Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [37]
Madam Oksana nodded. “True. So why should we deprive ourselves of your knowledge, your imagination, your fire?”
“Your blood,” Boris added, licking his (now human) lips.
“Crude,” Carmen said. “But he’s got a point.”
Lenka’s careful poise shattered. “Because I’m sick, you self-centered jerks. Because if I don’t get treatment, I’m going to die and take my special high-energy tasty blood with me.”
She’d startled them, which was a minor triumph in itself. Madam Oksana’s glance darted to Hector, who shook his head ruefully.
Rima, astonishingly, laughed.
“Oh, let her join us. She won’t forget anything she already knows, after all, and we can get new ideas for our acts off YouTube.”
“It would be a shame to waste her blood,” Kazimir said. “Perhaps she can come up with some way to preserve it?”
Lenka was shaking, possibly with relief, possibly with horror: She felt both. Also sick and weak and in need of something more to eat than the Fritos and jelly babies she’d been living off for three days.
“Sure—why not? There’s a bunch of things I want to do before I . . . turn. I need to work on a triple act for the cube rig, for one. And find someone to make us new costumes.”
Madam Oksana stood up and stretched. “Well, that is decided. Good. I will come to the office now and look at the YouTube.”
Lenka shook her head. “Unless you want me to die ahead of schedule, you’ll get me something to eat and let me go to bed. You can watch YouTube tomorrow.”
Joska and Mariana Kubatov joined the line of eager customers waiting for the house to open for the eight-o’clock show of the Cirque des Chauve-souris in San Francisco.
An Asian girl approached them. “Mr. and Mrs. Kubatov? Please follow me.”
Lenka’s mother saw that the tent had been painted and regilded, the faded murals artfully touched up, the brass lamps polished. The girl—the unicyclist—showed them to a booth. Two glasses of red wine sat on the table.
“Lenka said to tell you she can’t come out now, but she’ll see you after the show. Please, enjoy.” And she glided away.
Papa laid his hand on Mama’s. “You must not be disappointed. You know how frightened she is before a show.”
“Frightened I will scold her, you mean.” Mama turned her hand and squeezed. “I’m fine, Joska.”
They sipped their wine and looked around them.
The organ had been repaired, and the player’s repertoire now included old-timey arrangements of popular songs. The opening charivari was the same, but the acts themselves had been—not modernized, exactly. Polished, sharpened, refurbished.
Like the tent. Like the costumes, which were modest but sexy, well made, theatrical.
The Kubatovs smiled and applauded and waited for Lenka to appear.
Battina had acquired a new cat—a seal brown shorthair that rode a miniature flying trapeze from one upholstered platform to another, her tail sticking straight out behind her like a rudder.
“That is cruelty,” Papa murmured.
Mama patted his hand.
At the end of the first half, the steam organ began to play “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.” A cube fashioned of shining golden bars was winched smoothly into the spotlight. Three girls appeared, dressed in silk kimonos painted with bats: the Asian girl, the dark-haired contortionist, and finally, finally, Lenka, almost unrecognizable in a Dutch-boy bob, heavy eye shadow, and circles of rouge on her cheekbones.
The girls backflipped down the ramp, shedding their kimonos, posed a moment under the cube to show off their coy ribboned bloomers and white silk corsets. Lenka stepped lightly onto her partners’ linked hands and vaulted into the cube as if she were flying, then caught the Asian girl, creating a human chain up which the contortionist swarmed.
It was a breathtaking act. The three girls wound through all the cube’s dimensions, hanging from its bars and one another, folding and unfolding their bodies through a complex geometry. Their last trick was a subtle slip-off, Lenka seeming to slide through the contortionist’s hands headfirst in an uncontrolled fall. The audience gasped. Even Lenka’s mother,