for all of the local schools, with the hope that curious parents would later attend the whole carnival at full price. But what they did see was enough to impress even the most jaded fifth grader.
Along with the tantalizing scent of the food carts and the game booths boasting all the bells and whistles, costumed circus performers gave abbreviated demonstrations to cheering children and stunned teachers. A man in a red velvet jacket and dramatic black eyeliner swallowed a series of swords on a small dais, while Delilah rubbed her throat in empathy. Five acrobats in red-and-black sequined leotards formed an inverted pyramid, their bodies bent and twisted into complicated shapes. And set back from the midway, behind velvet ropes to hold the audience at a distance, a man and woman in matching top hats and shiny red-and-black costumes juggled lit torches and breathed fire into the air.
Everywhere the children turned, a new spectacle awaited, each more extravagant than the last. But the real draw was a series of stunning hand-carved and brightly painted circus wagons that had been hauled out to line the midway. Each wheeled cage displayed a different cryptid the children had only ever seen on television, the internet, or in books. Handlers in black slacks and bright red shirts stood by, ready to answer questions or prod creatures into displaying their bizarre and sometimes unsettling features.
The first wheeled cage held a brownie, a small gnomelike creature with a long nose and pointed ears, which Matt labeled “boring” and Shelley pronounced “cute.” Another held a cockatrice—a miniature dragon with dark, unsettling eyes that stared up at them from its rooster-like head. The creature had scales that glittered with each elegant movement of its long whip of a tail. Its sharp talons clicked against the metal floor of the cage, and Delilah stumbled backward when it opened its curved beak and let out a terrible crow.
The exhibit most popular with the boys, other than the woman who could twist her body until she was standing on her own skull, was a dog with three heads, each growling and snapping at the other two. As they watched, a woman in a sparkly red bustier and black skirt tossed a bloody hunk of meat into the cage with an artistic flourish. The boys in the audience cheered as each third of the dog fought viciously over the single dinner all three mouths had to share.
All Delilah could think was that the dog must have been awfully hungry to keep stealing food from itself.
While the rest of the group remained spellbound by the savage snapping dog, Delilah wandered toward the next wagon, where a cluster of kids from another school had gathered. She had to push her way to the front of the whispering, pointing crowd, and her first glimpse of the creature in the cage stole her breath. It was like nothing she had ever seen. Or rather, it was like several things Delilah had seen, but never in such a seemingly random compilation of mismatched parts.
The cryptid was the size and general shape of a lion, its body covered in smooth golden fur ending with a long, slim, tufted tail. Each of her four paws was wider than Delilah’s whole hand, but even more incredible was the huge pair of eagle-like wings growing from the creature’s back, its feathers fading from dark golden brown at the base to nearly white at the tips. Yet what really caused the commotion was the fact that the creature’s front feline paws grew up into deeply tanned human arms and shoulders, which supported an equally human neck and a human head with long, dark hair.
From the biceps up, the creature in the cage looked like a normal woman.
Mesmerized, Delilah glanced at the plaque wired to the front of the wagon. Sphinx, it read. The cryptid was a forty-three-year-old sphinx named Hecuba, who’d been taken from her mother’s nest on a Greek mountainside just weeks after she was born.
Delilah tried to imagine the creature in her natural habitat. Flying across the Greek countryside on huge powerful wings. Swooping to catch a goat or lamb in her razor-sharp claws, then taking the prize up to a massive nest on the side of a mountain. That would have been incredible to see.
Could Hecuba remember any of that life? Delilah couldn’t remember anything from when she was only a few weeks old.
The sphinx turned in her tight quarters, ready to pace several steps to the other end of her cage, but when her gaze met Delilah’s, Hecuba froze. Her eyes were gold and round like a cat’s, and the left one peeked at the child through a curtain of dark hair. But no cat had ever looked at Delilah like Hecuba was looking at her. No bird had either.
The sphinx glared at her the way her mother did in church, when Delilah kept clicking the ballpoint pen but couldn’t be scolded during the prayer.
The sphinx was looking at Delilah as if she wanted to say something.
Hecuba blinked, then continued pacing, but every time she turned toward the fascinated child, their gazes locked and Delilah’s curiosity was piqued again.
“Can we ask her questions?” she asked the sphinx’s handler, a large man in jeans whose thick arms were crossed over a simple red employee T-shirt. There were no top hats or sequins for handlers assigned to the most dangerous cryptids—nothing that could distract from the safety regulations.
“Questions?” The handler frowned down at her, as if he found her request very odd. “You can ask anything you want, but don’t expect an answer. She don’t talk. Even if she could, it’d probably be nonsense. Having a human head don’t mean she has a human brain.”
Delilah decided to give it a try anyway, because what other kind of brain could be inside a human head? She stepped closer to the cage, but stopped when the handler stuck one arm out to keep her at a safe distance. “Hecuba?” she said, and the sphinx stilled when she heard her name. “Do you remember Greece?”
The sphinx blinked, then narrowed her eyes at the child. A human tongue peeked from between her dry lips to wet them, and Delilah’s pulse quickened. Hecuba was going to answer. She, Delilah Marlow, was going to be the first person in history to carry on a conversation with a sphinx!
“Ha!” Someone shoved Delilah’s shoulder, and she stumbled to the left. When she turned, she found Matt Fuqua leering at her. “Did you really think it was going to answer you?” Matt and his friends laughed at Delilah while her cheeks burned.
Mrs. Essig quietly rounded up her group and announced that it was time to eat their bagged lunches.
As they headed down the midway toward the petting zoo, which boasted a picnic area and hand-washing station, the parade of performers and exhibits continued. Matt stepped into the path of an acrobat doing backflips down the sawdust-strewn path, and if Mrs. Essig hadn’t pulled him out of the way, he would have wound up tangled in a knot of bendy limbs and sequins.
Shelley whispered into Delilah’s ear that Mrs. Essig should have let him go. Death by circus acrobat would have been the most interesting thing ever to happen to him.
The petting zoo was a fenced-off area at the end of the midway. Inside, a series of small open-air pens had been arranged across from a collection of long folding picnic tables. Mrs. Essig claimed the end of one table for her six field-trip charges and shooed them toward a hand-washing station at one end of the exhibit.
Delilah dropped her lunch bag on the chair she’d claimed, then followed Shelley toward the boxy plastic sink and soap dispensers. While the boys splashed each other and used more paper towels than they actually required, Delilah and Shelley wandered slowly past the enclosures, oohing and aahing over the young beasts on display.
Instead of the usual collection of lambs, piglets, and newborn bunnies, the menagerie’s petting zoo held werewolf puppies, a centaur foal who pranced around her pen with hair the color of wheat flying out behind her, and the most adorable little bundle of white fur identified by the
