pain faded quickly, but my voice did not return.
“Cryptids don’t have birthdays,” the woman snapped, as I tried in vain to speak. My mouth opened. My lips and tongue moved. But my vocal cords did not vibrate. My brain was sending the signal to speak, but my body wasn’t receiving the order.
It was being intercepted by the collar.
In the menagerie, the handlers had sometimes muzzled cryptids, but that could only stop them from biting and speaking. Muzzles can’t prevent you from making sound. From hearing your own voice, as a reassurance that you do, in fact, still exist, even if only as property to be bought, sold or rented out.
But Vandekamp had found a way to turn off my voice, and the resulting claustrophobic terror felt as if the room was folding in on me. As if I were screaming into the void of some shrinking reality that no longer had enough space for me. As if soon they would cease to see me too, and start walking through me.
“So what do you suggest we do with her, Tabitha?” Vandekamp circled his desk again to sit behind it. “Sell her? Have her euthanized?”
My silent objection became a fruitless scream of rage. I strained the muscles in my throat, trying to be heard, until my eyes felt like they’d pop from my skull. But neither of them even looked at me.
I turned to Bowman to find him staring straight ahead, impervious to my frustration and fury.
“That seems a bit extreme,” the woman—Tabitha—said. “We’re going to have to inspect her. All monsters have telltale features. We just have to find hers.”
She turned to me, and again I tried to shout. To tell her that I’d already been inspected. I knew my desperate effort was pointless, but I couldn’t stop.
“Take off your clothes,” she ordered.
My profanity-laden refusal didn’t make so much as a squeak.
She pressed another icon on her remote, and pain exploded all over my body. I fell to my knees on the carpet, hunched over, my arms straining against my restraints. Screaming in silent agony.
What I’d felt when I’d slid my finger beneath my collar was a flash in the pan compared to the fire blazing through every nerve in my body.
“Tabitha,” Vandekamp said. “She can’t undress. She’s handcuffed.”
His wife finally released the button.
I slumped over my knees, breathing deeply as the pain slowly receded. I felt tender all over, but I couldn’t tell if that was a residual effect of the electric current or simply the knowledge that if I didn’t cooperate, she would press that button again.
“And anyway, she was inspected during the intake process. She has no cryptid features. Which is part of the problem.”
“I don’t understand,” she complained. “Even the most benign-looking monsters have an identifiable trait hidden somewhere. How could she have nothing?”
Finally, I made myself sit up and look at the Vandekamps, and the effort that took without the use of my hands was terrifying.
“What are we going to do with her?” Tabitha demanded as she smoothed a strand of brown hair back toward the simple twist it had escaped from. “No one’s going to pay to see that.” She waved one hand at me in disgust. “You’re going to have to figure out what she is. Make her talk.” She shrugged, and her cold gaze chased the last reverberating bolts of fire from my body. “Or I could do it.”
“I’ll figure something out.” He stood and kissed her on the forehead. “Why don’t you go tell the seamstresses what you want for the new costumes?”
She hesitated, then nodded reluctantly. “I do have a few ideas...”
As the door closed behind her, he sat on the front of his desk again. “Wait outside,” he said, and I thought he was talking to me until Bowman turned sharply and headed into the outer office, closing the door at his back. Vandekamp looked down at me, where I still knelt on his rug. “You were the one responsible for the takeover of Metzger’s Menagerie?”
I nodded. The truth was more complicated, but without my voice, I couldn’t explain about the team effort.
“I have some questions for you, and I suggest you answer them while you still can.” He pressed an icon on his remote, and when I felt no pain, I realized he’d given me back my voice.
Vandekamp twisted and lifted another folder from his blotter, then flipped it open. “According to the menagerie’s records, there are two cryptids missing. A werewolf called Claudio and a young marid named Adira. Where are they?”
I cleared my throat and was relieved by the sound that met my ears. “Adira died during the coup. She was shot by the Lot Supervisor. Christopher Ruyle.” We’d sent her body to the sultan so he could bury her.
Vandekamp glanced at the report again. “This Ruyle is also missing.”
“He’s dead. And for the record, he’s the only employee who died in the takeover.”
“And the werewolf?”
I held his gaze. And my silence.
He lifted the remote, drawing my attention to it. “You already know what this can do.”
I exhaled. I didn’t want to betray Claudio, but chances are that they’d never catch him anyway. “He left the menagerie last month.”
“Why would he leave? A werewolf cannot pass for human.”
“But he can live in the woods as long as he likes.” He was looking for Genevieve, the youngest of his children, who had been sold right before the coup. But I wouldn’t tell Vandekamp that no matter how much pain he put me through.
“How did you know about the coup?”
Surprise tugged up on Vandekamp’s left brow. “You haven’t figured out your mistake yet?”
I’d spent my time alone in that concrete cell going over every decision I’d made as the de facto manager of the liberated menagerie, trying to figure out how I’d failed the very people I’d been trying to save. I’d come up with a thousand small mistakes, but nothing I could pinpoint as our downfall.
“I found out from the Metzgers.” Vandekamp watched carefully for my reaction, but I had none to give him, except confusion.
“The Metzgers don’t know.” Raul and Renata had flawlessly covered our tracks with the former owner’s family.
“The Metzgers found out from old man Rudolph himself.”
“But Rudolph Metzger is...” I let my words fade into silence short of a confession.
“Dead,” Vandekamp finished for me. “Which is the inevitable result of dismembering a man and mailing a piece of him to each of his remaining relatives.”
“We didn’t—”
He shook his head, still watching me closely. “No, that didn’t seem like something
