Menagerie

by Rachel Vincent

  He froze halfway to the door, and my heart stilled along with him. Then slowly, Brandon turned. His eyes were red. His jaw was clenched. He looked at me as if he didn’t even know who I was.

  “How could you do this to me?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “The whole thing was a lie,” he shouted, and I flinched. “You were a lie! I trusted you. I told you everything. I ate with you and slept next to you, and the whole time you were some kind of monster, just using me as part of your human camouflage. There is no Delilah Marlow.”

  “No, that’s not true. It was all real! I didn’t know!” I took a step toward him, but Atherton grabbed my arm again, and several other deputies placed hands on the butts of their guns. “You have to believe I didn’t know.”

  “I don’t know what to believe.” Tears shone in Brandon’s eyes, but anger glowed in his cheeks. “I was in love with a woman who never even existed. I can’t believe I ever let you—” His sentence ended in an inarticulate sound of disgust, and something deep inside me cracked apart. Some delicate part of me collapsed like a demolished building, leaving only broken shapes and sharp edges.

  “Don’t blame yourself, son,” a middle-aged man called out from the waiting area. “We were all fooled in the eighties. I lost my aunt, uncle, and six cousins to those chameleon bastards, may they rot in hell.”

  Cheers erupted all around me, and suddenly my ribs felt too tight.

  “But I—I’m not one of them! I’m not—”

  “Baby killer!” a woman shouted from the waiting area.

  “Remember the reaping!” a man in regular steel cuffs shouted, though the cop who shoved him back into his chair didn’t seem to dispute the sentiment.

  A cop in his thirties stood from behind his desk and strode toward me, and I thought he was going to take over for Deputy Atherton and get me out of there—until he spit in my face.

  I blinked, stunned, as spittle dripped down my cheek.

  “Damn it, Bruce!” Atherton hauled me toward another door.

  Across the room, Brandon shoved the press-bar on the front exit and when he stepped into the parking lot, he took my last shred of hope with him. If my own boyfriend wouldn’t stand by me, who would?

  The front door closed behind Brandon, and I sniffed back tears that stung like utter rejection and humiliation. My hair fell into my face as Wayne led me into another hallway, several strands clinging to the spit on my cheek.

  Finally, Atherton closed the door behind us, shielding me from the rest of the world. Or maybe shielding it from me.

  In an interrogation room, I followed his instructions without truly hearing them. In my mind, the front door of the sheriff’s station closed over and over, and all I could see was the back of Brandon’s head.

  “Delilah,” Atherton said, and I realized he’d already said my name at least twice.

  “What?” I blinked to clear my head and looked down to find myself sitting in a cold plastic chair with my arms looped around the back. A tug against my cuffs rattled chains I had no memory of, which evidently ran between my handcuffs and a metal loop set into the ground. I couldn’t stand or even twist much in my chair without pulling my arms out of their sockets.

  Before I could ask if all of the metal was really necessary, a second deputy knelt to slap a set of iron shackles around my ankles and connect them to that same hook in the ground, behind my chair. When he stood, I tried to lean forward, but the pain in my shoulders stopped me. I tried to cross my ankles, but the shackles were in the way. I couldn’t move more than an inch in any direction, and that sudden severe confinement made my throat close. The room had plenty of open space but I couldn’t use any of it. Plenty of air, but I couldn’t seem to breathe any of it.

  “Struggling will only make it worse,” Atherton said, and while there was no malice in his voice, there was no willingness to help either. “Just try not to think about it.”

  But I couldn’t seem to manage that until the door opened, and Sheriff Pennington stepped in from the hall. He commented on my restraints with an incomprehensible grunt, then sat in the chair across a small folding table from mine.

  Pennington folded his fleshy arms on the table and studied my face. “Delilah Marlow?”

  I nodded, desperately trying not to squirm. “Am I under arrest?”

  He snorted, then swiped at his nose with the back of one hand. “No, and I wouldn’t arrest a dog for bitin’ either. I’d just put the bitch down in the interest of public safety. You won’t be charged, and you won’t be Mirandized, because you no longer have any rights, you devious piece of shit. As long as you’re under my jurisdiction, I can do whatever I want with you, and I can’t imagine your lot would improve if the feds take over.”

  His blatant threat bounced around the inside of my skull, and anger overtook my fear for the first time since I’d woken up in a jail cell. “This isn’t right, Sheriff.”

  “I deal in law, not morality.” Pennington paused for a moment, evidently to let that little cow chip of irony sink in. “What are you exactly, Delilah Marlow?”

  “I don’t know,” I repeated. He lifted one skeptical eyebrow, and I shrugged as best I could with my hands tightly bound behind me. “Look, if I knew, I’d tell you just to prove I’m not a surrogate.”

  “Unless you are a surrogate.”

  “If I were a surrogate, I’d lie. Either way, you’d have an answer. But I don’t know what I am. I didn’t know I wasn’t human until tonight.”

  “We don’t know what the surrogates were either, do we?” Pennington pulled a palm-sized notebook from his front pocket. “So that doesn’t really rule anything out for you.”

  I tried to find a more comfortable position, but the chains kept relief just out of reach. “Well, we know what they weren’t, and none of those little monsters looked anything like I did tonight.”

  “About that...” the sheriff continued, flipping open his notebook to reveal a single page of pencil scrawling. “Let’s put our heads together and come up with some possibilities that might keep you out of federal custody, shall we?”

  And finally something in his voice clued me in. Sheriff Pennington didn’t want me to be a surrogate either, because that would put me beyond his authority. The Justice Department had claimed jurisdiction over all of those cases before I was even born.

  “Here’re the facts, as they were relayed to me. One, your voice changed in depth and—” Pennington glanced at the notebook on the table in front of him “—quality. Says here it was deeper than it shoulda been, and it felt—” another glance at his notes “—large. Whatever that means. Two, your eyes changed color. Not just the irises, but the entirety of your eyeballs.” He made a vague gesture encompassing most of my face, and I shuddered at the thought. “They became white, shot through with dark veins. Does that sound about right?”

  I could only give him a painfully wrenching shrug, trying to hide the tide of horror washing over me. “I couldn’t see my own eyes.” And I’d never heard of a cryptid species which fit that description.

  “It also says here that the veins in your face became black, like dark spiderwebs beneath your skin. Do you know anything about that?”

  “No.” But I could imagine how terrifying it would have been to see. No wonder Shelley was scared. No wonder Brandon could hardly look at me. I’d spent four years studying cryptid species, yet couldn’t even identify my own. If I couldn’t understand what I’d become, how could they?

  Pennington glanced at his notebook again.

  “What about your hair? Witnesses say your hair took on a life of its own.”

  “Sheriff, I’m assuming that if you spoke to my friends, you know that I was a crypto-biology major, with an emphasis in human hybrid species. I should know what I am. But I truly have no clue. Before tonight, I didn’t even know the question n
eeded to be asked. All I know for sure at this point is that I’m no longer a bank teller.” I was no longer a driver, or a tenant, or a girlfriend, or a best friend.

  I was nothing other than the property of the state of Oklahoma.

  My eyes fell shut and I sucked in a deep breath.

  The reality—the true enormity—of my loss suddenly hit me in a way that the mere intellectual understanding of it hadn’t been able to. When the interrogation was over, they weren’t going to send me home. I had no home. I was never going to count another cash drawer or make another pot of coffee ever again, no matter what I did or said. Everything that I had ever been or done or loved was gone. Delilah Marlow no longer existed.

  No, Brandon was right. Delilah Marlow had never existed. My entire life was a delusion. A fantasy. A lie I hadn’t even known I was telling.

  The reality was pure hell.

  Pennington closed his notebook and crossed his arms on the table again, watching calmly as I fought total, devastating terror. “Before you start feeling too sorry for yourself, keep in mind that a man almost died because of you, and up at County General, they’re not sure he’ll ever regain normal brain function.”

  A bright spark of anger surged up through my fear, and I seized it. “He electrified a little girl!”

  Pennington turned to Atherton, who was stationed next to the door. “She’s talking about one of the beasts?”

  The deputy nodded and pulled his own notebook from the pocket of his khaki uniform pants. “A pubescent canis lupus lycanus. Female.” He looked up and pocketed the notebook. “A thirteen-year-old wolf bitch. The rep from Metzger’s says they have trouble with her all the time, and the customary motivational method is a low-voltage poke with a standard cattle prod.”

  “She was covered with electrical burns!” For a second, I forgot I was chained to the floor, and when I tried to stand, I nearly dislocated my shoulder. Both Pennington and Atherton reached for their guns.

  I froze. “Relax.” My pulse raced so fast the room started to look warped. “I can’t even open a jar of pickles, much less break through solid steel and iron.”

  Atherton glared at me. “Delilah, she’s not a child, she’s a wolf.” The deputy slid his gun back into its holster, but the fact that he didn’t snap it closed made me nervous. “An animal.”

  “Then why was she wearing underwear?” I demanded, and the sheriff and his deputy looked at me as if I’d lapsed into Latin. “Okay, just think about it. When we put wolves on display in a zoo—a regular zoo—we don’t put underwear on them because they aren’t self-aware enough to feel modesty or adapt to social conventions and restrictions. But Geneviève was wearing underwear, which means the menagerie understands that she’s thoroughly self-aware. And if she’s self-aware, why is it okay to put a child on display in skimpy undergarments, then shock her with a cattle prod when she doesn’t want to be seen in nothing but her underwear? You can’t have it both ways.”

  I sank back into my chair, only aware that I’d been straining against my restraints when my joints started screaming at me in protest.

  Atherton and the sheriff stared at me for a moment, obviously unsure what to say. Then Pennington dragged his chair closer to the table and scowled at me with confidence born of ignorance. “According to the law, your werewolf bitch isn’t a person. She’s a monster, and monsters are offered no protection under the law because them and their kind slaughtered more than a million innocent children during the reaping alone. Who knows how many others they’ve killed one at a time? If werewolves are self-aware, why didn’t the pack that tore that family apart up in the Ozarks last month use that self-awareness to decide not to kill innocent people?”

  “First of all, that was a pair of adlets, not a pack of werewolves, and second, self-awareness isn’t the same as a moral compass,” I argued. “I don’t believe every cryptid should be allowed to roam free, just like I don’t believe every human should be allowed to roam free. We have psychos, too. People kill their coworkers. Kids kill their classmates. Parents kill their own children. Those people are every bit as monstrous as the worst cryptid predator you can point to, yet they’re human, just like we are.”

  Atherton and Pennington stared at me, and unease churned in my stomach. “There is no we,” the deputy said, and though I’d known that for several hours by then, hearing him verbally exclude me from the rest of humanity added another layer of pain to that brutal certainty. “Delilah, you’re not human.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess you’re going to have to take a blood sample to figure out what I am, because I don’t know.”

  “Actually, we took one while you were knocked out.” The deputy glanced at my arm, which was when I noticed the small bandage in the crook of my left elbow. “They had to send it up to Tulsa. Your sample’s the lab’s number one priority, but it’ll still take several days.”

  I collapsed against the back of my chair, and my aching shoulders sagged with relief. “Then I guess we’re in for a bit of a wait.”

  The interrogation room door creaked open and we all turned as another deputy stepped into the doorway. “Mrs. Marlow’s here.”

  Sheriff Pennington stood and gave me a grim scowl. “I’m not very good at waiting, so you better hope your mama can shed some light on the subject. Otherwise, things are gonna get real bad for you, real damn fast.”

  State agencies report that more than 12,000 parents have been arrested in connection with the August 24 murders of more than 1.1 million children, and an unnamed source in the FBI tells the Boston Gazette that that figure is still rising...

  —From the front page of the Boston Gazette, August 28, 1986

  Charity

  When Charity Marlow’s phone rang at 12:04 a.m., she knew without even glancing at the caller ID that something was wrong. No one ever called in the middle of the night to say everything was fine.

  Ten minutes after she hung up the phone, Charity had dressed, brushed her hair, and brewed a pot of coffee. The deputy who knocked on her door declined a travel cup, so she made him wait while she fixed one for herself because “questioning” sounded like the kind of ordeal that would require coherence on her part.

  Coherence was the very least of what Charity Marlow owed her daughter, but it was all she had left to give.

  On the way to the sheriff’s station, she sat in the passenger’s seat of the patrol car and sipped quietly from her cup, and not once during the drive across town did she ask why Delilah was in custody. Charity had been both waiting for and dreading that night’s phone call for nearly twenty-five years.

  At the station, in a small room equipped with bright lights and cheap chairs, she sat across a small scarred table from Matthew Pennington, who’d held the title of sheriff for the past twelve years in spite of her consistent vote for whoever ran against him. Two armed deputies were stationed at the door, one on each side, and Charity saw no reason to pretend she didn’t understand their presence.

  “I suppose you want a blood test,” she said before the sheriff could even open his mouth.

  He nodded, but she read irritation in the stiff line of his jaw. Pennington liked to run the show. “We’ve got a phlebotomist from County General waiting for that very thing. Of course, you’d be saving us all a lot of time if you could just tell us what you and your daughter are.”

  Charity set her travel cup on the table. “Sheriff, if I weren’t human, I wouldn’t exactly feel inspired to bare my soul to you and your gun-toting hee-haws.” She tossed a glance at the deputies beside the door, both of whom scowled at her. “But I am human, and your lab should be able to confirm that with little more than a microscope. And since you clearly know otherwise about Delilah... Well, I’d be just as interested as you are in what the lab has to say about her blood sample.”

  Pennington leaned back and crossed thick arms over the brown button-up shi
rt stretched tight across his soft chest. “You’re telling me you don’t know what species your own daughter is?”

  Charity nodded. “In fact, considering that you have her in custody, I’d guess you know more about her genetic origin than I do.”

  “Well, you’d be wrong there.” Frustration deepened the sheriff’s voice even beyond the chain-smoker range. “I have her medical records. The blood test they ran at birth says she’s human.”

  Charity nodded again, but made no comment.

  “According to her record, she hasn’t had blood drawn since the day she was born.”

  “I believe that’s accurate.”

  “She’s never been sick?” Pennington leaned forward, arms folded over the table, and Charity winced at the acrid bite of cigarette smoke clinging to his uniform. “Not once in twenty-five years?”

  “Every child gets sick at some point, Sheriff. But Delilah never had anything I couldn’t treat myself.”

  “Because you’re an RN.”

  Charity sat a little straighter in her hard plastic chair. “Actually, I’m a nurse practitioner.”

  “That’s right,” the sheriff said, but she saw right through his sudden recollection of her employment history. “You finished your MSN when Delilah was three. Was that so that you could legally treat her yourself?”

  “In fact, it was. And as her primary medical caregiver, I found no reason to run further blood tests on a perfectly healthy child.” Charity looked right into the sheriff’s eyes. “But I would be willing to tell you what I do know, if you’ll go first.”

  The sheriff’s flustered flush was so bright that one of the deputies stepped forward to see if he was okay. Pennington waved the unspoken question off and glared at the woman seated across the table.

  “What we know, Mrs. Marlow, is that your daughter got worked up during a tour of the menagerie this evening and turned into the kind of creature that should have been lookin’ outta one of those cages, instead of looking into ’em. She grabbed a carny by the head and sank her fingers into his skull, and when she finally released him, he turned his livestock prod up as far as it would go and rammed it into his own leg.”