Game of Cages

It turned its weird, rotating eyes toward me.

My God.

I shut my eyes, trying to think. The floodlights didn’t make sense. Regina and Yin had used lights to trap the thing, but the people it fed on—its pets—had never done that. At first they’d tried to get it out of town, then they’d kept it safe. But they’d never kept it prisoner. So maybe it wasn’t a prisoner right now.

I felt a sudden rush of affection for it. It was trying to control me again. I shut my eyes and focused on the pain in my iron gate, but I couldn’t keep them closed. I had to look.

“I love you!” I shouted, fear and hatred giving power to my voice. I lunged forward, breaking the grip Hondo and his buddy had on me, then pretending to fall onto the stone floor. I took most of the impact on my shoulder and a little on my forehead. The pain was sharp, but it reminded me why I was there.

Was I in range of the sapphire dog’s tongue? The space where its mouth would be was still smooth and unmarked; it wasn’t opening its “jaw.” I had moved my my cuffed hands behind my knees when Hondo and his buddy caught my arms again.

There was a gunshot outside. Then more shots followed in a sudden rush, including the harsh pecking sound of automatic fire. It faded away, then surged again as people reloaded. I closed my eyes and refused to think about who they might be shooting.

There was a quick double honk of a car horn from outside. After a few seconds, I heard Steve’s high, strained voice. “What the heavens is going on here? Who are those men shooting at?” He was trying to push into the room with his gun drawn. No one seemed afraid of it. He started calling people by name.

Of course. No one here had a visible white mark. Steve didn’t know everyone had been turned into pets.

I heard him shout, then his gun went off. He cried out “Kerry!” in horror and was shoved into the room, unarmed. “What are you people doing?” He looked terrible, pale and drooping, with dark pouches under his eyes. He obviously hadn’t even gotten the meager sleep I had. He scanned the room, then gasped when he noticed the sapphire dog. “Oh,” he said quietly. “The lights. Good work, everyone.”

They stared at him. I passed the cuffs under my feet, then rolled to my knees. I pulled the ghost knife out of the front of my pants and palmed it as best I could.

As soon as my hand touched the spell, the sapphire dog turned toward me. I had its full attention.

“I love you!” I shouted and lunged forward.

The sapphire dog jumped off the pedestal immediately. It knew.

Hondo and the other man pounced on me. I didn’t even have time to throw the spell before they pinned me.

I cut a slot in the concrete and dropped the ghost knife into it. The pets would need a jackhammer to get it now.

The sapphire dog hurried toward the wall on its awkward, crumpled-leg gait. Steve had just come in through the door on that side, and he shuffled to intercept it. Neither were quick, but Steve managed to step into its path. He crouched low and held out his arms as though about to catch a running child.

None of the pets tried to stop him, and I knew something was wrong. I remembered the way the sapphire dog found us at the stables, and the way the pastor had immediately run from me when he had no way to know I was planning to kill it, and the way Hondo and his buddy had just pounced on me before they had any way of seeing my ghost knife—the sapphire dog was in their heads.

Not in the heads of the people it had controlled at a distance, like Regina and Ursula, but the heads of people it had fed on and marked.

And there was no way it would let them trap it here, no matter how much they loved it.

I shouted: “Get out of the way!” Steve looked at me in surprise, but it was too late.

The sapphire dog leaped up as if it was jumping into his arms. Its head struck Steve low on his torso and then sank into him. Its legs, body, and tail pulled back into a thin column behind that oversized head, like the tentacles of a jellyfish, and it slowly, excruciatingly, passed through Steve’s body and the wall behind him.

It couldn’t have taken longer than five or six seconds, but it seemed much longer. As it happened, Steve’s mouth fell open and a sorrowful expression came over his face. He looked as though he realized he’d done a terrible wrong to someone he cared about.

Then the predator was through and gone. Steve’s face went slack and he fell onto the floor in a sloppy mess.

I laid my forehead onto the freezing concrete floor and let out a long string of curses. The predator had not recognized me, or it would have had me shot out in the field. It had seen the ghost knife as soon as I touched it, though, and it had fled. Steve was dead because of me. The sapphire dog had not even bothered to feed on him.

I had failed.

Hondo and his pal still held on to me. I struggled, but they were using all of their weight. I was sure the next thing I was going to feel was a bullet punching through my skull.

“Move aside,” someone said. The speaker’s voice was low and gravelly and heavily accented. “You will move aside! I have only come to talk.” He pronounced will as “vill” and have as “haf” like a cartoon villain.

They moved aside and Zahn limped in, the right side of his head scorched black and his right arm withered to the bone. His clothes were in tatters, and his left leg was a mess of raw meat. Annalise had hit him hard, and I was glad she’d gotten her licks in. Still, just seeing him walk in here instead of her filled me with an empty, grieving rage.

Zahn didn’t act like a man with critical injuries, though. He didn’t even walk like a scrawny old man. “Is it not here?” he shouted, his voice raw. “I will speak to it immediately!”