Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(56)

The lights in my box brightened, throwing a square of illumination on the stadium seats just below. Gallagher’s gaze found me, and the image of him on the overhead screen zoomed in for a close-up. The audience turned to follow his gaze.

I gasped, surprised to find myself the center of attention again, and in my peripheral vision, all six of my customers turned as if they’d just then noticed I was there.

“Why are the lights on?” one of the men demanded.

“So he can see her,” Pagano answered.

“It’s her!” the woman next to him half whispered, her focus suddenly fixed on my face, though she’d hardly looked at me all evening. “So it’s true? He fights for her?”

“It’s true. Nothing else seems to motivate him,” Bowman said as if I weren’t standing right there, listening. “Not even his own safety.”

“That’s so beautiful!” one of the women said, but the man to her left scoffed.

“It’s a gimmick, Cherie. They don’t feel things the way we do. They’ve just been trained for this act, to draw in new customers. Like teaching a monkey to dance.”

My face flushed red-hot, but I only bit my tongue and clutched the tray, trying to pretend I couldn’t hear them.

“What is she?” a man in the second row asked. But I fixed my gaze on the screen, where a close-up of Gallagher showed details I couldn’t see from the private box.

His wounds had completely healed, and somehow they’d multiplied. His torso and arms were covered in thick, irregular scars, which had already begun to fade from fresh pink to an older shade of white.

That couldn’t be right. I stepped closer to the glass.

Gallagher’s hair had grown out beneath his cap, not just to stubble, but to a full inch and a half of hair, where there’d been only scruff the last time I’d seen him.

That could not have been just days ago.

My tray clattered to the floor. Glass shattered and wine splashed the wall and pooled on the wood floor.

How much time had I missed?

“Damn it!” the nearest lady cursed, using a napkin to brush drops of pinot noir from her shoes. “What the hell is wrong with her?”

“What’s the date?” I demanded, stepping over the tray and the broken glass.

On-screen, Gallagher frowned. He could tell I was upset.

Bowman and Pagano rushed toward me from the rear of the box, but they froze when I grabbed the lady’s arm. So did she. Bowman aimed his remote at me, while Pagano pulled his stun gun from his belt. “Let her go, Delilah,” Pagano said.

“What day is it?” I demanded.

The woman began to hyperventilate. “I...I don’t...”

I grabbed the phone sitting on the arm of her chair and pressed a button to wake it up. The date slid across her lock screen, and my eyes widened.

Two months. Two fucking months.

I hadn’t lost days. I’d lost eight full weeks of my life.





“In a landslide decision, the US House of Representatives has      declined to pass the so-called cryptid labor law, which would have allowed      ownership of several specific species of cryptids by private citizens. Insiders      cite concern for public safety as the reason the bill did not pass.”

—from the September 27, 1997, edition of       the Toledo Tribune





Delilah

Pagano pulled me away from the woman—Cherie?—and cuffed my hands at my back while Bowman radioed the event coordinator and asked for a server to fill in.

But instead of removing me from the box, Pagano took me closer to the glass, his gloved hand on my arm, careful to keep himself positioned between me and the guests I was no longer serving. He seemed to think that if they removed me from the box, Gallagher would refuse to fight.

He also seemed to think I posed no real threat to the customers. How much had they figured out about me during my missing time? Did they know I couldn’t hurt the customers unless the furiae saw them get away with committing an injustice?

I hardly saw the match, not because I couldn’t bear to watch—which was true—but because I couldn’t make sense of my loss. Where had the time gone? How was it taken? Why was it taken?

How many times had Gallagher been in the ring? How many creatures had he been forced to kill? Had I seen it all?

Why couldn’t I remember?

On the sand, the behemoth gored Gallagher’s arm, and blood arced across the sand. He pivoted and regrouped as the two-ton beast slowed to a thundering stop, then turned to charge again. But the only part that sank in through my shock was that Gallagher was alive.

Which meant that his death could not have caused my memory loss.

Minutes later, he stood on the sand over the body of the felled beast, and in the roar everyone else assumed to be a proclamation of his victory, I heard a bellow of anguish. Unlike with Argos, he hadn’t been able to kill such a huge creature without spilling its blood, and this time I knew that would not be the end. It couldn’t be.

His cap was too pale. Too dry. He might not make it until the next match if he didn’t use the blood he’d spilled, even if his victim hadn’t deserved death.

The spectators watched, mystified, as he knelt beside the body of the beast and took off his cap. For a moment, he appeared to be praying. Then he carefully, almost reverently, set his cap in the pool of blood still pouring from the massive tear in the behemoth’s stomach, inches from its spilled intestines.