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I looked at them with astonishment. “Then it’s the two of you?”
“It is,” she answered.
“Are you two the actual owners of the circus?”
“Hardly,” Mr. Grey scoffed. “Those two bumbling brothers share that dubious honor. We are merely two conservative investors in this enterprise.”
“A bit more involved than most of the others, though,” the old woman corrected him.
“Quite right, Erika,” Mr. Grey agreed, stretching his hand towards my forehead. “At moments like these, I sometimes wish it were otherwise.”
His gesture sparked a memory inside me, and I instantly recoiled. I knew the moment he touched me, it would all be over. I held up my left hand and protested, “Wait!”
“Why delay the inevitable?” Mr. Grey snorted. “This drama is preordained and scheduled to end now. What can possibly be gained by delaying it?”
“As if you can’t guess,” the elderly Erika muttered under her breath behind me.
“Well, if the ending is already set in stone,” I reasoned in a loud voice, “what harm could there be in answering some questions?”
Mr. Grey shook his head as he looked over his shoulder at Erika. I failed to see what her response was.
Mr. Grey replied, “Oh, very well then... I suppose the lamb has earned her right to know why she must be slaughtered.”
“Let’s start with something easy,” I asserted, mustering up the courage I couldn’t feel. “Am I really Brandeis?”
Mr. Grey responded by rolling his eyes and sighing while looking up, as if he were beseeching the heavens for a more intelligent question than that.
“What?” Erika said from behind me. “Seems purely logical she would ask that, Mr. Grey.”
Her continued movement on the shelves made me turn around to see what she was doing. Erica was gathering the dolls off the shelves and dropping them into a basket that must have appeared when I wasn’t looking. Amelia suddenly clutched me tightly before a rough hand turned me around to face Mr. Grey.
Chapter Eighteen
“You have very poor manners, Miss Bairum. It is very poor taste to look elsewhere when someone is responding to your question,” Mr. Grey scolded me with a frosty tone. I managed to keep my tongue still, because I didn’t want to incite him more than I already had and I wanted him to answer my question.
After he finished, I nodded and said, “Sorry for getting distracted.”
Mr. Grey wasn’t exactly mollified by my answer but he grunted and said, “You are Brandeis, yes, but I must add this: you are also two other persons who came before Brandeis.”
I squinted at him incredulously, not quite believing the words to come out of his mouth, but not quite doubting them either. “I don’t understand.”
Mr. Grey grunted again, but I detected a trace of kindness in his voice that I’d never noticed before. “I’m speaking of the basic concept of the cycle of life and re-life.”
I frowned and shook my head. “What’s that mean?”
“In its simplest terms, child,” Erika said from behind me, “it is the afterlife of the soul. Some souls find redemption in a perfectly changeless Heaven or Hell, while other souls elect to return to Earth, and they return in another form.”
“You consistently made the choice to return to us,” Mr. Grey continued. “You andCirque du Noirare interwoven and have become the whole fabric of our enterprise. You withdraw and retreat for long stretches at a time, but you must always return.”
“For what reason, though?” I asked, still as clueless as before.
“Because you’re—”
“Caught in a love triangle with me and my brother,” a gruff voice said from behind Mr. Grey. I never felt so glad to see the ominous form of Rex when he unexpectedly entered the room.
Mr. Grey eyed him with contempt. “Or the prize of a terrible contest that must be played, and replayed, and replayed, ad nauseum, until one of the contestants concedes defeat.”
“I beg to differ, Mr. Grey,” Laurent said out of nowhere. He entered from the back door and swept into the room with his usual theatrical bombast. “I prefer to share my brother’s romantic notions on what truly binds the three of us—it is a love that has never died.”
