Like Zyanya, I was given no shoes.
Once we were dressed and touched up, our handlers readjusted the settings on our collars and marched us through the topiary zoo into a large kitchen at the back of the main building, where a chef and his staff were putting the finishing touches on hundreds of bite-size appetizers.
The scent of food I would probably never taste made my mouth water.
Bottles of champagne stood chilling in a wall-sized glass refrigerator, along with bottles of white wine. Bottles of red were lined up on a countertop behind several rows of champagne flutes and stemmed wineglasses waiting to be filled.
A man in a formal server’s uniform, complete with a silver vest and bow tie, took us aside for an “engagement briefing.” The tag pinned to his vest read Event Coordinator.
“This bachelor party is as simple as it gets.” The coordinator avoided eye contact as he spoke. “The groom is Michael Hayes, who has some curiosities he’d like satisfied, but the client is James Lansing. His is the credit card on file, so he’s your boss for the night.”
The coordinator glanced at his clipboard. “Lenore...” His gaze finally landed on the siren, whom he clearly recognized. She’d already been “engaged” for two events since we’d been sold to the Spectacle, and rumor among the captives said that putting her onstage added several thousand dollars to the bill. “Lenore, you’re the entertainment.” He pulled a familiar remote from his pocket and pressed a button which pulled up a series of options on a screen I only got a glance at. “I’ve set your collar to allow minor influence in your voice. Make them feel good. Lower their inhibitions and help them enjoy themselves. Encourage them to spend. But if you try anything malicious, you’ll spend the night in the infirmary.”
Thoughts chased each other through my head in a dizzying funnel of possibility as I tried to take in everything I was seeing and hearing at once.
If they could truly limit Lenore to “minor” vocal influence, why would they need to warn her not to take things too far?
And if we were to be allowed in and out of the kitchen, would we have access to knives, meat mallets and other potential weapons? Would having weapons even matter, if we could be paralyzed with the press of a button?
Even if I could disable a guard and take his remote, at best I’d have seconds to figure out how to work it. And if I somehow managed to escape not just the room, but the building, then the grounds, I’d be abandoning everyone I cared about in the entire world. I’d have no other choice.
Would escape be worth an on-the-run existence that would only last for however long it took them to track my collar? Which I had no idea how to remove.
Would my friends be punished for my escape?
The coordinator glanced at his clipboard again, and the movement refocused my attention. “Mr. Lansing has requested the ‘hypnotist’ package, so about halfway through the evening, Lenore will pick a couple of volunteers from the party and bring them up onstage. The crowd will shout out things they want to see their friends do, and she will make it happen.” He turned directly to her for the next part. “Just whisper in their ears and do your thing. Most of the requests are stupid, and they’ve put down a huge security deposit, so it doesn’t really matter what they mess up. As for the rest of you...”
The coordinator turned to those of us who wouldn’t be singing, and I got the impression that the instructions were specifically aimed at Zyanya and me, because the others had presumably done this many times. “You’ll be carrying trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres. No one expects you to be good at it, and we have professional servers who’ll make sure everyone’s fed and liquored up. All you really have to do is balance your tray and look exotic. Stay in the center of things. Make sure all your freaky features are visible. They’re going to want to see claws and teeth. They’ll want to touch feathers and scales. Let them. There will be security all over the place, and if the customers try to get more than they’ve paid for, the handlers will take care of it.”
More than they’ve paid for. My skin crawled at the thought.
The coordinator gave us a quick lecture on the Savage Spectacle’s serving procedures and showed us how to balance a semifull tray with one hand. Then he made us practice with trays of water-filled plastic stemmed glasses. I sloshed three times in a span of five minutes—even in my normal human life, I’d never waited tables—which got me demoted to hors d’oeuvres, along with Zyanya, because those were harder to spill.
While we practiced, the professional servers came in and out of a set of swinging doors on the left every few minutes as they set things up in the next room.
An identical set of doors on the opposite side of the kitchen presumably led to another room on our right, but nothing was going on in there.
About an hour after our engagement briefing, the coordinator disappeared into the party room and the quiet buzz of activity in the kitchen became a tense bustle. Music poured from the other side of the swinging doors. I glanced at the huge clock high on one wall and saw that it was five minutes until 9:00 p.m. The party was about to start.
A minute later, the swinging door opened again, and this time a man in dark slacks and a green button-down shirt followed the coordinator into the kitchen. His gaze slid over thousands of dollars’ worth of top-shelf alcohol and gourmet appetizers as if they were everyday fare, and I realized that he was not a Spectacle employee.
“Mr. Lansing, these are the cryptids we’ve prepared for your party. We have Belinda, an echidna, and a female werewolf named Clarisse.” The coordinator gestured to the first women in our row.
“Echidna? Isn’t that a snake woman?” Lansing lifted Belinda’s chin as he studied the painted scales trailing down both sides of her face. “Where’s her tail?”
“She doesn’t have one in this form.”
“But she’ll shift later?”
The coordinator nodded. “If that’s what you’d like.”
Lansing grunted. “The freakier the better. What are these two?”
“Zyanya is a cheetah shifter. Notice her eyes and her teeth.” The coordinator grabbed her chin and tilted her head up. “She’s a gorgeous specimen.”
Lansing’s gaze lingered on Zyanya long enough to make me nervous.
“And her?” The client stopped in front of me. “Is this the siren?”
“No, Lenore is our siren, and she’s ready to lend a unique aura to your party.” The pair of men moved past me.
“I look forward to hearing her,” Lansing said. “Are we ready to go?”
“Yes. Let’s go show your guests in.” The coordinator escorted Lansing out of the kitchen.
Minutes later, voices rang out from behind the swinging doors. The guests had arrived, and they sounded as excited as I was horrified.
The coordinator stepped back into the kitchen and glanced at each of us in turn, evidently looking for flaws in the presentation. “Everybody ready?”
No one answered.
“You four each take a tray, and Lenore, you’ll follow them into the room, then head for the stage. They’re all set up for you.” When no one moved, he waved his arm impatiently. “Let’s go!”
We picked up our loaded trays and the coordinator pushed open one of the swinging doors and held it back with his body.
“Gentlemen, welcome to the Savage Spectacle!” he called out as we entered the room. “Where your most exotic desire is our pleasure to provide!”
I wanted nothing more than to crawl back into my menagerie cage and cry, and the truth of that thought killed something fragile deep inside me.
Rommily
The oracle sat on the floor of a bright, cold room, with her spine pressed into the corner. She didn’t like this room full of cold tile and steel cots. She didn’t like white coats and rubber gloves.
She didn’t like men with g
uns, or the collar around her neck, which sent pain throughout her body, like being shocked with a cattle prod from the inside.
“It’s definitely broken,” the man in the white coat said, as he pressed on the sides of Mirela’s swollen nose. Mirela flinched, and tears filled her eyes, but she made no complaint. “You’re not going to be able to use her for a couple of weeks, at least.”
“Wonderful.” The woman in pressed pink pants touched something on her tablet, and the light it reflected on her face changed. “Less than a week off the truck, and she’s out of commission.”
Rommily traced the grout between the white tiles with her finger, wishing it were dirt. Wishing it were grass, wet with dew, shining in the sunlight. She missed the sunlight. She missed the wind and the smell of fresh hay and wandering barefoot through the sawdust.
She missed Eryx, with his silent strength and comfort.
“They’re both oracles? What’s wrong with that one, Dr. Hill?” the woman in pink said, and when Rommily looked up, she found herself pinned to the corner where she sat by the woman’s cold gaze.
“Physically, nothing that I can see,” the doctor in the white coat said. “Not that I can get close enough to examine her.”
“She doesn’t like to be touched.” Mirela’s voice sounded oddly nasal as she pressed a tissue to her bloody nose. As if she’d been crying.
“Well, that’s too bad. This is not a hands-off facility.” The woman in pink clacked closer in heels that reminded Rommily of carnival clowns on stilts. Her thin nose wrinkled. “Why does she smell?”
“She won’t shower,” the doctor said. “That’s evidently what caused this mess.”
Rommily tugged on the loose thread hanging from the hem of her torn shirt. She didn’t like these clothes. These drab pants that were all one color. If gray could be called a color.
“Is she dangerous?” the woman asked.
“No.” The doctor swiveled on his stool to face Rommily. “But there’s something wrong with her. If she were human, I’d call her a head case.”
“And since she’s not human, what would you call her?”
The doctor shrugged. “Useless.”
“Fury reaps its own reward.” Rommily’s words ran together like watercolors as she closed her eyes. An image formed, and she gasped. Her eyes flew open again, but the image was still there. Still every bit as real as the cold tile room and the pink-clad woman staring down at her.
“What did she say?” the woman demanded, as the doctor walked his stool closer. “And what the hell is wrong with her eyes?”
“She’s having a vision,” Mirela said. “Just leave her alone, and it’ll be over in a minute.”
The woman in pink knelt in front of Rommily in her clown heels, clutching her tablet to her chest. “Well, she’s certainly useless as long as she smells like that. Let’s get her up and hose her down, if we have to.” The lady in pink stood. “Help me with her?”
The stool groaned as the doctor stood and rolled it back. “I’ll take her right arm. You take her left.”
“I wouldn’t do that...” Mirela said from the padded table, but they weren’t listening.
The woman in pink grabbed Rommily’s left hand while the doctor took her right arm. Rommily sucked in a sharp breath as they pulled her to her feet. “Scalpel born. Belly full of blood.”
“What the hell did she say?” The lady in pink tried to let go of Rommily, but the oracle had her hand in a grip of steel.
She laughed, as if her white-blind eyes saw straight into the woman’s soul. “Fate’s bastard is coming for you.”
Delilah
The coordinator waved us out of the kitchen. Only the habit of putting one foot in front of the other kept me from freezing in shock when I saw the room. Though really, calling it a room was like calling a cave a crack in the wall.
The space could easily have held several times the fifty guests invited to Michael Hayes’s bachelor party.
The windowless walls were lined with panels of gathered black drapery, which gave the room a formal look and dampened the echo most spaces that size would have suffered. The floor was white marble with black veins, shining in the light from several elaborate chandeliers hanging from the ornately coffered ceiling.
The huge room swallowed my footsteps and amplified my fear, making me feel insignificant in a way that being locked in a small cage never could have.
The guests were college-age men in business-casual dress, most of whom had already found the alcoholic beverage of their choice. Their chatter died as we entered the room, and I could feel every gaze on me. The attention felt simultaneously familiar and completely foreign, because though I’d been on display at Metzger’s, a menagerie patron’s motivation to plop down his credit card was almost always simple curiosity, tempered by fear. He or she wanted to see dangerous creatures—perhaps even those responsible for the reaping—removed from true threat by miracle of steel cages and iron bars.
But the patrons at the Savage Spectacle didn’t just look curious, they looked hungry. Greedy. These men—most of them near my age—didn’t believe we represented any threat, and it had never occurred to them, probably in their entire lives, that they might not have the right to do whatever they wanted in any given moment.
I could practically smell their anticipation in the air.
The coordinator whispered for us to spread out and carry our trays around the room, and the ladies in front of me did just that. Crowds formed around them instantly. Hands reached for flutes of champagne and handfuls of hair in equal numbers. Someone pulled Belinda’s lip down to inspect her sharp fangs, while a man in a red button-down shirt ran his hand down the length of Zyanya’s arm, then lifted her free hand so he could examine her claws.
Lenore’s flat-soled sandals whispered on the floor behind me as she headed for the stage, where red velvet curtains had been drawn back to reveal an orchestral quartet formally dressed in blue-and-silver tuxes, except for the female violinist, who wore a blue sequined gown. The siren climbed the steps on one side of the stage and conferred softly with the violinist. After several whispered questions and a couple of nods, Lenore took up her position behind the microphone, and when the music began, she sang.
I realized immediately that despite her instructions, her melody and its push were intended not for the paying audience, but for those of us forced to endure wandering hands and intrusive gazes. Her voice felt like a gentle wave of calm floating over me, blunting the sharp edge of my temper and relaxing the fist clenched at my side.
I was disgusted by what I was being forced to endure, but it would not kill me. And I wouldn’t have to kill anyone either.
If any of the employees were able to think beyond their own suddenly eased tensions and realize she was projecting the wrong atmosphere, she might get into trouble. But I was beyond grateful for her efforts.
As my tension eased, I glanced across the room and was surprised to see two familiar, large forms standing near the opposite wall. Eryx and...
“Gallagher!” I breathed, and though he couldn’t possibly have heard me, his gaze met mine, and his gray eyes brightened.
Mine filled with tears. Gallagher was a liberator. A protector. A man of uncompromising character who held others to the same high standard. The sight of him in a collar bruised me all the way to my soul. The collar looked so incredibly out of place that at first I didn’t notice he was wearing little else.
Nothing, in fact, but his unglamoured traditional red cap and a gray loincloth trimmed with a matching red cord.
He bore the indignity like a soldier. As if near nudity were a bruise or a gash, or some other battle scar earned at the hands of an enemy, but humiliation for him warmed my cheeks. I’d never seen Gallagher subjugated.
Even after seeing him hauled from the back of a van, I hadn’t real
ly thought it was possible.
Yet as sad as I was to see him in captivity, I was elated to see him alive.
I worked my way slowly across the room, pausing to let men ogle me and take food from my tray, but I dodged reaching hands without hearing a word said to me. I couldn’t see anything but Gallagher.
His bruises were mostly healed, and the cuts on his face had been treated with narrow butterfly bandages. His dark hair had been cut short, which looked strange to me, but his eyes were the same. Steely-gray windows into a soul like none other I’d ever met.
When he saw me heading toward him, the tension in his shoulders seemed to ease. I waited until the last bite from my tray had been taken and the guests wandered toward one of the more obviously “freaky” cryptids. Then I tucked the tray beneath my arm and headed straight for Gallagher.
“Delilah.” His voice rumbled through me, though it held little volume. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. Even if I hadn’t been okay, I would have told him I was. “You?” I took in every bruise and cut. Every line of a dire expression I knew well.
“No man here could hold his own among the fearsome fear dearg I battled in my youth.”
I couldn’t resist a small smile. “So you’re humoring their authority in order to stay close to me?”
His jaw clenched, and the muscles in his neck strained against the steel collar. “Something like that.”
“It was the hat, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “My human guise was never meant to last.”
“I know.” But there was something in the slight curve of his mouth. In the glint of light shining in his gray eyes. “You got caught on purpose.”
His upper lip twitched. “Why on earth would I do that?” But he hadn’t denied it. Because fear dearg cannot lie.
“Why would you do that?”
Gallagher shrugged broad, strong shoulders. “Sometimes it is easier to break out of a fortress than to break into one,” he whispered.