Spectacle. Rachel Vincent

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СКАЧАТЬ actually taken several steps in the same direction before I remembered—as I struggled to do every night—that Lenore was responsible for my 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 exit as one, and as I watched, resisting that draw myself, 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 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 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 and set up for the next day, 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.

      I couldn’t help smiling as I watched them. Even if we accomplished nothing else—even if we couldn’t rescue a single other cryptid from captivity—we had done at least this little bit of good.

      Afterward, I joined 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.

      As he bent to pluck a rabbit from a box of small rodents we’d bought at the local pet store that morning, I remembered the first time I’d ever seen him, standing beside a cage in the bestiary. Back before I knew what he was. Before either of us knew what I was.

      Before he cast off his human disguise and the safety it brought in order to protect me.

      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, an arrangement I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with, because when fate saddled me with an inner beast driven to avenge injustice and corruption, it failed to give me a way to defend myself from those very things.

      I chose to believe that the universe 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. His word was his honor.

      For the rest of my life, he would literally rip my enemies limb from limb to keep me safe.

      Sometimes that knowledge felt reassuring. Sometimes it felt overwhelming. Sometimes it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

      Those were the days when I truly understood how drastically my life had changed since my days as a bank teller.

      “Did you see the man with the scar?” I asked, as Gallagher 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, he plucked the last rabbit from the box.

      “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 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 the extremely wealthy. But he also has a specialized tactical team. Vandekamp is who the police bring in when they need to capture a cryptid they’re not equipped to handle. If he’s here, he knows. And he’s not alone. This is over.”

      Fear raced down my spine like lightning along a metal rod. “This? Over?”

      Gallagher dug a set of keys from his pocket and pressed them into my palm. “Go straight to the fairground’s main office and play the alarm tone over the intercom, then run back to our camper. We have to go.”

      A chill raced the length of my body. Everyone knew that if they heard an unbroken alarm tone they were to get in their designated vehicles and run. But our emergency procedure was so new we hadn’t even practiced it yet.

      Despite the risks, we hadn’t really thought we’d need it.

      “Go, Delilah. I’ll get all the cash from the silver wagon, then meet you at the camper.”

      I nodded, but before I could take two steps, a man in a protective vest stepped out of the shadows, aiming a stun gun at Gallagher’s chest. “Don’t move.” He had a regular handgun on his waistband, the snap on the holster already open. The name Brock was embroidered in shiny silver thread on the left side of his vest. Beneath that were the initials SS, stylized and intertwined, as if they belonged on an expensive hand towel or pillow case.

      I eyed the soldier, my СКАЧАТЬ