The lights in my box brightened, throwing a square of illumination on the stadium seats just below. Gallagher’s gaze found me, and the image of him on the overhead screen zoomed in for a close-up. The audience turned to follow his gaze.
I gasped, surprised to find myself the center of attention again, and in my peripheral vision, all six of my customers turned as if they’d just then noticed I was there.
“Why are the lights on?” one of the men demanded.
“So he can see her,” Pagano answered.
“It’s her!” the woman next to him half whispered, her focus suddenly fixed on my face, though she’d hardly looked at me all evening. “So it’s true? He fights for her?”
“It’s true. Nothing else seems to motivate him,” Bowman said as if I weren’t standing right there, listening. “Not even his own safety.”
“That’s so beautiful!” one of the women said, but the man to her left scoffed.
“It’s a gimmick, Cherie. They don’t feel things the way we do. They’ve just been trained for this act, to draw in new customers. Like teaching a monkey to dance.”
My face flushed red-hot, but I only bit my tongue and clutched the tray, trying to pretend I couldn’t hear them.
“What is she?” a man in the second row asked. But I fixed my gaze on the screen, where a close-up of Gallagher showed details I couldn’t see from the private box.
His wounds had completely healed, and somehow they’d multiplied. His torso and arms were covered in thick, irregular scars, which had already begun to fade from fresh pink to an older shade of white.
That couldn’t be right. I stepped closer to the glass.
Gallagher’s hair had grown out beneath his cap, not just to stubble, but to a full inch and a half of hair, where there’d been only scruff the last time I’d seen him.
That could not have been just days ago.
My tray clattered to the floor. Glass shattered and wine splashed the wall and pooled on the wood floor.
How much time had I missed?
“Damn it!” the nearest lady cursed, using a napkin to brush drops of pinot noir from her shoes. “What the hell is wrong with her?”
“What’s the date?” I demanded, stepping over the tray and the broken glass.
On-screen, Gallagher frowned. He could tell I was upset.
Bowman and Pagano rushed toward me from the rear of the box, but they froze when I grabbed the lady’s arm. So did she. Bowman aimed his remote at me, while Pagano pulled his stun gun from his belt. “Let her go, Delilah,” Pagano said.
“What day is it?” I demanded.
The woman began to hyperventilate. “I...I don’t...”
I grabbed the phone sitting on the arm of her chair and pressed a button to wake it up. The date slid across her lock screen, and my eyes widened.
Two months. Two fucking months.
I hadn’t lost days. I’d lost eight full weeks of my life.
“In a landslide decision, the US House of Representatives has declined to pass the so-called cryptid labor law, which would have allowed ownership of several specific species of cryptids by private citizens. Insiders cite concern for public safety as the reason the bill did not pass.”
—from the September 27, 1997, edition of the Toledo Tribune
Delilah
Pagano pulled me away from the woman—Cherie?—and cuffed my hands at my back while Bowman radioed the event coordinator and asked for a server to fill in.
But instead of removing me from the box, Pagano took me closer to the glass, his gloved hand on my arm, careful to keep himself positioned between me and the guests I was no longer serving. He seemed to think that if they removed me from the box, Gallagher would refuse to fight.
He also seemed to think I posed no real threat to the customers. How much had they figured out about me during my missing time? Did they know I couldn’t hurt the customers unless the furiae saw them get away with committing an injustice?
I hardly saw the match, not because I couldn’t bear to watch—which was true—but because I couldn’t make sense of my loss. Where had the time gone? How was it taken? Why was it taken?
How many times had Gallagher been in the ring? How many creatures had he been forced to kill? Had I seen it all?
Why couldn’t I remember?
On the sand, the behemoth gored Gallagher’s arm, and blood arced across the sand. He pivoted and regrouped as the two-ton beast slowed to a thundering stop, then turned to charge again. But the only part that sank in through my shock was that Gallagher was alive.
Which meant that his death could not have caused my memory loss.
Minutes later, he stood on the sand over the body of the felled beast, and in the roar everyone else assumed to be a proclamation of his victory, I heard a bellow of anguish. Unlike with Argos, he hadn’t been able to kill such a huge creature without spilling its blood, and this time I knew that would not be the end. It couldn’t be.
His cap was too pale. Too dry. He might not make it until the next match if he didn’t use the blood he’d spilled, even if his victim hadn’t deserved death.
The spectators watched, mystified, as he knelt beside the body of the beast and took off his cap. For a moment, he appeared to be praying. Then he carefully, almost reverently, set his cap in the pool of blood still pouring from the massive tear in the behemoth’s stomach, inches from its spilled intestines.
The camera zoomed in for a close-up on-screen, and audience members who’d already risen to join the after-party, buzzing with excitement over what they’d seen, sat back down to watch.
At first, nothing seemed to happen, except for the return of its original bright red color to Gallagher’s hat. But then the pool of blood began to shrink, even as the last of it poured from the poor animal’s jagged flesh.
The audience stared at the high-definition screen, transfixed, in near silence. When the large puddle was gone, individual drops of blood began to roll toward Gallagher’s cap from where they’d landed in the initial splatter.
With a spectacular disregard for the laws of physics, blood rolled out of the behemoth one drop at a time, crossing the sand like a line of fat red ants until there was no more to be found. Until both the corpse and the sand were dry and colorless. Until the hat had taken it all.
Gallagher picked up his cap, and the audience gasped. He stood, then placed the hat on his head with deliberate, precise movements which could only be part of a ceremony they would never understand or truly appreciate.
Though he’d been forced to kill, the behemoth’s death had not been in vain. His blood would keep Gallagher alive.
Gallagher, in turn, would keep me alive.
* * *
His room was empty when I arrived, just like the night before.
No, just like that night eight weeks before.
Again, I was told to shower, but given no clothes or towel. Did I see Gallagher after every fight? Did Vandekamp still misunderstand the nature of our relationship?
As I rinsed the last of the products from my hair, the cell door squealed open, and I went still. What if this wasn’t his cell? There were no personal effects, other than a generic toothbrush. They could have given me to anyone. They could have been doing it for eight weeks straight, if they’d figured out that the furiae could not come to my defense.
My heart pounded in terror. I would have only my own abilities to count on, if someone else walked through that door.
“Gallagher?” I called, forcing confidence and volume into my voice, though I felt neither.
“Delilah?” he said, and his voice brought tears to my eyes. Evidently this had not become routine, because he sounded not just relieved, but stunned. “I’m going to set a shirt on the floor for you, okay?”
&nb
sp; “Thank you.” As water poured over my face and hair, his hand appeared around the bathroom wall holding a familiar folded bundle of cloth. He set it down, and his arm disappeared, but not before I saw that it was wrapped in bloodstained gauze.
I finished rinsing and turned off the faucet, then squeezed water from my hair and brushed as much of it down my body toward the drain as I could. When I was as dry as I could get without a towel, I pulled his clean shirt over my head and stepped out of the bathroom.
Gallagher’s gaze studied every inch of my exposed skin, and while that would have made me uncomfortable coming from anyone else, he was just doing his job. Searching for wounds or bruises. For any sign that he’d failed to protect me.
But he didn’t reach out to hug me. In fact, he stayed several steps away, and he looked more worried than my bruise-free skin should have made him.
“I’m fine. Really. But you...” I frowned. He’d already showered, probably so that the infirmary could treat his wounds. Which were plentiful. If the behemoth hadn’t been slow, she could easily have killed him.
“I will heal,” he said as my gaze fell toward the bulge of a bandage puffing beneath his pants, at his calf. “I always do.”
“How many fights have there been?” I reached for him, and he looked surprised, but he let me trace a thick scar curling around his forearm toward his wrist.
“Fifteen. They gave me a break after that one, remember?” he said with a glance at the scar. “It required tears of the phoenix, and even then took a week to heal.”
“What did this?” I couldn’t look away from the scar. That injury might have meant amputation for any human.
Gallagher looked puzzled. “You don’t remember?”
My eyes watered again, and his scars blurred. His injuries and my memory loss were each terrifying on their own, but taken together, with absolutely no context, they were overwhelming. “There’ve been so many. And all because of me.”
“No.” He folded his arms over a broad chest marred by dozens of new marks. He was born into a warrior race, but this was not how he was meant to fight. This was not why he was meant to fight. “Because of Vandekamp,” he insisted. “This is not your fault, Delilah. I put myself here.”
“For me.” I didn’t know what else to say.
I couldn’t absorb it all. I couldn’t think.
“Your hair.” I said the first thing that popped into my mind as I sat down and wiped unspilled tears from my eyes. “It grew back.” Too late, I realized that I shouldn’t have been surprised by that.
Gallagher lifted his cap from his head and ran one hand over his dark hair. “Yes. I suppose you haven’t seen it up close in a while.”
I tried to hide my surprise. “How long has it been?”
“I’m not sure. A couple of months?”
My eyes widened, and he noticed. “Since your first fight?”
“No. Since the night of my second. You don’t remember?” He studied my face, and his concern set off alarms deep inside me. “What’s going on, Delilah?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Why are you lying to me?” His voice held no accusation, but guilt flooded me anyway. He had to tell me the truth, and he deserved the same from me. But if he found out someone had taken my memory, he wouldn’t stop fighting until he knew what had happened to me and who had done it. Until the guilty party was dead.
Or until he was dead.
I couldn’t let that happen, but short of a lie, I had no good answer. “I...”
“You don’t remember the last time we were in the same room?” There was something strange in his voice. Some odd mixture of disparate emotions. Concern and...relief? Or was I imagining that? “What happened, Delilah? How much time are you missing?”
I blinked up at him, surprised by a conclusion I probably should have expected. He knew me better than anyone in the world, since my mother had died, and redcaps were experts at interpreting things left unsaid. They had to be.
Still... “How did you know?”
He almost answered. I saw the impulse in his eyes. In the automatic opening of his mouth, as if he were about to speak. Then he thought better of it.
Though the fae couldn’t tell an outright lie, their methods of avoiding the truth ranged from simple omission of key details to the intentionally misleading delivery of information. The conscious decision not to tell me whatever he’d been about to say meant something. Something important.
“What aren’t you telling me, Gallagher?”
“What aren’t you telling me?” he demanded. “You don’t remember the night of my second fight. You don’t know what happened to my arm. You’re surprised by the length of my hair. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Falling asleep in your room the night of your first fight. You were newly bald, and they’d just used me to make you kill Argos, the hellhound.”
“That’s it?” His brows furrowed low over gray eyes. “There’s nothing else?”
“Nothing until I woke up this morning in a private cell. My new guard seems to know me. And evidently serving in the arena is my regular gig.”
“You’ve been at every one of my fights,” Gallagher confirmed. “But they haven’t let me speak to you in weeks.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I heard from Eryx that you’d been removed from the dormitory, but he didn’t know why.”
“How did he find out?”
Gallagher’s frown deepened. “Delilah, you see him all the time. He’s a favorite at parties. He’s a favorite at everything.”
“You don’t do parties?”
He nodded. “They won’t let me, if you’re serving. But they know better than to expect me to fight unless you’re there. To prove that you’re okay.”
“I’m so sorry—”
The cell door opened to reveal one handler carrying two food trays and another aiming his tranquilizer rifle at Gallagher. The man with the trays set them on the floor and slid them inside.
“Hey, can I get some clothes?” I stood to show them how badly Gallagher’s shirt fit me, but neither handler said a word. “Please. I’m just asking for a little dignity.”
The first handler closed the door, and their footsteps faded down the hall.
“Bastards.”
Gallagher chuckled. “You call them that every time.”
“How many times have we done this?”
“This?” he said as I handed him a tray loaded with a full rack of pork ribs without sauce, a baked potato with none of the fixings, a scoop of canned green beans and two pint cartons of milk. “We’ve only done this twice.”
“Twice before tonight, or including tonight?”
“Before tonight.”
I sank onto his sleep mat next to him with my tray.
“At least they’re feeding you better,” he said with a glance at my bowl of potato-and-ham soup, a whole wheat roll and two small plums.
“Yes, and I have no idea why. What am I missing, Gallagher?”
“I don’t know.” But he didn’t look at me when he said it. He was telling me the truth, but not the whole truth.
“What do you know?” I tucked my legs beneath me and set the tray on the mat.
“Nothing relevant to your memory loss, as far as I know. You have my word, and my word is my honor.”
“Then why won’t you tell me?”
“My reasons are personal. You saw me in undignified circumstances.” He looked up, and his gray-eyed gaze pleaded with me, even before his words did. “Please let that be enough, Delilah.”
“Of course.” If I could erase the memory of every undignified circumstance he’d seen me in, I would. I took a bite of soup and thought while I chewed. “What could have taken my memory? An encantado?”
/>
“No.” He hadn’t touched his food. “They can alter how you experience reality, which can create a false memory, but they can’t leave your memory blank. It might be simpler than that, Delilah. Vandekamp has highly trained medical personnel, both doctors and cryptid vets.”
My pulse swooshed harder. “What are you saying?”
“Large doses of electric shock can damage a person’s memory. This could all be because of your collar, if they use it too often. Like a side effect.”
“Are you missing any memories?” I dipped my bread in soup, then took another bite. I was hungry in spite of the circumstances. “Is anyone else, that you know of?”
“No.” Finally he pulled one rib from the rack.
“Then it doesn’t make much sense that I would be,” I said, as he tore a chunk of meat from the bone with his teeth. Unless they’d shocked me over and over, during my missing weeks. “It could be the drugs.”
He dropped the rib onto his tray again, almost untouched, and his voice rumbled with anger. “Someone drugged you?”
“I think so. I woke up sluggish and disoriented this morning, and there are several different pharmaceutical sources of memory loss. Vandekamp could have given me anything.”
“But why?”
I shrugged. “Memory loss could be an unintended side effect. Or maybe there’s something he doesn’t want me to remember.” I tore a hunk from my roll, and again it occurred to me that my food could be poisoned. “So what have I forgotten?”
“That I know of?” Gallagher ripped one rib from his rack. “Thirteen of my fights. At least as many trips to the infirmary. And the occasional noncombat event where people wearing expensive clothes want to see the reigning arena champion, for the additional cost of five thousand dollars a night.”
“It costs them five grand just to look at you?”
Instead of answering, Gallagher took renewed interest in his dinner.