“Calm down, warrior.”
The Targon’s voice penetrated his mind, and he spun. The sun shone brightly in the sky, and he had to blink rapidly to focus. Through familiar metal bars he could see the otherworlder, his caged neighbor.
Bars. Cage.
Dread beating at him, he looked around. He was back in the cage, he realized. Back at the circus, back in the menagerie. He’d . . . he’d been captured. The rest of the otherworlders were watching him. Some with anger. Some with pity. Kitten, with hope.
“Don’t despair,” she said. “You did it once, something no one else has ever done, and you can do it again.”
They were dirtier than when he’d left them, as though no one had bothered to clean them even once. They were thinner, too, as if no one had bothered to feed them. But at least they were alive.
And he could hear them. Once again, his ears were working. That meant Vika, wherever she was, was once again deaf.
“Where’s Vika?” he demanded of the Targon. “How long was I out?” The landscape had changed. Mountains had been replaced by planes, snowy tundra by red dirt, and trees by rolling wheat.
“She’s been locked in her trailer, and you were out only for the night.”
His relief was so potent, it buckled his knees. He tumbled down, shaking the entire cage.
“She’s your woman,” the Targon said. “You’ve claimed her.”
“She is. I have.” And he would not lose her. Not this way. Not in any way. “Where’s Jecis? Matas?”
A flash of fury in the Targon’s eyes. “They’re setting up for tomorrow’s show.”
It was time for information, Solo decided, time to learn the Targon’s motives. “You hate him. Matas. You hate him more than Jecis, the man responsible for your predicament. Why?”
“Hey, Jolly Red,” Criss called. “You don’t call, you don’t write. You have some nerve showing your face here again. My brothers are coming for me, you know, and they’ll have something to say to you. You just left me behind!”
The Targon held out his arms, and the world just . . . stopped . . . moving, even going silent. Solo frowned—or tried to. Like the world around him, he was motionless. His body felt as though it had been covered by cement, even his arms too heavy to lift. The only part of himself that he had any control over was his eyes, and he kept those trained on the otherworlder.
Only the Targon could move. He stalked to the side of his cage, his lips curling into a smile that wasn’t a smile. “Don’t worry. Unlike you, their minds are on lockdown. They have no idea what’s going on. And did you notice I’m stronger than before? I’ve been practicing.”
Stronger, despite the cuffs.
The cuffs!
“Yes, you are bound, too,” the Targon said, and suddenly Solo’s head could move.
He looked down. Sure enough, the metal of the cuffs circled his wrists. Jecis . . . oh, Jecis would pay. “There’s no key, you know.”
The otherworlder absorbed the news and shrugged, as if he simply didn’t care.
“How are you able to wield so much control with the drugs pumping through your system?” Solo asked.
“The drugs are inhibitors.”
“I know. So?”
“So. There is a fatal flaw to such drugs. A flaw spelled out in the name. They inhibit, they do not wipe away.”
“Why have you remained, then?”
A return of the rage, now laced with sadness. “Your woman once took care of mine. Mara was her name, and she and her friends heard about a magical circus called Cirque de Monstres and came for a visit. Matas saw her, wanted her, raped her, and vanished with her before I could get to her. He had no idea that we were linked, and that I knew everything he was doing to her, as he was doing it.” More and more rage seeped from his tone. “I could have killed him from the start, and maybe I should have, but I wanted to experience everything my Mara experienced. I wanted to see my tormentor every day—until I destroyed him.”
He wanted to punish himself for not saving his woman, and he understood. He did. He wasn’t sure how he would react if he discovered Vika had been harmed in any way.
Vika . . . the girl he loved.
Yeah. He loved her. With all of his heart, with all of his soul, he loved her. She was the one. The other piece of him. Somehow, she had entangled herself in his life, as if he were a tree and she the ivy, and he could no longer distinguish his foliage from hers. They were two halves of a whole, better together, dependent on each other.
“Nothing to say?” the Targon quipped.
“Nine days,” Solo replied through a throat now raw, recalling what the Targon had said the night of his escape. “You plan to destroy the circus.”
“Yes. But now, there are only four days left.”
“Do not wait. Act now.”
The Targon pretended he had not spoken. “I saw the way your Vika took care of my Mara. I heard the conversations they had—until Mara severed our connection. I was glad when you came along and began to watch out for little Vika.” Tension branched from the corners of his eyes. “I didn’t see into Mara’s mind again until the night of her death, when Vika’s father found her, gave her to Matas, and the male . . . the male . . . destroyed her.”
“I’m sorry, Kaamil-Alize. I know you have a plan, and you want to stick to it, but my woman still lives and she needs me. Help me now. Today. Together, we can end this.”
A shake of that dark head. “I told you. I must first experience everything Mara did.”
“Were you raped?” A harsh question, but one that needed to be asked.
A tic of the muscle beneath the otherworlder’s golden eyes. “No.”
“Then you have not experienced everything she did, and you never will. There’s no reason not to act. You can have Matas, I can have Jecis, and we ensure no one else ever suffers this way.”
Silence.
“We can save Vika, the girl who helped your Mara.”
Again, silence.
“If you do nothing, you’re as bad as the male you despise.”
The Targon popped his jaw. “We all watched Jecis increase your dosage of the inhibitor. If you become emotional, or if anyone presses that magic little button on your cage, you’ll be too weak to fight.”
“Never.” Not when it came to Vika’s safety.
“And we all heard them discuss your new and improved cuffs,” the otherworlder continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “If the bones in your wrists expand, and I’m guessing they do when you transform into your prettier half, you’ll activate the saws in the needles and you’ll lose your hands.”