Teeth: Vampire Tales

Flying by DELIA SHERMAN

Lights dazzling her eyes. The platform underfoot, an island in a sea of emptiness. The bar of the trapeze, rigid and slightly tacky against her rosined palms. Far below, a wide sawdust ring surrounded by tiers of white balloons daubed with black dots, round eyes above gaping mouths.

She stretches her arms above her head, rises lightly to her toes, bends her knees, and leaps off as she has a thousand times before, the air a warm, popcorn-flavored breeze against her face. Belly, shoulder, and chest muscles tense as she cranks her legs up and over the bar. She swings by her knees, her ponytail tickling her neck and cheeks. The white balloons below bob and sway, and a tinkling music rises around her, punctuated with the uneven patter of applause.

Her father calls, “Hep,” and she flies to him, grasping his wrists, pendulums, releases, twists, returns to her trapeze, riding it to the platform. She lands, flourishes, bows. Applause swells, then the music falls away, all but the deep drum that gradually picks up its pace like a frightened heartbeat. She spreads her arms, lights flashing from silver spangles, bends her knees, and leaps into a shallow dive, skimming through the air like a swallow, swooping, somersaulting, free of the trapeze, of gravity, of fear. Until, at the very top of the tent, her arms and body turn to lead. The bobbing balloons and the sandy ring swell and mourn as, flailing helplessly, she falls.

And wakes.

Panting, Lenka sat up and fumbled at the bedside lamp. Damn, she hated that dream. At least this time she hadn’t fallen out of bed and woken her parents. That’s all she needed — Mama patting her down, asking briskly if she’d hurt herself, Papa watching over her mother’s shoulder with sleep-blurred, helpless eyes. They wouldn’t yell at her — they never yelled at her these days, even when she deserved it. They’d just tell her to rest and maybe suggest talking to the doctor. Well, she wouldn’t. She was finished with doctors and rest. She’d been in remission for nearly three months now. When her parents were out at work, she did calisthenics in her room, took runs through the neighborhood. Short runs — she was still pretty feeble. But she was getting stronger, she told herself, every day.

She’d be flying again, soon.

Lenka sat in the kitchen, glumly eating cereal, waiting for the slap of the morning paper on the doormat.

Mama and Papa were always talking about how getting the morning paper delivered was one of the perks of living in the same place for more than a few months. So was Lenka having her own room and a view with trees in it and a separate kitchen and living room, with a TV.

Lenka didn’t care about any of it. She preferred backstage — any backstage. It was where she’d grown up, practically where she’d been born, a space variously sized and furnished, the only constants the smells — makeup, sweat, and do-it-yourself dry-cleaning sheets — and her family: the Fabulous Flying Kubatovs.

At their height, right before Lenka got sick, there had been seven of them: Mama and Papa, her two older brothers and their wives, and Lenka herself — in sweats and leotards, in tights and sequins, hands bound with tape and ankles wrapped with Ace bandages, practicing, stretching, dressing, mending costumes, arguing cheerfully with the other acts, seeing that Lenka got her legally mandated hours of English, math, and social studies. Making her strong. Teaching her to fly.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer thumped on the mat. Lenka opened the door and picked it up as Mama came in.

“You’re awake early,” she accused.

Lenka slid into her chair. “I’m fine, Mama, really. I had a bad dream.”

Her mother rolled her eyes and turned to the refrigerator. “I’m making an egg for your father. You want one?”

“Ick,” Lenka said, and opened the paper to the entertainment section.

She skimmed the movie listings. Nothing she wanted to see — which was good, since movies cost money. Her brothers and sisters-in-law sent what they could, but mostly it had to go for rent and doctors. Having leukemia was crazy expensive, even with insurance, and jobs hard to come by. Mama was temping for an accounting firm. Papa was working the register at Giant Eagle. These jobs yielded enough for food and a family membership to the YMCA so Papa and Mama could keep in shape. But Lenka noticed, every time they talked to her brothers, touring with Ringling Bros. in Florida, how Mama got crabby and Papa’s jokes got even lamer than they usually were. They were as miserable in Cleveland as she was.

A headline caught her eye. CIRQUE DES CHAUVE-SOURIS CONVEYS CLASSIC CIRCUS MAGIC.

Lenka didn’t want to read it, but she couldn’t help herself. Fresh from the eastern European circuit, the Cirque des Chauve-souris is like a glance back into a vanished time. Ringmistress Battina brings the Old Country to the new with a show that is as Gilded Age as the antique wooden tent and the steam organ. The kids probably won’t get it. There are no clowns or flashy high-wire acts; no midway, no concessions, no trendy patter. There is, however, a bar with draft pilsner and some seriously fine acrobatics.

“There’s a circus in town,” Lenka said.

Her mother didn’t even turn from the stove. “No.”

“The tumblers are Czech — you ever hear of the Vaulting Sokols?” Mama shook her head. “And a cat act. You love cat acts. Please, Mama?”

Papa came in, hair wet from the shower, shirt half buttoned over his undershirt.

“Please what, berusko?”

“She wants to go to the circus, Joska,” her mother said. “I have already said no. You want fried egg or scrambled?”

Lenka pushed the paper toward her father. He shook his head without looking. “Your mother is right. Your immune system is compromised. Circus means children; children mean germs. Not a good atmosphere for you, princess mine.”

“It’s not a big-top show, Papa, just salon acts. Straight from the Old Country — you’ll love it. Besides, Dr. Weiner didn’t say I couldn’t go out, he just said I had to take it easy.”

Mama beat the eggs with unnecessary vigor. “It will not make you happy, to watch someone else fly.”

“I miss the circus, you know?” Lenka got up and put an arm around her mother’s stiff shoulders. “Please, Mama? I’m going nuts, stuck here wondering if I’m ever going to be well enough to fly again.”

It wasn’t playing fair, but if Lenka had learned anything over the past year, it was that sometimes getting better involved pain.

Lenka and her parents drove in early from University Heights. As they waited for the house to open, they had time to examine the outside of the Cirque des Chauve-souris’s famous wooden tent.

“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” Mama said.

“It’s antique,” Papa said, not quite apologetically.

“So they can’t paint it? It doesn’t make a good impression, all dinged up like that.”

Papa smiled one of his sad clown smiles and took her hand. He reached for Lenka’s, too. Lenka squeezed his fingers gently and disengaged. Yes, it was painful to be waiting in line instead of making up and stretching backstage. But she’d rather he didn’t make such a thing out of it.

Inside, as her mother claimed three empty chairs on a side aisle, Lenka cast a professional eye over the setup.

The tent was roomier than it had looked from outside, but it felt cramped to Lenka, the peaked ceiling too low to fly in, the ring a raised platform hardly big enough for a decent cartwheel. A ramp connected it to a semicircular stage curtained with worn scarlet velvet. The audience was stacked back from the ring in folding chairs. A row of raised booths against the walls was furnished with tables and velvet banquettes. Above them were faded old-timey murals of circuses past. The light wasn’t great, but Lenka made out clowns in whiteface, a ringmaster in scarlet, a girl standing on a fat-haunched pony, a boy on a flying trapeze.

Lenka felt a tug on her sleeve. “They’re starting.”

The houselights snapped off; a portable steam organ struck up a wheezy oompah-pah, oompah-pah. A spot came up on a woman dressed in brown velvet with a cape to her feet. Her head was covered with a half mask sporting leaflike bat ears. The ringmistress. Battina.

She lifted her arms, and the cape hung down from her wrists like wings. “Welcome, mesdames,” she fluted, Russian accent thick as borscht. “Welcome, messieurs. Welcome. Les Chauve-souris!”

Lenka heard a chittering overhead, and suddenly the air was full of movement, half seen and half heard, a restless, leathery flutter. A woman gave a nervous shriek, and Mama covered her head protectively as small, dark shapes flickered through the lights and down to the stage. A crashing chord, and the shapes transformed into a troupe of performers, caped and masked in brown.

Mama folded her hands in her lap. “Handkerchiefs and trapdoors. They’re fast, though.”

As the organ struck up “Thunder and Blazes,” Battina rose into the air and skimmed over the ramp, her cape flaring out behind her. Everyone gasped, even Lenka. Between the cape and the tricky lighting, the telltale bulk of the harness and the glint of the wire were functionally invisible. Battina looked like she was really flying.

She circled over the audience and disappeared behind the curtains.

“Nice effect,” Mama said.

“Shh,” Papa said. “The acrobats.”

Lenka giggled.

There were three Vaulting Sokols, slender young men with white teeth and incredibly fast reflexes.

Papa watched their flipping and posturing for a moment, then whispered in Lenka’s ear. “They tumble like in your grandfather’s time — much skill, but little imagination.”

Behind Lenka, someone got up and headed for the bar. “They’re losing the audience,” Mama muttered.

The next act was better — a big man in a moth-eaten bear suit and a contortionist in a scale-patterned leotard who slithered around his body with multivertebraed suppleness until he plucked her off and spun her in the air like a living ball.

When the bear man and the snake girl removed their masks, Lenka saw that the girl was about her age, with very fair skin and very dark hair cut in a square bob. She made her compliment to the audience without a glimmer of a smile, one arm raised, her knee cocked, pivoting to acknowledge the applause.

“Very professional.” Mama approved.

The next act was Battina, capeless, and with black velvet cat ears sticking out of her thickly coiled hair. She swept in, proud as a queen, heading a procession of seven cats, their tails and heads held high.

Lenka had seen cat acts before — mostly on YouTube. Cats are cats. Even when they’re trained, they tend to wander off or roll belly-up or wash themselves. Not Battina’s cats. They walked a slack rope, jumped through hoops, balanced on a pole, and most remarkably of all, performed a kind of kitty synchronous dance routine in perfect unison, guided by Battina’s chirps and meows.

“The woman’s a witch,” Mama muttered.

“Shh,” Lenka said.

When the lights came up for intermission, Papa turned to her anxiously. “You like?”

“She’d better,” Mama said.

“The cats were way cool. And the contortionist is the bomb. Can I get a Coke at the bar? I’m really thirsty.”

After the break came a female sword swallower, a Japanese girl on a unicycle, and a slack-rope walker in a striped unitard that covered him to the knees. Lenka judged them all better than competent, but uninspired.

The contortionist reappeared, cartwheeling out between the curtains and down the runway, a simple effect made spectacular by the shimmering bat’s wings that stretched from her ankles to her wrists. Reaching the center of the ring, she reached up, grasped a previously invisible bar, and rode it slowly upward. Lenka’s throat closed in pure envy.

About six feet up, the trapeze stopped and the girl beat up to standing, bent her knees, and set the trapeze in motion, her wings rippling as she swung.

“She’s going to get those tangled in the ropes,” Mama muttered darkly.

She didn’t. Lenka watched the girl flow through her routine, twisting, coiling, somersaulting, hanging by her hands, her neck, one foot, an arm, as if the laws of gravity and physics had been suspended just for her. She must be incredibly strong. She must be incredibly disciplined. She must not have any friends, or go to movies or play video games or be on Facebook, just train and perform and sleep and do her chores and her lessons and train some more. It wasn’t a normal life. Mama and Papa said Lenka would learn to like normal life, if it turned out that she couldn’t perform.

Mama and Papa were so totally wrong. Dear Mama and Papa: When you read this, I will be far away from here.I’m not leaving because I don’t love you, or because I think you’re mean or unfair or anything. You’re the best and most loving parents in the world and you’ve saved my life, even more than Dr. Weiner and the clinic. You’ve given up a lot to make me well, and you haven’t tried to make me feel guilty about it, which is totally awesome.The thing is, I feel guilty anyway. And fenced in and tied down and fed up and generally sick and tired. And it’s not just all about me, although it probably sounds like it. I can see what my being sick has done to you. Temp work? Retail? Get real. Even Papa can’t make it funny. You’ve got to go back to flying again.Which you can’t as long as you’re looking after me.So I’m going away. Please don’t look for me. I’m eighteen. I’m in remission, I feel fine, I’ve got a little money to live on until I can find work. The only thing I’m tired of is resting. In a month or so, I’ll let you know how I’m doing. I’m going to call Radek’s cell phone, so you better be on the road.LenkaP.S. I know it’s stupid to say don’t worry, but really, you shouldn’t. You taught me how to take care of myself.P.P.S. I love you.

Lenka knew her parents. No matter what her letter said, they’d look for her, and the first place they’d look was the Cirque des Chauve-souris. She spent a couple of days hiding out, mostly in the Cleveland Art Museum, on the theory that it was the last place on Earth they’d expect her to be.

After the Cirque des Chauve-souris’s last show, she gave herself a quick sponge bath in the museum john and headed downtown.

Lenka had been hoping to slip in under cover of the mob scene that was a circus breaking down. When she found the backyard deserted, she was a little freaked out, but she didn’t let it stop her from slipping through the stage door.

A voice spoke out of the darkness. “We wondered when you’d show up.”

Lenka froze.

“Don’t worry,” the voice said. “We won’t call the police.”

“The police?”

The contortionist stepped into the light. Close up, she looked smaller and paler. “They’ve been here twice, looking for Lenka Kubatov, age eighteen, five foot six, brown-brown, hundred fifteen, kind of fragile looking. That’s you, right?”

Fragile looking? Lenka shrugged. “That’s me.”

“You ran away from home? Why? Do your parents beat you?”

“No,” Lenka said. “My parents are great.”

“Then why.?”

Lenka squared her shoulders. “I want to join the circus. This circus. I want to be a roustabout.”

The contortionist laughed. “That’s a new one,” she said. “Well, you’d better come talk to Battina.”

The ringmistress of the Chauve-souris was helping the strong man unbolt the booth partitions and banquettes from the walls. There wasn’t a roustabout in sight.

“The runaway,” she said when she saw Lenka. “Hector, I need a drink.”

The strong man laughed and slotted the partition into a padded wooden crate. “Later,” he said.

Battina settled herself on a banquette, for all the world as if she hadn’t been lifting part of it a moment before. “You must call your parents,” she said severely.

Lenka shook her head. “I’m eighteen.”

“The police said you are sick.”

“I was sick. I’m better now. I need to live my own life, let them live theirs. They’re flyers. They need to fly.”

“What was wrong with you?” Hector asked.

“Cancer,” Lenka said shortly. “Leukemia.”

Battina and Hector exchanged unreadable looks.

“What do you want?” Battina asked, as if she didn’t much care.

Lenka’s heart beat harder.

“I want to come with you,” she said. “I know I’m not up to performing, but you look like you could use some crew. I can put up rigs, I can clean cages, I can handle props. And I’m good at front-of-house stuff. You don’t even have to pay me — not right away.” She felt her eyes prickle with rising tears. “Without the circus, I’m not really alive. Please. Let me come with you.”

Her voice broke. Disgusted, she fished in her shoulder bag for a Kleenex and blew her nose. “Sorry,” she said hoarsely. “That was unprofessional.”

“That was truth.” Battina tapped her teeth with her thumbnail. “I can’t deny we could use help — someone who understands American chinovniks, who can talk on the telephone, who can make plans.” She cocked a dark eye at Lenka. “Are you such a one?”

“I’ve never done it,” Lenka said truthfully. “But I can try.”

“Our manager we lost in New York,” Battina said. “He left us with big mess — papers, engagements in cities I have never heard of. I am artist, not telephone operator. You think you can fix?”

Lenka wanted to say she was an artist, too. But she wasn’t — not while she was sidelined. “Yes.”

Battina’s gaze shifted over Lenka’s shoulder. “What do you say?”

Lenka spun around to face the performers of the Cirque des Chauve-souris, who had gathered behind her so silently that she hadn’t even known they were there. Skin pasty under the work lights, they measured her with narrowed eyes.

The contortionist spoke. “I say we take her. It isn’t right for an artist to be stuck in one place.”

The equilibrist nodded gravely.

“Why not?” the ropewalker said. “Might be time for new blood.”

The sword swallower giggled. “Boris is right.”

The acrobats exchanged looks. “Can we trust her?” one of them asked.

Battina glanced at the strong man. “Hector?”

The strong man examined Lenka, his deep-set eyes glinting under the shadow of his heavy brow, then leaned toward her. Not sure what he was up to, Lenka stiffened but held her ground. He sniffed delicately at her hair, then straightened and nodded.

Just like that, she was in.

“In” is a relative term.

The snake girl’s name was Rima — “like the bird girl,” she explained, and then had to explain that it was the name of a character in an old book. Battina’s real name was Madam Oksana Valentinovna. The Vaulting Sokolovs were Evzen, Kazimir, and Dusan, the equilibrist was Cio-Cio, and the sword swallower was Carmen. The ropewalker said his name was Boris from Leningrad, but Lenka thought he sounded more like Bert from Idaho.

None of them was remotely interested in making friends.

In Lenka’s experience, all circus people were family. Even when they hardly had a language in common, they shared everything: war stories, opinions, meals, personal histories, shampoo, detergent.

The performers of the Cirque des Chauve-souris, not so much. They didn’t chat among themselves. They didn’t hang out, they didn’t even eat together. On the road from Cleveland to Columbus, Madam Oksana filled Lenka in on the terms of her engagement. Lenka must keep to the office truck, not only to work, but to sleep and eat. Lenka must watch the show from the front of the house, keeping an eye on the local bartender and ushers hired for each venue. Lenka must never, ever bother the performers. Practices were closed; the backyard was off-limits. If she objected to any of these conditions, she could go back to Cleveland.

Lenka gritted her teeth and agreed. Papa had told her about the hoops First of May circus virgins had to jump through, back in the old days. Jumping through hoops was better than going back to Cleveland.

Things Lenka learned in Columbus, Ohio:

Circuses need a lot of permits.

You can do almost anything if the support staff likes you.

Madam Oksana’s cats fed themselves.

In Lenka’s experience, animal acts were incredibly work intensive. Animals have to be groomed, fed, and watered, their cages cleaned, repaired, and hauled into place. A cat act should mean, at the very least, tiers of cat carriers stacked in the backyard and bags and bags of kitty litter and cat chow.

Not at the Cirque des Chauve-souris.

When they weren’t onstage, Madam Oksana’s cats were free to wander where they pleased. Lenka saw them lounging on coiled ropes, sleeping on banquettes, prowling the backyard, perched on the artists’ trailers. One night, she saw the big gray tom with a rat in his jaws, trotting toward the tent. A couple of nights later, she was about to climb into bed when she saw a young calico stretched luxuriously across her pillow. She scratched Lenka when Lenka tried to cuddle her, then licked the scratches penitently and settled down to spend the night in a furry coil by Lenka’s feet, purring like a boiling kettle.

Lenka had never had a cat of her own. And she was lonely. She shared her bed with one or another of Madam’s cats almost every night, ignoring their scratches and love nips even when she woke with a throbbing ear or nose, blood on her pillow, and a rough pink tongue busily licking her clean. It was a small price to pay for the company.

The second week in Columbus, the audience started to trickle away like coffee through a filter. People who liked highly produced glitz were bored. Even people who liked boutique circuses came once and didn’t return.

Madam Oksana didn’t seem to care.

“They do not appreciate true art,” she said. “The fashion now is crude humor, terrible music, costumes that show everything. It is the same in Europe. Still, we will contrive.”

Lenka cared very much.

“It wouldn’t kill you to buy new costumes. Hector’s bear suit is going to totally fall apart one of these days.”

Madam Oksana shrugged liquidly. “New costumes are expensive.”

“If you could attract better houses, you could afford them. Your open is flashy, and Rima and Hector’s act totally rocks. But the Vaulting Sokolovs are, like, stuck in the last century, and Cio-Cio’s routine is totally lame. Here.” She turned to her laptop, searched, and opened a YouTube video of a Cirque de Soleil equilibrist. “Look,” she said, turning the screen to Madam Oksana. “Cio-Cio could do that with her hands tied behind her.”

Madam Oksana watched the tiny blue-clad figure moving from backbend to handstand while balancing on a giant red ball. “The music is like dogs barking. And the ball is not dignified.”

Neither is walking on your hands, Lenka did not say. “The music’s negotiable. And it doesn’t have to be a ball. She could use a teeter-totter. Or a flexible pole. The point is, she needs more props. There’s only so far you can take a unicycle if you don’t juggle.”

Some time later, after watching dozens of videos of tumblers and ropewalkers and sword swallowers and static trapeze artists, Madam Oksana looked thoughtful and Lenka was exhausted. Watching the trapeze acts was torture, especially one in which two women and a man twisted, swung, and maneuvered their way around a rigid rig like a giant skeletal cube.

There wasn’t a trick she saw that she couldn’t have done before she got sick.

If she could just get in shape again. If she could just practice.

Everyone slept late at the Cirque des Chauve-souris. With no matinees, there wasn’t any reason for the performers to be awake before two or even three in the afternoon, and as far as Lenka knew, they never were.

At eleven one morning, Lenka crept across the parking lot to the tent, telling herself there was no reason to be nervous. Madam Oksana had never said the tent was off-limits, or even the rigs, if nobody was using them.

The tent was dark and smelled of dust and rosin. Heart beating and palms sweating, Lenka turned on a work light, checked the guy ropes on the static trapeze, then chalked her hands and leapt up to grab the bar. Her shoulders screamed as they took her weight, and her belly muscles protested as she beat her legs up and over. She hung there a moment, then hauled herself up to sit on the bar, where she sat, swinging gently, getting her breath back. Her muscles were unhappy, and she should definitely put on a safety harness before she tried anything fancy. It wouldn’t do any harm, though, to throw one simple trick.

Lenka slid her butt forward, arched her neck and back, and spread her arms stiffly along the bar in a crucifix. As she swung, staring up into the peaked roof, she thought she saw a shadowy stirring among the lights. Her vision sparkled and faded. Her ears buzzed.

I’m going to fall, she thought calmly.

When Lenka woke, her mouth tasted of metal and she hurt all over, but in a strained-muscle way, not a broken-bone way. She opened her eyes to a ring of faces.

Madam Oksana was annoyed. “You are not obeying the rules.”

Lenka rolled herself to her side, pushed herself weakly upright. “I wasn’t in the backyard,” she said. “And nobody was practicing. I checked.”

Madam Oksana’s snarl made her look very like one of her cats. “You are a lawyer now, you argue with me? You kill yourself, maybe that is the end of your troubles, but not for us. You are here to make things easy, not bring police to ask questions. You practice, you must wear a belt, ponimaesh?”

Lenka grinned. “I got it, boss.”

Madam Oksana threw her hands to the heavens and disappeared into the shadows.

Lenka clambered to her feet and staggered dizzily.

Rima steadied her, her grip cool and strong on Lenka’s arm. “Maybe you should build up those muscles more before you go up again.”

Lenka laughed, embarrassed. “You know it.”

The thing about working out is, you feel weaker before you start to feel stronger, especially if you’re coming back from a long time away and you’re impatient.

What made it harder was that suddenly, Lenka was very much in demand.

Rima and Evzen wanted to learn to navigate YouTube. Then Cio-Cio and Hector and Boris got interested, and after that someone or another was constantly dropping by the office to use her laptop and study new moves and new routines. Hector built a cube like the one in the video, and Rima and Cio-Cio started working on it. The Sokolovs obsessively practiced new tricks. Every time Lenka turned around, someone was pestering her with questions about American circuses, American slang, American taste, until she started to feel like a human search engine.

“Watch this sequence, Lenka. Is it now smoking?”

“There is a man who swallows a bar stool, Lenka. Is this cool for me to do, or lame?”

She was welcome at practices now, which was what she’d wanted, but somehow, their attention made her feel lonelier than being ignored. Lenka tried not to mind that they never asked her questions about herself. It wasn’t that she wanted to talk about her family or her illness. But it might have been nice if they’d wanted to know.

After Columbus, they went to Chicago. A week into the run, Lenka took herself out to dinner. She’d been feeling kind of punk lately — too much fast food, too much pushing herself to get stronger faster so she could work herself into Rima and Cio-Cio’s act on the cube rig. Possibly too much Madam Oksana and Company, although she was hardly ready to admit that, even to herself.

In any case, she needed to get out, and Madam Oksana had decided the circus was doing well enough to pay her. So Lenka borrowed a dress from Rima and took a taxi to a restaurant she’d found on the internet. It was Italian, her favorite kind of restaurant, not fancy, but nice enough for tablecloths and candles. She ordered insalata mista, garlic shrimp, and a glass of white wine, which the waiter brought without comment. The garlic shrimp reminded her of Papa, who always ordered it. As she ate, she thought about calling her parents. Not that she wanted to give up, of course, not when she was just starting to feel at home. But they must be worried, and she wanted to hear the voice of somebody who loved her, even if it was yelling at her.

It was nearly one in the morning when Lenka got back to the circus. She was exhausted, achy, and a lot more lightheaded than she should be on a single glass of wine. Heading for the office truck and her bed, she hoped a cat was waiting for her.

When she heard the groan, her first impulse was to ignore it. She knew the performers sometimes hooked up with townies and brought them back to their trailers, especially Boris and Evzen. It didn’t bother her — it was what circus people did. But it wasn’t anything she needed to know more about.

Another groan — unmistakably not that kind of groan. Someone was hurt. Someone was in trouble.

Lenka groaned herself, softly, and padded around the costume truck toward the back door.

Per municipal regulations, a security light illuminated the area immediately around the door, which was currently occupied by Hector, Carmen, Kazimir, Madam Oksana, and Boris, who was holding the body of a young woman in his arms.

Lenka shrank back into the shadow of the costume truck, cheeks tingling with shock. The woman groaned again, and her head rolled back in a horribly final way, revealing a wound in the angle of her jaw. It was bleeding sluggishly.

Hector said a word Lenka would have sworn he didn’t even know.

“Shut up, Hector,” Madam Oksana said dispassionately. “She is not yet dead — although she may be if Boris insists on stupid clowning.”

Boris bared his teeth and hissed at her, reminding Lenka strongly of a cat defending his kill.

Madam Oksana hissed back.

Boris laid the girl on the ground and watched unblinking as Madam Oksana knelt, turned the girl’s head to one side, then bent and delicately licked at the seeping wound.

After a long moment, Hector laid his hand on her shoulder. “You must stop now,” he said.

Madam Oksana straightened and licked her lips. Her face was as blank as a doll’s.

Lenka looked at the girl. She lay as she’d been arranged, arms sprawled, neck pathetically arched to display an unbloodied expanse of white, unbroken skin.

While Lenka was digesting this, Kazimir swung the girl up and over his shoulders like a dead deer. “I’ll get some water down her and sprinkle some gin around. She’s already drunk, right, Boris?” Boris yawned. “Right. With any luck, she won’t even remember where she’s been when she wakes up.”

Boris stretched sleepily. “Why risk it? Why not make sure she won’t wake up?”

Hector gave him a look that would strip paint. “You are a savage, Boris, and very young. It is good for you that you have fallen among civilized monsters, who know better than to make messes where we eat. Kazimir will take your little inamorata where she will be found soon and cared for. And you. you will be more careful in the future.”

Kazimir disappeared into the tent, the girl’s dark head bobbing at his shoulder. Everybody relaxed. Carmen said, “I’m starved,” and folded abruptly like a piece of fabric. A moment later, Lenka saw a bat drop from the edge of the tent, catch an updraft, and glide out of the light. And then, shamefully, she fainted.

Lenka opened her eyes to darkness and silence. She felt like death on a cracker — exactly the way she’d felt when her parents had insisted on taking her to the emergency room in Cleveland a year ago. There was something heavy lying on her chest.

She moaned and tried to sit up. She couldn’t move.

A cat meowed right below her chin.

“Yes,” said Madam Oksana. “I know. Get off, Rima. We want her restrained, not smothered.”

Rima. The aerialist. Her friend. The cat. The vampire.

Rima walked down Lenka’s body and flopped heavily onto her ankles.

“Lenka Kubatovna,” Madam Oksana said. “What will we do with you? We have no wish to kill you. You are useful to us.”

Lenka wriggled uncomfortably. “Can you turn on a light? Talking about this in the dark is creepy. I feel like I’m in a bad horror movie, you know? Circus of the Vampires. It’s just too unreal.”

“This is not a time for joking,” Madam Oksana said stiffly. But she turned on a lamp. Lenka saw she was in her bed in the office truck, with Madam Oksana’s seven cats huddled around her, pinning down her blanket. She should have been able to throw them off easily, but no matter how she strained, she couldn’t budge them. They stared up at her as only cats can stare, their round, unblinking eyes glowing red.

Lenka suppressed a hysterical giggle. “No? It would make a great movie. Girl with leukemia runs away to join a circus of vampires who turn into cats and bats.”

The biggest cat, a brown furball like a miniature bear, shook itself and became Hector, sitting sad-eyed by her hip. “Spiders,” he said. “We can also be spiders and mosquitoes, but it is unpleasant to be so small.”

This was too much for Lenka, who started to laugh helplessly and couldn’t stop until Madam Oksana slapped her, bruising Lenka’s jaw and knocking the laughter right out of her.

“I do not like hysterics,” Madam Oksana said. “It is very simple. You will stay with us. We will buy a big computer and you will conduct the business of the circus and book tours and make everything smooth with the chinovnik. You will share your blood with us.” Her scarlet mouth stretched in a feral smile. “It will be what you call totally smoking.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Lenka said. “I’d call it incredibly gross.”

The cats turned back into circus performers and perched on the furniture. Free at last, Lenka sat up and glared at them. “I’ve got leukemia, remember? That’s a disease of the blood, in case you didn’t know.”

Dusan took her hand. He’d never touched her before. His skin was cool and waxy against her fingers. “For us, it is not poison,” he said. “For us, it is new strength.”

“All those multiplying white cells,” Boris said, “can put a real bounce in a vampire’s step. We wouldn’t love you half so much if your blood was normal.”

Lenka tried to tug her hand out of Dusan’s grip. It was like pulling against handcuffs. “Well, it is. I mean, remission, remember? I told you when I came.”

Rima bent and stroked her cheek, a touch like falling snow. “Nice try. But you are not in remission.”

As Lenka stared at her, stunned, Dusan lifted her wrist to his mouth, delicately nicked the flesh with a sharp canines, and licked the resulting drops of blood from her skin. “Delicious,” he said.

“If you don’t like hysterics,” she said shakily, “then you should all get out now, because I am about to seriously lose it, and I think you’d have to kill me to make me shut up.”

The office truck remained closed and silent all the next day, the door locked and the shades drawn. Carmen sold tickets from a table by the bar and flirted coolly with the bartender. The house was good, the applause enthusiastic, the chatter overheard during the blow-off promising. When Madam Oksana counted the take, she said she thought they’d be able to order new costumes soon, maybe even a desktop computer.

“It will do you no good,” Rima pointed out, “if Lenka goes mad with shock.”

Madam Oksana shrugged. “Then we will not buy computer.”

The next day, Boris eyed the silent office and wondered aloud whether he should break down the door to check if the mortal was still alive.

“She does not want to die, that one,” Madam Oksana said. “Leave her alone.”

The next night, another sold-out show. Townies gathered at the back door in hopes of a smile, a word, maybe even a date with one of the performers. Carmen and Evzen fed on something tastier than rat blood. The office trailer stayed locked and silent.

The next evening, after the last show, Lenka washed, put Rima’s dress on over her jeans, braided her dark hair, and went to the tent, where she found Horace and Carmen and Madam Oksana.

“I want to talk to you.”

Three pairs of eyes examined her gravely. The whites looked red, as if they were all suffering from a bad case of pinkeye. Lenka wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before.

Madam Oksana beckoned her closer.

“No, I want to talk to all of you. I’m only going through this once.”

Madam Oksana shrugged and closed her eyes briefly. Lenka heard a flutter, and three bats swooped down from among the lights, transforming as they landed. A calico cat snaked between the stage curtains and became Rima. The big gray tom that was Boris leapt smoothly onto the ring, his muzzle dark with blood, and settled down to a leisurely bath.

“We are all here,” Madam Oksana said. “Speak.”

Lenka licked her lips. “I’ve done a lot of thinking since the other night, and I’ve made some decisions. First, I’m totally okay with the whole vampire thing. I mean, you’re awesome performers and it’s not like you go around killing people all the time — ”

“Not on purpose,” Evzen murmured.

“Or very often, or somebody would have noticed. Anyway. I wouldn’t turn you in, even if I left, which, before you start telling me how I don’t have a choice, I actually do.”

She glared around at the assembled vampires, challenging one of them to argue. They gazed back, patient and incurious.

“I said in Cleveland I wanted to join you. I still do. Make me a full member of the troupe — make me a vampire — and I’ll stay.”

“Or else?” Kazimir prompted.

“Or else I’ll erase all my files, the bookkeeping program I set up, all the contacts in all the towns where you’ve got gigs, all the permit numbers — everything.”

Evzen shrugged. “We will keep you away from the computer.”

“You don’t even know how to turn it on,” Lenka said. “All you know how to do is search YouTube, and that’s not going to get you very far when some policeman in Utah wants to see your paperwork. You can’t figure out anything new by yourselves. You know how to do what you did when you. became vampires — and that’s it.”

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, who knew how the trick was done, covered her mouth with her hands, then laughed with relief when the contortionist caught Lenka and swung her, impossibly, up and out and back into the cube again, where she seemed to float for a heartbeat in midair, hovering, trapped, like a white bird in a glittering cage.

The show was over. The audience had departed, drunk on alcohol and circus magic. Lenka’s parents sat in their booth behind their empty glasses and waited for their daughter to come to them.

“I’m not going to cry,” Mama announced.

“There is no reason for crying,” Papa agreed.

Lenka appeared on the other side of the table. She’d changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, but her face was still masked with the garish doll paint.

“Mama,” she said. “Papa. I’m glad you came.”

She sounded less glad than polite. Her father hesitated a moment, then slid out of the booth and hugged her hugely. “Princess mine,” he said. “Berusko. You have become a great artist.” He held her out at arm’s length. “You are well? Your hands are very cold. There is so much to say. You will come eat with us?”

Lenka looked at him gravely. “I can’t, Papa. I’m sorry. I’m on a special diet — it wouldn’t be any fun for any of us.”

Mama joined them. She opened her mouth to scold, to question, her arms half raised to gather her daughter to her. But when Lenka turned to her, smoke eyed, solemn, self-contained, she dropped her arms and said crossly, “We were worried, Lenka.”

“I know, Mama. I’m sorry.”

“And your health?”

A smile flitted over the painted lips. “I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.”

“And happy?” Papa asked.

“Yes,” she said evenly. “Very happy.”

A calico cat leapt up onto the table and meowed.

“I’m sorry,” Lenka repeated.

Her mother nodded once, shortly. “You have duties. Go. We will come again tomorrow.”

“It’s the same show,” Lenka said.

“Even so,” her father said.

The calico meowed again, flowed through the air to her shoulder, and settled around her neck like a furry scarf. Girl and cat looked at the Kubatovs, amber eyes and dark equally calm and disinterested. Then Lenka smiled, a bright performer’s smile, turned, walked through the stage curtain, and was gone.