The coordinator waved us out of the kitchen. Only the habit of putting one foot in front of the other kept me from freezing in shock when I saw the room. Though really, calling it a room was like calling a cave a crack in the wall.
The space could easily have held several times the fifty guests invited to Michael Hayes’s bachelor party.
The windowless walls were lined with panels of gathered black drapery, which gave the room a formal look and dampened the echo most spaces that size would have suffered. The floor was white marble with black veins, shining in the light from several elaborate chandeliers hanging from the ornately coffered ceiling.
The huge room swallowed my footsteps and amplified my fear, making me feel insignificant in a way that being locked in a small cage never could have.
The guests were college-age men in business-casual dress, most of whom had already found the alcoholic beverage of their choice. Their chatter died as we entered the room, and I could feel every gaze on me. The attention felt simultaneously familiar and completely foreign, because though I’d been on display at Metzger’s, a menagerie patron’s motivation to plop down his credit card was almost always simple curiosity, tempered by fear. He or she wanted to see dangerous creatures—perhaps even those responsible for the reaping—removed from true threat by miracle of steel cages and iron bars.
But the patrons at the Savage Spectacle didn’t just look curious, they lookedhungry. Greedy. These men—most of them near my age—didn’t believe we represented any threat, and it had never occurred to them, probably in their entire lives, that they might not have the right to do whatever they wanted in any given moment.
I could practically smell their anticipation in the air.
The coordinator whispered for us to spread out and carry our trays around the room, and the ladies in front of me did just that. Crowds formed around them instantly. Hands reached for flutes of champagne and handfuls of hair in equal numbers. Someone pulled Belinda’s lip down to inspect her sharp fangs, while a man in a red button-down shirt ran his hand down the length of Zyanya’s arm, then lifted her free hand so he could examine her claws.
Lenore’s flat-soled sandals whispered on the floor behind me as she headed for the stage, where red velvet curtains had been drawn back to reveal an orchestral quartet formally dressed in blue-and-silver tuxes, except for the female violinist, who wore a blue sequined gown. The siren climbed the steps on one side of the stage and conferred softly with the violinist. After several whispered questions and a couple of nods, Lenore took up her position behind the microphone, and when the music began, she sang.
I realized immediately that despite her instructions, her melody and its push were intended not for the paying audience, but for those of us forced to endure wandering hands and intrusive gazes. Her voice felt like a gentle wave of calm floating over me, blunting the sharp edge of my temper and relaxing the fist clenched at my side.
I was disgusted by what I was being forced to endure, but it would not kill me. And I wouldn’t have to kill anyone either.
If any of the employees were able to think beyond their own suddenly eased tensions and realize she was projecting the wrong atmosphere, she might get into trouble. But I was beyond grateful for her efforts.
As my tension eased, I glanced across the room and was surprised to see two familiar, large forms standing near the opposite wall. Eryx and...
“Gallagher!” I breathed, and though he couldn’t possibly have heard me, his gaze met mine, and his gray eyes brightened.
Mine filled with tears. Gallagher was a liberator. A protector. A man of uncompromising character who held others to the same high standard. The sight of him in a collar bruised me all the way to my soul. The collar looked so incredibly out of place that at first I didn’t notice he was wearing little else.
Nothing, in fact, but his unglamoured traditional red cap and a gray loincloth trimmed with a matching red cord.
He bore the indignity like a soldier. As if near nudity were a bruise or a gash, or some other battle scar earned at the hands of an enemy, but humiliation for him warmed my cheeks. I’d never seen Gallagher subjugated.
Even after seeing him hauled from the back of a van, I hadn’t really thought it was possible.
Yet as sad as I was to see him in captivity, I was elated to see him alive.
I worked my way slowly across the room, pausing to let men ogle me and take food from my tray, but I dodged reaching hands without hearing a word said to me. I couldn’t see anything but Gallagher.
His bruises were mostly healed, and the cuts on his face had been treated with narrow butterfly bandages. His dark hair had been cut short, which looked strange to me, but his eyes were the same. Steely-gray windows into a soul like none other I’d ever met.
When he saw me heading toward him, the tension in his shoulders seemed to ease. I waited until the last bite from my tray had been taken and the guests wandered toward one of the more obviously “freaky” cryptids. Then I tucked the tray beneath my arm and headed straight for Gallagher.
“Delilah.” His voice rumbled through me, though it held little volume. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. Even if I hadn’t been okay, I would have told him I was. “You?” I took in every bruise and cut. Every line of a dire expression I knew well.
“No man here could hold his own among the fearsomefear deargI battled in my youth.”
I couldn’t resist a small smile. “So you’re humoring their authority in order to stay close to me?”
His jaw clenched, and the muscles in his neck strained against the steel collar. “Something like that.”
“It was the hat, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “My human guise was never meant to last.”
“I know.” But there was something in the slight curve of his mouth. In the glint of light shining in his gray eyes. “You got caught on purpose.”
