Menagerie

by Rachel Vincent

  “Mr. Ruyle?” Abraxas called in as loud a whisper as he could manage. “You gotta come now. Something’s wrong!”

  Footsteps echoed from within the camper, and the boy heard a scraping sound as Ruyle flipped the latch. He swung the door open, and Abraxas barged inside, then slammed the thin door at his back. “What’s—”

  “Some of the beasts got loose.” His chest heaving with each breath, the boy peeked through the dusty curtains over the grimy sink. “They were in the hybrid tent, no chains or nothin’, just walking around and talking to each other!”

  “Fuck!” Ruyle pulled on a pair of boots without socks, then clipped his key ring to his belt. “Let’s go get Gallagher. Stupid brute doesn’t have a phone.”

  “I tried him first.” Abraxas turned and peeked through a window on the other side of the small room, completely missing Ruyle’s irritated glance at the admission. “He’s not in his camper. I can’t find Freddie either, and Clyde’s still gone. We gotta do something! Do you have a tranq rifle?”

  Ruyle shook his head and unlocked the door. “They’re in a crate—at the back of the hybrid tent.”

  “We might be able to get to them,” Abraxas whispered, following the lot supervisor quietly down the steps and onto the gravel lot. “The beasts chased me when I ran out, so they may not be in the tent anymore.”

  “How many were there?” Ruyle stepped carefully, to keep his boots from crunching on loose rocks, and the boy tried to follow his example. “What kinds?”

  “Three, that I saw. That new female we picked up a couple of weeks ago—”

  “I hate that bitch,” the supervisor mumbled.

  “—and one of the dolphin shifters. And the minotaur.”

  Ruyle cursed beneath his breath. “It’ll take several darts to bring the bull down. Come on.”

  “Should we wake someone else up?”

  “They’d only be in the way,” the supervisor said as they stepped out of the lot and onto grass, and he seemed to breathe easier now that every footstep didn’t call attention to them. “The only men as qualified as me to bring down the minotaur are Clyde and Gallagher. It’ll probably take half a dozen of us to move him once he’s out.”

  “This ever happened before?” Abraxas asked, adrenaline firing through his veins, and Ruyle snorted.

  “A centaur broke his lead rope once and made it a couple hundred yards before I dropped him with a hunting rifle. But we never had one break out of his cage, much less three at once. They had to’ve had some help. Someone’s head’s gonna roll.”

  “Any guess who?” Abraxas asked, and Ruyle eyed the boy in the moonlight as they passed through the menagerie’s rear entrance.

  “How old are you, kid? Eighteen?”

  The boy followed his supervisor between two tents and past a bank of portable toilets. “Nineteen in a couple’a weeks, sir.”

  “And how long you been with us now?” Ruyle whispered, rolling his feet on the paved midway to mute his footsteps.

  “Three months.” Something moved in the gloom to his left, and Abraxas jumped, but when he stared into the darkness, he found only shadows.

  “Welcome to the trenches, kid. You ever shot a tranq rifle?”

  “I shot my dad’s Winchester .38,” the boy whispered, as they approached the hybrid tent.

  “I guess that’s close enough.” Ruyle put one finger to his lips and aimed an exaggerated wide-eyed look at Abraxas, who nodded. Then the handler pushed open the loose canvas panel and stepped into the tent.

  Abraxas followed him in, then immediately stepped to the right of the entrance, his pulse swooshing in his ears.

  “What the— Mr. Metzger?” Ruyle frowned and glanced around the tent, but Abraxas could tell he wasn’t seeing the red ring in the middle, or the striped canvas sidewalls, or Delilah Marlow’s circus wagon. Nor was he seeing Renata, the smooth-skinned dolphin shifter, who calmly told him to have a seat and remove his key ring from his belt.

  “Did you have any trouble?” Delilah whispered from the shadows to his right, and Abraxas shook his head, grinning, and crossed his arms over his thin chest.

  “Worked like a charm,” he said, as the lot supervisor sat in a folding chair near the middle of the tent, as if he could neither see nor hear them. “This was really your idea?” That’s what Gallagher had told him, when he’d chased the boy down and offered him a choice.

  Delilah nodded.

  “How many is this?”

  “Ruyle’s the fifth, but he’s a special case,” she said. “We still have a long way to go, and it’ll get trickier once the first few start leaving.”

  The minotaur snorted, towering over them both from her other side, and Abraxas laughed softly. “Eryx thinks you’ve got it in the bag. I agree.” He reached in front of Delilah to extend his fist toward the minotaur, who only stared at it, brows drawn low. “You have to make a fist and bump mine,” Abraxas whispered. “For solidarity.”

  “Like this.” Delilah returned the fist bump in demonstration.

  When Eryx gave it a try, he knocked the boy back by several steps.

  Abraxas chuckled softly and rubbed his knuckles. “I just fist-bumped a minotaur.”

  Eryx snorted, and Delilah grinned. “Well, I hope you’re both right, and the rest of them go this smoothly.”

  “So, everyone will think they were fired?” the boy asked, watching as Ruyle approached the empty circus wagon under the mistaken impression that the opening was an air conditioner vent in need of repair.

  “The ones I don’t hate will think they quit, and Ruyle here is headed somewhere special, but yeah, that’s the general idea,” Delilah said. “No bodies. No questions from the authorities or from worried relatives.”

  “Hey!” Abraxas called as Ruyle gripped the side of the cage, preparing to climb into it. The supervisor’s eyes widened in surprise; he’d obviously forgotten all about the boy. “If I say something to him, will he remember later?”

  “Not if you don’t want him to,” Renata said.

  “I want him to.” Abraxas crossed the sawdust-strewn ground toward the handler, and Ruyle’s expression grew more confused with every step the boy took. “Remember that Winchester .38 I told you about?”

  The supervisor nodded hesitantly, his eyes half-focused.

  “I fired it at the hunter chasing my cousin Thea into the woods, to keep him from selling her at auction. She was half-dryad on her dad’s side. Thea got away, and I’ve been trying to find her and bring her home ever since.” Abraxas pulled himself up to his full—if slight—height and punched the handler in the face. Ruyle stumbled backward and hit his spine on the cage.

  Renata calmly told the former supervisor to climb into the vent and begin his repairs and when Ruyle had obeyed, Abraxas slammed the door shut and locked it. “The bastard who tried to take my cousin died facedown in the dirt. Ask me, you’re getting off easy.”

  Delilah

  It took us three hours to convince all the handlers and performers that they had been fired or had quit jobs they were no longer satisfied with, and it would have taken a lot longer than that without Abraxas’s help. Once Raul and Renata really got into the swing of it, they were able to convince about half of their victims to leave their campers in the possession of the menagerie and hitch a ride home with a friend, which left us with more vehicles than we had people qualified to drive them.

  By the time we started firing the miscellaneous staff, at about four-thirty in the morning, Raul, Renata, Eryx, Abraxas, Gallagher, and I were running on nothing but adrenaline and the thrill of tentative success. About a third of the trucks and campers had left the campgrounds, carrying two-thirds of the employees we’d already dealt with, and all of wagon row was awake and wide-eyed, buzzing with rumors of the staff exodus.

  When Gallagher had escor
ted the petting zoo “nannies” to the hybrid tent to convince them both that they’d quit, Eryx hauled the children one cage at a time toward wagon row, where I used Gallagher’s keys to reunite parents with children.

  Zyanya cried when she saw her twins. “You did it!” she whispered, clutching the side of her cage while I unlocked it. “I can’t believe you did it.” Yet fear echoed in her voice and was evident in her grip on the metal wire. As excited as she was, she expected our coup to fail and dreaded the price we would pay.

  “It’s not over yet,” I admitted. “But as soon as we’re rid of the staff, we’ll let you all out. In the meantime, I thought you’d like some company while you wait.”

  I lifted both squirmy toddlers into their mother’s cage, and when she scooped up her excited, mewling, human-form kittens, my vision blurred beneath tears of my own. Even Eryx sniffled. I gave them two packs of hot dogs and three bottles of water from Clyde’s refrigerator, then left them to their reunion.

  While Zyanya coddled and examined her kittens, checking every inch of their tiny bodies for marks or injuries, speaking to them in hushed, tender tones, I opened the next wagon. Claudio looked up when I set some scavenged clothes and a pair of shoes on the pressed aluminum cage floor, along with a backpack full of food and water, and a pair of dark sunglasses. “Go get your daughter,” I said.

  Claudio ran his hand over the blue tee, and his eyes watered.

  “You can throw them in the backpack, if you want to go after her in wolf form. It has a strap here that’ll fasten around your stomach.” I demonstrated clicking the fasteners together. “You should be able to run with it on—”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “I’ve never worn such a shirt. Or such a color. I’ve never carried...possessions.”

  I smiled. “Welcome to emancipation. New clothes for everyone.”

  “Enjoy it, for however long it lasts,” Zyanya said, and when I leaned back to scowl at her, she shrugged, a quiet child cradled in each arm, their pudgy little hands clutching possessively at their mother’s dress, as if they were afraid to let her go. “You know it’s true. They’ll catch him. Or they’ll kill him. They’ll probably kill all of us when we’re caught, to make an example.” She nudged one of the packets of hot dogs, which she couldn’t open with her hands full of toddler. “Your heart’s in the right place, but you’ve just served our last meal.”

  “That’s not true,” I insisted as Claudio began to pull on the new clothes with a shifter’s typical immodesty. “You all have passage over the border and guaranteed citizenship in the merid sultanate. We’ll reach the border tomorrow. No more cages. No chains. No late-night visits in exchange for food. You and your kids are going to be free, Zyanya. For good.”

  Her laugh was harsh and bitter, and I instinctively recoiled from the sound. “You don’t get it, do you? These aren’t my only children, Delilah,” she said, and it took a moment before a brutal understanding crashed over me. “Two more were sold off years ago, separately. I can’t leave them here to suffer any more than Claudio can leave Genni. Half of wagon row will refuse to cross the border for the same reason.”

  “But what about these children?” I demanded, gesturing to the curly-headed toddlers. Surely she wouldn’t condemn them to captivity just because the older ones were locked up.

  “If they truly have passage, I’ll send them over the border with Payat.”

  Her brother grunted in consent from the cage on her other side.

  I could only stare at her, frustrated almost beyond words by how much I’d failed to consider. How little I’d seen of the larger picture. Still, there was only so much even a furiae could do, and she might not get another chance at freedom. “Zyanya, if you stay here, they’ll catch you eventually.”

  “I know. Claudio knows it, too.” She carefully laid her mewling twins side by side on her blanket, then crawled closer to the side of her cage and lowered her voice. “But how could either of us live in peace while our children are suffering?” Her orangish gaze pinned me from a foot away, as light from the parking lot shone on her dark skin, and despite the differences in their ages and appearances, something in Zyanya’s expression reminded me of my mom.

  My mother would move heaven and earth if she thought it would help me, and Zyanya would do the same for her children.

  “Okay. Maybe we can wait another day or two,” I said as a new idea began to form. “Do you know where your other kids are? Maybe we could buy them back in Metzger’s name before we cross.” I turned back to Claudio, who was trying to figure out how to tie his new boots. “We could do the same for Genni. Gallagher knows who bought her.”

  “What about my daughter?” one of the succubi demanded from farther down the row.

  “And my son,” the berserker added.

  “Our parents,” Lala called from the oracles’ cage.

  “And my mother and my little sister,” Lenore said. “We were separated when we were exposed. I can’t leave the country without them.”

  Calls rang out from the full length of wagon row, and the demands were overwhelming. My heart thumped too hard and my throat felt tight. I hadn’t understood the breadth of the problem. The scale of their suffering.

  I’d never felt like such a fool in my life.

  “Did you really think it would be that easy?” Zyanya demanded softly, with one look at my stricken face. “Did you honestly think you could spend two weeks in our shoes, then swoop in and solve all our problems?”

  “I...” Is that what I’d thought? Had I truly been that naive?

  “I get that you want to fix this, Delilah,” Zyanya said, as she pulled open one of the hot dog packets. “It’s in your nature. But this isn’t the kind of thing that can be fixed by making a couple of men claw their own privates off.” She took a bite from the first stick of beef. “You’re in way over your head, furiae.”

  * * *

  “We can’t go,” I said, before the bathroom door could even swing shut behind Gallagher. I’d dragged him into the nearest building I could find, and only realized it was a men’s room when I noticed the urinals.

  “We can’t go where?” But his deeply furrowed forehead told me he knew exactly what I was talking about.

  “Gallagher, they won’t cross the border with us. They all have family members who were sold off, and I can’t leave knowing they’re all going to be recaptured or killed just for trying to save their kids. Or their parents. Or their siblings.”

  “So, what, we get captured along with them?” he demanded. “How will that help?”

  “We won’t get captured. We’ve taken the menagerie, and no one knows! Don’t you get it? Metzger’s can travel all over the country, and as long as it looks like we’re keeping cryptids in cages, no one will know any different. We could buy back their relatives as we go, then just drive the whole caravan back to Mexico. We might even be able to pick up a few strays, like you guys picked me up. We’d be saving lives, Gallagher. That’s making a difference.”

  “Delilah, that’s a beautiful thought, but—”

  “Don’t patronize me!” I snapped, anger sizzling beneath my skin.

  His gaze hardened. “I’m not patronizing you. I’m telling you it won’t work. Metzger’s is broke. Maybe we could get Genni back. We haven’t been paid for her yet. But then we’d only be able to buy one or two more—assuming we can find them—before the funds are exhausted. And that’s if we don’t spend anything on food or fuel, which is well beyond the bounds of practicality.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and stared up at him in the fluorescent glow from overhead. “Isn’t the menagerie a business? Won’t people pay to come see us?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Wouldn’t that be the most satisfying irony ever?” I demanded. “Using the money we take from human audiences to buy freedom for cryptids?”
r />   He nodded. “There is a certain poetic ring to it, but are you sure they’d want to perform?”

  “I think that’s a question worth asking.” I shrugged. “We’d only have to use the cages for performances, and we could change the show. Cut out anything demeaning or cruel. We could be showing off, instead of being exploited. We could show people how much beauty there really is in the cryptid world!”

  Gallagher’s resistance was starting to weaken. “Okay, I’m not saying it’s not possible, for a little while anyway,” he said. “But, Delilah, you said it yourself—the menagerie is a business. There are fees, and inspections, and bookkeeping, and advertisement. The administrative aspects never end, and we’ve just fired everyone who knows about that stuff.”

  “We haven’t fired everyone yet. We know Abraxas will stay—he’s looking for his cousin. And there’s Alyrose.”

  “She won’t—”

  “She might,” I insisted, leaning against one of the grimy gray toilet stalls.

  “She’d be risking jail time if we’re caught.”

  “We’re risking a hell of a lot more than that. I’m going to ask her.”

  “Delilah.” Gallagher put a hand on each of my shoulders. “If this is what you want to do, I’m with you. I always will be. But I want you to think about this for a minute. You’re less than a day away from absolute freedom. No running. No hiding. No chains. Are you willing to give that up for a chance—a very slim chance—that we can find a handful of cryptids spread out all over the country?”

  “Am I willing to risk my own freedom for the chance to give that same thing to several dozen others?” I stared up at him. “Gallagher, that’s the only thing I’m willing to risk my freedom for.”

  * * *

  I sneaked Renata through the thickest shadows to Alyrose’s trailer, where Abraxas had promised to meet me with Kevin—the last of the handlers—in tow. The costume mistress answered her door in a blue satin robe, her normally spiky purple hair hanging limp around her ears. Her sleep-puffy eyes widened when she recognized me. “What the—”