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 thefuriaeawoke. “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.”
Delilah
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 door and the whole thing was much cleaner and newer than anything we’d had at Metzger’s. Much colder.
And much more expensive.
Mirela’s sisters lay unmoving in the two narrow cells after hers, and beyond those were several more, each occupied by one of my fellow captives.
The light shining through the canvas strapped in place over the cattle car was too warm in tone to be anything but sunlight, and the canvas itself gave me no hint of our location. I closed my eyes and listened, trying to slow my racing heart.
I heard the rattle of a cage door rolling up on another cattle car and male voices, speaking too softly for me to understand. The only familiar sound was the breathing of the other captives.
“Where are we?” Lala whispered, and I turned to see her pushing herself upright in the middle of her cell. She blinked at me through eyes ringed in dark circles and drew her denim-clad knees to her chest.
“I don’t—”
Heavy footsteps clomped toward us, and two shadowy silhouettes appeared through the thin canvas, starkly backlit, growing larger as they got closer. The shapes were male and bulky from whatever equipment they wore, and when one of them came to disconnect the canvas from the two rear corners of my cell, I could tell from his outline that he had a gun and some kind of baton.
When the canvas was unhooked, the men pulled it from the cattle car with practiced motions, then folded it with the same efficiency. Both men wore the Savage Spectacle’s black tactical gear, including visored helmets, and each wore a pistol and a stun gun holstered on opposite sides of their waists. They worked in silence, and after an initial assessing glance into the trailer, they didn’t leer, stare, laugh or point.
