“I don’t know. Do you have any urge to be near the blood? To soak it up, or...roll in it?”
“That’s disgusting.”
“It’s certainly messy. But not unheard of for toddlers who haven’t yet mastered the more graceful methods of consumption.”
“No, I have no urge to roll in the blood. But I do have the urge to...flee the scene.”
“Yes, we should go. But there’s no sense wasting all this.” Gallagher knelt on the ground, heedless of the blood surely soaking into the knee of his left pant leg, and set his glamoured red cap on the ground, inches from the body.
When we’d left the cabin, his baseball cap had looked faded and old. Sun-bleached, its color hardly recognizable as red. Now, in the light from my phone, it looked brand-new and deeply pigmented, having been revitalized during the slaughter of Oliver Malloy. Yet as I watched, Gallagher’s hat began to soak up the blood pooled beneath it, as well.
When that puddle had been absorbed into the material, blood began to run from the other puddles, rolling up individual blades of grass—in defiance of gravity—toward the hat. Though the bleeding had stopped along with the beating of the dead man’s heart, except for a slow dribble, blood began to pour from his neck again, drawn to Gallagher’s hat like metal shavings to a magnet.
Blood condensed out of the dirt and reformed droplets that had dissolved minutes earlier. But the strangest of all was the sudden sensation that my clothes and skin were...drying.
Startled, I reclaimed my phone from Gallagher and aimed it at my shirt, where I saw blood coalesce into several thin red streams, rolling down my clothing like rivers to drip onto the ground. A feather-soft sensation brushed my neck and arms, and I reaimed the light to see the same thing happening with the blood that had begun to dry on my skin.
In minutes, it was gone. All of it. Not a splotch or splatter remained on my clothing or skin. My hands were spotless.
If I weren’t still standing over a corpse, I’d have every reason in the world to believe I’d imagined the whole thing.
“Wow. Serial killers all over the world wish they had your cleanup skill,” I whispered.
Gallagher snorted as the last of the blood was drawn into his hat like a countertop spill absorbed by a paper towel. “The point is to make efficient use of the blood. The cleanup is just a bonus.”
My teeth began to chatter again, and he looked up at me with a concerned tilt of his head. “Let me gather up all the pieces, and we’ll go.”
I nodded, trying not to think about what he was describing.
A few minutes later, Gallagher and I left Malloy’s house. He was carrying two bulging black trash bags.
We made it to the van without any trouble, and on the hour-long drive back to the cabin, I couldn’t stop seeing the stranger lying dead in Malloy’s backyard. The farther we got from the scene of the crime and the less imminent the danger of being captured became, the clearer the reality of what we’d just done came into focus.
Two bodies.
We hadn’t killed them escaping. Or in self-defense. We weren’t saving friends’ lives. Gallagher was getting revenge. I was...
Well, as usual, I was being used by the universe as a weapon of vengeful destruction. Only this time...
“What’s wrong?” Gallagher glanced away from the road to study my profile for a second. “You look like you’re going to break the handle off the door.”
I hadn’t even realized I was clutching it. I forced my hands into what was left of my lap and took a deep breath. “I have no evidence that that man actually deserved what he got. Gallagher, I might have helped kill an innocent man.” And if tonight’s victim was innocent, the man in the woods from last night might well have been, too. “What’s happening?” Gallagher didn’t have an answer. I knew that, but I still had to ask. “Why would two fae who look exactly alike glamour themselves to look like other men? Why would the furiae want me to kill them, when I didn’t see them do anything wrong?”
He shrugged with a glance at the highway sign overhead as we passed beneath it. “Maybe she knows something you don’t.”
“I certainly hope so, because otherwise, this isn’t justice. It’s just murder. And this time it felt like she was using me. Like she was wearing me. That’s not how she operates.”
Gallagher frowned. “Isn’t that exactly how she operates? You’ve never really been in control of the furiae, Delilah.”
“Yes, but it’s never felt like this. It’s always been vengeance in a moment of passion. If we happened to see some man hitting his wife, the furiae would make him punch himself in the gut until he ruptured an organ. But she’s never hijacked my legs and taken me somewhere. She’s never outright killed anyone. And she’s never attacked someone I haven’t seen commit a crime.”
“Did he try to hurt you?” Gallagher asked as the van bumped over a crack in the highway.
“No. If he had, the furiae wouldn’t have been able to act.” She could only exact justice on someone else’s behalf.
“Did he say anything?” Gallagher’s voice was deep with what I’d learned to recognize as anxiety, an emotion he only ever seemed to feel when I was involved. “Do you have any idea how he got there? Whether he knew you would be there?”
“He started to ask who I was, then the furiae just...grabbed him.” A sob caught in my throat. “It can’t be coincidence, though. She used me to kill two identical men. Something seems to have brought them to me. Or me to them,” I amended, thinking of the pull I’d felt deep inside. “Gallagher, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the baby. But I’m starting to worry that it’s not the furiae, either. I mean, the ‘how’ was definitely her—my hair took on a life of its own and I could feel her rage pulse into him from my touch. But the ‘why’...? I don’t have a why. What if I’m not the only one being used here? What if someone or something is using the furiae—and using me through her?”
February 3, 1987
“Do you want me to go in with you?” Grandma Janice asked. Rebecca shook her head and slid her hands into the pockets of her stonewashed jeans. She’d been patted down by prison security guards and warned of the consequences if she tried to pass contraband to an inmate.
Surely actually seeing her mother would be the easy part.
Grandma Janice had visited at least once a month since the night her daughter was arrested, but Rebecca never asked how her mom was doing. She’d never asked about her father, though she knew that Grandma Betty had seen her son several times, mostly to work out payment for legal services.
Rebecca had never read any of the letters her parents had sent, either, though the bundle under her bed was nearly an inch thick now.
“Okay. I’ll be right out here.” Grandma Janice sat on a hard plastic bench in the open visitation room. Rebecca’s mother wasn’t allowed to see visitors out there. The parents arrested in connection with the reaping—Becca hated that term—were only allowed to see visitors, including their lawyers, through security glass.
A female prison guard led Rebecca down the hall into a long, narrow room. The left wall was made of security glass from the waist up, divided by a series of privacy screens to form a dozen small booths.
Each booth had a pair of telephone receivers—one on each side of the glass—and a stool bolted to the floor for the visitor to sit in.
“Third one down,” the guard escorting Rebecca said. “Your mother will be there in just a second.” She gave the teenager a sympathetic look, and Becca wondered how many “reaping parents” this prison currently had locked up. Hundreds had been arrested in Tennessee alone. Thousands across the country.
Rebecca sat on the stool and slid her hands beneath her thighs to keep from biting her nails. She’d kicked the childhood habit years before, but had relapsed shortly after the police came for Erica.
That wasn’t Erica.
At least, that’s wha
t the FBI’s blood test had said. She wasn’t even human, so she couldn’t have been Rebecca’s sister. Yet it still felt like every member of her family had either been carried off by the police or by the county medical examiner.
On the other side of the glass, a door opened, and Natalie Essig stepped into the room, but it took Rebecca a second to recognize her own mother. She’d lost weight. She was wearing a prison uniform. And her face was bare of any makeup. But her eyes lit up the moment she saw her daughter.
She glanced at the guard who’d escorted her in, and when the guard nodded, she crossed the room at a jog and sank onto the stool across from Rebecca.
Her gaze roamed her daughter’s face over and over, flitting from feature to feature again and again, noticing changes. She seemed to be trying to memorize every detail, in case another six months passed without a visit.
Natalie picked up the telephone handset on her side of the glass, but at first Becca could only stare at her. Even when her mother pointed to the telephone and tapped on the glass. Even when she said Rebecca’s name with a question in her muted voice. With pain swimming in her eyes.
Finally, Rebecca picked up the phone.
“Becca, I’m so glad you came!” her mother said. Yet her eyes were full of tears. “Are you okay? You look like you haven’t been eating well.” When Rebecca only continued to stare at her, Natalie cleared her throat and tried another approach. “How... How’s school going?”
“How’s school going?” Rebecca spat the words out as if they burned her tongue. “That’s what you’re going to ask me?”
“Becca, this is hard for me, too, but—”
“This is hard for you?”
Natalie’s expression collapsed into despair and she burst into tears. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t remember anything from that night.” Natalie’s words spilled out in a torrent of pain and confusion, one syllable melting into the next while she clutched the receiver, as if she were convinced this might be her only chance to explain herself. Ever. “My memory’s one big blank from the time your father and I got home from the restaurant until I woke up in a police car in the middle of the night. Covered in blood. Your dad was saying my name over and over.” She sobbed and wiped a drip from her nose. “Like he was begging me to wake up. And I could hear him, but it was like hearing the neighbor’s lawn mower on Saturday morning, while you’re still asleep. I didn’t want to wake up. I think I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t understand until—”
“Until what?” Becca’s voice carried almost no sound.
Instead of answering, her mother bowed her head slowly until she was staring down at her own prison uniform. Her hands began to shake, and the receiver with them. Rebecca could tell that her mother wasn’t seeing the uniform.
She was seeing the blood.
“Mom,” Rebecca whispered. “It’s over.”
Natalie’s head popped up and she fixed her daughter with a fierce gaze. “It will never be over,” she said through clenched teeth. “Someone did this to us. Someone—something—took everything we had. John and Laura. Erica—the real Erica. Our home. Your parents. My marriage. My future. You’re all I have left, Becca. And you have to believe me. I didn’t do this. It may have been my hands, but I wasn’t the one using them. I would never. I could never...”
Rebecca believed her.
“They wouldn’t even let me go to the funerals. They put John and Laura in the ground, and I didn’t get to say goodbye. I didn’t get to tell them how sorry I am. How, if I’d had any choice, I would have taken my own life before I’d hurt my children.”
“Don’t—” Becca cleared her throat and started over, pretending she couldn’t see the thin white scars on the insides of her mother’s wrists. Grandma Janice hadn’t told her... “Don’t do that. It won’t fix anything.”
Natalie nodded slowly. She cleared her throat, obviously trying to compose herself. “Have you seen Erica?”
“That child isn’t Erica.” Rebecca said the same thing to herself over and over again at night. Every night. “I’m not sure she was ever Erica.”
“That’s what my attorney told me. He said they’re nearly through testing all those six-year-olds, and so far not one of them is human. I can’t... It’s a little hard to believe.”
Rebecca nodded. “I know. They’re calling them surrogates.”
“What they are is evil.” That understanding seemed to hang in the air between them, pulling them together while the glass held them apart. “What else could make a parent do something like this?”
Another nod, and Becca began plucking at the threads on a thin spot in her jeans. “The police arrested the Galanises, across the street from Grandma Janice and Grandpa Frank. They took the little girl, too. Delphina. No one knows where they went.”
“Yeah.” Natalie pushed limp brown hair back from her forehead with her free hand. “There were a couple of cryptids in my unit, and they were transferred two months ago, with no explanation. In the middle of the night.”
“And they got Mrs. Madsen.” The very thought made Rebecca’s chest ache. If not for Mrs. Madsen, her parents might have killed her, too, under whatever spell Erica-the-surrogate had cast. “I’m worried about her dogs. I hope someone’s watching them.” She frowned, studying her mother. “Do they think Mrs. Madsen was involved?” If she’d wanted Rebecca dead, she could have simply not answered the door.
Natalie Essig shrugged. “They know she’s not human, and they’re not taking any chances. I can’t really say I blame them, considering.”
“So...what’s going to happen? If this wasn’t your fault, are you and Dad going to get out?” Grandma Janice seemed to think that was an inevitability. Grandpa Frank seemed much less optimistic.
“I don’t know. My attorney is in contact with a bunch of the other parents’ lawyers. He says there’s never been a case like this. They seem to think that if they can figure out what all those surrogates really are—what they did to us—they can prove we’re not at fault. Most of the other parents don’t have any other kids to go home to, but we still have you.” Natalie put her palm flat on the glass between them, but Rebecca only stared at it.
She wanted to believe in her mother’s innocence. She needed to. But if Erica wasn’t human—if none of those surviving six-year-olds were—couldn’t the parents be cryptids, too?
Natalie sighed and pulled her hand from the glass. “I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t blame you. But I’m human, Becca. So is your dad. I’ll tell our attorney to make sure you get a copy of the blood test if you don’t believe me.”
“Thanks.” Rebecca’s voice was a defeated whisper. She felt bad for distrusting her own mother. But she felt even more guilty for being civil to the woman who’d murdered John and Laura. “Did they test for drugs and stuff? Anything in your system that might have made you...do that? Or forget about it?”
“Yes. There was nothing in my blood but a little alcohol from the bottle of merlot your dad and I split on date night.”
Date night. Dinner and a movie, or bowling.
Normally her parents would have given her five dollars, plus pizza money, to watch her brother and sisters during their Saturday night out, but that night she’d gone to a sleepover. They’d left John in charge instead.
Grandma Janice said that sleepover had saved Rebecca’s life, but privately she wondered if it had actually cost John and Laura theirs. If she’d been home, would she have been able to protect them? Could she have somehow woken her parents up from the trance—or whatever—that they were in?
Would she have known, in that moment, that her little sister wasn’t human?
“Do you know where she is? Erica?”
“No.” Natalie seemed to have no trouble following the change of subject. “My lawyer says the government won’t say where any of them are. Right now, they’re trying to figure out how lon
g we had her. And where we got her.”
Rebecca thought about that for a moment. Then she leaned forward, clutching the phone in her right hand, the thin spot in her jeans forgotten. “Mom, if that girl isn’t Erica...what happened to my real sister?”
Delilah
Exhausted, I stepped over Gallagher’s prone form, still stretched out on his pallet, and stumbled out of the bedroom into the main room of the cabin, battling an extrastrong craving for caffeine. I hadn’t brushed my hair or my teeth yet. But if I didn’t get food soon, I was fairly well convinced that the baby would come out just to demand a meal of her own.
Which, on second thought, didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
“Salut,” Claudio said from the table, where he and Lenore were sipping from steaming mugs.
“Morning,” I grumbled. He probably had no idea how close I was to snatching the cup from his hand and draining it. Until I spotted the half-full coffeepot on the counter. “Last night was another good one. You didn’t even come out of the bedroom.”
“Yet somehow she looks like a pregnant zombie,” Lenore added, smiling at me over her mug.
“Gallagher slept in front of the door again,” I told them. “He had to put me back to bed twice.”
Claudio looked surprised when I pulled a mug from the dish drainer, but he knew better than to comment when I half-filled it from the coffeepot, then filled the empty space with milk.
Caffeine for me, calcium for the baby. Win-win.
Lenore refilled her own mug with the last of the coffee, and I tried not to hate her for that. “What is that, three nights in a row now?”
“Yes.” And I felt every single sleep-deprived second of all three of them.
The first few nights after the incident at Oliver Malloy’s house had been as peaceful as any period of posthomicide sleep could possibly have been. I’d had a few bad dreams, but no tug from my inner beast.
But then, on Thursday night, I’d tried to leave the cabin in my sleep. Gallagher had caught up to me in the main room, before I’d gotten close enough to the front door to alert Claudio. He’d woken me up and guided me back to bed, only to repeat the entire nocturnal adventure three hours later. And for the following two nights.
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