I had no idea what the dream meant, other than that I might be murdering more dark-haired fair-skinned men. And maybe women? Possibly in the forest. Though the detail with the chain running from my spine through my belly button seemed to indicate that I shouldn’t take the events of the dream literally.
I tried to turn off my brain and go back to sleep, hoping to sink back into Rommily’s dream for a little clarity—an admittedly strange thought. But my mind was racing, so I got up and made a pot of coffee instead.
When Lenore got back, Genni ran out the door to help her, and by the time I made it down the front steps, the pup was already on her way back to the cabin with an armload of newspapers.
“May I see a couple of those?” I asked, already reaching for the one on top.
“Delilah,” Lenore called as she hefted a plastic grocery bag from between the front seats of the van. “I have something else for you.” The strange way she was looking at me set off all my internal alarms.
“What is it?”
“Screenshots.” The siren slammed the driver’s door, then jogged across the small yard and followed me up the steps. “Your story broke too late to make it into print.”
“My story?” I took the bag from her in the kitchen and began unloading eggs, milk and toilet paper for Mirela and Claudio to put up.
“Yes. Literally. And it’s as weird as it sounds.” Lenore glanced around the cabin. “Where’s Gallagher? He’ll want to see this.”
“Right here.” He came out of the bedroom with his hair still damp from the shower, beneath his bright red cap. “Rommily’s still out cold. What did you guys give her?”
“Another shot of bourbon,” Lala said. “But it’s not that. It’s exhaustion. She’s hardly slept in two days.”
Lala had only been with us for half that time, but I knew better by then to ask how an oracle knew anything.
“Here. Sit. Both of you.” The siren pulled out two chairs at the table.
“What’s going on, Lenore?” I asked as I sat. Gallagher sank into the chair next to me, scowling. He appreciated neither drama nor suspense. But Lenore looked unfazed as she dug one of our shared cell phones from her pocket.
She pressed a button to wake it up, then opened the photos app and enlarged the first image. It was a screenshot of the main headline from my go-to news site.
Manhunt Is Over for Cryptid Fugitive Delilah Marlow
June 1991
The woman in the mirror eyed Rebecca with that impatient look her mother had always gotten when the phone rang in the middle of dinner. “You are not Natalie Essig.” Her voice sounded the way polished granite feels when you run your hand over it. Smooth. Cold. Unyielding.
Rebecca stared at the glass, and her reply caught in her throat as she struggled to process the absence of her own reflection. The mirror looked more like a door. No, a window.
A window into what? Into...where?
“Child? Can you speak?” the woman demanded.
“I’m Natalie’s daughter.” Rebecca finally spit the words out. “Who are you?”
“I have no time for children playing in the mirror.”
“Wait!” Rebecca stepped closer to the glass when the surface began to shimmer again, blurring the lines of a simple blue shift dress that left no hint about the woman’s culture or age. “Please. I’m trying to find my little sister. My real sister. You... I think you took her.”
“You’re referring to the child Erica Ann Essig, born to Natalie Essig?”
“Yes!” Rebecca aimed a nervous glance in the direction of her grandmother’s room, where Grandma Janice was napping. “Please. Is my sister okay?”
“Of course.” The woman sounded insulted.
“I’m sorry. It’s just... I read that sometimes changelings are...eaten.”
The woman’s scowl was sharp like the edge of a knife. “You should not believe everything you read.”
“That’s probably true,” Rebecca said, and the woman seemed even more insulted that there might be any doubt of that. “I want my sister back.” She stood taller, squaring her shoulders. Trying to look and sound old enough that the woman would take her seriously. “She isn’t yours, and you can’t keep her.”
“In fact, I could have kept her. But I did not.”
“You—? You—?” Rebecca gripped the curved edge of the linoleum countertop. “What does that mean? Where is she?”
“She is safe and well cared for, but she is not here. Thus, I could not return her to you even if I wanted to exchange the child I left in her place.”
“I don’t have that...child.”
The woman in the mirror frowned, yet no wrinkles formed in her skin. She seemed both young and old at the same time. Ageless. “You are not seeking to return the changeling?”
“No. I just want my sister back.”
“Well, this is interesting.” The woman’s strangely ageless face registered mild surprise. “Your sister has been exchanged for a child whose mother did not want her.”
“She— Why would you do that?” Rebecca demanded.
“Because that is our way.”
“Our, who? I—” Rebecca swallowed her outrage. Angering the woman in the mirror would not help. “Fine. How do I get my sister back?”
“These things may only be reversed at the mother’s behest.”
“My mother’s in prison. She can’t... I mean, I want my sister back. I’ll take care of her. My grandmother will help.”
In truth, she hadn’t really given the plan much thought, beyond finding her real sister. Grandma Janice was too old to be saddled with an eleven-year-old on her own, and Rebecca was too young to raise a child, but together they could probably manage. Becca could delay her sophomore year to help get her sister settled into what was left of a family she’d never even met, then start school again next semester, someplace within commuting distance. She would make it work. “Just...tell me what to do. How to get her back.”
“You must offer to exchange your sister for the natural child of the woman raising her—the child she didn’t want. She may agree to make the trade. Or she may decide to keep your sister as her own. The choice is hers.”
“Why does she get to decide whether or not I get my sister back? How is that fair?”
The woman raised one dark eyebrow in disdain. “Only children whine about fairness.”
“Fine. How am I supposed to exchange this other kid for my sister if I don’t have this other kid?”
“You do have her. Turn around.”
Rebecca turned, but the only thing behind her was the bathtub. Heart thumping in her ears, she pulled back the floral print shower curtain and found an infant, tightly swaddled in a white blanket, lying on the rubber shower mat, sound asleep.
She stumbled back from the tub, a fluttery panic building in the center of her chest. “That’s a baby.” She turned back to the mirror. “What am I supposed to do with a baby?” A surprise middle-schooler would be hard enough to explain to Grandma Janice, but a baby?
“That is the other woman’s child. In a month, you may ask her mother if she is willing to make a trade.”
“Wait, what? You took my sister from the hospital nursery eleven years ago. How is the kid she was exchanged for still a baby?”
“Time is not consistent among different worlds, child.” The woman’s impatience suggested she’d be no happier explaining that water was wet. “Eleven years for you have passed in only a handful of weeks for me.”
“What does that...? You’re saying that you only took my sister a few weeks ago, in your...time?”
“Precisely. The infant sleeping behind you is the natural child of the woman who has your sister. If she is amenable, you may make the exchange. Either way, the infant is in your hands now. You and I will have no further business.”
“Wait! What am I supposed
to do with a baby?”
“Take her to Charity Marlow in the state of Oklahoma, one month from today. She will be expecting...someone.”
“Why one month? Why can’t I take her today?”
But the glass was already starting to shimmer, the woman’s image beginning to fade.
“Wait!” Rebecca shouted, and behind her, the infant began to fuss. “Wait, come back!” She picked up the little purple dress and smeared another streak of red on the glass, but the woman in the mirror did not answer the summons.
“Damn it!” Rebecca smeared blood on the glass again. And again. But the mirror remained steady, reflecting nothing but her own image back at her.
“No!” Rebecca slammed her fist down on the countertop hard enough to bruise.
Behind her the baby began to cry.
Delilah
“The manhunt is over? What the hell does that mean?” Gallagher’s growl echoed in my head as I gripped Lenore’s phone, reading the headline over and over.
“They think they caught Delilah, but obviously they have the wrong woman. It’s so strange. Zoom in.” Lenore was practically bouncing on her toes behind my chair, and the amusement emanating from the siren’s voice made me want to laugh, though I found nothing funny in the idea that some poor innocent woman had been arrested in my place. “I took several screenshots. You can read the whole story. And there are pictures of the cops arresting ‘you’!”
“Yet somehow here I sit, mysteriously handcuff and jail-cell free.”
“I know. You have a doppelgänger. Seriously. She looks just like you! Only with better hair.”
I twisted to glare up at her, still fighting a totally inappropriate urge to smile as the siren’s amusement rolled over me, along with her voice. “It’s not like I’ve had access to a salon in the past year.”
“What’s going on?” Lala bounded downstairs from the loft, where she’d evidently been napping.
“It appears that the police have arrested Delilah’s lookalike in...” Miri leaned over my shoulder to read the first line of the article. “Oklahoma.”
“That’s weird. I’m from Oklahoma.” Standing, with the phone, I zoomed in on the text as I headed for the padded window seat overlooking the largely grassless front yard. And Eryx’s fresh grave.
“Hey, we can’t read over your shoulder from there,” Zyanya complained.
But I wanted a little privacy with the story of my arrest before I shared it with everyone else. I scrolled down until I found pictures.
Lenore was right. Whoever this woman was, she looked exactly like me, but with better hair. And actual makeup. And a much less pregnant silhouette.
“Who is she?” Zy perched on the arm of the couch, impatience on display as clearly as her golden cheetah eyes.
I scrolled back up to the text of the article. “According to this, she’s Delilah Marlow, long-time resident of a town about two hours from where I grew up. It says she’s been living under an alias there for years.” I looked up with a frown. “Which makes no sense, because the police know for a fact that, until last year, I was living in Franklin, Oklahoma, under my own name.” As evidenced by my lease, my car payment, my employment record and the eyewitness accounts of everyone I’d known. “I understand that they have to investigate someone who matches my physical description, outdated though that is.” I ran one hand over my baby bulge. “But how are they possibly explaining the conflicting information?”
“No idea. The whole thing is so bizarre,” Lenore said.
“What are we going to do?” Miri stood from her chair at the table when Claudio began spreading a sheet of plastic over it, preparing to skin another rabbit. “We can’t just let her rot in jail.”
“She won’t.” I scrolled back to the top of the article to start reading again. “She shouldn’t have any trouble proving she was somewhere else during the time I was a captive in the menagerie. Then at the Spectacle. Though I can’t imagine her life will get any easier, now that people know she looks just like a notorious ‘cryptid’ fugitive.”
When I’d been “outed,” I’d lost every friend I’d ever had. No one had tried to help me, except my mother. And she’d paid for that with her life.
Mirela looked skeptical. “But if she looks as much like you in person as she does in those pictures, even if she has an alibi, they’re going to assume she has some connection to you.”
“Probably.” I felt guilty thinking about how much trouble that poor woman could be in, just because she looked like me. “But I’m assuming she’s human, and her blood test will tell them that.”
Gallagher snorted. “For all the good that did you.”
“Fair point. But with any luck, no one’s seen her grow claws and gravity-resistant hair. If that, plus an alibi, don’t help her, nothing I could say or do would help, either.”
Lala looked openly dubious.
“Fine, if I were to turn myself in, they might believe they arrested the wrong woman. But they wouldn’t let her go. Mirela’s right. They’re going to believe that if she looks that much like me, she’s somehow involved with us. Turning myself in would only mean putting both of us in captivity, and increasing the risk of the rest of you being caught.” I turned to Gallagher, one hand on the curve of my belly. “I can’t do that to our child.” No matter how guilty I felt about the utter destruction of that other woman’s life.
And the truth was that I wouldn’t, even if turning myself in would set her free. If I had to choose between a stranger and my baby, my baby would win every time.
“I wouldn’t let you even if you wanted to,” he assured me. “Letting you put yourself in danger would go against my oath to protect you.”
“So, who do you think she is?” Claudio asked.
“I have no idea.” The article contained very little actual information, so I scrolled back down to the pictures and zoomed in again. It was bizarre to see myself in handcuffs. Being stuffed into the back of a familiar cryptid containment van. Wearing an orange inmate uniform.
It was like going back in time to the day I was arrested, and watching from outside my own body.
When I looked up, I found Gallagher studying me. “What? Do you know something about this?” He’d known I was a furiae before I knew, and he wouldn’t hesitate to keep something from me if he thought that would be in my best interest.
“No.”
“Could she be some kind of shifter?” I wondered aloud. “Or fae, glamoured to look like me?”
“Why would anyone choose to wear the face of a woman wanted by the police?” Zyanya asked.
“Another valid point.” I squinted at the picture again. “But it’s not just her face. It looks like she’s around my height. And it’s hard to tell through the jail uniform, but she seems to be built just like I was before my million-month pregnancy. And she’s evidently been living in Oklahoma since long before I was sold into the menagerie, so it’s not like she’s just trying on my face for the notoriety.”
“Does it say what her ‘alias’ is?” Lala plopped onto the closest couch cushion and leaned around Zy to stare at me.
I scrolled through the article again, in case I’d just missed that information. “No.”
“Yes, it does.” Lenore crunched into a carrot she was peeling for what would surely become yet another batch of rabbit stew. I really wanted fried chicken. And mashed potatoes with spicy gravy. And buttered biscuits. “Check out the next article.”
I swiped to the next screenshot, where I discovered even more pictures and a few personal details about my doppelgänger. “Elizabeth Essig.” I zoomed in on the picture, which appeared to have been taken from a social media profile. In that moment I would have given one of my pinkie fingers for a Wi-Fi connection. “This image of her profile says she goes by ‘Beth,’ and she’s a year younger than I am, though she doesn’t list a month or day. No kids. Never
married. And she’s a teacher at an elementary school.”
“Not anymore,” Lenore said. “Not after being arrested as a cryptid.”
I couldn’t look away from the face on my screen. “Whoever she is, she doesn’t deserve this.”
“Have you ever met her?” Claudio dropped the skinned rabbit onto a huge butcher block and grabbed the cleaver. “Do you know anyone named Elizabeth?”
“No. I don’t know any Beths, either.”
“You do know of someone named Elizabeth,” Gallagher said, and his steady eye contact said he was waiting for me to remember something.
“I don’t—” Then, suddenly, the memory was there.
My mother, in one of the interrogation rooms at the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. Telling Sheriff Pennington about her daughter. Her real daughter, who’d been exchanged for me when she was still an infant.
Elizabeth.
“Oh my God.” My hand clenched around the phone. “She looks like me, because she is me. Or...maybe I’m her.”
“What?” Lenore’s chopping knife stilled. Zy, Miri and Lala wore identical confused expressions.
“Delilah was a changeling,” Gallagher explained. “At about a month old, she was exchanged for a baby named Elizabeth.”
I couldn’t look away from the image still centered on the screen. Was Elizabeth Essig the woman I was supposed to be?
“So, does she look like you, or do you look like her?” Claudio asked. “Was one of you glamoured? Or were you exchanged because you already looked alike?”
“Peut-être qu’ils sont jumeaux,” Genni said. “Twins.” She pointed to one of the books on the shelf over the fireplace. “I read a book about two girls who didn’t know they were twins.”
“Like The Parent Trap!” Lenore laughed.
I gave Genni a smile. “Great idea, but I’m not a twin. Not that I know of, anyway.” I frowned. “At least, Elizabeth isn’t a twin.” Unless my mother had left out a huge part of her story. “But I have no idea why we would still look alike, twenty-six years after being exchanged. Ideas?” I aimed the question at Gallagher. “Is there some kind of glamour that lasts a lifetime?”
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