Menagerie

  “I didn’t waste it, I tried to donate it. You threw it on the ground!”

  Clyde flushed. “One more word and I will muzzle you!”

  “A muzzle would ruin the makeup,” I pointed out, thrilled by the opportunity to strip away his choices.

  Suddenly Clyde’s broad form loomed over me, backlit by the lights shining down at my chair. His face came closer, stale coffee breath wafting over me, and I was suddenly, absurdly aware that I hadn’t brushed my own teeth in almost twenty-four hours. “What part of ‘sold to the menagerie’ do you not understand?”

  His rage fed my reckless euphoria. He couldn’t stand having his authority challenged, and that made him easy to manipulate.

  I was in chains, but he was losing control.

  “The legality. The iniquity. The reality.” I shrugged again. “I don’t understand any of it, really.”

  “Well, let me help you out with that. You don’t decide how food gets distributed.” His fists slammed into the arms of the chair, and I flinched as the entire structure shuddered beneath me. “You eat what you’re given or you go hungry. You do what you’re told, or you go hungry.” He grabbed my arms and lifted me until the cuffs cut into my wrists, and that’s when I realized I’d poked the bear a little too hard.

  I had the power to piss him off, but not the power to calm him down.

  Terror squeezed my eyes shut.

  “If that isn’t enough to keep you in line, you better get used to this chair, because Alyrose will be covering up your bruises every damn day.”

  “Clyde,” Alyrose scolded, while I stared at the back of my own eyelids, trying to stop shaking. I was certain with every passing second that he was about to punch a hole right through my face.

  Instead, he drove his fist into my stomach so hard that for a moment, I was aware of nothing but pain.

  My body tried to curl around the agony spreading through my midsection, but the cuffs prevented that. Tears filled my eyes, then ran over, and I was left gasping for air I couldn’t use.

  “Now look at her eye makeup!” Alyrose cried, but I hardly heard her.

  I couldn’t make sense of this violent new existence, where terms like justice had no meaning, bondage was a state of existence, and hell was the forecast for the rest of my life. One word began to play over and over in my head. It was the most powerful word I’d ever known, yet the most worthless syllable ever to be uttered by someone wearing more chains than actual clothing.

  No. No. No. No. No...

  I sucked in a breath, then lost it on the tail of a sob that racked my entire body. The physical reality of defiance had come as a shock. It turns out that expecting pain can’t really prepare you for it.

  “Clyde. That’s enough.” Alyrose’s voice was soft, but firm. “Get the hell out of my camper and go track down her costume.”

  I couldn’t see him with my eyes squeezed shut, but I could measure his fury by the strength of each puff of breath that hit my face. For several tense seconds, he loomed over me, and I was afraid he’d take another shot.

  But finally he stood. My chair rocked with the release of the armrests, but I kept my eyes closed as the camper door squealed open. His footsteps became heavier and more solid against the wooden steps outside.

  “Get in there and keep an eye on that cryptid,” Clyde said, and when the door slammed shut behind him, I opened my eyes to find Abraxas staring at me, wide-eyed, as if he were afraid to look away even long enough to blink.

  I exhaled, and my heart finally stopped trying to beat a hole through my sternum. My entire midsection felt hot and swollen.

  “Well, you certainly haven’t made a friend out of Clyde.” Alyrose picked up her paintbrush and returned to the dark veins she’d been tracing on the back of my left hand.

  “Does he have any friends?” My voice sounded weak. It still hurt to breathe.

  She shrugged. “He’s kind of an ass, but he’s good at what he does.”

  What he does?

  “Is he the source of the bruises you cover up?”

  Alyrose’s tiny paintbrush stilled midstroke. “Some, yes.” She sat up and rolled her chair toward my head until she could look straight down into my eyes. “Delilah, it’s okay to pick your battles. Clyde doesn’t forgive or forget easily, and provoking him will only get you hurt.”

  “So you think I should shut up and do as I’m told?” No surprise there.

  “I think that the sooner you accept reality, the easier your life will become.”

  And that was the problem. As nice as Alyrose was, she was still human, and she still worked for Metzger’s, and the bottom line for her and for everyone else employed by the menagerie was that I wasn’t just inhuman, I was less than human, therefore unfit for concepts like liberty and justice. The reaping wasn’t going to be forgotten anytime soon, and people weren’t just angry about it, they were still afraid.

  Fear is a powerful, often irrational emotion, and mass fear on the scale of what followed the reaping has the power to shake any society to its core. As long as the world remembered, they would live in fear of all cryptids—regardless of whether or not any individual among us was truly dangerous.

  Of course, not everyone supported stripping cryptids of all rights. But the dissenters were few among a dangerous and violent many, and most found it easy enough to simply ignore the problem—the way someone opposed to animal cruelty could still eat meat, I’d been guilty of that very thing myself. I’d abandoned the idea of becoming a crypto-vet because I didn’t want to participate in the cruelty. But then I’d just come home and ignored the problem.

  Looking at Alyrose and Abraxas, I realized that even some of the menagerie staff seemed to be doing the same thing. They weren’t all hurting the captives, but neither were they trying to change anything.

  Submission was the only solution they could conceive of to fix my problem. But with the imprint of Clyde’s fist still throbbing in my stomach, I was much less interested in fixing a problem than in becoming one.

  Rommily

  The oracle curled her toes, and dirt squished between them. She liked standing up. She liked walking and staring up at the sun, turning her face into the breeze, even if the breeze was hot and dry.

  Rommily lifted her arms, letting the wind blow through her hair and caress her fingers and make a whooshing noise in her ears. The crowd around her stilled as patrons watched the girl in the bright skirt, a matching handkerchief tied over the top of her head, her golden-brown gaze fixed on the sky. Adults stared and children pointed at her chains, their only clue—absent the white eyes that accompanied a prophesy—that the oracle dressed as a fortune-teller was a captive of the menagerie rather than a flamboyantly dressed patron.

  Rommily could hardly feel the chains. She could hardly see the crowd or smell the popcorn. She didn’t hear her handler when he told her to step back, but Kevin was used to her unfocused eyes and wandering steps, so he took her by the shoulders and guided her back into her usual spot against the front of the tent.

  Even lost in the labyrinth of her own mind, as she’d been since that night in the rain, she understood that Kevin wasn’t truly focused on her. She’d had a bad morning. Rommily had vague memories of screaming, and hands, and a sharp prick in her arm. But she was generally very little trouble for Kevin, and when neither Ruyle nor Gallagher was watching, his attention tended to wander toward the siren tent across the midway.

  The canvas at Rommily’s back rustled in the wind, but the stakes had been driven deep and the material was too heavy to truly ripple or flap.

  Several feet away, the talker was well into his ballyhoo, the rise and fall of his words designed to pull people into the tent, where they would sit across a small round table from a pretty oracle whose chains were hidden by long skirts and colorful tablecloths. Mirela and Lala would look
into the customers’ eyes and hold their hands, then deliver some small glimpse into the future.

  Your next child will be a girl.

  Your boss will recommend you for a promotion.

  Your wife will find her lost wedding ring.

  The oracles saw much more than they were allowed to say, because revealing that the new baby will have spina bifida, the boss’s recommendation will be overruled, and the ring will be found in the neighbor’s bed would have a discouraging effect on the cash flow.

  Rommily used to sit in one of those chairs and sell incomplete information to people she would never meet again. But the things she saw now could not be sold, even if there’d been no fracture between her visions and her ability to express them.

  A small boy stopped in front of her and reached for the chain stretched between her feet. His father pulled him away, then met Rommily’s suddenly white-eyed gaze.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Blood poisoning,” she whispered. “Bacteremia.”

  The man picked up his child and hurried away from the fortune-tellers’ tent.

  “Hush, Rommily,” her handler said into her ear, tugging on the cuff of one black leather glove. “You’ll drive away the customers.” He knew better than to look into her eyes or touch her bare skin.

  Rommily heard Kevin, but the sounds falling from his lips meant no more to her than the shuffle of shoes on sawdust, the crackle of a paper hot-dog wrapper, or the excited screams from the Zipper.

  She took a step forward, and the chain connecting her ankles left a trail in the dirt. A woman with orange-streaked hair glanced up from her fried pie and met Rommily’s eerily blank gaze.

  “Pneumonia,” the oracle whispered, and Kevin took her by the arm.

  A boy with a pimple on his chin tried to snatch a bite of his girlfriend’s ice cream cone, and when she pulled it out of reach, the back of her right hand bumped Rommily’s bare arm.

  “Cancer,” the oracle said.

  The girl frowned at her. “What?”

  “Brain. Left hemisphere. Inoperable. There’s nothing we can do. I’m so sorry.”

  Startled, the girl dropped her ice cream and ran into the crowd, leaving her boyfriend to chase her, but by then, more people were looking at Rommily.

  “Fire,” she said to a woman wearing jeans a size too small, then Rommily’s focus skipped from face to face in the gathering crowd. “Collision. Heart failure. Suicide.” She didn’t know what all the words meant, but she heard them clearly, as they would one day—decades later, in many cases—be spoken to grieving friends and family members. “Aneurism. Natural causes. Overdose. Cirrhosis. Cardio—”

  “That’s enough!” Kevin pulled Rommily back against the tent and stepped in front of her to draw her attention from the crowd. For one fleeting instant, he accidentally looked into her strange, blank eyes.

  “Multiple gunshot wounds to the torso,” she whispered, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “I know.” His gaze fell to her chin and he dropped her arm. “You’ve told me.”

  “Running, and screaming, and blood.”

  “Rommily...”

  “This is the man all tattered and torn, that kissed the maiden all forlorn.” She put one finger beneath his chin and pushed up, trying to make him look at her, but Kevin swatted her hand away.

  “Ruyle won’t be happy if I have to put you back in your cage, and I don’t think you will be either.”

  The oracle’s mouth snapped closed, and a tear rolled down her cheek. The talker lured a few bystanders into the fortune-tellers’ tent, promising 100 percent accuracy, and the crowd began to flow again.

  Rommily was quiet for a while, and Kevin’s attention began to roam. People wandered in and out of the tent, buzzing excitedly over Mirela’s and Lala’s predictions, and the sun continued to sink slowly toward the horizon.

  When the wind died down and the sun slid behind the siren’s tent, casting Rommily in shadow, she began to fidget with the folds on her skirt and shuffle her bare feet. Something was coming. She could feel it before she saw it, and when the bull rounded a curve in the midway, pulling a cart draped with stained canvas, led by the handler in a red baseball cap, Rommily began to wring her hands.

  As the cart passed, its rear wheel bumped over a rut in the path and a seam in the canvas fell open. Half of a pale, black-veined face appeared in the gap, and a single cloudy white eye met the oracle’s similar gaze.

  A sudden onslaught of images sucked the air from Rommily’s lungs and the warmth from her limbs, sending her stumbling into the front of the tent.

  “Secret Mary,” the oracle said, but the words were too weak to be heard. “Secret Mary!” she shouted, and people turned to stare. Kevin reached for Rommily with one gloved hand, but she pulled away from him, still focused on the canvas-covered cart. “Princess Sara. Jane, and Pip, and Oliver.”

  The bull stopped pulling, and the cart sat still on the midway while Kevin tried to rein in his charge, and still that white eye stared through the gap in the canvas.

  As her handler tugged her into the tent, Rommily’s shrill cry echoed into the crowd, and beyond.

  “Fate’s bastards, every one, and you least among them!”

  Delilah

  “The makeup and claws are bad enough.” Gluing the claws on had ruined my recent manicure, erasing the only remaining evidence that I’d ever been anything other than an animal in a cage. Only the threat of being placed under Clyde’s supervision kept me from ripping the prosthetics from the ends of my fingers and scrubbing my face clean on the hem of my dress.

  I’d told myself that cooperation wasn’t submission; it was survival. But there was a limit to what I would endure in silence. “I won’t wear that, and you can’t make me.”

  “Wrong on both counts.” Gallagher closed the tent flap, and that time I was actually relieved to be free of the curious, invasive gazes from carnival staff passing behind the tent in the makeshift alley that served as a supply path during business hours. He hung the black dress on the outside of my cage. But “dress” was a label the costume didn’t deserve. It was more like scraps of black satin held together with sequins and a prayer.

  “Really?” I propped my hands on my hips, careful of the fake claws, and challenged him with one arched brow. “I guess you could knock me out or sedate me and change my clothes for me, but don’t you think the customers would be disappointed to find your shiny new exhibit lying unconscious on the floor of her cage?”

  Gallagher’s grim scowl was inspiration enough for me to continue.

  “Or you could try to wrestle me into that thing the hard way, but Alyrose won’t have time to repair any damage done to her masterpiece.” I held my painted arms out for emphasis, and the glare from the light mounted on the center pole flashed on the tips of my fake claws. “You really should have made me change before she spent all that time and effort on makeup.”

  “I would have, if Ruyle had signed off on the costume in time.” Gallagher stepped closer to the cage, but the bill of his cap left his face deeply shadowed. “You have to put the costume on, Delilah.”

  But we both knew the only card he had left to play was the violence card, and for no reason I could understand, he still hadn’t laid it on the table.

  Maybe his humanity ran more than skin-deep.

  “Why are you here, Gallagher?”

  “Because this is my job, and I can’t let you get me fired.”

  But there was something he wasn’t saying. His frame was too tense, his jaw too tight.

  Gallagher squared his broad shoulders and cleared his throat. “You are out of options. You have to wear the costume. We all have to do things we hate. That’s the nature of life.”

  “This isn’t life, it’s captivity. What do you hate doing?”

  “I hate see
ing you caged.”

  “Right.” I sat on my heels. “You’re the one keeping me caged.”

  “That doesn’t mean I like it.” He tipped his cap back and I could see his eyes, but I couldn’t make sense of the visceral conflict I saw in them.

  Conflict of what? Ideologies? Or something more personal?

  Loyalties?

  “I hope you do find freedom someday, and I hope you tear some heads off in the process,” he continued, holding my gaze so that I could see the raw candor in his, along with the risk he took with every word he spoke. “But I won’t be the one who lets that happen. I can’t be the one.”

  His voice had gone tight and deep, as if the words bruised his throat, and there was something new in his eyes when he said them.

  “Because you can’t lose this job.”

  “That’s right.” His hand settled onto the black satin still hanging from the side of my cage. “Which is why you have to put on this costume.”

  “I’m not even sure how to do that.” I studied the scraps of black cloth hanging against the side of my cage, searching for some structure I understood. A skirt. A bodice. A waistline. I saw none of that. “If the audience isn’t supposed to see bruises, this thing’s going to be a problem.”

  “Bruises?” Gallagher’s brows furrowed, and I realized I should have opened my argument with that.

  “Just one, really.” I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see him look as I lifted the hem of my dress to reveal the dark purple blotch on my stomach.

  “Son of a bitch,” he growled.

  I dropped my hem and opened my eyes to find him scruffing his cap over his hair.

  “Clyde?”

  I nodded. “Does this mean my exhibit is canceled?” Had I gained a reprieve and gotten Clyde in trouble?