Carnival of Hearts: BBW Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance (14 page)

Max looked up sharply as Greta began to shout. The wolves were separating, snapping out of the haze of desire that the marking ritual extended to them all. He wanted to join them, to find his feet, but Max was exhausted to his bones, spent of all of his energy, and languorous from the mark throbbing in his neck.

As the wolves tightened the circle, three bears emerged, lumbering from the tree line, and roared a challenge. Max recognized the scent of them. They were definitely from the carnival. The sound of a shotgun firing echoed across the treetops, and the bearded woman walked into the clearing behind the bears.

“Oh no,” Kat whispered against his shoulder. Then she was struggling out of his arms.

“Kat, stop,” he begged, but she slipped from his grasp and to her feet, tugging her underpants up and the hem of her dress down and hurrying towards the bears.

Greta tossed him a pair of sweats that he tried to climb into as he chased Kat, but he only ended up hopping and nearly falling over before he had to stop to get them on. Then he was right behind his new mate as she approached the bears with her hands up.

“Please, stop!” she cried. “No fighting! They didn’t kidnap me, I went with him!”

“What in the hell have you done?” Mabel, the bearded lady, asked, staring at Kat. “What…what have you done?”

“She’s my mate now,” Max said, arriving at Kat’s side. “We bear the marks from each other.”

Mabel lowered the shotgun. The bears shrank back towards her, whuffling with worry.

“It’s true.” Kat pushed her hair aside to reveal the still-bloody mark on her throat. “Mabel, I did it on purpose. I want to be with him. And there’s no reason to fight. The pack has agreed not to fight. Please. Where is he?”

“He’ll be here,” Mabel said, gazing in wonder at the mark on Kat. “He’ll be here in a minute. Sweetheart, are you sure they didn’t make you do this?”

“You can’t
make
the mark on someone,” Max said, frowning. “It has to be consensual. I love her, and she loves me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Mabel asked Kat.

“I didn’t think you’d understand,” she admitted quietly.

Mabel looked around at the bristled members of the pack and carefully set her shotgun on the ground, then pulled Kat into a warm hug. “I understand loving someone you shouldn’t. Only this is going to break your father’s heart, Kitty-Kat.”

“I didn’t want to break his heart,” Kat whispered. “But it was his or my own, Mabel. I think this was the only way he’d let me go.”

“You might be right,” Mabel whispered back.

And then Max caught the unmistakable scent of the approaching Ringmaster. Blazing sunlight and the high grasses of the Savannah. The lion. He reached for Kat, catching her arm, to pull her back towards him.

“KAT!” D’Orfeo bellowed as he prowled into the clearing and stalked towards them. “Go home. I’m going to destroy these—”

But to Max’s surprise, and Kat’s too, he could tell, the Ringmaster came to an abrupt halt, staring right past the two of them and into the pack itself.

The tamer, Baptiste, appeared at the Ringmaster’s side with his silver-tipped whip. A chorus of snarls resounded from the pack when they saw that, and Max held up a hand to calm them, to stop them from launching at the tamer. He looked over at Thomas, who nodded, and the snarling quieted.

Kat wasted no time, launching right in. “Dad, please don’t be angry, I know you’re upset. I love Max and we’ve marked each other and now I’m his mate and you can’t take me away from him. And nobody has to fight or die or anything! Everything is going to be good!”

But D’Orfeo barely even seemed to hear her.

Max looked over his shoulder to see what the Ringmaster was looking at, and then he blinked, realizing. D’Orfeo was staring at
Greta
.

Who was walking slowly towards them, in between the members of the pack, right past Thomas to stand across from the Ringmaster.

“Hello, Lucien,” she said softly.

“Greta,” the Ringmaster replied, plainly shocked to his marrow. “This is your pack.”

Greta nodded. “And this is yours.”

“I didn’t know.”

“No, nor did I.”

D’Orfeo looked over at Max and Kat, and grimaced. “You’ve stolen my daughter.”

Greta arched an eyebrow. “No. Nobody has stolen anything. Your daughter is incredibly brave and strong. She survived the marking ceremony because she’s in love with a wolf. Nobody has stolen anything from you.”

“Dad,” Kat said, letting go of Max and going to her father. Max saw a stricken expression flit through D’Orfeo’s eyes, and then the man’s face softened.

“I wasn’t ready to let go of you,” he told his daughter.

“You haven’t lost me at all,” she insisted. “I love you, I love the carnival. But I’m ready to live my own life. With Max.”

D’Orfeo looked at Max, and Max saw a warning in that look.

“I love her,” he told the Ringmaster. “I swear. I will protect her with my life.”

D’Orfeo nodded.

Thomas walked up to stand on Greta’s other side. He was eyeballing D’Orfeo with such fierce contempt that it shocked Max to see. Thomas could be hard and mean, Max knew, but he’d never seen him
loathe
anyone on sight the way he seemed to immediately loathe D’Orfeo. Or, Max realized as he looked between D’Orfeo and Greta, perhaps it wasn’t immediate at all. Perhaps it was an old loathing. The mysterious Ringmaster grew suddenly even more mysterious.

“I have made an agreement with your daughter,” Thomas said stiffly to D’Orfeo. “My pack will not attack your carnival again so long as you do not attack us.”

“We’re leaving the area tomorrow,” D’Orfeo said, his eyes lingering on Greta. “Though I did not expect to be leaving my daughter behind.”

“We’ll take care of her,” Greta promised him.

Kat stepped in suddenly and hugged D’Orfeo tight, and after a moment’s reluctance, Max saw the Ringmaster hug her back. “We’ll be around again next season.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Kat said. She smiled a little. “Tell Liam I said thank you. And
sorry
.”

The Ringmaster snorted. “You think I’m scary when I’m pissed, just wait till you see him next year. He’s gonna be
furious
.”

“Well, at least he’ll have a year to cool off.” Kat laughed.

Over her head, Max saw D’Orfeo meet Greta’s eyes again. They shared a long look, and though Max could not fathom what they were saying to each other with that look, he knew then that it must have been an old, long conversation that had never been finished, and likely never would be.

“Dad, I love you,” Kat said.

D’Orfeo bowed his head to his daughter’s. “I love you too. I have never been so proud of you, Kitty-Kat. You are stronger than I am.”

She laughed. “Well, that’s impossible, but I’ll take the compliment.” Then she let go of her father and returned to Max, and he held out his arms for her to step into. She snuggled in against his side, and he watched the Ringmaster sigh deeply.

“Next season,” he said again, nodding to them all.

Then he took a few steps backwards and turned, walking with that same elegant feline prowl back into the tree line. Baptiste waited until he had gone ahead a few paces, then took his silver-edged whip and turned, too, tromping back into the forest. Mabel picked up her shotgun and turned to follow him. The bears lingered, no doubt to protect their retreat, and then they too turned themselves about and went hunkering and ambling slowly back into the forest, back towards the carnival.

Max held tightly to Kat as they disappeared into the forest and the trees and the wind stole their scents away. He pressed a kiss to the top of his mate’s head. His mate. His heart swelled and he could not think of a time he had ever been happier. He wondered, in the year that would turn this season to the next, by the time the Carnival D’Orfeo returned, if he would have some wailing grandchildren to introduce to the Ringmaster. He certainly hoped so.

The Carnival D’Orfeo, after all, still travels the same circuit. It passes through the same towns, or near enough, every two or three years. It is famous in some parts for its spectacular big top show, in which a notably slender tamer performs incredible tricks with a fierce, powerful lion. It is famous in other parts, to other people, for the diverse number of individuals who travel with it, who live in the shadow of the big top. Like all carnivals, it has its mysteries and its mystique. Its oddities and its marvels. And its dangers. The foremost of those being the intimidating Ringmaster, and the dark past he keeps to himself.

By Scarlett Rhone

It was a year before the carnival’s brightly colored caravan could be seen approaching the mountain where the wolves made their home. And it had been quite a year for the wolves. The effects of their last meeting with the carnival were still reverberating, the pack still changing and the power dynamics shifting as tensions sharpened. Specifically, tensions between Greta and Thomas had become razor-edged, and though nobody wanted to talk about it, everybody knew that a confrontation was by now inevitable and probably swiftly oncoming. Greta had thought, once the carnival moved on, that things would cool down and get back to normal.
Normal
, however, turned out to be far behind them.

Greta had also thought that, when the seasons changed and it was time for the carnival to roll through the West Virginia circuit, she would simply send Kat and Max off to D’Orfeo for a month or two. However long they wished to stay. Then they would return and the carnival would move on and that would be that. It was not to be so, though she had a hard time reconciling her feelings about it all.

Two months before the carnival would have arrived at the edges of the wolves’ territory, Kat had announced that she was pregnant. The pack had been overjoyed, of course, and there had been much celebrating, but through all the excitement and happiness, Greta had felt the sharp pang of dread. The next day, she had written an email to D’Orfeo to tell him the news. And she knew that there would be no avoiding him now.

It had been a shock to see him again after so many years. She’d forgotten how gorgeous he was, how powerful he was, and how much she’d loved him. Their encounter had left her shell-shocked for days even after the carnival had moved on. A part of her had known, when Max had arrived at the cabin with Kat, that she was
Lucien’s
Kat, the little girl he’d picked up during that first summer circuit, but Greta had pushed the thought from her mind.

She’d been unable to really process that it had been more than a decade since she’d laid eyes on the Ringmaster, so long in fact that Kat had not recognized her at all, or remembered her. But then, Lucien must have scrubbed her from Kat’s memories altogether, as best he could. She didn’t blame him for that. They all did what they had to in order to live, to survive. Surviving a broken heart was the most agonizing wound of all.

There were so many things she’d wanted to say to him, as they stood looking at each other at the edge of the forest, his bears snarling at her wolves, with war brimming between them. Again. But it hadn’t been about them, it had been about Kat and Max. So Greta had swallowed down all the things she’d wanted to tell Lucien, as she always had, for the sake of the pack. Everything she’d ever done, it seemed, was for the sake of the pack. As one of its alphas, that was as it should’ve been, and Greta had always understood and accepted that. So why, after all this time, was it so hard for her to get Lucien out of her mind?

She was sitting on the cabin’s porch, in one of the old rocking chairs, watching the sun sink across the horizon and the hunters prepare to shift and go out in search of dinner for the pack. It was still early enough in the summer months that the heat was not oppressive, just constant and relaxing, and a breeze bustled through the forest leaves to swirl through the clearing every now and then. A glass of iced tea was sweating on the little table beside her. The scents the forest pulled in were rife with green things and clean earth, fading sunshine and wild animals scampering. She inhaled deeply, caught Kat’s particular smell off in the distance, where she was tromping through the grass towards the water well, bucket held to her stomach. Max would be leading the hunters, as he always did, and Kat would stay here, safe, with Greta. Protecting her had become one of Greta’s priorities ever since she’d joined the pack. And Greta would have been lying if she’d said it had nothing to do with who she was, and where she came from. Kat was Lucien’s daughter. Greta had been there the day he’d found her. But she’d never told Kat that.

On a beach in Georgia in early summer, the sound of a little girl wailing had brought the carnival to a dead stop in its tracks. Greta had been riding in the back of Liam’s old pickup with Lucien, tending to wounds he’d earned in the last battle they’d fought. She’d been barely more than a girl herself, then, the same age that Kat was now, and Lucien only a few years older. But their lives had already aged them, and when Lucien had heard the child’s cry, he had smacked at the cab’s window until Liam pulled over, then gone clambering out of the back of the truck before Greta could stop him.

After he’d found the girl, alone, Lucien ordered the caravan to stop and settle for the night on the beach, and he prowled the shoreline for miles one way and then the other, looking for a hint or a scent, some remnant of the girl’s people. But there was nothing. Liam got the child to go to sleep on the front seat of the cab, and then Greta and Lucien had gotten into a fight.

And she’d lost, of course. She usually lost fights with Lucien. She’d wanted to deliver the kid to a town somewhere, to a church or something, drop her off with humans who would figure out what to do with her. But Lucien, young but already so old, had just lost his family. So had Greta, but they had opposite reactions to grief of that kind. She pushed people away and Lucien instead needed to be responsible for someone. First Greta, then Liam and his fellow bears bereft of an alpha, then Mabel, and now this little girl.

They’d stood by the side of the road, the sound of the ocean at their backs, and screamed at each other for an hour. But Lucien wouldn’t budge, wouldn’t even discuss any option other than keeping the girl, and eventually Greta had been too exhausted to keep screaming. So they’d kept her, and Lucien had named her Kat, and for another two years Greta had been one of her mothers, along with Mabel and all the other women of the caravan, as Lucien had slowly put the carnival together. Kat had sat on Greta’s lap in the big top during the first performance, watching along with the crowd as Baptiste performed and Lucien roared in his lion skin.

That was one of the last times that Greta could remember being happy with the carnival. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, she’d ultimately determined. It wasn’t Lucien’s fault. What he had been doing, trying to do, was such an incredible challenge. There had been so many threats to the carnival, at the beginning. As an alpha, he had been young and inexperienced and had no idea how to dominate and control such a variety of species.

And of course, lions didn’t know how family dynamics worked for bears or wolves, so Lucien had made quite a few mistakes along the way as well. Some bigger than others. Greta wasn’t surprised that, rather than trying to explain to young Kat who Greta was and where she’d gone, Lucien had chosen instead to let the girl forget her entirely. Greta knew that, had their positions been reversed, she’d probably have done the same. It still stung, however.

She’d spent the past year letting go of that hurt, at least insofar as it had to do with Kat. After the carnival had gone on from their little mountain, Kat had of course had a million questions for Greta. But Greta had lied as simply and cleanly as she could, knowing that it would be pointless to rehash all of that history. And she didn’t want to explain to Kat that she’d been in love with her father, and that she’d left him, and that he’d never forgive her for it. Kat’s relationship with her father was contentious enough. Lucien had erased Greta from Kat’s life, and Greta decided to let it stay that way.

Part of her didn’t want to force Kat to try and understand what had happened between her and Lucien, and part of her—the larger part, she knew—didn’t want to have to relive it all in the telling of it. So she had accepted Kat as Max’s mate, had made room for her in the pack and loved her like she would have loved any of her pack members’ mates, but she’d left it at that. At least she’d tried, until Kat had announced that she was pregnant. Then Greta felt herself growing dangerously protective of her and knew that it had more to do with her connection to Lucien than anything else.

Beside her glass of iced tea, her cell phone chirped. She picked it up, and of course it was an email from Lucien, tell her that the carnival was making its approach. She set the phone down without replying immediately and let her head loll back against the chair, closing her eyes, knowing that this would be one of the last moments of peace that she would have for…well, she wasn’t even sure how long.

Maybe D’Orfeo would just try to take Kat away from them forever. Maybe he would wage war against them after all. She’d given up trying to predict him. But one thing she knew for absolutely sure was that it had to be her who dealt with him. It couldn’t be Thomas, or there really would be a war. The two of them would end up killing each other within an hour. Their hatred was deep, bolstered by their natural inclination to clash because they were both alpha men. Greta did not relish the idea of getting between them, so she intended to keep them as far apart as possible. She likewise intended to keep herself as far from each of them as possible.

That she’d been keeping Thomas at a distance was already causing some problems. The pack was pretending that they didn’t notice, that everything was fine, but it wasn’t. Despite the fact that Greta had never officially accepted Thomas as her mate, they had always been intimate. It was one of the ways that sharing the role of pack alpha had worked for them.

Since encountering Lucien a year ago, however, Greta had found she had no interest in mating with Thomas. For a while, she’d been able to brush him off and send him to one of the other females at the same time, and he hadn’t really noticed. Lately, though, he wanted
only
her, and she still refused him. He was getting angry, and the entire pack could sense it, and it set them all on edge. Greta knew that soon she would have to either fight Thomas or go to bed with him, and that was a choice she was not prepared to make at the moment.

Her phone chirped again and she sighed, opening her eyes, and reached to pick it up off the table and look at it. A message from Lucien.

On the beach.

So the carnival was already here.

Greta looked up from her phone, across the clearing to the tree line. The hunters were all gone, off on their runs, and the rest of the pack members were gathered in small knots around the fire pit, or by the tire swing, or lying on blankets on the grass. Greta got up from her chair and tucked her phone into the rear pocket of her jeans, then started off the porch and towards the other side of the clearing. Curtis and Jacob both stopped her, asked her where she was going, but as they were but sentinels and she was alpha, she brushed them off and told them she would be back by dawn. So, as the sun vanished beneath the horizon and night crept in, Greta headed through the woods and towards the beach, to the carnival.