Gallagher cuffed my hands in front of me with regular steel cuffs and led me out of the bathroom onto the deserted midway, where he took the tranquilizer rifle from Clyde. “You two turn in her clothes, then hit the sack. I got it from here.”
“You sure?” Freddie eyed me while I curled my bare toes on the rough sidewalk.
Gallagher gave him a terse nod.
Freddie took off after Clyde, with the box containing my stuff tucked under his arm.
Gallagher took my arm and marched me toward the rear exit of the fairgrounds.
I looked up at him, but the bill of his hat shielded most of his face from the couple of lampposts we passed beneath. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll try to liquefy your gray matter?”
“You don’t know how. That’s as much a problem for me as it is for you.”
“Are you sure?” The paved path ended at the open gate. The grass was scratchy but surprisingly cool against the soles of my feet. “I could just be biding my time, waiting for you to get careless.”
The huge ring of keys attached to his belt jangled and clanked with every step. “I’m never careless. And if you knew how to turn back into...whatever you are, you would have tried to kill us and escape while you were uncuffed.”
“I’m not a killer.” No sense denying that I was a flight risk, especially when I spotted a double line of circus cage wagons up ahead. They were great hulking shadows cast into the larger darkness by a line of tall lampposts.
Gallagher made a skeptical sound deep in his throat. “Of course you’re a killer. You just lack experience in the field.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
One dark brow rose in the shadows beneath the bill of his cap. “You’re an only child. Labeled ‘gifted’ in elementary school. High school salutatorian. Undergraduate degree in crypto-biology from Colorado State—on scholarship—then you came back home to handle deposits and withdrawals at the local credit union.”
I stopped walking to stare up at him. “How do you know all that? Why do you know all that?”
“My job is to break you. The more I know about you, the easier that will be.”
My gaze fell and I stared at my bare feet, mentally wading through shock to process not just what he’d said, but the utter lack of emotion with which he’d said it. His job was to break me, and he would do that with no more regret than when he got dressed and brushed his teeth in the morning. Breaking me was just something else on his to-do list.
Yet he was the only one at Metzger’s who’d spoken to me like a person.
“Why did you make those other handlers turn around?” I would already be one step closer to broken if he had let Freddie and Clyde watch me shower. Was that kindness just a setup for my inevitable psychological fracture? Show me mercy now, so that later his cruelty would seem all the more cruel?
Gallagher shrugged his massive shoulders. “I don’t have to start breaking you until tomorrow.”
“And that won’t bother you because you think I’m a killer?”
For a second, I thought he’d actually answer. Then Gallagher tugged me forward again.
“I— Ow!” A jagged rock bit into my heel and sent sharp pain up my leg. I hopped on my left foot, reaching to clutch the bruised sole of my right before I remembered my hands were cuffed again.
Gallagher hauled me upright before I could fall over.
“Can I at least get a pair of shoes?”
“I can’t issue anything that would help you escape.” He took my arm again. I couldn’t pull free, so I dragged my feet in silent protest, as well as out of caution. The dark grass suddenly felt like a minefield waiting to cripple me with every step.
For several minutes, I followed him in silence, watching the ground for rocks I probably wouldn’t be able to see in the dark anyway. Then an odd equine snort startled me and I looked up to find the double line of circus wagons just a few yards away.
“Home sweet home,” Gallagher said, and that fact—the visceral reality of it—hit me like sledgehammer straight to my soul.
My feet stopped moving and my mouth fell open. I inhaled as deeply as I could, but the air tasted foul. Like tyranny and manure.
“This can’t be happening.” The world teetered around me, and the very ground seemed determined to toss me like an angry bull. I dropped into a squat, knees and back bent, gasping, but no matter how much air I sucked in and spat out, I couldn’t get a satisfying breath.
“Delilah. Stand up.”
“This isn’t real,” I gasped, my elbows propped on my knees, hands hanging limp, cuffs and all. “This can’t be real.”
“It is, and making me drag you to your crate won’t change that. Stand up.”
But I could hardly hear him over the roar of oblivion devouring everything I’d ever had or been, leaving only an empty shell of me tethered to my brutal new reality by cuffs and chains.
“I’m having a nightmare,” I murmured. But that wasn’t quite right.
I was living a nightmare.
Gallagher squatted next to me and tilted my face up until I saw his gray eyes, finally illuminated in the beam from a light pole. “A cage locks other people out as much as it locks you in, and sometimes that’s for the best.”
“You’re locking me up to protect me? You really expect me to believe that?”
“I’m locking you up to protect everyone. Where you live is not up to you anymore, but how you live is still your choice. I can make things a little easier for you, if you’ll make my job easier for me.”
Fresh anger flared in the pit of my stomach. I tried to shove him back, but that was like trying to push over a tree with my bare hands. “You’re no better than your boss, offering to make me comfortable—for a price.”
Gallagher’s gaze hardened until his eyes looked like onyx pebbles. “I’m far worse than Ruyle.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me upright. His hand tightened around my arm, and when I flinched, he let me go. “But I wasn’t propositioning you. Do not insult me with that assumption again.”
“So then, what were you offering?”
“You help me get you ready for exhibition, and I’ll do what I can to make your adjustment less traumatic.”
Indignation burned in my veins. I didn’t want to be exhibition-ready, and there was no way to make any of this less traumatic. They could lock me up, but they couldn’t force me to cooperate. Let them sell me—hell, let them kill me. If I’d realized anything since being sold into the menagerie, it was that I had nothing left to lose.
I turned my back on Gallagher without a word and marched toward the circus carts on my own. He caught up in three huge strides, and a few yards later, he pulled me to a stop in front of an empty steel cage on wheels. It was the last cart on the first of two parallel rows of circus wagons and the only one without a stunning, brightly colored decorative frame—a naked version of all the other cages.
One steel mesh panel had been slid open along its track. The base of the wagon was a custom steel trailer two feet off the ground, and before I could even process the fact that there were no steps, Gallagher lifted me by the waist and set me inside the cage on my knees. The door slid shut behind me with a horrifying clang and I spun around to find him threading a padlock through two metal loops to hold the sliding panel closed.
“Wait!” Panic echoed in my voice. “Please don’t do this.” My eyes watered, and my throat felt so tight I had to force the words out, because this was my very last chance. “I’m not dangerous.”
Why the fuck had I let Brandon drag me to the carnival? It was just as depraved a spectacle as I’d imagined, but I’d never expected to become trapped inside it. If I’d insisted on a birthday dinner instead, I’d be curled up next to him in bed, blissfully ignorant of the horror I’d narrowly escaped.
“I don’t belong here!”
Gallagher clicked the padlock closed. “You’re no different from the rest.”
I couldn’t argue with that. No one belonged in the menagerie.
“What about these?” I held my hands up and rattled the cuffs.
He flipped a steel peg free from its loop on the outside of my cage, and a small panel in the mesh folded down, low enough that I had to sit to slide my hands through. He pulled a key from his pocket and removed the cuffs. Once I’d retracted my hands, he closed and locked the panel.
And just like that, my world was reduced to a four-by-six cage hardly tall enough for me to stand up in.
I sat with my legs folded beneath me, and the clang of my cage being closed echoing in my head. Gallagher watched me through the steel mesh. I couldn’t read his expression—it was shrouded in shadows—but I heard the jangle of metal as he clipped his key ring to a loop at his waist. “Try to get some sleep. Tomorrow won’t be easy.”
As if my evening had been a stroll through a moonlit park.
It took every bit of restraint I had to keep from pleading with him again to let me go. That wouldn’t work anyway, and I was done with begging.
“Fuck off,” I said through clenched teeth.
Gallagher tugged his cap lower on his forehead, then retreated into the dark.
I stared in the direction of his fading steps until I could no longer hear them, then I crawled into one corner of my cage and leaned against the solid aluminum end wall, my knees tucked up to my chest. The diamond-patterned aluminum floor was hard beneath me, and the fresh, shallow claw marks were the only sign of recent occupation by the leopard shifter Ruyle had mentioned.
When my eyes had adjusted to the dim light and shadows, I realized there was a blanket at the opposite end of my cage, half-unfolded from being tossed inside. There was no pillow and no sleeping mat, and I’d been offered neither food nor water. Inmates on death row were treated better.
Of course, inmates on death row had constitutionally guaranteed rights.
I considered the blanket for a few seconds, then I closed my eyes and rested my chin on my knees. It was too hot out to sleep anyway.
“What are you?” The strange voice rumbled softly from the darkness to my left, and my eyes flew open. Two points of light shone from the shadowy depths of the green-and-silver wagon across the aisle from mine.
I stared back at the bright eyes without lifting my chin from my knees.
Metal creaked and the green cage rocked as the weight within it shifted. A man wearing only a thin pair of gray shorts crawled out of the shadowy side of his cage into the area lit by a nearby light pole. Long lines of tight, lean muscle stood out beneath his skin, and each movement he made was smooth and graceful.
“What are you?” he repeated, the words low-pitched and gravelly.
“I’m a person.”
“But not a human, or you wouldn’t be here. So what are you, really?” A strand of silver hair fell over his gaunt face, hiding one shining eye.
“I don’t know. My name is Delilah.”
“Pas plus,” he said. “Not anymore. They call me Claudio.”
“They call you...?” I frowned, considering his odd phrasing. “Is that not what your mother named you?”
“My mother gave me life, and milk, and silver fur and golden eyes, but no true name, other than Little Gray Pup.” Those bright eyes blinked again, studying me even as I studied them. “Claudio is the name on my pedigree. It’s all I’ve ever been called.”
Little Gray Pup. Claudio.
All at once, I recognized the wolf heads and fleurs-de-lis carved into his wagon frame. “You’re the werewolf,” I whispered, curling my fingers through the wire mesh. “The girl is your daughter?”
He nodded. “Geneviève.”
On the tail of the name, a soft whine came from the dark cage to his right, and I found two more eyes shining at me. No cage stood across from the pup’s. Mine was the last in my row.
“Go back to sleep, Genni,” her father whispered, but affection softened his voice. The lights winked out when his daughter closed her eyes and I realized that because of the solid end panels, I could see into her cage from across the aisle, though he could not. But I couldn’t tell from those two lights in the dark whether she was in human or canine form.
“Merci.” Claudio’s words were so soft I almost mistook them for the rustle of cloth from the cage to my right. “For what you did for her. Thank you,” he repeated. “I am so very sorry for what it cost you.”
I didn’t know what to say. His daughter was the reason my life had been ripped from me, but I didn’t feel worthy of his gratitude. I’d made no conscious decision to act on Geneviève’s behalf. I’d had no idea what I could do, or what I would be sacrificing. I hadn’t acted, I’d merely reacted.
I was no martyr.
For a long time, I stared at the end panel of my own cage, too overwhelmed to truly focus on anything. I was listening to the snorts and shuffles of the unseen assortment of my fellow exhibits, assuming Claudio had fallen asleep, when his gravelly voice floated toward me again from across the aisle.
“The mystery of your species is a blessing, Delilah.” My name sounded foreign and beautiful, graced with his French accent and the lupine depth of his voice. “Do not rush to solve it.”
“Why not?” I whispered, as his eyes flashed at me in the dark.
“It costs them less to breed new exhibits than to buy them, but they will not try to breed what they cannot identify.”
Horror rolled over me in overlapping waves, and my crate seemed to rock like a boat at sea. Psychosomatic vertigo.
“Is that how you...how you got Geneviève?”
“And the four before her, each sold when they got too big for the petting zoo. She’s the only one they’ve let me keep.”
But he’d lost her mother. Grief was thick in his voice, and his pain made me ache deep, deep inside, both for his bleak past and for my own grim future.
Claudio retreated farther into his cage, and the rustle of rough fabric and the creak of metal told me he was curling up on his blanket to reclaim slumber.