Delilah
Woodrow adjusted my collar to lock me in the dormitory, then pushed the door closed in my face.
The long-term residents of the Spectacle stared at me as I crossed the room to sit on the floor by one of the windows. I couldn’t make out much of what they were whispering, but the distance they kept from me was telling. However fascinated they might have been by my ability and the vengeful form it had taken, I had caused them all a lot of pain.
I would have avoided me too.
Mirela and Rommily weren’t in the dorm. Nalah sat against one wall, shooting rage-filled looks my way. Zyanya and Mahsa were busy comforting Lala, and I decided to give them some distance.
Lunch came shortly after I arrived, and as soon as I sat with my tray of raw spinach, bread and a chicken thigh, Simra settled onto the floor next to me.
“Zyanya said you’re a furiae. What does that mean, exactly?” she asked, pushing strands of fine, silvery hair back from her pale face.
“Basically, I’m possessed by the spirit of vengeance.”
“Possessed?”
“That’s what it feels like.” I bit a chunk from my chicken thigh, then began stripping the meat from the bone.
“But you really are human?”
“I really, really am. Not that it matters.” Not that it should matter. Deciding who should be free and who should be locked up based on chromosomal features made no more sense than basing that decision on eye color.
Simra plucked a leaf of spinach from her tray and stared at the tiny green veins on the back side. “What did you do to that guard?”
I arranged my chicken and spinach on my slice of bread and folded it over to form half a sandwich. “I just made Sutton want to do to himself what he’d done to Mirela and Rommily. I like to think of it as poetic justice.” Though I had little control over what form that justice took.
Simra seemed to think about that while I took a bite of my makeshift sandwich. But I had little appetite.
As I pushed my tray away, the dormitory door opened, and one of the handlers shoved Magnolia inside. She stumbled and fell to her knees, and her face was shielded by a curtain of her fallen-leaf-colored hair, threaded through with thin woody vines. The handler aimed his remote at her, and both the sensor over the door and the one in her collar blinked red.
Magnolia didn’t even look up.
I frowned, studying the dryad. She looked different from when they’d taken her the afternoon before, but I couldn’t...
Her hair. She’d had several beautiful whitish blooms blossoming in her hair.
Now those blossoms were gone.
One of the other ladies knelt next to her and laid a hand on Magnolia’s shoulder, but the nymph turned on her, teeth gnashing. Mossy-green eyes flashed beneath the tiny woody tendrils growing in place of her eyelashes.
“Oh...” Simra breathed, and I turned to her with a questioning look. “They got rid of it.”
“It?”
“The baby.”
“She was pregnant?” I whispered, horrified. “Vandekamp ended it?”
“His wife. She won’t let the ‘monsters’ breed.”
The only thing I could imagine worse than being forced to end the pregnancy was how Magnolia might have gotten pregnant in the first place.
* * *
The handlers called my name a couple of hours after lunch, and along with two of the long-term captives, they also called Zyanya and Lenore. That choice was not random. Vandekamp had selected women he knew I would want to protect.
The shifter and the siren were living threats, intended to keep me in line.
The five of us were marched down a series of hallways into a bright, cold room equipped with six salon-style chairs, several racks of skimpy clothing, an entire arsenal of makeup and three women in khaki pants, collared shirts and pink aprons bearing the Savage Spectacle’s silver logo.
The ambient scents were a confusion of perfume, hair spray, lotion and various cosmetic pastes, glosses and powders. And glue.
We were each seated in one of the chairs, but were neither handcuffed nor shackled. Instead, our collars were programmed to paralyze us for the duration of the makeup session. Which took hours.
The “artists” moved us into whatever position their work required, posing us like dolls as they drew on our faces. As they curled, pinned and sprayed our hair. There were no mirrors in the room, because it didn’t matter what we thought of their efforts, so while I could see some of what was being done to my fellow captives, I couldn’t really tell what was being done to me. Except for the heavy false eyelashes. Those were impossible to miss.
The artists chatted as they worked, asking for opinions and offering suggestions as they discussed their families and social lives. It took most of my concentration to keep tears at bay as I listened to them discuss the very things I’d lost, while I sat there locked out of my own body, one step away from being rented out by the hour.
When my makeup was finished, the artist fitted me with a black lace masquerade mask, which fastened beneath the mass of dark curls she’d created. The mask was small enough to display the ridiculous lashes and whatever else she’d done to my face. I felt as if I were wearing several pounds of primer, foundation, glitter and whatever art had been drawn onto my temples and cheeks.
The other two artists finished with their living palettes early and moved on to the two remaining captives while my extensive makeover was completed. When they were finished, the makeup artists headed out for a coffee break, leaving us immobilized in our chairs, staring at a blank wall.
For a long time, we sat there like corpses, imprisoned in our own minds, and I wouldn’t have known the handlers were still stationed against the wall behind us if I hadn’t heard them breathing.
I couldn’t ask the other captives if the wait was normal. I couldn’t even turn to look at them. I could do nothing more than swallow the saliva gathering at the back of my throat, and try not to let the itch inside my left ear drive me out of my mind.
Finally, the hair and makeup ladies returned, smelling of coffee, and they solved the mystery of how we were supposed to get dressed without messing up their work.
We weren’t.
The handlers pulled us to our feet, and we could only stand there, immobilized, while the makeup artists stripped us down to bare skin, then stood back to assess the as yet unpainted portions of their canvases.
My face flamed. The indignity was a familiar one, but no less infuriating than it had ever been, and the knowledge that an audience of handlers stood behind me made my flesh crawl.
After they’d taken stock, the artists rubbed thick, glittering lotions and oils into our skin, then dressed us in skimpy costumes that didn’t have to go over our heads or slide over our sparkling limbs.
Zyanya’s costume was a cheetah-print bikini top with a micro skirt, slit up both sides, all the way to the waistband. Lenore got a skimpy, asymmetrical gold dress that wrapped over one shoulder and draped—barely—over her breasts before falling to midthigh. Her artist tied a matching sash at her waist, then helped her into a pair of gold gladiator sandals that laced up to the top of her calves.
The others were both in variations of generically sexy scraps of cloth draped over strategic parts of their flesh, and everyone but me was decked out in bright colors and extravagant fabrics.
But just like in the menagerie, I wore all black. I was also the only one in a masquerade mask, presumably to help disguise the fact that I had no telltale cryptid features to highlight.
Like Zyanya, I was given no shoes.
Once we were dressed and touched up, our handlers readjusted the settings on our collars and marched us through the topiary zoo into a large kitchen at the back of the main building, where a chef and his staff were putting the finishing touches on hundreds of bite-size appetizers.
The scent of food I would probably never taste made my mouth water.
Bottles of champagne stood chilling in a wall-sized glass refrigerator, along with bottles of white wine. Bottles of red were lined up on a countertop behind several rows of champagne flutes and stemmed wineglasses waiting to be filled.
A man in a formal server’s uniform, complete with a silver vest and bow tie, took us aside for an “engagement briefing.” The tag pinned to his vest read Event Coordinator.
“This bachelor party is as simple as it gets.” The coordinator avoided eye contact as he spoke. “The groom is Michael Hayes, who has some curiosities he’d like satisfied, but the client is James Lansing. His is the credit card on file, so he’s your boss for the night.”
The coordinator glanced at his clipboard. “Lenore...” His gaze finally landed on the siren, whom he clearly recognized. She’d already been “engaged” for two events since we’d been sold to the Spectacle, and rumor among the captives said that putting her onstage added several thousand dollars to the bill. “Lenore, you’re the entertainment.” He pulled a familiar remote from his pocket and pressed a button which pulled up a series of options on a screen I only got a glance at. “I’ve set your collar to allow minor influence in your voice. Make them feel good. Lower their inhibitions and help them enjoy themselves. Encourage them to spend. But if you try anything malicious, you’ll spend the night in the infirmary.”
Thoughts chased each other through my head in a dizzying funnel of possibility as I tried to take in everything I was seeing and hearing at once.
If they could truly limit Lenore to “minor” vocal influence, why would they need to warn her not to take things too far?
And if we were to be allowed in and out of the kitchen, would we have access to knives, meat mallets and other potential weapons? Would having weapons even matter, if we could be paralyzed with the press of a button?
Even if I could disable a guard and take his remote, at best I’d have seconds to figure out how to work it. And if I somehow managed to escape not just the room, but the building, then the grounds, I’d be abandoning everyone I cared about in the entire world. I’d have no other choice.
Would escape be worth an on-the-run existence that would only last for however long it took them to track my collar? Which I had no idea how to remove.
Would my friends be punished for my escape?
The coordinator glanced at his clipboard again, and the movement refocused my attention. “Mr. Lansing has requested the ‘hypnotist’ package, so about halfway through the evening, Lenore will pick a couple of volunteers from the party and bring them up onstage. The crowd will shout out things they want to see their friends do, and she will make it happen.” He turned directly to her for the next part. “Just whisper in their ears and do your thing. Most of the requests are stupid, and they’ve put down a huge security deposit, so it doesn’t really matter what they mess up. As for the rest of you...”
The coordinator turned to those of us who wouldn’t be singing, and I got the impression that the instructions were specifically aimed at Zyanya and me, because the others had presumably done this many times. “You’ll be carrying trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres. No one expects you to be good at it, and we have professional servers who’ll make sure everyone’s fed and liquored up. All you really have to do is balance your tray and look exotic. Stay in the center of things. Make sure all your freaky features are visible. They’re going to want to see claws and teeth. They’ll want to touch feathers and scales. Let them. There will be security all over the place, and if the customers try to get more than they’ve paid for, the handlers will take care of it.”
More than they’ve paid for. My skin crawled at the thought.
The coordinator gave us a quick lecture on the Savage Spectacle’s serving procedures and showed us how to balance a semifull tray with one hand. Then he made us practice with trays of water-filled plastic stemmed glasses. I sloshed three times in a span of five minutes—even in my normal human life, I’d never waited tables—which got me demoted to hors d’oeuvres, along with Zyanya, because those were harder to spill.
While we practiced, the professional servers came in and out of a set of swinging doors on the left every few minutes as they set things up in the next room.
An identical set of doors on the opposite side of the kitchen presumably led to another room on our right, but nothing was going on in there.
About an hour after our engagement briefing, the coordinator disappeared into the party room and the quiet buzz of activity in the kitchen became a tense bustle. Music poured from the other side of the swinging doors. I glanced at the huge clock high on one wall and saw that it was five minutes until 9:00 p.m. The party was about to start.
A minute later, the swinging door opened again, and this time a man in dark slacks and a green button-down shirt followed the coordinator into the kitchen. His gaze slid over thousands of dollars’ worth of top-shelf alcohol and gourmet appetizers as if they were everyday fare, and I realized that he was not a Spectacle employee.
“Mr. Lansing, these are the cryptids we’ve prepared for your party. We have Belinda, an echidna, and a female werewolf named Clarisse.” The coordinator gestured to the first women in our row.
“Echidna? Isn’t that a snake woman?” Lansing lifted Belinda’s chin as he studied the painted scales trailing down both sides of her face. “Where’s her tail?”
“She doesn’t have one in this form.”
“But she’ll shift later?”
The coordinator nodded. “If that’s what you’d like.”
Lansing grunted. “The freakier the better. What are these two?”
“Zyanya is a cheetah shifter. Notice her eyes and her teeth.” The coordinator grabbed her chin and tilted her head up. “She’s a gorgeous specimen.”
Lansing’s gaze lingered on Zyanya long enough to make me nervous.
“And her?” The client stopped in front of me. “Is this the siren?”
“No, Lenore is our siren, and she’s ready to lend a unique aura to your party.” The pair of men moved past me.
“I look forward to hearing her,” Lansing said. “Are we ready to go?”
“Yes. Let’s go show your guests in.” The coordinator escorted Lansing out of the kitchen.
Minutes later, voices rang out from behind the swinging doors. The guests had arrived, and they sounded as excited as I was horrified.
The coordinator stepped back into the kitchen and glanced at each of us in turn, evidently looking for flaws in the presentation. “Everybody ready?”
No one answered.
“You four each take a tray, and Lenore, you’ll follow them into the room, then head for the stage. They’re all set up for you.” When no one moved, he waved his arm impatiently. “Let’s go!”
We picked up our loaded trays and the coordinator pushed open one of the swinging doors and held it back with his body.
“Gentlemen, welcome to the Savage Spectacle!” he called out as we entered the room. “Where your most exotic desire is our pleasure to provide!”
I wanted nothing more than to crawl back into my menagerie cage and cry, and the truth of that thought killed something fragile deep inside me.