by Kat Falls
A movement behind the crosshatched steel wire caught my eye. I angled closer and spotted a woman off to one side, sitting on her haunches on a pile of furs. She was a tawny creature — skin the color of burnt caramel glinting under a light dusting of gold fur. Her dark hair streamed down her back in wild waves. Infected with lion maybe? As I approached the enclosure, she stood — faster than any normal human could have moved — and I skittered back. She tilted her head, studying me with golden eyes.
“Um, hi,” I said. Her brows quirked as if I amused her. “Can you understand me?”
“Of course.” The corners of her split upper lip lifted. “English is my first language. But if you prefer to converse in French or German, I’m fluent in those as well.”
“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I thought — Never mind.”
“You’re not feral.” Rafe pressed closer, voicing what I had avoided saying.
“No, but the day we get loose” — she eyed the handlers with simmering rage — “feral won’t even begin to describe us.”
“We?” I asked, and as if on cue three more curvaceous forms slipped out of the shadows. At one point their gowns had been elegant but now the skirts hung in frayed strips.
“I am Mahari,” the first lion-woman said and then cast a hand at the others. “Charmaine, Deepnita, and Neve.”
They sauntered forward, elongated fangs protruding from their feline lips. The lion DNA had added muscle to their frames and a catlike grace to their movements, making them breathtakingly beautiful and utterly terrifying.
I cut a look at Rafe but his attention was wholly focused on Mahari’s ample curves. Heat flashed through me. Because he was ogling her? Like I cared!
“And you are … ?” Mahari prompted.
“Lane and Rafe.” My voice came out higher than usual.
“She would make a nice addition,” Deepnita said, directing her amber gaze at me. With her dark, spiked hair and leonine features, she had a tough glamour to her.
“Think so?” Mahari laughed softly, her tongue lolling toward the back of her mouth. She leaned into the steel wire, her nostrils flaring as she took in my scent. “She seems more rabbit to me.”
“What? No,” I sputtered. Maybe when I’d first arrived in the Feral Zone. But not now.
Rafe guffawed and I glared him down to a smirk. Maybe I wasn’t a lion, but rabbit? Not even a little.
“Handlers,” hissed Charmaine, before retreating into the far corner. She crouched in the shadows with her wild curls curtaining her face. Only her luminous eyes and low, steady growl gave her away.
Two handlers approached the enclosure, dragging a fire hose. “Bath time, girls,” one announced with a leer. He turned the nozzle and aimed the jet of water through the fencing so that it slammed Mahari across the cage.
Rafe and I scrambled back as the handler chortled and turned the hose on the other lion-women. Deepnita roared like an enraged jungle cat as the spray knocked them to the floor. Neve rolled onto her stomach and struggled to rise in her soaked gown, but the handlers pinned her to the concrete with the blasting water and laughed themselves sick.
I ground my teeth to keep from shrieking at the sadists. No matter how dangerous these lion-women were, in that moment I would have thrown open the cage door if I had the key.
Rafe stepped between me and the wire wall of their enclosure. “We can’t help them.”
Help them? I wanted to see them tear these men apart. “My hands are tied. I can’t do anything.”
“Yeah, but you’re thinking it.”
True. I knew now not to set free a trapped feral — or a murderous tiger-man. But these women were sane. They might have years left before turning feral. They shouldn’t have to spend those years in a cage.
Rafe watched my face as if he could see the thoughts tumbling in my brain. “Figure out how to get us free and then worry about Cosmo and your silky.”
He was right. I’d already failed my dad. I couldn’t let them down too. My gaze fell on Neve, the youngest of the lionesses, wet and panting. My resolve faltered. Wasn’t there a way to do both? Escape and help these women?
Handlers surrounded us. When one raised his knife, I panicked. But he simply used it to cut the ties that bound our wrists. “Queen Sindee demands your presence in the throne room,” he announced.
Did he have any idea how absurd that sounded? Probably not, since he was too young to know what life was like before the country had divided.
The circle of handlers moved, and we had to move with them or be trampled.
We were marched through the brass doors and into the entry hall, which was three stories tall and dominated by an immense staircase. Despite the fact that I was a hostage, the castle’s white marble interior took my breath away. I hardly noticed the handlers who stood at attention on the landing as we climbed the stairs. We were ushered through an archway and into a room topped with a dome made of iridescent glass. A mosaic. “What was this place?” I asked in an awed whisper.
“The Chicago Cultural Center,” said a sultry voice from behind us.
We turned to face a woman tottering on impossibly high heels, swinging an ivory-headed cane. Her black hair had been teased into a stack — No, wait…. That wasn’t hair; it was a fur turban, which really wasn’t any stranger than her frayed evening gown and floor-length cape of blue leather. But even in odd clothes, she was very beautiful.
“So, you’re hunters,” she drawled, but within a heartbeat, her lowered lip plumped with displeasure. “Omar, they’re not kneeling. Why aren’t they kneeling, Omar?”
We stared at her, dumbfounded.
“Well, Queen Sindee,” Omar said with feigned patience, “perhaps they don’t realize —”
“I don’t care what they realize. I won’t be insulted in my own castle. Not by anyone.” She jabbed her cane at us. “Feed them to the hyboars.”
Rafe and I dropped in unison, wincing as our knees hit the hard marble. The queen sniffed. “Better.” With a flip of her blue cape, she faced Omar. “I want them for the court.”
It was like we’d dropped down Alice’s rabbit hole. How were we going to get out of this place?
“We don’t even know if they’re healthy,” Omar ground out.
She gave an impatient wave. “Then test them.”
With deliberate slowness, Omar took a silver cigarette case from the inside pocket of his coat. He snapped open the case and extracted two plastic sticks. He then beckoned two handlers forward and handed each a white stick. “Open wide,” he told us.
“Why?” Rafe looked as if he might throw a punch.
“It’s a Ferae test,” I told him. “He’s going to rub it under your tongue.”
The plastic stick was coated with a chemical biosensor. It wasn’t nearly as accurate as a blood test, but a trace of the virus in saliva would turn the stick bloodred.
Reluctantly Rafe opened his mouth and allowed the handler to rub the stick under his tongue. I was more cooperative, and within a minute both of our sticks had brightened to electric blue — meaning we were virus-free.
I inhaled deeply. A saliva test wasn’t infallible, but all the same, I felt lighter. I still couldn’t believe that I’d escaped Chorda unscathed.
When the handlers held up our blue sticks, Omar turned smug. “Good thing we didn’t let the hyboars have them, hm?”
The queen shot him an evil look as she fingered the blue stick that hung on a chain around her neck. I saw that Omar and the handlers wore their Ferae tests as well — like dog tags. The blond handler gave us each a thin cord to thread through the ends of our sticks. “Keep your health status on display at all times,” he told us. “By the king’s order.”
Rafe snorted softly but he tied off the cord and dropped it over his head. “Can we get up now?”
The handler looked to Omar, who glanced at the queen, who waved us to our feet.
“You took the last interloper,” she said to Omar. “These two are mine.”
“How about a compromise? You take the girl.” Omar eyed Rafe. “He has potential.”
“You have enough handlers, and I am bored with everyone in court. They are all boooring.” She stretched the word until it snapped. “Anyway, look at them.” She jabbed a bejeweled finger at us. “They’re a couple.” She turned to us for confirmation. “Isn’t that right?”
I gave a quick nod, slipped my hand into Rafe’s, and felt his pounding pulse between his fingers. He was a good actor. Here, I’d been thinking that he was actually calm.
“They’ll uncouple easily enough,” Omar said dryly.
“You’re wrong.” Rafe met the man’s one-eyed gaze head-on.
My heart slowed. What was he doing?
Omar snorted. “You’ll forget her in a week.”
“Not a chance. I’ve loved her since I was ten, long before we even met.”
The queen angled closer. “You can’t love someone you don’t know.”
“I did know her.” All of his facile charm fell away, leaving Rafe sounding raw. “Through stories. Her dad likes to brag because he’s so proud of her.”
My vision blurred as my longing for my dad throbbed to life once more.
“I hung on every word,” Rafe continued, without so much as a glance at me. “Because if there really was a little girl who went out every day, looking for stray animals to save, I figured that someday she would find me. And she did.”
I nearly dropped his hand I was so shocked. Luckily, he tightened his hold on mine. “So if you try to take her from me,” Rafe went on lightly, though his eyes had a dangerous gleam, “I will stick a steel knife in your happily-ever-after and gouge out its guts.”
A stunned silence fell over the group.
“Well,” said the queen, breaking the tension, “you’re certainly not boring.” She turned to Omar. “Don’t even think about hauling him off to the zoo to live with handlers.”
“Of course not,” Omar said acidly. “That would leave the girl unattached. And why risk adding a single female to the court? Especially one so young. She might catch the king’s eye….”
A guttural noise burst from the queen’s throat and her hands clenched as if they were around his neck. Omar pretended not to notice. “If you’ll excuse me, I have an initiation test to oversee.” He strode away with his handlers in tow. On their way out of the throne room, they passed a collared manimal pulling a drag sled piled with art and furniture.
The manimal, who had scaly green-gray skin, halted under the dome and bowed low. The queen lurched forward to pluck a painting off the top of the pile. “Hideous!” She struck the cringing manimal with the painting before flinging it across the floor. “Any human can see that’s not art.”
I bit my lip as the Jackson Pollock skidded to a stop against the far wall. My father would be having a heart attack about now.
“I’ll take care of it, my queen.” A servant appeared in the archway, wearing a spotless white suit and leather collar. When he bent low, his ears, which stuck out from the sides of his head, flopped forward. He picked up the painting with much more care than the queen had shown. His ginger hair failed to disguise the two thick horns that curled from the sides of his head.
“Burn it, Dromo,” she ordered in a scratchy voice as if she were holding back a sob. “We don’t need any more trash cluttering up the place.”
“Of course.” He beckoned the scaly servant to him and whispered quick instructions as he handed over the painting, meticulously touching only the frame.
I had a feeling that he hadn’t told the servant to burn the Pollock. He might be part ram, but I’d be willing to bet he knew something about art.
Queen Sindee tore off the fur turban to reveal coiled auburn hair. She collapsed onto a chaise and pressed her fingers to her temples. “He wouldn’t dare talk to me like that if the king was here.”
Dromo clattered across the marble floor on hoofed feet and lowered himself to one knee beside her. “Omar is an old, ugly man inside and out. His handlers hate him.”
She perked up at that. “Do they really?”
“I hate him,” Rafe piped in.
Dromo took our inventory with one head-to-toe glance.
“They’re joining the court,” the queen told him. “They’re all human.”
From the slight curl of his lip, I guessed that it required more than a blue test stick to impress Dromo. “My queen,” he said, “as impeccably human as they may be, they’re filthy.”
I resisted the urge to shove my filthy hands into my filthier pockets.
“So make them presentable,” she said wearily and fell back on the chaise with an arm flung over her eyes.
“Of course.” There was the barest lift to Dromo’s brows. “Should I assign them rooms?”
“One room,” she corrected without raising her arm.
The ram-man got to his feet and waved us toward the archway. I stole once last glance at the miserable queen. Just as I felt a stab of pity for her, she bolted upright. “Dromo,” she called, her voice suddenly harsh.
The ram-man turned back. “Yes, my queen?”
“Not too presentable,” she said, directing a red-tipped nail at me.
The room that Dromo assigned us was as beautiful as the rest of the building. The recessed panels in the ceiling were decorated with gilded suns, as was the huge four-poster canopy bed. As lovely as the room was, something terrible had happened in here. Dried blood splatter-painted the far wall, highlighting the bullet holes. I wondered just how long ago those bullet holes had been made. During the exodus or more recently?
“I’ll be back in a minute with clothes for you,” Dromo said. “Don’t touch anything. In fact, don’t move.”
The moment the ram-man left the room, I heard a ferocious bellow down in the yard. I drew back the curtain and saw the feral stalking as far as his chain would allow. He threw his head back and howled. I recoiled at the sound and half expected him to pound his chest with his fists. At least the handlers had quit torturing him.
Right now, people in the West were having civilized conversations. They were ordering dinner and sending in their homework. No one was worrying about how to escape a king who kept severed manimal heads on spikes.
Rafe opened the bedroom door once he thought Dromo was out of earshot. Two handlers stood in the hall outside our room. “Where do you think you’re going?” one demanded.
“We wanted to look around the castle,” Rafe said. “Check out the —”
The handler jerked the door shut.
“How are we going to get out of here?” I whispered.
“I’m working on it,” Rafe replied and flopped onto the bed.
I didn’t want to make myself presentable, but when Dromo came back with a tux for Rafe, he laid out my options. “Either you bathe yourself or the queen will order the handlers to help you.” Having seen how the handlers had “helped” the lion-women get clean, I slipped into the old-fashioned bathroom without another word.
I was surprised that the light switch worked. How had they kept the electricity on? I left the filthy brown uniform in a pile on the floor and turned on the shower full blast. The water shot out rusty orange. While I waited for it to run clear, I unwrapped the bandage on my calf. The three long wounds were crusted with blood and the skin enflamed but not infected, and Everson’s stitches were intact. I eased my sore body under the spray, saving my calf for last. When I dug my fingers into my dirt-matted hair, a blade of pain stabbed my forehead where Chorda had punched me. I stopped all movement until it had ebbed to a manageable level, and then turned the water hotter.
How were we going to get out of this compound? And what was the point anyway? I’d failed Director Spurling, and now she’d execute my dad if he ever set foot in the West. So maybe Dad and I would stay in the East. Live in Moline. I’d sign up for work duty and live in terror of Chorda for the rest of my life….
My skin was an angry red and steam had filled the bathroom but I continued to scrub my body
, then rinse, then scrub some more, hard enough to make the scratches on my arms bleed. Too bad I couldn’t peel off my flesh and sponge down to the bone. Maybe then I’d feel clean of Chorda’s touch. I jumped back when the water turned icy. At least I’d rinsed off first.
After wrapping my hair in a towel, I eyed my lump of muddy, sweat-soaked clothes and couldn’t even bring myself to pick them up. I put on the white robe that hung on the back of the door and stepped into the bedroom.
At Rafe’s startled look, I realized just how short the robe was. Worse, the silk was clinging to my wet skin. I braced myself for the lewd remark that was sure to come.
“Oh, come on,” he said, sounding dismayed, not lecherous. “Do not make my life this hard.”
“What?”
He shot me an exasperated look. “You’re Mack’s daughter. You don’t get to have a body.”
For the first time since coming to Chicago, I felt a smile pulling at the corners of my mouth. “I don’t?”
“No, you’re a head. A floating head. And sometimes not even that. Unless you want me to be the jerk who’s just after one thing.”
“I can be a floating head,” I said quickly. “But … you are the jerk who offered to take me to Moline if I shared your sleeping bag.”
“That doesn’t count,” he sputtered. “I didn’t know who you were. I —” He paused brow crinkling. “Hey, listen, could you maybe not mention that to Mack?”
I nodded. “So, what you said to Omar and the queen …” I wanted to ask how much of it had been true, but suddenly I felt exposed. And it had nothing to do with the skimpy robe.
“I didn’t want them to split us up.” He eyed me. “You know that was a lie, right? I’m not really in love with you.”
“Of course,” I said quickly.
“Good. ’Cause I’m not.”
“I know.”
“Glad we got that straight.”
I’d known better than to believe that he was in love with me, but I did want to know about the rest of it. Had he actually thought of himself as a stray animal? And had he really hoped that I’d come find him?