He always meant well.
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 hadnt 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 didnt 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. Theyre pretty rare. Wed 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 theyd be extinct within a centurya tragedy few in the U.S. would recognize.
You shouldnt have quit. Shelley turned to face forward again, taking Ricks arm, then called to me over her shoulder. You wouldve been a great crypto-vet.
I didnt quit. I just didnt go to grad school. For a while, though, that had been the plan. Id finished my crypto-biology degree and had already been accepted into two crypto-veterinary programs before Id 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 Metzgers 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, Id 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. Wed been together since the month Id come home from college, andpoor gift-giving skills asidehe 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 Id 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 attractionthe 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 tagHello, My Name is Delilah. Can I Interest You in a No-Fee Savings Plan?they didnt 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 Id 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 couldnt 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 didnt bring out any of the exotic stuff, though.
Well, then, youre 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. Youve 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 wed 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 Id ever seen.
Thats 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 Metzgers had the most diverse collection of any cryptid zoo in the country.
Metzgers was stunning. I couldnt 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 couldnt be calmed by junk food, and the glass of wine Id had in place of my pre-carnival dinner hadnt 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 didnt object to the inhumane treatment of cryptids in captivitythey were scared that the cryptids would escape and embark upon another devastating human slaughter.
What they didnt seem to realize was that if the menageries oddities escaped, we would see them coming.
We hadnt seen the reaping coming. The cryptid surrogates had pulled off the greatest con in all of historyso meticulously executed that we didnt realize the scale of the infiltration until it was far too late. Six years after the first wave, wed still had no idea that our losses numbered more than three hundred thousand.
Fearing locked-up cryptids that didnt look human would do us no more good than suspecting our own neighbors and relatives of being monsters, as wed done for decades after the reaping. But scared people cant be reasoned with. Scared politicians cant be talked down from their podiums. Scared nations pass reactionary laws without bothering to consider how much powder those legal snowballs will gather as they roll down Capitol Hill. Eventually, yesterdays outrage becomes todays normalcy.
Reactionary legislation had spawned outfits like Metzgers, where anything and everything not deemed to be human could be locked up and put on display with no limits, no boundaries, and no regulations except those meant to protect employees and spectators. Which made people like methe admittedly quiet minorityprofoundly uncomfortable.
My tension headache told me I shouldnt have accepted the tickets. My queasy stomach said I shouldnt be celebrating my birthday at the menagerie where, as a child, Id been shocked to see three malnourished little girls locked in an animal pen wearing no more than a few filthy scraps of material. Because when I remembered the reapinginarguably the most profound tragedy to ever strike the U.S.I also remembered the millions of innocent cryptids whod been rounded up and thrown in prisons or shot on sight for resisting arrest.
By the time I was born, several years after the reaping was discovered, the government had begun denying citizenship and legal rights to any living being only partially human, as well as to any hybrid of two or more different biological families.
What that meant was that ligers and mules were protected by the ASPCA because they were both hybrids of two animals that share the same biological genus and family. But because the griffin is a hybrid of two different classesMammalia and Avesand three different ordersCarnivora, Artiodactyla, and Squamatait isnt recognized as a natural animal but as a cryptid beast. Anything considered unnatural under such legislation was denied protection under U.S. law.
That secondary national tragedy, a clean sweep of everyone not wholly human or naturally fauna, had been brushed under the rug, and even mentioning it made my friends and coworkers look at me as if Id just set fire to the U.S. flag. So Id stopped talking about it. But I hadnt stopped feeling it.
Yet deep down, I was dying to see the strange and amazing creatures Id studied in school, for all the same reasons that had led me to major in crypto-biology in the first place. I wanted to see the beautiful selkie emerging from her seal-skin. The troll, so tall and thick he couldnt stand up in most human-scale buildings. The man who could turn into a cheetah at will. The part of me that objected to the confinement and abuse of such beings was the very same part that needed to see them for myself.
To understand.
Metzgers had no right to exploit the creatures in its custody, but that wouldnt end whether I looked at them or not. And who better than I to truly appreciate, rather than taunt or mock?
At least, thats how I rationalized my warring desires to both condemn and experience the spectacle.
At the center of the menagerie, towering over everything else, was the big top, an enormous red-and-white-striped circus tent with three sharp peaks that cast an ominous shadow over the fairgrounds. The entrance flaps remained tightly closed until a paying guest was admitted, making it impossible to catch even a passing glimpse of the mysteries within. Around the perimeter of the menagerie stood a series of smaller tents and attractions, and branching from those were a series of themed subsections. Everything from the posters and cages to the costumes and music was designed with a vintage feel so that it seemed as though wed stepped back in time.
Up first was the bestiary, where cryptid animals lounged or paced in sideshow cage wagons modeled after circus train cars from the early 1900s. They had bright, intricately carved frames and huge wooden wheels, and the beasts within were visible from both sides, through thick iron bars reinforced with sheets of modern steel mesh.
The mesh was a recent requirement, after a twelve-year-old had lost her right hand to an irritable troll in a carnival out West somewhere, a few years back.
Shelley oohed and aahed over the chimera, a beast with the body and claws of a lion, two headsone lion, one goatand a snake for a tail. Delilah, look how thick and smooth his fur is! she cried, her nose inches from the side of the cage. I gently tugged her back by one arm. Anything with claws and venom should be appreciated from at least two feet away. So glossy!
But when the creature turned to pace four steps in the other directionthe full length of its cramped quartersI noticed that the fur on the goat heads side was matted and dirty. Obviously that half didnt self-groom.
Here, kitty, kitty! Shelley called, and the snake growing in place of the beasts tail hissed at her.
Hes not a kitty, Shell, Brandon said. Hes a ferocious beast capable of tearing you apart with three different jaws at once.
Hes not a he. I pointed at a sign attached with twists of wire to the bars on one end of the cage car. Her name is Cleo. Shes eighty-six years old, as of last spring, I said, still reading from the plaque. Born in the wild well before both the reaping and the repeal of the Sanctuary Act, and still in her prime today. I stepped back for a better look. Poor thing. By the time she dies, shell have spent three-quarters of her life in a cage.
Rick rolled his eyes. Theyre animals, Delilah. They dont even know where they are.
Were all animals. From the taxonomy kingdom Animalia. And you dont know what she knows or feels. Have some respect. Shes your elder.
Rick laughed as if Id made a joke. He tried to put one arm around me and when I pulled away from him, I tripped over a rock and had to grab one of the cages bars to keep from falling. The heavy cage rocked just a little, and the chimera twisted toward me faster than I would have thought something with three heads could move. The snake hissed and the lion head roared.
I froze, intuitively trying not to trigger any further predatory instinct, but Shelley screeched and jumped back.
Rick laughed at her. Brandon pulled me away from the cage and didnt let go even after Id regained my balance, my heart still racing.
Dont touch the exhibits, a deep voice growled, and we turned to find a large man in a bright red baseball cap standing near the end of the chimera cage. His red polo shirt bore the Metzgers logo and the name embroidered over his heart read Gallagher. His hair was thick and curly beneath his cap and his eyes were dark gray. Unless you want to lose a lot of blood.
I tripped. In the glare from the setting sun, I noticed several old scars on his face and his forearms, and I wondered how many of those had come from beasts he was in charge of. And how many of them he deserved.
Cleos in an iron cage, surrounded by steel mesh, Rick said. Whats she going to do, roar until our ears bleed?