The Magpye: Circus (25 page)

"Things are going to change
around here, Jack," said King, pushing past his lieutenant and
striding across the bedroom. Slumping into a fat leather chair, he
plucked an apple from a nearby bowl and sunk his teeth into the
sweet flesh. "I want a meet, all the gangs together."

"You're sure that's a good
idea, boss? I seem to recall you weren't too happy about the gangs
meeting before."

"That was different," replied
Cane, taking another noisy bite of the apple. "I wasn't
invited."

Jack Taylor smiled in response,
but said nothing.

"We're going to consolidate,
Jack, bring all the gangs under our direct control. Cut out middle
management, you know what I mean?"

Taylor nodded. "You'll need
good men to run things day to day," he replied. "And we lost a lot
of good men in the mill."

"Leave recruitment to Garrity,"
said King. "There are always guys who want to make easy money.
Besides, I've still got a few good men, haven't I?"

Cane looked at Taylor, and it
took every ounce of Taylor's clarity and self control not to look
down at the mauled skull of Victor Chase. He had been a good man in
Cane King's eyes once, now he was nothing more a chew toy.

"Of course," said Taylor. "It
would be my pleasure."

Cane raised an eyebrow.
"There's one other thing," he said. "It's about my nephew."

"Your nephew's dead, boss,"
replied Taylor, his voice ice cold. The word "dead" seemed to have
a pretty loose meaning around the Kings of late. He'd seen one man
go into the building that hid The Pit, but seen two leave. The
second was in bad shape, there was no doubt about that, but there
was nothing alive in The Pit at all. Whoever, whatever, had come
out of there had gone in dead. He'd followed their van for block
after block, finally tailing them out of the city and to the
circus. That damned circus, things had never been the same since
King had had him burn it to the ground.

"He's not dead, at least, not to me," replied King,
breaking Taylor's chain of thought. "He'll always be
a
… part of me, you see. I'll
carry him inside me until the day
I
die. And it's not
right, his body laying there in that shit-pit. He's a King. He
deserves better."

Taylor said nothing, his face
an impassive mask. He didn't play poker, he didn't see the point,
but right now he felt like a man staring at a big pot with a bad
hand. He either had to fold, or go all-in.

"Boss, there's something you
need to know."

Marissa stood in the makeshift
kitchen of the lair and tried for the fourth time to pick up the
kettle. Her hand passed straight through it. She was becoming more
immaterial by the day. She knew what it meant. It meant Marv was
coming to terms with things. She didn't know how it was possible,
but he was. Perhaps it was his magic, becoming somehow more
refined. When the pain of his grief was a raw, open wound, it had
simply erased it by bringing Marissa back from the dead, albeit a
version of Marissa crafted from Marv's rose-tinted memories. Now
that he knew the truth, his magic was finding a way to salve that
new wound.

Whatever the reason, it meant Marissa, this Marissa, was
dying by inches. She was bleeding out of existence, one memory at a
time. She tried to focus, to convince herself that she
was
real, and reached for the kettle again. This time she made
contact, wrapping her fingers around the warm metal
handle.

"Making tea?"

Her father's voice startled
her. Of course he was there. Why else would she suddenly be solid
enough to pick up the kettle? At least she was real when he was
looking at her.

"Something for Able," she
replied. She couldn't bring herself to tell him what was happening
to her. After keeping the secret from him for six months that she
wasn't really his daughter, hiding her slow descent and
disintegration to the afterlife was nothing. She poured hot water
into a dented pan, a putrid stench rising from whatever was
inside.

"What the hell are you making?"
asked Marv, holding his nose.

"Broth," replied Marissa. "For
Able
."

"Ah," Marv replied. Since Able
had come back, both in body and mind, there had been some changes
in their lair. The Magpye was rarely seen or heard from, although
Marv had no doubt that the creature was lurking in Able's mind, and
Able seemed to have come to terms with what Marv now referred to as
his "condition". Eating had been one watershed and, whilst Marv
didn't like the sight of putrefied human flesh on his dinner table,
Able was at least eating with them. Living under a circus built on
a cemetery was turning out to have some advantages. Able had
offered to eat alone, naturally, but it had been Marissa who
insisted they all eat together. Their little family; a magician; a
ghost; and whatever Able was plus the countless phantoms he carried
around; seemed to have found some sort of strange equilibrium. It
had been almost three weeks, and Able seemed to be back to his
original self. There had been no talk of vengeance and, most
importantly, no talk of the Kings.

It seemed like it was over.

Marv had decided to give Able
another two weeks and then he'd try to get him to leave the circus
for good. There was still LA, still a chance for all of them.

"I'll let him know it's ready,"
said Marv, eager to get away from the smell of Able's broth.

"No," said Marissa, "I'll
go."

She'd wafted past Marv before
he had a chance to argue and when part of her arm passed through
the stonework of the archway, neither of them mentioned it. You
never admitted when a trick was blown, Marv told himself, even if
you were sure the audience had seen how it was done.

With a sigh, he headed to his
own small room. Books were piled up everywhere, all of the burnt or
torn, but readable for the most part. It was harder to destroy a
book of magic than most people thought. Alone here in his cell,
Marv had already spent weeks researching for something, anything,
that would help Marissa, but to no avail. With Grace dead, Marv
didn't dare reach out to any other magician. Whilst they all loved
their secrets, they loved getting hold of other people's secrets
more, and Marv didn't dare let anyone know the truth about Marissa
until he understood what he was dealing with.

***

Marissa found Able working on
Zip Nolan's airship. Able still seemed to enjoy being Zip and it
kept him busy, out here working on the machine. Marissa and Marv
had both agreed that keeping Able busy was a good idea.

Able was talking to the ghosts when Marissa walked in. His
voice, then another, then another. His voice tripped up from time
to time, one voice trying to talk
over
another, but all
through the same voice-box and tongue. He was arguing. They were
arguing.

"I can't do it. I don't even
know how."

"You did it before, Dorothy.
More than once."

"That was different. Those
girls needed help and it was either me or a bottle of gin and a hot
bath."

"Or a coat hanger."

"I don't care about any of
that. I just want him out."

"We need him out."

"I'm not going anywhere."

Marissa cleared her throat. She didn't worry about how it
was that she
had
a throat, it was enough that she
could clear it, and that was that.

The voices stopped and when
Able turned around he was just Able. Not Zip, or Dorothy, or
Malcolm, and thankfully not Magpye. Marissa knew that there were
other new ghosts as well. Able talked a lot about someone called
Rosa, he said that she was helping him to make sense of everything
that was in his head now. There was a part of Marissa that was
jealous of that.

And then, of course, there was
Adam. Nobody talked about Adam.

"I brought you some broth," she
said, pretending that she hadn't heard the conversation Able had
been having with himself. "It's safe, for you I mean."

Able smiled, the same old
genuine Able smile that Marissa had grown up with. It was warm,
even on a face as pale and cold as Able's now was.

"Thanks," he said simply,
taking the steaming bowl from her. He dipped his fingers into the
liquid, seemingly unaware of how hot it was, and fished out a small
chunk of withered corpse-flesh.

"You checked?"

"A mechanic," said Marissa,
smiling. "I thought he could help you with your project,
maybe?"

Able popped the sliver of dead
mechanic into his mouth and chewed appreciatively. "Maybe," he
said. "I think Zip has it covered."

"Just Zip?" asked Marissa. She
wanted to know what it was that Able had been talking to the others
about. She trusted Able but, no, she didn't trust them. She didn't
even trust the ghosts that she knew, ghosts like Dorothy and
Malcolm and Magda. Marissa, this Marissa, wasn't the same girl who
had died that night, so why should they be the same people
either?

Able plucked another chunk of
flesh from the bowl, ignoring Marissa's question. Able had always
been good at avoiding answers to difficult questions. Marissa
flicked him playfully on the forehead to get his attention. Her
heart, or at least Marv's memory of her heart, skipped a beat as
she saw the very tip of her finger vanish inside Able's head. He
didn't seem to notice.

"How does it feel?" she asked
hastily. "To have them all up there?"

Able scratched absent mindedly at the point where her
finger had passed through his skin. "I never knew my father," he
said, "And now I do, for what he's worth. Before then he could have
been anything or anyone, and I had dreams that he was a good man.
In that way, I've lost him more now than if I'd never known him.
Hell, Marissa, before that night I'd never lost anyone
before
…"

His voice trailed off for a
minute. Marissa wondered if it was his own memories he was
struggling to process or those of one of his ghosts. Thoughts of
death and loss were precisely the types of thoughts that she and
Marv had been trying to keep out of Able's head these past few
weeks.

“
When I see their
memories, or when they talk to me. In the moment I only feel what
they feel but afterwards, if I think about it, there's just an
emptiness. The space where they were, left empty in my head. I
suppose it feels a lot like grief," he said finally.

"That sounds like grief, Able,
yes," replied Marissa kindly. In so many ways, despite everything
he had been through, he

"They're just memories, Marissa. Like you. Just memories
that
… keep on remembering.
Their thoughts, their voices. If you try, you'll be able to hear
them too. They are in your head just as much as they are in
mine."

"They're in my
heart
," said Marissa.
She reached out to take Able's hand, to place it to her chest where
her heart would, where it
should
have been. She
stopped short, fearful that her hand would pass through his and
damning herself for even trying. Marv talked about a life after
this, but in this moment Marissa couldn't see any way out of the
limbo they had built for themselves. Fugitives from the police,
hunted by criminals and worse, a magician and a dead man and a
ghost. It would have been a joke, if anyone could think of a
punchline.

"I'm not sure I have a heart,
any more. I think maybe that's the one part of me that got broken
and stayed broken."

"I don't believe that," said
Marissa. "The Able Quirk I knew had a heart ten times bigger than
this circus."

"Just because I got my memories
back," said Able. "It doesn't mean I'm the same person."

"How could you be, after what
you've been through?"

"But if I'm not Able, and I'm not Magpye
then
… who am I?"

Dipping her head to avoid his
gaze, Marissa reached out again, this time letting her ethereal
hand rest on his. Slowly, her hand began to sink through his. Able
felt an electric tingle. He remembered holding hands with Marissa
like this once before, the first time they had held hands, moments
before their first kiss. The electricity had been the same.

It was magic, but not the kind that made Able a monster and
Marissa a ghost. It was the
other
kind of magic,
one that Able believed was probably a lot rarer
nowadays.

"I think you can be whoever you
want to be, Able."

"Then I want to be the man who
brings down the Kings. I want to bring this whole stinking legacy
to an end. It can die with me."

"You may not think of death as
the end any more Able," replied Marissa softly, "But don't be so
quick to give your life away."

"I'm not giving it away," said Able. His voice was sad and
as distant as Marissa had ever heard it. It sounded more like one
of the ghost's voices, speaking through Able. "They already took
it. What I've got now
… it's
something else entirely."

"Then, at least try to think of
it as a gift. Don't waste the chance you've been given. We can
still get away, all of us. Leave this all behind, let Cane King
have his damned city and we'll find a new life somewhere else.
Together."

Able looked at Marissa. His
flesh was dead, his head was full of ghosts, but the mirage of a
girl in front of him was the most real thing he could see. Maybe
Marv's magic was strong enough to pull some of Able's memories
through as well, now that he had them back, and maybe that
remembered love, that incandescent adolescent love that they had
shared, maybe that was the light that lit her up now.