Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(33)
I crossed the white tile floor silently, aware only of the wrathful need pulsing through me. As Sutton reached for Rommily, cursing the spray of water from the tap, my hands were pulled toward his head, my claws eager to sink into his temples. But then he turned, and my hand landed on the side of his neck instead.
My claws found no flesh, but his skin burned beneath mine. Sutton froze. His arms fell limp at his sides, then began to tremble. His teeth chattered.
Pick on someone your own size, the furiae within me mumbled, as I obliged her vengeful demands. Someone exactly your size...
When the fire inside me began to abate, I removed my hand from the handler’s neck. My claws were gone. My hair had settled over my shoulders.
Someone gasped behind me. Where I’d touched Sutton’s bare flesh, there now appeared a red imprint in the shape of my hand, with a pinpoint of red at the tip of each finger, where my claws had rested but had not broken through.
As I stared, Sutton curled his right hand into a fist and launched it at his own nose.
I flinched and stepped back, but the handler threw another punch at himself, then another and another, without complaint or any sign of hesitation. He grunted with the violence of each blow. His nose crunched and spurted blood. His cheek split open and showed gory strands of muscle.
The crowd at my back inched closer. I could feel their bewilderment, but it was the murmured buzz of relief—a quiet celebration of justice—that sent a peaceful thread of contentment through me as I watched the furiae’s handiwork.
In seconds, Sutton’s face was ruined. Bone showed through in several places, and his eyes were both swelling shut. His lips were split and he’d chipped several of his own teeth with his elaborate wedding band. Yet the punching did not stop.
“What’s happening?” Simra whispered from behind me, but I was too fascinated by the bloody spectacle to answer her.
“Delilah made him pay. That’s what she—” Zyanya’s answer ended in an agonized scream, but before I could turn, fire shot through my neck and down my spine. Agony raced down my arms and legs with a clinical precision that could only have come from the cruel shock collar.
A chorus of screams rose in echo of my pain, as behind me, my dormmates were each crippled by an electric current of their own.
My legs folded and I collapsed, immobilized on my left side on the cold floor as fire shot through me over and over. The others lay spread out around me on the tile, several frozen in the threshold, unable to vocalize more than a whimper of pain. Terrified and in agony, I rolled my eyes to look through the doorway and saw that everyone still in the dorm had collapsed as well, and several were seizing from the force of the electricity being pumped through them.
My lungs burned with every rapid breath I sucked in. My heart raced and my vision swam.
The dormitory door opened with a familiar squeal, and a dozen handlers burst into the room. One of them clicked something on his remote, and the pain ended. I exhaled, blissfully numb for a second. But when I tried to sit up, my body would not respond to the order from my brain. The paralysis had not ended. We all lay frozen and helpless on the floor.
And through it all, I heard the repetitive thunk of flesh on flesh as Sutton continued to punch his own ruined face.
“What the fuck?” Woodrow demanded, pushing his way into the bathroom while his men aimed tranquilizer rifles at the cryptids they considered most dangerous, just in case.
Three of the guns were aimed at me.
Woodrow stepped over several prone forms, and on the edge of my vision, he grabbed Sutton’s arm, to end the self-inflicted violence. “Sutton! Stop it!” The gamekeeper had to hold back the handler’s bloody fist with both hands, visibly struggling to control him. “Cuffs!” he shouted to his other men, and two of them lowered the rifles they were aiming at me and helped cuff their coworker to protect him from himself.
Neither of them even glanced at Rommily, who lay in the shower, immobilized, with water pouring over her torn clothing. Or at Mirela, whose ruined nose was still dribbling blood on the tile floor.
“What’s that on his neck?” one of the men asked.
Woodrow pulled down the collar of Sutton’s shirt and studied the fresh red mark. “It’s a handprint. Right where she touched him.” The gamekeeper turned to me, and I realized he’d seen the whole thing. Either the camera in the dormitory could see into the bathroom, or there was one hidden in the bathroom, as well. “Cuff her and throw her in a cell. Keep her paralyzed until the door’s locked.”
Two of the handlers rolled me onto my stomach, and though I couldn’t move, one pressed his knee into my back. My lungs could not expand beneath his weight. Panic made my head spin, and pinpoints of light floated across my vision. When the weight was finally lifted, I gasped for air, but the sound was eerily hollow without the use of my vocal cords.
Woodrow turned to the man who’d cuffed Sutton. “Take him to the infirmary, but don’t take the cuffs off. I’ll radio the boss.” Then he marched out of the room.
The handlers who’d cuffed me picked me up by my arms and carried me through the dormitory and into the hall. Still frozen on the floor, my friends could only watch, mute, as I was hauled away.
*
I’d been in the small concrete cell for no more than an hour when the lock clicked. I looked up from where I sat on the floor as Woodrow opened the door, but he stayed in the hall, out of my reach, even though I was still cuffed. “Are you going to behave, or do we need to paralyze you again?” He held up his remote for emphasis.