Menagerie

“No!” I shouted, and dimly I was aware that I’d squeezed Brandon’s hand hard enough to make him flinch. My other hand had crushed the glossy pamphlet.

“It’s okay,” the handler said. “She makes us do this all the time.” He shoved the cattle prod through a small hole in the steel mesh at the back of her cage.

Geneviève yelped in pain, and Claudio’s growling crescendoed until it was almost all I could hear. The handler jabbed the traumatized werewolf one more time, and she scuttled out of her corner and into the light.

Rage filled me like a bonfire lit deep inside my soul. Geneviève was a little girl, no more than thirteen years old. She trembled on the floor of her cage, knees drawn up to her chest, heels tucked close to her body in an attempt to cover herself. She wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her face in the hollow between her knees, letting her long, tangled blond hair fall down her nearly bare back.

“Oh...” Shelley breathed, clearly horrified, and this time Brandon’s hand clenched mine. None of us seemed to know what to say. Even Rick looked uncomfortable.

“Stand up, honey, and let them get a look at you,” the handler said, as Claudio continued to growl and pace in his cage. The male werewolf couldn’t see Geneviève, but he obviously cared about her, and he clearly knew what was happening. “I’m not going to tell you again,” the handler taunted, his cigarette bobbing with every word, and the girl-wolf began to tremble.

The cattle prod scraped the iron bars on its way into the cage, and Geneviève stood faster than I would have thought possible. She scrambled toward the front of her cage to escape the weapon, her eyes still squeezed closed, as if her refusal to see us somehow meant that we wouldn’t see her.

In that moment, I wished more than anything in the world that I’d made my friends sit through a boring birthday dinner with me instead of using Brandon’s tickets, so that at least we could have spared Geneviève this one moment of humiliation in the string of such instances that no doubt comprised her entire existence.

Genni’s hair brushed the base of her spine and did much more to cover her than the white bikini bottom and tube-style swimsuit top she’d been made to wear. Her arms and legs were thin and her rib cage was plainly visible through her skin. The outsides of her thighs were peppered with pairs of red welts that could only be burns from the cattle prod.

Little Geneviève obviously resisted her handler quite often. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved by that fact or horrified by it, so I settled for a deep sense of awe that a child so young had survived—so far—an existence I couldn’t even imagine.

On display. Nearly naked. Ordered to perform, and tortured for refusal.

I hated myself for being there to see it.

I started to head to the next cage and relieve Geneviève of the audience that gave her handler the chance to abuse her. But then she opened her eyes, and I was too mesmerized to move.

She had Claudio’s eyes. Exactly. Beautiful golden wolf eyes in a little girl’s face.

“Open your mouth, Genni, and let them have a look at your teeth.” The handler circled the end of her cage, still carrying the cattle prod, and Geneviève scuttled away from him. The name embroidered on his shirt was Jack. The tip of his cigarette glowed red in the shadows.

“Genni...” he warned, and when Claudio started howling, Jack banged on the end of the male wolf’s cage with the fist holding the cigarette. “Pipe down, Papa!”

Understanding crashed over me with a devastating weight and stunning intensity. The father was caged feet from his half-naked daughter, unable to protect her, yet forced to hear every offense heaped on her.

“Genni!” Jack shouted, and she turned on him, hissing, hair flying, her lips curled back to reveal long, sharp canines among the teeth in her otherwise human mouth.

“Ain’t that somthin’?” Jack took a long drag on his cigarette. “Have to file ’em down once a month, or she’s likely to bite a finger off when we groom her.”

“You groom her?” Brandon sounded sick. Shelley looked pale, and Rick was staring at his feet.

“Have to. That one won’t do nothin’ on her own. Has to be prodded into brushin’ her own teeth in the mornin’.” He brandished the forked end of the cattle prod at her and she hissed again, then retreated to the back of her cage. “No, no, don’t sit down, Genni. Give the good people their money’s worth.” Jack turned back to us. “Wanna hear her howl? She’s got a helluva voice, that one. Not much for speaking, but she howls like her mama did.”

“Did?” I didn’t want to ask, but I wanted to know. “She died?”

Jack shrugged, and the tip of his cigarette left squiggles of light dancing in front of my eyes. “Who knows? Sold her off last year.” He turned back to Geneviève, who stood in the darkest corner of her cage. “Give us a howl, darlin’.”

But Genni had had enough. She sank to the floor against the rear wall of her cage and vanished into the shadows again, closing her eyes so the twin points of yellow light disappeared.

Jack moved toward her with the prod again, and the fire burning in my belly burst into a full-body blaze.

“Leave her alone,” I said, and when the entire hybrid tent went silent around me, I realized that my voice sounded...different. Not lower in pitch, but larger somehow. More robust.

Brandon, Rick, and Shelley turned to look at me, their eyes wide. Distantly I realized that my scalp had started to tingle and that the heat blazing deep inside me now threatened to burn me alive.

It was a boundless and terrible heat. And it was not entirely unfamiliar.

Creatures in cages all around the tent turned to stare. Sounds I hadn’t even realized I was hearing suddenly ceased—the snort of something equine; steady small splashes from the special section across the ring; and the constant rustle of feet and hooves on hay.

Jack was too intent on causing pain to notice the sudden silence. “It’s no trouble.” With his back to us, he moved toward the center of the cage to lengthen his reach. “It’s just—” he twisted something at the base of the prod “—a little jolt.” He shoved the cattle prod between the bars and through the mesh, and Geneviève howled when the tip touched her right calf.

“Get the hell away from her!” I shouted, and my hair rose on my scalp, as if the power sparking through me had charged it at the roots. It floated around my head, not in thin tendrils, but in heavy ropes of hair, twisting around my face in my peripheral vision.

My pamphlet fell to the ground. Brandon dropped my hand. Shelley made a strange noise as she and Rick backed away from me.

Jack pulled the prod from Geneviève’s cage and turned, his mouth already open to yell at me. The first syllable died on his tongue. The cattle prod thunked to the ground. My hands found the sides of his head, and dimly I was aware that my fingers looked too dark, the nails long and vaguely pointed.

I gripped his skull and felt several tiny pops as my nails pierced the skin at his temples. Jack’s eyes rolled up into his head and his arms began to twitch. His teeth clattered together and sweat poured from his forehead. Blood dripped from his temples.

I saw it all, but none of it sank in. I registered nothing in that moment except the sparks still firing inside me, firing through me, out the tips of my fingers and into Jack’s head, where every synapse fried within him eased a bit of the demand for justice seething inside me.

How do you like it? I demanded, but my mouth never opened. My tongue never moved.

Shelley screamed. The sound of her terror cut through my rage and I pulled my hands from Jack’s head in one swift movement. I stumbled backward, horrified by what I’d done, sucking in great gasping breaths that did nothing to soothe the fire burning deep in my chest.

What had I done?

The handler wobbled on his feet. Blood leaked from four pinpoint holes on either side of his balding scalp. Eyes unfocused, he thumped to his knees on the ground, then felt around in the hay without ever looking down. His thick fist closed around the cattle prod he’d dropped and he twisted a knob on the end as far as it would go. Then he raised the prod as high as he could in both fists and rammed it down on his own thigh. The forked tip plunged through denim and into flesh.

The handler began to convulse. For a moment, no one else moved. The entire hybrid trailer watched Jack electrocute himself. Then hooves and paws began to pound against their cage floors. Wolves howled, something avian screeched, and several human mouths cheered.

“What did you do?” Shelley wailed.

My heart pounding, I turned to see my friends staring at me in horror, backing slowly toward the adlet cage to get away from me.

Rick tripped over the low circus ring and went down on one hip.

“I...” I looked at my hands and blinked to clear my vision, but my vision wasn’t the problem. The problem was my hands. They were too long and bony, my fingers ending in narrow black points. I had needle-claws, where I’d had normal fingernails before.

Blood dripped from the tip of one. I shook my head in denial of what I was seeing—of what I’d done—but instead of settling over my shoulders, my hair was twisting around my head, if the standing-on-end feeling in my scalp could be trusted.

I backed away from the handler still electrocuting himself and from Geneviève’s cage, where she stared at me through yellow wolf-girl eyes. Panic dumped adrenaline into my bloodstream and I suddenly itched to run. To escape.

“What the hell?”

I turned to find Rick staring at me, one dusty brown cowboy boot on either side of the bright red circus ring.

Another handler stepped out of the shadows and kicked the livestock prod from Jack’s hands. He stopped convulsing, but his eyes regained no focus. His mouth hung open.

“What are you?” Wendy, the woman in the sequined leotard, demanded, and I could only blink at her, because I had no answer. Yet even in my mounting terror, I knew that if I’d had an answer, I shouldn’t give it to her.