Spectacle

“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 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 shining 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.

“Shhh!” I stepped in front of her, trying to shield her delight from the man running the funnel cake stand. The game booths and food stands—everything other than the actual menagerie—belonged to subcontractors who worked the seasonal carnival route. They had no idea Metzger’s 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.” I pulled my 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 seven. We had a thirty-minute-long 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. “Exhaustion 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 to have regained my freedom, I couldn’t help missing the apartment and belongings I 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’d been 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 feel, yet be unable to truly understand. 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 griffin 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 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 formal 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, one suspicious stadium employee could 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 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 United States, 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 gifting him the owner didn’t work, sending a mere menagerie employee won’t either. And even if I were okay with sending someone else to be tortured to death at the hands of the sultan, it took forever for the encantados to make the old man’s family think he ran off with an acrobat. We can’t make another person disappear.”

“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 by the shadow of 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—”

“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 can’t go back on their word.

Nor can they lie.

Ever.

* * *

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, Ignis, the draco, 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 years 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 sound track, Zyanya and Payat leapt 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 orchestral sound track crescendoed with a crash of cymbals signaling the beginning of the finale. Eryx, the minotaur, took thundering steps toward the center of the ring, holding his thick arms out in the most graceful gesture we had managed to teach the former beast of burden. From their positions all around the huge ring, hybrid acrobats flipped and cartwheeled toward him. While I watched, as awed then as I’d been on the first night of their revamped performance, the acrobats climbed the minotaur like a tree, then each other like its branches until they stood on each others’ arms and legs and shoulders. Eryx became the base of a diamond-shaped formation of hybrid and shifter acrobats stacked to within mere feet of the aviary net.

As the minotaur slowly turned, showing off the finale for the 360-degree audience around the ring, two harpies in glittering red costumes soared around the act, dropping steel rings from overhead. They landed around outstretched arms and legs, revolving like hula hoops. From one side of the ring, Zyanya’s two young cubs pushed a large heavy ball toward the center with their small feline muzzles. When they had it in place, Eryx stepped up onto the ball, with one foot, then the other, lifting his graceful load as if it weighed no more than a bag of his own feed.