скачать книгу бесплатно
I followed her gaze to the left, where three stacks of blue vinyl-covered gymnastics mats were lined up against the interior wall, with folded blankets neatly piled on top.
“You’re right. This is a dormitory.” My focus skipped from face to frightened face. “Ladies, I think we’re home.”
Lenore slumped against the wall. “Well, it’s bigger than a cage. And at least we’re together.”
I nodded because I didn’t want to poison her optimism, but I felt none of it. Vandekamp hadn’t rescued us from the misery of a new menagerie; he’d delivered us into a whole new brand of captivity. A fresh hell.
“So, has anyone tested the collars, beyond the one-finger booby trap?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Zyanya tapped the concrete floor with one long, thick claw—a remnant of the feline form that, along with her eyes and incisors, remained even when she took on human form. “I tried to shift earlier, but the second I thought about taking on fur, my whole body froze from my chin down. I couldn’t move at all.” She trailed the point of one nail over the front of her collar. “How does this thing work?”
“I think it recognizes increased levels of adrenaline and feline hormones. Basically, it senses what you’re going to do before you can do it, and it sends electric impulses into your spine, temporarily paralyzing you.” I turned to Lenore. “What about you? Have you tried to sing?”
“No, but I tried to inject a suggestion into my tone of voice earlier. It was an accident. I was trying to help calm Rommily, and I didn’t realize what I’d done until I was flat on my back, immobilized.”
“It doesn’t prevent visions,” Lala said with a shrug. “I guess those aren’t much of a threat.”
That, or Vandekamp hadn’t been able to isolate the proper physiological signals.
“Speaking of guards, where are they?” There was no one in the large room but us and our fellow captives, yet the door wasn’t made of steel or iron, and it didn’t meet the standards typically required by facilities licensed to house cryptids.
“Who knows?” Mirela said as she stroked Rommily’s hair. “I’m starting to think they’re not needed here. These damn collars won’t let us leave the room, except to go to the bathroom. And there’s one of those sensors in the bathroom doorway too, in case they need to stop us from emptying our bladders, for some reason.”
“It’s all about control.” My hand strayed to the collar, trying to ease the persistent feeling of constriction, and only Zyanya’s quick grab for my wrist saved me from another brutal shock. “This place is cleaner and nicer than the menagerie, because the upscale clientele pays for exotic and beautiful, not skinny and dirty.” The thought of exactly what that clientele would expect for its money made my stomach churn. “But the truth is that Vandekamp has a measure of control over us that Metzger could never have dreamed of. We won’t have any hope of getting out of here until we figure out how this system works.”
“Maybe they can answer those questions for us.” Mirela stared across the room at the other female cryptids.
“Maybe.” I studied our new roommates. Most were shifters or anthropomorphs, like sirens and oracles, but several were species I’d never seen in person. I counted three nymphs, who had feathers, leaves and vines in place of normal human hair. A young echidna had the upper body of a human woman and the lower body and fangs—and likely the venom—of a very large snake. They watched us warily from several small cliques, however none, other than Magnolia, seemed willing to breach the gap and make an introduction. “But until we get to know them, it’s probably better that we don’t ask.”
“Why?” Lala said.
“Because they might be willing to sell us out for extra food or privileges,” Zyanya explained, and it broke my heart to know she spoke from experience. “Or for time spent with their children.”
“Children!” Mirela turned to her in sudden horror. “Zyanya, what happened to your kids? Did Vandekamp buy them?”
She shook her head slowly, and an old ache reawakened deep in my chest. I’d known the cheetah shifter for weeks in captivity before I’d found out she had children. The only way Zyanya knew of to deal with being isolated from them and unable to protect them was to keep the pain of separation to herself and to hoard her memories.
“He didn’t buy any of the kids,” Lala said.
I exhaled slowly. The coup I’d incited had cost Zyanya her family. There had to be a way to get the kids back. I had to find a way.
“Do you have any idea where—” A sudden thud turned us all toward the exit, where the door was now propped open by a gray-clad figure lying on the floor, sprawled into the hall from the shoulders up.
“Rommily!” Mirela was up in an instant, dark wavy hair trailing behind her. Lala and I raced after her.
The ambient buzz of soft conversation died as the other captives turned to watch, and just as Mirela grabbed Rommily by the ankles, the poor, fractured oracle began to convulse.
“Somebody help!” Mirela shouted as she pulled her middle sister through the doorway and back into the dormitory. But when she knelt next to Rommily’s head, the older oracle suddenly stiffened. Her eyes went wide and her jaw clenched so hard her teeth ground together.
“Pull them back!” I shouted at Lala, as she stared at her sisters, horrified and confused. “They’re too close to the sensor.”
I tugged Mirela back by one arm while Lala pulled Rommily by her ankles, and as soon as they were more than a foot away from the door, the convulsing stopped. Mirela blinked up at me in confusion, and I suddenly wished I’d pushed her into the hall instead. Surely the convulsing would have stopped once she was away from the doorway, whether she was inside or out. The sensors were based on proximity, and they didn’t care which direction the signal came from. Right?
“Are you okay?” Lala asked her sisters, and her voice drew me out of my thoughts.
“Yeah.” Mirela sat up and leaned over her middle sister, who only looked up at us, blinking tears from her eyes. “Rommily, what hurts?”
Heavy footsteps clomped toward us from the hallway, then two armed handlers stepped into the room. The first held his remote at the ready, the screen facing away from me. “Back up,” he warned, one finger poised to cause more pain.
When Lala carefully pulled Rommily back, Mirela and I followed her.
“What happened?” the second handler demanded, glancing at the screen on his own remote. “Our system indicates that Oracle 02—known as Rommily—tried to breach the doorway.”
“She wasn’t trying to breach.” Mirela stood, putting herself between the handlers and her younger sisters. “She just got confused.”
The second handler pointed to the doorway, where I noticed that a pinpoint of red light glowed from the apex of the arch. “Do not pass. It’s pretty damn simple.”
“She’s...disoriented.” I joined Mirela, trying to decide how best to explain about Rommily, to protect her. “Traumatized. She doesn’t always understand what she’s told. Or what she sees. It’s not her fault, and it can’t be fixed. So I suggest you get ready to make some exceptions on Rommily’s behalf.”
The second handler stepped closer, as if his presence could possibly intimidate me more than the collar around my neck already had. “Is that a threat?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Most definitely.”
Neither of them seemed to know how to respond to that.
“Just keep an eye on her,” the first one said at last, glancing from me to Mirela, to Rommily, then back to me.
Evidently I’d just become an honorary oracle. Which was fitting, considering that I’d just predicted an early death for anyone who messed with Rommily.
Or with me.
Delilah (#u80d6457e-5754-592d-9551-55b238c164dc)
Breakfast was delivered by two of our fellow captives—a selkie and a dryad, whose hair looked like a curtain of woody vines and whose fingers and toes branched like delicate tree limbs. They pushed a steel cart into the room and passed out trays from two different stacks—one for the shape-shifters, who were largely carnivorous—and one for the rest of us.
The food was bland but nutritionally sound, a definite improvement over the menagerie, but what I found truly noteworthy was the fact that captives were allowed to perform work duties with minimal supervision, because their collars wouldn’t allow them to go anywhere they weren’t supposed to be, or do anything they weren’t supposed to do.
If I earned a work detail that let me roam the property, I might be able to observe Vandekamp’s security systems and procedures in search of a weakness that could be exploited.
After breakfast, two handlers in tactical gear came in to call six more women out for work duty. Lala and Mahsa were among those chosen, but they weren’t told what their chores would be or when they’d be back.
Sometime later, the squeal of hinges drew my attention to the door as it opened, and the familiar, waiflike figure who stood in the hall drew a gasp from me. I stood, and Mirela joined me, but we both kept our distance from the ifrit—a fire djinni—in spite of the drugged haze lingering in her eyes. “I didn’t even know they’d bought Nalah,” Mirela whispered.
“Me neither.” I’d secretly been afraid she’d been euthanized. After all, we’d had to keep her sedated since we took over the menagerie, and we weren’t even trying to hold her prisoner.
Nalah looked tired and disoriented, standing there in the doorway, but she wasn’t trying to melt the walls and her gray scrubs weren’t even smoldering. Either because the sedatives we’d given her hadn’t worn off yet or because Vandekamp’s collar had succeeded where we’d failed.
“Go on.” The handler behind her gave her a small push, and as the ifrit stumbled into the dormitory, long strands of tangled hair fell over her face, reflecting light in every conceivable shade of red, yellow and orange. Her hair resembled the flames the fire djinn lived and breathed, and could kindle out of the air with little more than an angry thought.
From the hall, the handler aimed his remote at her, then clicked something on its screen. A red light flashed in the front of her collar, and the sensor over the door flashed at the same time.
Nalah was now restricted to this room just like the rest of us.
She wobbled on her feet, and I saw no awareness or recognition in her expression. She appeared to be in a total drug fog.
“Come help me with her.”
Mirela grabbed my arm. “As soon as the drugs wear off, she’s going to roast you.” Nalah blamed me for Adira’s death.
“Not if her collar works.” If Vandekamp’s tyrannical tech made Nalah easier to deal with, I was more than willing to take the good with the very, very bad. “She needs help, Mirela.”
“Fine.” The oracle let go of my arm, still staring warily at the ifrit. “I’ll get her some water and a mat to lie down on. You get...her.”
While Mirela pulled one of the gymnastics mats from the pile stacked against the wall, I approached the teenage djinni cautiously. “Nalah?”
Her gaze snapped up, fiery copper eyes focused on me with a familiar, burning hatred. But a second later, they glazed over again. That was all the malice she had the strength for, at least until the drugs were out of her system.
“Do you want to lie down? Mirela’s getting you some water.” I reached for her arm, but the djinni stumbled backward to get away from me, putting her dangerously close to the doorway sensor. “You need to move away from the door. It’ll—”
“Nalah?”
I turned to find a woman about my age staring at the ifrit through wide ice-blue eyes. Waist-length silvery hair hung down her back and the fall of light made it shimmer like water flowing in sunlight—easily the most identifiable feature of a marid, a water djinni. And she didn’t look friendly.
“I’m Delilah Marlow.” I stepped back, so I could keep both djinn in sight. “What’s your name?”
“Simra.”
“Do you know Nalah?” My understanding was that the young ifrit and her royal marid companion had been captured by Metzger’s shortly after they’d sneaked into the United States and had no friends here.
“Everyone south of the border knows her.” Simra’s cold gaze narrowed on Nalah. “Where is Princess Adira?” she demanded.
Tears filled Nalah’s copper eyes.
“Um...Adira was shot when we took over the menagerie,” I whispered, afraid that my explanation would upset Nalah. “She didn’t make it.”
“You failed her.” Simra glared at Nalah with feverish spite. “You should have taken the bullet for her. That was your obligation!” She let out a high-pitched war cry and lunged at the ifrit. I threw myself between them, but before she could crash into me, the marid collapsed in the grip of a seizure.
Her collar worked faster than I could, and it was a hell of a lot more effective.
Mirela led the sobbing ifrit to the sleeping mat she’d prepared while I knelt next to Simra with no idea how I could help her. Fortunately, her convulsions only lasted a few seconds, but she’d hit her head on the floor when she fell, and even after she stopped shaking, her eyes looked unfocused.
“Simra?” I swept glittering, silvery hair back from her forehead and searched her pale blue eyes for any sign of awareness. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, then rolled onto her side and covered her face with her hands. “I knew that would happen. Still, I had to try.” She pushed herself upright and smoothed long hair back from her pale face, composing herself.
“Try what? To hurt Nalah?”
Simra’s icy gaze focused on me. “To avenge the princess.”
“Did you know Adira?”
“I saw her in a parade once,” she replied, her expression softening with the memory. “When she was a girl. Nalah sat at her feet, and I was mad with envy. So many of us wanted to be the princess’s companion, but the ifrit royalty sent her Nalah as a gift, when the betrothal of their prince to our princess was announced. As a cross-cultural gesture.” Her gaze hardened again and she clasped her pale hands in her lap. “But Nalah let our princess die.”
“She’s just a kid. And she was Adira’s companion, not her bodyguard,” I pointed out.
“She has disgraced herself by outliving the princess she served.” Simra sat up, her spine as stiff as the line of her jaw. “If I could restore her honor by taking her life, I would.”
The casual brutality of her declaration sent a chill crawling over me, and for the first time, I was grateful that Sultan Bruhier, Adira’s grieving father, had denied us entry into his kingdom. Djinni culture sounded ruthless, and the injustice of it would have driven me—and the furiae within me—insane.
“Delilah?” a low-pitched voice called, and I looked up to find Bowman standing in the dormitory doorway holding a clipboard.
I stood, my heart thumping in anticipation. “Yes?”
“Come with me.” He pressed a button on his remote, and the red light above the door flashed, but if there was any response from my collar, I couldn’t feel it.
“Where?”
Bowman only watched me. Waiting.
I gave Simra my hand, and she let me pull her to her feet. “Do you know what this is about?”
She shrugged. “It’s a little early to be your first engagement, but you never know. Are you an oracle?”
“I’m human.”
“They’ll never believe that.” The skeptical tone of her voice said she didn’t believe it either.
At the door, Bowman bound my hands at my back with padded restraints, which told me that the staff wasn’t sure they could control me with a collar until they knew my species. And that the clientele didn’t want to see visible signs of abuse on their high-priced exotic chattel—except whatever marks they might inflict themselves.
“What’s this about?” I asked as I followed Bowman into the hall, taking note of the fact that he’d come for me alone. But armed.
He pressed a button on his remote as we approached an exit on the opposite side of the building from where we’d come in the night before, but his lips remained sealed as he pushed the door open.
“You don’t know, do you? You’re just an errand boy, right?” I asked, as I stepped out onto a sidewalk that felt rough and cool against my bare feet.
Bowman marched me past a row of nondescript single-story buildings, each built of gray or beige brick punctuated at regular intervals by windows too narrow for a human to pass through, even if the glass were broken. We were clearly on the operational side of the grounds, which obviously wasn’t meant to be seen by Vandekamp’s clientele.
At the end of the row of ugly buildings, we took a right, then approached a beautiful iron gate in an intricately patterned stone wall. Bowman pressed an icon on his remote to allow me through the gate, and a red sensor blinked between two stones near the ground, embedded right into the mortar.
When we walked through the gate, concrete gave way to smooth stone pavers beneath my feet and I caught my breath as I took in the stunning series of gardens and buildings that made up the Savage Spectacle’s grounds.
At first, I could only stare, wide-eyed, at the botanical zoo spread out around me, cut from various shrubs dotting the broad, neat lawn. The cryptid topiary was astonishing and incredibly intricate, yet the details conformed more to fantasy than to true anatomy.
To my left, two box-tree centaurs appeared frozen in midtrot, alternate legs gracefully curled beneath them as they ran, long human hair trailing behind them, and their poses were so dynamic I almost expected their hooves to hit the ground when reality’s stopped clock resumed ticking. On my right, a shrubbery manticore brandished its eight-foot-long stinger-tipped scorpion tail against a griffin with a twelve-foot wingspan, swooping in from overhead by the grace of the strong, bare trunk holding it up like a doll on a stand.
As Bowman led me across the courtyard, down winding stone paths and past iron arches leading to other areas of the grounds, I gawked at a small herd of shrubbery satyrs playing flutes in a semicircle, as if the artist had drawn inspiration from Renaissance-period stereotypes rather than actually going to see a satyr.
Past a gazebo surrounded by playful-looking elves that could have frolicked right off the front of a cookie box, I found a beautiful stone fountain spilling water from three tiers. Poised above it, as if they were about to dive into two feet of water, were two mermaids and a selkie emerging from her seal skin, all trimmed from massive bushes planted on three sides of the fountain. As with the griffin, they were held up by the pruned-bare center trunks. Unlike the griffin, however, those figures bore little resemblance to reality.
