Carnival of Hearts: BBW Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance by Scarlett Rhone Page A

off the chrome surface of the old caravan Mabel preferred, with its little porthole windows decorated by frilly lace curtains. Liam always pitched a tent, preferring to sleep on the earth. Sometimes he didn’t even bother with the tent, just rolled out a sleeping bag and drifted off on his back, with his face tilted to the stars. Her uncle Baptiste always parked his trailer near the front of the carnival because he felt it was his duty to maintain security, to be sure nobody tried to sneak in and vandalize anything.
    The roadies, Liam’s people, were all bears who slept together in one trailer by the big top. The twins, who performed the dance of serpents, were snake shifters and kept to themselves. Everyone, despite their great differences, worked together to keep the carnival prosperous and safe and together, and Kat thought that was the real power her father had. The ability to keep them all together. Traveling carnivals were rare these days, and yet they had never been turned away or broken up, in all the years that Kat had lived among them. But, for her, it was a double-edged sword. Nobody ever left the carnival either. And she was beginning to feel trapped.
    Other girls her age were in college, or at least living independently of their parents. They were creating lives, looking towards bright futures. Kat wondered if D’Orfeo expected her to stay and work at the carnival for her entire life. Mabel had educated her in her little chrome trailer, but Kat knew there was more to the world than the education that Mabel and the carnival could give her. She wanted to see it, to experience things that normal people did, but D’Orfeo wouldn’t have it.
    He wouldn’t let her go to school, he wouldn’t let her live somewhere else, he wouldn’t let her get a job of her own. It was too dangerous, he’d always say. He didn’t want to leave her alone while the carnival traveled, he’d say. This was her world, he’d say. But it wasn’t. It was his world. She sat at the top of the Ferris wheel, looking out at all the possibilities she couldn’t touch, and felt herself begin to resent him.
    She stood up in the Ferris wheel’s car, feeling it wobble slightly beneath her feet, to get a better view of the mountain in the distance. Moonlight struck its snowy peak in shades of silver, a pale cap above a drift of wispy clouds that faded across the embroidery of sprouting trees that blanketed the decline into the valley below. It seemed to echo the shape of the big top in the fore, and Kat wondered if everything, for the rest of her life, would just be a shadow or an echo or another kind of reminder that she could not escape the carnival.
    With a sigh, she swung her leg over the side of the car, reaching her bare toes towards the wheel’s frame to begin climbing back down. But movement by the tree line caught her eye, and she went still, squinting, trying to see more clearly through the darkening nighttime shadows. She saw movement. Several dark blots lumbering between the trees.
    And then she heard the unmistakable howl of a wolf rise up from the tree line, and all those dark blots came together and burst out of the forest, darting towards the perimeter of the carnival. Panic seized Kat’s heart and she started clambering down the Ferris wheel’s frame as quickly as she could, bellowing for Liam and Baptiste and her father.
    “Wolves!” she shrieked, and even as she screamed, another howl lifted to overpower her voice. She struggled not to fall off the Ferris wheel on her way down, but she saw lights flicker on around the carnival as its denizens came awake. And then Baptiste’s bullhorn blared; either he’d heard the howling or Kat herself screaming, but either way, the call to action sounded. She scrambled down and ultimately dropped, hitting the grass and rolling, but the Ferris wheel was just at the edge of the carnival’s lights and she could already see dark figures racing across the clearing towards her. She shoved