“How many possibilities are there?” I demanded, unable to stop my eyes from watering. When no one spoke, I stood. “At least give me a number. What does it matter to you?”
“Sit,” Vandekamp ordered, aiming his remote at me. But Tabitha put her hand over the screen.
“I’m not taking any chances with this baby,” she insisted. “Let’s just try to keep her calm.”
“This isn’t going to work, Tabitha,” Vandekamp said, as if I couldn’t hear them. “We can’t control her without the collar.”
“We have nothing to fear from Delilah, because herfuriaehas no bone to pick with us.” She was watching me, though she spoke to him, and her infuriatingly calm smile triggered a realization—she’d made sure that I’d never seen either of them personally abuse any of the captives. “Besides that, she cares about the baby.” Tabitha met my gaze. “Sit down, Delilah, and I’ll answer your questions.”
I sat, as much to indulge her sense of security as for the promised answers.
“There was only one client,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you who he was. It doesn’t matter.”
“Does he know about the baby?”
“Of course not. That would complicate things.”
“Wait.” Tension made my shoulders strain against my restraints. “If there was only one client, and he was human, how could the baby possibly be cryptid? Why do you need an amniocentesis?”
She glanced at Vandekamp, and he shrugged as he sat on the edge of his desk again. “You wanted to answer her questions.”
Before he’d known about the baby—before he’d told his wife she could have it—he would have had me dragged back to my cell in excruciating pain rather than voluntarily give me information.
“There’s another possibility for paternity,” Tabitha finally said. “One of the clients was a voyeur. He rented a selection of cryptids and paid extra for the right to...pair them.”
Her words played over and over in my head, but for a few merciful seconds, they meant nothing. Comprehension would not come.
“No,” I said as the brutal understanding finally crashed over me, paralyzing me as surely as my collar ever had. “What thehellgives you the right to play with people’s lives like that? As if locking us up and trotting us out on display wasn’t bad enough, you sick fucks have to double down on horror and abuse, like you invented the concepts. You can’t just rent people out like toys. You can’t pair people off and make them perform for you.”
I closed my eyes, but when I tried to scrub my face with my hands, pain shot through my shoulders. I’d forgotten I was cuffed.
“I didn’t do that,” I insisted, shaking my head firmly. “Iwouldn’tdo that. Not ever.”
But I had. I could see it in their faces. I’d given up that last piece of myself because if I hadn’t, someone would have taken it.
That’s what I’d been trying to forget when I hid my own memories. It had to be.
But buried secrets have a way of digging themselves up.
Voyeur.
A selection of cryptids.
With a cruel resurgence of horror, I realized I might be the only one at the Spectacle who didn’t know.
“Who was it?” I demanded, my voice as steady as I could make it, while I stared at the floor. I wasn’t ready to hear, but I had to know.
Tabitha sighed, and I could hear her disgust in that one long breath. “It was Gallagher.”
For Immediate Release
Dr. Willem Vandekamp has been granted the world’s first patent for a hormonal suppression technique designed to prevent the metamorphosis of cryptid hybrid shifters...
—from a 2005 press release by the United States Patent and Trademark Office
Delilah
“No.” My vision swam, warping Vandekamp’s office furniture until I could have been looking into the mirror maze at the menagerie. “No. Gallagher would never sacrifice his honor like that, and I wouldn’t either. We wouldn’t... Hecouldn’t. He swore to protect...”
