LITMIR.BIZ

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set of gray scrubs, a wireless sports bra and a drab but clean pair of underwear. The message sent by the prison-like clothing came through loud and clear.

      I spread my blanket out on the concrete floor and curled up with my hands beneath my head, and soon I realized that the intermittent traffic past my door was now headed in the opposite direction. My fellow captives were being removed from their cells one at a time.

      None of them came back.

      Despite having just awoken from sedation, I fell asleep on the floor and when I woke to the scrape of metal as my door was opened, I found a beautiful starlit night shining through the window in my cell.

      I sat up to find Bowman staring down at me from the doorway. He’d changed from his puffy bite suit into tactical gear and he was holding a pair of steel handcuffs. “Orientation. Let’s go.”

      Still weak from exhaustion, I stood. He spun me around by one arm and secured my wrists at my lower back, then led me into the hall, where one of his coworkers took possession of my other arm.

      “How many cryptids did Vandekamp buy?” I asked as we walked. “Is there a big guy named Gallagher?”

      They said nothing as they led me through the door at the end of the hall, then down two more passageways and into a cold, lab-like room several times the size of my cell, equipped with a sink and countertop along the back wall.

      Woodrow—the gamekeeper—sat on one side of a small square table with a file open in front of him. Bowman pushed me into a folding chair opposite the gamekeeper, then stood guard on my left while the man who’d had my other arm headed for the cabinets at the back of the room. I twisted to see what he was doing, but then the gamekeeper cleared his throat to capture my attention.

      “Delilah Marlow.” He tapped the page in front of him with the tip of a ballpoint pen, and his focus never left my file. “Also known as Drea.”

      “No one knows me as Drea. What are we doing here? Did Vandekamp buy all of us?”

      “You’re twenty-five?” he said, and I nodded. “It says here that you grew up believing you were human until you were exposed at Metzger’s. Which you were attending as a customer. Huh.” His brows rose, but his gaze stayed glued to the file. “Is this information accurate?”

      “Yes.” A cabinet door squealed open behind me and I turned to find the third handler lining up a syringe and two blood-sample vials on a stainless-steel tray. “But it’s incomplete.”

      “So I see,” the gamekeeper said as I turned back to him. “They still don’t know what species you are. Do you?”

      “I’m human.”

      Woodrow’s gaze finally met mine. “You might as well tell us the truth. We have literally dozens of witnesses who’ve seen you transform into a monster. We have internet photos and video.”

      “And I have a blood test performed by the state of Oklahoma that says I’m human. It’s in my camper, in the front pocket of a black backpack on the floor at the end of the couch.”

      He glanced at his wristwatch. His foot began to bounce beneath the table. “We’ll run our own tests. Shaw?” Woodrow glanced over my shoulder, and the third handler’s boots clomped toward us. “Let’s get going.”

      Shaw set the stainless-steel tray on the table. Bowman cuffed my left wrist to the chair beneath me, then tilted my chin up so that I had to look at him, and at the butt of the rifle he held inches from my nose. “If you even look like you’re going to try anything, you’ll wake up two days from now naked and concussed in a hole in the ground. Do you understand?”

      Clearly my reputation preceded me.

      Bowman stepped back, but remained within blunt trauma range.

      “Make a fist,” Shaw said, and when I complied, he tied a rubber strap around my right arm, above my elbow. He didn’t smile or chat as he cleaned the puncture site, but he hit my vein on the first try, so I made no objection to the two vials he filled, then labeled with my name and a number I couldn’t quite read.

      “What happened to the cryptids Vandekamp didn’t buy?” I hadn’t seen Raul and Renata, or Nalah, the ifrit. Or Zyanya’s toddler kittens. Or Gallagher.

      But they were pointedly ignoring my questions.

      “So...what do we do with her?” Bowman said as Shaw untied the rubber strap and took the full vials to a mini fridge beneath the cabinets at the back of the room.

      “Store her in the dormitory with the others,” Woodrow said, as Shaw’s boots clomped across the floor toward us again. “But keep a special eye on her until her test results come back. The boss says she’s seditious.”

      Shaw returned to the table carrying a square gray box made of thick, textured plastic, like an expensive tool kit. It was about the length of my hand. He set the box on the table in front of Woodrow, who unlatched it and flipped it open. Inside, nestled on a bed of laser-cut black foam, was a polished steel ring just a few inches in diameter, about the thickness of my smallest finger.

      “Basic settings only, for now,” Woodrow said. “We’ll adjust when we have more information.”

      Chills crawled over my skin as the gamekeeper pulled a thin but rugged-looking device from his pocket. It vaguely resembled the cell phone I’d had until the state of Oklahoma had stripped my right to own property. Woodrow tilted the device’s screen toward himself, then scrolled and tapped his way through a series of options I couldn’t see. A red light flashed on the front of the steel ring, then it flashed three more times in rapid succession, as if confirming whatever settings he’d programmed.

      My heart thumped so hard I could actually hear it.

      “Okay.” Woodrow set the remote on the table, but the screen had already gone dark. “Let’s get it done.”

      Shaw lifted the steel ring from its formfitting padding, and I frowned when I got a better look at it. The blinking red light had come from a tiny LED bulb that sat flush with the surface of the steel. The ring was designed to swing open on a set of tiny interior hinges, which wouldn’t be accessible once the device was closed around...

      Around what? The circumference looked about right for my upper arm, or my...

      My neck.

      Terror pooled in my stomach, like fuel set ablaze. That ring was a collar.

      I instinctively tried to scoot my chair away from the shiny, high-tech device, but Bowman’s heavy hand landed on my shoulder. Vandekamp’s collar was much lighter, sleeker and cleaner than the thick iron rings Metzger had fitted around resistant centaurs and satyrs, but even diamond-encrusted collars are for pets.

      Woodrow picked up the control device and used it to point at the collar Shaw still held. “I’m going to explain this to you once. That is an electronic restraint collar, which can be controlled by any of the remotes carried by the Spectacle’s staff. Those tiny spines will slide through the back of your neck and into your vertebrae, where they can deliver specialized electric signals with the press of a button.”

      Shaw tilted the collar to show me that the inner curve of one half of the collar held a vertical line of three very thin needles.

      I stared at the steel ring, trying to control panic as it clawed at my throat. “It’s a shock collar?”

      “It’s much more than that.” Woodrow clipped the remote back onto his belt and met my gaze for what he obviously considered the most important part of my orientation briefing. “This collar can deliver a painful shock or temporarily paralyze the beast wearing it from the neck down. The settings prevent cryptids from using their monstrous abilities until those settings are changed, which only happens during scheduled engagements. Which means the sirens can’t sing, the succubi can’t seduce, the shifters can’t shift and the beasts can’t lift a hand in aggression. Until we want them to. So consider this fair warning.”

      “The collar’s

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