Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(91)
“Done.” I was a step ahead of them. “But that doesn’t mean the collar won’t shock him—or worse—the minute you try to sever the connection to his spine.”
“We’re willing to take that chance,” Claudio insisted.
Gallagher gently slid the scissors between the back of Claudio’s neck and his collar. When the werewolf reported no pain, Gallagher carefully snipped the first spine. Claudio flinched, but made no complaint, so Gallagher slid the scissors a little deeper and snipped again. “This last one’s hard to reach. Any pain yet?”
“No.” Claudio held his head stiff and still.
“Okay, here goes.” Gallagher snipped again.
The remote in my hand beeped, and a notice popped up on the screen. “‘Collar deactivated,’” I read. “Claudio. Collar 47927.”
Claudio exhaled, and Gallagher actually smiled. Then he slid the collar up as far as it would go on the werewolf’s neck. “I can’t get this off, but that’s just as well. If they see you without the collar, they’ll know something’s wrong. But I can get these spines out. Hold very still.”
Gallagher gripped the highest of the three tiny spines with the tips of his blunt fingernails and pulled it straight out of the wolf’s neck.
Claudio’s eyes squeezed shut and he took a deep breath, but when he reported no pain, Gallagher removed the other two spines and dropped all three into the trash. “They can’t hurt you with this thing anymore.”
I snipped and removed Gallagher’s spines next, then he removed mine. My neck stung when he pulled the metal free, but the euphoria I felt when they clinked into the trash more than made up for it.
Vandekamp had placed his faith, his safety and his entire career on his collars, and that had led him to drop his guard.
He would have no idea what hit him.
“According to the current rate of research, it would take approximately one hundred fifty years to map the genome of every known species of cryptid. If this Dr. Vandekamp has come up with another way—a faster way—to understand and control these beasts, I think we owe it to ourselves and our children to listen to what he has to say.”
—from an NPR interview with Barbara Gray, president of the Mothers Against Cryptid Violence organization, August 8, 2012
Delilah
We hid Pagano’s body beneath Claudio’s bed. Anyone who looked would find it, but it wouldn’t be visible at a glance. The towels that mopped up his blood went into the trash, which conveniently covered Gallagher’s handcuffs with legitimate-looking medical waste.
The hardest part of sneaking out of the infirmary was leaving the rest of the patients behind, but we couldn’t stage a full-scale escape until we’d disabled all the collars and taken out as many of the handlers as possible. As far as I could tell, none of the patients’ injuries were life-threatening. Evidently, Vandekamp considered it more financially feasible to exterminate the mortally wounded than to treat the wounds.
With any luck, most would be able to walk away from the Spectacle under their own power—if and when Gallagher and I could free them.
But without a captured carnival to hide us...
“We need a plan,” I whispered as I led him down a back hallway of the infirmary toward the service entrance, where I’d often seen Eryx unloading supplies during lunch delivery. Hopefully at night, it would be empty.
“I have a plan. Kill them all.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said as we slipped out the back door into the night. “We need a plan for afterward. We have nowhere to go and no way to get there.”
“If we wait for those things to fall into our laps, we’ll die here, Delilah.”
“And if we don’t have a plan, we’ll die out there.” I pulled him to a stop in the shadows behind the building, acutely aware that the next time a handler did a security check in the infirmary, the whole compound would know we were missing. “In the menagerie, you had a plan. You were calm and smart, and you made balanced decisions. We need some of that tonight.”
“In the menagerie, I spent a year strategizing and laying the groundwork. Here, we have minutes. If they find us before we can deactivate the rest of the collars, we will never leave this place alive. And do you know what they’ll do when they find out about the baby?”
“They already know. That’s why they put me in a private cell. That’s why they’re feeding me better and giving me exercise.”
“They...?” He blinked at me in the dark. “What?”
“Tabitha Vandekamp had me artificially inseminated—while I was unconscious—with her husband’s sperm. She’s infertile, and because I’m genetically human, she’s decided that fate sent me here to give them a baby.”
“Why would they let you be paired with me if they want you to have their baby?”
“Vandekamp didn’t know about it. She wasn’t going to tell him until she knew I was pregnant, but by then, he’d already sent me on other engagements.”
His scowl darkened. “Wait, other engagements? Plural?”