Delilah
“Mirela,” I said as the oracle stepped into the line behind me. We’d stacked the sleeping mats and folded the blankets, which put us near the back of the bathroom queue. “Were you awake when they got back?” I nodded toward Lenore and Mahsa, who were several spots ahead of us in line.
“Yeah. You?”
I nodded. “Who could sleep?” We shuffled forward a couple of feet, and I rubbed my temples, as if that would actually fend off my day-old headache.
“Did they say anything?” Mirela whispered, staring at the siren’s back.
“No, but I haven’t asked.” It killed me to see our friends taken out of the dorm night after night, knowing they were headed for humiliation and abuse, and that there was nothing I could do to stop it. “I assume they’re bound by the same gag order that crippled Finola and the others.”
Mahsa turned to us with a small, cryptic smile, showing off her feline incisors. “We are,” she said. I should have realized she’d hear us—shifters have great ears no matter what form they take. “And that’s a real shame, considering how much trouble I had brushing blood and tiny chunks of human flesh from my teeth when we got back.”
My eyes widened. “You bit someone?”
The shifter shrugged. “I can’t answer that. But what I can tell you is that—hypothetically—if one of these collars is set to let a shifter shift, it might not be able to stop that shifter from biting.”
“Mahsa, you’re brilliant!” I seized her hand and gave it a tight squeeze. Hypotheticals were a very clever work-around for Vandekamp’s standard gag order!
She shrugged, but her face practically glowed with pride.
“But why would they let you shift in the first place?” Mirela asked.
“It’s usually more of a requirement than an allowance.” Simra spoke up from behind us. She was the last in line. “Some of the clients just want to look. Some want to touch. Others want to see ladies with nonhuman parts dressed up in six-inch heels, holding trays of fancy food. Some like to see shifters shift. Whatever the client wants, he makes us do.”
“He can make shifters shift?” Horror surged through me like ice in my veins, chilling me from the inside.
Simra shrugged. “He can make anyone do anything.”
My mind spun with the horrific implications. Was she saying that he would simply shock those who refused to perform? Or that Vandekamp’s collars could trigger the release of hormones that led to the performance he wanted to see?
That was it. Understanding slid into place in my head with an ominous, nearly audible click.
That’s why he’d been so desperate to find out what I was—so he could make me transform.
Vandekamp had figured out how to effectively disarm cryptids of their distinguishing traits and abilities, while retaining the ability to draw out those same traits and abilities on demand. On display. For money.
He had created push-and-play functionality in his living captives, with a built-in punishment for failure to perform.
“I thought you weren’t allowed to talk about that,” Mirela said.
Simra shrugged. “I’m not allowed to talk about my engagements.”
Because I was still reeling from her previous revelation, it took me a second to realize she’d just revealed another gap in Vandekamp’s security system. A big one. “Thank you!” I seized the marid’s hand and squeezed it.
Simra looked puzzled. “Why does that make you so happy?”
I hadn’t even realized I was smiling. “Because Vandekamp denies us information and communication to isolate us, even from each other. To keep us weak, scared and dependent. Every single thing we learn that he doesn’t want us to know is a victory. It’s a crack driven through the chains keeping us here. And you only have to break one link to destroy a chain.”
Simra frowned, her fingers grazing the front of her collar. “Is that what you’re doing? Trying to break the chains?”
I had to think about that. I hadn’t been consciously planning an escape. Where would we go, even if we could break free?
“That’s what she does,” Zyanya said softly, passing by us on her way from the bathroom. “That’s all she knows how to do.”
“I’m just keeping my eyes and ears open,” I insisted. I had no concrete plans—no real ideas—and I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.
The marid’s eyes sparkled even more than usual. “Yeah. Me too.”
Mirela frowned at Simra as she stepped into the bathroom just ahead of us. “You’ve been here almost a year, and you’re just now figuring out you can speak in generalizations?”
“It never occurred to me to try, before. I mean, talking typically hurts, so...” The marid shrugged.
“So you all just stopped trying,” I finished for her.
Simra nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“But none of that answers my question,” Mirela said. “Why would Vandekamp let—or make—Mahsa shift if he knew that would also allow her to bite?”
“He didn’t know.” I shuffled forward in the line again, and the closer we got to the bathroom, the better we could hear water running in the sink. “His long-term captives quit trying to fight back, so he had no true gauge of the limits of his technology. It’s trial and error.” Because Vandekamp wasn’t just trying to exert control over us. He was still testing his technology. He had to be, if it had been implemented so recently. “Now that he knows about the weakness, he’ll fix it.” I tuned back to Mahsa. “Were you punished for biting?”
Mahsa flinched and stiffened for a moment, and I realized that trying to answer had triggered pain from her collar. Then her eyes brightened with a new idea. She twisted and lifted her scrub top to show me a fresh, oblong bruise slanting across her rib cage.
“That’s from a baton,” Simra said. “But if that’s all they did, there must not have been any complaint from the customer.”
“No complaint?” Mirela echoed as I finally stepped into the bathroom. “But she took a bite out of him.”
Simra shrugged. “Some of the customers like that. They seem to think the scar makes them look tough.”
“Sick fuckers,” Lenore said, as she stepped up to one of the available sinks.
“Yeah, and that’s the one thing the Spectacle won’t give them. We’re not allowed to hurt them, no matter what they want.”
“It’s probably a legal liability,” I explained, as more of Vandekamp’s business model began to fall into place in my head. “They may think they want pain—and some of them truly may—but most will change their minds when the reality sinks in. Others will go home to husbands and wives who have objections. A single lawsuit could put the Savage Spectacle out of business.” And cripple any future endeavors.
“We should be so lucky.” Light shone brightly on Mahsa’s pale brown skin as she stepped up to the sink beside Lenore. “I bet—” But the shifter’s words were cut off by a piercing scream from the other side of a row of toilet stalls.
“Rommily!” Mirela took off toward the showers. Lala and I raced after her to find Rommily still screaming in front of the communal shower block, where water already poured from one of the heads. Her eyes were wide with panic. A handler loomed over her, pointing into the shower with one hand, holding a handful of her shirt in the other. According to the embroidery over his heart, his name was Sutton.
“It’s been five days!” he shouted. “If you’re not willing to meet the minimum hygiene standard, I’ll meet it for you.”
“Wait! She just needs—” Mirela reached for her sister, but the guard turned to block her, his forehead furrowed, eyes narrowed, and too late, I realized he’d mistaken her gesture as an act of aggression. He let go of Rommily, then shoved the butt of his rifle at Mirela’s head.
A spray of blood burst from her nose and she fell backward, clutching her face with both hands.
Eyes full of tears, Lala pulled Mirela across the floor, away from their middle sister and the guard. She grabbed a handful of brown paper towels from a dispenser on the wall and held them to her older sister’s nose.
Sutton turned back to Rommily and tried to pull her shirt over her head without losing control of his tranquilizer rifle. When the material ripped, her screaming intensified. But then he grabbed her exposed shoulder, and the oracle fell eerily still and quiet. Her eyes glazed over with a white film so thick that her irises and pupils were hardly visible beneath.
“Sepsis.” Rommily’s voice sounded strangely hollow and detached. As if it belonged to someone else. “Our staff didn’t find the bedsore until it was too late. What a tragic way for a young man to die.”
The handler blinked at her, and though he couldn’t possibly have realized he was hearing what a doctor would someday say to his loved ones, her words triggered an instinctive, violent fear in him. “Shut the fuck up and get in the shower.” He pulled at the tear he’d already started in her shirt and ripped the material wide-open.
Rommily’s eyes cleared and she screamed again, a terrified shrieking that bounced back at us all from the tiled walls.
Sutton flinched, then punched her in the side of the head. Rommily slammed into the shower wall with a thud. Her mouth snapped shut as she slid down the tile to sit in a puddle on the floor, still half-clothed, her gaze out of focus.
But as her cry died, a fiery howl of fury kindled inside me. My vision sharpened until I could see light bouncing off individual drops of water rolling down the shower wall. My hair rose from my shoulders and slowly writhed around my head. My nails hardened and lengthened into the needle-thin claws of a creature no lab test had ever been able to identify.
I crossed the white tile floor silently, aware only of the wrathful need pulsing through me. As Sutton reached for Rommily, cursing the spray of water from the tap, my hands were pulled toward his head, my claws eager to sink into his temples. But then he turned, and my hand landed on the side of his neck instead.
My claws found no flesh, but his skin burned beneath mine. Sutton froze. His arms fell limp at his sides, then began to tremble. His teeth chattered.
Pick on someone your own size, the furiae within me mumbled, as I obliged her vengeful demands. Someone exactly your size...
When the fire inside me began to abate, I removed my hand from the handler’s neck. My claws were gone. My hair had settled over my shoulders.
Someone gasped behind me. Where I’d touched Sutton’s bare flesh, there now appeared a red imprint in the shape of my hand, with a pinpoint of red at the tip of each finger, where my claws had rested but had not broken through.
As I stared, Sutton curled his right hand into a fist and launched it at his own nose.
I flinched and stepped back, but the handler threw another punch at himself, then another and another, without complaint or any sign of hesitation. He grunted with the violence of each blow. His nose crunched and spurted blood. His cheek split open and showed gory strands of muscle.
The crowd at my back inched closer. I could feel their bewilderment, but it was the murmured buzz of relief—a quiet celebration of justice—that sent a peaceful thread of contentment through me as I watched the furiae’s handiwork.
In seconds, Sutton’s face was ruined. Bone showed through in several places, and his eyes were both swelling shut. His lips were split and he’d chipped several of his own teeth with his elaborate wedding band. Yet the punching did not stop.
“What’s happening?” Simra whispered from behind me, but I was too fascinated by the bloody spectacle to answer her.
“Delilah made him pay. That’s what she—” Zyanya’s answer ended in an agonized scream, but before I could turn, fire shot through my neck and down my spine. Agony raced down my arms and legs with a clinical precision that could only have come from the cruel shock collar.
A chorus of screams rose in echo of my pain, as behind me, my dormmates were each crippled by an electric current of their own.
My legs folded and I collapsed, immobilized on my left side on the cold floor as fire shot through me over and over. The others lay spread out around me on the tile, several frozen in the threshold, unable to vocalize more than a whimper of pain. Terrified and in agony, I rolled my eyes to look through the doorway and saw that everyone still in the dorm had collapsed as well, and several were seizing from the force of the electricity being pumped through them.
My lungs burned with every rapid breath I sucked in. My heart raced and my vision swam.
The dormitory door opened with a familiar squeal, and a dozen handlers burst into the room. One of them clicked something on his remote, and the pain ended. I exhaled, blissfully numb for a second. But when I tried to sit up, my body would not respond to the order from my brain. The paralysis had not ended. We all lay frozen and helpless on the floor.
And through it all, I heard the repetitive thunk of flesh on flesh as Sutton continued to punch his own ruined face.
“What the fuck?” Woodrow demanded, pushing his way into the bathroom while his men aimed tranquilizer rifles at the cryptids they considered most dangerous, just in case.
Three of the guns were aimed at me.
Woodrow stepped over several prone forms, and on the edge of my vision, he grabbed Sutton’s arm, to end the self-inflicted violence. “Sutton! Stop it!” The gamekeeper had to hold back the handler’s bloody fist with both hands, visibly struggling to control him. “Cuffs!” he shouted to his other men, and two of them lowered the rifles they were aiming at me and helped cuff their coworker to protect him from himself.
Neither of them even glanced at Rommily, who lay in the shower, immobilized, with water pouring over her torn clothing. Or at Mirela, whose ruined nose was still dribbling blood on the tile floor.
“What’s that on his neck?” one of the men asked.
Woodrow pulled down the collar of Sutton’s shirt and studied the fresh red mark. “It’s a handprint. Right where she touched him.” The gamekeeper turned to me, and I realized he’d seen the whole thing. Either the camera in the dormitory could see into the bathroom, or there was one hidden in the bathroom, as well. “Cuff her and throw her in a cell. Keep her paralyzed until the door’s locked.”
Two of the handlers rolled me onto my stomach, and though I couldn’t move, one pressed his knee into my back. My lungs could not expand beneath his weight. Panic made my head spin, and pinpoints of light floated across my vision. When the weight was finally lifted, I gasped for air, but the sound was eerily hollow without the use of my vocal cords.
Woodrow turned to the man who’d cuffed Sutton. “Take him to the infirmary, but don’t take the cuffs off. I’ll radio the boss.” Then he marched out of the room.
The handlers who’d cuffed me picked me up by my arms and carried me through the dormitory and into the hall. Still frozen on the floor, my friends could only watch, mute, as I was hauled away.
* * *
I’d been in the small concrete cell for no more than an hour when the lock clicked. I looked up from where I sat on the floor as Woodrow opened the door, but he stayed in the hall, out of my reach, even though I was still cuffed. “Are you going to behave, or do we need to paralyze you again?” He held up his remote for emphasis.
“As long as you don’t try to beat up any defenseless women, we should be just fine.”
“Get up.”
I stood, which wasn’t easy with my hands bound at my back. Woodrow took my arm in a tight grip. “How are Rommily and Mirela?” I asked as he marched me out of the building and through the iron gate for my third trip to the boss’s office in my first week at the Savage Spectacle.
Woodrow remained silent all the way across the grounds and into the main building.
Both Vandekamp and his wife were waiting for me in his office. They stood as soon as the door opened.
“What did you do to Sutton?” Vandekamp demanded before the gamekeeper could even close the door.
I shrugged. “You can’t stop justice with a collar. I warned you.”
“Justice?” Tabitha Vandekamp demanded. “He knocked out four of his own teeth and exposed his skull in three places. They had to sedate him to keep him from killing himself in the ambulance.”
I tried to look unaffected by the gory details, but now that the whole thing had passed, knowing that I was the conduit for such violence made me uncomfortable, even though Sutton deserved what he’d gotten.
“How long will he be like that?” Vandekamp demanded.
“I don’t know.” I was as interested as they were in finding out how long their man would suffer self-destructive urges. But they would probably never tell me.
“How long will the handprint last?” his wife asked.
“I don’t know. That’s never happened before.”
Vandekamp’s gaze narrowed on me. “Then why did it happen now?”
Another shrug. “I can only assume I’m growing into my potential.”
“Willem.” His name sounded like a weapon, the way his wife wielded it, and I realized she was continuing some conversation I hadn’t heard the start of.
“She’s not a surrogate, Tabitha,” he insisted. “Surrogates didn’t leave marks on anyone.”
No, they’d brainwashed thousands of parents into killing their own children. At least, as near as anyone had been able to piece the whole thing together.
“Whatever she is, she can’t perform on demand and you can’t control her. What’s to stop her from making the handlers kill one another, then us?” Tabitha demanded.
“Ma’am, that wouldn’t—” Woodrow began, but she cut him off.
“You don’t know anything about her. That’s the problem.” She turned to her husband again. “She’s dangerous. Put a bullet in her head.”
“They’re right.” I had to fight past the lump of terror in my throat to be heard. “I couldn’t turn someone into a murderer even if I wanted to. That’s not how justice works. The furiae rights wrongs. She doesn’t make new ones.”
Mrs. Vandekamp’s jaw clenched. “Take her back to isolation,” she ordered Woodrow.
“No,” Vandekamp said, before the gamekeeper could do more than grab my arm. “Take her to the dorm. She’ll be serving tonight.”
“Serving?” I glanced from face to face, but no one even acknowledged that I’d spoken.
Woodrow frowned. “Sir, are you sure that’s a good—”
The look Vandekamp gave him could have withered an oak tree. “They’re expecting her in costuming and makeup at three, with the others.” His gaze narrowed on me. “Many of our beasts aren’t safe to touch, and we’re prepared to deal with that possibility for you. Until further notice, I’m instructing my men to treat any problem from you as an emergency. At the first sign of trouble, you will be paralyzed, then handled with gloves and a snare—a cable loop on an aluminum pole, like dogcatchers use. Should that become necessary, you can forget about ever speaking to Gallagher again.”
As I was hauled into the outer office, Mrs. Vandekamp turned a fiercely angry look on her husband. “Willem—”
“We paid good money for her. I’m not going to euthanize her until I know she can’t be used.”
“Then sell her. Get your money back.”
“You know exactly why we can’t sell—”
And as Woodrow closed the door behind me, I realized I too knew why the Vandekamps couldn’t sell me. Or likely any of the other captives they’d ever taken.
The Savage Spectacle’s business model wasn’t entirely legal. If he sold me, I’d be free of the limits of my collar and might tell my next owner exactly what was going on in the well-kept open secret that was the Spectacle. Old man Metzger had obviously been willing to keep private dealings private, in exchange for the rental fee he charged for his off-season acts, but most others would not be. Vandekamp’s world could come crumbling down around him.
The obvious conclusion settled over me with a fresh jolt of fear.
None of us were ever going to leave the Savage Spectacle.