“I can smell the hormones,” he whispered, following my lead as Pagano clomped toward the bed.
I turned to find my handler scowling at the werewolf. “You can tell just from smelling her?”
Claudio nodded, his hair catching on the rough material of the pillow. “But only because I know what to look for.” His voice was so low I could hardly hear him. “Is it a secret?”
I could tell from his lack of concern that he had no idea what the Spectacle’s official pregnancy policy was. “Yeah, it’s...complicated.” I whirled to face Pagano. “He won’t tell anyone.” Then I turned back to Claudio, and whispered, “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
Tabitha must not have known that shifters could smell my hormones, or she wouldn’t have let me come see him. Which meant that if she’d left me in the dorm with Zyanya and the other female shifters, everyone at the Spectacle would probably already know.
“I won’t tell,” Claudio whispered. His gaze held mine with a conflicted gravity. “Delilah, Melisande and I were forced to breed five children in captivity, and each was both a blessing and a curse.”
I slid my hand into his and tried not to think about how much of my situation I couldn’t explain to him.
“Each was taken from us early, and it kills me to know that they’re growing up in cages all over the country. But I know that the world is a better place with them in it. And I know that they will fight for their children just like I fought for mine. Just like you will fight for yours.”
My eyes watered and I sniffled. Pagano retreated to a chair by the wall, evidently satisfied that Claudio wouldn’t tell anyone.
The sharp squeal of metal made me gasp. A chain rattled, and Gallagher appeared in the doorway, clutching the rail he’d ripped from the hospital bed. The cuff dangled from his wrist, where it had been freed from the broken metal bar.
Since he hadn’t intended to hurt anyone—thus didn’t produce the monitored hormone—his collar hadn’t stopped him from tearing the bed in two.
Whichever handler had left him alone was about to be very fired.
Gallagher’s gray-eyed gaze found mine. “You’re...?” His expression cracked and fell apart, exposing a vulnerability I’d never expected to see in him. “Are you sure?”
Claudio’s eyes widened, as he drew conclusions I didn’t have time to explain.
I nodded. “About eight weeks. I wanted to tell you, but—”
“Gallagher, drop the bed frame.” Pagano lifted his remote, and I could tell from the way he clutched it that he was considering going for his gun instead.
“Don’t.” I turned to my handler, arms spread to show him that I meant no harm. “He’s not going to hurt anyone. Right, Gallagher?”
Gallagher’s eyes closed, as if Pagano presented no threat, and when his lips moved silently, I realized he was counting backward. Trying to confirm that he was going to be a father.
“It’s not an exact science,” I said, my voice steady and low for Pagano’s benefit. Trying to keep everyone calm. “But yes, the baby may be yours.”
Gallagher’s eyes opened, and swimming in them, I found a stunning confusion of emotions. Joy. Fear. Wonder. Confusion. Then that all collapsed in one horrible instant of pain. “Wait, may be mine? Who else’s could it be?”
“There are a couple of other possibilities.” My gaze dropped to the ground, but then I dragged it up again. What had happened to me was wrong, but it wasn’t my wrong. It wasn’t his wrong. It was a wrong made possible by the world we lived in. By a man who thought it acceptable to own people. By a woman willing to ruin several other lives to get what she wanted.
“Delilah, what happened?” Gallagher’s voice was so deep I could hardly hear it and so gruff it must have scraped his throat raw. His grip on the bed frame tightened until his fingers were white with tension. Until the metal began to groan. “I’ll kill every last one of them.”
He’d said it. He couldn’t take it back. And as tears burned twin paths down my face, I realized I didn’t want him to. I wanted him to tear into everyone who’d ever made me do anything against my will. Who’d ever put me in chains, touched me without invitation, drugged me or locked me up.
“Put the bed frame down and put your hands in the air.” Pagano aimed his remote at Gallagher with one hand and pulled his gun with the other. His real gun. Nervous sweat dripped down his forehead. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.”
Gallagher’s fist tightened. Metal squealed in his grip. His biceps bulged with tension, his gaze trained on my handler.
Pagano raised his pistol, aiming at Gallagher’s chest.
“No!” I cried.
Gallagher lifted the bed frame.
Pagano put his finger on the trigger.
I lunged between them, blocking the handler’s shot, but Gallagher leaned around me. His arm rose so fast I saw only a blur of motion on the edge of my vision. Something long flew across the room, end over end.
The handler pressed a button on his remote, and Gallagher made a stunned choking sound. He fell to the floor with a heavy thud just as the broken end of the metal bed frame punctured Pagano’s chest like a pencil through a sheet of paper, driving him backward until he hit the wall.
Pagano coughed up blood. Then he slid down the wall and fell over sideways, staring sightlessly at the doorway.
“No!” I sank onto my knees next to Gallagher. His legs were shaking, his heels crashing into the floor over and over; he was having a seizure. “Gallagher! What can I do?”
His eyes rolled back and his teeth clacked together.
“Get the remote!” Claudio growled, fighting his restraints in a vain attempt to get out of the bed. “It’s still shocking him!”
I scrambled across the floor and pulled the remote control from Pagano’s limp hand, silently apologizing for his bloody death, after the relative kindness he’d shown me. The remote had a smart screen, with half a dozen “quick touch” options. An icon at the bottom of the display read End Voltage.
I pressed it three times before I was sure the device had accepted my command.
Gallagher went still. I crawled back to him with the remote control in hand. His eyes were closed. “Gallagher.” I bent low to speak into his ear. “Gallagher. Please wake up! We have to move.” We weren’t going to get a better chance to escape, and we had no choice.
He’d killed a handler.
If Vandekamp caught us, he would have Gallagher killed slowly, brutally in the arena. In front of a crowd. And he’d make me watch.
“Is he okay?” Claudio asked, still straining for a better view.
“I don’t—”
Gallagher’s eyelids twitched. Then they opened. He blinked, and his gaze focused on me. “Delilah. Are you—” He sat up with no sign of vertigo, and when he saw Pagano’s corpse, he exhaled. “I got him.”
“He didn’t hurt me, Gallagher.”
“He wasn’t...?” His gaze fell to my stomach.
“No!”
Gallagher shrugged. “Pagano was keeping you locked up. That made him our enemy.” And for him, it was truly that simple.
He pushed himself to his feet, then reached down to help me up. “We’re leaving.”
“Okay,” I said, and he looked surprised that I wasn’t arguing. “But we can’t leave all the others.”
“We won’t.” Gallagher turned to Claudio. “Can you walk?”
The werewolf’s cuffs rattled when he shrugged. “Not quickly.”
“Okay, then you’ll stay here—stay safe—until we come back for you.” Gallagher glanced at me. “You figure out the remote. I’ll find the keys. It won’t be long before the nurse comes in to check my stitches.” He lifted his arm, and I saw that a long gash stretching toward his elbow had popped three stitches and begun to bleed.
Which was why they’d brought him to the infirmary.
While Gallagher dug in Pagano’s pockets, I went through the remote control’s menus and functions, careful not to press anything that might hurt any of us. “Okay,” I said, when I’d found what seemed to be the home menu. “There’s an option that will remove all restrictions. I’m going to try that, but anyone else with a remote will still be able to reprogram them.”
“Not for long.” Gallagher unlocked his cuffs and dropped them into a trash can against one wall. Next he unlocked one of Claudio’s cuffs and handed him the key, then covered the unlocked hand with the white sheet. “Stay put until we come for you, or until we give the all clear. Then you can unlock the rest of the cuffs.”
Claudio nodded.
“Okay.” Gallagher turned to me. “Remove my restrictions.”
I aimed the remote at him, and a new line appeared on the screen, confirming that whatever command I issued would take effect on “Gallagher. Collar number 47924.” I pressed the button marked Remove All Restrictions.
The remote asked me to confirm my command, and I pressed the button again.
Gallaher’s collar flashed red.
“Okay, I think we’re good. But maybe we should test it.”
“There’s no time.” He turned to the cabinet against one wall and gave the locked drawer a hard pull. The lock gave and the drawer slid open. Gallagher rifled through the contents until he came up with a slim pair of scissors with long handles. “Okay, I need you to slide these between the collar and my skin, then carefully snip the metal...spine...things.”
I held the scissors up to the light to examine them. “These are suture scissors. They’re made to cut thread, not metal.”
“They’re the only set slim enough to fit. And these spines are very thin.”
“But for all we know, that could kill you.”
“That’s why we’re not trying it out on you.”
“Try it on me,” Claudio said.
“No!” I insisted. “Genni needs you.”
“I’m doing this for Genevieve. Just promise you’ll get her out of here. No matter what.”
“We promise.” Gallagher grabbed the scissors from me and helped Claudio sit up, which was only possible because we’d freed one of his hands. He examined the werewolf’s collar. “Remove the restrictions.”
“Done.” I was a step ahead of them. “But that doesn’t mean the collar won’t shock him—or worse—the minute you try to sever the connection to his spine.”
“We’re willing to take that chance,” Claudio insisted.
Gallagher gently slid the scissors between the back of Claudio’s neck and his collar. When the werewolf reported no pain, Gallagher carefully snipped the first spine. Claudio flinched, but made no complaint, so Gallagher slid the scissors a little deeper and snipped again. “This last one’s hard to reach. Any pain yet?”
“No.” Claudio held his head stiff and still.
“Okay, here goes.” Gallagher snipped again.
The remote in my hand beeped, and a notice popped up on the screen. “‘Collar deactivated,’” I read. “Claudio. Collar 47927.”
Claudio exhaled, and Gallagher actually smiled. Then he slid the collar up as far as it would go on the werewolf’s neck. “I can’t get this off, but that’s just as well. If they see you without the collar, they’ll know something’s wrong. But I can get these spines out. Hold very still.”
Gallagher gripped the highest of the three tiny spines with the tips of his blunt fingernails and pulled it straight out of the wolf’s neck.
Claudio’s eyes squeezed shut and he took a deep breath, but when he reported no pain, Gallagher removed the other two spines and dropped all three into the trash. “They can’t hurt you with this thing anymore.”
I snipped and removed Gallagher’s spines next, then he removed mine. My neck stung when he pulled the metal free, but the euphoria I felt when they clinked into the trash more than made up for it.
Vandekamp had placed his faith, his safety and his entire career on his collars, and that had led him to drop his guard.
He would have no idea what hit him.
“According to the current rate of research, it would take approximately one hundred fifty years to map the genome of every known species of cryptid. If this Dr. Vandekamp has come up with another way—a faster way—to understand and control these beasts, I think we owe it to ourselves and our children to listen to what he has to say.”
—from an NPR interview with Barbara Gray, president of the Mothers Against Cryptid Violence organization, August 8, 2012
Delilah
We hid Pagano’s body beneath Claudio’s bed. Anyone who looked would find it, but it wouldn’t be visible at a glance. The towels that mopped up his blood went into the trash, which conveniently covered Gallagher’s handcuffs with legitimate-looking medical waste.
The hardest part of sneaking out of the infirmary was leaving the rest of the patients behind, but we couldn’t stage a full-scale escape until we’d disabled all the collars and taken out as many of the handlers as possible. As far as I could tell, none of the patients’ injuries were life-threatening. Evidently, Vandekamp considered it more financially feasible to exterminate the mortally wounded than to treat the wounds.
With any luck, most would be able to walk away from the Spectacle under their own power—if and when Gallagher and I could free them.
But without a captured carnival to hide us...
“We need a plan,” I whispered as I led him down a back hallway of the infirmary toward the service entrance, where I’d often seen Eryx unloading supplies during lunch delivery. Hopefully at night, it would be empty.
“I have a plan. Kill them all.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said as we slipped out the back door into the night. “We need a plan for afterward. We have nowhere to go and no way to get there.”
“If we wait for those things to fall into our laps, we’ll die here, Delilah.”
“And if we don’t have a plan, we’ll die out there.” I pulled him to a stop in the shadows behind the building, acutely aware that the next time a handler did a security check in the infirmary, the whole compound would know we were missing. “In the menagerie, you had a plan. You were calm and smart, and you made balanced decisions. We need some of that tonight.”
“In the menagerie, I spent a year strategizing and laying the groundwork. Here, we have minutes. If they find us before we can deactivate the rest of the collars, we will never leave this place alive. And do you know what they’ll do when they find out about the baby?”
“They already know. That’s why they put me in a private cell. That’s why they’re feeding me better and giving me exercise.”
“They...?” He blinked at me in the dark. “What?”
“Tabitha Vandekamp had me artificially inseminated—while I was unconscious—with her husband’s sperm. She’s infertile, and because I’m genetically human, she’s decided that fate sent me here to give them a baby.”
“Why would they let you be paired with me if they want you to have their baby?”
“Vandekamp didn’t know about it. She wasn’t going to tell him until she knew I was pregnant, but by then, he’d already sent me on other engagements.”
His scowl darkened. “Wait, other engagements? Plural?”
“Just one, other than...you. I can’t remember it. Gallagher, I’m the one who had my memory buried, and I think I did it so you wouldn’t find out about the other...event. Because I knew you’d get yourself killed trying to avenge me.”
“Dying in your service would be an honor.” He sounded almost wistful. “You’re not supposed to choose my well-being over your own.”
“None of that matters now. I had a te
st a few days ago, to determine the baby’s species. If it’s not human, she’s going to kill it.”
“Meaning...if it’s mine?”
“Yes.” I glanced at my feet on the pavement, barely visible in the dark. Then I made myself look him in the eye. “I know this is weird. I know neither of us asked for this. But...” I didn’t know how to put my conflicted tangle of emotions into words.
“But it’s happening.”
“Yeah. It is.”
“No.” He shook his head firmly. “I apologize. My words were woefully inadequate for what I intended to express. What I mean is that you are the most important thing in the world to me. What you do... I’ve pledged my life to making sure you can do it safely. I will be by your side as long as I have air to breathe and blood to spill, and that’s a stronger vow than any minister or court official has ever presided over. Whether or not the baby is mine, the baby is yours. I will protect him or her with the same vehemence with which I protect you. Which is why I’m getting you—both of you—out of here. Come on.”
He took my arm and tried to guide me deeper into the shadows, but I pulled him back.
I’d been thrown away by every friend I’d ever had, when fate had called me into service, and I’d been so bitter about what life had taken from me that I hadn’t thought to be thankful for what it had given me in return. Twice, I’d been taken in by people who shared no blood with me and owed me nothing. And twice those people—first my parents, then Gallagher—had set aside their own lives to make sure I was cared for.
“Thank you,” I said when he turned to see why I hadn’t moved. “My words are also ‘woefully inadequate,’ but I mean them sincerely.”
Gallagher nodded, accepting my gratitude with the same grave formality with which he approached important events in his life. “Now, we really must go. And we’re damn lucky it’s Sunday.”
“It is?” I’d lost track of the days in isolation, but the empty parking lots we passed as we moved from shadow to shadow supported his declaration. The Savage Spectacle was closed on Sundays, which meant it would be operating on minimum manning until nearly dawn.