Rachel Vincent - Menagerie

“Yes, but I think you’re better off here than you would be in state custody.” The deputy folded his hands on the table while I watched him through a strand of hair that had fallen over my eye. “The state reservation is over capacity. They’re sendin’ the overflow straight to an R & D holding facility, and that place...”

Atherton stared down at his hands, and the fact that he was clearly stalling made my heart beat too hard.

Cryptid research and development was big business, with both the government and the private sector, but regulation was virtually nonexistent. Animal activists raised hell if a pharmaceutical company wanted to test new shampoo on a sewer rat, but R & D could inject environmental toxins beneath a selkie’s removable seal skin all day long and no one blinked an eye.

“They don’t tag ’em or count ’em, Delilah. I made a couple of calls, and a guy in records told me that since the lab opened fourteen years ago, they’ve sent in more than five times the max capacity—all kinds of cryptids—and there’s no record of any of them ever officially leaving the facility. But they fire up the industrial incinerator about once a week.”

My pulse jumped, and I struggled to keep breathing slowly. Evenly. “What’s the alternative? Hotel California?”

The deputy nodded. “Otherwise known as the Oklahoma Cryptid Confinement Center.”

“Same thing.” Because there, every sentence that wasn’t a life sentence was a death sentence.

“The only other option I can think of would be a private collection. I know this guy out in—”

“No.” Chills shot up my spine. Werewolves on leashes, declawed and walking around like pets. Selkies and naiads swimming in giant koi ponds. Fauns serving drinks at private events in nothing but gold chains and collars. I shook my head vehemently. “I’m nobody’s pet.”

“That’s not up to you.” Atherton leaned back in his chair, his forehead crinkled in irritation. “I’m going out of my way to help you, and your appreciation looks a lot like ingratitude.”

Indignation sharpened my vision until I finally saw the deputy clearly. “You want me to be thankful that you’re willing to sell me as a living party favor instead of sentencing me to a cryptid prison?”

The deputy’s eyes narrowed. “You need to take a good, objective look at what you’re facing here, Delilah. OCCC is an open-population cryptid prison. There are no guards. No cells. No rules. Helicopters make periodic supply drops on the grounds. You’d fight for every scrap of food and clothing until the day some troll or adlet eats you for breakfast. Is your pride really worth dying for?”

Fuck! I closed my eyes and clenched my fists over and over, wishing that the rest of me would go as numb as my fingers.

“And at least in a collection you’d be alive and in good health. No collector is going to let any serious damage come to property he spent good money on.”

Property. Damage. Money . I would be an exotic pet. An insured asset in some rich prick’s ledger. Because even animal lovers keep dogs on leashes.

The deputy shrugged. “I could say something to the sheriff about a private collector,” he offered. “He’d have to think it was his own idea, but that shouldn’t be hard. He still thinks it was his idea to install a vent fan in the men’s room, and—”

“That was my idea.” Pennington pushed the door open and marched into the interrogation room. Atherton’s jaw tightened and his gaze dropped to the table between us for a second before he stood to relinquish the chair. “But I like where your head’s at, Deputy.” Pennington settled across the table from me, and the chair groaned beneath his weight. “I’ve found a fella out near the panhandle who’s lookin’ to replenish his collection. He doesn’t care what flavor of freak you are, so long as we pass along the results of your blood test as soon as we have ’em.”

My chest felt so tight I could hardly breathe. “What kind of collection?”

“Well, I guess calling it a collection is kinda puttin’ on airs. Fella actually calls it a reserve.”

Wayne frowned. “Sheriff, are you talking about Russell Clegg’s operation? He’s running a game park over there, bringing hunters from all over to—”

Pennington twisted to look up at his deputy, and the chair creaked again. “Atherton, shut your mouth. You know no such thing.”

I swallowed convulsively, struggling to hold down what little dinner I’d had as horror washed over me in waves. “You can’t just let them chase me through the woods and shoot me down like a deer!” I wouldn’t stand a chance, with hunters wearing infrared goggles and hound dogs following my scent.

“Handin’ you over to Clegg will save the great state of Oklahoma thousands of dollars a year in upkeep, and in the process, I’ll be making the streets of Franklin County a safer place to live. Folks want you gone, Delilah. Voting folks.”

“I thought you couldn’t send me anywhere until my blood test comes back.”

The sheriff shrugged. “After talking to your mother, I agree that whatever you are, you’re probably not a surrogate. If the test says otherwise, the feds can seize you from Clegg just as easily as they could seize you from me, and as long as my check has cleared, I could not give a—”

The door to the interrogation room flew open, startling us all.

“What?” Pennington roared at the deputy who stood in the threshold.

“There’s a man out ’ere wants to talk to ya, Sheriff. It’s about Lilah Marlow.”

“What about her?”

The deputy shrugged. “He said he’d only talk to you. We put him in the next room, now that they got Mrs. Marlow moved to a cell.”

The sheriff nodded. “I’ll be there when I’m done in here.” His deputy disappeared into the hall, and I glanced at Atherton with my brows raised, silently asking what he knew.

He only shrugged.

As the sheriff turned back to me with more questions, I stared at my own reflection in the one-way mirror, wondering who was looking back at me from the other side, and why.

I’d already been threatened with prison, a collection, and a hunting reserve. How much worse could this stranger’s plan for me possibly be?

“Ladies and gentlemen, our lead story continues to grow stranger and more disturbing. So far, in every single one of the reported cases of this mass prolicide—the killing of one’s own children—it appears that one child in each family has survived, completely unharmed. Even more bizarre—all of the surviving children are six years old, each born in the same month—March of 1980.”

—Continuing coverage on the Nightly News , August 30, 1986

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