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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 (#u80d6457e-5754-592d-9551-55b238c164dc)
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.
One of the men in bite suits reached into the pen and grabbed Rommily’s ankle with his bare hand. Her eyelids flew open to reveal featureless white orbs—the signature trait of an oracle in the grip of a premonition.
“Crushed by the weight of your own hubris,” Rommily said, each word running into the next as they fell from her mouth. “Broken rib. Punctured lung. Massive internal bleeding.”
Startled, the guard let go of Rommily and turned to his coworkers—the first lapse of judgment I’d seen from any of them so far. “What the hell is she saying?”
“That’s how you’re going to die.” Mirela’s voice was low-pitched and eerily steady, like the undisturbed surface of a deep lake. “When is anyone’s guess.”
“Is she serious?” the handler demanded from coworkers, who had no answer for him.
“Just grab her, Bowman,” the man in tactical gear snapped.
“Bowman...” Rommily repeated, blinking shiny white eyes at him. “Grab her...”
Bowman gritted his teeth and seized the oracle’s ankle again, then hauled her roughly toward the opening of the pen. Rommily’s head smacked the floor of her cell, and I flinched as her normal irises returned. Pain had driven her out of her vision.
Lala gripped the door of her cell. “Please be careful. She’s not dangerous. She’s just confused.”
The handlers led Rommily into the building with no particular care for how roughly they handled her. Yet neither of them touched her bare flesh again.
After the oracles had gone, I was alone in our trailer, and when the handlers unlocked my metal cell, I lowered myself to the ground before they could even reach for me. I didn’t fight when they each took one of my arms, and I held my head high as they marched me into the building, then down a hallway lined with steel doors. My dignity and the clothes I wore were all I had left in the world, and if being sold to the menagerie had taught me anything, it was that those would soon be taken away too.
Bowman opened a door halfway down on the left side of the hall and shoved me into a six-by-eight-foot gray brick room with a tall, narrow window at one end. There was a rolled-up blanket on the floor, next to a stainless-steel toilet/sink combo and a single roll of thin toilet paper.
Bowman cut the plastic binding from my wrists, then closed the door at my back. A soft beep told me it had locked automatically. The door had a square Plexiglas window at eye height and a rectangular cutout at the very bottom that was just the right size for a food tray.
As soon as the men were gone, I rubbed my sore wrists, then drank several handfuls of water from the sink, but I made myself stop when my stomach began to churn. Recovery from dehydration must be slow and steady. Then I used the toilet, my attention trained on the window in my door, to make sure no one was watching.
