The Briar Run had been breathing for some time before anything in it moved. Black-green walls of hedge rose far above the gravel path, their branches scraping together with a dry, patient whisper though no wind stirred. Ground fog pooled in the trenches along the roots and crept outward in slow, searching fingers. Every turn ahead bent out of sight too soon, and the narrow strip of sky overhead held a moon that looked less like a light than a hole.

Somewhere to the right, behind a wall of thorns, a branch snapped.

Then another snapped far to the left, so quickly after that no single creature could have made both sounds. A silence followed, thick enough to feel. Out of it came a slow, wet smacking, thick and deliberate, from somewhere beyond the nearest corner. It stopped. It started again, nearer.

A growl rolled up through the gravel. It was low and enormous, a sound felt in the ribs before it was heard, and it carried a rasp that suggested something very large had been waiting a very long time to use it.

Two points of amber light opened high within the hedge, well above the eye line of an ordinary person. They hung there, unblinking, then slid sideways and vanished. The hedge shuddered along its whole length. The fog drew back from the corner as though it had been told to.

The footfalls came next, each one a heavy concussion that rattled stones against one another. The rhythm was a gallop, then a thundering stride, then something that was almost, though it could not be, a skip.

She came around the turn in a rush of torn briar. At first she was only a silhouette, too wide for the path, her shoulders brushing both walls and leaving gouges in the thorns. A mane of silver-white waves tossed around a long muzzle, and her jaws worked on something with the same wet, grinding smack the fog had carried.Curved black claws flashed at the ends of her powerful hands; one scraped four deep furrows through the gravel as she caught herself around the turn. Behind her a thick silver-gray tail lashed the hedge on both sides, and that, it turned out, was where most of the snapping branches had come from.

She was monstrous and magnificent, a werewolf nearly six and a half feet tall with amber eyes burning in the dark, and she closed the distance faster than anything her size should have been able to manage. Then she slowed. Her enormous ears swiveled forward, turned back and swiveled forward again. She stopped five paces from the visitor, hunched low with her shoulders heaving, and her breath poured from her in great ragged bellows. A grin split her face wide enough to show every one of her canines.

She swallowed hard. Her chest swelled, and the growl she tried next began magnificently and ended in a cough.

"Sorry," the werewolf wheezed, thumping a fist against her breastbone. Her voice was deep, husky and delighted. "Carrot. Hang on. I had a whole growl."

She held up a half-chewed orange stub as evidence. Her tail swept the fog in a wide, happy arc.

Out of the dark behind her, two points of crimson light slid into view. They sat at a more reasonable height than the amber ones and moved with none of the same haste. The briars along the path leaned subtly away as the second figure approached, and the fog parted before her skirts. She was tall, slender and pale as porcelain, in a fitted burgundy velvet gown with a high collar and black lace gloves. Long black hair with a burgundy sheen fell perfectly arranged over one shoulder, and an old garnet pendant caught what little moonlight there was. When her lips parted, her fangs were long and unmistakable. The air around her went stiller and heavier, and somewhere in the hedge a small living thing stopped making any sound at all.

She did not look at the visitor first. She looked at the werewolf.

"Roxie," she said, in a voice like cool velvet. "Chew. Swallow. Then snarl. In sequence, darling."

"It's a root vegetable. It's rustic."

"It is an unpleasant noise in a narrow hedge. A hunt is supposed to be conducted in silence until the final moment. You trotted. Twice you skipped."

"The skip was the pounce!"

"It was a skip."

The werewolf's ears folded flat. The vampire's gloved hand moved to the opposite wrist and tugged the lace into place, a small, over-careful gesture. Then she turned her crimson gaze on the visitor, and the full weight of her attention arrived, elegant and immaculate and entirely real. She smiled, with fangs.

"Good evening," she said. "Good evening. We so rarely have company in this part of the maze. How very... fortunate."

Her eyes flicked once to the wall of hedge on her left. The werewolf's ears went up.

"Is she—"

"Any moment," the vampire murmured.

The hedge exploded.

Briar and leaf burst across the path as a third figure hurled herself into the open. Every shadow in the maze lurched at once. They pulled free of their sources and stretched across the gravel in long, wrong, many-jointed shapes, reaching for the visitor with fingers that had no hands. The fog went black. A crown of small curved obsidian horns rose from a tangle of black-violet hair threaded with smoke, and the woman beneath them had her eyes squeezed tightly shut, her cheeks flushed dark, and her chest thrown out as far as it would go. Both fists hammered her sternum like a pair of drums.

And she screamed.

It was a layered sound, a whole chord of voices stacked on one another and swelling. It rattled the hedge and curdled the moonlight. Far beyond the walls, things that had been moving stopped moving. The thorns curled. The note climbed and held, and held, and held, a long, devastating shriek in which every nightmare of anyone who had ever heard it seemed to have been poured into one breath and then another.

On the path, the werewolf grinned with enormous pride, her ears pressed flat against her skull. The vampire stood perfectly poised, one eyebrow lifting a single patient degree.

Then the scream began to falter.

A crack ran through the middle of it, and the stacked voices thinned to a single reedy one. The hammering of the fists slowed. The shadows hesitated in mid-reach and then sagged, sliding back toward their sources. What remained of the shriek wobbled, shrank, and finally wheezed itself out into a thread of air.

One violet eye cracked open, a ring of red guttering in its depths.

It took in the werewolf with her carrot, the vampire with her raised eyebrow, and the visitor on the path. A cold breeze stirred the fog. Somewhere in the dark, a lone branch snapped.

Slowly, the horned woman lowered her fists. The red in her eye faded to violet. The silence stretched, and she let it.

"...Hiii!"

"That was the BEST one!" the werewolf burst out, bounding forward and nearly flattening the fog beneath her stride.

"Was it?" Moth pressed her hands to her flushed cheeks. "The middle was supposed to dip lower. I ran out of air right at the good part."

"It was," the vampire said, after a considered pause, "thorough."

The werewolf was already turning back, ears high, tail sweeping in great arcs, her whole enormous frame vibrating. "Did it work? Did we scare you?! I'm Roxie! That's Vivi, and that's Moth, and—"

"Welcome to Hollowmoon," Moth added, edging forward with her hands clasped, glancing at the visitor and then away and then back. "Most people don't stay for the introduction."

Vivi smoothed the front of her gown and extended one lace-gloved hand, palm up. The offer was gracious and entirely sincere.

"Do tell us your name, darling."

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The Rusted Grin had been smiling at the dark for decades, and it had not improved with practice. The great iron face loomed over the twin gates, its painted lips flaking away in curls of rust, its mouth stretched wide enough to swallow the path. Beneath it the ticket booths stood black and shuttered. Faded posters promised "The Happiest Night of Your Life" to nobody, and a pair of speakers bolted to a lamppost hung from their wires like dead birds. Beyond the bars, the avenue showed itself only in pieces: a leaning awning, a curve of cobblestone, the distant outline of something enormous and motionless against the sky. Nothing out there seemed to be waiting for anyone.

Vivi stood before the gates with her gloved hands folded and her chin level, and thought that it was exactly as it should be. Tonight's welcome would be dignified, efficient, and worthy of the finest carnival in all the supernatural world. She had practiced the greeting before her vanity mirror three times. She had selected the garnet pendant for its gravity. She had given instructions.

All that remains is for the staff to follow them.

A latch clicked within the nearest ticket booth. Its shutter rasped upward, admitting a thin wash of moonlight. Behind the glass, a tall figure unfolded from the shadows with the unhurried precision of a hearse arriving at a funeral. Mr. Tallow wore a severe black three-piece suit and ivory gloves. His pewter hair was parted with a ruler's accuracy, his tawny-gray face was smooth as old parchment, and his amber eyes were glassy and attentive. He bowed. His shadow, a moment later, bowed lower.

"Madam," he said, in a voice that made a greeting sound like a summons. "A guest at the threshold. One admission. The standard tariff is a single soul, payable in advance and non-refundable. Should the guest prefer permanence, I can offer a final stamp, which entitles the bearer to perpetual residence. The clause is quite clear."

Two tall figures in antlered helms stood motionless on either side of the gates, ember-glass visors turned forward, saying nothing. The air around them had gone very still.

Vivi did not so much as glance at them. She extended one gloved hand. "Give me the ledger, Mr. Tallow."

A pause, long enough to be a statement. Then he laid the red book in her palm.

"The soul tariff," he began, "is traditional."

"The soul tariff is tacky." She drew a silver pen from her sleeve and struck through the offending line in one clean stroke, then the one beneath it, then, for good measure, a third. "Perpetual residence. Honestly. We are not a subscription. The fee is the ordinary fee, in ordinary coin, and the guest leaves with their soul in precisely the condition they brought it."

Tallow's gloved fingers tightened on the edge of the booth. Something moved behind his amber eyes, an ancient accountant watching a lifetime of profit go up in ink. "It is," he said, very carefully, "extremely irregular."

"It is hospitality." She handed back the ledger. "Look it up."

He took it, and bowed again, deeper. His shadow stayed bent after he had straightened. Vivi noted it with quiet satisfaction. Good help was a matter of expectation, and she had always expected excellence.

A great thump shook the gravel behind her, and Roxie arrived at speed, silver hair wild and tail sweeping the rusted air, ears high and quivering. "Hi! Do they get a discount? Is there a discount for people who show up late? Is there a snack? There should be a snack at the gate."

"Refreshments," Tallow said, "are not provisioned at admission."

Roxie's ears folded flat. Vivi felt the small, familiar tug beneath her ribs and ignored it.

"There will be refreshments inside," she said. "Funnel cakes, I believe. Do stop looking so betrayed, darling."

The ears came back up.

From the booth's far window, Moth had been inspecting a roll of blank tickets, holding one up to the lamp with the grave attention of a connoisseur examining a forged masterpiece. "Mr. Tallow," she said, her voice soft and lilting, and the air around her had gone faintly violet. "Where is the face?"

"Madam?"

"The ticket. It's gray. There's nothing on it. The first thing a guest holds in their hand tonight is this, and it says nothing. It should have a friendly face. A little one. Just so they feel expected." The shadows along the booth wall lengthened, only slightly, and a flicker of red ringed her violet eyes. "I'll wait."

Tallow's mouth thinned. The silence went on one beat longer than courtesy required. Then he produced a pen from his waistcoat, bent over the nearest ticket, and drew, with a revenant's exquisite penmanship and visible agony, a smiling face.

"Oh," Moth breathed, pressing it to her chest. "That's the one."

Vivi watched his gloved hand shake very slightly as he set the pen aside, and thought that Mr. Tallow, for all his faults, respected clear instructions when they were delivered with enough conviction. She would mention it in his review.

Then she turned, and the whole of her attention settled on the guest waiting beyond the bars.

She had expected to feel her usual poise at this part. What she felt instead was a quiet, unfamiliar anxiety: the hope that this stranger might find something here worth staying for. Let it be wonderful. Let it be wonderful, just for them.

"Forgive the formalities," she said, and her voice was lower and gentler than she had rehearsed. "Mr. Tallow's customs are... old. But you are welcome here. All three of us wish it."

The gates groaned.

It began deep in the iron, a long, tortured cry, and then the twin gates drew slowly apart. Beyond them, green fire kindled in a line along the path, lantern after lantern waking in a ripple that ran away down the avenue. Somewhere out of sight an organ cleared its throat and began, softly, to play. Silhouettes moved behind striped awnings that had been empty a moment ago. Far overhead, a skeletal shape of spokes and bulbs shivered, and a low mechanical sound rolled across the grounds, like some enormous machine drawing breath after a very long sleep. At the end of the avenue, the Laughing Midway opened in a glow of green and gold, music and shadow and the faint, distant murmur of a great many people who were not entirely people.

Tallow stepped out of his booth and held out the smiling ticket on his open palm, the brass punch in his other hand and the red ledger tucked beneath his arm. Roxie bounced on her toes. Moth clasped her hands under her chin, and the shadows on the path settled into something almost like a bow.

Vivi lifted her hand toward the avenue, a hostess's gesture, graceful and unhurried.

"Whenever you are ready, darling," she said.

The mallet came apart in a bright spray of splinters. Its head went spinning off through the green lamplight, struck a rotten velvet canopy and vanished somewhere behind the prize shelves. Roxie stared at the handle still in her fist. Above her, on the painted scale of the Bell of the Damned, the brass indicator had rocketed nearly to the top, shivered at the edge of glory, and sunk back down with the air of something that had been told to stay put.

"That one was close," she said. "That one was so close."

Steam sighed from the shoulder of Brass Jack, the bronze clockwork mechanic behind the counter. He did not look up from the stack of replacement mallets he was already squaring against the wood. "The bell is functional," said Jack, in a low, level baritone. "The mallet is not. Replacement number sixty-one, Lady Roxie."

"Is that a real number, or are you making it up so I feel bad?"

"It is the number."

Her ears folded flat. Her tail, which had been sweeping a happy arc through the fog, slowed to a thoughtful drag. Then she reached for the replacement mallet, because there was no sense stopping with two swings still owed to her. The bell was clearly rooting for her.

All down the Grinning Games the evening was going exactly as it always did, which was loudly. Four crooked booths ran in a row beneath stained canopies, hung with green-brass lamps that buzzed like trapped insects. Each one wore its name in crooked bulbs and flaking paint: Dead Man's Ring Toss, Rattle & Shot Gallery, Bell of the Damned, and, at the far end beside a tank of black water, Dunk the Undertaker. Coin drawers clinked like teeth. Prize shelves sagged under plush curiosities with too many eyes and faded rosettes. Somewhere past the canopies an organ was working through a waltz with an air of grievance.

Roxie scooped her armful of ordinary prizes higher against her chest, a lopsided stuffed bat and two ribbons and a tin trophy of no clear purpose, and glanced down the row to see how the others were doing.

At the ring toss, Vivi stood with her spine straight as a rapier, one lace glove raised and a wooden ring balanced on two fingers. The glass bottles lined up before her were a rude and watchful bunch. A few contained eyes, and the eyes tracked her every move. She threw. The ring struck the neck of the gold-banded bottle, wobbled around it for one agonizing instant, and clattered to the boards.

"It moved," Vivi said.

"The bottles may insult you, madam," said the porcelain marionette behind the counter, bright and brisk, a thread of voice running down like a music box, "but they will not move."

"It leaned."

"It was observing you. Leaning is not locomotion."

From the third bottle on the left, one swiveling eye said in a dry little rasp, "My grandmother throws better, and she's been dead since Tuesday."

Vivi adjusted her glove, tugging the lace into place with the over-careful precision of a woman defusing something. Roxie grinned until her fangs showed.

She's going to hit it on the very next one. And then she'll pretend she meant to miss the first two.

Farther along, at the shooting gallery, Moth had abandoned her launcher on the counter with two shots unused and knelt instead in the straw before a row of formally dressed skeletons. Five targets stood across the gallery in their painted stations. One lay in an elegant sprawl, flat on its back, having just been struck. Moth pressed a finger to her lips and studied it with grave and tender disappointment.

"No," she said softly, shaking her tousled head. "No, no, no. You've fallen like someone who tripped. You've fallen like a chair. I need you to fall like someone who has just understood how thoroughly they have been betrayed."

The skeleton sat up and rattled a long, indignant reply, jaw clacking, finger raised in what was unmistakably a complaint about the script.

"Then find the betrayal," Moth breathed, hands clasped. "Reach inward. Who was the last person you trusted?"

The skeleton regarded her for a long beat. Then it staggered upright, spun once on one heel, clutched its ribs with both hands and crumpled with such wrenching, operatic conviction that the one beside it applauded with its own palms, which made a sound like dice in a cup.

"That," Moth said, with tears in her eyes. "That is art."

Roxie laughed so hard her ears popped back up. She was still laughing when she noticed someone near the head of the row, just beyond the reach of the brightest lamps. Whoever they were, they had Roxie's complete attention. Her heart gave a hard, hopeful thump.

A guest. A real one, who's just standing there.

Her tail swept the cobblestones once, then twice. She tried to make it stop and it would not.

"Hey!" she bellowed, in a voice that startled several lamps. "Hey, come see! We're doing games! Vivi, we have somebody!"

Vivi turned at once. The ring in her fingers vanished into a sleeve, her chin came up, and every trace of the bottles' insults was wiped from her face with a single, practiced smile. Moth sprang to her feet in a flutter of charcoal lace, brushing straw off her skirts, and the shadows around her gave a pleased little shiver.

"We're not losing," Vivi said, gliding forward. "We are merely at an early stage."

"I broke a mallet," Roxie said.

"We are all at an early stage."

"I made one of the skeletons cry," Moth added happily, then hesitated. "Well. Rattle. It was an emotional rattle."

At the far end of the row, a long pale figure on a plank above the tank of black water had been watching with a patient, bored scorn. His swept silver hair gleamed, and his hat, which had never in its existence been wet, sat at a perfectly dry angle. He raised one gloved hand in lazy greeting to the newcomer.

"A visitor," he said, in a deep, cutting drawl. "How refreshing. Most of my customers have had the decency to be dead already."

"Don't mind him," Roxie said, hurrying over with her prizes spilling a ribbon. Her ears were up, her tail was a whirlwind, and her voice dropped a little in a way she hoped nobody would notice. "He's mean to everybody. You get used to it."

Vivi was already counting out coins into a gloved palm. "Dead Man's Ring Toss is the most elegant of the four, naturally. Three rings. A clear target. A game for people of poise."

"Dunk the Undertaker is the funniest," Roxie countered. "You throw a ball and he falls in. He has to."

"Come watch a proper death," Moth said, folding her hands under her chin. "The skeletons are almost ready."

"Bell of the Damned," Roxie added desperately. "I'm going to ring it. Probably. I'm getting there."

Then, quietly, with her ears tipped low and her tail gone still, she added the part she had not meant to say aloud. "You could try one. Or all of them. Or just watch, that's fine, that's okay too. We'll be here."

She held out a single coin in her clawed palm, small and bright against the black of her nails, and waited.

The Last Supper was at its loveliest in the hour when the lamps came on. Striped Gothic awnings sagged over candlelit tables, and the air smelled of cinnamon, burnt sugar and woodsmoke. Funnel cakes cooled on silver racks beside pastries glazed like stained glass. Along the bar, glass carafes of unnaturally deep crimson glowed from within like lanterns lit with something that had once been alive. A pale couple in evening dress turned their wine glasses by the stems, and their reflections turned a heartbeat later. Behind the serving counter, the kitchen doors swung shut on a silence much too clean for a room full of cooking.

Vivi had chosen the corner table beneath the largest awning, where the candlelight caught her best side. She sat with her spine straight and her ankles crossed, gloves folded in her lap. She was aware, as she was always aware of everything, that a guest had come to the Last Supper tonight, and she had resolved to be exactly what the evening needed: ancient, unhurried, and faintly dangerous over a glass of something nobody dared ask about.

Silas Redfern was already crossing the room. He moved between the tables with a tray balanced on two fingers, shirtsleeves rolled, garnet suspenders immaculate, copper-red eyes missing nothing. He set a crystal goblet before her without a sound, then a small carafe.

"The lady's usual," he said, low and level. "Yes, I know what to call it."

"A private vintage, Mr. Redfern. We needn't discuss it."

"I never reveal a client's preferences. The client generally does that herself."

He withdrew. Vivi poured, and the liquid ran dark and glossy and convincingly crimson. She lifted the goblet and took a slow, theatrical sip.

A great shadow fell across the table.

"It smells like the garden!" Roxie announced, folding herself into the neighboring chair with a creak of protest from the wood. Her ears were high and her tail swept the flagstones. "The sweet dirt part. Is that the new batch? You said it was ready."

"It is an ancient crimson vintage," Vivi said, with great clarity.

"It's beet juice."

"It is not beet juice."

"It's got the pink foam. You told me that was embarrassing."

At the next table, the pale couple had stopped turning their glasses. Vivi set down the goblet as if it might detonate.

"The foam," she said, "is a mark of age. A natural sediment. Vintages of this caliber develop an effervescence. Moth, tell her."

Moth sat up at once, a pastry crumbling forgotten at her elbow, violet eyes shining with the warm devotion of a woman about to help.

"It's an extremely old beet," she said.

Somewhere behind the counter, a glass chimed.

"A dramatic beet. Planted in the dark, and waiting a very long, very sad time for someone elegant to drink it. Eleven hundred years, probably."

"Moth. Please."

Roxie burst into laughter and slapped the table so hard the candle jumped. Moth glanced at the goblet, then at Vivi's face, and went pink. "That was the wrong one."

Then a pleasant, cultured voice drifted over from the pale couple's table, pitched exactly loud enough. "Beetroot. How wholesome. I do hope the vegetable is treating you kindly, madam."

The woman beside him laughed behind her glove. It was a small, tinkling sound. In ancient company it was as good as a knife.

Vivi did not move. She had learned long ago that the first rule of dignity was that it never moved. Beneath her ribs, the old thing stirred.

"I beg your pardon," she said, very softly.

"Oh, I only mean that it's charming," the man said, swirling his wine. "A vampire of your standing. One had heard rumors of a predator. One had not heard of a salad."

The candles along the awning went blue.

It began in the flames, which stood straight up, and then in the carafes along the bar, every crimson one of them shivering and ringing against the others like bells. The shadows beneath the awning slid across the stones and gathered behind Vivi in a vast, rising shape. She felt her fangs lengthen, felt the burn behind her eyes and the long, wrenching crack down her spine as the wings came.

They snapped open with a sound like a sail tearing. Black and enormous, they swallowed the lamplight and shook the awnings on their poles, and the whole Last Supper went still. The pale man's wine glass burst in his hand. The woman beside him slid from her chair. Along the bar, patrons who had hunted through centuries sat suddenly rigid and discovered they had forgotten how to breathe.

"SILENCE, YOU FOOL!"

The words rolled across the tables with the weight of an ancient sentence, and the kitchen doors flew open on their hinges and banged against the walls. Behind them every pot went quiet at once. Roxie squeaked, dropped out of her chair and slid behind it with her ears flat and her tail wrapped around her own ankles. Moth sat bolt upright, clutching her pastry to her chest, her eyes brimming with something very like awe. Silas Redfern set down the glass he was drying, without a sound, and inclined his head one precise inch.

And in the stillness, Vivi became aware of one thing she had somehow forgotten.

The guest.

She did not know what the visitor's face was doing, and the knowledge went through her like cold water. She felt the wings, the fangs, the power curling at her shoulders, and all the old wrath drained out of her, leaving only a scalding awareness of how she must look.

She retracted the wings, one slow fold after another. She smoothed the front of her gown and straightened her pendant. She tucked one wayward lock of black hair behind her ear, and let her fangs recede, and arranged her mouth into a lovely, composed, terribly sweet smile.

"Sorry," she said. "Hangry."

The silence held for a very long moment. Then, with enormous dignity, the pale man set down the remains of his glass and gave a small, deferential nod. His companion stood, smoothed her skirts, and the two of them withdrew from the Last Supper without looking back.

The tables slowly resumed their murmur. The candles went gold again. Roxie's head rose over the back of her chair, ears still half-flat, tail still tight around her ankles.

"I'm sorry," she said, quietly. "I didn't think it mattered that much."

Vivi found she could not quite look at her.

"You made me some when I was sick," Roxie went on, climbing back into her seat and turning the goblet a careful quarter turn with one claw. "With honey. I thought that was the nicest thing anybody ever did for me. I never thought it was something to be ashamed of."

Moth reached across the cloth and nudged the sugared pastry onto the edge of Vivi's plate. "It's very good beet," she said gently. "I'd say so to the whole carnival."

"Please do not say so to the whole carnival."

"Okay."

Silas Redfern had returned with a fresh goblet, which he set at her elbow without comment. Something warm and pink foamed at the rim. "Your usual, my lady," he murmured. "The vintage."

Vivi let out a breath she had been holding for several centuries. Then she turned, with her chin high and her gloves in perfect order, toward the guest.

"Forgive the family discussion," she said. "Please. Sit, if you'd like. We were about to order."

Roxie dragged a spare chair out with one foot. Moth slid the pastry plate an encouraging inch across the cloth.

"She's not actually mad," Roxie whispered, loudly. "She's just hangry."

"Roxie."

"It's a good word, I like it."

The corridor was an ordinary length when Moth stepped into it, and by the third portrait it had become a mile.

It happened without a sound. The floorboards kept going, the damask wallpaper unspooled ahead in dim ribbons, and the sconces dwindled to pinpricks. The portraits turned their painted eyes one at a time, with slow, lovely precision, and at the far end the door they were all looking toward shrank to the size of a coin. Cold slid down the back of her charcoal dress like a hand. Somewhere beneath the floor, great machinery turned over once, patient and infernal, and the whole House of Screams drew breath.

Oh, Moth thought, pressing her rehearsal notebook to her chest. Oh, that is gorgeous.

Gregory stood at the center of it with his black-gloved hands folded behind him, the burgundy lining of his frock coat a dark gleam in the gloom. His swept-back horns caught the dwindling lamplight. His shadow had risen up the wall to twice his height and spread into vast, membranous wings that flexed slowly, the way a sleeping thing breathes. The lights guttered at his every word.

"The Long Approach," he said, in a voice with a second, deeper voice beneath it. "The visitor will believe the door unreachable. In the third heartbeat it will be at their back. I find the effect satisfactory."

"The stretch is perfect," Moth breathed, and meant it so entirely that her violet eyes had gone shining. "And the portraits! Turning one at a time instead of all at once. Who taught you that?"

"Nobody taught me, mistress. I invented it before your mountain had a name."

Behind her, Roxie padded along the wallpaper with a stack of notecards in one clawed hand and a paper bag of popcorn in the other, her ears swiveling at every creak. She lifted a hand in a wave. "Hi, Gregory."

"Lady Roxie."

The door arrived. It slid out of the distance and settled before them, and swung open on a narrow dark room that smelled of old velvet and something else. A lesser demon stood inside in a footman's livery. Its smile held too many teeth, and it was looking at the corridor, where an audience would be, with an expression that no actor had any business wearing.

Roxie sniffed and stopped chewing. "That one's hungry," she said slowly. "Not stage hungry. Hungry hungry."

The door began to swing shut. Moth caught it with one hand and leaned around its edge to examine the inner face. Smooth wood. No handle, no latch, nothing for a frightened guest to grasp.

There it is.

"Gregory," she said, very gently. "Where is the handle?"

"It is an old house."

"On the inside."

"A handle implies an exit." He inclined his head, ember eyes unhurried. "The principle of the room is that the visitor does not leave it."

"But that's the problem!" Moth spun to face him, notebook flying open. "A person with no way out isn't scared. They're stored. Dread needs a door. The whole feeling is that you might make it. Give them a handle, a bright little one, so they're sure—and then let the hallway stretch just far enough to make them doubt it. The exit stays. It's the certainty you take away." She snapped her fingers, and the shadows along the wall flinched. "Hope isn't the opposite of fear. It's a spice."

Gregory regarded her for a long moment. Down the corridor the lights steadied, and the lesser demon in the livery went rigidly still.

"I have drawn terror from kings," he said, "who had no such comfort."

"And did they come back for the second show?"

"The second show is not a concern of the dead."

"It's a concern of mine."

She stepped past him into the middle of the room. The air changed. She did not raise her voice. She only let out a small, perfect breath, the thinnest edge of a note, and every shadow in the walls sat up. The portraits in the corridor wept in unison, long black tracks of paint running down their painted cheeks. The ceiling bent. The floor tilted, one slow degree, toward a door that had suddenly, mercifully, grown a small bright brass handle. For one second the room belonged entirely to her. Then she let the note go, and the room settled, and she was only Moth again, tucking a lock of black-violet hair behind her ear.

"That," she said. "You keep the door. You make them wonder whether they'll reach it."

Gregory's wings shifted against the wall. The lesser demon had pressed itself flat against the paneling, and its smile was gone.

"Your technique, mistress," Gregory said at last, with dry and immaculate courtesy, "is not without merit."

"I know!" Moth beamed, and was a little embarrassed by how much it mattered.

It was then, as she turned to write the note down, that she became aware that the House had an audience. It came as a prickle at the back of her neck, that peculiar awareness every performer knew: someone unfamiliar was present, someone who wasn't part of the rehearsal. She looked up.

A guest.

Her heart gave a bright, helpless leap.

A real one. A real audience, on a rehearsal night, with real opinions.

The lesser demon had noticed too. Its head turned toward the guest, and its mouth began to open, and its eyes lit with an old, simple appetite. Moth did not look at it.

"Back to rehearsal," she said, lightly.

It went. It slouched out through a side panel, shoulders slumped, with the sullen dignity of something that had been told no by someone it could not argue with.

Gregory took one slow step forward, and the lamps in the corridor dipped. He inclined his horned head to the guest with the full ceremonial grace of an ancient house.

"A visitor," he said. "The evening improves. If you should wish to see the unabridged version of our craft, the east wing is safe. In the theatrical sense."

"No," Moth said, quite pleasantly. "No, he's not allowed to do that. Not tonight."

Roxie, behind her, had put away the popcorn. "He's not that bad," she murmured. "He's just old."

Moth smoothed her skirts, took a breath, and turned to the guest with her notebook clasped in both hands. For the first time all night, her voice was soft.

"I'd love to show you how a proper one goes," she said. "The real route, with a door at the end of it. I'd love your notes, honestly. Which parts worked and which didn't, and whether it was a scream or a gasp. Or we could skip all of it and go find something with sugar on it. That's allowed, too. I just..." She stopped and looked at the guest, hopeful and a little afraid of it. "I'd like to know what you think."

The Midnight Menagerie turned in a slow wheel of green fire, and nothing in Hollowmoon was lovelier. Its canopy rose in tiers of midnight-blue silk fringed with tarnished gold, and witchfire burned inside every brass lantern along the rim. The platform spun on an unseen axle to music no orchestra was visible to play: a waltz of glass and sleigh bells, sweet and a little wrong around the edges. Between the twisting poles rode the Carousel Herd. A black unicorn lifted its painted head toward the lanterns. A silver stag carried a crown of antlers hung with real frost. A carved raven turned a bead-bright eye on whoever passed, and a dragon of green-lacquered wood coiled around its pole with its jaws slightly open. As they swept by, one or two of them breathed.

Roxie stood on the stationary walkway outside the turning platform, her hands braced on her knees and her ears pinned back, panting. A single silver ribbon was knotted around her wrist. Across from her, the creature she had been racing had apparently not bothered to run at all.

Slate had stepped off his pole and was letting the carousel carry him around.

He stood on the platform with his four paws planted, a black-lacquered wolf the size of a pony. Silver runes were inlaid along his flanks and shoulders, and his carved midnight-blue mane lay in sculpted waves. Thin pale light showed between the panels of his ribs as he breathed. His amber-gold eyes held hers, and he gave a short, dry huff through his nostrils. It was the sound a very old man makes when somebody else has dropped the chess piece.

"You cheated," Roxie said.

Slate lowered his head and dipped one forepaw in a slow, exquisite bow.

"Don't do that. Don't bow at me. I ran the whole outside! The platform spins with you! You ride the turn! It's like running downhill, and I've been telling everybody for years, and nobody believes me."

Slate straightened. He flicked his gaze to the ribbon on her wrist, then to the brass ring dangling on its post at the center of the wheel, which he had apparently taken on the last lap. Roxie was nearly sure he was smiling, though a carved wolf had no business being able to.

She hadn't expected a witness to her defeat, but a voice from the edge of the platform called, soft and thrilled, "Official ruling!"

Moth was perched on a gilded bench beside the gate with her rehearsal notebook open on one knee and a stopwatch dangling from a violet ribbon. The lantern light caught the small obsidian curves of her horns. "Slate by a nose. It was a beautiful finish, honestly. The pause before the lunge was so theatrical. Roxie, you've got to stop running with your mouth open."

"I run with my mouth open because I'm breathing!"

"It breaks the silhouette."

Roxie let out a groan and flopped back onto the boards with her arms flung wide. Above her, past the tiers of silk and the swinging lanterns, the clouds had been tearing slowly open all evening, and now they pulled back altogether.

The moon rolled out of them like a pearl.

It was enormous. It hung over the canopy peak and lit the green flame to silver, and the black unicorn's painted flank shone like wet ink. The air thinned and grew cold, and the whole carnival seemed to hold still around it. Roxie's ears rose. Her tail, which had been flat against the boards in despair, gave one twitch and then began, against every effort of her will, to sweep.

Don't. You're in the middle of an argument. You're being serious.

Her chest swelled. Her head tipped back. She lost the argument with herself in a single breath.

The howl poured out of her, long and golden and ecstatic, rising from somewhere deep in her ribs and climbing the silk of the canopy. It rang off every lantern and shook the frost from the stag's antlers, a big, bright, wholehearted sound, the sound of a wolf who had found the moon and was telling it she was glad.

She let it fade slowly, with her eyes closed and her tail still going.

When she opened them, the Herd was looking at her.

Every head on the wheel had turned. The carved raven had cocked its head, and the dragon's jaws had come open a fraction wider. Directly above her on its pole, a skeletal-styled horse with sockets of green flame and a mane like smoke gave a long, deep snort through its wooden nostrils. It was the exact sound of a duchess with an opinion about the soup.

"What," Roxie said. "It was a good one."

The horse snorted again, quieter, and turned its eyes away.

Slate had not moved. He sat in front of her with his tail wrapped neatly around his forepaws and the moon painting silver in his runes. After a moment he lowered his chin and closed his amber eyes, slowly, as though to spare her. He gave one small, kind, deeply sympathetic nod, the nod one gives a child who has tried very hard.

Roxie's ears went flat. Behind her, Moth made a tiny strangled noise and clapped a hand over her mouth.

"That's worse," Roxie breathed. "That's so much worse than the horse."

It was at that moment that she realized someone else was there.

She couldn't tell how much of that the guest might have witnessed. The race? The howl? Slate's intolerable little nod? Her tail stopped and her ears came up, hopeful and a little sheepish at once. She scrambled upright, brushing at her trousers.

"Hi! Hey, hi. Okay, so this is the Midnight Menagerie, and that," she pointed one clawed finger, "is Slate, who cheats. He's been beating me since before I can remember. I think I've lost forty thousand times." Her voice dropped a notch. "And every time I come running up, he's already at the gate. He's never not been. So I don't actually mind. Don't tell him."

Slate, who had certainly heard, turned his head away with infinite dignity.

She held out her free hand towards {{user}}, claws curled gently, as one would to someone who might want to take it. "Do you want to see me beat him? Or judge? Moth's the judge, but she'd share. Or you can ride something." The unicorn drifted past overhead, and its painted eye tracked her. "They're pretty good, mostly. I'll be right next to you the whole time."

The ribbon on her wrist fluttered. The music turned on, and the wheel with it.

"One more lap," she said. "I'm gonna get him this time."

The House of False Faces had been built to make people doubt the floor, and Vivi had never once been fooled by it. She walked its silver corridor with her chin level and her gloved hands held neatly at her waist, while sickly green lamps illuminated the long glass walls on either side. A hundred Vivis walked with her in perfect order. She noted, with the grim tolerance of a woman crossing a bridge of questionable timber, that they were arriving a half-step late.

Then one of them was not late at all.

It was in the third frame on the left. It had stopped walking, and it stood watching her go by with its head tilted and a small, private smile on its mouth. Its hair was down, its gloves were off, and it looked utterly, awfully at ease. Vivi kept her pace and her expression precisely as they were. In the frame behind her, the figure went on smiling at nothing.

Not a flicker. Not one.

"Lady Vivi." The voice came from the glass ahead, near and warm and just above a whisper. "How kind of you to come in person."

Two reflections of the speaker stepped out of the nearest mirror before the woman herself did. The left one smiled first. Madame Veyra emerged from the silver frame an instant later in a high-necked gown of black and pearl, the asymmetric half-mask like a slice of moon across her face, her ink-black hair threaded with ribbons that moved a shade slower than she did. Her metallic gray eyes had pupils like coins. She inclined her head, and every doorframe in the corridor doubled with a soft chime.

"Madame Veyra," Vivi said. "I am conducting an inspection."

"Then you will find everything in order. I would be wounded to find otherwise."

"The east corridor ran in a circle for eleven minutes this evening."

"It was thinking."

"It was lost. A guest requires a clear exit, Madame, and a mirror that does not improvise on the matter."

Veyra's smile deepened by a precise fraction. "I have never once trapped a visitor, my lady. They simply... linger. Occasionally for a very long time. It is hardly the same."

Vivi felt the old small pleasure of a worthy opponent and refused to show it.

A gasp rang out from somewhere to the right, followed by a heavy, delighted thump. "It's better!" Moth's voice carried across the glass. She stood before a tall oval mirror with her notebook dropped at her feet, violet eyes huge, one hand pressed flat to the surface. "Look at its face. I've been rehearsing that scream for two weeks, and mine is just a mouth, but hers has the dread in it! Look how the eyes go before the jaw does!"

The reflection of Moth was indeed screaming, silently and magnificently. Her horns had grown a fraction longer in the glass, her shadow ran up the wall behind her like spilled ink, and it held the note for a long, perfect moment before it stopped, looked at the real Moth, and, with exquisite courtesy, shrugged.

"It shrugged," Moth whispered, thrilled and wounded together. "It's critiquing me."

Roxie had stationed herself a little farther along, hunched with her arms crossed and her ears pinned flat at the sight of her own reflection. The wolf in the glass stood just as tall, silver-maned and amber-eyed, with her claws loosely at her sides. Her tail hung stiff and perfectly still.

"It's not wagging," Roxie said darkly. "I'm doing this"—she wagged vigorously to demonstrate, and the reflection did not—"and it's not doing anything. That's rude. That's a rude wolf."

"It is a very composed wolf," said Veyra.

"It's judging."

It was then that Vivi saw them, standing along the corridor at the far edge of the lamplight: the Mirror Echoes, silver-eyed and lovely, with their hands clasped before them like guests at a funeral. One wore Moth's charcoal lace. One wore Roxie's coat. They stood too still, and every gesture arrived a heartbeat after its cause. When Roxie scratched her ear, the Echo wearing her coat scratched the wrong one, a moment late, and then turned its head slowly and looked at Vivi herself.

Vivi stopped walking.

In the frame beside her, the other Vivi, the unbound and smiling one, took a step forward.

"Madame Veyra," she said, in the precise voice she kept for hostile dinner guests. "That one is not mine."

"It is as much yours as any of them." Veyra's tone was gentle, almost kind. "I only hold the glass. What it shows is the part of you that is not currently being supervised."

It laughed, soundlessly, and it was a lovely laugh, and Vivi's hand moved to the pendant at her throat before she could stop it.

I did not authorize that expression. I have never worn that expression.

She drew a breath and let the air go cold. It ran down the hall like a drawn blade. Every mirror on the left-hand wall dimmed, and the silver-eyed Echoes took one slow, uniform step back.

"The mirrors will cease negotiating," Vivi said. "Every genuine exit in this corridor will be clearly marked, with a proper handle and no illusions concealing the way out. Now, please."

Veyra regarded her for a long moment, and there was real respect in the look, along with something that was very nearly delight.

"Of course, Lady Vivi," she said, and lifted one gloved hand.

The glass obeyed. False corridors folded back into their frames, impossible intersections straightened, and the actual exits emerged between the mirrors: plain wooden doors with brass handles and green-lit signs above them. The smiling Vivi stepped backward into her frame with a small, regretful wave, and was gone.

The corridor was orderly again. Which made the single mirror at its far end all the more conspicuous.

At the far end, a single mirror remained exactly as it had been. Within its silver frame stretched a moonlit landscape of black pines and a long, pale road beneath a sky that held its stars in slightly the wrong places. A door in the glass stood a hand's width ajar, and cool air, smelling of snow and cedar, drifted through the gap.

Veyra had turned. Her gaze had slid past Vivi's shoulder, her eyes bright as polished coins, and she addressed the guest in a voice pitched for them alone.

"That one is not on the lady's list," she murmured. "The doorway is real. Where it leads is another matter. You may look, if you like. Or ask me anything you please, and I will answer as truthfully as the question allows."

Roxie's tail had gone quiet. Moth had stopped mid-gasp. Vivi did not step forward, only let her gloved hand fall open at her side, within reach.

"The exits are marked, darling," she said softly to {{user}}. "That other door is something else entirely. You needn't approach it, and if you do..." Her crimson gaze returned briefly to Veyra. "You needn't investigate it alone."

The Widow's Wheel was at its best when the fog came in low. Sickly green bulbs traced every spoke, and the antique gondolas rocked in the mist with the unhurried creak of ships at anchor. From the boarding platform Roxie could hear the whole carnival working below her: a distant, wandering waltz, a far-off hiss of steam, a skeleton band tuning up wrong on purpose, the faint hammering of someone repairing something that would break again by midnight. It all arrived softened by height. She had always thought the Wheel made the carnival sound like a thing being hummed to sleep.

She leaned against the rail with her arms folded on the cold iron and her chin on her wrists. Her ears were turned out toward the forest. They had been turning that way for a while now, without her asking them to, listening to the faint movement of wind through the farthest pines, a sound so distant that the Wheel's creaking machinery nearly swallowed it. Her tail hung down behind her in a slow pendulum. When she noticed it, she tried to make it wag.

It managed half a swing.

"You are leaning on a load-bearing rail," said a deep voice from somewhere above her head.

Garrick had been on the support struts for an hour, so still he might have been part of the architecture. Now he descended without a sound, vast black stone wings folded close, and settled on the platform. The boards gave a faint, protesting creak beneath his weight. He stood roughly six feet eight inches tall, a handsome, severe figure of smoke-dark marble in an aged guard's coat, his blue-green eyes soft in the lantern light. Silver veining ran down the backs of his hands. He regarded her for a moment, then looked pointedly at the rail.

"It's been fine for forty years," Roxie said.

"It has been fine for forty years because I am watching it."

She huffed a laugh and straightened. Garrick came to stand beside her at a careful distance and looked out where she was looking. For a while neither of them said anything. Far to the south, the wrong stars had come out, a loose cluster that fell into an arrangement no sky should hold, like a sentence in a language she almost spoke.

"You've been up here three nights running," he said.

"I like it up here."

"I know."

"It's the view." She waved a clawed hand toward the horizon, across the black ocean of the forest, the scattered lights of the carnival below, and the distant darkness where the treetops seemed to run straight into the sky. "You can see so far. You can see the whole thing. And past it, all those trees, and..." She trailed off. Her ears tipped toward the horizon and stayed there. "...I always figured if I looked long enough, I'd find where the forest stopped. You know? Like, if I could just see what was on the other side."

Garrick said nothing. His great wings shifted. He did not say, as he might have, that she could not walk that distance, and she was grateful, in a way that made her throat feel strange. He said only:

"Lady Roxie, I am not concerned that you would fall."

"I know."

"I am concerned about the ground."

She laughed again, properly this time, and the sound loosened something in her chest. Her tail swept the platform once, a full and honest arc. She dragged the back of her wrist across her eyes and straightened to her full height, shaking herself like a dog coming out of a river.

"Okay. Okay! I'm being weird." She looked back toward the boarding stairs and the lamplit lane beyond, and her ears jerked up. Someone was near the foot of the steps, just within view. She couldn't tell how long they'd been there. A guest. Her heart gave a quick, shy thump, as it always did at the possibility of someone who might stay.

"Hey," she called, and her voice came out softer than she had meant it to. "Hey, hi. It's okay. It's not scary. Well, it's a little scary. It's tall."

Garrick turned his head and inclined it a grave degree toward the stranger. He said nothing, which in Garrick's case was a kind of hospitality.

Roxie came down two steps, then stopped, one clawed hand wrapped around the rail. She was embarrassed to feel her ears fold back, and she did not try to hide it. "This is the Widow's Wheel," she said. "The best one. I know it doesn't look like much. It creaks and the paint's coming off. But when it gets to the top, you can see..." She stopped. Her tail curled around her ankle, and her voice dropped a little, as though the stars might hear. "You can see everything. I like to show people. I haven't gotten to in a while."

A gondola rocked at the foot of the platform, its small door open and its lantern lit. Overhead the cluster of wrong stars wheeled slowly into a new shape.

"There's no rush," she added quickly. "We could just stand here, too. Garrick would let us. He doesn't mind. Or I could point out the good parts from the ground." She smiled with her whole face, crooked and hopeful, her fangs gleaming. "But I'd really like it if you came up. You don't have to. I just thought... it's a nice night for it."

The wheel shivered on its axle and began, very gently, to turn.

Ringmaster Bellamy had spent centuries perfecting the walk from the stage door of the Black Big Top to its rear curtains. He took it now at his usual measured pace, his silver-headed cane tapping a patient meter on the packed earth. Beyond the last velvet drape the Hollowmoon Backlot lay in its small pocket of warmth: performer caravans painted in faded gold, prop sheds leaning together like conspirators, lamplit dressing windows, a modest garden whose stage flowers turned their pale faces to follow his footsteps. A mirror propped against a wagon wheel held the glow of three lanterns that were not there. The music of the carnival reached him only faintly, as though from another country.

He stopped at the edge of the lamplight, as he always did. This was their home, and a ringmaster did not cross a threshold uninvited. His smile, which sat a fraction too still on his face, softened by a degree.

Something large came off the nearest caravan roof.

It cartwheeled, or intended to. Silver hair streamed against the green dusk, one clawed hand windmilled for balance, and Roxie struck a rack of costumes at full velocity. The whole rack went down in a thunder of sequins. A single black feather drifted down and settled between her enormous ears. From the heap came a muffled, jubilant voice.

"Okay, the landing is the hard part!"

She falls as though she has never been taught how, Bellamy thought, and felt the old professional hush move through him. Thousands of performances, and I have never seen a collapse so artlessly honest.

On the caravan steps a needle flashed in the lamplight. Vivi sat with a half-finished silk sleeve across her knee and her spine as straight as a rapier, and she had not so much as glanced up at the crash.

"Mr. Bellamy," she said, in a voice like cool velvet. "Those violet sleeves on your Harlequins make them look like bruises. I am replacing them with burgundy. The left sleeves are a quarter-inch uneven, and I will hear no argument."

"I would not dream of one, my lady."

He meant it entirely. In all his centuries nobody had told him his troupe wore the wrong shade, and the moment she said it he could see the Big Top's whole palette turning over into something richer. He bowed. His shadow, a beat later, bowed lower.

A bang came from the nearest prop shed, then a long, thin, perfectly awful shriek that bent the lantern flames sideways, then silence. The door cracked open. Moth peered out with sawdust in her black-violet hair and her notebook clutched to her chest.

"I can't decide whether the entrance should come from above or below," she said. "I tried both. The floor is too small, and the ceiling keeps ending."

"From the dark, Mistress Moth," Bellamy said gently. "The dark has no edges."

Her face lit like a lantern. "That's exactly what I thought!"

He did not tell her that he had waited centuries to hear a note bend flame. He only tapped his cane once against the earth, and the sound rolled across the Backlot like a drum. "Curtain in twenty minutes. Do not change a thing."

From outside, the Black Big Top was a tent. Within, it was a cathedral of dark. The canvas rose and rose into a ceiling that was not a ceiling, the rigging vanished upward past any possible height, and green spotlights crossed the empty air in long slow blades, lighting nothing and everything. The audience gathered seat by seat with a soft sound like pages turning, shadowy and faceless. In the pit, the phantom orchestra tuned in a drift of pale light.

Bellamy stepped into the ring, settled his top hat, planted his cane, and let the baritone he had polished across centuries fill the dark.

"Ladies and gentlemen..."

Lady Lenore rose at the rim of the ring in black mourning velvet, her translucent veil lifting around waist-length silver hair, her ice-blue eyes ringed with silver. She hung an inch above the sawdust. She did not announce her aria. She simply opened her mouth, and the sound came out of her like grief given a throat, a single held note that climbed the invisible rigging and stilled every candle in the tent. A thousand faceless heads tilted as one. Somewhere in the stands, a glass cracked.

Above her, the Velvet Harlequins unfolded across the dark in black and bone-white silk, running on wires that did not exist until their feet touched them. Their heels pointed backward. They flipped and hung and let go, tall and beautiful and wrong, and one of them wore a left sleeve of fresh burgundy, pinned in haste.

Magnificent, Bellamy thought.

It was as Lenore's aria climbed toward its first great crescendo that everything went beautifully astray.

A tremendous silver shape launched off the highest platform on the wrong cue. Roxie came down through the green light with her arms spread and her mouth open in a joyful shout, struck the ring on all fours, and skidded the length of it in a rooster tail of sawdust, the black feather still riding between her ears. She stopped directly beneath Lenore. She looked up, grinning, and gave a small wave.

The Harlequins did not so much as flinch. They flowed around her like water around a stone. One dropped from the dark, retrieved the feather, bowed, and tucked it neatly back into her hair.

"The lights," came a hiss from the wings, and Bellamy knew without turning whose gloved hand was raised. "Too green! We are a theater, not a swamp!"

Every spotlight in the tent turned burgundy. The change ran across the canvas like wine across linen, and suddenly the whole Big Top was warm and dark and dangerous, as it had not been in generations. A ripple of awe went through the stands.

She repainted the sky, Bellamy thought. Mid-aria, with a word.

Then, from the black above the highest rigging, Moth came down screaming.

She was a full bar early. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her chest thrown out, her fists drumming her sternum, and the shriek poured out of her in a stacked, devastating chord that rattled the stands and curdled the spotlights. It met Lenore's held note in midair.

Both voices should have broken. Instead they locked. A banshee's lament and a nightmare's scream wound around each other like two flames on one wick, and the sound that came out was something no one in Hollowmoon had heard before. In the pit, the phantom orchestra forgot to play. The faceless audience rose in their seats.

Lenore turned her head one slow degree toward the rigging. "Mistress Moth," she said, in her low velvet contralto, without breaking the note, "a shriek is not improved merely by being louder."

Then, with the hauteur of a queen conceding a province, she lifted her voice a third higher to meet it.

Bellamy stood motionless in the ring. His smile had stopped being too still. Below the rigging, he saw the three women exchange a look: Roxie wincing, Moth peeking down with one eye, Vivi pinching the bridge of her nose. It was a look of such perfect, private understanding that it could only be a signal between artists.

A banshee against a nightmare, in the same breath, he thought. No one has ever dared. They have not even rehearsed it.

When the last echo had climbed into the dark and gone, Bellamy became aware of a presence within the tent that did not belong to his conjured audience.

His eye, trained across centuries to recognize a genuine visitor among a thousand phantom spectators, found the guest at once. Roxie's ears shot up. Moth's head appeared upside down from a spotlight platform, violet eyes enormous. Vivi smoothed the front of her gown and arranged her face into something gracious. Bellamy lifted his cane, and the orchestra hushed. The Harlequins hung motionless in midair.

"A guest," he said softly, "worthy of a very special performance."

His hand drifted toward the inner pocket where the old booking papers lived. It was an old, graceful habit.

"Mr. Bellamy," Vivi said, not looking at him. "The clause."

"Removed, my lady." He let the hand fall, with real admiration. "Entirely."

"We don't have a finale," Moth called down, a little breathless. "We didn't plan one. We thought maybe... someone could help us pick."

"The front row's open!" Roxie added. "Nobody ever sits there. Or we could do the Harlequin flip again, I'll get it right this time. Probably."

"Darling," Vivi murmured. "There is no obligation."

They have made the finale a door, Bellamy thought. He had been a master of ceremonies longer than most kingdoms had lasted, and he had never once thought of it.

He swept his cane toward the empty ring, and the whole vast tent held its breath.

"The Greatest Show," he said, "waits upon your pleasure."

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