“Delilah, I haven’t been hunting. I mean, I have been. But not just to soak my hat.”
A chill crawled up my spine. “What does that mean?”
“I’ve been looking for him. To fulfill my promise to you.”
“Him? Who...?” I asked, and Gallagher’s gaze trailed down to my stomach again. But I wasn’t seeing the concern or affection of a father-to-be.
The look on his face was pure rage.
Oh. The thin man. The customer from the Spectacle who’d paired me and Gallagher and demanded that we “perform” for his amusement—a callous, monstrous demand that had stolen a choice from us, forever altered our relationship and given us a child.
“He will pay for what he did,” Gallagher insisted. “I gave you my word. And even if I hadn’t...my hands itch to spill the life from his veins. I want to hear him scream until he chokes on his own blood. I want to see terror in his eyes when he recognizes me and understands exactly why his last moments will be excruciating, and as prolonged as I can make them. Delilah, I want to craft a rattle for our child from his vertebrae.”
“Well, that’s...colorful.” I frowned at him. “Is that really something redcaps do? Make toys from the bones of your victims?”
“From the bones of our enemies, anyway. A bone rattle is a very appropriate gift for the child of a warrior.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
“How close are you to finding him?”
“Not very.” His causal tone belied the frustration lurking behind his dark eyes as they stared down at me. “I don’t have a name to go on, and everyone I might have been able to question either died at the Spectacle or escaped and is on the run. It’s been a vexing, exhausting hunt, to say the least.”
No doubt made even more so by the fact that most devices that carry a signal or transmit data glitch out in the hands of a redcap. Gallagher had literally never used a computer and had never utilized a cell phone beyond its actual telephone function.
“Why haven’t you asked for help? Or even told me what you were doing?”
“This isn’t your burden.”
I exhaled, struggling for patience. “That’s not what I asked you.”
Gallagher stood. “I knew talking about him would make you uncomfortable. I was afraid it might make you remember more than you want to.”
In fact, I remembered very little of our child’s conception, by choice. Gallagher had only participated to keep me from being paired with someone else. On an intellectual level, I was grateful for the choice he’d made. But I didn’t get one.
The only choice I’d had was to leave the memories buried.
“I didn’t want to say anything until I was able to present you with the rattle and tell you exactly how long that bastard had bled and sobbed before death finally took him. Lenore tells me that it is customary in the human world for a new father to present a gift to the mother of his child, and I’d hoped you’d find the tale of the thin man’s agonizing death appropriate for such a joyous occasion.”
“Lenore...?” I laughed out loud at the sudden realization that Gallagher was describing a warrior’s version of a push present.
Then, suddenly, I wanted to cry. “Gallagher, we haven’t made any preparations at all for this baby.” Other than reading the dog-eared copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, twice each. But the longer my pregnancy continued, the less convinced I became that anything in that stupid book was relevant to me and my nonstandard gestation. “We need somewhere for her to sleep. Something for her to wear. Something for her to eat, in case I’m unable to nurse. Or in case I’m not here to nurse her.”
“Delilah, you’re not going to die in childbirth.”
“Are you willing to give me your word about that?”
“You know that is not the kind of thing I can swear to. But I truly believe it.” Gallagher stepped closer, as if he wanted to pull me into a hug, but wasn’t sure it would be welcome. Which left him standing awkwardly about a foot away, looking helpless against my tears, when he would have easily ripped apart any other foe. “I’m much more worried about you waking up covered in blood than about you giving birth. Human or not, you have the strong heart and fearsome fortitude of a fear dearg warrior, and no matter how he or she came to exist, our child could not have wished for a better mother.”
“Thank you.” Though I lacked his confidence in me. “But you wouldn’t worry about me waking up covered in blood if I were actually a redcap.”
“Delilah, if you were fear dearg, your cap would have consumed the blood, and there would have been none left to stain your hands and clothing.”
“But I’m not, so why the hell did I wander into the woods in the middle of the night, and how on earth could I have done that much damage without a weapon? Did I use my bare—”
The body lies on a bed of dirt and dead leaves. His throat is a gaping mass of torn tissue, glistening bright red in the moonlight.
My right hand comes into view, and it is drenched in blood. Dripping with it. My fingers tremble. I kneel and wipe my hand on the man’s left pant leg, and when I stand again, I see his face. Wide-set brown eyes. Dark hair. Narrow nose. No freckles...
Oh my God.
“I did it.” My voice sounded hollow with shock. “I saw it. The aftermath. The body. I really killed someone. A man.” I don’t know why I expected to find judgment in Gallagher’s gaze, but there was none. There was only concern. “Gallagher, this is not okay. I’m not a murderer.”
“Do you remember actually killing him, or just seeing the body?”
“I don’t need to remember the act itself. I remember looking down at him and knowing I’d killed him. His throat was ripped out and my hands were covered in blood.” The memory was so real I felt like I still needed to wash my hands. “I don’t want to remember any more of it.”
I just wanted to be sure it would never happen again.
September 6, 1986
Rebecca Essig sat on her grandmother’s front steps, picking flakes of white paint from the iron railing while her sister played in the front yard with a little girl from down the street. Encouraged by a mother who felt sorry for the Essig girls, eight-year-old Meredith Cooper had brought over her Pogo Ball and a couple of Hula-Hoops on that bright, hot Saturday afternoon.
She’d also brought her big sister.
Sara Cooper sat on the step next to Rebecca, chewing and popping a fragrant hunk of grape-flavored bubble gum. She hadn’t said a word in nearly half an hour, but Rebecca knew it was only a matter of time before she worked up the nerve to start asking questions.
“You want some gum?” she finally asked, poking Rebecca in the shoulder with what remained of the pack.
“No, thanks.”
Sara gave her purple bubble an extrahard pop, then took a deep breath. “So, is it true? Did your parents do it? Did Erica really see the whole thing?”
Sara Cooper was a year ahead of Rebecca in school, and though they’d often seen each other in the halls during the first few weeks of class—an inevitability in such a small town—they’d never really spoken before, because varsity cheerleaders didn’t typically have much to say to mousy freshmen.
Until the slaughter of that mousy freshman’s siblings by her own parents had thrust her into suburban notoriety.
Seven other families in Greenville had suffered similar tragedies on that very same night, but while two of the other surviving children were in Erica’s first grade class, none of the other families had had kids in high school.
Rebecca Essig was the only source of legitimate, gruesome gossip available to the other teenagers in town.
“Yeah,” Rebecca said at last. “It’s true.” She’d thought about lying. She’d even thought about not answering. But as tired as she was, both of those other options seemed like more work than simply telling the truth, consequences be damned.
They’d been saying that much on TV all week, anyway.
Across the street, the front door of a small, boxy house with pale yellow siding opened and a little girl thumped down the steps on bare feet, carrying a doll in a bright pink dress. The girl’s skin was pale and her hair was long and dark, with dozens of tiny white flowers growing on thin woody vines peppered throughout the length.
The child tottered out onto the lawn, where she spread her arms in the sun, then settled onto her knees in the dirt, sitting on her own heels. She began to play with her doll, talking to it in a high-pitched voice, and Rebecca noticed that the child’s lower legs, folded beneath her, looked...fuzzy. Indistinct, in the grass and dirt.
Roots, Rebecca realized. Her grandfather had said the family across the street were dryads. They gained sustenance from the soil, like a plant, through retractable roots that sprouted from their feet and legs when they came in contact with the earth.
Sara scooted down to sit on the step next to Rebecca, drawing her thoughts back to her own yard. “What did she say?”
“Erica?” Becca shrugged. “Nothing.” Nothing since that night at the police station, anyway. Not even the day of the double funeral—the second-worst day of Rebecca’s life. The police had told both girls they might be called to testify, but in the six days since, they’d heard nothing from the cops. Nor from the state’s attorney.
Like the rest of the world, hypnotized by the national tragedy unfolding before them, Rebecca was getting her updates from the nightly news.
“I heard that all of the kids who survived were six years old. Well, all of them but you.” Sara popped her gum again, and Rebecca privately marveled at the older girl’s nerve.
People stared at Rebecca when she walked her grandfather’s dog up and down the street, which she only did to get out of the house. They whispered when she went to the grocery store with her grandmother. And once, a stranger had put a hand on her shoulder and whispered, “God bless you, dear,” at the post office, while her grandfather was buying a roll of stamps. But since the night her parents had killed two of her three siblings, no one had come right out and asked such invasive, painful questions.
Until Sara Cooper.
“I wasn’t home when it happened,” Rebecca whispered, hoping Erica wouldn’t hear her over Meredith’s enthusiastic counting of her own hula hoop revolutions.
“Twenty-five! Twenty-six! Twenty-sev—Wait, that doesn’t count! I only dropped it for a second!”
“So, has your sister always been that weird, or is this new since that night? Like, from the trauma?”
Rebecca looked up from the paint chips she was picking from beneath her fingernails to find Erica bouncing contentedly on the Pogo Ball in the cracked driveway, one hand on the hood of their grandfather’s car for balance. The only thing “odd” she could find about her sister’s behavior was that the six-year-old was surprisingly coordinated and well-balanced. At least, compared to Meredith Cooper, who’d moved on to the hula hoop after she’d fallen off the ball and scraped her knees twice.
“Do you think she’s...like...scarred for life?” Sara asked when Rebecca went back to scraping paint from the railing without response. “After seeing something so horrible? My mom’s a therapist, and she said your sister’d probably need psychological counseling for the rest of her life. She said there’d be nightmares. Emotional regression. Maybe even bedwetting.”
“I thought your mom was the guidance counselor’s secretary,” Rebecca said. “At school.”
Sara shrugged. “She steps in to help with the counseling whenever there’s a problem.”
Rebecca went back to flaking paint from the railing, because she’d been taught that when one has nothing nice to say, one should say nothing at all. Of course, the fact that that adage had come from the mother who’d stabbed her brother and sister to death had led Rebecca to question the merit of the advice.
Still, Sara’s question plagued her.
Rebecca had hardly gotten three consecutive hours of sleep in the two weeks since the killings. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Laura’s body, splayed out in a tangle of bloody limbs on the floor. She woke up from frequent nightmares drenched in sweat, staring up at the living room ceiling because she refused to sleep either in the dark or in her mother’s old bedroom.
Yet Erica...
Becca stifled a yawn while she studied her sister. Erica had plenty of energy. She wasn’t exactly laughing and joking with Meredith Cooper, but that wasn’t something she would have done before that night in August, either. She’d always been kind of a loner, playing alongside other children, more often than with them.
Erica had been sleeping and eating just fine since that night, though she maintained that their grandparents’ house “smelled funny,” and she hadn’t wet the bed once since she was four. Rebecca wasn’t sure what “emotional regression” might look like, but she was pretty sure Erica was recovering very well from what she’d witnessed.
Extraordinarily well.
For another half hour, Sara and Rebecca sat on the steps, watching their sisters play in the yard. The popping of Sara’s gum became a counterpoint to the steady thump of the Pogo Ball against the pavement and the occasional clatter of the hula hoop, when Meredith’s hips failed her.
Across the street, the young dryad stood with her doll and tossed flower-strewn hair over one shoulder on her way into her house.
Rebecca had just decided to go in for a cold Coke when a police car pulled to a stop in front of the house. Blocking the driveway.
Becca stood, her mouth suddenly dry. There must be news about her parents. Or maybe the cops had more questions.
Meredith let her hoop fall when two uniformed police officers got out of the patrol car. Before they’d even made it onto the grass, a second car pulled up behind the first and Rebecca’s pulse began to throb in her ears. This had to be about her mom and dad.
Grandma Janice had gone to see them, separately, and she’d said Becca’s parents had both been in tears. That they remembered nothing of what had happened that night. That they’d begged for pictures of their children and asked how Rebecca and Erica were dealing with everything.
Rebecca found their recent behavior just as puzzling as the way they’d acted that night. Though not nearly as disturbing.
“Erica Essig?” One of the cops stopped in front of Meredith, the toe of his shiny black shoe anchoring her hula hoop to the ground.
Meredith shook her head. Erica stepped off the Pogo Ball.
Rebecca knew she should say something. She should go get her grandparents. But her feet felt glued to the porch steps.
“Miss Janice!” Sara spun and pounded twice on the front door. “Miss Janice, the police are here!”
Across the street, the little dryad’s mother stepped onto her front porch, drawn by Sara’s shouting.
“Erica Essig?” The first two cops headed up the driveway to the left of Grandpa Frank’s car. Both men’s hands hovered over the service pistols in holsters on their belts, as if they expected trouble. From a six-year-old.
Something was terribly, terribly wrong.
The edges of Rebecca’s vision lost focus, until she could see nothing but her sister. “Erica!” she called, but her voice carried little sound. The front door squealed open behind her and Grandma Janice hurried down the steps, gripping the flaking railing.
“We’re going to need you to come with us.” The first policeman pulled a set of handcuffs from his belt. Erica looked up at him with long, dark hair half-covering her face, her tiny hands at her sides.
“Wait! What are you doing? She’s just a child!” Grandma Janice rushed across the small lawn and down the driveway, her knees cracking audibly.
“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to stand back.” One of the cops from the second car came forward, arms extended at his sides, as if he
were a human guardrail. “You girls, too.” He tossed his head at Meredith and Sara, directing them toward the porch.
“Frank!” Grandma Janice shouted. “Get out here! Call a lawyer!”
Frank appeared in the doorway with his cane. “What’s going on out here?”
“Sir, we’re going to have to take your granddaughter down to the station.”
“Why?” Grandma Janice demanded. “Do you have a warrant?”
“No, ma’am, right now she’s not under arrest. She’s being taken into custody as a ward of the federal government.”
“What does that mean?” Rebecca asked her grandfather softly, from where they both still stood on the porch.
“A ward of the...” Grandma Janice frowned. “The government is taking custody of my granddaughter? On what grounds?” She turned to glance at Rebecca, but the police seemed uninterested in the teenager. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Ma’am, you’re to direct all questions to the FBI.” The first officer reached for little Erica, who stared up at him with an oddly curious expression. But no sign of fear. She made no attempt to resist as he turned her by both shoulders, then had to kneel to cuff her small wrists behind her back.
“Are those really necessary?” Grandma Janice gestured boldly to the cuffs, but her voice shook. “This is ridiculous. Frank, call our lawyer!” Grandpa Frank shuffled back into the house, and his wife followed her youngest granddaughter as Erica was led to the back of the first police car, in handcuffs. “Don’t worry, honey. They’re going to take good care of you. And Grandpa Frank and I will come get you just as soon as we get this sorted out.”
Erica said nothing as the policeman helped her into the back of the car. He closed the door, then all four cops got back into their vehicles.
As both cars pulled away from the curb, Rebecca watched from the porch, stunned while Erica smiled at her from the rear window of the first car.
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