So again we fed the animals, and this time we refilled several empty water containers. Then we moved on through a room full of young naga and cockatrices and other winged and scaled beasts, including a rare and sickly phoenix, whose feathers had begun to fall out and gather on the floor of her cage.
Thefuriaeraged within me as I watched the poor phoenix cowering in one corner of her pen with her beak tucked beneath one wing. Despite my discomfort with her recent activities, thefuriaeand I agreed about what should happen to whoever’d put the poor, defenseless bird in a cage.
Having searched all the rooms in the first half of the hallway, our group turned right at the corner while Eryx and Claudio turned left. And while Gallagher forced an extratough lock on a metal door, on the right side of the second hallway, my focus snagged on the door across from it.
This door was also metal, and I could see nothing noteworthy about it. Yet I found myself walking toward it, even after Gallagher managed to get the other door open.
I twisted the knob, and to my surprise, it turned easily. Still unsure what I was doing, or why, I opened the unlocked door and stepped inside.
“You guys!” Zyanya’s footsteps pounded past me in the hallway, headed toward Eryx and Claudio, but instead of turning back, I stepped forward. All on its own, my hand reached out and flipped a set of three switches to the left of the door.
Fixtures flickered overhead, then bathed the windowless room in a cold, white light.
This room was smaller than the others. It held only two cages, both of them large and bolted to the far wall. One of the cages was empty.
The other held a man, human, as far as I could tell. He sat on the floor of his six-foot-tall pen with his knees tucked up to his chest, a posture I’d only ever seen grown men assume when they had no other way to cover themselves. And, in fact, the man was completely naked—except for a familiar, smooth metal collar around his neck.
Shock washed over me at the sight of that collar. It was one of Willem Vandekamp’s, personally designed by the now-deceased owner of the Savage Spectacle. When I’d worn one, the collars had been in the testing phase, not yet approved by the government for commercial distribution, and now that congress had officially failed to pass the law that would have allowed wider use, the collars neverwouldsee distribution.
A rare and limited victory for cryptid-kind.
The only people who’d ever worn those collars were my fellow former captives at the Spectacle. I did not recognize the man in the cage, but he must have been a Spectacle prisoner.
A sudden tugging sensation pulled me closer to the cage, and the familiarity of the urge sent a chill racing over my arms. Thefuriaewanted this man.
She’d never sent me after a cryptid before, but if this man was wearing one of Vandekamp’s collars and being held in a cryptid research lab, hehadto be cryptid, no matter how human he looked. Right?
Though my own fugitive existence seemed to suggest that there were a few rare exceptions to that rule.
Through the open door at my back, I heard more hurried footsteps, followed by the crack of tiles breaking beneath Eryx’s powerful, lumbering gait. I should rejoin Gallagher and the others.
Yet something pulled me toward the man in the cage.
His eyes widened as I came closer. He pushed himself to his feet, heedless of his own nudity, and gripped the mesh front of the cage as he frantically studied my face. Without even glancing at my stomach. “Who are you?” he demanded, his voice riding the thin line between fascination and fear.
My right arm started to rise, my hand open, fingers grasping for him. But I clenched my jaw, resisting the terrible, familiar urge, and thefuriaelet me force my hand back to my side. She wanted to kill this man, and even if I were sure he deserved that, I couldn’t reach through the side of a wire mesh cage.
“Who areyou?” I asked through clenched teeth as I physically resisted another inexplicable homicidal urge. “Are you human? Were you at the Savage Spectacle?”
His gaze stayed glued to mine. Searching it. “I don’t know what that is. Do I know you?”
“Where did you get that collar?” My fingers twitched, and I wrapped them around a handful of my jeans to keep from reaching for him again, for all the good that would do. “Those were only used at the Spectacle.”
“What are you?” The man’s fevered gaze roamed over me, his brows drawn low, as if he were trying to remember where he’d seen me before.
“Where...did you get...that collar?” I spoke each word slowly. Carefully. Pointedly.
The man blinked, clearly trying to focus on my question. “I was locked up. In a...?” The word seemed to elude him.
“A collection?” I asked. “A menagerie? A lab?”
He shook his head and a strand of brown hair fell over his smooth, unlined forehead. “A...government facility. Sometimes they ran tests, but it wasn’t really a lab.”
My gaze fell to his neck. “And they used these collars at that facility?”
“Not at first. But a couple of years ago I woke up wearing one. We all did. They stopped locking the doors and cages, but that didn’t matter, because we couldn’t go anywhere they didn’t want us to be without being paralyzed by pain. Or actually paralyzed.”
I nodded. “There are needles at the back of the collar that stick into your spinal column. They register the production of hormones in your system and trigger either pain or paralyzation to make you do whatever the person with the controller wants. Or stop you from doing whatever they don’t want.”
