Dragon Justice, page 32
“We’ll be near Tucson in a couple of days right? I know we have bills and things, but do we have enough?” Her eyes were wide and hopeful. Her optimism made me feel guilty for being the bearer of bad news.
“Lala, we don’t have any. The money’s spent before we even make it.”
“What? All of it?” Unshed tears seem to magnify her eyes. “But we’re going to be within a few miles of Gael’s son.”
Like most of us, Lala got invested in every cryptid we tried to buy from the menageries, preserves and labs that owned them. But this one was personal for her. She was the one who’d found the berserker’s son, in a vision.
“We have to buy him, Delilah. That’s the whole point of this, right?” She spread her arms to take in the entire menagerie, and our perilous, secret possession of it. “So pay something late. We only need twelve thousand dollars.”
And right after we’d taken over the menagerie, I would have paid it in a heartbeat to free one of our fellow cryptids from captivity. In fact, I’d done just that before I had a handle on the menagerie’s finances. Before I’d realized how dire our financial situation really was.
I’d handled tens of thousands of dollars in cash nearly every night since we took over the menagerie, but the vast majority of it went to paying our operating costs. Taxes. Licenses and permits in every single town. Fairground rental fees. Inspections. Food. Fuel. Maintenance. And insurance. That was the big one. Insurance alone cost Metzger’s Menagerie more than a million a year. And we were only getting off that easily because Rudolph Metzger hadn’t reported most of our recent “incidents” to the insurance company—some because the old man was trying to cut corners, and some because he was no longer in a position of authority at the menagerie.
We’d shipped him south of the border in one of his own menagerie cages as a gift to the marid sultan, whose only daughter had died during our revolt.
If the insurance company knew about everything Metzger had covered up, our coup of the menagerie would have been exposed long ago—not because a customer saw through our masquerade, but because of simple, stupid bankruptcy.
Even so, we sat on the verge of that very catastrophe on a nightly basis.
“Lala, we’re already paying bills late. If that gets any worse, they’ll start foreclosing on things.” Old man Metzger had bought much of his equipment on credit. Ironically, we no longer needed most of it, since we were running our own show now and only selling the illusion of captivity. But we couldn’t return or sell any of it without explaining why our creatures and hybrids no longer needed to be restrained or sedated.
“There has to be a way,” the young oracle insisted, heartbreak in her eyes.
“Maybe there is. I don’t want everyone to get their hopes up, but I was thinking about asking Renata if she’d be willing to help.”
“Oh!” Lala jumped and clenched her fists in excitement.
“Shh!” I stepped in front of her, trying to shield her delight from the man running the funnel-cake stand. The subcontractors had no idea that Metzger’s Menagerie was being run by the very cryptids who made up its exhibits and performances, and if any of them ever found out, our ruse—and our freedom—would come to a violent end.
“Sorry,” Lala whispered, as she recomposed herself into the role of tired carnival worker. “I just… I thought it was too dangerous to let the encantados play with people’s minds.”
“It is. But we don’t have a lot of choice this time, do we?” I pulled my ink pen from the top of the clipboard while she tried to control her smile. “I have to go collect the stats. What was your head count?”
“Two hundred and seven. We had a thirty-minute line late this afternoon.”
“Mirela must be exhausted.” The oldest of the three oracles was alone inside the tent, since it was Lala’s turn to play carnival employee.
Lala shrugged. “That just makes the bed feel that much softer at the end of the night.”
I gave her a smile as I moved on to the next tent. Her upbeat outlook never failed to amaze me. At the end of the day, as grateful as I was for my freedom, I couldn’t help missing the apartment and belongings I’d lost when I was arrested and sold. I resented the fact that, even in freedom, I had to hide. But Lala lived for every minor liberty and moment of comfort, as if indulging in them might someday make up for everything she was denied in her sixteen years as a captive.
I continued down the sawdust path, taking head counts from the few tents that were still open, until I got to the bestiary, where the nonhuman hybrids were on display in a series of vintage circus cage wagons. Ember, the phoenix, was easily my favorite. From her head down, her plumage graduated through shades of red, yellow, and orange, ending in long, wide tail feathers that looked like living flames in the bright light thrown from high, pole-mounted fixtures. But she could hardly even stretch those tail feathers in the confines of her cage.
Darkness shifted behind the next enclosure, a subtle blending of one shadow into another, and though I heard neither footsteps nor breathing, I knew I was no longer alone.
“This isn’t fair to them.” I tucked my clipboard under one arm and stared up at the phoenix.
“I know.” Gallagher stepped out of the shadows, yet they seemed to cling to him, giving him a dangerous look that most humans would fear without truly understanding why. They would blame their instinctive fear on his towering height. On his massive musculature. But they wouldn’t really grasp his destructive potential.
If they were lucky.
“I got a quote on bigger cages, but considering that our budget is around zero, it’s not going to happen anytime soon.” Three months after our coup, we had yet to come up with a solution for the beasts’ confinement. Their enclosures were inhumanely small, but much like the lions in any zoo, the chimera, the gryphon and the others were all far too dangerous to simply keep on leashes. “We’re going to have to raise ticket prices.”
Gallagher shook his head, and light shone on the red baseball cap covering most of his short dark hair. “The menagerie’s customer base is blue-collar. They’re already paying more than they can afford. We need to be touring larger venues. Exhibition grounds. Amusement parks.”
“No.” I was already weary of the argument we’d been putting off for two months. “Bigger venues are too much of a risk.”
“Eryx brings in five hundred people in every tiny town we visit. Imagine the thousands he’d attract in a larger venue. In bigger cities.”
I turned to look up at him. “The cryptids… We’re all still skittish, Gallagher. Most of them are terrified to deal with vendors and carny subcontractors, and with good reason. That would only be worse if we played larger venues, with more inspections and more invasive oversight.”
His brows furrowed low over dark eyes. “It’s almost September, Delilah. Schools are already back in session, and the county-fair circuit will dry up in the next few weeks. If we’re not prepared to step into the big interior venues—stadiums and concert halls—we won’t make it through the winter, because we certainly can’t raise funds the way old man Metzger did.”
The very thought gave me chills.
During the off season, when the carnival circuit shrank to virtually nothing, Rudolph Metzger had rented the most exotic of his cryptids to various private collections, where they were exhibited in a more intimate setting for high-dollar clientele who wouldn’t frequent a sweaty, dirty, outdoor carnival.
“We’re not renting anyone out, and we’re not risking larger venues.”
In our menagerie, we ran the shows and set our own limits. Except for the required inspections, there was no third-party oversight. Under Gallagher’s plan, all it would take was one suspicious stadium employee to blow our ruse wide-open, and we’d all be back in cages. We couldn’t take that risk.
“We’ll find another way,” I assured him.
Our original plan had been to take the entire menagerie south of the border. But when Sultan Bruhier’s daughter, Adira, died during the coup, he’d closed his borders, leaving us trapped in the US, where exposure would mean imprisonment and, in many cases, torture.
“We could send Bruhier another gift,” Gallagher said. I shook my head, but he kept talking. “I could call one of the old handlers and offer him a job, then throw him in a cage and ship him down to the sultan.”
“We gave him Metzger. If that didn’t work, sending a lower-ranking menagerie employee won’t, either. And even if I was okay with sending someone else to be tortured to death at the hands of the sultan, we can’t make another person disappear. It took forever for the encantados to make the old man’s family think he ran off with an acrobat. We can’t do that again.”
“We can’t let everyone starve to death, either.”
“I know.” I cleared my throat and took the pen from my clipboard again. “What was the bestiary’s head count?”
“Four hundred sixty.”
“Are we all set for takedown?”
“As soon as the gates close.”
“Good.” I turned to head to the hybrids’ tent, but Gallagher took my hand before I made it two steps.
“Delilah.” He tugged me closer, and when I looked up at him, I found his eyes shrouded in the shadow cast by his hat bill in the light falling from overhead. “My oath to protect you includes protecting you from starvation. And from yourself. Buying the incubus nearly bankrupted us.”
“I couldn’t just leave him there, Gallagher—”
“But now we’re rationing food. Something has to give.”
I nodded. I knew that. “I have to get a head count from the big top. I’ll think of something. I swear.”
Gallagher frowned at my choice of words. Swearing meant something different to him than it did to the rest of the world because the fae couldn’t go back on their word.
Nor could they lie.
Redcaps are fae soldiers from their birthing cries to their dying breath, but the few who survived their brutal civil war each swore to find and serve a noble cause. To fight a battle worthy of the blood they must spill to survive.
Gallagher chose to serve and protect me because as a furiae, a force driven to avenge injustice and corruption wherever I find it, I am helpless to defend myself against those very things.
I chose to believe that fate sent me Gallagher to make up for what it took from me. My friends. My family. My property. My freedom.
Gallagher’s oath to protect me at any cost was the driving force in his life. His oath was unbreakable.
For the rest of my life, he would literally rip my enemies limb from limb to keep me safe.
* * *
At eleven fifty, I stepped inside the massive striped tent and watched the big-top finale from the west entrance. Though I saw the show nearly every night, I was still awed by the strength and ingenuity of the performers. By their grace and beauty. By the pride they took in their performances, now that the show was truly theirs.
In the ring—we only assembled one of them, now that our show was smaller—Zyanya and her brother, Payat, had already completed their live shift into cheetah form. As I watched, the draco named Ignis breathed fire over the first of two steel rings suspended from a sturdy steel frame, and the audience oohed as the ring burst into flames.
Ignis was a three-foot-long winged serpent whose fire-breathing range had been surgically reduced from over seven feet to a mere eighteen inches long before old man Metzger had bought me for his menagerie. Even with his surgical handicap, Ignis represented the biggest risk we were willing to take in the ring, because he was difficult to communicate with and impossible to retrain without using the abusive tactics his previous trainers had employed.
Once Ignis had swooped to light the second steel ring, heralded by a crescendo in the soaring big-top soundtrack, Zyanya and Payat leaped through the blazing hoops in sync, still in cheetah form, and landed gracefully on the backs of a matching set of thickly muscled centaurs—part Belgian horse, part man.
Several minutes later, the show culminated in a flaming, twisting, glittering, swooping spectacle that utilized Eryx, the minotaur, as the base of a diamond-shaped formation of hybrid acrobats stacked to within mere feet of the aviary net, while Ignis swooped and glided through the air around them. The music soared and the crowd stood on collapsible risers, stomping and clapping for a show they would credit to a huge staff of human handlers and trainers.
For nearly a minute, the performers remained frozen in their ending pose, breathing hard, basking in applause from spectators who would have run screaming if they’d known the truth about what they’d just seen.
Then the music faded, and smoke machines fired a gray mist into the ring. Under the cover of smoke, the performers dismounted and filed from the ring toward the back of the tent while the audience climbed down from the bleachers and headed for marked exits in pairs and small clusters. Children clutched their parents’ hands, chattering about the massive minotaur and the graceful leopard shifter. Adults recounted their favorite parts, from the berserker in bear form throwing glittering rings for the harpies to catch in their beaks, to the wolf and the cheetahs transforming from man into animal right in front of them.
I stood at my post, thanking them all for coming, directing them toward the main exit, past the closed ticket booth. I shook hands with fathers and high-fived young boys wearing souvenir Metzger’s hats with minotaur horns, and little girls who’d bought headbands with cat ears or fake teeth with wolf or cheetah incisors poking into their lower lips.
At exactly midnight, as I was ushering the crowd from the big top, Abraxas—one of our three human employees—turned off the calliope music and played a light instrumental intended to signal the night’s end. The intercom crackled, then Lenore’s smooth siren voice spoke over the music, urging the audience members to make their way straight to the exit, then proceed directly to their cars.
Only the fact that I knew who she was and what she was doing allowed me to resist the sudden compulsion to leave the carnival and drive straight home. Even though I no longer had a car. Or a home, outside the menagerie and the camper I shared with Gallagher.
Abraxas and Alyrose, our human costume mistress, still had to wear earplugs during the nightly farewell, but Lenore’s human husband, Kevin, was used to it.
Caught in the siren’s pull, the spectators headed for the entrance as one. But as I watched, an odd movement caught my eye. One tall man in the crowd had his hand over his ear, not cupped like he was covering it, but as if…he’d just put in an earplug. The light was too dim for me to see for sure, but the possibility set me on edge.
Everyone else was with a friend or a date or a family, yet this man walked alone, amid the jostle and flow of the crowd. Watching. When his gaze met mine, he smiled, but the expression seemed localized to his lips, one of which was bisected by a thick line of scar tissue that hooked down and over the edge of his chin.
He looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him, and the mental disconnect hovered on the edge of my thoughts like an itch that couldn’t quite be reached.
When the crowd had gone and the smoke had cleared, Abraxas turned off the sound system. Gallagher locked the gates. All over the menagerie, creatures with scales and horns and tails shed their chains and emerged from their cages like monstrous butterflies from steel cocoons. They shook off the pretense of captivity and stretched muscles stiff from hours in confined spaces.
It was my favorite part of the evening.
Together, we closed things down for the day and set up for tomorrow, our last night in this small Southern town. While I swept the bleachers in the big top, I listened to Zyanya and Payat laughing as they broke down and stored the equipment in the ring. Zyanya’s toddlers ran circles around their mother and uncle and made the occasional mad dash into the stands, playing as children should. As they’d never been allowed to do, before the coup.
Afterward, I met Gallagher as he fed the last of the beasts and nonhuman hybrids—the menagerie residents we couldn’t simply let out of their cages, because of safety concerns.
“Did you see the man with the scar?” I asked as he opened the feeding hatch on one side of the wendigo’s cage and tossed a live rabbit inside.
“No. Why?” Using the two-foot-long steel-clawed grabber, Gallagher plucked the last rabbit from the box we’d bought at the local pet store that morning.
“I think I saw him put plugs in his ears during Lenore’s farewell message. And he was here alone. No one goes to the menagerie alone.” I opened the feeding hatch on the adlet’s cage and Gallagher shoved the rabbit inside. The adlet—a wolf-man stuck in a perpetual in-between state—ripped it nearly in half before it even hit the floor of the pen.
“You think he suspected something?”
“Maybe. But obviously we haven’t heard any police sirens. I’m probably imagining it.” I’d been living under a constant cloud of paranoia since the moment we’d locked Rudolph Metzger in one of his own cages.
“Maybe not.” Gallagher shrugged. “The last time I had a feeling about one of our patrons was when you visited the menagerie, and that changed everything. For all of us. Tell me about this man,” he said as he picked up the empty rabbit box. “What did his scar look like?”
“It ran through his lip and over the edge of his chin, and—”
Gallagher stopped walking so abruptly that I almost ran into him. His sudden tension made my pulse trip faster. “Which side of his chin?”
“The left.”
He dropped the empty box, alarm darkening his eyes. “That’s Willem Vandekamp.”
“Vandekamp. Why do I know that name?” Why was his face familiar? If I’d seen him before, how could I possibly have forgotten that scar?
“He owns the Savage Spectacle.” At my blank look, Gallagher explained, his words rushed and urgent. “It’s a private cryptid collection catering to wealthy, high-profile clients. But he also has a specialized tactical team. Vandekamp is who the police call when they need to bring in a cryptid they’re not equipped to handle. They’ve called him in, Delilah. This is over.”
