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.”
