She never saw her little sister again.
Delilah
In my life before captivity, I’d owned a car. I’d held a job and had an apartment of my own. For fun, I’d read novels and streamed movies and TV on my tablet. I’d had little interest in current events, and even less interest in history.
Back when I’d had unlimited access to information, I’d had little use for it.
But in captivity, I’d learned that information is power, and that one of the best ways to break a new captive is to strip her of that power. To keep her ignorant of where she is and why. Of when her next meal or shower will come. Of what day of the week it is, and what she’ll be expected to endure before that day is over.
Since our escape, I’d become a voracious and unapologetic consumer of the news. I lived for the days when we’d venture into the local town from whatever hideout we were currently occupying. I scanned storefronts for a free Wi-Fi notice like a desert wanderer watching the horizon for signs of water. And when I found it, I gorged.
Today was no exception, despite the actual reason for our visit to the University of Maryland.
“What are you doing?” Gallagher leaned over the driver’s seat armrest to peer at my phone.
“Well, I was going to try to use the magic of the internet to uncover the thin man’s name and address. But I got distracted by this.” I held the phone up to show him the headline of the article I’d been scanning.
He squinted at the small print, reading aloud. “‘Cop opens fire in mall food court. Thirty-six dead.’”
“It happened yesterday. Just after 6:00 p.m.” The thought made me feel sick. “I know you’re not much of a mall shopper, but Saturday night is basically prime time for the food court. It would have been like shooting fish in a barrel. Only easier, because people are much bigger targets, and cops are trained marksmen.”
Gallagher pushed the phone away in disgust. “Why do human authorities have no honor?”
I shrugged, mentally tugging at a thread of optimism that threatened to unravel the very fabric of my reality. “I prefer to think that we’re only hearing about the rare cases where that’s true. That the vast majority are good people who never make headlines.”
Gallagher scowled as he turned back to the window. “The evidence does not support your theory.”
I followed his gaze toward the rear of the university lab. We’d been parked in the lot behind the building for nearly an hour, trying to combine reconnaissance for our rescue mission with research into the thin man’s identity, using free Wi-Fi from the Starbucks around the corner. Multitasking at its finest.
Unfortunately, the connection was spotty at best, this far away from the coffee shop. And I knew as little about recon as Gallagher knew about the internet.
“What exactly are you looking for online?” he asked when I started tapping on the phone screen again.
“Well, we know that all of the Spectacle’s customers were either very wealthy or very politically powerful. Or both. So I did an image search of the wealthiest US congressmen, and these are the results.” I held the phone up, and he squinted at the images. “Sorry. This would be easier on a laptop or a tablet, but this isn’t the kind of search it’s safe to run on a rented device at an internet café.” I was pretty sure the government monitored those public-use IP addresses for eyebrow-raising search strings.
I handed him the phone. “Just scroll down and look at the pictures, and tell me if any of them look like the thin man.”
Gallagher took the phone, but after a few seconds of dragging his finger up the screen, the images began to flicker.
“Damn it.” I plucked the device from his grip, and the images steadied. “I guess we’ll have to do this the hard way. How old would you say the thin man was?”
Gallagher watched through the windshield as a man in jeans and a white lab coat carried a trash bag out the back door of the building and tossed it up into the dumpster. “In human years?”
I gave him an exasperated look. “Well, dog years wouldn’t be very helpful.”
“If the thin man were fae, I’d guess him to be at least a century old. Possibly half again that. But humans are relatively short-lived, and your species and mine age at different rates.” He shrugged. “I lack skill estimating human age, beyond childhood.”
“Okay, so describe him. Gray hair? What color eyes? You said he was tall?”
Gallagher turned away from the lab for a moment to study me with cautious curiosity. “You really don’t remember?”
Blue and purple pillows. Thick rugs. Bare bodies. All of it swimming beneath my unshed tears. “Delilah.” Gallagher reaches for me. “It will be brief...”
“I remember...you. Just flashes.” I closed my eyes and shook my head to clear it. “But not him.” Not the bastard who’d turned my champion into my—
I shook my head again, dislodging painful thoughts.
Gallagher watched me from the driver’s seat. Within arm’s reach, yet outside of my personal space. That was the balance we had struck—protective hovering outside of a carefully preserved distance. Mentally preparing for the birth of our child, while avoiding the subject of how she came to exist.
We weren’t pretending it hadn’t happened exactly. We were pretending it hadn’t changed things.
Or rather, I was pretending. Gallagher was...waiting. He seemed to understand that eventually I’d have to deal with it, and that would be our make-or-break moment.
But we couldn’t afford for us to be broken—not as future parents and not as partners in the furiae’s mission for justice. And I was terrified that if I let myself remember, that was exactly what would happen.
Gallagher closed his eyes for a moment. Then he cleared his throat and met my gaze again with a cautious light in his own. “Yes, he was tall for a human. Very thin. But he seemed to be naturally slight of build. Narrow, but not frail or sickly. He had mostly gray hair, combed over to the left.”
“Was his skin wrinkled? Did he look older, or prematurely gray? What about eye color?”
He closed his eyes again, and I watched them move beneath his eyelids, as if he were seeing that room in his mind. Remembering that night.
His fist clenched around the armrest, and the plastic creaked.
“I don’t remember his eye color. But he was definitely wrinkled.” Gallagher’s eyes opened. “Mostly at the corners of his eyes and his forehead. Some around his mouth.”
“Okay. That’s good. Thanks.” I narrowed the search to wealthy congressmen over the age of sixty, but as usual, half the results generated were only tangentially related to what I was looking for. I scrolled past images of women, group shots of senators and several random unrelated images, then tapped on the first picture of a man who fit Gallagher’s description and held up the phone. “Is this him?”
Gallagher shook his head. “Not thin enough.”
I scrolled through more results and showed him all of the likely possibilities, but they were all either too young or too old. Too gray or too wrinkled.
“Okay, I think we’re barking up the wrong tree. Maybe he’s not a congressman. Or not a politician. He could just be a wealthy bastard with a really sick fetish. Which probably describes ninety-nine percent of the Spectacle’s clientele.”
“Is there a search for that online?” Gallagher asked, and I couldn’t help smiling.
“That’s not exactly how the internet works.” Next, I tried an image search of Willem Vandekamp, concentrating on pictures of him with groups of known social associates, but Gallagher didn’t recognize any of those, either. Which left me no choice but to broaden the search to include the wealthiest Americans over the age of sixty.
Dozens of images filled my screen. According to the search engine, there were tens of thousands of pictures on subsequent results pages.
“Okay, they’re turning off all
the lights,” Gallagher said, and I looked up from my phone to see that, indeed, what few windows had been lit in the university lab on a Sunday afternoon were going dark one by one. I glanced at the time—5:04 p.m. The sun was still high in the sky, glaring in through the van’s rear windshield, but the few buildings that were open on campus on the weekend were closing down for the day.
“We may get lucky,” I said a few minutes later as we watched employees head to their cars in the lot. Most were too absorbed in their cell phones or digging for their keys in the bottom of their purses to notice us sitting in our van on the back row. “We may have nothing to deal with but the custodial staff and a couple of security guards. If that.”
While Gallagher kept an eye on the building, waiting for any after-hours employees to show up, I went back to my search results, scrolling through image after image until suddenly, after studying at least a hundred strangers’ faces, the features in front of me looked familiar.
My finger hesitated just above the screen, ready to swipe it away. Instead, I lingered, staring at the face of a man I’d served in a private booth at the arena. So many of my memories of the Spectacle had been buried deep inside my own mind, but that one...
Mr. Arroway. Beer and peanut butter crackers.
That was the first night I saw Gallagher fight. The night they realized they could use me against him.
Mr. Arroway, it turned out, was an oil executive from Oklahoma. From just a couple of hours away from my rural hometown.
“What is it? Did you find him?” Gallagher leaned over again to peer at my phone. “That’s not him.”
“No. I—I know.” At the last second, I bit off the explanation, because if Gallagher realized the face on the screen belonged to another Spectacle customer, he’d feel honor-bound to hunt the man down and kill him in defense of me. And every time he killed someone in his distinctive, bloodless but brutal style, he brought the authorities closer to finding us.
I decided to hold Mr. Arroway in my back pocket, in case Gallagher couldn’t find the blood of anyone even less karmically entitled to a long and happy life with which to soak his cap.
I swiped past his picture. “Are you sure you didn’t hear a name? Did you notice any accent when he spoke?”
“No, and no.” Gallagher turned to me with a sigh as I swiped through several more images. “Don’t let this upset you, Delilah. I’ve been looking for him for nine months. I don’t expect you to find him in two hours—”
My hand clenched around the phone. I had no conscious memory of the face on the screen, but looking at him made the hair on my arms stand on end. Sweat formed behind my knees and in the crooks of my elbows.
The man’s eyes were a piercing blue, his cheeks high and gaunt. His hair was thick and gray, peppered with black, combed over to the left.
Aren’t you a pretty thing?
The phone slipped from my grip and clattered to the floor of the van. His voice echoed in my head, and air fled my lungs, leaving me gasping.
Blue and purple pillows. Thick rugs. Bare bodies.
Deeply set eyes watch me from a gaunt face. His tongue slides out to moisten his thin lips. His gaze flicks toward Gallagher. “Take her.”
“Delilah?” Gallagher bent over his armrest to pick up the phone. The image flickered, but I knew from the sudden hardening of his gaze. From the stressed creaking of his teeth as he ground them together. “That’s him,” he growled. “Where is he?” Gallagher touched the screen and the photo dissolved into disconnected streaks of color.
I blinked, forcing the jagged shard of memory to the back of my mind, where the sharp edges made cuts I would surely feel later. Seeing his face—looking into those eyes, frozen on the screen—had driven the reality home.
A terrible thing had happened to me. My wounds were real, and I could not expect the damage to stay buried in the graveyard of my memory. It would have to be dealt with eventually, and the start of that would be hunting this man down. Letting Gallagher avenge us both, where the furiae could not.
“Let me.” I took the phone back and clicked on the image to open the source link, without actually looking at the face on the screen again. “Oliver Malloy. He’s an executive in a company that owns a series of restaurant chains. His net worth is about twenty million dollars. A lot less than I’d expected.” Yet more than enough to rent six captives at the Savage Spectacle and pair them to “perform” for his entertainment.
I pushed the information away. Distancing myself from it. They were just words on the screen. Information unrelated to me, or to my baby, or to the family I’d chosen for myself, when fate had taken my parents from me—twice.
“Where does he live?” Gallagher’s voice was so deep I could hardly understand his words. The van was suddenly filled with his rage. Thick with it, like smoke, but rather than suffocating, I found his wrath invigorating, a therapeutic counterpoint to the fear Oliver Malloy’s familiar features had resurrected in me. The fear I tried to deny with every breath I took.
Deep in my gut, the furiae purred in contentment. Because she could not execute justice on my behalf, she celebrated Gallagher’s drive to do that very thing.
“His corporate bio says he lives outside of DC. About half an hour from here, on an estate that’s been in his family for years. It’ll take me a minute to get an address.”
Gallagher turned the key in the ignition, and the engine growled to life. Warm air blasted from the air vents, but began to cool almost immediately.
“We can’t go after him now. We have to make a plan. Let everyone know what we’re doing. We need to find out what kind of security he has.”
Gallagher dismissed my objections with a huff as he shifted the van into gear. “First of all, you’re overthinking this. Keeping people alive and setting them free are difficult tasks. Killing people is simple. I need only a shadow and a target.”
A silent thrill resonated deep inside me, and I tried not to think about what that said about me.
“And second, we’re not going there now. I’m taking you back to the cabin, then I will go after Oliver Malloy alone.”
* * *
As we pulled into the narrow gravel driveway, the cabin’s front door opened, and its occupants spilled onto the porch. “Well?” Lenore asked the moment Gallagher helped me out of the passenger’s seat.
“Sunday is definitely the day to strike,” he said as we made our way up the porch steps. “There was a skeleton staff—only a couple of actual researchers—and almost no security. They took out the trash at a quarter to five, and twenty minutes later, they’d turned off the lights and locked up.”
Claudio closed the door when we’d all filed into the cabin. “So we’re going in after they close, one week from today?”
Gallagher nodded. “Since we don’t actually know where Mirela and Lala are being held, we’ll need time to look around. We also have the option of disabling whoever takes out the trash and going in then. We wouldn’t have to break in that way, but we would have to disable any other staff members we come across.”
“Which means more corpses,” Zyanya said.
“No, it means more witnesses.” I’d already made Gallagher promise not to kill anyone who didn’t have to die.
“What matters is that it’s a school lab, not a government lab or a private collection. They’ll be more concerned about keeping the subjects in than keeping people out.” Gallagher pulled a chair out for me at the table. “We’ll take out the exterior security camera. Then we’ll go in and grab Miri and Lala. Quick and easy.”
Unless they were expecting us. Unless the whole thing was a trap. But he didn’t want to say that in front of the others.
I sank into the chair and Lenore set a glass of ice water in front of me. I thanked her, then waved Rommily forward and pulled out the chair beside mine.
She sat, and when her gaze met mine, her eyes were
completely focused, if red from crying. The oracle seemed to spend as much time in her head, trapped in her own visions, as in the here and now with the rest of us, but since she’d heard about her sisters’ capture, she’d been more reachable than usual.
“We saw the lab today, Rommily,” I told her. “We’re going to get Miri and Lala out next week.” I took her hand and squeezed it. “You and Eryx may have to share your loft space after that, but at least we’ll have them back.”
Hopefully unharmed.
“It is a bad bargain where both are losers,” she murmured.
A chill rolled up my spine. Her eyes were completely clear, but her words had the feel of prophecy.
October 4, 1986
Normally, at 2:00 p.m. on a Saturday, the only cars on the street in downtown Greenville would belong to mothers shopping for groceries and families on their way home from peewee football. But on that particular weekend afternoon, a procession of cars filed into the parking lot of the county courthouse, a forty-year-old one-story building that had once been the home of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Rebecca Essig and her grandparents were near the end of that solemn parade.
Grandpa Frank parked in the small lot to the east of the building, and as Rebecca got out of the car, her gaze caught on the front window of a diner across the street. There was a new sign on the window.
No Dogs or Cryptids Allowed
She’d eaten at that diner with her grandmother the week before. The sign hadn’t been there.
Down the street, taped to the door of the hardware store her grandfather spent most of his spare time in was another sign.
Humans Only
“When did that start?” Rebecca asked as her grandparents emerged from the front bench seat. Her grandmother followed her gaze.
“Oh. A few days ago. After the paper ran that story about cryptids being responsible for the reaping.”
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