Genni’s whine crescendoed into a yowl of terror. Eryx twisted in his harness, trying to get a look at the problem.
Gallagher lurched forward to interrupt the cycle, but I darted out of the shadows to pull him back. “Use something that doesn’t conduct. Like...wood. Or plastic.” We glanced around and found nothing on the ground, so I raced to the flatbed truck and pulled a shovel from the large tool bin behind the cab. Gripping it by the wooden handle, I swung the shovel at the cattle prod, knocking it out of Clyde’s grip.
The prod thumped onto the grass four feet away.
Claudio let go of the handler and backed shakily into the corner of his cage, where Genni began to lick his face and nuzzle him. Clyde collapsed onto the grass in a bright beam from the truck’s headlights, clutching his mauled forearm, jaw clenched to deny the pain an outlet. For one long, tense moment, no one moved. No one spoke.
Then Eryx stamped one hoof, his human eyes wordlessly demanding an update—he hadn’t seen much from his position at the front of the cart.
“It’s okay.” I crossed my fingers, hoping I was right. I had no idea how much voltage had gone through Claudio, but I couldn’t reasonably hope it had fried the handler without mentally damning the werewolf to the same fate.
Clyde looked up at the sound of my voice, still clutching his arm, and at first his stare was blank. Then he frowned, and I froze like a deer in oncoming headlights when I realized he was coming out of his stupor. And that he recognized me.
“What’s...” Clyde cleared his throat and pushed himself to his feet, still holding his ruined arm, while blood ran between his fingers. He slammed the cage door shut without ever taking his focus from me, but he was speaking to Gallagher. “What the fuck is she doing out here, and where the hell are her restraints?”
“You’re hurt,” Gallagher observed, with an almost clinical detachment. Clyde was also shiny with sweat and pale, even in the glare from the headlights. He’d lost a lot of blood.
“You need to go to the hospital.” I glanced at the Metzger’s truck, then at Gallagher, and the rage I found etched into his face sent chills deep into my bones. His fists were clenched. His teeth were grinding. His eyes had darkened until I couldn’t be sure they held any color at all.
Clyde glanced from Gallagher to me, then back, and the obvious misunderstanding surfaced in his eyes, already glassy with blood loss. “You have five seconds to deal with your little whore, before I wake up the whole damn menagerie.”
The snarl that rumbled from Gallagher was like no sound I’d ever heard. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t feline, or canine, or ursine, or anything like the grunts and grumbles of a troll, or giant, or even the berserker. It was a sound of raw power and pure rage.
Gallagher seemed to be standing on the edge of some crucial precipice. The monster within me understood the storm of violence roiling off him like clouds in advance of a downpour, but the rest of me couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. What I was feeling. What the very charge in the air told me was about to happen.
“Gallagher?” I kept my voice low and steady out of instinct, the way one might address a gunman with his finger on the trigger, or a dog with its teeth already buried in flesh.
He turned to me, and Clyde dived for the cattle prod. Gallagher lunged at him so fast I could hardly track the movement. His massive right shoulder slammed into Clyde’s solar plexus, driving the air from his body an instant before they both hit the ground.
Gallagher clamped one broad hand over Clyde’s mouth, then reached for the cattle prod. I thought he’d rip it from Clyde’s grasp. Instead he ripped Clyde’s arm from his body, with no more effort than it might take to tear a breadstick in two.
I blinked, shocked beyond all words. All thoughts. Then blood began to soak through Clyde’s empty left sleeve, and my legs folded beneath me. Horrified, I held back screams with both hands over my mouth while Clyde howled into Gallagher’s palm.
Eryx snorted and pawed at the ground with one hoof. Claudio and Genni stood on all fours in their cage, panting while they watched, evidently unbothered by the savage spill of blood.
My sight lost focus and I started to shake while Gallagher pulled Clyde apart. Piece by piece. One-handed. An arm landed several feet in front of me, followed by a blood-filled left boot. A bare leg hit the side of Claudio’s cage and he and Genni both scuttled back, then edged forward again to watch the show.
When it was over, Clyde lay in blurry, red-streaked pieces on the grass between the werewolf cage and Gallagher’s camper. Empty, blood-soaked scraps of clothing littered the ground. More blood gathered in out-of-focus pools on the grass and dripped from the wire mesh side of the crate.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.
I couldn’t believe what I’d seen, even with evidence of it lying all around me in gruesome bits and pieces.
“What...what...what...?” My chin quivered, and I couldn’t get beyond that one word. I swallowed and started over, staring up at him from my knees in the blood-splattered grass. “What the fuck, Gallagher?”
He turned to me slowly, moonlight shining on an arc of blood splattered across his face. “I said I would rip him limb from limb for touching you. My word is my honor.”
My teeth began to chatter, in spite of the heat. I had no idea what to say.
Gallagher knelt among the dismembered remains of his foe and took his faded baseball cap off. I watched, stunned, while he set his cap upside down in a pool of blood and stared at it. At first, I thought he was praying.
Then a drop of blood rolled up and over the edge of Clyde’s empty black boot, and I gasped. Once I’d noticed that one small motion, I could see all the others.
I could see the pattern.
Blood flowed all around me—from everywhere it had landed during the massacre, as well as from the severed body parts—but it flowed toward Gallagher’s hat. It rolled, and streamed, and gathered in defiance of gravity, over blades of grass and twigs and trash blown from the carnival midway. Blood trickled through the wire mesh side of Claudio’s cage and fell in fine beads from Gallagher’s face and clothing. It all collected in the pool beneath his hat, but that pool didn’t widen. It didn’t deepen. In fact, it seemed to be shrinking.
As I watched, the blood from the puddle soaked into Gallagher’s hat, pulled up through the fibers like a spill into a paper towel, and I couldn’t look away.
“What’s happening?” I whispered, and when he didn’t answer—didn’t even look away from his bloody hat—I tried again. “Gallagher, what the hell is happening?”
He didn’t answer, but Eryx snorted, so I tore my gaze from the deliberate flow of blood and looked at the minotaur. And that’s when I finally realized that whatever was happening, he’d known about it all along.
Red cap. He’d written it in the sawdust, but I hadn’t understood what he’d been trying to tell me.
I still didn’t.
“Is this what you were saying?”
Eryx nodded. Geneviève whined and I looked up to find her father sitting next to her in human form, casually nude as shifters often seemed to be by necessity, one arm wrapped protectively around her canine shoulders. “Did you know about this?” I whispered, and he shook his head. “Do you know what’s happening?”
Claudio shook his head again, and Eryx snorted in obvious frustration. Claudio could speak, but had no answers, and Eryx clearly understood, yet couldn’t speak.
Finally, when the last drop of blood had soaked into Gallagher’s gruesome baseball cap, leaving the gory crime scene eerily absent of mess, he picked up his hat, which now glistened with thick, dark blood.
“No!” I cried, when I realized what he was about to do, but he set the hat on his head anyway.
I braced myself for the sight of blood running down his face, into his eyes, and over his chin. But that d
idn’t happen.
The blood stayed in his hat, and after a few seconds, the hat stopped glistening. It looked...dry. It looked normal—as clean and bright red as it must have been the day he’d bought it.
Assuming such a hat could be bought.
“Delilah.” Gallagher stepped over Clyde’s torso and veered around his right leg, then sank to his knees in the grass next to me. “Delilah,” he said again, and when I didn’t look at him—when I could only stare at my hands, clenched around handfuls of my dirty linen skirt, he lifted my chin until I met his gaze.
His eyes looked normal. Gray and...worried. “Delilah, are you okay?”
“What is this? What happened?” I brushed his hand away and tried not to be swayed by the fact that the rare glimpse of true concern in his expression was for me. “What are you?”
“I am a redcap.” He answered without hesitation, and seemed almost relieved by the opportunity.
“A redcap.” I thought back through everything I’d learned about cryptids in college, but couldn’t place the species.
“We’re also known as fear dearg.” He took my hands, and they finally stopped shaking. “It means ‘red man’ in—”
“In Celtic,” I finished for him. And suddenly I understood. “You’re fae.”
“Fae, yes, but of the solitary variety. I serve no king or queen.” There was something oddly fragile in the admission, and for once, his eyes hid nothing. His pain was mine to observe. “I have no home.”
“How are you here? There are no fae here, Gallagher.”
“None that you know of.” He squeezed my hand, then brushed hair back from my forehead. “The fae are better equipped than any other cryptid species to blend in with humanity.”
Which was why I’d learned as much about them in mythology class as in any of my biology courses.
“Glamour,” I said, and he nodded. “What do you really look like?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “This is my actual appearance.”
“But fear dearg is small—like, three feet tall—and his teeth are sharp and pointy, and his fingers—”
Gallagher scowled. “Yes, and furiae are hideous old hags who fly on bat wings and have snakes for hair. How often have you known folklore to be completely accurate, Delilah?”
“Okay. Fair point.” But shock still dulled my thoughts and slowed my tongue. “I guess the blood part’s real, though? You have to kill to survive?”
“Yes.” His gaze was open. Brutally honest. “If the blood ever completely dries from my cap I will die,” he explained, one side of his face brightly lit by the headlights. “We are warriors by nature—fear dearg crave slaughter. In the past, we’ve been mercenaries, assassins, and hunters. Some worked for pay, but most would work for the thrill of the kill. However, a few centuries ago, a group of fear dearg who did not relish the death of innocents broke away to form their own tribe. The honora militem. Members of the militem swore to take as victims only those who deserve a painful end. They took an oath promising to repay the earth for the resources they used by dedicating their lives to selfless service. Most became champions.”
The strange tradition. The formal words. The strong drive to facilitate my calling. “You’re militem.”
“I am what’s left of militem.” He shifted on his knees in the grass, as if the admission made him uncomfortable. “When I was a boy, there was a civil war, such as has never been fought among humans. I and a few others are all that remain, scattered across the globe.”
“Your word is your honor...” I mumbled, and another piece of the puzzle slid into place. “Fae cannot tell an outright lie.” But according to conventional wisdom, they were masters of deception.
No wonder he’d stressed the distinction.
“Which is why we take the oath—it prevents us from killing the innocent, even in desperate times, when our caps begin to dry. Without the oath, most fear dearg would give in to the irresistible lure of violence. Even now, having just bathed my cap, my hands itch to rip flesh and break bone.”
I could see the stress that resisting the biological urge put him through. No wonder he was always tense. Living in such close proximity to fragile flesh and pumping blood must have been torture similar to that of a celibate man walking through a nudist colony.
“Your cap looks dry now.” I stared at his hat, remembering how faded it had been minutes earlier, yet how bright on the day we’d met.
“I use glamour to disguise my traditional red cap as a human baseball cap and the drying of blood as the fading of color, but I have no choice about the truth behind the illusion. Clyde had to die. I had to dip my hat in blood. And you had to know the truth. Though this is not how I would have chosen to show you.”
The truth. “You’re a monster. Like me.” I wanted to condemn what he’d done. I wouldn’t sentence my worst enemy to the mutilation Clyde had suffered. But what right did I have to denounce Gallagher’s nature, when mine wasn’t so very different?
“No.” He took me by both arms and stared right into my eyes. “Your calling is sacred. You are the physical incarnation of justice. The force that balances the scales. You are everything antithetical to my nature. I am a monster. And now I must clean up a monster’s mess.”
Gallagher stood and pulled me up with him, and I realized the wolves and the minotaur were still watching us. And that the sun would soon be up. And that the ground was still littered with body parts.
“Stay here. Don’t touch anything,” Gallagher said, and before I could nod, he disappeared around the corner of his camper. A second later, the front door squealed open, and I heard his footsteps as he walked through the small space.
“Are you okay?” I asked Claudio. I wanted to get closer, to see for myself, but I couldn’t make myself step over Clyde. Any part of him.
The werewolf nodded. “A redcap. How could we not have known?”
“Eryx knew,” I said, and the minotaur snorted in acknowledgment.
“This won’t stop them,” Claudio said, and I realized he’d moved past the recent slaughter to his own tragedy. “They’ll still sell Geneviève. The deal’s already been struck.”
“No.” I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering in spite of the warm night. “Gallagher won’t let it happen.” He might be at Metzger’s for Adira, but that hadn’t stopped him from treating Eryx with respect and helping me. He would help Genni, too. She was an innocent.
Claudio shook his head. “There’s nothing he can do without exposing himself.”
Genni whined, her muzzle resting on his leg.
“He’s right,” Gallagher said, and I whirled to find him headed our way, carrying a large black trash bag.
“You can’t just let them give Genni to another carnival,” I insisted, crossing my arms over my thin linen dress. “What’s the point of being strong enough to rip a man limb from limb if you can’t stop bad people from selling children?”
“I can’t stop them, and if I try, I’ll either lose my job or expose my species.” He bent to pick up Clyde’s arm, then dropped it into the open bag. “There’ll be nothing I can do to help anyone if that happens.”
“Fine. I’ll get her out of here.” I held my hand out, palm up. “Give me your keys.”
“No.” He bent for another body part, and his trash bag began to bulge with morbid shapes.
“I’m not just going to let them take her, Gallagher. She’s only a kid!” I said, and Genni whined in what I assumed was agreement. “You’re supposed to be facilitating my life’s work!”
“Which I’m doing, by keeping you from getting yourself killed.” Gallagher stood and met my gaze. “Beyond that, I have another promise to keep, which I can’t do if I have to expose myself by killing anyone who touches you when they hunt you and Genni down.”
“What?”
He exhaled slowly, obviously grasping for patience. “As you might recall, I swore to rip apart anyone who lays a hostile hand on you.”
Alarm coursed through me with the stunning realization. “You meant that literally.” As evidenced by the body parts still scattered all over the grass.
“Of course.” Gallagher shoved a severed hand into his bag. “My word is my—”
“Honor.” I gripped handfuls of my own hair, too frustrated to think straight, then combed through the tangled strands with my fingers. “I know.”
“Then you understand that if you let them sell Genni, she will live, as will all the police and idiot civilian hunters who won’t have to go through me to get to you.”
“He’s right,” Claudio said. “Sell her, but sell me with her. We’ll go without a fuss, and I promise that if you keep us together, neither of us will ever tell a soul that you’re not human. Ever.”
Gallagher dropped the last arm into his bag and stepped closer to Claudio’s cage. “I swear that I will try, but I can’t promise it’ll work.” Claudio nodded, and Gallagher held his gruesome goody bag out to me. “Will you hold this open?”
“No way in hell.” I stepped back, arms folded firmly over my chest.
Gallagher rolled his eyes, then handed the bag to Eryx, who held the opening wide while the handler picked up Clyde’s torso and dropped it inside with a leaden thunk. Gallagher took the bag back and pulled the red drawstrings tight, then glanced around the scene of the crime in satisfaction.
My gaze was drawn to his gruesome bundle. “An hour ago, I would have sworn that a man’s body wouldn’t fit in a standard trash bag, and that even if it did, it’d be too heavy to lift.”
“Pieces always fit better than the whole,” he said. “And a corpse weighs less after you drain the blood.”
“Spoken like a true psychopath.” And I was starting to suspect that Gallagher could have lifted several corpses at once, even still full of their lifeblood.