Spectacle

“We can’t let everyone starve to death either.”

“I know.” I cleared my throat and took the pen from my clipboard again. “What was the bestiary’s head count?”

“Four hundred sixty.”

“Are we all set for takedown?”

“As soon as the gates close.”

“Good.” I turned to head to the hybrids’ tent, but Gallagher took my hand before I made it two steps.

“Delilah.” He tugged me closer, and when I looked up at him, I found his eyes shrouded by the shadow of his hat bill, in the light falling from overhead. “My oath to protect you includes protecting you from starvation. And from yourself. Buying the incubus nearly bankrupted us.”

“I couldn’t just leave him there—”

“But now we’re rationing food. Something has to give.”

I nodded. I knew that. “I have to get a head count from the big top. I’ll think of something. I swear.”

Gallagher frowned at my choice of words. Swearing meant something different to him than it did to the rest of the world because the fae can’t go back on their word.

Nor can they lie.

Ever.

* * *

At eleven fifty, I stepped inside the massive striped tent and watched the big-top finale from the west entrance. Though I saw the show nearly every night, I was still awed by the strength and ingenuity of the performers. By their grace and beauty. By the pride they took in their performances, now that the show was truly theirs.

In the ring—we only assembled one of them, now that our show was smaller—Zyanya and her brother, Payat, had already completed their live shift into cheetah form. As I watched, Ignis, the draco, breathed fire over the first of two steel rings suspended from a sturdy steel frame, and the audience oohed as the ring burst into flames.

Ignis was a three-foot-long winged serpent whose fire-breathing range had been surgically reduced from over seven feet to a mere eighteen inches years before old man Metzger had bought me for his menagerie. Even with his surgical handicap, Ignis represented the biggest risk we were willing to take in the ring because he was difficult to communicate with and impossible to retrain without using the abusive tactics his previous trainers had employed.

Once Ignis had swooped to light the second steel ring, heralded by a crescendo in the soaring big-top sound track, Zyanya and Payat leapt through the blazing hoops in sync, still in cheetah form, and landed gracefully on the backs of a matching set of thickly muscled centaurs—part Belgian horse, part man.

Several minutes later, the orchestral sound track crescendoed with a crash of cymbals signaling the beginning of the finale. Eryx, the minotaur, took thundering steps toward the center of the ring, holding his thick arms out in the most graceful gesture we had managed to teach the former beast of burden. From their positions all around the huge ring, hybrid acrobats flipped and cartwheeled toward him. While I watched, as awed then as I’d been on the first night of their revamped performance, the acrobats climbed the minotaur like a tree, then each other like its branches until they stood on each others’ arms and legs and shoulders. Eryx became the base of a diamond-shaped formation of hybrid and shifter acrobats stacked to within mere feet of the aviary net.

As the minotaur slowly turned, showing off the finale for the 360-degree audience around the ring, two harpies in glittering red costumes soared around the act, dropping steel rings from overhead. They landed around outstretched arms and legs, revolving like hula hoops. From one side of the ring, Zyanya’s two young cubs pushed a large heavy ball toward the center with their small feline muzzles. When they had it in place, Eryx stepped up onto the ball, with one foot, then the other, lifting his graceful load as if it weighed no more than a bag of his own feed.

Through it all, Ignis swooped and glided through the air in and around the acrobats’ limbs, dodging spinning rings and spitting small jets of fire. The music soared and the crowd stood on collapsible risers, stomping and clapping for a show they would credit to a huge staff of human handlers and trainers.

For nearly a minute, the performers remained frozen in their ending pose, breathing hard, basking in applause from spectators who would have run screaming if they’d known the truth about what they’d just seen.

Then the music faded and smoke machines fired a gray mist into the ring. Under the cover of smoke, the performers dismounted and jogged from the ring through a chain-link tunnel toward the back of the tent, while the audience climbed down from the bleachers and headed for marked exits in pairs and small clusters. Children clutched their parents’ hands, chattering about the massive minotaur and the graceful leopard shifter. Adults recounted their favorite parts, from the berserker in bear form throwing glittering rings for the harpies to catch in their beaks, to the wolf and the cheetahs transforming from man into animal right in front of them.

I stood at my post, thanking them all for coming, directing them toward the main exit, past the closed ticket booth. I shook hands with fathers and high-fived young boys wearing souvenir Metzger’s hats with minotaur horns sticking up from the sides and little girls who’d bought headbands with cat ears or fake teeth with wolf or cheetah incisors poking into their lower lips.

At exactly midnight, as I was ushering the crowd from the big top, Abraxas—one of our three human employees—turned off the calliope music and played a light instrumental intended to signal the night’s end. The intercom crackled, then Lenore’s smooth, siren voice spoke over the music, urging the audience members to make their way to the exit, then proceed directly to their cars.

I’d actually taken several steps in the same direction before I remembered—as I struggled to do every night—that Lenore was responsible for my sudden compulsion to leave the carnival and drive straight home. Even though I no longer had a car. Or a home outside the menagerie and the camper I shared with Gallagher.

Abraxas and Alyrose, our human costume mistress, still had to wear earplugs during the nightly farewell, but Lenore’s human husband, Kevin, was used to it.

Caught in the siren’s pull, the spectators headed for the exit as one, and as I watched, resisting that draw myself, an odd movement caught my eye. One tall man in the crowd had his hand over his ear, not cupped like he was covering it, but as if...he’d just put in an earplug. The light was too dim for me to see for sure, but the possibility set me on edge.

Everyone else was with a friend or a date or family, yet this man walked alone, amid the jostle and flow of the crowd. Watching. When his gaze met mine, he smiled, but the expression seemed localized to his lips, one of which was bisected by a thick line of scar tissue that hooked down and over the edge of his chin.

He looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him, and the mental disconnect hovered on the edge of my thoughts like an itch that couldn’t be reached.

When the crowd had gone and the smoke had cleared, Abraxas turned off the sound system. Gallagher locked the gates. All over the menagerie, creatures with scales and horns and tails shed their chains and emerged from their cages like monstrous butterflies from steel cocoons. They shook off the pretense of captivity and stretched muscles stiff from hours in confined spaces.

It was my favorite part of the evening.

Together, we closed things down and set up for the next day, our last night in this small southern town. While I swept the bleachers in the big top, I listened to Zyanya and Payat laughing as they broke down and stored the equipment in the ring. Zyanya’s toddlers ran circles around their mother and uncle, and made the occasional mad dash into the stands, playing as children should. As they’d never been allowed to do before the coup.

I couldn’t help smiling as I watched them. Even if we accomplished nothing else—even if we couldn’t rescue a single other cryptid from captivity—we had done at least this little bit of good.

Afterward, I joined Gallagher as he fed the last of the beasts and nonhuman hybrids—the menagerie residents we couldn’t simply let out of their cages, because of safety concerns.

As he bent to pluck a rabbit from a box of small rodents we’d bought at the local pet store that morning, I remembered the first time I’d ever seen him, standing beside a cage in the bestiary. Back before I knew what he was. Before either of us knew what I was.

Before he cast off his human disguise and the safety it brought in order to protect me.

Redcaps are fae soldiers from their birthing cries to their dying breath, but the few who survived their brutal civil war each swore to find and serve a noble cause. To fight a battle worthy of the blood they must spill to survive.

Gallagher chose to serve and protect me, an arrangement I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with, because when fate saddled me with an inner beast driven to avenge injustice and corruption, it failed to give me a way to defend myself from those very things.

I chose to believe that the universe sent me Gallagher to make up for what it took from me. My friends. My family. My property. My freedom.

Gallagher’s oath to protect me at any cost was the driving force in his life. His oath was unbreakable. His word was his honor.

For the rest of my life, he would literally rip my enemies limb from limb to keep me safe.

Sometimes that knowledge felt reassuring. Sometimes it felt overwhelming. Sometimes it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

Those were the days when I truly understood how drastically my life had changed since my days as a bank teller.

“Did you see the man with the scar?” I asked, as Gallagher opened the feeding hatch on one side of the wendigo’s cage and tossed a live rabbit inside.

“No. Why?” Using the two-foot-long steel-clawed grabber, he plucked the last rabbit from the box.

“I think I saw him put plugs in his ears during Lenore’s farewell message. And he was here alone. No one goes to the menagerie alone.” I opened the feeding hatch on the adlet’s cage and Gallagher shoved the rabbit inside. The adlet—a wolf man stuck in a perpetual in-between state—ripped it nearly in half before it even hit the floor of the pen.

“You think he suspected something?”

“Maybe. But obviously we haven’t heard any police sirens. I’m probably imagining it.” I’d been living under a cloud of paranoia since the moment we’d locked Rudolph Metzger in one of his own cages.

“Maybe not.” Gallagher shrugged. “The last time I had a feeling about one of our patrons was when you visited the menagerie, and that changed everything. For all of us. Tell me about this man,” he said as he picked up the empty rabbit box. “What did his scar look like?”

“It ran through his lip and over the edge of his chin, and—”

Gallagher stopped walking so abruptly that I almost ran into him. His sudden tension made my pulse trip faster. “Which side of his chin?”

“The left.”

He dropped the empty box, alarm darkening his eyes. “That’s Willem Vandekamp.”

“Vandekamp. Why do I know that name?” Why was his face familiar? If I’d seen him before, how could I possibly have forgotten that scar?

“He owns the Savage Spectacle.” At my blank look, Gallagher explained, his words rushed and urgent. “It’s a private cryptid collection catering to the extremely wealthy. But he also has a specialized tactical team. Vandekamp is who the police bring in when they need to capture a cryptid they’re not equipped to handle. If he’s here, he knows. And he’s not alone. This is over.”

Fear raced down my spine like lightning along a metal rod. “This? Over?”

Gallagher dug a set of keys from his pocket and pressed them into my palm. “Go straight to the fairground’s main office and play the alarm tone over the intercom, then run back to our camper. We have to go.”

A chill raced the length of my body. Everyone knew that if they heard an unbroken alarm tone they were to get in their designated vehicles and run. But our emergency procedure was so new we hadn’t even practiced it yet.

Despite the risks, we hadn’t really thought we’d need it.

“Go, Delilah. I’ll get all the cash from the silver wagon, then meet you at the camper.”

I nodded, but before I could take two steps, a man in a protective vest stepped out of the shadows, aiming a stun gun at Gallagher’s chest. “Don’t move.” He had a regular handgun on his waistband, the snap on the holster already open. The name Brock was embroidered in shiny silver thread on the left side of his vest. Beneath that were the initials SS, stylized and intertwined, as if they belonged on an expensive hand towel or pillow case.

I eyed the soldier, my pulse racing.

“Put your hands up,” Brock ordered. “Or I will taze you.” He thought we were human.

Gallagher didn’t move, but I could feel the tension emanating from him. Every muscle in his body was taut, ready to explode into motion. “Vandekamp deals in exotic fetishes. He’ll rent them out by the hour,” Gallagher said, trying to convince me of what needed to be done while he eyed the private soldier. “They’ll die in captivity, Delilah. And in great pain.”

Chains. Cages. Fists. Whips. Blood.

My heart ached at the memories. The terror. My lungs refused to expand. If Vandekamp knew about the coup, others knew, too. Gallagher was right. The menagerie was finished.

We had to sound the alarm and give people the chance to escape.

“Kill him.” My words carried no sound, but Gallagher read them on my lips. He turned, impossibly fast, and ripped the stun gun from the soldier’s hand. It broke apart in his grip like a child’s toy.

Brock grunted and reached for his gun, his movements clumsy with shock. Gallagher grabbed his head in both hands and gave it a vicious twist.

I heard a distinct crack. The man’s arms fell to his side, but to my surprise, his head remained attached to his body. Gallagher hadn’t spilled a single drop of blood, even though he needed it to survive.

“You’re not going to...?” I gestured to his faded red cap as the body fell to the ground at his feet.

“No time. We have to—”

Something whistled softly through the air, and Gallagher stumbled. He slapped one hand to his thick thigh and pulled out a dart attached to a tiny vial that had already nearly emptied into his flesh. He growled as he stepped in front of me, shielding me, and turned toward the direction the dart had come from. “Get down.”

As I knelt behind him, I heard another soft whistle. He flinched, then fell onto his knees. “Gallagher!” My pulse racing, I pulled a second dart from his leg and stared into the dark, trying to spot the threat.

“Get the gun.” Gallagher’s voice was much too soft. His eyes were losing focus.

I spun toward Brock’s corpse and was reaching for the pistol still in his holster when Gallagher fell to the ground with a heavy thud.

“No!” The gun forgotten, I dropped onto my knees to put one hand on his chest. It rose, then fell. He was completely unconscious, his hat still firmly seated on his head.

“Delilah Marlow.”

Fear electrified every nerve ending in my body as I twisted to see the man with the scar staring down at me, his tranquilizer rifle aimed at my chest. I shoved my terror down to feed the rage burning out of control in my gut. “You have three seconds to get the hell out of my menagerie before I scramble your brain.”

His brows rose in an insulting blend of fascination and amusement. “Do your worst.”

My worst was already on its way.

Deep inside me, the furiae stretched as she woke up, intent on avenging Gallagher, and as her righteous anger rapidly filled me, my nails hardened and began to lengthen into needlelike points.

Vandekamp’s gaze flicked to my hands, but his expression did not change.

I stood, and my vision zoomed into an extraordinary clarity and depth. My hair began to rise on its own, defying gravity as my rage mounted.

Vandekamp held his ground three feet away. He twisted a small knob on his rifle and aimed it at my thigh.

I lunged for him, my thin black claws grasping for his head. He pulled the trigger, and pain bit into my thigh. I gasped and stumbled sideways, then tripped over Gallagher’s thick leg. The world rushed toward me. My shoulder slammed into the dirt path.

Gallagher lay a foot away, his eyes closed.

The dart burned fiercely in my thigh, and my vision blurred. My arms were too heavy to lift. I couldn’t move my legs.

From somewhere in the fairgrounds, a scream rang out, then was suddenly silenced.

“Don’t do this,” I begged as a second scream split the night. But my voice was too soft. The world was starting to lose focus.

Vandekamp put his boot on my shoulder and pushed me onto my back. He knelt next to me, his rifle hanging from one shoulder, and stared into my eyes, apparently fascinated by the black-veined orbs they had become when the furiae awoke. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Delilah.” He brushed hair back from my face and tucked it behind my ear. “My name is Willem Vandekamp.”

I blinked, and his face blurred as darkness engulfed me.

“You belong to me now.”

Delilah

The squeal of metal ripped through my head like a chain saw through wood, and my eyes flew open. Bright, warm light turned the throbbing behind my eyes into a sharp pain that pulsed with my heartbeat, and at first I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. My world seemed to be composed entirely of shiny steel slats and canvas.

My tongue felt like it was dried to the roof of my mouth, and my throat hurt when I swallowed. When I tried to sit up, I discovered my wrists were bound at my back with something that didn’t rattle or clank like metal handcuffs, and they must have been bound for a while, because I couldn’t feel my fingers. I was lying on my stomach in a long, subdivided steel cage, draped with a sheet of canvas thin enough to let light through. I blinked, trying to remember how I wound up shackled and caged, and...

Vandekamp.

With his name came the memory of his scarred face staring down at me. The iron weight of fear threatened to press all the air from my chest as understanding crashed over me.

The menagerie had been retaken.

I was a prisoner. Again.

For weeks, I’d battled nightmares about being recaptured. Recaged. But my dreams were pale shadows of the horrifying reality.

My lungs refused to expand. I gasped, trying to catch my breath as the steel slats seemed to be closing in on me. I can’t do this again. I couldn’t live in a cage and eat scraps. I couldn’t wear rags and take orders. I couldn’t “perform” in another menagerie, watching people I cared about suffer just to draw out my beast and its violent brand of justice.

Not again.

Motion to my left drew my eye, and I twisted on the cold steel floor to see Mirela lying in the next cell, unbound and evidently unconscious, still dressed in her fortune-teller costume. But I couldn’t see into the cells beyond hers from my prone position.

Grunting with the effort, I tucked my legs beneath my stomach and pulled myself upright without the use of my hands. On my knees, I could see down the length of the steel cage into at least a dozen cells separated by steel-slat walls. I was in the very last one. And finally I understood.

We were in a cattle car—a long horse trailer modified to hold human-sized cryptids. Each pen had its own roll-up door and the whole thing was much cleaner and newer than anything we’d had at Metzger’s. Much colder.

And much more expensive.

Mirela’s sisters lay unmoving in the two narrow cells after hers, and beyond those were several more, each occupied by one of my fellow captives.

The light shining through the canvas strapped in place over the cattle car was too warm in tone to be anything but sunlight, and the canvas itself gave me no hint of our location. I closed my eyes and listened, trying to slow my racing heart.

I heard the rattle of a cage door rolling up on another cattle car and male voices, speaking too softly for me to understand. The only familiar sound was the breathing of the other captives.

“Where are we?” Lala whispered, and I turned to see her pushing herself upright in the middle of her cell. She blinked at me through eyes ringed in dark circles and drew her denim-clad knees to her chest.

“I don’t—”

Heavy footsteps clomped toward us, and two shadowy silhouettes appeared through the thin canvas, starkly backlit, growing larger as they got closer. The shapes were male and bulky from whatever equipment they wore, and when one of them came to disconnect the canvas from the two rear corners of my cell, I could tell from his outline that he had a gun and some kind of baton.

When the canvas was unhooked, the men pulled it from the cattle car with practiced motions, then folded it with the same efficiency. Both men wore the Savage Spectacle’s black tactical gear, including visored helmets, and each wore a pistol and a stun gun holstered on opposite sides of their waists. They worked in silence, and after an initial assessing glance into the trailer, they didn’t leer, stare, laugh or point.

The soldiers’ professional bearing was so unlike that of Metzger’s rough-edged roustabouts and handlers that Lala and I seemed more interested in them than they were in us.

From my left, I heard and felt movement as the rest of the captives began to wake up, but I couldn’t tear my searching gaze from the world outside the cattle car. Where were the rides and the booths? Where were the campers, trucks and trailers? Where was the fairground?

I saw nothing but a gray building and, behind that, a thick patch of forest.

“Where are we?” Lala asked again. “What’s happening?”

I hardly even heard her questions over the chattering of my teeth, a nervous reaction I’d had since I was a kid. My mouth was dry and my hands were shaking in my bindings, which chafed my already-raw wrists.

“We’ve been captured, obviously,” Zarah said from the other end of the trailer, where she was confined in the pen next to Trista, her twin and fellow succubus.

“But where’s the menagerie?”

“Probably right where we left it,” Mirela said to her sister, while she watched the black-clad men stack the folded canvas on top of at least two others. “It looks like we’ve been seized. They must know the old man is dead.”

But how? Renata and Raul had done flawless work with Metzger’s relatives. We’d hoped to get at least a year out of the ruse, which should have given us plenty of time to figure out how to get everyone south of the border.

“I think we’re being sold,” Lenore said, and for once, I didn’t fight the calming pull of her voice. Instead, I let the sound relax my tense muscles and slow my racing heart, and finally my teeth stopped chattering. Clarity returned to my vision.

Our cattle trailer was parked in front of a squat gray brick building punctuated by a series of tall, narrow windows. Its resemblance to a prison was no doubt intentional. Two men stood guard at either side of the building’s entrance, wearing padded bite suits similar to what K9 trainers used to condition attack dogs. Their utility belts each held a Taser and a baton, but no guns.

The trees visible behind and above the building were taller than they typically grew in Oklahoma, my home state, and the flora was greener and more lush.

“We’re all being sold?” Mahsa asked, and when I turned to follow the leopard shifter’s gaze, relief flooded me. Two more cattle cars stood about fifty feet away, on the other side of the parking lot, but their occupants were still unconscious, and I wouldn’t be able to identify them until they sat up.

“Mirela,” I whispered as I watched the two tactical team members head for the building entrance. “Do you see Gallagher?”

She studied the other trailers, then shook her head. “But they might have put him in that last one, with Eryx and the centaurs. He’s heavy enough.”

I squinted, but the only thing I could tell about the third trailer, viewed through the one in the middle, was that its cells were larger and lower to the ground, and on the scale of horses and cows. More like an actual cattle car.

Even if all three of the trailers were full, they couldn’t possibly hold even half the cryptids from Metzger’s. Where were all the rest?

“Hey!” Lala shouted, and we both turned to her in surprise as one of the succubi tried to shush her. “Where the hell are we? Who are you people?”

“Lala!” Mirela scolded her softly, as the men continued to ignore us. “Don’t make trouble.”

I wasn’t sure whether to applaud the young oracle or cry for us all. She’d grown bold and confident after months of relative freedom, and she seemed much less willing than the others to fall back into the trembling and quiet comportment of a captive.

Before the two soldiers made it to the building, the door opened and Willem Vandekamp stepped out. All four men—two in tactical gear, two in puffy, full-body bite suits—snapped to attention as he marched past them, with another man on his heels, and I could only stare, trying to figure out what his presence meant.

Was this his building? Was Vandekamp storing us until...what? An auction? A bulk sale? Seizure by the government?

Vandekamp took up a position between our cattle car and the next and one of his men handed him a clipboard. “Okay, let’s get them stored. Start over there.” He pointed in our direction. “Individual cells. Give them uniforms, then start processing.”

Murmurs rose the length of the trailer as the other ladies tried to figure out where we were and who the man obviously in charge was.

“The uniforms say ‘SS,’” Lenore whispered, for those who couldn’t read.

“The Savage Spectacle.” I spoke just loudly enough for Mirela to hear, knowing she’d pass the information down. “That’s Willem Vandekamp. The owner.” But the gray brick building in front of us didn’t look like someplace catering to wealthy, high-profile clients.

Most of the occupants of the next trailer had woken up, and I was relieved to see both cheetah shifters, Gael the berserker, and Drusus the incubus among its occupants. But I wasn’t sure I should be relieved to find them confined alongside us.

“Let me know when it’s done.” Vandekamp let his assessing gaze wander over all three trailers, then he gave his clipboard to a man wearing a thick pair of brown cargo pants and a lightweight short-sleeved button-down shirt with a stylized set of overlapping S’s embroidered on his front left pocket. He carried a tranquilizer rifle just like the one Vandekamp had shot me with.

When his boss had gone back inside, the man with the clipboard turned to the other soldiers, who gathered around for their instructions. “Let’s get this done right, boys. No mistakes. Start at the front and work your way back.”

The other men nodded, then headed our way, and I didn’t realize I was backing away from them until my bound hands hit the other end of my pen.

“I am Adrian Woodrow,” the man with the clipboard said, in a loud, clear voice. “I am the gamekeeper here at the Savage Spectacle, which means I’m in charge of your daily lives.”

Here at the Savage Spectacle? My stomach began to twist. The Spectacle was our final destination. Vandekamp wouldn’t have to rent off-season menagerie acts anymore because he’d bought three trailers full of us.

“The Savage Spectacle does not travel, and it is not a zoo. We are a licensed private collection of exotic wildlife, catering exclusively to the cryptid-themed fetishes and fantasies of a select list of private clients.”

“What’s a fetish?” Lala whispered, her hands trembling as they gripped the side of her pen.

Trista snorted softly, and since my answer would only have further scared Lala, I kept it to myself.

“You’re all about to be sorted into specific categories depending on your species and your position here at the Spectacle. You’ll be issued clothing and given a complete physical exam to make sure you’re bringing nothing infectious or transmissible into our community. It is in your best interest to cooperate fully. Consequences here at the Spectacle are swift and severe. Tolerances are nil. Orders will not be repeated.”

The men reporting to Woodrow slid open the first cell in the cattle car, and the men in padded suits pulled Zarah out, while the one of the ones in tactical gear aimed his tranquilizer rifle at her. Zarah still wore only a red sequined bralette and matching bikini because the succubi worked—and lived—in as little clothing as possible. Her bright costume looked sad and absurd, removed from the carnival atmosphere, but none of the men even seemed to notice. They simply hauled her into the building by both arms.

While they were inside, another team of four came for her sister, Trista, and over the next hour, my stunned, scared friends were removed from their pens one at a time and led into the building. The men wasted no energy and overlooked no precaution. They answered no questions, and eventually the women stopped asking.

I took in every detail I could, trying to figure out how far we’d been shipped while we were unconscious, but the only clue I had, other than lush flora that wouldn’t grow in Oklahoma or West Texas, was my hunger, extreme thirst and severely dry mouth. We’d driven hours, at least, but the sun had yet to set.

Or maybe it had yet to set again.

After the shifters, the succubi and the sirens were marched out of sight, a team of men opened the door to Rommily’s pen. She sat at the back of her cell with her eyes closed, slowly shaking her head in denial of whatever horrific vision was playing behind her eyelids. When they told her to come out of the pen, she didn’t respond. She probably couldn’t even hear them.