is Princess Adira?” she demanded.
Tears filled Nalah’s copper eyes.
“Um...Adira was shot when we took over the menagerie,” I whispered, afraid that my explanation would upset Nalah. “She didn’t make it.”
“You failed her.” Simra glared at Nalah with feverish spite. “You should have taken the bullet for her. That was your obligation!” She let out a high-pitched war cry and lunged at the ifrit. I threw myself between them, but before she could crash into me, the marid collapsed in the grip of a seizure.
Her collar worked faster than I could, and it was a hell of a lot more effective.
Mirela led the sobbing ifrit to the sleeping mat she’d prepared while I knelt next to Simra with no idea how I could help her. Fortunately, her convulsions only lasted a few seconds, but she’d hit her head on the floor when she fell, and even after she stopped shaking, her eyes looked unfocused.
“Simra?” I swept glittering, silvery hair back from her forehead and searched her pale blue eyes for any sign of awareness. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, then rolled onto her side and covered her face with her hands. “I knew that would happen. Still, I had to try.” She pushed herself upright and smoothed long hair back from her pale face, composing herself.
“Try what? To hurt Nalah?”
Simra’s icy gaze focused on me. “To avenge the princess.”
“Did you know Adira?”
“I saw her in a parade once,” she replied, her expression softening with the memory. “When she was a girl. Nalah sat at her feet, and I was mad with envy. So many of us wanted to be the princess’s companion, but the ifrit royalty sent her Nalah as a gift, when the betrothal of their prince to our princess was announced. As a cross-cultural gesture.” Her gaze hardened again and she clasped her pale hands in her lap. “But Nalah let our princess die.”
“She’s just a kid. And she was Adira’s companion, not her bodyguard,” I pointed out.
“She has disgraced herself by outliving the princess she served.” Simra sat up, her spine as stiff as the line of her jaw. “If I could restore her honor by taking her life, I would.”
The casual brutality of her declaration sent a chill crawling over me, and for the first time, I was grateful that Sultan Bruhier, Adira’s grieving father, had denied us entry into his kingdom. Djinni culture sounded ruthless, and the injustice of it would have driven me—and the furiae within me—insane.
“Delilah?” a low-pitched voice called, and I looked up to find Bowman standing in the dormitory doorway holding a clipboard.
I stood, my heart thumping in anticipation. “Yes?”
“Come with me.” He pressed a button on his remote, and the red light above the door flashed, but if there was any response from my collar, I couldn’t feel it.
“Where?”
Bowman only watched me. Waiting.
I gave Simra my hand, and she let me pull her to her feet. “Do you know what this is about?”
She shrugged. “It’s a little early to be your first engagement, but you never know. Are you an oracle?”
“I’m human.”
“They’ll never believe that.” The skeptical tone of her voice said she didn’t believe it either.
At the door, Bowman bound my hands at my back with padded restraints, which told me that the staff wasn’t sure they could control me with a collar until they knew my species. And that the clientele didn’t want to see visible signs of abuse on their high-priced exotic chattel—except whatever marks they might inflict themselves.
“What’s this about?” I asked as I followed Bowman into the hall, taking note of the fact that he’d come for me alone. But armed.
He pressed a button on his remote as we approached an exit on the opposite side of the building from where we’d come in the night before, but his lips remained sealed as he pushed the door open.
“You don’t know, do you? You’re just an errand boy, right?” I asked, as I stepped out onto a sidewalk that felt rough and cool against my bare feet.
Bowman marched me past a row of nondescript single-story buildings, each built of gray or beige brick punctuated at regular intervals by windows too narrow for a human to pass through, even if the glass were broken. We were clearly on the operational side of the grounds, which obviously wasn’t meant to be seen by Vandekamp’s clientele.
At the end of the row of ugly buildings, we took a right, then approached a beautiful iron gate in an intricately patterned stone wall. Bowman pressed an icon on his remote to allow me through the gate, and a red sensor blinked between two stones near the ground, embedded right into the mortar.
When we walked through the gate, concrete gave way to smooth stone pavers beneath my feet and I caught my breath as I took in the stunning series of gardens and buildings that made up the Savage Spectacle’s grounds.
At first, I could only stare, wide-eyed, at the botanical zoo spread out around me, cut from various shrubs dotting the broad, neat lawn. The cryptid topiary was astonishing and incredibly intricate, yet the details conformed more to fantasy than to true anatomy.
To my left, two box-tree centaurs appeared frozen in midtrot, alternate legs gracefully curled beneath them as they ran, long human hair trailing behind them, and their poses were so dynamic I almost expected their hooves to hit the ground when reality’s stopped clock resumed ticking. On my right, a shrubbery manticore brandished its eight-foot-long stinger-tipped scorpion tail against a griffin with a twelve-foot wingspan, swooping in from overhead by the grace of the strong, bare trunk holding it up like a doll on a stand.
As Bowman led me across the courtyard, down winding stone paths and past iron arches leading to other areas of the grounds, I gawked at a small herd of shrubbery satyrs playing flutes in a semicircle, as if the artist had drawn inspiration from Renaissance-period stereotypes rather than actually going to see a satyr.
Past a gazebo surrounded by playful-looking elves that could have frolicked right off the front of a cookie box, I found a beautiful stone fountain spilling water from three tiers. Poised above it, as if they were about to dive into two feet of water, were two mermaids and a selkie emerging from her seal skin, all trimmed from massive bushes planted on three sides of the fountain. As with the griffin, they were held up by the pruned-bare center trunks. Unlike the griffin, however, those figures bore little resemblance to reality.
A selkie would shed her seal skin as she emerged from the water, not as she dived into it, and mermaids...well... In reality, their upper halves didn’t resemble human lingerie models anywhere near as closely as the topiary might lead one to believe.
Disgusted, I turned away from the elaborately inaccurate portrayals and focused on the back of the building we seemed headed for: a stately three-story structure with a massive back porch set up for fine dining outdoors.
Through small gaps in a tall wall of shrubbery, I caught glimpses of an empty parking lot set back from the building and an unattended valet stand.
Bowman
