I nodded. But I knew that would never happen. If this went badly, we wouldn’t make it out of the park.
“Lenore, thank you. I’m so sorry for having to drag you into this, but...thank you. I—” The rest of the words slid out of my grasp as that tugging sensation wrapped around my middle. Deep inside me, the furiae stretched, coming to life slowly like a cat waking up from a nap.
Then, suddenly, she was on alert. Pacing furiously inside me, ready to attack the cage that was my body, if I didn’t set her loose soon.
“They’re here. Some of them, anyway.” But definitely more than one. The furiae was fired up like I’d never felt her before, buzzing with destructive energy inside me.
“Okay. I’m going to head down there and start calling them this way.” She leaned over both of our armrests and pulled me into a hug. “In case this does go bad... I love you, Delilah. You’re like a sister to me. I hope you know that.”
“I do. And I love you, too.” And like my actual sister, I was afraid that love for me might be leading her toward her own death.
“Good luck,” she said as she pushed open her door.
“You, too.”
Pulse racing, I watched through the windshield as Lenore walked down the sidewalk on the west side of the park, headed for the main stage, where I could see a tiny podium already being set up. When she was about halfway there, one of the teams of soldiers intercepted her.
I held my breath, wishing I could hear what she was saying to them. But then she threw her head back and laughed, and I exhaled in relief. A minute later, the soldiers both tipped their uniform caps at her. Then they turned around and left the park at a brisk march, as if she’d given them a new route to patrol.
Which she probably had.
She glanced back at me once, then continued toward the stage.
Lenore became difficult to see on the other end of the park, but within minutes of her arrival, the crew members began to leave in ones and twos. Knowing Lenore, she’d probably convinced them all to take their breaks at the same time.
When she was the only one left onstage, she picked up a microphone from the cluster attached to the front of the podium and began to talk.
Speakers mounted around the entire perimeter of the park amplified her voice, aiming it not just into the park, but out into the town. Equipment that strong would carry her message for miles.
Her words didn’t matter. The real message was in her voice itself. In the way it made me—and any other human within hearing range—want to leave the park and go home. I was only able to fight that urge because I knew what I was hearing. What she was doing. And because I’d been inoculating myself against her influence for more than a year.
Alone at the microphone, Lenore told her story, and the words themselves were as moving as the compulsion carried in her voice.
She told the empty park about growing up as a siren born after the reaping. About hiding in plain sight and living in terror of discovery. She talked about the stupid mistake that got her captured, and about the cruelty she and the rest of us endured as captives in Metzger’s Menagerie. Though no one was around to hear, she told the world about our coup. About how we tried to find and buy our fellow cryptids, intending to free them at the southern border. Around the time she got to the part where Willem Vandekamp recaptured us, people began to step out of the wooded sections of the park onto the sidewalk. Into the clearing.
At first there were just a few. They glanced around the park, as if confused about how they got there. Then they began to amble slowly toward the stage. They came in all different shapes and sizes. All different hair and skin tones. All different clothing. And with them came a brutal need building inside me to get out of the car. To go closer. To let the furiae wreak vengeance for us both.
But I resisted that urge as the crowd grew. As Lenore kept talking, telling her new, ever-swelling audience about the things she hadn’t been allowed to say at the Savage Spectacle, thanks to the restrictions of Vandekamp’s collars—a predicament her audience no doubt remembered from personal experience. In front of a thousand bodies spread across the grounds in thin clusters, she talked about being rented out as entertainment at parties. About being used, and ogled, and fondled. She told a crowd of three thousand about the first time she was put on the full-contact roster. The do-whatever-you-want-to-her roster. Then she told a crowd of five thousand strong about the day they paralyzed her through her collar and ended her pregnancy against her will.
By the time the grounds were full of surrogates, humans had started to catch on. A military truck pulled up with the screech of tires, and soldiers jumped out of the bed shouting orders. Waving rifles. Trying to clear a nearly silent crowd that seemed, at least to them, to have assembled out of nowhere.
Hundreds of surrogates turned toward the intrusion.
The soldiers pointed their rifles at each other and fired.
I flinched at the thunder of gunfire. And again as the corpses hit the ground, a few hundred yards away.
Then the surrogates turned back to Lenore, mesmerized by her voice. Driven to stay and listen in silence. And that, I decided, was enough. I got out of the car, my heart pounding in my ears, and I could still hear birds chirping despite the size of the eerily quiet crowd.
Then I closed the car door.
Thousands of heads turned my way.
A murmur rippled through the crowd, and my heart tried to claw its way up my throat. The ripple made it all the way to the front, and Lenore stopped talking, though she couldn’t have seen me very clearly from so far away.
Suddenly, almost as one, the crowd began to move toward me, and the motion was like the undulation of a wave headed for the shore. Only the wave was made of living bodies, and I was the shore, and that wave would soon crash over me.
So I waded in on my own terms.
At first, a path opened up for me, while they all stared, and that pulling sensation deep in my gut began to spin like a broken compass. There were so many targets, the furiae didn’t know where to begin.
I made it about a third of the way into the crowd before their fascination became the inevitable need to touch me, and the first hand grabbed my arm.
The furiae lashed out so hard and fast that I felt the impact as a psychic backlash, repelling me from the target of her vengeance like two magnets placed with like ends together.
In my peripheral vision, even as a dozen more hands reached for me, I saw the arc of arterial spray as the first surrogate severed her own carotid, splattering a dozen forms all around her.
Heedless of the gore, they reached for me, and one by one, their hands fell away. Blood arched into the air. Bodies thumped to the ground. And still they came, stepping over the corpses of their own kind. Slipping in blood.
Falling at my feet over and over.
I could no longer see Lenore. I couldn’t see anything over the forest of bloody bodies that had sprouted around me, limbs reaching for me.
The murmur of the surrogates’ need became a roar as hand after slick hand stuck out from the press of the crowd. From somewhere came a spray of bullets, followed by agonized screams, and I wasn’t sure who’d been shot—more soldiers, or members of the crowd too distracted to make them turn on each other.
Lenore started speaking again, from the microphone, and her voice felt different this time. The urge to go home was gone. Now her voice made me want to stay and watch. To see. To believe that the scourge of humankind—the agents of blood and chaos that had been preying on us for thirty years—were finally getting their due.
I stumbled left, and something tugged me right. I fell, and a bloody hand pulled me up. And as soon as they made contact, they turned on themselves.
Then the furiae roared inside me, overwhelmed, and everything changed.
The next surrogate that reached for me turned away, and instead of clawing his own t
hroat out, he fell upon his neighbor. Then the next, and the next and the next. Suddenly, instead of falling in on me, the violence of the moment rippled out from me, like waves echoing from a rock thrown into a pond.
This new savagery was brutally efficient. But it cost me. My arms felt like they weighed a ton and my legs were too heavy to lift. My eyes tried to close. My throat felt dry.
The furiae was draining me to feed her vengeance. This could not last.
I could not last.
I went still in the center of the chaos, covered in gore, and threw my arms out. I let my head fall back as blood continued to pour forth around me. I let my eyes close.
And I prayed that it would be enough.
Gallagher
The redcap raced through the empty streets, following the lure of the siren’s voice, though it was not what pulled him. Terror like he’d never felt pulsed through his veins with every desperate beat of his heart.
Faster.
Faster.
You’ll be too late.
He’d known what had happened the moment he’d arrived at the cabin to see Mirela holding his daughter. Feeding her with a bottle.
Do. Not. Fail. Her.
He ran so fast that witnesses saw only a shadowy blur. He ran so hard that asphalt cracked beneath his shoes. The sound of air rushing in and out of his enormous lungs was so loud in his own ears that he didn’t hear the more visceral sounds of slaughter until he rounded the corner into the park, and the whole thing hit him at once.
Despite the fear and rage pulsing through him, for one long moment—several endless beats of his heart—Gallagher could only stare at the spectacle.
It was magnificent.
She was magnificent.
Delilah stood in the middle of a huge crowd, drenched in the fragrant crimson life force that fed his soul, as if she were the eye of a blood hurricane, wreaking destruction in an ever-widening ring.
All around her, surrogates fell upon each other, ripping one another apart. It was a splendid slaughter, reminiscent of the war that formed his earliest memories. The formative battles that still thrilled him in his dreams.
Around the fringes, people watched. Humans, staring, disgusted and rapt, with their phones out. Recording Delilah’s moment of savage victory for the entire world to see. From every possible angle.
They were clearly mesmerized—almost hypnotized by the siren’s voice—but they could not possibly appreciate the sight like he did. They did not find grace in every arc of blood or beauty in each fallen form. They could not understand the twitches and convulsions—the bewitching dance of the dying.
But they had only to see. To remember. To spread the word of this slaughter undertaken on their behalf by a terrible and benevolent force sent to save those who did not deserve saving.
And as he watched, he could no longer deny the truth. Delilah had been born for this one moment—to fell a forest made of monsters—and every moment he’d had with her leading up to this had been nothing more than time stolen from fate. Precious moments borrowed against a collateral of bloodshed.
But when this was over, when she’d fulfilled her purpose, her life would be her own. Future moments would belong to both of them, and to their brand-new—
In the middle of the slaughter, Delilah threw her arms out. She tossed her head back. And she fell to her knees.
“Delilah!” Gallagher’s voice rolled over the park like thunder. Humans watching the bloodbath shuddered from the force of his rage. “Delilah!”
He stormed the battlefield, stomping over corpses and tossing still-writhing bodies aside like an angry child throwing his playthings, clearing a path through the chaos. Through the carnage.
“Delilah!”
At the center of the crowd, he found her, half-collapsed, as the slaughter went on all around them. He lifted her in both arms, his hold sure in spite of the blood, and she clung to him with a frighteningly weak grip.
Hands reached for her as he forced his way through the mayhem, elbowing aside heads and torsos indiscriminately. Delilah’s hold around his neck weakened with every step and by the time he emerged from the crowd, she lay limp in his arms, her sight unfocused. Her eyelids fluttering.
“Gallagher!” Huffing, Lenore raced toward him, keys dangling from her grip as she pointed at the parking lot at one end of the park. “Put her in the van!”
They arrived at the vehicle at the same time, from two different directions, and Lenore pulled open the sliding side door. Gallagher laid Delilah on the bench seat, then sat with her head in his lap. “Drive.”
As the siren backed the van out of the lot, Gallagher stared through the windshield and was stunned to see that the furaie’s work continued, even without Delilah. Caught up in the grip of her vengeance, the surrogates were still tearing each other limb from limb.
Delilah had given them her gift. And that gift kept giving.
* * *
“Is she okay?” the siren asked, glancing in the rearview mirror for the thousandth time as the van bumped over ruts in the poorly maintained back road.
“No.” Gallagher stroked hair back from Delilah’s forehead, but her eyes would not open. “She’s unconscious. What the hell were you thinking?”
“It was her decision. It was her destiny. You know that as well as I do. You saw what I saw.”
A redcap could not deny the truth. So he clenched his teeth and said nothing.
By the time they arrived at the cabin, most of the blood was gone, having rolled up Gallagher’s body—even over his face—to obey the summons from his cap. Delilah had no visible injuries. Yet her breathing was shallow. Her pulse thready.
“Delilah, please wake up,” he whispered as Lenore slammed her door and rounded the front of the van. “Please, please come back to us. If not for me, then for Alina. She needs you.” He lifted her limp form, clutching her to his chest. “I need you.”
Lenore slid open the side door and stood back while Gallagher climbed out of the van. He carried Delilah into the cabin, past the silent, shocked faces of their adopted family. Past Zyanya, who held the sleeping baby in one arm.
Gallagher carried her into the bedroom and kicked the door shut. He laid her on the bed, propped up on pillows, then he sat on the side of the mattress, her hand clutched in both of his. “Delilah. Please open your eyes.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. Then her eyes struggled open. “I had to do it.”
“You have no reason to apologize. I swore to save you, and I failed.”
She tried to squeeze his hand, but her fingers hardly twitched. “You did your job. Saving me from this was never the goal. You saved me for this. Your oath is fulfilled.”
“No. Delilah, this isn’t ov—” But he couldn’t say it. Because he knew it was a lie.
“Alina is your job now. You swore you’d protect her. And your word is your honor.” Delilah’s eyes closed.
They never opened again.
* * *
The next morning, Gallagher dug another grave. He stood in a cloud of grief, clutching his tiny daughter, while Zyanya said words he wasn’t ready to hear, over the body of the woman he’d sworn to give his life for.
He threw the first clod of dirt, and flinched when it landed. Then he watched, jaw clenched, while Claudio filled in the grave.
One by one, his friends went inside, teary-eyed, and dealt with their loss. When the baby started crying, Mirela came out with the promise of a bottle and a fresh diaper. Gallagher handed his daughter to her. But he did not move from the spot where he’d been standing for more than an hour.
He couldn’t leave Delilah. Not yet.
Finally, when the sun began to sink below the forest canopy, he exhaled so heavily his lungs seemed to collapse in on themselves. Then he knelt, and with one hand pressed to the fresh dirt, he told Deli
lah’s grave what he’d never gotten a chance to say to her.
“I love you. I have always loved you. And when I die, it will be with your name on my lips.”
Epilogue
The birds in the park were singing.
The redcap registered that fact like he registered the number of children on the swing set and parents sitting on benches. The number of cars in the parking lot and the position of every tree, relative to the sun and the shifting shadow it would cast all day long.
The world had changed since that day five years ago—since the Blood Harvest, as Delilah’s sacrifice had come to be called—but Gallagher had not. He still saw every danger and every possible way out, whether around the threat or straight through it.
“Daddy, can I swing?” The little girl tugging on his hand was the spitting image of her mother. Dark hair. Freckles. And a wicked gleam of intelligence and obstinance in those bright blue eyes.
He’d started losing arguments the day she started speaking.
“Of course, Acushla.” The word meant “darling” in Irish, but the literal translation was more like pulse or vein. Because she was his lifeblood. The very beating of his heart. “Go ahead.”
Alina let go of her father’s hand and raced toward the playground. Mulch flew from beneath her sneakers and she plopped joyfully into the last available swing.
Other five-year-olds might have needed a push to get started, but Alina was strong and eerily coordinated. For as much as she looked like her mother, she was her father’s daughter in ways he didn’t even notice most of the time.
In ways those around them seemed to feel, but were unable to articulate.
Gallagher stayed well back from the playground, but the other parents still stared. It was the middle of a sunny day and he was roughly the size of a house.
The world may have been changing, but change wasn’t a light switch to be flipped. It was a road to be traveled. And like most roads, it was broad, smooth and well-lit in some places, but dark, narrow and full of potholes in others.
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