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    Carniepunk: A Duet with Darkness
    Carniepunk: A Duet with Darkness
    Carniepunk: A Duet with Darkness
    Ebook49 pages53 minutes

    Carniepunk: A Duet with Darkness

    By Allison Pang

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    About this ebook

    Don’t miss this urban fantasy short story featuring Abby Sinclair in the spellbinding Carniepunk anthology collection, from bestselling author Allison Pang!

    Having just quit Julliard, disillusioned fiddler Melanie St. James finds herself as part of a group of traveling musicians en route to an OtherFolk carnival. Eager to break the chains of a lifetime of conformity, Melanie throws caution to the wind and enters a reckless bargain, plying her musical skills for the chance to win a violin that can open Doors to the CrossRoads. But the competition turns out to be far more than she expected. When the carnival barker makes her an offer she can’t refuse, Melanie is forced to play for the Devil or risk trading her soul for the one thing she holds dearer than life itself.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPocket Star
    Release dateSep 8, 2014
    ISBN9781476793511
    Author

    Allison Pang

    Allison Pang is the author of the urban fantasy Abby Sinclair series, as well as the writer for the webcomic Fox & Willow. She likes LEGOS, elves, LEGO elves…and bacon. She spends her days in Northern Virginia working as a cube grunt and her nights waiting on her kids and cats, punctuated by the occasional husbandly serenade. Sometimes she even manages to write. Mostly she just makes it up as she goes.

    Read more from Allison Pang

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    • 2/5
      Only made it about halfway. Main female character was too unlikable to continue.

    Book preview

    Carniepunk - Allison Pang

    flower

    A Duet with Darkness

    An Abby Sinclair Short Story

    Allison Pang

    The spotlights shine upon my face, but I barely notice, caught up in the way my fingers rock over the strings, my thoughts nothing more than a blur of white as the music converges into a single strand of color. As always, something dances below my consciousness, a perception that no matter how good I am, no matter how hard I try, there is more to come if I only dare reach for it.

    I crack an eye open during a slight pause in the beat, my vision drawn to the man in the front row. Sitting next to my mother, her white coat a shining pearl of righteousness. But who the man is, I’m not sure.

    He stares right up at me from the center front, his spiky hair glowing silver and orange, one brow arched as my fingers caress the strings.

    You can do better than that, those glittering eyes say. Stop toying with me.

    A jolt thrums through my arms at his smugness. His rebellion burrows into my bones until all I want is to leap from the stage and out the door. To run.

    To fly.

    But instead, I finish my set, my mother’s cold, fish-belly gaze sliding over me. Never good enough for her.

    Inside my skin, an inferno burns.

    When I exit the stage that night, I do so without the intention of ever coming back. I leave the girl I was by the roadside, sloughing off her life, her very skin. I slither out of her like a dying snake, only to emerge into a world I somehow always belonged to.

    And I know about them. This strange affliction that allows me to see music, to lock it into a tawdry rainbow of pure, aching color—it allows me to see them as well. The very words they speak, those wonderful syllables—they drip from their mouths and ring through my bones. Their presence assaults me, teases me, taunts me with what I can never have.

    Nobu says most mortals have to be awakened to the presence of the OtherFolk. To recognize the existence of the CrossRoads.

    But not me.

    —

    THE VAN STINKS of fried chicken and musty clothes. Bong water. Stale sex. Dried sweat. A shag carpet that probably hasn’t been cleaned in decades. Elizabeth tries to air it out from time to time, but the Thai sticks she lights do little more than give everything a vague patchouli odor. Like spritzing a pig with Chanel, I guess. The flavor of the road and a handful of bodies slumbering in close quarters has a way of clinging to the skin.

    Nobu and I share a joint in the back, surrounded by a Stonehenge of amps and monitors. In the front, Elizabeth’s head bobs up and down in Brystion’s lap. It’s all panting breath and wet sucking sounds as the incubus’s fingers fist through the golden blond curls at the nape of her neck in a desperate clawing motion.

    Nobu snorts and takes a final puff before flicking the roach into a plastic bag. A long, masculine groan echoes from the driver’s side and I roll my eyes, inclining my head

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