“I don’t remember making any agreement. Last week, I woke up missing two months’ worth of memories.”
“You’re missing...?” She turned a fiery gaze on her husband, hands on her narrow hips. “I told you there would be long-term damage. She’s not a cryptid, Willem. You can’t just go plucking things from her brain and expect her mind to remain intact!”
“There’s no way the girls accidentally took two entire months from her memory.” Vandekamp sank onto the edge of his desk again. “That’s not how it works. Someone did this intentionally.”
“Well, I had nothing to do with it,” his wife insisted. “Her memory loss doesn’t benefit me if she doesn’t remember our agreement.”
The truth was that I couldn’t see how my memory loss benefited me either. Had I meant to erase the recollection of whatever deal I’d made with her, or was that another unintended casualty of my mass memory wipe?
“What did you agree to?” I demanded.
“To let the pregnancy continue, of course.” Tabitha frowned at her husband. “Is she paralyzed?” She dug a remote from her pocket and pressed a button over his objections. Feeling returned to my chest and stomach, then spread with a tingling sensation to my limbs, and I exhaled in relief. “You can’t do that. We don’t know what kind of effect that has on the baby.”
“Why do you care?” In my mind, I saw the young nymph Magnolia fall to her knees in the dorm, weak from both her unwanted medical procedure and her brutal loss. “Why protect my baby, when you have all the others terminated?”
“Because the others weren’tbabies. They were foals or colts or puppies. Animals that may as well have been born in a barn. You’re different, Delilah.” She pulled the extra guest chair closer and sat in it, putting herself at eye level with me, as if we were going to have a deep, reaffirming girl chat. “You’re human. We’ve had that verified with test after test. We’ve had you examined.”
I’d been examined?
“At first, I couldn’t figure out how that was possible. Then the oracle told me that you were going to have a baby, and I realized that you were given to us, just like thefuriaewas given to you.”
“She wasn’t given,” Vandekamp insisted. “I caught her myself. She and all the others were payment for the service I provided the Metzgers.”
His wife frowned at him, then turned back to me. “My point is that this is fate. How else can you explain Willem stumbling across a monster who’s one hundred percent human. For all we know, there isn’t another like you in the entire world. And then you got pregnant, just like the oracle said you would, and it all started to make sense.”
“What oracle?” I asked. “Mirela? Lala?”
“No, the middle one. The one who doesn’t talk much.”
“Rommily.”Shit.I closed my eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. “What did she say, exactly? And I meanexactly.”
“I don’t remember the specific words, but she said something about fury. I thought she was talking about anger until Willem told me about your calling.”
“What else?” Vandekamp said from his perch on the edge of his desk.
“She said fate’s bastard. That’s your baby, obviously, since you’re not married.”
No, fate’s bastard was me, not my unborn child. Rommily had called me that before. It meant “orphan.” But I could see her confusion. “What else did she say?”
“Something about a knife. No, a scalpel. And a belly full of blood.”
I groaned, and when Vandekamp’s gaze met mine, I knew he’d come to the same conclusion.
Tabitha was oblivious. “I assume that means you’ll need a cesarean. Which is no big deal, from what I’ve read...” Her words faded into nothing when she noticed that her husband and I were both staring at her. “What?”
“Rommily is broken, for lack of a better term,” I explained. “Death is just about the only thing she can predict.”
Tabitha smoothed her knee-length gray pencil skirt with one hand. “What does that mean?”
“Dr. Hill just sliced open his own stomach with a scalpel after making physical contact with Delilah,” Vandekamp told her. “Rommily wasn’t predicting Delilah’s pregnancy. She was predicting Dr. Hill’s death by self-evisceration.”
Tabitha blinked. Then she blinked again. “No.” She shook her head, and a strand of hair fell from her neat French twist. “That’s a coincidence.” She smoothed her hair back and sat straighter, and I could practically see her pushing a mental reset button. “What matters is that you’re here and you’re pregnant and that is very fortunate for you. If you’d gotten pregnant anywhere else, your baby would be born in chains, even if it turns out to be human, because no one else understands what you really are. But we understand.” She turned to her husband, evidently expecting some sign of affirmation, but he seemed at a loss for words.
“Meaning what? You’re going to save my baby? How? Throw it into foster care?” As horrified as I was by the thought, wasn’t that better than what I could offer the poor child?
But Tabitha only stared at me, and the look in her eyes made my skin crawl. “You really don’t remember, do you?”
“Remember what?” Vandekamp asked.
