Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(39)
As my tension eased, I glanced across the room and was surprised to see two familiar, large forms standing near the opposite wall. Eryx and...
“Gallagher!” I breathed, and though he couldn’t possibly have heard me, his gaze met mine, and his gray eyes brightened.
Mine filled with tears. Gallagher was a liberator. A protector. A man of uncompromising character who held others to the same high standard. The sight of him in a collar bruised me all the way to my soul. The collar looked so incredibly out of place that at first I didn’t notice he was wearing little else.
Nothing, in fact, but his unglamoured traditional red cap and a gray loincloth trimmed with a matching red cord.
He bore the indignity like a soldier. As if near nudity were a bruise or a gash, or some other battle scar earned at the hands of an enemy, but humiliation for him warmed my cheeks. I’d never seen Gallagher subjugated.
Even after seeing him hauled from the back of a van, I hadn’t really thought it was possible.
Yet as sad as I was to see him in captivity, I was elated to see him alive.
I worked my way slowly across the room, pausing to let men ogle me and take food from my tray, but I dodged reaching hands without hearing a word said to me. I couldn’t see anything but Gallagher.
His bruises were mostly healed, and the cuts on his face had been treated with narrow butterfly bandages. His dark hair had been cut short, which looked strange to me, but his eyes were the same. Steely-gray windows into a soul like none other I’d ever met.
When he saw me heading toward him, the tension in his shoulders seemed to ease. I waited until the last bite from my tray had been taken and the guests wandered toward one of the more obviously “freaky” cryptids. Then I tucked the tray beneath my arm and headed straight for Gallagher.
“Delilah.” His voice rumbled through me, though it held little volume. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. Even if I hadn’t been okay, I would have told him I was. “You?” I took in every bruise and cut. Every line of a dire expression I knew well.
“No man here could hold his own among the fearsome fear dearg I battled in my youth.”
I couldn’t resist a small smile. “So you’re humoring their authority in order to stay close to me?”
His jaw clenched, and the muscles in his neck strained against the steel collar. “Something like that.”
“It was the hat, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “My human guise was never meant to last.”
“I know.” But there was something in the slight curve of his mouth. In the glint of light shining in his gray eyes. “You got caught on purpose.”
His upper lip twitched. “Why on earth would I do that?” But he hadn’t denied it. Because fear dearg cannot lie.
“Why would you do that?”
Gallagher shrugged broad, strong shoulders. “Sometimes it is easier to break out of a fortress than to break into one,” he whispered.
On his left, the minotaur snorted.
Before I could ask him what he’d seen of the Spectacle and its security procedures so far, one of the handlers stationed behind Eryx and Gallagher—the only two male cryptids in the room—frowned at me. “Go refill your tray.”
I nodded, but before I turned back to the bacchanalia, I gave Gallagher a pleading look. “Please don’t cause trouble,” I whispered. “No matter what you see, I’m more okay than I will be if you interfere. Okay?”
“No.”
“Gallagher, I can take care of myself,” I hissed. “In here, I have to.”
“Move along,” the handler ordered.
I turned to Eryx. “Keep him in check, okay?”
The bull nodded, giving me his mute promise to try. They’d dressed him in nothing but a loincloth, similar in style to what he’d worn in the menagerie, which gave me a clear view of his massively muscled human chest and arms, beneath the fur that began on his shoulders and grew over his bovine head, up to the base of two enormous, curved horns. I saw no new cuts or bruises, and no sign that he’d been denied food or water. The only real change in him was the massive steel collar around his thick neck.
I couldn’t understand why the women had been given beautiful costumes but the men had not, until Willem Vandekamp walked through the grand entrance, then made his way toward the stage, shaking guests’ hands as he went.
Onstage, he eschewed the microphone and congratulated the groom in a voice that carried the width of the room on its own. He thanked the guests for coming and the host for choosing the Savage Spectacle as the venue. Then he signaled to someone at the back of the room, and the crowd parted as Eryx and Gallagher were marched forward to stand in front of the stage.
“You may have noticed these two beasts standing at the back of the room all evening,” Vandekamp began. “I’ve brought them in to give you an early glimpse, on the house, of our newest competitors. Our minotaur and redcap will be making their debuts in the ring later this week, and I promise you, it will be an event like no other.”
“What’s a redcap?” someone shouted from the crowd, words slurred together.
Vandekamp smiled. “Watch this.” He knelt on the stage and plucked Gallagher’s hat from his head, then tossed it into the crowd. It hit the floor, and though everyone stared, no one reached for it.