“Excuse me, please.” Willem slid his arm from Tabitha’s tight grip and abandoned both his wife and a cluster of patrons as he walked purposefully across the sand.
“Senator Wilson.” He offered his hand to each of them in turn. “Senator Pickering. Mrs. Pickering. I’m Dr. Willem Vandekamp. My event coordinator tells me you were both guests of Senator Aaron’s tonight. Is he still here?”
“No, he left during the first round,” Pickering said, as Wilson took a sip from a glass of red wine. “But we enjoyed the exhibition.”
Willem swallowed his frustration and forced his jaw to unlock. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“Enjoyedmay be overstating it a bit,” Senator Wilson said. “But I was quite entertained, especially by that last match. We both expected the hound to bite several chunks out of the fellow in the hat, but he hardly got a taste at all.”
“Yes. Gallagher is formidable.” He followed the senator’s gaze to the broken body of the hound. “We hope to get several months out of him, at least.”
“And what will you do with him afterward?” Pickering asked. “I assume you’d be willing to donate the remains of such a rare find?”
“Of course. We have a standing agreement with a research facility in Atlanta, and they have permission to report all their findings to the government.”
“Who was the creature in the lit window?” Pickering used his wineglass to point to the box where Willem had arranged for Delilah to be displayed. “From across the stadium, she looked like a normal woman wearing a costume.”
“And a collar,” his wife added.
“I assure you she is anything but normal. She’s afuriae. We acquired her at the same time as Gallagher, and she seems to be the only thing that motivates him.”
“They’re a couple?” Mrs. Pickering asked, as she plucked a bacon-wrapped scallop from the tray of a passing waitress. “Some cryptids form couples, right? Like the ones that can pass for human?”
“Some do,” her husband said. “But scientists believe most of them to be incapable of complex emotions, hon. They’re driven by procreative instinct and base needs, much like any household pet or zoo animal. Very few of them mate for life.”
“Yet he was willing to kill for her.” Mrs. Pickering shrugged. “Sounds pretty romantic to me.”
“They’re simplistic creatures, dear,” her husband insisted.
Willem knew better. But he never made a point that would cost him money.
Wilson turned to Willem with a frown. “Regardless, what you’re really saying is that you need thisfuriaebecause your collar can’t control him?”
“It can, and it does.” Willem’s posture relaxed and his speech quickened with the opportunity to discuss his technological innovation. “At the first sign of aggression from him—a surge of either testosterone, adrenaline or a species-specific hormone we haven’t yet assigned a name to—the collar paralyzes him completely. Our difficulty lies not in preventing violence from him outside the ring, but in eliciting it for the sake of the fight.”
Pickering gave him a puzzled look over the rim of his glass. “Didn’t you say he needs to kill to survive?”
“Yes. But he doesn’t like to perform. So tonight we used Delilah—thefuriae—as both a reward and a threat. To motivate him. But make no mistake. The collar can neutralizeanycryptid. Under any circumstance. I’m so confident in my technology that I routinely take the sand with them, to introduce them, with nothing standing between me and the beasts but my collars.”
“We noticed that.” Wilson nodded. But his eye was drawn back up to that same box seat. “What exactly is afuriae? Another species offae?”
“No.” Willem considered his phrasing, well aware that an outright lie could come back to haunt him, if he were granted an audience on Capitol Hill. “She’s a beast driven by revenge. Under normal circumstances, she looks so ordinary as to be nearly useless here at the Spectacle. But when she gets mad, she turns into a monster. Unfortunately, as with Gallagher, we can easily neutralize her, but we can’t make her perform on command.”
“That’s a shame.” Pickering drained the last of his wine. “I hope you didn’t pay much for her.”
“I think a revenge cryptid sounds quite useful.” His wife transferred her weight onto the ball of her left foot and pulled her right heel from the sand. “I’d unleash her the next time one of the ladies from my garden club gets bitchy.”
Her husband and his colleague laughed, but Willem was struck silent with a sudden epiphany. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me. Please enjoy the rest of your evening, and let me know if you’d like to see another show. On the house, of course.” With that, he headed straight for the champion’s entrance.
His wife watched him go from the other side of the ring.
Delilah
“Where are we going?” I demanded.
Woodrow and Bowman still wore gloves as they half led, half dragged me down a wide concrete hallway deep in the bowels of the stadium. The floor was rough but warm against my bare feet, the way a basement is always warm in the winter, because of the insulation of the earth.
Based on the noise echoing above and around us from the massive after-party going on in the stands, my guess was that we were somewhere far beneath the top-tier box from which I’d been forced to inspire Gallagher’s victory.
