LITMIR.BIZ

       Delilah

      “Wake up, Delilah.”

      The surface beneath me felt hard and rough, but neither cool nor warm. Light glared through my closed eyelids, and something snug was wrapped around my neck.

      My eyes flew open, but the world remained hazy. The three women bending over me had blurry faces, and their grayish clothing was shapeless and unfamiliar.

      “She’s waking up,” one of the blurry forms said, and I recognized Lenore’s voice even without the mental tug of her siren’s lure. I exhaled slowly. I was among friends.

      “What happened?” Blinking to clear my vision, I pushed myself upright on a rough concrete floor and reached for my neck, but someone grabbed my hand.

      “No, don’t touch it!” Lala cried.

      The faces were finally starting to come into focus.

      Lenore. Lala. And Zyanya, the cheetah shifter. A few feet away, Mirela sat next to Rommily, who was curled up asleep on the floor with one thin arm tucked beneath her head. In addition to those stupid gray scrubs, they all wore—

      My hands flew to my neck, and my fingers brushed smooth, warm steel that had taken on the temperature of my skin. I felt along the curve of the high-tech collar until I got to the hidden hinge at one side, distinguishable only by a tiny crack where the two sections were joined. “How can they—”

      “Don’t!” Lenore cried as I slid my finger beneath the front of the collar. Excruciating pain shot through my entire body, lighting every nerve ending on fire. My jaw spasmed, trapping a terrified cry of pain inside, and the jolt didn’t end until someone knocked my hand away from the collar.

      “What the hell was that?” I demanded when my jaw finally unclenched, as painful aftershocks coursed through me, far outlasting the initial pain. I leaned back against the concrete wall to keep from falling over. I felt like a human lightning rod.

      “You can touch the collar, but if you pull on it or put your finger under it...that happens.” Lala’s gaze was full of sympathy. “We’ve all tried it. They really don’t want us taking these things off.”

      “As if we could,” Zyanya snapped. “The damn joints locked the second they snapped it closed, so this shock treatment’s overkill. These things aren’t coming off until someone cuts them off.”

      “They’re not afraid we’re going to take the collars off,” I said, as my gaze roamed the large concrete room, where we sat among at least two dozen other women of various humanoid and hybrid species, each of whom wore the same uniform and collar. “They don’t want you to pull on the collar because the needles will damage your spine.”

      “Like they care,” Lala said.

      “They care about the money Vandekamp has invested in us. Just like Metzger did. If you give yourself nerve damage, you’re worth less to them. Which gives them less incentive to keep you alive.”

      “On the bright side,” Mahsa said, and I turned to find the leopard shifter curled up in a nearby corner. “I haven’t seen anyone beaten yet.”

      “Give it time,” Zarah said, as she and Trista padded toward us on bare feet. “Only paying customers get to cause damage.”

      “What does that mean?” Mahsa crawled closer, and we formed a protective ring of former menagerie captives.

      “Exactly what that gamekeeper said. This isn’t a circus, ladies,” Trista explained, pushing long pale hair over her shoulder. “The rumors about the Savage Spectacle seem to be true. They rent cryptids to their customers with no bars and cages to stand between them.”

      I’d heard no rumors. But then, I hadn’t spent my entire life in captivity, piecing together an understanding of the outside world through stories traded with new prisoners.

      “We wondered how they did that.” Zarah ran one finger over the outside of her collar. “Now we know.”

      Mahsa blinked wide leopard eyes. “Rent us for what?”

      “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.” Finola’s voice was full of bitter resentment. Like Lenore’s, it now held none of the calming effect she’d once used to help her friends through the transition from captives to masters of their own fate in the liberated menagerie. The collar had robbed her of her purpose in a way no cage ever could have.

      “Why is your shirt inside out?” Lala asked.

      I followed her focus to the shallow V-shaped neckline of my scrubs top, where the back side of the seam showed. My jaw clenched. They’d stripped me while I was unconscious, then put my clothes back on inside out. Was that intentional, so I’d know...

      Know what?

      “They were looking for your tell,” a soft voice said from my left, and I turned to see a young dryad sitting against the wall, braiding a long length of hair, among which grew thin woody vines blooming with small white flowers. “To figure out what you are.”

      She held one hand out to us, palm down, and I saw that her veins appeared bright green beneath her skin, rather than the normal blue or blue green. Her feet looked much the same. If she were ever allowed back into the woods—the forest nymph’s natural habitat—she would be able to bury her feet in the dirt and draw sustenance from the earth’s nutrients, like a plant.

      But I could tell from her pale skin and the dark circles beneath her eyes that nothing more yielding than concrete had been beneath her feet in a long, long time.

      “They couldn’t have done anything more than examine you unless they paid the rental fee. There are cameras everywhere. No one gets away with anything here—neither the jailed nor the jailers.” She returned to her woody braid. “I’m Magnolia, by the way.”

      Without waiting

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