Menagerie

  “Every now and then, the universe decides to prove that by endowing a living being with the essence of one of those truths. You have been chosen to represent vengeance. To remind the world that mankind is not its own final authority. That burden is equal parts honor and curse, and it is nothing that humanity at large will ever accept. Or willingly allow to exist.”

  I could only stare at him, stunned by an outpouring of information I couldn’t properly process. Most of it was churning in my head, slowly being ground into digestible chunks.

  “What sacrifice put me here?” My voice echoed with shock.

  “I don’t know. Sometimes martyrs are brought back as furiae.”

  “But I’m not dead.” Not that I knew of anyway. But then, the list of things I didn’t know had never felt quite so comprehensive before.

  “It’s not always self-sacrifice. Each case is unique. We may never figure out how you became a furiae, but I have no doubt it’s true. That’s why you couldn’t transmute when Clyde abused you.” He finally refolded the paper and slid it into his pocket. “You can’t avenge yourself—your calling is purely selfless.”

  My thoughts were racing. I didn’t want to believe it, but I couldn’t come up with anything to contradict his theory. “But I’ve seen plenty of unjust things, and none of them ever turned me into a monster. Why now? Why Genni?”

  Gallagher was quiet, and I could tell he was searching through his knowledge of the mythology for an answer that made sense. “According to the lore, each of the Erinyes was responsible for avenging a certain kind of offense. Maybe your specialty is avenging abused cryptids.”

  Clarity rushed over me. I’d always been fascinated by cryptids and bothered by the way they were treated. That was why I’d majored in crypto-biology in the first place. I’d thought my degree would help me make a difference. If I’d gone on to crypto-veterinary school, surely I would have seen the abuse firsthand a lot sooner. My inner beast might have shown herself years ago.

  “So, you’re telling me that I can avenge any captive in the menagerie, but not myself?”

  Gallagher nodded. “You may also be able to avenge humans, even if they’re not your specific calling, but you can’t take vengeance on your own behalf.”

  “So, I’m totally helpless.”

  “No.” He stood and looked straight into my eyes. “You have intelligence and courage. And you have me.”

  Yet he didn’t seem to see the conflict of interest. “You’re a jailer.”

  “That sums me up no more thoroughly than the word prisoner describes you.” He came closer to the side of my cage, piercing me with the intensity of his steel focus. “I’m working on something, Delilah. I can get you out of here, so that you can better serve the demands of your calling. But I’m going to need trust, patience, and cooperation from you, or it won’t work. Can you do that?”

  “Can you tell me what you’re up to?” I said, and he shook his head, while mine spun with the possibilities. “Of course you can’t. Do I have any other choice?”

  “Not a good one. But my word is my honor, Delilah. Will you work with me?”

  I exhaled and sat on my ankles in my cage. “Okay.”

  Gallagher nodded, and though he looked pleased, he did not smile. I wasn’t sure he even knew how.

  “The latest reports indicate that these ‘surrogate’ children brought home unbeknownst to their unwitting families somehow ‘glamoured’ parents into slaughtering all human siblings in a single bloody night. What kind of creatures are we talking about here, Ginger? Are they fae? What kind of fae, exactly?”

  —Transcript from a September 24, 1986 interview with

  Ginger Cumberland, Head of Research at Yale’s Crypto-biology Department, on Wake Up America

  Eryx

  The minotaur watched the carnival awaken from within his custom-made heavy-duty steel crate, but the carnival did not watch him back. The handlers and roustabouts never seemed to notice him until they needed him for heavy labor, and that was okay with Eryx.

  The only advantage of having no speech was that most people assumed he also had no language and little comprehension beyond basic repetitive instructions.

  Eryx was just fine with that assumption.

  Before breakfast, Gallagher injected the usual dose of the usual drugs into his arm through the steel mesh and between the strong, thick steel bars. The bars on the minotaur’s cage were twice as thick as those on the other cages because Eryx could have kicked out one of the regular bars in his sleep. In fact, he’d done that very thing during a bad dream the year he was fourteen and still in the possession of another carnival. The staff had risen to find him sleeping with one massive hoofed leg dangling from the side of his busted-open cage. The dislodged bar lay on the ground, and the wire mesh panel was twisted and torn around the bovine leg protruding through it.

  Still, he’d never tried to run or to hurt anyone, and those who worked with him on a daily basis were so accustomed to his benign presence and tractable disposition that even though he was four times heavier and nine times stronger than the average circus roustabout, few ever worried for their safety around the giant beast.

  They worried even less about information spilled near him, and Eryx soaked it up like a sponge, patiently waiting for the opportunity and ability to use what he knew. And the information didn’t just come from the staff. Many of his fellow captives—even those who recognized intelligence in his eyes—assumed him incapable of betraying the secrets they let slip in his presence.

  Eryx knew about the siren’s stealthy lover, and the ringmaster’s closet fetish. He knew about the old man’s hypocrisy and he knew where Gallagher went when he slipped away from the menagerie some nights and came back...rejuvenated.

  The bull knew where Rommily had disappeared to on that rainy night months before. He knew who’d been with her, and what had happened to her, and he knew that she would never be the same again.

  And as Gallagher marched him down the row of wagons, past cage after cage and captive after captive, Eryx saw Rommily, sitting between her sisters, and he understood—not for the first time—that they were the same in many ways, the fragile oracle and the mighty minotaur.

  Both knew important things, yet could not speak them.

  Rommily looked up as he passed, and when her wide-eyed, fevered gaze found his, the minotaur stopped walking, heedless of the ring tugging at his septum and the impatient sounds of the handler in the red cap.

  “Steel trap,” she murmured, but his ears were so attuned to her voice that he would have heard even the softest sound to fall from her tongue. “One track. Speak mine. Boggle yours. Think alike.”

  The bull snorted softly, and her wheat-colored eyes narrowed, studying him as the handler turned to assess the problem. “Eryx. Let’s go.”

  “Labyrinth, deconstructed!” Rommily shouted, as Gallagher urged the minotaur forward. “Eccentric rings! Fools will tumble. Blood will flow. And the bull shall stand tallest of them all...”

  Delilah

  Geneviève’s cage, which had been ominously missing from the lineup last night, was in place next to her father’s when I woke up. I couldn’t have slept for more than a couple of hours, with my thoughts flying around like debris in a storm, but she looked like she’d been awake all night.

  “Genni!” I called, when I noticed her curled up in one corner of her pen, and to my relief, she looked up at the sound of my voice. “We missed you last night. Are you okay?”

  She blinked, but made no response, and I noticed the fresh bandage on her forearm.

  “What happened to your arm, honey?”

  “What’s wrong with her arm?” Claudio sat up and looked to me for a reply because he couldn’t see into his daughter’s cage. “I don’t smell fresh blood.”

  “Genni, hold your arm out ple
ase,” I said, and after a moment’s hesitation, she complied. “The bandage is clean,” I told Claudio, but I didn’t mention how thin her arm was or how prominent her elbow looked because of that. “If there was blood, it’s dry and covered. Genni, what happened? Did someone hurt you?”

  Just asking made my chest ache. In my former life, if she’d said yes, I would have called child protective services. But because Genni was raised in the menagerie, her answer was largely irrelevant. If someone had hurt her, it wouldn’t be the first time, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Or maybe there was.

  If Gallagher was right, I might be the only one who could do something about it. But I wasn’t quite ready to dive into the deep end of the vengeance pool.

  I wasn’t actually sure how to kick-start my inner furiae, and Gallagher and I had agreed that the rest of the staff should not know what we’d figured out. If they discovered that my life’s purpose was at odds with their tendency to abuse the captives, I might very well be hurt—or at least isolated—beyond the ability to help anyone else. Yet what was the point of having a “calling,” as Gallagher referred to it, if I couldn’t perform the inherent duties?

  Still, when Genni shook her head, relief rolled over me, taking some of the pressure off my response.

  “Did you do that to yourself?” I asked, and she nodded, then mimed biting her own arm. “She bit herself,” I told her father, and Claudio nodded in acknowledgment, his face a mask of worry. “Did they sew you up? Did they put cream on your arm before the bandage?”

  Genni shrugged.

  “She doesn’t know,” I said. “My guess is that she was unconscious.”

  “But she’s okay now?”

  “Seems to be,” I said, well aware that “okay” was a relative term among menagerie captives.

  Geneviève curled up on the metal floor of her pen and pulled her blanket up to her shoulders, then tucked both hands beneath her cheek like a pillow. “Dites-moi une histoire, s’il vous plaît.”

  “She wants to hear another story,” her father translated, but I’d already figured that out. “She used her manners.” He seemed pleased by that, and the rare glimpse at a normal parenting moment under such barbaric circumstances made my eyes water.

  “Okay, let me think.” She’d liked Hansel and Gretel, and I wanted to give her a story about a girl who triumphed over extraordinary adversity. Something relevant to her life. “Genni, do you know about the Black Bull-man of Norroway?” I asked, and when she shook her head, I sat cross-legged facing her and pulled my blanket into my lap, settling in for the story about a noble minotaur and his troubled young bride.

  Halfway through, I looked up from where Genni lay watching me and discovered that Claudio, Zyanya, Payat, and Mahsa were all listening as well, and based on the silence from farther down the line, my audience had grown even bigger than I could see.

  * * *

  Breakfast was a small scoop of watery oatmeal—without utensils—and a boiled pig’s foot, served by Abraxas. He didn’t smile or chat with the captives, but he was a definite improvement over Clyde because everything he scooped onto the trays actually made it into someone’s stomach.

  I ate every bite of my meal, silently cursing myself for every scrap of food I’d ever wasted in my life before captivity.

  I was leaning against the end panel of my cage, marveling at how much better I felt having eaten twice in a span of twelve hours, when Zyanya called my name from her ornate black-and-silver-framed crate across the aisle. “Hey,” she said when I looked up. “Where did you go last night?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I woke up in the middle of the night, and your cage was gone, but this morning you have clean clothes and a fresh blanket. Where’d you go?”

  “Gallagher took her,” a female voice called from farther down my own line of cages, and I recognized Lenore’s melodic siren voice. I knew most of my fellow captives by voice better than by sight.

  “He didn’t take me,” I insisted, afraid someone would think I’d made a late-night concession for food. Which was when I realized my secret—any secret, actually—would be really hard to keep in the menagerie. “He just...”

  “He made you work?” Claudio guessed, and I could have kissed him.

  “Yes, actually. He says I can’t go back on display until we figure out what I am.” What he’d really said was that I couldn’t go back on display until I figured out how to transmute without having to see someone else hurt. I’d come close on the travel trailer, but close wasn’t good enough to charge admission for.

  “Any clue yet?” Lenore asked from the wagon she shared with Finola.

  Immediately the buzz of caged conversation swelled.

  “I think she’s a gorgon,” the berserker called from three cages down. He was well out of my line of sight, but I’d grown to recognize the odd rattle in his voice. “Her hair looked like Medusa. I saw it that first night.”

  “I saw it, too, and there were no snakes,” Zyanya insisted, seated with her knees sticking up near her shoulders, every bit the cat, even in human form. “No snakes, no gorgon. Plus, no one turned into stone.”

  “That stone part’s bullshit,” Finola, the other siren, called. I recognized her by the telltale melodic quality of her voice, even when she wasn’t singing. “Gorgons don’t actually petrify people—they exude some kind of hormone that paralyzes them. Besides, she can’t be a gorgon. They’re extinct.”

  After that, the discussion devolved into an argument over whether gorgons were actually extinct or just very, very endangered, and I let it proceed without me, grateful that everyone seemed to have forgotten about my illicit nighttime activities.

  When the daily parade of captives toward the fairgrounds began, I watched with renewed interest, waiting for a glimpse of Eryx. Hoping he would look at me on his way past, or somehow acknowledge the new secret we shared, so I could stop worrying that I’d imagined him writing in the sawdust.

  I wanted to know what he’d been trying to tell me. Did he know what Gallagher was up to?

  Halfway through the cavalcade of weary exhibits in gilded cages, the white centaur and the buck pulled the oracle sisters by my crate and the moment my gaze met Rommily’s, her eyes widened and glazed over with a white film.

  “David! Dorothy! Heidi!” she shouted at me. “Siblings in serendipity, they welcome you!”

  “Are those the names she said to you last time?” Claudio asked, and I could only shake my head, watching the oracles pass.

  “Who are they?” Mahsa called from behind me.

  “I have no idea.”

  “What were the other names?” the berserker asked, and in the aisle between rows, I could see his shadow silhouette turn toward mine.

  “Um... Jane, and Pip, and Oliver. And a princess named Sara. And Secret Mary.”

  “Sara, la princesse.” Geneviève sat up and pushed her blanket off. “Mon histoire préférée!”

  “What?” I turned to Genni, goose bumps rising on my arms. “Geneviève, what did you say?”

  “She’s talking about the girl in her favorite story,” Claudio explained, pushing shaggy silver hair back from his face. “Mirela used to tell it to her, after Genni’s mother... After they sold Melisande.”

  “A Little Princess.” I’d read it over and over as a kid.

  “Oui!” Genni looked so hopeful I hated to disappoint her by not telling the story, but my brain was racing too quickly to stop.

  “Holy shit! They’re all characters.”

  “What?” Zyanya blinked big orangish eyes at me.

  “Rommily’s names. They’re all characters from books. Sara, from A Little Princess. Mary, from The Secret Garden. Pip, from Great Expectations. Oliver, from Oliver Twist. David, from David Copperfield. Dorothy, from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Heidi, from—well, from Heidi. I don’t know who Jane is, but there must be a thousand characters named Jane.”

  Genni watched me, still waiting for her story, but her father looked puzzled. “Are they dead?”

  “They’re fictional. They were never alive in the first place.” I shrugged. “You said Mirela told Genni about A Little Princess? Can she read? Weren’t the oracles born here?” I had yet to meet anyone who’d learned to read after being born into captivity. Except maybe Eryx.

  “No, they were bought as small children, after their parents were exposed and sold elsewhere,” the werewolf papa said. “That was a couple of years after the old man brought me in from France.”

  “Were they old enough to read?”

  “Mirela knows her letters,” Mahsa said, smoothing long black hair over one dark shoulder, and I realized that everyone within hearing distance had gone quiet, listening. Most sat pressed against the aisle sides of their cages, trying to see as many fellow prisoners as possible. “She went to school for a couple of years before they were exposed. Sometimes she reads signs for us, so we know where we are. And I saw her teach letters to her sisters, in the dirt. When we were in the petting zoo.”

  The petting zoo.

  An old memory flashed through my mind, and I connected the dots. I’d seen Mirela, Rommily, and Lala in the petting zoo when I was a kid. Mirela had been about my age, and I couldn’t understand what three normal-looking girls were doing in the pen next to two small werewolves. They must have been new to the menagerie when I’d seen them.

  The ache in my chest rivaled the rage in my soul. Small children ripped from their parents and sold into exhibition. That ache bruised even deeper when I realized I probably wasn’t hearing about an isolated incident.