Fury

by Rachel Vincent

  My face was the face of evil.

  “Get in the car,” he whispered. “Tell Lenore to start the engine.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to throw her in the dumpster and soak up all the blood.”

  Having spent most of my life as a law-abiding citizen, I felt like I should object to that on general principle. Instead, I squeezed his massive arm in thanks. Then, jaw clenched, I made myself look down at my doppelgänger one more time, and—

  She no longer looked like me.

  “Gallagher!”

  He followed my gaze to see that the dead woman now had wide-set brown eyes, a narrow nose and no freckles. Her features were a more feminine version of the man I’d driven to kill himself in Malloy’s yard. And the one in the woods. And the man in the lab. She could be their sister.

  She looked just like the women among the human forest in Rommily’s dream.

  Gallagher aimed a nod over my head, and I turned to see Lenore staring at us in concern, the gas pump still protruding from our tank. “Get in the car. Tell Lenore to pull forward and pick me up here.”

  I turned without another word and rounded the corner of the building, where the source of Lenore’s stress became obvious. There was a car idling behind ours, and the driver was giving her angry looks while she pretended to be having trouble with the gas pump. Trying to buy us time to get back.

  “Pull forward and pick Gallagher up by the dumpster,” I whispered as I walked past her and carefully lowered myself into the front passenger seat, letting my hair fall forward so that all the other driver saw of me was my pregnant silhouette.

  As I closed the door, Lenore returned the nozzle to the pump and closed our gas cap. Then she got in the car. “What’s going on?” she whispered as she started the engine and shifted into Drive.

  “I’ll tell you when we’re on the road. Just go.”

  She fastened her seat belt, then let the car roll forward until it passed the corner of the building.

  Gallagher emerged from the shadow of the dumpster and slid into the backseat. “Go. Now. But not too fast.”

  Lenore pulled us onto the road, headed toward the highway. “How worried should I be?” She glanced from Gallagher, in the rearview mirror, to me. “What happened?”

  “I killed a woman who looked just like me,” I told her as we took the on-ramp onto the highway.

  “What? Behind the gas station?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Gallagher said. “I cleaned up all the blood and dumped the body in the trash bin. It won’t be found until it hits the landfill—if it’s found at all—and by then, they’ll have no idea which truck picked it up, much less which bin it came from.”

  “I trust your crime cover-up expertise,” Lenore said. “I’m more interested in how the dead woman found Delilah and why they looked alike.”

  “My best guess is that she was pulled toward me just like the men were, and the two hours we sat down the street at Sonic let her get close enough to find me in the bathroom.” I shrugged, shifting in my seat to try to ease the suddenly fierce ache in my back. “As for why she looked like me... I think she was Erica.”

  “Erica, the surrogate?” Lenore turned to me, and the car swerved slightly to the right.

  “Watch the road,” Gallagher growled.

  “Yes, Erica the surrogate.” I twisted in my seat, trying to see both of them at once. “You guys, I think they’re all surrogates. All of those human shapeshifters. I think the furiae is pulling them toward me, so she can deal with them. I think they’re still glamoured to look like the babies they were originally traded for, and after they die, they’re reverting back to their true forms. Which happen to be eerily identical.”

  “But why now?” Lenore asks. “And how? They were all arrested before you and I were even born.” She frowned. “Well, before you were traded for Elizabeth. So how are they just now free to stage a comeback?”

  “Oh my God.”

  “What?” The siren glanced at me, but I was already twisting in my seat again, trying to see Gallagher without the barrier of the rearview mirror.

  “We did this.” I craned my neck until I could see into the backseat, and Gallagher’s grim expression confirmed what I’d just figured out. “The man in the cage at the lab. He was a surrogate. He said he was in a government lab, using Vandekamp’s collars, and one day they just stopped working. Gallagher, when we freed ourselves from the Spectacle, we also freed the surrogates. We set them loose on the world.”

  “I’m afraid you might be right.” I’d rarely heard him sound so grim.

  “That means the furiae isn’t helping me protect and defend the world. She’s helping me clean up the mess I made. Those people they killed... The people in the mall. The kids in school. They died because of us.”

  “No.” Gallagher reached forward and seized my hand. “Delilah, they died because of the surrogates. Let the guilt lie where it belongs. We didn’t bring them here. We didn’t lock them up instead of sending them back to whatever hell they came from. And we didn’t fire those guns or poison those milk cartons.”

  I knew he was right. But I also knew that none of that mattered. We let the surrogates out. We unleashed them on the world, and everything they—

  Pain shot through my abdomen, so sharp and sudden that I cried out. Warmth flooded my thighs.

  “What’s wrong?” Gallagher asked.

  Lenore took one look at my face and knew. “The baby’s coming.”

  September 1999

  Rebecca Essig stood from her desk chair as the first bell rang, and fifth graders began to wander into her classroom. Today, there were no Toy Story backpacks or Parent Trap lunch boxes, but close-toed shoes and brown bag lunches were in abundance.

  The menagerie had come to town, and the fifth graders of Franklin Elementary had complimentary, limited-access tickets.

  “Everybody take your seats please!” Rebecca called across the room as she headed for the classroom door, where she stood every morning to greet her students. “We’re loading the buses right after the second bell, and the quietest table gets to line up first!”

  Matt Fuqua marched into the classroom wielding a giant string of red licorice like a ringleader’s whip, lashing the shoulder of the girl in front of him. Rebecca confiscated the candy in midlash with reflexes honed by four full weeks of seizing contraband from her problem student. “No candy in the classroom,” she reminded him as she folded the licorice whip and dropped it into the trash can. And made a mental note to make sure it was still there when they left for the buses.

  “Ms. Essig, my mom said to remind you to bring my emergency inhaler.” Neal Grundidge stopped in the middle of the doorway, heedless of the line growing behind him. “She says all that hay and dust will definitely trigger an asthma attack. Oh, and my EpiPen.” He shrugged. “I guess she thinks I might also inhale a peanut.”

  “They’re already in my bag.” Rebecca waved him into the room to uncork the traffic bottleneck. “And you’ll be in my group, so you’ll have access to them all day.”

  Neal was always in Rebecca’s group. As was Matt Fuqua. She couldn’t assign kids with severe allergies or behavioral issues to parent chaperones, which always left her with a ragtag group of charges suffering assorted problems and varying levels of attentiveness.

  As the rest of her students filed into the room behind Neal, Rebecca’s gaze caught on a familiar dark ponytail bobbing in the sea of heads coming down the hall. Delilah Marlow walked into the classroom chatting with her best friend, Shelley Wells, and as she had on the first day of school—and every day since—Rebecca caught her breath.

  Two towns over, Elizabeth would just then be walking into her fourth grade class at a school down the street from the Essig house, and though the girls were a year apart in age, they were virtually identical. Even down to the lengt
h of their hair and a fondness for sparkly fingernail polish on chipped nails.

  But that was where their similarities ended. Where Elizabeth was fiery and outspoken, a chatterbox who never met a stranger, Delilah was reserved and thoughtful, only truly opening up to her best friend.

  So far, Rebecca seemed to be the only person who knew both girls, but she worried constantly that the half-hour drive between towns wouldn’t always be enough of a buffer. That eventually, a mutual acquaintance would notice that Delilah Marlow and Elizabeth Essig looked so much alike that they could be not just sisters but twins.

  Someday, Rebecca knew, she would have to put more distance between her adopted daughter and her secret sister. But that day would not come this school year. Rebecca still had eight more months to be a legitimate, if covert, part of her sister’s life.

  “Good morning, Delilah. Shelley,” she said as the girls passed her. “Take your seats please. We’ll be loading the buses in a few minutes.”

  When the second bell rang, Rebecca lined her students up and marched them down the hall and out the side door with the other fifth graders. It took two buses to ferry all three classes plus chaperones to the county fairgrounds, and by the time they arrived, Rebecca was ready to take the whole fifth grade circus right back to school.

  Matt Fuqua was going to be the death of her. Or get her fired.

  Rebecca gave her parent chaperones their marching orders, then began to herd her group of six children toward the front gate, following the calliope music like rats toward the pied piper. The kids chatted excitedly with one another, then oohed and ahhed over the shiny souvenir tickets the lady in red sequins handed out at the front gate.

  As they headed into the menagerie, an acrobat walked by on her hands, her legs bent at the knees so that her feet dangled just inches over her own head. “How does she do that?” Shelley asked.

  “She’s a circus freak.” Matt stomped past the girls with an air of entitlement most boys didn’t assume until halfway through middle school. “My dad says some of them are just as weird as the monsters they got in cages.”

  Rebecca hurried forward with an apologetic glance at the acrobat. “They’re human.” She grabbed the back of Matt’s shirt to keep him from wandering down one of the off-limits paths reserved for full-price ticket holders. And adults. “That’s all that matters.”

  “Are we sure they’re human? My dad says sometimes you can’t tell just from lookin’. Remember the reaping?”

  Rebecca gave him a stiff nod and let go of his shirt. To most of her fifth graders, thirteen years may as well have been a century, and they thought anyone old enough to literally remember the reaping must be a senior citizen.

  They had no way of knowing that their teacher remembered like few others ever could.

  For the next couple of hours, she wandered the menagerie with her charges, rounding up the stragglers and setting a reasonable pace while they ogled the exhibits. But after Matt Fuqua made fun of Delilah in front of a large crowd, Rebecca decided it was time for lunch, just to give him something to do with his mouth, other than make trouble.

  She led the kids to the petting zoo, where there were a series of picnic tables and a hand-washing station, so kids could wash up after petting the werewolf puppies and the centaur foals. The children took their time meandering the open-air stalls, staring at the exhibits, but it wasn’t until they sat down to eat, when she didn’t have to keep one eye on Matt, that Rebecca truly noticed the creatures they’d come to see.

  Very few people had more of a reason to hate cryptids than Rebecca Essig, yet as she walked the length of the petting zoo observing the young giant—a grimy, three-foot-tall diaper-clad toddler—and the baby yeti with dirt and twigs tangled in his fur, the only real emotion she could summon was sympathy.

  These weren’t the monsters who’d taken her family from her. These were children born into captivity, paying for the crimes of others with their very lives.

  This was wrong.

  Disgusted, Rebecca started to turn away from the pens and hurry her kids along when her focus caught on three small figures seated in the dirt, facing the back of their pen. There was no sign announcing their species, but from the back, they looked like human children.

  “They’re new,” a voice said near her right shoulder, and Rebecca whirled around, startled.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said they’re new,” the petting zoo’s “nanny” told her. “The oracles. Sisters. Their whole family was apprehended last month, after passing for human their whole lives.”

  “Oracles, like prophets?”

  The nanny nodded. “Though at their age, they mostly just find lost things.”

  Rebecca’s heart ached for the girls. For what little she could see of their scrawny arms and the vertebrae visible through the thin fabric of their gray dresses. From the back, they could have been any of her students. Or her daughter. “What happened to their parents?”

  “Sold to labs. The menagerie got all three of the girls for what their father would have cost on his own. They eat less than he would have, too.”

  “Doesn’t look like they eat much of anything,” Rebecca mumbled.

  “No, and they don’t say much yet, either. But they’ll adjust,” the nanny said. Then something hit the ground with a crash from the other end of the petting zoo, and the nanny excused herself.

  But Rebecca remained, captivated and horrified by the three painfully thin little girls. Determined, she opened her own brown bag and took out the sandwich and orange she’d packed for herself. With a glance to her right, to make sure the nanny was still occupied, she cleared her throat as loudly as she could, and the oldest of the sisters finally turned to look at her.

  “Here.” Rebecca held out the sandwich. “Are you hungry?”

  The child’s haunted brown eyes widened, and she touched her sister’s arm. Almost as one, the other two turned, and all three young oracles padded toward her, barefoot in the dirt.

  They looked just alike—each had the same long dark hair and golden-brown eyes—but in three different sizes, like human nesting dolls.

  Only they weren’t human. Not that Rebecca could tell that from looking at them.

  She held the sandwich over the short fence, and the oldest girl—she couldn’t have been older than seven—snatched it and immediately took several steps back, as if she were afraid Rebecca might change her mind. Then she tore the sandwich into three roughly equal pieces and gave each of her sisters a portion.

  “Here.” Rebecca held out the orange, and this time the middle child came forward, glancing nervously at the nanny, who was still occupied with a student from another group who’d knocked over the hand-washing station. The middle oracle reached for the orange, but instead of taking it, she grabbed Rebecca’s wrist, in a frighteningly strong grip.

  Her eyes clouded over until her golden brown irises were no longer visible beneath a white film.

  “Four little monkeys jumping on the bed.”

  Chill bumps blossomed across Rebecca’s arms. Her mother used to sing that nursery rhyme to Laura and Erica when she was putting them to bed.

  “Two fell down and broke their heads.”

  Rebecca tried to pull her arm away, but the child’s grip was like iron.

  “Two more monkeys jumping on the bed.” The whispered words flew from the oracle’s mouth in a desperate tangle of syllables. “One will fall and break her head.”

  The blood drained from Rebecca’s face. She glanced back at the table where the kids were eating lunch, completely oblivious, and her gaze focused on Delilah. Rebecca and her secret sister were the last remaining little Essig monkeys.

  “Which one?” She turned back to the oracle, but the child’s eyes were gold again. She let go of Rebecca’s hand and stumbled backward.

  Rebecca grabbed for her, and the orange fell i
nto the dirt. “Which one?” she whispered fiercely. “Which one of us is going to die?”

  The oracle pulled free of Rebecca’s grip and knelt to pick up the orange. As she walked backward toward her sisters at the rear of the cage, her focus found Rebecca one last time. “That is up to you.”

  Delilah

  I did my best to time my contractions while Lenore drove, because Gallagher couldn’t hold the phone for more than a couple of minutes before the clock on the screen dissolved into a meaningless cluster of pixels. They started about fifteen minutes apart, but by the time we got back to the cabin, the contractions were coming every nine minutes. I felt like the baby was trying to rip her way out through my navel.

  Gallagher helped me out of the car while Lenore ran into the cabin ahead of us, yelling, “The baby’s coming! This is not a drill, people!”

  “Does she have to shout?” Gallagher grumbled.

  “If that offends your ears, I’m afraid you’re in for a long night.” I stopped walking to breathe through another round of pain, while he stood there holding my arm, looking frustrated and helpless.

  By the time I got to the bedroom, Zyanya had removed the shower curtain from the tub and laid it across the bed to protect the mattress, then topped that with a layer of our oldest clean towels.

  In the bathroom, she helped me change into one of my two nightgowns, then led me back to the bed, where Lenore had set a package of absorbent pads with a waterproof bottom layer on the nightstand.

  Zy picked up the package and studied it with a frown.

  “They’re to protect the towels.” Lenore took the package from her and ripped it open, then spread one of the pads on my side of the bed.

  Zy frowned. “They why use towels at all?”

  “So that she’s not just lying on crinkly plastic. It’s for Delilah’s comfort.”

  But by then, the only thing I wanted for my comfort was an epidural.