the county fair circuit will dry up in the next few weeks. If we’re not prepared to step into the big interior venues—stadiums and concert halls—we won’t make it through the winter, because we certainly can’t raise funds the way old man Metzger did.”
The very thought gave me chills.
During the off-season, when the carnival circuit shrank to virtually nothing, Rudolph Metzger had rented the most exotic of his cryptids to various private collections, where they were exhibited in a more formal setting for high-dollar clientele who wouldn’t frequent a sweaty, dirty, outdoor carnival.
“We’re not renting anyone out, and we’re not risking larger venues.”
In our menagerie, we ran the shows and set our own limits. Except for the required inspections, there was no third-party oversight. Under Gallagher’s plan, one suspicious stadium employee could blow our ruse wide-open, and we’d all be back in cages. We couldn’t take that risk.
“We’ll find another way,” I assured him.
Our plan had been to take the entire menagerie south of the border. But when Sultan Bruhier’s daughter, Adira, died during the coup, he’d closed his borders, leaving us trapped in the United States, where exposure would mean imprisonment, and in many cases, torture.
“We could send Bruhier another gift,” Gallagher said. I shook my head, but he kept talking. “I could call one of the old handlers and offer him a job, then throw him in a cage and ship him down to the sultan.”
“We gave him Metzger. If gifting him the owner didn’t work, sending a mere menagerie employee won’t either. And even if I were okay with sending someone else to be tortured to death at the hands of the sultan, it took forever for the encantados to make the old man’s family think he ran off with an acrobat. We can’t make another person disappear.”
“We can’t let everyone starve to death either.”
“I know.” I cleared my throat and took the pen from my clipboard again. “What was the bestiary’s head count?”
“Four hundred sixty.”
“Are we all set for takedown?”
“As soon as the gates close.”
“Good.” I turned to head to the hybrids’ tent, but Gallagher took my hand before I made it two steps.
“Delilah.” He tugged me closer, and when I looked up at him, I found his eyes shrouded by the shadow of his hat bill, in the light falling from overhead. “My oath to protect you includes protecting you from starvation. And from yourself. Buying the incubus nearly bankrupted us.”
“I couldn’t just leave him there—”
“But now we’re rationing food. Something has to give.”
I nodded. I knew that. “I have to get a head count from the big top. I’ll think of something. I swear.”
Gallagher frowned at my choice of words. Swearing meant something different to him than it did to the rest of the world because the fae can’t go back on their word.
Nor can they lie.
Ever.
* * *
At eleven fifty, I stepped inside the massive striped tent and watched the big-top finale from the west entrance. Though I saw the show nearly every night, I was still awed by the strength and ingenuity of the performers. By their grace and beauty. By the pride they took in their performances, now that the show was truly theirs.
In the ring—we only assembled one of them, now that our show was smaller—Zyanya and her brother, Payat, had already completed their live shift into cheetah form. As I watched, Ignis, the draco, breathed fire over the first of two steel rings suspended from a sturdy steel frame, and the audience oohed as the ring burst into flames.
Ignis was a three-foot-long winged serpent whose fire-breathing range had been surgically reduced from over seven feet to a mere eighteen inches years before old man Metzger had bought me for his menagerie. Even with his surgical handicap, Ignis represented the biggest risk we were willing to take in the ring because he was difficult to communicate with and impossible to retrain without using the abusive tactics his previous trainers had employed.
Once Ignis had swooped to light the second steel ring, heralded by a crescendo in the soaring big-top sound track, Zyanya and Payat leapt through the blazing hoops in sync, still in cheetah form, and landed gracefully on the backs of a matching set of thickly muscled centaurs—part Belgian horse, part man.
Several minutes later, the orchestral sound track crescendoed with a crash of cymbals signaling the beginning of the finale. Eryx, the minotaur, took thundering steps toward the center of the ring, holding his thick arms out in the most graceful gesture we had managed to teach the former beast of burden. From their positions all around the huge ring, hybrid acrobats flipped and cartwheeled toward him. While I watched, as awed then as I’d been on the first night of their revamped performance, the acrobats climbed the minotaur like a tree, then each other like its branches until they stood on each others’ arms and legs and shoulders. Eryx became the base of a diamond-shaped formation of hybrid and shifter acrobats stacked to within mere feet of the aviary net.
As the minotaur slowly turned, showing off the finale for the 360-degree audience around the ring, two harpies in glittering red costumes soared around the act, dropping steel rings from overhead. They landed around outstretched arms and legs, revolving like hula hoops. From one side of the ring, Zyanya’s two young cubs pushed a large heavy ball toward the center with their small feline muzzles. When they had it in place, Eryx stepped up onto the ball, with one foot, then the other, lifting his graceful load as if it weighed no more than a bag of his own feed.
Through it all, Ignis swooped and glided through the air in and around the acrobats’ limbs, dodging spinning rings and spitting small jets of fire. The music soared and the crowd stood on collapsible risers, stomping and clapping for a show they would credit to a huge staff of human handlers and trainers.
For nearly a minute, the performers remained frozen in their ending pose, breathing hard, basking in applause from spectators who would have run screaming if they’d known the truth about what they’d just seen.
Then the music faded and smoke machines fired a gray mist into the ring. Under the cover of smoke, the performers dismounted and jogged from the ring through a chain-link tunnel toward the back of the tent, while the audience climbed down from the bleachers and headed for marked exits in pairs and small clusters. Children clutched their parents’ hands, chattering about the massive minotaur and the graceful leopard shifter. Adults recounted their favorite parts, from the berserker in bear form throwing glittering rings for the harpies to catch in their beaks, to the wolf and the cheetahs transforming from man into animal right in front of them.
I stood at my post, thanking them all for coming, directing them toward the main exit, past the closed ticket booth. I shook hands with fathers and high-fived young boys wearing souvenir Metzger’s hats with minotaur horns sticking up from the sides and little girls who’d bought headbands with cat ears or fake teeth with wolf or cheetah incisors poking into their lower lips.
At exactly midnight, as I was ushering the crowd from the big top, Abraxas—one of our three human employees—turned off the calliope music and played a light instrumental intended to signal the night’s end. The intercom crackled, then
