The Faire (Harrow Faire #5) - Kathryn Ann Kingsley Page 0,32

worms in the ground.” He held out a hand and touched his fingertips to her cheek. “I am light…and I am dark. I am not lying to you, Cora. It is simply that I am more than you can comprehend.”

She shivered and shut her eyes. “I’m scared.”

“I know. I am here with you. I will always be with you.” He shifted his hand to press his palm to her. “And you will always be with me.”

That was the truth of it, deep down. Her choice was already made. There was no separating her from Harrow Faire. Not now, not ever. Someday, when she died, there would be no line to draw between them. They would be one and the same.

Why was she afraid to blur that line just a little more now?

Lazarus’s voice was quiet but firm. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little lives are rounded by a sleep.” He smirked at the quote. “We are all asleep beside each other, living realities that are similar, but just a hair apart. I am giving you the chance to rewrite your nightmare and save those you have come to care for.”

She opened her eyes and looked back to him. His eyes were gone—as empty as the void beneath her. There was no smile on his face. “Was this your game from the beginning?”

“Does it matter if it was?”

“No. I don’t suppose it does.” She took in a deep breath and, on the exhale, looked down into the hole and groaned. “Rock-fucking, cock-gobbling ass-badger!”

Laz furrowed his brow. “What on Earth is a—” He stopped himself. “Never mind. Just jump, Cora. I will be there to catch you.”

Looking down into the abyss beneath the grate, she knew there was nothing left to do. “Fine. But I’m sick of this shit.”

Lazarus smirked. “Noted.”

She took a step into the darkness, and felt the world give way beneath her.

Cora was falling.

This time, she didn’t bother to scream.

8

Rudy was pacing. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, like a caged animal.

He paced like one because he was one.

Loudly cracking his neck to one side and then the other, there was some small relief in the visceral popping. He always had some joint or another that needed relief. It was part and parcel to his curse—his gift. His bones were always rearranging themselves as he changed his shape.

He was accustomed to pacing. He often paced about his zoo. He rarely spent time in his boxcar. The walls were too close for him. More often than not, he slept on his roof. But this time, it was none of those places that he walked. It was the grass in front of Barker’s boxcar.

He grimaced, smelling the air. It was thick with scents. The woods, the patrons, the reek of gasoline-driven rides, oil, grease, greasy foods, sugar…alcohol.

Beneath that were all the scents that came with animals, both feral and human. Flesh, sweat, urine, shit, sex.

Then came all the emotions.

Fear. Happiness. Joy. Lust. Sadness. It all had a smell. All of it. Fear was the most poignant—it always was—he could follow a trail of it for miles. It was the most primal. All other emotions paled before it.

And then there was the smell that was thickest in the air and had been for many years—it was the one that had his hackles raised. It was the smell of death. The aroma of a dying animal. A scent that promised a fresh kill to anyone who followed it.

Harrow Faire was dying and had been for decades.

It riled the beast in him. It demanded he hunt, kill the wounded, and eat its corpse. But there was nothing to hunt. No flesh he could dig his teeth into. The smell was pervasive anyway. It had nearly driven him mad. It certainly had ruined his mood for nigh on fifty years. It grated on him like a disease. Every moment he could smell it, and every moment he wanted to murder something because of it.

I wasn’t always so testy.

The pups of the Faire must think him a rotten kind of creature. It wasn’t his fault. He was always just a hair’s breadth away from drinking their blood from the stump of whatever limb he tore from their bodies. It had earned him a reputation over the years.

It was that reputation that probably explained why Barker looked so startled when he came out of his boxcar. He nearly tripped over his own two feet and would have wound