Delilah
The coordinator waved us out of the kitchen. Only the habit of putting one foot in front of the other kept me from freezing in shock when I saw the room. Though really, calling it a room was like calling a cave a crack in the wall.
The space could easily have held several times the fifty guests invited to Michael Hayes’s bachelor party.
The windowless walls were lined with panels of gathered black drapery, which gave the room a formal look and dampened the echo most spaces that size would have suffered. The floor was white marble with black veins, shining in the light from several elaborate chandeliers hanging from the ornately coffered ceiling.
The huge room swallowed my footsteps and amplified my fear, making me feel insignificant in a way that being locked in a small cage never could have.
The guests were college-age men in business-casual dress, most of whom had already found the alcoholic beverage of their choice. Their chatter died as we entered the room, and I could feel every gaze on me. The attention felt simultaneously familiar and completely foreign, because though I’d been on display at Metzger’s, a menagerie patron’s motivation to plop down his credit card was almost always simple curiosity, tempered by fear. He or she wanted to see dangerous creatures—perhaps even those responsible for the reaping—removed from true threat by miracle of steel cages and iron bars.
But the patrons at the Savage Spectacle didn’t just look curious, they looked hungry. Greedy. These men—most of them near my age—didn’t believe we represented any threat, and it had never occurred to them, probably in their entire lives, that they might not have the right to do whatever they wanted in any given moment.
I could practically smell their anticipation in the air.
The coordinator whispered for us to spread out and carry our trays around the room, and the ladies in front of me did just that. Crowds formed around them instantly. Hands reached for flutes of champagne and handfuls of hair in equal numbers. Someone pulled Belinda’s lip down to inspect her sharp fangs, while a man in a red button-down shirt ran his hand down the length of Zyanya’s arm, then lifted her free hand so he could examine her claws.
Lenore’s flat-soled sandals whispered on the floor behind me as she headed for the stage, where red velvet curtains had been drawn back to reveal an orchestral quartet formally dressed in blue-and-silver tuxes, except for the female violinist, who wore a blue sequined gown. The siren climbed the steps on one side of the stage and conferred softly with the violinist. After several whispered questions and a couple of nods, Lenore took up her position behind the microphone, and when the music began, she sang.
I realized immediately that despite her instructions, her melody and its push were intended not for the paying audience, but for those of us forced to endure wandering hands and intrusive gazes. Her voice felt like a gentle wave of calm floating over me, blunting the sharp edge of my temper and relaxing the fist clenched at my side.
I was disgusted by what I was being forced to endure, but it would not kill me. And I wouldn’t have to kill anyone either.
If any of the employees were able to think beyond their own suddenly eased tensions and realize she was projecting the wrong atmosphere, she might get into trouble. But I was beyond grateful for her efforts.
As my tension eased, I glanced across the room and was surprised to see two familiar, large forms standing near the opposite wall. Eryx and...
“Gallagher!” I breathed, and though he couldn’t possibly have heard me, his gaze met mine, and his gray eyes brightened.
Mine filled with tears. Gallagher was a liberator. A protector. A man of uncompromising character who held others to the same high standard. The sight of him in a collar bruised me all the way to my soul. The collar looked so incredibly out of place that at first I didn’t notice he was wearing little else.
Nothing, in fact, but his unglamoured traditional red cap and a gray loincloth trimmed with a matching red cord.
He bore the indignity like a soldier. As if near nudity were a bruise or a gash, or some other battle scar earned at the hands of an enemy, but humiliation for him warmed my cheeks. I’d never seen Gallagher subjugated.
Even after seeing him hauled from the back of a van, I hadn’t really thought it was possible.
Yet as sad as I was to see him in captivity, I was elated to see him alive.
I worked my way slowly across the room, pausing to let men ogle me and take food from my tray, but I dodged reaching hands without hearing a word said to me. I couldn’t see anything but Gallagher.
His bruises were mostly healed, and the cuts on his face had been treated with narrow butterfly bandages. His dark hair had been cut short, which looked strange to me, but his eyes were the same. Steely-gray windows into a soul like none other I’d ever met.
When he saw me heading toward him, the tension in his shoulders seemed to ease. I waited until the last bite from my tray had been taken and the guests wandered toward one of the more obviously “freaky” cryptids. Then I tucked the tray beneath my arm and headed straight for Gallagher.
“Delilah.” His voice rumbled through me, though it held little volume. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. Even if I hadn’t been okay, I would have told him I was. “You?” I took in every bruise and cut. Every line of a dire expression I knew well.
“No man here could hold his own among the fearsome fear dearg I battled in my youth.”
I couldn’t resist a small smile. “So you’re humoring their authority in order to stay close to me?”
His jaw clenched, and the muscles in his neck strained against the steel collar. “Something like that.”
“It was the hat, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “My human guise was never meant to last.”
“I know.” But there was something in the slight curve of his mouth. In the glint of light shining in his gray eyes. “You got caught on purpose.”
His upper lip twitched. “Why on earth would I do that?” But he hadn’t denied it. Because fear dearg cannot lie.
“Why would you do that?”
Gallagher shrugged broad, strong shoulders. “Sometimes it is easier to break out of a fortress than to break into one,” he whispered.
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.”