In this riveting sequel to New York Times bestselling author Rachel Vincent’s acclaimed novel Menagerie, Delilah Marlow will discover that there is no crueler cage than the confines of the human mind...

When their coup of Metzger’s Menagerie is discovered, Delilah and her fellow cryptids find their newly won freedom brutally stripped away as they are sold into The Savage Spectacle, a private collection of “exotic wildlife.” Specializing in ruthless cryptid cage matches, safari-style creature hunts and living party favors, the Spectacle’s owner, Willem Vandekamp, caters to the forbidden fetishes of the wealthy and powerful. At the Spectacle, any wish can be granted—for the right price.

But Vandekamp’s closely guarded client list isn’t the only secret being kept at the Spectacle. Beneath the beauty and brutality of life in the collection lie much darker truths, and no one is more determined than Delilah to strip the masks from the human monsters and drag all dark things into the light.

Praise for Menagerie

“Well-paced, readable and imaginative.”

—New York Times on Menagerie

“A dark tale of exploited and abused others, expertly told by Vincent.”

—Library Journal, starred review

“Vincent summons bold and vivid imagery with her writing.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“As depicted by Vincent, Delilah is magnificent in her defiance of injustice, and the well-wrought background for her world sets the stage for her future adventures in this captivating new fantasy series.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Vincent creates a fantastic world that is destined to pique your curiosity... As Delilah Marlow slowly uncovers a side of herself that she never knew existed, you’ll sympathize with her...desperate to see her succeed.”

—RT Book Reviews

“The promising opener in a new series...a fast-paced story of vengeance and justice.”

—The Roanoke Times

“Amazing world-building and a captivating cast of characters. My new favorite Rachel Vincent book.”

—#1 New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong

Also by

New York Times bestselling author

Rachel Vincent and MIRA Books

The Menagerie Series

MENAGERIE

The Shifters

STRAY

ROGUE

PRIDE

PREY

SHIFT

ALPHA

Unbound

BLOOD BOUND

SHADOW BOUND

OATH BOUND

For more titles by Rachel Vincent, visit her website at rachelvincent.com.

Spectacle

Rachel Vincent

www.mirabooks.co.uk

This is for everyone who followed me down the dark and twisted tunnel that is Menagerie.

Welcome back.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Booklist

Title Page

Dedication

Part One: Démasqué

Prologue

First Quote

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Second Quote

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Third Quote

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Fourth Quote

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Part Two: Menagerie

Chapter 20

Fifth Quote

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Sixth Quote

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Seventh Quote

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Eighth Quote

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Ninth Quote

Chapter 33

Tenth Quote

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Acknowledgments

Extract

Copyright

Part One

Démasqué

Twenty-seven years ago

A scream broke through the surface of Tabitha’s dreams like an oar slicing through calm water, and she sat straight up in bed, still half-submerged in that other world. Heart pounding, she slid one small hand beneath her mattress, grasping for the handle of the knife her mother had hidden there.

Just in case.

Because if there were another reaping, parents could not be trusted. Children would have to protect themselves.

Tabitha’s fingers found the blade of the knife instead, and the cut was a sharp, immediate pain. The clarity of the sting—not muddled like blunt blows that left bruises—drew her thoughts into focus and vanquished the fog of sleep. She sucked on the cut without truly noticing the familiar, coppery taste of blood. Then she slid off the bed and lifted her thin mattress, bedding and all, and seized the knife the proper way.

Just like her mother had shown her.

Another scream sliced through the night, startling crickets and cicadas into silence, and Tabitha whirled toward the source of the sound. The open window over her nightstand.

She pushed the sheer curtain aside and bent to stare through the gap beneath the old, cloudy glass and the flaking windowsill.

Candlelight flickered in the barn.

Tabitha straightened her pale green nightgown, covering an old bruise on her leg, then headed for the hall clutching the knife. No one knew what a second reaping would look like, but Tabitha knew where to stab. Her mother had shown her which soft bits of flesh would be most vulnerable to her blade, should he come into her room at night, and Tabitha remembered every lesson.

What she did not remember was that the first lesson had come three years ago, almost a year before the reaping.

In the hall, Tabitha passed the bathroom and peeked into Isabelle’s room on her way toward the stairs. Isabelle’s bed was empty. Her sheet was thrown back and her slippers were missing.

Tabitha took the stairs one at a time, flinching with every creak of the wooden treads. Downstairs, her parents’ bedroom door stood open. Their bed was empty too.

Barefoot, her stomach pitching with fear and dread, Tabitha pushed open the back door and descended three porch steps. The grass felt prickly against her bare feet, but the backyard was peppered with smooth patches of soft dirt. When she was halfway across the yard, another scream froze her in place. Her fist clenched around the knife handle.

But then she exhaled slowly and pushed forward. That wasn’t her mother’s scream. It was just Isabelle’s.

Over the past two years, she had heard Isabelle cry a lot from her room down the hall. She’d heard Isabelle pray and beg in the middle of the night. But the screaming was new. Was that why Tabitha’s mother slept with earplugs? Had she known there would eventually be screaming?

Tabitha pushed open the barn door. The horses looked nervous, shuffling in their stalls and tossing their manes. Her father stood in the center aisle, clutching a thick-bottomed glass. In the light flickering from a candle stuck to the top of the nearest stall with melted wax, she could see that the glass was empty, but for a single melting ice cube.

The front stall was supposed to be empty too.

“Tabitha?” Her father’s gaze struggled to focus as he stared at her, and she knew that was not his first glass of the night.

At the mention of her daughter’s name, Tabitha’s mother popped up from the nearest stall like Jack from his box. Her clear gaze was focused and hard. “Go back to bed. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Let her stay,” Tabitha’s father said. “Nine is old enough to know how the world works.”

Neither of them mentioned the knife their daughter held.

Tabitha’s mother frowned, then sank onto her knees in the stall again. Her father waved her forward, and when she hesitated two feet away, he slapped one rough hand onto her shoulder and pulled her closer, positioning her in front of the open stall.

Tabitha flinched, but she forgot all about the unwanted hand when her gaze landed on the floor of the stall. There, propped up on both elbows in the strewn hay, lay Isabelle. Her face was crimson and streaked with tears. Her hair was sweaty and matted, odd strands of it clinging to her damp cheeks.

“Tabitha,” Isabelle panted. “Help me.”

But there was nothing Tabitha could do but watch.

Most of Isabelle’s hair was dark, from the dye Tabitha’s mother made her use, but the roots were a soft green. The very shade of the moss that grew along the edges of the stream running through the back acre of her father’s farm. The acre that used to belong to Isabelle’s family.

Isabelle had been fourteen when the soldiers had come for her parents after the reaping, when all the cryptids were being rounded up. Everyone knew it was coming. Isabelle’s parents had begged Tabitha’s mother to hide their daughter. To save her. But it was Tabitha’s father who’d agreed. He was the one who’d thought of the dye—the same shade his wife used to cover her gray. The same shade of Tabitha’s hair.

Tabitha and Isabelle could be like sisters, he’d said. And because he’d always been fond of his neighbors’ daughter, he’d agreed not only to hide Isabelle, but to buy his neighbors’ land after the state foreclosed on it and save it for her. For when she grew up.

Isabelle grew up real pretty. Tabitha’s father always said that. But she’d had to quit school when she got fat. Tabitha’s mother said people wouldn’t understand. They’d figure out she wasn’t human and they’d come for her too. So Tabitha kept the secret about pretty Isabelle, who cleaned the house and cried at night.

Nine years old was old enough to keep a secret, her father’d said.

But now, on the floor in the barn, Isabelle didn’t look so pretty. And suddenly Tabitha understood.

“Is she having a baby?” That’s what their mare had done when she’d lain down in the barn.

“It might be a baby.” Tabitha’s mother peered down at Isabelle, blocking Tabitha’s view. “But it might be a monster. We’ll know in a few minutes. It’s time to push.”

Tabitha’s father’s grip tightened on her shoulder. His other hand clutched his empty glass.

Tabitha watched, fascinated, as Isabelle gave birth, too tired now to scream. When it was over, the baby gave a hearty cry, and Tabitha’s father sucked in a breath. Tabitha’s mother pulled a rag from the pocket of her apron and wiped the infant’s face. She stood and turned, holding the child closer to the candlelight to examine it.

“Please...” Isabelle begged from the ground. “Let me see him.”

“Her,” Tabitha’s mother corrected. She folded the rag, then scrubbed it gently over the infant’s head. Then she looked up at her husband, disappointment clenching her square jaw.

The baby’s hair was a soft, pale green.

Tabitha’s father threw his glass at the side of the barn. It shattered, raining shards all over the hay. She flinched. Her father stomped out of the barn, headed for the house.

Tabitha’s mother spread the rag on the ground at Isabelle’s feet, then laid the baby on top of it. She turned to her daughter as Isabelle cried.

“Give me your knife.”

“While families all over the country are in mourning, a couple of local grandparents are counting their blessings. Two weeks ago, twelve-year-old Willem Henry Vandekamp survived what’s become known as The Reaping because he was at a birthday party sleepover. He is Otto and Judith Vandekamp’s only surviving grandchild.”

—from a September 4, 1986, broadcast of the Channel 10 Nightly News, Poplar Bluff, Missouri

Rommily

The oracle wandered down the midway, her gaze flitting from one brightly striped tent to the next, her fingers reaching for each soft scrap of silk and scratchy patch of sequins she passed.

She had not forgotten the cages and chains and blood. No matter how fractured her mind might be, she could never erase the pain and terror of that night in the rain or overcome a lifetime spent in a four-by-six animal pen.

But those were distant horrors now, relegated to the realm of nightmares.

The daylight was for dreaming.

As she meandered in the afternoon sun, her eyes were bright and focused. Her thoughts—typically tangled like a knotted cord—were blissfully calm, because there were no customers yet, and her fellow carnies knew better than to touch or speak to her. Those she considered friends smiled or waved when she passed, and those she cared little for paid her little attention.

Rommily listened to the shifters count out beats under the big top as they rehearsed an addition to their hoop-jumping, ball-balancing act. She heard the soft shuffle of hooves from behind a heavy canvas flap as the centaurs played their afternoon game of poker with Abraxas, the young human roustabout who’d taught them when to hit and when to stand.

As she passed the next tent, Rommily heard a familiar snort, and the sound triggered a warmth that spread beneath the surface of her skin. She veered from the midway with no conscious intent. Her feet followed instructions from her heart without consulting her brain, and a minute later, she stood behind the equine tent, where a single broad tree spread limbs in all directions, and with them, cool patches of shadow.

The minotaur sat in the shade on a wide, sturdy bench most men couldn’t have lifted. He stood when he saw Rommily, and the images that flashed behind her eyes were triggered not by premonition but by memory.

Strong hands tearing guilty flesh.

Blood spilled in the name of justice.

She said nothing as she crossed the patch of sparse grass separating them. Rommily only spoke in the grip of a vision, since that night in the rain, and without a human mouth, the bull couldn’t speak at all. Their connection had developed without the luxury of unnecessary words.

The minotaur’s arms spread as Rommily came closer. She reached out for him, her hand tiny and fragile against massive planes of muscle, her touch a delicate contrast to his raw power. The oracle trailed her fingers over the ridge of his human collarbone, just where dense, soft bovine fur began to grow. The top of her head didn’t reach his shoulder, and three of her standing side by side couldn’t have matched his width, yet she seemed to fit perfectly when she laid her head against his chest and wrapped her arms as far as they would go around his immense rib cage.

For several long minutes they stayed just like that, free from the burden of words. Safe from prying gazes.

When the pace of the day began to pick up—when footsteps fell hurriedly and voices began to sound tense—she reluctantly stepped back and squeezed the bull’s hand, then made her way to the fortune-telling tent all on her own.

Her older sister, Mirela, was already dressed in the white flouncy blouse and long, colorful skirt of a fortune-teller—an oracle cursed by fate with the genes of a “cryptid” and cursed by law with the chains of captivity.

Once, the outfit and chains had been authentic. Their internment in the traveling menagerie had been reality. Now the clothes were a costume—the wool pulled over the eyes of an audience that wanted to believe what it was seeing.

Metzger’s Menagerie—the institution that had once held her in bondage, half-starved and sometimes beaten where the bruises wouldn’t show—had become her salvation. It was now the veil shielding her from the prying eyes and cruel hands the rest of the world seemed so eager to wield.

Lala, Rommily’s younger sister, wore blue jeans and a red uniform shirt, which declared her name to be Louise. That was a lie Rommily found funny on some days and sad on others, but today she gave it little thought as she stepped behind the folding screen and exchanged her long white cotton dress for a blouse and skirt matching Mirela’s. She wasn’t fit to perform—not even the miracle of freedom could fix her shattered mind—but she had to wear the costume because the inability to control her visions meant she couldn’t pass for a human employee.

Dressed, she let Lala secure her with chains and shackles that didn’t really lock. Then when Mirela slid her paperback novel beneath the table and gave them a nod, Lala led Rommily out the tent onto the midway, where she would serve as a living advertisement for the wonder customers would find inside.

Overhead, static blared from a speaker mounted on a tall pole, then organ music poured forth, its playful notes dancing up and down the oracle’s spine, spinning around and around in her head like the stylized mermaid and unicorn seats on the carousel. The music was calming, some nights, because it signified a routine she knew well. But tonight the notes made her dizzy.

The oracle’s gaze lost focus. Her eyes closed as she chased the melody in her head, winding down mischievous paths and around dark corners. She didn’t notice when the carnival gates opened or the crowd appeared. She didn’t notice when Lala launched into her spiel.

The music felt odd tonight.

Laughter broke into the oracle’s thoughts and her eyes flew open as a father passed by the fortune-teller’s tent, tickling a toddler whose hair was fixed in blond pigtails.

“Cradle and all...” Rommily mumbled, her gaze glued to the child as terrifying images flickered deep in her mind. The crowd seemed to blur as her focus skipped from face to face, searching for another piece of a puzzle she would never be able to fully assemble.

Minutes later, a man and woman pushed a stroller down the midway. Rommily stared into it as it passed, and her eyes glazed into solid white orbs. “Out with the bathwater!” People turned toward the oracle and her petite female handler, intrigued by what they assumed to be part of the show. “Wednesday’s child! From the cradle to the grave!”

Parents pulled their children closer. The crowd began to murmur, and the whispered word reaping met Rommily’s ears.

Lala’s sales pitch ended in midsentence as she tried to shush her sister. But Rommily’s message—unclear as it was—could not go unheard.

“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world!”

Delilah

Calliope music shrieked from the speakers just off the midway, its grating notes bouncing around my head like the ricochet of a whimsical bullet. Night after night, the iconic circus music managed to overwhelm all the other sounds of the menagerie, no matter how loud the cries of the barkers and buzz of the crowd grew.

Not that there was much of a crowd on the midway, after 10:00 p.m. The main event drew most of the customers into the big top for the last two hours of every evening, leaving only stragglers to knock down mermaid-shaped cutouts with water guns and toss rings onto an inflatable minotaur’s plastic horns. Or to visit the exhibits.

“Delilah!”

I turned toward the sound of my name to find Lala at her post in front of the fortune-teller’s tent. Folding my arms over my clipboard, I crossed the sawdust-strewn path toward her, sidestepping a little boy eating a melting ice-cream cone while his father threw darts at the balloon breasts of a cartoon-style siren. My head throbbed from the music and my feet ached from another eighteen-hour workday, but I put on a smile for Lala.

She was living her dream.

“How’d we do?” the youngest of the three oracles asked, crossing her arms over a red Metzger’s Menagerie polo. She’d filled out a bit with proper nutrition, since our coup of the menagerie, but the true source of her newfound confidence was the hours she spent watching television and listening to the radio while she worked, immersing herself in human culture. Despite her youth—she was barely nineteen—Lala had become one of our most self-assured and dependable liaisons with human society, and it certainly didn’t hurt that she looked completely human when she wasn’t in the grip of a vision.

“Um...” I checked the figure at the bottom of the form clipped to my clipboard. “Fifty-one thousand, two hundred seventy-two dollars.” Gross. In one night.

“That’s almost a thousand dollars more than last night.” Lala’s brown eyes shone in the light from a nearby pole. “That’s good, right?”

“It’s very good.” That was nearly twice what I’d made in a year as a bank teller, before I was “exposed” and sold into the menagerie. I should have been thrilled, especially considering that at $104 per ticket, admission wasn’t exactly affordable for the nine-to-fivers and minimum wagers who made up most of our customer base. Yet people kept paying night after night, in town after tiny, rural town.

“We’ll be near Tucson in a couple of days, right? I know we have bills and things, but do we have enough?” Her wide-eyed optimism made me feel guilty for being the bearer of bad news.

“Lala, we don’t have any. The money’s spent before we even make it.”

“What? All of it?” Unshed tears seem to magnify her eyes. “But we’re going to be within a few miles of Gael’s son.”

Like most of us, Lala got invested in every cryptid we tried to buy from the other menageries, preserves and labs that owned them. But this one was personal for her. She was the one who’d found the berserker’s son, in a vision.

“We have to buy him, Delilah. That’s the whole point of this, right?” She spread her arms to take in the entire menagerie, and our perilous, secret possession of it. “So pay something late. We only need twelve thousand dollars.”

Right after we’d taken over the menagerie, I would have paid it in a heartbeat to free one of our fellow cryptids from captivity. In fact, I’d done just that, before I had a handle on the menagerie’s finances. Before I’d realized how dire our financial situation really was.

I’d handled tens of thousands of dollars in cash nearly every night since we took over the menagerie, but the vast majority of it went to paying our operating costs. Taxes. Licenses and permits in every single town. Fairground rental fees. Inspections. Food. Fuel. Maintenance. And insurance. That was the big one. Insurance alone cost Metzger’s Menagerie more than a million a year. And we were only getting off that easily because Rudolph Metzger hadn’t reported most of our recent “incidents” to the insurance company—some, because the old man was trying to cut corners, and some because he was no longer in a position of authority at the menagerie.

We’d shipped him south of the border in one of his own menagerie cages, as a peace offering to the marid sultan, whose only daughter had died during our revolt.

If the insurance company knew about everything Metzger had covered up, our coup of the menagerie would have been exposed long ago, not because a customer saw through our masquerade, but because of simple, stupid bankruptcy.

Even so, we sat on the verge of that very catastrophe on a nightly basis.

“Lala, we’re already paying bills late. If that gets any worse, they’ll start foreclosing on things.” Old man Metzger had bought much of his equipment on credit. Ironically, we no longer needed most of it, since we were running our own show now and only selling the illusion of captivity. But we couldn’t return any of it without explaining why our creatures and hybrids no longer needed to be restrained or sedated.

“There has to be a way,” the young oracle insisted, heartbreak shining in her eyes.

“Maybe there is. I don’t want everyone to get their hopes up, but I was thinking about asking Renata if she’d be willing to help.”

“Oh!” Lala jumped and clenched her fists in excitement.

“Shhh!” I stepped in front of her, trying to shield her delight from the man running the funnel cake stand. The game booths and food stands—everything other than the actual menagerie—belonged to subcontractors who worked the seasonal carnival route. They had no idea Metzger’s was being run by the very cryptids who made up its exhibits and performances, and if any of them ever found out, our ruse—and our freedom—would come to a violent end.

“Sorry,” Lala whispered, as she recomposed herself into the role of tired carnival worker. “I just... I thought it was too dangerous to let the encantados play with people’s minds.”

“It is. But we don’t have a lot of choice this time.” I pulled my pen from the top of the clipboard while she tried to control her smile. “I have to go collect the stats. What was your head count?”

“Two hundred seven. We had a thirty-minute-long line late this afternoon.”

“Mirela must be exhausted.” The oldest of the three oracles was alone inside the tent, since it was Lala’s turn to play carnival employee.

Lala shrugged. “Exhaustion makes the bed feel that much softer at the end of the night.”

I gave her a smile as I moved on to the next tent. Her upbeat outlook never failed to amaze me. At the end of the day, as grateful as I was to have regained my freedom, I couldn’t help missing the apartment and belongings I lost when I was arrested and sold. I resented the fact that even in freedom, I had to hide. But Lala lived for every minor liberty and moment of comfort, as if indulging in them might someday make up for everything she’d been denied in her sixteen years as a captive.

I continued down the sawdust path, taking head counts from the few tents that were still open until I got to the bestiary, where the nonhuman hybrids were on display in a series of vintage circus cage wagons. Ember, the phoenix, was easily my favorite. From her head down, her plumage graduated through shades of red, yellow and orange, ending in long, wide tail feathers that looked like living flames in the bright light thrown from high pole-mounted fixtures. But she could hardly even stretch those tail feathers in the confines of her cage.

Darkness shifted behind the next enclosure, a subtle blending of one shadow into another, and though I heard neither footsteps nor breathing, I knew I was no longer alone.

“This isn’t fair to them.” I tucked my clipboard under one arm and stared up at the phoenix.

“I know.” Gallagher stepped out of the shadows, yet they seemed to cling to him, giving him a dangerous look that most humans would feel, yet be unable to truly understand. They would blame their instinctive fear on his towering height. On his massive musculature. But they wouldn’t really grasp his destructive potential.

If they were lucky.

“I got a quote on bigger cages, but considering that our budget is around zero, it’s not going to happen anytime soon.” Three months after our coup, we had yet to come up with a solution for the beasts’ confinement. Their enclosures were inhumanely small, but much like the lions in any zoo, the chimera, the griffin and the others were all far too dangerous to simply keep on leashes. “We’re going to have to raise ticket prices.”

Gallagher shook his head, and light shone on the red baseball cap covering most of his short, dark hair. “The menagerie’s customer base is blue-collar. They’re already paying more than they can afford. We need to be touring larger venues. Exhibition grounds. Amusement parks.”

“No.” I was already weary of the argument we’d been putting off for two months. “Bigger venues are too much of a risk.”

“Eryx brings in five hundred people in every tiny town we visit. Imagine the thousands he’d attract in a larger venue. In bigger cities.”

I turned to look up at him. “The cryptids... We’re all still skittish, Gallagher. Most of them are terrified to deal with vendors and carny subcontractors, and with good reason. That would only be worse if we played larger venues, with more inspections and more invasive oversight.”

His brows furrowed low over dark eyes. “It’s September, Delilah. Schools are already back in session, and the county fair circuit will dry up in the next few weeks. If we’re not prepared to step into the big interior venues—stadiums and concert halls—we won’t make it through the winter, because we certainly can’t raise funds the way old man Metzger did.”

The very thought gave me chills.

During the off-season, when the carnival circuit shrank to virtually nothing, Rudolph Metzger had rented the most exotic of his cryptids to various private collections, where they were exhibited in a more formal setting for high-dollar clientele who wouldn’t frequent a sweaty, dirty, outdoor carnival.

“We’re not renting anyone out, and we’re not risking larger venues.”

In our menagerie, we ran the shows and set our own limits. Except for the required inspections, there was no third-party oversight. Under Gallagher’s plan, one suspicious stadium employee could blow our ruse wide-open, and we’d all be back in cages. We couldn’t take that risk.

“We’ll find another way,” I assured him.

Our plan had been to take the entire menagerie south of the border. But when Sultan Bruhier’s daughter, Adira, died during the coup, he’d closed his borders, leaving us trapped in the United States, where exposure would mean imprisonment, and in many cases, torture.

“We could send Bruhier another gift,” Gallagher said. I shook my head, but he kept talking. “I could call one of the old handlers and offer him a job, then throw him in a cage and ship him down to the sultan.”

“We gave him Metzger. If gifting him the owner didn’t work, sending a mere menagerie employee won’t either. And even if I were okay with sending someone else to be tortured to death at the hands of the sultan, it took forever for the encantados to make the old man’s family think he ran off with an acrobat. We can’t make another person disappear.”

“We can’t let everyone starve to death either.”

“I know.” I cleared my throat and took the pen from my clipboard again. “What was the bestiary’s head count?”

“Four hundred sixty.”

“Are we all set for takedown?”

“As soon as the gates close.”

“Good.” I turned to head to the hybrids’ tent, but Gallagher took my hand before I made it two steps.

“Delilah.” He tugged me closer, and when I looked up at him, I found his eyes shrouded by the shadow of his hat bill, in the light falling from overhead. “My oath to protect you includes protecting you from starvation. And from yourself. Buying the incubus nearly bankrupted us.”

“I couldn’t just leave him there—”

“But now we’re rationing food. Something has to give.”

I nodded. I knew that. “I have to get a head count from the big top. I’ll think of something. I swear.”

Gallagher frowned at my choice of words. Swearing meant something different to him than it did to the rest of the world because the fae can’t go back on their word.

Nor can they lie.

Ever.

* * *

At eleven fifty, I stepped inside the massive striped tent and watched the big-top finale from the west entrance. Though I saw the show nearly every night, I was still awed by the strength and ingenuity of the performers. By their grace and beauty. By the pride they took in their performances, now that the show was truly theirs.

In the ring—we only assembled one of them, now that our show was smaller—Zyanya and her brother, Payat, had already completed their live shift into cheetah form. As I watched, Ignis, the draco, breathed fire over the first of two steel rings suspended from a sturdy steel frame, and the audience oohed as the ring burst into flames.

Ignis was a three-foot-long winged serpent whose fire-breathing range had been surgically reduced from over seven feet to a mere eighteen inches years before old man Metzger had bought me for his menagerie. Even with his surgical handicap, Ignis represented the biggest risk we were willing to take in the ring because he was difficult to communicate with and impossible to retrain without using the abusive tactics his previous trainers had employed.

Once Ignis had swooped to light the second steel ring, heralded by a crescendo in the soaring big-top sound track, Zyanya and Payat leapt through the blazing hoops in sync, still in cheetah form, and landed gracefully on the backs of a matching set of thickly muscled centaurs—part Belgian horse, part man.

Several minutes later, the orchestral sound track crescendoed with a crash of cymbals signaling the beginning of the finale. Eryx, the minotaur, took thundering steps toward the center of the ring, holding his thick arms out in the most graceful gesture we had managed to teach the former beast of burden. From their positions all around the huge ring, hybrid acrobats flipped and cartwheeled toward him. While I watched, as awed then as I’d been on the first night of their revamped performance, the acrobats climbed the minotaur like a tree, then each other like its branches until they stood on each others’ arms and legs and shoulders. Eryx became the base of a diamond-shaped formation of hybrid and shifter acrobats stacked to within mere feet of the aviary net.

As the minotaur slowly turned, showing off the finale for the 360-degree audience around the ring, two harpies in glittering red costumes soared around the act, dropping steel rings from overhead. They landed around outstretched arms and legs, revolving like hula hoops. From one side of the ring, Zyanya’s two young cubs pushed a large heavy ball toward the center with their small feline muzzles. When they had it in place, Eryx stepped up onto the ball, with one foot, then the other, lifting his graceful load as if it weighed no more than a bag of his own feed.

Through it all, Ignis swooped and glided through the air in and around the acrobats’ limbs, dodging spinning rings and spitting small jets of fire. The music soared and the crowd stood on collapsible risers, stomping and clapping for a show they would credit to a huge staff of human handlers and trainers.

For nearly a minute, the performers remained frozen in their ending pose, breathing hard, basking in applause from spectators who would have run screaming if they’d known the truth about what they’d just seen.

Then the music faded and smoke machines fired a gray mist into the ring. Under the cover of smoke, the performers dismounted and jogged from the ring through a chain-link tunnel toward the back of the tent, while the audience climbed down from the bleachers and headed for marked exits in pairs and small clusters. Children clutched their parents’ hands, chattering about the massive minotaur and the graceful leopard shifter. Adults recounted their favorite parts, from the berserker in bear form throwing glittering rings for the harpies to catch in their beaks, to the wolf and the cheetahs transforming from man into animal right in front of them.

I stood at my post, thanking them all for coming, directing them toward the main exit, past the closed ticket booth. I shook hands with fathers and high-fived young boys wearing souvenir Metzger’s hats with minotaur horns sticking up from the sides and little girls who’d bought headbands with cat ears or fake teeth with wolf or cheetah incisors poking into their lower lips.

At exactly midnight, as I was ushering the crowd from the big top, Abraxas—one of our three human employees—turned off the calliope music and played a light instrumental intended to signal the night’s end. The intercom crackled, then Lenore’s smooth, siren voice spoke over the music, urging the audience members to make their way to the exit, then proceed directly to their cars.

I’d actually taken several steps in the same direction before I remembered—as I struggled to do every night—that Lenore was responsible for my sudden compulsion to leave the carnival and drive straight home. Even though I no longer had a car. Or a home outside the menagerie and the camper I shared with Gallagher.

Abraxas and Alyrose, our human costume mistress, still had to wear earplugs during the nightly farewell, but Lenore’s human husband, Kevin, was used to it.

Caught in the siren’s pull, the spectators headed for the exit as one, and as I watched, resisting that draw myself, an odd movement caught my eye. One tall man in the crowd had his hand over his ear, not cupped like he was covering it, but as if...he’d just put in an earplug. The light was too dim for me to see for sure, but the possibility set me on edge.

Everyone else was with a friend or a date or family, yet this man walked alone, amid the jostle and flow of the crowd. Watching. When his gaze met mine, he smiled, but the expression seemed localized to his lips, one of which was bisected by a thick line of scar tissue that hooked down and over the edge of his chin.

He looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him, and the mental disconnect hovered on the edge of my thoughts like an itch that couldn’t be reached.

When the crowd had gone and the smoke had cleared, Abraxas turned off the sound system. Gallagher locked the gates. All over the menagerie, creatures with scales and horns and tails shed their chains and emerged from their cages like monstrous butterflies from steel cocoons. They shook off the pretense of captivity and stretched muscles stiff from hours in confined spaces.

It was my favorite part of the evening.

Together, we closed things down and set up for the next day, our last night in this small southern town. While I swept the bleachers in the big top, I listened to Zyanya and Payat laughing as they broke down and stored the equipment in the ring. Zyanya’s toddlers ran circles around their mother and uncle, and made the occasional mad dash into the stands, playing as children should. As they’d never been allowed to do before the coup.

I couldn’t help smiling as I watched them. Even if we accomplished nothing else—even if we couldn’t rescue a single other cryptid from captivity—we had done at least this little bit of good.

Afterward, I joined Gallagher as he fed the last of the beasts and nonhuman hybrids—the menagerie residents we couldn’t simply let out of their cages, because of safety concerns.

As he bent to pluck a rabbit from a box of small rodents we’d bought at the local pet store that morning, I remembered the first time I’d ever seen him, standing beside a cage in the bestiary. Back before I knew what he was. Before either of us knew what I was.

Before he cast off his human disguise and the safety it brought in order to protect me.

Redcaps are fae soldiers from their birthing cries to their dying breath, but the few who survived their brutal civil war each swore to find and serve a noble cause. To fight a battle worthy of the blood they must spill to survive.

Gallagher chose to serve and protect me, an arrangement I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with, because when fate saddled me with an inner beast driven to avenge injustice and corruption, it failed to give me a way to defend myself from those very things.

I chose to believe that the universe sent me Gallagher to make up for what it took from me. My friends. My family. My property. My freedom.

Gallagher’s oath to protect me at any cost was the driving force in his life. His oath was unbreakable. His word was his honor.

For the rest of my life, he would literally rip my enemies limb from limb to keep me safe.

Sometimes that knowledge felt reassuring. Sometimes it felt overwhelming. Sometimes it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

Those were the days when I truly understood how drastically my life had changed since my days as a bank teller.

“Did you see the man with the scar?” I asked, as Gallagher opened the feeding hatch on one side of the wendigo’s cage and tossed a live rabbit inside.

“No. Why?” Using the two-foot-long steel-clawed grabber, he plucked the last rabbit from the box.

“I think I saw him put plugs in his ears during Lenore’s farewell message. And he was here alone. No one goes to the menagerie alone.” I opened the feeding hatch on the adlet’s cage and Gallagher shoved the rabbit inside. The adlet—a wolf man stuck in a perpetual in-between state—ripped it nearly in half before it even hit the floor of the pen.

“You think he suspected something?”

“Maybe. But obviously we haven’t heard any police sirens. I’m probably imagining it.” I’d been living under a cloud of paranoia since the moment we’d locked Rudolph Metzger in one of his own cages.

“Maybe not.” Gallagher shrugged. “The last time I had a feeling about one of our patrons was when you visited the menagerie, and that changed everything. For all of us. Tell me about this man,” he said as he picked up the empty rabbit box. “What did his scar look like?”

“It ran through his lip and over the edge of his chin, and—”

Gallagher stopped walking so abruptly that I almost ran into him. His sudden tension made my pulse trip faster. “Which side of his chin?”

“The left.”

He dropped the empty box, alarm darkening his eyes. “That’s Willem Vandekamp.”

“Vandekamp. Why do I know that name?” Why was his face familiar? If I’d seen him before, how could I possibly have forgotten that scar?

“He owns the Savage Spectacle.” At my blank look, Gallagher explained, his words rushed and urgent. “It’s a private cryptid collection catering to the extremely wealthy. But he also has a specialized tactical team. Vandekamp is who the police bring in when they need to capture a cryptid they’re not equipped to handle. If he’s here, he knows. And he’s not alone. This is over.”

Fear raced down my spine like lightning along a metal rod. “This? Over?”

Gallagher dug a set of keys from his pocket and pressed them into my palm. “Go straight to the fairground’s main office and play the alarm tone over the intercom, then run back to our camper. We have to go.”

A chill raced the length of my body. Everyone knew that if they heard an unbroken alarm tone they were to get in their designated vehicles and run. But our emergency procedure was so new we hadn’t even practiced it yet.

Despite the risks, we hadn’t really thought we’d need it.

“Go, Delilah. I’ll get all the cash from the silver wagon, then meet you at the camper.”

I nodded, but before I could take two steps, a man in a protective vest stepped out of the shadows, aiming a stun gun at Gallagher’s chest. “Don’t move.” He had a regular handgun on his waistband, the snap on the holster already open. The name Brock was embroidered in shiny silver thread on the left side of his vest. Beneath that were the initials SS, stylized and intertwined, as if they belonged on an expensive hand towel or pillow case.

I eyed the soldier, my pulse racing.

“Put your hands up,” Brock ordered. “Or I will taze you.” He thought we were human.

Gallagher didn’t move, but I could feel the tension emanating from him. Every muscle in his body was taut, ready to explode into motion. “Vandekamp deals in exotic fetishes. He’ll rent them out by the hour,” Gallagher said, trying to convince me of what needed to be done while he eyed the private soldier. “They’ll die in captivity, Delilah. And in great pain.”

Chains. Cages. Fists. Whips. Blood.

My heart ached at the memories. The terror. My lungs refused to expand. If Vandekamp knew about the coup, others knew, too. Gallagher was right. The menagerie was finished.

We had to sound the alarm and give people the chance to escape.

“Kill him.” My words carried no sound, but Gallagher read them on my lips. He turned, impossibly fast, and ripped the stun gun from the soldier’s hand. It broke apart in his grip like a child’s toy.

Brock grunted and reached for his gun, his movements clumsy with shock. Gallagher grabbed his head in both hands and gave it a vicious twist.

I heard a distinct crack. The man’s arms fell to his side, but to my surprise, his head remained attached to his body. Gallagher hadn’t spilled a single drop of blood, even though he needed it to survive.

“You’re not going to...?” I gestured to his faded red cap as the body fell to the ground at his feet.

“No time. We have to—”

Something whistled softly through the air, and Gallagher stumbled. He slapped one hand to his thick thigh and pulled out a dart attached to a tiny vial that had already nearly emptied into his flesh. He growled as he stepped in front of me, shielding me, and turned toward the direction the dart had come from. “Get down.”

As I knelt behind him, I heard another soft whistle. He flinched, then fell onto his knees. “Gallagher!” My pulse racing, I pulled a second dart from his leg and stared into the dark, trying to spot the threat.

“Get the gun.” Gallagher’s voice was much too soft. His eyes were losing focus.

I spun toward Brock’s corpse and was reaching for the pistol still in his holster when Gallagher fell to the ground with a heavy thud.

“No!” The gun forgotten, I dropped onto my knees to put one hand on his chest. It rose, then fell. He was completely unconscious, his hat still firmly seated on his head.

“Delilah Marlow.”

Fear electrified every nerve ending in my body as I twisted to see the man with the scar staring down at me, his tranquilizer rifle aimed at my chest. I shoved my terror down to feed the rage burning out of control in my gut. “You have three seconds to get the hell out of my menagerie before I scramble your brain.”

His brows rose in an insulting blend of fascination and amusement. “Do your worst.”

My worst was already on its way.

Deep inside me, the furiae stretched as she woke up, intent on avenging Gallagher, and as her righteous anger rapidly filled me, my nails hardened and began to lengthen into needlelike points.

Vandekamp’s gaze flicked to my hands, but his expression did not change.

I stood, and my vision zoomed into an extraordinary clarity and depth. My hair began to rise on its own, defying gravity as my rage mounted.

Vandekamp held his ground three feet away. He twisted a small knob on his rifle and aimed it at my thigh.

I lunged for him, my thin black claws grasping for his head. He pulled the trigger, and pain bit into my thigh. I gasped and stumbled sideways, then tripped over Gallagher’s thick leg. The world rushed toward me. My shoulder slammed into the dirt path.

Gallagher lay a foot away, his eyes closed.

The dart burned fiercely in my thigh, and my vision blurred. My arms were too heavy to lift. I couldn’t move my legs.

From somewhere in the fairgrounds, a scream rang out, then was suddenly silenced.

“Don’t do this,” I begged as a second scream split the night. But my voice was too soft. The world was starting to lose focus.

Vandekamp put his boot on my shoulder and pushed me onto my back. He knelt next to me, his rifle hanging from one shoulder, and stared into my eyes, apparently fascinated by the black-veined orbs they had become when the furiae awoke. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Delilah.” He brushed hair back from my face and tucked it behind my ear. “My name is Willem Vandekamp.”

I blinked, and his face blurred as darkness engulfed me.

“You belong to me now.”

Delilah

The squeal of metal ripped through my head like a chain saw through wood, and my eyes flew open. Bright, warm light turned the throbbing behind my eyes into a sharp pain that pulsed with my heartbeat, and at first I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. My world seemed to be composed entirely of shiny steel slats and canvas.

My tongue felt like it was dried to the roof of my mouth, and my throat hurt when I swallowed. When I tried to sit up, I discovered my wrists were bound at my back with something that didn’t rattle or clank like metal handcuffs, and they must have been bound for a while, because I couldn’t feel my fingers. I was lying on my stomach in a long, subdivided steel cage, draped with a sheet of canvas thin enough to let light through. I blinked, trying to remember how I wound up shackled and caged, and...

Vandekamp.

With his name came the memory of his scarred face staring down at me. The iron weight of fear threatened to press all the air from my chest as understanding crashed over me.

The menagerie had been retaken.

I was a prisoner. Again.

For weeks, I’d battled nightmares about being recaptured. Recaged. But my dreams were pale shadows of the horrifying reality.

My lungs refused to expand. I gasped, trying to catch my breath as the steel slats seemed to be closing in on me. I can’t do this again. I couldn’t live in a cage and eat scraps. I couldn’t wear rags and take orders. I couldn’t “perform” in another menagerie, watching people I cared about suffer just to draw out my beast and its violent brand of justice.

Not again.

Motion to my left drew my eye, and I twisted on the cold steel floor to see Mirela lying in the next cell, unbound and evidently unconscious, still dressed in her fortune-teller costume. But I couldn’t see into the cells beyond hers from my prone position.

Grunting with the effort, I tucked my legs beneath my stomach and pulled myself upright without the use of my hands. On my knees, I could see down the length of the steel cage into at least a dozen cells separated by steel-slat walls. I was in the very last one. And finally I understood.

We were in a cattle car—a long horse trailer modified to hold human-sized cryptids. Each pen had its own roll-up door and the whole thing was much cleaner and newer than anything we’d had at Metzger’s. Much colder.

And much more expensive.

Mirela’s sisters lay unmoving in the two narrow cells after hers, and beyond those were several more, each occupied by one of my fellow captives.

The light shining through the canvas strapped in place over the cattle car was too warm in tone to be anything but sunlight, and the canvas itself gave me no hint of our location. I closed my eyes and listened, trying to slow my racing heart.

I heard the rattle of a cage door rolling up on another cattle car and male voices, speaking too softly for me to understand. The only familiar sound was the breathing of the other captives.

“Where are we?” Lala whispered, and I turned to see her pushing herself upright in the middle of her cell. She blinked at me through eyes ringed in dark circles and drew her denim-clad knees to her chest.

“I don’t—”

Heavy footsteps clomped toward us, and two shadowy silhouettes appeared through the thin canvas, starkly backlit, growing larger as they got closer. The shapes were male and bulky from whatever equipment they wore, and when one of them came to disconnect the canvas from the two rear corners of my cell, I could tell from his outline that he had a gun and some kind of baton.

When the canvas was unhooked, the men pulled it from the cattle car with practiced motions, then folded it with the same efficiency. Both men wore the Savage Spectacle’s black tactical gear, including visored helmets, and each wore a pistol and a stun gun holstered on opposite sides of their waists. They worked in silence, and after an initial assessing glance into the trailer, they didn’t leer, stare, laugh or point.

The soldiers’ professional bearing was so unlike that of Metzger’s rough-edged roustabouts and handlers that Lala and I seemed more interested in them than they were in us.

From my left, I heard and felt movement as the rest of the captives began to wake up, but I couldn’t tear my searching gaze from the world outside the cattle car. Where were the rides and the booths? Where were the campers, trucks and trailers? Where was the fairground?

I saw nothing but a gray building and, behind that, a thick patch of forest.

“Where are we?” Lala asked again. “What’s happening?”

I hardly even heard her questions over the chattering of my teeth, a nervous reaction I’d had since I was a kid. My mouth was dry and my hands were shaking in my bindings, which chafed my already-raw wrists.

“We’ve been captured, obviously,” Zarah said from the other end of the trailer, where she was confined in the pen next to Trista, her twin and fellow succubus.

“But where’s the menagerie?”

“Probably right where we left it,” Mirela said to her sister, while she watched the black-clad men stack the folded canvas on top of at least two others. “It looks like we’ve been seized. They must know the old man is dead.”

But how? Renata and Raul had done flawless work with Metzger’s relatives. We’d hoped to get at least a year out of the ruse, which should have given us plenty of time to figure out how to get everyone south of the border.

“I think we’re being sold,” Lenore said, and for once, I didn’t fight the calming pull of her voice. Instead, I let the sound relax my tense muscles and slow my racing heart, and finally my teeth stopped chattering. Clarity returned to my vision.

Our cattle trailer was parked in front of a squat gray brick building punctuated by a series of tall, narrow windows. Its resemblance to a prison was no doubt intentional. Two men stood guard at either side of the building’s entrance, wearing padded bite suits similar to what K9 trainers used to condition attack dogs. Their utility belts each held a Taser and a baton, but no guns.

The trees visible behind and above the building were taller than they typically grew in Oklahoma, my home state, and the flora was greener and more lush.

“We’re all being sold?” Mahsa asked, and when I turned to follow the leopard shifter’s gaze, relief flooded me. Two more cattle cars stood about fifty feet away, on the other side of the parking lot, but their occupants were still unconscious, and I wouldn’t be able to identify them until they sat up.

“Mirela,” I whispered as I watched the two tactical team members head for the building entrance. “Do you see Gallagher?”

She studied the other trailers, then shook her head. “But they might have put him in that last one, with Eryx and the centaurs. He’s heavy enough.”

I squinted, but the only thing I could tell about the third trailer, viewed through the one in the middle, was that its cells were larger and lower to the ground, and on the scale of horses and cows. More like an actual cattle car.

Even if all three of the trailers were full, they couldn’t possibly hold even half the cryptids from Metzger’s. Where were all the rest?

“Hey!” Lala shouted, and we both turned to her in surprise as one of the succubi tried to shush her. “Where the hell are we? Who are you people?”

“Lala!” Mirela scolded her softly, as the men continued to ignore us. “Don’t make trouble.”

I wasn’t sure whether to applaud the young oracle or cry for us all. She’d grown bold and confident after months of relative freedom, and she seemed much less willing than the others to fall back into the trembling and quiet comportment of a captive.

Before the two soldiers made it to the building, the door opened and Willem Vandekamp stepped out. All four men—two in tactical gear, two in puffy, full-body bite suits—snapped to attention as he marched past them, with another man on his heels, and I could only stare, trying to figure out what his presence meant.

Was this his building? Was Vandekamp storing us until...what? An auction? A bulk sale? Seizure by the government?

Vandekamp took up a position between our cattle car and the next and one of his men handed him a clipboard. “Okay, let’s get them stored. Start over there.” He pointed in our direction. “Individual cells. Give them uniforms, then start processing.”

Murmurs rose the length of the trailer as the other ladies tried to figure out where we were and who the man obviously in charge was.

“The uniforms say ‘SS,’” Lenore whispered, for those who couldn’t read.

“The Savage Spectacle.” I spoke just loudly enough for Mirela to hear, knowing she’d pass the information down. “That’s Willem Vandekamp. The owner.” But the gray brick building in front of us didn’t look like someplace catering to wealthy, high-profile clients.

Most of the occupants of the next trailer had woken up, and I was relieved to see both cheetah shifters, Gael the berserker, and Drusus the incubus among its occupants. But I wasn’t sure I should be relieved to find them confined alongside us.

“Let me know when it’s done.” Vandekamp let his assessing gaze wander over all three trailers, then he gave his clipboard to a man wearing a thick pair of brown cargo pants and a lightweight short-sleeved button-down shirt with a stylized set of overlapping S’s embroidered on his front left pocket. He carried a tranquilizer rifle just like the one Vandekamp had shot me with.

When his boss had gone back inside, the man with the clipboard turned to the other soldiers, who gathered around for their instructions. “Let’s get this done right, boys. No mistakes. Start at the front and work your way back.”

The other men nodded, then headed our way, and I didn’t realize I was backing away from them until my bound hands hit the other end of my pen.

“I am Adrian Woodrow,” the man with the clipboard said, in a loud, clear voice. “I am the gamekeeper here at the Savage Spectacle, which means I’m in charge of your daily lives.”

Here at the Savage Spectacle? My stomach began to twist. The Spectacle was our final destination. Vandekamp wouldn’t have to rent off-season menagerie acts anymore because he’d bought three trailers full of us.

“The Savage Spectacle does not travel, and it is not a zoo. We are a licensed private collection of exotic wildlife, catering exclusively to the cryptid-themed fetishes and fantasies of a select list of private clients.”

“What’s a fetish?” Lala whispered, her hands trembling as they gripped the side of her pen.

Trista snorted softly, and since my answer would only have further scared Lala, I kept it to myself.

“You’re all about to be sorted into specific categories depending on your species and your position here at the Spectacle. You’ll be issued clothing and given a complete physical exam to make sure you’re bringing nothing infectious or transmissible into our community. It is in your best interest to cooperate fully. Consequences here at the Spectacle are swift and severe. Tolerances are nil. Orders will not be repeated.”

The men reporting to Woodrow slid open the first cell in the cattle car, and the men in padded suits pulled Zarah out, while the one of the ones in tactical gear aimed his tranquilizer rifle at her. Zarah still wore only a red sequined bralette and matching bikini because the succubi worked—and lived—in as little clothing as possible. Her bright costume looked sad and absurd, removed from the carnival atmosphere, but none of the men even seemed to notice. They simply hauled her into the building by both arms.

While they were inside, another team of four came for her sister, Trista, and over the next hour, my stunned, scared friends were removed from their pens one at a time and led into the building. The men wasted no energy and overlooked no precaution. They answered no questions, and eventually the women stopped asking.

I took in every detail I could, trying to figure out how far we’d been shipped while we were unconscious, but the only clue I had, other than lush flora that wouldn’t grow in Oklahoma or West Texas, was my hunger, extreme thirst and severely dry mouth. We’d driven hours, at least, but the sun had yet to set.

Or maybe it had yet to set again.

After the shifters, the succubi and the sirens were marched out of sight, a team of men opened the door to Rommily’s pen. She sat at the back of her cell with her eyes closed, slowly shaking her head in denial of whatever horrific vision was playing behind her eyelids. When they told her to come out of the pen, she didn’t respond. She probably couldn’t even hear them.

One of the men in bite suits reached into the pen and grabbed Rommily’s ankle with his bare hand. Her eyelids flew open to reveal featureless white orbs—the signature trait of an oracle in the grip of a premonition.

“Crushed by the weight of your own hubris,” Rommily said, each word running into the next as they fell from her mouth. “Broken rib. Punctured lung. Massive internal bleeding.”

Startled, the guard let go of Rommily and turned to his coworkers—the first lapse of judgment I’d seen from any of them so far. “What the hell is she saying?”

“That’s how you’re going to die.” Mirela’s voice was low-pitched and eerily steady, like the undisturbed surface of a deep lake. “When is anyone’s guess.”

“Is she serious?” the handler demanded from coworkers, who had no answer for him.

“Just grab her, Bowman,” the man in tactical gear snapped.

“Bowman...” Rommily repeated, blinking shiny white eyes at him. “Grab her...”

Bowman gritted his teeth and seized the oracle’s ankle again, then hauled her roughly toward the opening of the pen. Rommily’s head smacked the floor of her cell, and I flinched as her normal irises returned. Pain had driven her out of her vision.

Lala gripped the door of her cell. “Please be careful. She’s not dangerous. She’s just confused.”

The handlers led Rommily into the building with no particular care for how roughly they handled her. Yet neither of them touched her bare flesh again.

After the oracles had gone, I was alone in our trailer, and when the handlers unlocked my metal cell, I lowered myself to the ground before they could even reach for me. I didn’t fight when they each took one of my arms, and I held my head high as they marched me into the building, then down a hallway lined with steel doors. My dignity and the clothes I wore were all I had left in the world, and if being sold to the menagerie had taught me anything, it was that those would soon be taken away too.

Bowman opened a door halfway down on the left side of the hall and shoved me into a six-by-eight-foot gray brick room with a tall, narrow window at one end. There was a rolled-up blanket on the floor, next to a stainless-steel toilet/sink combo and a single roll of thin toilet paper.

Bowman cut the plastic binding from my wrists, then closed the door at my back. A soft beep told me it had locked automatically. The door had a square Plexiglas window at eye height and a rectangular cutout at the very bottom that was just the right size for a food tray.

As soon as the men were gone, I rubbed my sore wrists, then drank several handfuls of water from the sink, but I made myself stop when my stomach began to churn. Recovery from dehydration must be slow and steady. Then I used the toilet, my attention trained on the window in my door, to make sure no one was watching.

Seated on the blanket, I listened to footsteps and the beeping of more locked doors as the rest of my friends were marched and stored. The sun sank slowly outside my window, labeling the directions for me, but ignorance of the exact time and my own location ate at my thoughts like an infection. I’d only been imprisoned in the menagerie for about a month before our coup, and since then, I’d lost focus on the reality of captivity. I remembered pain and hunger and humiliation. But I’d forgotten about ignorance and dependence, and how they preyed on the mind rather than the body.

For hours, I sat in an impenetrable concrete cell, deprived of both food and information, and with each passing second, my anger grew until it overwhelmed my fear. The Spectacle was using ignorance as a weapon, keeping us in the dark to leave us disoriented and pliable.

At some point, immeasurable hours after I’d been locked up, a folded stack of material was slid through the opening at the bottom of the door. A food tray followed the clothing, and on it was an empty paper cup lying on its side, a boiled chicken leg, a slice of white bread and half an apple.

Before I could pick up the tray, Bowman’s face appeared outside the door window. “Change clothes and slide your old ones through the slot.” He disappeared without waiting to see if his instructions would be followed.

Still dressed in my grubby Metzger’s uniform, I filled the paper cup with water and ate every bite of food on my tray. Then I changed clothes not because I’d been told to, but because my Metzger’s polo and jeans were covered in grime from a trip I couldn’t remember.

The new uniform was a set of gray scrubs, a wireless sports bra and a drab but clean pair of underwear. The message sent by the prison-like clothing came through loud and clear.

I spread my blanket out on the concrete floor and curled up with my hands beneath my head, and soon I realized that the intermittent traffic past my door was now headed in the opposite direction. My fellow captives were being removed from their cells one at a time.

None of them came back.

Despite having just awoken from sedation, I fell asleep on the floor and when I woke to the scrape of metal as my door was opened, I found a beautiful starlit night shining through the window in my cell.

I sat up to find Bowman staring down at me from the doorway. He’d changed from his puffy bite suit into tactical gear and he was holding a pair of steel handcuffs. “Orientation. Let’s go.”

Still weak from exhaustion, I stood. He spun me around by one arm and secured my wrists at my lower back, then led me into the hall, where one of his coworkers took possession of my other arm.

“How many cryptids did Vandekamp buy?” I asked as we walked. “Is there a big guy named Gallagher?”

They said nothing as they led me through the door at the end of the hall, then down two more passageways and into a cold, lab-like room several times the size of my cell, equipped with a sink and countertop along the back wall.

Woodrow—the gamekeeper—sat on one side of a small square table with a file open in front of him. Bowman pushed me into a folding chair opposite the gamekeeper, then stood guard on my left while the man who’d had my other arm headed for the cabinets at the back of the room. I twisted to see what he was doing, but then the gamekeeper cleared his throat to capture my attention.

“Delilah Marlow.” He tapped the page in front of him with the tip of a ballpoint pen, and his focus never left my file. “Also known as Drea.”

“No one knows me as Drea. What are we doing here? Did Vandekamp buy all of us?”

“You’re twenty-five?” he said, and I nodded. “It says here that you grew up believing you were human until you were exposed at Metzger’s. Which you were attending as a customer. Huh.” His brows rose, but his gaze stayed glued to the file. “Is this information accurate?”

“Yes.” A cabinet door squealed open behind me and I turned to find the third handler lining up a syringe and two blood-sample vials on a stainless-steel tray. “But it’s incomplete.”

“So I see,” the gamekeeper said as I turned back to him. “They still don’t know what species you are. Do you?”

“I’m human.”

Woodrow’s gaze finally met mine. “You might as well tell us the truth. We have literally dozens of witnesses who’ve seen you transform into a monster. We have internet photos and video.”

“And I have a blood test performed by the state of Oklahoma that says I’m human. It’s in my camper, in the front pocket of a black backpack on the floor at the end of the couch.”

He glanced at his wristwatch. His foot began to bounce beneath the table. “We’ll run our own tests. Shaw?” Woodrow glanced over my shoulder, and the third handler’s boots clomped toward us. “Let’s get going.”

Shaw set the stainless-steel tray on the table. Bowman cuffed my left wrist to the chair beneath me, then tilted my chin up so that I had to look at him, and at the butt of the rifle he held inches from my nose. “If you even look like you’re going to try anything, you’ll wake up two days from now naked and concussed in a hole in the ground. Do you understand?”

Clearly my reputation preceded me.

Bowman stepped back, but remained within blunt trauma range.

“Make a fist,” Shaw said, and when I complied, he tied a rubber strap around my right arm, above my elbow. He didn’t smile or chat as he cleaned the puncture site, but he hit my vein on the first try, so I made no objection to the two vials he filled, then labeled with my name and a number I couldn’t quite read.

“What happened to the cryptids Vandekamp didn’t buy?” I hadn’t seen Raul and Renata, or Nalah, the ifrit. Or Zyanya’s toddler kittens. Or Gallagher.

But they were pointedly ignoring my questions.

“So...what do we do with her?” Bowman said as Shaw untied the rubber strap and took the full vials to a mini fridge beneath the cabinets at the back of the room.

“Store her in the dormitory with the others,” Woodrow said, as Shaw’s boots clomped across the floor toward us again. “But keep a special eye on her until her test results come back. The boss says she’s seditious.”

Shaw returned to the table carrying a square gray box made of thick, textured plastic, like an expensive tool kit. It was about the length of my hand. He set the box on the table in front of Woodrow, who unlatched it and flipped it open. Inside, nestled on a bed of laser-cut black foam, was a polished steel ring just a few inches in diameter, about the thickness of my smallest finger.

“Basic settings only, for now,” Woodrow said. “We’ll adjust when we have more information.”

Chills crawled over my skin as the gamekeeper pulled a thin but rugged-looking device from his pocket. It vaguely resembled the cell phone I’d had until the state of Oklahoma had stripped my right to own property. Woodrow tilted the device’s screen toward himself, then scrolled and tapped his way through a series of options I couldn’t see. A red light flashed on the front of the steel ring, then it flashed three more times in rapid succession, as if confirming whatever settings he’d programmed.

My heart thumped so hard I could actually hear it.

“Okay.” Woodrow set the remote on the table, but the screen had already gone dark. “Let’s get it done.”

Shaw lifted the steel ring from its formfitting padding, and I frowned when I got a better look at it. The blinking red light had come from a tiny LED bulb that sat flush with the surface of the steel. The ring was designed to swing open on a set of tiny interior hinges, which wouldn’t be accessible once the device was closed around...

Around what? The circumference looked about right for my upper arm, or my...

My neck.

Terror pooled in my stomach, like fuel set ablaze. That ring was a collar.

I instinctively tried to scoot my chair away from the shiny, high-tech device, but Bowman’s heavy hand landed on my shoulder. Vandekamp’s collar was much lighter, sleeker and cleaner than the thick iron rings Metzger had fitted around resistant centaurs and satyrs, but even diamond-encrusted collars are for pets.

Woodrow picked up the control device and used it to point at the collar Shaw still held. “I’m going to explain this to you once. That is an electronic restraint collar, which can be controlled by any of the remotes carried by the Spectacle’s staff. Those tiny spines will slide through the back of your neck and into your vertebrae, where they can deliver specialized electric signals with the press of a button.”

Shaw tilted the collar to show me that the inner curve of one half of the collar held a vertical line of three very thin needles.

I stared at the steel ring, trying to control panic as it clawed at my throat. “It’s a shock collar?”

“It’s much more than that.” Woodrow clipped the remote back onto his belt and met my gaze for what he obviously considered the most important part of my orientation briefing. “This collar can deliver a painful shock or temporarily paralyze the beast wearing it from the neck down. The settings prevent cryptids from using their monstrous abilities until those settings are changed, which only happens during scheduled engagements. Which means the sirens can’t sing, the succubi can’t seduce, the shifters can’t shift and the beasts can’t lift a hand in aggression. Until we want them to. So consider this fair warning.”

“The collar’s receptors also receive signals from every single door in the compound,” Shaw added. “Restricting you to any room or wing we choose.”

I could only stare, stunned. I’d never seen or heard of anything like it. “How can that possibly work?”

Shaw’s eyes lit up. “Vandekamp designed it himself. Receptors in the spines respond instantly to the spike in adrenaline and in species-specific hormones that—”

“Shaw,” Woodrow growled, and the handler’s mouth snapped shut.

But I’d heard enough to understand.

Woodrow stood. “Get on with it.”

“Okay, now, hold still.” Shaw came toward me with the collar, and panic lit a fire in my lungs.

“No.” I stood, and the folding chair scraped the floor then fell over, hanging from the cuff attached to my left wrist.

I can’t wear a collar.

“Sit down,” Woodrow demanded, while Bowman aimed his tranquilizer rifle at my leg. “That’s the only warning you’ll get.”

“Please don’t do this.” I backed away from them both, dragging the chair, though I had nowhere to go. “I’ll be reasonable if you will. There has to be another—”

Woodrow glanced at Bowman. “Do it. And don’t forget to write a report and log the spent dart.”

I turned to Bowman just as he fired. Pain bit into my left thigh. The tiny vial emptied its load into my leg before I could pull it out with my free hand.

As I backed farther away from them, my focus flitting warily from face to face, the edges of the room began to darken. The scrape of the metal chair against the floor sounded suddenly distant. My central vision began to blur. “Stay back.”

My legs felt weak half a second before they folded beneath me, and I didn’t even feel my knees slam into the tile. The ceiling spun around me as I fell onto my back. The chair clattered to the floor, and Woodrow’s weathered face leaned over me.

“Gallagher’s going to kill you...” I warned, but my words sounded stretched and distorted.

“Do it now, before the bitch wakes up again,” Woodrow said, as the world faded to black around me. “Looks like she’s going to have to learn everything the hard w—”

“Culminating in a narrow Senate victory, Congress has passed the Cryptid Containment Act, which will allow cryptids to be housed and studied in both public and private labs, for the purpose of scientific advancement.”

—from the February 4, 1990, edition of the Boston Herald

Delilah

“Wake up, Delilah.”

The surface beneath me felt hard and rough, but neither cool nor warm. Light glared through my closed eyelids, and something snug was wrapped around my neck.

My eyes flew open, but the world remained hazy. The three women bending over me had blurry faces, and their grayish clothing was shapeless and unfamiliar.

“She’s waking up,” one of the blurry forms said, and I recognized Lenore’s voice even without the mental tug of her siren’s lure. I exhaled slowly. I was among friends.

“What happened?” Blinking to clear my vision, I pushed myself upright on a rough concrete floor and reached for my neck, but someone grabbed my hand.

“No, don’t touch it!” Lala cried.

The faces were finally starting to come into focus.

Lenore. Lala. And Zyanya, the cheetah shifter. A few feet away, Mirela sat next to Rommily, who was curled up asleep on the floor with one thin arm tucked beneath her head. In addition to those stupid gray scrubs, they all wore—

My hands flew to my neck, and my fingers brushed smooth, warm steel that had taken on the temperature of my skin. I felt along the curve of the high-tech collar until I got to the hidden hinge at one side, distinguishable only by a tiny crack where the two sections were joined. “How can they—”

“Don’t!” Lenore cried as I slid my finger beneath the front of the collar. Excruciating pain shot through my entire body, lighting every nerve ending on fire. My jaw spasmed, trapping a terrified cry of pain inside, and the jolt didn’t end until someone knocked my hand away from the collar.

“What the hell was that?” I demanded when my jaw finally unclenched, as painful aftershocks coursed through me, far outlasting the initial pain. I leaned back against the concrete wall to keep from falling over. I felt like a human lightning rod.

“You can touch the collar, but if you pull on it or put your finger under it...that happens.” Lala’s gaze was full of sympathy. “We’ve all tried it. They really don’t want us taking these things off.”

“As if we could,” Zyanya snapped. “The damn joints locked the second they snapped it closed, so this shock treatment’s overkill. These things aren’t coming off until someone cuts them off.”

“They’re not afraid we’re going to take the collars off,” I said, as my gaze roamed the large concrete room, where we sat among at least two dozen other women of various humanoid and hybrid species, each of whom wore the same uniform and collar. “They don’t want you to pull on the collar because the needles will damage your spine.”

“Like they care,” Lala said.

“They care about the money Vandekamp has invested in us. Just like Metzger did. If you give yourself nerve damage, you’re worth less to them. Which gives them less incentive to keep you alive.”

“On the bright side,” Mahsa said, and I turned to find the leopard shifter curled up in a nearby corner. “I haven’t seen anyone beaten yet.”

“Give it time,” Zarah said, as she and Trista padded toward us on bare feet. “Only paying customers get to cause damage.”

“What does that mean?” Mahsa crawled closer, and we formed a protective ring of former menagerie captives.

“Exactly what that gamekeeper said. This isn’t a circus, ladies,” Trista explained, pushing long pale hair over her shoulder. “The rumors about the Savage Spectacle seem to be true. They rent cryptids to their customers with no bars and cages to stand between them.”

I’d heard no rumors. But then, I hadn’t spent my entire life in captivity, piecing together an understanding of the outside world through stories traded with new prisoners.

“We wondered how they did that.” Zarah ran one finger over the outside of her collar. “Now we know.”

Mahsa blinked wide leopard eyes. “Rent us for what?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.” Finola’s voice was full of bitter resentment. Like Lenore’s, it now held none of the calming effect she’d once used to help her friends through the transition from captives to masters of their own fate in the liberated menagerie. The collar had robbed her of her purpose in a way no cage ever could have.

“Why is your shirt inside out?” Lala asked.

I followed her focus to the shallow V-shaped neckline of my scrubs top, where the back side of the seam showed. My jaw clenched. They’d stripped me while I was unconscious, then put my clothes back on inside out. Was that intentional, so I’d know...

Know what?

“They were looking for your tell,” a soft voice said from my left, and I turned to see a young dryad sitting against the wall, braiding a long length of hair, among which grew thin woody vines blooming with small white flowers. “To figure out what you are.”

She held one hand out to us, palm down, and I saw that her veins appeared bright green beneath her skin, rather than the normal blue or blue green. Her feet looked much the same. If she were ever allowed back into the woods—the forest nymph’s natural habitat—she would be able to bury her feet in the dirt and draw sustenance from the earth’s nutrients, like a plant.

But I could tell from her pale skin and the dark circles beneath her eyes that nothing more yielding than concrete had been beneath her feet in a long, long time.

“They couldn’t have done anything more than examine you unless they paid the rental fee. There are cameras everywhere. No one gets away with anything here—neither the jailed nor the jailers.” She returned to her woody braid. “I’m Magnolia, by the way.”

Without waiting for us to return the introduction, she stood and wandered across the room toward a small cluster of captives gathered against the opposite wall.

My focus followed her, taking in the large, mostly empty room. “Where are we?” The walls held a series of tall, narrow windows. I couldn’t tell which direction the sun was coming from, but the weak daylight felt like early morning. Equidistant apart on the ceiling were two dark security camera domes, like the kind used at any department store for 360-degree surveillance.

“At first I thought it was a holding cell.” Lenore tucked her knees up to her chest with her arms wrapped around them. “But there’s a bathroom through there.” She nodded toward an open doorway on the opposite wall. “And I think those mats and blankets are to be slept on.”

I followed her gaze to the left, where three stacks of blue vinyl-covered gymnastics mats were lined up against the interior wall, with folded blankets neatly piled on top.

“You’re right. This is a dormitory.” My focus skipped from face to frightened face. “Ladies, I think we’re home.”

Lenore slumped against the wall. “Well, it’s bigger than a cage. And at least we’re together.”

I nodded because I didn’t want to poison her optimism, but I felt none of it. Vandekamp hadn’t rescued us from the misery of a new menagerie; he’d delivered us into a whole new brand of captivity. A fresh hell.

“So, has anyone tested the collars, beyond the one-finger booby trap?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Zyanya tapped the concrete floor with one long, thick claw—a remnant of the feline form that, along with her eyes and incisors, remained even when she took on human form. “I tried to shift earlier, but the second I thought about taking on fur, my whole body froze from my chin down. I couldn’t move at all.” She trailed the point of one nail over the front of her collar. “How does this thing work?”

“I think it recognizes increased levels of adrenaline and feline hormones. Basically, it senses what you’re going to do before you can do it, and it sends electric impulses into your spine, temporarily paralyzing you.” I turned to Lenore. “What about you? Have you tried to sing?”

“No, but I tried to inject a suggestion into my tone of voice earlier. It was an accident. I was trying to help calm Rommily, and I didn’t realize what I’d done until I was flat on my back, immobilized.”

“It doesn’t prevent visions,” Lala said with a shrug. “I guess those aren’t much of a threat.”

That, or Vandekamp hadn’t been able to isolate the proper physiological signals.

“Speaking of guards, where are they?” There was no one in the large room but us and our fellow captives, yet the door wasn’t made of steel or iron, and it didn’t meet the standards typically required by facilities licensed to house cryptids.

“Who knows?” Mirela said as she stroked Rommily’s hair. “I’m starting to think they’re not needed here. These damn collars won’t let us leave the room, except to go to the bathroom. And there’s one of those sensors in the bathroom doorway too, in case they need to stop us from emptying our bladders, for some reason.”

“It’s all about control.” My hand strayed to the collar, trying to ease the persistent feeling of constriction, and only Zyanya’s quick grab for my wrist saved me from another brutal shock. “This place is cleaner and nicer than the menagerie, because the upscale clientele pays for exotic and beautiful, not skinny and dirty.” The thought of exactly what that clientele would expect for its money made my stomach churn. “But the truth is that Vandekamp has a measure of control over us that Metzger could never have dreamed of. We won’t have any hope of getting out of here until we figure out how this system works.”

“Maybe they can answer those questions for us.” Mirela stared across the room at the other female cryptids.

“Maybe.” I studied our new roommates. Most were shifters or anthropomorphs, like sirens and oracles, but several were species I’d never seen in person. I counted three nymphs, who had feathers, leaves and vines in place of normal human hair. A young echidna had the upper body of a human woman and the lower body and fangs—and likely the venom—of a very large snake. They watched us warily from several small cliques, however none, other than Magnolia, seemed willing to breach the gap and make an introduction. “But until we get to know them, it’s probably better that we don’t ask.”

“Why?” Lala said.

“Because they might be willing to sell us out for extra food or privileges,” Zyanya explained, and it broke my heart to know she spoke from experience. “Or for time spent with their children.”

“Children!” Mirela turned to her in sudden horror. “Zyanya, what happened to your kids? Did Vandekamp buy them?”

She shook her head slowly, and an old ache reawakened deep in my chest. I’d known the cheetah shifter for weeks in captivity before I’d found out she had children. The only way Zyanya knew of to deal with being isolated from them and unable to protect them was to keep the pain of separation to herself and to hoard her memories.

“He didn’t buy any of the kids,” Lala said.

I exhaled slowly. The coup I’d incited had cost Zyanya her family. There had to be a way to get the kids back. I had to find a way.

“Do you have any idea where—” A sudden thud turned us all toward the exit, where the door was now propped open by a gray-clad figure lying on the floor, sprawled into the hall from the shoulders up.

“Rommily!” Mirela was up in an instant, dark wavy hair trailing behind her. Lala and I raced after her.

The ambient buzz of soft conversation died as the other captives turned to watch, and just as Mirela grabbed Rommily by the ankles, the poor, fractured oracle began to convulse.

“Somebody help!” Mirela shouted as she pulled her middle sister through the doorway and back into the dormitory. But when she knelt next to Rommily’s head, the older oracle suddenly stiffened. Her eyes went wide and her jaw clenched so hard her teeth ground together.

“Pull them back!” I shouted at Lala, as she stared at her sisters, horrified and confused. “They’re too close to the sensor.”

I tugged Mirela back by one arm while Lala pulled Rommily by her ankles, and as soon as they were more than a foot away from the door, the convulsing stopped. Mirela blinked up at me in confusion, and I suddenly wished I’d pushed her into the hall instead. Surely the convulsing would have stopped once she was away from the doorway, whether she was inside or out. The sensors were based on proximity, and they didn’t care which direction the signal came from. Right?

“Are you okay?” Lala asked her sisters, and her voice drew me out of my thoughts.

“Yeah.” Mirela sat up and leaned over her middle sister, who only looked up at us, blinking tears from her eyes. “Rommily, what hurts?”

Heavy footsteps clomped toward us from the hallway, then two armed handlers stepped into the room. The first held his remote at the ready, the screen facing away from me. “Back up,” he warned, one finger poised to cause more pain.

When Lala carefully pulled Rommily back, Mirela and I followed her.

“What happened?” the second handler demanded, glancing at the screen on his own remote. “Our system indicates that Oracle 02—known as Rommily—tried to breach the doorway.”

“She wasn’t trying to breach.” Mirela stood, putting herself between the handlers and her younger sisters. “She just got confused.”

The second handler pointed to the doorway, where I noticed that a pinpoint of red light glowed from the apex of the arch. “Do not pass. It’s pretty damn simple.”

“She’s...disoriented.” I joined Mirela, trying to decide how best to explain about Rommily, to protect her. “Traumatized. She doesn’t always understand what she’s told. Or what she sees. It’s not her fault, and it can’t be fixed. So I suggest you get ready to make some exceptions on Rommily’s behalf.”

The second handler stepped closer, as if his presence could possibly intimidate me more than the collar around my neck already had. “Is that a threat?”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Most definitely.”

Neither of them seemed to know how to respond to that.

“Just keep an eye on her,” the first one said at last, glancing from me to Mirela, to Rommily, then back to me.

Evidently I’d just become an honorary oracle. Which was fitting, considering that I’d just predicted an early death for anyone who messed with Rommily.

Or with me.

Delilah

Breakfast was delivered by two of our fellow captives—a selkie and a dryad, whose hair looked like a curtain of woody vines and whose fingers and toes branched like delicate tree limbs. They pushed a steel cart into the room and passed out trays from two different stacks—one for the shape-shifters, who were largely carnivorous—and one for the rest of us.

The food was bland but nutritionally sound, a definite improvement over the menagerie, but what I found truly noteworthy was the fact that captives were allowed to perform work duties with minimal supervision, because their collars wouldn’t allow them to go anywhere they weren’t supposed to be, or do anything they weren’t supposed to do.

If I earned a work detail that let me roam the property, I might be able to observe Vandekamp’s security systems and procedures in search of a weakness that could be exploited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come help me with her.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nalah?”

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

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

“Simra.”

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

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

Tears filled Nalah’s copper eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Try what? To hurt Nalah?”

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

“Did you know Adira?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where?”

Bowman only watched me. Waiting.

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

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

“I’m human.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Send her in,” came the reply.

Bowman opened the inner office door and escorted me inside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My brow rose. “You believe that part, but not my birthday? I—”

She pressed her thumb against her remote screen, and pain shot through my throat. I cried out, and bent at the waist as I strained my shoulders trying to reach for my neck. But my voice carried no sound and my hands were still cuffed at my back.

The pain faded quickly, but my voice did not return.

“Cryptids don’t have birthdays,” the woman snapped, as I tried in vain to speak. My mouth opened. My lips and tongue moved. But my vocal cords did not vibrate. My brain was sending the signal to speak, but my body wasn’t receiving the order.

It was being intercepted by the collar.

In the menagerie, the handlers had sometimes muzzled cryptids, but that could only stop them from biting and speaking. Muzzles can’t prevent you from making sound. From hearing your own voice, as a reassurance that you do, in fact, still exist, even if only as property to be bought, sold or rented out.

But Vandekamp had found a way to turn off my voice, and the resulting claustrophobic terror felt as if the room was folding in on me. As if I were screaming into the void of some shrinking reality that no longer had enough space for me. As if soon they would cease to see me too, and start walking through me.

“So what do you suggest we do with her, Tabitha?” Vandekamp circled his desk again to sit behind it. “Sell her? Have her euthanized?”

My silent objection became a fruitless scream of rage. I strained the muscles in my throat, trying to be heard, until my eyes felt like they’d pop from my skull. But neither of them even looked at me.

I turned to Bowman to find him staring straight ahead, impervious to my frustration and fury.

“That seems a bit extreme,” the woman—Tabitha—said. “We’re going to have to inspect her. All monsters have telltale features. We just have to find hers.”

She turned to me, and again I tried to shout. To tell her that I’d already been inspected. I knew my desperate effort was pointless, but I couldn’t stop.

“Take off your clothes,” she ordered.

My profanity-laden refusal didn’t make so much as a squeak.

She pressed another icon on her remote, and pain exploded all over my body. I fell to my knees on the carpet, hunched over, my arms straining against my restraints. Screaming in silent agony.

What I’d felt when I’d slid my finger beneath my collar was a flash in the pan compared to the fire blazing through every nerve in my body.

“Tabitha,” Vandekamp said. “She can’t undress. She’s handcuffed.”

His wife finally released the button.

I slumped over my knees, breathing deeply as the pain slowly receded. I felt tender all over, but I couldn’t tell if that was a residual effect of the electric current or simply the knowledge that if I didn’t cooperate, she would press that button again.

“And anyway, she was inspected during the intake process. She has no cryptid features. Which is part of the problem.”

“I don’t understand,” she complained. “Even the most benign-looking monsters have an identifiable trait hidden somewhere. How could she have nothing?”

Finally, I made myself sit up and look at the Vandekamps, and the effort that took without the use of my hands was terrifying.

“What are we going to do with her?” Tabitha demanded as she smoothed a strand of brown hair back toward the simple twist it had escaped from. “No one’s going to pay to see that.” She waved one hand at me in disgust. “You’re going to have to figure out what she is. Make her talk.” She shrugged, and her cold gaze chased the last reverberating bolts of fire from my body. “Or I could do it.”

“I’ll figure something out.” He stood and kissed her on the forehead. “Why don’t you go tell the seamstresses what you want for the new costumes?”

She hesitated, then nodded reluctantly. “I do have a few ideas...”

As the door closed behind her, he sat on the front of his desk again. “Wait outside,” he said, and I thought he was talking to me until Bowman turned sharply and headed into the outer office, closing the door at his back. Vandekamp looked down at me, where I still knelt on his rug. “You were the one responsible for the takeover of Metzger’s Menagerie?”

I nodded. The truth was more complicated, but without my voice, I couldn’t explain about the team effort.

“I have some questions for you, and I suggest you answer them while you still can.” He pressed an icon on his remote, and when I felt no pain, I realized he’d given me back my voice.

Vandekamp twisted and lifted another folder from his blotter, then flipped it open. “According to the menagerie’s records, there are two cryptids missing. A werewolf called Claudio and a young marid named Adira. Where are they?”

I cleared my throat and was relieved by the sound that met my ears. “Adira died during the coup. She was shot by the Lot Supervisor. Christopher Ruyle.” We’d sent her body to the sultan so he could bury her.

Vandekamp glanced at the report again. “This Ruyle is also missing.”

“He’s dead. And for the record, he’s the only employee who died in the takeover.”

“And the werewolf?”

I held his gaze. And my silence.

He lifted the remote, drawing my attention to it. “You already know what this can do.”

I exhaled. I didn’t want to betray Claudio, but chances are that they’d never catch him anyway. “He left the menagerie last month.”

“Why would he leave? A werewolf cannot pass for human.”

“But he can live in the woods as long as he likes.” He was looking for Genevieve, the youngest of his children, who had been sold right before the coup. But I wouldn’t tell Vandekamp that no matter how much pain he put me through.

“How did you know about the coup?”

Surprise tugged up on Vandekamp’s left brow. “You haven’t figured out your mistake yet?”

I’d spent my time alone in that concrete cell going over every decision I’d made as the de facto manager of the liberated menagerie, trying to figure out how I’d failed the very people I’d been trying to save. I’d come up with a thousand small mistakes, but nothing I could pinpoint as our downfall.

“I found out from the Metzgers.” Vandekamp watched carefully for my reaction, but I had none to give him, except confusion.

“The Metzgers don’t know.” Raul and Renata had flawlessly covered our tracks with the former owner’s family.

“The Metzgers found out from old man Rudolph himself.”

“But Rudolph Metzger is...” I let my words fade into silence short of a confession.

“Dead,” Vandekamp finished for me. “Which is the inevitable result of dismembering a man and mailing a piece of him to each of his remaining relatives.”

“We didn’t—”

He shook his head, still watching me closely. “No, that didn’t seem like something you would do, after all the trouble you went through to hide the takeover.”

Sultan Bruhier. Adira’s father got his final revenge on us by exposing the coup that had cost his daughter her life. But the sultan couldn’t have shipped pieces of Rudolph Metzger all over the country if I hadn’t given him the old man in the first place.

Vandekamp’s viewing of my reaction seemed part entertainment, part clinical observation. So I swallowed my guilt to deny him the pleasure.

“What did you do with Gallagher?” I demanded, and his fleeting frown made my stomach flip. He didn’t recognize the name.

Gallagher wasn’t at the Spectacle. He’d been sold to someone else or sent to a cryptid prison or—worst-case scenario—given to a research lab.

A cold new fear overtook me. No matter where he was, he would fight to get to me.

I stared at the floor, struggling to control my horror at that thought. Or at least hide it from Vandekamp.

“Until we know what you are, you’re a financial liability,” he said, and I forced myself to focus on his words. “You can enlighten me, or I can let my lovely wife pull the information out of you. But I don’t think that’s what you want.”

No use denying that. Tabitha Vandekamp was scary in a way no thick-fisted roustabout had ever been. But she couldn’t change the facts.

“I’ve told you.” I shrugged, mentally tamping down the fear that he might recognize my half-truth. “Run the test again. The results will be the same, and no amount of torture will change that. I’m human.”

Vandekamp crossed his arms over his shiny blue button-down shirt. “I’ve seen you turn into a monster, Delilah.”

“The two are not mutually exclusive.” I shrugged and held his gaze. “You and I have that in common.”

Willem

Willem Vandekamp watched the office door close behind his latest purchase, and for a moment, he sat lost in his thoughts. After more than twenty years in the cryptobiology field, he’d long been convinced that nothing could surprise him.

Until Delilah.

A cryptid who went to college.

A cryptid who’d taken his seminar.

She understood too much, but the real problem Delilah represented wasn’t how much she knew about him, but how little he knew about her.

Delilah would make the investors nervous. She would terrify his friends in Washington.

Speaking of whom...

Willem glanced at his watch, an obsolete device in the age of cell phones and handheld tablets, but one that gave him comfort in its simplicity. He was two minutes late for the conference call, but had no intention of actually picking up the phone for another three. Punctuality might give those congressional blowhards the mistaken impression that his time was less important than theirs.

What if Tabitha was right? Willem leaned back in his chair and linked his hands behind his head, still staring at the door. What if Delilah was a surrogate? No one had seen a single one of those sadistic little bastards since the government rounded them up nearly thirty years ago. They’d be thirty-five years old now—a full decade older than Delilah—but who knew whether they’d age like humans? Hell, if they were some kind of fae, their glamour could make them look like anything or anyone.

But Delilah wasn’t fae. According to her file, the sheriff who’d originally arrested her had kept her in iron cuffs with no effect.

Willem’s desk phone rang. His direct line. He noted the DC area code on the display and smiled. Then he let it ring two more times before he answered.

“Hello?”

“Vandekamp.” Senator Aaron sounded distinctly displeased. “We had an appointment, unless I’m mistaken?”

“I apologize.” Willem spun in his chair to look out the window at the topiary garden. “It’s been a bit chaotic here, and I’m running on about three hours of sleep.”

“Does that mean the rumors are true?” the second voice demanded in an eager baritone.

“If the rumors say that I have retaken Metzger’s Menagerie from the creatures who escaped their cages and killed the owner, then yes.”

“How could this have happened?”

“It couldn’t have, if my restraint system were federally subsidized and put into production,” Willem pointed out, without bothering to filter sharp criticism from his tone.

“If your restraint system were more than a prototype, that might be a possibility,” Senator Aaron said. “Until then—”

“It’s ready.” Willem stood and paced the length of his office, his pulse roaring in his ears. “Come see for yourself. My technology is going to change the world, Senator. You can be on the forefront of the new wave or you can be crushed by the tide. Your choice.”

He dropped his phone into its cradle and took a deep breath. Then he pressed the intercom button and spoke without waiting for a greeting from his secretary. “I want a full recording from Delilah’s collar. I need to see every hormonal fluctuation on a timeline alongside video footage from her dorm. Every twelve hours.”

As the only creature at the Savage Spectacle that Willem could neither identify nor control, Delilah Marlow was the one thing standing between him and a government contract that would revolutionize humanity’s control over the beasts it shared the planet with.

She could not be allowed to derail two decades of progress.

Delilah

A couple of hours after the sun set, Woodrow, the gamekeeper, stepped into the dormitory to conclude our first-day orientation with an announcement that lights-out would be in half an hour. He told us to clean our teeth with the brushes we’d been issued and use the toilets, then warned us—again—that failure to follow orders would result in serious consequences.

The long-term Spectacle captives began filing into the bathroom in two lines, clearly accustomed to the routine. Lala and Mahsa were the first from our group to join them, and I stepped into line after them. “How was your work assignment?” I asked, as we shuffled forward after the others. “What were you doing?”

“Vacuuming some big room,” Lala said.

“Scrubbing the kitchens,” Mahsa added.

“Multiple kitchens?”

“Yeah.” The leopard shifter shrugged. “Two of them, in two different buildings. There may be more, though.” Her eyes widened. “Did you see the bushes?”

“The topiaries? Ridiculous, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Lala said. “But they’re beautiful. Especially the nymph with roses for hair.”

We shuffled forward again, and the women who’d been first in line began to exit the bathroom. “So, did you see any way out? The property seems to be walled in, but I assume there’s a gate up front? And maybe one in the back, for deliveries?” We’d all been unconscious when we’d arrived, but I couldn’t imagine them driving tarp-covered cattle cars past the massive front building and the valet stand.

“I—” The oracle flinched, and her hand flew to the collar at her neck.

“Lala? What’s wrong?”

Simra turned around, a couple of places in front of us and frowned at me as if I’d just asked a colossally stupid question. “She’s not allowed to talk about certain things.” But I didn’t understand until she tapped the shiny steel collar around her own neck.

Holy shit.

Vandekamp’s collar was preventing her from speaking specifically about gates and exits? How was that possible, short of paralyzing the vocal cords entirely? There was no way any electronic device could tell what someone intended to say before the words even formed.

Or was there? If the collars could anticipate a shifter’s intention to shift based on the anticipatory hormones, maybe the speech block worked similarly. Maybe the collar’s receptors simply detected the presence of whatever nervous hormone people produce when they’re about to break a rule. Or maybe it sensed spikes in blood pressure, like a lie detector. Maybe the collar simply read the physiological signs of our intent.

Stunned by Simra’s revelation, I shared a horrified glance with Mahsa and Lala as the line shuffled forward. Why was I allowed to ask questions about things others weren’t allowed to discuss?

The most likely answer seemed to be that since I hadn’t known the question was forbidden, my body didn’t react with any signs of anxiety that could trigger my collar. Would that change, now that I knew?

Disturbed by the policing of my very voice, I shifted my thoughts from the fact that we weren’t allowed to talk about something to what we weren’t allowed to talk about.

Exits, locks...

Vandekamp was censoring information that might help plan an escape.

When I got to the front of the line for the toilet stalls, Finola leaned forward to whisper from behind me. “Is that hand sanitizer?”

I followed the siren’s gaze to a line of four liquid dispensers on the wall. The sign hanging above them notified us that they were to be utilized every time we used the restroom, though I couldn’t imagine that more than a few of the captives could read. “Looks like.”

We shuffled forward as one of the stalls emptied, and Zyanya spoke up from behind the siren. “Why do they care whether we brush our teeth and wash our hands?”

“Presumably it cuts down on communicable illness in such tight quarters,” Lenore said.

“Yes, but I suspect that’s a secondary concern.” I stepped forward again, and found myself second in line. “Our value and appeal both decline if we’re sick or dirty.”

When we’d all flushed, sanitized and brushed, Lala and I helped several of the other captives arrange the gymnastics mats on the floor and distribute blankets. There were no pillows or pajamas, and the mats were worn and thin, but the accommodations were both cleaner and more comfortable than anything we’d had in our carnival cages.

The menagerie refugees and I claimed spots on the left side of the room, in our own little cluster, and seconds after we’d all chosen a mat, the lights overhead were extinguished, in both the big room and the bathroom. We were left with only the light shining in from the series of tall, narrow windows, through which I could see several security light poles.

An instant later, every collar in the room briefly flashed red, and I wondered what new restriction had just been placed on us.

For several minutes, I lay on my side, thinking about collars and tranquilizer rifles and blood tests and topiary cryptids locked in their poses. After having survived the menagerie, I’d thought I knew what to expect from imprisonment. I understood how to deal with chains and cages and hunger, but this shiny, antiseptic captivity felt like the glittery wrapping on a box full of horrors, just waiting to be unwrapped.

In the near dark, one of the forms to my right sat up on her gym mat, and I recognized Zyanya’s silhouette even shrouded as it was by baggy scrubs. She turned to me, waving one hand to get my attention, and I sat up to see what was wrong. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out.

Her hands flew to her throat, and even in the thick shadows, I saw the fear and desperation in every motion. Zyanya was terrified.

I scooted off my mat and reached for her, but when I tried to ask what was wrong, there was no response from my vocal cords. I remembered the flash of red from every collar in the room.

Vandekamp had silenced us—all of us—evidently for the entire night.

Anger raged like a storm inside me. Having lost my voice earlier made this instance no easier to bear.

With the press of a single button, Vandekamp ripped from all of us a right I’d considered not just inalienable, but literally impossible to steal without a scalpel and the courage to face the bloody reality and cruelty of a sadistic and permanent mutilation.

He’d made the process so neat and easy that it required no thought or effort, and his conscience probably never had to justify the reasoning behind such a barbaric practice.

Zyanya’s hands began to shake. Her mouth opened, forming silent words too fast for me to read on her lips. I seized her hand, and with it, her attention. I pointed at my own collar with my free hand, then covered my mouth, trying to explain that she hadn’t permanently lost the ability to speak. That we were all suffering the same temporary loss.

The shifter’s forehead furrowed, fury dancing in her luminous cat eyes, and I knew she understood. And she was pissed.

Her rage called to the beast inside me, which uncoiled like a snake ready to strike. My vision sharpened until I could see Zyanya perfectly well in the dark and my hands ached for something to grab. For some damage to wreak.

But like hers, my anger was impotent, for the moment, without a target to strike.

I mimed lying down on my mat, silently encouraging both Zyanya and the furiae to try to get some sleep. Because there was nothing else for us to do, mired in silent darkness.

Zyanya lay down with obvious reluctance and feline grace. Her cat eyes glowed at me from two feet away, reflecting what little light shone into our room.

When I finally fell asleep, her eyes followed me into my mute nightmares.

* * *

With dawn came the return of both overhead lights and our ability to speak. I’d never in my life been more desperate to be heard, simply because for the past eight hours, I couldn’t be.

I cornered Simra at one of the bathroom sinks while she brushed her teeth. “Why didn’t you warn us that we would be muted at lights-out?”

She frowned at me in the mirror, mint-scented foam dripping down her pale chin. Then she spit into the sink and turned to me. “I didn’t realize you needed a warning. Was it different in your last collection?”

“We’re not from a collection. But that’s not the point.” I traced my collar with one finger. “Vandekamp invented this technology, and as far as I know, no one else has anything like it.”

“We didn’t have it here either, until a couple of winters ago.” Magnolia spoke up from the next sink. “But Simra hasn’t been here long enough to know that. Few have. They used to keep us in concrete cells in another building. Then one day, they put these collars on a few of us and put us in a separate room, with cameras on the ceiling. And they left the door unlocked.”

Vandekamp had been testing his technology on a small sample of the captives, obviously.

Magnolia shrugged. “After a while, they put collars on everyone, and that’s when the nightly engagements began. Before that, we were on display at events, but there was no...touching.”

Chills slid down my spine, forming a cold puddle in the bottom of my stomach.

“This isn’t what it’s like everywhere else, ladies,” I told them softly. “At the menagerie, they could put us in cages and they could put us on display and they could deny us food or clothing, but they couldn’t control our words. They couldn’t control our thoughts.”

“The collars don’t do that,” Simra insisted as she rinsed her toothbrush. “I’m still free up here.” She tapped her temple with the index finger of her free hand.

“Really? If you were to think about pulling all the water out of these faucets and those toilets—” a basic skill among marids “—I mean, if you were to really consider doing it, what would happen?”

She dropped her toothbrush into the holder on the shelf above the sink. “I’d be frozen in place. Or I might be shocked.”

“Exactly. These collars not only prevent you from doing what comes naturally, they prevent you from even thinking about it. Vandekamp is eroding your will.”

“Eroding?” She let water fill her cupped palms, but then just stared at it, frowning.

“With every thought he denies us, he robs us of a little bit of what makes us who we are. Like how massive canyons can be carved from small streams over time.” A concept marids were intimately familiar with. “Vandekamp is the stream, and you are the rock, and by the time he’s done with you, he’ll have carved a hunk right out of your soul.”

Simra’s sad, but not truly surprised expression opened a fresh crack in my already splintered heart. She stepped back from the sink so another woman could have a turn, and I followed her toward the doorway.

“Simra, how long have you been here?”

“They don’t give us calendars.”

Fair enough. I knew exactly how difficult it was to keep track of time when every day was just a cruel repeat of the day before.

“How many fall seasons have you been at the Spectacle?”

“This is my second. I came north to look for Adira after she was stolen from her groom before they could wed by terrorists trying to prevent an alliance between the marid and ifrit kingdoms.”

I blinked, stunned by the story Sultan Bruhier had evidently told his people. Was he trying to avoid conflict with the ifrits?

Either way, it was not my place to deny her the bliss of ignorance.

“I was going to help bring her home,” Simra continued. “To prove my worth as a companion.”

“So you’ve been here about a year?”

Simra nodded.

“I grew up free too.”

“And you really think it’s better to live in a rolling cage and eat scraps than to be here, in a room with showers and toilets and decent food to eat? Woodrow says we’re lucky. We’re not in cages. We’re not being starved. We’re not being dragged from town to town in the back of a stifling, germ-filled trailer. Or being injected with toxic chemicals in lab tests.”

And that was the true danger in the propaganda the Spectacle was feeding its captives—the idea that they weren’t being abused or exploited just because they weren’t being starved or experimented on.

Chains and cages were only one way to crush a person’s soul.

“So what is happening to you?” I asked as I followed her into the dorm room. “What does Vandekamp do with his collection?”

“Whatever the client wants. It’s different for everyone. For every engagement.”

She tried to turn away from me, but I ducked into her path again. “What is it for you?”

“I can’t tell you that.” Her hand went to her collar and her mouth closed. Her jaw tensed. Then she stepped around me and practically ran to the other ride of the room.

“What was that about?” Lenore’s question floated on a fresh, minty breath as she stopped at my side.

“Vandekamp has his captives convinced that they’re lucky because they’re not lab rats or circus exhibits, yet they’re not allowed to talk about what goes on in these ‘engagements.’”

“They aren’t?”

“Not all of it anyway. The collars won’t let them. And I see no more logical reason for that than for the fact that we can’t talk at night. Vandekamp’s just trying to exert as much control over us as he can. It’s like he gets off on it.”

“Delilah.”

I dragged my focus away from Simra and turned to meet Lenore’s concerned gaze. “What?”

“You can’t help people who don’t want to be helped.”

But the furiae inside me disagreed.

“It’s not that they don’t want to be helped. It’s that they truly think this is the best life has to offer.” If I couldn’t help them, why the hell had fate saddled me with the vengeful beast already stirring restlessly inside me? “They just need to see someone stand up to these remote-wielding bastards. Once they know it’s possible, they’ll fight for themselves. For each other. Humanity doesn’t have the market cornered on courage and justice. That’s not human nature. It’s just nature.”

Gallagher

Gallagher glanced around the police station in disgust. The floor was grimy, but he’d certainly seen worse. The handcuffed detainees on the bench next to him were ill-mannered and angry, but no more so than the handlers and grunts he’d spent the past year working alongside in the menagerie. It wasn’t the people or the building that offended him.

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