“The other day I thought she looked familiar, but I didn’t...” And just like that, a vital understanding slid into place in my head. I felt like I’d spent my entire life in that moment of confusion that comes when you wake up from a long nap and you’re not sure where you are, or why you were asleep in the first place. I’d lived a lifetime of unfocused assumptions, trying to rub sleep from my eyes.
And suddenly I was awake. Suddenly I understood.
“She knew.”
“What do you mean? What did she know?” Lenore leaned closer to look at the screen.
Gallagher took Alina from me, so I could cover myself, then he laid her in her makeshift crib and retreated across the room to his chair in the corner.
“Everything. Or most of it, anyway. She must have. Rebecca grew up with the surrogate as her sister. She raised Elizabeth as her daughter. And taught me for nearly a year, until...”
Oh my God.
“Until what?” Lenore demanded.
“Until she died. After school one day, at the end of my fifth grade year. It happened right in front of me. This lady was driving through the school parking lot, too fast. She wasn’t paying attention. Ms. Essig shouted something. Shelley and I turned around, and the car just plowed right into her.”
“That must have been traumatic,” Lenore said. Gallagher was watching me with something unspoken behind his eyes. Something...important. But he wouldn’t say whatever he was thinking until he was good and ready.
“It was traumatic.” I accepted the stew from Zyanya with a nod of thanks, but the memory had chased away my appetite. “If the car hadn’t hit her, it might have hit Shelley and me. At the time, that’s all I could think about. How close I’d come to getting hit. But now...”
“She saved your life.” Gallagher’s voice echoed with a depth that was like looking into a deep hole. Like staring into the next dimension. “She knew who you were, and she put herself between you and death.”
Slowly, I nodded. “I think she did.”
But he was still staring at me with that look. Like he was waiting for me to understand something. Something...more. “She sacrificed herself for you, Delilah.”
“Yes, I think she did. For me and Shelley.”
“No.” He stepped out of the shadows, and I could feel the purpose behind each of his steps. Driving him toward me with some truth I couldn’t yet see. “She sacrificed herself for you. That’s the event you were looking for. That’s what you asked me about all those months ago, when you sat in that menagerie cage, trying to figure out how you got there. How and why fate chose you. The universe saw the same thing in you that your sister saw. The same thing she thought worthy of saving, even at the expense of her own life. The same thing I see in you.”
“Furiaes are chosen through sacrifice.” That’s what Gallagher had told me that night, in the menagerie. But not always self-sacrifice. “She made me what I am.”
“No. She loved you enough to protect you. Fate saw that same willingness to sacrifice in you and gave you the opportunity to live up to that potential. But you put the whole thing into motion,” he said. “The day you stood up for Genevieve, as a customer of the menagerie. That was the day you accepted your purpose.”
“That’s the ‘how.’” I stroked one finger gently down Alina’s cheek while her pursed lips sucked at nothing in her sleep. “But not the ‘why.’ What’s my purpose? Surely fate didn’t intend for me to hide out in a cabin while bloodshed all over the country goes unpunished? But that’s all I can do, now that we’re on the news. Now that they’re putting up roadblocks and administering random blood tests.” Even before that, the furiae hadn’t avenged any unrighted wrongs in months. At least, not until the surrogates began to find me. “What am I supposed to do? Just wait until another surrogate wanders close enough for me to safely go after?”
“I don’t know,” Gallagher admitted with a shrug of powerful shoulders. “What I do know is that fate would not have given you this gift if it weren’t also going to give you an opportunity to use it. Until then, be patient. Be careful.” He sank onto the other side of the bed and laid one huge hand on our daughter’s tiny bulge of a belly as he met my gaze with a soft smile. “Be a mother. And try to be happy.”
* * *
Alina slept for a lifetime record of three and a half hours that night, then woke up starving and angry at two in the morning. I gently lifted Gallagher’s arm from my waist so I could feed her in the bed with us, and being sandwiched between them—with his firm warmth at my back and her soft warmth at my front—was the most amazingly peaceful feeling I’d ever experienced. I knew as I lay there that even if fate gave me a chance to go back and spare myself the pain and humiliation of captivity, I wouldn’t do a thing differently, for fear that I would never wind up there, in that one perfect moment.
When the baby was full, I eased us from the bed and returned her to her dresser drawer bassinet, which I set on the mattress next to Gallagher. He was snoring softly, but I knew from experience that he’d be awake the second either of us needed him. Even in his sleep, he was on alert. All the time.
In the main room, I tiptoed past the foldout couch, where Lenore, Genni and Zyanya were asleep, then stepped over Claudio, who’d rolled away from the front door and into my path in his sleep.
Overhead, the bed in the loft creaked as one of the oracles rolled over. Miri and Lala had filled the space Eryx’s absence left in Rommily’s life, as well as in the loft, and though sisters could never replace true love, I had to believe they were a comfort to her, in her loss.
Trying to be quiet, I plucked a clean glass from the dish drainer and ran cold tap water into it. I drained the glass, and as I was filling it for a second time, movement outside caught my eye through the window over the sink. I squinted, trying to find some meaningful shape in a nest of shadows cast by moonlight shining through the foliage, but the only thing I was sure I saw were limbs swaying in the wind.
I rinsed out my glass and returned it to the drainer, then was headed back toward the bedroom when the front door creaked open behind me.
I turned slowly, my heart hammering, and found a woman in jeans and a T-shirt standing in the doorway. Twigs and prickly stickers stuck to the laces of her sneakers, and there were several leaves snagged in her hair.
Her shirt bore a screen-printed high school mascot.
Though her pale brown ponytail and blue eyes were unfamiliar, I knew exactly who the woman was. “You’re a surrogate,” I whispered. It wasn’t a question, yet I needed an answer.
“I’ve been called that.” The stranger cocked her head to the side as she studied me in the shadows. “What are you?” she said, and Zyanya began to stir on the sofa bed.
“Were you there today? At the naval academy?” She was dressed like a high school chaperone. A teacher, or maybe a parent. Someone the kids should have been able to trust.
“Guilty. But not in the regretful sense.” She gave me an odd smile, and with a jolt of shock, I realized I was looking at a mass murderer. The woman who’d brainwashed soldiers into opening fire on hundreds of defenseless teenagers. Standing in the middle of our living room with the door wide open behind her, as if she had every right to be where my friends and I lived. Where my daughter was asleep in the next room.
In my peripheral vision, Zyanya sat up. “Delilah?” Though she was in human form, she stood from the sofa bed with a cheetah’s eerie, lethal grace. “What’s happening?” she whispered as Lenore sat up on the other side of the couch.
“It’s okay. Stay back.” I already felt that familiar pull in my gut and the tingling in my fingers—the furiae demanding I put this surrogate to a violent end—but I was resisting the urge. This woman had information I needed.
The surrogate stepped closer, unfazed by the threats Zy and I represented, as if her fascination with me eclipsed all other concerns. Her eyes narrowed as she st
udied me. “Who are you?”
“How many of you are there?” I asked, instead of answering. Surely the government hadn’t kept them all alive...
“Enough. More than you can fight.”
“Answer the question,” Lenore whispered, and the melody of her voice was like a strong current, trying to carry me along with it. To drag me under. Though she was talking to the surrogate, if anyone had asked me a question, in that moment, I would have answered it.
“Five thousand. Maybe six,” the woman said. “I can feel every one of them, like limbs from my own body. As if I had five thousand hands, all ready to push the same button. To plunge the same knife...”
“Five thousand. What happened to the rest?” There were more than three hundred thousand left in place of human infants, in March of 1980.
“Limbs lost in battle. Casualties of war. They’re gone, but I can still feel them. Dead, yet they still cause pain. But they kept their secrets...”
“Kept their...?” And suddenly I understood. The government had tortured—killed—hundreds of thousands of surrogates, likely in an attempt to understand the enemy. Yet they’d learned nothing from their efforts.
“We are fewer now, but stronger,” she said. “We are crawling like flies on the corpse of humanity.”
The image brought bile to the back of my throat. I shuffled forward, joining the furiae in eagerness to end a threat that had no right to exist on the same planet as my defenseless daughter, much less in the same cabin. I needed to kill her. Yet I needed to hear what she could tell me even more. “You’re here to end the human race?”
“Not to end it. To feed from it. From pain. From chaos.” She seemed to have no reservations about spilling her guts, and whether that was from her compulsion to be near me, the siren’s influence on her willpower or simply pride on the part of a violent anarchist, I had no idea. “We make one cut, and instead of bandaging the wound, humanity tries to carve it out,” the surrogate continued. “They turn a dribble of blood into a fount. One bite into a feast. They are fools fleeing from their own shadows, and we have only to cast the light.”
A growl rumbled up from the floor, and Claudio stepped into sight on all fours, his silvery fur glimmering in moonlight spilling through the front door. His eyes practically glowing in the dark.
“Claudio. It’s okay,” I said. The surrogate didn’t even seem to notice him.
“Kill her.” Gallagher’s voice rumbled over me from behind, resonating in every bone in my body. Echoing in my mind. And though I didn’t turn to look, I knew he was holding our daughter. I could feel Alina, sleeping just feet from this mass murderer. “Kill her, Delilah.”
“Delilah.” The surrogate seemed to be tasting my name. She shook her head. “No, that’s not right.” Yet she took another step toward me.
A high-pitched canine whine rose from Genni’s human throat. The whole cabin was waking up, and the surrogate was surrounded, but she didn’t look scared.
She looked curious. Driven. “What are you?”
Gallagher was right. It was time to end this.
“I am fate.” I stepped forward and took her hand, as if I’d shake it. “I am vengeance.” Violence surged through me as the furiae flexed within my skin, stretching the length of my arm. Using me like a funnel to pour self-destruction straight into the surrogate.
Her eyes widened. She reached for her throat with her free hand, and this time I turned and lurched away from her, around the table. I didn’t need to see the show to know how it would end. Especially once the wet gasping sounds began.
While the monster died on the floor of our cabin, I took my daughter from Gallagher and carried her back into the bedroom, where I curled up with her on the bed. He followed us into the room and pulled the blankets up to my waist, careful to leave the baby uncovered. Then he leaned over me to pluck her tiny red cap from her head.
And though he didn’t say a word, I understood what was happening.
Tonight, my daughter would taste her first blood, not with the appetite that fed her belly, but with the one that fed her soul.
The front door squealed closed, and a few minutes after that, I heard Gallagher ask Claudio to open it for him. I knew from the rustle of cloth and the heavier-than-normal sound of his steps that he’d just picked up the body.
By the time he got back to the bedroom, smelling of fresh air and fresh blood, I was lying on my pillow, shaking with spent adrenaline, while our daughter slept soundly beside me.
“Delilah.” Gallagher sat on the other side of the bed, with Alina between us. His gaze held a bold, open affection that made me wonder how long he’d been shielding his feelings from me. “It’s okay. You did your duty. And tonight, Alina will bathe in the blood her mother provided.” He sounded oddly proud as he held out his hand to show me that her tiny red cap was soaked. “That is an honor I did not expect you to claim.”
“Well, I didn’t do it on purpose.”
Careful not to wake her, Gallagher slid the saturated cap onto Alina’s head, and I groaned, until I realized it hadn’t left so much as a smudge against the sheets. She squirmed for a minute, her tiny features tensing. Then she relaxed back into a deep sleep, as satisfied as she’d been after I’d nursed her.
Within seconds, her cap looked dry, yet a brighter shade of red than it had been minutes earlier.
“Definitely a warrior,” Gallagher whispered. Then he reached over her to sweep a strand of hair back from my forehead. “What’s wrong, Delilah? You were magnificent tonight.”
“What’s wrong?” I swiped angrily at my still-damp eyes. “That monster made it into our home. Within feet of our daughter, hours after she made US soldiers open fire on a room full of teenagers! If I hadn’t been here, she could have brainwashed anyone in there into killing the rest of us! Including Alina!”
Gallagher shook his head. “First of all, I would never let that happen. Second, we have no evidence that the surrogates are capable of that kind of influence on crytpids—we’ve only ever heard of them acting against humans.”
I pushed myself upright on the mattress, propped on one arm. “That’s a hell of a risk to count on, with our daughter’s life on the line.”
“And third,” he continued, “if you weren’t here, she wouldn’t have been drawn here in the first place.”
“So I’m the reason my daughter was in danger? That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
He frowned at me over her sleeping form. “Comfort is not the purpose of truth, Delilah.”
“I know.” It was terribly frustrating to argue with someone who couldn’t tell a lie. Even to make me feel better.
“I want to give you comfort. But I have sworn to give you truth. I’m not sure how to proceed when those two things are at odds with each other.”
I ran one finger over the edge of Alina’s cap. It felt dry to the touch. “Yeah. Me neither.”
“What I do know is that our daughter was never in any true danger tonight. We were both here to protect her, and I didn’t even have to lift a finger. Because you are a fearsome warrior.”
“But that monster made it into the house, Gallagher. And tonight won’t be the last time. For whatever reason, the surrogates are being drawn to me, and on their way, they’re slaughtering people. They’re—Oh my God.”
“What?”
I sat straighter as the truth pulled me upright. “I’m the reason this second reaping is spiraling in on us, tightening like a noose around our necks. The surrogates are being drawn to me, and the longer we stay here, the more of them will find us. And the more of them that are gathered in one place, the more dangerous they’ll become. They killed more than a million children spread out all across the country. Acting as individuals, one household at a time. Imagine what they could do in large numbers. Now that they’re grown. A second full-scale reaping could kill millions.”
“You’re describing war.” The grim depth of his proclamation was stunning.
“Not just war. Open-ended destruction.” I extended one arm in the direction of the main room, where our intruder had died. “She said they don’t want to eradicate humanity, they want to feed from it. They’ll keep feasting on our pain and chaos for as long as possible. They’ll keep turning teacher against student, nurse against patient, soldier against civilian. Stealing trust and security from us. Making us fear the very people who should protect us.”
They could spread out from the US and take their plague worldwide.
Or at least they could try.
“Gallagher, they seem to think the ‘corpse of humanity’ is a never-ending buffet, but humanity isn’t going to fall for this a second time. People already understand that locking up the surrogates—locking up all cryptids—didn’t work, and now they’re shooting cryptids found in the wild. It’s only a matter of time before they decide to kill us all, even those in captivity, just to be sure they got the dangerous ones. No one will be safe then. We’ll look back on the days of chains and cages with nostalgia. And Alina...”
I couldn’t say it.
But I didn’t need to.
“That’s your ‘why,’ Delilah.” Gallagher’s dark eyes seemed to shine at me from the other side of the bed. “This is your purpose. You were spared from one reaping to stop a second one. To keep them from feeding on humanity. And to keep humanity from slaughtering us in retaliation.”
“So I’m supposed to kill them one at a time? When they break into the house in the middle of the night and put all of us in danger?”
Gallagher shrugged. “That seems to be working so far.”
“For however long that lasts. But if we’ve figured out the pattern, so will the government. They may not be publicizing it, but someone at the Cryptid Containment Bureau knows the surrogates are roaming around free. They’ll be looking for a way to catch them. Or kill them. And they’ll see this pattern in the chaos. Maybe they already have. They may not know that these events are converging on me, but they’ll eventually see that they are converging. And they’ll come here looking for whatever magnet is attracting this plague upon humanity to their corner of the world. But they won’t just find us. They’ll find her.” I ran one hand over Alina’s soft red cap, and she jerked a little in her sleep. “I can’t let them find her, Gallagher.”
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