Then, as the oracle sobbed on his chest, the mighty minotaur took his last breath.
June 1991
A spider crawled across Rebecca Essig’s left shin. Squealing, she jumped up from the bare concrete floor and flicked the bug off, then used a tiny loafer from the box of shoes to smash it.
Two hours. Seven spiders. No little purple dress.
With a sigh, she tossed the shoe back into the box. It was half of a pair that had belonged to her brother, John, when he was eight or nine years old, and like all the other shoes in the box, her mother had refused to throw it out or give it away because he’d worn it in his birthday portrait.
In most matters, Natalie Essig—at least the woman she’d been before a monster had turned her into a murderer—bowed to logic and reason. But sentimentality ruled in the venue of childhood clothing. Every fall when the Essig kids got new school clothes, Natalie had sorted the previous year’s clothing into categories including throw away, give away, hand-me-down or keep. The “keep” box held clothes her kids had worn during important events, like the taking of a toddler’s first steps and the loss of a first tooth. And any outfit worn in an important or a professionally taken photograph.
Rebecca and her father had agreed that Natalie’s nostalgia ran amok in that particular department, but Laura had loved looking through the old clothes and mentally pairing them with pictures on display all over the house. That was what Rebecca chose to remember as she went through box after box, in search of the little purple dress.
After the FBI had explained that Rebecca’s only surviving sibling was actually a surrogate, Grandma Janice had given away all of Erica’s toys. She’d burned all of Erica’s clothes in a barrel in the driveway, where the entire neighborhood could see. And she’d destroyed every picture of Erica that didn’t also contain other members of the family.
The only exceptions to the surrogate purge were the clothes in the “keep” boxes, and Grandma Janice had only kept those because most of them were hand-me-downs that Laura and Rebecca had also worn. Including the little purple dress.
Rebecca had worn the dress on her first day of first grade, in 1978. Four years later, Laura had worn the dress on her first day of first grade, in 1982. And four years after that, the surrogate masquerading as Erica had worn the little purple dress on her first day of school in 1986. Just thirteen days before she’d somehow made Natalie and William Essig murder their own son and daughter.
That afternoon, after her first day of school, Erica had come running inside to beg Rebecca for money for the ice cream truck, because their parents weren’t home yet. Rebecca had given her a dollar and told her to come back with a cone for each of them. But on her way down the front steps, Erica had tripped and split her chin wide open on the sidewalk. She’d bled all over the ground, the dollar bill she’d been holding and the little purple dress.
The gash was bad enough that Natalie’d had to leave work early to take her youngest to the emergency room, where she’d received six stitches. They’d come home from the hospital with the little purple dress in a plastic bag.
But blood or no blood, Natalie had refused to throw away the dress all three of her daughters had worn on their first day of school. She’d dropped it, still in the plastic bag, into the “keep” box, which was still sitting in the garage, waiting to be sealed and put in the attic after the Essigs’ back-to-school clothing purge. Natalie had intended to wash the dress, but then football practice, and ballet class, and meet-the-teacher night had gotten in the way.
Thirteen days later, that unwashed dress had still been in the garage the night Rebecca’s parents were arrested. A few months after that, the box had been sealed and stacked in the storage unit with the other “keep” boxes, where it had sat for nearly five years.
Until Rebecca Essig saw a drop of blood on a bathroom towel and had an idea.
Three spiders and another half hour later, she was down to the last two unopened boxes in the storage unit. Both of them were labeled Keep. Rebecca used her car key to rip through the packing tape and opened the first box. There, right on top, was the hospital bag, just like she remembered. Inside was the dress, still stiff with dried blood.
Rebecca grabbed the bag and locked up the storage unit without bothering to reseal or restack any of the boxes. She drove straight back to her grandmother’s house and locked herself into the bathroom with the dress and the book where she’d found instructions for contacting a faerie who’d taken a human child.
“This is stupid,” she mumbled to herself as she ran water over the dried-stiff hem of the little purple dress. “This is never going to work.” According to the book, the mother of a stolen child could get in touch with whoever’d taken her baby by nursing the one left in its place, then smearing a bit of the child’s blood on the mirror and stating her own child’s full name.
Obviously the first half of the instructions would be impossible, but Natalie Essig had nursed all four of her children. Mentally crossing her fingers, Rebecca took the wet hem of the little purple dress and smeared a streak of the surrogate’s rehydrated blood across the mirror. Then she looked into the glass and said her sister’s name.
“Erica Ann Essig.”
The mirror began to shimmer, like light shining on the surface of a calm lake. Her reflection stretched and warped, as if she were seeing herself reflected in a puddle. Then it disappeared entirely.
Rebecca sucked in a startled breath. She hadn’t truly believed this would work.
Then a stranger’s face appeared in the mirror.
Delilah
The squeal of the bedroom door woke me, and I levered myself up in bed as Gallagher stepped into the room. Covered in dirt. “Sorry,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
“I’m fine.” I started to throw the covers back. Then I noticed that it was still dark outside.
Gallagher leaned against the closed door and unlaced one boot at a time. “The grave is dug and everyone else is asleep.” Rommily sobbed from the front room, and I gave him a skeptical look, which he could obviously see just fine without any light. “Okay, nearly everyone else is asleep.” Tiny pellets of earth rained over the floor when he dropped his boots. “I’ll clean that up. I mean it, Delilah. Get some rest.”
I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted to go sit with Rommily. I wanted to find some way to help her. But I could hardly hold my eyes open.
I propped my pillow against the headboard while Gallagher headed into the bathroom. He turned on the shower to let the water heat up, then stripped down to his pants and knelt on the floor to clean up the dirt he’d tracked in. I turned on the nightstand lamp so he could better see what he was doing.
Gallagher chuckled. “You know I can see in the dark, right?”
I shrugged. “I was trying to help.”
When he realized I wasn’t going to go back to sleep, he rose onto his knees with a sigh. “I’ve been thinking about that man from the cage. Clearly he’s somehow related to the other men the furiae killed. At the very least, they’re the same species, whatever that species is. And they seem to have been drawn to you.”
“He said he walked for days before he got caught, because he felt drawn here. To me, presumably.”
Gallagher stood, holding the muddy rag. “Days? He felt some kind of pull toward you from that far away?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t really thought about the distance, or the implied strength of my...draw.
“Did you feel it?”
“Not until I was right outside the door to that room.”
“And he didn’t tell you his name?” Gallagher asked. I shook my head and took a sip from the water glass on the nightstand. “What did he say? Did he tell you where he got that collar?”
“He said he was in a government facility that started using the collars a couple of years ago. Then last year—last fall—they just stopped working.” I sat up st
raighter. “Gallagher, I think the system at his facility was being run from the control room at the Spectacle. I think that when we destroyed the control room, we disarmed all the collars at that other facility, too. And they would’ve had no idea what was going on until their captives could suddenly do whatever they wanted.”
“Good.” Gallagher took his rag into the bathroom to rinse it out at the sink. “Serves the bastards right.”
“Yeah. The guy in the cage said he and most of the other prisoners escaped.”
“What kind of facility was this? Why would they have Vandekamp’s collars?”
“I’m guessing it was part of his effort to get them approved for commercial use. Which would help get his bill through congress—making it legal for private citizens to own cryptids as forced labor. If he gives the collars to a government-run facility and they work, he’s got a mark in favor of his technique and technology before the legislation even goes up for a vote.”
Gallagher wrung the rag out and laid it across the edge of the tub to dry. “No wonder the bill crashed and burned.”
“No kidding. I haven’t read anything about escapes from a government facility, so someone powerful has clearly kept it out of the news. But members of congress who do know would never have let the bill go through. Or the collars be put into large-scale use.”
“But those other men weren’t wearing collars, were they? The one in the woods, and the one at Malloy’s house?”
“No. They seemed to be walking around perfectly free, passing for human without any trouble. Which means that the collar could have been what got the man in the cage caught. Maybe the tracking device in it was still operational even after the system went down? Or maybe someone simply spotted a man wearing a collar and called the police.”
“So he breaks free from a government facility, then comes here because of some mysterious pull toward you, and he winds up captured and caged in the same lab as Miri and Lala?”
I shrugged. “We’re here because Rommily knew her sisters would wind up here at some point. The naked man followed us here. It’s weird, but it kind of makes sense.” And at the moment, it felt no stranger than being nearly eleven months pregnant. “Your shower’s hot,” I said when I noticed steam rolling out of the bathroom. “Better get in while it lasts.”
Gallagher retreated into the bathroom and closed the door.
I was asleep before he came out.
I woke up again when the sun rose high enough to shine in my eyes, and after a quick shower, I headed into the main room.
Everyone was awake and sipping coffee, but no one was talking. No one was cooking. Rommily was curled up in the window seat, leaning on Lala’s shoulder. Her eyes were open and blinking, but bloodshot and unseeing. Her face was red and swollen from crying.
Genni—also red-faced—sat on the couch cuddled up to Zyanya.
I headed into the kitchen, where Lenore pulled out a chair at the table and set down a bowl of granola and some fresh berries she and Genni had picked the day before. “Thank you,” I whispered as she dropped a spoon into the bowl.
She responded with a sad look and a pat on my shoulder.
Through the window, I could see Gallagher and Claudio getting poor Eryx ready for his burial. They had covered his body, and somehow, seeing him on the ground, shrouded in a blanket, drove his death home. Hard. As if I hadn’t watched him die hours before.
Eryx was gone.
He and Claudio had been my first friends at Metzger’s, before I’d known that Gallagher was actually one of us. Eryx had helped us take over the menagerie. He’d killed the man who’d stolen Rommily’s voice and her lucidity. He’d been both the brawn and the huge, soft heart behind our efforts to free ourselves and track down others we might be able to help, during the short time we’d run the menagerie. And since then, he’d been a tireless rock. He’d been to the rest of the group what Gallagher was to me—a protector and a friend.
I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around his absence. The mental disconnect between knowing that he’d died and understanding that I would never see him again felt like a chasm my heart just couldn’t bridge.
My sniffles echoed around the room, and by the time Gallagher came in to tell us they were ready, we were all crying.
We filed out of the cabin in a tearful line to find that he and Claudio had already laid Eryx to rest in the grave Gallagher had dug during the night, less than a foot from where the minotaur had died. Under the tree. Though I hoped we’d get to stay in the cabin for a while longer, there was no guarantee of that, especially once the media and the authorities got wind of what had happened at the lab, and who’d been responsible.
It broke my heart to know that when we had to leave, Eryx couldn’t go with us. We would probably never see his grave again.
Rommily was rarely truly able to express herself, and grief did not help. So Mirela took over. She and Lala had been speaking for their sister since long before I’d met them, and though we’d all felt their absence like a hole in the heart, it had been especially hard on Rommily, who’d lost both her family and her voice.
If not for Eryx, I’m not sure she would have made it this long without them.
“Eryx was truly one of a kind,” Miri began, Rommily’s right hand clutched in hers. “He was born in captivity and sold as a small child. He couldn’t go to school, yet he learned to read. He couldn’t speak, yet he always made himself understood. And everything he said or did was said or done from the heart. We will always love you. We will always miss you. We will never forget you.”
Sobbing, Rommily threw in the first handful of dirt.
* * *
I know I’m dreaming, but that doesn’t make this feel any less real.
Twigs and leaves slap at my face as I run through the woods. Fallen branches break open the soles of my feet. Moonlight filters through the limbs overhead, casting shadows that shift with every cloud that rolls by, turning the trees into many-armed monsters, forever reaching for me from every direction.
I run faster, but not because of the trees. I’m running not because I can—though here, I’m not pregnant—but because I’m being pulled by some force inside me. Like a chain attached to my spine and run through my navel, with something very strong tugging on the other end.
I run and I run, and I don’t trip, even though it’s dark out here. And finally, up ahead, I see something. A clearing. A large open space in the middle of the woods, where people seem to be growing in place of trees.
They’re all looking at me. And they all have the same face.
His face. The face of the men I’ve killed. The men and women around me all have dark hair. Wide-set brown eyes. Narrow noses. No freckles.
I’m pulled right into the center of their gathering, and the crowd closes around me. There’s no way out.
I should be scared. Instead, I feel an odd exhilaration firing from that place inside me. That place where the invisible chain was moored.
The crowd tightens around me, identical faces and bodies drawing closer. I lift my hands and reach for the nearest one. My fingers sink through flesh, and blood spurts like—
“Hey. Delilah,” a voice whispered near my ear.
My eyes flew open. A form bent over me, and my heart beat a panicked rhythm for a second before I recognized Lenore.
“Hey,” she said again. “I was going to apologize for having to wake you up, but it sounded like you were having a bad dream. So, you’re welcome.” She was still whispering, and when I felt the warm form pressed against my right arm, I understood why.
Rommily. Still sound asleep.
Gallagher had talked both of us into taking a nap after lunch, and I was pretty sure one of her sisters had slipped something into her coffee to help her sleep.
Lenore sat on the edge of the bed, near my thigh. “I’m going into town. Do you need anything?”
&
nbsp; “Um... I need to check the news. I’ll come with you.”
“No.” She put a hand on my shoulder when I tried to sit up. “It’s not safe for anyone else to be seen until we know none of you were caught on security camera footage at the lab. I’m going by myself. But I can pick up anything you need. Within reason.”
“You mean other than a crib and an obstetrician?”
Lenore gave me a sad smile. “Yes. Other than that.”
“The usual. Food staples and a glimpse at the headlines. Pick up actual newspapers if you can’t make it to the café. We need to know what people know about the lab break-in. And a potential second wave of surrogates.”
She nodded. “That’s the real reason I’m going. That, and toilet paper.”
I grabbed her hand when she stood. “Please be careful. We can’t lose anyone else.”
Lenore nodded again without calling me on my lie. We could and probably would lose someone else. No one could live in hiding forever.
When Lenore was gone, I turned off the lamp, throwing the room into deep afternoon shadows cast by the east-facing window, and started to curl up next to Rommily.
“Puppet on a chain. Make them dance. Set the forest on fire.”
I froze, one hand ready to plump my pillow. Rommily was talking in her sleep. Chain. Forest. It was like she could see my—
I hadn’t dreamed that I was being pulled through the forest toward an army of identical murder victims. She’d dreamed that I was being pulled through the forest toward an army of identical murder victims. While she’d been pressed up against me.
Had I somehow channeled the oracle’s dream?
Was it a prophetic dream? Was that what it was like to see the future? If so, it was no wonder Rommily never made any sense, and it suddenly seemed miraculous to me that her sisters usually did.
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