“I found a picture. It’s pretty good quality, so I suspect it was scanned.” I turned the phone around so they could both see the screen.
“Okay. Cute kid.” Lenore shrugged. “I mean, she would be if I didn’t already know she was a murderer. So, what are we supposed to take from this?”
“I think she’s my changeling.”
“What?”
“We know that as an infant, I was left in Elizabeth’s place for my mother to raise. I think Erica was left in mine.”
“Why on earth would you think that?” Gallagher asked.
I zoomed in on the chubby little-girl face, then held the phone up next to my left cheek, so they could see us together. “Erica Essig is the spitting image of me at six years old.”
June 1995
“No, no, no, I don’t wanna drive anymore!” Elizabeth Essig stomped her little feet in the gas station parking lot, glaring into the open driver’s side door of her mother’s car at a booster seat stained by grape juice and littered with orange cracker crumbs. “I wanna go home.”
Rebecca bit back the urge to point out that in order to go home, they’d have to drive some more, because at that moment, “home” was a somewhat fluid concept. Especially for a four-year-old in the middle of her first move.
“Home is where we’re going, Beth.” Rebecca squatted in front of her daughter and set the plastic bag full of road trip snacks on the ground. “We’re going to our new home. Remember, I showed you pictures of the new house, and your new yellow room?”
Beth nodded, still pouting, and crossed chubby arms over the front of her T-shirt.
“But to get there, we have to get back in the car and drive for a few more hours.”
“Why is the new house so far away?” Beth demanded, and her mother’s eyes fell closed for a second as she took a deep breath, grasping for patience. “Why can’t we get a new house that’s closer? Why can’t we stay with Grandma Janice anymore? I like my pink room. I don’t want a yellow room!”
“Elizabeth, we’ve been over this. My new job is in Oklahoma. We have to move there because a ten-hour daily commute is more than I can handle.”
The four-year-old frowned.
“Your new preschool is in Oklahoma, and you’re going to make lots of good friends.”
“Can I go to a slumber party with my new friends?”
Rebecca cringed at the thought. Beth had seen a movie on TV about three little girls who’d solved the mystery of the missing teddy bear at a sleepover, and she’d become obsessed with the idea of sleeping at a friend’s house. She had no idea that the memories her mother associated with slumber parties included blood-soaked carpet and police cars.
“You can have a slumber party at our house,” Becca said at last. “Once school has started and you’ve made some friends.” That way she wouldn’t have to worry about some other girl’s brainwashed parents turning into homicidal maniacs in the middle of the night.
“What about Grandma Janice?”
Rebecca poked her daughter in the stomach with a grin. “Grandma Janice will have to throw her own slumber parties.”
Beth laughed at the thought of her great-grandmother sleeping on the floor, surrounded by other gray-haired ladies in curlers and house shoes, watching the news while they ate ice cream right out of the bucket. “I mean, when will we see her? She’ll miss me!”
“Yes, she will, but we’ll go see her at Christmas. You can bring her a present.”
The child’s eyes lit up at that thought. “Can I tie a big red bow on it? Grandma Janice likes big red bows.”
“Yes. Of course you can. But we can’t plan slumber parties or Christmas presents until we get to our new house and unpack your new room. So will you please get back in the car?”
Finally, Elizabeth climbed back into her booster seat and let her mother buckle her in. “I’m hungry.”
“Here.” Rebecca dug into the plastic bag and pulled out a snack-size packet of cheddar-flavored crackers, which she opened and handed to her daughter.
Beth crunched into a cracker as her mother backed the car out of the parking lot. “How many minutes until we get there?”
“We’re still counting in terms of hours, hon.” Rebecca turned onto the on-ramp and merged smoothly with highway traffic. “It’s a long way from Tennessee to Oklahoma.”
“Will there be another Beth in my class in Oklahoma?”
“We won’t know that until school starts.”
“Because I don’t like other girls named Beth. Or Elizabeth, either.” The four-year-old crunched into another cracker, then spoke around it. “That’s my name.”
“There are lots of girls named Elizabeth, honey.”
“I think their mommies copied. Once, Beth Williams copied my coloring sheet. The one about days of the week. Maybe her mom’s a copier, too.”
“Or maybe her mom just liked the same name I liked.”
“Why did you like my name?”
For a moment, Rebecca was silent as she considered her answer. In the four years since she’d found a baby in the bathtub of her grandmother’s house, she’d gotten good at telling little lies to explain her daughter’s presence, because telling the truth would have been dangerous. Babies don’t appear out of nowhere through human means, and any baby that appeared through nonhuman means would be suspect. And might be taken into custody by the government, on suspicion of being a surrogate. Or at least a cryptid.
So Rebecca had told her lies and kept her secrets, to protect the child in her care. A child who’d been unwanted both by her birth mother and by the cryptid woman who’d removed her from an unwelcoming home. That poor child had lost everything before she was even old enough to hold her head up, and the least Rebecca could do was let her keep her real name. Her only connection to the life she’d been ripped from as an infant.
Elizabeth.
“I saw it written somewhere, and I just knew it was your name.”
The name had been written on her daughter’s original birth certificate, which Rebecca had spent several weeks tracking down. Though Charity Marlow had called her toddler Delilah, the baby she’d given birth to had been named Elizabeth.
“Why is your new job in Oklahoma?” Beth asked, and Rebecca was relieved by how quickly and easily distracted the four-year-old still was by her own endless series of questions. “Why can’t you teach kids in Tennessee?”
“I probably could. But I thought you and I could use a fresh start.”
“But why?”
“Because I finally graduated. Remember the ceremony? Remember all the people throwing black hats?”
Beth nodded solemnly. “I threw my hat, too. But then I couldn’t find it.”
“Well, that’s why we’re moving. Because I graduated and Grandma Janice is going to live in a special place with other people her age. So this is the perfect time for us to put down roots someplace new.” In a cute little town just half an hour from Franklin, Oklahoma, where Delilah Marlow lived with the woman who chose her over Elizabeth. Where Rebecca’s new teaching job might give her an occasional glimpse of the baby sister she’d lost, then found, then given up.
Where she might be able to watch over Delilah—even if only from afar.
Delilah
“Delilah, that isn’t even possible,” Lenore insisted. “You are ten years too young to have been the baby exchanged for Erica Essig, or any other surrogate.”
“I know. But I’m telling you, except for the dress she’s wearing, this could be me on my first day of first grade.”
Lenore shrugged. “So maybe you’re related. That would explain why Elizabeth looks so much like you.”
“You’re not listening. Okay, wait.” I opened another browser window on the phone and pulled up my mother’s social media account. She’d only had one. Though she’d died during our escape from the menagerie, h
er account was still intact, and it was both a relief and a heartache to see her face smiling out at me from her profile picture.
I opened the photo album labeled Delilah’s School Pictures, all of which I’d helped her scan onto her computer years ago, when she’d worried that a house fire could steal all of her memories. When she’d first shared them online, they’d gotten a few complimentary comments and a few more “likes.” But now...
I resisted the urge to click on any of the hundreds of comments, because I knew exactly what kind of vitriol they would contain. The world blamed me for the loss of the humans who’d died in the bombing of the Spectacle.
I scrolled through the pictures and tapped on the one from first grade. I wore a blue dress, and my mother had fixed my hair in loose waves falling around my shoulders. “This is me at age six.” I turned the phone around for them to see. “Erica Essig. Me.” I scrolled back and forth between the two browser windows, so they could see both pictures back-to-back.
“Holy shit,” Lenore breathed, but Gallagher scowled at the phone, as if it were responsible for information he didn’t want to hear. “There’s no way you two could look that much alike and not at least be related.”
“I know.” I minimized the image. “Elizabeth Essig—who’s a year younger than I am—looks just like me now. And Erica Essig—her aunt-who-was-actually-a-surrogate—looked just like me as a kid. But she was taken into custody as a six-year-old, four years before I was born.”
“The three of you are obviously connected.” Lenore wadded up her empty hot dog wrapper and dropped it into the grease-stained Sonic bag. “But I’m not sure I understand exactly how.”
“I think I’m starting to. I think that, rather than two children simply being swapped one-for-one, somehow the three of us were sort of shuffled down the line, in a loop. Like when you play Dirty Santa, and everyone has to pass their present to the person on their left. Only with babies.” I traced the dots I was connecting in a circle as I explained. “The surrogate wound up with my birth mother, I wound up with Elizabeth’s birth mother and, somehow, Elizabeth wound up with Rebecca Essig. Who, I guess, would be my...biological sister?”
Lenore nodded slowly. “So the question is how did Rebecca get custody of Elizabeth?”
“I think the more pressing question is why am I one year older than Elizabeth and ten years younger than Erica, if we were all swapped at the same time?”
“You weren’t.” Gallagher’s voice echoed through the car with a note of certainty. “You were born in March of 1980, into the Essig family, and were stolen from the hospital and replaced with a surrogate almost immediately. But you weren’t actually swapped for Charity’s daughter, Elizabeth, until she was born in 1990.”
“What? How could I not have aged in ten years?”
“You were kidnapped by the fae.” Gallagher shrugged. “I don’t know what species of fae took you, but if they kept you in Faerie for a little while—even just days, in their time—years could have passed in our world. You could have been taken from the hospital in 1980 and given to Charity Marlow a decade later yet only have aged a few days or weeks in the interim.”
My thoughts spun so fast they were hard to make sense of. But one thing was clear. “You really think I was replaced by a surrogate? That I’m one of the babies that went missing in March of 1980?”
Gallagher shrugged. “Nothing else makes sense.”
“I’m not even sure this makes sense yet.” Lenore frowned.
“It sounds crazy, but I kind of hope it’s true, because if it is...” I slurped the last of my grape soda. “Our baby could have some other relatives out there.” We could get answers to the question of what she’d be inheriting from me, even if we had to hack into medical records.
“Are we good to go?” Lenore dropped her cup into one of the cup holders in the center console.
“Yeah.” Though I might actually be leaving the land of free Wi-Fi with more questions than answers. “Oh, wait a minute. I want to screenshot a couple of these pictures while we have internet.”
I opened the browser to my mother’s photos again and took a screenshot of each of my school pictures, all the way through high school. Then, just for bittersweet nostalgia, I took screenshots of the class photos, as well.
“Okay. I’m ready. I need to find a bathroom on the way, though.”
Lenore shifted into Reverse and backed carefully out of the parking spot. “Can you wait till we get back to the cabin?”
“In a universe where there wasn’t a fetal warrior leading the charge against my bladder, that would absolutely be a possibility.”
Lenore snorted. “At least pregnancy hasn’t stolen your sense of humor. There’s a gas station on the corner.”
“She can’t go in by herself,” Gallagher insisted.
“It’s the old-fashioned kind with an exterior-entrance restroom. I’ll pump and she can go to the bathroom. And you and your menacing glare can guard the door to the restroom from the backseat.”
Gallagher grumbled something unintelligible and I hid a smile as Lenore pulled out of the Sonic parking lot, headed toward the gas station on the corner.
She selected the pump closest to the facilities—the only one within sight of them—and while I rounded the corner of the building to use a filthy, single-occupancy public restroom that might have horrified me before I’d been hosed down naked in a cage, she used the last of the funds on our reloadable Visa card to refill the tank.
I could feel Gallagher’s gaze on me from the car as I stepped out of the restroom, my hands still wet from being washed because there were no paper towels in the grimy holder mounted on the wall. He’d wanted to come in with me, but I drew the line at him following me into the bathroom, and he couldn’t stand guard outside, where he would definitely be noticed.
I’d taken three steps toward the car when I felt a familiar psychic tug, seeming to pull me in the opposite direction. Toward the dumpster behind the building.
With dread weighing me down like concrete boots, I tried to just keep walking. To get in the car and let Lenore drive me far away from the dark urge building inside me. Yet I could only watch like a prisoner inside my own body as I turned and headed for the dumpster instead.
The car door squealed open at my back. I knew Gallagher was getting out, and that he was too smart to run or to shout for me and draw attention. But if he were noticed, he would be recognized, and he was too big not to be noticed in broad daylight.
With his heavy footsteps clomping after me, I rounded the corner of the dumpster, mentally fighting each step I took. I expected to find another anonymous man waiting for me, pulled toward me as I was pulled toward him, but instead—
I sucked in a sharp breath. My eyes narrowed as I studied her, trying to understand.
My own face stared back at me. Pale skin. Dark hair. Blue eyes. Freck—Wait. The face looking out at me from my own eyes had noticeably fewer freckles. As if it had been exposed to less sun.
“Elizabeth?” The syllables seemed to tremble as they fell from my lips. How was she here? Had the police realized she wasn’t me? Were they using her as bait?
“Who are you?” she asked, and it was like hearing myself speak. Not the way I heard myself in real life, with half of the sound coming from within my own head, but like I sounded on camera. The way everyone else heard me.
“I...” I wanted to tell her about her mother. About my mother. About changelings, and the fae, and identities that weren’t so much mistaken as...tangled. Connected in ways I could hardly keep straight.
But then she reached for me, and in her gaze, I found that same feverish compulsion I’d seen in the faces of the men I’d killed. That hunger for something neither of us could understand, which brought them closer to their own deaths with every step they took.
And in response, that pull inside me strengthened.
The furiae wanted her, just like it had wanted those men. Which meant she couldn’t be Elizabeth, because Elizabeth was human.
Other than Elizabeth, the only other person who could be walking around with my face was...
Erica.
I figured it out just as Gallagher rounded the corner of the huge trash bin. “Delilah, no!” He stopped cold when he saw us. When he saw her. But she didn’t even seem to hear him.
“You...” Erica sounded stunned. Confused.
“Delilah!” Gallagher whispered, and though I felt him hovering over me like a shield, he didn’t try to touch me.
“This...is all...your fault.” My tingling hand shot out, and though her eyes—my eyes—flashed with fear, she stood frozen while my palm landed on her forearm.
Something seemed to spark between us.
In an instant, her eyes dilated, though little sunlight fell behind the building. She flinched as her hand rose and she gripped her own throat, on either side of her esophagus. Then, jaw clenched, she pulled.
Gallagher lifted me out of the way, and the spray of blood missed me, other than a sparse sprinkling of tiny red dots across my bulging belly.
My doppelgänger made a horrific choking sound. Eyes like the ones I saw in the mirror every morning widened while her hands fluttered around her throat, trying to hold the blood in. As if she could just take it back.
But though she’d committed the act herself, the violence wasn’t hers to take back. It was mine.
I watched, horrified, and though I knew exactly who she was, deep down I felt like I was witnessing my own death.
“What the hell?” Gallagher whispered as she fell to her knees on the cracked pavement. Then she fell over sideways and her right shoulder slammed into the ground.
“Surrogate,” I whispered, clinging to him. Near panic. “Who else could she be?”
He dropped his hat onto the concrete, and it began to soak up the blood before the flow had even slowed. “You mean she was...?”
“Erica.” My grip on his arm must have hurt, but he didn’t seem to feel it. “We were right. She was left in my place. She killed my...siblings. She got my birth parents sent to prison. And she did it all wearing my face.”
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