“She didn’t read about Princess Sara, though,” Claudio said. “She saw it on television. On a movie disk.”
“A DVD.” That made more sense. And if the oracle sisters had seen A Little Princess as a movie, they might have seen all the others the same way, long before they could have read the books.
“So why is she shouting the names of storybook characters at you?” Payat asked.
I could only shrug, my mind still racing. “Maybe she wants to tell me a story. Or maybe she wants me to tell one,” I said, thinking of Eryx and our guessing game the night before.
Claudio shook his head once, firmly. “She doesn’t ask for things anymore, and if her sisters didn’t feed her, she would hardly eat. She has visions all the time, but she only shouts like that when she’s seen something she really wants to tell someone.”
What could Rommily possibly have seen involving a bunch of characters from books more than a century old, and what did any of that have to do with me?
Were any of them captives or prisoners?
Oliver Twist was stuck in a prison-like orphanage. Sara was forced to work for the owner of a girls’ school, after her father died and left her penni—
“Orphans.” The connection between the characters hit me like a punch to the gut. “They’re all orphans. Sara, Mary, Pip, David, Oliver, Heidi, and Dorothy. And presumably Jane. Their parents are all...”
...dead.
Fate’s bastards. “And I least among them...” My goose bumps receded beneath growing horror. “She’s telling me I’m an orphan. Or that I’m going to be.”
Movement to my right caught my eye and when the world zoomed back into focus, I saw Gallagher leading Eryx as he pulled a cage holding one of the squat, gnarl-limbed trolls.
“Gallagher!” I shouted, with no real forethought. He gave me a dark scowl, then kept walking without acknowledging me.
Normally, I would have let it go at that. Instead, I gripped the wire mesh and pulled myself onto my knees.
“Delilah, don’t!” Zyanya whispered fiercely. “You’re asking for trouble.”
And I knew that. But my mother was the only person left in the world who’d cared about me both before and after captivity, and I didn’t even know if she was alive. Getting ahold of her was worth whatever I’d have to endure for my insolence later.
So I steeled my nerve and raised my voice. “Gallagher! I need to talk to you.”
His scowl became an angry glower and he handed Eryx’s lead rope to Abraxas, who was passing in the opposite direction, with a barked order to wait for him. Gallagher stormed toward me, every step a bolt of thunder, anger firing in his gaze like lightning.
“Delilah, don’t make it worse,” Claudio whispered. But I was already committed.
“What the hell are you doing?” Gallagher growled, and the look in his gray eyes froze the blood in my veins. He looked like he might have ripped my head from my neck, if not for the steel barrier.
My mother was worth the risk.
“I need a favor, and I’m willing to pay.” Though I wasn’t sure how. “I’ll... You can put me in the show tonight. I’ll figure out how to transmute. I swear I’ll make it happen.” And if I couldn’t, he would already have granted my favor.
“Gallagher?” Chris Ruyle headed toward us from the silver wagon, wearing his authority like a badge, and my heartbeat echoed in my ears. “Is there a problem?”
“Nothing I can’t handle.” Gallagher held my gaze with fury dancing in his own. “Don’t forget where you’re sitting.” His voice rolled over me with a chilling hostility that made me wonder if I’d imagined everything that happened the night before. “You do as you’re told, or you pay the price, just like all the other monsters in metal boxes.”
He turned to stomp off, and desperation warred with my common sense. “Gallagher, please!” I called after him, gripping the wire so tightly it cut into my fingers. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important!”
He stiffened. Two steps later, he grabbed Abraxas by the front of his red tee. “No lunch for Drea today. No dinner either. Got it?”
Abraxas nodded, clearly terrified, and Gallagher let him go. “If you hear one more word out of her before I get back, hose her down.”
His words were a shock almost as violent as the hose itself.
Gallagher snatched Eryx’s lead rope and pulled the bull toward the rear entrance to the fairgrounds. As he was marched off, the minotaur turned to look at me, and I could swear I saw sympathy in his sad, human eyes.
* * *
Lunch came and went, and I was not served. Crews came to haul off the second troll, the lamia, the puca, the pair of djinn, and the berserker, but Gallagher did not return.
I didn’t speak, even when Claudio and Zyanya both tried to draw me out of silence. Even when Geneviève asked politely in French for another story, I complied with Gallagher’s gag order not for my own safety, but for my mother’s. My last remaining parent, who was in serious trouble, if I’d interpreted Rommily’s riddle correctly.
Or maybe she was already dead.
I would never know for sure without Gallagher’s help.
After lunch, crew members leading pairs of drugged centaurs came to haul off the adlet and the cat shifters, leaving me alone with Geneviève and Claudio, who was trying to talk his daughter into performing her first live shift to keep her from being abused for refusal.
Early in the afternoon, two more hauling crews came for the werewolves, and my unadorned crate stood alone for the second day in a row. My growing hunger couldn’t hold a candle to my need for a restroom, though I’d had nothing to drink since the small bowl of water that had come with my breakfast.
And through it all, I could think of nothing but my mother, hoping with every breath in my body that I’d misinterpreted the oracle’s fractured prophecy.
Finally, as carnival performers headed toward the midway in black satin and red sequins glittering in the hot afternoon sun, Eryx and Gallagher appeared at the fairgrounds’ back gate, headed my way. I could tell from my handler’s gait that he wasn’t as mad as he’d been earlier, but he didn’t look happy either.
“Gallagher,” I said as he fastened the minotaur’s harness to my cage.
He leaned around the end panel. “Just shut up and sit still, and you might not end this day any worse off than you began it.”
Out of options, I bit my tongue as Eryx pulled my cage through the gate, then into the alley behind a series of tents, avoiding the midway because the carnival was already open for business. Hours of operation were longer on the weekend, but I couldn’t be sure whether it was Saturday or Sunday, and when I realized the day of the week no longer held any significance to me, I wanted to cry.
Eryx hauled me into my own small tent, and without a word, our handler unharnessed him and led him back outside, presumably to the hybrid tent, where the mighty minotaur should already have been on display.
Gallagher returned alone, still scowling from beneath the brim of his faded red cap. He hooked the bottom of the red-and-white tent sidewall into place, then stood to face me, thick arms crossed over an even thicker chest. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“That I need your help.”
Gallagher’s anger felt almost as ominous as Rommily’s prophecy, but as tenuous as our partnership seemed, he was my only ally in the carnival. “That is not the way to get it,” he growled as he unlocked my cage.
My legs ached in anticipation of truly stretching. Of walking. Of being out of that damn cage.
“If you ever pull something like that again, I’ll have no choice but to let Ruyle punish you hard, fast, and in full view, just to keep my job.” He pulled a pair of cuffs from a hook on the side of my cage, and I held my hands out so he could restrain me.
I didn’t realize until the
metal closed over my wrists that the restraint routine was so ingrained that I hadn’t even given it conscious thought.
“There’s always a choice,” I insisted as he helped me to the ground. “Especially for those who aren’t locked in metal boxes.”
He led me out of the tent and through the back alley toward a row of blue portable toilets. “I can’t lose this job, Delilah.” The tension in his voice was an alarm, warning me that there was more to what he was saying than the sum of the words themselves. “Not yet.”
“Why not? If you’re going to break me out of here anyway, why can’t we just go now?” Gallagher opened the toilet stall, but instead of stepping inside, I studied his gaze for some hint of what he was hiding. “We could leave tonight,” I whispered. We could pile into his truck, or trailer, or whatever he drove, and I could call my mom from the road to check on her. Of course, I’d have to find a phone, since he didn’t have a cell, and mine had been confiscated along with everything I’d owned.
“It’s not that simple. Your escape is not my only concern, and this undertaking can’t be rushed,” he whispered. “I cannot lose this job before the time is right.”
Tension twisted in my stomach. I suddenly felt as if I were standing in a pitch-black room, inches from some heinous danger I could sense, yet couldn’t see. What would happen if I stepped forward? “What are you up to?” Why was he keeping me in the dark?
“You don’t get to ask that question.” Gallagher nudged me toward the toilet, and I stepped inside. “What you get to do is turn yourself inside out, so we can all see the real you.” His voice was muffled through the door. “You said you’d learn to transmute for tonight.”
I stepped out of the stall, rubbing sanitizer from the dispenser onto my hands. “I said I was ready to make a deal. You help me, I’ll help you.”
“I’m already helping you. You have to do your part.” Gallagher led me back to my tent and lifted me into my cage.
“Fine,” I said as he locked me in. “But my condition stands. First I need you to call my mom and make sure she’s still alive.”
“Why would you think she’s dead?”
“Because Rommily’s spent the past two days trying to tell me that I’m an orphan. Or that I will be.”
“No one knows what Rommily means most of the time, Delilah. That’s why she doesn’t work in the tent anymore.”
But according to Claudio, banning Rommily from the oracle tent had more to do with the fact that since the day Clyde hurt her, her prophecies related almost exclusively to death, which wasn’t marketable on the midway, because it scared the customers.
Her prophecy scared me, too.
“She called me an orphan, which either means that my mom is dead—or will be—or that she was talking about my biological parents. Whoever and wherever they may be. I’m not going to do another thing to help either of us until you find me a phone and let me talk to her.”
A fierce, low growl rolled up from Gallagher’s throat. “One phone call with your mother? One very short phone call, then you’ll cooperate with me until the day you regain your freedom?”
“You have my word.”
“Fine.” He clipped the key ring back onto his belt. “I’ll be right back, and you better be ready to work.” Then Gallagher unhooked one of the sidewalls and disappeared into the carnival.
Time dragged while he was gone, and I had no way to accurately count the minutes. The clomp of hooves had replaced the ticking of the clock since I’d been imprisoned by the menagerie, and the sun’s position in the sky had become a cosmic hour hand, tracing time as it circled the world around me. But neither of those was accurate enough to tell me how long I lay awake at night, how soon breakfast would come, or how long Gallagher had left me alone, locked in a cage.
Finally, he ducked into the tent again and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. He slid it through the tray slot in the side of my cage.
I took the phone, and an ache swelled deep inside me, equal parts bitter loss and rose-tinted nostalgia. The juxtaposition of the before and after halves of my life could not have felt more bizarre if I’d worn shackles and chains to work at the bank.
“Whose is this?” I dragged my finger across the screen to wake the phone up and exhaled in relief when I wasn’t asked for a password, a concept so removed from my new existence that for a second, I couldn’t remember its purpose.
Authorization. Permission to use.
“Alyrose’s. She’s taking tickets for the hybrid tent tonight.”
I dialed my mother’s cell number, and the phone rang over and over in my ear. Finally, her voice mail picked up.
“Hello, this is Charity Marlow. I can’t come to the phone right now, so leave me a message. Unless you’re a reporter, in which case you can go fuck yourself. Have a great day!”
The beep speared my brain, and I couldn’t help smiling, in spite of the circumstance.
Gallagher frowned. “What’s funny?”
“I just realized how much of my personality can be credited to nurture, rather than nature.” How had I never noticed before how much like my mother I was? “Hey, Mom, it’s me,” I said, when I realized that my voice message was already recording. “I’m fine, but I need you to call me back if you get this within the next few minutes. After that, don’t call, because I won’t have access to this phone.” I squeezed my eyes shut, and two tears rolled down my face as every moment of homesickness, memory, and isolation I’d suffered in captivity suddenly coalesced into a single devastating pang of loss. “I love you.”
I hung up, and a minute later I was still staring at the phone when it buzzed in my hand.
Fresh tears gathered in my eyes when I saw my mother’s number on the screen, and in my haste, I said hello before I’d actually accepted the call. “Mom?” I said again, with the phone pressed to my head.
She sobbed into my ear. “Lilah!”
She was alive.
Hearing her say my name felt amazing, yet it also hurt, deep inside.
“Yeah, it’s me. I’m okay, but I don’t have long. Are you okay?”
“No, honey, I’m not,” she said over the rumble of road noise. “Last week a heartless, corrupt backwoods sheriff sold my daughter to a traveling menagerie. But the Cryptid Conservation Society gave me the name of a civil rights attorney from—”
“Mom.” My throat felt thick, and the word almost got stuck in it. “Are you physically all right? Are you sick? Or hurt? Has anyone threatened you?”
She hesitated a second, as if the question surprised her. “The reporters are persistent, and there’ve been a few threats. But nothing serious. And I feel fine. Why?”
“No reason.” I tried to make my pulse slow, but I couldn’t overlook the obvious—just because she wasn’t sick or in danger now didn’t mean she wouldn’t be tomorrow. Or the next day. “I miss you.”
“I miss you too, honey. You’re in Texas now, right?”
I frowned, and a glance at Gallagher told me he’d heard her. “How did you know that, Mom?”
“Metzger’s has a website, hon, and I’m not completely technologically incompetent.”
“Okay.” Gallagher held out his hand for the phone, as if I could just reach through the wire mesh and drop it onto his palm. “We don’t have much time, Delilah.”
“Who’s that?” my mother asked.
“No one. I have to go.” Tears blurred my vision, and I scrubbed my eyes with my free hand. Saying goodbye over the phone was just as hard as saying it in person had been.
“Can I call you back at this number?”
“No. I won’t have access to a phone again.” I sniffled and swiped at my nose with the back of my hand. “I just really needed to hear your voice.”
“Me, too, hon, and I think I can do even better than that. The drive’s not t
hat long, and—”
“Don’t,” I said, and the word sounded like a sob. “Do not come here, Mom. I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“Delilah, there is no way I’m just going to leave you there to rot. I don’t care if they declare you cryptid, or an alien, or the Antichrist, you’re still my daughter, and they can’t keep me away.” Her engine noise softened and I heard a soft, familiar thump as she shifted into Park. “Anyway, I need pictures documenting your living conditions for the attorney—”
My chest ached fiercely. “Mom, do not hire an attorney.” If she fought, Pennington and Metzger would throw her in jail.
She hesitated, and I could hear her breathing over the line. “Honey, it’s starting to look like I’m going to have to hire her just to make them show me your blood test results. Unless you’ve already seen them?”
Gallagher tapped on the corner of my cage and I looked up to see warning in his stern expression.
“No.” I felt bad about lying to my mother, but not bad enough to tell her the truth. After what I’d done to Jack, they wouldn’t set me free no matter what my test results said, and she’d only be putting herself in danger if she kept digging. “Mom, I have to go, but I’m fine. Really. Don’t come here, and don’t hire the lawyer. That’ll only make things worse.”
My mother huffed. “I don’t see how they could possibly be any—”
“Mom. Promise me!” My grip on the phone was so tight the plastic creaked.
After another moment’s hesitation, she exhaled slowly. “Fine.” I didn’t believe her, but she would only have to keep her reluctant promise long enough for Gallagher to break me out. Which he’d said would be soon. “I love you, honey.”
“I love you, too.” I made myself hang up without thinking about it, so I couldn’t lose my nerve. Then I pressed another series of buttons on Alyrose’s phone.
“What are you doing?” Gallagher demanded, reaching for his keys.
“I’m just erasing my call from the log.” I slid the phone back through the slot, and he took it. “Now, dial the weather line, or something generic like that. If you give the phone back and it doesn’t show a call, Alyrose will get curious and ask you what you wanted.”