Spectacle

“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...