Keith Crowe sighed. “What the federal government unofficially knows is both technically and legally unrelated to what we were able to prove in state court.”
“I don’t understand. What does that mean?”
Springs creaked over the line as the attorney sank into the chair behind the massive oak desk that had impressed Rebecca so thoroughly the first time she’d met with him in his office. “That means—Okay, we appealed your parents’ guilty verdict based on the fact that the federal government knows that the surrogates were actually responsible. Everyone knows the surrogates were responsible. But what everyone knows isn’t the same as what we can prove. The Cryptid Containment Bureau denied our request for test results from the surrogate that was removed from your family. Every judge we appealed to refused to grant us a subpoena. So even though we all know your parents weren’t responsible for their actions that night, we have no way of proving that. Thus, no grounds for an appeal, according to the district court judge.”
“But you said the burden of proof is on the prosecution.”
“It is. It was. And the jury decided they’d met that burden.”
“But there are hundreds of parents who were found innocent, because of the surrogates.”
“I know. That’s because every jury is different. Every lawyer is different. Every judge is different. And every case is different. Even when we’re talking about the reaping. Statistically, parents who drowned or drugged their children were more likely to be found innocent than those who stabbed or shot their own kids, because juries don’t want to believe parents who truly love their children could possibly kill them in such a brutal, painful way. Your parents—”
“I know—” Rebecca cleared her throat, then started over. “I know how it happened. I was there.”
“My point is that even though we’ve decided as a society to recognize that the reaping was a large-scale, coordinated attack upon our most vulnerable citizens, on an individual level, lawyers have had varying degrees of success using that to cast doubt upon their clients’ guilt. For us, the pendulum swung the wrong way. And since the Supreme Court already declined to hear a similar case from another set of parents last month, we have no higher court to appeal to.”
“This is really over?”
“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry, Rebecca.”
“They lost three of their four children, through no fault of their own, and they’re going to spend the rest of their lives in prison.”
“Unfortunately. And several of my colleagues believe that to be a somewhat subconscious mercy, on the part of the juries.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, in more than half of the reaping cases that have gone to trial so far, the parents have been found guilty for up to six counts of infanticide. Some through horrible methods. But not one jury has handed down a death sentence, even in states where that would normally be pretty likely. That seems to indicate that, at least on some level, juries don’t truly believe the parents are responsible.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Rebecca knew she was being rude. It wasn’t Keith’s fault that the appeal had gone the wrong way. He’d done everything he could for the Essigs—pro bono. But at the end of the day, her parents were no better off than they’d been before he’d taken their case.
“Honey, you still have your parents. Surely that’s something to be thankful for.”
“I tell you what—I’ll ask them how grateful they are in forty years when they’re dying alone on cots in the prison infirmary.” She slammed the phone back into its cradle. Then slammed it again, for good measure.
Biting back a scream of frustration, Rebecca let her forehead thump against the glass side of the phone booth. She took several deep breaths. Then she stood up straight, hiked her backpack higher on her shoulders and stepped out of the booth.
Moving as fast as she could without actually running, Rebecca Essig took the next left, then walked three-quarters of a mile from the gas station to the public library. By the time she pushed open the heavy double doors, she’d begun to sweat, in spite of the cool fall day.
She made her way across the main room, heedless of the squeaking of her sneakers against the slick granite, and dropped her bag on the floor next to the information desk.
“How can I help you?” The woman who looked up from her novel wore her dark brown hair pulled back in a bun so severe it tugged on the corners of her eyes.
Rebecca crossed her arms on top of the high counter. “I need to see everything you have about changelings. About how a person could get one back.”
Delilah
“Is that it?” Zyanya asked, staring at the nondescript two-story building at the end of the street, and I nodded from the front passenger’s seat. Which had been unofficially labeled as mine, both because it was the easiest for me to get in and out of and because I was the most human looking of us, thus the least likely to be noticed through the windshield or the transparent front windows.
Poor Eryx always had to sit on the floor in the cargo area, in the very back. There was nothing a hat or a pair of sunglasses could do to disguise a bull’s head.
“There’s a parking lot around back,” Gallagher said from the bench seat behind me. Claudio sat on his left, which left the third row open for Miri and Lala. Assuming our mission was successful.
Zyanya drove past the lab, then took us around the block, where she pulled into the lot from an adjacent street and parked on the last row. We were a little early, because we wanted to see the lab’s weekend employees leave. And any night-shift security or custodial employees arrive.
“Are there cameras?” Claudio leaned forward to study the back of the building through the windshield. At his feet sat a backpack stuffed with supplies we—or the captured oracles—might need.
“Obviously we haven’t been inside, but there’s one by the main entrance, and one out back, aimed at the dumpster,” Gallagher told him.
“That’s what the paint’s for.” I held up the spray bottle of Midnight Madness.
We waited, watching the building until the lights went off and a couple of people left through the back door and got into cars near the front of the lot. A few minutes later, a third man in a white coat came out. He tossed a large trash bag into the bin, then got into his car and drove away without even a glance in our direction.
When the last of the light had faded from the western horizon and the parking lot lights had come on, Zyanya restarted the van and drove across the lot, where she pulled into the space closest to the dumpster, using it to block us from sight of the camera over the back door.
I handed Gallagher the can of black spray paint, and he got out of the van. Within two steps, he’d blended in with the darkness so well that I could no longer see him.
A minute later, he reemerged from the shadows around the huge trash bin and waved the rest of us forward with one finger pressed to his lips. We filed out of the van as quietly as we could and rounded the dumpster just as Gallagher twisted the back door’s knob so hard and fast that the lock snapped. Yet the door remained closed. So he pulled, hard, and metal groaned as the dead bolt ripped free, warping the frame.
The door swung open, revealing an unlit back hallway tiled in sterile white. Several doors lined the hall, spaced far apart and labeled with thin plastic plaques on the wall.
Halfway down, another hallway bisected the first one at a ninety-degree angle.
“Two groups,” Gallagher whispered. “We’ll take the right side.” He gestured to me and Zyanya. Which left Eryx and Claudio in the other group. “You take the left. Be quiet and on alert. If you find any security or custodial staff, disable them as quietly as possible and come find us.”
Eryx nodded. Then he gave the first doorknob on the left side of the hall a fierce twist. Something snapped, and the door swung open.
Gallagher broke open
the first door on the right side, then he took a single step into the darkened room. I could tell from his stiff posture that he was scanning for threats with eyes that could see much better in the dark than mine could.
From within the room came a soft shuffling sound that could have been anything from boots against carpet to wings unfolding. I heard a soft snort, then a whine. But Gallagher’s posture registered no threat.
When he’d decided the room was safe, he flipped on the lights and stood back to let us in, while the soft chorus of shuffles and unidentifiable sounds swelled.
The fluorescent lights were still warming up to their true brightness when I stepped into the room, and the momentary flicker deepened the ominous feel of the space full of sterile tables and...animal cages.
“Oh my God,” I whispered as I glanced over walls lined in waist-tall cages, stacked two-high all over the room. Returning my gaze through wire mesh pens were young nine-tailed foxes, griffin kittens and several infant multiheaded Cerberean hounds—more commonly known as hellhounds. They were each small enough to fit into three-foot tall cages, sometimes two to a pen, and too young to be dangerous, beyond biting in self-defense. “They’re experimenting on hybrids. On babies.”
On infants of the cryptid beast category not protected by the ASPCA because they were combinations of two or more biological classes, rather than the more closely related “natural” genus or species hybrids like the liger or mule.
Zyanya gave me a skeptical look. “Why does that surprise you? They’ve been putting our babies in cages for decades. Why would you think they’d have any more empathy for creatures without a human face?”
She was right, of course. But I hadn’t given much thought to cryptids living in laboratories, after all the atrocities I’d seen on the carnival and private collection side of legal captivity. And I’d had no idea they would experiment on the young.
“We should let them out.”
“I wish we could,” Gallagher whispered, scowling out at the entire room. “But we can’t take them with us, and if we set them free, they’ll only be recaptured. Or shot on sight.” I knew he’d struggled with the same dilemma when he was undercover as a handler at Metzger’s Menagerie, where I’d met him. Where he’d been put in charge of my “training.”
What I didn’t know was how he’d survived the guilt.
“I shouldn’t have come.” I ran one hand over my stomach as the baby squirmed, and now when I looked over the room, all I could see was our child, alone, naked and suffering inside one of those cages. Screaming for parents unable to get to her. “I can’t stand this.”
Zyanya stepped in front of me and captured my tear-filled gaze with a hard one of her own. “We help those we can help. That’s always been the way. And right now, the only ones we can help are Miri and Lala. So channel your grief. Focus your anger. Let’s get this done.”
Again, she was right.
I nodded and blinked away my tears, struggling to get control of my emotions. “They’re not in here. Let’s move on.” I wasn’t going to make it if I kept staring at creatures I couldn’t help.
“Just a minute.” Zyanya headed for a huge plastic tub marked Food at the far end of the nearest lab table. She opened the tub and pulled out a large scoop full of dry, nearly scentless pellets, similar to the ones Metzger’s had fed Eryx by the pound. Then she went from cage to cage, folding down the built-in food trays and filling them.
The snorts and growls around us began to quiet as the young beasts eagerly devoured their extra meal.
Gallagher headed for the food container and took out one handful at a time to help her, and when I realized what he was doing, I joined in.
At the last cage, the lion head of a young chimera pressed up against his cage, trying to get to my hand. Desperate for any kind physical contact.
Sniffling, I dumped my handful of food into his tray and folded it back into his cage. Then I fled the room.
Gallagher caught up with me in the hall and slid in front of me before I could try the next doorknob. I let him snap the lock and push the door open, and after he’d assessed the danger and turned on the light, he led Zyanya and me into another room just like the one before, except that these cages were larger and fewer. They held adolescent and adult versions of the captives in the other room, in cages that were small enough to count as cruelty.
“Gallagher, we have to let them go. They’re old enough to fend for themselves. And they deserve the chance to try.” I shrugged. “Even if they get shot, they might find dying in freedom preferable to living in cages.”
“She’s right,” Zy said, eyeing a thin hellhound whose two heads looked almost skeletal.
“Agreed. But they’re scared and hungry. Animals in that state will lash out at anyone, and I won’t risk either of you.” His gaze dropped to my swollen belly. “Besides, if we let them out now, they’ll draw attention to the lab before we’ve found Miri and Lala. Once we have the oracles and you’re all in the van, ready to flee, I’ll let the grown beasts out myself. They’re on their own from there.”
“Thank you.” I stood on my toes to give him a hug, and he tensed beneath my touch for a second before returning it.
So again we fed the animals, and this time we refilled several empty water containers. Then we moved on through a room full of young naga and cockatrices and other winged and scaled beasts, including a rare and sickly phoenix, whose feathers had begun to fall out and gather on the floor of her cage.
The furiae raged within me as I watched the poor phoenix cowering in one corner of her pen with her beak tucked beneath one wing. Despite my discomfort with her recent activities, the furiae and I agreed about what should happen to whoever’d put the poor, defenseless bird in a cage.
Having searched all the rooms in the first half of the hallway, our group turned right at the corner while Eryx and Claudio turned left. And while Gallagher forced an extratough lock on a metal door, on the right side of the second hallway, my focus snagged on the door across from it.
This door was also metal, and I could see nothing noteworthy about it. Yet I found myself walking toward it, even after Gallagher managed to get the other door open.
I twisted the knob, and to my surprise, it turned easily. Still unsure what I was doing, or why, I opened the unlocked door and stepped inside.
“You guys!” Zyanya’s footsteps pounded past me in the hallway, headed toward Eryx and Claudio, but instead of turning back, I stepped forward. All on its own, my hand reached out and flipped a set of three switches to the left of the door.
Fixtures flickered overhead, then bathed the windowless room in a cold, white light.
This room was smaller than the others. It held only two cages, both of them large and bolted to the far wall. One of the cages was empty.
The other held a man, human, as far as I could tell. He sat on the floor of his six-foot-tall pen with his knees tucked up to his chest, a posture I’d only ever seen grown men assume when they had no other way to cover themselves. And, in fact, the man was completely naked—except for a familiar, smooth metal collar around his neck.
Shock washed over me at the sight of that collar. It was one of Willem Vandekamp’s, personally designed by the now-deceased owner of the Savage Spectacle. When I’d worn one, the collars had been in the testing phase, not yet approved by the government for commercial distribution, and now that congress had officially failed to pass the law that would have allowed wider use, the collars never would see distribution.
A rare and limited victory for cryptid-kind.
The only people who’d ever worn those collars were my fellow former captives at the Spectacle. I did not recognize the man in the cage, but he must have been a Spectacle prisoner.
A sudden tugging sensation pulled me closer to the cage, and the familiarity of the urge sent a chill racing over my arms. The furiae wanted this man.
&
nbsp; She’d never sent me after a cryptid before, but if this man was wearing one of Vandekamp’s collars and being held in a cryptid research lab, he had to be cryptid, no matter how human he looked. Right?
Though my own fugitive existence seemed to suggest that there were a few rare exceptions to that rule.
Through the open door at my back, I heard more hurried footsteps, followed by the crack of tiles breaking beneath Eryx’s powerful, lumbering gait. I should rejoin Gallagher and the others.
Yet something pulled me toward the man in the cage.
His eyes widened as I came closer. He pushed himself to his feet, heedless of his own nudity, and gripped the mesh front of the cage as he frantically studied my face. Without even glancing at my stomach. “Who are you?” he demanded, his voice riding the thin line between fascination and fear.
My right arm started to rise, my hand open, fingers grasping for him. But I clenched my jaw, resisting the terrible, familiar urge, and the furiae let me force my hand back to my side. She wanted to kill this man, and even if I were sure he deserved that, I couldn’t reach through the side of a wire mesh cage.
“Who are you?” I asked through clenched teeth as I physically resisted another inexplicable homicidal urge. “Are you human? Were you at the Savage Spectacle?”
His gaze stayed glued to mine. Searching it. “I don’t know what that is. Do I know you?”
“Where did you get that collar?” My fingers twitched, and I wrapped them around a handful of my jeans to keep from reaching for him again, for all the good that would do. “Those were only used at the Spectacle.”
“What are you?” The man’s fevered gaze roamed over me, his brows drawn low, as if he were trying to remember where he’d seen me before.
“Where...did you get...that collar?” I spoke each word slowly. Carefully. Pointedly.
The man blinked, clearly trying to focus on my question. “I was locked up. In a...?” The word seemed to elude him.
“A collection?” I asked. “A menagerie? A lab?”
Fury Page 13
