Fury

by Rachel Vincent

  That thought sent a chill through me.

  Fate had chosen me to right unrighted wrongs, and so far, that justice had taken a decidedly gory format. But could there be any wrong more worth righting than the extinction of an entire species?

  “Which way?” Gallagher slowed the van with a glance in the rearview mirror.

  I glanced at my phone again. “The neighborhood is up here on the right. About a mile down. It’s a wealthy neighborhood—all the lots are acreages—but there’s no gate.”

  “Then the residents are either stupid or cocky.”

  “Or they have top-of-the-line private security systems.” I watched the road for landmarks as we approached, and finally I spotted the well-lit neighborhood entrance sign—a black and copper plaque set into a bed of stones. “Turn here.”

  We pulled into the neighborhood and drove around for a while, even after we’d found Malloy’s house, looking for an out-of-the-way place to park the van. On his own, Gallagher would have parked it a mile down the road, hidden by brush, and he would probably have jogged the whole way back in minutes. But I wasn’t in any condition to trek through a mile of wooded, uneven terrain in the dark so that we could come upon the house from behind.

  Instead, we parked at the end of a cul-de-sac where the homes were unfinished. Thus unoccupied. The construction crew had left several large pieces of equipment parked overnight, and with any luck, our panel van would blend in with them.

  We still had to walk half a mile from the construction site, but the sidewalks were flat and even, and well-lit, though we avoided as much light as we could.

  Malloy’s house was set well back from the road, at the end of a broad, winding driveway. Large, amorphous flower beds butted up against the front of the house on both sides of the tall, narrow front porch and I could tell from the illumination of the floodlights that the place was probably stunning in daylight. And too big for a man with no spouse or kids.

  Though his yard was well-lit with flood and security lights, all of Malloy’s interior lights were off, as far as I could see.

  “Ready?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “How do we get in?”

  “I don’t think I’d fit down the chimney, so...the door?”

  I frowned at him. “I hope this kid inherits my sense of humor.”

  Gallagher led the way around the house, and in the backyard, he seemed almost to draw shadows around himself as he unscrewed the floodlights one by one, then threw small rocks with unerring accuracy at the security lights over the broad back patio.

  I followed him onto the porch, where he used brute strength to break the doorknob lock, then pull the door open. Wood creaked as the frame split beneath pressure from the still-engaged dead bolt, and the door swung open.

  From just inside the back door, a green light flashed insistently against the kitchen wall—a high-tech alarm system with a touch screen, waiting to accept a four-digit code. Gallagher laid his entire huge right hand flat on the display, and it began to flash beneath his fingers in an irregular, fitful pattern. The system beeped softly for a second. Then it went dead, fried by the fae’s inability to operate electronic devices.

  “That’s convenient,” I whispered.

  Gallagher snorted softly. “Unless you want to be able to use a cell phone.”

  I followed him through the dining room, across an ostentatious, marble-floored front entry and up a curving staircase, to where a set of double doors faced us from the end of the second-floor hallway. “Bingo,” I whispered.

  While I watched from near the staircase, my heart racing with anticipation, he stalked silently toward the doors and threw them open. I held my breath, but there was no response from inside.

  Gallagher growled, then stomped into the master bedroom, intentionally taking loud, aggressive footsteps. He reached to the left of the door and flipped on the overhead lights. He wanted his prey awake. And terrified.

  A disoriented grumble echoed from the room, then became an inarticulate sound of confusion. And as I made my way slowly toward the master suite, the shouting started.

  “Who the fuck are you? What the hell are you—?”

  Something flew across the room, past the open double doorway, and I recognized the crunch of a cell phone smashing against the wall. A second after that, a clunky cordless landline phone followed.

  “Take whatever you want. My billfold is on the dresser. Just take it and go. Please.” Malloy’s voice slid down my spine like melting ice, leaving a cold trail the length of my body. I consciously remembered very little of hearing him speak, yet my body knew his voice...

  “Do you remember me?” Gallagher’s demand was a rumble like the growl of heavy machine parts. The grinding of a blade against a whetstone. “Think hard.”

  “You...”

  I stepped into the doorway. Across the room, Oliver Malloy sat in the center of a king-size bed. His legs were a thin outline beneath the rust-colored satin comforter, his spindly arms ending in knobby fingers that clutched the covers.

  He hadn’t noticed me yet. His terror was focused entirely on Gallagher, who loomed over him from the side of the bed, the threat of violence evident in each tense bulge of muscle and every breath that expanded his powerful chest.

  I blinked, and suddenly Gallagher’s faded red baseball hat was gone. In its place sat the traditional cap of the fear dearg, no longer glamoured as part of his human disguise. Malloy’s eyes widened. His hands began to tremble. “You...”

  “And me,” I said from the doorway. Startled, he turned to me, and his gaze dropped to my stomach. I saw the conclusion reflected on his horrified features. Terror shined in his eyes.

  “The Savage Spectacle.”

  “We took it down,” I told him.

  “And now you’ve come for me.” He understood his fate.

  I nodded calmly, content to let the furiae rage inside me. But Gallagher had more to say.

  “We will make a rattle for our child from your teeth and phalanges, and stacking toys from your vertebrae. She will teethe on your kneecaps and we will rock her to sleep whispering tales of your bloody demise.”

  I ran one hand over my stomach, and the sound of Malloy’s rapid, panicked breathing made the furiae squirm with delight inside me. “Wait. Let’s talk about this,” he said. “I have money.”

  “This isn’t about money,” Gallagher growled. And though we could certainly have used some cash, his vow prevented him from killing for profit.

  “I can help you,” Malloy insisted. “I can get you out of the country. Do you need passports? ID? A private plane? Name it. It’s yours.”

  The plane might have been nice, if we’d had anywhere to go. And if we’d already found the rest of our cryptid family members. But even if he’d wanted to—and no matter what he was offered—a redcap could not abandon his vow.

  Gallagher shook his head. “You know what we need.”

  “They’ll catch you.” Malloy’s voice was steady, but his hands were not. “People saw you fight in the ring. They’ll know who this was.”

  “We’ve already accepted that inevitability,” I assured him.

  Malloy swallowed thickly. “Will it be quick? May I at least ask for that mercy?”

  “No.” Gallagher lunged over the bed faster than a man his size should have been able to. He hauled Malloy’s much smaller frame across the mattress, and the thin man’s high-pitched scream echoed through my head.

  I turned as the distinctive sound of tearing gristle echoed across the room. My stomach pitched.

  I’d thought I had to watch. That the baby would insist upon seeing the slaughter. Maybe even on participating. But as the furiae and the fetal warrior celebrated, I backed into the hallway, and neither of them tried to stop me.

  Hoarse cries followed me down the stairs and into the kitchen, and just when I was starting to w
orry that the nearest neighbors would hear, they dissolved into a choking, gurgling sound. As if Malloy had been punched in the throat.

  Gallagher was determined to make this death last. I almost felt sorry for Malloy.

  Almost.

  At the kitchen sink, I gulped cold water from my cupped hand, then wiped my fingerprints from everything I’d touched. My prints were on file from my arrest in Oklahoma, the day I was sold into Metzger’s menagerie, but I wasn’t sure that would even matter. It was just as illegal for us to be living free, in hiding, as it was for us to kill someone, and they could only execute us once. So erasing evidence felt pointless.

  But leaving fingerprints around felt careless.

  Something thumped to the floor overhead, and I flinched again. My eyes fell closed, and I was bombarded with mental images of what must be happening upstairs. The blood. The dismembered body parts.

  My eyes flew open again, and—

  I stumbled back, startled to see a man’s silhouette framed in the window over the kitchen sink. He was standing in the middle of Malloy’s backyard, watching me, though he couldn’t possibly be seeing much, with the interior lights off.

  Still, he was a witness. What if he’d already called the police?

  I should get Gallagher. We should soak his hat and go.

  The silhouette slid his hands into his pockets, and the tiny hairs on my skin began to rise as we stared at each other, each seeing nothing but the outline of a stranger. Then he stepped forward, and I gasped at the sudden pull from deep inside me. It felt as if the baby had tugged on some organ I’d never even realized I had.

  Or maybe that was the furiae.

  The silhouette took another step forward, and that pull came again, so insistent that I actually took a step of my own and bumped into the sink.

  Heart pounding, palms suddenly slick with sweat, I threw the back door open. Logic screamed at me to stop. To close the door and bolt it. To race upstairs as fast as my poor swollen body could move and tell Gallagher what was going on.

  Instead, my legs carried me down the steps, my fingers itching for...something.

  My mind railed against this betrayal by my body, shouting protests and terrified utterances my mouth refused to give voice to.

  My feet hit the grass and I prayed that Gallagher would look out of Malloy’s window and see me. That he might somehow intuit that I’d left the house. That his child and I were in danger.

  I could hear the mechanical whine of Malloy’s central air conditioner and, more distantly, the gurgle of his pool filter. Crickets chirruped and, somewhere, an owl hooted, as if this were any normal night. As if my sworn protector weren’t upstairs ripping a man to pieces in my honor. As if my body weren’t carrying me and my unborn child toward untold—

  The silhouette stepped closer, and suddenly I could see his shadowy face in the ambient light of a sky full of stars. As my thoughts raced toward panic, I studied his features, trying to find some sense in what was happening.

  Pale wavy hair. Eyes that were probably blue in the daylight. Slim, fair features and a trim build.

  I’d never seen him before in my life.

  The man frowned as he stared at me from several feet away, as if he were making the same assessment. As if he were drawn to me through that same pull, yet had no idea why.

  I opened my mouth, but before I could ask who he was and what was happening, something thumped against an upstairs window. Startled, I twisted to look as a gory hunk of flesh slid down the glass.

  When I turned back to the man, I found him still watching me, evidently unconcerned with what was happening upstairs. He opened his mouth, his brows drawn low in confusion. “Who are—?”

  My hand shot out as my legs closed the slim distance between us. I felt my hair rise from the roots, twisting around my head as if the strands had life of their own. The familiarity of the impulse was both a relief and a frustration. The furiae was awake, and whoever this man was, she wanted him.

  My fingers clamped around his wrist. I held my breath, waiting for her to pronounce his sentence in my head, as if it were one of my own thoughts. To turn his crimes—whatever they were—back upon him.

  But while I could feel the furiae raging inside me, a beast demanding to be fed, her voice was oddly silent. I had no idea what this man had done to rouse her ire. I couldn’t even be sure she knew.

  Fire seemed to flow through me into the man’s flesh. His eyes widened in terror. Then he jerked free of my hold and ripped out his own throat in one sudden, brutal motion.

  I gasped, shocked, as a fount of warm blood drenched me, arcing over me from my chin to my kneecaps. I staggered backward, and the grass was so slick with blood that I nearly slipped. Two stumbling steps later, I realized that the furiae seemed satisfied by what I’d just done and had released me from her grip. My body was my own again. And I was left with the aftermath of a destruction that looked horrifyingly similar to what I’d seen in that sliver of memory of the murder in the woods.

  The man grasped at his throat, choking and gasping, spurting more blood. I stared, stunned and numb, as he fell first to his knees, then onto his side. His body twitched once. Twice. Then he went horribly, horribly still, his hand lying in a puddle of his own blood.

  Shaking, I looked around to find blood glistening in the starlight. On my clothes. On the grass. Pooling in bare patches of dry yard.

  “Delilah?”

  I spun toward the house so quickly that, again, I nearly slipped in the gore. Gallagher stood in the doorway, his massive silhouette a darker shadow against the night. “I... I... I...” No other words would come. My arms trembled as I held them out, trying to show him what I couldn’t seem to articulate.

  He jogged down the steps toward me. “What happened? Who is that?”

  “I don’t know. He was watching me. Through the window. I wanted to come get you, but my legs brought me out here, and then...” I mimed reaching for the dead man. “It just happened.” I swallowed thickly as tears filled my eyes.

  “You killed him?”

  “No. The furiae...she made him tear his own throat out.”

  “Is that what happened last time? You said you didn’t remember actually killing that other man.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Gallagher, this wasn’t like the other times. She’s never made her victims outright kill themselves before.” Sure, the furiae had given them wounds that were likely fatal, eventually, but her goal always seemed to be that they suffered with their own sins unleashed upon them, not that they necessarily died. “But this... This was decisively, efficiently lethal.” As if the furiae thought this man was too dangerous for anything other than a swift end. “And I have no idea what he did to deserve it. I didn’t see him do anything.”

  Gallagher knelt beside the body, then looked up at me with one hand out, palm up. “I need your cell.”

  I turned on the flashlight and gave him my phone, though I had no intention of looking at the dead man. I’d seen enough. But then the beam of light caught a strand of dark hair, and—

  “That’s not him.”

  “What?” Gallagher frowned up at me.

  “That’s not the man I... Gallagher, that’s not him. The man the furiae killed had blond hair. Light eyes. This guy...” I clasped my hand over Gallagher’s and redirected the light at the corpse’s face.

  This man had dark, straight hair and dull, dead brown eyes. His skin was light, but not as pale as the man who’d looked at me with such curiosity. As if he’d been drawn to me.

  Drawn to his own death.

  “What do you mean? There’s another man out here?” Gallagher stood with a speed and grace that shouldn’t have been possible from such a large, thick frame, already searching the shadows for an undiscovered threat.

  “No, this is him. Only it’s not. He...changed. Is that some kind of glamour? I assu
me glamour fades when the person using it dies?”

  “Yes.” Gallagher frowned at me, then knelt next to the man again, studying him under the bright light. “Only the fae can use glamour. If he’s fae, I don’t recognize the species. But then, there are hundreds of species, and most of them have been living among humans, beneath the veil of their own glamour, for centuries.”

  As Gallagher himself had.

  “So that’s a yes?” My teeth were chattering from the spent adrenaline. “He could be fae?”

  “I can’t think of any more likely explanation. You’re sure he didn’t look like this?”

  “Absolutely sure. But that makes no sense. It’s not like he was hiding green hair or a hollow back. Why would anyone use glamour to disguise one human appearance with another human appearance?”

  “I don’t know.” Gallagher aimed the beam of light at the dead man’s face again, and I made myself take a closer look, pushing past my own horror and disgust.

  The man’s face was largely free from blood; most of it had sprayed me or soaked into the ground. But his eyes...

  Wide-set brown eyes. Dark hair. Narrow nose. No freckles.

  Goose bumps rose in a wave over my arms, in spite of the warm night. “Gallagher, I recognize him.”

  “What? How?”

  “I...” I pushed hair back from my face and, too late, I realized I’d just smeared blood across my temples. “The furiae already killed him once. This is the man I remembered from the forest. This is the man I already killed.”

  Gallagher stood, and the beam of light swung across the grass to shine through the back door into Malloy’s kitchen. “The man from last night looked just like this man? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “He looked like this man looks now. Not like he looked a few minutes ago.” I frowned, staring down at a face I could no longer clearly see without aid from the flashlight. “The furiae killed two men who looked just alike. What’s going on, Gallagher?”