It is opening night.

In the center of the fair a dragon cranes his long neck high above the rides, lets moonlight slide over his scales like a jug of milk being poured. Master, a humanoid bug in top hat and red waistcoat, standing by the dragon’s clawed feet, laughs and slaps his six hands together and says, “Let there be light!”

Flames spout into the air as if a rocket is taking off. The queue gathered at the fair’s entrance, gold-leaf tickets clutched protectively to their chests, whoop and clap. The fair is open.

Beatrice is not thirsty but will drink tonight regardless. She stands outside her tent, between the two cardboard-teeth that drape down around the entrance. She inhales and holds in her stomach, lets it out again. She’s getting plump and she knows it. It’s incredible, she thinks, how many people are willing to pay to have their blood drained by a vampire. What a dull world it is must be for such people to exist. She is not one of the more popular attractions, except perhaps with housewives fresh from a steamy novel, and yet there will be a steady stream of paying customers tonight. More blood than she wants.

Beatrice watches Harry rotate his shell in the distance. Harry, once a travelling shoe salesman in a different life, is a gigantic snail with benches screwed into his shell. Later, he will undulate his body and rotate his shell to win screams from visitors.

Another burst of flame. Every five minutes Randolph cascades fire into the sky, blue, red, white — a light show, shadows cast, faces illuminated momentarily, the cold winter air shocked into warmth.

Beatrice hears the chants from outside the ground. On the fair’s first night in any town, the protestors are as much of a specatacle as the fare itself. They are their own festival of bibles and microphones, bubbling anger and frothing wine. Even the non-religious preach against the satanic creatures within the walls. Creatures like her.

Visitors are marching through now. The night has begun in earnest. Children point and run from freakshow to freakshow as parents hurry after them like their kids are housecats escaped.

”Look like you want to be here, Beatrice,” master demands. She hadn’t seen him scuttle to her tent, but he stands there now, whip in hand. She’s never seen him use it but wouldn’t be surprised if he had.

”I’m a vampire,” she retorts. ”They like us moody.”

”Well I like you seductive, smiling. Understand? You’re prettier when you smile.”

She understands well enough. There is nowhere else in this world for creatures like them. Without the security that comes from being part of this wandering pack, this bizarre family, there is only death. They are loathed as much as they are adored, often more so. If the master kicks her out it would be a death sentence.

Besides, where would she get her blood from? She can’t bear the thought of taking it from the unwilling.

Beatrice has her first customers. She bites neck after neck, careful to leave a twisted toothy imprint — a souvenir most desirable — and careful not to take too much for fear of bloating early. Still, the blood gives her a buzz and she lets herself enjoy this first night in town.

Giant Sarah strides by Beatrice’s tent on her break. She bends down, hand on back, and peels open the flap. “All good, Bee?”

Beatrice looks at Giant Sarah’s feet, mostly because that’s all she can see of the huge woman. They are blistered and bandaged, toes like smashed boulders. “What’s he had you doing, Sarah?”

”What’s he not?”

Beatrice knows she’s set up half the fair herself. Did most of the heavyy moving, as well as running the helter-skelter, constantly bending to pick up children and adults alike who want to ride the whirling slide.

”You need to take it easy,” says Beatrice.

The tent flaps fell back in place. “Yeah. I know,” drifts Sarah’s resigned voice as the ground rocks. “We all do.”

There are each under the same threat. Of being kicked out of their supposed family. But what can they do? Master saved them all. He’d gathered them, the freaks that they’d become, once they’d woken in this world. He’d been the one to come up with a plan that would keep them safe, had made deals with land owners to allow their fair to tour and set up.

Safe. Kept them all safe.

But not truly.

Beatrice doesn’t know his real name. No one does. He is the master of ceremonies, he said, and that was all.

Beatrice closes a little early tonight and stands outside her tent, watches her friends — the dragon forced to breathe fire on clockwork as his throat tears itself to ribbons,

She is careful as she meanders through the fair a few moments later, blends in with last visitors, navy hoody shading her face. She has never been in master’s caravan before, but tonight she creeps inside. He’s out by Tara the yeti now, who is gluing back hair that’s falling out in tufts under the stress.

Beatrice rifles through every drawer in the caravan, breaks open suitcases. It has to end, she thinks. They are being treated like animal, not a family. It’s time for the truth.

But there is no truth to find. Not in here. What was she expecting anyway? A diary saying his evil scheme of working them all to death is going wonderfully. Idiot, she thinks.

She’s about to leave when the door bursts open and master walks in. His eyes roam over the scene methodically, as if he’s ironing a shirt with his gaze.

He settles on Beatrice. “You’re done. I knew we shouldn’t have kept a vampire. Especially once you got fat. I want you out, tonight.”

In her old life she was married, had a child. She had love. In this life she has only misery.

Rage. She dives at master. She buries her teeth into his neck, cracking through carapace. He screams but the dragon fire outside is roaring louder.

She pulls her mouth away, smears his blood from off her lips, then gazes into his eyes. She’s only done this a handful of times before, and even then she wasn’t sure if it they were lucky guesses or she really did see into their minds.

This time she concentrates with her entire being. His pupils grow, the black water pooling deeper, wider. And she begins to see.

She sees him as young man in a different life. Sees him full of hate for the world but cannot see why. Sees a lust for control that he can never have. He is reading esoteric ancient texts, those about moving on, past lives and new lives, controlled reincarnation.

He is studying how to make bombs.

He is looking at maps. Areas densely populated. It does not matter to him who lives there, whose lives he’s ripping away, whose families are being deprived. Density, ease of access, that’s what matters.

She watches his grinning face as he sets the explosives.

It’s enough for her.

In a frezy she goes for his neck again. She will not stop though. She is a leech. She will take it all until master is a dried out husk.

​

Three nights later, with master still missing and presumed to have left the fair — perhaps run off with some local — the attractions pack themselves up and ready to move. Beatrice does not know whether to tell them what she found out, let alone what she did. Would it help them?

There is more laughter in the air than on usual leaving nights, more hope, Beatrice thinks. No one forced into roles, everyone simply working together.