“Okay, I know you’re not aware of the whole ‘my body, my decision’ movement so let me just explain this by saying that until you can hold the baby, I have sole custody. And that should make it easier for you to protect us both, because we’ll always be in the same place. But beyond that, please tell me you understand that I’m not trying to put the baby in danger. The safest place for us to be is with you.”
Gallagher frowned, and for a second, I thought I’d won. Until he crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the closed door. “Then I won’t go, either.”
“They’re going to need your help getting Miri and Lala back. And for all we know, the furiae and I might be able to help, too. We’re going, Gallagher.”
“So I get no say in what happens to my child?”
“Don’t...” I exhaled heavily and sank onto the end of the bed. “Don’t do that. We both know life isn’t fair. I didn’t get any say in this.” I ran one hand over my stomach, and regretted the words just a second too late to take them back.
“You’re punishing me.” He nodded, a gracious acceptance of a weapon I hadn’t meant to wield. “I deserve that. But the baby doesn’t.”
“You don’t deserve that, and I’m not punishing you. God, this is hard.” I scrubbed both hands over my face and fought for composure, knowing that if I cried, I would win the argument not because I’d made my point, but because he felt guilty. “I hate what happened that night.” I hated the humiliation and helplessness I still felt every time I thought about it. How out of control I still was of my own body. Yet most of all, I hated the wall it had built between us. “But I love this baby. And I love you.”
Gallagher’s scowl was a study in internal conflict, hope and fear battling behind his stormy gaze. “Delilah, ours cannot be an amorous—”
“Relax. I also love Rommily and Zy and the others.” So what if that wasn’t exactly what I’d meant. “We’re all family.”
“No.” He shook his head firmly. “What’s between us is not like what’s between all the others. This isn’t simple loyalty and affection. This is much stronger. I will never choose anyone else over you.”
My heart became one fragile ache and felt suddenly vulnerable to too hard a beat or too sharp a word. “I know—”
“You don’t know,” Gallagher growled, his form tense, as if maintaining the distance between us took physical effort. “They’re my family, too. I love them all. But I would let any one of them die a slow and painful death if that’s what it took to keep you safe. And I feel no guilt about that prospect. None.”
“I don’t believe—” I bit off my own words. Fear dearg couldn’t lie. Yet the conflict written in every line of his tormented expression told me there was something he wasn’t saying. “Then why...?”
His gaze dropped to my stomach, and suddenly I understood.
“The baby. Swear you would save the baby over me, Gallagher.”
“You know I can’t tell you that. I’m not saying I wouldn’t. I’m saying I can’t swear to it. This hasn’t... The champion/benefactor relationship isn’t romantic or physical in nature, so there’s never been this kind of conflict before. I honestly don’t know how this should work. Or how it should affect my oath.”
“Okay, I get that redcaps aren’t supposed to have kids with their benefactors. But they do have kids, right?” I laid one hand on the upper curve of my stomach. “If you’d already had a child before you pledged yourself to me, what would that ranking look like, in your head? If you had to choose between us?”
Gallagher crossed the room and sank into the chair in the corner, but his posture remained tense. Almost formal. “Under normal circumstances, I would choose you over anyone else in the world. Including my own children. That’s how this works. But if I’d had children before we met, I wouldn’t have sworn myself to you until they were old enough to fend for themselves.”
“Okay...” I ran one hand through my hair, thinking that over. “In related news, I may have discovered what’s behind the drastic decline in the fear dearg population...”
He actually gave me a little smile. Albeit a bitter one. “Civil war, Delilah. That’s what decimated our population. But that was decades ago. For centuries before that, our traditions worked just fine. When we were ready to contribute to the population, we chose partners who were healthy and like-minded, raised our children, then devoted our lives to service.”
“Healthy and like-minded, huh?” I couldn’t resist a sardonic smile. “That is so hot.”
“Procreation is about much more than the attractiveness of one’s sexual partner,” he insisted with an obstinate grunt. “A redcap might take many lovers for the sake of attraction before he or she decides to procreate, but none of those relationships endure like the champion/benefactor bond. Attraction is fleeting. Marriages often fail. Parenthood is a brief state, and as much as the fear dearg love their children, we have them in order to give them to the world. It’s a temporary custody, to use your terminology.”
“So, when you came of age, your parents just...left you?”
“When I came of age, my parents were dead. As were my siblings. Ours was a devastating war, Delilah. And I fought it before I came of age.”
In fact, he’d only been eleven years old.
That was difficult for me to keep in mind because I had trouble picturing Gallagher as a child. As anything other than the force of strength and dark impulses constantly placing himself between me and danger. “But if your parents had survived, they would have just left you when you were old enough? You would have just left your own children when they turned eighteen?”
Gallagher chuckled. “Eighteen is a legal threshold, and that is meaningless to fear dearg. A male redcap is typically physically mature by fifteen. Unlike humans, who grow slowly, then age quickly, we spend the vast majority of our lives at physical peak.”
“Yeah, well, the male of the human species often doesn’t physically mature until around twenty, and emotional and mental maturity usually take quite a bit longer than that.” I ran one hand over the curve of my belly. “So are you just going to throw our child out when he or she is tall enough to see over the van?”
“Of course not.” With a sigh, Gallagher crossed the room again and sank onto the bed next to me, careful to preserve a thin slice of space between us. Since I’d healed from being shot during our escape from the Spectacle, he hadn’t once touched me without outright invitation. Not even to feel his child kick. He’d had no more choice than I in the act that conceived our baby, yet he seemed surprised and pleased every time I accepted his offer of a hug or a hand up from a low seat.
“Delilah, this child isn’t just fear dearg. And he or she definitely won’t grow up in the world I grew up in. That world doesn’t even exist anymore. We’re going to have to figure things out as we go, for this little one. Just like we’re figuring things out with...us. And if the past year is any indication, that’s only going to get more difficult and more complicated.”
The aching way he looked at my stomach, as if he really wanted to feel the baby in that moment, made me tear up. “And you’re right. It is simpler while the two of you are in the same place, but that won’t be the case for much longer. I’m still trying to figure most of this out, and that would be a lot easier for me if you wouldn’t put yourself—and the baby—in danger.”
I couldn’t think of any reasonable objection to that, so... “Then maybe I’ll go, but just wait in the van.”
He exhaled slowly. “Maybe we should readdress this once we actually have a plan of action.”
“Agreed.” He stood and I caught his hand as he headed for the door. “Gallagher, promise me you won’t pick me over the baby, should it ever come to that.”
“Part of my job is making sure it doesn’t come to that.”
“But if it does...” I squeezed his hand, holding him in that moment with me.
“Save the baby. That’s what I want.”
“Delilah—”
“Let me make this easy for you.” I tightened my grip on his hand. “If you have a choice, and you let this baby die, I’m not sure I will want to live.” His eyes darkened and he opened his mouth to argue, but I spoke over him. “That’s not a threat. It’s not an ultimatum. It’s the truth. Now that I’ve felt her—now that I’ve imagined holding her and feeding her and watching her grow up—I’m not sure I will want to live in this world if she can’t. So there would be little sense in protecting me, if you can’t also protect her.”
“How can you possibly know it’s a she?”
“I don’t. But I object to ‘it’ as a pronoun for a child.” In greater society, it was for monsters. And our baby wasn’t a monster, no matter how she’d been created. “Then there’s the fact that Rommily’s been referring to her as a girl for six months.” And if anyone would know, other than an ultrasound tech, it would be our beloved but communication-challenged oracle. “But stop trying to change the subject.”
Gallagher took a deep breath. Then he shifted his grip on my hand so that he was holding mine, instead of vice versa. “Delilah, my oath to protect you includes protecting you from yourself. But please don’t make me do that.”
* * *
Over a dinner of rabbit stew, we discussed our options for rescuing Mirela and Lala, and I used a few precious megabytes from the prepaid data plan on one of our phones to download a campus map and some pictures of the university lab they’d been sold to.
As near as I could tell, security at the lab was minimal, but as far-fetched as it seemed to me, we couldn’t afford to ignore the possibility that selling Miri and Lala to a low-security lab was a trap intended to draw out more of the Spectacle escapees. So I agreed that the next day, Gallagher, Lenore and Claudio—those of us best able to pass for human, other than Rommily and me—would drive to the university and do surveillance on the lab. After dark, when Gallagher would be better able to disguise his size.
Because even when people thought he was human, they tended to remember him.
When the stew was eaten and the dishes were done, I settled onto the couch with Genni to help her read a chapter from one of the old paperback novels that had come with the cabin.
Rommily and Eryx retreated to the loft, where I could hear her crying softly, and him trying to comfort her with soft, nonverbal sounds, and for the millionth time, I wished I could see what she saw. Or at least understand what she occasionally tried to tell us about what she saw.
When Genni started yawning, we all went to bed, and though in my premenagerie life I would never have retired before midnight, lately I valued rest anywhere and any way I could get it. I hadn’t slept well since early in my first trimester.
Could a fear dearg pregnancy even be measured in trimesters? I felt more like things had progressed into a fourth quarter.
Around midnight, according to the old alarm clock on the nightstand, the creak of floorboards woke me up as Gallagher stood from his pallet beneath the window and snuck out of the room. A couple of minutes later, I heard the van’s engine, then the crunch of tires on gravel.
I mentally crossed my fingers that he would find a suitable victim to satisfy the redcap’s bloodlust—someone who had earned a brutal, gory death. And that we wouldn’t need him while he was gone.
Hours later, the squeal of rusty hinges woke me again, and I opened my eyes to find that dawn had arrived, and Gallagher had come with it. Yet despite another night spent in a real bed—a luxury after months spent in the menagerie and at the Savage Spectacle—I didn’t feel rested.
“Hey,” Gallagher whispered as he closed the door softly behind him. “I didn’t intend to wake you. Go back to sleep.”
I rolled onto my side, then pushed myself upright. “Can’t.” Not without a trip to the bathroom. I threw back the covers and swung my feet over the side of the mattress.
“Delilah! What happened?” Gallagher crossed the floor in three steps and dropped onto his knees in front of me. He took my hands in both of his—for once touching me without hesitation—and that’s when I saw the blood.
“Oh my God.” The underside of the soft white sheet was streaked with dry smudges of it. My nightgown was stained with arcing splatters of it. My hands were caked with it, crusted into the cracks of my knuckles and beneath my nails.
“Delilah. Is it the baby?” Gallagher demanded, his strong hands open and useless at his sides, without an enemy to rip apart.
“I don’t know. Nothing hurts.” I let him help me carefully out of the bed, one hand supporting the swollen mass of my belly, and I stared down at the sheets, expecting to find a puddle of blood on the mattress from the onset of labor gone terribly wrong. Having had no prenatal care, that was my biggest fear in the world.
Yet there was no pool of blood. In fact, the mess seemed concentrated on my hands and the upper curve of my stomach, as if rather than bleeding I had been bled on.
I felt around on my stomach, just to be sure, and found no injury or soreness, other than the usual numbness in my lower rib cage.
Relief settled over me with the certainty that I was neither injured nor in labor. But eliminating the most obvious source of the blood left an even more terrifying possibility.
The world seemed to shrink around me until nothing existed but the breath wheezing in and out of my lungs, the blood on my hands and the utter terror shining in Gallagher’s dark, dark eyes.
“Delilah!” He ran his hands down my arms and over my skull, frantically searching for the injury. “Tell me who did this, and I’ll rip him limb from limb.” His voice carried the gravelly threat of true violence, and deep inside me, the furiae purred like a cat being stroked.
Tears filled my eyes as I pulled out of his grip. “Gallagher, I think I did this.”
August 24, 1986
Grandma Janice wasn’t one to dwell on the dark side of things. That had always been one of the things Rebecca liked most about her mother’s mother. Normally that optimism meant focusing on all the ice cream she’d gotten to eat after having her tonsils out at the undignified age of fifty-five, rather than on the pain of recovery. Or on the fun she’d had playing in the mud with her grandchildren, when the aboveground pool in her backyard had sprung a leak.
But picking up her bloodstained granddaughters from the police station in the middle of the night had stretched even her ability to look on the bright side.
“Erica, you can have your mom’s old bed for tonight, and, Becca, I thought you’d enjoy the trundle!” Grandma Janice knelt on creaking knees and pulled out a twin-size mattress-in-a-drawer made up with a light blue sheet, tucked around the corners with military precision.
The first grader’s hair was a tangled mess from having slept on Rebecca’s lap all the way from the police station. It was nearly 3:00 a.m., and she could hardly hold her eyes open, so, still clutching the teddy bear the paramedic had given her, Erica climbed onto the bed. Her right foot left a rust-colored smudge on the pale pink comforter.
“Oh, sweetie, let’s clean you off a little first!” Grandma Janice hurried across the hall into the lime-green tiled bathroom and came back seconds later with a damp washcloth. Rebecca leaned against the rose-patterned wallpaper, numb from physical and emotional exhaustion, while her grandmother sank onto the mattress and lifted the child’s small legs into her lap.
Erica giggled and curled her ticklish toes as their grandmother scrubbed the bottoms of her bare feet. “What on earth have you been into?”
“Blood,” Rebecca said, and Grandma Janice’s hand clenched around the soiled rag. Her typically relentless smile suddenly seemed frozen in place.
Rebecca headed down the hall to the living room, where she sank into her grandfather’s armchair and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. And tried to turn off her brain.
“Becca, honey,
don’t you think you should get some sleep?”
She dragged her gaze away from the cracks in the ceiling to find her grandfather standing in the kitchen doorway in his thick brown robe, leaning on his cane.
“Can’t.”
“Well, you should try, for Erica’s sake.” Grandma Janice crossed the living room into the kitchen, where she ran water into the coffeepot at the sink. “She’s probably terrified in there by herself.”
But Rebecca could already hear her sister snoring softly.
“Can I just sleep in here, please?” She leaned forward and ran her fingers into her hair at the temples, then cradled her forehead in both palms, her elbows propped on her knees. “On the couch? I can’t be in there. In Mom’s old room.”
Grandma Janice turned from the sink, still holding the full coffeepot, a look of utter consternation on her face. “Becca, honey, your mother didn’t... She couldn’t have...”
“She did.” Rebecca moved from the armchair to the couch, where she curled up on her side with the scratchy, crocheted pillow beneath her head. “Erica saw it all. I heard her tell the psychologist at the police station.” She pulled the coordinating throw blanket from the back of the couch and draped it over herself, up to her shoulders. “She and Dad... They just let Erica watch. Like it was a game.”
Dr. Emory’s horrified expression flashed behind Rebecca’s eyes as she stared at the brown shag carpet. Erica’s voice played in her mind, matter-of-factly telling them how her parents had stabbed John to death in his bed. Then Laura...
And through it all Erica had remained dry-eyed and calm, recounting the details of a double murder as if it were the plot of a Saturday morning cartoon.
Dr. Emory said that was a symptom of shock.
Lying on the couch an hour later, Rebecca wasn’t so sure.
No one other than Erica got any sleep in the predawn hours of Sunday, August 24. Grandma Janice offered Rebecca food. Grandpa Frank offered her coffee. But eventually, when Rebecca refused to move from the couch or respond to their questions, they retreated to their bedroom where they spoke in hushed, teary voices, trying to figure out what they’d done to turn their only daughter into a murderer.
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