Illusion

By Aurelia T. Evans

FROM EXCITING ROMANCE AUTHOR AURELIA T. EVANS

Book eleven in the Arcanium series

Arcanium's greatest illusion is that there's any illusion at all...

When an old flame returns to Arcanium in the company of her own magical circus, Illumina, offering an alliance, Bell initially considers the merger an opportunity for much-needed change.

However, with Illumina comes Maya, who has lost her memories not just of Locke's Arcanium but all her time with Bell—love, guilt, wishes, everything. Having her memories removed leaves Maya with too large a gap in her mind that she's desperate to fill, and she knows that Bell, of all the people in Arcanium, can give her the information she's missing.

Bell still loves Maya and spends every day trying to atone for the pain he caused her and the rest of his cast. In spite of her frustration, she's happiest without him, without the memories that once nearly destroyed her. If Illumina is to become part of Arcanium, he has no choice. He has to keep his distance, because she doesn't know why she should run as far away as she can from Arcanium—and from Bell.

Even so, resisting Maya is almost too much for him to bear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Totally Bound Publishing
• Release date: Apr 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839435003

Aurelia T. Evans

Aurelia T. Evans is an up-and-coming erotica author with a penchant for horror and the supernatural. She’s the twisted mind behind the werewolf/shifter Sanctuary trilogy, demonic circus series Arcanium, and vampire serial Bloodbound. She’s also had short stories featured in various erotic anthologies. Aurelia presently lives in Dallas, Texas (although she doesn’t ride horses or wear hats). She loves cats and enjoys baking as much as she dislikes cooking. She’s a walker, not a runner, and she writes outside as often as possible.

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Author

Totally Bound Publishing books by Aurelia T. Evans

Single Books

Red Queen

Intervention

Arcanium

Fortune

Carousel

Aerial

Ringmaster

Contortion

Spider

Funhouse

Haunted

Skeletons

Silk

Collections

Frostbite: Gravedigger

Arcanium

ILLUSION

AURELIA T. EVANS

Illusion

ISBN # 978-1-83943-500-3

©Copyright Aurelia T. Evans 2021

Cover Art by Erin Dameron-Hill ©Copyright April 2021

Interior text design by Claire Siemaszkiewicz

Totally Bound Publishing

This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

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The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

Published in 2021 by Totally Bound Publishing, United Kingdom.

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Book eleven in the Arcanium series

Arcanium’s greatest illusion is that there’s any illusion at all…

When an old flame returns to Arcanium in the company of her own magical circus, Illumina, offering an alliance, Bell initially considers the merger an opportunity for much-needed change.

However, with Illumina comes Maya, who has lost her memories not just of Locke’s Arcanium but all her time with Bell—love, guilt, wishes, everything. Having her memories removed leaves Maya with too large a gap in her mind that she’s desperate to fill, and she knows that Bell, of all the people in Arcanium, can give her the information she’s missing.

Bell still loves Maya and spends every day trying to atone for the pain he caused her and the rest of his cast. In spite of her frustration, she’s happiest without him, without the memories that once nearly destroyed her. If Illumina is to become part of Arcanium, he has no choice. He has to keep his distance, because she doesn’t know why she should run as far away as she can from Arcanium—and from Bell.

Even so, resisting Maya is almost too much for him to bear.

Trademark Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

The Emperor of Ice Cream: Wallace Stevens

My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark: Stump, Wentz, Hurley, Walker, Hill & Trohman

Circus: Britney Spears, Dr. Luke, Claude Kelly, Benny Blanco

Bowie knife: Clarence Risner

Dirty Dancing: Vestron Pictures

Hysteria: UMG, Beyond the Black

Magic 8-Ball: Mattel Inc.

Sybian: Syb Inc. dba Abco Research Associates

Put on a Happy Face: Charles Strouse, Lee Adams

Body Worlds: Dr. Angelina Whalley and Dr. Gunther von Hagens

Netflix: Netflix Inc.

Chapter One

Bell closed his eyes in the golden lantern light backstage.

When Bell let go, spread himself wide over the web of Arcanium, he was its omnipresent god and omnipotent voyeur, from the thoughts of his cast backstage with him to the audience anticipating the performances, the guests putting in their last efforts in the midway and the Skeletons settling in for their evening meal. He could see what they’d done yesterday and what they would do tomorrow. Even when he didn’t try, he had a finger on every pulse within the borders of Arcanium.

There had been nothing since Locke that had come close to taking Arcanium again. The fae hadn’t even constituted a threat. They would have left with far more chagrin if they had known how distant they had been from taking Arcanium by force. And Locke was now a red diamond on Neve’s finger, waiting for the day she was ready to kill him slowly.

Bell’s opiate of choice had always been pleasure, but his taste for violence went in and out with the seasons. He hadn’t the heart anymore for the punishment of man. He had enough of that to contend with in his cast’s memories and nightmares—but he’d rediscovered the old joy in punishing the immortals who had exploited his Arcanium, even if he had to experience the act of punishment secondhand.

Man swallowed against the apple every second they breathed, and Bell burned with the same sadistic sickness as his fireborn brethren. He kept the Ringmaster in Arcanium as much to remind himself of the line he couldn’t cross as to do the things he shouldn’t.

No one had ever told him what he could and couldn’t do. He was neither angel nor demon nor creation from dust. He had determined his own lines, chiseled his own moral code into his skin before Hammurabi had commissioned his scribes. He was free will incarnate, an agent of chaos to cast awry best-laid plans. He was his own, and so he made his world in his own image, populated it with free wills of all shapes and sizes to shape to his liking—which was often to theirs, because it pleased him to manipulate but not necessarily to control. Manipulation meant nothing without will. If he’d wanted slaves, he would have filled the circus with more convincing golems—like a flea circus of mechanical illusion but with zombies.

But where would be the fun in that?

Bell opened his eyes again, returning himself to the moment, although a blink could send him back out into the circus, forward or backward. All Arcanium and beyond was as accessible to him as the palace of his memories, but although grasping the world in his hands became easy when he made himself more of the god he was, he didn’t see much fun in that either. He made things easier for his cast and for himself, imparting skills that they hadn’t or couldn’t have learned before, gifting talent, but even the demons preferred to work for their performances. Without effort, there could be no achievement, and without achievement, no satisfaction. Pleasure, as with pain, had to be earned.

Selena wrapped her arms around his shoulders from behind, her sharp smile against his cheek. She kissed him lightly. Ready, darling?

As a demon, Selena could twist her body into shapes that Valorie couldn’t have hoped to create. In Valorie’s case, Bell had wanted a contortionist human enough to be both awe-inspiring and credible. When Selena had offered her services as a demon, he no longer had to keep the contortions credible. He didn’t need her to inspire awe. She preferred to inspire fear.

With her black eyes, dead blue skin and blood-stained hair, she was beautiful, but she was still a demon and plied most of her contortionist trade in the Haunted Funhouse rather than in the big top. For the big top performances, she’d taken over Maya’s role as his magician’s assistant and damsel in distress—at least, Arcanium’s version of a damsel in distress, which rarely followed a traditional plot.

Selena retrieved one of the steel knives, gleaming silver as new for every performance, from the bandolier around his torso and brought it to his throat. He lifted his chin, threaded his fingers through her locked hair, breathed in her craving for impure blood. When she shifted her kiss to his mouth, he met that craving with his tongue, hissing as her sharp teeth caught him and she slid the blade over his chin. Then she kissed down to the trickle of blood and drank from the wound until he healed it under her mouth.

She fed from his corruption instead of feeding from his people or too many of his guests, and in return, she made him numb. She could render men into oblivion, but the best she could do for Bell was take both the pleasure and the pain away for a time.

Most of the human cast believed he was sleeping with Selena. Kitty knew better. Neve and Elizabeth had guessed otherwise. And, to his annoyance, Vivian suspected, although because she didn’t know, she hadn’t shared that information with Dom or Delilah. The demons and the faerie could tell just by looking at him, but they wouldn’t share that information one way or the other. A jinni’s business, like that of a demon’s, was his own.

Selena kept his secret, liked keeping secrets in general, because secrets so easily corrupted, improving the flavor of that which she fed upon. It was only apt that she’d chosen an actual lover among his humans who was as ingenuous as they came. The fact that she regularly drained Victor of corruption that he had done nothing to earn satisfied Bell.

Selena licked the smear of blood from the edge of the blade before returning it to the bandolier. Then she jumped onto his back, wrapping her legs and arms around him. She was taller than him by half a head without heels, over a head with the ones she wore for the performance, but although taking a human form limited him in many ways, it didn’t impede his strength. He caught her legs and tucked her against him as he carried her to the curtains. Chelsine would finish her fire dance any minute, which would cue the lights for Sera’s aerial act. After Sera, Bell and Selena would enter. Though Selena should have been getting into place, Sasha and Mikhail had worked their magic, as they always did, and both Bell and Selena were reluctant to part.

Bell had never been so frustrated for so long.

Selena would find her own satisfaction after the performance, as most of his cast did. Some didn’t even wait until they were out from backstage.

To be surrounded by the lust and love of his people, to feel it against his skin, against his teeth, to drink it like milk and honey, hum with the vibrations of their moans and screams, watch them dance around each other, caress, kiss, their pupils dilated and their cheeks flushed, the touch of their tongue to their lips… It was the torture of his own dungeon, to be surrounded by everything he wanted but not to partake himself, even when he was tempted.

Instead, he rested his head back against Selena’s chest as her hair draped on either side of his face.

Selena slid from his back and kissed his shoulder. Hard out there for a demon with a soul. You, of all people, should know better than to resist. God, Bell, there are so many willing victims. Why do you do this to yourself?

He didn’t have a word she would understand. Demons punished with ease, but they had little concept of self-punishment. The closest any of them came was limited self-denial.

I’ll see you in the ring. Bell would seem casual to anyone without an extra sense or two to detect the deception.

Sure, handsome. Selena broke away, scurrying up the ladder to the heavens, where the trapeze swings, spotlights and aerial silks lived.

Neve was his crown jewel—the Spider, a black diamond he would keep in a vault if he could, but Kitty, who reclined on the chaise longue, was the life’s blood, the very beating heart of his circus. Locke had understood that she was valuable but hadn’t understood how much, or else he would never have allowed the Ringmaster to take her for himself.

Without an ounce of magic in her blood, Kitty sensed his attention, opened her eyes and met Bell’s gaze across backstage. Though she couldn’t see it, the Ringmaster’s darkness seeped from under the curtains as he introduced Sera, but when it reached Kitty, it dissipated. She was a pink, floral oasis in a sea of smoke.

Bell sent her what love he could spare from a distance. She received it like a blanket warmed in sunlight, because she was his Kitty Cat and he could rest his head on her shoulder and hold her until the sun rose and set again. Even if she blamed him like the rest, she’d lost none of her love for him. If a human being could become family to jinn, they had bound themselves with something thicker than blood.

She was the only other one who truly loved the circus. The others, demon and human, dwelled within it, sheltered in its shade for a time, but they could all find shelter elsewhere. He had a number of voluntaries but none with so much to lose if they left. That she would lose it broke his heart for her. He cradled her heart as much as he could without making his hands a cage.

Sera’s sweeping cinematic score faded. Bell closed his eyes again, gathering himself into the persona who people recognized and believed was him. Since Locke, never had he so wished to be the man people assumed he was. Not a good man, not harmless, but one who could be measured and fitted, warm and enticing as melting butter and honey, burnt cinnamon incense in a small world of cedar, silk and sawdust—the mysterious stranger who could manipulate emotions like clay on a wheel to make people feel flattered, comfortable, content, to lower their guard and put themselves in his hands.

Here in Arcanium, we hope that you have survived your foray into the fantastic, into the dream and the nightmare, indistinguishable—deadly, dangerous, a glimpse into beautiful darkness for a short time. What has been real, what fantasy? We offer no answers. The Ringmaster’s deep, resonant voice richened each word in his script, imparted emotional significance he was incapable of meaning. In some ways, the Ringmaster himself was the greatest illusion of Arcanium, but it was the only one that the audience never questioned.

In this dream within a dream, let this be the finale of seem. During the day, he is a teller of fortunes, both good and bad, but with the setting of the sun, he weaves reality from the stuff of imagination. What is real and what is illusion? Let us blur the lines further.

The light on the other side of the red velvet curtains dimmed to near darkness. Bell let in the barest of lantern light as he entered, nothing but a shadow in the silence. As the curtains closed again, the darkness was absolute, but like the Ringmaster, Bell didn’t need the light. He knew the big top like he knew his own mind, because it was his creation.

The lights flashed up in a splash of jewel colors, with the spotlight on him in the center of the ring, just as the music switched on, not the symphonic metal or sweeping cinematic pop of the other performances, but a bleacher-vibrating blast of Fall Out Boys’ My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark. Because Bell, like most immortals, had an unhealthy appetite for irony. The only song that made an audience reel faster was when he used Britney Spears’ Circus with unrepentant aplomb.

Selena descended from the heavens, untethered to rope or rigging. As with Sera, the audience strained to see whatever transparent cord held her hovering in the air. They could strain until their eyes popped out. Creating the illusion that there was illusion at all was one of his greatest joys that had nothing to do with lust, and he had precious little joy these days. Within the big top and fortune teller tent, the best he could hope for was glimmers, so he took what he could get.

Selena could do her portion of the illusionist danger act under her own power, but there was no need for her to exert herself when making magic look like tricks was effortless to him. What magicians did to make their illusions seem like magic took far more work than he needed to make magic look like illusion.

They also used his magic instead of hers to establish their dynamic from the beginning. Sometimes Selena even tried—and failed—to wrest control from him. It helped her maintain character and convinced the audience of his dominance over the scene, over magic and illusion, over his magician’s assistant, over the audience itself.

There was benefit to submission for beings such as him. The demons in his care actually seemed to thrive, living under the consummate control of someone like him, someone who kept them leashed and collared and relieved them of the usual expectations. They liked having restrictions to push and pull against.

Selena could take or leave D/s games the rest of the time, but in a circus like Arcanium—a circus of leather, latex and enough innuendo to power a mid-size city—she was more than willing to play the part of the unwilling prisoner, with her left leg straight in the air by her ear, her arm wrapped around her thigh and bound to the collar around her neck to trap her leg there and keep her from being able to run.

Like Valorie, she was thin, her narrower curves setting off her flexible limbs and the purple latex she wore to unique advantage. She didn’t reach the level of his Skellies—no one healthy and living could—but she made him seem strapping in comparison.

He conjured her down to the center of the ring with him. She struggled in vain against the leather bonds holding her, wriggling her beautiful body against his until she reached the ground. His chest to her back, he smoothed his hand up the length of her thigh to the delicate ankle then hooked his arm around her waist to bring her closer against him. He had much more license for lascivious intent during the big top performances, where children under thirteen were not permitted—at well-documented risk of life and limb, not that anyone believed the warnings.

He went through the motions of lust within their dance, Latin style mingled with his magic and demonstrations of Selena’s flexibility and ferocity through her resistance, struggling against but never managing to shake either the leather bindings or the effect of his touch on her. The incubus and succubus had already planted seeds in the audience’s heads. It didn’t take much for Bell and Selena together to make them grow.

Until his magic flung Selena from the center of the ring to the wooden target that had appeared in front of the curtains. She slammed face-forward against the wood with real force that no sound effect could replicate.

Mmm, harder, darling. She writhed against the target, grasped the edge of the pallet with her free hand, but she couldn’t budge from where Bell had put her.

He drew two knives from the bandolier that crossed his otherwise-bare chest. He paused only for the audience to blink against the shine on the silver before flinging both toward the decidedly squirmy demon twenty feet in front of him.

They hit right on either side of her waist. The audience winced for her. She only became more agitated.

Bell flourished his hand like a flower. Another leather shackle appeared in his palm, with no sleeve from which he could have retrieved it, not even the usual leather bag on his belt.

He pitched the shackle straight at her. The right leg and arm that had been free jerked to the side, so that her legs were arranged at twelve and three on the clock. The wrist that wasn’t bound to the collar was now shackled to her leg just short of her knee. Selena could slip from each of these bindings if she chose—with work, given that leather and latex didn’t lend themselves to slipping anywhere, especially on each other—but the audience wouldn’t know quite how flexible or determined she could be.

And Selena wasn’t actually trying to get free so much as challenge him by attempting to shake his magic off—like a goat trying to shake off a reticulated python. No mean feat, as his snake charmer could attest. Impossible, really.

This time without hesitation, Bell flung two more knives. They hit outside each of her elbows.

He flipped her around on the target to face him and the audience, proving that she wasn’t bound to anything but herself. The chorus of oohs and aahs from the crowd barely made it through the music.

Rather than one of the knives in his bandolier, he went for the etched Bowie knife in the sheath on his belt and held it up for the audience to admire. Selena’s eyes widened without guile—not the easiest thing for a demon to manage, but Selena had been passing for human for longer than her lover of choice had been alive, and before that, she’d possessed enough humans to learn how to pull it off.

The song determined the pace, and everyone loved a fast-paced danger show. He threw the Bowie knife directly at Selena’s pretty face, square between her black eyes.

The tip of the blade dented the skin, but it drew no blood.

Bell called the five knives out of the wooden target, one by one, until they hovered in front of Selena’s body. He quickly but casually removed the rest from their bandolier sheath and tossed them in front of him to hover in a staggered formation.

With a push to the air, the knives flew once again at Selena—face, neck, heart, gut, all potentially fatal blows alone, undeniably so together.

Selena fell back through the wooden target as though it weren’t there, although it caught each of the blades with a series of thunks. She sank into the ground with a burst of sawdust and a high-pitched cry.

The music abruptly stopped.

In the midst of such a quick-beat act, Bell took his time turning around, his bare feet quieter than the brush of his cotton pants in the sawdust.

Hold the pause. The audience looked around wildly then back to him, because he was pleasant to look at and he held attention without having to hold on to souls to do it.

Then he pointed into the bleachers. Music burst through the big top once more as the spotlight found Selena in the middle of the audience, twisted into full demon-possessed, spider-like contortion, her mouth a dark, crooked cavern as black behind the snaggle teeth as her eyes.

Her deafening shriek blended with the music and the startled screams and laughter of the audience as she scurried down the bleachers, still in her contorted state—nimbler than anyone had any right to be with their limbs in all the wrong places and angles, going down headfirst and backward. She leaped from the bottom bleacher over the ring partition, unraveling herself and stretching out her limbs to strike him with her claws like a lion.

The magical web of his circus trembled.

Bell almost didn’t catch Selena. If he hadn’t, she would have landed on all fours like a cat, but she would have reamed him after the performance. But he saw her hitting the ground and blinked himself back to the present, back to the ring and snatched her from the air in a Dirty Dancing lift. She launched from his shoulders in a double flip to land on her heels—not quite stilettos but still not the best shoes for uneven earth. Little could make Selena fall when she didn’t want to.

The web still shivered, the movement of someone with uncertain motives, certainly not the usual thought patterns of those who entered Arcanium—to enjoy a circus, to leer at the sun-glistening bodies of the more revealing of his cast, to terrify themselves in the unprepossessing funhouse. And from his cast, their efforts to entertain themselves and others, to serve the guests, to keep them politely distant or unprofessionally close. To make it through another day.

This wasn’t that.

This was nothing.

And nothing was not good. It was a void, a gap in his sight as prominent as a dark cloud in his eye, like watching someone walk across the edge of a forest at night. The average person would never see anything, but demon and jinn made no distinction between a new-moon night and a high-noon day, and Bell was attuned to anomaly.

While he and Selena sparred in a dance fight that showed off the full extent of her gymnastic contortion and his speed, style and timing to the musical transition of Beyond the Black’s Hysteria, Bell followed the invisible void moving through his circus.

The only reason he didn’t stop or send one or more of his demons or monsters to meet the shadow was that it didn’t seem malicious. It was at peace, calm, serene, its movement measured rather than furtive.

Locke had been more effective at concealing himself when he’d entered. Bell had only ever been able to feel the trail that his presence had left behind, never where he had been at any given moment. He’d cloaked himself in innocuous motives, predictable thoughts. Only the Spider’s and Neve’s memories had made his motivations better known, because he’d hidden himself less from them.

This was something that only cloaked itself from being recognized. Bell sensed curiosity, amusement, intrigue and trepidation like music from a staticky radio station. Multiple voices. A crowd where there should not have been one, because most of the guests still in Arcanium after eight came to the big top performances.

Bell conjured playing cards from his palms in a bird-flock rush. The ruby-backed cards fluttered around Selena, herding her to the sawing table and transparent coffin, where the playing cards forced her in.

He called the decks back to his hands for a number of shuffling tricks that impressed audiences as much as any magic he offered, which was why he appreciated real skills within his circus more than the non-illusions that he