the ass, but his skin was on her bare skin, a caress light but deliberate. “While Arcanium is in transition, why not help make it the circus you wanted it to be?”

Vivian scoffed. “I still can’t figure out what this is.”