Menagerie

“No, that was a couple of guys from the SWAT team the sheriff called in to assist with your transport. Dr. Almaguer said he would only examine you while you were still unconscious. To check for species-identifying features.”

Dr. Almaguer. My teeth began to chatter and I set my chin on my knees to make it stop. They’d called in a small-animal veterinarian to examine me—the very man who’d once put my dad’s farm dog to sleep.

The deputy propped one foot on the lowest stool rung and set my clothes on his lap. “He didn’t find anything, Delilah.”

Because there was nothing to find. How else could I not have known?

“Are you going to give my clothes back?”

“That’s up to you,” he said.

I closed my eyes. He was going to interrogate me in the nude. Because he could.

“What are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Make this easy on yourself, Delilah. Just tell us what you are, and you can have your clothes back.” The deputy shifted on his stool and my underwear slid from the pile of clothes and landed on the floor. He didn’t notice, but my focus snagged on that bit of fabric. I would have told him anything I knew for a single scrap of my own clothing. But there was nothing to say.

“I told you, I don’t know what I am. Please give me my clothes.” My cheeks were burning, but my teeth still chattered. “I’m freezing.”

“Yeah, the sheriff runs warm, so he keeps the air turned down low. Especially in the summer.” Atherton shifted on the stool again, and his tone softened. “Delilah, I can’t help you until you help me. I got orders. So why don’t you tell me what you are, and I’ll not only give you your clothes back, I’ll get you some water. Or something to eat. Are you hungry? Your friends said you didn’t eat much dinner.”

“Are they here?” Shelley’s scream still echoed in my aching head. Brandon’s look of horror was imprinted on my retinas. “Can I see them?”

Deputy Atherton started to shake his head, and I buried my face in the crook between my knees, sniffing back fresh tears. “Please,” I said into my lap. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I have no idea what happened. Please just give me my clothes and let me see my friends.”

Atherton sighed. “Ms. Wells had to be sedated. Her boyfriend took her home.”

My throat felt thick, my tongue clumsy. “Is she okay?”

“She’s terrified. She’s not the only one. The news is out, and people don’t feel safe, knowing you were born and raised here. Knowing you went to school with their children and spent the night at their houses—and they didn’t have a clue. People are starting to remember the reaping, Delilah.”

Oh, fuck.

Terror pooled in my stomach like acid, eating at me from the inside. “They don’t think I’m a surrogate, do they?” I peered at him over my knees. My hands started shaking again. “Because I swear I’m not.”

“How can you know that, if you don’t know what you are? You look human, and you lived among us for years. Just like the surrogates. What are we supposed to think?”

Panic slowed my brain, yet sped up my words. “This is totally different. I wasn’t hiding or lying in wait, planning something. I didn’t know I wasn’t human. I still can’t believe what happened. You have to tell them that. Tell the sheriff I’m not one of them.”

“How do I know that’s true?”

Terror scattered my thoughts into a maelstrom of disjointed theories. Think, Delilah! “There were hundreds of thousands of surrogates, but there’s only one of me.”

The deputy shrugged. “So far. For all we know, you could be the first in a whole new wave.”

“No, that’s not what I am!” My arms tightened around my shins, drawing my knees tighter against my chest. “I don’t have any siblings.”

“Having grown, healthy siblings would work in your favor. Being an only child does not.”

“Okay... But I’m an adult!” Surely they’d figured that much out when they’d taken my clothes off. “The surrogates were six-year-olds.”

“Yes, but even cryptids age. The surrogates are now thirty-five years old. Wherever they are.”

But no one knew where they were, and that was the problem. As soon as they’d been discovered, Uncle Sam had rounded them up like rabid dogs, and no one knew whether they’d been shot, or studied, or cryogenically frozen for later. And that was fine, because the surrogates truly were dangerous. They were the fucking devil’s spawn.

If the government thought I was one of them, I would disappear, too.

“I’m not a surrogate.” I pushed hair from my face with one hand and sat up as straight as I dared without clothes on. “I didn’t steal any babies. I’ve never hurt a soul in my life before tonight, and I don’t know how that happened. Think about it. If I’d known what I was, why would I go to the menagerie? Please, Deputy. You have to believe me. I’m not conspiring against humanity.”

Atherton exhaled slowly. Then he stood, still watching me, and shook out my blouse. “I believe you.” He stuck my shirt between two of the bars and dropped it on the floor. “But I’m not the one you have to convince.” Next came my jeans, bra, and underwear, each dropped just inside my cell. “Get dressed.”

I glanced at my clothes, then back up at him. “Are you going to watch?”

He blinked, obviously startled by the thought. “Of course not.” When he walked down the aisle away from my cell, I realized that Atherton wasn’t the enemy. He was just doing his job.

Unfortunately, his job was to extract information I didn’t have, in order to help the sheriff—

Help the sheriff what?

End life as I knew it?

I lunged for my clothes, then dragged the whole pile back into my corner, where I shimmied into my underwear as fast as I could. I turned my back on the bars to put my bra on, in case he turned around, and had just stepped into my jeans when the brutal reality of my new situation hit me over the head like that carny’s mallet, swinging straight for my soul.

I’ll never go home again.

My legs buckled beneath me and my knees slammed into the concrete. My jaw snapped shut with the impact, but I hardly felt it. I was a cryptid living under false pretenses, and no one would care that I hadn’t known. Most probably wouldn’t even believe that.

I pushed my arms through the sleeves of my shirt, but had trouble buttoning it. My hands wouldn’t stop trembling.

Gone. Everything I’d ever had was probably already gone. My job. My apartment. My car. My clothes. Cryptids weren’t allowed to own property or enter into contracts. Including leases.

“Deputy Atherton, I think I need to talk to an attorney.” My voice had almost no tone and very little volume. I seemed to be hearing myself from one end of a long tunnel.

He turned and headed down the aisle toward me again. “They’re not gonna give you a lawyer, Delilah. Cryptids aren’t citizens. You have no rights in the U.S. of A., in Franklin County, or in the incorporated township of Franklin. You are now the property of the state of Oklahoma.”

Property. No rights.

“Unless they decide you are a surrogate,” Atherton continued. “If that happens, the feds will come for you.”

And I would never be seen again.

I clutched my half-buttoned shirt to my chest and scooted back into the corner, pressing my spine into the seam where both brick walls met. The world seemed to be shrinking around me, as if someone were sucking all the air out of a vacuum-sealed bag. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.

“Is your mother still over on Sycamore?” Deputy Atherton asked, and a fresh bolt of fear opened my lungs. “They’re sending someone to pick her up.”

“Leave her alone.” My gaze snapped up to meet his, and his brows rose. “She has nothing to do with this. She’s human.”

“You thought you were human, too, and you were wrong about that. Is there anything we should know before they knock on her door?”

I held his gaze in silence.

“They’re already on their way, Delilah. If you know something that will keep her from getting hurt, you need to tell me.”

“She sleeps with my dad’s shotgun under her bed.” I crossed my arms over my knees and stared at the ground. “Better call first and let her know you’re coming. That, or send an ambulance in advance.”

Atherton’s brows rose. He unclipped a radio from his belt and relayed my mother’s itchy trigger finger to someone in Dispatch.

My bare toes curled on the concrete, and I wished for a pair of shoes. My racing thoughts had stilled into a single bold question mark, and the mental silence was almost as confining as the bars caging me.

“So, what happens now?”

He pulled a thick, rusty pair of medieval-looking iron cuffs from a pouch at his back. “Come on, Delilah. Get up. It’s time to meet the sheriff.”

Delilah

“Turn around and stick both hands between the bars.”

The theory seemed to be that my hands were my weapons, and that with them restrained in iron behind my back I would be much less of a threat.

I complied, and the cuffs closed over my wrists one at a time. They were heavy, and the weight felt both surreal and brutally degrading. But surely if I were going to have any adverse reaction to iron—which would narrow my species down to one out of hundreds of kinds of fae—the bars on my cell would have triggered it already.

Iron was the only way that we knew of to identify the fae. Most of them had one feature or another that clothes wouldn’t cover—feathers, a hollow back, vines growing in place of hair—but glamour was a better disguise than any clothing, contact lenses, or wigs could ever hope to be.

Once I was cuffed, the deputy let me out of my cell and guided me down the aisle. He didn’t touch me. In fact, he seemed to be walking a couple of feet behind me until he had to come forward and open the door at the end of the aisle.

The moment I stepped into the open front room of the sheriff’s station, all phone calls and typing ceased. The ambient nervous chatter died, and everyone turned to watch me be escorted across the room. None of the stares were friendly. Even the people in handcuffs looked at me as if I were a slimy clump dug from their shower drains.

My face flamed. I wanted to hide, but the best I could do was let my hair swing forward to shield part of my face.

Several feet into my barefoot walk of shame, I saw Brandon sitting in a cracked plastic waiting room chair. I tripped over my own nerves and Deputy Atherton started to catch me, then changed his mind. I saw the moment it happened. He was reaching for me, probably out of instinct, then suddenly recoiled. He flinched—as if I were a snake about to strike, when really I was falling face-first toward the dingy yellow floor tile, unable to catch myself with my hands cuffed at my back.

Brandon stared at his shoes as I staggered, then awkwardly regained my balance on my own. I recognized tension in the cords standing out from his neck, as if he wanted to look, but was fighting the urge.

“Brandon,” I called once I was steady, and my voice cracked on the first syllable. His jaw clenched, but he didn’t look up. My flush deepened. “Brandon.” Raw desperation echoed in my voice and a couple of strangers sneered at the tender bits of my heart and soul I’d exposed.

My boyfriend of four years was the only person in the room not watching me.

“Brandon, please.” My cheeks were scalding and my throat ached. But I couldn’t believe he would abandon me without a word. He knew better than anyone else in the world aside from my mother that I would never hurt someone on purpose.

Deputy Atherton took me by the arm, evidently having gathered the courage to touch me in the face of my humiliation. “Come on, Delilah.”

“No.” I jerked free of his grip, and people all over the room flinched. “Say it, Brandon,” I demanded, and at first he didn’t move. Then my roommate and lover—one of my very best friends—stood and marched toward the exit, as if he wanted to run, but pride wouldn’t let him. “Brandon! Say it, you fucking coward!”

He froze halfway to the door, and my heart stilled along with him. Then slowly, Brandon turned. His eyes were red. His jaw was clenched. He looked at me as if he didn’t even know who I was.

“How could you do this to me?”

“I didn’t—”

“The whole thing was a lie,” he shouted, and I flinched. “You were a lie! I trusted you. I told you everything. I ate with you and slept next to you, and the whole time you were some kind of monster, just using me as part of your human camouflage. There is no Delilah Marlow.”

“No, that’s not true. It was all real! I didn’t know!” I took a step toward him, but Atherton grabbed my arm again, and several other deputies placed hands on the butts of their guns. “You have to believe I didn’t know.”

“I don’t know what to believe.” Tears shone in Brandon’s eyes, but anger glowed in his cheeks. “I was in love with a woman who never even existed. I can’t believe I ever let you—” His sentence ended in an inarticulate sound of disgust, and something deep inside me cracked apart. Some delicate part of me collapsed like a demolished building, leaving only broken shapes and sharp edges.

“Don’t blame yourself, son,” a middle-aged man called out from the waiting area. “We were all fooled in the eighties. I lost my aunt, uncle, and six cousins to those chameleon bastards, may they rot in hell.”

Cheers erupted all around me, and suddenly my ribs felt too tight.

“But I—I’m not one of them! I’m not—”

“Baby killer!” a woman shouted from the waiting area.

“Remember the reaping!” a man in regular steel cuffs shouted, though the cop who shoved him back into his chair didn’t seem to dispute the sentiment.

A cop in his thirties stood from behind his desk and strode toward me, and I thought he was going to take over for Deputy Atherton and get me out of there—until he spit in my face.

I blinked, stunned, as spittle dripped down my cheek.

“Damn it, Bruce!” Atherton hauled me toward another door.

Across the room, Brandon shoved the press-bar on the front exit and when he stepped into the parking lot, he took my last shred of hope with him. If my own boyfriend wouldn’t stand by me, who would?

The front door closed behind Brandon, and I sniffed back tears that stung like utter rejection and humiliation. My hair fell into my face as Wayne led me into another hallway, several strands clinging to the spit on my cheek.

Finally, Atherton closed the door behind us, shielding me from the rest of the world. Or maybe shielding it from me.

In an interrogation room, I followed his instructions without truly hearing them. In my mind, the front door of the sheriff’s station closed over and over, and all I could see was the back of Brandon’s head.

“Delilah,” Atherton said, and I realized he’d already said my name at least twice.

“What?” I blinked to clear my head and looked down to find myself sitting in a cold plastic chair with my arms looped around the back. A tug against my cuffs rattled chains I had no memory of, which evidently ran between my handcuffs and a metal loop set into the ground. I couldn’t stand or even twist much in my chair without pulling my arms out of their sockets.

Before I could ask if all of the metal was really necessary, a second deputy knelt to slap a set of iron shackles around my ankles and connect them to that same hook in the ground, behind my chair. When he stood, I tried to lean forward, but the pain in my shoulders stopped me. I tried to cross my ankles, but the shackles were in the way. I couldn’t move more than an inch in any direction, and that sudden severe confinement made my throat close. The room had plenty of open space but I couldn’t use any of it. Plenty of air, but I couldn’t seem to breathe any of it.

“Struggling will only make it worse,” Atherton said, and while there was no malice in his voice, there was no willingness to help either. “Just try not to think about it.”

But I couldn’t seem to manage that until the door opened, and Sheriff Pennington stepped in from the hall. He commented on my restraints with an incomprehensible grunt, then sat in the chair across a small folding table from mine.

Pennington folded his fleshy arms on the table and studied my face. “Delilah Marlow?”

I nodded, desperately trying not to squirm. “Am I under arrest?”

He snorted, then swiped at his nose with the back of one hand. “No, and I wouldn’t arrest a dog for bitin’ either. I’d just put the bitch down in the interest of public safety. You won’t be charged, and you won’t be Mirandized, because you no longer have any rights, you devious piece of shit. As long as you’re under my jurisdiction, I can do whatever I want with you, and I can’t imagine your lot would improve if the feds take over.”

His blatant threat bounced around the inside of my skull, and anger overtook my fear for the first time since I’d woken up in a jail cell. “This isn’t right, Sheriff.”

“I deal in law, not morality.” Pennington paused for a moment, evidently to let that little cow chip of irony sink in. “What are you exactly, Delilah Marlow?”

“I don’t know,” I repeated. He lifted one skeptical eyebrow, and I shrugged as best I could with my hands tightly bound behind me. “Look, if I knew, I’d tell you just to prove I’m not a surrogate.”

“Unless you are a surrogate.”

“If I were a surrogate, I’d lie. Either way, you’d have an answer. But I don’t know what I am. I didn’t know I wasn’t human until tonight.”

“We don’t know what the surrogates were either, do we?” Pennington pulled a palm-sized notebook from his front pocket. “So that doesn’t really rule anything out for you.”

I tried to find a more comfortable position, but the chains kept relief just out of reach. “Well, we know what they weren’t, and none of those little monsters looked anything like I did tonight.”

“About that...” the sheriff continued, flipping open his notebook to reveal a single page of pencil scrawling. “Let’s put our heads together and come up with some possibilities that might keep you out of federal custody, shall we?”

And finally something in his voice clued me in. Sheriff Pennington didn’t want me to be a surrogate either, because that would put me beyond his authority. The Justice Department had claimed jurisdiction over all of those cases before I was even born.

“Here’re the facts, as they were relayed to me. One, your voice changed in depth and—” Pennington glanced at the notebook on the table in front of him “—quality. Says here it was deeper than it shoulda been, and it felt—” another glance at his notes “—large. Whatever that means. Two, your eyes changed color. Not just the irises, but the entirety of your eyeballs.” He made a vague gesture encompassing most of my face, and I shuddered at the thought. “They became white, shot through with dark veins. Does that sound about right?”

I could only give him a painfully wrenching shrug, trying to hide the tide of horror washing over me. “I couldn’t see my own eyes.” And I’d never heard of a cryptid species which fit that description.

“It also says here that the veins in your face became black, like dark spiderwebs beneath your skin. Do you know anything about that?”

“No.” But I could imagine how terrifying it would have been to see. No wonder Shelley was scared. No wonder Brandon could hardly look at me. I’d spent four years studying cryptid species, yet couldn’t even identify my own. If I couldn’t understand what I’d become, how could they?

Pennington glanced at his notebook again.

“What about your hair? Witnesses say your hair took on a life of its own.”

“Sheriff, I’m assuming that if you spoke to my friends, you know that I was a crypto-biology major, with an emphasis in human hybrid species. I should know what I am. But I truly have no clue. Before tonight, I didn’t even know the question needed to be asked. All I know for sure at this point is that I’m no longer a bank teller.” I was no longer a driver, or a tenant, or a girlfriend, or a best friend.

I was nothing other than the property of the state of Oklahoma.

My eyes fell shut and I sucked in a deep breath.

The reality—the true enormity—of my loss suddenly hit me in a way that the mere intellectual understanding of it hadn’t been able to. When the interrogation was over, they weren’t going to send me home. I had no home. I was never going to count another cash drawer or make another pot of coffee ever again, no matter what I did or said. Everything that I had ever been or done or loved was gone. Delilah Marlow no longer existed.

No, Brandon was right. Delilah Marlow had never existed. My entire life was a delusion. A fantasy. A lie I hadn’t even known I was telling.

The reality was pure hell.

Pennington closed his notebook and crossed his arms on the table again, watching calmly as I fought total, devastating terror. “Before you start feeling too sorry for yourself, keep in mind that a man almost died because of you, and up at County General, they’re not sure he’ll ever regain normal brain function.”

A bright spark of anger surged up through my fear, and I seized it. “He electrified a little girl!”

Pennington turned to Atherton, who was stationed next to the door. “She’s talking about one of the beasts?”

The deputy nodded and pulled his own notebook from the pocket of his khaki uniform pants. “A pubescent canis lupus lycanus. Female.” He looked up and pocketed the notebook. “A thirteen-year-old wolf bitch. The rep from Metzger’s says they have trouble with her all the time, and the customary motivational method is a low-voltage poke with a standard cattle prod.”

“She was covered with electrical burns!” For a second, I forgot I was chained to the floor, and when I tried to stand, I nearly dislocated my shoulder. Both Pennington and Atherton reached for their guns.

I froze. “Relax.” My pulse raced so fast the room started to look warped. “I can’t even open a jar of pickles, much less break through solid steel and iron.”

Atherton glared at me. “Delilah, she’s not a child, she’s a wolf.” The deputy slid his gun back into its holster, but the fact that he didn’t snap it closed made me nervous. “An animal.”

“Then why was she wearing underwear?” I demanded, and the sheriff and his deputy looked at me as if I’d lapsed into Latin. “Okay, just think about it. When we put wolves on display in a zoo—a regular zoo—we don’t put underwear on them because they aren’t self-aware enough to feel modesty or adapt to social conventions and restrictions. But Geneviève was wearing underwear, which means the menagerie understands that she’s thoroughly self-aware. And if she’s self-aware, why is it okay to put a child on display in skimpy undergarments, then shock her with a cattle prod when she doesn’t want to be seen in nothing but her underwear? You can’t have it both ways.”

I sank back into my chair, only aware that I’d been straining against my restraints when my joints started screaming at me in protest.

Atherton and the sheriff stared at me for a moment, obviously unsure what to say. Then Pennington dragged his chair closer to the table and scowled at me with confidence born of ignorance. “According to the law, your werewolf bitch isn’t a person. She’s a monster, and monsters are offered no protection under the law because them and their kind slaughtered more than a million innocent children during the reaping alone. Who knows how many others they’ve killed one at a time? If werewolves are self-aware, why didn’t the pack that tore that family apart up in the Ozarks last month use that self-awareness to decide not to kill innocent people?”

“First of all, that was a pair of adlets, not a pack of werewolves, and second, self-awareness isn’t the same as a moral compass,” I argued. “I don’t believe every cryptid should be allowed to roam free, just like I don’t believe every human should be allowed to roam free. We have psychos, too. People kill their coworkers. Kids kill their classmates. Parents kill their own children. Those people are every bit as monstrous as the worst cryptid predator you can point to, yet they’re human, just like we are.”