Free Wicked as They Come by Delilah S. Dawson

out in a deadly warning.
    “Yes. If I don’t want to live here and put on a goofy turban and read palms?”
    “Having second thoughts, love?”
    Hands on hips, he considered his boots. I chose the strongest-looking chair and sat, a puff of dust rising around me.
    “If you don’t want what I offer—what you’ve already agreed to—you’ve got two choices. Strike out on your own and be eaten by the woodland creatures, leaving behind an awfully pretty skeleton. Or I can take you to the next city and turn you over to the Coppers while you’re alive.”
    “And that’s a bad thing, right?”
    “How to explain it?” He sat down on the ruined chaise and leaned over a low, oval table. With one gloved fingertip, he drew a rabbit in the dust. “This world of ours, it runs on blood. There used to be balance, but now there are too many of us. Something changed, and all of the animals turned on one another until every creature running wild had fangs.” He drew fangs on the rabbit and then snapped, and there were suddenly dozens of tiny, fanged rabbits in the dust.
    He had made dust bunnies. I grinned. But he was serious.
    “So the Pinkies took every normal animal they could catch and put them behind high fences, where nothing could turn them. Cities were fortified, with mazes of walls around their precious cattle and hogs and sheep. Now the city folk spend every second with clothing tightly laced around throats and wrists to keep from rousing the Bludmen they can’t avoid and high boots to crush the bludrats that they can never quite eradicate.”
    “That sounds horrible,” I said.
    “I happen to agree,” he said with a wry smile. “But a few hundred years ago, one of the strongest cities elected a group to maintain the balance between blood drinkers and supposed innocents. The Copper Equilibrium Consortium, they called it. Because, of course, blood tastes of copper and is worth money, which is made of copper. So clever. And it spread from city to city until the Coppers took complete power. They make rules. They punish rule breakers. And they make sure that the blood drinkers, whether animals or Bludmen, never gain control. Of anything.”
    “So the Bludmen in the city—are they like normal people?”
    He snorted. “What’s normal, love? They run businessesand accept vials of blood as payment, as we do. But they’re tamed, cowed, perverted, as I see it. The Pinkies love it, because blood is, after all, a renewable resource. But any Bludman found drinking directly from a Pinky is immediately destroyed.”
    I could hear the disgust in his tone. He leaned over and wrote some strange figures in the dust between the bunnies, and when he snapped, a moth popped into existence and fluttered around my head.
    “Domesticated, as colorful and benign as parrots,” he muttered.
    “What about you?”
    “What about me?”
    “You’re not tame?”
    “Never,” he said fiercely. “I’m a gypsy. A rogue. Wicked as they come. The caravan has a special certificate that allows us to travel as we wish and stop outside of cities and villages. I make my own rules, save one: None of my people can feed on Pinkies. Customers use money or vials of blood to buy their tickets, and in return, they get to rub elbows with monsters and freaks, walk the fine line of danger absent in their gilded cage. We give them excitement; they give us the food we crave.”
    He chuckled, low and bitter. “Sometimes I think we’re just mutual parasites, feeding on each other in an endless, vicious, flawed cycle. There’s a little too much magic in this world, maybe. But shows like ours are one of the last reminders of a life free from control.”
    Funny. The life he was offering me, the one I resisted so strongly, was based on freedom. We both wanted the same thing, yet he didn’t seem to understand that love was itself a cage, and I wasn’t ready to hear that gildeddoor snap shut. I reached out a hand, tentative, and barely brushed his arm. He smiled