Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(66)

“Will do.” Brewer stepped almost silently out of his hiding place, and at the bottom of his screen, his hands extended in front of him, holding his stun gun.

On the other screen, Miles slowly approached his downed target, twigs cracking with every step he took.

Brewer fired his stun gun with an audible jolt of electricity. The form in front of him jumped with the impact, then shook as electricity passed through him. An instant later, he hit the ground with hardly a sound. He’d landed in a patch of bare dirt.

“He’s down!” Brewer bounded forward and his hand rose toward the screen. Something clicked, and a flashlight shone from his helmet onto the form at his feet. “I’ve got him! I won!”

And he had. Payat lay on the ground, unconscious. Still in human form.

“What the hell...?” Again, the coordinator forgot he was holding his microphone, and this time Brewer heard him, as well. “Then what did the other guy catch?”

As one, we turned to Miles’s screen as he finally switched on his own flashlight. The beam skirted the underbrush, then settled on a fur-covered form lying on its side, its ribs rising and falling with each labored breath. “What the hell is that?” Miles demanded, as the audience gasped. “That’s not a cheetah.”

“No, it isn’t.” The coordinator turned to Charles. “It’s a werewolf. Patch me through to him.”

“You’ve got Miles,” Charles said with the click of a few buttons.

“Mr. Miles, slowly back away from the creature, and stand very still. We’re sending help your way immediately.”

“What the hell’s going on?” Instead of backing away, Miles leaned forward for a closer look. “What the—”

The creature lunged at him in a blur of sharp-toothed muzzle and glowing eyes.

Miles shouted and stumbled back. The werewolf’s muzzle clamped closed around his left forearm. Miles screamed and swung his stun gun like a hammer. The wolf let him go and backed away, growling.

Blood soaked through Miles’s sleeve, a darker shade of green on the infrared cameras. He fired the last load from his stun gun, and the werewolf collapsed on the ground, trembling as the second dose of electricity coursed through him.

“We appear to have had a breach.” Fischer had clearly seen what I’d already noticed—the fur-covered form on the ground in Miles’s feed wasn’t wearing a collar. And while the coordinator clearly thought one of the Savage Spectacle’s captives had somehow gotten out of his collar and escaped his cell, I knew better.

I recognized the form on the screen in front of me, even though it was painted several shades of night-vision green. I knew that fur, and I knew that muzzle, and I knew the single eye blinking sluggishly up at the camera.

Vandekamp hadn’t lost one of his werewolves; he’d gained one.

Claudio had come to claim his daughter.





For Immediate Release: January 18, 2002

AFCR contact: Rebecca Foster WASHINGTON, DC—The American Foundation for Cryptid Research has      awarded $9.9 million in research grants to three projects, each of which hopes      to unlock genetic secrets of a specific cryptid species. This award marks the      Foundation’s largest grants to date, the majority of which will go to a project      at Colorado State University, seeking to map the genome of several species of      shifter hybrids...





Delilah

Claudio was tranquilized on a live camera feed, in spite of the very active interest of Mr. Miles, who seemed unconcerned with his own injury and thrilled by the unexpected excitement. While handlers fitted the wolf with a muzzle and a paramedic bandaged Miles’s arm, Willem Vandekamp came into the viewing room and whispered something to Olive Burnette, who left with her orders. Then Vandekamp marched to the front of the room and took the microphone from Fischer.

Over the mic, he effusively congratulated Mr. Brewer on his quick and virtually effortless mastery of a vicious cheetah shifter and apologized for the “technical difficulties.” To make it up to such a valued customer, Vandekamp offered him a makeup hunt, on the house.

That must have been quite a generous financial offer, because Brewer, who’d been vocally disappointed in the reaction to his victory, suddenly seemed quite satisfied with his hunting experience.

The screens went blank while they reset the game field for the second round, and the handlers gave us a signal to start refilling drinks and plates.

After a fifteen-minute intermission, the house lights went down again, and this time Vandekamp ran the show himself. He announced that the second-round hunters would be chasing a feral adolescent werewolf named Genevieve who would as soon tear their throats out as look at them. Which was why the hunters had been outfitted with bite-proof sleeves and collars, and why they’d be hunting this vicious creature not with stun guns, but with the lethal longbow.

For one long, terrifying moment, I couldn’t breathe.

That’s why Genni was in the stables, rather than the dormitory. The very night her father had broken into the Spectacle to save her, Vandekamp had scheduled her to die.

“Oh, shit,” Zyanya whispered from my right.

“What?” Simra’s gaze roamed the screens, looking for the source of our distress.