“Tabitha,” Isabelle panted. “Help me.”
But there was nothing Tabitha could do but watch.
Most of Isabelle’s hair was dark, from the dye Tabitha’s mother made her use, but the roots were a soft green. The very shade of the moss that grew along the edges of the stream running through the back acre of her father’s farm. The acre that used to belong to Isabelle’s family.
Isabelle had been fourteen when the soldiers had come for her parents after the reaping, when all the cryptids were being rounded up. Everyone knew it was coming. Isabelle’s parents had begged Tabitha’s mother to hide their daughter. To save her. But it was Tabitha’s father who’d agreed. He was the one who’d thought of the dye—the same shade his wife used to cover her gray. The same shade of Tabitha’s hair.
Tabitha and Isabelle could be like sisters, he’d said. And because he’d always been fond of his neighbors’ daughter, he’d agreed not only to hide Isabelle, but to buy his neighbors’ land after the state foreclosed on it and save it for her. For when she grew up.
Isabelle grew up real pretty. Tabitha’s father always said that. But she’d had to quit school when she got fat. Tabitha’s mother said people wouldn’t understand. They’d figure out she wasn’t human and they’d come for her too. So Tabitha kept the secret about pretty Isabelle, who cleaned the house and cried at night.
Nine years old was old enough to keep a secret, her father’d said.
But now, on the floor in the barn, Isabelle didn’t look so pretty. And suddenly Tabitha understood.
“Is she having a baby?” That’s what their mare had done when she’d lain down in the barn.
“It might be a baby.” Tabitha’s mother peered down at Isabelle, blocking Tabitha’s view. “But it might be a monster. We’ll know in a few minutes. It’s time to push.”
Tabitha’s father’s grip tightened on her shoulder. His other hand clutched his empty glass.
Tabitha watched, fascinated, as Isabelle gave birth, too tired now to scream. When it was over, the baby gave a hearty cry, and Tabitha’s father sucked in a breath. Tabitha’s mother pulled a rag from the pocket of her apron and wiped the infant’s face. She stood and turned, holding the child closer to the candlelight to examine it.
“Please...” Isabelle begged from the ground. “Let me see him.”
“Her,” Tabitha’s mother corrected. She folded the rag, then scrubbed it gently over the infant’s head. Then she looked up at her husband, disappointment clenching her square jaw.
The baby’s hair was a soft, pale green.
Tabitha’s father threw his glass at the side of the barn. It shattered, raining shards all over the hay. She flinched. Her father stomped out of the barn, headed for the house.
Tabitha’s mother spread the rag on the ground at Isabelle’s feet, then laid the baby on top of it. She turned to her daughter as Isabelle cried.
“Give me your knife.”
“While families all over the country are in mourning, a couple of local grandparents are counting their blessings. Two weeks ago, twelve-year-old Willem Henry Vandekamp survived what’s become known as The Reaping because he was at a birthday party sleepover. He is Otto and Judith Vandekamp’s only surviving grandchild.”
—from a September 4, 1986, broadcast of the Channel 10 Nightly News, Poplar Bluff, Missouri
The oracle wandered down the midway, her gaze flitting from one brightly striped tent to the next, her fingers reaching for each soft scrap of silk and scratchy patch of sequins she passed.
She had not forgotten the cages and chains and blood. No matter how fractured her mind might be, she could never erase the pain and terror of that night in the rain or overcome a lifetime spent in a four-by-six animal pen.
But those were distant horrors now, relegated to the realm of nightmares.
The daylight was for dreaming.
As she meandered in the afternoon sun, her eyes were bright and focused. Her thoughts—typically tangled like a knotted cord—were blissfully calm, because there were no customers yet, and her fellow carnies knew better than to touch or speak to her. Those she considered friends smiled or waved when she passed, and those she cared little for paid her little attention.
Rommily listened to the shifters count out beats under the big top as they rehearsed an addition to their hoop-jumping, ball-balancing act. She heard the soft shuffle of hooves from behind a heavy canvas flap as the centaurs played their afternoon game of poker with Abraxas, the young human roustabout who’d taught them when to hit and when to stand.
As she passed the next tent, Rommily heard a familiar snort, and the sound triggered a warmth that spread beneath the surface of her skin. She veered from the midway with no conscious intent. Her feet followed instructions from her heart without consulting her brain, and a minute later, she stood behind the equine tent, where a single broad tree spread limbs in all directions, and with them, cool patches of shadow.
The minotaur sat in the shade on a wide, sturdy bench most men couldn’t have lifted. He stood when he saw Rommily, and the images that flashed behind her eyes were triggered not by premonition but by memory.
Strong hands tearing guilty flesh.
Blood spilled in the name of justice.
She said nothing as she crossed the patch of sparse grass separating them. Rommily only spoke in the grip of a vision, since that night in the rain, and without a human mouth, the bull couldn’t speak at all. Their connection had developed without the luxury of unnecessary words.
The minotaur’s arms spread as Rommily came closer. She reached out for him, her hand tiny and fragile against massive planes of muscle, her touch a delicate contrast to his raw power. The oracle trailed her fingers over the ridge of his human collarbone, just where dense, soft bovine fur began to grow. The top of her head didn’t reach his shoulder, and three of her standing side by side couldn’t have matched his width, yet she seemed to fit perfectly when she laid her head against his chest and wrapped her arms as far as they would go around his immense rib cage.
For several long minutes they stayed just like that, free from the burden of words. Safe from prying gazes.
When the pace of the day began to pick up—when footsteps fell hurriedly and voices began to sound tense—she reluctantly stepped back and squeezed the bull’s hand, then made her way to the fortune-telling tent all on her own.
Her older sister, Mirela, was already dressed in the white flouncy blouse and long, colorful skirt of a fortune-teller—an oracle cursed by fate with the genes of a “cryptid” and cursed by law with the chains of captivity.
Once, the outfit and chains had been authentic. Their internment in the traveling menagerie had been reality. Now the clothes were a costume—the wool pulled over the eyes of an audience that wanted to believe what it was seeing.
Metzger’s Menagerie—the institution that had once held her in bondage, half-starved and sometimes beaten where the bruises wouldn’t show—had become her salvation. It was now the veil shielding her from the prying eyes and cruel hands the rest of the world seemed so eager to wield.
Lala, Rommily’s younger sister, wore blue jeans and a red uniform shirt, which declared her name to be