The wagon of oddities was never lit when there wasn’t a person present. It would have been a waste of good wax, and a fire hazard, and besides, some of Annie’s “pets” didn’t much care for light. They could stand it—anything that couldn’t handle a little candlelight wasn’t going to display too well in the daytime—but they preferred the comfortable security of the dark that they’d been born to. Rustling and hissing filled the wagon as she lit the lantern next to the door, chasing some of the shadows back into the corners where they belonged.
“Now, now,” she chided, in the tone she’d used for Adeline when the girl was younger. “There’s no need to make such a fuss. I’m just here to make sure that all of you are secure. Once I know you’re fresh and fine, I’ll leave you alone until morning.” Adeline would be deep in dreamland by then, far from the concerns of the flesh, and Annie would be able to slip into her own bunk, surrendering the weight of the day to blissful unconsciousness.
The sun would rise far too soon for her liking, and another day would begin. Best to get her duties over with quickly.
It wasn’t as if the wagon of oddities was a good place to linger. There was no one with the show more familiar with it than she, not even Mr. Blackstone, who was technically the owner of the wagon and everything that it contained. He disliked the wagon, disliked the way the shadows seemed to weigh down the corners until they had become something more concrete than simple darkness, something lingering and terrible. He disliked the smell of it, animal and rank and oddly unnatural, for all that the bulk of it came from the bodies of the creatures kept there. They would never have chosen to cohabitate in the wild; would have torn each other to pieces if given the opportunity, filling their bellies with the flesh of the things that were currently their neighbors. A zoo like this, a smell like this, could never have existed in the natural world.
The fish came first. Two great tanks of them, kept on opposite sides of the wagon, to prevent opportunistic attempts at predation. The larger tank was iron-banded, with a padlock holding the lid in place. That didn’t mean Annie—or anyone with sense—trusted its occupants not to find a way to gnaw through the chain.
They were small creatures, at most five inches in length, with red bodies that always looked as if they had been dipped in blood that had then somehow failed to wash off in the water. Their mouths bristled with the jagged points of their teeth. When Annie had assisted Karina, the circus taxidermist, in preparing a few of the smaller specimens for outside display, she had been horrified to discover that those teeth didn’t fit neatly together the way a human’s did, or even slide seamlessly into holes in the creatures’ jaws, like a crocodile’s. No, they jutted out at all angles, making it impossible for the fish to feed without biting themselves, which no doubt only enraged them further.
The man who’d sold them to her called them “nibblers.” It was a coy name for creatures that really should have been called something more akin to “devourers.” She supposed it was a statement on the world they lived in that the names more befitting the toothy terrors had to be reserved for things even larger and more horrific.
The nibblers tracked her with their eyes and with tiny adjustments of their terrible bodies as she walked to the front of the wagon. There was never any doubt as to whether they were paying attention: when something warm and fleshy was nearby, the nibblers were nothing but attention. They were the most attentive creatures in the world.
“You’re next,” she said reproachfully. “And don’t gnash your teeth at me, you dreadful things. You can’t bite through glass.” Of that, she was reasonably sure. Had they been equipped to chew through glass, she would have long since been bones, even if she was the last meal they would ever have. Nibblers, thankfully, could not breathe air any more than any other fish. Had they been amphibious, she was quite sure they would have eaten the entire circus long since, and died gasping but content.
The other tank was filled by the single hulking form of an albino river catfish. The big cat’ shifted in the water as Annie approached, whiskers quivering, watching her with oddly soulful eyes. Sometimes she thought the catfish was really more of an aquatic puppy, a dog that had somehow been forced into the wrong body.
“Good evening, Oscar,” she said gravely, picking up the jar that contained his food. The circus orphans gathered nightcrawlers for him every morning and evening, digging up the fat, slick worms and wiping them mostly clean before dropping them in pilfered dishes at the back of the oddities wagon. Annie didn’t mind the worms themselves, but if she didn’t consolidate them into the jar, they had a nasty tendency to slither into all corners of the place, dying and drying up like leathery threads.
(Townies were oddly horrified when they stumbled across the dead, dried-out worms—oddly because they were in the wagon to see terrible things, all the horrors and wonders of the unclaimed West. After beholding a feasting nibbler or a loop of bloodwire wrapping itself tight around the body of a captive squirrel, why should a worm hold any mystery? But somehow that little mundane reminder of the natural world was more than the sensibilities of some paying customers could handle, leading to Mr. Blackstone ordering her to keep the worms under control. Really. Annie had been a townie for most of her life before running away to join the circus, and yet sometimes she felt as if she would never understand them.)
The cat’ stirred in the water, beginning to rise from his place in the thin band of muck along the bottom. They couldn’t give the poor old boy as much mud as he wanted; it kicked up too much mess, blocking him from view, and quite countering the point of having a catfish of his size and coloration. If people couldn’t see him, they wouldn’t pay to see him, and if they didn’t pay to see him, he’d wind up on the grill before the silt had settled.
“Yes, yes, I see you,” said Annie. She tapped the surface of the water three times with her index finger. Oscar accelerated, rising to the top of the tank in a glorious sweep of open fins and creamy flesh. If she closed her eyes, she could almost hear the gasps and awed exclamations of the townies, many of whom had never seen a proper cat’, as far as they were from the mysterious Mississippi. Even the most squeamish among them were often willing to pay a penny for the privilege of feeding him a live, wriggling worm—the same worms that would send them fleeing when dead and dried up on the floor.
Deftly, she extricated a nightcrawler from the jar and dangled it over the surface. Oscar stuck his mouth out of the water and slurped the worm daintily from her fingers, making it disappear.
“Good boy,” she said, and repeated the trick three more times before dropping a handful of worms into the tank for him to chase down and devour. He found them all with remarkable speed, given his poor eyesight and small catfish brain. Then, after nosing about in the silt for one last morsel, he settled back down, apparently content.
Oscar always amazed people with his “tricks.” Most folks figured fish couldn’t be trained, and maybe they couldn’t—he was never going to go fetching any sticks or jumping through any hoops. But fish could learn, and Oscar knew that humans meant food and safety. Had known, in fact, since he was just a tiny thing, lurking around the edges of the pond, coming out to eat only when human fishermen were there to frighten away the bigger fish, who would have seen his unusual coloration as a sign of weakness. Albinos were easy targets in the wild, which made them even rarer than they would otherwise have been.
Annie turned to look at the nibblers. They were still watching her. “I hate you,” she informed them.
Fish couldn’t talk. That would have been silly. Sailors who claimed to have heard fish speaking were clearly delusional from too much time spent at sea. But caring for the nibblers had convinced her of one thing: fish could hate. Fish could hate very, very well.
Carefully, Annie pulled on the welder’s gloves that hung next to the tank and unlocked the padlock on the first hatch. The nibblers became more active. She opened the cold box next, withdrawing a skinned goat shank. There were some in the circus who grumbled about how well the fish were fed, given how often roustabouts and handworkers went to bed with empty stomachs. Mr. Blackstone’s method of dealing with the complainers was to bring them to watch at feeding time.
“That,” he would say, as the nibblers stripped their supper to the bone in seconds, “is what they’re like when they’ve been fed recently. Can you imagine if we ever let them get hungry?”
That was usually enough to silence the complaints for a few weeks, until hunger overwhelmed common sense once more. What he didn’t seem to realize—and Annie couldn’t make him understand—was that the nibblers were always hungry. Give them a steak and they would want a cow; give them a cow and they would want the whole damn herd. Whatever cruel God had seen fit to fill America’s rivers with such horrors had not seen fit to also give them the capacity to be satiated.
“If you leap, I will leave you,” she said, hoping, as she often did, that the fish would somehow learn to understand; that they would see the logic in muzzling their hunger for human flesh long enough to let her feed them the dead, cold things that they deserved. She knew her hope was pointless. That didn’t stop it from kindling in her breast every time she had to perform this least-favored of chores.
The nibblers shifted in the tank, eyes always following her, jaws beginning to gnash. Little lines of blood colored the water around them, exciting the swarm more. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like to encounter a school of them in the wild, where she had heard they could number in the hundreds. Imagine! It was a wonder anything survived within a hundred miles of the rivers. They should have been long abandoned, surrendered to the hunger that never died.
Two deadbolts secured the metal plate directly above the water. Annie hooked the end of a sharp metal chain through the goat, wrapping the chain twice around her hand, and pulled the deadbolts free. Speed was of the essence now. Saying a silent prayer to whatever gods might be watching, she yanked the plate back and dropped the meat into the water, taking a hasty step back.
Luck was with her: one more night when she would not die in the course of keeping herself employed and keeping her daughter alive. Only a few of the nibblers jetted toward the surface, and they withdrew without leaping once they realized that she was out of range. The rest of the school had already closed around the shank, and the few who had been willing to attempt going after her were forced to fight their way through the thrashing bodies in order to get their terrible teeth on the prize. The goat shank vanished, first beneath the press of bodies, and then behind a veil of bubbles as the wildly eating nibblers churned the water into an impenetrable veil.
The carnage lasted only a few seconds before the nibblers were swimming back to the glass, fixing their terrible eyes on her once more. The shank bone, freed from its fleshy confines, drifted lazily down to the bottom of the tank to join the graveyard forming there.
Annie kept a wary eye on the nibblers as she pulled the chain and hook free. Occasionally, the dreadful things would attempt to hitch a ride with the assemblage, forcing her to get the tongs. She couldn’t let them die, much as she might have liked to. Whatever nibblers required to breed, it wasn’t present in the tank; if they all died off, she’d be left without an attraction, and the children adored the nibblers. Many of the adults, as well. When the show was truly short on funds, Mr. Blackstone would occasionally ask a few of the rougher men from the crew to host “private shows” for locals, wherein they fed live rabbits, kicking and screaming, into the tanks.
Annie was never present for that. Nothing could have muzzled the screams of the poor rabbits.
Quickly, she used a fireplace poker to shove the plate back into place before locking the nibbler tank, checking twice to be sure that everything was secure.
The rest of the wagon’s horrors—oddities, oddities; they must always be called by the proper name, even when she was only speaking to her own heart, lest she slip and use the wrong name in the presence of a paying customer—were easier to care for. Some of them only required feeding every few weeks, like the various serpents, the great spiders, and the bloodwire, which was still wrapped tight and content around its latest opossum. Unlike the nibblers, it had no trouble growing; someone needed to take the shears to it again soon, or else it was going to overgrow its tank.
Finally, she walked to the very back of the wagon and unlocked the kennel that waited there. Its occupant made a discontented grumbling sound, like a train engine trying and failing to fire.
“Hush now,” said Annie, dropping to her hands and knees and crawling, quite indecorously, into the dark.
Vast yellow eyes opened a few inches above her head, reflecting the light from the lanterns in ghost-flicker luminescence. It would have been unnerving, had it not been so familiar. Annie held her hand out toward the eyes. A moment later, a tongue the size of a lady’s handkerchief rasped across her palm in rough greeting.
“Yes, hello,” said Annie, crawling farther inside, until she bumped against the lynx’s side. She turned over then, rolling onto her back and resting her head on the great cat’s back, reaching up with both hands to scratch under her chin. The purring intensified. “Oh, you silly mush. You silly, silly mush. Did you think you’d been forgotten?”
Lacking words, the lynx simply purred on. Annie closed her eyes, letting the sound comfort her.
When she had fled her life to come to the circus—which had not, to be quite honest, been her original intent; her only target had been “away,” which was a terrible goal for a woman who knew nothing of the wilds, running for her life with an infant strapped to her chest—she had been able to take very little. Her jewelry, most of which had long since been sold or melted down to ease them through the lean times; her mother’s silver brush set, which she had since allowed to grow dark with tarnish, in the hopes of discouraging thieves; her daughter. Even her name had been left behind, buried and now virtually forgotten, to make her trail harder to follow.
But tucked into her valise she had carried a lynx cub, one last gift from the man who had been her husband, who had thought she needed “protection,” although it was never quite clear from what, if not from him. She had refused hunting hounds and mastiffs, calling them poorly suited to the heat and empty spaces of Deseret, where rain was a rumor and green spaces were a lie. Besides, dogs were messy, nasty creatures, and she had not cared for animals then, in any sense of the word; had not enjoyed their company, nor known the tricks of keeping them alive. When pressed, she had allowed that cats were not so bad, and a week later, a box had been in her parlor, hissing and growling at anyone who attempted to get close.
The cat’s name, according to the man who delivered it, was Tranquility; she was a lynx, which was apparent to anyone with eyes. Less apparent was the fact that she had been prepared to live with humans, bred in a private zoo, presumably to be hunted; her adult teeth had been blunted, to make her less dangerous to the people around her. She still had her claws, of course. Removing them would have removed her integrity as a protector.
“No one will even think about troubling you with a watchdog like this on your property,” the man had said jovially. Then: “Your husband must love you very much.”
“I suppose that’s true,” she had said, and began making preparations to run.
When the time had come to actually go through with it, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to leave Tranquility behind. Without the lynx, she might not have realized the depths of her husband’s hubris, or how unwilling he was to listen to her. More, while Tranquility would not have been the only living thing she left behind, she would have been the most vulnerable. It wasn’t the big cat’s fault that she’d been an unwanted gift. It wouldn’t have been fair.
In a way, Tranquility had saved them twice. Annie had run as far and as fast as she could, and just as the money was running out, she had stumbled across the Blackstone Family Circus and Traveling Wonder Show. The thought of joining the circus would never have occurred to her were it not for the people who had seen her with the baby on her hip and the half-grown lynx slung across her shoulders, and assumed that she was circus-folk already.
“Does the cat do tricks?” The question had come from the roustabout at the gate—Danny, she’d learn later, raised under the big tent, circus orphan–turned–gawky lookout–turned worker. Unskilled, like the bulk of the bodies that made up the circus, but when had that ever stopped anyone from having a place in their own home? As long as Blackstone rode the American territories, and the territories of the nearby associated lands, Danny, and the people like him, would have a place to call their own.
(But not Deseret. Even before Annie had come to the show, they had never played for Deseret. That, more than anything, had eventually convinced her that it was safe to stay—that she would never open the doors to the oddities and find herself looking into the one pair of eyes she hoped never to see again.)
“The cat does not do tricks,” she had replied. Tranquility had been panting against her throat, small, sharp breaths that tickled her skin and reminded her of the silent child on her hip, who was so much less equipped to make her needs known. “But the cat could use some water and a shady place to rest, and my daughter is hungry. I can do mending. I can clean. Whatever’s needed, if it buys us rest and a bottle of milk.”
Danny had looked at her with the blank incomprehension of someone who had never been required to think in his life: someone who, if shown a wheel, would gladly put his shoulder to it and push for all that he was worth, but who would never have been able to locate the wheel on his own.
“I don’t know that I’m allowed to hire, ma’am,” he’d said.
Annie’s first reaction had been despair. This was it, then: this was the end of the road. She had run until she’d found herself with no road remaining, and now even the people who would supposedly welcome anyone—the circus-folk her own long-ago nannies had told her stories about, who stole naughty children, whisking them off so that they were never heard from again—wouldn’t have her.
“I see,” she’d said dully. “Thank you for your time.”
“You’re sure the cat doesn’t do tricks?”
Tranquility could take down a rabbit in full flight from the predator at its heels, and would share, most nights, surrendering half the meat to Annie and Adeline. Tranquility could growl like something three times her size, scaring off predators, whether animal or man. Most of the rougher sorts found in towns and in well-lit places did not, it seemed, want to tangle with a lynx, half-grown or not.
(Annie had not been fool enough to linger outside of cities—not yet. As the money ran out and her clothing became more and more disreputable, she had become resigned to the fact that one day she would have no choice. On that day, she would place Adeline in a church pew and pray that God had some mercy left for the West, where little girls with stolen voices deserved as much of a future as any other child; where her daughter ought to have a few good days, before everything fell apart, as it inevitably would.)
Tranquility could keep her warm at night, could purr the pain in her shoulders away, could be a companion where she would otherwise have none save for Adeline, who was too young and too silent to understand what was happening around her.
“No,” she’d said, weary to the bone. “The cat does no tricks.”
“We’ll have to fix that,” had said a voice behind her, and she had turned, and beheld Nathanial Blackstone for the first time.
Any man whose name was painted in giant gilt letters on the side of a wagon train should have been larger than life, six feet if he were an inch, with shoulders like an oak door and a face like a monument. He should have dominated any space that he inhabited, a myth walking. Nathanial Blackstone … didn’t.
Oh, he was tall; taller even than her own father, who had regularly hit his head on doorways and tree branches that no one else would have worried about. But he was also gaunt, a skeleton of a man with his skin drawn taut across his bones. He was one of the darkest men she’d ever seen, with skin so brown that it made the whites of his eyes seem to glow like Tranquility’s did by firelight, seeing everything, even the things that should by rights have gone unseen. There was not a single hair on the top of his head. As if to balance that fact, a bold handlebar mustache graced his upper lip, waxed and curled into a parody of itself, the sort of mustache that would be remembered after everything else about its bearer had long since been forgotten.
“Sir,” Annie had said, unsure what else to do. Her manners, like everything else about her, had been worn thin by the road.
“My name is Nathanial,” he had replied. “We always have need of someone to do the mending, especially if you’re clever with a needle and thread; we always have need of someone the children will listen to, if you think you might be able to enforce some discipline over them. Everything else can be worked through in time, if you feel like the circus might be the place for you.”
“Truly, sir, I don’t know whether there’s a place for me in this world,” she had replied. “But it’s worth trying, and if there’s a bed in it for us, I’m happy to do whatever you propose.”
“Good,” Nathanial had said, and put a hand on her arm, and steered her to his wagon.
Now, years and miles and hundreds of shows from there, Annie was the keeper of the freak show and the guardian of the oddities. She still did mending, when necessary, but that hadn’t been her primary job in years. The circus orphans had to find their makeshift mothers in other wagons; all her motherhood was taken up by Adeline, who was delicate and delightful, and needed her.
The cat still, despite the efforts of some of the best trainers the show had to offer, did not do tricks. But she purred. Oh, how she purred.
Her head resting lightly on the flank of a deadly predator, surrounded by monsters, Annie Pearl closed her eyes and slept.