Serpent's Touch (Serpent's Touch 1)

The morning shows started, and I took my place in the ticket booth. Radax manned the front entrance to the menagerie, as usual. I send a quick smile and a wave of a hand—my left hand—his way. He inclined his head to me in greeting.

At noon, I made lunch for Madame and a quick egg salad sandwich for myself. As I walked through one of the passages inside the tents, looking for a hiding place to eat my sandwich, the brack Nerkan stopped me.

“Madame wants you to get these for her.” He shoved a piece of paper into my hand.

It was a shopping list with different powders and spices, all of which I could probably get at the local grocery store.

“I’ll need to be back in the ticket booth soon,” I reminded him softly.

He wrinkled his nose, obviously annoyed. “Fine, I’ll sell tickets until you come back. Take the van. And make it quick. The booth is too hot. I hate it there.”

I snuggled into my hoodie on the way to the van in the parking lot. High noon temperatures had chased away the freshness of the early morning, but I didn’t take off either the hoodie or the scarf. They were more than just clothes, they were my security blanket, my one safe place, even as they weren’t a place at all.

Radax had taught me how to drive, both manual and automatic transmissions. Madame had allowed it, likely foreseeing the usefulness of my having the skill. She often preferred sending me to run errands rather than one of the bracks. I attracted much less attention as compared to them with their tall, muscular bodies, bald heads, and tattooed arms and necks.

I pulled over into the parking lot of the local store and parked the white, windowless van of the menagerie.

Madame’s list wasn’t long, but it was specific. It took me some time to locate all the items. Once I’d collected them all, I got in line to the cash register and occupied my time by watching people.

They were my one true window into the world outside of the menagerie. I rarely spoke to anyone, but I always watched carefully, trying to guess the life they all led, the life I would never be allowed to have.

A young woman was holding the hand of a man. Was he her boyfriend? Just a friend? Or a relative?

A man had a toddler strapped into the baby seat of his shopping cart. The boy was happily munching on a cookie from an open box. Was this a single dad? Or did mom stay at home?

An older woman bent over to tie the shoelaces of a little girl. Were they a grandma and a granddaughter, spending time together?

All those mundane things people did every day while interacting with each other were a mystery to me. What was it like to have a grandmother, a child, a family?

A teenage boy in line in front of me opened a bottle of water and took a drink. His friend squeezed the bottle while he was drinking, spilling its contents on the boy’s chest.

“Hey!” The boy in the soaking wet shirt shoved his friend away, both laughing loudly.

Water…

As I watched it run down the boy’s shirt and uselessly drip on the floor, my mind veered to the creature left to die from thirst in the crate inside one of Madame’s tents.

He was dangerous—the image of the piece of rock shaped like Krin’s thumb rose in my mind. The prisoner might be a true monster.

But he was suffering.

“Are you having a bad day, little one?”His voice had sounded listless but kind—raspy because his throat was dry.

His suffering came from something so easily fixed as lack of water. Even I—the “weak, pathetic human” as Madame often referred to me—had the power to help him.

If I gave him water, though, I’d violate Madame’s direct order—an offence punishable by death. In the dark world of the menagerie, I was but a shadow. As a shadow, I could survive, but I needed to remain invisible—do nothing, say nothing, see nothing…

The cashier scanned my purchases. “Anything else?”

In my sweaty hand, I crinkled the twenty-dollar bill Nerkan had given me.

The cashier glanced at me expectantly. “That’d be seventeen dollars and fifteen cents.”

A sticker on the shelf inside the glass door of the refrigerated display stated the price of a bottle of water as ninety-nine cents. That was all it’d cost to stop someone from suffering a horrible death from thirst—ninety-nine cents for a bottle of water and…quite possibly, my life if Madame ever found out. She might also hurt Radax for my offense, as she often did.

“I’d rather die as an animal than live as your slave,” the gorgonian had said to Madame.His quiet voice had carried so much strength when he’d said that—the strength I did not possess but couldn’t help to admire. He dared defy the goddess, choosing to pay with his life for his freedom.

I stepped away from the cash register and grabbed two long cucumbers from the vegetable stand nearby.

“These, too,” I croaked, slamming the cucumbers onto the belt.

A cucumber consisted mostly of water. Yet it was not water. Would that make a difference if Madame discovered my feeding it to her prisoner? Probably not. But defiance came easier to me when it wasn’t about breaking her direct order.

I wasn’t strong enough to defy a goddess. But maybe I was smart enough to find a way around her orders? And maybe I could be stealthy enough to avoid getting caught?

* * *