His chest and arms were human, enormously muscled, and deeply tanned from years spent laboring under the sun, clothed in nothing but a much larger version of the satyrs’ loincloth. The shaggy brown hair began again on his colossal human shoulders and thickened all the way over a massively muscled neck before growing thinner and shorter over his bovine head. Above and behind a drooping set of cow ears grew a pair of curved, whitish horns so thick at their base that I could hardly have wrapped both hands around them.
I stared with my mouth hanging open, only dimly aware that the thudding was the sound of the minotaur’s hooves hitting the ground. I must have made some noise, because Eryx stopped, his long tail stirring dust on the ground. His heavily lashed, brown-eyed gaze met mine, and I recognized surprise in the widening of his oddly expressive eyes.
His eyes were human.
When the slack in the lead rope tugged on his nose ring, the minotaur snorted and tossed his head.
Gallagher stopped and looked back. “Eryx,” he called to the minotaur. But he was looking at me.
The bull-man snorted, then he turned to follow his handler, leaving me to stare after them both.
“He’s something, isn’t he?”
I jumped, startled by the disembodied voice. Chris Ruyle, the lot supervisor, stepped into sight from the end of my cage. He leaned with one shoulder against the steel frame and I scooted back to put as much space between us as possible.
“One of only three mature male minotaurs in the country. The old man paid a quarter mil for him three years ago, and he costs a fucking fortune to feed. Draws a real crowd, though.” Ruyle pulled a stick of gum from his pocket and unwrapped it, then dropped the sliver of paper on the ground. “He’s not as tall as a giant, but he weighs more than one. Something about bone density and muscle mass. Guess how much he eats. Go on, guess,” he insisted, but I only stared back at him. “That big bastard eats fifteen pounds of high-protein feed a day, just to maintain his size. Fortunately, he pulls his own weight, and then some. No machine built can raise a tent better or faster than a minotaur. Pound for pound, they’re stronger than an elephant and easier to control than a giant.”
“Fascinating,” I said, and though I was actually fascinated, I let nothing but boredom leak into my voice.
“If you think about it, he’s the perfect menagerie freak. He works hard, brings in customers, and never talks back. Or at all, for that matter.”
“He can’t speak?” The question flew out before I could swallow it, in spite of my determination to show no interest.
“Nothing but snorts and mooooos. Which is just as well, considering there’s nothing really going on up here.” He tapped his own skull, and I refrained from pointing out the irony in the gesture. “His brain is more cow than man. Eryx may be as big as a giant, but he’s as simpleminded as a child.”
“Children are universally young, not universally stupid,” I mumbled.
“Enough about the bull.” The supervisor’s grin chilled me from the inside out. “Today’s your big day.”
“Emancipation?” I swiped one arm across my brow. “Whew! That was fast.”
“Exhibition. Tonight you get to show the hometown crowd the real you.”
My arms tightened around my knees. “I won’t perform.”
Ruyle stepped so close to the cage that the wire mesh brushed the tip of his nose. His gaze hardened. “You will perform, because if you’re no use to the menagerie, the old man won’t care much if the quality of your care...declines.” His gaze held mine long enough to punctuate the less-than-subtle threat, then he glanced over my shoulder when something rattled on the other side of my cage. “Breakfast!” He made a face at whatever was being served behind me. “I’m more of a waffles-and-sausage man, myself, but you know what they say about beggars, right?”
Ruyle wandered away, whistling, and I turned to see Clyde, the mustached handler I’d met the night before, pushing a large stainless steel cart in the aisle between the two rows of cage wagons. He stopped in front of Zyanya and scooped a bloody serving of raw meat onto a plastic tray, then slid it through the fold-down panel in the side of the cheetah-shifter’s cage.
Zyanya snatched the tray and set it on the floor of her pen. She growled softly as she ripped into a sloppy cut of raw meat with human hands and teeth that must have been at least part-feline. While I watched her in equal parts disgust and fascination, Clyde served two more carts in line with my own, then gave small, bloody portions of meat to both Geneviève and her father.
Finally, the handler parked his cart in front of my cage and pulled a clipboard from a slot next to the trays. He ran one finger down a list I couldn’t see, then nodded to himself, replaced the clipboard, and pulled one of the last three trays from the stack. “They don’t know what you are yet, so you get a little bit of everything.”
Clyde pulled a slice of white bread from an open bag and dropped it onto the largest compartment. He dipped a small plastic bowl into a stainless steel tub of water on top of his cart, then set it in the tray compartment designed for a cup. Then he scooped two small chunks of cooked meat from the center tub onto my tray and opened the panel in the side of my cage.
Clyde shoved the tray at me. Water sloshed over the edge of the bowl and soaked into my bread.
I grabbed the tray before it could fall, and my stomach growled in spite of the unappetizing nature of the meal. “What is this?” I poked at a dark blob of meat with one finger, because I hadn’t been given any utensils.
Clyde glanced at my tray. “Looks like...turkey kidney. And maybe a chunk of liver.”
I gagged and set the tray on the floor of my pen. I’d never been able to stomach organ meat.
“Oh, you’re too good for innards?” Clyde slammed the lid on the center serving compartment. “That shit’s full of vitamins and packed with calories. You really gonna waste perfectly good meat little Genni over there would be grateful for?”
I glanced past Clyde to see that the werewolf pup—still in human form—had finished her meal and was licking her semi-clawed fingers clean.
“Give it to her.” I turned back to the handler. “No reason for it to go to waste.”
Clyde looked at me as if I’d lapsed into Greek. “You want to give away your breakfast?”
“Just the meat. She needs it worse than I do anyway.” I pushed my meal toward the closed panel, and he shrugged, then opened it. When I slid the tray halfway out, he scooped up the liver and kidney with one hand, then shoved the tray back at me and slammed the panel shut.
The handler crossed the aisle to the pup’s crate, and my heart ached when the wolf-girl sat up, her golden-eyed gaze eagerly glued to the meat in his hand.
“Your new neighbor has a gift for you, Genni.” Clyde held up the turkey organs, and Geneviève’s mouth fell open, her attention still tracking the meat.
The handler’s fist closed and he squeezed until dark red bits of turkey oozed between his fingers. When his hand opened, the meat fell to the ground in front of Genni’s cage. “Don’t forget to thank her,” he stage-whispered to the young werewolf. Then he wiped his messy fist on a towel hanging from the cart and pushed the whole thing back down the aisle without even a glance back at me.
Genni’s howl followed him.
Her hunger echoed deep within my soul.
Eryx
The minotaur stood in the shade of the brightly striped big top tent, chewing tasteless feed pellets and watching flies crawl on a pile of dung dropped by one of the centaurs when his handler refused to give him a bathroom break. The carnival staff tended to forget that hybrids were as much human as they were beast, but that wasn’t the biggest blind spot in humanity’s collective psyche.
Eryx had long ago realized that the only true difference between the hybrids and most of their handlers was that the handlers hid their be
asts on the inside. A wolf will growl to warn that it’s angry and a bull will paw the ground before charging. Rattlesnakes rattle, cats moan and hiss, and hyenas grunt and cackle. But a man will smile right in your face as he drives a knife into your heart.
Such was the nature of humanity, as Eryx understood it.
When the minotaur reached for his feed pail, his chain clanked and he glanced in annoyance at the big iron leash fastened to the cuff above his right hoof.
As he chewed, the groan of metal and the clomp of hooves drew his gaze to the somber procession passing the big top. It took all four satyrs to pull Finola and Lenore in their wheeled cage, though both sirens were more bone than flesh, lately. But the sirens didn’t interest him. Neither did the succubi who followed, Zarah and Trista—twisted sisters, from twin birthing cries to shared cages, customers, and comforts. Nor did the two succubi in the cage behind them, whose names he’d never cared to remember. A pair of centaurs hauled each of their cages, but it was the fourth cart in line—the one pulled by the buck and the Arabian—that captured Eryx’s attention.
Rommily.
Her name echoed in his heart and his chest ached when he saw her.
She sat between her sisters, Mirela and Lala, all three on their knees, one colorful skirt flowing into the next on the floor of their cage. Rommily’s hair was long and dark, loose curls pulled into looser waves by their own weight, and he knew exactly what those waves would smell like, if he’d been close enough to catch the hot breeze blowing through her crate.
The interactive exhibits were bathed nearly every day. They were groomed, and perfumed, and styled, because they would have personal contact with the customers, the very thought of which made Eryx’s fist clench around a handful of feed pellets, grinding them into powder.
He let the pulverized protein slide through his grip into the massive feed pail, then he set the bucket on the ground and bent to drink from the trough filled just for his use, because a minotaur could not easily utilize a cup, bowl, or fountain.
Eryx had never minded the trough, but the other limitations of his bovine features bothered him more with every passing day. Sometimes the inability to speak seemed much crueler a constraint than the chains, harness, and cage that restricted his every movement.
Though the bull’s muzzle was not suited to human speech, his eyes and ears functioned perfectly.
When he stood, wiping water from his snout with the back of one thick hand, Rommily and her sisters were gone, headed to the tent where Mirela and Lala would read palms and tell fortunes once the carnival opened. Rommily was no use inside the tent since the night they’d found her wandering in the rain, so she stood outside with the talker, one ankle chained to a tent stake, a living advertisement for what customers would find inside.
Even separated from them by a wall of canvas, she was never far from her sisters, a blessing Eryx knew she cherished, even if she could no longer clearly express such thoughts. He could see it in the way she clung to Mirela’s hand when they chained her. In the way she whispered frantic, likely impenetrable secrets to Lala as their handler unlocked the cage. Rommily no longer had lucidity, but she still had her sisters.
Eryx had never met another minotaur. He’d never even seen another of his species in person, except for his mother. Though sometimes he could remember her smell and her warmth and the feel of her coarse hair when he awoke from dreams of her, he had no clear mental image of what she looked like. He didn’t even know her name.
The minotaur’s earliest true memory was of a box, big and rough, with splinters that dug into his fingers and the sharp points of errant nails that slashed at his face when the floor pitched and tossed him into the sides of his confinement.
He’d spent three days in that crate with only a blanket, a few bottles of water he didn’t know how to drink from, and a contraption that dispensed feed pellets when he pressed on a big blue button. Sometimes he heard human voices, but more often he heard bleats, and neighs, and whinnies, and even the occasional hiss. Eryx lost control of his bladder on the second day and he was mortified by the accident, but there was no one around to see him hang his head and ram his infant horns against the sides of the box when he could find no other way to express his distress.
When the floor had finally stopped tilting, he’d heard voices and felt the rumble of a truck beneath his box. Then the world had stilled around him, and there’d been a great squeal of nails being pried loose as one side of the crate was forced open. Daylight had blinded him as a chorus of aahs rang out from around the box. An instant later, small, eager arms had enfolded him. Eryx blinked as the child who’d embraced him dragged him onto a sunlit lawn bedecked with streamers and balloons, scattered with people in lavish clothes eating cake from little glass plates.
Rodney had turned six the day he received Eryx as a birthday present, but already the three-year-old minotaur outweighed him by fifty pounds.
Twenty-five years, eight hundred pounds, and three owners later, Eryx had yet to meet another of his own species or spend more than five minutes at a time unrestrained, but on his good days, he could almost remember little Rodney’s last name. On the great days, he remembered the stories Rodney had read to him, and the colorful pictures in his big storybook, and the feel of delicate paper and brittle crayons between fingers that had been as thick and strong as a man’s before the bull was five years old.
When the great days came more and more often and the good days began to run one into the next, Eryx had realized that something was changing. He was stronger now. He could feel that with every beat of his massive heart. With every step he took and every breath he drew and every movement of every muscle in his body.
The injections were not working. Not as they had before anyway. The carefully formulated mix of drugs designed to keep the minotaur, centaurs, and satyrs docile enough to be controlled yet strong enough for heavy labor had ceased to be effective on Eryx. Maybe he had grown, and his handlers had failed to compensate with a higher dosage. Or maybe his body had become so accustomed to the chemical cocktail that it no longer affected him as it once had.
The only thing Eryx was sure of was that no one had noticed the clarity of his focus or the increase in his strength, and he had no intention of letting them. As long as his steps were slow and deliberate and his attention seemed labored, no one would look beyond what they expected to see from the carnival’s prized beast of burden.
They wouldn’t see what was right beneath their noses until it was far, far too late...
Delilah
The ground beneath my wagon was strewn with fresh hay, and for the first time since I’d been hauled from the back of the Metzger’s van in chains, I couldn’t smell manure.
“Where are we?” The tent my cage sat in was about fifteen feet across and square. It was dimly lit by several floor lamps with filmy red shades. A folding screen stood near the back wall of the tent beside two round collapsible tables, each holding a neatly folded red-and-purple bundle of cloth. Tablecloths, I assumed. But I couldn’t help thinking they’d make great pillows.
If my exhausted estimation could be trusted, I hadn’t slept in twenty-eight hours. I’d had nothing to eat but soggy bread in at least fifteen.
“Please tell me this isn’t where the succubi...do their thing,” I said with a glance at the red lamps.
Gallagher dragged the third and final table toward the two against the rear wall. “This is the fortune-tellers’ tent. The oracles work here—two of them anyway—but they won’t need to set up for several hours, so we have a little time.” Yet the tense line of his jaw told me that wouldn’t be long enough for whatever he had planned.
“I have nothing but time. Literally. I have nothing else.” I sat on my knees on the aluminum floor of my cart to keep my thin dress from riding up, and the diamond plate pattern bit into my skin.
Gallagher set t
he table down with a thump, and when he turned, his expression was as featureless as a stone wall and about as yielding. He pulled a cord attached to one canvas panel and the first of the two open flaps fell closed, cutting off most of the sunlight within the tent. When he reached for the second cord, my pulse tripped.
“Don’t close that!”
He pulled the cord, and as the last flap fell, the outside world disappeared, leaving me alone with a man more than twice my size, whose job description included the phrase “break Delilah.”
He seemed to be looking at me, but I could hardly see him in the dim lamplight. “We have work to do.”
“I won’t perform.”
“All you have to do is sit there and look...beastly.”
I scooted forward until nothing but wire mesh and my own resolve stood between us. “Even if I knew how to look beastly—and I don’t—I wouldn’t play along, and no punishment you can dish out would be worse than putting me on display like an animal.” I sucked in a deep breath and pressed my palms against the floor of my cage to keep them from trembling. “Nothing.”
Gallagher crossed huge arms over his broad chest, and even though I was seated in my cage, I still had to look up at him. “You’re wrong about that.”
The truly horrible thing was that I believed him. I’d never been hit or gone hungry. I’d never been electrocuted, robbed, or even really threatened. The worst things that had ever happened to me in my life had happened in the past eighteen hours, and I wasn’t naive enough to believe I’d seen the worst the menagerie had to offer reluctant captives.
“But I am a caretaker,” Gallagher continued, and I wondered how many of my thoughts he’d been able to read on my face. “My job does not typically include causing pain.”