Spectacle--A Novel

  After breakfast, two handlers in tactical gear came in to call six more women out for work duty. Lala and Mahsa were among those chosen, but they weren’t told what their chores would be or when they’d be back.

  Sometime later, the squeal of hinges drew my attention to the door as it opened, and the familiar, waiflike figure who stood in the hall drew a gasp from me. I stood, and Mirela joined me, but we both kept our distance from the ifrit—a fire djinni—in spite of the drugged haze lingering in her eyes. “I didn’t even know they’d bought Nalah,” Mirela whispered.

  “Me neither.” I’d secretly been afraid she’d been euthanized. After all, we’d had to keep her sedated since we took over the menagerie, and we weren’t even trying to hold her prisoner.

  Nalah looked tired and disoriented, standing there in the doorway, but she wasn’t trying to melt the walls and her gray scrubs weren’t even smoldering. Either because the sedatives we’d given her hadn’t worn off yet or because Vandekamp’s collar had succeeded where we’d failed.

  “Go on.” The handler behind her gave her a small push, and as the ifrit stumbled into the dormitory, long strands of tangled hair fell over her face, reflecting light in every conceivable shade of red, yellow and orange. Her hair resembled the flames the fire djinn lived and breathed, and could kindle out of the air with little more than an angry thought.

  From the hall, the handler aimed his remote at her, then clicked something on its screen. A red light flashed in the front of her collar, and the sensor over the door flashed at the same time.

  Nalah was now restricted to this room just like the rest of us.

  She wobbled on her feet, and I saw no awareness or recognition in her expression. She appeared to be in a total drug fog.

  “Come help me with her.”

  Mirela grabbed my arm. “As soon as the drugs wear off, she’s going to roast you.” Nalah blamed me for Adira’s death.

  “Not if her collar works.” If Vandekamp’s tyrannical tech made Nalah easier to deal with, I was more than willing to take the good with the very, very bad. “She needs help, Mirela.”

  “Fine.” The oracle let go of my arm, still staring warily at the ifrit. “I’ll get her some water and a mat to lie down on. You get...her.”

  While Mirela pulled one of the gymnastics mats from the pile stacked against the wall, I approached the teenage djinni cautiously. “Nalah?”

  Her gaze snapped up, fiery copper eyes focused on me with a familiar, burning hatred. But a second later, they glazed over again. That was all the malice she had the strength for, at least until the drugs were out of her system.

  “Do you want to lie down? Mirela’s getting you some water.” I reached for her arm, but the djinni stumbled backward to get away from me, putting her dangerously close to the doorway sensor. “You need to move away from the door. It’ll—”

  “Nalah?”

  I turned to find a woman about my age staring at the ifrit through wide ice-blue eyes. Waist-length silvery hair hung down her back and the fall of light made it shimmer like water flowing in sunlight—easily the most identifiable feature of a marid, a water djinni. And she didn’t look friendly.

  “I’m Delilah Marlow.” I stepped back, so I could keep both djinn in sight. “What’s your name?”

  “Simra.”

  “Do you know Nalah?” My understanding was that the young ifrit and her royal marid companion had been captured by Metzger’s shortly after they’d sneaked into the United States and had no friends here.

  “Everyone south of the border knows her.” Simra’s cold gaze narrowed on Nalah. “Where is Princess Adira?” she demanded.

  Tears filled Nalah’s copper eyes.

  “Um...Adira was shot when we took over the menagerie,” I whispered, afraid that my explanation would upset Nalah. “She didn’t make it.”

  “You failed her.” Simra glared at Nalah with feverish spite. “You should have taken the bullet for her. That was your obligation!” She let out a high-pitched war cry and lunged at the ifrit. I threw myself between them, but before she could crash into me, the marid collapsed in the grip of a seizure.

  Her collar worked faster than I could, and it was a hell of a lot more effective.

  Mirela led the sobbing ifrit to the sleeping mat she’d prepared while I knelt next to Simra with no idea how I could help her. Fortunately, her convulsions only lasted a few seconds, but she’d hit her head on the floor when she fell, and even after she stopped shaking, her eyes looked unfocused.

  “Simra?” I swept glittering, silvery hair back from her forehead and searched her pale blue eyes for any sign of awareness. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, then rolled onto her side and covered her face with her hands. “I knew that would happen. Still, I had to try.” She pushed herself upright and smoothed long hair back from her pale face, composing herself.

  “Try what? To hurt Nalah?”

  Simra’s icy gaze focused on me. “To avenge the princess.”

  “Did you know Adira?”

  “I saw her in a parade once,” she replied, her expression softening with the memory. “When she was a girl. Nalah sat at her feet, and I was mad with envy. So many of us wanted to be the princess’s companion, but the ifrit royalty sent her Nalah as a gift, when the betrothal of their prince to our princess was announced. As a cross-cultural gesture.” Her gaze hardened again and she clasped her pale hands in her lap. “But Nalah let our princess die.”

  “She’s just a kid. And she was Adira’s companion, not her bodyguard,” I pointed out.

  “She has disgraced herself by outliving the princess she served.” Simra sat up, her spine as stiff as the line of her jaw. “If I could restore her honor by taking her life, I would.”

  The casual brutality of her declaration sent a chill crawling over me, and for the first time, I was grateful that Sultan Bruhier, Adira’s grieving father, had denied us entry into his kingdom. Djinni culture sounded ruthless, and the injustice of it would have driven me—and the furiae within me—insane.

  “Delilah?” a low-pitched voice called, and I looked up to find Bowman standing in the dormitory doorway holding a clipboard.

  I stood, my heart thumping in anticipation. “Yes?”

  “Come with me.” He pressed a button on his remote, and the red light above the door flashed, but if there was any response from my collar, I couldn’t feel it.

  “Where?”

  Bowman only watched me. Waiting.

  I gave Simra my hand, and she let me pull her to her feet. “Do you know what this is about?”

  She shrugged. “It’s a little early to be your first engagement, but you never know. Are you an oracle?”

  “I’m human.”

  “They’ll never believe that.” The skeptical tone of her voice said she didn’t believe it either.

  At the door, Bowman bound my hands at my back with padded restraints, which told me that the staff wasn’t sure they could control me with a collar until they knew my species. And that the clientele didn’t want to see visible signs of abuse on their high-priced exotic chattel—except whatever marks they might inflict themselves.

  “What’s this about?” I asked as I followed Bowman into the hall, taking note of the fact that he’d come for me alone. But armed.

  He pressed a button on his remote as we approached an exit on the opposite side of the building from where we’d come in the night before, but his lips remained sealed as he pushed the door open.

  “You don’t know, do you? You’re just an errand boy, right?” I asked, as I stepped out onto a sidewalk that felt rough and cool against my bare feet.

  Bowman marched me past a row of nondescript single-story buildings, each built of gray or beige brick punctuated at regular intervals by windows too narrow for a human to pass through, ev
en if the glass were broken. We were clearly on the operational side of the grounds, which obviously wasn’t meant to be seen by Vandekamp’s clientele.

  At the end of the row of ugly buildings, we took a right, then approached a beautiful iron gate in an intricately patterned stone wall. Bowman pressed an icon on his remote to allow me through the gate, and a red sensor blinked between two stones near the ground, embedded right into the mortar.

  When we walked through the gate, concrete gave way to smooth stone pavers beneath my feet and I caught my breath as I took in the stunning series of gardens and buildings that made up the Savage Spectacle’s grounds.

  At first, I could only stare, wide-eyed, at the botanical zoo spread out around me, cut from various shrubs dotting the broad, neat lawn. The cryptid topiary was astonishing and incredibly intricate, yet the details conformed more to fantasy than to true anatomy.

  To my left, two box-tree centaurs appeared frozen in midtrot, alternate legs gracefully curled beneath them as they ran, long human hair trailing behind them, and their poses were so dynamic I almost expected their hooves to hit the ground when reality’s stopped clock resumed ticking. On my right, a shrubbery manticore brandished its eight-foot-long stinger-tipped scorpion tail against a griffin with a twelve-foot wingspan, swooping in from overhead by the grace of the strong, bare trunk holding it up like a doll on a stand.

  As Bowman led me across the courtyard, down winding stone paths and past iron arches leading to other areas of the grounds, I gawked at a small herd of shrubbery satyrs playing flutes in a semicircle, as if the artist had drawn inspiration from Renaissance-period stereotypes rather than actually going to see a satyr.

  Past a gazebo surrounded by playful-looking elves that could have frolicked right off the front of a cookie box, I found a beautiful stone fountain spilling water from three tiers. Poised above it, as if they were about to dive into two feet of water, were two mermaids and a selkie emerging from her seal skin, all trimmed from massive bushes planted on three sides of the fountain. As with the griffin, they were held up by the pruned-bare center trunks. Unlike the griffin, however, those figures bore little resemblance to reality.

  A selkie would shed her seal skin as she emerged from the water, not as she dived into it, and mermaids...well... In reality, their upper halves didn’t resemble human lingerie models anywhere near as closely as the topiary might lead one to believe.

  Disgusted, I turned away from the elaborately inaccurate portrayals and focused on the back of the building we seemed headed for: a stately three-story structure with a massive back porch set up for fine dining outdoors.

  Through small gaps in a tall wall of shrubbery, I caught glimpses of an empty parking lot set back from the building and an unattended valet stand.

  Bowman marched me around the elaborate back porch, then used his remote to allow me entry through a small side door up a narrow set of steps. The door opened into a back hall, where Bowman’s boots echoed against the hardwood. My bare feet were silent on the cold floor.

  We passed through a tall rear foyer tiled in marble and paneled with dark wood, where abstract sculptures stood on marble pedestals. I stared at the display of wealth and opulence, awed for a second, until I realized that Willem Vandekamp financed the luxury—and no doubt his technological breakthroughs in cryptid containment—with the exploitation of helpless, suffering captives.

  “This way.” Bowman marched down a left-hand hallway without me, assuming I’d follow, and for a second, the uncharacteristic carelessness of that action gave me hope. Then a low-powered jolt came from my collar to spur me on, and I understood. He was demonstrating how little effort it took to keep a captive in line with the press of a single button.

  At the end of the hall, Bowman tweaked another setting to allow me through another doorway into a richly adorned office suite.

  A young, attractive assistant glanced up from her computer screen, her fingers paused over the keyboard. When she saw me, she frowned, then pressed a button on the telephone next to her keyboard. “Mr. Vandekamp, that cryptid is here.”

  “Send her in,” came the reply.

  Bowman opened the inner office door and escorted me inside.

  Willem Vandekamp sat at his desk, but standing to his left was a petite woman in her midthirties, wearing a white blouse and a knee-length pencil skirt. She wore low heels and perfect makeup, and stood with her arms crossed over her chest. Her nose crinkled as she studied me, and I wondered if she was more offended by my appearance or my smell. I hadn’t showered in at least two days, nor had I brushed my teeth.

  Two chairs stood in front of the massive, ornate desk, but I was not offered one, so I stood in the middle of the room, staring back at Vandekamp while he stared at me. Bowman stood at my side, at attention, ready to disable me with his remote, should I suddenly appear threatening.

  Finally, the woman exhaled with a frown. “I see the problem.”

  “I have your blood test results.” Vandekamp lifted one edge of a sheet of paper from his desk, and he seemed both annoyed and fascinated with whatever was printed on it.

  I shrugged without even a glance at the paper. “I tried to tell your handlers.”

  “We ran the test twice and found no trace of any nonhuman enzyme or hormone,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. On my right, Bowman suddenly seemed to stand even stiffer with the news, though I couldn’t tell that he’d actually moved. “The sheriff of your hometown said the state of Oklahoma got the same result, which they assumed to be a lab error. But even if my lab made mistakes—and it does not—two labs independently making the same error, twice each, is beyond the realm of both possibility and coincidence. Yet I’ve personally seen you take on characteristics no human could possibly possess. How can that be?”

  I shrugged, and the padded cuffs dragged the back of my shirt. I wasn’t sure how I’d been chosen as a furiae, or what force had chosen me, but I saw no reason to share what I did know with a man who intended to rent me out by the hour.

  “Can you control it?” The woman’s brown-eyed gaze stayed glued to me, as if my every inhalation might reveal some clue. “Or are you at the mercy of your beast?”

  “I am at the mercy of nothing.” That one wasn’t so much a lie as a personal goal.

  “Show us your inner monster,” she ordered, and Bowman tensed in anticipation. When I only stared back at her, she pulled a familiar remote control from her pocket and aimed it at me as she tapped something on the screen. I braced myself for searing pain in every nerve ending, but nothing happened.

  She glanced at her remote in irritation. “Willem?”

  “We can’t program the prompt command until we know what she is,” he explained.

  “Why not?”

  I laughed, amused to realize I understood what she did not. “Because that’s done by stimulating hormonal and neurological reactions through the needles penetrating my spine. Which you can’t do until you know what reactions to stimulate.” And they might never know how if I denied them that information by refusing to release my inner furiae.

  Or if the furiae turned out not to be triggered by anything they could stimulate.

  The woman’s gaze hardened, but Vandekamp looked suddenly intrigued. “How do you know that?”

  His files were obviously incomplete, and I had no intention of filling in the blanks—until I looked down at him, sitting behind his desk, and a sudden moment of déjà vu reminded me where I’d seen him before.

  “Willem Vandekamp.” I turned the syllables over in my head. “You’re Dr. Willem Vandekamp. I took your seminar at Colorado State.” During my senior year as a cryptobiology major. He hadn’t had the scar then, but... “You did a six-week lecture series on hormonal impulses in cryptid hybrids, and you had this theory that cryptids could be hormonally neutered.” A wave of nausea washed over me along with the obvious conc
lusion. “I guess that’s more than a theory now, huh?”

  The woman’s eyes widened as she turned to him. “You taught her? In class?” Something in her voice—in the casual anger with which she addressed him—told me she was not an employee. Not just an employee anyway.

  “You went to college.” Vandekamp stood and walked around his desk to sit on the front edge of it, eyeing me more closely, and suddenly I realized that though he was now addressing me, he hadn’t so much as greeted his own employee. “That’s not in your files.”

  I shrugged. “Your university bio didn’t mention your ‘private collection.’” For obvious reasons. Even if the Spectacle wasn’t actually breaking any laws—and I found that hard to believe—its clientele would expect the kind of total anonymity that can’t come from a service advertised to the general public.

  “You were my student. Fascinating!” Yet Vandekamp looked more like he wanted to dissect my brain than discuss my senior thesis.

  “And you were a very good teacher. I may not understand how you’re doing what you’re doing, but I understand why it works. And in my case, why it won’t.”

  “This one isn’t like the others,” the woman—his wife?—said, and the sharp edge in her voice could have cut glass.

  “I’m like them in every way that matters,” I insisted.

  “Yet you look human. Like a surrogate.” She spoke through clenched teeth. “What if she’s a surrogate, Willem? What if the government missed one? What if this is what they look like, all grown-up?”

  Vandekamp twisted to pick up a file from his desk blotter. He flipped open the folder and scanned the first page. “She’s only twenty-five. Too young to be a surrogate.”

  “Yes, and the test results say she’s human, but we know that’s not true. If she’s a surrogate, you could wake up one morning to find that you’ve stabbed me in some kind of psychotic trance. Doesn’t it say in that file that she made a man electrocute himself?”