Page 71 of A Malicious Menagerie
“It won’t be ‘enough’ until I’ve killed everyone who’s ever threatened you,” Chase growls darkly.
“While a sweet sentiment, I’d prefer chocolates or flowers as tokens of your affection. Not dead bodies.”
“What about jewelry?” he asks far too innocently. “A ring?”
“Do I look like I want to be teased right now?” I grump.
“Who said I was teasing?”
I don’t have the mental bandwidth to process that question right now. Thankfully, we’ve reached the back hallways, and I quickly find a maintenance closet so I can dig through Harold the handyman’s tools.
“What are you doing?” Chase asks, bemused.
“Speaking of jewelry…” I hold up the bolt cutters triumphantly. “I doubt you want to keep the ring Mathis gave you.”
Chase helps me position the shears around his metal collar, the ring so tight around his skin that there’s barely room to fit. He grips the handles next to my hands to lend me strength as my meager biceps struggle to produce enough force to cut the metal. A grunt escapes me as I lean everything I have into the task. Then, suddenly, there’s a sharpsnapas the metal gives way. Chase pulls it apart at a seamless hinge before tossing the offending device down the hall, where it bounces a few times with a metallic ringing sound.
“Good riddance,” he snarls, his hand tracing the branching network of shiny pink scars around his neck. He manages to smooth the anger from his face when he glances my way. “Thank you.”
“But wait, there’s more,” I quip, holding out a set of navy coveralls.
The coveralls barely fit, and Chase grumps and snarls at the way they bunch in certain,ahem, places. Still, they’ll do for now.
“Now what?” Chase asks as I lead him toward the loading bay.
“Now, we wait.”
32
The End and the Beginning
Delia
There’s someone in my cage.
At first, I think it must be Anna, though I just saw her being herded away by security guards. I’m terrified to think that they discovered her escape plot. What will Mathis do to her after everything he’s proven capable of?
However, the footsteps are too heavy to belong to Anna’s slight frame, and the scent of cologne—something herbal and masculine—wends its way through the trees to my sensitive nose. Underneath that, as always, is the coppery scent of the blood in his veins. My stomach grumbles even though Anna brought me two pints only yesterday.
Despite the draw of his blood and the musical, beguilingbadum badum badumof his strong heart, I keep myself tucked away and out of sight in the shadows. Somewhere in the menagerie, chaos reigns. I can hear men shouting and scurrying about like chickens startled by a fox prowling into the coop.
But judging by the echoing roar that trails off into a malignant chuckle, something more dangerous than a fox is stalking through the menagerie.
My intruder’s jogging footsteps draw closer, the dry leaves crunching underfoot giving away his position. A moment later, he rounds a tree and comes into my line of sight. With a start, I realize that I recognize him—it’s Mathis’s assistant, the one who walks through the menagerie on occasion and attends every gala. The one Anna promised is on our side.
I’ve always thought he was so handsome that he seemed almost unreal, like one of the shirtless men painted on the bodice rippers my momma liked to pick up from the grocery store. Still, it’s hard to unlearn all the distrust I have for this man. It always seemed to me that his pretty packaging might hide a rotten core.
Now, the man is looking around frantically, his eyes squinting through the gloom. Of course, I’m only assuming that there’s gloom, since I’ve been able to see perfectly in the dark ever since I became a vampire.
“Delia,” he calls in a low voice, and I realize with dawning horror that he’s looking forme.
His eyes almost pass over me, but something must give me away—a flash of my crimson eyes, maybe—because his wide aquamarine gaze snaps back to me.
For a moment, we both regard each other warily, neither keen to make the first move. Finally, the man—Nathan, Anna called him—raises a hand and gives a tentative wave. “Hello.”
His voice is deep, stern, and reminiscent of an actor in a superhero movie. “Hello,” I murmur back, more out of knee-jerk politeness than anything else.
“I’m sorry for intruding,” he continues, as if he merely stopped by for an unplanned visit. Then, he surprises me by carefully lowering himself onto the ground a few feet away so we’re at eye level.
