Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(62)

Was the security room also ground central for collar programming?

Pagano pulled me from the room before I’d learned anything useful, and I followed him back through the topiary and another iron gate, then into an unfamiliar building he called “the stable.”

Inside, I found a small foyer joining two hallways.

“Are you good from here?” my handler asked, as he pointed his remote at me and pressed a button. I blinked at him in confusion. “You remember where you’re going?” he clarified, and I noticed that Olive Burnett, the arena event coordinator, was hovering in the doorway, waiting to claim his full attention. He rolled his eyes at me in exasperation. “There are only two hallways, Delilah.”

“Yeah.” I glanced from Pagano to Burnette, then back. Evidently this was our regular arrangement. “I got it.”

I couldn’t leave the building, but I would get no better chance to snoop on my own.

I turned down the left-hand hallway and knocked on the first door, encouraged by the fact that I wasn’t paralyzed or driven to my knees with pain by the proximity sensor in my collar.

“Yeah?” a guard said as he opened the door. His gaze brightened when it fell on my cart. “Great. We’re starving.”

I gave him two trays while I stared over his shoulder at a room lined with sterile white-tiled horse stalls, each occupied by a centaur or satyr. The centaurs each had room for only a couple of steps forward or backward, and they couldn’t turn around at all in the cramped space.

My heart ached for them.

I recognized three of the centaurs and four of the satyrs from Metzger’s, but they did not smile when they saw me. Their glazed gazes held nothing but fear, and just the sight of their misery made the furiae stir deep inside me.

But before my inner beast could get me in trouble, the handler closed the door in my face.

I distributed trays to three more rooms, then I knocked on the last door in the left-hand hallway. “Come in,” a woman’s voice called.

I opened the door to see a female handler holding an electric rotary file—it looked like an electric toothbrush, with a rough metal cylinder in place of the bristle head. Strapped to the table in front of her was an adolescent feline shifter I’d never seen before. That I could remember. Her eyes were closed, and her breathing was deep enough to indicate sedation, rather than true sleep.

“Just set the trays over there.” The handler hardly glanced at me as she pulled the poor girl’s mouth open and began filing the points of her sharp canines.

I had to force myself to look away.

The back of the room—just like the four before it—was lined with built-in cages, each of which contained a single young shifter. I counted three boys and two girls. The last pen on the left stood open, waiting for the girl on the table to return.

I set two trays on the desk the handler had pointed at, and as I was heading back into the hall, my gaze caught on a familiar set of golden wolf eyes and long, tangled blond hair in one of the pens. “Genni!” I whispered, glad that the handler couldn’t hear me over the grinding sound of her electric file.

But Genevieve heard me just fine; a werewolf’s hearing is much better than any human’s.

“What are you doing here?” I threaded my fingers through the mesh front of her cage, amazed that the guard had so much confidence in my collar that she hadn’t even glanced up from her work. How long had I been serving her lunch?

“Where else would I be?” Genni whispered in her distinctive French accent, and I realized I shouldn’t be surprised to see her.

Right before our coup, she’d been sold to the All American Menagerie. Gallagher and I had tried to buy her back as soon as we took over, but All American had already sold her because they couldn’t make her perform and she’d been too feral to breed.

Her father, Claudio, had been devastated. He’d left the menagerie to look for her.

Genni looked thin, yet much healthier than she’d ever been in the menagerie. But she and the other young shifters were pale, as if they rarely saw the sun.

“Did you bring me quelque chose?” Genni asked, her gaze wandering to the trays I’d delivered.

“Um...sure. Just a sec.” I glanced at the handler, to make sure she was still busy, then I snatched the garlic bread from both trays and slid it through the tray slot of Geni’s cage, into her eager hands. “Eat fast.”

Yet as soon as I’d given her the food, I felt guilty. Five other pairs of wide eyes watched our interaction, and I couldn’t tell whether they were more hungry for food or for kindness. But I had nothing else to give.

“Merci. Have you figured out les colliers yet?” Genni whispered around a mouth full of bread. “How to...” she hesitated while she searched for the word “...turn them off?”

My eyes widened. I’d been trying to turn the collars off? All of them? Was that possible? Had I figured it out?

Could Vandekamp have erased my memory to take that knowledge from me?

“Hey! You know better, Delilah,” a voice called out from behind me. Startled, I whirled around to see a second guard standing in the doorway. “Get moving.”

I turned to give Genni an apologetic look, but she had her back to me, no doubt trying to eat the rest of her bread before the guard saw.

As I pushed my cart toward the next hallway, the guard glanced at his lunch tray in disgust.