“Who.” His voice doesn't sound like his voice.
“I—” My teeth are chattering. In seventy-degree sunshine, my teeth are chattering. “Vance. Dr. Vance, he—he came in, no one was there, he—” The blouse. I grab the torn edges and pull them together, and his jaw goes tight.
“Are you hurt?” he bites out. “Did he?—”
“He didn't—I got away. I stabbed him. Rowe, Istabbedhim, there was a scalpel and I just?—”
“Good.”
The word is flat, and then he's moving. He straightens, and his hand hovers at my shoulder… and then it settles against my lower back. His palm. Through the thin fabric of my ruined shirt, warm and broad and steady, and Rowe Holloway, who cannot be touched, who keeps ten inches of air between us like a religion, presses his hand against my back and guides me out of the car.
Some faraway part of me knows that this isn’t easy on him. And on any other day of my life, this touch would rewrite my whole nervous system.
Today, I just shake and let him steer me.
“My trailer,” he says, low, his body angled around mine like a walking shield. “You're safe. Nobody touches you here. Nobody gets near you here.”
We make it maybe forty feet.
A figure cuts across our path from the direction of the Big Top—tall, dark-haired, pale-eyed, moving with an unhurried authority. The Ringmaster. Elias. I've only seen him from the bleachers, spotlit and theatrical, and up close and unlit, he is somehow more, not less.
He takes one look at us. At my face. My wrist. Theblouse I'm holding shut with a fist. At Rowe's hand pressed flat against my back.
Elias goes still. When he speaks, the showman's warmth is gone, and what's underneath is quiet and cold and absolute.
“What happened?”
18
ROWE
“What happened?” Elias asks again. The question hasn't finished leaving his mouth before the doors start opening.
They come out of their trailers like crows to a carcass. Cole first, half a sandwich still in one hand, a knife already in the other. Logan vaults over one of the picnic tables by the cantina instead of walking around it. Jonah fills his doorway, ducks under the frame, and crosses the lot in six strides. Jules and Nova appear from the direction of the new meeting trailer with Silas and Teddy behind them, and Marek simplyisthere, at the edge of the circle, the way Marek always is.
Blood in the water. My family can smell it from a hundred yards.
Wren shrinks against my palm. I feel it through her ruined blouse—her whole body trying to fold in on itself, to take up less space, so I press my hand more firmly against her spine because I will not let her disappear.
“Wren,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “I've told you about Elias. He runs the show. Silas,his brother. Jules. Nova. Jonah. Marek. Teddy.” I tip my chin at each of them. “You've met Cole and Logan.”
“Hi,” Wren whispers. She's clutching the torn edges of her blouse together with one white-knuckled fist, mascara tracks down both cheeks, and she looks like she'd trade a kidney for the ground to open up beneath her. “Sorry. I'm—sorry. I didn't mean to?—”
“Don't,” Nova says. Her green eyes have gone flat and hard, fixed on the ring around Wren's wrist. “Don't you dare apologize.”
“Who did it?” Logan's voice is low. Dangerous. His eyes are on the blouse, the wrist, the beard burn on her neck, my hand on her back—and I watch him do the same math Elias did. His jaw flexes.
“Rowe.” Elias again. Quiet. “Talk.”
I look down at Wren. At the top of her head, the hair coming loose from her ponytail, the tremor that hasn't stopped since she got out of the car.
“Jules. Nova. Would you—” I swallow. “Take her to my trailer. Help her clean up. Please.”
Jules's eyebrows climb toward her blue hair. “You want us to leave right when it's getting interesting?”
“Jules.”
“I'm just saying, historically the fun part happens next, and historically Iparticipate?—”
