Fury

by Rachel Vincent

  “I will never let that happen.”

  “You have to stop saying things like that without thinking them through first. I can’t have one of your promises getting you killed. We’re going to need you for a long time.”

  He seemed to think about that for a second. Then he nodded, still staring at that precious, sleeping face. “What do you want to call her?”

  “Something that means ‘light.’” Like the light she’d brought into our lives, in the middle of so much darkness.

  “Delilah, that’s perfect.” He stroked one thick finger down her cheek. “That’s exactly what she is.”

  “We should have bought a baby name book.”

  “Nonsense. What about Aurora? That means ‘dawn.’ Or Phoebe? That one means ‘radiant.’ Neve is Old Irish for ‘bright.’ Or Alina. That means ‘bright’ in Gaelic and Greek, and ‘beautiful’ in Irish. And she’s definitely both.”

  I could only stare at him. “How do you know all that?”

  Gallagher smiled. “I’ve been around awhile, and I speak Gaelic and Irish.”

  “You do?” I’d never heard him speak anything but English. Possibly because I only understood English.

  “From childhood. Before the war,” he explained. “Do you like any of those names?”

  “Alina. Bright and beautiful.” I stared down at her, and the name felt...right. “I think her name is Alina.”

  “Alina.” He nodded. “I can’t believe she’s here. A whole new person. Out of nowhere.”

  “Not out of nowhere,” I corrected, squirming a little with the reminder of my own discomfort. “Definitely out of somewhere.”

  “Of course. I didn’t mean to belittle your pain and effort. I just meant...yesterday, she wasn’t here. This morning, she wasn’t here. And now...there’s a brand-new person. Someone you grew, like a plant in the soil. All I know is taking life, but you’ve made life. You made beauty and strength out of horror and pain. That’s a miracle, Delilah. You made a miracle.”

  “I had a little help.” I was feeling generous, now that most of the pain was over. “A very little, but still...” I shrugged, and the baby squirmed in my arms. Then she began to fuss. “We probably should have bought a pacifier. Unless you know how to carve one from the souls of your enemies, or something like that.”

  Gallagher chuckled. “I’m afraid your work is not done. You’re going to have to feed her. Or else one of us will have to go out for more supplies.”

  “No. Surely this part is easy, compared to the last part.” Yet as I stared down at the front of my gown, I had no idea how to proceed.

  Fortunately, Zyanya came to my rescue, carrying a glass of ice water and a bowl of soup.

  “Thank you,” I said as she set both on the table. “But she comes first. Can you show me...?”

  “Would you like me to leave?” Gallagher stood.

  “Of course not. This is just another part of that miracle. The part that’s going to save us a fortune in formula and bottles.”

  Zyanya showed me how to hold the baby and helped me get her to latch on, and the sensation—the pressure—was strange. But also...amazing. Alina looked so content. So satisfied. Yet utterly helpless. Defenseless. Her entire life was in my hands.

  I’d never had a more wonderful burden. A more promising responsibility.

  When she fell asleep, Gallagher took her while I covered myself. Then I asked Zyanya to let everyone in.

  They filled the room, speaking in excited whispers, and while I ate my soup, they clustered around Gallagher, staring at her soft, pink cheeks. Exclaiming over her dark hair.

  “Quel est son nom?” Genni asked.

  “Alina,” I told her. “It means ‘light.’”

  “May I...hold her?” the pup asked, turning to me, even though Gallagher held the baby. “Please?”

  “Of course. But wash your hands first. Then have a seat in the chair.”

  Genni raced into the bathroom and scrubbed her hands, then came back and sat on the chair next to my bed. The others watched while Gallagher carefully put his daughter in the fourteen-year-old’s arms.

  Miri and Lala looked captivated by the sight, and even Rommily appeared to be completely with us, at least for the moment. But Lenore stood alone by the door, watching with a bittersweet smile.

  I waved her forward, and she sat on the bed next to me. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Happy for you.”

  “It’s okay to be sad, too,” I whispered. “Not every moment has to be one or the other.”

  “Yeah. I’m a little sad, too.” She laid her head on my shoulder, and I didn’t know how to comfort her. So I just sat with her. “It wasn’t meant to be, for me. I mean, if I’d had a choice, I would have kept my baby. But I don’t know how that would have played out. It would have been hard, without a father. And if Kevin ever found out...it would have broken his heart.”

  It wasn’t the baby that would have broken her husband’s heart. It was how the baby had been conceived.

  The furiae had already done what she could for Lenore. The man who’d ended her pregnancy without permission had subsequently eviscerated himself with his own scalpel. Nothing I said would have helped Lenore, beyond what the furiae had already helped me do. So I just took her hand and squeezed it. And together, we stared at my new baby.

  May 2000

  The calendar on the wall beside the chalkboard taunted Rebecca with its series of red X’s. There were only two weeks of school left.

  “Okay, guys, the bell will ring in a few minutes. Please pack up your backpacks—don’t forget we have homework in math and reading tonight!—and go back to your tables.” She smiled as the kids jostled for position in front of the line of hooks on the wall, where their backpacks all hung. Then she held up the fat red marker. “I’m going to pick someone from the quietest table to mark off today on the calendar!”

  Rebecca hadn’t thought they’d care about the thick red marker. Some years, fifth graders considered themselves too old for juvenile privileges like marking off the days left in the school year. But the 1999/2000 class was competitive. For them, it was more about being chosen than about what they were being chosen to do.

  “Come on, guys! Take your seats!”

  For the first time in her career—in her life, really—Rebecca was dreading the end of the school year. She looked forward to passing Matt Fuqua on to some poor, unsuspecting middle-school teacher, but Delilah...

  She no longer thought of Delilah only as her secret sister. As the embodiment of an idea that never had a chance to materialize—the Essig that should have been.

  Having spent the past academic year teaching and watching her, Rebecca now understood that Delilah was her own person. The product not just of her genes, but of her environment. Of the parents who loved her and the friends who welcomed her.

  Delilah was happy. She was sweet. She was kind. She was pensive. She was slow to anger and quick to defend. And, unlike Rebecca, she was not—at least in the eyes of the world—a survivor of the reaping. She was not a case to be studied or a victim to be pitied. She was not an orphan or a freak.

  By some miracle, the reaping had not touched her. Well, no more than it had touched any of her classmates, who hadn’t yet been sparkles in their parents’ eyes in August of 1986.

  That, Rebecca took great pride in. She’d protected her sister by making the most difficult decision of her life. The decision to let Delilah go. And the universe had rewarded her with this school year. This one nine-month opportunity to get to know the sister she’d given up and to have some kind of positive influence on the person she would become.

  But now that was nearly over.

  When a hush fell over the classroom, Rebecca blinked and realized they were waiting for her declaration. And that she still held the red marker.

  “Great hustle today, gu
ys. But Table Two, you guys were just a little faster and a little quieter than everyone else. Who hasn’t marked the calendar yet from your table?”

  At Table Two, Matt pointed to himself. Neal and Delilah pointed to Shelley Wells.

  Rebecca held the marker out to Shelley and watched while she drew a red X through Tuesday, May 16.

  “Okay, bus riders, line up to the left of the door! Walkers and parent pickups, line up on the right!”

  The kids chatted as they stood from their tables—actually, groups of four desks arranged in squares—and pushed in their chairs. Rebecca led them into the hallway, where her bus kids fell into the line of bus kids from the next classroom and that classroom’s walkers and parent pickup kids fell in with hers.

  The bus kids headed to the left with the other teacher, and Rebecca took her line to the right, out the west entrance of the school, to where cars were already lined up around the side of the building, waiting for the children.

  The kids who saw their parents ran for the cars, and those whose parents hadn’t yet arrived sat in a line on the sidewalk beneath the awning to wait.

  Rebecca did a head count of the fifth graders, then she headed to the end of the sidewalk, to join the teachers helping younger kids into their cars.

  Delilah, Shelley Wells and three of the fifth grade boys, all walkers who lived within half a mile of the school, meandered slowly toward Rebecca, headed for the crosswalk just past where the line of seated kids ended. The boys were in their own world, arguing over a game show they’d seen the night before.

  Delilah and Shelley were never in any hurry to get home, where they’d have to say goodbye to each other and start their homework. But halfway down the sidewalk, the boys got excited about something and left the girls behind, dodging errant second graders on their bolt past Rebecca and across the street.

  A couple of minutes later, Rebecca waved goodbye to the first grader she’d just buckled into a booster seat, and when she looked up, she saw Shelley and Delilah waiting at the crosswalk. When the first grader’s car had passed, they looked both ways, then stepped into the street.

  At that moment, some strange refraction of the afternoon sunlight seemed to envelop Delilah in a shining haze. Like an aura of brightness.

  When she looked away, shielding her eyes from the strange glare, Rebecca noticed a car driving through the parking lot, past the line of pickup cars, heading right for the girls. The woman behind the wheel was staring at her flip phone, trying to dial, and her windows were rolled up.

  Rebecca pushed past two first graders and stepped between two of the cars idling in line. The woman with the phone kept coming, completely oblivious.

  “Delilah, move!” Rebecca shouted. Only later would it occur to the other teachers, as they gave statements to the police, that she had only shouted a warning to one of the girls in the crosswalk.

  Delilah and Shelley looked up as the car barreled toward them, but instead of running, they froze, too terrified to move. Rebecca was the closest teacher, and the girls were too far away for her to reach. And as time seemed to slow, she noticed that the glow around Delilah grew brighter the closer the car came to hitting her. So Rebecca did the only thing she could think of to stop that from happening.

  She stepped into the parking lot.

  In the instant before the car struck her, Rebecca remembered the little oracle in the petting zoo. She remembered the grimy gray dress, and the orange, and the nursery rhyme the little girl had spoken. The rhyme her mother used to sing to Laura and Erica when they were little girls.

  The car smashed into Rebecca Essig with a thunk and the crunch of bone. She hit the hood of the car and slid into the windshield, and she probably would have survived with just a few broken bones. But then the woman behind the wheel screamed and slammed on her brakes. Rebecca flew off the front of the car and cracked her skull on the pavement.

  The children seated on the sidewalk were spared the sight by the line of cars waiting to pick them up, but the parents in those cars and the teachers standing on the sidewalk saw the whole thing.

  As did Delilah Marlow and Shelley Wells.

  Mrs. Turner, whose classroom was across the hall from Rebecca’s, shouted for the driver to call for an ambulance on her flip phone. As she knelt in the parking lot next to her friend and colleague, she realized that though Rebecca Essig’s eyes were closed—though blood was pooling slowly beneath her head—her mouth was moving. She was saying something.

  While one of the other teachers escorted two stunned little girls across the street, Mrs. Turner leaned down so she could hear Rebecca Essig’s last words.

  “Two little monkeys jumping on the bed. One fell down and broke her head...”

  Delilah

  Alina turned out to be a screamer.

  When she was dry and fed, she either went to sleep or stared up at the world with bright blue eyes. If she wasn’t swaddled, she’d swing her arms happily until her own movement startled her.

  But when she was hungry, or tired, or wet, or dirty, or needed to burp, she screamed. And she only slept for two hours at a time.

  Which meant that we all only slept two hours at a time. She was the sweetest, most adorable and consistent alarm clock I’d ever had.

  Because we had no crib, and the baby books advised against putting a newborn in the bed with her parents, Gallagher had cleared out a drawer from the dresser and padded it with a folded blanket, then set it next to me on the bed like a bassinet, so I couldn’t accidentally roll over my own daughter in the middle of the night.

  At first, he and I took shifts caring for her, so the other one could sleep. But because he couldn’t feed her, our shifts gradually became less about what time it was and more about what the baby needed. I was in charge of feeding and burping. He was in charge of changing and bathing.

  I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by his lack of squeamishness in the face of dirty diapers, considering that he regularly, literally pulled people apart. But I was.

  I was even more surprised when he turned out to have some kind of magic touch. Most of the time, he could put her to sleep with little more than a few laps around the room, cradled in his arms.

  And he was endlessly, miraculously patient. Which was wonderful, because after three days with a newborn, I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life, and still recovering from the physical toll of childbirth. I’d turned down repeated offers from Lenore to go into town and pick up some painkillers, but that afternoon, I broke into tears. Not the happy “I love being a mother” tears. The “I have no idea what I’m doing and my baby hates me” tears.

  “I’ll be back in two hours,” I heard Lenore whisper to Gallagher as I tried for the second consecutive hour to rock my daughter to sleep, without a rocking chair. “Let. Her. Sleep.”

  I wanted to argue. It wasn’t safe in town, and even though Lenore hadn’t been featured on the news, I didn’t want her to take the risk. But I was too tired to talk, much less argue, so I let Mirela tuck me into bed with a glass of ice water. And I let everyone else in the cabin take turns walking Alina around in the front room, until she went to sleep, too.

  An instant after my head hit the pillow, Lenore sat on the side of my bed. I groaned and glanced at the alarm clock, and was surprised to find that three hours had passed. The light shining through the window had a distinctly afternoon feel. I must have totally passed out. Yet my nap had only taken the edge off my exhaustion.

  “Here.” She set a bottle of extrastrength ibuprofen on the nightstand next to my water glass. “And there are three gel ice packs in the freezer. In an hour, you can sit on one, wrapped in a towel.”

  “Thank you.” I pulled her into a quick hug. Then I ripped the seal from the bottle of pills.

  “I also got two newborn pacifiers and some baby wipes.”

  “I’m sorry. That must have been so expensive.�
�

  Lenore shrugged. “I hit a new town, a little farther out than we usually go, and sold a sob story to a lady carrying a two-thousand-dollar purse and a lot of upper-class guilt. That’s part of what took me so long.”

  “Part?” I tossed three ibuprofen tablets into my mouth and swallowed them with a drink of no-longer ice-cold water.

  For a moment, she just looked at me, as if she weren’t quite sure how to say whatever she needed to tell me. “Delilah, it happened again. And you were right. This time it was soldiers.”

  “What?” My cheeks felt cold as the blood drained from my face. “Surrogates?”

  “Had to be.”

  “I was just guessing.” The fact that I’d anticipated the surrogates’ next move made me feel uncomfortable in my own skin. Suspicious of whatever connection drew us to each other and let me understand their thought process so well. “What happened? Where?”

  “It was at the naval academy. There were several high school groups taking tours. They went to the gift shop, and several officers walked in and just starting shooting. Then they killed themselves.”

  More kids, murdered by people they should have been able to trust. By people who should have been protecting them. The surrogates knew exactly where we were most vulnerable. And how to turn us against each other. “Survivors?”

  “None. Nearly three hundred fatalities, including teachers, campus employees and other officers and cadets.”

  I exhaled, and the weight of what she was telling me—the full extent of the loss—felt like stones being layered on my chest, pressing the life out of me. All those poor parents. Those poor brothers and sisters and spouses.

  “We need to do some extra hunting, or something,” Lenore whispered, in deference to the grim gravity of the moment. “It won’t be safe to go into town—any of the towns—anymore. Not even for me.”

  “Why? Lenore, what aren’t you saying?”

  She stared at her lap, where she’d been picking at a hangnail, and her reluctance to meet my gaze set off my mental alarms. “They’ve declared martial law in DC and the surrounding areas. The news said they’re rolling out roadblocks sometime overnight, run by the Cryptid Containment Bureau, in conjunction with the FBI and the national guard. They’ll be stopping every car and using this new blood test. It looks like one of those things diabetic people use. They prick your finger, and if they can’t confirm you as human in ninety seconds, you’ll be detained. Ostensibly for further testing. But we all know how that’ll go. And that’s not the worst of it.”