Menagerie

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 (#ulink_f777f232-26aa-5703-a1ea-ee9ac5a2d508)

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 shirt 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.”

Charity’s bold spirit—a thing of wide repute in Franklin County—faded like a blossom gone dry in the sun. She closed her eyes to hide her thoughts from the sheriff, and the face that flashed behind her eyelids belonged to a woman she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years, but would never in her life forget.

“Lilah actually hurt someone?” More than two decades of secrets, lies, and guilt swelled within her as she examined every fear and doubt she’d ever had about the daughter she loved more than anything else in the world. More, even, than the husband whose heart had given out at the age of fifty-seven, beneath the burden of their secret. “I didn’t think she was even capable of violence.”

“Why don’t you tell us what you know?”