Rachel Vincent - Menagerie

That evening, Brandon took my hand as we wandered down the fairground midway behind my best friend, Shelley Wells, and her boyfriend, Rick. Barkers cried out from both sides of the path, challenging us to pin the tail on the centaur, or knock down pop-up silhouettes of satyrs with a rubber-tipped archery set, or shoot the shell bras off mermaid figurines with water guns. Calliope music played at a volume only small children and the near-deaf could actually enjoy.

The noise scattered my thoughts and scraped my nerves raw. We hadn’t even gotten to the menagerie section of the carnival yet and I was ready to go home.

“Hey, Lilah, did you see they have a minotaur?” Shelley pointed to a twenties-style poster tacked up next to a spinning ride advertised as “guaranteed to make you hurl.”

“They didn’t have him when we were kids.”

I nodded, and she turned to walk backward, facing me while she shouted above the jostling, buzzing crowd. “You see a minotaur in school?”

“No. They’re pretty rare.” We’d seen very few live cryptids in class, and minotaurs were among the least likely to ever be studied by undergrads. They bred slowly in captivity and gave birth to only one offspring at a time. Most experts believed they’d be extinct within a century—a tragedy few in the U.S. would recognize.

“You shouldn’t have quit.” Shelley turned to face forward again, taking Rick’s arm, then called to me over her shoulder. “You would’ve been a great crypto-vet.”

“I didn’t quit. I just didn’t go to grad school.” For a while, though, that had been the plan. I’d finished my crypto-biology degree and had already been accepted into two crypto-veterinary programs before I’d realized that the only jobs legally available in the U.S. for crypto-vets would have required me to lock up my patients. Even the ones with human faces.

Those jobs were at places like Metzger’s Menagerie.

Or worse: research labs, in which scientists tested everything from cosmetics to biological weapons on creatures protected by neither human law nor ASPCA regulations.

Disillusioned by those prospects, I’d moved back home to Franklin, where the median income was less than two-thirds that of the national average and my best guess on the median vocabulary looked even less promising.

A jewel glittering among small-town clods of red clay, Brandon was a newly minted pharmacist with a future in the family business. He read books and spoke in complete sentences. We’d been together since the month I’d come home from college, and—poor gift-giving skills aside—he was a very nice guy. And he truly loved me.

The only part of me that had been relieved to find such a morally ambiguous birthday present on my nightstand was the part that had half expected an engagement ring.

I wanted to be more than a small-town bank teller married to a small-town pharmacist. But I had no idea what “more” might look like, and the certainty that I’d know it when I saw it had faded with each day spent in Franklin. All I ever saw was Brandon, and all he seemed to want to see was me.

And a traveling zoo full of bizarre beasts.

The actual menagerie was behind a second gate at the end of the sawdust-strewn midway, a design no doubt intended to pull people past countless opportunities to spend money on their way to the main attraction—the only part of the carnival not offered on a yearly basis by the county fair.

Brandon and I caught up with Shelley and Rick at the menagerie gate, where another line had formed. I recognized several of the people in the crowd as account holders from the bank, but without my name tag—Hello, My Name is Delilah. Can I Interest You in a No-Fee Savings Plan?—they didn’t seem to recognize me. The family in front of us had three small children, each clamoring to touch the shifter kittens and phoenix chicks in the petting zoo. At the gate, the parents were reminded that certain areas of the exhibit, namely the succubus tent, would be off-limits to anyone under eighteen.

Rick snickered like an overgrown twelve-year-old and Shelley elbowed him. I thanked the universe for my mature, stable, predictable boyfriend, then realized that I’d just found three different ways to call Brandon boring.

When we got to the front of the line, an elderly man in a red sequined vest and a black top hat took one look at Shelley, then bowed low and pulled a bouquet of real daisies from his sleeve. He presented them to her with a flourish from one knee, heedless of his cracking joints.

Delighted, Shelley returned his bow with a curtsy, spreading the hem of an imaginary skirt, and even I couldn’t resist a smile. Then she and Rick helped the poor old man to his feet.

The ticket taker resettled his hat on his head. “First time at the menagerie?”

“Kind of.” Shelley stuck her nose into the daisies and sniffed. “Delilah and I saw some of it when we were kids. They didn’t bring out any of the exotic stuff, though.”

“Well, then, you’re in for a treat!” He glanced at our plastic full-pass bracelets, then waved us inside with a grand, white-gloved gesture. “Trust me, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve never seen anything like this before.”

However, that could only be partly true, no matter what they had on display behind velvet curtains and in gilded cages. Gone were the days when centaurs roamed the plains in herds, with flocks of thunderbirds beating powerful wings overhead, but we’d grown up seeing cryptids of all sizes, shapes, and colors on television and in movie theaters. They were the villains in our horror movies, most of which drew on the reaping for inspiration. They were the hidden terrorist threats in our thrillers, the bumbling bad guys in our comedies, and the subject of scientific study in nearly every documentary I’d ever seen.

That’s where traveling creature features had the market cornered. Anyone could see a werewolf on television, but the average citizen could only see one live at the menagerie. If he or she could afford the cost of admission. And Metzger’s had the most diverse collection of any cryptid zoo in the country.

Metzger’s was stunning. I couldn’t deny that, even as I stopped to scrape a thin coating of manure and sawdust from the sole of my left boot onto the grass.

Compared to the Tilt-A-Whirl and corn-dog portion of the carnival, the menagerie was practically circus finery. The lights were brighter and the colors more vibrant. Even the boisterous organ music felt more sophisticated and dimensional. Costumed performers wandered the midway with flaming batons, balloon bouquets, and souvenir top hats, giving the menagerie the same glamorous, exotic appeal I remembered from my visit as a child. The red sequined costumes had been updated, as, presumably, had the employees wearing them, and the scents of fried dough and roasted meat still made my mouth water.

But the guilt twisting my insides into knots couldn’t be calmed by junk food, and the glass of wine I’d had in place of my pre-carnival dinner hadn’t helped in the least. The small line of People First protesters shouting, “Remember the reaping!” outside the front gate had only made the whole thing worse.

The People First activists wanted the menagerie to leave Franklin County. We had that much in common. However, they didn’t object to the inhumane treatment of cryptids in captivity—they were scared that the cryptids would escape and embark upon another devastating human slaughter.

What they didn’t seem to realize was that if the menagerie’s oddities escaped, we would see them coming .

We hadn’t seen the reaping coming. The cryptid surrogates had pulled off the greatest con in all of history—so meticulously executed that we didn’t realize the scale of the infiltration until it was far too late. Six years after the first wave, we’d still had no idea that our losses numbered more than three hundred thousand.