I will taze you.” He thought we were human.
Gallagher didn’t move, but I could feel the tension emanating from him. Every muscle in his body was taut, ready to explode into motion. “Vandekamp deals in exotic fetishes. He’ll rent them out by the hour,” Gallagher said, trying to convince me of what needed to be done while he eyed the private soldier. “They’ll die in captivity, Delilah. And in great pain.”
Chains. Cages. Fists. Whips. Blood.
My heart ached at the memories. The terror. My lungs refused to expand. If Vandekamp knew about the coup, others knew, too. Gallagher was right. The menagerie was finished.
We had to sound the alarm and give people the chance to escape.
“Kill him.” My words carried no sound, but Gallagher read them on my lips. He turned, impossibly fast, and ripped the stun gun from the soldier’s hand. It broke apart in his grip like a child’s toy.
Brock grunted and reached for his gun, his movements clumsy with shock. Gallagher grabbed his head in both hands and gave it a vicious twist.
I heard a distinct crack. The man’s arms fell to his side, but to my surprise, his head remained attached to his body. Gallagher hadn’t spilled a single drop of blood, even though he needed it to survive.
“You’re not going to...?” I gestured to his faded red cap as the body fell to the ground at his feet.
“No time. We have to—”
Something whistled softly through the air, and Gallagher stumbled. He slapped one hand to his thick thigh and pulled out a dart attached to a tiny vial that had already nearly emptied into his flesh. He growled as he stepped in front of me, shielding me, and turned toward the direction the dart had come from. “Get down.”
As I knelt behind him, I heard another soft whistle. He flinched, then fell onto his knees. “Gallagher!” My pulse racing, I pulled a second dart from his leg and stared into the dark, trying to spot the threat.
“Get the gun.” Gallagher’s voice was much too soft. His eyes were losing focus.
I spun toward Brock’s corpse and was reaching for the pistol still in his holster when Gallagher fell to the ground with a heavy thud.
“No!” The gun forgotten, I dropped onto my knees to put one hand on his chest. It rose, then fell. He was completely unconscious, his hat still firmly seated on his head.
“Delilah Marlow.”
Fear electrified every nerve ending in my body as I twisted to see the man with the scar staring down at me, his tranquilizer rifle aimed at my chest. I shoved my terror down to feed the rage burning out of control in my gut. “You have three seconds to get the hell out of my menagerie before I scramble your brain.”
His brows rose in an insulting blend of fascination and amusement. “Do your worst.”
My worst was already on its way.
Deep inside me, the furiae stretched as she woke up, intent on avenging Gallagher, and as her righteous anger rapidly filled me, my nails hardened and began to lengthen into needlelike points.
Vandekamp’s gaze flicked to my hands, but his expression did not change.
I stood, and my vision zoomed into an extraordinary clarity and depth. My hair began to rise on its own, defying gravity as my rage mounted.
Vandekamp held his ground three feet away. He twisted a small knob on his rifle and aimed it at my thigh.
I lunged for him, my thin black claws grasping for his head. He pulled the trigger, and pain bit into my thigh. I gasped and stumbled sideways, then tripped over Gallagher’s thick leg. The world rushed toward me. My shoulder slammed into the dirt path.
Gallagher lay a foot away, his eyes closed.
The dart burned fiercely in my thigh, and my vision blurred. My arms were too heavy to lift. I couldn’t move my legs.
From somewhere in the fairgrounds, a scream rang out, then was suddenly silenced.
“Don’t do this,” I begged as a second scream split the night. But my voice was too soft. The world was starting to lose focus.
Vandekamp put his boot on my shoulder and pushed me onto my back. He knelt next to me, his rifle hanging from one shoulder, and stared into my eyes, apparently fascinated by the black-veined orbs they had become when the furiae awoke. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Delilah.” He brushed hair back from my face and tucked it behind my ear. “My name is Willem Vandekamp.”
I blinked, and his face blurred as darkness engulfed me.
“You belong to me now.”
The squeal of metal ripped through my head like a chain saw through wood, and my eyes flew open. Bright, warm light turned the throbbing behind my eyes into a sharp pain that pulsed with my heartbeat, and at first I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. My world seemed to be composed entirely of shiny steel slats and canvas.
My tongue felt like it was dried to the roof of my mouth, and my throat hurt when I swallowed. When I tried to sit up, I discovered my wrists were bound at my back with something that didn’t rattle or clank like metal handcuffs, and they must have been bound for a while, because I couldn’t feel my fingers. I was lying on my stomach in a long, subdivided steel cage, draped with a sheet of canvas thin enough to let light through. I blinked, trying to remember how I wound up shackled and caged, and...
Vandekamp.
With his name came the memory of his scarred face staring down at me. The iron weight of fear threatened to press all the air from my chest as understanding crashed over me.
The menagerie had been retaken.
I was a prisoner. Again.
For weeks, I’d battled nightmares about being recaptured. Recaged. But my dreams were pale shadows of the horrifying reality.
My lungs refused to expand. I gasped, trying to catch my breath as the steel slats seemed to be closing in on me. I can’t do this again. I couldn’t live in a cage and eat scraps. I couldn’t wear rags and take orders. I couldn’t “perform” in another menagerie, watching people I cared about suffer just to draw out my beast and its violent brand of justice.
Not again.
Motion to my left drew my eye, and I twisted on the cold steel floor to see Mirela lying in the next cell, unbound and evidently unconscious, still dressed in her fortune-teller costume. But I couldn’t see into the cells beyond hers from my prone position.
Grunting with the effort, I tucked my legs beneath my stomach and pulled myself upright without the use of my hands. On my knees, I could see down the length of the steel cage into at least a dozen cells separated by steel-slat walls. I was in the very last one. And finally I understood.
We were in a cattle car—a long horse trailer modified to hold human-sized cryptids. Each pen had its own roll-up
