“Okay, Genni and I will be on the lookout for any unexpected scents on our run today,” Claudio said. “Again.”
The theory was that if I was being drawn to a victim, he must be close. And he must have left a scent. But so far, none of the shifters had smelled anything amiss in the woods.
I nursed my makeshift latte for as long as I could keep it warm, but by the time Gallagher lumbered out of the bedroom half an hour later, everyone else had woken up and I was on my second three-egg omelet.
The baby insisted she was starving.
“How are you feeling?” As usual, Gallagher ignored everyone else in the room until he’d made sure I didn’t need anything.
“I’m fine. Just ready to carry this baby in my arms, rather than my pelvic floor. And to sleep through an entire night without fighting the personification of justice for control of my own body.”
Eryx snorted, and I turned a weary smile on him and Rommily, where they sat on the window seat, which supported his weight much better than the couch did. “What? Is that too much for an expectant mother to ask for?”
Zyanya shrugged as she folded up the sleeper sofa. “I tried to keep my prayers centered on good health and two full years with my child, but to each her own.”
“Oh, I’m praying for those, too,” I assured her as my smile wilted. I couldn’t imagine how hard it must be for her to watch my baby grow—to see Claudio with his daughter—while her own children were still at the mercy of whoever’d bought them when Vandekamp had raided the menagerie.
“Is everybody ready for tonight?” Gallagher asked as he began cracking eggs for his own breakfast.
“Je suis prêt,” Genni said.
Claudio shook his head. “You’re not going to the lab, chèrie.”
“I am old enough and I want to help rescue Miri and Lala,” the pup insisted, using sharply accented English to drive her point home.
“I would not risk your safety for anything in the world.” Her father pulled her close and laid a kiss on her forehead. “And anyway, there isn’t enough room in the van for everyone, so we need you and Lenore to stay here with Rommily,” he whispered.
We could never be sure whether or not the oracle was listening to us—she seemed to be staring into the future more often than into the present—but we tried not to offend her by openly speaking about the fact that it wasn’t safe to leave her alone, in case she zoned out while she was cooking and burned the cabin down.
Genni looked disappointed, but she knew better than to argue.
Zyanya gave her a sympathetic smile, and Eryx patted her shoulder in solidarity on his way into the kitchen to fill his drinking glass—actually a one-gallon bucket—with ice water.
Gallagher sat next to me with his plate. “Are you sure you’re up to this? You haven’t been sleeping well.”
“I’ll take a nap this afternoon. Feel free to guard the door to make sure I don’t kill anyone.”
Gallagher didn’t smile. The others seemed relieved that I was able to look at my mysterious homicidal compulsion with a sense of humor, but he wasn’t buying it.
The worst thing that captivity had stolen from me was control of my own body. Cuffs and cages had restricted my movement. Vandekamp’s collars had literally paralyzed me. Oliver Malloy had used Gallagher against me. But the furiae’s hijacking of my body to commit outright murder was a particularly brutal incarnation of that hell and a vicious betrayal, considering that she’d been not only a trusted ally but a part of me for the past year.
“You can stay here,” Gallagher said as he cut into his omelet, still watching me.
“I’m not sure that’d be smart,” I whispered, eyeing his breakfast, though I’d just finished my own. “Neither Genni nor Rommily could stop me if something...happens. Also, I don’t want to be very far away from you or Zy—” who’d helped deliver several babies in the menagerie “—while I’m this close to going into labor.”
God, please let me be close to going into labor.
Gallagher nodded. But he didn’t look happy about it.
After breakfast, Genni sat on the floor with the whiteboard and one of the newspapers Lenore and Zyanya had found at an old-fashioned newspaper stand outside the post office during their last run into town. Newspapers were the cheapest print we’d found for her reading lessons, other than the novels we’d found in the cabin, which she’d already read.
“A-rayg-ned,” she sounded out as she wrote a word on the whiteboard. Her assignment was to read an article and write down all the words she didn’t know, to be looked up in the 1956 edition dictionary we’d found on the shelf above the fireplace.
Frowning, I stood from the table for a better look at her board. “Arraigned,” I corrected. “The g is silent.”
“Arraigned,” she repeated in her French accent.
I gave her a smile and poured myself a glass of juice.
“Slawg-ha-ter,” she murmured as she wrote another word. That one I knew without having to look.
“Slaughter. The g and the h are silent.”
Genni frowned up at me, holding a blue dry-erase marker. “Why do they put letters in the words if you’re not supposed to say them?”
I laughed. “That usually means the word originated in another language, where there are different rules and exceptions for pronunciation.” Her brows rose and she opened her mouth, but I beat her to the punch. “That happens in French, as well.”
Her mouth snapped shut. Then she went back to her newspaper. “Surr-o-gate.”
My hand clenched around my glass. I set the juice on the counter and crossed into the living area, where she was spread out with her things. Lenore looked up from her novel when she noticed me. “What’s wrong?”
“What is she reading?” I tried to bend and pick up the newspaper, but my stomach got in the way and my hips protested the movement.
“Here.” Lenore plucked the paper from the floor with an apologetic smile for the pup. She glanced at the headline, and the blood seemed to drain from her face. “Delilah, you may want to sit down.”
I groaned. “Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to get off that couch?”
“I’ll help.” She patted the center cushion, and when I’d lowered myself carefully, she handed me the newspaper.
Killer Cop Claims No Memory;
DC Remembers the Reaping
“Oh, shit.”
Genevieve rose onto her knees, peering over the top of the newspaper. “Qu’est-ce qui se passe?”
“Nothing,” Lenore said. But the pup wasn’t fooled.
“This happened last Saturday.” More than a week ago. I’d read about the mall shooting while Gallagher and I scoped out the university lab, but at the time, there’d been no mention of the reaping. “When did you get this paper?”
“Yesterday.” Lenore tapped the date at the top of the page, which said the paper was two days old. “What does the article say?”
I scanned the print. “The cop that shot up a mall food court last week says the last thing he remembers is clocking in for his shift. He woke up half an hour later with a hole in his shoulder and people screaming all around him. He says he doesn’t remember shooting. Or being shot by a fellow officer on duty.”
Lenore leaned closer to read for herself. “And people think he’s a surrogate?”
“Or that he was brainwashed by one.”
Genni frowned at both of us, and I realized she probably hadn’t heard much about the reaping, having been born into captivity long after it happened.
“The cop could be lying,” Lenore said. “He’s probably blaming this on cryptids to avoid a death sentence. What does he care if it causes a public panic?”
“He could be,” I agreed. But as I continued to scan the front page article, my doubt about that grew. “This says there have been five other mass shootings by cops
this year, and three of those happened in the past month. All of them within a hundred miles of DC.”
Lenore peered around my arm at the paper. “I remember reading about a couple of those at the café. Did the other cops claim memory loss?”
“They killed themselves. All five of them. Evidently the food court cop was pointing his gun at his own head when another member of mall security shot him in the shoulder.” I looked up from the paper to meet Lenore’s gaze. “If he’d gotten there a second later, the killer would have been carried out in a body bag rather than arrested. And he couldn’t have claimed memory loss.”
“What if he’s telling the truth?” she whispered. “What if it is happening again?”
“No.” I shook my head, but I wasn’t sure which of us I was actually trying to convince. “The reaping was brainwashed parents killing their own kids. It was insidious. The surrogates had been embedded with the families for years—raised from infancy—and the parents lived to suffer the rest of their lives, knowing what they’d done.”
And suddenly, though I’d known the details my whole life, the true terror of the reaping hit home for me for the very first time, as my own child stretched inside me, reminding me of her presence and vitality.
Nothing could ever make me hurt her. Nothing.
Yet all those other parents probably would have said the same thing, before the reaping.
I could think of no greater agony in the world than knowing that some monster had used my hands to take my child’s life, and the knowledge that the furiae was entirely capable of that lit a match flame of terror deep in my soul.
What if she unleashed me on someone innocent?
What if she were already doing that very thing? I knew nothing about her most recent prey.
I shook my head to clear it, refusing to borrow trouble when we had so much of our own already. “Besides, the surrogates were all rounded up,” I insisted. “They got caught.”
“And maybe they learned from their mistakes.” Zyanya sank onto the couch on my other side and read the headline. I hadn’t even heard her come into the room. “Maybe this is like the killer in that book. The one who threw his gun into the river.” She pointed to the shelf over the fireplace, at the worn paperback thriller we’d all read at least twice. “The surrogates are the killers. The cops were just the weapons. And until last week, they’d thrown all of them into the river.”
Frowning, Genni stood and took the book down from the shelf, as if reading it might explain what we were talking about.
“Oh my God.” Lenore covered her mouth with both hands. “There was also that teacher. With the milk cartons. She killed nearly her whole class. And a few months ago there was that nightshift nurse who injected something into the IVs of every patient on her floor, then shot herself up with something in the bathroom.”
“Authority figures.” My voice hardly carried any sound. “Instead of parents. The surrogates could be using authority figures this time. Anyone we’re supposed to be able to trust to protect us.”
“But how, if the surrogates were all arrested?” Zyanya asked.
“They weren’t actually arrested,” Lenore said. “They were just kind of...taken. And they were little kids.”
“Or maybe they just looked like kids.” I folded the paper and set it on what was left of my lap.
“There was a kid in the closet, wasn’t there?” Zyanya asked. “In that classroom? Didn’t you say he survived the milk box massacre because he was allergic?”
“Or maybe because he was a surrogate.” Lenore’s eyes widened as she caught on to Zy’s point. “There could easily have been kids on that hospital floor and there would definitely have been kids at the mall food court.”
I took a second to process what she was saying. That the surrogates could still be out there. They could still look like kids. And they could be using authority figures the way they used parents thirty years ago.
Or we could be jumping to conclusions just as paranoid and unfounded as the humans we’d seen gathered on the sidewalk in town, brandishing metaphorical pitchforks.
“I don’t know whether or not the surrogates still...exist,” I said. “But if they’re alive, they’re buried in a deep, dark hole somewhere. The US government would never let them see the light of day.”
“If they’re still locked up—or dead—how can this be happening?” Zyanya asks. “If it even is happening?”
Lenore shrugged. “A second wave?”
I’d heard that phrase before. When the police discovered that I had no telltale cryptid features, they had postulated that I might be a surrogate—part of a second wave of attack, since I was too young to have been part of the reaping.
The accusations had been terrifying and impossible to disapprove. But I found them even more terrifying a year later.
“That could be true,” I admitted. “But it might not be. And it’s the doubt, as much as the violence itself, that makes the situation so dangerous. If people don’t believe this is real, they won’t fight it. If they do believe it’s real, they’ll start looking for monsters in the faces of people they see every day. That’s how the surrogates got us the first time. Kids couldn’t trust their parents. Parents couldn’t trust themselves or their children. They made us afraid to go to bed in our own homes.”
“And now—maybe—they’ve found a new way to get to us,” Lenore said. “To make us suspicious of the people we should trust the most.”
“If we start seeing soldiers shooting civilians, I think it’ll be safe to say we’ve identified a second wave. And Zy could be right. Maybe this time they’re disposing of their weapons to keep from exposing themselves. But that’s a big maybe.”
“Well, thanks to that cop, if that’s what they’re doing, it’s no longer working.” Lenore tapped the half of the article that was still visible on my lap. Then she frowned and grabbed the paper, squinting at the small print. “You guys, people are starting to blame us for this.” She traced a circle in the air, to include all our cabin’s occupants. “Not just cryptids in general. I mean us, specifically.”
“What?” I took the paper from her and scanned the lower half of the article. “They’re saying that all of the police incidents have happened in this area, and all in the past nine months—since we escaped the Spectacle. Which is also true for the teacher and the nurse killings, though they haven’t made that connection. At least, not in this article.” I folded the paper again and rubbed my temples, fighting a serious headache. “People don’t just think we’re in the onset of another reaping. They’re starting to think we’re behind the second wave.”
October 1988
“Becca!”
Rebecca Essig turned to see Sara Cooper waving to her from the front steps of the school, clutching her backpack strap at her shoulder with one hand. “Wait! What about debate team! You said you’d give it a chance!”
“I can’t today!” Rebecca walked backward across the school’s front lawn, her own bag balanced on both shoulders. “I’ll see you tomorrow!” She turned around again and jogged toward the sidewalk, pretending she didn’t hear Sara’s objection.
Debate team was stupid. All they ever did was eat junk from the vending machine and argue with their mouths full. They’d never even placed at the district level.
Rebecca had much more important things to do.
Half a mile from the school, she turned left into the parking lot of a convenience store, where she dug a dime from her pocket and dropped it into the pay phone. She dialed the number by heart, and her palms began to sweat while she listened to the phone ring.
When no one answered, she hung up, retrieved her coin from the return and started walking.
At the next convenience store, Rebecca stopped and dialed the same number. This time someone answered on the second ring.
“Kubric and Crowe Law Firm, this is Tara speaking
.”
“Hi, Tara, this is Rebecca Essig. Is Keith in?”
“Sure thing, hon. Just a sec.” The receptionist transferred Rebecca’s call to another line, and she listened for several seconds while cheesy music played in her ear.
“Hi, Rebecca, this is Keith. Sorry for the wait. It’s been crazy around here today.”
“Does that mean there’s news?” She’d been calling her parents’ attorney after school every day for nearly a week, and so far there’d been nothing to report.
“Yes. And it’s bad, I’m afraid. The appellate court upheld the lower court’s decision.”
“Okay.” Rebecca took a moment to absorb the new information. She’d kind of been expecting it. Then she sucked in a deep breath and nodded to herself, mentally shoving the disappointment behind her. “So what’s the next step?”
Silence met her over the line. Then Keith Crowe, attorney at law, exhaled into her ear. “There is no next step. I’m so sorry, Rebecca. If you want, I can try to arrange a visit before they transfer your parents to the federal penitentiary.”
“Wait, I—” The graffiti scrawled inside the phone booth blurred in front of her as she tried to process what she was hearing. “You’ve been fighting for my parents for two years. You can’t give up now!”
“Rebecca, it’s not that I’m giving up. There’s literally nothing left for me to do with your parents’ case. They’ve been convicted, and we lost the appeal.”
“Isn’t there another court? Another judge? Another appeal? How can this be over? They didn’t do it!” They hadn’t meant to do it, anyway. “Everyone knows the surrogates were responsible. That’s why the government rounded them all up. That’s why they arrested every cryptid in the country. If they know who was really responsible, how can they keep my parents in prison?”
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