Atherton stood and gave me an apologetic look as he fumbled with his keys.
Pennington rolled his eyes, then snatched the key ring and tossed it to Gallagher, who caught it one-handed. “It’s the big one with the black rubber grip.”
“No.” Despite the pain, I struggled frantically while Gallagher thumbed through the keys. “You can’t just sell me!” I shouted, and a deputy with baby cheeks and big brown eyes jumped, startled by my outburst. “You can’t sell people! How could you all just go along with this?”
“You wanna sedate her?” Pennington asked, as Gallagher found the right key and pried it from the ring.
Metzger gave him a contemptuous huff. “It’s never safe to introduce chemicals into the system of a cryptid before you know its species. Reactions vary widely. This one was raised human?”
Pennington nodded.
The menagerie owner sat on the edge of the table in front of me. “Do you have family?” he demanded, and I realized he had yet to address me by name.
When I only glared up at him, the grinding of my teeth drowned out by the panicked rush of my own pulse, Pennington answered for me. “We got her mother in a cell. Not her real mother. Charity’s human, best we can tell.”
“I don’t know how you can tell, considering how normal this specimen looks. I’d keep an eye on the mother,” Metzger said, and when Pennington nodded, the menagerie owner turned back to me, his voice carrying a soft, measured menace. “You’re going to come peacefully, because if you don’t, I’ll see that your mother is charged with harboring a cryptid and public endangerment.”
I studied his dark brown eyes, looking for the bluff, but I found none. He would have my mom arrested with no more regret than when he shook the dust of Franklin County off his boots and led his rolling prison into the next town.
“Fine.” I couldn’t drag my mother down with me, so I made myself sit still, battling competing urges to both fight and flee.
When the tension in my frame eased, Metzger stood and turned to the sheriff. “That would never have worked on a surrogate. The feds have no claim on her.” He nodded to Gallagher, whom I could feel looming over me from behind, then the old man and the sheriff wandered into the hallway, talking about the proper restraint technique of a “human-lookin’” cryptid.
I jumped when Gallagher’s hand settled onto my shoulder. “Relax.” His voice was low and carefully controlled, but the word was spoken so close to my ear that I could feel the breath it rode on. His hand slid down my arm, like a handler strokes a horse’s flank, to soothe her.
“Don’t touch me!” I snapped through clenched teeth, and the light pressure of his fingers disappeared.
“I’m going to unthread the chains, then I’m going to help you up and lead you to the truck.” He spoke softly as he worked, filling me in on each step before he carried it out, and when I looked up, I found Wayne watching, his expression trapped somewhere between anger and fascination. “I’ll have to hold your arm as we walk,” Gallagher continued. His hand brushed my bare foot, and the shackles fell away. “That’s standard safety procedure.”
“Do I look that dangerous?” I asked as he knelt behind me.
“Appearance isn’t relevant to threat potential.”
Metal clanged on the concrete, and suddenly my arms felt weightless, free of the burden of several pounds of iron chain.
The old man turned at the sound, and Gallagher tugged me up by one arm while he pulled my chair back with his free hand. My legs ached, and I wanted to stretch them. My fingers started tingling, as feeling returned, and I rolled my sore shoulders to help the process along.
When I turned to look up at Gallagher, I had to look way up. He was six foot six, if he was an inch. Maybe even taller. He returned my gaze with no visible thought or emotion, the face of a soldier. Or a stone statue. I got the feeling just from looking at him that unlike Deputy Atherton, Gallagher was burdened with neither empathy nor compassion.
Atherton, however, was suddenly nowhere to be found.
“Is she a biter?” Metzger asked the sheriff. “We brought a muzzle.”
Pennington shrugged. “I’d keep it handy. That one’s got a mouth like a snake.”
Metzger’s eyebrows shot up. “She has venomous fangs?” He pulled a small notebook from his jacket pocket. “That should narrow things down.”
Pennington shook his head, looking confused. “No, she’s a smart-ass.”
The old man stuffed the notebook back into his pocket and stalked past him, gesturing for Gallagher and me to follow. “You should use more care when describing cryptids, Sheriff,” he shot back over his shoulder, as Gallagher tugged me along. “In my line of work, similes are often indistinguishable from description.”
Pennington mumbled something rude, then pushed past us into the front of the sheriff’s station.
When Gallagher pulled me into the room, I had to fight for a deep breath. My gaze lost focus as it skipped from face to face in an open reception area that should have been nearly empty at 2:00 a.m. Some of the staff had stayed to help identify my species or find some place to send me. Others had stayed because there’d never been a cryptid outed in Franklin County, and I was big news.
Still others, based on the staggering hatred shining in their eyes, had evidently come just to spit on me.
“Lilah!” My mother’s voice cracked beneath the weight of my name. I turned toward the sound and saw her standing, unrestrained, next to Deputy Wayne Atherton.
“Mom!” I shouted.
But Gallagher kept pulling me forward, still barefoot, after Metzger, denying me the goodbye Atherton had obviously risked his job to give me.
“Where are you taking her?” my mom demanded from across the room. I wanted to turn again, but if they thought I was resisting, Metzger might demand my mother’s arrest on the spot and Gallagher might produce his muzzle.
Other questions followed my mother’s, and when a woman’s commanding tone and professional cadence rose above the others, I looked up to see that Channel 5 had sent a small crew from Oklahoma City.
A new foreboding settled through me like sand sinking through water, and suddenly my legs felt too heavy to move. Someone had alerted the media. More reporters would follow.
“Folks,” Pennington began, and I groaned when I saw him standing with his hands on his hips, feet spread wide, ready to address the public as their leader in arms. Naturally, I’d been apprehended in the middle of an election year.
As soon as the crowd turned toward the sheriff, Rudolph Metzger stopped in the middle of the station and Gallagher pulled me to a halt several feet behind him. “Ladies and gentlemen, I understand your curiosity, but I don’t yet have the answers to most of your questions.” The menagerie owner’s voice carried with even more presence and authority than the Channel 5 reporter’s, and the crowd abandoned Pennington in favor of the man who’d probably been talking for the menagerie since before he could grow a decent beard.
“What I can confirm for you is that Delilah Marlow has been exposed as a cryptid hidden among the good people of Franklin County, and I have agreed, on behalf of Metzger’s Menagerie, to take possession of her in the interest of public safety, effective immediately.”
“What is she?” The reporter thrust a microphone at him, and I realized that her cameraman had framed the shot so that Gallagher and I were both visible over Metzger’s shoulder.
“How was she exposed?”
“Was anyone killed?”
“What will you do with her?”
“Is she the only one?”
Metzger smiled for the crowd—I saw it in profile—and graciously waved off the questions. “That’s all I’m prepared to say tonight, but I’m excited to announce that thanks to our new acquisition—” he aimed an elegant gesture my way, and I dropped my head when I saw co
untless phone cameras aimed at me “—Metzger’s has agreed to extend our engagement in Franklin County to indulge the hometown crowd. Come see us tomorrow night, when we will unveil our latest exhibition. We’ll answer what questions we can for you then.”
Horror pitched me into a stunned fog. I didn’t hear the questions lobbed at us as we continued through the lobby toward the door. All I could think about were words like acquisition, and exhibit, and hometown crowd, and what they meant strung together in the same sentence with my name.
“Lilah!” My mom lurched forward and reached for my arm, with Deputy Atherton just a step behind her.
Gallagher slid between us without missing a step as he hauled me across the floor.
“Lilah!” She followed as closely as he’d let her. “I’ll fight this. I’ll get a lawyer. I’ll get you out of there, honey.”
But since the reaping, no court had ever deigned to hear a case brought forth by a cryptid. Some courts were even refusing to hear witness testimony from cryptids. And if she dragged him into her fight, Pennington would arrest her just to keep her out of his hair.
“Mom, don’t,” I said as she jogged to keep up. “I’m fine. Really. So just...don’t. Okay? Promise me.”
“Lilah—”
“Promise me!” I begged, as Gallagher tugged me through the front door and toward the dark parking lot, where a windowless Metzger’s van was double-parked on the first row, beneath a light pole. I dragged my feet until a rock cut into my bare sole. “You have to trust me, Mom. It’s better this way.” For you. But if I said that aloud, she wouldn’t stop fighting until we were both behind bars.
Gallagher pulled me to a stop behind the van, where another handler in a red Metzger’s shirt opened the rear doors, then helped lift me into the cargo area. I twisted in his grip to see Deputy Atherton dragging my mother back into the sheriff’s station. Her tear-streaked face was the last thing I saw before the van door slammed shut on life as I’d known it.
PART 2
Confiné
Rommily
The oracle sat up in the dark, suddenly wide-awake. She wasn’t sure whether the images still burned into her brain were from a dream or a vision, but there was little difference between the two anymore.
Rommily clutched the side of her cage to pull herself onto her knees in the narrow space between her sleeping sisters. Her gaze skimmed dead grass and muddy hoofprints dimly lit by lamp poles on the edge of the parking lot, but she saw none of that. The oracle’s eyes were filled with another place and another time. Though she could no longer trace the threads connecting the present and the future, she understood that they were drawing closer together with every beat of her heart.
Something thunked in the dark, and Rommily’s focus—a fragile thing, at best—was yanked back into the present. A door squealed open, tracing a skewed rectangle of light on the ground in front of the nearest staff trailer, and a dark silhouette emerged. The backlit outline joined another shadowy shape, then voices spoke, accompanied by the heavy footsteps of two men with rough hands and cold hearts.
“Thumb on the scale,” the oracle mumbled as the handlers stomped past her cage. One was still pulling his shirt on while the other scrubbed sleep from his face with both thick hands, cursing the phone call that had awakened him.
“Balance restored.” Rommily’s voice carried more volume than before, and Mirela stirred on her left, one foot peeking from beneath her brightly colored skirt.
In the distance, two points of light snaked toward the menagerie on a narrow gravel road. Rommily’s grip tightened around the steel grid caging her as the hum of the engine grew louder. A current of anticipation fired through her, crackling in her ears like static. Humming in her throat like a melody.
“The blind lady.”
A van pulled into the parking lot and reversed into position with the crunch of gravel. The old man got out of the passenger’s seat, and Rommily retreated from the edge of her cage as he rounded the vehicle, limping on his bad hip. The old man missed nothing.
The driver stepped out and slammed his door, and the oracle scooted farther into the shadows. She watched, unseen, as the drowsy handlers opened the rear doors of the vehicle. The large man with gray eyes and a red hat jumped out of the back of the van and lifted a young woman in chains from the darkness that hid her.
The oracle’s gaze narrowed on the dimly lit figure. The woman’s dark hair hung limp and her eyes were dull with exhaustion, but Rommily had seen her true face. She knew the terror it could inspire.
“She won’t serve her dish cold,” the oracle mumbled, almost giddy with joy as chill bumps rose all over her skin. “And two graves won’t be near enough...”
Delilah
The van rolled to a halt, then shifted into Reverse, sliding me across the bench seat. Gallagher grabbed my arm to stop me from falling. He hadn’t moved an inch or said a word since we’d left the sheriff’s station, and his stony silence left me with nothing to think about but the inevitable indignity of being displayed in a decorative cage for an audience of my own friends and neighbors.
The van stopped again. Footsteps stomped through gravel, then the doors flew open, and a jolt of adrenaline set my chest on fire. “Please, no,” I mumbled, staring out into the yellow glare of several light poles. I wasn’t ready. This couldn’t be real. How could my fate possibly be up to two men and a checkbook, with no attorney, no trial, and no defense?
How could I have fewer rights under the law than a stray dog had?
Stray dogs were never responsible for the mass slaughter of American children. Everyone knew that.
I hadn’t killed any kids either. I hadn’t brainwashed any parents or stolen any babies. But that hadn’t stopped Sheriff Pennington from selling me to the first man to walk in with a checkbook. Cryptids would forever pay the price for the horror of the reaping.
Metzger stared into the cargo area with his arms crossed over his red satin shirt. His showman’s bearing and voice had been abandoned, along with his jacket and his red suspenders. All that remained of Rudolph Metzger, the menagerie front man, were the polished black boots he still wore and the top hat, now held in his left hand. Behind him stood two more large handlers, who looked gruff and irritated to be on the job in the middle of the night. Like Gallagher, they wore nothing sequined or shiny. These men were the power and sweat behind the glitz and the glamour.
I was officially behind the scenes of the menagerie.
Gallagher jumped down from the van, then lifted me out by both arms and set me down on gravel. Rocks cut into my bare feet. My shoulders ached and my wrists were raw from the heavy cuffs fastened at my back, but no one offered to take them off. No one gave me any shoes, asked my name, or addressed me directly at all.
“What is she?” the handler on the left asked. According to his shirt, his name was Wallace.
“She is a mystery.” Metzger thumped his top hat to knock dust from it. “She’s new and exotic. Very rare. That’s the angle anyway, until her blood test comes back. Play it up.”
The owner pulled Gallagher aside, leaving the other handlers to glare at me, bulging arms crossed over broad chests. They were a human wall, and I would not be able to breach it.
“My daughter’s getting remarried on Friday, and my wife and I are watching her kids during the honeymoon.” Metzger had to look way up to talk to Gallagher. “I’ll catch up with the menagerie two weeks from today. You have that long to break her in and train her.”
Break me in? Train me?
I sucked in breath after rapid breath, but couldn’t seem to get enough air. The night was uncomfortably dry and warm, but my veins had become arctic channels, pumping tiny icebergs through me to pierce and sink all hope.
“That won’t be long enough, sir.” Gallagher’s voice was so low and deep that I could hardly hear him
. “She’s spent a lifetime—”
“Make it happen,” Metzger demanded.
I hunched around the cold knot in my belly, struggling to absorb everything I was hearing through filters of shock and exhaustion. Nothing felt real. Nothing but the iron cuffs.
“Delegate some of your other responsibilities and make this your primary concern,” the old man said. “I want her turning a profit when I get back, or I’m selling her to Vandekamp to recoup part of my loss, and you’ll make up the rest from your own paycheck. For the next six months. Understood?”
Gallagher nodded, and panic tightened my chest until I could hardly breathe. Who the hell was Vandekamp?
“Get her processed, then put her on the row. Tomorrow, start breaking her.” Metzger marched off toward a long line of campers and 18-wheelers, many painted with menagerie images in the same retro style as the posters hanging all over town.
His instructions echoed in my head.
Break me? Like a stick for kindling or like a pony for riding? Break me like a date, or like a heart, or like a promise?
In the end, it wouldn’t matter. I had no intention of being broken.
Metzger’s footsteps faded, and I turned back to Gallagher, fighting to convert my fear into fuel for the sparks of rage flickering deep in my soul.
My entire existence was in his hands, which meant he was the biggest obstacle to my escape.
I studied him as he gave Wallace and the other handler a series of instructions involving words like crate, and blanket, and padlock. Gallagher was big. He was tall, and broad, and solid enough to make the others—large men in their own right—look almost delicate. I would not escape by overpowering my handler physically.
But there were other ways to overpower. My mother had shown me that in every battle from the PTA presidency to the great flower-bed debate of 2008, in which she and her army of petunias had sent my father’s ground cover packing. Pride. Love. Jealousy. Hatred. Insecurity. Any weakness can be exploited, and everyone has a weakness.