Wicked After Midnight(4)

“I guess I have to go, then. Maybe I can find that handsome stranger you mentioned.”

She looked down, the spell broken and her eyes crinkled up with humor. “Then go tell Cherie and get packing. I’ll set up the bon voyage party.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, and we both chuckled.

“I’d hug you, honey, but you look hungry.”

“I am hungry.” I sighed. “For so many things.”

I stood and dusted off my breeches and bustle. Only in the caravan could I get away with a style like that, one that would have been outrageous in the cities of Sangland. But the breeches felt like skinny jeans, and I would miss them once I was costumed in fifty pounds of ruffles to blend with the humans for the trip. With a smile and a wave, I headed toward my wagon.

The only problem was that I had lied to Criminy. Cherie had no idea we were going away. And she wasn’t going to like it one bit.





2


“No! I won’t do it! You’re insane!”

In six years of sharing a wagon and often two square feet of space on a very small chair, I had never seen Cherie so furious. I’d seen her homesick, shy, kind, and often prissy. But until that very moment, I had doubted her ability to feel passion of any sort. It brought out her Freesian accent a little more, too.

“But it’s so boring here, Cherie. Nothing ever changes. And you’ve always wanted to see Franchia.”

She paced the train car, skirts snapping. “Not at university! Not sitting still, having numbers drilled into my head. I like the caravan.”

“Then we’ll skip out of Ruin and go to Paris. Be the stars of a cabaret.”

“The caravan is respectable, but the cabaret? I am not some tawdry showgirl!”

I shrugged. “You’re a girl who performs in a show. Same difference.”

She stopped in front of me, shaking a manicured talon in my face. “No. No. No. This is different. The caravan, it’s an art. With Master Criminy, we are safe, cared for. Legitimate. But once you’re in the cabarets . . . you don’t understand. The men, they expect things from the girls there. It is not all dancing and then back into your wagons like good little ducks.”

I sighed and flopped down on the bottom bunk of the bed we shared. “It wouldn’t be like that. We’re Bludmen. Predators. The men will probably be scared of us. But whatever. I’m going.”

“All this time, and still I do not understand this ‘whatever.’ You, who fight against being told what to do all the time—do you not understand that all men are not as good as Master Crim? In Paris, we would be playthings, feathers to be batted about on the wind. It is debauched, dangerous. Bludmen are not so loved. You cannot go out alone.”

She returned to her pacing, her blond curls flouncing in her wake. For a bloodthirsty killer, she looked like a china doll from back home, like Claudia from Interview with a Vampire. Except that she really was as sweet as she looked and swore she’d never drunk from a live human in her entire twenty-five years. Cherie was content in the caravan, happy with what seemed to her an easy life compared with the tiny wagon she’d grown up in, somewhere in a freezing forest. With carnivalleros coming and going over the years, she was sure the perfect man would arrive at the perfect time to sweep her off her slippered feet. Maybe because she’d been born a Bludman, she had a better sense of how very long three hundred years of life could be, how very much time she could give that mysterious man to arrive. Having been born human, I possessed a sense of urgency about life that she couldn’t quite fathom.

I stood and stopped her with firm hands on her slender shoulders. “Cherie, I need something new. I can’t stay here. I can’t do this anymore. I have to leave, with you or without you. But I’d prefer with.”

A battle of wills ensued, a test of friendship spoken only with the eyes.

I felt her deflate and knew then that I had won.

“Fine. But only Ruin. Not Paris. Just promise me that if it’s wretched, we can come back here. Where it’s safe.”

“Of course. We can always come back.”

She drew me into a hug, and I inhaled a cloud of her hair, scented with her favorite shampoo, a soft mix of Freesian pine and vanilla that she splurged on with her carefully saved coppers. Most of her earnings were shipped back to her family in Freesia a few times a year, whenever we were near London and Criminy gathered up the caravan’s post.

“You’re going to love it.” I patted her back and pulled away to look into her eyes, which were as cloudy gray as Criminy’s but balmy and pleasant. Criminy felt like a storm, but Cherie was like a quiet rainy day spent reading by an open window, as different as two Bludmen could be. “We’re going to have an adventure!”