“So then, what were you offering?”
“You help me get you ready for exhibition, and I’ll do what I can to make your adjustment less traumatic.”
Indignation burned in my veins. I didn’t want to be exhibition-ready, and there was no way to make any of this less traumatic. They could lock me up, but they couldn’t force me to cooperate. Let them sell me—hell, let them kill me. If I’d realized anything since being sold into the menagerie, it was that I had nothing left to lose.
I turned my back on Gallagher without a word and marched toward the circus carts on my own. He caught up in three huge strides, and a few yards later, he pulled me to a stop in front of an empty steel cage on wheels. It was the last cart on the first of two parallel rows of circus wagons and the only one without a stunning, brightly colored decorative frame—a naked version of all the other cages.
One steel mesh panel had been slid open along its track. The base of the wagon was a custom steel trailer two feet off the ground, and before I could even process the fact that there were no steps, Gallagher lifted me by the waist and set me inside the cage on my knees. The door slid shut behind me with a horrifying clang and I spun around to find him threading a padlock through two metal loops to hold the sliding panel closed.
“Wait!” Panic echoed in my voice. “Please don’t do this.” My eyes watered, and my throat felt so tight I had to force the words out, because this was my very last chance. “I’m not dangerous.”
Why the fuck had I let Brandon drag me to the carnival? It was just as depraved a spectacle as I’d imagined, but I’d never expected to become trapped inside it. If I’d insisted on a birthday dinner instead, I’d be curled up next to him in bed, blissfully ignorant of the horror I’d narrowly escaped.
“I don’t belong here!”
Gallagher clicked the padlock closed. “You’re no different from the rest.”
I couldn’t argue with that. No one belonged in the menagerie.
“What about these?” I held my hands up and rattled the cuffs.
He flipped a steel peg free from its loop on the outside of my cage, and a small panel in the mesh folded down, low enough that I had to sit to slide my hands through. He pulled a key from his pocket and removed the cuffs. Once I’d retracted my hands, he closed and locked the panel.
And just like that, my world was reduced to a four-by-six cage hardly tall enough for me to stand up in.
I sat with my legs folded beneath me, and the clang of my cage being closed echoing in my head. Gallagher watched me through the steel mesh. I couldn’t read his expression—it was shrouded in shadows—but I heard the jangle of metal as he clipped his key ring to a loop at his waist. “Try to get some sleep. Tomorrow won’t be easy.”
As if my evening had been a stroll through a moonlit park.
It took every bit of restraint I had to keep from pleading with him again to let me go. That wouldn’t work anyway, and I was done with begging.
“Fuck off,” I said through clenched teeth.
Gallagher tugged his cap lower on his forehead, then retreated into the dark.
I stared in the direction of his fading steps until I could no longer hear them, then I crawled into one corner of my cage and leaned against the solid aluminum end wall, my knees tucked up to my chest. The diamond-patterned aluminum floor was hard beneath me, and the fresh, shallow claw marks were the only sign of recent occupation by the leopard shifter Ruyle had mentioned.
When my eyes had adjusted to the dim light and shadows, I realized there was a blanket at the opposite end of my cage, half-unfolded from being tossed inside. There was no pillow and no sleeping mat, and I’d been offered neither food nor water. Inmates on death row were treated better.
Of course, inmates on death row had constitutionally guaranteed rights.
I considered the blanket for a few seconds, then I closed my eyes and rested my chin on my knees. It was too hot out to sleep anyway.
“What are you?” The strange voice rumbled softly from the darkness to my left, and my eyes flew open. Two points of light shone from the shadowy depths of the green-and-silver wagon across the aisle from mine.
I stared back at the bright eyes without lifting my chin from my knees.
Metal creaked and the green cage rocked as the weight within it shifted. A man wearing only a thin pair of gray shorts crawled out of the shadowy side of his cage into the area lit by a nearby light pole. Long lines of tight, lean muscle stood out beneath his skin, and each movement he made was smooth and graceful.
“What are you?” he repeated, the words low-pitched and gravelly.
“I’m a person.”
“But not a human, or you wouldn’t be here. So what are you, really?” A strand of silver hair fell over his gaunt face, hiding one shining eye.
“I don’t know. My name is Delilah.”
“Pas plus,” he said. “Not anymore. They call me Claudio.”
“They call you...?” I frowned, considering his odd phrasing. “Is that not what your mother named you?”
“My mother gave me life, and milk, and silver fur and golden eyes, but no true name, other than Little Gray Pup.” Those bright eyes blinked again, studying me even as I studied them. “Claudio is the name on my pedigree. It’s all I’ve ever been called.”
Little Gray Pup. Claudio.
All at once, I recognized the wolf heads and fleurs-de-lis carved into his wagon frame. “You’re the werewolf,” I whispered, curling my fingers through the wire mesh. “The girl is your daughter?”
He nodded. “Geneviève.”
On the tail of the name, a soft whine came from the dark cage to his right, and I found two more eyes shining at me. No cage stood across from the pup’s. Mine was the last in my row.
“Go back to sleep, Genni,” her father whispered, but affection softened his voice. The lights winked out when his daughter closed her eyes and I realized that because of the solid end panels, I could see into her cage from across the aisle, though he could not. But I couldn’t tell from those two lights in the dark whether she was in human or canine form.
“Merci.” Claudio’s words were so soft I almost mistook them for the rustle of cloth from the cage to my right. “For what you did for her. Thank you,” he repeated. “I am so very sorry for what it cost you.”
I didn’t know what to say. His daughter was the reason my life had been ripped from me, but I didn’t feel worthy of his gratitude. I’d made no conscious decision to act on Geneviève’s behalf. I’d had no idea what I could do, or what I would be sacrificing. I hadn’t acted, I’d merely reacted.
I was no martyr.
For a long time, I stared at the end panel of my own cage, too overwhelmed to truly focus on anything. I was listening to the snorts and shuffles of the unseen assortment of my fellow exhibits, assuming Claudio had fallen asleep, when his gravelly voice floated toward me again from across the aisle.
“The mystery of your species is a blessing, Delilah.” My name sounded foreign and beautiful, graced with his French accent and the lupine depth of his voice. “Do not rush to solve it.”
“Why not?” I whispered, as his eyes flashed at me in the dark.
“It costs them less to breed new exhibits than to buy them, but they will not try to breed what they cannot identify.”
Horror rolled over me in overlapping waves, and my crate seemed to rock like a boat at sea. Psychosomatic vertigo.
“Is that how you...how you got Geneviève?”
“And the four before her, each sold when they got too big for the petting zoo. She’s the only one they’ve let me keep.”
But he’d lost her mother. Grief was thick in his voice, and his pain made me ache deep, deep inside, both for his bleak past and for my own grim future.
Claudio retreated farther into his cag
e, and the rustle of rough fabric and the creak of metal told me he was curling up on his blanket to reclaim slumber.
Delilah
I was still wide-awake, the werewolf’s horrific warning echoing in my mind, when the sun rose to shine on my new hell. The only improvement morning brought was daylight, and after twenty minutes of starkly illuminated clarity, I decided I preferred the dark.
Daylight made it impossible to miss the filth caked into the seam where the floor of my cage joined the end panels, or the ribs showing through Geneviève’s skin, even in wolf form. Or how the cheetah—werecheetah?—in the cage on Claudio’s other side was missing several patches of fur, which was how I discovered that in cat form, her skin was patterned just like her fur.
The sun still hung low and heavy on the eastern horizon when the rest of the carnival came to life. The tantalizing scents of bacon and coffee reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before.
“Flags up!” a woman’s voice shouted.
When I pressed my face against the wire mesh side of my cage, daylight showed me what the night had hidden. A young woman in an apron stood in front of an arrangement of plastic tables and folding metal chairs, setting out salt and pepper shakers.
Behind her, a large man in an apron manned an open-sided food truck, scrambling eggs and flipping bacon.
At the woman’s cry, a steady procession of Metzger’s employees began meandering past the rows of caged chattel toward the scent of breakfast. They formed a line—half of them large men in red polo shirts—and filled trays with heaping portions of steaming food. Coffee was poured, knives and forks clanked, and boisterous conversation rose above it all.
“Don’t start drooling yet,” a raspy female voice said, and I turned to find one of the cheetah shifters—now in human form—watching me from the black-and-silver cage wagon to the right of Claudio’s. She was small and delicately built with smooth dark skin and a tiny waist, and she had the most beautiful orange-gold eyes I’d ever seen. According to the plaque wired to her crate, her name was Zyanya. “We don’t get bacon and eggs from the pie car. Not for free anyway.”
Pie car?
I decided not to ask what “not for free” meant.
“I wasn’t expecting them to share.” I turned back to watch the buffet line. “But I had kind of assumed the staff would live on corn dogs and fried Twinkies. That’s what I’d eat if I lived in the carnival. Under other circumstances,” I added with a glance at the cage floor beneath me.
“What’s a Twinkie?”
That time when I turned back to the row of carts across from mine, I found Geneviève watching me with her knees tucked up to her chest, tangled golden hair hiding most of her small body like a curtain.
“Um. It’s a little yellow cake filled with cream. When they’re deep-fried, the outside gets crunchy, and the middle is all gooey and sweet. I’d pick a fried Twinkie over scrambled eggs any day.” But I realized from the puzzled look in her golden wolf eyes that a child raised in a cage had probably never tasted either.
“Junk food comes from the grease carts, which are part of the carnival, not part of the menagerie,” another woman’s voice called, but her wagon was too far down the line for me to see. “They don’t open until the gates open.”
“Who’s speaking?” I asked, my face pressed to the wire mesh.
“That’s Lenore,” Zyanya said, running one hand through her short-cropped dark curls. “One of the sirens. Before she was exposed, she used to sing at some county fair in Alabama.”
“Mississippi,” Lenore corrected. “Then one day I got sloppy, and they pulled me offstage and locked me up.”
“You grew up human?” I really wished I could see her.
“I grew up passing for human,” she said. “All it took was a good pair of contact lenses and a little self-control. But nothing good lasts forever, right?” The bitterness in her voice was an eerie echo of my own.
She’d grown up hiding in plain sight, and I’d never known I needed to. Lenore and I were two sides of the same doomed coin.
The staff members ate quickly, and as each stood to return his empty tray, another stepped forward to claim the open seat. Neither Chris Ruyle nor Rudolph Metzger appeared. Neither did Gallagher. Obviously the management took its meals apart from the common rabble.
As crew members passed the line of cage carts on their way back from breakfast, most stopped to stare at me. I could only stare back at them, bitterly aware that twenty-four hours earlier, my life might have made most carnies jealous, but now they looked at me like people look at dogs in the pound. As if I might bite, but I’d definitely give them fleas.
From bits of overheard conversation, I discovered they were placing bets not just on how long I would last in the carnival after my “free-range raising,” but on what my species would turn out to be.
After breakfast, I watched the aproned man and woman clean up the pie car, while a steady procession of performers wandered past my cage on their way onto the fairgrounds to rehearse. Without their costumes, makeup, and equipment, I couldn’t match most of them with their acts, but I passed at least half an hour trying to.
Around midmorning, I recognized the heavy clank of horse trailers being opened from farther down the rows of carts, followed by the clomp of hooves first on metal ramps, then on earth. Those were sounds I knew well, having grown up on a farm, and I could tell from the absence of equine snorts and whinnies that the handlers weren’t unloading actual horses.
Minutes later, several handlers lead a line of six centaurs by my crate, and I couldn’t help but stare.
They were beautiful.
Regal and proud, despite the chains and the drugged glaze of their eyes, the centaurs marched on four strong horse legs with their human shoulders squared and heads held high. The first two were Belgians, thick and powerful, their builds capable of heavy labor—a fact the staff would no doubt exploit. They shared the same dark brown coat, smooth, tan human skin, and stark blond hair, and after a closer glance at their nearly identical square chins and straight noses, I concluded that the first two centaurs were brothers. Or maybe cousins.
After the Belgians came a beautiful white Arabian, who looked almost delicate following the draft horses. She had dark eyes, fine, sculpted features, and long white hair that fell down her back to the juncture of her human and equine halves. Unlike the bare-chested men of her species, she wore an elastic sports bra of the same drab gray as my dress.
I couldn’t identify the breeds of the fourth and fifth centaurs, one male, the other female, but the sixth was unlike anything I’d ever seen. He was a hybrid of man and what appeared to be white-tailed deer, based on the distinctive reddish-brown summer coat and white underside of his tail. His human half—well, one-third—was elegantly muscled with a dramatically thick neck, obviously necessary to support the massive six-pointed antlers growing from his otherwise human head.
I couldn’t imagine where they kept him. His rack wouldn’t fit into a standard horse trailer.
Each pair of centaurs was led by a single handler, and though the men holding the ropes were roughly half the size of the captives they escorted, the centaurs showed no inclination to resist. That was surely due, at least in part, to whatever drug had slowed their steps and glazed their eyes.
I watched the deer-man until he passed out of sight. I’d never studied anything like him in school.
“What is that last one called?” I asked, turning to Claudio, and I was almost ashamed of the interest ringing in my own voice. It was that very curiosity that supported the market for exploitative shows like the menagerie in the first place.
Claudio started to answer, but Zyanya beat him to the punch, blinking orangish cat eyes at me from her cage. “He’s a cervuscentaur. The ringmaster says it every night in his spiel. The proper name for the others is act
ually hippocentaur.”
I’d known that much. Hippo was the Greek word for horse.
On the heels of the centaurs came a line of four satyrs, which—unlike centaurs—walked upright on only one set of furry, hoofed legs. Led by a single handler, they were linked by a chain running through cuffs around their goat legs. My heart ached for them, bound together like slaves, clad only in flimsy loincloths, and my sympathy was compounded when I noticed that their ankles had been rubbed free of fur by the padded leg irons.
The satyrs were much smaller than the centaurs and couldn’t carry a pack-load, but I had no doubt they would be used as beasts of burden.
As the satyrs passed, I heard the squeal of unoiled wheels, followed by the light clang of metal, which I recognized from the fold-down panel Gallagher had opened in order to remove my cuffs the night before.
When Claudio perked up in his cage, staring eagerly down the aisle, I realized that our breakfast was being served—absent the scents of coffee and bacon.
While I sat cross-legged in my wheeled pen, a new sound arose so subtly it took me a moment to realize I’d been hearing it for at least thirty seconds.
There was a thudding. A repetitive, earthy thunk, like a hammer striking the ground over and over. The sound came closer and closer, and when Gallagher stepped into sight holding a thick rope, I blinked, surprised.
He adjusted his red cap without even a glance in my direction.
A second later, the minotaur appeared, led by Gallagher’s rope, tied around a copper ring piercing his bovine nose. I fell back onto my heels in astonishment. He was huge.
Eryx. I remembered his name from the posters nailed up all over town, and the minotaur was easily reminiscent of the mountain he was named for.
He was at least seven feet tall, and easily half again as wide as Gallagher, from shoulder to shoulder. Eryx stood on two powerful legs, neither fully bovine nor human, but some combination that merged huge hooves and shaggy brown hair with a mostly upright skeletal structure and the heavy musculature necessary to support such a massive creature.