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 you would do, after all the trouble you went through to hide the takeover.”
Sultan Bruhier. Adira’s father got his final revenge on us by exposing the coup that had cost his daughter her life. But the sultan couldn’t have shipped pieces of Rudolph Metzger all over the country if I hadn’t given him the old man in the first place.
Vandekamp’s viewing of my reaction seemed part entertainment, part clinical observation. So I swallowed my guilt to deny him the pleasure.
“What did you do with Gallagher?” I demanded, and his fleeting frown made my stomach flip. He didn’t recognize the name.
Gallagher wasn’t at the Spectacle. He’d been sold to someone else or sent to a cryptid prison or—worst-case scenario—given to a research lab.
A cold new fear overtook me. No matter where he was, he would fight to get to me.
I stared at the floor, struggling to control my horror at that thought. Or at least hide it from Vandekamp.
“Until we know what you are, you’re a financial liability,” he said, and I forced myself to focus on his words. “You can enlighten me, or I can let my lovely wife pull the information out of you. But I don’t think that’s what you want.”
No use denying that. Tabitha Vandekamp was scary in a way no thick-fisted roustabout had ever been. But she couldn’t change the facts.
“I’ve told you.” I shrugged, mentally tamping down the fear that he might recognize my half-truth. “Run the test again. The results will be the same, and no amount of torture will change that. I’m human.”
Vandekamp crossed his arms over his shiny blue button-down shirt. “I’ve seen you turn into a monster, Delilah.”
“The two are not mutually exclusive.” I shrugged and held his gaze. “You and I have that in common.”
Willem Vandekamp watched the office door close behind his latest purchase, and for a moment, he sat lost in his thoughts. After more than twenty years in the cryptobiology field, he’d long been convinced that nothing could surprise him.
Until Delilah.
A cryptid who went to college.
A cryptid who’d taken his seminar.
She understood too much, but the real problem Delilah represented wasn’t how much she knew about him, but how little he knew about her.
Delilah would make the investors nervous. She would terrify his friends in Washington.
Speaking of whom...
Willem glanced at his watch, an obsolete device in the age of cell phones and handheld tablets, but one that gave him comfort in its simplicity. He was two minutes late for the conference call, but had no intention of actually picking up the phone for another three. Punctuality might give those congressional blowhards the mistaken impression that his time was less important than theirs.
What if Tabitha was right? Willem leaned back in his chair and linked his hands behind his head, still staring at the door. What if Delilah was a surrogate? No one had seen a single one of those sadistic little bastards since the government rounded them up nearly thirty years ago. They’d be thirty-five years old now—a full decade older than Delilah—but who knew whether they’d age like humans? Hell, if they were some kind of fae, their glamour could make them look like anything or anyone.
But Delilah wasn’t fae. According to her file, the sheriff who’d originally arrested her had kept her in iron cuffs with no effect.
Willem’s desk phone rang. His direct line. He noted the DC area code on the display and smiled. Then he let it ring two more times before he answered.
“Hello?”
“Vandekamp.” Senator Aaron sounded distinctly displeased. “We had an appointment, unless I’m mistaken?”
“I apologize.” Willem spun in his chair to look out the window at the topiary garden. “It’s been a bit chaotic here, and I’m running on about three hours of sleep.”
“Does that mean the rumors are true?” the second voice demanded in an eager baritone.
“If the rumors say that I have retaken Metzger’s Menagerie from the creatures who escaped their cages and killed the owner, then yes.”
“How could this have happened?”
“It couldn’t have, if my restraint system were federally subsidized and put into production,” Willem pointed out, without bothering to filter sharp criticism from his tone.
“If your restraint system were more than a prototype, that might be a possibility,” Senator Aaron said. “Until then—”
“It’s ready.” Willem stood and paced the length of his office, his pulse roaring in his ears. “Come see for yourself. My technology is going to change the world, Senator. You can be on the forefront of the new wave or you can be crushed by the tide. Your choice.”
He dropped his phone into its cradle and took a deep breath. Then he pressed the intercom button and spoke without waiting for a greeting from his secretary. “I want a full recording from Delilah’s collar. I need to see every hormonal fluctuation on a timeline alongside video footage from her dorm. Every twelve hours.”
As the only creature at the Savage Spectacle that Willem could neither identify nor control, Delilah Marlow was the one thing standing between him and a government contract that would revolutionize humanity’s control over the beasts it shared the planet with.
She could not be allowed to derail two decades of progress.
A couple of hours after the sun set, Woodrow, the gamekeeper, stepped into the dormitory to conclude our first-day orientation with an announcement that lights-out would be in half an hour. He told us to clean our teeth with the brushes we’d been issued and use the toilets, then warned us—again—that failure to follow orders would result in serious consequences.
The long-term Spectacle captives began filing into the bathroom in two lines, clearly accustomed to the routine. Lala and Mahsa were the first from our group to join them, and I stepped into line after them. “How was your work assignment?” I asked, as we shuffled forward after the others. “What were you doing?”
“Vacuuming some big room,” Lala said.
“Scrubbing
