A/N: Written for SuperPhantom Week 2024, some blend of Days 2 (Strange) and 3 (Outsider). Technically related to my fic Through the Wringer but occurs before the events of that story so can be read as a standalone. Set about S12 for SPN. Contains minor swearing.
Claire didn't do circuses. She'd never gone in for that whole three rings and a show thing, even if animals weren't part of it. They weren't here; as far as she could tell, it was supposed to be all illusion and trick on top of the acrobatics and similar feats. She was prepared for hypnosis, suggestion, sleight of hand….
Magic.
Maybe real magic.
She took a seat on the wooden bench five rows back, idly spinning the bracelet she wore on her left wrist and determinedly keeping a straight face as she watched the ringmaster of Circus Gothica wax poetic about the show. Attempt at creepy makeup aside, the guy didn't look like much. He looked like someone she could take in a fight without much effort.
She wasn't going to assume that he was as pathetic as he looked.
This might not be a case. The others weren't convinced this was a case. Not for them, anyway. She hadn't even been able to talk Alex into coming with her, and Jody had told her that robberies—locked rooms or no—were matters for the police, not for hunters.
But Claire had learned to follow her gut instincts, so she'd come anyway.
At least the smell of popcorn overpowered the smell of sweat in here. It wasn't as hot now that she was out of the sun as it had been outside, but the dark tent didn't exactly help matters. It was big enough, at least—over thirty feet high if she had to guess—and the sidewalls were open, but it apparently wasn't the sort of place that could afford a cooling system.
If they were responsible for the robberies, they weren't spending any money from their stolen goods for the sake of anyone's comfort.
As advertised, the clowns never smiled—which probably didn't make them clowns, technically speaking, but if Dean's info was any good, they would still be enough to keep Sam far away from a potential case like this.
Thankfully not as advertised, her nightmares didn't actually come alive. She hadn't entirely ruled out this somehow being a djinn thing even without people going missing. There were contortionists, jugglers, stilt walkers, tightrope walkers and other aerialists, and otherwise people showing off extreme flexibility, balance, coordination, and strength. But one of the performers was dressed up as the stereotypical grim reaper, and she knew better, even if no one else here did.
This entire show was aiming for dark and gritty but didn't entirely escape kitschy, leaning so hard into its self-proclaimed gothic image that it detracted from the show itself.
The performances were impressive enough, but so far, she hadn't seen anything that was undeniably supernatural. Even the magician was more of an illusionist—linked rings and pulling out seemingly-endless scarves and all—and didn't display anything that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Regular humans could be so talented, and she couldn't smell anything particularly suspicious.
Truthfully, she'd done a quick search of the grounds and the tents—as best she could without arousing suspicion—but was left with a list of places she wanted to check more thoroughly later (or just check in general, like the train) rather than proof that she was looking at someone in over their head after making a deal with a crossroads demon or deciding to amuse themselves after centuries of practicing magic.
Not that she thought a witch would bother with a spectacle like this if they weren't after a particular target or drawing on the power of their audience. Granted, anyone who made a deal with a demon to get some place like this going—again, according to her research—would be getting the short end of the stick, but that was par for the course with demon deals. Plus, for all she knew, the ringmaster fancied himself as smarter than the average demon stuck on crossroads duty.
To be fair, the ringmaster—Freakshow, he'd called himself—looked smug enough to believe that, but she'd tried to stop judging books by their cover after meeting Castiel and learning the hard way that appearances were definitely not everything.
Not that she didn't still judge and make a comment or ten, but she could be disparaging and flippant and still be on her guard.
Maybe it had been a deal with a demon. A demon could have made the legal mess of the accusations against Circus Gothica go away—or rather, become too tangled to ever be sorted out, which would explain the sudden dropping of all charges and any barriers against reforming.
It had only shut down a couple of years ago, but people seemed to have already forgotten its reputation, and she doubted that was due to the pitiful attempt it had made at a rebrand before it had again taken up its old Circus Gothica name. Finding dirt on it had been hard, too. Anything on something resembling an official site had been scrubbed—no archived news articles or TV footage, no trace of a website, nothing she could easily access from a computer and reliably track back to its source—so the most she'd been able to find were vague allusions to it on forums.
But she knew Sam and Dean had tracked cases from the testimonies of people not unlike GothGirl666 or Fryer Tuck, and the robberies in towns where the circus had been seemed suspicious to her even if the circus itself had existed long before the string of robberies allegedly associated with it had begun.
Things changed. Something could have changed, sparking the robberies. A change could have led to the shutdown. A change—not necessarily a demon deal—could have allowed the circus to reform, its slate wiped clean.
A human with that capability would need to have a lot of wealth or power to throw around, though. Possibly both.
Financed by stolen goods? Buying the silence of anyone who could come forward with something they wanted forgotten? Maybe. Bribery and greed were hardly unheard of. But then Jody was right, and it wasn't the sort of case Claire needed to be investigating.
A hacker? Not something she could really rule out without talking to someone better at that sort of thing than she was, but surely that would result in a bigger story, not the hush-up that seemed to have happened. That reeked of someone with more power to throw around. She hadn't exactly been trusting of the government or big corporations even before the leviathans and the whole SucroCorp incident—it still made her skin crawl to think that they'd nearly gotten away with all of that—but she also couldn't imagine why the government (any part of the government) or a company as large as, say, Amazon or VladCo would care about a circus and its legal troubles.
But it wasn't like anyone in their right mind would admit to making a deal with a demon unless they could hear the hellhounds braying and knew, on a visceral level, what was coming for them.
As far as she could tell, there were less than a handful of the original performers involved in this new Circus Gothica. The only obvious one was the ringmaster, and she wasn't about to talk to him unless she had to. At least, she wasn't sure she could fool him with a sob story—or some earnest-sounding one—and she doubted she could afford too many missteps even if she changed up her hairstyle and went even heavier on the makeup.
It wasn't like it would be easy to fool those used to wearing masks and peering beneath them.
Still, enough of the acts were the same that someone else had to be an original performer—the skeleton on stilts and the cloaked grim reaper on the wire came to mind as possibilities—so if she could corner one, if she could find out more—
"And now, ladies and gentlemen and folk of the night, the grim reaper himself will make one final death-defying act. You may have thought the scythe he carries just for show or balance, but I assure you, it is no mere prop." Freakshow smiled at them before turning and calling to the performer on the tightrope, "Reaper, begin your harvest."
Claire narrowed her eyes, right hand flying to the knife in her boot while the other searched her pockets for something that might ward off whatever was coming. If she knew what this was—
The scythe arced downwards.
Claire ducked, despite the fact that the performer was more than twenty feet above her, but most of the people around her flinched, and in her defense, she'd expected that throats would be cut.
That would be a quick and bloody death. A suitable harvest for a false reaper employing dark magic.
Instead of gurgling screams and the thud of bodies, she heard gasps and shrieks and looked up in time to see the reaper falling. Not swinging. Falling.
He'd cut the rope.
There was no safety net strung beneath it.
Claire blinked, but the performer did not become a broken body bleeding all over the dirt.
He was floating two feet above the ground.
Everyone around her erupted into cheers as he raised the scythe high before sweeping into a bow, and the ringmaster launched into a speech about defying the odds.
This wasn't defying the odds.
She'd need to get a closer look before everything was cleared out, but she didn't think it was mere illusion, either.
This was magic.
Or something supernatural even if it wasn't specifically magic, anyway.
Was she chilled because of the blatant display of power she'd seen—and Freakshow's remarks about culling unneeded boundaries to reap power, since that might not simply be pandering to his target audience—or was she chilled for another reason entirely?
She couldn't smell sulfur, nor that tangy sort of ozone most people only associated with storms, but—
But this was something.
It had to be something.
It was too hot out for this to be a normal cold spot when there weren't even fans running somewhere.
The performer vanished abruptly, earning renewed applause, and Claire watched intently, trying to figure out what she was missing without falling (hopefully without falling, at least) for Freakshow's intentional misdirection.
She never saw the performer reappear, not even as the crowd around her began collecting their things.
She did notice a glint in the loose dirt of the arena floor before Freakshow scuffed his boot over the spot, but that wasn't necessarily intentional or noteworthy.
It wasn't necessarily unintentional or insignificant, either.
Claire straightened, frowned, and shifted in her seat even as others around her stood and began filing out.
Something wasn't right.
Something was missing.
She palmed her blade instead of returning it to its sheath and let her free hand roam over her pockets again, and then she looked down and realized that she was no longer wearing the silver charm bracelet Jody had given her for her birthday.
(Jody had also gifted her some weapons suitable for hunting, but this was the only gift Claire had advertised to her non-hunting friends. Not that she had a lot of those. Not that she really had any of those. But it was the gift she showed off to her acquaintances for the sake of appearances.)
Potential usefulness in hunting aside, even if it amounted to nothing more than a trinket, Claire wanted it back.
Checking the ground around her yielded nothing, but she went down on her hands and knees anyway and the knife went back into its sheath. The soil was packed hard from trampling feet, and she kept the bracelet polished; it wasn't something she'd miss. Her wallet—arguably the easier target for a potential pickpocket—was still safely zippered into the pocket of the jacket she'd worn as much for the usefulness of said pockets as to fit in with the crowd. Black leather was hot as hell in the sun, but better the jacket with its myriad of hidden pockets and useful things than hauling around a bag because her remaining choices were down to a long-sleeved shirt, the memorability of the scar on her arm from that one vamp fight, or the fashion mistake of a fanny pack Alex had discovered in the back of one of Jody's cupboards last Christmas and dared Claire to wear.
Like she'd be caught dead doing that even if she weren't trying to blend in.
"Show's over, my dear. I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to clear out so that we can reset, but we'd be delighted to have you back for our twilight performance."
Claire took a beat to compose herself before getting to her feet. The ringmaster's makeup was thick and did him even fewer favours up close, but his clothes looked expensive. To be expected, she supposed, since looking the part was so key to the performance. The shard of red crystal hung as a pendant on the thick gold chain around his neck was noteworthy for its gaudiness, but it was hardly a symbol of witchcraft even if it looked to be a step above costume jewellery.
"Sorry." She offered what she hoped looked like an apologetic but slightly panicked smile. "I'm just looking for my bracelet. The clasp must have broken."
He gave the ground at their feet a cursory glance before giving her what was probably supposed to be a sympathetic look. "Why don't you check to see if someone's turned it into the Lost and Found at our main ticket office? I'll show you the way."
She'd rather get a better look at the centre ring, but his words had not been a suggestion. He was likely to have her by the arm and drag her if she refused—or call over whatever amounted to security in this place.
It was funny, come to think of it.
She hadn't seen anyone she'd twigged as security, and Jody had taught her the tricks of spotting them that her life before Jody had not.
Claire allowed herself to be ushered outside, resolving to try to sneak back into the tent later. At least if she was caught, her claim of looking for her bracelet wouldn't be a complete lie.
Especially since, to no one's surprise, her bracelet wasn't in the lost and found.
"I'll keep an eye out for it," promised Freakshow, but the words sounded about as genuine as the smile he was giving her.
The grateful smile Claire gave him in return was equally as false and no more real than the first one. "Thanks." She gave him and the guy manning the ticket kiosk a nod of farewell before heading towards a vendor selling popcorn. She didn't look back, but she was fairly certain Freakshow was still watching her. She hadn't wanted to be on the ringmaster's radar, but now that she was, best to put on a show of looking for the bracelet she knew hadn't been lost outside.
More to the point, she wasn't sure it had been lost at all.
Then again, she didn't know how it had been stolen during the show without her noticing. She hardly thought she was that unobservant, though she supposed most people who'd been robbed that way assumed the same. It made her wish she'd gotten some iron charms, though. Finding a blacksmith willing to try their hand at such delicate work wasn't as hard as it could be within the hunting community, even though she figured the charm's attachment might need to be made of a different metal and brazed.
Still.
If the robbery—because it was a robbery, which shouldn't surprise her given why she was here—had a supernatural cause, all she could rule out were those burned by silver. Namely because, even if the burning could be withstood for a short time, if something affected by silver had taken it, she really should have noticed. If not by the scream, the smell, or the sizzling sound it could make, then by the shift in the air of something having its innate magic disrupted.
Claire munched on her purchased popcorn, grateful her combat boots meant her tracks wouldn't make her any easier to follow than the black she was wearing. Trying to talk to any of the performers now was probably foolhardy, but she wanted a chance to look inside the train cars, and she still had the bracelet excuse. If she had to be robbed, she'd at least get what she could out of it before she could beat up whatever or whoever had stolen from her and get it back.
She was a mere five steps from the first of the performers' wagons when she shivered as if someone had walked over her grave.
"The general audience isn't allowed back here." The contortionist Claire had turned to face was giving her a smile which didn't even try to reach her heavily mascaraed grey eyes. "If you're looking for washrooms, head to the left of the sideshow."
Claire opened her mouth to tell the woman about her missing bracelet when someone behind her said, "Trouble?"
The woman's smile turned genuine, though that might be because Claire had jumped despite herself. "Lydia'd have my back if you didn't, but since you're here, you might as well deal with her. Lost souls are your job."
Claire glanced at the reaper—he'd been the one to speak—and looked back to the contortionist to ask what she'd meant, only to realize the contortionist was nowhere in sight.
Circus Gothica was creepy, but that was not due to the décor or the performances inside the big top.
"Metaphorically?" Claire asked carefully, trying for a joking tone as she turned back to the reaper. He'd stashed the scythe somewhere but still wore his hood up, shadowing his face more effectively than she thought a mere hood should shadow his face, but she shouldn't jump to conclusions simply because she didn't want to be wrong about this being a job. Either way, his voice sounded young, and he was no taller than she was.
The reaper pulled back his hood, revealing a shock of white hair over a young face. His smile was all sharp teeth, and she had to hope the red eyes meant contacts and not monster, if only because she didn't know off the top of her head what would kill him if he were a monster. He didn't look like he should be a threat when he wasn't holding a weapon, but something about him put her on her guard in a way the contortionist had not. "Of a sort."
Fine.
She could play along.
"And that sort is—?"
He spread his arms and spun in a quick circle. "I'm the Reaper. I reap." He was acting like that answered her question.
It didn't.
"I thought reapers took care of dead souls, not lost ones."
"Not all lost souls are dead," he agreed, "and not all dead souls are lost."
Okay, that was probably a common enough belief in this crowd even without knowing anything about the truth of the supernatural.
"But you're not dead," he added, "just lost." He jerked his head towards one of the train cars farther down the line in a follow me gesture and started walking.
She followed because she wanted to know what the hell was going on.
And because she was a solid ninety-five percent sure he wouldn't kill her.
She'd be less confident if he still had that scythe, since it was obviously sharp enough to cut through whatever they used for their tightrope with one solid swing and little enough effort that a teenager could maintain his balance throughout the striking process and only falling once gravity seized him (unless the rope itself was part of the gimmick?), but something about this guy made her skin crawl.
"How long have you been doing that trick in your act?" she asked, since that was about as close to a normal segue into asking how long he'd been around as she could safely get. He might be inclined to answer since she wasn't pestering him for answers as to how he did it.
She wanted to know that, too, but this was an important start.
"Always," he said, which was another non-answer in her book. Sure, maybe his parents were carnies, maybe he'd grown up ringside and taken part as soon as he was able, maybe he'd graduated to this particular part once he'd become good enough that they trusted him with his own act—
—but this wasn't meant to be a family-friendly circus. The crowd was primarily teenagers and young adults, with some older ones—goths especially—thrown into the mix. The youngest person she'd seen had to have been at least ten. To get in here, she'd walked past a protest thrown by adults who didn't like the image Circus Gothica projected. A family act would be a great way to quiet those voices; a solitary act by someone who had to be younger than her? Not so much.
But if always didn't mean as long as he could remember, then it meant since he'd arrived, with arrived probably meaning ran away from home. Not that she could judge, either in the running away department or the reckless acts department.
…then again, it could mean as long as he could remember if he couldn't remember much. Which he might not, depending on how badly some of his earlier attempts at that trick had gone. He couldn't have a concussion now—at least, he shouldn't; she doubted he'd be able to perform if he did, even if she wouldn't have put it past Freakshow to make him perform as long as he could still walk the wire—but….
Guesswork would lead her down too many meandering paths. Even if she wasn't posing as a reporter, there was an easier way to get the information she needed. "So you were with the original Circus Gothica?"
His expression went blank in an instant. "The Circus Gothica has no pretenders. This is the original."
"I mean before the shutdown. And the rebranding. And picking the old brand back up."
His shoulders rolled in a shrug. "I'm the only Reaper."
And she knew from Fryer Tuck's account that the reaper had performed on the highwire in Circus Gothica's original run at least once. He'd performed in its final show, back in some town in the Midwest that was also supposedly haunted, though she'd found enough stories about its so-called hauntings that she figured if it were real and not the tourist schtick most of the other sites had claimed it to be, a legitimate hunter or two would have rolled through there.
The fact that the place apparently held ghost tours really didn't help its cause.
"So what did you do when it was shut down? Finish up your high school degree or something?" She wasn't sure if he was old enough to have finished high school in the first place, which meant he definitely didn't look old enough to attend college like she did.
Or rather, like she was supposed to.
And did, sometimes.
When she wasn't hunting.
As long as she passed her classes and didn't get herself killed, it would be fine.
Truthfully, she didn't care half as much about her classes as Jody did, but she knew how rare secondary education was among hunters. To the people who cared, it would stand for something.
Claire wasn't one of the ones who cared.
She didn't intend to stop hunting, and it's not like monsters cared who hunted them.
Really, the only reason she'd finally agreed was because she knew how valuable connections and contacts could be. If she asked the right people, she could hear a lot about the prowess of Bobby Singer and his impeccable translations of dead languages. Getting her foot in the door—
"Or something." The reaper (she should find out his real name instead of calling him the reaper, shouldn't she?) heaved open the heavy door at the end of the train car and held it, gesturing for her to enter with one hand. "Come on in."
"Said the spider to the fly," she murmured as she passed him, and the grin he gave her in response was positively wicked. "Hey," she started as she turned back, barely registering the sparsely-furnished office sort of room around her rather than the line of seats she'd expected, "what's your—?"
The door slammed shut.
Shit.
She'd really just walked into that one, hadn't she? Knowingly.
Dammit, Jody was never going to let her go off on a hunt alone again, even if she didn't believe it was a hunt.
Claire heard the clunk of metal settling into place and no doubt barring the door so was two steps back towards the nearest window when metal shutters slammed down and—from the sounds of it—locked into place. There must have been a switch outside to trigger it so quickly, but now that the windows were covered, it was pitch black in here.
"Hey! What's the big idea?"
No response.
Not that she'd really expected one.
Claire crumpled the empty bag of popcorn and threw it before pulling out her phone and switching on the flashlight. Two chairs separated by a desk clear of any paperwork and a chest near the head of the car, opposite the door at the back. She tried the drawers and the chest; both locked. Unsurprisingly. Because she wasn't about to get lucky now.
The rug on the floor moved when she tugged on it, but it wasn't concealing a trap door.
She went back and banged her fist on the door. Everything in here was metal, and she could break a chair and beat on the walls to her heart's content, but the reaper hadn't exactly stuck her in the train car nearest the general populace. She could bang and scream all she wanted, and they might not hear her—especially not over the music she could now hear pumping through speakers.
She was going to have to call for help, wasn't she?
Tempting as it was to call Sam and Dean and beg them to bail her out without calling Jody, she didn't have any idea where they were. They could be halfway across the country for all she knew. She could reach out to Garth, see if there were any other hunters in the area—
Except, Claire realized as she looked down at her phone, she didn't have any service in here.
Frickin' hell.
"I deal with lost souls," whispered the reaper from behind her, and Claire whirled. The flashlight on her phone caught nothing new, but the reaper's voice (somehow still behind her) continued, "I also deal with those who ask too many questions."
There must be speakers in here.
Maybe, if there were speakers, there was a mic, too.
Claire chewed on her lip for a beat before saying, "I lost my bracelet. I just want it back."
Laughter.
It seemed to fill the entire car, echoing around her.
"Surely that's not all you want, little fly."
Claire reminded herself that it was a string of robberies that had been associated with Circus Gothica, not a string of murders or missing persons reports.
"Some answers would be nice, too."
"42."
"What?"
"There's your answer. 42."
The hell—? It didn't matter. "Look, you let me go now, we can both laugh this off as a stupid prank. I won't go to the police." Jody might decide to get involved and look into things a bit more, or at least encourage other jurisdictions to do so, but that would be of her own accord. "I won't even complain."
"You wouldn't tell your story?" The reaper—his voice now coming from in front of her—sounded unnervingly amused. It made Claire want to punch something—namely, him.
She'd called it a prank, and he hadn't corrected her, but he had to know this was crossing a line.
"If keeping my mouth shut will get me out of here, I can keep my mouth shut."
"But it would be such a good story."
Two glowing red eyes opened in the darkness, and she lifted her phone to let the flashlight shine on a cloaked figure. The Reaper, complete with scythe.
Shit, shit, shit.
She had no idea how he'd gotten in here, but since she hadn't heard anything, the answer was not going to be by normal means. Claire tucked her phone into the front pocket of her jeans, flashlight facing outwards, and pulled her knives as she settled into a ready stance. Without knowing what he was, fighting him wasn't exactly going to be a walk in the park. Her phone was unlikely to stay in her pocket for long, but she'd take the light while she had it.
At least it was still working.
"Easy," purred the reaper. He'd sidestepped out of the light—either he didn't fancy being blinded or wanted to force her to keep moving to keep him in sight—but then there was a rustle of cloth, and suddenly she could see him, white hair and tanned skin lit with an unearthly glow. It wasn't enough to show off her surroundings, but it was enough to make him a far easier target. He should have left up his hood.
He should have stayed outside where she couldn't stab him, but that was his mistake.
She hadn't met a demon that glowed, but who knew what tricks they could pick up? Then again, would a demon be stupider than a practicing witch? She'd heard a handful of stories about both but hardly enough for comfort. More often than not, it was a guise dropped at the worst possible moment. Unless this guy was really new at this—being a demon or practicing magic—which she supposed was hardly impossible. "Christo."
The reaper—whatever he was—didn't stop his advance; he merely cocked his head at her with a curiosity gut-wrenchingly similar to the look Castiel would sometimes give her using her father's face. A heartbeat later, he blinked, the red in his eyes flickering to green for the briefest of seconds. "Gesundheit?"
"What the hell are you?"
The smug expression was back on his face, and he lifted his hands—and therefore his cloak and the scythe, even if it wasn't in a position where he could easily cut her with it. "Your worst nightmare."
"Try again," she snarled, letting one of her knives fly.
Her aim was true.
She wouldn't have thrown if she hadn't been certain that she'd hit her target.
But the knife sailed right through him. It didn't miss. It didn't hit some kind of armour or shield and fall to the floor. It went through the dead centre of his chest and, judging by the clang, struck the wall behind him and fell to the floor with a clatter.
Not a demon.
Not a witch.
Not even another bloody angel come to make her life hell on earth.
Not a real reaper, either. Probably. She hardly knew all their tricks, especially since she was pretty sure she didn't know all the stories from the Winchesters.
Claire shifted her knife to her right hand and tried to remember what iron she had on her, since the packet of salt from the fast food joint on her way here was not going to cut it if the reaper was secretly a ghost.
Except he hadn't had any trouble opening and closing the door to the train car and otherwise interacting with the world. He hadn't thrown a chair at her, either, or disarmed her or thrown her into the wall or otherwise acted like she'd expect a ghost to act.
He was pretty talkative, too.
"Hey, no need to be throwing things just because you don't like Mulan," he said, sounding a hell of a lot calmer than she felt. "We can just have a civil conversation."
"What. The. Hell. Are. You?" she hissed, emphasizing each word as he finally stopped two feet from her face.
She stepped back to get more room between them and hit the wall.
Dammit.
His stupid, taunting grin was back. "Told you. I'm the Reaper."
"You're not a damned reaper, you sick son of a bitch." She ripped open the packet of salt with her teeth and threw it at him.
He didn't disperse, like a ghost should've. (Maybe. If it had been enough salt.)
He raised an eyebrow at her instead.
What she wouldn't give for a crowbar right now.
"The Reaper, not a reaper. I mean, it beats Minion, and there's too many of us with that title anyway." He gave an easy shrug, and she realized he was no longer holding the scythe. She couldn't even see it, and she sure as hell hadn't heard him drop it. "So. Bracelet? What'd it look like?"
What?
He was trying to throw her off her game. He had to be.
Trouble was, it was working.
She felt like her brain had short-circuited.
"Like, black and spiky? Studded? Beaded? Gold? Silver? Gimme something to work with."
She stared at him.
"Did it have any gems, real or fake?"
"It's a silver charm bracelet." She didn't see the point of lying to him.
The reaper nodded and turned away from her. Clearly, he didn't fear her knife in his back, no doubt meaning if she threw it, it wouldn't stick—a suspicion confirmed when he walked right through the desk. She lifted the phone from her pocket again and took a couple of cautious steps forward so she had a better idea of what he was doing, but all he was doing was bending over the chest.
What the f—?
"Silver charm bracelet," he announced, spinning back to face her less than half a minute later.
She had not seen him open that chest.
She also knew that chest was locked. He might have a key, but she hadn't heard him use one even if he had pulled it without her seeing.
Still, he was holding up her bracelet.
"Yours?"
She nodded, lowering the phone but not her knife as he crossed back to her side of the train car.
"Okay, great. You want it back. I have it. So here's how this is gonna work."
"What, I sign a frickin' NDA?"
"No. I mean, you not saying anything is definitely gonna be part of this, but you not coming back—ever—is also part of it. Because I can't do what I'm doing if people like you come back."
"And what the hell are you supposed to be doing?"
That sharp-toothed smile returned. "Having my own fun dealing with problems permanently while letting everyone else think I deal with those problems permanently in a very different way."
Right.
So he was saying that he didn't off anyone who became a problem?
Forgive her for not being sure if she could believe him.
Then again, no reports of murders or missing persons. Not any that she could specifically attribute to Circus Gothica, anyway.
"You wanna tell it to me plain?"
"I don't kill people. But I will make you a deal."
"So you're a demon." Except he couldn't be. His eyes hadn't gone black, and he could hardly be such a high level—
"What I am doesn't matter," he said, which wasn't a no, especially since it very much did matter.
"I'm not selling my soul," she hissed at him. "Also, newsflash? Demon deals definitely kill people. I have it on good authority that being dragged down by your little pets ain't fun. Killing people now might be a blessing rather than letting them live ten years just to face that."
He had to be a good actor because he looked genuinely confused. "What? No. The deal is you get your bracelet back and leave here safely in exchange for never coming back here, not saying anything about what I've done—any of what I've done—and not fighting me when I do what I have to do."
"Which is?"
"Okay, you don't have to agree not to fight me, but it's a lot easier if you do. Agree, that is. Not fight me. Obviously it's harder if you fight me. But if you fight and Freakshow catches us, you're with me on the wire, and you're not going to like the fall when the rope is cut."
To hell with this.
She swung at him, but he only looked resigned.
"I'm taking this as agreement," he said as she stumbled through him as if he were nothing more than a freaking hologram. Claire twisted to face him, all too aware that he was suddenly there, closing the distance between them with unnatural swiftne—
She was in her car, parked with the windows rolled down under the scant shade of a tree that had seen better days in the lot of a motel she didn't recognize but looked to be the sort Sam and Dean would stay at.
Her charm bracelet was on her right wrist.
A quick check told her that both her knives were back in her boots.
She didn't know how they had gotten there.
She didn't know how she had gotten here.
She didn't know where here was.
What. The. Hell.
There was a yellow sticky note on her steering wheel, its inked message messy but legible—and more threat than warning, in her opinion.
It'll be worse if you try coming back. I can't protect you twice.
Oh, screw that.
She found her phone and, subsequently, the sticky note that had been stuck onto it.
I can't protect everyone either. Don't drag anyone else into this.
Claire grabbed her laptop from the trunk and looked for the files she'd printed off to boot, but all her hard copies and written notes on Circus Gothica were gone, and the laptop had been wiped of anything potentially useful.
Maybe that shouldn't surprise her, given that she was in her car. A car that the reaper, whatever the hell he was, shouldn't have known to be hers. Even if he'd found her keys, it wasn't like she had a fob he could use to find the car. It wasn't new enough for that.
She checked the date and time and then her location with her phone—which is how she found out she'd apparently travelled a good hundred miles in half an hour. Less, considering that was half an hour from when she'd last checked the time, which had been at some point during the show.
She didn't know what Circus Gothica's whole thing was, let alone what the hell the reaper was, but it was something, and he was something to watch even if he wasn't killing people yet.
Of course, if he could transport people and things as easily as a winged angel, she didn't know that he wasn't killing people, just that he hadn't killed her.
Growling, she opened her glove compartment, pulled out one of her burner phones (thankfully sticky note free), and punched in Garth's number.
This was a case.
Now that she knew more, a bit more digging would help to clarify exactly what kind of case it was.
And she'd get to the bottom of it if it killed her.
