The audience chuckled, but their gazes stayed glued to the screens. As did mine. And when the coordinator waved a handler forward and spoke to him privately, I knew exactly what he was saying.
Go get Vandekamp.
“You’re hooked in,” Charles said, and the coordinator turned back to the screen on the far left.
“Mr. Brewer, are you certain you’ve spotted your target?”
The image on Brewer’s screen jumped as he did, startled by a voice he obviously hadn’t expected to hear from inside his helmet. “Yes. He’s just feet away,” the hunter whispered. “Can you see him?”
“We see something,” Fischer said, and the tension in his voice was quite clear. “But we aren’t sure what, exactly. Please approach with caution.”
“Will do.” Brewer stepped almost silently out of his hiding place, and at the bottom of his screen, his hands extended in front of him, holding his stun gun.
On the other screen, Miles slowly approached his downed target, twigs cracking with every step he took.
Brewer fired his stun gun with an audible jolt of electricity. The form in front of him jumped with the impact, then shook as electricity passed through him. An instant later, he hit the ground with hardly a sound. He’d landed in a patch of bare dirt.
“He’s down!” Brewer bounded forward and his hand rose toward the screen. Something clicked, and a flashlight shone from his helmet onto the form at his feet. “I’ve got him! I won!”
And he had. Payat lay on the ground, unconscious. Still in human form.
“What the hell...?” Again, the coordinator forgot he was holding his microphone, and this time Brewer heard him, as well. “Then what did the other guy catch?”
As one, we turned to Miles’s screen as he finally switched on his own flashlight. The beam skirted the underbrush, then settled on a fur-covered form lying on its side, its ribs rising and falling with each labored breath. “What the hell is that?” Miles demanded, as the audience gasped. “That’s not a cheetah.”
“No, it isn’t.” The coordinator turned to Charles. “It’s a werewolf. Patch me through to him.”
“You’ve got Miles,” Charles said with the click of a few buttons.
“Mr. Miles, slowly back away from the creature, and stand very still. We’re sending help your way immediately.”
“What the hell’s going on?” Instead of backing away, Miles leaned forward for a closer look. “What the—”
The creature lunged at him in a blur of sharp-toothed muzzle and glowing eyes.
Miles shouted and stumbled back. The werewolf’s muzzle clamped closed around his left forearm. Miles screamed and swung his stun gun like a hammer. The wolf let him go and backed away, growling.
Blood soaked through Miles’s sleeve, a darker shade of green on the infrared cameras. He fired the last load from his stun gun, and the werewolf collapsed on the ground, trembling as the second dose of electricity coursed through him.
“We appear to have had a breach.” Fischer had clearly seen what I’d already noticed—the fur-covered form on the ground in Miles’s feed wasn’t wearing a collar. And while the coordinator clearly thought one of the Savage Spectacle’s captives had somehow gotten out of his collar and escaped his cell, I knew better.
I recognized the form on the screen in front of me, even though it was painted several shades of night-vision green. I knew that fur, and I knew that muzzle, and I knew the single eye blinking sluggishly up at the camera.
Vandekamp hadn’t lost one of his werewolves; he’d gained one.
Claudio had come to claim his daughter.
For Immediate Release: January 18, 2002
AFCR contact: Rebecca Foster
WASHINGTON, DC—The American Foundation for Cryptid Research has awarded $9.9 million in research grants to three projects, each of which hopes to unlock genetic secrets of a specific cryptid species. This award marks the Foundation’s largest grants to date, the majority of which will go to a project at Colorado State University, seeking to map the genome of several species of shifter hybrids...
Delilah
Claudio was tranquilized on a live camera feed, in spite of the very active interest of Mr. Miles, who seemed unconcerned with his own injury and thrilled by the unexpected excitement. While handlers fitted the wolf with a muzzle and a paramedic bandaged Miles’s arm, Willem Vandekamp came into the viewing room and whispered something to Olive Burnette, who left with her orders. Then Vandekamp marched to the front of the room and took the microphone from Fischer.
Over the mic, he effusively congratulated Mr. Brewer on his quick and virtually effortless mastery of a vicious cheetah shifter and apologized for the “technical difficulties.” To make it up to such a valued customer, Vandekamp offered him a makeup hunt, on the house.
That must have been quite a generous financial offer, because Brewer, who’d been vocally disappointed in the reaction to his victory, suddenly seemed quite satisfied with his hunting experience.
The screens went blank while they reset the game field for the second round, and the handlers gave us a signal to start refilling drinks and plates.
After a fifteen-minute intermission, the house lights went down again, and this time Vandekamp ran the show himself. He announced that the second-round hunters would be chasing a feral adolescent werewolf named Genevieve who would as soon tear their throats out as look at them. Which was why the hunters had been outfitted with bite-proof sleeves and collars, and why they’d be hunting this vicious creature not with stun guns, but with the lethal longbow.
For one long, terrifying moment, I couldn’t breathe.
That’s why Genni was in the stables, rather than the dormitory. The very night her father had broken into the Spectacle to save her, Vandekamp had scheduled her to die.
“Oh, shit,” Zyanya whispered from my right.
“What?” Simra’s gaze roamed the screens, looking for the source of our distress.
“We know her,” I said softly. “She’s only thirteen years old.”
“I’ve seen her hunted twice, both times in the first round,” Simra said. “She’s very hard to catch, because she can fit into very small spaces, and she doesn’t go down easy.”
I swallowed a bitter taste at the back of my mouth. “How often do they die in this round?”
“About half the time,” Simra said, and my hand clenched around the edge of my tray.
“Hunters, are you ready?” Vandekamp asked.
My attention narrowed on his face, then slid to the wall of screens behind him.
“Ready.” A gloved hand appeared on one of the right-hand screens, and about half
the audience cheered.
“Good to go!” A second hand, also gloved, appeared on one of the left-hand screens, and the other half of the audience cheered.
“Mr. Wheeler, is the prey ready?” Vandekamp stepped to one side of the room, while Charles Wheeler pressed a series of buttons on the keyboard in front of him. The center overhead screen changed to show a small, slim humanoid shape, too dark to reveal much detail. But I would have recognized Genevieve’s silhouette anywhere.
Charles punched a few more buttons then twisted a small dial, and the image lightened to reveal Genni in full detail, painted in a monochromatic scheme of green.
As Payat had, she wore nothing but her collar and a small video camera mounted on a headband.
Vandekamp lifted his hands, then dropped them with a flourish. “Let the hunt begin!”
Charles’s hand hovered over his keyboard for a single dramatic second. Then he punched the space bar with one finger, and a gate slid open on-screen. For a five count, Genni pressed herself against the bars at her back, and in the greenish view, I could see her focus shift back and forth as she assessed her su
rroundings. She knew where she was; I could see that in her calm assessment. She was afraid, but not panicked, because she’d been through it all before. But she probably had no idea that this time the hunters were wielding arrows, rather than stun guns.
“Let’s get her moving, Mr. Wheeler,” Vandekamp said from his position against the right-hand wall, and Charles pressed another series of buttons.
A second later, the front of Genni’s collar blinked bright red, and she jumped, startled by an obvious jolt of pain. Then she ran.
I watched, my heart pounding as she nimbly ducked below branches, dodged vines and leapt over roots I wouldn’t have been able to see with my human eyes. At times she was little more than a green-tinged blur, moving virtually silently through the underbrush, effortlessly avoiding twigs and dead leaves which would make noise and give away her position.
I’d never seen a shifter let loose in her natural environment before, and where Payat had been terrified and timid, Genni was breathtaking.
She’s done this before. And not just in her two previous hunts. Like Payat, Genevieve had grown up in a cage, with no experience in the wild. At some point after All American sold her, Genni must have logged serious hours in the woods.
The odds were actually in her favor, and that fact left me both happy and terrified for her. If she survived this round, next time they’d put her up against hunting rifles, and even if she recovered from being shot once, she couldn’t recover over and over.
The ending would ultimately be the same for everyone sentenced to the hunt: they may survive the round, but they could not survive the game itself.
Still, for nearly an hour, Genni evaded not just capture, but detection, and when one of the men chasing her finally got a glimpse, he lost it a second later.
From her viewpoint camera, the audience could see that she had climbed a tree, but the hunter was completely unaware until she leapt from one branch to the next, and the limb she landed on held her slight weight but creaked beneath the burden.
I gasped when the hunter looked up, and Genevieve appeared in the center of his viewpoint screen.
The woman I was serving a meatball slider to shoved me out of her field of vision. I tripped over the edge of the tier and would have crashed into other guests if Simra hadn’t grabbed my arm with her spare hand.
We rushed toward the side of the room and turned back to the screens just in time to see an arrow fly.
Genni leapt for another branch. The arrow hit her thigh in midair with a barely perceptible thunk.
The audience burst into applause. Genevieve crashed to the ground, already growling, and when the hunter approached, she swiped at him with fingers tipped with canine claws, even in human form.
“Mr. Perry, hold your fire,” Charles said into his microphone, when the hunter on-screen pulled a second arrow from his quiver. “You’ve already taken your shot.” He pressed another button, and the red light on Genni’s collar flashed. She froze in the hunter’s viewpoint screen, immobilized, and the hunter lowered his weapon.
“I won?”
“Yes, sir, you are tonight’s round-two victor.” Vandekamp took center stage again, then he covered his mic and gave Charles instructions to set up for round three. But Charles was already tapping away at his keyboard and speaking softly into his microphone. “Unfortunately, Mr. Perry, it looks like your quarry will survive.”
Simra, Zyanya and I were the only ones in the room who didn’t boo.
Rommily
The oracle sat on the end of the exam table, her hands cuffed in her lap, her bare feet dangling over the pull-out step. The paper beneath her made a loud crinkling sound when she moved, so she sat as still as she could.
“Hey, Oakland, did she say anything to you?” the man in the white coat whispered from the other side of the room.
Rommily heard him, but she was much more interested in the lines of grout running through the tile floor.
“No, but she told Perkins he’d be trampled by a ‘mad pageant,’” the man in the black uniform answered. “Whatever the hell that means.”
The tiles were several different sizes, and the grout between them appeared to follow no pattern. It was like a maze with no center, and Rommily couldn’t seem to find her way out...
Sharp footsteps clicked into the room, and a pair of shiny white shoes with very tall heels stepped into the tile maze.
Rommily blinked, then looked up to see the woman with tightly twisted hair staring at her. Scowling.
“Mrs. Vandekamp.” The man in the white coat stepped forward, but Rommily’s handler stayed on the edge of the room.
“So?” the woman said. “What’s the prognosis? Is there any damage?”
“Nothing physical. We had to sedate her to do an exam and run X-rays, but there’re no healed fractures. No significant scarring. Her anatomy is virtually identical to that of a human, except in the ocular region, and—”
“Then what’s wrong with her?”
The man in the coat shrugged. “The problem seems to be psychological.”
“Are you suggesting we call in a therapist? For an animal?”
Rommily’s gaze fell to the floor again, watching the woman’s pointed left heel stab into an intersection of the grout maze.
“That’s your call, ma’am. All I’m saying is that oracles are so similar to us that they don’t actually fall within my training as a cryptoveterinarian. According to Rommily’s record, her entire family passed for human until she was around four years old, and—”
“So did the surrogates, Doctor,” the woman snapped. “Looking human doesn’t make her human. What I need to know is whether or not she can be fixed in a manner cost-effective enough to be practical.”
“Probably not.” The man in the coat cleared his throat. “But she might be worth keeping around if you want to maintain her sisters’ mental health and profitability. Considering the psychological fragility of oracles, in general...”
The woman groaned, and her right heel stepped into the middle of a small rectangular tile. “Send her back to the dorm,” she called over her shoulder on her way out of the room. But Rommily hardly registered her fate. Now that the intruding shoes were gone, she was feverishly tracing the grout lines. Searching for a way out.
“Come on.” Oakland pulled Rommily down from the table by one arm, careful only to touch her sleeve, even though he wore gloves.
The oracle dragged her feet, staring at the floor.
“Rommily,” the handler snapped. He gasped when she looked up at him through eyes clouded with a white film.
“Crushed by a child in the night...” she mumbled.
“What?” Chill bumps rose over Oakland’s arms. But the oracle wasn’t finished.
“The cock will crow at midnight, and the bull will rule the maze.”
Delilah
I spent the next day in isolation, in my concrete cell. Except for Pagano, who brought breakfast and lunch, I saw no one, and when I asked why I’d been given neither exercise nor a shift of delivering lunch trays, my handler replied only with silence.
When my cell door creaked open at dusk, I stood, expecting to find Pagano carrying my dinner tray. Instead, I came face-to-face with Willem Vandekamp. Pagano stood just behind him, in the hallway.
“You’ve been requested for another private engagement,” Vandekamp said.
Blood rushed to my head, and the small room seemed to swim around me.
Private engagement. Me, alone with a guest. I had no exotic features and no marketable cryptid abilities, so there was no reason for a client to want to see me alone, up close and personal, that I could think of. Except for one.
“No.” I held Vandekamp’s gaze, searching for some change in the way he looked at me. Some sign of cruel or intimate knowledge. If he knew I wa
s pregnant, he must know how it happened. “I need to talk to you privately.”
“We’re not negotiating. You’re going, and you’ll do what’s expected, or Gallagher’s collar will malfunction for a full thirty seconds during his next match.” Which would be plenty of time for any opponent to do serious damage. Vandekamp had me, and he knew it. “I don’t know why you bother arguing. We both know you like it.” He gave me an infuriatingly casual shrug. “And even if you don’t, you won’t remember it.”
A bolt of surprise shot up my spine. “Why not?”
He gave me a strange look, then turned to Pagano without answering. “Get her ready. The van is fueled and ready.”
I blinked, trying to make sense of what I’d just heard. I was leaving the Spectacle, and Vandekamp was going to have my memory of an engagement erased. Had he done that before? Was he responsible for the entire two-month gap? Was that intentional, or had something gone wrong with what was evidently a standard practice?
“Erasing the memory of something doesn’t mean it never happened,” I said, as the questions compounded in my head.
Vandekamp laughed. “That’s exactly what you said last time.” As he turned to leave, he put one hand on Pagano’s shoulder. “Bring her to me as soon as you get back. I’ll be waiting.”
“Where are they sending me?” I asked the moment Vandekamp’s footsteps faded.
“I don’t know where you’re going,” Pagano said as he programmed my collar to let me out of the room. “They always preprogram the address into the van’s GPS.”
Was I supposed to know that, or was that detail among those they evidently repeatedly stole from me?
“You have to know something,” I insisted as I stepped into the hall. But if he did, he kept it to himself.
In a bathroom at the end of the hall, my handler instructed me to shower, then change into the clean scrubs waiting folded up on the floor. Pagano didn’t turn away, but he didn’t look particularly interested in seeing me naked either, so I mentally crossed him off the paternity-possibility list. And though I had no memories to support that conclusion, it felt right.