“Wallace.” I didn’t even have to think about it. His name was just there, along with the memory of him standing in front of Zyanya’s cage, extorting sexual favors from a half-starved captive in exchange for food.
Gallagher let go of my hands and reached for the door to my cage. Each movement was fast and sharp, as if he couldn’t wait to fulfill my request. “I’ll send him to take you to the bathroom.”
“No, it can’t happen here,” I said. “The staff has to see me transmute while no one’s being hurt.” To protect Genni and Rommily from future pointless abuse.
Gallagher nodded again, breathing faster now. He swallowed, and I realized he was trying to rein in his excitement. “Give me five minutes,” he said as he slid my cage door closed and locked it. He wanted to see what I could do. He could hardly wait.
That made two of us.
Leaders of the cryptid community deny any knowledge of or involvement in the mass slaughter of innocent children now known nationally as “the reaping,” but most government officials remain skeptical.
—Opening line from a front-page article in the
Chicago Post, October 4, 1986
Gallagher
The boss of livestock hardly saw the crowd that split before him, instinctively making way for the large man marching down the center of the paved midway, clearly on an urgent mission. He hardly heard the organ music or smelled the fried food either, because he was lost in his own thoughts. In the memory of Delilah’s eyes, before color had returned to them and the veins had faded. Of her voice when the furiae had seized it, adding a dark and thrilling depth to the normally mellow notes.
That voice had called out to him, not with the actual words spoken, but with the power of the tone itself. Listening to Delilah speak had triggered wordless flashes behind his eyes—images he kept buried not because they bothered him, but because they excited him.
Blood. Unseeing eyes. Torn flesh. Broken bone.
Not thinking those thoughts was an exercise in willpower—a way to control his craving for violence—but the more time he spent with Delilah, the harder it became to maintain that willpower. She made him want to give in to a basic nature neither of them could ever truly escape.
But that would not be wise.
Not yet.
Gallagher never lied, not even to himself, so denying that he had an interest in Delilah wasn’t possible. In truth, he thought about her all the time, but he couldn’t say precisely when this captivating new fascination had developed. It was a strange feeling: part burning curiosity about what she could do, part utter fixation on why she’d been charged with that task. But it was her purpose—the clear-cut objective of her existence—that occupied most of his idle thoughts.
The universe had a plan for Delilah. She’d been given an exquisite and devastating ability and had been burdened with its use because she was everything Gallagher was not.
He marched past the sirens’ tent, then the oracles’ tent, and he was halfway to the red-trimmed succubi tent before he realized he’d taken off in the wrong direction. Wallace was at work in the hybrid tent. Gallagher’s head was not in the game. Because Delilah was in his head.
Growling to himself, the boss of livestock executed an abrupt about-face, without noticing the strange look that Rommily’s handler gave him from outside the oracles’ tent. Gallagher was thinking about Mike Wallace, a man he’d been working alongside for a year. A man he’d eaten with, traveled with, and shared the occasional drink with.
A man he was about to deliver into the claw-fingered hands of Lady Justice herself.
Gallagher wondered if Wallace would die. That thought did not bother him.
He wondered if Wallace would bleed and scream. That thought excited him, dumping adrenaline into his veins with every beat of his heart. He itched to see Delilah standing over a limp body. Blood dripping from her fingers. Hair floating around her face. Power emanating from her every pore.
He ached to be the one who put her in that position, yet he could not quite swallow his envy of her.
The world would never embrace his cravings as it would embrace Delilah’s, once those in need of justice understood what she was. She would be their champion; he would be their nightmare, as fate had decreed on the day of his birth.
Unless she gave him purpose.
Gallagher stopped in midstride and several passersby had to dart around him to avoid a collision. He could ask her. The words were there—written long before he was born, memorized before he’d even learned to spell them—but the precedent was not. Tradition did not support the most radical impulse Gallagher had ever had. Delilah was not a proper candidate for the position, and even if she were, he had not yet earned the right to request her consideration.
There were preliminary advances. Prescribed offerings. A conventional exchange of sentiment. But there was no time for most of that, and she would understand little of it anyway.
Gallagher’s plan would not work.
Yet he could think of nothing else. She needed him, and he needed purpose.
Resolved, the boss of livestock marched on with his head high and his spine straight, headed for the hybrid tent with fresh intent. The sacrifice of Mike Wallace would serve three different but vital functions. The handler’s suffering would feed the furiae’s appetite for justice and it would free both Genni and Rommily from the pain of triggering Delilah’s transmutation.
But most important, Mike Wallace would serve as Gallagher’s official tribute of blood to Delilah—the first sacrament of formal devotion.
PART 3
Émancipé
Delilah
While I waited in my cage in the quiet, empty tent, I could feel the furiae moving inside me. It was a strange sensation, and every time I decided it was psychosomatic—after all, she and I were one and the same—she would stretch again, as if she were trying to break free of my body, and I would reconsider.
I’d never felt her like that before. Not even the day she’d attacked Jack in the hybrid tent. In the nearly two weeks I’d been at Metzger’s, I’d tried countless times to call her forth with no luck, but now that she’d been awakened, she would not go back to sleep. At least, not until she got what she wanted.
It reminded me of how my mother had described her pregnancy to me once. She’d said that when I’d finally kicked hard enough to make my presence known, she realized I’d been kicking for days, but she’d had no understanding of the sensation.
Of course, as it turns out, she wasn’t feeling me at all. She was feeling Elizabeth.
I’d been jittery and uneasy for the past few days, except when I’d been too weak from hunger to move. I’d attributed that psychological unease to being cooped up in a cage, but in looking back, I could see that much of my discomfort was the furiae pacing inside me, eager to avenge injustice hidden beneath the striped canvas and behind the bright lights.
In a sudden surreal moment of epiphany, I realized I was incubating not a child, but a cause. I had become the mother of retribution, and my vengeful offspring would kick until she got her way.
She wouldn’t have to wait long.
Gallagher never came back. Wallace ducked into my tent holding the minotaur’s guide rope, grumbling that the assignment was beneath him as he led Eryx into my tent. The minotaur met my gaze, and I wondered how much he knew about our trial run. I wondered how much he knew about everything. The handlers’ tongues wagged freely around him because they thought he was mindless.
No one ever seemed to truly notice him, except for me. And Gallagher.
Eryx blinked at me deliberately as Wallace harnessed him to the end of my cage, and I wondered what he was trying to tell me.
“They ever figure out what you are?” Wallace slapped Eryx on the shoulder, and the massive minotaur hauled my cage slowly toward
the rear of the tent.
“They figured out I’m dangerous,” I said, and Eryx snorted.
Wallace lifted a flap at the back of the tent. “You’ve been misinformed. What you are is caged.”
“Only a fool believes his eyes above all other senses.” I could tell from his dismissive glance that he had no idea I was quoting Gallagher.
Wagon row was still nearly empty when Eryx hauled my cage into place. Most of the hybrids were still performing in the big top, but Genni was there in her cage, as were several of the humanoid captives, who had no role in the final show. Several roustabouts were carrying supplies toward the rear entrance to the fairgrounds, and the man who ran the pie car was headed toward the silver wagon.
My audience was small, but it would have to do.
Wallace left Eryx harnessed to my wagon while he ordered me to put my hands through the tray slot, so they could be cuffed. Then he unlocked my cage door. He wasn’t supposed to leave the minotaur unattended while he took me to the portable toilet, but like most of the other handlers, Wallace assumed he had nothing to fear from the docile, drugged beast, as long as he was tied to something.
The furiae twisted frantically inside me as Wallace slid the door open. Anticipation tingled in my fingers.
“Make it quick,” the handler snapped, waving me forward, and he seemed to have no idea that by cuffing my hands in front instead of at my back, he’d underestimated me just like he’d underestimated the minotaur.
My vision sharpened dramatically as I shuffled on my knees toward the open side panel. My fingertips burned, and I heard several soft cracking sounds as the nails lengthened and hardened into needle-points.
“What the hell?” Wallace’s eyes widened as my hair began to rise off my shoulders under its own power. He tried to slam the door shut as I reached for him, and he might have crushed my hands if Eryx hadn’t lurched forward at that very moment, pulling the cage side panel right out of Wallace’s grip.
I swayed with the sudden motion, then the furiae threw herself over the threshold. My knees crashed into Wallace’s stomach. He hit the ground on his back, screaming.
The furiae grabbed his head. My sharp, narrow nails slid through the flesh at his temples.
The handler’s screaming soon stopped, but by then, several others had risen to fill the shocked silence. Wallace’s eyes rolled up until only the bottoms of his irises were visible. He began to shake as if I were electrifying him.
Footsteps pounded toward us as he writhed in pain beneath me.
When I stared down at Wallace, I saw him not convulsing on the ground, but standing in front of Zyanya in the middle of the night. I heard him unlock her cage and unzip his pants.
How do you like it?
“Help him!” someone shouted. Shadowed silhouettes fell over me, but I didn’t look up.
Frenzied cheering echoed from the cages behind me.
“Someone get a mallet! And a muzzle!” Ruyle shouted. He’d emerged from the silver wagon, but was scared to get too close to me.
“I got it,” Gallagher called, and I finally looked up. He held a tranquilizer gun, aimed right at me. He fired, and pain bit into my thigh.
Stunned, I fell back on my heels and my fingers were ripped from Wallace’s temples. I collapsed against a wagon wheel as the world swam around me.
Blood dripped from the sides of Wallace’s head as he struggled to sit up, but his eyes regained no focus.
Gallagher marched toward me, rifle aimed at the ground, and though his gray-eyed glare betrayed no involvement in my little trial run, I could tell from his easy gait that he was as pleased with the result as I was.
The last thing I saw before the world went dark was Mike Wallace’s bloody right hand, clawing at his own gory groin through the unzipped crotch of his jeans.
He’d torn his briefs—and what lay beneath the material—to shreds.
* * *
It was late when I woke up in my cage on wagon row, which I only knew because the carnival was dark and quiet. The silver wagon’s windows were unlit, as were most of the personal trailers in the dirt parking lot.
As far as I could tell from my limited perspective, all the other cages had been hauled back into the usual configuration of two parallel lines, and I thought everyone was asleep until Claudio sat up across the aisle from me.
“Delilah.” His long thin fingers gripped the side of his cage. Dim light from the edge of the parking lot shone on nails that were thick, curved, and yellow, even in human form. “Mon Dieu, what have you done?”
I frowned at Claudio, well aware that he could see me much better than I could see him in the dark. “I don’t...” I knew who I was and where I was but everything else was kind of foggy.
“Gallagher said you tried to escape. He had to tranquilize you.”
And all at once, the whole thing came back with a rush of adrenaline, remembered pain, and primal satisfaction. I could practically feel the furiae purring inside me like a smug cat.
“Wait, Gallagher said I tried to escape?” But Gallagher never lied. His word was his honor.
Claudio shrugged. “He said you got out of your cage.” And that much was true. Claudio—and everyone else—had probably assumed the rest. “You’re lucky they didn’t put a bullet in your head.”
“No, they’re lucky she didn’t rip them all wide-open,” Zyanya said from her the cage. All I could see of her was the light reflecting from her feline eyes in the dark. “Whatever she did to Wallace left a bucket of blood soaking into the dirt.” Her silhouette moved among the darker shadows, and her next words were half whisper, half throaty growl. “Smells like dinner.”
“I didn’t do that.” I’d hardly even seen it, before Gallagher’s tranquilizer knocked me out. “All I did was touch him.” I’d touched skin, then pushed through that into skull, then into the fragile, malleable tissue of his brain.
“Then what the hell happened to the bastard?”
“He tried to rip off his own man parts,” Lenore whispered from farther down the row. Even at a volume almost too low to hear, her melodic voice made me want things I couldn’t possibly articulate. Dark things. Primal, violent things. “He might have actually succeeded.”
“Why would he...?” Mahsa began, but the leopard shifter didn’t seem to know how to finish her sentence.
“Because Delilah touched him,” Lenore whispered, and her cage wagon creaked as she moved around in it. “Whatever she did made him want to hurt himself.”
The groan of metal and whispered murmurs from farther up wagon row told me that others were waking up. Listening.
“But why like that?” Payat asked, from Zyanya’s other side. “Why not make him dig his own eyes out, or bite off his tongue?”
“I didn’t know.” I couldn’t explain what I’d been thinking when the furiae took over. I wasn’t even sure I understood it. “I just wanted justice. I wanted him to understand what he’d done wrong and to punish himself in some manner that fit the offense.”
“That was his choice?” the berserker called. “Why wouldn’t he just climb into a cage?”
“She’s talking about a different offense,” Payat said, and I could tell from the angle of his glowing eyes that he was staring at the end panel of his cage in his sister’s direction.
“You...” Zyanya crawled forward until I could see her in the light thrown from the lamp in the parking lot. She sat in a deep squat, with her knees up near her ears. “You did that for me?”
“And for everyone else he’s coerced with threats or promises to give something he had no right to deprive you of in the first place.”
“That’s a crime?” Zyanya sounded stunned.
Lenore huffed, and even that rough exhalation of air seemed to carry oddly expressive notes. “No,” she said. “Not here. Not against us
.”
“I deal in morality, not in law,” I whispered, oddly pleased by the opportunity to twist Sheriff Pennington’s words into a more satisfying truth. “Wallace can’t misuse a body part he doesn’t have.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t digest meat I don’t eat,” Zyanya snapped, but I could hear the truth in the raw, vulnerable quality of her voice, as if she were on the edge of relieved tears. She was pleased not just by the fact that someone had acted on her behalf, but by the knowledge that she’d been found worthy of the action.
The fact that she’d had reason to doubt that broke my heart.
“They won’t underestimate you again,” Claudio warned.
I was fine with that, because they would also never again torture someone innocent to make me perform.
My gaze landed on Genni, who lay in her wagon, unmoving, and I couldn’t distinguish most of her from the shadows.
“Is she okay?” I whispered.
“I don’t know.” Claudio was pressed against the side of his cage, trying to get as physically close to his daughter as possible. “I’ve been calling her name, but there’s been no response.”
“I can’t see her very well either,” Finola said from the crate on my right, which she shared with Lenore. “But her wagon was already here when we got back, and I don’t think she’s moved since then.”
“What happened to her?” Claudio’s voice was thick and growly with worry, as if his vocal chords were more canine than usual. “Did anyone see?”
“Clyde electrocuted her.” I tried to strip all emotion from my voice, half-afraid that now that I’d unleashed the furiae, she would be on a hair trigger.
The father pressed his face into the side of his cage until the mesh made a grid on his face, pale in the moonlight. “Why?”
“To trigger my transmutation.” The last word got lost in a sob I couldn’t choke back. “I’m so sorry, Claudio. I couldn’t make him stop.”