LITMIR.BIZ

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flashed, but if there was any response from my collar, I couldn’t feel it.

      “Where?”

      Bowman only watched me. Waiting.

      I gave Simra my hand, and she let me pull her to her feet. “Do you know what this is about?”

      She shrugged. “It’s a little early to be your first engagement, but you never know. Are you an oracle?”

      “I’m human.”

      “They’ll never believe that.” The skeptical tone of her voice said she didn’t believe it either.

      At the door, Bowman bound my hands at my back with padded restraints, which told me that the staff wasn’t sure they could control me with a collar until they knew my species. And that the clientele didn’t want to see visible signs of abuse on their high-priced exotic chattel—except whatever marks they might inflict themselves.

      “What’s this about?” I asked as I followed Bowman into the hall, taking note of the fact that he’d come for me alone. But armed.

      He pressed a button on his remote as we approached an exit on the opposite side of the building from where we’d come in the night before, but his lips remained sealed as he pushed the door open.

      “You don’t know, do you? You’re just an errand boy, right?” I asked, as I stepped out onto a sidewalk that felt rough and cool against my bare feet.

      Bowman marched me past a row of nondescript single-story buildings, each built of gray or beige brick punctuated at regular intervals by windows too narrow for a human to pass through, even if the glass were broken. We were clearly on the operational side of the grounds, which obviously wasn’t meant to be seen by Vandekamp’s clientele.

      At the end of the row of ugly buildings, we took a right, then approached a beautiful iron gate in an intricately patterned stone wall. Bowman pressed an icon on his remote to allow me through the gate, and a red sensor blinked between two stones near the ground, embedded right into the mortar.

      When we walked through the gate, concrete gave way to smooth stone pavers beneath my feet and I caught my breath as I took in the stunning series of gardens and buildings that made up the Savage Spectacle’s grounds.

      At first, I could only stare, wide-eyed, at the botanical zoo spread out around me, cut from various shrubs dotting the broad, neat lawn. The cryptid topiary was astonishing and incredibly intricate, yet the details conformed more to fantasy than to true anatomy.

      To my left, two box-tree centaurs appeared frozen in midtrot, alternate legs gracefully curled beneath them as they ran, long human hair trailing behind them, and their poses were so dynamic I almost expected their hooves to hit the ground when reality’s stopped clock resumed ticking. On my right, a shrubbery manticore brandished its eight-foot-long stinger-tipped scorpion tail against a griffin with a twelve-foot wingspan, swooping in from overhead by the grace of the strong, bare trunk holding it up like a doll on a stand.

      As Bowman led me across the courtyard, down winding stone paths and past iron arches leading to other areas of the grounds, I gawked at a small herd of shrubbery satyrs playing flutes in a semicircle, as if the artist had drawn inspiration from Renaissance-period stereotypes rather than actually going to see a satyr.

      Past a gazebo surrounded by playful-looking elves that could have frolicked right off the front of a cookie box, I found a beautiful stone fountain spilling water from three tiers. Poised above it, as if they were about to dive into two feet of water, were two mermaids and a selkie emerging from her seal skin, all trimmed from massive bushes planted on three sides of the fountain. As with the griffin, they were held up by the pruned-bare center trunks. Unlike the griffin, however, those figures bore little resemblance to reality.

      A selkie would shed her seal skin as she emerged from the water, not as she dived into it, and mermaids...well... In reality, their upper halves didn’t resemble human lingerie models anywhere near as closely as the topiary might lead one to believe.

      Disgusted, I turned away from the elaborately inaccurate portrayals and focused on the back of the building we seemed headed for: a stately three-story structure with a massive back porch set up for fine dining outdoors.

      Through small gaps in a tall wall of shrubbery, I caught glimpses of an empty parking lot set back from the building and an unattended valet stand.

      Bowman marched me around the elaborate back porch, then used his remote to allow me entry through a small side door up a narrow set of steps. The door opened into a back hall, where Bowman’s boots echoed against the hardwood. My bare feet were silent on the cold floor.

      We passed through a tall rear foyer tiled in marble and paneled with dark wood, where abstract sculptures stood on marble pedestals. I stared at the display of wealth and opulence, awed for a second, until I realized that Willem Vandekamp financed the luxury—and no doubt his technological breakthroughs in cryptid containment—with the exploitation of helpless, suffering captives.

      “This way.” Bowman marched down a left-hand hallway without me, assuming I’d follow, and for a second, the uncharacteristic carelessness of that action gave me hope. Then a low-powered jolt came from my collar to spur me on, and I understood. He was demonstrating how little effort it took to keep a captive in line with the press of a single button.

      At the end of the hall, Bowman tweaked another setting to allow me through another doorway into a richly adorned office suite.

      A young, attractive assistant glanced up from her computer screen, her fingers paused over the keyboard. When she saw me, she frowned, then pressed a button on the telephone next to her keyboard. “Mr. Vandekamp, that cryptid is here.”

      “Send her in,” came the reply.

      Bowman opened the inner office door and escorted me inside.

      Willem Vandekamp sat at his desk, but standing to his left was a petite woman in her midthirties, wearing a white blouse and a knee-length pencil skirt. She wore low heels and perfect makeup, and stood with her arms crossed over her chest. Her nose crinkled as she studied me, and I wondered if she was more offended by my appearance or my smell. I hadn’t showered in at least two days, nor had I brushed my teeth.

      Two chairs stood in front of the massive, ornate desk, but I was not offered one, so I stood in the middle of the room, staring back at Vandekamp while he stared at me. Bowman stood at my side, at attention, ready to disable me with his remote, should I suddenly appear threatening.

      Finally, the woman exhaled with a frown. “I see the problem.”

      “I have your blood test results.” Vandekamp lifted one edge of a sheet of paper from his desk, and he seemed both annoyed and fascinated with whatever was printed on it.

      I shrugged without even a glance at the paper. “I tried to tell your handlers.”

      “We ran the test twice and found no trace of any nonhuman enzyme or hormone,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. On my right, Bowman suddenly seemed to stand even stiffer with the news, though I couldn’t tell that he’d actually moved. “The sheriff of your hometown said the state of Oklahoma got the same result, which they assumed to be a lab error. But even if my lab made mistakes—and it does not—two labs independently making the same error, twice each, is beyond the realm of both possibility and coincidence. Yet I’ve personally seen you take on characteristics no human could possibly possess. How can that be?”

      I shrugged, and the padded cuffs dragged the back of my shirt. I wasn’t sure how I’d been chosen as a furiae, or what force had chosen me, but I saw no reason to share what I did know with a man who intended to rent me out by the hour.

      “Can you control it?” The woman’s brown-eyed gaze stayed glued to me, as if my every inhalation might reveal some clue. “Or are you at the mercy of your beast?”

      “I am at the mercy of nothing.” That one wasn’t so much a lie as a personal goal.

      “Show us your inner monster,” she ordered, and Bowman tensed

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