Rachel Vincent - Menagerie

I blinked, stunned, as spittle dripped down my cheek.

“Damn it, Bruce!” Atherton hauled me toward another door.

Across the room, Brandon shoved the press-bar on the front exit and when he stepped into the parking lot, he took my last shred of hope with him. If my own boyfriend wouldn’t stand by me, who would?

The front door closed behind Brandon, and I sniffed back tears that stung like utter rejection and humiliation. My hair fell into my face as Wayne led me into another hallway, several strands clinging to the spit on my cheek.

Finally, Atherton closed the door behind us, shielding me from the rest of the world. Or maybe shielding it from me.

In an interrogation room, I followed his instructions without truly hearing them. In my mind, the front door of the sheriff’s station closed over and over, and all I could see was the back of Brandon’s head.

“Delilah,” Atherton said, and I realized he’d already said my name at least twice.

“What?” I blinked to clear my head and looked down to find myself sitting in a cold plastic chair with my arms looped around the back. A tug against my cuffs rattled chains I had no memory of, which evidently ran between my handcuffs and a metal loop set into the ground. I couldn’t stand or even twist much in my chair without pulling my arms out of their sockets.

Before I could ask if all of the metal was really necessary, a second deputy knelt to slap a set of iron shackles around my ankles and connect them to that same hook in the ground, behind my chair. When he stood, I tried to lean forward, but the pain in my shoulders stopped me. I tried to cross my ankles, but the shackles were in the way. I couldn’t move more than an inch in any direction, and that sudden severe confinement made my throat close. The room had plenty of open space but I couldn’t use any of it. Plenty of air, but I couldn’t seem to breathe any of it.

“Struggling will only make it worse,” Atherton said, and while there was no malice in his voice, there was no willingness to help either. “Just try not to think about it.”

But I couldn’t seem to manage that until the door opened, and Sheriff Pennington stepped in from the hall. He commented on my restraints with an incomprehensible grunt, then sat in the chair across a small folding table from mine.

Pennington folded his fleshy arms on the table and studied my face. “Delilah Marlow?”

I nodded, desperately trying not to squirm. “Am I under arrest?”

He snorted, then swiped at his nose with the back of one hand. “No, and I wouldn’t arrest a dog for bitin’ either. I’d just put the bitch down in the interest of public safety. You won’t be charged, and you won’t be Mirandized, because you no longer have any rights, you devious piece of shit. As long as you’re under my jurisdiction, I can do whatever I want with you, and I can’t imagine your lot would improve if the feds take over.”

His blatant threat bounced around the inside of my skull, and anger overtook my fear for the first time since I’d woken up in a jail cell. “This isn’t right, Sheriff.”

“I deal in law, not morality.” Pennington paused for a moment, evidently to let that little cow chip of irony sink in. “What are you exactly, Delilah Marlow?”

“I don’t know,” I repeated. He lifted one skeptical eyebrow, and I shrugged as best I could with my hands tightly bound behind me. “Look, if I knew, I’d tell you just to prove I’m not a surrogate.”

“Unless you are a surrogate.”

“If I were a surrogate, I’d lie. Either way, you’d have an answer. But I don’t know what I am. I didn’t know I wasn’t human until tonight.”

“We don’t know what the surrogates were either, do we?” Pennington pulled a palm-sized notebook from his front pocket. “So that doesn’t really rule anything out for you.”

I tried to find a more comfortable position, but the chains kept relief just out of reach. “Well, we know what they weren’t, and none of those little monsters looked anything like I did tonight.”

“About that...” the sheriff continued, flipping open his notebook to reveal a single page of pencil scrawling. “Let’s put our heads together and come up with some possibilities that might keep you out of federal custody, shall we?”

And finally something in his voice clued me in. Sheriff Pennington didn’t want me to be a surrogate either, because that would put me beyond his authority. The Justice Department had claimed jurisdiction over all of those cases before I was even born.

“Here’re the facts, as they were relayed to me. One, your voice changed in depth and—” Pennington glanced at the notebook on the table in front of him “—quality. Says here it was deeper than it shoulda been, and it felt—” another glance at his notes “— large . Whatever that means. Two, your eyes changed color. Not just the irises, but the entirety of your eyeballs.” He made a vague gesture encompassing most of my face, and I shuddered at the thought. “They became white, shot through with dark veins. Does that sound about right?”

I could only give him a painfully wrenching shrug, trying to hide the tide of horror washing over me. “I couldn’t see my own eyes.” And I’d never heard of a cryptid species which fit that description.

“It also says here that the veins in your face became black, like dark spiderwebs beneath your skin. Do you know anything about that?”

“No.” But I could imagine how terrifying it would have been to see. No wonder Shelley was scared. No wonder Brandon could hardly look at me. I’d spent four years studying cryptid species, yet couldn’t even identify my own. If I couldn’t understand what I’d become, how could they?

Pennington glanced at his notebook again.

“What about your hair? Witnesses say your hair took on a life of its own.”

“Sheriff, I’m assuming that if you spoke to my friends, you know that I was a crypto-biology major, with an emphasis in human hybrid species. I should know what I am. But I truly have no clue. Before tonight, I didn’t even know the question needed to be asked. All I know for sure at this point is that I’m no longer a bank teller.” I was no longer a driver, or a tenant, or a girlfriend, or a best friend.

I was nothing other than the property of the state of Oklahoma.

My eyes fell shut and I sucked in a deep breath.

The reality—the true enormity —of my loss suddenly hit me in a way that the mere intellectual understanding of it hadn’t been able to. When the interrogation was over, they weren’t going to send me home. I had no home. I was never going to count another cash drawer or make another pot of coffee ever again, no matter what I did or said. Everything that I had ever been or done or loved was gone. Delilah Marlow no longer existed.

No, Brandon was right. Delilah Marlow had never existed. My entire life was a delusion. A fantasy. A lie I hadn’t even known I was telling.

The reality was pure hell.

Pennington closed his notebook and crossed his arms on the table again, watching calmly as I fought total, devastating terror. “Before you start feeling too sorry for yourself, keep in mind that a man almost died because of you, and up at County General, they’re not sure he’ll ever regain normal brain function.”

A bright spark of anger surged up through my fear, and I seized it. “He electrified a little girl!”

Pennington turned to Atherton, who was stationed next to the door. “She’s talking about one of the beasts?”

The deputy nodded and pulled his own notebook from the pocket of his khaki uniform pants. “A pubescent canis lupus lycanus . Female.” He looked up and pocketed the notebook. “A thirteen-year-old wolf bitch. The rep from Metzger’s says they have trouble with her all the time, and the customary motivational method is a low-voltage poke with a standard cattle prod.”