She cradles Benjamin’s face in her palm, and when I see the extreme gentleness with which she handles him, I start to sob. The world blurs, and rather than be amazed that I’m actually crying and not making that stupid gasping hiccup-y noise, I just want it to stop so that I can see him while I still can.
Katarina looks at me, the lines in her face ghoulishly lit up from below by the lantern’s flickering flame. That same slightly amused smirk from the night we met is back on her face, and I want to scream at her for smiling. “Didn’t he tell you what he was going to do?” she asks.
After months of being a husk, I suddenly feel like the sloppiest, mushiest thing ever. I’m an armful of sopping wet towels. I push the flood of tears from my cheeks with my palms before I answer. “Not until right before he threw himself from the stupid Ferris wheel.” Gin’s slender, strong arms snake around me, along with a tangle of silvery hair. Whiskey wraps herself around both her sister and me and sobs quietly into my neck.
Katarina’s many layers of necklaces clatter as she cranes her neck to look up at the massive Ferris wheel. It shifts with a heavy metallic groan, as though its girders can no longer support it. Farther away, there’s the sound of collapsing wood and several startled shrieks. Finally, she turns that cryptic gaze back to me. “Benjamin was perhaps a bit…overzealous, shall we say.”
Her hands hover above his body, straightening out his arm, fixing the grotesque angle of his leg. “I’m not saying that he didn’t do the right thing, but—”
“What do you mean?” Marcel asks. He stands over all of us, knives at the ready, as though he expects more trouble. Wet tracks curve down his cheeks, and a fine tremor shakes his shoulders.
Katarina gives Marcel a wry smile. I want to smack her, wouldn’t even mind if she cursed us all into oblivion. “He threw himself from a goddamned Ferris wheel. I don’t know how bad the damage is, but it’s guaranteed he broke some bones and he likely has internal bleeding. Magic can do a lot, but magic works on its own timetable, not ours.”
I draw a ragged breath into my expanding lungs. Ever since my mom left, I’ve felt like the only thing worth fighting for was my old life. But I know I’m wrong. I don’t have to go back to that. I can make a life I want, and right now, what I want includes Ben. I want Ben. “What are you talking about? He’s dead, and—”
Yelling at the edge of the carnival cuts my hysterics short. “There she is!” One of the cooks steps out of the shadows. A woman who works in one of the gaming booths screams, “This is her fault!” It seems as though half the carnival has found their way to us, pouring out from among the tents and booths. Some of them are confused. Some of them bear cuts and the beginnings of bruises, as though caught in the way of the self-destructing carnival. Every single one of them is furious.
Gin and Whiskey stand. Gin pushes her tears away with the back of her hand before shifting her grip on her metal post. Marcel’s gaze darts from face to face, trying to determine who is a friend and who is a foe. We are terribly outnumbered.
All around us, rides collapse into heaps of bent tubing and screaming metal, tents faint to the ground in dizzy twists of fabric as people rush to the safety of open air. There is so much screaming. “The carnival is falling apart because of her!” the guy from the cook shack yells. Somewhere far away but edging closer, police sirens wail into the night. The mob surges forward with a roar.
A massive voice rises over the ruckus. “Stop!”
Lars, his flaming-orange hair visible over the heads of everyone else, draws in a big breath, as though readying himself to fight the crowd off single-handed. But in the silence following his roar, I hear the one woman capable of stopping this riot.
“Anyone who hurts my employees will answer to me.” Like a flipped switch, the angry crowd goes from feral tigers to day-old kittens. They part, and Leslie walks into the clearing.
Her blond curls are frizzy from sweat, and her stage makeup is smudged. A gash runs halfway across her forehead, blood drying in dark red lines down her face. “The carnival is falling apart because we’re lazy and ungrateful. But more importantly, this carnival is mine, and if I want to let it fall to ruin, so help me, I will. The keepers of the curse have given up more than any of you here, and I will protect them with my last breath. As it is, I will make it my mission to see the Morettis rot in jail for what they did tonight. Anyone who has a problem with anything I just said has ten minutes to get off this property.”
A dejected sort of mutter runs through the crowd. The man from the cook shack and several others melt into the darkness. More than a few hostile glances are directed at me, at Leslie, at anyone who dared to help break the curse, but all my friends hold their ground.
I want to marvel at Leslie’s strength. At the way the crowd obeys and begins to disperse. At the fact that Whiskey looks as though she could keep a hundred attackers at bay with a bucket of baseballs. At this family I made, when I felt like I didn’t fit in with the family and friends I had.
But I don’t get to do any of that.
Because right then, Benjamin’s hand twitches in mine.
Chapter Forty-One
Benjamin
The sky is a pristine blue the day we put Sidney to rest.
My leg still hasn’t healed all the way, and though Happy would prefer it if I used the wheelchair that looks like he got it cut-rate from a nineteenth-century insane asylum, I walk across the lawn to the ceremony, leaning heavily on Emma.
I could lean on her forever. With the curse lifted, it’s like I’ve never really seen her before, because now she has detail. A tiny scar curves toward her cheek from her upper lip. Her irises had always seemed to be a flat brown, but now they’re flecked with gold. She’s the Emma I fell for, but intrinsically, wonderfully different.
She’s alive again.
She wears a gauzy gray dress that swishes around her knees, and the somber color reminds me of what lies ahead and takes my smile with it. Not only is Sidney dead, but the Moretti brothers are in jail, and soon Emma and I will have to testify against the many assaults they committed. Emma straightens the tie Marcel loaned me and helps me hobble out to the field where I once listened to Sidney rant under the moon.
The ceremony is simple. Leslie speaks. Pia sings the hymn we all agreed Sidney would hate the least. And then Mom scatters his ashes, the wind swirling them toward the trees.
At the party afterward—Katarina insisted on throwing a traditional New Orleans wake, including a four-piece jazz band—Emma and I gather our friends together in the foyer to say our good-byes.
Because we can’t stay. Even though Leslie intends to rebuild the carnival and there would be plenty of work for a more-than-apprentice carpenter, I have to go where Emma goes, and—among other things—Emma wants to tell her family she’s okay.