I’d actually taken several steps in the same direction before I remembered—as I struggled to do every night—that Lenore was responsible for my sudden compulsion to leave the carnival and drive straight home. Even though I no longer had a car. Or a home outside the menagerie and the camper I shared with Gallagher.
Abraxas and Alyrose, our human costume mistress, still had to wear earplugs during the nightly farewell, but Lenore’s human husband, Kevin, was used to it.
Caught in the siren’s pull, the spectators headed for the exit as one, and as I watched, resisting that draw myself, an odd movement caught my eye. One tall man in the crowd had his hand over his ear, not cupped like he was covering it, but as if...he’d just put in an earplug. The light was too dim for me to see for sure, but the possibility set me on edge.
Everyone else was with a friend or a date or family, yet this man walked alone, amid the jostle and flow of the crowd. Watching. When his gaze met mine, he smiled, but the expression seemed localized to his lips, one of which was bisected by a thick line of scar tissue that hooked down and over the edge of his chin.
He looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him, and the mental disconnect hovered on the edge of my thoughts like an itch that couldn’t be reached.
When the crowd had gone and the smoke had cleared, Abraxas turned off the sound system. Gallagher locked the gates. All over the menagerie, creatures with scales and horns and tails shed their chains and emerged from their cages like monstrous butterflies from steel cocoons. They shook off the pretense of captivity and stretched muscles stiff from hours in confined spaces.
It was my favorite part of the evening.
Together, we closed things down and set up for the next day, our last night in this small southern town. While I swept the bleachers in the big top, I listened to Zyanya and Payat laughing as they broke down and stored the equipment in the ring. Zyanya’s toddlers ran circles around their mother and uncle, and made the occasional mad dash into the stands, playing as children should. As they’d never been allowed to do before the coup.
I couldn’t help smiling as I watched them. Even if we accomplished nothing else—even if we couldn’t rescue a single other cryptid from captivity—we had done at least this little bit of good.
Afterward, I joined Gallagher as he fed the last of the beasts and nonhuman hybrids—the menagerie residents we couldn’t simply let out of their cages, because of safety concerns.
As he bent to pluck a rabbit from a box of small rodents we’d bought at the local pet store that morning, I remembered the first time I’d ever seen him, standing beside a cage in the bestiary. Back before I knew what he was. Before either of us knew what I was.
Before he cast off his human disguise and the safety it brought in order to protect me.
Redcaps are fae soldiers from their birthing cries to their dying breath, but the few who survived their brutal civil war each swore to find and serve a noble cause. To fight a battle worthy of the blood they must spill to survive.
Gallagher chose to serve and protect me, an arrangement I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with, because when fate saddled me with an inner beast driven to avenge injustice and corruption, it failed to give me a way to defend myself from those very things.
I chose to believe that the universe sent me Gallagher to make up for what it took from me. My friends. My family. My property. My freedom.
Gallagher’s oath to protect me at any cost was the driving force in his life. His oath was unbreakable. His word was his honor.
For the rest of my life, he would literally rip my enemies limb from limb to keep me safe.
Sometimes that knowledge felt reassuring. Sometimes it felt overwhelming. Sometimes it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
Those were the days when I truly understood how drastically my life had changed since my days as a bank teller.
“Did you see the man with the scar?” I asked, as Gallagher opened the feeding hatch on one side of the wendigo’s cage and tossed a live rabbit inside.
“No. Why?” Using the two-foot-long steel-clawed grabber, he plucked the last rabbit from the box.
“I think I saw him put plugs in his ears during Lenore’s farewell message. And he was here alone. No one goes to the menagerie alone.” I opened the feeding hatch on the adlet’s cage and Gallagher shoved the rabbit inside. The adlet—a wolf man stuck in a perpetual in-between state—ripped it nearly in half before it even hit the floor of the pen.
“You think he suspected something?”
“Maybe. But obviously we haven’t heard any police sirens. I’m probably imagining it.” I’d been living under a cloud of paranoia since the moment we’d locked Rudolph Metzger in one of his own cages.
“Maybe not.” Gallagher shrugged. “The last time I had a feeling about one of our patrons was when you visited the menagerie, and that changed everything. For all of us. Tell me about this man,” he said as he picked up the empty rabbit box. “What did his scar look like?”
“It ran through his lip and over the edge of his chin, and—”
Gallagher stopped walking so abruptly that I almost ran into him. His sudden tension made my pulse trip faster. “Which side of his chin?”
“The left.”
He dropped the empty box, alarm darkening his eyes. “That’s Willem Vandekamp.”
“Vandekamp. Why do I know that name?” Why was his face familiar? If I’d seen him before, how could I possibly have forgotten that scar?
“He owns the Savage Spectacle.” At my blank look, Gallagher explained, his words rushed and urgent. “It’s a private cryptid collection catering to the extremely wealthy. But he also has a specialized tactical team. Vandekamp is who the police bring in when they need to capture a cryptid they’re not equipped to handle. If he’s here, he knows. And he’s not alone. This is over.”
Fear raced down my spine like lightning along a metal rod. “This? Over?”
Gallagher dug a set of keys from his pocket and pressed them into my palm. “Go straight to the fairground’s main office and play the alarm tone over the intercom, then run back to our camper. We have to go.”
A chill raced the length of my body. Everyone knew that if they heard an unbroken alarm tone they were to get in their designated vehicles and run. But our emergency procedure was so new we hadn’t even practiced it yet.
Despite the risks, we hadn’t really thought we’d need it.
“Go, Delilah. I’ll get all the cash from the silver wagon, then meet you at the camper.”
I nodded, but before I could take two steps, a man in a protective vest stepped out of the shadows, aiming a stun gun at Gallagher’s chest. “Don’t move.” He had a regular handgun on his waistband, the snap on the holster already open. The name Brock was embroidered in shiny silver thread on the left side of his vest. Beneath that were the initials SS, stylized and intertwined, as if they belonged on an expensive hand towel or pillow case.
I eyed the soldier, my pulse racing.
“Put your hands up,” Brock ordered. “Or I will taze you.” He thought we were human.
Gallagher didn’t move, but I could feel the tension emanating from him. Every muscle in his body was taut, ready to explode into motion. “Vandekamp deals in exotic fetishes. He’ll rent them out by the hour,” Gallagher said, trying to convince me of what needed to be done while he eyed the private soldier. “They’ll die in captivity, Delilah. And in great pain.”
Chains. Cages. Fists. Whips. Blood.
My heart ached at the memories. The terror. My lungs refused to expand. If Vandekamp knew about the coup, others knew, too. Gallagher was right. The menagerie was finished.
We had to sound the alarm and give people the chance to escape.
“Kill him.” My words carried no sound, but Gallagher read them on my lips. H
e turned, impossibly fast, and ripped the stun gun from the soldier’s hand. It broke apart in his grip like a child’s toy.
Brock grunted and reached for his gun, his movements clumsy with shock. Gallagher grabbed his head in both hands and gave it a vicious twist.
I heard a distinct crack. The man’s arms fell to his side, but to my surprise, his head remained attached to his body. Gallagher hadn’t spilled a single drop of blood, even though he needed it to survive.
“You’re not going to...?” I gestured to his faded red cap as the body fell to the ground at his feet.
“No time. We have to—”
Something whistled softly through the air, and Gallagher stumbled. He slapped one hand to his thick thigh and pulled out a dart attached to a tiny vial that had already nearly emptied into his flesh. He growled as he stepped in front of me, shielding me, and turned toward the direction the dart had come from. “Get down.”
As I knelt behind him, I heard another soft whistle. He flinched, then fell onto his knees. “Gallagher!” My pulse racing, I pulled a second dart from his leg and stared into the dark, trying to spot the threat.
“Get the gun.” Gallagher’s voice was much too soft. His eyes were losing focus.
I spun toward Brock’s corpse and was reaching for the pistol still in his holster when Gallagher fell to the ground with a heavy thud.
“No!” The gun forgotten, I dropped onto my knees to put one hand on his chest. It rose, then fell. He was completely unconscious, his hat still firmly seated on his head.
“Delilah Marlow.”
Fear electrified every nerve ending in my body as I twisted to see the man with the scar staring down at me, his tranquilizer rifle aimed at my chest. I shoved my terror down to feed the rage burning out of control in my gut. “You have three seconds to get the hell out of my menagerie before I scramble your brain.”
His brows rose in an insulting blend of fascination and amusement. “Do your worst.”
My worst was already on its way.
Deep inside me, the furiae stretched as she woke up, intent on avenging Gallagher, and as her righteous anger rapidly filled me, my nails hardened and began to lengthen into needlelike points.
Vandekamp’s gaze flicked to my hands, but his expression did not change.
I stood, and my vision zoomed into an extraordinary clarity and depth. My hair began to rise on its own, defying gravity as my rage mounted.
Vandekamp held his ground three feet away. He twisted a small knob on his rifle and aimed it at my thigh.
I lunged for him, my thin black claws grasping for his head. He pulled the trigger, and pain bit into my thigh. I gasped and stumbled sideways, then tripped over Gallagher’s thick leg. The world rushed toward me. My shoulder slammed into the dirt path.
Gallagher lay a foot away, his eyes closed.
The dart burned fiercely in my thigh, and my vision blurred. My arms were too heavy to lift. I couldn’t move my legs.
From somewhere in the fairgrounds, a scream rang out, then was suddenly silenced.
“Don’t do this,” I begged as a second scream split the night. But my voice was too soft. The world was starting to lose focus.
Vandekamp put his boot on my shoulder and pushed me onto my back. He knelt next to me, his rifle hanging from one shoulder, and stared into my eyes, apparently fascinated by the black-veined orbs they had become when the furiae awoke. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Delilah.” He brushed hair back from my face and tucked it behind my ear. “My name is Willem Vandekamp.”
I blinked, and his face blurred as darkness engulfed me.
“You belong to me now.”
Delilah
The squeal of metal ripped through my head like a chain saw through wood, and my eyes flew open. Bright, warm light turned the throbbing behind my eyes into a sharp pain that pulsed with my heartbeat, and at first I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. My world seemed to be composed entirely of shiny steel slats and canvas.
My tongue felt like it was dried to the roof of my mouth, and my throat hurt when I swallowed. When I tried to sit up, I discovered my wrists were bound at my back with something that didn’t rattle or clank like metal handcuffs, and they must have been bound for a while, because I couldn’t feel my fingers. I was lying on my stomach in a long, subdivided steel cage, draped with a sheet of canvas thin enough to let light through. I blinked, trying to remember how I wound up shackled and caged, and...
Vandekamp.
With his name came the memory of his scarred face staring down at me. The iron weight of fear threatened to press all the air from my chest as understanding crashed over me.
The menagerie had been retaken.
I was a prisoner. Again.
For weeks, I’d battled nightmares about being recaptured. Recaged. But my dreams were pale shadows of the horrifying reality.
My lungs refused to expand. I gasped, trying to catch my breath as the steel slats seemed to be closing in on me. I can’t do this again. I couldn’t live in a cage and eat scraps. I couldn’t wear rags and take orders. I couldn’t “perform” in another menagerie, watching people I cared about suffer just to draw out my beast and its violent brand of justice.
Not again.
Motion to my left drew my eye, and I twisted on the cold steel floor to see Mirela lying in the next cell, unbound and evidently unconscious, still dressed in her fortune-teller costume. But I couldn’t see into the cells beyond hers from my prone position.
Grunting with the effort, I tucked my legs beneath my stomach and pulled myself upright without the use of my hands. On my knees, I could see down the length of the steel cage into at least a dozen cells separated by steel-slat walls. I was in the very last one. And finally I understood.
We were in a cattle car—a long horse trailer modified to hold human-sized cryptids. Each pen had its own roll-up door and the whole thing was much cleaner and newer than anything we’d had at Metzger’s. Much colder.
And much more expensive.
Mirela’s sisters lay unmoving in the two narrow cells after hers, and beyond those were several more, each occupied by one of my fellow captives.
The light shining through the canvas strapped in place over the cattle car was too warm in tone to be anything but sunlight, and the canvas itself gave me no hint of our location. I closed my eyes and listened, trying to slow my racing heart.
I heard the rattle of a cage door rolling up on another cattle car and male voices, speaking too softly for me to understand. The only familiar sound was the breathing of the other captives.
“Where are we?” Lala whispered, and I turned to see her pushing herself upright in the middle of her cell. She blinked at me through eyes ringed in dark circles and drew her denim-clad knees to her chest.
“I don’t—”
Heavy footsteps clomped toward us, and two shadowy silhouettes appeared through the thin canvas, starkly backlit, growing larger as they got closer. The shapes were male and bulky from whatever equipment they wore, and when one of them came to disconnect the canvas from the two rear corners of my cell, I could tell from his outline that he had a gun and some kind of baton.
When the canvas was unhooked, the men pulled it from the cattle car with practiced motions, then folded it with the same efficiency. Both men wore the Savage Spectacle’s black tactical gear, including visored helmets, and each wore a pistol and a stun gun holstered on opposite sides of their waists. They worked in silence, and after an initial assessing glance into the trailer, they didn’t leer, stare, laugh or point.
The soldiers’ professional bearing was so unlike that of Metzger’s rough-edged roustabouts and handlers that Lala and I seemed more interested in them than they were in us.
From my left, I heard and felt movement as the rest of the captives began to wake
up, but I couldn’t tear my searching gaze from the world outside the cattle car. Where were the rides and the booths? Where were the campers, trucks and trailers? Where was the fairground?
I saw nothing but a gray building and, behind that, a thick patch of forest.
“Where are we?” Lala asked again. “What’s happening?”
I hardly even heard her questions over the chattering of my teeth, a nervous reaction I’d had since I was a kid. My mouth was dry and my hands were shaking in my bindings, which chafed my already-raw wrists.
“We’ve been captured, obviously,” Zarah said from the other end of the trailer, where she was confined in the pen next to Trista, her twin and fellow succubus.
“But where’s the menagerie?”
“Probably right where we left it,” Mirela said to her sister, while she watched the black-clad men stack the folded canvas on top of at least two others. “It looks like we’ve been seized. They must know the old man is dead.”
But how? Renata and Raul had done flawless work with Metzger’s relatives. We’d hoped to get at least a year out of the ruse, which should have given us plenty of time to figure out how to get everyone south of the border.
“I think we’re being sold,” Lenore said, and for once, I didn’t fight the calming pull of her voice. Instead, I let the sound relax my tense muscles and slow my racing heart, and finally my teeth stopped chattering. Clarity returned to my vision.
Our cattle trailer was parked in front of a squat gray brick building punctuated by a series of tall, narrow windows. Its resemblance to a prison was no doubt intentional. Two men stood guard at either side of the building’s entrance, wearing padded bite suits similar to what K9 trainers used to condition attack dogs. Their utility belts each held a Taser and a baton, but no guns.
The trees visible behind and above the building were taller than they typically grew in Oklahoma, my home state, and the flora was greener and more lush.
“We’re all being sold?” Mahsa asked, and when I turned to follow the leopard shifter’s gaze, relief flooded me. Two more cattle cars stood about fifty feet away, on the other side of the parking lot, but their occupants were still unconscious, and I wouldn’t be able to identify them until they sat up.