LITMIR.BIZ

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Ignis had swooped to light the second steel ring, heralded by a crescendo in the soaring big-top sound track, Zyanya and Payat leapt through the blazing hoops in sync, still in cheetah form, and landed gracefully on the backs of a matching set of thickly muscled centaurs—part Belgian horse, part man.

      Several minutes later, the orchestral sound track crescendoed with a crash of cymbals signaling the beginning of the finale. Eryx, the minotaur, took thundering steps toward the center of the ring, holding his thick arms out in the most graceful gesture we had managed to teach the former beast of burden. From their positions all around the huge ring, hybrid acrobats flipped and cartwheeled toward him. While I watched, as awed then as I’d been on the first night of their revamped performance, the acrobats climbed the minotaur like a tree, then each other like its branches until they stood on each others’ arms and legs and shoulders. Eryx became the base of a diamond-shaped formation of hybrid and shifter acrobats stacked to within mere feet of the aviary net.

      As the minotaur slowly turned, showing off the finale for the 360-degree audience around the ring, two harpies in glittering red costumes soared around the act, dropping steel rings from overhead. They landed around outstretched arms and legs, revolving like hula hoops. From one side of the ring, Zyanya’s two young cubs pushed a large heavy ball toward the center with their small feline muzzles. When they had it in place, Eryx stepped up onto the ball, with one foot, then the other, lifting his graceful load as if it weighed no more than a bag of his own feed.

      Through it all, Ignis swooped and glided through the air in and around the acrobats’ limbs, dodging spinning rings and spitting small jets of fire. The music soared and the crowd stood on collapsible risers, stomping and clapping for a show they would credit to a huge staff of human handlers and trainers.

      For nearly a minute, the performers remained frozen in their ending pose, breathing hard, basking in applause from spectators who would have run screaming if they’d known the truth about what they’d just seen.

      Then the music faded and smoke machines fired a gray mist into the ring. Under the cover of smoke, the performers dismounted and jogged from the ring through a chain-link tunnel toward the back of the tent, while the audience climbed down from the bleachers and headed for marked exits in pairs and small clusters. Children clutched their parents’ hands, chattering about the massive minotaur and the graceful leopard shifter. Adults recounted their favorite parts, from the berserker in bear form throwing glittering rings for the harpies to catch in their beaks, to the wolf and the cheetahs transforming from man into animal right in front of them.

      I stood at my post, thanking them all for coming, directing them toward the main exit, past the closed ticket booth. I shook hands with fathers and high-fived young boys wearing souvenir Metzger’s hats with minotaur horns sticking up from the sides and little girls who’d bought headbands with cat ears or fake teeth with wolf or cheetah incisors poking into their lower lips.

      At exactly midnight, as I was ushering the crowd from the big top, Abraxas—one of our three human employees—turned off the calliope music and played a light instrumental intended to signal the night’s end. The intercom crackled, then Lenore’s smooth, siren voice spoke over the music, urging the audience members to make their way to the exit, then proceed directly to their cars.

      I’d 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

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