I should have done it Everson’s way back in Moline when he’d offered to help by having his mother use her clout. Why had I thought coming to Chicago was the better choice?
We stepped into the drizzle and Rafe pressed a finger to his lips. Something about his posture set my senses on high alert. He slowly withdrew his gun, motioning for me to stay put.
What did you hear? I wanted to ask. Chorda? I clenched my jaw shut as he moved into the street. Then I too heard the noise that had made him skittish — maniacal laughter. Somewhere close by people were trading hee-hee-hees as if demented giggling were a language.
Rafe hauled me back into the gutted house. “Hyboars,” he hissed.
Hyena-boars. My dad had woven them into stories and Cosmo had relayed facts. He’d told us that the handlers used hyboars to hunt down runaway manimals.
I followed Rafe through the burnt shell to the kitchen, where a section of the back wall had collapsed. We clambered through the hole and dashed across the overgrown yard. More braying laughter stopped us midsprint. A bristling creature scrabbled over a pile of debris that had once been a garage. The beast paused at the top to shift its powerful, sloping shoulders like a boxer priming for a fight.
I wheeled around to see more hyboars stampeding through the shadowy interior of the house. Panic bloomed in my stomach. Muscular and razor tusked, the cackling beasts leapt out the gap we’d just climbed through. I pressed into Rafe and felt him draw a shuddering breath. He followed them with the tip of his gun but there were too many.
Longhaired men stormed into the yard. They wore leather butcher aprons — just as Cosmo had described. Handlers. Other giveaways: the hunting rifles clutched in their meaty hands and the knob-topped batons and dog whips tucked into their apron pockets. They surrounded us, grabbed our weapons, and frisked us roughly without a word. When they turned back to the house, I went as still as a cornered animal.
A gruesome man stepped through the gap in the wall. Going by his face and scalp, I could tell he’d had a close encounter with some serious claws and teeth. A chunk of his nose was missing, along with one eye, a fact that he didn’t hide under an eye patch — the sunken cavity and badly sewn eyelid were on full display. He strode toward us. Instead of an apron, he wore a leather coat with a fur collar. “Drop,” he ordered. “Face down, hands behind your back.”
“Fun as that sounds,” Rafe replied evenly, “we’re here on a job and we need to get going.”
The man’s brow lowered over his empty eye socket, and he made a sharp gesture.
The hyboars sprang. I screeched, flinging myself backward into Rafe. The beasts stopped just short of us and hunkered low, chuckling like maniacs. If I could’ve, I would’ve crawled down Rafe’s shirt to hide.
“It’s your choice….” The one-eyed man bared his yellow teeth in some evil version of a smile. “Get down or the hyboars will take you down.”
With a sigh, Rafe planted himself face-first on the wet ground. I remained frozen in place, mesmerized by a drop of drool suspended from a hyboar tusk.
“It’s okay, Lane,” Rafe said, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “Come lie next to me.”
Some fetch I was. I stretched out beside him, my cheek pressed into the soggy weeds, my eyes searching his desperately. His blue-green gaze was steady as always, and it reminded me that we might be on the ground surrounded by hyena-boars and crazy people, but that didn’t mean we had given up. “Don’t mention the silky,” he whispered.
A handler straddled me and yanked my arms behind my back. I gasped as he tied my wrists together. Another handler bound Rafe’s wrists, and then we were hauled to our feet. Rafe glanced at the handler gripping his arm. “Nice apron. You guys do a lot of baking?”
“No, manimal training,” the handler snapped. “And none of us is looking to get bitten in the groin.”
As Rafe grimaced at that image, the handlers wheeled us around to face the one-eyed man.
“I am Omar,” the man said casually, “the king’s overseer.”
Omar — the man who had put Cosmo in the zoo for licking a spoon.
“You are in violation of the laws of Chicago Compound, which apply to the whole of the city and the surrounding areas. Trespassing,” Omar ticked off, “possession of unauthorized weapons, and failure to display proof of your health. Therefore, your freedom is forfeit.”
“By forfeit, do you mean —” Rafe’s words cut off with a grunt as a handler’s baton slammed into his ribs.
“The only time you’ll speak is to answer my questions,” Omar said. “Now, did you come here alone or with others?”
“It’s just the two of us,” I said. As hard as it was to look at his ravaged face, I didn’t take my eyes from him. “We’re here tracking a rogue feral. One that’s killed a lot of people.”
Omar’s gaze sharpened on me. “You are a hunter?”
“If that’s what a compound needs.” I was certainly as dirty and bedraggled as the hunters and hacks I’d seen in Moline. I shrugged like I didn’t care what he called me. “We lead scavenging trips too. Feed us, and we’ll do practically anything.”
“And you’re certain it’s just the two of you?” Omar asked again.
“I don’t hunt in a pack.” Rafe shot a scornful look at the gaggle of handlers surrounding Omar.
“Maybe not yet …” Omar smiled. “But we’re good at getting beasts to obey.”
I felt Rafe stiffen beside me. “Who are you calling a —” This time the handler slammed the baton into his gut.
“Stop talking,” I hissed under my breath. How were we going to escape if he was a battered mess?
Omar jerked his chin and a handler gripped my arm and propelled me forward. Rafe’s handler used the knobby end of his baton to get Rafe moving. What did they want with us?
“Keep going,” my handler ordered as he directed me around the house. He was younger than the others. With his blond hair tied back, he didn’t look nearly as cruel as the rest, even if his grip was cutting off my arm’s circulation. He ushered me onto the weedy street where four rickshaws stood waiting, each pulled by a manimal of considerable size: three bull-men and one guy who might have been part rhino, going by his leathery skin and the fact that a sharp-tipped horn had sprouted along the bridge of his nose.
A hyboar thrashed on the ground behind the last rickshaw. A chain ran from the metal-link collar around the creature’s neck to the wheel bar under the passenger bench. The handler who’d been prodding Rafe along snatched the dog whip from his apron pocket and lashed the animal. “Get up!”
As the creature slowly rose on its hind legs, my perceptions reeled and reconfigured. I wasn’t looking at an animal, but a barrel-chested man. A man infected with hyena. Long, coarse fur covered every inch of his body. In fact — I looked away quickly, cheeks hot. The man was so hairy I hadn’t realized that he was naked. He remained in a crouch, poised to spring at the handler who’d struck him. His claws and elongated jaws glistened with drool.
The handler grinned and lifted the whip in warning. “You want more?”
The feral launched himself at the handler with a snarl, only to be brought up short by the chain. I glimpsed his awful face, so inhuman and insane, I felt my own sanity slipping. Clawing at air, the slavering thing screeched at us. I stumbled back. There was no hint of the man this feral had once been. No humanity that I could see left in him at all. He had become an it. My whole being flinched at the idea and my control began to splinter. Suddenly I understood Rafe so much better. The callous distance he put between himself and manimals, his choice to live alone in a prison rather than in Moline — he was terrified of becoming a creature like this.