On his left, the minotaur snorted.
Before I could ask him what he’d seen of the Spectacle and its security procedures so far, one of the handlers stationed behind Eryx and Gallagher—the only two male cryptids in the room—frowned at me. “Go refill your tray.”
I nodded, but before I turned back to the bacchanalia, I gave Gallagher a pleading look. “Please don’t cause trouble,” I whispered. “No matter what you see, I’m more okay than I will be if you interfere. Okay?”
“No.”
“Gallagher, I can take care of myself,” I hissed. “In here, I have to.”
“Move along,” the handler ordered.
I turned to Eryx. “Keep him in check, okay?”
The bull nodded, giving me his mute promise to try. They’d dressed him in nothing but a loincloth, similar in style to what he’d worn in the menagerie, which gave me a clear view of his massively muscled human chest and arms, beneath the fur that began on his shoulders and grew over his bovine head, up to the base of two enormous, curved horns. I saw no new cuts or bruises, and no sign that he’d been denied food or water. The only real change in him was the massive steel collar around his thick neck.
I couldn’t understand why the women had been given beautiful costumes but the men had not, until Willem Vandekamp walked through the grand entrance, then made his way toward the stage, shaking guests’ hands as he went.
Onstage, he eschewed the microphone and congratulated the groom in a voice that carried the width of the room on its own. He thanked the guests for coming and the host for choosing the Savage Spectacle as the venue. Then he signaled to someone at the back of the room, and the crowd parted as Eryx and Gallagher were marched forward to stand in front of the stage.
“You may have noticed these two beasts standing at the back of the room all evening,” Vandekamp began. “I’ve brought them in to give you an early glimpse, on the house, of our newest competitors. Our minotaur and redcap will be making their debuts in the ring later this week, and I promise you, it will be an event like no other.”
“What’s a redcap?” someone shouted from the crowd, words slurred together.
Vandekamp smiled. “Watch this.” He knelt on the stage and plucked Gallagher’s hat from his head, then tossed it into the crowd. It hit the floor, and though everyone stared, no one reached for it.
“Galla—”
Gallagher called his cap before Vandekamp could order him to perform, and a collective gasp echoed across the room. No one actually saw the hat disappear from the floor, and no one actually saw it reappear on his head. Somehow, it happened in midblink. For everyone. All at once.
The audience burst into applause and excited chatter. And like a true showman, Vandekamp dismounted the stage without offering any further information, keeping them curious for Gallagher’s event in “the ring.”
He shook more hands on his way out of the room, then disappeared through the massive double doors without even a glance my way.
Gallagher and Eryx remained on display in front of the stage.
For the next hour, I avoided invasive questions and wandering hands, eager to escape into the kitchen every time my tray was emptied. Lenore sang and the rest of us served, and the patrons quickly got drunk on top-shelf alcohol and their own egos.
“What are you?” a man asked, plucking a tiny caprese skewer from my tray.
“I’m a Gemini,” I said, as he stuffed the bite into his mouth. “That makes us totally incompatible.”
The man next to him laughed into a fragrant glass of expensive whiskey.
As I left to refill my tray, the event coordinator brought Lansing and the groom onto the stage and announced the start of the hypnotist game.
At first, the “tricks” were simple and stupid, but the guests were all drunk and privileged, so the game devolved quickly. Lansing made Lenore compel his friends to tell their most humiliating secrets and when one of them admitted onstage to having slept with the bride, the host told Lenore to make him strip to nothing and take one of the servers’ trays. He spent the next half hour serving his friends in the nude, with a cloth napkin draped over the erection Lenore had made sure he wouldn’t be able to get rid of.
I was leaving the kitchen with another tray, reluctant to rejoin a group of men evidently determined to prove that money doesn’t equal class, when something clattered to the floor across the room, accompanied by a familiar low-pitched feline growl.
Eryx took three thundering steps into the fray, eager to protect a friend, and his handlers grabbed him. I waved him back, to keep him out of trouble, then pushed my way through the crowd toward Zyanya.
I found her surrounded by half a dozen drunk partiers. Her tray was on the floor, bits of fancy cheese, crackers and tapenade scattered across the marble.
“I’m just saying, we paid to see her. We should get to see all of her.” The groom reached for the tie of Zyanya’s cheetah-print bikini top and tried to pull it loose. Again.
Zyanya turned to put her back out of his reach, and then it became a game. Each time she turned, there was another set of hands eager to tug on the straps. A man in gray slacks finally succeeded, and Zyanya clutched her loose top to her chest with both hands.
“Let her go.” I put one arm around the shifter’s shoulders and turned to the nearest handler, who was leaning against one black-draped wall, sipping from a bottle of water. “Aren’t you supposed to step in here?”
The handler slowly screwed the lid on his water, then pushed away from the wall and sauntered toward us. He towered over most of the partygoers. “What’s the problem?”
“I paid to see her, so I want to see her.” The guest of honor pouted like a child as he flicked the untied bikini strap from beneath my protective grip. Before I could point out that he hadn’t paid for anything, the handler shot me a censoring glance.
“That’s not part of your package.” He crossed thick arms over his chest, and I was almost as relieved to hear that as I was horrified that such a package existed.
“This should cover it.” James Lansing pulled a clip of bills from his pocket as he pushed his way into the huddle, and though I only got a glance, they all appeared to be hundreds. “But for that much, I want a private show. Just me and the groom and your pretty little pussycat.”
“That can certainly be arranged,” the handler said.
Lansing tossed him the entire clip. “Take one for your trouble.”
The handler thanked him and peeled a bill from the stack, then shoved it into his pocket. “Follow me.”
“Wait!” I tightened my grip around Zyanya’s shoulders.
The handler grabbed her arm and pulled her away from me. “Customers get anything they want at the Spectacle—as long as they’re willing to pay.”
“Hey,” Lansing said as the handler pulled back a section of the black drape to reveal a door in the rear wall. “I want her too.” He nodded at me, then pulled a credit card from his wallet.
A cold wash of fear froze me in place. The handler shoved Zyanya into the room he’d just opened, then marched toward me. “No.” My voice was hardly a whisper, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d screamed. The handler dragged me toward the small room as if I weighed nothing. “No. I won’t do this.” I closed my eyes and dragged my feet, to no effect.
Over the handler’s shoulder, I saw Gallagher clench both fists. Eryx’s bovine nostrils widened when he huffed, and he pawed the marble floor with his right hoof. His promise to keep Gallagher in check seemed to have been forgotten.
“Let her go!” Gallagher bellowed.
The entire room went still. Every head swiveled toward him, and several people gasped. He looked swollen with rage, every muscle in his body standing out beneath his skin, his neck bulging against the confines of the steel collar.
“Gallagher
, don’t!” I cried.
One of the handlers stepped in front of him and ordered him back. Gallagher reached out and snapped the man’s neck with one hand.
The body fell to the floor. The crowd gasped. A current of fear ran through them, raising the hair on my arms. Stroking the sleeping furiae inside me like petting a purring cat.
But Gallagher fell to his knees. He roared, his face contorted with the agony coursing through him.
Three more handlers ran toward him, each wielding a remote control, and he fell onto the floor, convulsing in pain.
“The bigger they are...” My handler laughed. His grip on my arm tightened, and he pulled me toward Zyanya and that empty room.
“It’ll be okay,” she whispered from the doorway.
But it wouldn’t. She didn’t deserve this. Gallagher didn’t deserve to be electrocuted for trying to protect me.
Rage surged inside me. I felt my hair lift from my scalp, fighting the pins that held it in place. My nail beds began to itch and burn as my nails hardened, growing into thin points.
Behind me, someone gasped, and when I opened my eyes, my vision had sharpened so dramatically that I could see individual folds in the fabric draping the wall all the way across the large room.
The handler dropped my arm and stepped back.
“What the fuck?” Lansing demanded, staring at my eyes. “What is she?” But he didn’t back away. In fact, the entire crowd of inebriated, privileged young men was closing in on me, as if wealth and entitlement exempted them from a healthy fear of death.
The handler pressed an icon on his remote, then frowned at the screen when the collar failed to inhibit my transformation.
Rage coursing through me, I reached for Lansing.
The handler cursed and grabbed my arm. The moment his skin touched mine, he froze. The furiae wanted Lansing, but she would accept the man who’d been willing to give Zyanya to him. Who’d accepted payment for her humiliation and degradation.
“Take her indignity upon yourself.” The words fell from my lips, though I hadn’t felt them form. They were simply there, channeling justice with every syllable.
The handler dropped my arm.
“What are you doing, man?” the groom demanded. “Don’t let her go! That damn collar’s not working!”
Other handlers rushed toward us from both sides of the room, but they had to push their way through a crowd that didn’t yet feel threatened enough to disperse.
The handler who’d taken Lansing’s money pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it on the floor. He unbuckled his utility belt and let it fall, Taser and all, then pulled his boots off, one by one. By the time the fastest of his coworkers got close enough to see what was going on, he was standing in front of the mesmerized crowd in a stained pair of white underpants and a single ripped athletic sock.
“Murphy!” the approaching handler shouted at his nearly naked coworker. “What the hell are you doing, man?”
“He touched her.” Lansing pointed at me as he backed farther away from us. “She said something, then he just started stripping!”
Murphy bent to pull his remaining sock off, and the soft pooch of an aging belly folded over the band of his underwear.
“Man, put your clothes back on.” Another handler stepped forward, aiming his remote at me, but he didn’t press any of the buttons. I wasn’t an immediate threat, now that my hair had fallen and my nails had receded, and if he paralyzed me, he wouldn’t get any answers. “What did you do to him?” he demanded, as two more handlers pushed back the still-gathering crowd.
Onstage, Lenore had stopped singing, and the string quartet stood behind her, trying to see over the crowd.
“I gave him a dose of his own medicine.”
Murphy hooked both thumbs beneath the waistband of his underwear, and the crowd groaned in unison as he pushed the stained material to the floor. He stepped out of the pile of shed clothing and dropped onto his knees.
“Murphy, get up,” one of the handlers said, while another spoke softly into a handheld radio, calling for backup.
Murphy didn’t get up. He just stood there on his knees, exposed in front of the crowd, while one of the other handlers pulled Zyanya toward the edge of the room, where the other cryptid servers had already been gathered.
And suddenly, the groom burst into laughter. “Is he just going to stay there like that?” He pointed at Murphy, and his amusement seemed to spread through the crowd, now that I no longer seemed dangerous.
The partygoers snickered, and Murphy’s cheeks flushed. He knew what was happening. He knew what he was doing and what they were saying, but he was helpless to make it stop. He was living out the degradation he’d tried to heap upon Zyanya.
“Get up,” one of the handlers said, as the double doors at the front of the room flew open and more handlers poured in, tranquilizer rifles aimed and ready.
“He can’t,” I told them, as Murphy shuffled toward the door on his knees, tears trailing down his scarlet face, loose flesh wobbling. “I don’t think he ever will again.”
* * *
“What the hell did you do?” Vandekamp paced back and forth in front of his desk, and the drastic change in his demeanor made me nervous. I’d never seen him angry.
“I didn’t do anything,” I insisted, wishing I could pull the stupid mask from my face, but I’d been handcuffed again, still in my costume. “Seriously. Murphy grabbed my arm and it just happened. I was merely a conduit for justice.” My head swiveled as I watched Vandekamp pace past me, while a man stationed to the right of the desk kept his gun aimed at my chest.
“I told you what would happen if you didn’t behave.”
“I’m not in control of the furiae.” Not always. “I tried to tell you that.”
Vandekamp turned to the pair of handlers stationed by the door. “Where are the others she was serving with?”
“We’re holding them down the hall, sir, waiting for your decision.”
“Isolate each of them. No lights. No windows. No sleep mat. No communication with anyone. No food or water for forty-eight hours.”
“But I couldn’t help it!” I insisted. “Punishing them won’t teach me a lesson, because I didn’t do it on purpose!”
Vandekamp didn’t even seem to hear me.
“What about her?” one of the handlers asked, and though I couldn’t see him, I could hear hatred and fear in every word he spoke.
“Send her back to the dorm. Shut her down if she comes within three feet of any employee.”
Shut her down. As if I were a machine that could simply be turned off when it wasn’t needed.
“Sir, are you sure? She’s the problem. Shouldn’t she be punished too?”
But the handler clearly didn’t understand—the whole time I sat in a well-lit room surrounded by friends and fed three meals a day, I’d be able to think about nothing but the suffering I’d brought upon Zyanya, Lenore, Belinda and Clarisse.
“That is her punishment.”
“In an unprecedented event, nearly two dozen cryptids of multiple species have escaped from the Massachusetts state preserve. Residents are advised to stay inside and lock their doors.”
—from the Boston Gazette, September 1996
Delilah
I refused food for the next thirty-six hours.
Lala tried to convince me that what was happening to the others wasn’t my fault. But she was wrong.
Mirela and Finola told me that making myself suffer wouldn’t help those being punished for what I’d done. They were right, but that didn’t change anything. I couldn’t stop their suffering, but I could make sure they didn’t suffer alone.
After lunch on the second day after the bachelor party, the dormitory door opened and Bowman called my name. He wore th
ick leather gloves and the collar of his shirt was folded up, leaving none of his neck exposed.
“What?” I didn’t bother to stand. My insides had become one vicious cramp with the kind of hunger I remembered from my first few days in the menagerie, before Gallagher had started sneaking me extra food.
I hadn’t seen Gallagher since the bachelor party. None of the others who’d been taken out for engagements had seen him either.
“Delilah, you’ve been engaged,” Bowman said. “Let’s go.”
I stood, and the room spun around me. My legs felt shaky. “By myself?” In the week and a half we’d been at the Spectacle, I hadn’t seen anyone leave for an engagement alone.
“Come on.”
My first few steps were unsteady.
He adjusted the settings on my collar, then escorted me down the hall toward the makeup room. “I guess you shouldn’t have given your lunch away, huh?”
Of course they’d been watching.
Bowman held the makeup-room door open for me, revealing that three women and two men were already reclined in five of the six available chairs. “We have a late addition to the roster,” he said, gesturing for me to sit in the empty chair.
“We’ll get to her when we’re done here,” one of the makeup artists said, without looking up from the man whose face she was painting. With his sculpted features exaggerated by subtle, miraculously masculine makeup, I hardly recognized Drusus, the incubus our menagerie had picked up about a month before we were recaptured.
After at least two hours in the reclining chair, I was rubbed in body glitter and dressed in the same outfit I’d worn to the bachelor party, only this time I was given a pair of sandals with three-inch heels.
The handlers marched us through the topiary, then through a second iron gate I’d never noticed before, toward the back of the stone garden wall along a winding sidewalk.
Beyond that gate was a vast section of the Savage Spectacle I’d never seen before, completely surrounded by a tall iron fence and hidden by a thick grove of tall trees. The sidewalk wound through the grove, lit by light posts at regular intervals, and we emerged from the thicket in front of two imposing brick structures both almost absent of windows. The one on the right sat just a few hundred feet from the iron fence at the back of the property. The other was huge and octagonal, and it was surrounded by a parking lot of its own. Which implied that it also had its own entrance and driveway, though I could see neither from our vantage point.