Fury

by Rachel Vincent

  But all of that was long over by the time I’d started kindergarten in a room full of human-only classmates nine years after the reaping. At that point, cryptids caught pretending to be human would be arrested and placed in labs, preserves or carnivals.

  And now, cryptids were more likely to be shot on sight than arrested. Signs in the windows of local businesses reminded people to report any strange or unexplained sightings directly to the Cryptid Containment Bureau—bypassing local law enforcement—at the national hotline number. Flyers handed out at all government buildings and stocked in cardboard stands next to every cash register in town provided “quick lists” of identifiable features for the most common kinds of cryptids, to help citizens accurately report any sightings.

  And the really scary thing was that our escape from the Savage Spectacle nine months before was only partially responsible for the renewed public panic. Though obviously we made a convenient scapegoat for any tragedy humanity didn’t want to accept the blame for.

  “Things are extratense this week,” I said as we approached the internet café on the corner. “So we need to be extracareful.”

  “We’re always careful,” Lenore insisted. And she was right. But the warning was burning a hole on the end of my tongue, and an even bigger one in my heart. I hardly recognized the world I’d grown up in, and I wasn’t sure whether that was because it had changed or because I had.

  “It’s my turn to order.” Zyanya pulled our van—the third we’d stolen since our escape from the Spectacle—into an empty spot on the edge of the parking lot. It wasn’t a true panel van, because it had windows down both sides and in the back, but the side windows were covered with a plain white decal you could see out of, but not into, and the rear windows were too deeply tinted to allow nosy passersby to see inside.

  Stolen though it was, that van and the four-door sedan parked behind our remote cabin were our most valuable possessions, because there was no safer way to travel for those of us who weren’t—or couldn’t pass for—human. We’d been driving it since before we’d found the cabin, and it was probably past time to find another and steal new plates. But we couldn’t afford to do that until we were ready to leave town.

  And we wouldn’t be ready to leave town until after the baby was born.

  I eased myself out of the front passenger seat and rounded the vehicle to smile at Zyanya as we headed into the café. It wasn’t her turn to order, but Lenore didn’t mind, and lately it was as much of a risk for me to speak to the barista as for Zyanya to. My face—though thoroughly human—was the most famous from the news coverage of the disaster at the Savage Spectacle. During our escape, the owners had sent in the national guard to bomb the entire compound, killing dozens of innocent cryptids and not-so-innocent guards, whom they’d deemed acceptable collateral damage.

  The only upside to that slaughter was that the government couldn’t be sure how many of us had actually escaped. Unfortunately, they were fairly certain that Gallagher and I were among the survivors.

  Thankfully, the authorities seemed to have no idea that I was pregnant, and people were usually more interested in my stomach than my face. Well-meaning strangers often stopped me to ask questions about the baby, which made me feel highly conspicuous yet oddly invisible at the same time.

  But eventually someone would put two and two together and come up with three—me, Gallagher and the baby. And if we got caught, so would the rest of our fugitive family.

  We headed into the café, and while Lenore and I found seats near the window, Zy headed to the counter without asking us what we wanted. We always ordered the same thing. The cheapest thing on the menu: three small coffees. Two regular, one decaf.

  Coffee was one of the things I’d missed most when I was first sold into captivity, but now that I was free, for however long that lasted, I was abstaining from the good stuff because I’d read that caffeine was bad for the baby.

  Of course, when I’d made that decision, I’d had no idea that a fear dearg pregnancy could last an entire year. Give or take a month, according to Gallagher. But I chose to believe that after ten and a half months, I was surely getting close to the end since, though the father—and possibly the baby—were redcaps, I was thoroughly human.

  While I sank into a hard plastic chair at the back of the café, Lenore dragged an extra seat over from another table. She set her slim purse down and picked up a tablet locked into a case that was tethered to the table, and while she began scanning headlines from all the major news networks, I watched Zy order.

  In the months since our escape, the cheetah shifter had gotten very good at playing human. As long as she spoke slowly and calmly, she could hold a long conversation without revealing her canines, and despite having grown up with no education at all, the cashier and accounting skills she’d developed when we were secretly running the menagerie far exceeded the experience one needed to order and pay for coffee.

  The only thing that worried me was her eyes. Like her teeth, Zyanya’s eyes would always look feline, even in human form, and if one of her over-the-counter noncorrective colored contact lenses ever fell out in front of someone, we were all screwed.

  Blending in was much easier for Lenore. She wore the same kind of contacts to turn her distinctive lilac irises into a nondescript and rather forgettable shade of brown, but she’d grown up passing for human and was much more used to the contact lenses than Zyanya was, thus much less likely to rub her eyes and pop one out.

  “When is your baby due?”

  My palms felt damp as I turned to the woman at the table behind me and scrounged up a smile. “Any day now.” With a sixty-day margin of error.

  “Do you know what you’re having?” she asked as she gathered the empty sweetener packets from her table and dropped them onto a plate that held nothing but crumbs.

  A baby, I thought. Though at that point, the little person wiggling around inside me felt more like a toddler.

  “No,” I said with another forced smile, and she probably had no idea how true my answer was. Neither Gallagher nor I had any idea what to expect from a baby that was part fear dearg, part human. “We like surprises.”

  The woman glanced at my left hand, where it rested on the upper curve of my swollen belly, and when she found no ring, her smile lost a little of its warmth.

  I had to swallow bitter laughter. If the knowledge that I wasn’t married made her uncomfortable, I could only imagine how she’d react to finding out how I’d gotten pregnant.

  Not that I remembered much of the event.

  “Well, best of luck to you.” She stood and draped her purse strap over one shoulder. “The Lord never gives us more than we can handle.”

  Lenore snorted as the woman walked away. “Spoken like someone who’s never lived in a cage,” she whispered.

  A couple of minutes later, Zyanya joined us with three steaming cups—mine had an orange decaf lid—and a pocket full of sugar packets and stirrers. While I dumped sugar into my coffee, I indulged a long look at the freshly baked cinnamon rolls and scones on display up at the counter. My sweet tooth had become an irritable imperative in what I hoped was late pregnancy, but we were very low on cash and couldn’t even really afford the coffee we had to buy in order to access the complimentary internet.

  Lenore followed my gaze to the glass display cabinet, then pulled a five-dollar bill from her pocket. “Will you go get her a cookie?” She pushed the cash toward Zyanya, who looked thrilled by the challenge of a second round of ordering.

  “No, it’s okay. Really,” I insisted. “I don’t need a cookie.”

  “Lilah, the baby wants a cookie,” Zyanya whispered, and I felt even more guilty knowing that none of her pregnancy cravings had ever been indulged, because all of her pregnancies were engineered and endured while she was a captive in Metzger’s Menagerie.

  That reminder always helped me put things in perspective. Wh
at Gallagher and I were forced to do at the Spectacle felt like a monstrous, humiliating violation of the one bit of dignity I’d managed to keep intact during my imprisonment. And it was. But Zyanya and thousands like her had been forced to breed with other captives they hardly knew—some of whom were rented out specifically for that purpose—over and over throughout adult lives spent entirely in captivity. They were forced to bear children bred for profit and doomed to chains and cages from the moment they were conceived.

  Compared to that, my lack of a cookie fund could hardly compare.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Lenore’s smile died before it reached her eyes. She seemed determined to celebrate my pregnancy with me, despite the brutal end of her own, and it was difficult for me to think of my own relative good fortune without also thinking about her loss.

  My pregnancy, like our freedom-in-hiding, felt bittersweet, yet I clung to them both because I had no idea when they would end.

  “I’ll sweet-talk someone out of his wallet on the way out of town.” Lenore shrugged, as if her offer wouldn’t mean taking another monumental risk. “We need a fresh infusion of cash, anyway.”

  My eyes watered as Zyanya stood with the five-dollar bill, and I decided to blame the tears on hormones.

  When I was a kid, I’d imagined that having sisters would feel like this. Like friends sharing living space and secrets and envy and laughter.

  Of course, when I was a kid, I hadn’t imagined us as fugitives likely to be shot on sight, if we were discovered.

  Zy came back from the counter with two dollars in change and the biggest peanut butter cookie I’ve ever seen, and I insisted we split it three ways.

  I hated the fact that we were living hand-to-mouth, in a “borrowed” cabin and on stolen funds, but I hated it even worse that the burden for providing those borrowed and stolen goods fell squarely on Lenore. Especially considering the consequences if she were to get caught. Gallagher, Zy, Claudio and Eryx—the more physically imposing among our group—could easily have intimidated men in dark parking lots into handing over their cash, but they would have been reported to the police.

  Under the right circumstances, Lenore could inject enough compulsion into her voice to convince people that they wanted to give her what they had. That they were donating to a down-on-her-luck woman with four kids to feed, or a college scholarship student struggling to care for her sick grandfather. A siren’s gifts were as substantial as they were subtle.

  Even so, we were careful not to take Lenore “shopping” too often in the same town, because people would remember giving money to her. And they would remember her face if they saw it again.

  That’s the problem with being beautiful. Even when you look completely human.

  “So?” Zyanya whispered as she broke a small chunk from the huge cookie. “Find anything new online?” Though she’d made incredible strides in literacy since our escape, she’d had no opportunity to practice typing, so Lenore and I usually worked the coffee shop tablets.

  “I figured out what triggered the angry mob outside,” I whispered. “A couple of days ago, a fourth-grade teacher injected some kind of poison into her class’s snack-time milk cartons, then passed them out.”

  “Sick bitch.” Though Lenore’s voice was little more than a murmur of sound, it stirred up a fierce, burning indignation deep in my chest, as well as a craving for violent vengeance I chose to attribute to the furiae—the spirit of vengeful justice the universe had decided it was my fate to wield, and the reason the rest of the world believed me to be a cryptid. “That’s even worse than the cop who opened fire at that county fair in Virginia last week.”

  “Twenty-four dead,” I continued. “Six more suffering critical organ failure. The police found one kid unscathed in the supply closet, where he hid when everyone started getting sick. His parents say he’s allergic to milk. School is out all over the state for a full week.”

  “Well, that explains the middle-school playdate.” Lenore nodded at something behind me, and I turned to see two mothers drinking lattes from huge white mugs at a long table across the café from us. At the other end of their table, three school-age kids were each holding one of the tablets tethered to the table, absorbed in separate, solitary games.

  The mothers held their mugs in white-knuckled grips. They were whispering to each other, glancing every few seconds at their kids or at the café’s entrance, as if they expected to have to run any moment. Or defend themselves and their children.

  “Oh, that is not good,” I said softly as I turned back to my own table. The palpable rising of tension in town kept everyone on edge and on alert for anything out of the ordinary. Which made it even more dangerous for us to be there.

  “What happened to the teacher?” Zyanya leaned over to scan the story.

  “She drank three of the cartons and was dead before the cops arrived. The kids who survived said she hadn’t been herself all morning.”

  “No wonder parents are terrified. You should be able to trust teachers to teach your kids, not kill them.” Lenore sipped from her cup, then gave her head a shake, as if to clear it of unwanted imagery. “Anything more relevant to us, and hopefully a little less horrifying?”

  I nodded, scrolling through the rest of the headlines. Then I clicked on one. “There’ve been a couple of cryptid arrests in the DC area,” I whispered, scanning the article. “Two succubi and a berserker. But they weren’t ours.”

  Ours, meaning fellow escapees from Metzger’s Menagerie and/or the Savage Spectacle. We’d been trying for months to find Zyanya’s brother and small children, Rommily’s sisters and the other friends and relatives we’d been separated from, but the best we’d managed was monitoring the news to see if any of them had been captured.

  So far, none had. Unfortunately, the news was not all good. Less than a month after our escape, three of our former dormitory-mates had been shot on sight by civilian hunters eager to cash in on the dead-or-alive reward.

  “Shit,” Lenore whispered, and I glanced at her tablet to find her staring at a picture of her husband, Kevin, wearing an orange prison uniform. “The verdict’s in. They found him guilty.” She sounded more angry than surprised.

  Kevin was one of three humans who’d helped us take over the menagerie more than a year ago. When we were recaptured, all three were arrested, and their trial had been a circus of its own, lasting months and generating headlines full of hate and hysteria—and keeping the Spectacle disaster in the news.

  “What about Alyrose and Abraxas?” Zyanya asked.

  “Guilty on all counts. Sentencing begins next week.” Lenore’s eyes closed. “I just wish I could talk to him. Tell him I’m okay. I mean, he probably thinks I’m dead.” The wistful tone of her voice struck harmonic notes within me, and suddenly I had the urge to call Gallagher, just to tell him I was okay. Because we all knew he was worrying about the three of us in town alone, in such a tense climate. But there was no one else we could bring without giving ourselves away.

  And we’d needed a little girl-time.

  “Maybe it’s better that way,” Zyanya said with a shrug. “We can’t get to Kevin in prison. You’ll never see each other again. He needs to let you go.”

  Near tears, Lenore turned back to her tablet and opened a new search engine window. I went back to my own search, averting my attention to give her at least the semblance of privacy in her grief.

  “What else did you find?” Zyanya asked me as she dumped a fourth packet of sugar into her steaming paper cup.

  “Not much. Vandekamp’s legislation is officially dead. There isn’t a member of congress left who would touch his collars with a ten-foot pole.” Willem Vandekamp had invented steel collars that had tapped into his prisoners’ spinal cords with a series of three small electrodes, allowing him to exert total physical control over us at the press of a button. He’d become so reliant upon his new technology—
so confident in it—that he’d used few other methods of restraint at the Spectacle. Once Gallagher and I had managed to deactivate the system controlling the shock/paralyzing collars, there’d been nothing standing in the way of our escape other than a staff of security guards and handlers who’d grown complacent and too dependent upon the technology.

  “I’m surprised it took that long to kill the bill,” Lenore whispered, lifting her coffee cup toward her mouth.

  “It didn’t. I’m just now seeing the story, because Kevin’s conviction has the Spectacle back in the news.”

  And suddenly I felt conspicuous for more than just my huge stomach. What if the lady who’d asked about my baby saw my face tonight on the news? If she recognized and reported me, the authorities would descend upon this area with guns and handcuffs and cages. They’d examine security footage and release current pictures of us, including the fact that I was now largely pregnant.

  Even if we managed to sneak out of town, abandoning our cozy if cramped cabin, we’d be on the run again, when my baby could be born any day. Or, at least, any month.

  “We need to go,” I whispered.

  Both Lenore and Zyanya turned to me with a questioning look, then began scanning the café for whatever had spooked me, their posture tense. Ready to flee.

  “Nothing’s wrong.” Nothing new, anyway. “This just feels like too much of a risk now, with the townsfolk gathering pitchforks, our names back in the news and this baby on the way. We have to stop coming to town for a while.” I turned to Lenore and lowered my voice even further. “Which means we need to make a sizable cash withdrawal before we head home.”

  “How sizable?” she whispered.

  “Whatever you think you can manage.”

  “We haven’t hit the food truck park in a couple of weeks,” Zy said as Lenore and I deleted our search histories and logged out of the tablets tethered to the table. “It’s next door to a bank with an outdoor ATM.”