Menagerie

My throat felt thick, my tongue clumsy. “Is she okay?”

“She’s terrified. She’s not the only one. The news is out, and people don’t feel safe, knowing you were born and raised here. Knowing you went to school with their children and spent the night at their houses—and they didn’t have a clue. People are starting to remember the reaping, Delilah.”

Oh, fuck.

Terror pooled in my stomach like acid, eating at me from the inside. “They don’t think I’m a surrogate, do they?” I peered at him over my knees. My hands started shaking again. “Because I swear I’m not.”

“How can you know that, if you don’t know what you are? You look human, and you lived among us for years. Just like the surrogates. What are we supposed to think?”

Panic slowed my brain, yet sped up my words. “This is totally different. I wasn’t hiding or lying in wait, planning something. I didn’t know I wasn’t human. I still can’t believe what happened. You have to tell them that. Tell the sheriff I’m not one of them.”

“How do I know that’s true?”

Terror scattered my thoughts into a maelstrom of disjointed theories. Think, Delilah! “There were hundreds of thousands of surrogates, but there’s only one of me.”

The deputy shrugged. “So far. For all we know, you could be the first in a whole new wave.”

“No, that’s not what I am!” My arms tightened around my shins, drawing my knees tighter against my chest. “I don’t have any siblings.”

“Having grown, healthy siblings would work in your favor. Being an only child does not.”

“Okay... But I’m an adult!” Surely they’d figured that much out when they’d taken my clothes off. “The surrogates were six-year-olds.”

“Yes, but even cryptids age. The surrogates are now thirty-five years old. Wherever they are.”

But no one knew where they were, and that was the problem. As soon as they’d been discovered, Uncle Sam had rounded them up like rabid dogs, and no one knew whether they’d been shot, or studied, or cryogenically frozen for later. And that was fine, because the surrogates truly were dangerous. They were the fucking devil’s spawn.

If the government thought I was one of them, I would disappear, too.

“I’m not a surrogate.” I pushed hair from my face with one hand and sat up as straight as I dared without clothes on. “I didn’t steal any babies. I’ve never hurt a soul in my life before tonight, and I don’t know how that happened. Think about it. If I’d known what I was, why would I go to the menagerie? Please, Deputy. You have to believe me. I’m not conspiring against humanity.”

Atherton exhaled slowly. Then he stood, still watching me, and shook out my blouse. “I believe you.” He stuck my shirt between two of the bars and dropped it on the floor. “But I’m not the one you have to convince.” Next came my jeans, bra, and underwear, each dropped just inside my cell. “Get dressed.”

I glanced at my clothes, then back up at him. “Are you going to watch?”

He blinked, obviously startled by the thought. “Of course not.” When he walked down the aisle away from my cell, I realized that Atherton wasn’t the enemy. He was just doing his job.

Unfortunately, his job was to extract information I didn’t have, in order to help the sheriff—

Help the sheriff what?

End life as I knew it?

I lunged for my clothes, then dragged the whole pile back into my corner, where I shimmied into my underwear as fast as I could. I turned my back on the bars to put my bra on, in case he turned around, and had just stepped into my jeans when the brutal reality of my new situation hit me over the head like that carny’s mallet, swinging straight for my soul.

I’ll never go home again.

My legs buckled beneath me and my knees slammed into the concrete. My jaw snapped shut with the impact, but I hardly felt it. I was a cryptid living under false pretenses, and no one would care that I hadn’t known. Most probably wouldn’t even believe that.

I pushed my arms through the sleeves of my shirt, but had trouble buttoning it. My hands wouldn’t stop trembling.

Gone. Everything I’d ever had was probably already gone. My job. My apartment. My car. My clothes. Cryptids weren’t allowed to own property or enter into contracts. Including leases.

“Deputy Atherton, I think I need to talk to an attorney.” My voice had almost no tone and very little volume. I seemed to be hearing myself from one end of a long tunnel.

He turned and headed down the aisle toward me again. “They’re not gonna give you a lawyer, Delilah. Cryptids aren’t citizens. You have no rights in the U.S. of A., in Franklin County, or in the incorporated township of Franklin. You are now the property of the state of Oklahoma.”

Property. No rights.

“Unless they decide you are a surrogate,” Atherton continued. “If that happens, the feds will come for you.”

And I would never be seen again.

I clutched my half-buttoned shirt to my chest and scooted back into the corner, pressing my spine into the seam where both brick walls met. The world seemed to be shrinking around me, as if someone were sucking all the air out of a vacuum-sealed bag. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.

“Is your mother still over on Sycamore?” Deputy Atherton asked, and a fresh bolt of fear opened my lungs. “They’re sending someone to pick her up.”

“Leave her alone.” My gaze snapped up to meet his, and his brows rose. “She has nothing to do with this. She’s human.”

“You thought you were human, too, and you were wrong about that. Is there anything we should know before they knock on her door?”

I held his gaze in silence.

“They’re already on their way, Delilah. If you know something that will keep her from getting hurt, you need to tell me.”

“She sleeps with my dad’s shotgun under her bed.” I crossed my arms over my knees and stared at the ground. “Better call first and let her know you’re coming. That, or send an ambulance in advance.”

Atherton’s brows rose. He unclipped a radio from his belt and relayed my mother’s itchy trigger finger to someone in Dispatch.

My bare toes curled on the concrete, and I wished for a pair of shoes. My racing thoughts had stilled into a single bold question mark, and the mental silence was almost as confining as the bars caging me.

“So, what happens now?”

He pulled a thick, rusty pair of medieval-looking iron cuffs from a pouch at his back. “Come on, Delilah. Get up. It’s time to meet the sheriff.”

Delilah (#ulink_20ebfcf1-7bfc-5705-b171-93afe7c89235)

“Turn around and stick both hands between the bars.”

The theory seemed to be that my hands were my weapons, and that with them restrained in iron behind my back I would be much less of a threat.

I complied, and the cuffs closed over my wrists one at a time. They were heavy, and the weight felt both surreal and brutally degrading. But surely if I were going to have any adverse reaction to iron—which would narrow my species down to one out of hundreds of kinds of fae—the bars on my cell would have triggered it already.

Iron was the only way that we knew of to identify the fae. Most of them had one feature or another that clothes wouldn’t cover—feathers, a hollow back, vines growing in place of hair—but glamour was a better disguise than any clothing, contact lenses, or wigs could ever hope to be.

Once I was cuffed, the deputy let me out of my cell and guided me down the aisle. He didn’t touch me. In fact, he seemed to be walking a couple of feet behind me until he had to come forward and open the door at the end of the aisle.

The moment I stepped into the open front room of the sheriff’s station, all phone calls and typing ceased. The ambient nervous chatter died, and everyone turned to watch me be escorted across the room. None of the stares were friendly. Even the people in handcuffs looked at me as if I were a slimy clump dug from their shower drains.