“I would never let that happen. We’ll leave,” he growled. “We’ll go south. I’ll find a way over the border for us, even if I have to tear a hole through the wall with my bare hands.”
“There are too many of us.” I gestured at the front room with another sweep of one arm. “And most of them can’t pass for human, even at a glance.”
“We’re going alone,” he whispered. “I can’t put you and Alina at risk by chaining you to the others.”
“Gallagher—”
“I told you that if it came down to it, I would choose you over them. I will not argue about this, Delilah.”
And that, like everything else he’d ever said, could only be the truth.
“Fine.” I exhaled heavily. “But let’s give it some time. See how the situation in town plays out. We’ll stand a better shot of getting out of the area if they lift martial law. And until then, we’re safer here, with our friends, than on the road.”
Gallagher nodded. “You should get some sleep. I’ll stand watch.”
“We’re standing watch now?”
“I’m standing watch. And burying the body. No one else will get to either of you tonight.”
* * *
I didn’t sleep at all. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that, though Gallagher always told the truth, he wasn’t always right. And this time, he was wrong.
He hadn’t just sworn to protect me. He’d sworn to protect me so I could fulfill whatever purpose fate had bestowed on me.
If I ran from the surrogates, I would always be running, because they would always be drawn to me. And they would kill on the way. They would be like a giant, murderous arrow, pointing right at me. And at Alina.
One way or another, the furiae would get what it wanted from me. I could either kill the surrogates one at a time, putting Gallagher and Alina at risk as both the monsters and the authorities hunted us around the globe.
Or I could kill them all at once.
Delilah
The next morning was brutal. By the time the sun came up, I felt like the walking dead, and I looked even worse.
Gallagher seemed tired, but he insisted he was okay, so I talked him into going hunting with Claudio, Genni and Zyanya, since there were more of us in the cabin than ever, and we couldn’t go into town for supplies.
Mirela and Lala took Rommily out to look for berries, hoping both to supplement our food reserves and that being out of the cabin for a couple of hours would be good for their grieving sister. Which left Lenore alone with me and Alina.
She walked the baby around the bedroom in circles while I indulged in a long shower, then I took Alina into the kitchen to nurse her while Lenore made breakfast for us both.
When she sank into the chair next to me and set an omelet in front of each of us, I turned in my seat to face her. “Lenore, I need to ask you a huge favor.”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“It’ll be dangerous, so I feel like I should tell you that it’s okay to say no. Except that it isn’t. I have to do something. And you’re the only one who can help me.”
She gave me a nervous smile. “If this is your way of asking me to change a diaper, you’re leaning just a tad toward melodrama.” When I only exhaled, her smile faded. “Okay. What’s going on?”
“The surrogates are converging on us. Because of me.”
“Because of you?”
“Gallagher thinks this is my purpose. The reason fate made me a furiae. He thinks that Rebecca Essig’s sacrifice was the ‘how.’ But the surrogates and the second reaping are the ‘why.’ And I think he’s right.”
“Wow. So you’re, like, humankind’s sword and shield?”
“Something like that. Only honestly, right now I feel like I’m staring down an army, wielding nothing but a plastic spork.”
“First of all, that’s not true. I’ve seen what you can do. Second... I cry foul. Humankind doesn’t deserve a sword and shield. Or even a plastic spork. Not after everything they’ve done to us. You should be fighting for us.”
“Lenore, I’m not choosing humankind over cryptids. This isn’t us versus them. The surrogates are the enemy. And the only way humankind will ever understand that is if we show them that the rest of us are all on the same side.”
She nodded slowly. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
“Basically. And we can’t do that if I’m just killing them one at a time, out here in the woods. Unseen by anyone who would benefit from clear evidence that we’re fighting with humanity, not against it.”
Our omelets were growing cold, but she didn’t seem any more concerned about that than I was. “How can I help?”
“Do you remember that thing you used to do at the menagerie, after the coup? Over the loudspeaker?”
“Directing everyone toward the exits?” She shrugged. “I just gave them a little push.”
“And if you could push people to leave, you could probably draw them in, too. Right?”
Lenore cut into her omelet, but left the bite on her plate. “I assume we’re not talking about humans this time? We’re talking about surrogates?”
“Yes. Last night, you made that woman answer my questions. Which means they’re as susceptible to the siren’s call as humans are. If I gave you a microphone, could you pull them toward me?”
She frowned, her breakfast forgotten. “Delilah, they’re already drawn toward you.”
“Yes, but I need to amplify that. I need to get as many of them as possible into one place.”
“What place?”
“There’s going to be a rally next week, in support of outlawing cryptids altogether. I read about it in one of the papers you brought back. They’re only expecting a couple thousand people but the park could easily hold several times that.” I shrugged. “Rallies have microphones and speakers.”
“Yes, but what’s the reach? The surrogates could be spread out all over the country, and we’re not going to reach more than a couple of miles with a sound system.”
“They’re not all over the country. They escaped from a facility near DC, and they might have spread out a little immediately afterward, but for at least the past few months, they’ve been drawn here. Toward me. That’s why all the mass casualty events have been around here. And in another week there’ll be even more of them. I’m hoping we just need to tell them where to go.”
“Then what?” Lenore finally speared a bite of her omelet. “If you get them there, what’s the plan?”
I shrugged. “That’s not up to me. It never has been. This has always been the furiae’s show, and I’m just going to...let her loose.”
* * *
Gallagher could tell something was wrong, but he seemed to be assuming that my stress level was about the possibility that another surrogate could wander into our cabin at any moment. And about the fact that I’d agreed to leave behind all my friends and honorary family members to get my daughter out of the eye of the surrogate hurricane we could all feel winding up toward full strength.
I insisted that we couldn’t sit in ignorance in our cabin, waiting for the Cryptid Containment Bureau to find us. We had to keep abreast of the news, despite the risk, for our own safety. To mitigate that risk, Lenore went out alone, and she never took the highway or any of the main roads, to avoid the possibility of being pulled over and administered a blood test.
Twice, she came close, but she was able to turn around without being noticed when she saw a line of cars backed up at a checkpoint that had appeared overnight.
As often as she could, she brought back newspapers and screenshots of online news reports. She also brought milk, eggs and bread bought from country gas stations, rather than grocery stores in town.
The food was always near its expiration date, and the news was always grim.
A charter bus driver had driven his bus off an over
pass twenty miles from our cabin, killing everyone on board, as well as four people in the two cars the bus landed on. Thirty miles to our south, a restaurant manager killed more than eighty people in the span of an hour by serving a crystalline pesticide in the saltshakers at his restaurant. In the same town, a sheriff’s deputy had shot his boss at three in the morning, because he thought the sheriff was about to open fire on the inmates. People didn’t know whether to demand his head on a spike or hail him as a hero.
Gallagher read every word of every article Lenore brought back. He listened to every story she told about the increasingly paranoid and violent atmosphere in the cluster of small towns around our cabin. And while he and the others were absorbed with the daily dose of new information, I took the supplies Lenore had secretly acquired for me and packed them into a box I was hiding on the top shelf of the bedroom closet.
The night before the rally, Gallagher came in from his nearly hourly patrol around the cabin just as I was finishing up Alina’s 10:00 p.m. feeding. She’d slept nearly four hours straight the night before, after a big dinner, and I had high hopes for a repeat performance.
When she fell asleep in my arms, he took her from me and tucked her into her dresser drawer bassinet while I straightened my clothing, and when I looked up, I found him staring down at her. “She’s so beautiful,” he whispered.
“Yes. But you shouldn’t whisper while she’s napping. We don’t want her to become dependent upon silence for sleep.”
He turned to show me one arched brow. “Did you read that in the baby book?”
“Of course. It’s a gripping read. I highly recommend it.”
Gallagher scowled. “Fear dearg have been raising infants for millennia without the need of an instruction manual.”
“Yes. But you have not. Promise me you’ll read it, Gallagher.”
His focus narrowed on my face, and I realized I’d gone too far. I rarely ever asked him to promise anything, because I knew he had to keep his word. “It means that much to you?”
“Yes. Promise me you’ll read the book. This week. And that you’ll always be patient with Alina. And that you won’t kill the first boy who asks for her phone number. Or laugh when she’s learning to apply eyeliner.”
“That’s a lot of promises to make for a two-week-old, Delilah.”
I shrugged. “Chalk it up to postpartum hormones. I grew your daughter in my body. The least you can do is make me a couple of simple promises.”
He sank onto the edge of the bed next to me and slid one arm around my waist. “Somehow, this doesn’t feel quite as simple as you’re suggesting it is.”
“Just promise.”
“Fine. I promise I will read the book. This week. And that I will always be patient with Alina. And that I won’t kill the first boy who asks for her phone number—though evidently I’m free to scare off all the others?”
I shrugged. “I’m hoping that after the first one, you’ll get the hang of it.”
“Oh, also I promise not to laugh when she’s learning to apply eyeliner. Not that there’s any need for that. She was born with beautiful eyes.” He reached up and ran one finger down the left side of my face, from the corner of my eye to the corner of my mouth. “She got them from her mother.”
His gaze held mine, from just inches away, and in it, I saw all the things he wouldn’t let himself say. Apologies for what we’d been through, and promises he couldn’t keep that none of it would happen again.
I leaned in and kissed him.
Gallagher’s hand slid up the back of my neck and into my hair. His head tilted and his mouth opened and he devoured me with that kiss as he had with all the others. As if he might never get another chance.
This time, I thought, he might actually be right.
* * *
“You ready?” Lenore whispered as she pulled the bedroom door closed behind her.
I slid the stack of paper envelopes into the box at the top of the closet. “Almost.”
Morning sunlight cast a slanted rectangle on the floor of the bedroom, one corner of it highlighting Alina’s bare foot, in her dresser drawer bassinet. Gallagher and the shifters had gone hunting again, on a mission to find an actual deer and end the mass extinction of rabbits sweeping the forest surrounding our cabin. But Mirela, Lala and Rommily had stayed put. Lala had gotten poison ivy during their previous berry search and Miri was standing over the stove, making her a homemade poultice to ease the itch.
“Can I help?” Lenore asked. “What do you need?”
“Nothing. More time. An alternate universe to escape into.” I sank onto the floor in the sunlight and lifted Alina from her makeshift cradle, careful to support her head. She opened her eyes and began to fuss, but her objections melted into the sweetest hungry noises when she latched on to my breast and began feeding. I pressed one finger against her palm, and her hand curled around it. She held on, blinking up at me, as I tried to memorize her breathy, gulping nursing sounds. And the way the sunlight shined against her bright red cap. And how sweet she smelled, after a bath in the roasting pot, with a palm full of liquid dish soap.
I tried to make that moment last, but within ten minutes, she was fast asleep again, her mouth gaping open, a bead of milk trembling on her chin.
I blotted the milk with the hem of my shirt, then tucked her back into bed with tears in my eyes.
I was determined not to cry again.
“Hey...” Mirela knocked on the door, then pushed it open. “Are you—?” She frowned with one look at my face. “Oh, Delilah, it’s just for an afternoon! We’ll take good care of her, and she’ll be right here waiting for you when you get back.”
“I know.” I sniffled back tears and made myself set the homemade bassinet on the bed. “It’s just...hard.”
“I suspect it’s always hard to leave them for the first time. But you need a little time to yourself. If you’re sure this is safe...?” She turned to Lenore.
The siren nodded. “We’ll take the back roads. No checkpoints. And we won’t go in anywhere. She just needs a little fresh air.”
“Well, you’ll have nothing to worry about here. Just make sure you’re home before Gallagher gets back, or he’ll kill me for letting you out of our sight.”
“Thank you.” I took Miri’s hands. Then I pulled her into a hug. “For everything. If she gets hungry, everything you need is in a box at the top of the closet. The clean diapers are...well, you know where they are. You washed them.”
“Yes. We’ll be fine. Go fend off cabin fever for a couple of hours.”
“Okay. Thanks.” I hugged Lala, then squeezed Rommily for so long I thought she would start to protest that she couldn’t breathe. Instead, she hugged me back and whispered into my ear. “Phantom limbs.”
“I know,” I whispered back. “They still feel pain.”
I followed Lenore to the car and managed to keep it together until we rounded the curve in the narrow road that put our cabin out of sight. That’s when I started bawling like a child.
“Delilah.” Lenore pressed on the brake, and the car began to slow. “Do you want to go back? There’s got to be another way.”
“No. There isn’t. It’s just so hard to leave her.”
“I know.”
“But I’m doing this for her.” Because I couldn’t let Alina grow up in this world. I couldn’t let her life be about survival.
I wanted her life to be about living. About chasing dreams like butterflies, following wherever they led her with no chains or cages to get in her way. I wanted her to live without checking over her shoulder. Without feeling hatred and fear every time someone looked at her.
“Keep going. This is for Alina.”
It took us nearly an hour to drive twenty-eight miles, using back roads—sometimes little more than a wide trail cut into the dirt—to avoid checkpoints. Lenore and I both looked hum
an at a glance, but she wouldn’t pass a blood test, and if anyone made me take off my sunglasses and let down my hair, I’d be recognized. So we took it slowly and carefully.
In town, we drove through a fast-food place for a cup of coffee, then pulled into a lot at the back of the park, on the opposite side from where the rally was being set up.
Then we sat, giving the surrogates time to feel my presence. Waiting to feel that tug from my own gut. Watching the crew assembling the stage and the audio for the rally.
The event wasn’t scheduled to start until 4:00 p.m. We planned to preempt it as soon as we were sure the sound system was working.
A military truck passed the park twice while we sat there, and both times my pulse rushed so fast my vision started to look strange. Several soldiers sat in the bed of the truck, all carrying rifles. Four more men in uniform walked the length of the park in pairs, patrolling. But they never looked our way.
“So...what if this doesn’t work?” Lenore asked as we sipped our coffee, watching the closest set of soldiers walk away from us, headed toward the stage.
“I don’t know. I guess we’ll be arrested.” Or shot.
“Gallagher would tear down the world to get to you.”
“I know.” But I was hoping—praying—that Alina would keep him from making a fatal mistake. He’d promised to do his best to protect her. Which he couldn’t do if he got himself killed.
“Delilah, if this goes bad, I want you to run. But don’t come back to the car. Meet me in the alley behind the drugstore, and we’ll regroup from there. We’ll find a way back to the cabin.”
Fury Page 26
