“It’s okay,” the handler said. “She makes us do this all the time.” He shoved the cattle prod through a small hole in the steel mesh at the back of her cage.
Geneviève yelped in pain, and Claudio’s growling crescendoed until it was almost all I could hear. The handler jabbed the traumatized werewolf one more time, and she scuttled out of her corner and into the light.
Rage filled me like a bonfire lit deep inside my soul. Geneviève was a little girl, no more than thirteen years old. She trembled on the floor of her cage, knees drawn up to her chest, heels tucked close to her body in an attempt to cover herself. She wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her face in the hollow between her knees, letting her long, tangled blond hair fall down her nearly bare back.
“Oh...” Shelley breathed, clearly horrified, and this time Brandon’s hand clenched mine. None of us seemed to know what to say. Even Rick looked uncomfortable.
“Stand up, honey, and let them get a look at you,” the handler said, as Claudio continued to growl and pace in his cage. The male werewolf couldn’t see Geneviève, but he obviously cared about her, and he clearly knew what was happening. “I’m not going to tell you again,” the handler taunted, his cigarette bobbing with every word, and the girl-wolf began to tremble.
The cattle prod scraped the iron bars on its way into the cage, and Geneviève stood faster than I would have thought possible. She scrambled toward the front of her cage to escape the weapon, her eyes still squeezed closed, as if her refusal to see us somehow meant that we wouldn’t see her.
In that moment, I wished more than anything in the world that I’d made my friends sit through a boring birthday dinner with me instead of using Brandon’s tickets, so that at least we could have spared Geneviève this one moment of humiliation in the string of such instances that no doubt comprised her entire existence.
Genni’s hair brushed the base of her spine and did much more to cover her than the white bikini bottom and tube-style swimsuit top she’d been made to wear. Her arms and legs were thin and her rib cage was plainly visible through her skin. The outsides of her thighs were peppered with pairs of red welts that could only be burns from the cattle prod.
Little Geneviève obviously resisted her handler quite often. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved by that fact or horrified by it, so I settled for a deep sense of awe that a child so young had survived—so far—an existence I couldn’t even imagine.
On display. Nearly naked. Ordered to perform, and tortured for refusal.
I hated myself for being there to see it.
I started to head to the next cage and relieve Geneviève of the audience that gave her handler the chance to abuse her. But then she opened her eyes, and I was too mesmerized to move.
She had Claudio’s eyes. Exactly. Beautiful golden wolf eyes in a little girl’s face.
“Open your mouth, Genni, and let them have a look at your teeth.” The handler circled the end of her cage, still carrying the cattle prod, and Geneviève scuttled away from him. The name embroidered on his shirt was Jack. The tip of his cigarette glowed red in the shadows.
“Genni...” he warned, and when Claudio started howling, Jack banged on the end of the male wolf’s cage with the fist holding the cigarette. “Pipe down, Papa!”
Understanding crashed over me with a devastating weight and stunning intensity. The father was caged feet from his half-naked daughter, unable to protect her, yet forced to hear every offense heaped on her.
“Genni!” Jack shouted, and she turned on him, hissing, hair flying, her lips curled back to reveal long, sharp canines among the teeth in her otherwise human mouth.
“Ain’t that somthin’?” Jack took a long drag on his cigarette. “Have to file ’em down once a month, or she’s likely to bite a finger off when we groom her.”
“You groom her?” Brandon sounded sick. Shelley looked pale, and Rick was staring at his feet.
“Have to. That one won’t do nothin’ on her own. Has to be prodded into brushin’ her own teeth in the mornin’.” He brandished the forked end of the cattle prod at her and she hissed again, then retreated to the back of her cage. “No, no, don’t sit down, Genni. Give the good people their money’s worth.” Jack turned back to us. “Wanna hear her howl? She’s got a helluva voice, that one. Not much for speaking, but she howls like her mama did.”
“Did?” I didn’t want to ask, but I wanted to know. “She died?”
Jack shrugged, and the tip of his cigarette left squiggles of light dancing in front of my eyes. “Who knows? Sold her off last year.” He turned back to Geneviève, who stood in the darkest corner of her cage. “Give us a howl, darlin’.”
But Genni had had enough. She sank to the floor against the rear wall of her cage and vanished into the shadows again, closing her eyes so the twin points of yellow light disappeared.
Jack moved toward her with the prod again, and the fire burning in my belly burst into a full-body blaze.
“Leave her alone,” I said, and when the entire hybrid tent went silent around me, I realized that my voice sounded...different. Not lower in pitch, but larger somehow. More robust.
Brandon, Rick, and Shelley turned to look at me, their eyes wide. Distantly I realized that my scalp had started to tingle and that the heat blazing deep inside me now threatened to burn me alive.
It was a boundless and terrible heat. And it was not entirely unfamiliar.
Creatures in cages all around the tent turned to stare. Sounds I hadn’t even realized I was hearing suddenly ceased—the snort of something equine; steady small splashes from the special section across the ring; and the constant rustle of feet and hooves on hay.
Jack was too intent on causing pain to notice the sudden silence. “It’s no trouble.” With his back to us, he moved toward the center of the cage to lengthen his reach. “It’s just—” he twisted something at the base of the prod “—a little jolt.” He shoved the cattle prod between the bars and through the mesh, and Geneviève howled when the tip touched her right calf.
“Get the hell away from her!” I shouted, and my hair rose on my scalp, as if the power sparking through me had charged it at the roots. It floated around my head, not in thin tendrils, but in heavy ropes of hair, twisting around my face in my peripheral vision.
My pamphlet fell to the ground. Brandon dropped my hand. Shelley made a strange noise as she and Rick backed away from me.
Jack pulled the prod from Geneviève’s cage and turned, his mouth already open to yell at me. The first syllable died on his tongue. The cattle prod thunked to the ground. My hands found the sides of his head, and dimly I was aware that my fingers looked too dark, the nails long and vaguely pointed.
I gripped his skull and felt several tiny pops as my nails pierced the skin at his temples. Jack’s eyes rolled up into his head and his arms began to twitch. His teeth clattered together and sweat poured from his forehead. Blood dripped from his temples.
I saw it all, but none of it sank in. I registered nothing in that moment except the sparks still firing inside me, firing through me, out the tips of my fingers and into Jack’s head, where every synapse fried within him eased a bit of the demand for justice seething inside me.
How do you like it? I demanded, but my mouth never opened. My tongue never moved.
Shelley screamed. The sound of her terror cut through my rage and I pulled my hands from Jack’s head in one swift movement. I stumbled backward, horrified by what I’d done, sucking in great gasping breaths that did nothing to soothe the fire burning deep in my chest.
What had I done?
The handler wobbled on his feet. Blood leaked from four pinpoint holes on either side of his balding scalp. Eyes unfocused, he thumped to his knees on the ground, then felt around in the hay without ever looking down. His thick fist closed around the cattle prod he’d dropped and he twisted a knob on the end as far as it would go. Then he raised the prod as high as he could in both fists and rammed it down on his own thigh. The forked tip plunged through denim and into flesh.
The handler began to convulse. For a moment, no one else moved. The entire hybrid trailer watched Jack electrocute himself. Then hooves and paws began to pound against their cage floors. Wolves howled, something avian screeched, and several human mouths cheered.
“What did you do?” Shelley wailed.
My heart pounding, I turned to see my friends staring at me in horror, backing slowly toward the adlet cage to get away from me.
Rick tripped over the low circus ring and went down on one hip.
“I...” I looked at my hands and blinked to clear my vision, but my vision wasn’t the problem. The problem was my hands. They were too long and bony, my fingers ending in narrow black points. I had needle-claws, where I’d had normal fingernails before.
Blood dripped from the tip of one. I shook my head in denial of what I was seeing—of what I’d done—but instead of settling over my shoulders, my hair was twisting around my head, if the standing-on-end feeling in my scalp could be trusted.
I backed away from the handler still electrocuting himself and from Geneviève’s cage, where she stared at me through yellow wolf-girl eyes. Panic dumped adrenaline into my bloodstream and I suddenly itched to run. To escape.
“What the hell?”
I turned to find Rick staring at me, one dusty brown cowboy boot on either side of the bright red circus ring.
Another handler stepped out of the shadows and kicked the livestock prod from Jack’s hands. He stopped convulsing, but his eyes regained no focus. His mouth hung open.
“What are you?” Wendy, the woman in the sequined leotard, demanded, and I could only blink at her, because I had no answer. Yet even in my mounting terror, I knew that if I’d had an answer, I shouldn’t give it to her.
You are normal. You are human. You are ours. The memory of my mother’s bedtime mantra played through my head as it always had in moments of fear and doubt since I was a small child. It had never in my life felt more relevant. Or more like a total lie.
The handler in the red cap pushed Wendy aside and stomped toward me, reaching out for me. Then, suddenly, his gaze darted over my shoulder. “Wait!” he shouted, and I turned to run.
The last thing I saw before my skull exploded in pain and the world went dark was the face of the hybrid tent ticket taker in the top hat as he swung a felt-covered mallet at my head.
Atherton
The call came over the radio at 7:04 p.m., while Wayne Atherton was eating a cheeseburger in the driver’s seat of his patrol car.
“All units, respond with your location. We got a problem up at the fairgrounds.”
Wayne dropped his burger into the grease-stained bag and answered with food still in his mouth. “This is officer oh-four. I’m just off Highway 71, a mile past Exit 52.” Known locally as the Sonic exit. Wayne finished his bite while four other deputies responded with their locations, then Dispatch came back over the radio with a squawk of static.
“No details yet, but there’s an ambulance on the way to the menagerie and they’re requesting all the backup we can send. Oh-four, you’re closest, but I’m sending everyone else your way. Be careful. And don’t forget your iron kit.”
The iron kit. Shit.
Wayne slammed the gearshift into Drive and pulled onto the highway without checking for oncoming traffic. He only remembered to turn on his siren when the car he nearly ran off the road blasted its horn.
“Dispatch, how’re those details coming?” he demanded as he sped down the dusty two-lane highway toward the Franklin County fairgrounds. “I need to know what I’m walking into.”
A month before, a cop down near Dallas had lost an arm to an ogre drunk on Kool-Aid and impatient for his dinner.
“Oh-four, you’re headed for the hybrid tent, set up near where they put the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair. Not sure how it happened, but it sounds like one of the hybrids got loose and injured a menagerie employee.”
“A hybrid?” Wayne stomped on the gas pedal and began scanning the side of the road for the familiar faded wooden sign marking the entrance to the fairgrounds. What he knew about cryptids would easily fit between the cardboard pages of a toddler’s picture book, and the only hybrids he could even name were mermaids and werewolves. “No civilian casualties, Dispatch?”
“Well, I doubt the carny’s a cop, Wayne,” Grace said in that exasperated tone she usually saved for after hours.
“You know what I mean. No customers hurt? No locals?”
“Hang on, oh-four.” Dispatch went silent for a minute, and just as Wayne was turning onto the wide gravel path leading to the fairgrounds, Grace came back on the line. “We’re only hearing about the one injury so far, and Metzger’s says no one else is in immediate danger. Secondary report says the perpetrator is restrained.”
Perpetrator? “If this is a hybrid attack, there’s no perp, Grace. You wouldn’t characterize a tiger that escaped from the zoo as a perpetrator, would you?”
“I don’t make the reports, I just dispatch them. But I’m coming up with all kinds of new ways to characterize you.”
Wayne laughed, picturing Grace chewing on the cap of her pen. “What kind of injury are we talking about, Dispatch?”
“We’re not clear on that yet, oh-four, but the folks at the carnival seem to want us to take the cryptid into custody.”
“This is the Sheriff’s Department, not the pound!” Franklin County wasn’t equipped to hold most cryptids, much less keep them for any extended period of time. Hell, some of them wouldn’t even fit in a standard jail cell!
“You’re preaching to the choir, oh-four. Just haul ass and watch your back.”
He hated it when Grace talked like she was his boss instead of his girlfriend. Especially over the radio, where anyone could hear. But as usual, she was right. “I’ll check in as soon as I know what’s going on.”
Wayne turned off the siren but left his lights flashing as he rolled through the menagerie’s open gate, where carnies in elaborate red-and-black costumes waved him on. He drove straight down the midway with his foot on the brake, honking to warn everyone who hadn’t noticed his blue-and-red strobe. Where the midway forked, another pair of menagerie employees waved him to the right, through another gate, and a minute later, Wayne could see the commotion. A large group was being held back from the entrance to a big circus-style striped tent by a crimson velvet rope and a staff of large red-clad men.
He got out of his car, lights still flashing. The crowd made way for him, and when he got to the front, he headed straight for a woman in a leotard and top hat and a man in a black Metzger’s cap. “Deputy Wayne Atherton, Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. Who can fill me in?”
The employee in the black cap stuck his hand out for Wayne to shake. “I’m Chris Ruyle, the lot supervisor.”
Wayne had no idea what a lot supervisor was, but he walked and talked like the boss. “What happened, Mr. Ruyle?”
“We were hoping you could tell us.” Ruyle lifted the closed tent flap and gestured for Wayne to go in ahead of him. Inside, a woman lay on her side on the ground, a familiar head of dark wavy hair spread all around her. Her hands were bound at her back. With iron cuffs.
Wayne dropped to his knees at her side. “That’s Delilah Marlow.” She’d been a couple of years behind him in high school, and all he really knew about her was that she’d been ready to shake the red dirt from her shoes on her way out of town since before she could even walk. No one had expected that girl to come home after college, much less stay. “Dispatch said the victim was an employee. What the hell happened?” A large purple bump was already starting to rise on one side of her skull. “What did this?”
“I did.”
Wayne looked up at the man who’d spoken. Then he looked up some more. The man held a black top hat and wore a red vest with Lerner embroidered on it in scrolling black print.
Wayne stood, anger bubbling up from his guts. Damn out-of-towners beating up on local girls. Franklin County wouldn’t stand for such things. “I thought this was a cryptid attack.”
“It was,” Lerner said. “But the creature wasn’t ours. She was yours.”
“Mine?” Wayne followed Lerner’s gaze to Delilah Marlow’s unconscious form. There was hay caught in her hair and blood beneath her fingernails—defensive wounds if he’d ever seen them. “You got five seconds to start making sense before I arrest you for assault and battery.”
Lerner stared at him unflinchingly, and Ruyle cleared his throat to catch Wayne’s attention. “Officer Atherton, the victim is over there.” Ruyle pointed toward a small crowd of flamboyantly dressed carnival employees gathered around a man seated on the ground with his mouth gaping open, staring at the hay beneath him. A trickle of blood seeped from each of his temples. A line of drool hung from his open lips. “This girl is the creature, and I can assure you she doesn’t belong to Metzger’s. So what I need to know from you is just what exactly this Delilah Marlow is, and what the hell she did to my handler.”
Martin,
I’m sure you’ve seen the news by now, and I’m very sorry to have to tell you that your sister Patricia and her family are among the thousands of victims of this morning’s national tragedy. I wanted to call, but your phone number wasn’t in Patty’s address book, and she was in no shape to find it for us. She and Robert are both in total shock. They lost four of their children overnight, and the police aren’t sure exactly what happened. All we do know is that Emily, the six-year-old, was the only one who survived...
—From a hand-written letter by Hannah Goodwin to
her brother-in-law and his family, August 24, 1986
Delilah
A soft buzzing woke me up. Not like a bee or a fly, but like...electricity. I was lying on something hard, rough, and cold, but the cold was all wrong. I could feel it not just against my face and arms, but against parts of me that should have been insulated by my clothes.
My eyes flew open as I shoved myself up with both hands, but the glaring assault of fluorescent light—the source of the buzzing—was like a spike driven through my skull. My arms gave out and my eyes fell shut. My cheek slammed into the floor, and I sucked in a shocked breath.
The floor. I was lying on the cold, hard floor. Naked.
My pulse racing, I lifted my head carefully and had to breathe through a wave of vertigo. My head throbbed fiercely. Light painted the insides of my eyelids red. I sat up on my knees, shivering, and folded my arms over my chest to cover myself. Then I opened my eyes again.
The glare was no longer crippling, but my headache was. I blinked and my eyes started to adjust to the light, but the world was a blur. Another blink, and several dark stripes came into focus.
No, not stripes. Bars. Thick iron bars.
Panicked, I scrambled away from them on my hands and knees until I came to a gray brick wall. I leaned my bare back against it, my knees pulled up to my chest, and finally made myself look at my surroundings.
I was in a corner cell with two walls of iron bars and a rough concrete floor.
No.
My heart pounded hard enough to jar my whole body with each beat. The adjoining cell had a hazard-orange floor with No Occupancy painted on it in black block letters.
No, no, no, no...
Across a wide aisle from my cell were other, normal cells.
Jail.
I was in jail. Because I’d turned into some kind of monster and stuck my fingers through that carny’s skull.
But that wasn’t possible. I wasn’t a monster, and I had never hurt anyone in my life.
Yet I could remember exactly how that man’s flesh had felt beneath my fingers. I could still feel the resistance his skull had offered, then that satisfying pop when my fingers had breached it.
Nonononono. I buried my face in my arms and squeezed my eyes shut, but the images were still there.
A dangling cigarette.
A cattle prod lying in the hay.
Blood dripping down the sweaty man’s face.
What the hell had I done? How had I done it?
Tears rolled down my cheeks and I swiped at them with both hands. This couldn’t be happening. I wasn’t a cryptid. My parents were human. I didn’t have so much as a birthmark to be examined, much less feathers, or horns, or scales.
Yet in that tent, I’d had... What had I had, exactly? Weird hair? Pointy fingers? That didn’t fit the description of any cryptid I’d ever studied.
I examined my hands. They were trembling uncontrollably, but looked normal, other than the blood dried beneath my fingernails.
I pulled handfuls of long, dark hair over my shoulder. My hair looked normal. Whatever I’d become had left no trace of itself. How was that even possible? The vast majority of cryptid species can’t blend in with the human population—not even shape-shifters. I’d officially learned that on day one as a crypto-biology major, but like everyone else, I’d actually known it my whole life.
So how could whatever kind of creature I was blend in well enough to hide itself not just from the rest of the world, but from me? How could I not know what I was?
What else did I not know about myself? If I couldn’t put faith in my own humanity, how much of the rest of my life was a lie?
I didn’t mean to do it.
Terrified, I mentally relived that surreal memory over and over, trying to understand what had happened. The only thing I was sure of every single time was that I hadn’t intended to turn into a monster and shove my fingers through a man’s skull. I’d seen it happen. I’d felt it happen. But I hadn’t made it happen. Not on purpose anyway.
And that meant I could no longer trust my own body.
I didn’t realize I was pounding my head into the brick wall at my back until the repetitive thuds finally broke through the vicious cycle of my memories.
The fierce throb in my head felt like my brain was trying to burst through my skull. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The concrete floor had sanded raw spots into my knees and my palms, as well as on more tender patches of bare flesh.
This couldn’t be happening.
On my right, a door squealed open on rusty hinges. Startled, I turned to find a sheriff’s deputy heading down the center aisle toward me. He carried a tall stool under one arm and a bundle of familiar material beneath the other.
The sight of my clothes in his hand triggered fresh tears as I scooted along the wall at my back. When I hit the far corner, I stopped, cradled by solid brick on two sides. I tucked my legs up to my chest again and crossed my ankles to cover my most private parts. I was as shielded and defended as I could get, yet I’d never felt more exposed or vulnerable.
“Hi.” The deputy set his stool down in the aisle, out of reach from my cell.
I rested my chin on my left knee and let my hair fall forward like a curtain, hoping all he could see were my shins, hair, and eyes.
“Do you remember me?”
He did look a little familiar, but no name came to mind.
“I’m Deputy Wayne Atherton. You were a couple of years behind me in school.”
Wayne. Yes. We’d had a history class together my sophomore year.
“Where am I? Are you in charge?”
“This is the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. You’ve been taken into custody as a cryptid living under false pretenses. And as far as you’re concerned, yes, I’m in charge.”
“Did—” My voice cracked, so I cleared my throat and started over, my face flaming. “Did you take my clothes off?”
