Ulysses moved only a little, but every eye focused on him when he did. “Harry formed this troupe,” he said quietly. “Many of us had no homes, no employment, nothing at all before he took us in. His hearth has always been open to anyone in need—anyone who is different, regardless of the nature of that difference.” He looked directly at Florizel. “Once you aspired to be a great thespian of the legitimate stage. But no one would employ you because of your appearance. Your talent meant nothing. You were lost in the throes of dipsomania when we found you, and Harry gave you a chance to play to the crowds.”
He turned to Regina, whose tall, impossibly thin body towered over everyone else. “Your brother cast you out when you refused to marry a man who would not touch you if not for your family wealth. You would not easily have found a partner outside, but here…”
He didn’t finish his sentence. Regina clasped her long, spidery fingers around the thick ones of her husband, Tor the strongman.
“There are countless other stories like these,” Ulysses said. “It is clear to me—”
“Harry asked for our opinions,” Giovanni said. “You don’t want us to stay, do you, Harry?”
“It… well, it is true that Mr. Munroe wishes us to leave and will pay us half the promised sum if we do so. But Miss Munroe—she is so very set on our performance. She even wishes to keep us on for a second one.”
“I still don’t see how it’s worth turning a man like Munroe against us,” Giovanni said. “If we have enough to see us through winter—”
“Only if nothing else happens,” Caitlin said. “If we have another fire, or any bad luck at all—”
“We’ll get along. Let’s pull out, Harry. We don’t need to borrow more trouble.”
“I also vote that we leave,” Tamar said, slipping up to the front of the gathering. “What do we owe to this… Athena Munroe? To any of their kind?”
“That’s right.”
“Tamar speaks truth. As long as he pays, he doesn’t matter what his sister—”
A deep, reverberating growl sliced through the strident words. Morgan fixed his potent stare on each of the speakers in turn. Every one of them stepped back into the safety of the crowd.
“Cowards,” he said. He didn’t have to raise his voice; every word rang like the clash of cymbals. “You pride yourselves on being different and better than townies. You say you are a family. Now one comes to you who needs what you can give, and you turn your back on her.”
A chorus of protests. “You are not making any sense, Morgan,” Giovanni said. “Athena Munroe is rich as Croesus. How can she need our help?”
“She is not like us,” Florizel said, daring to step forward again. “In what manner is she a freak, as Caitlin so kindly refers to us? She is a cripple, that is all.”
Morgan snarled. Florizel’s face lost what little color it had.
“A cripple,” Morgan said. “An outsider among her own kind, who helps strangers without asking anything in return. She saw me Change today, and she was not afraid. And she did not change her mind about us.”
Caitlin stood at Morgan’s shoulder. “What Morgan says is true. She may be a towny, but she knows what it’s like to suffer.”
“We gave our word to perform for her orphans,” Morgan said. “I will go to Munroe. I’ll tell him that I will leave Denver if he allows the performance.”
“You’ll do that just for this lady and her orphans?”
Florizel asked. “Have you been enjoying the lady’s favors—what favors she has to bestow—and that is why her brother wants us gone?”
Caitlin had seldom seen Morgan make the actual Change into the “Wolf-Man,” the creature he became in the sideshow. Now he began to transform, his body half-wreathed in black mist, fine dark hair flowing over his hands and feet and at the neckline of his shirt. His face remained almost untouched, but it was undeniably lupine. And deadly.
Harry intervened. “Morgan’s honor and his word have been good from the first moment we met him,” he said. “I trust his instincts, and Caitlin’s. I think… I think they are right.” He mopped at his face with a handkerchief. “I believe we should stay for the performance, and then leave.”