Menagerie
Menagerie
Rachel Vincent
From New York Times bestselling author Rachel Vincent comes a richly imagined, provocative new series set in the dark mythology of the Menagerie…When Delilah Marlow visits a famous traveling carnival, Metzger's Menagerie, she is an ordinary woman in a not-quite-ordinary world. But under the macabre circus black-top, she discovers a fierce, sharp-clawed creature lurking just beneath her human veneer. Captured and put on exhibition, Delilah in her black swan burlesque costume is stripped of her worldly possessions, including her own name, as she's forced to "perform" in town after town.But there is breathtaking beauty behind the seamy and grotesque reality of the carnival. Gallagher, her handler, is as kind as he is cryptic and strong. The other "attractions"–mermaids, minotaurs, gryphons and kelpies–are strange, yes, but they share a bond forged by the brutal realities of captivity. And as Delilah struggles for her freedom, and for her fellow menagerie, she'll discover a strength and a purpose she never knew existed.Renowned author Rachel Vincent weaves an intoxicating blend of carnival magic and startling humanity in this intricately woven and powerful tale."Blood Bound offers a little something for everyone: a convincing magical system for urban fantasy fans; for romance readers, a love that time and distance can't break; and a twist-and-turn plot for mystery buffs. Readers looking for a light and fluffy ride should go elsewhere."–Shelf Awareness
One hundred twelve years.
That’s how long the menagerie had been in Rudolph’s family. The technological boom had not been good to traveling circuses, but thanks to Rudolph’s talent and attention, Metzger’s had survived when many other menageries folded. But survival wasn’t enough. He wanted Metzger’s to flourish!
His gaze focused on the occupants of the room beyond the one-way glass, uncomfortably aware of the fact that if the woman hadn’t been chained to both her chair and the floor, he would’ve had no idea she wasn’t, in fact, a woman at all. She was a monster.
“She wasn’t trying to pass for human. She thought she was human. The world thought she was human. When audiences look at her, they will see themselves, locked up and helpless. When the other exhibits look at her, they will see possibility. Opportunity. She grew up in freedom and human privilege. She’s smart, she’s loud, and she has a severely inflated sense of self-worth. Her delusions make her dangerous.”
He turned to his boss of livestock. “You must break her, Gallagher. She is the spark, and if that spark kindles, it will burn my menagerie to the ground.”
Rudolph shook his head to disguise the chill traveling up his spine. This female could incite riots. She could save the carnival—or be the end of everything he’d been working toward his entire life.
Praise for the novels of New York Times bestselling author Rachel Vincent (#ulink_c734943b-7b35-5de6-859c-dd83369d4648)
“Compelling and edgy, dark and evocative, Stray is a must read! I loved it from beginning to end.”
—New York Times bestselling author Gena Showalter on Stray
“Well written, fresh, charming, great voice—Buffy meets Cat People. I loved it, and look forward to much more in the future from this talented author.”
—New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham
“This is the kind of book that ups the ante in teen literature. The characters are true to life in a way not often captured by YA authors; Vincent writes dialogue as if she spends her days haunting the hallways of her local high school. The love triangle is fantastic… This plot is driven by more relatable impulses: love, friendship, jealousy.”
—RT Book Reviews on My Soul to Steal
“Vincent does a nice job of balancing all the various species of character…with dollops of humor and enough backstory to keep readers new to the series engaged, without dousing the pace for those already in the know.”
—Booklist on If I Die
“A well-thought-out vision of werecat social structure as well as a heroine who insists on carving her own path, even if it means breaking some of her society’s most sacred taboos.”
—Library Journal on Rogue
“Blood Bound offers a little something for everyone: a convincing magical system for urban fantasy fans; for romance readers, a love that time and distance can’t break; and a twist-and-turn plot for mystery buffs.”
—Shelf Awareness on Blood Bound
Menagerie
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
Rachel Vincent
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
RACHEL VINCENT is the daughter of a registered nurse and an attorney/pianist, and only rarely has she ever seen either of them without a book in hand. As the oldest of three (then later, five) children, she’s always known exactly when and how things should be done, and as a wife and mother, she has never once conceded an argument. A former English teacher and supporter of the serial comma, Rachel has written more than twenty novels and hopes to spend the rest of her life with her fingers on the keyboard and her head in the clouds.
www.rachelvincent.com (http://www.rachelvincent.com)
This one is for my husband and children, who suffered with me through three years, several rewrites, a shifted release date and the loss of my longtime editor while I wrote Menagerie. It’s been a long road, but I think it’s been worth it, and I can’t thank you all enough.
Contents
Cover (#u16b4a9c9-901f-5e6d-acb1-68685d25a004)
Back Cover Text (#u3b389668-7f93-5829-bdd6-0cda2b416fe3)
Praise (#u98afc889-8b97-55d6-9cb6-21bff99a73a5)
Title Page (#u4f501e27-1042-596e-82de-4e78f3601122)
About the Author (#u943c7023-db3b-5da6-ab45-7c3c621e9c2c)
Dedication (#uea9d5b8d-31a7-5b10-9c55-8695c63664ea)
Part 1: Exposé (#u960a1e15-6738-5a4d-99a1-3746a2bbd6cb)
Introduction (#u21985912-adb9-53a7-9c4e-839d6876a567)
Quote 1 (#u60f2d8a1-f97b-5215-b465-42226a9a5cf6)
Rommily (#u1ab434db-35f0-50e4-a656-2e5d54251fea)
Delilah (#ucce6a3db-9827-5f01-9bf7-3f5efac15374)
Quote 2 (#uc9380112-8427-5b8b-ad89-78ea733ff5ee)
Delilah (#u8cfb34fa-03a5-51d9-93ef-6f0f55e093a5)
Atherton (#u0e738ad7-0394-502c-a4ae-b7fa47e57c1e)
Quote 3 (#uda8956c3-7b3f-5587-95ad-e24bb4474ff9)
Delilah (#u2caee6b9-185e-5599-8659-f84bc459b5f4)
Delilah (#u987bebff-0392-59a2-ab23-d5bb0af0e4a1)
Quote 4 (#ue32ba3dd-cac8-59d7-9f1b-86c4f3fccf02)
Charity (#u337b5508-3a09-5ff9-a61d-952ea4f53667)
Delilah (#ubc96d620-6dd2-5aeb-9b8a-8c952430f304)
Quote 5 (#uc5f83aca-3519-5526-be1b-06eb25a8e96c)
Rudolph (#ud2213f10-38c4-5c5f-89fd-8e63e4cca1bb)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 2: Confiné (#litres_trial_promo)
Rommily (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Nalah (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Eryx (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Rommily (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Gallagher (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Geneviève (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Eryx (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Nalah (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Gallagher (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 3: Émancipé (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Charity (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Gallagher (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Abraxas (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Kevin (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Rudolph (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
PART 1 Exposé (#ulink_4914e6d4-57e1-5e05-bc55-b5e31c50fed6)
Twenty-five years ago...
The heat rippling over the surface of Charity Marlow’s blacktop driveway was one hundred twelve degrees. It was nearly one hundred nine in the shade from the scrub brush that passed for trees in her front yard.
She sat on a white iron bench in her backyard, picking at the paint flaking off the arm scrolls. A glass of sweet tea stood on the empty plant stand to her right, thinner on top, where the ice cubes melted, thicker on bottom, where the sugar settled.
Inside, the baby was crying.
She’d been going for close to three hours this time, and Charity’s arms ached from holding her. Her head throbbed and her feet were sore from standing. From pacing and rocking in place. Her throat was raw from crooning, her nerves shot from exhaustion, and her patience long worn thin.
She’d decided to go inside again when the last ice cube had melted into her tea, and not a minute later.
Not a minute earlier either, even though the top of her head felt close to combusting from the heat of the sun.
She stared at the cracked earth beneath her feet, at the hands in her lap, watching her own fingers shake from exhaustion. Then she stared at her tea as the ice cubes shrank before her eyes, and still the baby screamed.
Then, the last ice cube melted.
Despair swallowed Charity like the whale swallowed Jonah, but she held no hope of being spit back out. Her arms felt like they were made of iron as she lifted her tea.
She closed her eyes while the top of her skull burned in the blazing sunlight. “Lord,” she whispered, condensation dripping over her fingers from the outside of her cold glass, “won’t you take this angry child and give me a quieter, happier one in her place?”
As soon as she’d said the words, she regretted them. Words spoken in pain and exhaustion are rarely meant, and Charity Marlow’s were no exception.
But there was no taking them back.
The moment the last word fell from her lips, the baby stopped crying.
Setting her glass down, she listened harder but heard only silence.
She stood and rounded the bench, headed for the kitchen door. By the time she got to the house, she was running. The screen door slammed behind her and her sandals slapped the floor, competing with the thunder of her own heartbeat in her ears as she raced down the hall.
She stopped in the nursery threshold, one hand clenched around the glossy white door frame, breathing too fast. Too hard. Her chest felt like it was constricting around her heart, as if her ribs were laced up too tight.
“I didn’t mean it. Please, I didn’t mean it.”
The baby was dead. Charity was sure of it. She’d committed the worst sin a mother could commit, and now she was being punished.
But there was no answer from above, so she had to take that next step forward. And the one after that.
By her third step into the nursery, she could see a chubby little fist propped against the pastel crib bumper. Anguish swelled up from her heart and caught in her throat, a lump she couldn’t breathe through, yet couldn’t swallow.
One more step, and she could see the whole crib and the baby lying in it, eyes peacefully closed.
Charity sobbed and sagged against the crib rail, one hand on her daughter’s round little stomach.
The child’s eyes fluttered open, and Charity’s shocked gasp was like a crack of thunder in the silent house. Her eyes filled with tears of joy and relief and she reached to pick up the child, already scolding herself for being such a superstitious fool.
Then the child smiled at her and Charity froze, her fingers inches from her daughter’s pale pink jumper. Chills raced up her spine and goose bumps erupted all over her body.
The child laughed—surely no purer sound of joy was ever heard—and she stepped back from the crib, fear crawling beneath her skin.
The baby laughed again, and she took another step back, then another, and another, until her back hit the pale yellow wall. In that moment, as confusion, guilt and fear met within her, calling into question everything she’d thought she understood about the world and her place in it, Charity Marlow knew only one thing for sure.
That was not her baby.
Fourteen years ago...
The whistling tones of a calliope organ rang out from a speaker mounted over the carnival gate, the playful notes tripping up and down the musical register with a spirited energy. The kids from Franklin Elementary buzzed with anticipation, whispering excitedly to one another as they fidgeted in two semistraight lines. The music seemed to feed their enthusiasm and fray their patience.
As she approached the gate, ten-year-old Delilah Marlow clutched her brown-bag lunch and stared at the graceful form in front of her. The woman handing out tickets wore a red sequined leotard with a black feathered hat, black stockings, and shiny black slippers. Her lips were painted bright red. Her blue eyes practically glowed beneath dramatic sparkly lashes and thin dark eyebrows that ended in a jewel-studded curlicue at each of her temples.
She was the most glamorous thing Delilah had ever seen.
“Here you go, sweetheart.” The costumed woman handed her a shiny slip of red paper. Delilah’s gaze lingered on the sequins and feathers as the woman handed tickets to each of the other five fifth graders in the group, and to Mrs. Essig, their young homeroom teacher. “You all enjoy your visit, and remember to look but not touch. Especially you!” She patted the brown spikes sticking up all over Matt Fuqua’s head. “With that hair, you might just be mistaken for a werewolf pup!”
The other three boys laughed and elbowed Matt, but fell into a sudden awed silence as another woman in red sequins passed by—walking on her black-gloved hands. Her tiny waist was bent backward at a severe angle, so that both of her bare feet dangled over her head, her toes nearly touching the top of her skull.
Delilah couldn’t stop staring.
Shelley Wells linked her arm with Delilah’s as they stepped through the gate and into the carnival. “How does she do that?”
“She’s a circus freak.” Matt marched past the girls as if he owned the whole midway. “My dad says some of them are just as weird as the monsters they got in cages.”
Mrs. Essig hurried to catch up with him, shooting an apologetic glance at the red-sequined woman. “They’re human,” she whispered fiercely as she grabbed the back of Matt’s shirt to keep him from wandering down an offshoot of the main path on his own. “That’s all that matters.”
Matt pulled free of his teacher’s grip. “Are we sure they’re human? My dad says sometimes you can’t tell just from lookin’. Remember the reaping?”
Mrs. Essig nodded stiffly, but Delilah knew their teacher didn’t actually remember the reaping, and neither did Matt Fuqua. Only old people actually remembered the reaping, and most of them didn’t like to talk about it, because they’d all known someone who’d died. Or killed. Or been taken.
Remember the reaping? wasn’t just a question. It was something parents said in hushed voices. Something priests advised while they made the sign of the cross. Something politicians shouted from behind podiums. Remember the reaping was a warning not to let history repeat itself. A reminder for humanity not to let its guard down.
Remember the reaping was an American way of life.
The teacher rubbed her forehead and pinched the bridge of her nose. Delilah recognized both gestures. Mrs. Essig was getting another headache.
Matt shrugged, oblivious to his teacher’s discomfort. “My dad says you have to be careful who you trust, because the reaping could happen again.”
According to Delilah’s father, Matt Fuqua was just smart enough to be dangerous. Others who’d warranted the same description included congressmen from the wrong side of the aisle and that eight-year-old from Memphis who’d figured out how to put his mother’s car into Neutral before he realized he couldn’t reach the brake.
Just smart enough to be dangerous, it turned out, wasn’t really very smart at all.
For the next hour, Delilah and her classmates wandered along the crowded sawdust-strewn midway, clutching their lunches and staring in awe at every vibrant spectacle they passed. They didn’t have access to the entire menagerie. The owner had generously offered a complimentary midway “preview” for all of the local schools, with the hope that curious parents would later attend the whole carnival at full price. But what they did see was enough to impress even the most jaded fifth grader.
Along with the tantalizing scent of the food carts and the game booths boasting all the bells and whistles, costumed circus performers gave abbreviated demonstrations to cheering children and stunned teachers. A man in a red velvet jacket and dramatic black eyeliner swallowed a series of swords on a small dais, while Delilah rubbed her throat in empathy. Five acrobats in red-and-black sequined leotards formed an inverted pyramid, their bodies bent and twisted into complicated shapes. And set back from the midway, behind velvet ropes to hold the audience at a distance, a man and woman in matching top hats and shiny red-and-black costumes juggled lit torches and breathed fire into the air.
Everywhere the children turned, a new spectacle awaited, each more extravagant than the last. But the real draw was a series of stunning hand-carved and brightly painted circus wagons that had been hauled out to line the midway. Each wheeled cage displayed a different cryptid the children had only ever seen on television, the internet, or in books. Handlers in black slacks and bright red shirts stood by, ready to answer questions or prod creatures into displaying their bizarre and sometimes unsettling features.
The first wheeled cage held a brownie, a small gnomelike creature with a long nose and pointed ears, which Matt labeled “boring” and Shelley pronounced “cute.” Another held a cockatrice—a miniature dragon with dark, unsettling eyes that stared up at them from its rooster-like head. The creature had scales that glittered with each elegant movement of its long whip of a tail. Its sharp talons clicked against the metal floor of the cage, and Delilah stumbled backward when it opened its curved beak and let out a terrible crow.
The exhibit most popular with the boys, other than the woman who could twist her body until she was standing on her own skull, was a dog with three heads, each growling and snapping at the other two. As they watched, a woman in a sparkly red bustier and black skirt tossed a bloody hunk of meat into the cage with an artistic flourish. The boys in the audience cheered as each third of the dog fought viciously over the single dinner all three mouths had to share.
All Delilah could think was that the dog must have been awfully hungry to keep stealing food from itself.
While the rest of the group remained spellbound by the savage snapping dog, Delilah wandered toward the next wagon, where a cluster of kids from another school had gathered. She had to push her way to the front of the whispering, pointing crowd, and her first glimpse of the creature in the cage stole her breath. It was like nothing she had ever seen. Or rather, it was like several things Delilah had seen, but never in such a seemingly random compilation of mismatched parts.
The cryptid was the size and general shape of a lion, its body covered in smooth golden fur ending with a long, slim, tufted tail. Each of her four paws was wider than Delilah’s whole hand, but even more incredible was the huge pair of eagle-like wings growing from the creature’s back, its feathers fading from dark golden brown at the base to nearly white at the tips. Yet what really caused the commotion was the fact that the creature’s front feline paws grew up into deeply tanned human arms and shoulders, which supported an equally human neck and a human head with long, dark hair.
From the biceps up, the creature in the cage looked like a normal woman.
Mesmerized, Delilah glanced at the plaque wired to the front of the wagon. Sphinx, it read. The cryptid was a forty-three-year-old sphinx named Hecuba, who’d been taken from her mother’s nest on a Greek mountainside just weeks after she was born.
Delilah tried to imagine the creature in her natural habitat. Flying across the Greek countryside on huge powerful wings. Swooping to catch a goat or lamb in her razor-sharp claws, then taking the prize up to a massive nest on the side of a mountain. That would have been incredible to see.
Could Hecuba remember any of that life? Delilah couldn’t remember anything from when she was only a few weeks old.
The sphinx turned in her tight quarters, ready to pace several steps to the other end of her cage, but when her gaze met Delilah’s, Hecuba froze. Her eyes were gold and round like a cat’s, and the left one peeked at the child through a curtain of dark hair. But no cat had ever looked at Delilah like Hecuba was looking at her. No bird had either.
The sphinx glared at her the way her mother did in church, when Delilah kept clicking the ballpoint pen but couldn’t be scolded during the prayer.
The sphinx was looking at Delilah as if she wanted to say something.
Hecuba blinked, then continued pacing, but every time she turned toward the fascinated child, their gazes locked and Delilah’s curiosity was piqued again.
“Can we ask her questions?” she asked the sphinx’s handler, a large man in jeans whose thick arms were crossed over a simple red employee T-shirt. There were no top hats or sequins for handlers assigned to the most dangerous cryptids—nothing that could distract from the safety regulations.
“Questions?” The handler frowned down at her, as if he found her request very odd. “You can ask anything you want, but don’t expect an answer. She don’t talk. Even if she could, it’d probably be nonsense. Having a human head don’t mean she has a human brain.”
Delilah decided to give it a try anyway, because what other kind of brain could be inside a human head? She stepped closer to the cage, but stopped when the handler stuck one arm out to keep her at a safe distance. “Hecuba?” she said, and the sphinx stilled when she heard her name. “Do you remember Greece?”
The sphinx blinked, then narrowed her eyes at the child. A human tongue peeked from between her dry lips to wet them, and Delilah’s pulse quickened. Hecuba was going to answer. She, Delilah Marlow, was going to be the first person in history to carry on a conversation with a sphinx!
“Ha!” Someone shoved Delilah’s shoulder, and she stumbled to the left. When she turned, she found Matt Fuqua leering at her. “Did you really think it was going to answer you?” Matt and his friends laughed at Delilah while her cheeks burned.
Mrs. Essig quietly rounded up her group and announced that it was time to eat their bagged lunches.
As they headed down the midway toward the petting zoo, which boasted a picnic area and hand-washing station, the parade of performers and exhibits continued. Matt stepped into the path of an acrobat doing backflips down the sawdust-strewn path, and if Mrs. Essig hadn’t pulled him out of the way, he would have wound up tangled in a knot of bendy limbs and sequins.
Shelley whispered into Delilah’s ear that Mrs. Essig should have let him go. Death by circus acrobat would have been the most interesting thing ever to happen to him.
The petting zoo was a fenced-off area at the end of the midway. Inside, a series of small open-air pens had been arranged across from a collection of long folding picnic tables. Mrs. Essig claimed the end of one table for her six field-trip charges and shooed them toward a hand-washing station at one end of the exhibit.
Delilah dropped her lunch bag on the chair she’d claimed, then followed Shelley toward the boxy plastic sink and soap dispensers. While the boys splashed each other and used more paper towels than they actually required, Delilah and Shelley wandered slowly past the enclosures, oohing and aahing over the young beasts on display.
Instead of the usual collection of lambs, piglets, and newborn bunnies, the menagerie’s petting zoo held werewolf puppies, a centaur foal who pranced around her pen with hair the color of wheat flying out behind her, and the most adorable little bundle of white fur identified by the sign hanging from its pen as an infant yeti.
There was also a young giant—a three-foot-tall toddler wearing a folded tablecloth as a diaper. The giant’s forehead protruded grotesquely and his legs were knobby and twisted. After a second of staring at him, Delilah decided that the huge toddler was much more scared of the taunting children than they were of him.
Shelley’s favorites were the werewolf pups. The plaque hanging from their pen said that they were five years old and had been born right there in the menagerie. They had a baby sister, according to petting zoo’s “nanny”—a woman in black overalls and a stained red apron. But the infant was still too young to be separated from her mother, so Shelley and Delilah would have to come back with their parents to see the full display at night, if they wanted a glimpse at the only baby werewolf in the menagerie.
At the last pen before the hand-washing station, Matt and his friends had gathered, wet fingers still dripping, and were shouting to be heard over one another as they stared into the pen. “What’s going on?” Shelley said, elbowing her way through the small throng of boys with Delilah at her side.
“There’s no sign, so we’re taking bets about what’s in the pen,” Matt explained. “I’ve got a homemade fudge brownie up for grabs, from my lunch, and Elías is throwing in a candy bar.”
Delilah peered into the pen and discovered the source of the mystery. Three forms sat at the back in a semicircle, facing away from the crowd. The one on the left was the smallest and the one on the right was the largest, but all three wore what seemed to be threadbare nightgowns. Without their faces visible, their species was a total mystery.
“I say they’re cyclopses,” Matt declared.
Delilah shook her head. “Cyclopses are giants.”
“Actually, there’s a pygmy species native to a small island near Greece.” Neal Grundidge pulled a used tissue from his pocket and swiped at his runny nose. “They’re people-sized.”
“They could be satyrs,” Elías said. “We can’t see their feet from here.”
“Hey!” Matt shouted, gripping the pen with both hands. “Hey, turn around! We paid for freaks, so show us some freaks!”
“This field trip is free,” Shelley reminded him, but Matt only wedged one sneakered foot into the pen and climbed up a foot.
“Get down!” Delilah whispered fiercely, as the nanny started toward them with clenched fists and narrowed eyes. “You’re going to get us all in trouble.”
“We’re not leaving until you turn around, freaks!” Matt shouted, propelling himself another foot up the six-foot fence.
The creatures on the right and left of the semicircle hunched even closer to the center, but the one in the middle slowly began to turn.
Delilah held her breath, and Matt dropped onto the ground but clutched the fence with both hands. All six of the classmates watched, spellbound, as the form in the middle stood on human legs and feet and turned to face them. Long dark hair hung over her face, obscuring the source of her monstrosity, and silence fell over the fifth graders as they waited, frozen.
Finally the girl in the dress lifted one human-looking hand and pushed her hair back to reveal...
A perfectly normal-looking little girl.
“Awww!” Neal frowned. “She looks like my little sister.”
“What is she?” Elías asked, as the nanny approached.
“She’s not a she, she’s an it,” Matt insisted, backing solemnly away from the pen. “That’s the most dangerous kind of freak. The kind that looks like us. She must be a surrogate.”
“Are those her sisters?” Neal asked. “Surrogates don’t have brothers and sisters.”
“She’s an oracle,” the nanny said. “All three of them are. Right now they mostly find lost things and guess your middle name, but someday, they’ll be able to see the future.”
“You think they’ll see another reaping?” Shelley whispered.
Delilah hardly heard her best friend’s question. When her classmates had bored of the normal-looking freak and moved on to eat their lunch, Delilah stood alone in front of the pen, staring at the child oracle, who stared right back at her through haunting golden-brown eyes. The girl was a couple of years younger than Delilah, and a lot skinnier. Her nightgown was stained. Her hair was tangled and dirty, her bare feet caked in mud. There was no food in the oracles’ pen, nor any furniture at all.
When Delilah finally turned away from the girl on the other side of the fence, bothered by something she couldn’t quite put into words, she could feel the oracle watching as she walked all the way back to her table and sat with her friends. That unseen gaze followed her as she pulled a sandwich from her brown bag and stared at it, suffering a sudden loss of appetite.
Finally, as she opened her carton of milk, Delilah’s grim tangle of thoughts cleared enough for one to shine through. If that girl was a monster, anyone could be a monster. That’s why the world was so terrified of another reaping. Because just like last time, humanity would never see it coming.
But if monsters could look like humans, and humans could look like monsters, how could anyone ever really be sure that the right people stood on the outside of all those cages?
“Three hundred one thousand babies were born in hospitals across the United States in March of 1980. Not one of them made it home from the hospital.”
—Opening lines of a 1996 documentary entitled
The Reaping—America’s Greatest Tragedy
Rommily (#ulink_b95076e4-ee42-5236-8fd2-4f66ba26c4ae)
A bead of sweat rolled down Rommily’s brow and soaked into the thin blanket beneath her head. In midsummer, the inside of the cargo trailer was always sweltering, and being accustomed to the dark and the heat and the relentless jostling from the road wasn’t the same as being comfortable. But then, comfort wasn’t a concept she remembered very well anyway. She’d been sold to the menagerie as a skinny six-year-old with wide honey-brown eyes, clinging to her older sister’s hand while she whispered reassurances into her younger sister’s ear.
At twenty, Rommily was still thin and her eyes were still wide and honey brown, but the rest of her was all grown-up.
For the past decade of their fourteen years in captivity the oracles had shared a single cage on wheels, just wide enough to let them sleep side by side and just tall enough to stand up in. Rommily’s entire world consisted of 192 cubic feet of space, which she shared with her sisters. What little time they didn’t spend staring out at the world through steel mesh was spent performing, in chains.
Rommily could recall little of her life before the menagerie, and what memories she still possessed had taken on the hazy quality of a half-remembered dream.
The overloaded semi rolled to a stop with a familiar groan and the harsh squeal of brakes, and her body rocked with the motion. Near the front of the trailer, the pup whined in her cage, and at the rear one of the cats snorted, startled from sleep by the sudden loss of forward momentum.
The cats, she knew, always dreamed of trees, of wind and earth and prey. The pup dreamed about her mother. Rommily remembered their dreams clearly, though she hadn’t been able to peek into them in months.
She sat up on the threadbare quilt that served as her pallet in the summer and her blanket in the cold. She glanced at the sister on her left, then at the sister on her right, both still asleep in spite of the narrow empty space she had left between them. She could hardly see them in the muddy darkness, but she knew their shapes by heart.
On the left was Lala, with her perpetual baby face and thin frame, dirty toes peeking from beneath her long layered skirt, even with her legs curled up to her chest. Lala was the youngest of the three, and the smartest, according to most.
On the right was Mirela, whose bountiful figure endured, though she was fed no more than the rest of the livestock. Mirela had a spine of steel, a fact evident in her proud posture. Mirie would not bend. Not for food, not for sleep, and not for comfort. Deep down, her sisters understood that if she were ever pushed too hard, she would snap, and the recoil might kill them all.
There wasn’t enough room to move around in the steel crate, so Rommily sat with her knees tucked up to her chest and stared into the cage across the narrow aisle that ran down the center of the cargo trailer. A set of eyes flashed in the dark, reflecting what little light filtered through the vents in the top of the wide-load trailer.
The minotaur was awake. If he ever slept, Rommily couldn’t tell. Every time she woke up on the road, the bull was watching her. Not just looking at her. Watching her. She wasn’t sure of much anymore, but she was sure of that.
The rumble of the engine died, and in its absence voices echoed from outside, shouting orders and barking replies. Rommily couldn’t tell what time it was from the muddy light overhead, but the time of day never mattered anyway. Regardless of the hour or the weather, the roustabouts would start setting everything up the moment they arrived at the site, the latest in an endless blur of rural county fairgrounds. Lost time was lost money, and if there was anything old man Metzger wasn’t willing to lose, it was money.
Something scraped the outside of the cargo trailer, and Lala rolled over in her sleep. Metal creaked from the left and right as the other livestock began to stir in their cages. The acrid scent of fresh urine wafted from the front of the trailer and Rommily’s nose crinkled. Someone’s bladder control had failed. Probably the pup’s. But that was no surprise, considering how long they’d been locked in the dark.
A sudden violent squeal of metal ripped through the voices echoing from outside, and Rommily’s eyelids snapped shut as mental images rolled over her. Visions still came like that sometimes, triggered from deep within her by a sight, scent, or sound.
“Take the key and lock her up,” she mumbled.
The bull’s eyes narrowed as his attention to Rommily intensified, but she didn’t notice. She could no longer see anything but what played in her head, and even if she actually understood what she saw this time, no one else ever would. They hadn’t been able to make much sense of anything she’d said since the rainy night they’d found her wandering between the cages on some Midwestern fairgrounds, drenched to the bone and dripping with enough blood to drive the cats into a frenzy.
Rommily knew that she understood more of the world than it understood of her since that night, but that frustrated her much less than the brutal realignment of her divination. Her third eye saw mostly the end of life now, and each vision chipped away a little more of her sanity. Mirela worried that she was too far gone already. Rommily worried that Mirela was right.
“Jack fell down and broke his crown,” she whispered, and the words ran together like watercolors on canvas.
On her right, Mirela sat up, took one look at Rommily, then shoved her other sister’s shoulder. Lala groaned and opened her eyes, ready to grump, but when her gaze fell on Rommily, the words died on her tongue.
Before either of them could try for the thousandth time to interpret their sister’s words, the mighty groan of steel obliterated any attempt at communication. A second later, their cage began to tremble as the floor of the trailer shuddered beneath it.
The trailer wall behind the bull’s cage separated from the ceiling with a great creak. Harsh daylight poured in through the ever-widening seams at the top of the wall and down both sides, blinding the occupants inside as the wall, hinged at the bottom, folded down like a ramp the full length of the trailer.
The effect was like opening one long side of a box to reveal its contents. Anyone unaccustomed to the sight would have been astonished by the number of wheeled cages lined up inside, neat as a child’s blocks put away for storage.
But Rommily and her sisters, and the pup, and the cats, and all the others—they only stared out at the circus unfolding before them with tired, glazed eyes.
The bull didn’t turn to look, not even when several big roustabouts in dusty jeans and matching red shirts climbed the ramp at his back. Their heavy boots clomped against the metal floor, and they began opening locks and pulling heavy iron chains from the axles beneath the bull’s cage.
The minotaur was bigger than all three of the oracles combined, and it took eight men—all of them big and strong, and accustomed to the work—to control the roll of his cage down the ramp. If left to gravity, his cart would crash heavily into whatever blocked its path, and if there was anything old man Metzger liked less than wasted time or lost money, it was broken equipment.
While several of the roustabouts stayed behind to sedate the bull, then let him out of his pen and fit him with a work harness, the others climbed the ramp again to fetch the horse cages. The centaurs couldn’t bear a load like the minotaur, but all beasts of burden would be put to heavy labor of one sort or another.
To keep them healthy enough to work, they were given extra food.
To keep them relatively safe to work with, they were given regular sedatives, which kept their minds dull.
Rommily watched as the minotaur was harnessed, leather straps fitting over his largely bovine head and massive, heavy horns before lying across enormous cords of human neck muscle. He blinked at her through a medicated daze. His attention didn’t falter even when the lot superintendent started shouting orders and waving his arms, directing carts of brightly colored costumes and decorative wagon casings—huge hand-carved frames, which would be mounted on the sides of the cages when they went on display.
Mirela and Lala sat on their knees on either side of their sister, and together they watched the pre-carnival dance, a laborious routine they knew well. Everyone had a job. Every job was important. The last time someone forgot to double-check a lock, three people had died. Four, if you count the creature that got loose.
But no one ever counted him.
The beasts of burden were put to work unloading the other cages. The oracles watched, mute, as pairs of large men hauled huge posts toward the fairgrounds. Women drove tractors pulling carts full of supplies, hay, and feed.
Rommily’s fingers folded around the steel mesh in front of her when the roustabouts came for her cage. The animal exhibits had been unloaded and all that remained were the specialized-service acts. The succubi. The sirens. The oracles. Soon they would be cleaned up, decked out in bright colors, and acclaimed on the midway as dancers, singers, and fortune-tellers. But that was all for show. For profit. For later.
For now...
The rattle of chains and the metallic screech of wheeled cages. Sweat-stained clothes and growling bellies, and the aged stench of travel.
The oracle sisters rocked with the jostle of the cage as they were rolled off the trailer. They squinted against the harsh sunlight. Rommily breathed deeply in the open air, but even outside the stale livestock trailer, the menagerie still smelled like captivity. Like straw and animals and sweat and manure. Like rust, oil, and exhaust.
The bull passed the oracles’ cage pulling two of the wolves’ pens, linked end to end. His gaze caught on Rommily again, and he veered so sharply that the man pulling his harness turned and beat him over the head with a thick baton. Rommily could only watch, and when the small procession had gone, her focus fell on a sign revealed by its passing.
Welcome to the Franklin County Fairgrounds.
Rommily shook her head, and her grip on the steel mesh tightened. When she opened her mouth, the commotion of the menagerie swallowed her voice before even her sisters could hear it. But the words echoed in her own head long after they fell from her tongue.
“...we all fall down...”
Delilah (#ulink_7d737ea8-25b5-5624-b053-a6f994a87fa4)
On the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday, I woke up to find that Brandon had left four glossy red tickets on my nightstand. They were made from nice card stock—definitely keepsake quality—covered in glittering, scrolling black script. My hand shook as I picked them up. I knew what they were before I even read the print.
Admission For One
To Metzger’s Menagerie
The Largest Traveling Zoo
In The Northern Hemisphere
I left the tickets in the glove box during my shift at the bank, where I spent most of the day trying to tune out the excited chatter of my fellow tellers. About half of my coworkers also had tickets. The other half couldn’t afford to go.
Nothing pays very well in small-town Oklahoma, and usually that’s okay, because there isn’t much to do in the land of red earth anyway, until you get up to the capital or out toward Tulsa. Hell, you can’t even get full-strength beer with your dinner unless you pay for an import.
But the menagerie hadn’t been within driving distance of Franklin County in nearly fifteen years, and it might never come back. Everyone who could borrow money or call in a debt would be there to see the spectacle.
Including me.
Brandon had spent a fortune on the tickets, and it didn’t really matter that I would rather drive to the city and spend my birthday at the ballet, or a concert, or even a baseball game. As my mother had told me all my life, the true gift was in the intent, and my boyfriend had meant well.
He always meant well.
That evening, Brandon took my hand as we wandered down the fairground midway behind my best friend, Shelley Wells, and her boyfriend, Rick. Barkers cried out from both sides of the path, challenging us to pin the tail on the centaur, or knock down pop-up silhouettes of satyrs with a rubber-tipped archery set, or shoot the shell bras off mermaid figurines with water guns. Calliope music played at a volume only small children and the near-deaf could actually enjoy.
The noise scattered my thoughts and scraped my nerves raw. We hadn’t even gotten to the menagerie section of the carnival yet and I was ready to go home.
“Hey, Lilah, did you see they have a minotaur?” Shelley pointed to a twenties-style poster tacked up next to a spinning ride advertised as “guaranteed to make you hurl.”
“They didn’t have him when we were kids.”
I nodded, and she turned to walk backward, facing me while she shouted above the jostling, buzzing crowd. “You see a minotaur in school?”
“No. They’re pretty rare.” We’d seen very few live cryptids in class, and minotaurs were among the least likely to ever be studied by undergrads. They bred slowly in captivity and gave birth to only one offspring at a time. Most experts believed they’d be extinct within a century—a tragedy few in the U.S. would recognize.
“You shouldn’t have quit.” Shelley turned to face forward again, taking Rick’s arm, then called to me over her shoulder. “You would’ve been a great crypto-vet.”
“I didn’t quit. I just didn’t go to grad school.” For a while, though, that had been the plan. I’d finished my crypto-biology degree and had already been accepted into two crypto-veterinary programs before I’d realized that the only jobs legally available in the U.S. for crypto-vets would have required me to lock up my patients. Even the ones with human faces.
Those jobs were at places like Metzger’s Menagerie.
Or worse: research labs, in which scientists tested everything from cosmetics to biological weapons on creatures protected by neither human law nor ASPCA regulations.
Disillusioned by those prospects, I’d moved back home to Franklin, where the median income was less than two-thirds that of the national average and my best guess on the median vocabulary looked even less promising.
A jewel glittering among small-town clods of red clay, Brandon was a newly minted pharmacist with a future in the family business. He read books and spoke in complete sentences. We’d been together since the month I’d come home from college, and—poor gift-giving skills aside—he was a very nice guy. And he truly loved me.
The only part of me that had been relieved to find such a morally ambiguous birthday present on my nightstand was the part that had half expected an engagement ring.
I wanted to be more than a small-town bank teller married to a small-town pharmacist. But I had no idea what “more” might look like, and the certainty that I’d know it when I saw it had faded with each day spent in Franklin. All I ever saw was Brandon, and all he seemed to want to see was me.
And a traveling zoo full of bizarre beasts.
The actual menagerie was behind a second gate at the end of the sawdust-strewn midway, a design no doubt intended to pull people past countless opportunities to spend money on their way to the main attraction—the only part of the carnival not offered on a yearly basis by the county fair.
Brandon and I caught up with Shelley and Rick at the menagerie gate, where another line had formed. I recognized several of the people in the crowd as account holders from the bank, but without my name tag—Hello, My Name is Delilah. Can I Interest You in a No-Fee Savings Plan?—they didn’t seem to recognize me. The family in front of us had three small children, each clamoring to touch the shifter kittens and phoenix chicks in the petting zoo. At the gate, the parents were reminded that certain areas of the exhibit, namely the succubus tent, would be off-limits to anyone under eighteen.
Rick snickered like an overgrown twelve-year-old and Shelley elbowed him. I thanked the universe for my mature, stable, predictable boyfriend, then realized that I’d just found three different ways to call Brandon boring.
When we got to the front of the line, an elderly man in a red sequined vest and a black top hat took one look at Shelley, then bowed low and pulled a bouquet of real daisies from his sleeve. He presented them to her with a flourish from one knee, heedless of his cracking joints.
Delighted, Shelley returned his bow with a curtsy, spreading the hem of an imaginary skirt, and even I couldn’t resist a smile. Then she and Rick helped the poor old man to his feet.
The ticket taker resettled his hat on his head. “First time at the menagerie?”
“Kind of.” Shelley stuck her nose into the daisies and sniffed. “Delilah and I saw some of it when we were kids. They didn’t bring out any of the exotic stuff, though.”
“Well, then, you’re in for a treat!” He glanced at our plastic full-pass bracelets, then waved us inside with a grand, white-gloved gesture. “Trust me, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve never seen anything like this before.”
However, that could only be partly true, no matter what they had on display behind velvet curtains and in gilded cages. Gone were the days when centaurs roamed the plains in herds, with flocks of thunderbirds beating powerful wings overhead, but we’d grown up seeing cryptids of all sizes, shapes, and colors on television and in movie theaters. They were the villains in our horror movies, most of which drew on the reaping for inspiration. They were the hidden terrorist threats in our thrillers, the bumbling bad guys in our comedies, and the subject of scientific study in nearly every documentary I’d ever seen.
That’s where traveling creature features had the market cornered. Anyone could see a werewolf on television, but the average citizen could only see one live at the menagerie. If he or she could afford the cost of admission. And Metzger’s had the most diverse collection of any cryptid zoo in the country.
Metzger’s was stunning. I couldn’t deny that, even as I stopped to scrape a thin coating of manure and sawdust from the sole of my left boot onto the grass.
Compared to the Tilt-A-Whirl and corn-dog portion of the carnival, the menagerie was practically circus finery. The lights were brighter and the colors more vibrant. Even the boisterous organ music felt more sophisticated and dimensional. Costumed performers wandered the midway with flaming batons, balloon bouquets, and souvenir top hats, giving the menagerie the same glamorous, exotic appeal I remembered from my visit as a child. The red sequined costumes had been updated, as, presumably, had the employees wearing them, and the scents of fried dough and roasted meat still made my mouth water.
But the guilt twisting my insides into knots couldn’t be calmed by junk food, and the glass of wine I’d had in place of my pre-carnival dinner hadn’t helped in the least. The small line of People First protesters shouting, “Remember the reaping!” outside the front gate had only made the whole thing worse.
The People First activists wanted the menagerie to leave Franklin County. We had that much in common. However, they didn’t object to the inhumane treatment of cryptids in captivity—they were scared that the cryptids would escape and embark upon another devastating human slaughter.
What they didn’t seem to realize was that if the menagerie’s oddities escaped, we would see them coming.
We hadn’t seen the reaping coming. The cryptid surrogates had pulled off the greatest con in all of history—so meticulously executed that we didn’t realize the scale of the infiltration until it was far too late. Six years after the first wave, we’d still had no idea that our losses numbered more than three hundred thousand.
Fearing locked-up cryptids that didn’t look human would do us no more good than suspecting our own neighbors and relatives of being monsters, as we’d done for decades after the reaping. But scared people can’t be reasoned with. Scared politicians can’t be talked down from their podiums. Scared nations pass reactionary laws without bothering to consider how much powder those legal snowballs will gather as they roll down Capitol Hill. Eventually, yesterday’s outrage becomes today’s normalcy.
Reactionary legislation had spawned outfits like Metzger’s, where anything and everything not deemed to be human could be locked up and put on display with no limits, no boundaries, and no regulations except those meant to protect employees and spectators. Which made people like me—the admittedly quiet minority—profoundly uncomfortable.
My tension headache told me I shouldn’t have accepted the tickets. My queasy stomach said I shouldn’t be celebrating my birthday at the menagerie where, as a child, I’d been shocked to see three malnourished little girls locked in an animal pen wearing no more than a few filthy scraps of material. Because when I remembered the reaping—inarguably the most profound tragedy to ever strike the U.S.—I also remembered the millions of innocent cryptids who’d been rounded up and thrown in prisons or shot on sight for resisting arrest.
By the time I was born, several years after the reaping was discovered, the government had begun denying citizenship and legal rights to any living being only partially human, as well as to any hybrid of two or more different biological families.
What that meant was that ligers and mules were protected by the ASPCA because they were both hybrids of two animals that share the same biological genus and family. But because the griffin is a hybrid of two different classes—Mammalia and Aves—and three different orders—Carnivora, Artiodactyla, and Squamata—it isn’t recognized as a natural animal but as a cryptid “beast.” Anything considered “unnatural” under such legislation was denied protection under U.S. law.
That secondary national tragedy, a clean sweep of everyone not wholly human or “naturally” fauna, had been brushed under the rug, and even mentioning it made my friends and coworkers look at me as if I’d just set fire to the U.S. flag. So I’d stopped talking about it. But I hadn’t stopped feeling it.
Yet deep down, I was dying to see the strange and amazing creatures I’d studied in school, for all the same reasons that had led me to major in crypto-biology in the first place. I wanted to see the beautiful selkie emerging from her seal-skin. The troll, so tall and thick he couldn’t stand up in most human-scale buildings. The man who could turn into a cheetah at will. The part of me that objected to the confinement and abuse of such beings was the very same part that needed to see them for myself.
To understand.
Metzger’s had no right to exploit the creatures in its custody, but that wouldn’t end whether I looked at them or not. And who better than I to truly appreciate, rather than taunt or mock?
At least, that’s how I rationalized my warring desires to both condemn and experience the spectacle.
At the center of the menagerie, towering over everything else, was the big top, an enormous red-and-white-striped circus tent with three sharp peaks that cast an ominous shadow over the fairgrounds. The entrance flaps remained tightly closed until a paying guest was admitted, making it impossible to catch even a passing glimpse of the mysteries within. Around the perimeter of the menagerie stood a series of smaller tents and attractions, and branching from those were a series of themed subsections. Everything from the posters and cages to the costumes and music was designed with a vintage feel so that it seemed as though we’d stepped back in time.
Up first was the bestiary, where cryptid animals lounged or paced in sideshow cage wagons modeled after circus train cars from the early 1900s. They had bright, intricately carved frames and huge wooden wheels, and the beasts within were visible from both sides, through thick iron bars reinforced with sheets of modern steel mesh.
The mesh was a recent requirement, after a twelve-year-old had lost her right hand to an irritable troll in a carnival out West somewhere, a few years back.
Shelley oohed and aahed over the chimera, a beast with the body and claws of a lion, two heads—one lion, one goat—and a snake for a tail. “Delilah, look how thick and smooth his fur is!” she cried, her nose inches from the side of the cage. I gently tugged her back by one arm. Anything with claws and venom should be appreciated from at least two feet away. “So glossy!”
But when the creature turned to pace four steps in the other direction—the full length of its cramped quarters—I noticed that the fur on the goat head’s side was matted and dirty. Obviously that half didn’t self-groom.
“Here, kitty, kitty!” Shelley called, and the snake growing in place of the beast’s tail hissed at her.
“He’s not a kitty, Shell,” Brandon said. “He’s a ferocious beast capable of tearing you apart with three different jaws at once.”
“He’s not a he.” I pointed at a sign attached with twists of wire to the bars on one end of the cage car. “Her name is Cleo. She’s eighty-six years old, as of last spring,” I said, still reading from the plaque. “Born in the wild well before both the reaping and the repeal of the Sanctuary Act, and still in her prime today.” I stepped back for a better look. “Poor thing. By the time she dies, she’ll have spent three-quarters of her life in a cage.”
Rick rolled his eyes. “They’re animals, Delilah. They don’t even know where they are.”
“We’re all animals. From the taxonomy kingdom Animalia. And you don’t know what she knows or feels. Have some respect. She’s your elder.”
Rick laughed as if I’d made a joke. He tried to put one arm around me and when I pulled away from him, I tripped over a rock and had to grab one of the cage’s bars to keep from falling. The heavy cage rocked just a little, and the chimera twisted toward me faster than I would have thought something with three heads could move. The snake hissed and the lion head roared.
I froze, intuitively trying not to trigger any further predatory instinct, but Shelley screeched and jumped back.
Rick laughed at her. Brandon pulled me away from the cage and didn’t let go even after I’d regained my balance, my heart still racing.
“Don’t touch the exhibits,” a deep voice growled, and we turned to find a large man in a bright red baseball cap standing near the end of the chimera cage. His red polo shirt bore the Metzger’s logo and the name embroidered over his heart read Gallagher. His hair was thick and curly beneath his cap and his eyes were dark gray. “Unless you want to lose a lot of blood.”
“I tripped.” In the glare from the setting sun, I noticed several old scars on his face and his forearms, and I wondered how many of those had come from beasts he was in charge of. And how many of them he deserved.
“Cleo’s in an iron cage, surrounded by steel mesh,” Rick said. “What’s she going to do, roar until our ears bleed?”
The man tugged the bill of his red cap down, shading more of his strong features. “Only a fool believes his eyes over all other senses.”
Shelley laughed out loud while Rick fumed, and when I turned back for another glimpse of the large man in the red hat, he was gone.
Shelley and I dragged the guys toward the next cage: Panthera leo aeetus. Commonly known as a griffin.
Rick and Brandon were fascinated by the griffins, both perched on dead tree branches bolted to the ends of their massive aviary on wheels. They had the hindquarters of a lion and the majestic head, wings, and front claws of an eagle.
An eagle on the physical scale of a lion.
I’d seen them on television and studied them in school, but I’d had no appreciation for their size until I stood in front of them. They must have weighed at least five hundred pounds each.
Brandon shouted at one, unrebuked by another large, gruff handler, and was rewarded when the griffin suddenly threw his enormous wings out and flapped, as if he’d dive at us. We all gasped and backpedaled. The griffin pulled his dive up short at the last second, and I noticed that a patch on his right wing, along the top ridge, was bare of feathers at exactly the spot his wing would have hit the bars, if he hadn’t stopped.
The griffin made a horrible avian screech and I covered both my ears, but when he settled on a branch closer to us, still riled up from being teased, I realized that his sharp eagle’s beak and incredible wingspan were far less intimidating than his feet, a lethal cross between a lion’s claws and a bird’s talons.
They were huge. And sharp. I noticed a dried chunk of raw meat wedged between his first and second digits.
My heart ached for him. The griffin was obviously meant to soar the skies and stalk the plains in wide-open freedom. None of which he would get in the menagerie. Yes, griffins could be dangerous, but so could bears and sharks and alligators, yet we didn’t round them all up and throw them into cages.
After the griffins came the phoenix. Shelley was disappointed when it refused to burst into flames, then rise from its own ashes for her personal amusement, even though the signs wired to its cage said the poor thing wasn’t due for a “rebirth” for nearly another month. I thought it was beautiful, even without the flames. The phoenix had a long graceful swan-like neck with plumage in vibrant graduating shades of red, yellow, and orange. Its broad sweeping tail would have made any peacock jealous.
After the bestiary, we skipped the “Natural Oddities” section, which promised us trolls, ogres, goblins, and other assorted humanoid creatures of legend. Brandon led the way toward the “Human Hybrids” section, where the sign at the entrance promised us “bizarre and fascinating combinations of man and beast.”
“Come forward, come forward!” the uniformed man at the tent entrance called, waving us closer with both white-gloved hands. “Metzger’s guarantees you’ve never seen a spectacle like this, no matter what other shows you’ve attended. No one else on earth has such an extensive collection of grotesque mergers of human and animal flesh as you’ll find in this very tent. Wolf and man, horse and man, fish and man, bird and woman...” He winked at Rick. “We’ve got it all! And don’t forget to take a peek at our world-famous minotaur! You won’t find another like him anywhere else in the continental U.S.!”
“It sounds really freaky,” Shelley said.
“That it is, that it is.” The talker bowed deeply, top hat in hand. “But you’ve got these lucky gentlemen to keep you and your friend safe.” He gave the guys another faux-confidential wink, and I almost laughed out loud. Brandon got nervous when he heard coyotes howl at night.
The man in the top hat glanced at our bracelets, then held back a canvas flap with a practiced flourish.
“Seriously, what’s it like in there?” Shelley asked before Rick could push his way inside.
The carny shrugged with an evasive smile. “Some people love it. Gives others the willies. But what I can tell you is that you can’t truly know who you are in here—” he laid one gloved hand over his red sequined vest “—until you’ve been through there.” He pushed the tent flap open wider.
Brandon, Shelley, and Rick stared into the darkness.
I stepped inside.
“Shock and grief echo across the United States this morning with the news that more than one million children died overnight, most reportedly killed in their sleep. Government officials and residents alike watch, stunned, as the reports continue to pour in, raising the death toll by several thousand per hour...”
—As reported by anchor Brian Richards on
U.S. Morning News, August 24, 1986
Delilah (#ulink_bc5b6fce-6054-5d70-8349-9a343575b3e8)
My ears roared with my own pulse as my friends followed me through the low entrance into the soaring tent, where a circle of faux-vintage wagon cages surrounded a bright red circus ring. The ring was empty except for a tall stool in the center, dramatically illuminated by a stark spotlight. Unoccupied bleachers lined the shadowy perimeter of the space, set up for a show to come later that night.
The farm scent was much less noticeable in the hybrid tent, where all the exhibits were at least part human, but there was yet more hay beneath our feet and the prevailing ambient noise was still the whisper of paws against hard surfaces and the occasional clomp of hooves.
Like the wagons in the bestiary, those in the hybrid tent had solid steel—or iron?—end panels, complete with massive, heavy-looking couplings with which they could be connected to the other cars. In theory. However, the rust on the hitches made me doubt that they were ever hooked to anything for very long.
Though we couldn’t see inside the cars with their end panels facing us, we could see into the wagons across the ring, where vaguely humanoid beings paced, slouched, or sat in the corners of their cages, wearily trying to ignore their audience.
A woman in a red sequined leotard and red-trimmed black top hat stepped forward when we got to the entrance of the ring, defined by padded crimson ropes strung between two shiny metal posts. “Welcome to the human hybrids tent, where every genetic atrocity you can imagine is on display to satisfy your curiosity!” Her name tag read Wendy, and she was cradling something in the crook of her left arm.
“Oh!” Shelley rushed toward the woman and the small bundle she held. “He doesn’t look so atrocious!”
Wendy gave her a slick, indulgent smile. “No, this little guy is damn near adorable.” She leaned into the light and I saw that she held an infant satyr, whose furry brown goat legs ended in tiny hooves. His chubby little belly and everything north of it was human, except the tiny horns growing from the sides of his skull.
I’d never seen anything cuter in my life.
“His mother just fed him, and I was about to take him back to the petting zoo.” Wendy twisted toward the circle of cages with hardly a glance at her young charge. “His mother’s the one at the back of—”
“Oh, can I hold him first?” Shelley asked, already reaching for the infant.
“I...um...” Wendy sputtered, obviously unsure how to answer. “I guess. Just for a second.” She laid the child in my best friend’s arms, while Rick and Brandon watched, dumbfounded.
“His fur tickles.” Shelley ran one finger down his fuzzy shin and over his hoof, but the child’s eyes never fluttered. He didn’t even seem to feel the touch.
“Why isn’t he moving?” I asked Wendy.
She shrugged. “He has a full belly. He’s passed out cold.”
That much was true, but it had nothing to do with the state of his stomach. I gently pulled back the baby’s left eyelid, then his right. “He’s not full, he’s sedated.” I frowned up at Wendy. “Why would you sedate an infant?” I demanded. Brandon put one hand on my shoulder to calm me, embarrassed by what he no doubt saw as an irrational tantrum on my part, but I shrugged him off. “He’s not a threat. He’s a baby.”
Wendy’s patronizing smile faltered. “If the reaping taught us anything, it’s that a threat can come in any size.” She took the baby back, and with it, her bright, cheery expression, which now looked as false as her ridiculously long, ridiculously red fingernails. “Now, if you’d like to see the kind of monster this little guy will grow into—” she swept her empty arm toward the wagon car on our left “—start here and follow the circle counterclockwise.”
My gaze followed the path formed between the outer loop of wagons and the inner, twelve-inch-high circus ring. Several other customers were clustered at various points on the path.
“When you get to the far side of the circle, go through the gate to the adjoining tent for a look at our special exhibits.”
Rick’s eyes brightened. “Is that where you keep the mermaids?”
She nodded and gave him an almost intimate smile, as if she were letting us in on a special secret. “Along with a couple of our other rare specimens. Including the Brazilian encantados—dolphin shape-shifters—and our world-famous minotaur.”
Brandon shoved Rick’s shoulder. “I told you there were mermaids!”
Wendy’s smile grew, and she was now ignoring me completely. “Just make sure you stay on the path and out of the center ring.”
“Why? What happens there?” Shelley asked.
“At the eight-o’clock show, one of the werewolves will do a live shift. I’ve seen it a million times, and it’s still incredible. You can’t miss it!” She laughed at Shelley’s worried expression. “They’re chained the whole time, even inside the safety cages, and they’re surrounded by armed handlers, too.” She gave each of us a full-color glossy pamphlet. “And the ten-o’clock show is stunning!” She gestured toward the ring with a familiar, wide-armed wave. “The draco sets two rings on fire and the cat shifters jump through them.” Her arm rose gracefully to take in the soaring ceiling of the tent. “They put a bird net around the whole thing, and the harpies make several breathtaking dives. I guarantee you’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the highlight of the evening.”
I stared at the pamphlet. I wanted to see the draco breathe fire and the harpies swoop and dive, but wanting something didn’t give one the right to have it. While I could rationalize my willingness to walk through passive exhibits I found fascinating yet morally repulsive, I could not justify sitting through a show in which sentient creatures were forced to perform against their will.
Though the prices Metzger’s was able to charge made it clear that I took the minority viewpoint on that.
“Do the shows cost extra?” Rick asked.
“Um...let me see your bracelet.” Wendy glanced at the wrist he held out. “Nope, you guys have the deluxe admission. You can go anywhere and see anything, except for the staff-only and staging areas.”
“Awesome,” Shelley said.
Wendy smiled and wished us a great evening, though her smile staled when it landed on me, then gestured for us to enter the ring. As we approached the first huge circus wagon, I glanced back to find her talking to Gallagher, the handler in the red cap, who’d snapped at me for touching the chimera cage.
They were both watching me.
I made myself turn back to my friends just as Shelley gasped. “He’s so big!”
For a second, I thought she was talking about the huge handler, and I almost nodded in agreement. Then I realized she was staring into the first cage, a silver-trimmed green masterpiece with fleurs-de-lis and stylized howling wolf heads carved into the corners. I hurried to catch up with my friends and as soon as I stepped in front of the first cage, labeled Claudio—Werewolf, I lost my breath.
Claudio was beautiful.
His eyes were golden, like multifaceted bits of amber, and while they were clearly wolf eyes, they contained an obvious understanding—a self-awareness that ordinary wolves’ eyes didn’t have. His fur was thick and silver and glossy, and when he paced into the half of his cage that was lit from the overhead lights, I saw that his silver coat was actually made up of many different shades of black, white, and gray. His fur shifted with each movement, the color rippling and buckling as each individual hair reflected the light at a slightly different angle.
I stared, transfixed.
Claudio growled at us softly, padding back and forth in a cage that was much too confined, because Shelley was right. He was huge.
“I didn’t realize how big they’d be,” Brandon said.
“Ordinary wolves don’t get that large,” I whispered, uncomfortably aware that the shifter could both hear and understand me, assuming he spoke English. “One hundred seventy-five pounds, max, for males. Most are closer to one-fifty.” By contrast, Claudio was two hundred pounds, by my guess—a wolf the size of a grown man—and in spite of an obviously confined lifestyle, he looked lean and powerful.
“The reality isn’t like the old monster movies,” I said, still speaking softly because somehow that felt more respectful of Claudio. “They don’t have superpowers. They’re strong and fast because they’re wolves, but they’re not superstrong, or superfast.”
“Yeah, but even a regular wolf can rip a man’s throat out,” Brandon said, and I couldn’t argue.
I stepped closer to the cage, fascinated, and Claudio snarled at me, lips curled back to reveal a muzzle full of lethally sharp teeth. The lump in my throat threatened to cut off my airway. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, and the growling stopped. Claudio blinked and tilted his head in an oddly human display of surprise, and that stream of guilt trickling through me swelled into a veritable river, until my veins surged with it.
Claudio didn’t belong in a cage, and just by coming to observe him in captivity, I’d become part of the problem.
Anger on his behalf uncoiled like a living thing deep inside me and I gasped at the hot, unsettling sensation in my belly.
“Lilah!” Shelley called as she moved on to the next cart, a green-trimmed silver inverse of the werewolf’s, with full moons carved into the scrolling frame. “There’s a girl wolf!”
Claudio’s snarling resumed, more intensely than before, a reminder that he not only heard everything we said, but understood us, as well.
The plaque on the next circus wagon read Geneviève—Werewolf, but at first glance, the cage appeared empty.
“I don’t...” Something flashed in one dark corner of the cage, two pinpoints of yellow light, there, then gone. Then there again.
Geneviève was blinking.
Curiosity got the better of me and I squinted, trying to get a better look at her, but I could barely make out a small, hunched form in the shadows.
“I can’t see her,” Rick complained. “What good are two-hundred-dollar menagerie tickets if the exhibits are just going to hide?”
“I think she’s scared,” I said. Brandon took my hand, and Shelley nodded mutely.
“She’s scared? She’s the monster. We’re supposed to be scared of her.” Rick scowled, already walking backward toward the next car, which, according to the sign, held one of only four adlets currently living in captivity.
Adlets were the wolf version of a satyr, stuck in an in-between state with both canine and human features. They were also cannibalistic, highly aggressive, and one of the most effective arguments in favor of keeping cryptids locked up.
“Hold on a minute, now, you don’t want to miss this,” a voice called from the darkness behind the werewolf cages. Hay crunched beneath heavy footsteps, and a moment later something clanked against the bars on the rear of Geneviève’s cage.
The light reflecting from her yellow eyes blinked out.
Claudio’s snarling deepened and from our right, the adlet responded with a fierce, eerie howl of its own. On the other side of the ring, hooves and paws scraped the floors of other cages as the captives paced nervously.
Unease gathered in the pit of my stomach and crawled along my arms. My hair stood on end. The hybrids’ anxiety was both obvious and contagious.
“Just a sec.” A handler stepped into the light falling over and through half of Geneviève’s cage. He was a stout, balding man in a Metzger’s T-shirt but no vest, hat, or sequins whatsoever. His shirt was stained with sweat, his boots caked with dirt, and a lit cigarette dangled from his mouth. This was a behind-the-scenes man if I’d ever seen one. He held what looked like a thick stick. “This ought to get her up for you.”
Geneviève whined, and the sound reminded me of a puppy we’d had when I was in middle school, before she’d chewed up the legs of my dad’s favorite chair and he’d made us give her away.
Claudio growled, accompanied by a snarl from the adlet, and when assorted hisses, growls, and the clang of metal rang out from across the ring of circus wagons, I realized that the entire hybrid section of the menagerie knew exactly what was about to happen.
“Last warning, Genni,” the handler said, and though her whining intensified, her eyes did not open. Too late, I realized that the handler’s stick was actually an electrified cattle prod.
“No!” I shouted, and dimly I was aware that I’d squeezed Brandon’s hand hard enough to make him flinch. My other hand had crushed the glossy pamphlet.
“It’s okay,” the handler said. “She makes us do this all the time.” He shoved the cattle prod through a small hole in the steel mesh at the back of her cage.
Geneviève yelped in pain, and Claudio’s growling crescendoed until it was almost all I could hear. The handler jabbed the traumatized werewolf one more time, and she scuttled out of her corner and into the light.
Rage filled me like a bonfire lit deep inside my soul. Geneviève was a little girl, no more than thirteen years old. She trembled on the floor of her cage, knees drawn up to her chest, heels tucked close to her body in an attempt to cover herself. She wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her face in the hollow between her knees, letting her long, tangled blond hair fall down her nearly bare back.
“Oh...” Shelley breathed, clearly horrified, and this time Brandon’s hand clenched mine. None of us seemed to know what to say. Even Rick looked uncomfortable.
“Stand up, honey, and let them get a look at you,” the handler said, as Claudio continued to growl and pace in his cage. The male werewolf couldn’t see Geneviève, but he obviously cared about her, and he clearly knew what was happening. “I’m not going to tell you again,” the handler taunted, his cigarette bobbing with every word, and the girl-wolf began to tremble.
The cattle prod scraped the iron bars on its way into the cage, and Geneviève stood faster than I would have thought possible. She scrambled toward the front of her cage to escape the weapon, her eyes still squeezed closed, as if her refusal to see us somehow meant that we wouldn’t see her.
In that moment, I wished more than anything in the world that I’d made my friends sit through a boring birthday dinner with me instead of using Brandon’s tickets, so that at least we could have spared Geneviève this one moment of humiliation in the string of such instances that no doubt comprised her entire existence.
Genni’s hair brushed the base of her spine and did much more to cover her than the white bikini bottom and tube-style swimsuit top she’d been made to wear. Her arms and legs were thin and her rib cage was plainly visible through her skin. The outsides of her thighs were peppered with pairs of red welts that could only be burns from the cattle prod.
Little Geneviève obviously resisted her handler quite often. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved by that fact or horrified by it, so I settled for a deep sense of awe that a child so young had survived—so far—an existence I couldn’t even imagine.
On display. Nearly naked. Ordered to perform, and tortured for refusal.
I hated myself for being there to see it.
I started to head to the next cage and relieve Geneviève of the audience that gave her handler the chance to abuse her. But then she opened her eyes, and I was too mesmerized to move.
She had Claudio’s eyes. Exactly. Beautiful golden wolf eyes in a little girl’s face.
“Open your mouth, Genni, and let them have a look at your teeth.” The handler circled the end of her cage, still carrying the cattle prod, and Geneviève scuttled away from him. The name embroidered on his shirt was Jack. The tip of his cigarette glowed red in the shadows.
“Genni...” he warned, and when Claudio started howling, Jack banged on the end of the male wolf’s cage with the fist holding the cigarette. “Pipe down, Papa!”
Understanding crashed over me with a devastating weight and stunning intensity. The father was caged feet from his half-naked daughter, unable to protect her, yet forced to hear every offense heaped on her.
“Genni!” Jack shouted, and she turned on him, hissing, hair flying, her lips curled back to reveal long, sharp canines among the teeth in her otherwise human mouth.
“Ain’t that somthin’?” Jack took a long drag on his cigarette. “Have to file ’em down once a month, or she’s likely to bite a finger off when we groom her.”
“You groom her?” Brandon sounded sick. Shelley looked pale, and Rick was staring at his feet.
“Have to. That one won’t do nothin’ on her own. Has to be prodded into brushin’ her own teeth in the mornin’.” He brandished the forked end of the cattle prod at her and she hissed again, then retreated to the back of her cage. “No, no, don’t sit down, Genni. Give the good people their money’s worth.” Jack turned back to us. “Wanna hear her howl? She’s got a helluva voice, that one. Not much for speaking, but she howls like her mama did.”
“Did?” I didn’t want to ask, but I wanted to know. “She died?”
Jack shrugged, and the tip of his cigarette left squiggles of light dancing in front of my eyes. “Who knows? Sold her off last year.” He turned back to Geneviève, who stood in the darkest corner of her cage. “Give us a howl, darlin’.”
But Genni had had enough. She sank to the floor against the rear wall of her cage and vanished into the shadows again, closing her eyes so the twin points of yellow light disappeared.
Jack moved toward her with the prod again, and the fire burning in my belly burst into a full-body blaze.
“Leave her alone,” I said, and when the entire hybrid tent went silent around me, I realized that my voice sounded...different. Not lower in pitch, but larger somehow. More robust.
Brandon, Rick, and Shelley turned to look at me, their eyes wide. Distantly I realized that my scalp had started to tingle and that the heat blazing deep inside me now threatened to burn me alive.
It was a boundless and terrible heat. And it was not entirely unfamiliar.
Creatures in cages all around the tent turned to stare. Sounds I hadn’t even realized I was hearing suddenly ceased—the snort of something equine; steady small splashes from the special section across the ring; and the constant rustle of feet and hooves on hay.
Jack was too intent on causing pain to notice the sudden silence. “It’s no trouble.” With his back to us, he moved toward the center of the cage to lengthen his reach. “It’s just—” he twisted something at the base of the prod “—a little jolt.” He shoved the cattle prod between the bars and through the mesh, and Geneviève howled when the tip touched her right calf.
“Get the hell away from her!” I shouted, and my hair rose on my scalp, as if the power sparking through me had charged it at the roots. It floated around my head, not in thin tendrils, but in heavy ropes of hair, twisting around my face in my peripheral vision.
My pamphlet fell to the ground. Brandon dropped my hand. Shelley made a strange noise as she and Rick backed away from me.
Jack pulled the prod from Geneviève’s cage and turned, his mouth already open to yell at me. The first syllable died on his tongue. The cattle prod thunked to the ground. My hands found the sides of his head, and dimly I was aware that my fingers looked too dark, the nails long and vaguely pointed.
I gripped his skull and felt several tiny pops as my nails pierced the skin at his temples. Jack’s eyes rolled up into his head and his arms began to twitch. His teeth clattered together and sweat poured from his forehead. Blood dripped from his temples.
I saw it all, but none of it sank in. I registered nothing in that moment except the sparks still firing inside me, firing through me, out the tips of my fingers and into Jack’s head, where every synapse fried within him eased a bit of the demand for justice seething inside me.
How do you like it? I demanded, but my mouth never opened. My tongue never moved.
Shelley screamed. The sound of her terror cut through my rage and I pulled my hands from Jack’s head in one swift movement. I stumbled backward, horrified by what I’d done, sucking in great gasping breaths that did nothing to soothe the fire burning deep in my chest.
What had I done?
The handler wobbled on his feet. Blood leaked from four pinpoint holes on either side of his balding scalp. Eyes unfocused, he thumped to his knees on the ground, then felt around in the hay without ever looking down. His thick fist closed around the cattle prod he’d dropped and he twisted a knob on the end as far as it would go. Then he raised the prod as high as he could in both fists and rammed it down on his own thigh. The forked tip plunged through denim and into flesh.
The handler began to convulse. For a moment, no one else moved. The entire hybrid trailer watched Jack electrocute himself. Then hooves and paws began to pound against their cage floors. Wolves howled, something avian screeched, and several human mouths cheered.
“What did you do?” Shelley wailed.
My heart pounding, I turned to see my friends staring at me in horror, backing slowly toward the adlet cage to get away from me.
Rick tripped over the low circus ring and went down on one hip.
“I...” I looked at my hands and blinked to clear my vision, but my vision wasn’t the problem. The problem was my hands. They were too long and bony, my fingers ending in narrow black points. I had needle-claws, where I’d had normal fingernails before.
Blood dripped from the tip of one. I shook my head in denial of what I was seeing—of what I’d done—but instead of settling over my shoulders, my hair was twisting around my head, if the standing-on-end feeling in my scalp could be trusted.
I backed away from the handler still electrocuting himself and from Geneviève’s cage, where she stared at me through yellow wolf-girl eyes. Panic dumped adrenaline into my bloodstream and I suddenly itched to run. To escape.
“What the hell?”
I turned to find Rick staring at me, one dusty brown cowboy boot on either side of the bright red circus ring.
Another handler stepped out of the shadows and kicked the livestock prod from Jack’s hands. He stopped convulsing, but his eyes regained no focus. His mouth hung open.
“What are you?” Wendy, the woman in the sequined leotard, demanded, and I could only blink at her, because I had no answer. Yet even in my mounting terror, I knew that if I’d had an answer, I shouldn’t give it to her.
You are normal. You are human. You are ours. The memory of my mother’s bedtime mantra played through my head as it always had in moments of fear and doubt since I was a small child. It had never in my life felt more relevant. Or more like a total lie.
The handler in the red cap pushed Wendy aside and stomped toward me, reaching out for me. Then, suddenly, his gaze darted over my shoulder. “Wait!” he shouted, and I turned to run.
The last thing I saw before my skull exploded in pain and the world went dark was the face of the hybrid tent ticket taker in the top hat as he swung a felt-covered mallet at my head.
Atherton (#ulink_f2d1a5a5-8481-5f5f-9bdc-f658f6d70fb2)
The call came over the radio at 7:04 p.m., while Wayne Atherton was eating a cheeseburger in the driver’s seat of his patrol car.
“All units, respond with your location. We got a problem up at the fairgrounds.”
Wayne dropped his burger into the grease-stained bag and answered with food still in his mouth. “This is officer oh-four. I’m just off Highway 71, a mile past Exit 52.” Known locally as the Sonic exit. Wayne finished his bite while four other deputies responded with their locations, then Dispatch came back over the radio with a squawk of static.
“No details yet, but there’s an ambulance on the way to the menagerie and they’re requesting all the backup we can send. Oh-four, you’re closest, but I’m sending everyone else your way. Be careful. And don’t forget your iron kit.”
The iron kit. Shit.
Wayne slammed the gearshift into Drive and pulled onto the highway without checking for oncoming traffic. He only remembered to turn on his siren when the car he nearly ran off the road blasted its horn.
“Dispatch, how’re those details coming?” he demanded as he sped down the dusty two-lane highway toward the Franklin County fairgrounds. “I need to know what I’m walking into.”
A month before, a cop down near Dallas had lost an arm to an ogre drunk on Kool-Aid and impatient for his dinner.
“Oh-four, you’re headed for the hybrid tent, set up near where they put the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair. Not sure how it happened, but it sounds like one of the hybrids got loose and injured a menagerie employee.”
“A hybrid?” Wayne stomped on the gas pedal and began scanning the side of the road for the familiar faded wooden sign marking the entrance to the fairgrounds. What he knew about cryptids would easily fit between the cardboard pages of a toddler’s picture book, and the only hybrids he could even name were mermaids and werewolves. “No civilian casualties, Dispatch?”
“Well, I doubt the carny’s a cop, Wayne,” Grace said in that exasperated tone she usually saved for after hours.
“You know what I mean. No customers hurt? No locals?”
“Hang on, oh-four.” Dispatch went silent for a minute, and just as Wayne was turning onto the wide gravel path leading to the fairgrounds, Grace came back on the line. “We’re only hearing about the one injury so far, and Metzger’s says no one else is in immediate danger. Secondary report says the perpetrator is restrained.”
Perpetrator? “If this is a hybrid attack, there’s no perp, Grace. You wouldn’t characterize a tiger that escaped from the zoo as a perpetrator, would you?”
“I don’t make the reports, I just dispatch them. But I’m coming up with all kinds of new ways to characterize you.”
Wayne laughed, picturing Grace chewing on the cap of her pen. “What kind of injury are we talking about, Dispatch?”
“We’re not clear on that yet, oh-four, but the folks at the carnival seem to want us to take the cryptid into custody.”
“This is the Sheriff’s Department, not the pound!” Franklin County wasn’t equipped to hold most cryptids, much less keep them for any extended period of time. Hell, some of them wouldn’t even fit in a standard jail cell!
“You’re preaching to the choir, oh-four. Just haul ass and watch your back.”
He hated it when Grace talked like she was his boss instead of his girlfriend. Especially over the radio, where anyone could hear. But as usual, she was right. “I’ll check in as soon as I know what’s going on.”
Wayne turned off the siren but left his lights flashing as he rolled through the menagerie’s open gate, where carnies in elaborate red-and-black costumes waved him on. He drove straight down the midway with his foot on the brake, honking to warn everyone who hadn’t noticed his blue-and-red strobe. Where the midway forked, another pair of menagerie employees waved him to the right, through another gate, and a minute later, Wayne could see the commotion. A large group was being held back from the entrance to a big circus-style striped tent by a crimson velvet rope and a staff of large red-clad men.
He got out of his car, lights still flashing. The crowd made way for him, and when he got to the front, he headed straight for a woman in a leotard and top hat and a man in a black Metzger’s cap. “Deputy Wayne Atherton, Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. Who can fill me in?”
The employee in the black cap stuck his hand out for Wayne to shake. “I’m Chris Ruyle, the lot supervisor.”
Wayne had no idea what a lot supervisor was, but he walked and talked like the boss. “What happened, Mr. Ruyle?”
“We were hoping you could tell us.” Ruyle lifted the closed tent flap and gestured for Wayne to go in ahead of him. Inside, a woman lay on her side on the ground, a familiar head of dark wavy hair spread all around her. Her hands were bound at her back. With iron cuffs.
Wayne dropped to his knees at her side. “That’s Delilah Marlow.” She’d been a couple of years behind him in high school, and all he really knew about her was that she’d been ready to shake the red dirt from her shoes on her way out of town since before she could even walk. No one had expected that girl to come home after college, much less stay. “Dispatch said the victim was an employee. What the hell happened?” A large purple bump was already starting to rise on one side of her skull. “What did this?”
“I did.”
Wayne looked up at the man who’d spoken. Then he looked up some more. The man held a black top hat and wore a red vest with Lerner embroidered on it in scrolling black print.
Wayne stood, anger bubbling up from his guts. Damn out-of-towners beating up on local girls. Franklin County wouldn’t stand for such things. “I thought this was a cryptid attack.”
“It was,” Lerner said. “But the creature wasn’t ours. She was yours.”
“Mine?” Wayne followed Lerner’s gaze to Delilah Marlow’s unconscious form. There was hay caught in her hair and blood beneath her fingernails—defensive wounds if he’d ever seen them. “You got five seconds to start making sense before I arrest you for assault and battery.”
Lerner stared at him unflinchingly, and Ruyle cleared his throat to catch Wayne’s attention. “Officer Atherton, the victim is over there.” Ruyle pointed toward a small crowd of flamboyantly dressed carnival employees gathered around a man seated on the ground with his mouth gaping open, staring at the hay beneath him. A trickle of blood seeped from each of his temples. A line of drool hung from his open lips. “This girl is the creature, and I can assure you she doesn’t belong to Metzger’s. So what I need to know from you is just what exactly this Delilah Marlow is, and what the hell she did to my handler.”
Martin,
I’m sure you’ve seen the news by now, and I’m very sorry to have to tell you that your sister Patricia and her family are among the thousands of victims of this morning’s national tragedy. I wanted to call, but your phone number wasn’t in Patty’s address book, and she was in no shape to find it for us. She and Robert are both in total shock. They lost four of their children overnight, and the police aren’t sure exactly what happened. All we do know is that Emily, the six-year-old, was the only one who survived...
—From a hand-written letter by Hannah Goodwin to
her brother-in-law and his family, August 24, 1986
Delilah (#ulink_058978dd-00e7-5261-af0e-45ae66f19e54)
A soft buzzing woke me up. Not like a bee or a fly, but like...electricity. I was lying on something hard, rough, and cold, but the cold was all wrong. I could feel it not just against my face and arms, but against parts of me that should have been insulated by my clothes.
My eyes flew open as I shoved myself up with both hands, but the glaring assault of fluorescent light—the source of the buzzing—was like a spike driven through my skull. My arms gave out and my eyes fell shut. My cheek slammed into the floor, and I sucked in a shocked breath.
The floor. I was lying on the cold, hard floor. Naked.
My pulse racing, I lifted my head carefully and had to breathe through a wave of vertigo. My head throbbed fiercely. Light painted the insides of my eyelids red. I sat up on my knees, shivering, and folded my arms over my chest to cover myself. Then I opened my eyes again.
The glare was no longer crippling, but my headache was. I blinked and my eyes started to adjust to the light, but the world was a blur. Another blink, and several dark stripes came into focus.
No, not stripes. Bars. Thick iron bars.
Panicked, I scrambled away from them on my hands and knees until I came to a gray brick wall. I leaned my bare back against it, my knees pulled up to my chest, and finally made myself look at my surroundings.
I was in a corner cell with two walls of iron bars and a rough concrete floor.
No.
My heart pounded hard enough to jar my whole body with each beat. The adjoining cell had a hazard-orange floor with No Occupancy painted on it in black block letters.
No, no, no, no...
Across a wide aisle from my cell were other, normal cells.
Jail.
I was in jail. Because I’d turned into some kind of monster and stuck my fingers through that carny’s skull.
But that wasn’t possible. I wasn’t a monster, and I had never hurt anyone in my life.
Yet I could remember exactly how that man’s flesh had felt beneath my fingers. I could still feel the resistance his skull had offered, then that satisfying pop when my fingers had breached it.
Nonononono. I buried my face in my arms and squeezed my eyes shut, but the images were still there.
A dangling cigarette.
A cattle prod lying in the hay.
Blood dripping down the sweaty man’s face.
What the hell had I done? How had I done it?
Tears rolled down my cheeks and I swiped at them with both hands. This couldn’t be happening. I wasn’t a cryptid. My parents were human. I didn’t have so much as a birthmark to be examined, much less feathers, or horns, or scales.
Yet in that tent, I’d had... What had I had, exactly? Weird hair? Pointy fingers? That didn’t fit the description of any cryptid I’d ever studied.
I examined my hands. They were trembling uncontrollably, but looked normal, other than the blood dried beneath my fingernails.
I pulled handfuls of long, dark hair over my shoulder. My hair looked normal. Whatever I’d become had left no trace of itself. How was that even possible? The vast majority of cryptid species can’t blend in with the human population—not even shape-shifters. I’d officially learned that on day one as a crypto-biology major, but like everyone else, I’d actually known it my whole life.
So how could whatever kind of creature I was blend in well enough to hide itself not just from the rest of the world, but from me? How could I not know what I was?
What else did I not know about myself? If I couldn’t put faith in my own humanity, how much of the rest of my life was a lie?
I didn’t mean to do it.
Terrified, I mentally relived that surreal memory over and over, trying to understand what had happened. The only thing I was sure of every single time was that I hadn’t intended to turn into a monster and shove my fingers through a man’s skull. I’d seen it happen. I’d felt it happen. But I hadn’t made it happen. Not on purpose anyway.
And that meant I could no longer trust my own body.
I didn’t realize I was pounding my head into the brick wall at my back until the repetitive thuds finally broke through the vicious cycle of my memories.
The fierce throb in my head felt like my brain was trying to burst through my skull. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The concrete floor had sanded raw spots into my knees and my palms, as well as on more tender patches of bare flesh.
This couldn’t be happening.
On my right, a door squealed open on rusty hinges. Startled, I turned to find a sheriff’s deputy heading down the center aisle toward me. He carried a tall stool under one arm and a bundle of familiar material beneath the other.
The sight of my clothes in his hand triggered fresh tears as I scooted along the wall at my back. When I hit the far corner, I stopped, cradled by solid brick on two sides. I tucked my legs up to my chest again and crossed my ankles to cover my most private parts. I was as shielded and defended as I could get, yet I’d never felt more exposed or vulnerable.
“Hi.” The deputy set his stool down in the aisle, out of reach from my cell.
I rested my chin on my left knee and let my hair fall forward like a curtain, hoping all he could see were my shins, hair, and eyes.
“Do you remember me?”
He did look a little familiar, but no name came to mind.
“I’m Deputy Wayne Atherton. You were a couple of years behind me in school.”
Wayne. Yes. We’d had a history class together my sophomore year.
“Where am I? Are you in charge?”
“This is the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. You’ve been taken into custody as a cryptid living under false pretenses. And as far as you’re concerned, yes, I’m in charge.”
“Did—” My voice cracked, so I cleared my throat and started over, my face flaming. “Did you take my clothes off?”
“No, that was a couple of guys from the SWAT team the sheriff called in to assist with your transport. Dr. Almaguer said he would only examine you while you were still unconscious. To check for species-identifying features.”
Dr. Almaguer. My teeth began to chatter and I set my chin on my knees to make it stop. They’d called in a small-animal veterinarian to examine me—the very man who’d once put my dad’s farm dog to sleep.
The deputy propped one foot on the lowest stool rung and set my clothes on his lap. “He didn’t find anything, Delilah.”
Because there was nothing to find. How else could I not have known?
“Are you going to give my clothes back?”
“That’s up to you,” he said.
I closed my eyes. He was going to interrogate me in the nude. Because he could.
“What are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Make this easy on yourself, Delilah. Just tell us what you are, and you can have your clothes back.” The deputy shifted on his stool and my underwear slid from the pile of clothes and landed on the floor. He didn’t notice, but my focus snagged on that bit of fabric. I would have told him anything I knew for a single scrap of my own clothing. But there was nothing to say.
“I told you, I don’t know what I am. Please give me my clothes.” My cheeks were burning, but my teeth still chattered. “I’m freezing.”
“Yeah, the sheriff runs warm, so he keeps the air turned down low. Especially in the summer.” Atherton shifted on the stool again, and his tone softened. “Delilah, I can’t help you until you help me. I got orders. So why don’t you tell me what you are, and I’ll not only give you your clothes back, I’ll get you some water. Or something to eat. Are you hungry? Your friends said you didn’t eat much dinner.”
“Are they here?” Shelley’s scream still echoed in my aching head. Brandon’s look of horror was imprinted on my retinas. “Can I see them?”
Deputy Atherton started to shake his head, and I buried my face in the crook between my knees, sniffing back fresh tears. “Please,” I said into my lap. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I have no idea what happened. Please just give me my clothes and let me see my friends.”
Atherton sighed. “Ms. Wells had to be sedated. Her boyfriend took her home.”
My throat felt thick, my tongue clumsy. “Is she okay?”
“She’s terrified. She’s not the only one. The news is out, and people don’t feel safe, knowing you were born and raised here. Knowing you went to school with their children and spent the night at their houses—and they didn’t have a clue. People are starting to remember the reaping, Delilah.”
Oh, fuck.
Terror pooled in my stomach like acid, eating at me from the inside. “They don’t think I’m a surrogate, do they?” I peered at him over my knees. My hands started shaking again. “Because I swear I’m not.”
“How can you know that, if you don’t know what you are? You look human, and you lived among us for years. Just like the surrogates. What are we supposed to think?”
Panic slowed my brain, yet sped up my words. “This is totally different. I wasn’t hiding or lying in wait, planning something. I didn’t know I wasn’t human. I still can’t believe what happened. You have to tell them that. Tell the sheriff I’m not one of them.”
“How do I know that’s true?”
Terror scattered my thoughts into a maelstrom of disjointed theories. Think, Delilah! “There were hundreds of thousands of surrogates, but there’s only one of me.”
The deputy shrugged. “So far. For all we know, you could be the first in a whole new wave.”
“No, that’s not what I am!” My arms tightened around my shins, drawing my knees tighter against my chest. “I don’t have any siblings.”
“Having grown, healthy siblings would work in your favor. Being an only child does not.”
“Okay... But I’m an adult!” Surely they’d figured that much out when they’d taken my clothes off. “The surrogates were six-year-olds.”
“Yes, but even cryptids age. The surrogates are now thirty-five years old. Wherever they are.”
But no one knew where they were, and that was the problem. As soon as they’d been discovered, Uncle Sam had rounded them up like rabid dogs, and no one knew whether they’d been shot, or studied, or cryogenically frozen for later. And that was fine, because the surrogates truly were dangerous. They were the fucking devil’s spawn.
If the government thought I was one of them, I would disappear, too.
“I’m not a surrogate.” I pushed hair from my face with one hand and sat up as straight as I dared without clothes on. “I didn’t steal any babies. I’ve never hurt a soul in my life before tonight, and I don’t know how that happened. Think about it. If I’d known what I was, why would I go to the menagerie? Please, Deputy. You have to believe me. I’m not conspiring against humanity.”
Atherton exhaled slowly. Then he stood, still watching me, and shook out my blouse. “I believe you.” He stuck my shirt between two of the bars and dropped it on the floor. “But I’m not the one you have to convince.” Next came my jeans, bra, and underwear, each dropped just inside my cell. “Get dressed.”
I glanced at my clothes, then back up at him. “Are you going to watch?”
He blinked, obviously startled by the thought. “Of course not.” When he walked down the aisle away from my cell, I realized that Atherton wasn’t the enemy. He was just doing his job.
Unfortunately, his job was to extract information I didn’t have, in order to help the sheriff—
Help the sheriff what?
End life as I knew it?
I lunged for my clothes, then dragged the whole pile back into my corner, where I shimmied into my underwear as fast as I could. I turned my back on the bars to put my bra on, in case he turned around, and had just stepped into my jeans when the brutal reality of my new situation hit me over the head like that carny’s mallet, swinging straight for my soul.
I’ll never go home again.
My legs buckled beneath me and my knees slammed into the concrete. My jaw snapped shut with the impact, but I hardly felt it. I was a cryptid living under false pretenses, and no one would care that I hadn’t known. Most probably wouldn’t even believe that.
I pushed my arms through the sleeves of my shirt, but had trouble buttoning it. My hands wouldn’t stop trembling.
Gone. Everything I’d ever had was probably already gone. My job. My apartment. My car. My clothes. Cryptids weren’t allowed to own property or enter into contracts. Including leases.
“Deputy Atherton, I think I need to talk to an attorney.” My voice had almost no tone and very little volume. I seemed to be hearing myself from one end of a long tunnel.
He turned and headed down the aisle toward me again. “They’re not gonna give you a lawyer, Delilah. Cryptids aren’t citizens. You have no rights in the U.S. of A., in Franklin County, or in the incorporated township of Franklin. You are now the property of the state of Oklahoma.”
Property. No rights.
“Unless they decide you are a surrogate,” Atherton continued. “If that happens, the feds will come for you.”
And I would never be seen again.
I clutched my half-buttoned shirt to my chest and scooted back into the corner, pressing my spine into the seam where both brick walls met. The world seemed to be shrinking around me, as if someone were sucking all the air out of a vacuum-sealed bag. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.
“Is your mother still over on Sycamore?” Deputy Atherton asked, and a fresh bolt of fear opened my lungs. “They’re sending someone to pick her up.”
“Leave her alone.” My gaze snapped up to meet his, and his brows rose. “She has nothing to do with this. She’s human.”
“You thought you were human, too, and you were wrong about that. Is there anything we should know before they knock on her door?”
I held his gaze in silence.
“They’re already on their way, Delilah. If you know something that will keep her from getting hurt, you need to tell me.”
“She sleeps with my dad’s shotgun under her bed.” I crossed my arms over my knees and stared at the ground. “Better call first and let her know you’re coming. That, or send an ambulance in advance.”
Atherton’s brows rose. He unclipped a radio from his belt and relayed my mother’s itchy trigger finger to someone in Dispatch.
My bare toes curled on the concrete, and I wished for a pair of shoes. My racing thoughts had stilled into a single bold question mark, and the mental silence was almost as confining as the bars caging me.
“So, what happens now?”
He pulled a thick, rusty pair of medieval-looking iron cuffs from a pouch at his back. “Come on, Delilah. Get up. It’s time to meet the sheriff.”
Delilah (#ulink_20ebfcf1-7bfc-5705-b171-93afe7c89235)
“Turn around and stick both hands between the bars.”
The theory seemed to be that my hands were my weapons, and that with them restrained in iron behind my back I would be much less of a threat.
I complied, and the cuffs closed over my wrists one at a time. They were heavy, and the weight felt both surreal and brutally degrading. But surely if I were going to have any adverse reaction to iron—which would narrow my species down to one out of hundreds of kinds of fae—the bars on my cell would have triggered it already.
Iron was the only way that we knew of to identify the fae. Most of them had one feature or another that clothes wouldn’t cover—feathers, a hollow back, vines growing in place of hair—but glamour was a better disguise than any clothing, contact lenses, or wigs could ever hope to be.
Once I was cuffed, the deputy let me out of my cell and guided me down the aisle. He didn’t touch me. In fact, he seemed to be walking a couple of feet behind me until he had to come forward and open the door at the end of the aisle.
The moment I stepped into the open front room of the sheriff’s station, all phone calls and typing ceased. The ambient nervous chatter died, and everyone turned to watch me be escorted across the room. None of the stares were friendly. Even the people in handcuffs looked at me as if I were a slimy clump dug from their shower drains.
My face flamed. I wanted to hide, but the best I could do was let my hair swing forward to shield part of my face.
Several feet into my barefoot walk of shame, I saw Brandon sitting in a cracked plastic waiting room chair. I tripped over my own nerves and Deputy Atherton started to catch me, then changed his mind. I saw the moment it happened. He was reaching for me, probably out of instinct, then suddenly recoiled. He flinched—as if I were a snake about to strike, when really I was falling face-first toward the dingy yellow floor tile, unable to catch myself with my hands cuffed at my back.
Brandon stared at his shoes as I staggered, then awkwardly regained my balance on my own. I recognized tension in the cords standing out from his neck, as if he wanted to look, but was fighting the urge.
“Brandon,” I called once I was steady, and my voice cracked on the first syllable. His jaw clenched, but he didn’t look up. My flush deepened. “Brandon.” Raw desperation echoed in my voice and a couple of strangers sneered at the tender bits of my heart and soul I’d exposed.
My boyfriend of four years was the only person in the room not watching me.
“Brandon, please.” My cheeks were scalding and my throat ached. But I couldn’t believe he would abandon me without a word. He knew better than anyone else in the world aside from my mother that I would never hurt someone on purpose.
Deputy Atherton took me by the arm, evidently having gathered the courage to touch me in the face of my humiliation. “Come on, Delilah.”
“No.” I jerked free of his grip, and people all over the room flinched. “Say it, Brandon,” I demanded, and at first he didn’t move. Then my roommate and lover—one of my very best friends—stood and marched toward the exit, as if he wanted to run, but pride wouldn’t let him. “Brandon! Say it, you fucking coward!”
He froze halfway to the door, and my heart stilled along with him. Then slowly, Brandon turned. His eyes were red. His jaw was clenched. He looked at me as if he didn’t even know who I was.
“How could you do this to me?”
“I didn’t—”
“The whole thing was a lie,” he shouted, and I flinched. “You were a lie! I trusted you. I told you everything. I ate with you and slept next to you, and the whole time you were some kind of monster, just using me as part of your human camouflage. There is no Delilah Marlow.”
“No, that’s not true. It was all real! I didn’t know!” I took a step toward him, but Atherton grabbed my arm again, and several other deputies placed hands on the butts of their guns. “You have to believe I didn’t know.”
“I don’t know what to believe.” Tears shone in Brandon’s eyes, but anger glowed in his cheeks. “I was in love with a woman who never even existed. I can’t believe I ever let you—” His sentence ended in an inarticulate sound of disgust, and something deep inside me cracked apart. Some delicate part of me collapsed like a demolished building, leaving only broken shapes and sharp edges.
“Don’t blame yourself, son,” a middle-aged man called out from the waiting area. “We were all fooled in the eighties. I lost my aunt, uncle, and six cousins to those chameleon bastards, may they rot in hell.”
Cheers erupted all around me, and suddenly my ribs felt too tight.
“But I—I’m not one of them! I’m not—”
“Baby killer!” a woman shouted from the waiting area.
“Remember the reaping!” a man in regular steel cuffs shouted, though the cop who shoved him back into his chair didn’t seem to dispute the sentiment.
A cop in his thirties stood from behind his desk and strode toward me, and I thought he was going to take over for Deputy Atherton and get me out of there—until he spit in my face.
I blinked, stunned, as spittle dripped down my cheek.
“Damn it, Bruce!” Atherton hauled me toward another door.
Across the room, Brandon shoved the press-bar on the front exit and when he stepped into the parking lot, he took my last shred of hope with him. If my own boyfriend wouldn’t stand by me, who would?
The front door closed behind Brandon, and I sniffed back tears that stung like utter rejection and humiliation. My hair fell into my face as Wayne led me into another hallway, several strands clinging to the spit on my cheek.
Finally, Atherton closed the door behind us, shielding me from the rest of the world. Or maybe shielding it from me.
In an interrogation room, I followed his instructions without truly hearing them. In my mind, the front door of the sheriff’s station closed over and over, and all I could see was the back of Brandon’s head.
“Delilah,” Atherton said, and I realized he’d already said my name at least twice.
“What?” I blinked to clear my head and looked down to find myself sitting in a cold plastic chair with my arms looped around the back. A tug against my cuffs rattled chains I had no memory of, which evidently ran between my handcuffs and a metal loop set into the ground. I couldn’t stand or even twist much in my chair without pulling my arms out of their sockets.
Before I could ask if all of the metal was really necessary, a second deputy knelt to slap a set of iron shackles around my ankles and connect them to that same hook in the ground, behind my chair. When he stood, I tried to lean forward, but the pain in my shoulders stopped me. I tried to cross my ankles, but the shackles were in the way. I couldn’t move more than an inch in any direction, and that sudden severe confinement made my throat close. The room had plenty of open space but I couldn’t use any of it. Plenty of air, but I couldn’t seem to breathe any of it.
“Struggling will only make it worse,” Atherton said, and while there was no malice in his voice, there was no willingness to help either. “Just try not to think about it.”
But I couldn’t seem to manage that until the door opened, and Sheriff Pennington stepped in from the hall. He commented on my restraints with an incomprehensible grunt, then sat in the chair across a small folding table from mine.
Pennington folded his fleshy arms on the table and studied my face. “Delilah Marlow?”
I nodded, desperately trying not to squirm. “Am I under arrest?”
He snorted, then swiped at his nose with the back of one hand. “No, and I wouldn’t arrest a dog for bitin’ either. I’d just put the bitch down in the interest of public safety. You won’t be charged, and you won’t be Mirandized, because you no longer have any rights, you devious piece of shit. As long as you’re under my jurisdiction, I can do whatever I want with you, and I can’t imagine your lot would improve if the feds take over.”
His blatant threat bounced around the inside of my skull, and anger overtook my fear for the first time since I’d woken up in a jail cell. “This isn’t right, Sheriff.”
“I deal in law, not morality.” Pennington paused for a moment, evidently to let that little cow chip of irony sink in. “What are you exactly, Delilah Marlow?”
“I don’t know,” I repeated. He lifted one skeptical eyebrow, and I shrugged as best I could with my hands tightly bound behind me. “Look, if I knew, I’d tell you just to prove I’m not a surrogate.”
“Unless you are a surrogate.”
“If I were a surrogate, I’d lie. Either way, you’d have an answer. But I don’t know what I am. I didn’t know I wasn’t human until tonight.”
“We don’t know what the surrogates were either, do we?” Pennington pulled a palm-sized notebook from his front pocket. “So that doesn’t really rule anything out for you.”
I tried to find a more comfortable position, but the chains kept relief just out of reach. “Well, we know what they weren’t, and none of those little monsters looked anything like I did tonight.”
“About that...” the sheriff continued, flipping open his notebook to reveal a single page of pencil scrawling. “Let’s put our heads together and come up with some possibilities that might keep you out of federal custody, shall we?”
And finally something in his voice clued me in. Sheriff Pennington didn’t want me to be a surrogate either, because that would put me beyond his authority. The Justice Department had claimed jurisdiction over all of those cases before I was even born.
“Here’re the facts, as they were relayed to me. One, your voice changed in depth and—” Pennington glanced at the notebook on the table in front of him “—quality. Says here it was deeper than it shoulda been, and it felt—” another glance at his notes “—large. Whatever that means. Two, your eyes changed color. Not just the irises, but the entirety of your eyeballs.” He made a vague gesture encompassing most of my face, and I shuddered at the thought. “They became white, shot through with dark veins. Does that sound about right?”
I could only give him a painfully wrenching shrug, trying to hide the tide of horror washing over me. “I couldn’t see my own eyes.” And I’d never heard of a cryptid species which fit that description.
“It also says here that the veins in your face became black, like dark spiderwebs beneath your skin. Do you know anything about that?”
“No.” But I could imagine how terrifying it would have been to see. No wonder Shelley was scared. No wonder Brandon could hardly look at me. I’d spent four years studying cryptid species, yet couldn’t even identify my own. If I couldn’t understand what I’d become, how could they?
Pennington glanced at his notebook again.
“What about your hair? Witnesses say your hair took on a life of its own.”
“Sheriff, I’m assuming that if you spoke to my friends, you know that I was a crypto-biology major, with an emphasis in human hybrid species. I should know what I am. But I truly have no clue. Before tonight, I didn’t even know the question needed to be asked. All I know for sure at this point is that I’m no longer a bank teller.” I was no longer a driver, or a tenant, or a girlfriend, or a best friend.
I was nothing other than the property of the state of Oklahoma.
My eyes fell shut and I sucked in a deep breath.
The reality—the true enormity—of my loss suddenly hit me in a way that the mere intellectual understanding of it hadn’t been able to. When the interrogation was over, they weren’t going to send me home. I had no home. I was never going to count another cash drawer or make another pot of coffee ever again, no matter what I did or said. Everything that I had ever been or done or loved was gone. Delilah Marlow no longer existed.
No, Brandon was right. Delilah Marlow had never existed. My entire life was a delusion. A fantasy. A lie I hadn’t even known I was telling.
The reality was pure hell.
Pennington closed his notebook and crossed his arms on the table again, watching calmly as I fought total, devastating terror. “Before you start feeling too sorry for yourself, keep in mind that a man almost died because of you, and up at County General, they’re not sure he’ll ever regain normal brain function.”
A bright spark of anger surged up through my fear, and I seized it. “He electrified a little girl!”
Pennington turned to Atherton, who was stationed next to the door. “She’s talking about one of the beasts?”
The deputy nodded and pulled his own notebook from the pocket of his khaki uniform pants. “A pubescent canis lupus lycanus. Female.” He looked up and pocketed the notebook. “A thirteen-year-old wolf bitch. The rep from Metzger’s says they have trouble with her all the time, and the customary motivational method is a low-voltage poke with a standard cattle prod.”
“She was covered with electrical burns!” For a second, I forgot I was chained to the floor, and when I tried to stand, I nearly dislocated my shoulder. Both Pennington and Atherton reached for their guns.
I froze. “Relax.” My pulse raced so fast the room started to look warped. “I can’t even open a jar of pickles, much less break through solid steel and iron.”
Atherton glared at me. “Delilah, she’s not a child, she’s a wolf.” The deputy slid his gun back into its holster, but the fact that he didn’t snap it closed made me nervous. “An animal.”
“Then why was she wearing underwear?” I demanded, and the sheriff and his deputy looked at me as if I’d lapsed into Latin. “Okay, just think about it. When we put wolves on display in a zoo—a regular zoo—we don’t put underwear on them because they aren’t self-aware enough to feel modesty or adapt to social conventions and restrictions. But Geneviève was wearing underwear, which means the menagerie understands that she’s thoroughly self-aware. And if she’s self-aware, why is it okay to put a child on display in skimpy undergarments, then shock her with a cattle prod when she doesn’t want to be seen in nothing but her underwear? You can’t have it both ways.”
I sank back into my chair, only aware that I’d been straining against my restraints when my joints started screaming at me in protest.
Atherton and the sheriff stared at me for a moment, obviously unsure what to say. Then Pennington dragged his chair closer to the table and scowled at me with confidence born of ignorance. “According to the law, your werewolf bitch isn’t a person. She’s a monster, and monsters are offered no protection under the law because them and their kind slaughtered more than a million innocent children during the reaping alone. Who knows how many others they’ve killed one at a time? If werewolves are self-aware, why didn’t the pack that tore that family apart up in the Ozarks last month use that self-awareness to decide not to kill innocent people?”
“First of all, that was a pair of adlets, not a pack of werewolves, and second, self-awareness isn’t the same as a moral compass,” I argued. “I don’t believe every cryptid should be allowed to roam free, just like I don’t believe every human should be allowed to roam free. We have psychos, too. People kill their coworkers. Kids kill their classmates. Parents kill their own children. Those people are every bit as monstrous as the worst cryptid predator you can point to, yet they’re human, just like we are.”
Atherton and Pennington stared at me, and unease churned in my stomach. “There is no we,” the deputy said, and though I’d known that for several hours by then, hearing him verbally exclude me from the rest of humanity added another layer of pain to that brutal certainty. “Delilah, you’re not human.”
“Yeah, well, I guess you’re going to have to take a blood sample to figure out what I am, because I don’t know.”
“Actually, we took one while you were knocked out.” The deputy glanced at my arm, which was when I noticed the small bandage in the crook of my left elbow. “They had to send it up to Tulsa. Your sample’s the lab’s number one priority, but it’ll still take several days.”
I collapsed against the back of my chair, and my aching shoulders sagged with relief. “Then I guess we’re in for a bit of a wait.”
The interrogation room door creaked open and we all turned as another deputy stepped into the doorway. “Mrs. Marlow’s here.”
Sheriff Pennington stood and gave me a grim scowl. “I’m not very good at waiting, so you better hope your mama can shed some light on the subject. Otherwise, things are gonna get real bad for you, real damn fast.”
State agencies report that more than 12,000 parents have been arrested in connection with the August 24 murders of more than 1.1 million children, and an unnamed source in the FBI tells the Boston Gazette that that figure is still rising...
—From the front page of the Boston Gazette, August 28, 1986
Charity (#ulink_f777f232-26aa-5703-a1ea-ee9ac5a2d508)
When Charity Marlow’s phone rang at 12:04 a.m., she knew without even glancing at the caller ID that something was wrong. No one ever called in the middle of the night to say everything was fine.
Ten minutes after she hung up the phone, Charity had dressed, brushed her hair, and brewed a pot of coffee. The deputy who knocked on her door declined a travel cup, so she made him wait while she fixed one for herself because “questioning” sounded like the kind of ordeal that would require coherence on her part.
Coherence was the very least of what Charity Marlow owed her daughter, but it was all she had left to give.
On the way to the sheriff’s station, she sat in the passenger’s seat of the patrol car and sipped quietly from her cup, and not once during the drive across town did she ask why Delilah was in custody. Charity had been both waiting for and dreading that night’s phone call for nearly twenty-five years.
At the station, in a small room equipped with bright lights and cheap chairs, she sat across a small scarred table from Matthew Pennington, who’d held the title of sheriff for the past twelve years in spite of her consistent vote for whoever ran against him. Two armed deputies were stationed at the door, one on each side, and Charity saw no reason to pretend she didn’t understand their presence.
“I suppose you want a blood test,” she said before the sheriff could even open his mouth.
He nodded, but she read irritation in the stiff line of his jaw. Pennington liked to run the show. “We’ve got a phlebotomist from County General waiting for that very thing. Of course, you’d be saving us all a lot of time if you could just tell us what you and your daughter are.”
Charity set her travel cup on the table. “Sheriff, if I weren’t human, I wouldn’t exactly feel inspired to bare my soul to you and your gun-toting hee-haws.” She tossed a glance at the deputies beside the door, both of whom scowled at her. “But I am human, and your lab should be able to confirm that with little more than a microscope. And since you clearly know otherwise about Delilah... Well, I’d be just as interested as you are in what the lab has to say about her blood sample.”
Pennington leaned back and crossed thick arms over the brown button-up shirt stretched tight across his soft chest. “You’re telling me you don’t know what species your own daughter is?”
Charity nodded. “In fact, considering that you have her in custody, I’d guess you know more about her genetic origin than I do.”
“Well, you’d be wrong there.” Frustration deepened the sheriff’s voice even beyond the chain-smoker range. “I have her medical records. The blood test they ran at birth says she’s human.”
Charity nodded again, but made no comment.
“According to her record, she hasn’t had blood drawn since the day she was born.”
“I believe that’s accurate.”
“She’s never been sick?” Pennington leaned forward, arms folded over the table, and Charity winced at the acrid bite of cigarette smoke clinging to his uniform. “Not once in twenty-five years?”
“Every child gets sick at some point, Sheriff. But Delilah never had anything I couldn’t treat myself.”
“Because you’re an RN.”
Charity sat a little straighter in her hard plastic chair. “Actually, I’m a nurse practitioner.”
“That’s right,” the sheriff said, but she saw right through his sudden recollection of her employment history. “You finished your MSN when Delilah was three. Was that so that you could legally treat her yourself?”
“In fact, it was. And as her primary medical caregiver, I found no reason to run further blood tests on a perfectly healthy child.” Charity looked right into the sheriff’s eyes. “But I would be willing to tell you what I do know, if you’ll go first.”
The sheriff’s flustered flush was so bright that one of the deputies stepped forward to see if he was okay. Pennington waved the unspoken question off and glared at the woman seated across the table.
“What we know, Mrs. Marlow, is that your daughter got worked up during a tour of the menagerie this evening and turned into the kind of creature that should have been lookin’ outta one of those cages, instead of looking into ’em. She grabbed a carny by the head and sank her fingers into his skull, and when she finally released him, he turned his livestock prod up as far as it would go and rammed it into his own leg.”
Charity’s bold spirit—a thing of wide repute in Franklin County—faded like a blossom gone dry in the sun. She closed her eyes to hide her thoughts from the sheriff, and the face that flashed behind her eyelids belonged to a woman she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years, but would never in her life forget.
“Lilah actually hurt someone?” More than two decades of secrets, lies, and guilt swelled within her as she examined every fear and doubt she’d ever had about the daughter she loved more than anything else in the world. More, even, than the husband whose heart had given out at the age of fifty-seven, beneath the burden of their secret. “I didn’t think she was even capable of violence.”
“Why don’t you tell us what you know?”
Charity crossed her arms over her favorite blue summer sweater and when she leaned back in her chair, a gray-streaked strand of straight brown hair fell over her ear.
“Keeping your secret can’t help her anymore, Mrs. Marlow,” Wayne Atherton said. “We can’t help her either, if we don’t know what she is.”
Unlike Pennington, Atherton truly seemed to want to help, so Charity cleared her throat and took a long sip of her coffee. “Almost twenty-five years ago, my six-week-old daughter disappeared from her crib.”
“You’re telling us that Delilah was kidnapped?” Pennington prompted after a moment of silence, but Charity only shook her head.
“I’m telling you that my daughter Elizabeth was kidnapped. Her middle name was Delilah, so that’s what I called the changeling left in her place.”
For one long moment, neither the sheriff nor his deputy spoke. Charity couldn’t even be sure they were breathing.
“Changeling.” Pennington seemed to be tasting the word, as if he might want to spit it back out. “So, you’re saying the fae took your baby and left a surrogate in its place? There hasn’t been a confirmed surrogate exchange since the reaping.” The sheriff laid both thick hands flat on the table between them. “Mrs. Marlow, are you telling us that your daughter is part of a second wave of attack?”
Atherton slipped quietly out of the room.
“No.” Charity set her coffee down and looked straight into the sheriff’s eyes, so that he couldn’t possibly mistake any part of her bearing or intent. “This is different. I don’t know what those little monsters were, but Delilah isn’t one of them.”
The sheriff crossed his arms above his belly. “How can you be sure? Does she look like Elizabeth?”
“I haven’t seen Elizabeth in twenty-five years, Sheriff, but as infants, they were identical.”
Pennington’s scraggly gray brows rose. “Sounds like a surrogate to me.”
“You’re wrong.” Charity lifted her cup in one unsteady hand and took a sip of the cooling coffee. Then she set the cup down and took a long, deep breath. “Delilah was sent to deliver pain, but not by instilling terror on a national scale like the surrogates. She was left in Elizabeth’s place to punish me. And I got exactly what I asked for.”
“What—”
Charity held up one hand and spoke over the sheriff. “Elizabeth was a beautiful child, but she had an ugly temper. She cried for days and nights on end. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I couldn’t think straight. One day, when she was six weeks old, I prayed that the Lord would take my brand-new baby girl—the center of my existence—and send me a quieter, happier child in her place.”
She pulled a tissue from the purse in her lap and dabbed at first one eye, then the other. “Now, it may be that a lot of women in my position do the same thing, and nothing comes of it. But I...” She leaned forward, and fresh tears fell from her eyes. “Well, Sheriff, I said my prayer out loud. And it wasn’t the Lord who heard me.”
“Who heard you?” the remaining deputy whispered.
Charity twisted in her chair to give him a censuring glance. “Believe it or not, Deputy, no one claimed credit for replacing my daughter with a more pleasant doppelgänger.” She turned back to the sheriff. “So I did some research and learned that I could get in touch with whoever took my daughter if I were to nurse the child for a week, then smear a bit of her blood on a mirror and state my own child’s name.” More inclined toward logic than superstition, Charity had thought the whole thing sounded gruesome and crazy, but the truth was that since the reaping, anything seemed possible. The sheriff eyed her doubtfully, but she continued. “It worked! A woman appeared to me in my bathroom mirror, holding Elizabeth from some room I’ve never seen before.”
“What did she say?” the deputy asked, and the sheriff scowled, but let the question stand.
“She said that in a year, if I had taken proper care of the changeling and still wanted my daughter back, Elizabeth would be returned to me.”
“This woman in the mirror?” The sheriff’s skepticism was fading beneath undeniable curiosity. “Did you get her name? Her species?”
“She wouldn’t tell me any of that. But she looked and sounded as human as Delilah did.”
“So what did you do?” Pennington said, and from across the table, Charity could see that though he held a pen, the notebook page in front of him was completely blank.
“We cared for Lilah as if she were our own. She was a delightful child. Happy and affectionate. We came to love her—I felt guilty for how much I loved her, when my own daughter was missing.” Charity folded her hands on the table and took a deep breath. “Then the one-year mark came and went, and Elizabeth never reappeared.”
“Did you try the blood-on-the-mirror trick again?” the sheriff asked.
Charity nodded. “Several times, but my summons went unanswered.”
“And you never got her back?” the deputy guessed, clearly transfixed by the story.
Pennington waved one hand to silence the deputy, and when he turned back to Charity, she met his gaze with tear-filled eyes. “No, I never got Elizabeth back,” she said. Then she took a deep breath and gave voice to a fear that had lived in her soul for twenty-five years, but had never before been spoken aloud.
“Sheriff, I think my Elizabeth was never returned because I loved Delilah more.”
Delilah (#ulink_10eb8116-68dc-56cc-93fb-448a858e6744)
The weight of my mother’s confession steadily pressed the air from my lungs until psychological suffocation felt like a very real threat. I tried to lean forward, staring intently through the one-way glass into the room where she sat, but again chains and cuffs held me painfully short of where I wanted to be.
However, the real trauma went much, much deeper. Brandon had been wrong—there really was a Delilah Marlow. But I wasn’t her.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to take it all in. Trying to understand.
I wasn’t my mother’s daughter.
That devastating revelation triggered a landslide of loss, leaving me crushed by the debris of my own life. I had no real name or family. No birthplace or birth date. No true identity. Added to the confiscation of everything I’d ever owned, that left me with nothing but a body I could no longer trust. Though according to Pennington, that was now owned by the state of Oklahoma.
This can’t be real.
What was I, if I had no name, no friends, no family, no job, no home, no belongings, and no authority over my own body? What could I be?
Maybe I was just the good little girl my mother’d begged for. Or maybe I was the monster Sheriff Pennington believed me to be. Maybe I was the first enemy soldier in a secret war against humanity. But could that even be true, if I didn’t know about it?
A strange creak cut through my thoughts, and Deputy Atherton turned away from the window to look at me. “Delilah? Are you okay?”
When I opened my mouth to tell him just how far from okay I was, the creaking stopped. I’d been clenching my jaw so tightly we could both hear the stress.
“You really didn’t know about any of that?” he said, pointing beyond the glass at my mother.
I shook my head. Even after hearing it, I wasn’t sure I truly understood. All I knew for sure was that I was a changeling of unknown origin sent to torture my mother. And that somehow a punishment meant to last a year had lasted a lifetime. For what? For loving me too much?
That wasn’t fair to her. She was a good mother. Yet if whoever’d taken Elizabeth Delilah Marlow—the real Lilah—had brought her back, where would that have left me? Would I have been raised by the woman in the mirror? Was she my mother?
No.
Charity Marlow had been living with her secret for twenty-five years, maintaining her silence to protect me, mourning her real daughter—a baby who’d looked just like me—in private, because the world could not know of her loss. That made her my mother, even if we shared no blood.
Had my dad known?
Yes.
Suddenly my father’s periodic melancholy made sense. What had he seen when he’d looked at me? Could he see the difference between me and his Elizabeth? Had he loved me as much as my mother did?
Had he blamed her for the loss of their true child? Had he blamed me?
“If you tell the sheriff I let you watch, he’ll have my badge.”
Deputy Atherton’s statement sliced through my thoughts so suddenly that it took me a second to understand what he’d said.
I sniffed, unable to wipe either my eyes or my dripping nose. “I won’t tell him.” As the only person to show me even the slightest bit of compassion, Atherton was the closest thing I had to an ally. “Thank you for letting me see my mom. What’s going to happen to her?” I whispered, still staring through the glass.
He shrugged. “If she’s human, she should be fine.”
“She harbored a cryptid for twenty-five years. That’s a felony, Deputy.”
“She was protecting her kid. The sheriff would never...” Atherton didn’t bother to finish. We both knew the sheriff would.
“Mrs. Marlow,” Pennington continued from the next room. “As an officer of the law, I have to ask, why didn’t you turn the changeling over to the proper authorities when it became clear that your daughter was never going to be returned?”
The changeling. He wasn’t even using my name anymore. I’d become a thing.
“She didn’t know she wasn’t human,” my mother said. “I didn’t know for sure. If I’d given her to the police, they would have put her in the state refuge, where she’d have been less than a snack for the first troll or ogre to find her. She was a baby, Sheriff.”
“Yes, and I’m sure she was adorable.” Pennington leaned back in his chair again, and though I couldn’t see his face, I could picture his patronizing expression perfectly. “A few years ago I saw a baby tiger in the zoo, over at Tulsa. It was behind a thick wall of glass playin’ with its handler, chasin’ a bit of string with a stuffed mouse tied at the end. That baby tiger was the cutest damn thing I ever saw in my life.” He paused dramatically. “A year and a half later it ripped that same handler’s arm off and bit through her jugular.”
My mother didn’t even flinch. “You’re suggesting Lilah is like this tiger?”
“I’m tellin’ you she’s worse. The tiger acted on instinct. Your Lilah made a deliberate decision to—” Pennington crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, we’re not sure what she did to that poor man. What we are sure of is that if you’d done your civic duty when she was a baby, we wouldn’t be sittin’ here now. I suspect the state’s attorney will have a few things to say to you about that, but I could put in a word on your behalf, if you were to help us out. We really need to know what she is. You must have seen something when she was growing up that could help us. There musta been signs that she was different from the other girls.”
“There weren’t, Sheriff,” my mother insisted. “That’s why it was so easy for me to believe she was human, no matter where she came from. Lilah was normal. She was smart, and kind, and always the first to go to bat for the underdog. I was always so proud of her.”
My mother’s face blurred beneath tears I couldn’t hold back.
“So, you never saw anything strange about her hair? Or her eyes? Or her hands?” Pennington asked, and my mother shook her head. “Not even when she got riled up about something?”
“No. There was never anything like that.” My mom leaned forward, her arms folded on top of the table, and I recognized the fierce look in her eyes. “Look, Sheriff, I have no idea what Lilah did to that man, but I have no doubt that he damn well deserved it.”
Deputy Atherton twisted a knob at the bottom of the glass, and my mother’s voice went silent. He pressed a button on the same panel, and the glass frosted over until it became reflective again. My viewing was over.
“She loves you.”
“Yeah, and I’m afraid that’s going to get her in serious trouble.” I rotated my shoulders in the futile search for a more comfortable position as he slid into the chair across the table from me. “What’s next for her?”
The deputy exhaled and pushed a strand of brown hair from his forehead. “Pennington’s approved a rush order on her blood test, so we should hear back within twenty-four hours, assuming she’s human.”
Because identifying one of thousands of cryptid species by blood was complicated, but confirming humanity was pretty quick.
“She’ll have to stay here until we’re sure, though.”
“Can’t you just let her go home? She’s no threat, Deputy.”
Atherton shook his head. “Standard procedure, for public safety. Anyone suspected of having cryptid blood has to stay in custody until the results are in. I’ll take her some coffee and a stale cinnamon roll, but that’s the best I can do.”
“What about me?” I shifted in my seat, trying to ease the pressure on my shoulders. “Am I going to sit in a cell until they figure out what I am?”
“Looks like it, and you should probably consider that a stroke of luck. Pennington’s had a couple of the guys out front looking at options for where to send you since before you woke up, and the very best of them is going to make this place look like a luxury hotel.”
A fresh jolt of fear tightened my chest. “Please tell me Pennington’s not the final authority.”
Atherton shrugged. “The law’s a little fuzzy on that. If that carny was in the morgue instead of the psych ward, Pennington would have to call in the state police. That’s standard for all capital offenses. But since he doesn’t have to make that call, he’s probably not gonna. If you turn out to be a surrogate, you fall under federal jurisdiction, but that’s another call he’s not going to make unless he has to.”
“So my fate is in the hands of the sheriff of a county with fewer than fifteen thousand people in it.” My mouth was dry, and my hands had gone numb, but because I wasn’t human, they could keep me as long as they wanted without so much as a sip of water or a trip to the bathroom.
“Yes, but I think you’re better off here than you would be in state custody.” The deputy folded his hands on the table while I watched him through a strand of hair that had fallen over my eye. “The state reservation is over capacity. They’re sendin’ the overflow straight to an R & D holding facility, and that place...”
Atherton stared down at his hands, and the fact that he was clearly stalling made my heart beat too hard.
Cryptid research and development was big business, with both the government and the private sector, but regulation was virtually nonexistent. Animal activists raised hell if a pharmaceutical company wanted to test new shampoo on a sewer rat, but R & D could inject environmental toxins beneath a selkie’s removable seal skin all day long and no one blinked an eye.
“They don’t tag ’em or count ’em, Delilah. I made a couple of calls, and a guy in records told me that since the lab opened fourteen years ago, they’ve sent in more than five times the max capacity—all kinds of cryptids—and there’s no record of any of them ever officially leaving the facility. But they fire up the industrial incinerator about once a week.”
My pulse jumped, and I struggled to keep breathing slowly. Evenly. “What’s the alternative? Hotel California?”
The deputy nodded. “Otherwise known as the Oklahoma Cryptid Confinement Center.”
“Same thing.” Because there, every sentence that wasn’t a life sentence was a death sentence.
“The only other option I can think of would be a private collection. I know this guy out in—”
“No.” Chills shot up my spine. Werewolves on leashes, declawed and walking around like pets. Selkies and naiads swimming in giant koi ponds. Fauns serving drinks at private events in nothing but gold chains and collars. I shook my head vehemently. “I’m nobody’s pet.”
“That’s not up to you.” Atherton leaned back in his chair, his forehead crinkled in irritation. “I’m going out of my way to help you, and your appreciation looks a lot like ingratitude.”
Indignation sharpened my vision until I finally saw the deputy clearly. “You want me to be thankful that you’re willing to sell me as a living party favor instead of sentencing me to a cryptid prison?”
The deputy’s eyes narrowed. “You need to take a good, objective look at what you’re facing here, Delilah. OCCC is an open-population cryptid prison. There are no guards. No cells. No rules. Helicopters make periodic supply drops on the grounds. You’d fight for every scrap of food and clothing until the day some troll or adlet eats you for breakfast. Is your pride really worth dying for?”
Fuck! I closed my eyes and clenched my fists over and over, wishing that the rest of me would go as numb as my fingers.
“And at least in a collection you’d be alive and in good health. No collector is going to let any serious damage come to property he spent good money on.”
Property. Damage. Money. I would be an exotic pet. An insured asset in some rich prick’s ledger. Because even animal lovers keep dogs on leashes.
The deputy shrugged. “I could say something to the sheriff about a private collector,” he offered. “He’d have to think it was his own idea, but that shouldn’t be hard. He still thinks it was his idea to install a vent fan in the men’s room, and—”
“That was my idea.” Pennington pushed the door open and marched into the interrogation room. Atherton’s jaw tightened and his gaze dropped to the table between us for a second before he stood to relinquish the chair. “But I like where your head’s at, Deputy.” Pennington settled across the table from me, and the chair groaned beneath his weight. “I’ve found a fella out near the panhandle who’s lookin’ to replenish his collection. He doesn’t care what flavor of freak you are, so long as we pass along the results of your blood test as soon as we have ’em.”
My chest felt so tight I could hardly breathe. “What kind of collection?”
“Well, I guess calling it a collection is kinda puttin’ on airs. Fella actually calls it a reserve.”
Wayne frowned. “Sheriff, are you talking about Russell Clegg’s operation? He’s running a game park over there, bringing hunters from all over to—”
Pennington twisted to look up at his deputy, and the chair creaked again. “Atherton, shut your mouth. You know no such thing.”
I swallowed convulsively, struggling to hold down what little dinner I’d had as horror washed over me in waves. “You can’t just let them chase me through the woods and shoot me down like a deer!” I wouldn’t stand a chance, with hunters wearing infrared goggles and hound dogs following my scent.
“Handin’ you over to Clegg will save the great state of Oklahoma thousands of dollars a year in upkeep, and in the process, I’ll be making the streets of Franklin County a safer place to live. Folks want you gone, Delilah. Voting folks.”
“I thought you couldn’t send me anywhere until my blood test comes back.”
The sheriff shrugged. “After talking to your mother, I agree that whatever you are, you’re probably not a surrogate. If the test says otherwise, the feds can seize you from Clegg just as easily as they could seize you from me, and as long as my check has cleared, I could not give a—”
The door to the interrogation room flew open, startling us all.
“What?” Pennington roared at the deputy who stood in the threshold.
“There’s a man out ’ere wants to talk to ya, Sheriff. It’s about Lilah Marlow.”
“What about her?”
The deputy shrugged. “He said he’d only talk to you. We put him in the next room, now that they got Mrs. Marlow moved to a cell.”
The sheriff nodded. “I’ll be there when I’m done in here.” His deputy disappeared into the hall, and I glanced at Atherton with my brows raised, silently asking what he knew.
He only shrugged.
As the sheriff turned back to me with more questions, I stared at my own reflection in the one-way mirror, wondering who was looking back at me from the other side, and why.
I’d already been threatened with prison, a collection, and a hunting reserve. How much worse could this stranger’s plan for me possibly be?
“Ladies and gentlemen, our lead story continues to grow stranger and more disturbing. So far, in every single one of the reported cases of this mass prolicide—the killing of one’s own children—it appears that one child in each family has survived, completely unharmed. Even more bizarre—all of the surviving children are six years old, each born in the same month—March of 1980.”
—Continuing coverage on the Nightly News, August 30, 1986
Rudolph (#ulink_3d57d98a-8868-5624-ad63-b209e27cefe6)
“Just twist that button next to the window, and you’ll be able to hear what they’re saying.” The sheriff’s deputy still had one hand on the doorknob, clearly eager to leave the observation room. Rudolph Metzger was neither surprised nor offended. Often locals were almost as unnerved by menagerie workers and their close proximity to the beasts as they were by the beasts themselves. “They can’t see or hear you. The sheriff will be with you shortly,” the deputy added on his way out.
Rudolph exhaled slowly when the door closed behind the officer, leaving him alone in the dim interrogation/observation room with Gallagher.
One hundred and twelve years.
That’s how long the menagerie had been in Rudolph’s family. The Metzgers had been bringing quality live entertainment to small towns all over the U.S. since before cell phones and personal computers. Since before the internet brought footage of dangerous and exotic creatures into private homes with one simple click of a mouse.
Since long before the reaping and the repeal of the Sanctuary Act.
Back then, business was simple and the creature carnival was smaller. Beasts only. The chimera. The phoenix. The basilisk. Nothing with human parts could be caged or put on display, but business was good because outside of zoos and traveling menageries, private citizens couldn’t get an up close look at a griffin without getting their eyes pecked out or their limbs ripped off.
But the technological boom had not been good to traveling circuses.
Rudolph shrugged off bittersweet nostalgia and waved a hand at the button on the wall, his gaze focused on the occupants of the room beyond the one-way glass. Gallagher stepped forward to twist the knob, and voices filled the room.
For a while, Rudolph only watched, uncomfortably aware of the fact that if the woman hadn’t been chained to both her chair and the floor, he would’ve had no idea she wasn’t, in fact, a woman at all. She was a monster. A female monster, certainly, but not a woman.
Only humans can be men and women.
But she looked like a woman, and that was a problem.
Most monsters could not hide for long among humanity—monstrosity shone through, even among the most normal-looking of creatures. Werewolves, for instance, had wolf eyes and canines even in human form. Ifrits gave off an unnatural body heat and had hair the color of flames. Sirens’ eyes often came in colors foreign to humanity. Each species had its tell.
But this one...
After five minutes of studying her, scrutinizing every visible part, Rudolph could see no sign of aberration. Of course, the same was true of oracles, until their eyes clouded over in the grip of second sight.
“You’re sure?” he said, still staring at the female chained to the chair. Strands of her ordinary dark hair hung over her ordinary blue eyes. She was ordinary, in the human sense, but somewhat attractive.
Yet another problem.
Gallagher nodded without pulling his gaze from the subject behind the window. He was a man of few words, but he was also a man of strong instinct and no bullshit, both qualities the old man considered himself to have in spades. If Gallagher said this beast was more than she seemed, then she was more than she seemed.
She was also the kind of exhibit that could make or break a menagerie. Rudolph could not afford the risk she represented, nor could he afford to pass up the crowds she could draw. The profit she could bring.
When the Sanctuary Act was overturned, mere months after the reaping, traveling menageries began to evolve into modern creature features, complete with humanoid and hybrid exhibits as well as specialty shows. Demand was high and regulations were few. Insurance was optional and inspections were rare in most venues. Costs were low and profit margins were wide.
At first, Metzger’s had flourished.
Yet by the time Rudolph’s father passed the reins on to his middle-aged sons in the late 1990s, everything had begun to change. Rubes had become skeptics accustomed to movie magic and special effects. Audiences were harder to impress and less willing to pay for the privilege. Safety regulations, inspections, and insurance for traveling menageries had become astronomic expenses in an age when customers could sue a restaurant over too-hot coffee.
Rudolph’s three brothers—and their prissy, gold-digging wives—wanted no part of the circus lifestyle, and after he bought them out to keep them from running Metzger’s into the ground with their own disinterest, the menagerie’s liquid assets were nearly drained.
Fortunately, Rudolph had a head for figures and an eye for beasts. He could tell at a glance which werewolf pup was the hardiest of the litter and which centaurs could subsist on oats and water without compromising their stamina. Rudolph knew just how to coax the livestock into breeding, and exactly when to sell which offspring to supplement income during the rough winter months when traveling was restricted by the weather.
Thanks to Rudolph’s talent and attention, Metzger’s had survived when many other menageries folded. But survival wasn’t enough. He wanted Metzger’s to flourish!
Gallagher’s discovery could help make that happen.
“We can’t show her like that.” Rudolph waved one hand at the glass, and Gallagher nodded. “If people think she’s a surrogate, no one will come see her. And if it looks like we’ve put a human woman in a cage, the rubes will feel sorry for her and we’ll be the bad guys. You’ll have to bring out her beast. Show them she’s a monster—but not a surrogate.”
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Rachel Vincent
From New York Times bestselling author Rachel Vincent comes a richly imagined, provocative new series set in the dark mythology of the Menagerie…When Delilah Marlow visits a famous traveling carnival, Metzger's Menagerie, she is an ordinary woman in a not-quite-ordinary world. But under the macabre circus black-top, she discovers a fierce, sharp-clawed creature lurking just beneath her human veneer. Captured and put on exhibition, Delilah in her black swan burlesque costume is stripped of her worldly possessions, including her own name, as she's forced to "perform" in town after town.But there is breathtaking beauty behind the seamy and grotesque reality of the carnival. Gallagher, her handler, is as kind as he is cryptic and strong. The other "attractions"–mermaids, minotaurs, gryphons and kelpies–are strange, yes, but they share a bond forged by the brutal realities of captivity. And as Delilah struggles for her freedom, and for her fellow menagerie, she'll discover a strength and a purpose she never knew existed.Renowned author Rachel Vincent weaves an intoxicating blend of carnival magic and startling humanity in this intricately woven and powerful tale."Blood Bound offers a little something for everyone: a convincing magical system for urban fantasy fans; for romance readers, a love that time and distance can't break; and a twist-and-turn plot for mystery buffs. Readers looking for a light and fluffy ride should go elsewhere."–Shelf Awareness
One hundred twelve years.
That’s how long the menagerie had been in Rudolph’s family. The technological boom had not been good to traveling circuses, but thanks to Rudolph’s talent and attention, Metzger’s had survived when many other menageries folded. But survival wasn’t enough. He wanted Metzger’s to flourish!
His gaze focused on the occupants of the room beyond the one-way glass, uncomfortably aware of the fact that if the woman hadn’t been chained to both her chair and the floor, he would’ve had no idea she wasn’t, in fact, a woman at all. She was a monster.
“She wasn’t trying to pass for human. She thought she was human. The world thought she was human. When audiences look at her, they will see themselves, locked up and helpless. When the other exhibits look at her, they will see possibility. Opportunity. She grew up in freedom and human privilege. She’s smart, she’s loud, and she has a severely inflated sense of self-worth. Her delusions make her dangerous.”
He turned to his boss of livestock. “You must break her, Gallagher. She is the spark, and if that spark kindles, it will burn my menagerie to the ground.”
Rudolph shook his head to disguise the chill traveling up his spine. This female could incite riots. She could save the carnival—or be the end of everything he’d been working toward his entire life.
Praise for the novels of New York Times bestselling author Rachel Vincent (#ulink_c734943b-7b35-5de6-859c-dd83369d4648)
“Compelling and edgy, dark and evocative, Stray is a must read! I loved it from beginning to end.”
—New York Times bestselling author Gena Showalter on Stray
“Well written, fresh, charming, great voice—Buffy meets Cat People. I loved it, and look forward to much more in the future from this talented author.”
—New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham
“This is the kind of book that ups the ante in teen literature. The characters are true to life in a way not often captured by YA authors; Vincent writes dialogue as if she spends her days haunting the hallways of her local high school. The love triangle is fantastic… This plot is driven by more relatable impulses: love, friendship, jealousy.”
—RT Book Reviews on My Soul to Steal
“Vincent does a nice job of balancing all the various species of character…with dollops of humor and enough backstory to keep readers new to the series engaged, without dousing the pace for those already in the know.”
—Booklist on If I Die
“A well-thought-out vision of werecat social structure as well as a heroine who insists on carving her own path, even if it means breaking some of her society’s most sacred taboos.”
—Library Journal on Rogue
“Blood Bound offers a little something for everyone: a convincing magical system for urban fantasy fans; for romance readers, a love that time and distance can’t break; and a twist-and-turn plot for mystery buffs.”
—Shelf Awareness on Blood Bound
Menagerie
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
Rachel Vincent
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
RACHEL VINCENT is the daughter of a registered nurse and an attorney/pianist, and only rarely has she ever seen either of them without a book in hand. As the oldest of three (then later, five) children, she’s always known exactly when and how things should be done, and as a wife and mother, she has never once conceded an argument. A former English teacher and supporter of the serial comma, Rachel has written more than twenty novels and hopes to spend the rest of her life with her fingers on the keyboard and her head in the clouds.
www.rachelvincent.com (http://www.rachelvincent.com)
This one is for my husband and children, who suffered with me through three years, several rewrites, a shifted release date and the loss of my longtime editor while I wrote Menagerie. It’s been a long road, but I think it’s been worth it, and I can’t thank you all enough.
Contents
Cover (#u16b4a9c9-901f-5e6d-acb1-68685d25a004)
Back Cover Text (#u3b389668-7f93-5829-bdd6-0cda2b416fe3)
Praise (#u98afc889-8b97-55d6-9cb6-21bff99a73a5)
Title Page (#u4f501e27-1042-596e-82de-4e78f3601122)
About the Author (#u943c7023-db3b-5da6-ab45-7c3c621e9c2c)
Dedication (#uea9d5b8d-31a7-5b10-9c55-8695c63664ea)
Part 1: Exposé (#u960a1e15-6738-5a4d-99a1-3746a2bbd6cb)
Introduction (#u21985912-adb9-53a7-9c4e-839d6876a567)
Quote 1 (#u60f2d8a1-f97b-5215-b465-42226a9a5cf6)
Rommily (#u1ab434db-35f0-50e4-a656-2e5d54251fea)
Delilah (#ucce6a3db-9827-5f01-9bf7-3f5efac15374)
Quote 2 (#uc9380112-8427-5b8b-ad89-78ea733ff5ee)
Delilah (#u8cfb34fa-03a5-51d9-93ef-6f0f55e093a5)
Atherton (#u0e738ad7-0394-502c-a4ae-b7fa47e57c1e)
Quote 3 (#uda8956c3-7b3f-5587-95ad-e24bb4474ff9)
Delilah (#u2caee6b9-185e-5599-8659-f84bc459b5f4)
Delilah (#u987bebff-0392-59a2-ab23-d5bb0af0e4a1)
Quote 4 (#ue32ba3dd-cac8-59d7-9f1b-86c4f3fccf02)
Charity (#u337b5508-3a09-5ff9-a61d-952ea4f53667)
Delilah (#ubc96d620-6dd2-5aeb-9b8a-8c952430f304)
Quote 5 (#uc5f83aca-3519-5526-be1b-06eb25a8e96c)
Rudolph (#ud2213f10-38c4-5c5f-89fd-8e63e4cca1bb)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 2: Confiné (#litres_trial_promo)
Rommily (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Nalah (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Eryx (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Rommily (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Gallagher (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Geneviève (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Eryx (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Nalah (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Gallagher (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 3: Émancipé (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Charity (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Gallagher (#litres_trial_promo)
Quote 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Abraxas (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Kevin (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Rudolph (#litres_trial_promo)
Delilah (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
PART 1 Exposé (#ulink_4914e6d4-57e1-5e05-bc55-b5e31c50fed6)
Twenty-five years ago...
The heat rippling over the surface of Charity Marlow’s blacktop driveway was one hundred twelve degrees. It was nearly one hundred nine in the shade from the scrub brush that passed for trees in her front yard.
She sat on a white iron bench in her backyard, picking at the paint flaking off the arm scrolls. A glass of sweet tea stood on the empty plant stand to her right, thinner on top, where the ice cubes melted, thicker on bottom, where the sugar settled.
Inside, the baby was crying.
She’d been going for close to three hours this time, and Charity’s arms ached from holding her. Her head throbbed and her feet were sore from standing. From pacing and rocking in place. Her throat was raw from crooning, her nerves shot from exhaustion, and her patience long worn thin.
She’d decided to go inside again when the last ice cube had melted into her tea, and not a minute later.
Not a minute earlier either, even though the top of her head felt close to combusting from the heat of the sun.
She stared at the cracked earth beneath her feet, at the hands in her lap, watching her own fingers shake from exhaustion. Then she stared at her tea as the ice cubes shrank before her eyes, and still the baby screamed.
Then, the last ice cube melted.
Despair swallowed Charity like the whale swallowed Jonah, but she held no hope of being spit back out. Her arms felt like they were made of iron as she lifted her tea.
She closed her eyes while the top of her skull burned in the blazing sunlight. “Lord,” she whispered, condensation dripping over her fingers from the outside of her cold glass, “won’t you take this angry child and give me a quieter, happier one in her place?”
As soon as she’d said the words, she regretted them. Words spoken in pain and exhaustion are rarely meant, and Charity Marlow’s were no exception.
But there was no taking them back.
The moment the last word fell from her lips, the baby stopped crying.
Setting her glass down, she listened harder but heard only silence.
She stood and rounded the bench, headed for the kitchen door. By the time she got to the house, she was running. The screen door slammed behind her and her sandals slapped the floor, competing with the thunder of her own heartbeat in her ears as she raced down the hall.
She stopped in the nursery threshold, one hand clenched around the glossy white door frame, breathing too fast. Too hard. Her chest felt like it was constricting around her heart, as if her ribs were laced up too tight.
“I didn’t mean it. Please, I didn’t mean it.”
The baby was dead. Charity was sure of it. She’d committed the worst sin a mother could commit, and now she was being punished.
But there was no answer from above, so she had to take that next step forward. And the one after that.
By her third step into the nursery, she could see a chubby little fist propped against the pastel crib bumper. Anguish swelled up from her heart and caught in her throat, a lump she couldn’t breathe through, yet couldn’t swallow.
One more step, and she could see the whole crib and the baby lying in it, eyes peacefully closed.
Charity sobbed and sagged against the crib rail, one hand on her daughter’s round little stomach.
The child’s eyes fluttered open, and Charity’s shocked gasp was like a crack of thunder in the silent house. Her eyes filled with tears of joy and relief and she reached to pick up the child, already scolding herself for being such a superstitious fool.
Then the child smiled at her and Charity froze, her fingers inches from her daughter’s pale pink jumper. Chills raced up her spine and goose bumps erupted all over her body.
The child laughed—surely no purer sound of joy was ever heard—and she stepped back from the crib, fear crawling beneath her skin.
The baby laughed again, and she took another step back, then another, and another, until her back hit the pale yellow wall. In that moment, as confusion, guilt and fear met within her, calling into question everything she’d thought she understood about the world and her place in it, Charity Marlow knew only one thing for sure.
That was not her baby.
Fourteen years ago...
The whistling tones of a calliope organ rang out from a speaker mounted over the carnival gate, the playful notes tripping up and down the musical register with a spirited energy. The kids from Franklin Elementary buzzed with anticipation, whispering excitedly to one another as they fidgeted in two semistraight lines. The music seemed to feed their enthusiasm and fray their patience.
As she approached the gate, ten-year-old Delilah Marlow clutched her brown-bag lunch and stared at the graceful form in front of her. The woman handing out tickets wore a red sequined leotard with a black feathered hat, black stockings, and shiny black slippers. Her lips were painted bright red. Her blue eyes practically glowed beneath dramatic sparkly lashes and thin dark eyebrows that ended in a jewel-studded curlicue at each of her temples.
She was the most glamorous thing Delilah had ever seen.
“Here you go, sweetheart.” The costumed woman handed her a shiny slip of red paper. Delilah’s gaze lingered on the sequins and feathers as the woman handed tickets to each of the other five fifth graders in the group, and to Mrs. Essig, their young homeroom teacher. “You all enjoy your visit, and remember to look but not touch. Especially you!” She patted the brown spikes sticking up all over Matt Fuqua’s head. “With that hair, you might just be mistaken for a werewolf pup!”
The other three boys laughed and elbowed Matt, but fell into a sudden awed silence as another woman in red sequins passed by—walking on her black-gloved hands. Her tiny waist was bent backward at a severe angle, so that both of her bare feet dangled over her head, her toes nearly touching the top of her skull.
Delilah couldn’t stop staring.
Shelley Wells linked her arm with Delilah’s as they stepped through the gate and into the carnival. “How does she do that?”
“She’s a circus freak.” Matt marched past the girls as if he owned the whole midway. “My dad says some of them are just as weird as the monsters they got in cages.”
Mrs. Essig hurried to catch up with him, shooting an apologetic glance at the red-sequined woman. “They’re human,” she whispered fiercely as she grabbed the back of Matt’s shirt to keep him from wandering down an offshoot of the main path on his own. “That’s all that matters.”
Matt pulled free of his teacher’s grip. “Are we sure they’re human? My dad says sometimes you can’t tell just from lookin’. Remember the reaping?”
Mrs. Essig nodded stiffly, but Delilah knew their teacher didn’t actually remember the reaping, and neither did Matt Fuqua. Only old people actually remembered the reaping, and most of them didn’t like to talk about it, because they’d all known someone who’d died. Or killed. Or been taken.
Remember the reaping? wasn’t just a question. It was something parents said in hushed voices. Something priests advised while they made the sign of the cross. Something politicians shouted from behind podiums. Remember the reaping was a warning not to let history repeat itself. A reminder for humanity not to let its guard down.
Remember the reaping was an American way of life.
The teacher rubbed her forehead and pinched the bridge of her nose. Delilah recognized both gestures. Mrs. Essig was getting another headache.
Matt shrugged, oblivious to his teacher’s discomfort. “My dad says you have to be careful who you trust, because the reaping could happen again.”
According to Delilah’s father, Matt Fuqua was just smart enough to be dangerous. Others who’d warranted the same description included congressmen from the wrong side of the aisle and that eight-year-old from Memphis who’d figured out how to put his mother’s car into Neutral before he realized he couldn’t reach the brake.
Just smart enough to be dangerous, it turned out, wasn’t really very smart at all.
For the next hour, Delilah and her classmates wandered along the crowded sawdust-strewn midway, clutching their lunches and staring in awe at every vibrant spectacle they passed. They didn’t have access to the entire menagerie. The owner had generously offered a complimentary midway “preview” for all of the local schools, with the hope that curious parents would later attend the whole carnival at full price. But what they did see was enough to impress even the most jaded fifth grader.
Along with the tantalizing scent of the food carts and the game booths boasting all the bells and whistles, costumed circus performers gave abbreviated demonstrations to cheering children and stunned teachers. A man in a red velvet jacket and dramatic black eyeliner swallowed a series of swords on a small dais, while Delilah rubbed her throat in empathy. Five acrobats in red-and-black sequined leotards formed an inverted pyramid, their bodies bent and twisted into complicated shapes. And set back from the midway, behind velvet ropes to hold the audience at a distance, a man and woman in matching top hats and shiny red-and-black costumes juggled lit torches and breathed fire into the air.
Everywhere the children turned, a new spectacle awaited, each more extravagant than the last. But the real draw was a series of stunning hand-carved and brightly painted circus wagons that had been hauled out to line the midway. Each wheeled cage displayed a different cryptid the children had only ever seen on television, the internet, or in books. Handlers in black slacks and bright red shirts stood by, ready to answer questions or prod creatures into displaying their bizarre and sometimes unsettling features.
The first wheeled cage held a brownie, a small gnomelike creature with a long nose and pointed ears, which Matt labeled “boring” and Shelley pronounced “cute.” Another held a cockatrice—a miniature dragon with dark, unsettling eyes that stared up at them from its rooster-like head. The creature had scales that glittered with each elegant movement of its long whip of a tail. Its sharp talons clicked against the metal floor of the cage, and Delilah stumbled backward when it opened its curved beak and let out a terrible crow.
The exhibit most popular with the boys, other than the woman who could twist her body until she was standing on her own skull, was a dog with three heads, each growling and snapping at the other two. As they watched, a woman in a sparkly red bustier and black skirt tossed a bloody hunk of meat into the cage with an artistic flourish. The boys in the audience cheered as each third of the dog fought viciously over the single dinner all three mouths had to share.
All Delilah could think was that the dog must have been awfully hungry to keep stealing food from itself.
While the rest of the group remained spellbound by the savage snapping dog, Delilah wandered toward the next wagon, where a cluster of kids from another school had gathered. She had to push her way to the front of the whispering, pointing crowd, and her first glimpse of the creature in the cage stole her breath. It was like nothing she had ever seen. Or rather, it was like several things Delilah had seen, but never in such a seemingly random compilation of mismatched parts.
The cryptid was the size and general shape of a lion, its body covered in smooth golden fur ending with a long, slim, tufted tail. Each of her four paws was wider than Delilah’s whole hand, but even more incredible was the huge pair of eagle-like wings growing from the creature’s back, its feathers fading from dark golden brown at the base to nearly white at the tips. Yet what really caused the commotion was the fact that the creature’s front feline paws grew up into deeply tanned human arms and shoulders, which supported an equally human neck and a human head with long, dark hair.
From the biceps up, the creature in the cage looked like a normal woman.
Mesmerized, Delilah glanced at the plaque wired to the front of the wagon. Sphinx, it read. The cryptid was a forty-three-year-old sphinx named Hecuba, who’d been taken from her mother’s nest on a Greek mountainside just weeks after she was born.
Delilah tried to imagine the creature in her natural habitat. Flying across the Greek countryside on huge powerful wings. Swooping to catch a goat or lamb in her razor-sharp claws, then taking the prize up to a massive nest on the side of a mountain. That would have been incredible to see.
Could Hecuba remember any of that life? Delilah couldn’t remember anything from when she was only a few weeks old.
The sphinx turned in her tight quarters, ready to pace several steps to the other end of her cage, but when her gaze met Delilah’s, Hecuba froze. Her eyes were gold and round like a cat’s, and the left one peeked at the child through a curtain of dark hair. But no cat had ever looked at Delilah like Hecuba was looking at her. No bird had either.
The sphinx glared at her the way her mother did in church, when Delilah kept clicking the ballpoint pen but couldn’t be scolded during the prayer.
The sphinx was looking at Delilah as if she wanted to say something.
Hecuba blinked, then continued pacing, but every time she turned toward the fascinated child, their gazes locked and Delilah’s curiosity was piqued again.
“Can we ask her questions?” she asked the sphinx’s handler, a large man in jeans whose thick arms were crossed over a simple red employee T-shirt. There were no top hats or sequins for handlers assigned to the most dangerous cryptids—nothing that could distract from the safety regulations.
“Questions?” The handler frowned down at her, as if he found her request very odd. “You can ask anything you want, but don’t expect an answer. She don’t talk. Even if she could, it’d probably be nonsense. Having a human head don’t mean she has a human brain.”
Delilah decided to give it a try anyway, because what other kind of brain could be inside a human head? She stepped closer to the cage, but stopped when the handler stuck one arm out to keep her at a safe distance. “Hecuba?” she said, and the sphinx stilled when she heard her name. “Do you remember Greece?”
The sphinx blinked, then narrowed her eyes at the child. A human tongue peeked from between her dry lips to wet them, and Delilah’s pulse quickened. Hecuba was going to answer. She, Delilah Marlow, was going to be the first person in history to carry on a conversation with a sphinx!
“Ha!” Someone shoved Delilah’s shoulder, and she stumbled to the left. When she turned, she found Matt Fuqua leering at her. “Did you really think it was going to answer you?” Matt and his friends laughed at Delilah while her cheeks burned.
Mrs. Essig quietly rounded up her group and announced that it was time to eat their bagged lunches.
As they headed down the midway toward the petting zoo, which boasted a picnic area and hand-washing station, the parade of performers and exhibits continued. Matt stepped into the path of an acrobat doing backflips down the sawdust-strewn path, and if Mrs. Essig hadn’t pulled him out of the way, he would have wound up tangled in a knot of bendy limbs and sequins.
Shelley whispered into Delilah’s ear that Mrs. Essig should have let him go. Death by circus acrobat would have been the most interesting thing ever to happen to him.
The petting zoo was a fenced-off area at the end of the midway. Inside, a series of small open-air pens had been arranged across from a collection of long folding picnic tables. Mrs. Essig claimed the end of one table for her six field-trip charges and shooed them toward a hand-washing station at one end of the exhibit.
Delilah dropped her lunch bag on the chair she’d claimed, then followed Shelley toward the boxy plastic sink and soap dispensers. While the boys splashed each other and used more paper towels than they actually required, Delilah and Shelley wandered slowly past the enclosures, oohing and aahing over the young beasts on display.
Instead of the usual collection of lambs, piglets, and newborn bunnies, the menagerie’s petting zoo held werewolf puppies, a centaur foal who pranced around her pen with hair the color of wheat flying out behind her, and the most adorable little bundle of white fur identified by the sign hanging from its pen as an infant yeti.
There was also a young giant—a three-foot-tall toddler wearing a folded tablecloth as a diaper. The giant’s forehead protruded grotesquely and his legs were knobby and twisted. After a second of staring at him, Delilah decided that the huge toddler was much more scared of the taunting children than they were of him.
Shelley’s favorites were the werewolf pups. The plaque hanging from their pen said that they were five years old and had been born right there in the menagerie. They had a baby sister, according to petting zoo’s “nanny”—a woman in black overalls and a stained red apron. But the infant was still too young to be separated from her mother, so Shelley and Delilah would have to come back with their parents to see the full display at night, if they wanted a glimpse at the only baby werewolf in the menagerie.
At the last pen before the hand-washing station, Matt and his friends had gathered, wet fingers still dripping, and were shouting to be heard over one another as they stared into the pen. “What’s going on?” Shelley said, elbowing her way through the small throng of boys with Delilah at her side.
“There’s no sign, so we’re taking bets about what’s in the pen,” Matt explained. “I’ve got a homemade fudge brownie up for grabs, from my lunch, and Elías is throwing in a candy bar.”
Delilah peered into the pen and discovered the source of the mystery. Three forms sat at the back in a semicircle, facing away from the crowd. The one on the left was the smallest and the one on the right was the largest, but all three wore what seemed to be threadbare nightgowns. Without their faces visible, their species was a total mystery.
“I say they’re cyclopses,” Matt declared.
Delilah shook her head. “Cyclopses are giants.”
“Actually, there’s a pygmy species native to a small island near Greece.” Neal Grundidge pulled a used tissue from his pocket and swiped at his runny nose. “They’re people-sized.”
“They could be satyrs,” Elías said. “We can’t see their feet from here.”
“Hey!” Matt shouted, gripping the pen with both hands. “Hey, turn around! We paid for freaks, so show us some freaks!”
“This field trip is free,” Shelley reminded him, but Matt only wedged one sneakered foot into the pen and climbed up a foot.
“Get down!” Delilah whispered fiercely, as the nanny started toward them with clenched fists and narrowed eyes. “You’re going to get us all in trouble.”
“We’re not leaving until you turn around, freaks!” Matt shouted, propelling himself another foot up the six-foot fence.
The creatures on the right and left of the semicircle hunched even closer to the center, but the one in the middle slowly began to turn.
Delilah held her breath, and Matt dropped onto the ground but clutched the fence with both hands. All six of the classmates watched, spellbound, as the form in the middle stood on human legs and feet and turned to face them. Long dark hair hung over her face, obscuring the source of her monstrosity, and silence fell over the fifth graders as they waited, frozen.
Finally the girl in the dress lifted one human-looking hand and pushed her hair back to reveal...
A perfectly normal-looking little girl.
“Awww!” Neal frowned. “She looks like my little sister.”
“What is she?” Elías asked, as the nanny approached.
“She’s not a she, she’s an it,” Matt insisted, backing solemnly away from the pen. “That’s the most dangerous kind of freak. The kind that looks like us. She must be a surrogate.”
“Are those her sisters?” Neal asked. “Surrogates don’t have brothers and sisters.”
“She’s an oracle,” the nanny said. “All three of them are. Right now they mostly find lost things and guess your middle name, but someday, they’ll be able to see the future.”
“You think they’ll see another reaping?” Shelley whispered.
Delilah hardly heard her best friend’s question. When her classmates had bored of the normal-looking freak and moved on to eat their lunch, Delilah stood alone in front of the pen, staring at the child oracle, who stared right back at her through haunting golden-brown eyes. The girl was a couple of years younger than Delilah, and a lot skinnier. Her nightgown was stained. Her hair was tangled and dirty, her bare feet caked in mud. There was no food in the oracles’ pen, nor any furniture at all.
When Delilah finally turned away from the girl on the other side of the fence, bothered by something she couldn’t quite put into words, she could feel the oracle watching as she walked all the way back to her table and sat with her friends. That unseen gaze followed her as she pulled a sandwich from her brown bag and stared at it, suffering a sudden loss of appetite.
Finally, as she opened her carton of milk, Delilah’s grim tangle of thoughts cleared enough for one to shine through. If that girl was a monster, anyone could be a monster. That’s why the world was so terrified of another reaping. Because just like last time, humanity would never see it coming.
But if monsters could look like humans, and humans could look like monsters, how could anyone ever really be sure that the right people stood on the outside of all those cages?
“Three hundred one thousand babies were born in hospitals across the United States in March of 1980. Not one of them made it home from the hospital.”
—Opening lines of a 1996 documentary entitled
The Reaping—America’s Greatest Tragedy
Rommily (#ulink_b95076e4-ee42-5236-8fd2-4f66ba26c4ae)
A bead of sweat rolled down Rommily’s brow and soaked into the thin blanket beneath her head. In midsummer, the inside of the cargo trailer was always sweltering, and being accustomed to the dark and the heat and the relentless jostling from the road wasn’t the same as being comfortable. But then, comfort wasn’t a concept she remembered very well anyway. She’d been sold to the menagerie as a skinny six-year-old with wide honey-brown eyes, clinging to her older sister’s hand while she whispered reassurances into her younger sister’s ear.
At twenty, Rommily was still thin and her eyes were still wide and honey brown, but the rest of her was all grown-up.
For the past decade of their fourteen years in captivity the oracles had shared a single cage on wheels, just wide enough to let them sleep side by side and just tall enough to stand up in. Rommily’s entire world consisted of 192 cubic feet of space, which she shared with her sisters. What little time they didn’t spend staring out at the world through steel mesh was spent performing, in chains.
Rommily could recall little of her life before the menagerie, and what memories she still possessed had taken on the hazy quality of a half-remembered dream.
The overloaded semi rolled to a stop with a familiar groan and the harsh squeal of brakes, and her body rocked with the motion. Near the front of the trailer, the pup whined in her cage, and at the rear one of the cats snorted, startled from sleep by the sudden loss of forward momentum.
The cats, she knew, always dreamed of trees, of wind and earth and prey. The pup dreamed about her mother. Rommily remembered their dreams clearly, though she hadn’t been able to peek into them in months.
She sat up on the threadbare quilt that served as her pallet in the summer and her blanket in the cold. She glanced at the sister on her left, then at the sister on her right, both still asleep in spite of the narrow empty space she had left between them. She could hardly see them in the muddy darkness, but she knew their shapes by heart.
On the left was Lala, with her perpetual baby face and thin frame, dirty toes peeking from beneath her long layered skirt, even with her legs curled up to her chest. Lala was the youngest of the three, and the smartest, according to most.
On the right was Mirela, whose bountiful figure endured, though she was fed no more than the rest of the livestock. Mirela had a spine of steel, a fact evident in her proud posture. Mirie would not bend. Not for food, not for sleep, and not for comfort. Deep down, her sisters understood that if she were ever pushed too hard, she would snap, and the recoil might kill them all.
There wasn’t enough room to move around in the steel crate, so Rommily sat with her knees tucked up to her chest and stared into the cage across the narrow aisle that ran down the center of the cargo trailer. A set of eyes flashed in the dark, reflecting what little light filtered through the vents in the top of the wide-load trailer.
The minotaur was awake. If he ever slept, Rommily couldn’t tell. Every time she woke up on the road, the bull was watching her. Not just looking at her. Watching her. She wasn’t sure of much anymore, but she was sure of that.
The rumble of the engine died, and in its absence voices echoed from outside, shouting orders and barking replies. Rommily couldn’t tell what time it was from the muddy light overhead, but the time of day never mattered anyway. Regardless of the hour or the weather, the roustabouts would start setting everything up the moment they arrived at the site, the latest in an endless blur of rural county fairgrounds. Lost time was lost money, and if there was anything old man Metzger wasn’t willing to lose, it was money.
Something scraped the outside of the cargo trailer, and Lala rolled over in her sleep. Metal creaked from the left and right as the other livestock began to stir in their cages. The acrid scent of fresh urine wafted from the front of the trailer and Rommily’s nose crinkled. Someone’s bladder control had failed. Probably the pup’s. But that was no surprise, considering how long they’d been locked in the dark.
A sudden violent squeal of metal ripped through the voices echoing from outside, and Rommily’s eyelids snapped shut as mental images rolled over her. Visions still came like that sometimes, triggered from deep within her by a sight, scent, or sound.
“Take the key and lock her up,” she mumbled.
The bull’s eyes narrowed as his attention to Rommily intensified, but she didn’t notice. She could no longer see anything but what played in her head, and even if she actually understood what she saw this time, no one else ever would. They hadn’t been able to make much sense of anything she’d said since the rainy night they’d found her wandering between the cages on some Midwestern fairgrounds, drenched to the bone and dripping with enough blood to drive the cats into a frenzy.
Rommily knew that she understood more of the world than it understood of her since that night, but that frustrated her much less than the brutal realignment of her divination. Her third eye saw mostly the end of life now, and each vision chipped away a little more of her sanity. Mirela worried that she was too far gone already. Rommily worried that Mirela was right.
“Jack fell down and broke his crown,” she whispered, and the words ran together like watercolors on canvas.
On her right, Mirela sat up, took one look at Rommily, then shoved her other sister’s shoulder. Lala groaned and opened her eyes, ready to grump, but when her gaze fell on Rommily, the words died on her tongue.
Before either of them could try for the thousandth time to interpret their sister’s words, the mighty groan of steel obliterated any attempt at communication. A second later, their cage began to tremble as the floor of the trailer shuddered beneath it.
The trailer wall behind the bull’s cage separated from the ceiling with a great creak. Harsh daylight poured in through the ever-widening seams at the top of the wall and down both sides, blinding the occupants inside as the wall, hinged at the bottom, folded down like a ramp the full length of the trailer.
The effect was like opening one long side of a box to reveal its contents. Anyone unaccustomed to the sight would have been astonished by the number of wheeled cages lined up inside, neat as a child’s blocks put away for storage.
But Rommily and her sisters, and the pup, and the cats, and all the others—they only stared out at the circus unfolding before them with tired, glazed eyes.
The bull didn’t turn to look, not even when several big roustabouts in dusty jeans and matching red shirts climbed the ramp at his back. Their heavy boots clomped against the metal floor, and they began opening locks and pulling heavy iron chains from the axles beneath the bull’s cage.
The minotaur was bigger than all three of the oracles combined, and it took eight men—all of them big and strong, and accustomed to the work—to control the roll of his cage down the ramp. If left to gravity, his cart would crash heavily into whatever blocked its path, and if there was anything old man Metzger liked less than wasted time or lost money, it was broken equipment.
While several of the roustabouts stayed behind to sedate the bull, then let him out of his pen and fit him with a work harness, the others climbed the ramp again to fetch the horse cages. The centaurs couldn’t bear a load like the minotaur, but all beasts of burden would be put to heavy labor of one sort or another.
To keep them healthy enough to work, they were given extra food.
To keep them relatively safe to work with, they were given regular sedatives, which kept their minds dull.
Rommily watched as the minotaur was harnessed, leather straps fitting over his largely bovine head and massive, heavy horns before lying across enormous cords of human neck muscle. He blinked at her through a medicated daze. His attention didn’t falter even when the lot superintendent started shouting orders and waving his arms, directing carts of brightly colored costumes and decorative wagon casings—huge hand-carved frames, which would be mounted on the sides of the cages when they went on display.
Mirela and Lala sat on their knees on either side of their sister, and together they watched the pre-carnival dance, a laborious routine they knew well. Everyone had a job. Every job was important. The last time someone forgot to double-check a lock, three people had died. Four, if you count the creature that got loose.
But no one ever counted him.
The beasts of burden were put to work unloading the other cages. The oracles watched, mute, as pairs of large men hauled huge posts toward the fairgrounds. Women drove tractors pulling carts full of supplies, hay, and feed.
Rommily’s fingers folded around the steel mesh in front of her when the roustabouts came for her cage. The animal exhibits had been unloaded and all that remained were the specialized-service acts. The succubi. The sirens. The oracles. Soon they would be cleaned up, decked out in bright colors, and acclaimed on the midway as dancers, singers, and fortune-tellers. But that was all for show. For profit. For later.
For now...
The rattle of chains and the metallic screech of wheeled cages. Sweat-stained clothes and growling bellies, and the aged stench of travel.
The oracle sisters rocked with the jostle of the cage as they were rolled off the trailer. They squinted against the harsh sunlight. Rommily breathed deeply in the open air, but even outside the stale livestock trailer, the menagerie still smelled like captivity. Like straw and animals and sweat and manure. Like rust, oil, and exhaust.
The bull passed the oracles’ cage pulling two of the wolves’ pens, linked end to end. His gaze caught on Rommily again, and he veered so sharply that the man pulling his harness turned and beat him over the head with a thick baton. Rommily could only watch, and when the small procession had gone, her focus fell on a sign revealed by its passing.
Welcome to the Franklin County Fairgrounds.
Rommily shook her head, and her grip on the steel mesh tightened. When she opened her mouth, the commotion of the menagerie swallowed her voice before even her sisters could hear it. But the words echoed in her own head long after they fell from her tongue.
“...we all fall down...”
Delilah (#ulink_7d737ea8-25b5-5624-b053-a6f994a87fa4)
On the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday, I woke up to find that Brandon had left four glossy red tickets on my nightstand. They were made from nice card stock—definitely keepsake quality—covered in glittering, scrolling black script. My hand shook as I picked them up. I knew what they were before I even read the print.
Admission For One
To Metzger’s Menagerie
The Largest Traveling Zoo
In The Northern Hemisphere
I left the tickets in the glove box during my shift at the bank, where I spent most of the day trying to tune out the excited chatter of my fellow tellers. About half of my coworkers also had tickets. The other half couldn’t afford to go.
Nothing pays very well in small-town Oklahoma, and usually that’s okay, because there isn’t much to do in the land of red earth anyway, until you get up to the capital or out toward Tulsa. Hell, you can’t even get full-strength beer with your dinner unless you pay for an import.
But the menagerie hadn’t been within driving distance of Franklin County in nearly fifteen years, and it might never come back. Everyone who could borrow money or call in a debt would be there to see the spectacle.
Including me.
Brandon had spent a fortune on the tickets, and it didn’t really matter that I would rather drive to the city and spend my birthday at the ballet, or a concert, or even a baseball game. As my mother had told me all my life, the true gift was in the intent, and my boyfriend had meant well.
He always meant well.
That evening, Brandon took my hand as we wandered down the fairground midway behind my best friend, Shelley Wells, and her boyfriend, Rick. Barkers cried out from both sides of the path, challenging us to pin the tail on the centaur, or knock down pop-up silhouettes of satyrs with a rubber-tipped archery set, or shoot the shell bras off mermaid figurines with water guns. Calliope music played at a volume only small children and the near-deaf could actually enjoy.
The noise scattered my thoughts and scraped my nerves raw. We hadn’t even gotten to the menagerie section of the carnival yet and I was ready to go home.
“Hey, Lilah, did you see they have a minotaur?” Shelley pointed to a twenties-style poster tacked up next to a spinning ride advertised as “guaranteed to make you hurl.”
“They didn’t have him when we were kids.”
I nodded, and she turned to walk backward, facing me while she shouted above the jostling, buzzing crowd. “You see a minotaur in school?”
“No. They’re pretty rare.” We’d seen very few live cryptids in class, and minotaurs were among the least likely to ever be studied by undergrads. They bred slowly in captivity and gave birth to only one offspring at a time. Most experts believed they’d be extinct within a century—a tragedy few in the U.S. would recognize.
“You shouldn’t have quit.” Shelley turned to face forward again, taking Rick’s arm, then called to me over her shoulder. “You would’ve been a great crypto-vet.”
“I didn’t quit. I just didn’t go to grad school.” For a while, though, that had been the plan. I’d finished my crypto-biology degree and had already been accepted into two crypto-veterinary programs before I’d realized that the only jobs legally available in the U.S. for crypto-vets would have required me to lock up my patients. Even the ones with human faces.
Those jobs were at places like Metzger’s Menagerie.
Or worse: research labs, in which scientists tested everything from cosmetics to biological weapons on creatures protected by neither human law nor ASPCA regulations.
Disillusioned by those prospects, I’d moved back home to Franklin, where the median income was less than two-thirds that of the national average and my best guess on the median vocabulary looked even less promising.
A jewel glittering among small-town clods of red clay, Brandon was a newly minted pharmacist with a future in the family business. He read books and spoke in complete sentences. We’d been together since the month I’d come home from college, and—poor gift-giving skills aside—he was a very nice guy. And he truly loved me.
The only part of me that had been relieved to find such a morally ambiguous birthday present on my nightstand was the part that had half expected an engagement ring.
I wanted to be more than a small-town bank teller married to a small-town pharmacist. But I had no idea what “more” might look like, and the certainty that I’d know it when I saw it had faded with each day spent in Franklin. All I ever saw was Brandon, and all he seemed to want to see was me.
And a traveling zoo full of bizarre beasts.
The actual menagerie was behind a second gate at the end of the sawdust-strewn midway, a design no doubt intended to pull people past countless opportunities to spend money on their way to the main attraction—the only part of the carnival not offered on a yearly basis by the county fair.
Brandon and I caught up with Shelley and Rick at the menagerie gate, where another line had formed. I recognized several of the people in the crowd as account holders from the bank, but without my name tag—Hello, My Name is Delilah. Can I Interest You in a No-Fee Savings Plan?—they didn’t seem to recognize me. The family in front of us had three small children, each clamoring to touch the shifter kittens and phoenix chicks in the petting zoo. At the gate, the parents were reminded that certain areas of the exhibit, namely the succubus tent, would be off-limits to anyone under eighteen.
Rick snickered like an overgrown twelve-year-old and Shelley elbowed him. I thanked the universe for my mature, stable, predictable boyfriend, then realized that I’d just found three different ways to call Brandon boring.
When we got to the front of the line, an elderly man in a red sequined vest and a black top hat took one look at Shelley, then bowed low and pulled a bouquet of real daisies from his sleeve. He presented them to her with a flourish from one knee, heedless of his cracking joints.
Delighted, Shelley returned his bow with a curtsy, spreading the hem of an imaginary skirt, and even I couldn’t resist a smile. Then she and Rick helped the poor old man to his feet.
The ticket taker resettled his hat on his head. “First time at the menagerie?”
“Kind of.” Shelley stuck her nose into the daisies and sniffed. “Delilah and I saw some of it when we were kids. They didn’t bring out any of the exotic stuff, though.”
“Well, then, you’re in for a treat!” He glanced at our plastic full-pass bracelets, then waved us inside with a grand, white-gloved gesture. “Trust me, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve never seen anything like this before.”
However, that could only be partly true, no matter what they had on display behind velvet curtains and in gilded cages. Gone were the days when centaurs roamed the plains in herds, with flocks of thunderbirds beating powerful wings overhead, but we’d grown up seeing cryptids of all sizes, shapes, and colors on television and in movie theaters. They were the villains in our horror movies, most of which drew on the reaping for inspiration. They were the hidden terrorist threats in our thrillers, the bumbling bad guys in our comedies, and the subject of scientific study in nearly every documentary I’d ever seen.
That’s where traveling creature features had the market cornered. Anyone could see a werewolf on television, but the average citizen could only see one live at the menagerie. If he or she could afford the cost of admission. And Metzger’s had the most diverse collection of any cryptid zoo in the country.
Metzger’s was stunning. I couldn’t deny that, even as I stopped to scrape a thin coating of manure and sawdust from the sole of my left boot onto the grass.
Compared to the Tilt-A-Whirl and corn-dog portion of the carnival, the menagerie was practically circus finery. The lights were brighter and the colors more vibrant. Even the boisterous organ music felt more sophisticated and dimensional. Costumed performers wandered the midway with flaming batons, balloon bouquets, and souvenir top hats, giving the menagerie the same glamorous, exotic appeal I remembered from my visit as a child. The red sequined costumes had been updated, as, presumably, had the employees wearing them, and the scents of fried dough and roasted meat still made my mouth water.
But the guilt twisting my insides into knots couldn’t be calmed by junk food, and the glass of wine I’d had in place of my pre-carnival dinner hadn’t helped in the least. The small line of People First protesters shouting, “Remember the reaping!” outside the front gate had only made the whole thing worse.
The People First activists wanted the menagerie to leave Franklin County. We had that much in common. However, they didn’t object to the inhumane treatment of cryptids in captivity—they were scared that the cryptids would escape and embark upon another devastating human slaughter.
What they didn’t seem to realize was that if the menagerie’s oddities escaped, we would see them coming.
We hadn’t seen the reaping coming. The cryptid surrogates had pulled off the greatest con in all of history—so meticulously executed that we didn’t realize the scale of the infiltration until it was far too late. Six years after the first wave, we’d still had no idea that our losses numbered more than three hundred thousand.
Fearing locked-up cryptids that didn’t look human would do us no more good than suspecting our own neighbors and relatives of being monsters, as we’d done for decades after the reaping. But scared people can’t be reasoned with. Scared politicians can’t be talked down from their podiums. Scared nations pass reactionary laws without bothering to consider how much powder those legal snowballs will gather as they roll down Capitol Hill. Eventually, yesterday’s outrage becomes today’s normalcy.
Reactionary legislation had spawned outfits like Metzger’s, where anything and everything not deemed to be human could be locked up and put on display with no limits, no boundaries, and no regulations except those meant to protect employees and spectators. Which made people like me—the admittedly quiet minority—profoundly uncomfortable.
My tension headache told me I shouldn’t have accepted the tickets. My queasy stomach said I shouldn’t be celebrating my birthday at the menagerie where, as a child, I’d been shocked to see three malnourished little girls locked in an animal pen wearing no more than a few filthy scraps of material. Because when I remembered the reaping—inarguably the most profound tragedy to ever strike the U.S.—I also remembered the millions of innocent cryptids who’d been rounded up and thrown in prisons or shot on sight for resisting arrest.
By the time I was born, several years after the reaping was discovered, the government had begun denying citizenship and legal rights to any living being only partially human, as well as to any hybrid of two or more different biological families.
What that meant was that ligers and mules were protected by the ASPCA because they were both hybrids of two animals that share the same biological genus and family. But because the griffin is a hybrid of two different classes—Mammalia and Aves—and three different orders—Carnivora, Artiodactyla, and Squamata—it isn’t recognized as a natural animal but as a cryptid “beast.” Anything considered “unnatural” under such legislation was denied protection under U.S. law.
That secondary national tragedy, a clean sweep of everyone not wholly human or “naturally” fauna, had been brushed under the rug, and even mentioning it made my friends and coworkers look at me as if I’d just set fire to the U.S. flag. So I’d stopped talking about it. But I hadn’t stopped feeling it.
Yet deep down, I was dying to see the strange and amazing creatures I’d studied in school, for all the same reasons that had led me to major in crypto-biology in the first place. I wanted to see the beautiful selkie emerging from her seal-skin. The troll, so tall and thick he couldn’t stand up in most human-scale buildings. The man who could turn into a cheetah at will. The part of me that objected to the confinement and abuse of such beings was the very same part that needed to see them for myself.
To understand.
Metzger’s had no right to exploit the creatures in its custody, but that wouldn’t end whether I looked at them or not. And who better than I to truly appreciate, rather than taunt or mock?
At least, that’s how I rationalized my warring desires to both condemn and experience the spectacle.
At the center of the menagerie, towering over everything else, was the big top, an enormous red-and-white-striped circus tent with three sharp peaks that cast an ominous shadow over the fairgrounds. The entrance flaps remained tightly closed until a paying guest was admitted, making it impossible to catch even a passing glimpse of the mysteries within. Around the perimeter of the menagerie stood a series of smaller tents and attractions, and branching from those were a series of themed subsections. Everything from the posters and cages to the costumes and music was designed with a vintage feel so that it seemed as though we’d stepped back in time.
Up first was the bestiary, where cryptid animals lounged or paced in sideshow cage wagons modeled after circus train cars from the early 1900s. They had bright, intricately carved frames and huge wooden wheels, and the beasts within were visible from both sides, through thick iron bars reinforced with sheets of modern steel mesh.
The mesh was a recent requirement, after a twelve-year-old had lost her right hand to an irritable troll in a carnival out West somewhere, a few years back.
Shelley oohed and aahed over the chimera, a beast with the body and claws of a lion, two heads—one lion, one goat—and a snake for a tail. “Delilah, look how thick and smooth his fur is!” she cried, her nose inches from the side of the cage. I gently tugged her back by one arm. Anything with claws and venom should be appreciated from at least two feet away. “So glossy!”
But when the creature turned to pace four steps in the other direction—the full length of its cramped quarters—I noticed that the fur on the goat head’s side was matted and dirty. Obviously that half didn’t self-groom.
“Here, kitty, kitty!” Shelley called, and the snake growing in place of the beast’s tail hissed at her.
“He’s not a kitty, Shell,” Brandon said. “He’s a ferocious beast capable of tearing you apart with three different jaws at once.”
“He’s not a he.” I pointed at a sign attached with twists of wire to the bars on one end of the cage car. “Her name is Cleo. She’s eighty-six years old, as of last spring,” I said, still reading from the plaque. “Born in the wild well before both the reaping and the repeal of the Sanctuary Act, and still in her prime today.” I stepped back for a better look. “Poor thing. By the time she dies, she’ll have spent three-quarters of her life in a cage.”
Rick rolled his eyes. “They’re animals, Delilah. They don’t even know where they are.”
“We’re all animals. From the taxonomy kingdom Animalia. And you don’t know what she knows or feels. Have some respect. She’s your elder.”
Rick laughed as if I’d made a joke. He tried to put one arm around me and when I pulled away from him, I tripped over a rock and had to grab one of the cage’s bars to keep from falling. The heavy cage rocked just a little, and the chimera twisted toward me faster than I would have thought something with three heads could move. The snake hissed and the lion head roared.
I froze, intuitively trying not to trigger any further predatory instinct, but Shelley screeched and jumped back.
Rick laughed at her. Brandon pulled me away from the cage and didn’t let go even after I’d regained my balance, my heart still racing.
“Don’t touch the exhibits,” a deep voice growled, and we turned to find a large man in a bright red baseball cap standing near the end of the chimera cage. His red polo shirt bore the Metzger’s logo and the name embroidered over his heart read Gallagher. His hair was thick and curly beneath his cap and his eyes were dark gray. “Unless you want to lose a lot of blood.”
“I tripped.” In the glare from the setting sun, I noticed several old scars on his face and his forearms, and I wondered how many of those had come from beasts he was in charge of. And how many of them he deserved.
“Cleo’s in an iron cage, surrounded by steel mesh,” Rick said. “What’s she going to do, roar until our ears bleed?”
The man tugged the bill of his red cap down, shading more of his strong features. “Only a fool believes his eyes over all other senses.”
Shelley laughed out loud while Rick fumed, and when I turned back for another glimpse of the large man in the red hat, he was gone.
Shelley and I dragged the guys toward the next cage: Panthera leo aeetus. Commonly known as a griffin.
Rick and Brandon were fascinated by the griffins, both perched on dead tree branches bolted to the ends of their massive aviary on wheels. They had the hindquarters of a lion and the majestic head, wings, and front claws of an eagle.
An eagle on the physical scale of a lion.
I’d seen them on television and studied them in school, but I’d had no appreciation for their size until I stood in front of them. They must have weighed at least five hundred pounds each.
Brandon shouted at one, unrebuked by another large, gruff handler, and was rewarded when the griffin suddenly threw his enormous wings out and flapped, as if he’d dive at us. We all gasped and backpedaled. The griffin pulled his dive up short at the last second, and I noticed that a patch on his right wing, along the top ridge, was bare of feathers at exactly the spot his wing would have hit the bars, if he hadn’t stopped.
The griffin made a horrible avian screech and I covered both my ears, but when he settled on a branch closer to us, still riled up from being teased, I realized that his sharp eagle’s beak and incredible wingspan were far less intimidating than his feet, a lethal cross between a lion’s claws and a bird’s talons.
They were huge. And sharp. I noticed a dried chunk of raw meat wedged between his first and second digits.
My heart ached for him. The griffin was obviously meant to soar the skies and stalk the plains in wide-open freedom. None of which he would get in the menagerie. Yes, griffins could be dangerous, but so could bears and sharks and alligators, yet we didn’t round them all up and throw them into cages.
After the griffins came the phoenix. Shelley was disappointed when it refused to burst into flames, then rise from its own ashes for her personal amusement, even though the signs wired to its cage said the poor thing wasn’t due for a “rebirth” for nearly another month. I thought it was beautiful, even without the flames. The phoenix had a long graceful swan-like neck with plumage in vibrant graduating shades of red, yellow, and orange. Its broad sweeping tail would have made any peacock jealous.
After the bestiary, we skipped the “Natural Oddities” section, which promised us trolls, ogres, goblins, and other assorted humanoid creatures of legend. Brandon led the way toward the “Human Hybrids” section, where the sign at the entrance promised us “bizarre and fascinating combinations of man and beast.”
“Come forward, come forward!” the uniformed man at the tent entrance called, waving us closer with both white-gloved hands. “Metzger’s guarantees you’ve never seen a spectacle like this, no matter what other shows you’ve attended. No one else on earth has such an extensive collection of grotesque mergers of human and animal flesh as you’ll find in this very tent. Wolf and man, horse and man, fish and man, bird and woman...” He winked at Rick. “We’ve got it all! And don’t forget to take a peek at our world-famous minotaur! You won’t find another like him anywhere else in the continental U.S.!”
“It sounds really freaky,” Shelley said.
“That it is, that it is.” The talker bowed deeply, top hat in hand. “But you’ve got these lucky gentlemen to keep you and your friend safe.” He gave the guys another faux-confidential wink, and I almost laughed out loud. Brandon got nervous when he heard coyotes howl at night.
The man in the top hat glanced at our bracelets, then held back a canvas flap with a practiced flourish.
“Seriously, what’s it like in there?” Shelley asked before Rick could push his way inside.
The carny shrugged with an evasive smile. “Some people love it. Gives others the willies. But what I can tell you is that you can’t truly know who you are in here—” he laid one gloved hand over his red sequined vest “—until you’ve been through there.” He pushed the tent flap open wider.
Brandon, Shelley, and Rick stared into the darkness.
I stepped inside.
“Shock and grief echo across the United States this morning with the news that more than one million children died overnight, most reportedly killed in their sleep. Government officials and residents alike watch, stunned, as the reports continue to pour in, raising the death toll by several thousand per hour...”
—As reported by anchor Brian Richards on
U.S. Morning News, August 24, 1986
Delilah (#ulink_bc5b6fce-6054-5d70-8349-9a343575b3e8)
My ears roared with my own pulse as my friends followed me through the low entrance into the soaring tent, where a circle of faux-vintage wagon cages surrounded a bright red circus ring. The ring was empty except for a tall stool in the center, dramatically illuminated by a stark spotlight. Unoccupied bleachers lined the shadowy perimeter of the space, set up for a show to come later that night.
The farm scent was much less noticeable in the hybrid tent, where all the exhibits were at least part human, but there was yet more hay beneath our feet and the prevailing ambient noise was still the whisper of paws against hard surfaces and the occasional clomp of hooves.
Like the wagons in the bestiary, those in the hybrid tent had solid steel—or iron?—end panels, complete with massive, heavy-looking couplings with which they could be connected to the other cars. In theory. However, the rust on the hitches made me doubt that they were ever hooked to anything for very long.
Though we couldn’t see inside the cars with their end panels facing us, we could see into the wagons across the ring, where vaguely humanoid beings paced, slouched, or sat in the corners of their cages, wearily trying to ignore their audience.
A woman in a red sequined leotard and red-trimmed black top hat stepped forward when we got to the entrance of the ring, defined by padded crimson ropes strung between two shiny metal posts. “Welcome to the human hybrids tent, where every genetic atrocity you can imagine is on display to satisfy your curiosity!” Her name tag read Wendy, and she was cradling something in the crook of her left arm.
“Oh!” Shelley rushed toward the woman and the small bundle she held. “He doesn’t look so atrocious!”
Wendy gave her a slick, indulgent smile. “No, this little guy is damn near adorable.” She leaned into the light and I saw that she held an infant satyr, whose furry brown goat legs ended in tiny hooves. His chubby little belly and everything north of it was human, except the tiny horns growing from the sides of his skull.
I’d never seen anything cuter in my life.
“His mother just fed him, and I was about to take him back to the petting zoo.” Wendy twisted toward the circle of cages with hardly a glance at her young charge. “His mother’s the one at the back of—”
“Oh, can I hold him first?” Shelley asked, already reaching for the infant.
“I...um...” Wendy sputtered, obviously unsure how to answer. “I guess. Just for a second.” She laid the child in my best friend’s arms, while Rick and Brandon watched, dumbfounded.
“His fur tickles.” Shelley ran one finger down his fuzzy shin and over his hoof, but the child’s eyes never fluttered. He didn’t even seem to feel the touch.
“Why isn’t he moving?” I asked Wendy.
She shrugged. “He has a full belly. He’s passed out cold.”
That much was true, but it had nothing to do with the state of his stomach. I gently pulled back the baby’s left eyelid, then his right. “He’s not full, he’s sedated.” I frowned up at Wendy. “Why would you sedate an infant?” I demanded. Brandon put one hand on my shoulder to calm me, embarrassed by what he no doubt saw as an irrational tantrum on my part, but I shrugged him off. “He’s not a threat. He’s a baby.”
Wendy’s patronizing smile faltered. “If the reaping taught us anything, it’s that a threat can come in any size.” She took the baby back, and with it, her bright, cheery expression, which now looked as false as her ridiculously long, ridiculously red fingernails. “Now, if you’d like to see the kind of monster this little guy will grow into—” she swept her empty arm toward the wagon car on our left “—start here and follow the circle counterclockwise.”
My gaze followed the path formed between the outer loop of wagons and the inner, twelve-inch-high circus ring. Several other customers were clustered at various points on the path.
“When you get to the far side of the circle, go through the gate to the adjoining tent for a look at our special exhibits.”
Rick’s eyes brightened. “Is that where you keep the mermaids?”
She nodded and gave him an almost intimate smile, as if she were letting us in on a special secret. “Along with a couple of our other rare specimens. Including the Brazilian encantados—dolphin shape-shifters—and our world-famous minotaur.”
Brandon shoved Rick’s shoulder. “I told you there were mermaids!”
Wendy’s smile grew, and she was now ignoring me completely. “Just make sure you stay on the path and out of the center ring.”
“Why? What happens there?” Shelley asked.
“At the eight-o’clock show, one of the werewolves will do a live shift. I’ve seen it a million times, and it’s still incredible. You can’t miss it!” She laughed at Shelley’s worried expression. “They’re chained the whole time, even inside the safety cages, and they’re surrounded by armed handlers, too.” She gave each of us a full-color glossy pamphlet. “And the ten-o’clock show is stunning!” She gestured toward the ring with a familiar, wide-armed wave. “The draco sets two rings on fire and the cat shifters jump through them.” Her arm rose gracefully to take in the soaring ceiling of the tent. “They put a bird net around the whole thing, and the harpies make several breathtaking dives. I guarantee you’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the highlight of the evening.”
I stared at the pamphlet. I wanted to see the draco breathe fire and the harpies swoop and dive, but wanting something didn’t give one the right to have it. While I could rationalize my willingness to walk through passive exhibits I found fascinating yet morally repulsive, I could not justify sitting through a show in which sentient creatures were forced to perform against their will.
Though the prices Metzger’s was able to charge made it clear that I took the minority viewpoint on that.
“Do the shows cost extra?” Rick asked.
“Um...let me see your bracelet.” Wendy glanced at the wrist he held out. “Nope, you guys have the deluxe admission. You can go anywhere and see anything, except for the staff-only and staging areas.”
“Awesome,” Shelley said.
Wendy smiled and wished us a great evening, though her smile staled when it landed on me, then gestured for us to enter the ring. As we approached the first huge circus wagon, I glanced back to find her talking to Gallagher, the handler in the red cap, who’d snapped at me for touching the chimera cage.
They were both watching me.
I made myself turn back to my friends just as Shelley gasped. “He’s so big!”
For a second, I thought she was talking about the huge handler, and I almost nodded in agreement. Then I realized she was staring into the first cage, a silver-trimmed green masterpiece with fleurs-de-lis and stylized howling wolf heads carved into the corners. I hurried to catch up with my friends and as soon as I stepped in front of the first cage, labeled Claudio—Werewolf, I lost my breath.
Claudio was beautiful.
His eyes were golden, like multifaceted bits of amber, and while they were clearly wolf eyes, they contained an obvious understanding—a self-awareness that ordinary wolves’ eyes didn’t have. His fur was thick and silver and glossy, and when he paced into the half of his cage that was lit from the overhead lights, I saw that his silver coat was actually made up of many different shades of black, white, and gray. His fur shifted with each movement, the color rippling and buckling as each individual hair reflected the light at a slightly different angle.
I stared, transfixed.
Claudio growled at us softly, padding back and forth in a cage that was much too confined, because Shelley was right. He was huge.
“I didn’t realize how big they’d be,” Brandon said.
“Ordinary wolves don’t get that large,” I whispered, uncomfortably aware that the shifter could both hear and understand me, assuming he spoke English. “One hundred seventy-five pounds, max, for males. Most are closer to one-fifty.” By contrast, Claudio was two hundred pounds, by my guess—a wolf the size of a grown man—and in spite of an obviously confined lifestyle, he looked lean and powerful.
“The reality isn’t like the old monster movies,” I said, still speaking softly because somehow that felt more respectful of Claudio. “They don’t have superpowers. They’re strong and fast because they’re wolves, but they’re not superstrong, or superfast.”
“Yeah, but even a regular wolf can rip a man’s throat out,” Brandon said, and I couldn’t argue.
I stepped closer to the cage, fascinated, and Claudio snarled at me, lips curled back to reveal a muzzle full of lethally sharp teeth. The lump in my throat threatened to cut off my airway. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, and the growling stopped. Claudio blinked and tilted his head in an oddly human display of surprise, and that stream of guilt trickling through me swelled into a veritable river, until my veins surged with it.
Claudio didn’t belong in a cage, and just by coming to observe him in captivity, I’d become part of the problem.
Anger on his behalf uncoiled like a living thing deep inside me and I gasped at the hot, unsettling sensation in my belly.
“Lilah!” Shelley called as she moved on to the next cart, a green-trimmed silver inverse of the werewolf’s, with full moons carved into the scrolling frame. “There’s a girl wolf!”
Claudio’s snarling resumed, more intensely than before, a reminder that he not only heard everything we said, but understood us, as well.
The plaque on the next circus wagon read Geneviève—Werewolf, but at first glance, the cage appeared empty.
“I don’t...” Something flashed in one dark corner of the cage, two pinpoints of yellow light, there, then gone. Then there again.
Geneviève was blinking.
Curiosity got the better of me and I squinted, trying to get a better look at her, but I could barely make out a small, hunched form in the shadows.
“I can’t see her,” Rick complained. “What good are two-hundred-dollar menagerie tickets if the exhibits are just going to hide?”
“I think she’s scared,” I said. Brandon took my hand, and Shelley nodded mutely.
“She’s scared? She’s the monster. We’re supposed to be scared of her.” Rick scowled, already walking backward toward the next car, which, according to the sign, held one of only four adlets currently living in captivity.
Adlets were the wolf version of a satyr, stuck in an in-between state with both canine and human features. They were also cannibalistic, highly aggressive, and one of the most effective arguments in favor of keeping cryptids locked up.
“Hold on a minute, now, you don’t want to miss this,” a voice called from the darkness behind the werewolf cages. Hay crunched beneath heavy footsteps, and a moment later something clanked against the bars on the rear of Geneviève’s cage.
The light reflecting from her yellow eyes blinked out.
Claudio’s snarling deepened and from our right, the adlet responded with a fierce, eerie howl of its own. On the other side of the ring, hooves and paws scraped the floors of other cages as the captives paced nervously.
Unease gathered in the pit of my stomach and crawled along my arms. My hair stood on end. The hybrids’ anxiety was both obvious and contagious.
“Just a sec.” A handler stepped into the light falling over and through half of Geneviève’s cage. He was a stout, balding man in a Metzger’s T-shirt but no vest, hat, or sequins whatsoever. His shirt was stained with sweat, his boots caked with dirt, and a lit cigarette dangled from his mouth. This was a behind-the-scenes man if I’d ever seen one. He held what looked like a thick stick. “This ought to get her up for you.”
Geneviève whined, and the sound reminded me of a puppy we’d had when I was in middle school, before she’d chewed up the legs of my dad’s favorite chair and he’d made us give her away.
Claudio growled, accompanied by a snarl from the adlet, and when assorted hisses, growls, and the clang of metal rang out from across the ring of circus wagons, I realized that the entire hybrid section of the menagerie knew exactly what was about to happen.
“Last warning, Genni,” the handler said, and though her whining intensified, her eyes did not open. Too late, I realized that the handler’s stick was actually an electrified cattle prod.
“No!” I shouted, and dimly I was aware that I’d squeezed Brandon’s hand hard enough to make him flinch. My other hand had crushed the glossy pamphlet.
“It’s okay,” the handler said. “She makes us do this all the time.” He shoved the cattle prod through a small hole in the steel mesh at the back of her cage.
Geneviève yelped in pain, and Claudio’s growling crescendoed until it was almost all I could hear. The handler jabbed the traumatized werewolf one more time, and she scuttled out of her corner and into the light.
Rage filled me like a bonfire lit deep inside my soul. Geneviève was a little girl, no more than thirteen years old. She trembled on the floor of her cage, knees drawn up to her chest, heels tucked close to her body in an attempt to cover herself. She wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her face in the hollow between her knees, letting her long, tangled blond hair fall down her nearly bare back.
“Oh...” Shelley breathed, clearly horrified, and this time Brandon’s hand clenched mine. None of us seemed to know what to say. Even Rick looked uncomfortable.
“Stand up, honey, and let them get a look at you,” the handler said, as Claudio continued to growl and pace in his cage. The male werewolf couldn’t see Geneviève, but he obviously cared about her, and he clearly knew what was happening. “I’m not going to tell you again,” the handler taunted, his cigarette bobbing with every word, and the girl-wolf began to tremble.
The cattle prod scraped the iron bars on its way into the cage, and Geneviève stood faster than I would have thought possible. She scrambled toward the front of her cage to escape the weapon, her eyes still squeezed closed, as if her refusal to see us somehow meant that we wouldn’t see her.
In that moment, I wished more than anything in the world that I’d made my friends sit through a boring birthday dinner with me instead of using Brandon’s tickets, so that at least we could have spared Geneviève this one moment of humiliation in the string of such instances that no doubt comprised her entire existence.
Genni’s hair brushed the base of her spine and did much more to cover her than the white bikini bottom and tube-style swimsuit top she’d been made to wear. Her arms and legs were thin and her rib cage was plainly visible through her skin. The outsides of her thighs were peppered with pairs of red welts that could only be burns from the cattle prod.
Little Geneviève obviously resisted her handler quite often. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved by that fact or horrified by it, so I settled for a deep sense of awe that a child so young had survived—so far—an existence I couldn’t even imagine.
On display. Nearly naked. Ordered to perform, and tortured for refusal.
I hated myself for being there to see it.
I started to head to the next cage and relieve Geneviève of the audience that gave her handler the chance to abuse her. But then she opened her eyes, and I was too mesmerized to move.
She had Claudio’s eyes. Exactly. Beautiful golden wolf eyes in a little girl’s face.
“Open your mouth, Genni, and let them have a look at your teeth.” The handler circled the end of her cage, still carrying the cattle prod, and Geneviève scuttled away from him. The name embroidered on his shirt was Jack. The tip of his cigarette glowed red in the shadows.
“Genni...” he warned, and when Claudio started howling, Jack banged on the end of the male wolf’s cage with the fist holding the cigarette. “Pipe down, Papa!”
Understanding crashed over me with a devastating weight and stunning intensity. The father was caged feet from his half-naked daughter, unable to protect her, yet forced to hear every offense heaped on her.
“Genni!” Jack shouted, and she turned on him, hissing, hair flying, her lips curled back to reveal long, sharp canines among the teeth in her otherwise human mouth.
“Ain’t that somthin’?” Jack took a long drag on his cigarette. “Have to file ’em down once a month, or she’s likely to bite a finger off when we groom her.”
“You groom her?” Brandon sounded sick. Shelley looked pale, and Rick was staring at his feet.
“Have to. That one won’t do nothin’ on her own. Has to be prodded into brushin’ her own teeth in the mornin’.” He brandished the forked end of the cattle prod at her and she hissed again, then retreated to the back of her cage. “No, no, don’t sit down, Genni. Give the good people their money’s worth.” Jack turned back to us. “Wanna hear her howl? She’s got a helluva voice, that one. Not much for speaking, but she howls like her mama did.”
“Did?” I didn’t want to ask, but I wanted to know. “She died?”
Jack shrugged, and the tip of his cigarette left squiggles of light dancing in front of my eyes. “Who knows? Sold her off last year.” He turned back to Geneviève, who stood in the darkest corner of her cage. “Give us a howl, darlin’.”
But Genni had had enough. She sank to the floor against the rear wall of her cage and vanished into the shadows again, closing her eyes so the twin points of yellow light disappeared.
Jack moved toward her with the prod again, and the fire burning in my belly burst into a full-body blaze.
“Leave her alone,” I said, and when the entire hybrid tent went silent around me, I realized that my voice sounded...different. Not lower in pitch, but larger somehow. More robust.
Brandon, Rick, and Shelley turned to look at me, their eyes wide. Distantly I realized that my scalp had started to tingle and that the heat blazing deep inside me now threatened to burn me alive.
It was a boundless and terrible heat. And it was not entirely unfamiliar.
Creatures in cages all around the tent turned to stare. Sounds I hadn’t even realized I was hearing suddenly ceased—the snort of something equine; steady small splashes from the special section across the ring; and the constant rustle of feet and hooves on hay.
Jack was too intent on causing pain to notice the sudden silence. “It’s no trouble.” With his back to us, he moved toward the center of the cage to lengthen his reach. “It’s just—” he twisted something at the base of the prod “—a little jolt.” He shoved the cattle prod between the bars and through the mesh, and Geneviève howled when the tip touched her right calf.
“Get the hell away from her!” I shouted, and my hair rose on my scalp, as if the power sparking through me had charged it at the roots. It floated around my head, not in thin tendrils, but in heavy ropes of hair, twisting around my face in my peripheral vision.
My pamphlet fell to the ground. Brandon dropped my hand. Shelley made a strange noise as she and Rick backed away from me.
Jack pulled the prod from Geneviève’s cage and turned, his mouth already open to yell at me. The first syllable died on his tongue. The cattle prod thunked to the ground. My hands found the sides of his head, and dimly I was aware that my fingers looked too dark, the nails long and vaguely pointed.
I gripped his skull and felt several tiny pops as my nails pierced the skin at his temples. Jack’s eyes rolled up into his head and his arms began to twitch. His teeth clattered together and sweat poured from his forehead. Blood dripped from his temples.
I saw it all, but none of it sank in. I registered nothing in that moment except the sparks still firing inside me, firing through me, out the tips of my fingers and into Jack’s head, where every synapse fried within him eased a bit of the demand for justice seething inside me.
How do you like it? I demanded, but my mouth never opened. My tongue never moved.
Shelley screamed. The sound of her terror cut through my rage and I pulled my hands from Jack’s head in one swift movement. I stumbled backward, horrified by what I’d done, sucking in great gasping breaths that did nothing to soothe the fire burning deep in my chest.
What had I done?
The handler wobbled on his feet. Blood leaked from four pinpoint holes on either side of his balding scalp. Eyes unfocused, he thumped to his knees on the ground, then felt around in the hay without ever looking down. His thick fist closed around the cattle prod he’d dropped and he twisted a knob on the end as far as it would go. Then he raised the prod as high as he could in both fists and rammed it down on his own thigh. The forked tip plunged through denim and into flesh.
The handler began to convulse. For a moment, no one else moved. The entire hybrid trailer watched Jack electrocute himself. Then hooves and paws began to pound against their cage floors. Wolves howled, something avian screeched, and several human mouths cheered.
“What did you do?” Shelley wailed.
My heart pounding, I turned to see my friends staring at me in horror, backing slowly toward the adlet cage to get away from me.
Rick tripped over the low circus ring and went down on one hip.
“I...” I looked at my hands and blinked to clear my vision, but my vision wasn’t the problem. The problem was my hands. They were too long and bony, my fingers ending in narrow black points. I had needle-claws, where I’d had normal fingernails before.
Blood dripped from the tip of one. I shook my head in denial of what I was seeing—of what I’d done—but instead of settling over my shoulders, my hair was twisting around my head, if the standing-on-end feeling in my scalp could be trusted.
I backed away from the handler still electrocuting himself and from Geneviève’s cage, where she stared at me through yellow wolf-girl eyes. Panic dumped adrenaline into my bloodstream and I suddenly itched to run. To escape.
“What the hell?”
I turned to find Rick staring at me, one dusty brown cowboy boot on either side of the bright red circus ring.
Another handler stepped out of the shadows and kicked the livestock prod from Jack’s hands. He stopped convulsing, but his eyes regained no focus. His mouth hung open.
“What are you?” Wendy, the woman in the sequined leotard, demanded, and I could only blink at her, because I had no answer. Yet even in my mounting terror, I knew that if I’d had an answer, I shouldn’t give it to her.
You are normal. You are human. You are ours. The memory of my mother’s bedtime mantra played through my head as it always had in moments of fear and doubt since I was a small child. It had never in my life felt more relevant. Or more like a total lie.
The handler in the red cap pushed Wendy aside and stomped toward me, reaching out for me. Then, suddenly, his gaze darted over my shoulder. “Wait!” he shouted, and I turned to run.
The last thing I saw before my skull exploded in pain and the world went dark was the face of the hybrid tent ticket taker in the top hat as he swung a felt-covered mallet at my head.
Atherton (#ulink_f2d1a5a5-8481-5f5f-9bdc-f658f6d70fb2)
The call came over the radio at 7:04 p.m., while Wayne Atherton was eating a cheeseburger in the driver’s seat of his patrol car.
“All units, respond with your location. We got a problem up at the fairgrounds.”
Wayne dropped his burger into the grease-stained bag and answered with food still in his mouth. “This is officer oh-four. I’m just off Highway 71, a mile past Exit 52.” Known locally as the Sonic exit. Wayne finished his bite while four other deputies responded with their locations, then Dispatch came back over the radio with a squawk of static.
“No details yet, but there’s an ambulance on the way to the menagerie and they’re requesting all the backup we can send. Oh-four, you’re closest, but I’m sending everyone else your way. Be careful. And don’t forget your iron kit.”
The iron kit. Shit.
Wayne slammed the gearshift into Drive and pulled onto the highway without checking for oncoming traffic. He only remembered to turn on his siren when the car he nearly ran off the road blasted its horn.
“Dispatch, how’re those details coming?” he demanded as he sped down the dusty two-lane highway toward the Franklin County fairgrounds. “I need to know what I’m walking into.”
A month before, a cop down near Dallas had lost an arm to an ogre drunk on Kool-Aid and impatient for his dinner.
“Oh-four, you’re headed for the hybrid tent, set up near where they put the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair. Not sure how it happened, but it sounds like one of the hybrids got loose and injured a menagerie employee.”
“A hybrid?” Wayne stomped on the gas pedal and began scanning the side of the road for the familiar faded wooden sign marking the entrance to the fairgrounds. What he knew about cryptids would easily fit between the cardboard pages of a toddler’s picture book, and the only hybrids he could even name were mermaids and werewolves. “No civilian casualties, Dispatch?”
“Well, I doubt the carny’s a cop, Wayne,” Grace said in that exasperated tone she usually saved for after hours.
“You know what I mean. No customers hurt? No locals?”
“Hang on, oh-four.” Dispatch went silent for a minute, and just as Wayne was turning onto the wide gravel path leading to the fairgrounds, Grace came back on the line. “We’re only hearing about the one injury so far, and Metzger’s says no one else is in immediate danger. Secondary report says the perpetrator is restrained.”
Perpetrator? “If this is a hybrid attack, there’s no perp, Grace. You wouldn’t characterize a tiger that escaped from the zoo as a perpetrator, would you?”
“I don’t make the reports, I just dispatch them. But I’m coming up with all kinds of new ways to characterize you.”
Wayne laughed, picturing Grace chewing on the cap of her pen. “What kind of injury are we talking about, Dispatch?”
“We’re not clear on that yet, oh-four, but the folks at the carnival seem to want us to take the cryptid into custody.”
“This is the Sheriff’s Department, not the pound!” Franklin County wasn’t equipped to hold most cryptids, much less keep them for any extended period of time. Hell, some of them wouldn’t even fit in a standard jail cell!
“You’re preaching to the choir, oh-four. Just haul ass and watch your back.”
He hated it when Grace talked like she was his boss instead of his girlfriend. Especially over the radio, where anyone could hear. But as usual, she was right. “I’ll check in as soon as I know what’s going on.”
Wayne turned off the siren but left his lights flashing as he rolled through the menagerie’s open gate, where carnies in elaborate red-and-black costumes waved him on. He drove straight down the midway with his foot on the brake, honking to warn everyone who hadn’t noticed his blue-and-red strobe. Where the midway forked, another pair of menagerie employees waved him to the right, through another gate, and a minute later, Wayne could see the commotion. A large group was being held back from the entrance to a big circus-style striped tent by a crimson velvet rope and a staff of large red-clad men.
He got out of his car, lights still flashing. The crowd made way for him, and when he got to the front, he headed straight for a woman in a leotard and top hat and a man in a black Metzger’s cap. “Deputy Wayne Atherton, Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. Who can fill me in?”
The employee in the black cap stuck his hand out for Wayne to shake. “I’m Chris Ruyle, the lot supervisor.”
Wayne had no idea what a lot supervisor was, but he walked and talked like the boss. “What happened, Mr. Ruyle?”
“We were hoping you could tell us.” Ruyle lifted the closed tent flap and gestured for Wayne to go in ahead of him. Inside, a woman lay on her side on the ground, a familiar head of dark wavy hair spread all around her. Her hands were bound at her back. With iron cuffs.
Wayne dropped to his knees at her side. “That’s Delilah Marlow.” She’d been a couple of years behind him in high school, and all he really knew about her was that she’d been ready to shake the red dirt from her shoes on her way out of town since before she could even walk. No one had expected that girl to come home after college, much less stay. “Dispatch said the victim was an employee. What the hell happened?” A large purple bump was already starting to rise on one side of her skull. “What did this?”
“I did.”
Wayne looked up at the man who’d spoken. Then he looked up some more. The man held a black top hat and wore a red vest with Lerner embroidered on it in scrolling black print.
Wayne stood, anger bubbling up from his guts. Damn out-of-towners beating up on local girls. Franklin County wouldn’t stand for such things. “I thought this was a cryptid attack.”
“It was,” Lerner said. “But the creature wasn’t ours. She was yours.”
“Mine?” Wayne followed Lerner’s gaze to Delilah Marlow’s unconscious form. There was hay caught in her hair and blood beneath her fingernails—defensive wounds if he’d ever seen them. “You got five seconds to start making sense before I arrest you for assault and battery.”
Lerner stared at him unflinchingly, and Ruyle cleared his throat to catch Wayne’s attention. “Officer Atherton, the victim is over there.” Ruyle pointed toward a small crowd of flamboyantly dressed carnival employees gathered around a man seated on the ground with his mouth gaping open, staring at the hay beneath him. A trickle of blood seeped from each of his temples. A line of drool hung from his open lips. “This girl is the creature, and I can assure you she doesn’t belong to Metzger’s. So what I need to know from you is just what exactly this Delilah Marlow is, and what the hell she did to my handler.”
Martin,
I’m sure you’ve seen the news by now, and I’m very sorry to have to tell you that your sister Patricia and her family are among the thousands of victims of this morning’s national tragedy. I wanted to call, but your phone number wasn’t in Patty’s address book, and she was in no shape to find it for us. She and Robert are both in total shock. They lost four of their children overnight, and the police aren’t sure exactly what happened. All we do know is that Emily, the six-year-old, was the only one who survived...
—From a hand-written letter by Hannah Goodwin to
her brother-in-law and his family, August 24, 1986
Delilah (#ulink_058978dd-00e7-5261-af0e-45ae66f19e54)
A soft buzzing woke me up. Not like a bee or a fly, but like...electricity. I was lying on something hard, rough, and cold, but the cold was all wrong. I could feel it not just against my face and arms, but against parts of me that should have been insulated by my clothes.
My eyes flew open as I shoved myself up with both hands, but the glaring assault of fluorescent light—the source of the buzzing—was like a spike driven through my skull. My arms gave out and my eyes fell shut. My cheek slammed into the floor, and I sucked in a shocked breath.
The floor. I was lying on the cold, hard floor. Naked.
My pulse racing, I lifted my head carefully and had to breathe through a wave of vertigo. My head throbbed fiercely. Light painted the insides of my eyelids red. I sat up on my knees, shivering, and folded my arms over my chest to cover myself. Then I opened my eyes again.
The glare was no longer crippling, but my headache was. I blinked and my eyes started to adjust to the light, but the world was a blur. Another blink, and several dark stripes came into focus.
No, not stripes. Bars. Thick iron bars.
Panicked, I scrambled away from them on my hands and knees until I came to a gray brick wall. I leaned my bare back against it, my knees pulled up to my chest, and finally made myself look at my surroundings.
I was in a corner cell with two walls of iron bars and a rough concrete floor.
No.
My heart pounded hard enough to jar my whole body with each beat. The adjoining cell had a hazard-orange floor with No Occupancy painted on it in black block letters.
No, no, no, no...
Across a wide aisle from my cell were other, normal cells.
Jail.
I was in jail. Because I’d turned into some kind of monster and stuck my fingers through that carny’s skull.
But that wasn’t possible. I wasn’t a monster, and I had never hurt anyone in my life.
Yet I could remember exactly how that man’s flesh had felt beneath my fingers. I could still feel the resistance his skull had offered, then that satisfying pop when my fingers had breached it.
Nonononono. I buried my face in my arms and squeezed my eyes shut, but the images were still there.
A dangling cigarette.
A cattle prod lying in the hay.
Blood dripping down the sweaty man’s face.
What the hell had I done? How had I done it?
Tears rolled down my cheeks and I swiped at them with both hands. This couldn’t be happening. I wasn’t a cryptid. My parents were human. I didn’t have so much as a birthmark to be examined, much less feathers, or horns, or scales.
Yet in that tent, I’d had... What had I had, exactly? Weird hair? Pointy fingers? That didn’t fit the description of any cryptid I’d ever studied.
I examined my hands. They were trembling uncontrollably, but looked normal, other than the blood dried beneath my fingernails.
I pulled handfuls of long, dark hair over my shoulder. My hair looked normal. Whatever I’d become had left no trace of itself. How was that even possible? The vast majority of cryptid species can’t blend in with the human population—not even shape-shifters. I’d officially learned that on day one as a crypto-biology major, but like everyone else, I’d actually known it my whole life.
So how could whatever kind of creature I was blend in well enough to hide itself not just from the rest of the world, but from me? How could I not know what I was?
What else did I not know about myself? If I couldn’t put faith in my own humanity, how much of the rest of my life was a lie?
I didn’t mean to do it.
Terrified, I mentally relived that surreal memory over and over, trying to understand what had happened. The only thing I was sure of every single time was that I hadn’t intended to turn into a monster and shove my fingers through a man’s skull. I’d seen it happen. I’d felt it happen. But I hadn’t made it happen. Not on purpose anyway.
And that meant I could no longer trust my own body.
I didn’t realize I was pounding my head into the brick wall at my back until the repetitive thuds finally broke through the vicious cycle of my memories.
The fierce throb in my head felt like my brain was trying to burst through my skull. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The concrete floor had sanded raw spots into my knees and my palms, as well as on more tender patches of bare flesh.
This couldn’t be happening.
On my right, a door squealed open on rusty hinges. Startled, I turned to find a sheriff’s deputy heading down the center aisle toward me. He carried a tall stool under one arm and a bundle of familiar material beneath the other.
The sight of my clothes in his hand triggered fresh tears as I scooted along the wall at my back. When I hit the far corner, I stopped, cradled by solid brick on two sides. I tucked my legs up to my chest again and crossed my ankles to cover my most private parts. I was as shielded and defended as I could get, yet I’d never felt more exposed or vulnerable.
“Hi.” The deputy set his stool down in the aisle, out of reach from my cell.
I rested my chin on my left knee and let my hair fall forward like a curtain, hoping all he could see were my shins, hair, and eyes.
“Do you remember me?”
He did look a little familiar, but no name came to mind.
“I’m Deputy Wayne Atherton. You were a couple of years behind me in school.”
Wayne. Yes. We’d had a history class together my sophomore year.
“Where am I? Are you in charge?”
“This is the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. You’ve been taken into custody as a cryptid living under false pretenses. And as far as you’re concerned, yes, I’m in charge.”
“Did—” My voice cracked, so I cleared my throat and started over, my face flaming. “Did you take my clothes off?”
“No, that was a couple of guys from the SWAT team the sheriff called in to assist with your transport. Dr. Almaguer said he would only examine you while you were still unconscious. To check for species-identifying features.”
Dr. Almaguer. My teeth began to chatter and I set my chin on my knees to make it stop. They’d called in a small-animal veterinarian to examine me—the very man who’d once put my dad’s farm dog to sleep.
The deputy propped one foot on the lowest stool rung and set my clothes on his lap. “He didn’t find anything, Delilah.”
Because there was nothing to find. How else could I not have known?
“Are you going to give my clothes back?”
“That’s up to you,” he said.
I closed my eyes. He was going to interrogate me in the nude. Because he could.
“What are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Make this easy on yourself, Delilah. Just tell us what you are, and you can have your clothes back.” The deputy shifted on his stool and my underwear slid from the pile of clothes and landed on the floor. He didn’t notice, but my focus snagged on that bit of fabric. I would have told him anything I knew for a single scrap of my own clothing. But there was nothing to say.
“I told you, I don’t know what I am. Please give me my clothes.” My cheeks were burning, but my teeth still chattered. “I’m freezing.”
“Yeah, the sheriff runs warm, so he keeps the air turned down low. Especially in the summer.” Atherton shifted on the stool again, and his tone softened. “Delilah, I can’t help you until you help me. I got orders. So why don’t you tell me what you are, and I’ll not only give you your clothes back, I’ll get you some water. Or something to eat. Are you hungry? Your friends said you didn’t eat much dinner.”
“Are they here?” Shelley’s scream still echoed in my aching head. Brandon’s look of horror was imprinted on my retinas. “Can I see them?”
Deputy Atherton started to shake his head, and I buried my face in the crook between my knees, sniffing back fresh tears. “Please,” I said into my lap. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I have no idea what happened. Please just give me my clothes and let me see my friends.”
Atherton sighed. “Ms. Wells had to be sedated. Her boyfriend took her home.”
My throat felt thick, my tongue clumsy. “Is she okay?”
“She’s terrified. She’s not the only one. The news is out, and people don’t feel safe, knowing you were born and raised here. Knowing you went to school with their children and spent the night at their houses—and they didn’t have a clue. People are starting to remember the reaping, Delilah.”
Oh, fuck.
Terror pooled in my stomach like acid, eating at me from the inside. “They don’t think I’m a surrogate, do they?” I peered at him over my knees. My hands started shaking again. “Because I swear I’m not.”
“How can you know that, if you don’t know what you are? You look human, and you lived among us for years. Just like the surrogates. What are we supposed to think?”
Panic slowed my brain, yet sped up my words. “This is totally different. I wasn’t hiding or lying in wait, planning something. I didn’t know I wasn’t human. I still can’t believe what happened. You have to tell them that. Tell the sheriff I’m not one of them.”
“How do I know that’s true?”
Terror scattered my thoughts into a maelstrom of disjointed theories. Think, Delilah! “There were hundreds of thousands of surrogates, but there’s only one of me.”
The deputy shrugged. “So far. For all we know, you could be the first in a whole new wave.”
“No, that’s not what I am!” My arms tightened around my shins, drawing my knees tighter against my chest. “I don’t have any siblings.”
“Having grown, healthy siblings would work in your favor. Being an only child does not.”
“Okay... But I’m an adult!” Surely they’d figured that much out when they’d taken my clothes off. “The surrogates were six-year-olds.”
“Yes, but even cryptids age. The surrogates are now thirty-five years old. Wherever they are.”
But no one knew where they were, and that was the problem. As soon as they’d been discovered, Uncle Sam had rounded them up like rabid dogs, and no one knew whether they’d been shot, or studied, or cryogenically frozen for later. And that was fine, because the surrogates truly were dangerous. They were the fucking devil’s spawn.
If the government thought I was one of them, I would disappear, too.
“I’m not a surrogate.” I pushed hair from my face with one hand and sat up as straight as I dared without clothes on. “I didn’t steal any babies. I’ve never hurt a soul in my life before tonight, and I don’t know how that happened. Think about it. If I’d known what I was, why would I go to the menagerie? Please, Deputy. You have to believe me. I’m not conspiring against humanity.”
Atherton exhaled slowly. Then he stood, still watching me, and shook out my blouse. “I believe you.” He stuck my shirt between two of the bars and dropped it on the floor. “But I’m not the one you have to convince.” Next came my jeans, bra, and underwear, each dropped just inside my cell. “Get dressed.”
I glanced at my clothes, then back up at him. “Are you going to watch?”
He blinked, obviously startled by the thought. “Of course not.” When he walked down the aisle away from my cell, I realized that Atherton wasn’t the enemy. He was just doing his job.
Unfortunately, his job was to extract information I didn’t have, in order to help the sheriff—
Help the sheriff what?
End life as I knew it?
I lunged for my clothes, then dragged the whole pile back into my corner, where I shimmied into my underwear as fast as I could. I turned my back on the bars to put my bra on, in case he turned around, and had just stepped into my jeans when the brutal reality of my new situation hit me over the head like that carny’s mallet, swinging straight for my soul.
I’ll never go home again.
My legs buckled beneath me and my knees slammed into the concrete. My jaw snapped shut with the impact, but I hardly felt it. I was a cryptid living under false pretenses, and no one would care that I hadn’t known. Most probably wouldn’t even believe that.
I pushed my arms through the sleeves of my shirt, but had trouble buttoning it. My hands wouldn’t stop trembling.
Gone. Everything I’d ever had was probably already gone. My job. My apartment. My car. My clothes. Cryptids weren’t allowed to own property or enter into contracts. Including leases.
“Deputy Atherton, I think I need to talk to an attorney.” My voice had almost no tone and very little volume. I seemed to be hearing myself from one end of a long tunnel.
He turned and headed down the aisle toward me again. “They’re not gonna give you a lawyer, Delilah. Cryptids aren’t citizens. You have no rights in the U.S. of A., in Franklin County, or in the incorporated township of Franklin. You are now the property of the state of Oklahoma.”
Property. No rights.
“Unless they decide you are a surrogate,” Atherton continued. “If that happens, the feds will come for you.”
And I would never be seen again.
I clutched my half-buttoned shirt to my chest and scooted back into the corner, pressing my spine into the seam where both brick walls met. The world seemed to be shrinking around me, as if someone were sucking all the air out of a vacuum-sealed bag. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.
“Is your mother still over on Sycamore?” Deputy Atherton asked, and a fresh bolt of fear opened my lungs. “They’re sending someone to pick her up.”
“Leave her alone.” My gaze snapped up to meet his, and his brows rose. “She has nothing to do with this. She’s human.”
“You thought you were human, too, and you were wrong about that. Is there anything we should know before they knock on her door?”
I held his gaze in silence.
“They’re already on their way, Delilah. If you know something that will keep her from getting hurt, you need to tell me.”
“She sleeps with my dad’s shotgun under her bed.” I crossed my arms over my knees and stared at the ground. “Better call first and let her know you’re coming. That, or send an ambulance in advance.”
Atherton’s brows rose. He unclipped a radio from his belt and relayed my mother’s itchy trigger finger to someone in Dispatch.
My bare toes curled on the concrete, and I wished for a pair of shoes. My racing thoughts had stilled into a single bold question mark, and the mental silence was almost as confining as the bars caging me.
“So, what happens now?”
He pulled a thick, rusty pair of medieval-looking iron cuffs from a pouch at his back. “Come on, Delilah. Get up. It’s time to meet the sheriff.”
Delilah (#ulink_20ebfcf1-7bfc-5705-b171-93afe7c89235)
“Turn around and stick both hands between the bars.”
The theory seemed to be that my hands were my weapons, and that with them restrained in iron behind my back I would be much less of a threat.
I complied, and the cuffs closed over my wrists one at a time. They were heavy, and the weight felt both surreal and brutally degrading. But surely if I were going to have any adverse reaction to iron—which would narrow my species down to one out of hundreds of kinds of fae—the bars on my cell would have triggered it already.
Iron was the only way that we knew of to identify the fae. Most of them had one feature or another that clothes wouldn’t cover—feathers, a hollow back, vines growing in place of hair—but glamour was a better disguise than any clothing, contact lenses, or wigs could ever hope to be.
Once I was cuffed, the deputy let me out of my cell and guided me down the aisle. He didn’t touch me. In fact, he seemed to be walking a couple of feet behind me until he had to come forward and open the door at the end of the aisle.
The moment I stepped into the open front room of the sheriff’s station, all phone calls and typing ceased. The ambient nervous chatter died, and everyone turned to watch me be escorted across the room. None of the stares were friendly. Even the people in handcuffs looked at me as if I were a slimy clump dug from their shower drains.
My face flamed. I wanted to hide, but the best I could do was let my hair swing forward to shield part of my face.
Several feet into my barefoot walk of shame, I saw Brandon sitting in a cracked plastic waiting room chair. I tripped over my own nerves and Deputy Atherton started to catch me, then changed his mind. I saw the moment it happened. He was reaching for me, probably out of instinct, then suddenly recoiled. He flinched—as if I were a snake about to strike, when really I was falling face-first toward the dingy yellow floor tile, unable to catch myself with my hands cuffed at my back.
Brandon stared at his shoes as I staggered, then awkwardly regained my balance on my own. I recognized tension in the cords standing out from his neck, as if he wanted to look, but was fighting the urge.
“Brandon,” I called once I was steady, and my voice cracked on the first syllable. His jaw clenched, but he didn’t look up. My flush deepened. “Brandon.” Raw desperation echoed in my voice and a couple of strangers sneered at the tender bits of my heart and soul I’d exposed.
My boyfriend of four years was the only person in the room not watching me.
“Brandon, please.” My cheeks were scalding and my throat ached. But I couldn’t believe he would abandon me without a word. He knew better than anyone else in the world aside from my mother that I would never hurt someone on purpose.
Deputy Atherton took me by the arm, evidently having gathered the courage to touch me in the face of my humiliation. “Come on, Delilah.”
“No.” I jerked free of his grip, and people all over the room flinched. “Say it, Brandon,” I demanded, and at first he didn’t move. Then my roommate and lover—one of my very best friends—stood and marched toward the exit, as if he wanted to run, but pride wouldn’t let him. “Brandon! Say it, you fucking coward!”
He froze halfway to the door, and my heart stilled along with him. Then slowly, Brandon turned. His eyes were red. His jaw was clenched. He looked at me as if he didn’t even know who I was.
“How could you do this to me?”
“I didn’t—”
“The whole thing was a lie,” he shouted, and I flinched. “You were a lie! I trusted you. I told you everything. I ate with you and slept next to you, and the whole time you were some kind of monster, just using me as part of your human camouflage. There is no Delilah Marlow.”
“No, that’s not true. It was all real! I didn’t know!” I took a step toward him, but Atherton grabbed my arm again, and several other deputies placed hands on the butts of their guns. “You have to believe I didn’t know.”
“I don’t know what to believe.” Tears shone in Brandon’s eyes, but anger glowed in his cheeks. “I was in love with a woman who never even existed. I can’t believe I ever let you—” His sentence ended in an inarticulate sound of disgust, and something deep inside me cracked apart. Some delicate part of me collapsed like a demolished building, leaving only broken shapes and sharp edges.
“Don’t blame yourself, son,” a middle-aged man called out from the waiting area. “We were all fooled in the eighties. I lost my aunt, uncle, and six cousins to those chameleon bastards, may they rot in hell.”
Cheers erupted all around me, and suddenly my ribs felt too tight.
“But I—I’m not one of them! I’m not—”
“Baby killer!” a woman shouted from the waiting area.
“Remember the reaping!” a man in regular steel cuffs shouted, though the cop who shoved him back into his chair didn’t seem to dispute the sentiment.
A cop in his thirties stood from behind his desk and strode toward me, and I thought he was going to take over for Deputy Atherton and get me out of there—until he spit in my face.
I blinked, stunned, as spittle dripped down my cheek.
“Damn it, Bruce!” Atherton hauled me toward another door.
Across the room, Brandon shoved the press-bar on the front exit and when he stepped into the parking lot, he took my last shred of hope with him. If my own boyfriend wouldn’t stand by me, who would?
The front door closed behind Brandon, and I sniffed back tears that stung like utter rejection and humiliation. My hair fell into my face as Wayne led me into another hallway, several strands clinging to the spit on my cheek.
Finally, Atherton closed the door behind us, shielding me from the rest of the world. Or maybe shielding it from me.
In an interrogation room, I followed his instructions without truly hearing them. In my mind, the front door of the sheriff’s station closed over and over, and all I could see was the back of Brandon’s head.
“Delilah,” Atherton said, and I realized he’d already said my name at least twice.
“What?” I blinked to clear my head and looked down to find myself sitting in a cold plastic chair with my arms looped around the back. A tug against my cuffs rattled chains I had no memory of, which evidently ran between my handcuffs and a metal loop set into the ground. I couldn’t stand or even twist much in my chair without pulling my arms out of their sockets.
Before I could ask if all of the metal was really necessary, a second deputy knelt to slap a set of iron shackles around my ankles and connect them to that same hook in the ground, behind my chair. When he stood, I tried to lean forward, but the pain in my shoulders stopped me. I tried to cross my ankles, but the shackles were in the way. I couldn’t move more than an inch in any direction, and that sudden severe confinement made my throat close. The room had plenty of open space but I couldn’t use any of it. Plenty of air, but I couldn’t seem to breathe any of it.
“Struggling will only make it worse,” Atherton said, and while there was no malice in his voice, there was no willingness to help either. “Just try not to think about it.”
But I couldn’t seem to manage that until the door opened, and Sheriff Pennington stepped in from the hall. He commented on my restraints with an incomprehensible grunt, then sat in the chair across a small folding table from mine.
Pennington folded his fleshy arms on the table and studied my face. “Delilah Marlow?”
I nodded, desperately trying not to squirm. “Am I under arrest?”
He snorted, then swiped at his nose with the back of one hand. “No, and I wouldn’t arrest a dog for bitin’ either. I’d just put the bitch down in the interest of public safety. You won’t be charged, and you won’t be Mirandized, because you no longer have any rights, you devious piece of shit. As long as you’re under my jurisdiction, I can do whatever I want with you, and I can’t imagine your lot would improve if the feds take over.”
His blatant threat bounced around the inside of my skull, and anger overtook my fear for the first time since I’d woken up in a jail cell. “This isn’t right, Sheriff.”
“I deal in law, not morality.” Pennington paused for a moment, evidently to let that little cow chip of irony sink in. “What are you exactly, Delilah Marlow?”
“I don’t know,” I repeated. He lifted one skeptical eyebrow, and I shrugged as best I could with my hands tightly bound behind me. “Look, if I knew, I’d tell you just to prove I’m not a surrogate.”
“Unless you are a surrogate.”
“If I were a surrogate, I’d lie. Either way, you’d have an answer. But I don’t know what I am. I didn’t know I wasn’t human until tonight.”
“We don’t know what the surrogates were either, do we?” Pennington pulled a palm-sized notebook from his front pocket. “So that doesn’t really rule anything out for you.”
I tried to find a more comfortable position, but the chains kept relief just out of reach. “Well, we know what they weren’t, and none of those little monsters looked anything like I did tonight.”
“About that...” the sheriff continued, flipping open his notebook to reveal a single page of pencil scrawling. “Let’s put our heads together and come up with some possibilities that might keep you out of federal custody, shall we?”
And finally something in his voice clued me in. Sheriff Pennington didn’t want me to be a surrogate either, because that would put me beyond his authority. The Justice Department had claimed jurisdiction over all of those cases before I was even born.
“Here’re the facts, as they were relayed to me. One, your voice changed in depth and—” Pennington glanced at the notebook on the table in front of him “—quality. Says here it was deeper than it shoulda been, and it felt—” another glance at his notes “—large. Whatever that means. Two, your eyes changed color. Not just the irises, but the entirety of your eyeballs.” He made a vague gesture encompassing most of my face, and I shuddered at the thought. “They became white, shot through with dark veins. Does that sound about right?”
I could only give him a painfully wrenching shrug, trying to hide the tide of horror washing over me. “I couldn’t see my own eyes.” And I’d never heard of a cryptid species which fit that description.
“It also says here that the veins in your face became black, like dark spiderwebs beneath your skin. Do you know anything about that?”
“No.” But I could imagine how terrifying it would have been to see. No wonder Shelley was scared. No wonder Brandon could hardly look at me. I’d spent four years studying cryptid species, yet couldn’t even identify my own. If I couldn’t understand what I’d become, how could they?
Pennington glanced at his notebook again.
“What about your hair? Witnesses say your hair took on a life of its own.”
“Sheriff, I’m assuming that if you spoke to my friends, you know that I was a crypto-biology major, with an emphasis in human hybrid species. I should know what I am. But I truly have no clue. Before tonight, I didn’t even know the question needed to be asked. All I know for sure at this point is that I’m no longer a bank teller.” I was no longer a driver, or a tenant, or a girlfriend, or a best friend.
I was nothing other than the property of the state of Oklahoma.
My eyes fell shut and I sucked in a deep breath.
The reality—the true enormity—of my loss suddenly hit me in a way that the mere intellectual understanding of it hadn’t been able to. When the interrogation was over, they weren’t going to send me home. I had no home. I was never going to count another cash drawer or make another pot of coffee ever again, no matter what I did or said. Everything that I had ever been or done or loved was gone. Delilah Marlow no longer existed.
No, Brandon was right. Delilah Marlow had never existed. My entire life was a delusion. A fantasy. A lie I hadn’t even known I was telling.
The reality was pure hell.
Pennington closed his notebook and crossed his arms on the table again, watching calmly as I fought total, devastating terror. “Before you start feeling too sorry for yourself, keep in mind that a man almost died because of you, and up at County General, they’re not sure he’ll ever regain normal brain function.”
A bright spark of anger surged up through my fear, and I seized it. “He electrified a little girl!”
Pennington turned to Atherton, who was stationed next to the door. “She’s talking about one of the beasts?”
The deputy nodded and pulled his own notebook from the pocket of his khaki uniform pants. “A pubescent canis lupus lycanus. Female.” He looked up and pocketed the notebook. “A thirteen-year-old wolf bitch. The rep from Metzger’s says they have trouble with her all the time, and the customary motivational method is a low-voltage poke with a standard cattle prod.”
“She was covered with electrical burns!” For a second, I forgot I was chained to the floor, and when I tried to stand, I nearly dislocated my shoulder. Both Pennington and Atherton reached for their guns.
I froze. “Relax.” My pulse raced so fast the room started to look warped. “I can’t even open a jar of pickles, much less break through solid steel and iron.”
Atherton glared at me. “Delilah, she’s not a child, she’s a wolf.” The deputy slid his gun back into its holster, but the fact that he didn’t snap it closed made me nervous. “An animal.”
“Then why was she wearing underwear?” I demanded, and the sheriff and his deputy looked at me as if I’d lapsed into Latin. “Okay, just think about it. When we put wolves on display in a zoo—a regular zoo—we don’t put underwear on them because they aren’t self-aware enough to feel modesty or adapt to social conventions and restrictions. But Geneviève was wearing underwear, which means the menagerie understands that she’s thoroughly self-aware. And if she’s self-aware, why is it okay to put a child on display in skimpy undergarments, then shock her with a cattle prod when she doesn’t want to be seen in nothing but her underwear? You can’t have it both ways.”
I sank back into my chair, only aware that I’d been straining against my restraints when my joints started screaming at me in protest.
Atherton and the sheriff stared at me for a moment, obviously unsure what to say. Then Pennington dragged his chair closer to the table and scowled at me with confidence born of ignorance. “According to the law, your werewolf bitch isn’t a person. She’s a monster, and monsters are offered no protection under the law because them and their kind slaughtered more than a million innocent children during the reaping alone. Who knows how many others they’ve killed one at a time? If werewolves are self-aware, why didn’t the pack that tore that family apart up in the Ozarks last month use that self-awareness to decide not to kill innocent people?”
“First of all, that was a pair of adlets, not a pack of werewolves, and second, self-awareness isn’t the same as a moral compass,” I argued. “I don’t believe every cryptid should be allowed to roam free, just like I don’t believe every human should be allowed to roam free. We have psychos, too. People kill their coworkers. Kids kill their classmates. Parents kill their own children. Those people are every bit as monstrous as the worst cryptid predator you can point to, yet they’re human, just like we are.”
Atherton and Pennington stared at me, and unease churned in my stomach. “There is no we,” the deputy said, and though I’d known that for several hours by then, hearing him verbally exclude me from the rest of humanity added another layer of pain to that brutal certainty. “Delilah, you’re not human.”
“Yeah, well, I guess you’re going to have to take a blood sample to figure out what I am, because I don’t know.”
“Actually, we took one while you were knocked out.” The deputy glanced at my arm, which was when I noticed the small bandage in the crook of my left elbow. “They had to send it up to Tulsa. Your sample’s the lab’s number one priority, but it’ll still take several days.”
I collapsed against the back of my chair, and my aching shoulders sagged with relief. “Then I guess we’re in for a bit of a wait.”
The interrogation room door creaked open and we all turned as another deputy stepped into the doorway. “Mrs. Marlow’s here.”
Sheriff Pennington stood and gave me a grim scowl. “I’m not very good at waiting, so you better hope your mama can shed some light on the subject. Otherwise, things are gonna get real bad for you, real damn fast.”
State agencies report that more than 12,000 parents have been arrested in connection with the August 24 murders of more than 1.1 million children, and an unnamed source in the FBI tells the Boston Gazette that that figure is still rising...
—From the front page of the Boston Gazette, August 28, 1986
Charity (#ulink_f777f232-26aa-5703-a1ea-ee9ac5a2d508)
When Charity Marlow’s phone rang at 12:04 a.m., she knew without even glancing at the caller ID that something was wrong. No one ever called in the middle of the night to say everything was fine.
Ten minutes after she hung up the phone, Charity had dressed, brushed her hair, and brewed a pot of coffee. The deputy who knocked on her door declined a travel cup, so she made him wait while she fixed one for herself because “questioning” sounded like the kind of ordeal that would require coherence on her part.
Coherence was the very least of what Charity Marlow owed her daughter, but it was all she had left to give.
On the way to the sheriff’s station, she sat in the passenger’s seat of the patrol car and sipped quietly from her cup, and not once during the drive across town did she ask why Delilah was in custody. Charity had been both waiting for and dreading that night’s phone call for nearly twenty-five years.
At the station, in a small room equipped with bright lights and cheap chairs, she sat across a small scarred table from Matthew Pennington, who’d held the title of sheriff for the past twelve years in spite of her consistent vote for whoever ran against him. Two armed deputies were stationed at the door, one on each side, and Charity saw no reason to pretend she didn’t understand their presence.
“I suppose you want a blood test,” she said before the sheriff could even open his mouth.
He nodded, but she read irritation in the stiff line of his jaw. Pennington liked to run the show. “We’ve got a phlebotomist from County General waiting for that very thing. Of course, you’d be saving us all a lot of time if you could just tell us what you and your daughter are.”
Charity set her travel cup on the table. “Sheriff, if I weren’t human, I wouldn’t exactly feel inspired to bare my soul to you and your gun-toting hee-haws.” She tossed a glance at the deputies beside the door, both of whom scowled at her. “But I am human, and your lab should be able to confirm that with little more than a microscope. And since you clearly know otherwise about Delilah... Well, I’d be just as interested as you are in what the lab has to say about her blood sample.”
Pennington leaned back and crossed thick arms over the brown button-up shirt stretched tight across his soft chest. “You’re telling me you don’t know what species your own daughter is?”
Charity nodded. “In fact, considering that you have her in custody, I’d guess you know more about her genetic origin than I do.”
“Well, you’d be wrong there.” Frustration deepened the sheriff’s voice even beyond the chain-smoker range. “I have her medical records. The blood test they ran at birth says she’s human.”
Charity nodded again, but made no comment.
“According to her record, she hasn’t had blood drawn since the day she was born.”
“I believe that’s accurate.”
“She’s never been sick?” Pennington leaned forward, arms folded over the table, and Charity winced at the acrid bite of cigarette smoke clinging to his uniform. “Not once in twenty-five years?”
“Every child gets sick at some point, Sheriff. But Delilah never had anything I couldn’t treat myself.”
“Because you’re an RN.”
Charity sat a little straighter in her hard plastic chair. “Actually, I’m a nurse practitioner.”
“That’s right,” the sheriff said, but she saw right through his sudden recollection of her employment history. “You finished your MSN when Delilah was three. Was that so that you could legally treat her yourself?”
“In fact, it was. And as her primary medical caregiver, I found no reason to run further blood tests on a perfectly healthy child.” Charity looked right into the sheriff’s eyes. “But I would be willing to tell you what I do know, if you’ll go first.”
The sheriff’s flustered flush was so bright that one of the deputies stepped forward to see if he was okay. Pennington waved the unspoken question off and glared at the woman seated across the table.
“What we know, Mrs. Marlow, is that your daughter got worked up during a tour of the menagerie this evening and turned into the kind of creature that should have been lookin’ outta one of those cages, instead of looking into ’em. She grabbed a carny by the head and sank her fingers into his skull, and when she finally released him, he turned his livestock prod up as far as it would go and rammed it into his own leg.”
Charity’s bold spirit—a thing of wide repute in Franklin County—faded like a blossom gone dry in the sun. She closed her eyes to hide her thoughts from the sheriff, and the face that flashed behind her eyelids belonged to a woman she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years, but would never in her life forget.
“Lilah actually hurt someone?” More than two decades of secrets, lies, and guilt swelled within her as she examined every fear and doubt she’d ever had about the daughter she loved more than anything else in the world. More, even, than the husband whose heart had given out at the age of fifty-seven, beneath the burden of their secret. “I didn’t think she was even capable of violence.”
“Why don’t you tell us what you know?”
Charity crossed her arms over her favorite blue summer sweater and when she leaned back in her chair, a gray-streaked strand of straight brown hair fell over her ear.
“Keeping your secret can’t help her anymore, Mrs. Marlow,” Wayne Atherton said. “We can’t help her either, if we don’t know what she is.”
Unlike Pennington, Atherton truly seemed to want to help, so Charity cleared her throat and took a long sip of her coffee. “Almost twenty-five years ago, my six-week-old daughter disappeared from her crib.”
“You’re telling us that Delilah was kidnapped?” Pennington prompted after a moment of silence, but Charity only shook her head.
“I’m telling you that my daughter Elizabeth was kidnapped. Her middle name was Delilah, so that’s what I called the changeling left in her place.”
For one long moment, neither the sheriff nor his deputy spoke. Charity couldn’t even be sure they were breathing.
“Changeling.” Pennington seemed to be tasting the word, as if he might want to spit it back out. “So, you’re saying the fae took your baby and left a surrogate in its place? There hasn’t been a confirmed surrogate exchange since the reaping.” The sheriff laid both thick hands flat on the table between them. “Mrs. Marlow, are you telling us that your daughter is part of a second wave of attack?”
Atherton slipped quietly out of the room.
“No.” Charity set her coffee down and looked straight into the sheriff’s eyes, so that he couldn’t possibly mistake any part of her bearing or intent. “This is different. I don’t know what those little monsters were, but Delilah isn’t one of them.”
The sheriff crossed his arms above his belly. “How can you be sure? Does she look like Elizabeth?”
“I haven’t seen Elizabeth in twenty-five years, Sheriff, but as infants, they were identical.”
Pennington’s scraggly gray brows rose. “Sounds like a surrogate to me.”
“You’re wrong.” Charity lifted her cup in one unsteady hand and took a sip of the cooling coffee. Then she set the cup down and took a long, deep breath. “Delilah was sent to deliver pain, but not by instilling terror on a national scale like the surrogates. She was left in Elizabeth’s place to punish me. And I got exactly what I asked for.”
“What—”
Charity held up one hand and spoke over the sheriff. “Elizabeth was a beautiful child, but she had an ugly temper. She cried for days and nights on end. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I couldn’t think straight. One day, when she was six weeks old, I prayed that the Lord would take my brand-new baby girl—the center of my existence—and send me a quieter, happier child in her place.”
She pulled a tissue from the purse in her lap and dabbed at first one eye, then the other. “Now, it may be that a lot of women in my position do the same thing, and nothing comes of it. But I...” She leaned forward, and fresh tears fell from her eyes. “Well, Sheriff, I said my prayer out loud. And it wasn’t the Lord who heard me.”
“Who heard you?” the remaining deputy whispered.
Charity twisted in her chair to give him a censuring glance. “Believe it or not, Deputy, no one claimed credit for replacing my daughter with a more pleasant doppelgänger.” She turned back to the sheriff. “So I did some research and learned that I could get in touch with whoever took my daughter if I were to nurse the child for a week, then smear a bit of her blood on a mirror and state my own child’s name.” More inclined toward logic than superstition, Charity had thought the whole thing sounded gruesome and crazy, but the truth was that since the reaping, anything seemed possible. The sheriff eyed her doubtfully, but she continued. “It worked! A woman appeared to me in my bathroom mirror, holding Elizabeth from some room I’ve never seen before.”
“What did she say?” the deputy asked, and the sheriff scowled, but let the question stand.
“She said that in a year, if I had taken proper care of the changeling and still wanted my daughter back, Elizabeth would be returned to me.”
“This woman in the mirror?” The sheriff’s skepticism was fading beneath undeniable curiosity. “Did you get her name? Her species?”
“She wouldn’t tell me any of that. But she looked and sounded as human as Delilah did.”
“So what did you do?” Pennington said, and from across the table, Charity could see that though he held a pen, the notebook page in front of him was completely blank.
“We cared for Lilah as if she were our own. She was a delightful child. Happy and affectionate. We came to love her—I felt guilty for how much I loved her, when my own daughter was missing.” Charity folded her hands on the table and took a deep breath. “Then the one-year mark came and went, and Elizabeth never reappeared.”
“Did you try the blood-on-the-mirror trick again?” the sheriff asked.
Charity nodded. “Several times, but my summons went unanswered.”
“And you never got her back?” the deputy guessed, clearly transfixed by the story.
Pennington waved one hand to silence the deputy, and when he turned back to Charity, she met his gaze with tear-filled eyes. “No, I never got Elizabeth back,” she said. Then she took a deep breath and gave voice to a fear that had lived in her soul for twenty-five years, but had never before been spoken aloud.
“Sheriff, I think my Elizabeth was never returned because I loved Delilah more.”
Delilah (#ulink_10eb8116-68dc-56cc-93fb-448a858e6744)
The weight of my mother’s confession steadily pressed the air from my lungs until psychological suffocation felt like a very real threat. I tried to lean forward, staring intently through the one-way glass into the room where she sat, but again chains and cuffs held me painfully short of where I wanted to be.
However, the real trauma went much, much deeper. Brandon had been wrong—there really was a Delilah Marlow. But I wasn’t her.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to take it all in. Trying to understand.
I wasn’t my mother’s daughter.
That devastating revelation triggered a landslide of loss, leaving me crushed by the debris of my own life. I had no real name or family. No birthplace or birth date. No true identity. Added to the confiscation of everything I’d ever owned, that left me with nothing but a body I could no longer trust. Though according to Pennington, that was now owned by the state of Oklahoma.
This can’t be real.
What was I, if I had no name, no friends, no family, no job, no home, no belongings, and no authority over my own body? What could I be?
Maybe I was just the good little girl my mother’d begged for. Or maybe I was the monster Sheriff Pennington believed me to be. Maybe I was the first enemy soldier in a secret war against humanity. But could that even be true, if I didn’t know about it?
A strange creak cut through my thoughts, and Deputy Atherton turned away from the window to look at me. “Delilah? Are you okay?”
When I opened my mouth to tell him just how far from okay I was, the creaking stopped. I’d been clenching my jaw so tightly we could both hear the stress.
“You really didn’t know about any of that?” he said, pointing beyond the glass at my mother.
I shook my head. Even after hearing it, I wasn’t sure I truly understood. All I knew for sure was that I was a changeling of unknown origin sent to torture my mother. And that somehow a punishment meant to last a year had lasted a lifetime. For what? For loving me too much?
That wasn’t fair to her. She was a good mother. Yet if whoever’d taken Elizabeth Delilah Marlow—the real Lilah—had brought her back, where would that have left me? Would I have been raised by the woman in the mirror? Was she my mother?
No.
Charity Marlow had been living with her secret for twenty-five years, maintaining her silence to protect me, mourning her real daughter—a baby who’d looked just like me—in private, because the world could not know of her loss. That made her my mother, even if we shared no blood.
Had my dad known?
Yes.
Suddenly my father’s periodic melancholy made sense. What had he seen when he’d looked at me? Could he see the difference between me and his Elizabeth? Had he loved me as much as my mother did?
Had he blamed her for the loss of their true child? Had he blamed me?
“If you tell the sheriff I let you watch, he’ll have my badge.”
Deputy Atherton’s statement sliced through my thoughts so suddenly that it took me a second to understand what he’d said.
I sniffed, unable to wipe either my eyes or my dripping nose. “I won’t tell him.” As the only person to show me even the slightest bit of compassion, Atherton was the closest thing I had to an ally. “Thank you for letting me see my mom. What’s going to happen to her?” I whispered, still staring through the glass.
He shrugged. “If she’s human, she should be fine.”
“She harbored a cryptid for twenty-five years. That’s a felony, Deputy.”
“She was protecting her kid. The sheriff would never...” Atherton didn’t bother to finish. We both knew the sheriff would.
“Mrs. Marlow,” Pennington continued from the next room. “As an officer of the law, I have to ask, why didn’t you turn the changeling over to the proper authorities when it became clear that your daughter was never going to be returned?”
The changeling. He wasn’t even using my name anymore. I’d become a thing.
“She didn’t know she wasn’t human,” my mother said. “I didn’t know for sure. If I’d given her to the police, they would have put her in the state refuge, where she’d have been less than a snack for the first troll or ogre to find her. She was a baby, Sheriff.”
“Yes, and I’m sure she was adorable.” Pennington leaned back in his chair again, and though I couldn’t see his face, I could picture his patronizing expression perfectly. “A few years ago I saw a baby tiger in the zoo, over at Tulsa. It was behind a thick wall of glass playin’ with its handler, chasin’ a bit of string with a stuffed mouse tied at the end. That baby tiger was the cutest damn thing I ever saw in my life.” He paused dramatically. “A year and a half later it ripped that same handler’s arm off and bit through her jugular.”
My mother didn’t even flinch. “You’re suggesting Lilah is like this tiger?”
“I’m tellin’ you she’s worse. The tiger acted on instinct. Your Lilah made a deliberate decision to—” Pennington crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, we’re not sure what she did to that poor man. What we are sure of is that if you’d done your civic duty when she was a baby, we wouldn’t be sittin’ here now. I suspect the state’s attorney will have a few things to say to you about that, but I could put in a word on your behalf, if you were to help us out. We really need to know what she is. You must have seen something when she was growing up that could help us. There musta been signs that she was different from the other girls.”
“There weren’t, Sheriff,” my mother insisted. “That’s why it was so easy for me to believe she was human, no matter where she came from. Lilah was normal. She was smart, and kind, and always the first to go to bat for the underdog. I was always so proud of her.”
My mother’s face blurred beneath tears I couldn’t hold back.
“So, you never saw anything strange about her hair? Or her eyes? Or her hands?” Pennington asked, and my mother shook her head. “Not even when she got riled up about something?”
“No. There was never anything like that.” My mom leaned forward, her arms folded on top of the table, and I recognized the fierce look in her eyes. “Look, Sheriff, I have no idea what Lilah did to that man, but I have no doubt that he damn well deserved it.”
Deputy Atherton twisted a knob at the bottom of the glass, and my mother’s voice went silent. He pressed a button on the same panel, and the glass frosted over until it became reflective again. My viewing was over.
“She loves you.”
“Yeah, and I’m afraid that’s going to get her in serious trouble.” I rotated my shoulders in the futile search for a more comfortable position as he slid into the chair across the table from me. “What’s next for her?”
The deputy exhaled and pushed a strand of brown hair from his forehead. “Pennington’s approved a rush order on her blood test, so we should hear back within twenty-four hours, assuming she’s human.”
Because identifying one of thousands of cryptid species by blood was complicated, but confirming humanity was pretty quick.
“She’ll have to stay here until we’re sure, though.”
“Can’t you just let her go home? She’s no threat, Deputy.”
Atherton shook his head. “Standard procedure, for public safety. Anyone suspected of having cryptid blood has to stay in custody until the results are in. I’ll take her some coffee and a stale cinnamon roll, but that’s the best I can do.”
“What about me?” I shifted in my seat, trying to ease the pressure on my shoulders. “Am I going to sit in a cell until they figure out what I am?”
“Looks like it, and you should probably consider that a stroke of luck. Pennington’s had a couple of the guys out front looking at options for where to send you since before you woke up, and the very best of them is going to make this place look like a luxury hotel.”
A fresh jolt of fear tightened my chest. “Please tell me Pennington’s not the final authority.”
Atherton shrugged. “The law’s a little fuzzy on that. If that carny was in the morgue instead of the psych ward, Pennington would have to call in the state police. That’s standard for all capital offenses. But since he doesn’t have to make that call, he’s probably not gonna. If you turn out to be a surrogate, you fall under federal jurisdiction, but that’s another call he’s not going to make unless he has to.”
“So my fate is in the hands of the sheriff of a county with fewer than fifteen thousand people in it.” My mouth was dry, and my hands had gone numb, but because I wasn’t human, they could keep me as long as they wanted without so much as a sip of water or a trip to the bathroom.
“Yes, but I think you’re better off here than you would be in state custody.” The deputy folded his hands on the table while I watched him through a strand of hair that had fallen over my eye. “The state reservation is over capacity. They’re sendin’ the overflow straight to an R & D holding facility, and that place...”
Atherton stared down at his hands, and the fact that he was clearly stalling made my heart beat too hard.
Cryptid research and development was big business, with both the government and the private sector, but regulation was virtually nonexistent. Animal activists raised hell if a pharmaceutical company wanted to test new shampoo on a sewer rat, but R & D could inject environmental toxins beneath a selkie’s removable seal skin all day long and no one blinked an eye.
“They don’t tag ’em or count ’em, Delilah. I made a couple of calls, and a guy in records told me that since the lab opened fourteen years ago, they’ve sent in more than five times the max capacity—all kinds of cryptids—and there’s no record of any of them ever officially leaving the facility. But they fire up the industrial incinerator about once a week.”
My pulse jumped, and I struggled to keep breathing slowly. Evenly. “What’s the alternative? Hotel California?”
The deputy nodded. “Otherwise known as the Oklahoma Cryptid Confinement Center.”
“Same thing.” Because there, every sentence that wasn’t a life sentence was a death sentence.
“The only other option I can think of would be a private collection. I know this guy out in—”
“No.” Chills shot up my spine. Werewolves on leashes, declawed and walking around like pets. Selkies and naiads swimming in giant koi ponds. Fauns serving drinks at private events in nothing but gold chains and collars. I shook my head vehemently. “I’m nobody’s pet.”
“That’s not up to you.” Atherton leaned back in his chair, his forehead crinkled in irritation. “I’m going out of my way to help you, and your appreciation looks a lot like ingratitude.”
Indignation sharpened my vision until I finally saw the deputy clearly. “You want me to be thankful that you’re willing to sell me as a living party favor instead of sentencing me to a cryptid prison?”
The deputy’s eyes narrowed. “You need to take a good, objective look at what you’re facing here, Delilah. OCCC is an open-population cryptid prison. There are no guards. No cells. No rules. Helicopters make periodic supply drops on the grounds. You’d fight for every scrap of food and clothing until the day some troll or adlet eats you for breakfast. Is your pride really worth dying for?”
Fuck! I closed my eyes and clenched my fists over and over, wishing that the rest of me would go as numb as my fingers.
“And at least in a collection you’d be alive and in good health. No collector is going to let any serious damage come to property he spent good money on.”
Property. Damage. Money. I would be an exotic pet. An insured asset in some rich prick’s ledger. Because even animal lovers keep dogs on leashes.
The deputy shrugged. “I could say something to the sheriff about a private collector,” he offered. “He’d have to think it was his own idea, but that shouldn’t be hard. He still thinks it was his idea to install a vent fan in the men’s room, and—”
“That was my idea.” Pennington pushed the door open and marched into the interrogation room. Atherton’s jaw tightened and his gaze dropped to the table between us for a second before he stood to relinquish the chair. “But I like where your head’s at, Deputy.” Pennington settled across the table from me, and the chair groaned beneath his weight. “I’ve found a fella out near the panhandle who’s lookin’ to replenish his collection. He doesn’t care what flavor of freak you are, so long as we pass along the results of your blood test as soon as we have ’em.”
My chest felt so tight I could hardly breathe. “What kind of collection?”
“Well, I guess calling it a collection is kinda puttin’ on airs. Fella actually calls it a reserve.”
Wayne frowned. “Sheriff, are you talking about Russell Clegg’s operation? He’s running a game park over there, bringing hunters from all over to—”
Pennington twisted to look up at his deputy, and the chair creaked again. “Atherton, shut your mouth. You know no such thing.”
I swallowed convulsively, struggling to hold down what little dinner I’d had as horror washed over me in waves. “You can’t just let them chase me through the woods and shoot me down like a deer!” I wouldn’t stand a chance, with hunters wearing infrared goggles and hound dogs following my scent.
“Handin’ you over to Clegg will save the great state of Oklahoma thousands of dollars a year in upkeep, and in the process, I’ll be making the streets of Franklin County a safer place to live. Folks want you gone, Delilah. Voting folks.”
“I thought you couldn’t send me anywhere until my blood test comes back.”
The sheriff shrugged. “After talking to your mother, I agree that whatever you are, you’re probably not a surrogate. If the test says otherwise, the feds can seize you from Clegg just as easily as they could seize you from me, and as long as my check has cleared, I could not give a—”
The door to the interrogation room flew open, startling us all.
“What?” Pennington roared at the deputy who stood in the threshold.
“There’s a man out ’ere wants to talk to ya, Sheriff. It’s about Lilah Marlow.”
“What about her?”
The deputy shrugged. “He said he’d only talk to you. We put him in the next room, now that they got Mrs. Marlow moved to a cell.”
The sheriff nodded. “I’ll be there when I’m done in here.” His deputy disappeared into the hall, and I glanced at Atherton with my brows raised, silently asking what he knew.
He only shrugged.
As the sheriff turned back to me with more questions, I stared at my own reflection in the one-way mirror, wondering who was looking back at me from the other side, and why.
I’d already been threatened with prison, a collection, and a hunting reserve. How much worse could this stranger’s plan for me possibly be?
“Ladies and gentlemen, our lead story continues to grow stranger and more disturbing. So far, in every single one of the reported cases of this mass prolicide—the killing of one’s own children—it appears that one child in each family has survived, completely unharmed. Even more bizarre—all of the surviving children are six years old, each born in the same month—March of 1980.”
—Continuing coverage on the Nightly News, August 30, 1986
Rudolph (#ulink_3d57d98a-8868-5624-ad63-b209e27cefe6)
“Just twist that button next to the window, and you’ll be able to hear what they’re saying.” The sheriff’s deputy still had one hand on the doorknob, clearly eager to leave the observation room. Rudolph Metzger was neither surprised nor offended. Often locals were almost as unnerved by menagerie workers and their close proximity to the beasts as they were by the beasts themselves. “They can’t see or hear you. The sheriff will be with you shortly,” the deputy added on his way out.
Rudolph exhaled slowly when the door closed behind the officer, leaving him alone in the dim interrogation/observation room with Gallagher.
One hundred and twelve years.
That’s how long the menagerie had been in Rudolph’s family. The Metzgers had been bringing quality live entertainment to small towns all over the U.S. since before cell phones and personal computers. Since before the internet brought footage of dangerous and exotic creatures into private homes with one simple click of a mouse.
Since long before the reaping and the repeal of the Sanctuary Act.
Back then, business was simple and the creature carnival was smaller. Beasts only. The chimera. The phoenix. The basilisk. Nothing with human parts could be caged or put on display, but business was good because outside of zoos and traveling menageries, private citizens couldn’t get an up close look at a griffin without getting their eyes pecked out or their limbs ripped off.
But the technological boom had not been good to traveling circuses.
Rudolph shrugged off bittersweet nostalgia and waved a hand at the button on the wall, his gaze focused on the occupants of the room beyond the one-way glass. Gallagher stepped forward to twist the knob, and voices filled the room.
For a while, Rudolph only watched, uncomfortably aware of the fact that if the woman hadn’t been chained to both her chair and the floor, he would’ve had no idea she wasn’t, in fact, a woman at all. She was a monster. A female monster, certainly, but not a woman.
Only humans can be men and women.
But she looked like a woman, and that was a problem.
Most monsters could not hide for long among humanity—monstrosity shone through, even among the most normal-looking of creatures. Werewolves, for instance, had wolf eyes and canines even in human form. Ifrits gave off an unnatural body heat and had hair the color of flames. Sirens’ eyes often came in colors foreign to humanity. Each species had its tell.
But this one...
After five minutes of studying her, scrutinizing every visible part, Rudolph could see no sign of aberration. Of course, the same was true of oracles, until their eyes clouded over in the grip of second sight.
“You’re sure?” he said, still staring at the female chained to the chair. Strands of her ordinary dark hair hung over her ordinary blue eyes. She was ordinary, in the human sense, but somewhat attractive.
Yet another problem.
Gallagher nodded without pulling his gaze from the subject behind the window. He was a man of few words, but he was also a man of strong instinct and no bullshit, both qualities the old man considered himself to have in spades. If Gallagher said this beast was more than she seemed, then she was more than she seemed.
She was also the kind of exhibit that could make or break a menagerie. Rudolph could not afford the risk she represented, nor could he afford to pass up the crowds she could draw. The profit she could bring.
When the Sanctuary Act was overturned, mere months after the reaping, traveling menageries began to evolve into modern creature features, complete with humanoid and hybrid exhibits as well as specialty shows. Demand was high and regulations were few. Insurance was optional and inspections were rare in most venues. Costs were low and profit margins were wide.
At first, Metzger’s had flourished.
Yet by the time Rudolph’s father passed the reins on to his middle-aged sons in the late 1990s, everything had begun to change. Rubes had become skeptics accustomed to movie magic and special effects. Audiences were harder to impress and less willing to pay for the privilege. Safety regulations, inspections, and insurance for traveling menageries had become astronomic expenses in an age when customers could sue a restaurant over too-hot coffee.
Rudolph’s three brothers—and their prissy, gold-digging wives—wanted no part of the circus lifestyle, and after he bought them out to keep them from running Metzger’s into the ground with their own disinterest, the menagerie’s liquid assets were nearly drained.
Fortunately, Rudolph had a head for figures and an eye for beasts. He could tell at a glance which werewolf pup was the hardiest of the litter and which centaurs could subsist on oats and water without compromising their stamina. Rudolph knew just how to coax the livestock into breeding, and exactly when to sell which offspring to supplement income during the rough winter months when traveling was restricted by the weather.
Thanks to Rudolph’s talent and attention, Metzger’s had survived when many other menageries folded. But survival wasn’t enough. He wanted Metzger’s to flourish!
Gallagher’s discovery could help make that happen.
“We can’t show her like that.” Rudolph waved one hand at the glass, and Gallagher nodded. “If people think she’s a surrogate, no one will come see her. And if it looks like we’ve put a human woman in a cage, the rubes will feel sorry for her and we’ll be the bad guys. You’ll have to bring out her beast. Show them she’s a monster—but not a surrogate.”
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Rachel Vincent
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From New York Times bestselling author Rachel Vincent comes a richly imagined, provocative new series set in the dark mythology of the Menagerie…When Delilah Marlow visits a famous traveling carnival, Metzger′s Menagerie, she is an ordinary woman in a not-quite-ordinary world. But under the macabre circus black-top, she discovers a fierce, sharp-clawed creature lurking just beneath her human veneer. Captured and put on exhibition, Delilah in her black swan burlesque costume is stripped of her worldly possessions, including her own name, as she′s forced to «perform» in town after town.But there is breathtaking beauty behind the seamy and grotesque reality of the carnival. Gallagher, her handler, is as kind as he is cryptic and strong. The other «attractions»–mermaids, minotaurs, gryphons and kelpies–are strange, yes, but they share a bond forged by the brutal realities of captivity. And as Delilah struggles for her freedom, and for her fellow menagerie, she′ll discover a strength and a purpose she never knew existed.Renowned author Rachel Vincent weaves an intoxicating blend of carnival magic and startling humanity in this intricately woven and powerful tale."Blood Bound offers a little something for everyone: a convincing magical system for urban fantasy fans; for romance readers, a love that time and distance can′t break; and a twist-and-turn plot for mystery buffs. Readers looking for a light and fluffy ride should go elsewhere."–Shelf Awareness