My brow rose. “You believe that part, but not my birthday? I—”
She pressed her thumb against her remote screen, and pain shot through my throat. I cried out, and bent at the waist as I strained my shoulders trying to reach for my neck. But my voice carried no sound and my hands were still cuffed at my back.
The pain faded quickly, but my voice did not return.
“Cryptids don’t have birthdays,” the woman snapped, as I tried in vain to speak. My mouth opened. My lips and tongue moved. But my vocal cords did not vibrate. My brain was sending the signal to speak, but my body wasn’t receiving the order.
It was being intercepted by the collar.
In the menagerie, the handlers had sometimes muzzled cryptids, but that could only stop them from biting and speaking. Muzzles can’t prevent you from making sound. From hearing your own voice, as a reassurance that you do, in fact, still exist, even if only as property to be bought, sold or rented out.
But Vandekamp had found a way to turn off my voice, and the resulting claustrophobic terror felt as if the room was folding in on me. As if I were screaming into the void of some shrinking reality that no longer had enough space for me. As if soon they would cease to see me too, and start walking through me.
“So what do you suggest we do with her, Tabitha?” Vandekamp circled his desk again to sit behind it. “Sell her? Have her euthanized?”
My silent objection became a fruitless scream of rage. I strained the muscles in my throat, trying to be heard, until my eyes felt like they’d pop from my skull. But neither of them even looked at me.
I turned to Bowman to find him staring straight ahead, impervious to my frustration and fury.
“That seems a bit extreme,” the woman—Tabitha—said. “We’re going to have to inspect her. All monsters have telltale features. We just have to find hers.”
She turned to me, and again I tried to shout. To tell her that I’d already been inspected. I knew my desperate effort was pointless, but I couldn’t stop.
“Take off your clothes,” she ordered.
My profanity-laden refusal didn’t make so much as a squeak.
She pressed another icon on her remote, and pain exploded all over my body. I fell to my knees on the carpet, hunched over, my arms straining against my restraints. Screaming in silent agony.
What I’d felt when I’d slid my finger beneath my collar was a flash in the pan compared to the fire blazing through every nerve in my body.
“Tabitha,” Vandekamp said. “She can’t undress. She’s handcuffed.”
His wife finally released the button.
I slumped over my knees, breathing deeply as the pain slowly receded. I felt tender all over, but I couldn’t tell if that was a residual effect of the electric current or simply the knowledge that if I didn’t cooperate, she would press that button again.
“And anyway, she was inspected during the intake process. She has no cryptid features. Which is part of the problem.”
“I don’t understand,” she complained. “Even the most benign-looking monsters have an identifiable trait hidden somewhere. How could she have nothing?”
Finally, I made myself sit up and look at the Vandekamps, and the effort that took without the use of my hands was terrifying.
“What are we going to do with her?” Tabitha demanded as she smoothed a strand of brown hair back toward the simple twist it had escaped from. “No one’s going to pay to see that.” She waved one hand at me in disgust. “You’re going to have to figure out what she is. Make her talk.” She shrugged, and her cold gaze chased the last reverberating bolts of fire from my body. “Or I could do it.”
“I’ll figure something out.” He stood and kissed her on the forehead. “Why don’t you go tell the seamstresses what you want for the new costumes?”
She hesitated, then nodded reluctantly. “I do have a few ideas...”
As the door closed behind her, he sat on the front of his desk again. “Wait outside,” he said, and I thought he was talking to me until Bowman turned sharply and headed into the outer office, closing the door at his back. Vandekamp looked down at me, where I still knelt on his rug. “You were the one responsible for the takeover of Metzger’s Menagerie?”
I nodded. The truth was more complicated, but without my voice, I couldn’t explain about the team effort.
“I have some questions for you, and I suggest you answer them while you still can.” He pressed an icon on his remote, and when I felt no pain, I realized he’d given me back my voice.
Vandekamp twisted and lifted another folder from his blotter, then flipped it open. “According to the menagerie’s records, there are two cryptids missing. A werewolf called Claudio and a young marid named Adira. Where are they?”
I cleared my throat and was relieved by the sound that met my ears. “Adira died during the coup. She was shot by the Lot Supervisor. Christopher Ruyle.” We’d sent her body to the sultan so he could bury her.
Vandekamp glanced at the report again. “This Ruyle is also missing.”
“He’s dead. And for the record, he’s the only employee who died in the takeover.”
“And the werewolf?”
I held his gaze. And my silence.
He lifted the remote, drawing my attention to it. “You already know what this can do.”
I exhaled. I didn’t want to betray Claudio, but chances are that they’d never catch him anyway. “He left the menagerie last month.”
“Why would he leave? A werewolf cannot pass for human.”
“But he can live in the woods as long as he likes.” He was looking for Genevieve, the youngest of his children, who had been sold right before the coup. But I wouldn’t tell Vandekamp that no matter how much pain he put me through.
“How did you know about the coup?”
Surprise tugged up on Vandekamp’s left brow. “You haven’t figured out your mistake yet?”
I’d spent my time alone in that concrete cell going over every decision I’d made as the de facto manager of the liberated menagerie, trying to figure out how I’d failed the very people I’d been trying to save. I’d come up with a thousand small mistakes, but nothing I could pinpoint as our downfall.
“I found out from the Metzgers.” Vandekamp watched carefully for my reaction, but I had none to give him, except confusion.
“The Metzgers don’t know.” Raul and Renata had flawlessly covered our tracks with the former owner’s family.
“The Metzgers found out from old man Rudolph himself.”
“But Rudolph Metzger is...” I let my words fade into silence short of a confession.
“Dead,” Vandekamp finished for me. “Which is the inevitable result of dismembering a man and mailing a piece of him to each of his remaining relatives.”
“We didn’t—”
He shook his head, still watching me closely. “No, that didn’t seem like something you would do, after all the trouble you went through to hide the takeover.”
Sultan Bruhier. Adira’s father got his final revenge on us by exposing the coup that had cost his daughter her life. But the sultan couldn’t have shipped pieces of Rudolph Metzger all over the country if I hadn’t given him the old man in the first place.
Vandekamp’s viewing of my reaction seemed part entertainment, part clinical observation. So I swallowed my guilt to deny him the pleasure.
“What did you do with Gallagher?” I demanded, and his fleeting frown made my stomach flip. He didn’t recognize the name.
Gallagher wasn’t at the Spectacle. He’d been sold to someone else or sent to a cryptid prison or—worst-case scenario—given to a research lab.
A cold new fear overtook me. No matter where he was, he would fight to get to me.
I stared at the floor, struggling to control my
horror at that thought. Or at least hide it from Vandekamp.
“Until we know what you are, you’re a financial liability,” he said, and I forced myself to focus on his words. “You can enlighten me, or I can let my lovely wife pull the information out of you. But I don’t think that’s what you want.”
No use denying that. Tabitha Vandekamp was scary in a way no thick-fisted roustabout had ever been. But she couldn’t change the facts.
“I’ve told you.” I shrugged, mentally tamping down the fear that he might recognize my half-truth. “Run the test again. The results will be the same, and no amount of torture will change that. I’m human.”
Vandekamp crossed his arms over his shiny blue button-down shirt. “I’ve seen you turn into a monster, Delilah.”
“The two are not mutually exclusive.” I shrugged and held his gaze. “You and I have that in common.”
Willem
Willem Vandekamp watched the office door close behind his latest purchase, and for a moment, he sat lost in his thoughts. After more than twenty years in the cryptobiology field, he’d long been convinced that nothing could surprise him.
Until Delilah.
A cryptid who went to college.
A cryptid who’d taken his seminar.
She understood too much, but the real problem Delilah represented wasn’t how much she knew about him, but how little he knew about her.
Delilah would make the investors nervous. She would terrify his friends in Washington.
Speaking of whom...
Willem glanced at his watch, an obsolete device in the age of cell phones and handheld tablets, but one that gave him comfort in its simplicity. He was two minutes late for the conference call, but had no intention of actually picking up the phone for another three. Punctuality might give those congressional blowhards the mistaken impression that his time was less important than theirs.
What if Tabitha was right? Willem leaned back in his chair and linked his hands behind his head, still staring at the door. What if Delilah was a surrogate? No one had seen a single one of those sadistic little bastards since the government rounded them up nearly thirty years ago. They’d be thirty-five years old now—a full decade older than Delilah—but who knew whether they’d age like humans? Hell, if they were some kind of fae, their glamour could make them look like anything or anyone.
But Delilah wasn’t fae. According to her file, the sheriff who’d originally arrested her had kept her in iron cuffs with no effect.
Willem’s desk phone rang. His direct line. He noted the DC area code on the display and smiled. Then he let it ring two more times before he answered.
“Hello?”
“Vandekamp.” Senator Aaron sounded distinctly displeased. “We had an appointment, unless I’m mistaken?”
“I apologize.” Willem spun in his chair to look out the window at the topiary garden. “It’s been a bit chaotic here, and I’m running on about three hours of sleep.”
“Does that mean the rumors are true?” the second voice demanded in an eager baritone.
“If the rumors say that I have retaken Metzger’s Menagerie from the creatures who escaped their cages and killed the owner, then yes.”
“How could this have happened?”
“It couldn’t have, if my restraint system were federally subsidized and put into production,” Willem pointed out, without bothering to filter sharp criticism from his tone.
“If your restraint system were more than a prototype, that might be a possibility,” Senator Aaron said. “Until then—”
“It’s ready.” Willem stood and paced the length of his office, his pulse roaring in his ears. “Come see for yourself. My technology is going to change the world, Senator. You can be on the forefront of the new wave or you can be crushed by the tide. Your choice.”
He dropped his phone into its cradle and took a deep breath. Then he pressed the intercom button and spoke without waiting for a greeting from his secretary. “I want a full recording from Delilah’s collar. I need to see every hormonal fluctuation on a timeline alongside video footage from her dorm. Every twelve hours.”
As the only creature at the Savage Spectacle that Willem could neither identify nor control, Delilah Marlow was the one thing standing between him and a government contract that would revolutionize humanity’s control over the beasts it shared the planet with.
She could not be allowed to derail two decades of progress.
Delilah
A couple of hours after the sun set, Woodrow, the gamekeeper, stepped into the dormitory to conclude our first-day orientation with an announcement that lights-out would be in half an hour. He told us to clean our teeth with the brushes we’d been issued and use the toilets, then warned us—again—that failure to follow orders would result in serious consequences.
The long-term Spectacle captives began filing into the bathroom in two lines, clearly accustomed to the routine. Lala and Mahsa were the first from our group to join them, and I stepped into line after them. “How was your work assignment?” I asked, as we shuffled forward after the others. “What were you doing?”
“Vacuuming some big room,” Lala said.
“Scrubbing the kitchens,” Mahsa added.
“Multiple kitchens?”
“Yeah.” The leopard shifter shrugged. “Two of them, in two different buildings. There may be more, though.” Her eyes widened. “Did you see the bushes?”
“The topiaries? Ridiculous, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Lala said. “But they’re beautiful. Especially the nymph with roses for hair.”
We shuffled forward again, and the women who’d been first in line began to exit the bathroom. “So, did you see any way out? The property seems to be walled in, but I assume there’s a gate up front? And maybe one in the back, for deliveries?” We’d all been unconscious when we’d arrived, but I couldn’t imagine them driving tarp-covered cattle cars past the massive front building and the valet stand.
“I—” The oracle flinched, and her hand flew to the collar at her neck.
“Lala? What’s wrong?”
Simra turned around, a couple of places in front of us and frowned at me as if I’d just asked a colossally stupid question. “She’s not allowed to talk about certain things.” But I didn’t understand until she tapped the shiny steel collar around her own neck.
Holy shit.
Vandekamp’s collar was preventing her from speaking specifically about gates and exits? How was that possible, short of paralyzing the vocal cords entirely? There was no way any electronic device could tell what someone intended to say before the words even formed.
Or was there? If the collars could anticipate a shifter’s intention to shift based on the anticipatory hormones, maybe the speech block worked similarly. Maybe the collar’s receptors simply detected the presence of whatever nervous hormone people produce when they’re about to break a rule. Or maybe it sensed spikes in blood pressure, like a lie detector. Maybe the collar simply read the physiological signs of our intent.
Stunned by Simra’s revelation, I shared a horrified glance with Mahsa and Lala as the line shuffled forward. Why was I allowed to ask questions about things others weren’t allowed to discuss?
The most likely answer seemed to be that since I hadn’t known the question was forbidden, my body didn’t react with any signs of anxiety that could trigger my collar. Would that change, now that I knew?
Disturbed by the policing of my very voice, I shifted my thoughts from the fact that we weren’t allowed to talk about something to what we weren’t allowed to talk about.
Exits, locks...
Vandekamp was censoring information that might help plan an escape.
When I got to the front of the line for the toilet stalls, Finola leaned forward to whisp
er from behind me. “Is that hand sanitizer?”
I followed the siren’s gaze to a line of four liquid dispensers on the wall. The sign hanging above them notified us that they were to be utilized every time we used the restroom, though I couldn’t imagine that more than a few of the captives could read. “Looks like.”
We shuffled forward as one of the stalls emptied, and Zyanya spoke up from behind the siren. “Why do they care whether we brush our teeth and wash our hands?”
“Presumably it cuts down on communicable illness in such tight quarters,” Lenore said.
“Yes, but I suspect that’s a secondary concern.” I stepped forward again, and found myself second in line. “Our value and appeal both decline if we’re sick or dirty.”
When we’d all flushed, sanitized and brushed, Lala and I helped several of the other captives arrange the gymnastics mats on the floor and distribute blankets. There were no pillows or pajamas, and the mats were worn and thin, but the accommodations were both cleaner and more comfortable than anything we’d had in our carnival cages.
The menagerie refugees and I claimed spots on the left side of the room, in our own little cluster, and seconds after we’d all chosen a mat, the lights overhead were extinguished, in both the big room and the bathroom. We were left with only the light shining in from the series of tall, narrow windows, through which I could see several security light poles.
An instant later, every collar in the room briefly flashed red, and I wondered what new restriction had just been placed on us.
For several minutes, I lay on my side, thinking about collars and tranquilizer rifles and blood tests and topiary cryptids locked in their poses. After having survived the menagerie, I’d thought I knew what to expect from imprisonment. I understood how to deal with chains and cages and hunger, but this shiny, antiseptic captivity felt like the glittery wrapping on a box full of horrors, just waiting to be unwrapped.
In the near dark, one of the forms to my right sat up on her gym mat, and I recognized Zyanya’s silhouette even shrouded as it was by baggy scrubs. She turned to me, waving one hand to get my attention, and I sat up to see what was wrong. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out.