Menagerie

The drive to make that act a reality was all-consuming.

  Broiling with fury, I turned to find Clyde standing over Genni while she sobbed, fighting to breathe through her running nose. The cattle prod hung at his side. He was laughing. The bastard was laughing, because I’d given him exactly what he wanted.

  He’d staged the entire thing to trigger my transmutation. In front of a live audience. Without Gallagher’s knowledge or permission.

  He’d hurt Genni for no reason at all.

  “What did I—” Abraxas’s voice cracked when his gaze met mine. Then he blinked and cleared his throat. “What did I tell you, ladies and gentlemen? She’s something else, isn’t she?” He turned toward the midway and stumbled through his pitch, drawing more and more people into my tent, where cameras flashed and phones recorded my misery, in clear violation of the menagerie’s policy. A couple of small children started to cry, but their parents only picked them up and continued to stare at me with kids clutched to their chests.

  Clyde set his electrical prod on the ground behind the game booth, then picked Genni up and tossed her into her open cage. He slammed the door shut and locked it while she shook and sobbed behind her gag, blinking at me from twenty-five feet away. Then he stored his weapon on the step rail of her crate and sauntered into the tent as if he owned it.

  As if he owned me.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to have to ask you to put away your cameras.” He waited while the audience complied reluctantly. “What you just heard Drea say before she graced us with her true face is a prime example of why monsters that look human are the most dangerous of their kind. Cryptids like this are capable of masterful feats of deception. They are silver-tongued beasts who will lie right to your face to protect the illusion of their humanity, which is exactly how this particular cryptid spent twenty-five years passing for human.

  “Now, folks, I don’t want you to worry about your safety—Drea is securely locked in a steel cage—but again let me say that we do not know what she is. The experts are flummoxed, but it’s possible one of you can identify her species. On the table next to the entrance, you’ll notice an empty jar and a stack of notecards, which my assistant will be happy to pass out.”

  While Abraxas helped audience members fill out entry forms, I glared at Clyde, riding the current of fury coursing through my body, silently cursing the cage standing between me and a mind-scrambling end for the handler.

  Justice for Geneviève.

  The closer he came to my cage, the harder every cell in my body cried out for his suffering. I was drawn to him like metal to a human bastard of a magnet, but every time I reached for him, my claws slid through the wire mesh then stopped when my palms met metal.

  I knew I couldn’t get to him, but my body refused to accept that. The furiae within me suddenly felt like its own separate entity—inside of me, a part of me, but acting of its own accord.

  People came and went with their kids and their astonished oohs and aahs. Abraxas continued to call spectators in from the midway. Clyde answered questions about where Metzger’s had acquired me, and what I ate, and what havoc I might wreak if I ever escaped bondage. But as time passed after Genni’s suffering, my inner beast slowly retreated beneath my skin, biding her time. She still wanted to crack Clyde’s skull like an eggshell, but she seemed to finally understand that her chance had not yet come.

  My twisty, stand-up hair had already begun to fall limp when Gallagher stormed into the tent and grabbed Abraxas by the front of his shirt. A beat of hope and relief pulsed through me when he hauled the boy off his feet and ripped the megaphone away. I couldn’t hear what he said over the crowd and the music, but the shapes drawn by his lips were familiar enough.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Abraxas pointed to Clyde, stuttering some explanation I couldn’t make out.

  Clyde watched the interchange in smug satisfaction, his arms crossed over his Metzger’s polo, and the furiae inside me stretched beneath my skin, resurrecting my urge to reach for him.

  Gallagher dropped the boy and barked an order I couldn’t hear. Then he marched through the crowd, jostling people out of his way, and slammed one huge fist down on the small portable stereo. I jerked, startled. Slivers of plastic and electronics rained onto the table and the sawdust-covered ground.

  The music died, and the crowd turned to stare at him. The sudden silence echoed in my ears and for a second I was sure I’d gone deaf. Then Gallagher faced the audience, his bearing stiff and his fists clenched. “This exhibit is now closed,” he growled. “Don’t forget to purchase a Metzger’s T-shirt or commemorative minotaur mug on your way out.”

  For a moment, everyone stared in confusion. Then Abraxas lifted his megaphone and began directing the audience back onto the midway.

  By the time Gallagher hauled the boy-crier into the empty tent and dropped the open sidewall, my hair hung lank and tangled over my shoulders and my vision had returned to normal. My fingernails were still pointed, but those points were receding right in front of my eyes. Yet I could still feel the furiae just beneath my skin, like the seething undercurrent beneath the calm surface of a lake.

  I’d never felt anything so persistent. So bloodthirsty. She was a part of me—she was me—but this new appetite for violence was so foreign that I couldn’t help thinking of her as a distinct division of me. A hungry splinter faction of Delilah that could only be controlled if it were fed regularly. Suddenly, the result of my blood test made more sense. Becoming a furiae hadn’t cost me my humanity; it had made me capable of holding others of my species accountable for their cruelty.

  “You’re fired!” Gallagher roared at Clyde from across the tent, and I shivered as the words rolled over and through me, soothing my inner beast like a cat being stroked. The furiae liked seeing Clyde reproached. “Get the hell out of my menagerie!”

  “You can’t fire me.” Clyde pulled a trash can from beneath the folding table and brushed the remains of his stereo into it with a jarring clatter.

  “I’m your boss!” Gallagher shouted.

  The sidewall rose behind him, and Ruyle stepped into the tent. “And I’m yours. Clyde stays.”

  Gallagher turned on the lot superintendent, and my pulse rushed in anticipation of the confrontation. “He sabotaged the mermaid tank, then usurped my act and launched an unauthorized showcase of an ungroomed exhibit! He’s damn lucky I’m only firing him.” But the tight clench of his fists told me he was actually hoping for a more extreme solution.

  As was I.

  “Clyde transformed a useless cryptid from a drain on carnival resources into a profitable exhibit and engaged the audience in the search for her species. They’re talking about it up and down the midway. Videos are already surfacing online.” Ruyle unlocked his cell phone with a swipe of the screen. “Two thousand hits in twenty-four minutes. Most asking where we’ll stop next. That’s the first time YouTube has ever worked in our favor.” He held his cell up for Gallagher, and I couldn’t clearly see the image paused on it, but I knew it was me.

  Yet for the first time since discovering that I had an inner beast, I wasn’t horrified or humiliated at the knowledge that she’d been gawked at. She’d wanted to be seen. But she’d wanted to be seen punishing Clyde for what he’d done, not as a monster sitting helpless in a cage.

  “She’s my project,” Gallagher growled, and for once, I felt no need to object to the possessive nature of his claim. What he really meant but couldn’t say was that I was his ally.

  “Which is why you owe Clyde a debt—looks like you’re going to get to keep your little pet.” Ruyle turned to Abraxas, who still clutched the megaphone to his thin chest. “Take the jar to my office. There’s a twenty waiting for you, as promised.”

  Ruyle glanced at me with a smug half smile, then he nodded at Clyde and ducked beneath the untethered side panel and out
of the tent.

  When Gallagher noticed Abraxas lingering, he turned to the boy with ice in his gray-eyed glare.

  “I’m sorry.” Abraxas started to hand him the megaphone, then set it on the ground between them instead. “I thought you knew. Clyde said this would be my chance to show Ruyle I could talk on the midway.”

  “Go,” Gallagher growled. Abraxas blinked at him, then grabbed the jar full of paper slips and took off through the loose sidewall panel at a run.

  “You, too,” Gallagher said to Clyde, but the smaller handler only leaned with one hip against the folding table, smug and gloating.

  “Don’t you want to know how I got your pet freak to perform?”

  “He tortured Geneviève.” I turned to Clyde, and a resurgence of rage made my fingers tingle, but I swallowed the instinct, loathe to give him a second show. “He cuffed her, gagged her, and shocked her with the cattle prod for no reason at all.” My voice had taken on a husky quality, just as it had that night in the hybrid tent.

  “Oh, I had a reason.” Clyde tapped on the end panel of my cage, and fire surged through me. He turned back to Gallagher. “At first I thought Drea was a lost cause, on account of her raising, but then I realized that could be used against her. This one thinks like a human bitch.” He hooked one thumb in my direction. “Which means you can make her do anything you want, if you push the right button.”

  “Take Geneviève back to the row,” Gallagher ordered through clenched teeth.

  “She’s scheduled for a live shift in the center ring tonight.”

  “Take her back,” Gallagher growled. “Give her some water and let her rest. Claudio can go on in her place.”

  “You’re too soft on them.” Clyde pushed back the sidewall panel, but hesitated before he ducked beneath it. “They’re going to run all over you.”

  “If I didn’t repair the damage mental runts like you and Jack do to the inventory, the old man wouldn’t have a thing to put on display. Now go do your damn job.”

  Clyde ducked beneath the loose canvas flap and disappeared, still grinning.

  Gallagher slid his fingers through the wire mesh between us, just outside of my own grip on the metal, and when he only breathed deeply for several long seconds, I realized he was trying to rein in his temper.

  Finally, he turned and secured the loose sidewalls to stakes in the ground, effectively locking all the doors. Then he opened my cage and motioned me forward until I sat in the threshold, my legs dangling from the edge of the wagon. “Are you okay?” He pulled a bottle of water from one of the pockets of his cargo-style jeans and handed it to me.

  “You should be worried about Genni, not me.” I cracked open the bottle and drank a third of it in several large gulps.

  “I’ll check on her when I’m done here.” Gallagher scruffed his faded red cap over his short hair. “So, Clyde figured out how to bring out your beast, but not what it is?”

  I wedged the open bottle between my thighs to keep from knocking it over, and the cold condensation was a shock to my overheated skin. “I think he just re-created the circumstance that triggered my first transmutation and hoped for the best.” Gallagher and I could have done the same thing—if we’d been willing to hurt someone innocent.

  Clyde wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.

  My hand tightened around the water bottle. I closed my eyes, trying to absorb the conclusions and ramifications spinning in my head, but only one thing became clear. “We can’t wait. We have to go now.”

  “I told you. That’s not an option.”

  I opened my eyes again to find him watching me from inches away. “They’re going to have to hurt someone every time I go on display, and the only way they’re going to make any money under that business model is if they use acts that aren’t profitable on their own. Which is only Genni and Rommily, right?”

  Gallagher nodded, his teeth clenched tightly.

  “That is not okay with me!” The words grated against my throat on their way out, as the furiae asserted her influence on my vocal chords.

  “Agreed, but we can’t leave yet. I made a promise, and I can’t go back on my word, Delilah. Not even to set you free.”

  “You made a promise to someone else?”

  Gallagher nodded.

  “To one of the other captives?” An odd beat of jealousy flashed through me at the thought.

  “I can’t... Look, I’d rather get you out of here tonight. Right now. But my word is my honor.”

  I knew I’d lost before he even finished the familiar phrase. Anger ground my teeth together, and I tried to scoot back into my cage, to put distance between us.

  He caught me with one hand around my ankle. “Delilah. I’m going to set you free.” Gallagher tugged me forward until my legs dangled from the cage again, and we were inches apart. “You have my word. But now I need yours. I want you to promise me you’re going to be patient and wait. No more stunts like you pulled yesterday.”

  “I’m not promising you anything. You said it yourself—I’m supposed to be avenging unrighted wrongs. Instead, I’m the reason Genni was tortured tonight, and that’s going to happen over and over unless we do something about it. Clyde was right. As long as I’m in this cage, I’m worth less than the food it takes to keep me alive.”

  Anger flashed across Gallagher’s face. “That is not true,” he growled. “You are judge, jury, and executioner—the physical embodiment of retribution.” Fervor burned in his eyes, kindling a blistering response deep inside me, where the furiae was stirred by his words. “You serve no one and nothing except the concept of justice itself, and no ignorant brute of a handler could possibly understand your worth.”

  For a second, I couldn’t breathe. The conviction in his voice was stunning. It was absolute. No one had ever in my life believed in me as much as Gallagher did in that moment. I could see that in his eyes as clearly as I could hear it in his voice.

  “What you do is important to the world. Who you are is important to me. You are worth fighting for, and I will fight for you. But you have to be willing to compromise until the time is right.”

  I stared at him, trying to understand. Where had his conviction come from? Every other human I’d met since being sold to the menagerie had treated me like an animal, but Gallagher seemed to be polishing a pedestal for me.

  I didn’t deserve his conviction. Regardless of whatever calling I served, all I’d done so far was get people hurt. I couldn’t let that happen again.

  “I can’t compromise someone else’s safety just so Metzger’s can get a show out of me,” I insisted.

  “Then figure out how to give them what they want some other way. On your own terms.”

  As if I hadn’t thought of that. “How?”

  Gallagher closed his eyes and scruffed his hat over his hair again as he thought out loud. “Injustice triggers your transmutation, but do you have to actually see that injustice, live?” His eyes opened, and his gaze met mine. “Could you possibly just think about an instance in the past? Meditate about it?”

  “I think that’s what was happening that time in the travel trailer, and I’ve tried that a couple of times since, but I was never able to make it work. But tonight when I saw Clyde hurting Genni, my inner beast was just there. She was drawn to him, in a way she couldn’t be when I was locked up in the travel trailer, because he wasn’t there.”

  “Because he wasn’t there...” Gallagher’s eyes brightened, and after a second, I caught on.

  “Clyde wasn’t close enough to be punished in the travel trailer, so my beast never fully manifested. I don’t need to see the abuse—I just need to see the abuser!”

  Gallagher nodded. “That’s what it sounds like anyway.”

  I frowned as a new realization dawned. “But I see Clyde all the time without sprouting claws.”

/>   “So maybe part of it is that meditation,” he suggested. “Maybe if you visualize giving him what he deserves?”

  “We need a trial run.” Warmth blossomed in my gut and my fingers began to itch. My beast was still there, just beneath the surface of my skin. She was still eager. And she was pissed off that she hadn’t gotten the man she’d shown up for.

  Gallagher shrugged. “I could send Clyde in here on an errand.”

  I shook my head. “I want a real trial run.” My voice took on that fuller quality, as if the words were somehow heavier than they should have been. “Give him a reason to unlock my cage, and I’ll take care of the rest.” I was suddenly viscerally certain that I could do it. That now that she’d been unlocked, the furiae wouldn’t let me truly rest until she’d drawn blood.

  “Delilah, I can’t let you kill Clyde.”

  I could feel my beast crawling around inside me, restless, stretching to fill the shape of my limbs. “I don’t know that he’ll die. What I do know is that I’m supposed to hurt him. He deserves it.”

  Gallagher frowned and took a step back, and I realized he’d heard the beast in my voice. He stared into my eyes, then stepped closer again. “Delilah?”

  “I can feel her.” I reached out for him, and he took my hands. “She wants him, Gallagher, and I have to give him to her.”

  “But—”

  “She won’t rest until she draws blood.” I hardly recognized the sound of my own voice, or the odd echo it carried.

  Gallagher’s eyes widened, but instead of backing away, he leaned closer to me, as if he were drawn to my beast. His pupils dilated until his irises almost disappeared, and his hands tightened around mine. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  He nodded. “But I can’t give you Clyde.” His voice was deep and even gruffer than usual, similar to how Brandon had sounded when he was aroused. Only Gallagher’s interest didn’t look or feel like anything as simple as physical titillation. The fire in his eyes was part empathy and part fascination—a vicarious anticipation of what he’d just agreed to let me do. “Will your beast take anyone else, for now?”