Wicked Ever After(9)

Nana was stuck to him like a tick, her eyes resentful as I approached. When I put a hand on her forehead and one on his arm, I thought she might snap at me.

“You’re taking too much, Nana. It’s his turn to drink again, or it won’t work.”

I yanked hard, and she hissed at me and muttered, “Mind your own beeswax.” She clamped down harder and shook me off.

And so, like any well-bred Southern woman and experienced nurse, I pinched her nose closed, put an elbow in her face, and tried to pry her decidedly less fragile body away from my declining husband.

It worked finally, and she popped off and jerked back against the bed, nostrils flaring wide. “Sugar, you’d best get out. You smell just like a big, juicy steak just now.” Nana licked her lips and started to move into a crouch, her eyes glued hungrily to me, and that’s when Criminy pounced right back onto her neck.

She growled and pushed him away, but even with her newfound strength, she was no match for him. I could only watch, fascinated, as they kept on like that, trading blood and blud and barbs, alternately drinking and yanking away and being drunk from. It was like watching a nature documentary about a particularly foreign creature that you couldn’t quite understand but couldn’t stop watching, and they kept rewinding the bloodiest bits and forcing you to watch them in slow motion.

Finally, Crim yanked his arm away from her and somersaulted backward to a standing position, leaving Nana looking perplexed . . . and about forty pounds up from the seventy-pound bag of bones she’d been when I’d brought her here. She didn’t quite look young—there was something soft around her jaw, some smoothing of her wrinkles—but she had a woman’s shape and looked altogether more healthy and strong than I’d ever seen her. Criminy held out a hand, and she looked at it as if she might bite his fingers off, then took it and let him pull her up to stand.

“How do you feel?” Criminy asked, back to his usual level of murderous politeness.

“Like getting out of this old-lady dress and eating a goddamn hamburger.”

Criminy smiled, and Nana smiled back, her teeth shiny and strong and framed by fangs.

“I can help with that,” he said.





4


Time always ran strangely when I was on Earth. When I’d run away from Criminy tonight, it had been dusk, right as the crowd arrived and the night’s show started; but Nana and I had reappeared in the glass box in the morning, just in time to whisk her, half-naked and bloody, through the empty caravan as the carnivalleros finished their usual late breakfast.

Nana had always been stubborn, both in dealing with my parents when I was a kid and in facing off with cancer three times and refusing to die. Now she turned her hell on the caravan’s costumer, our third in six years. The position was apparently cursed. The first one I’d met, Mrs. Cleavers, had been killed by Coppers who were hunting for me. The second, Criminy’s former best friend Antonin, had run off with a murder-minded automaton lover (don’t ask). And the third, well . . .

I knocked on the door of the costume wagon, waiting for the usual irritating hmph from inside before ushering Nana into the crowded, spangled space.

“What’s this, then? New act for the freak show?”

Her voice grated on my nerves, as it had since my first day in the caravan.

“Emerlie, this is my grandmother, Ruby.”

“You sure you’re not her grandmother, dove?”

Emerlie leaned back on her chaise and smirked, high pink boots crossed and an apple in her gloved hand. Our cockney tightrope walker had sucked up to our previous costumers in order to design her own outlandish getups, and the last one had eventually just brought her in as his assistant so that she’d be forced to sew her own lurid leather tutus. Now she languished in the solo wagon she’d always coveted and made anyone who approached her feel like a burden. The costumes had become decidedly brighter and altogether more difficult to obtain since Emerlie Fetchings’s reign had begun, and I’d looked forward to the larger cities we approached so I could deal with costumers who didn’t try to punish me with haberdashery and take joy in poking me with pins. I had money enough, but I was out of patience when it came to Emerlie.

Born into a circus family, she still couldn’t let go of the fact that I’d stolen Criminy’s heart, stomped on Casper’s, and become the star of the caravan without really wanting to. Glancers, after all, were higher on the totem pole than unicyclists.

“If I were your grandmother, missy, I’d wipe that smug smile off your face and teach you some damn manners. Now, are you gonna dress me or leave me standing around in my drawers?” Nana finished her tirade with an overly pointy smile that I still wasn’t accustomed to. She was looking younger by the minute, and it didn’t escape me that her hands were now smoother than mine. Her tone was almost as sharp as her chin—but at least it seemed she was that way with everyone, not just me.