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.
You are normal. You are human. You are ours. The memory of my mother’s bedtime mantra played through my head as it always had in moments of fear and doubt since I was a small child. It had never in my life felt more relevant. Or more like a total lie.
The handler in the red cap pushed Wendy aside and stomped toward me, reaching out for me. Then, suddenly, his gaze darted over my shoulder. “Wait!” he shouted, and I turned to run.
The last thing I saw before my skull exploded in pain and the world went dark was the face of the hybrid tent ticket taker in the top hat as he swung a felt-covered mallet at my head.
The call came over the radio at 7:04 p.m., while Wayne Atherton was eating a cheeseburger in the driver’s seat of his patrol car.
“All units, respond with your location. We got a problem up at the fairgrounds.”
Wayne dropped his burger into the grease-stained bag and answered with food still in his mouth. “This is officer oh-four. I’m just off Highway 71, a mile past Exit 52.” Known locally as the Sonic exit. Wayne finished his bite while four other deputies responded with their locations, then Dispatch came back over the radio with a squawk of static.
“No details yet, but there’s an ambulance on the way to the menagerie and they’re requesting all the backup we can send. Oh-four, you’re closest, but I’m sending everyone else your way. Be careful. And don’t forget your iron kit.”
The iron kit. Shit.
Wayne slammed the gearshift into Drive and pulled onto the highway without checking for oncoming traffic. He only remembered to turn on his siren when the car he nearly ran off the road blasted its horn.
“Dispatch, how’re those details coming?” he demanded as he sped down the dusty two-lane highway toward the Franklin County fairgrounds. “I need to know what I’m walking into.”
A month before, a cop down near Dallas had lost an arm to an ogre drunk on Kool-Aid and impatient for his dinner.
“Oh-four, you’re headed for the hybrid tent, set up near where they put the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair. Not sure how it happened, but it sounds like one of the hybrids got loose and injured a menagerie employee.”
“A hybrid?” Wayne stomped on the gas pedal and began scanning the side of the road for the familiar faded wooden sign marking the entrance to the fairgrounds. What he knew about cryptids would easily fit between the cardboard pages of a toddler’s picture book, and the only hybrids he could even name were mermaids and werewolves. “No civilian casualties, Dispatch?”
“Well, I doubt the carny’s a cop, Wayne,” Grace said in that exasperated tone she usually saved for after hours.
“You know what I mean. No customers hurt? No locals?”
“Hang on, oh-four.” Dispatch went silent for a minute, and just as Wayne was turning onto the wide gravel path leading to the fairgrounds, Grace came back on the line. “We’re only hearing about the one injury so far, and Metzger’s says no one else is in immediate danger. Secondary report says the perpetrator is restrained.”
Perpetrator? “If this is a hybrid attack, there’s no perp, Grace. You wouldn’t characterize a tiger that escaped from the zoo as a perpetrator, would you?”
“I don’t make the reports, I just dispatch them. But I’m coming up with all kinds of new ways to characterize you.”
Wayne laughed, picturing Grace chewing on the cap of her pen. “What kind of injury are we talking about, Dispatch?”
“We’re not clear on that yet, oh-four, but the folks at the carnival seem to want us to take the cryptid into custody.”
“This is the Sheriff’s Department, not the pound!” Franklin County wasn’t equipped to hold most cryptids, much less keep them for any extended period of time. Hell, some of them wouldn’t even fit in a standard jail cell!
“You’re preaching to the choir, oh-four. Just haul ass and watch your back.”
He hated it when Grace talked like she was his boss instead of his girlfriend. Especially over the radio, where anyone could hear. But as usual, she was right. “I’ll check in as soon as I know what’s going on.”
Wayne turned off the siren but left his lights flashing as he rolled through the menagerie’s open gate, where carnies in elaborate red-and-black costumes waved him on. He drove straight down the midway with his foot on the brake, honking to warn everyone who hadn’t noticed his blue-and-red strobe. Where the midway forked, another pair of menagerie employees waved him to the right, through another gate, and a minute later, Wayne could see the commotion. A large group was being held back from the entrance to a big circus-style striped tent by a crimson velvet rope and a staff of large red-clad men.
He got out of his car, lights still flashing. The crowd made way for him, and when he got to the front, he headed straight for a woman in a leotard and top hat and a man in a black Metzger’s cap. “Deputy Wayne Atherton, Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. Who can fill me in?”
The employee in the black cap stuck his hand out for Wayne to shake. “I’m Chris Ruyle, the lot supervisor.”
Wayne had no idea what a lot supervisor was, but he walked and talked like the boss. “What happened, Mr. Ruyle?”
“We were hoping you could tell us.” Ruyle lifted the closed tent flap and gestured for Wayne to go in ahead of him. Inside, a woman lay on her side on the ground, a familiar head of dark wavy hair spread all around her. Her hands were bound at her back. With iron cuffs.
Wayne dropped to his knees at her side. “That’s Delilah Marlow.” She’d been a couple of years behind him in high school, and all he really knew about her was that she’d been ready to shake the red dirt from her shoes on her way out of town since before she could even walk. No one had expected that girl to come home after college, much less stay. “Dispatch said the victim was an employee. What the hell happened?” A large purple bump was already starting to rise on one side of her skull. “What did this?”
“I did.”
Wayne looked up at the man who’d spoken. Then he looked up some more. The man held a black top hat and wore a red vest with Lerner embroidered on it in scrolling black print.
Wayne stood, anger bubbling up from his guts. Damn out-of-towners beating up on local girls. Franklin County wouldn’t stand for such things. “I thought this was a cryptid attack.”
“It was,” Lerner said. “But the creature wasn’t ours. She was yours.”
“Mine?” Wayne followed Lerner’s gaze to Delilah Marlow’s unconscious form. There was hay caught in her hair and blood beneath her fingernails—defensive wounds if he’d ever seen them. “You got five seconds to start making sense before I arrest you for assault and battery.”
Lerner stared at him unflinchingly, and