“Procreation is about much more than the attractiveness of one’s sexual partner,” he insisted with an obstinate grunt. “A redcap might take many lovers for the sake of attraction before he or she decides to procreate, but none of those relationships endure like the champion/benefactor bond. Attraction is fleeting. Marriages often fail. Parenthood is a brief state, and as much as thefear dearglove their children, we have them in order to give them to the world. It’s a temporary custody, to use your terminology.”
“So, when you came of age, your parents just...left you?”
“When I came of age, my parents were dead. As were my siblings. Ours was a devastating war, Delilah. And I fought it before I came of age.”
In fact, he’d only been eleven years old.
That was difficult for me to keep in mind because I had trouble picturing Gallagher as a child. As anything other than the force of strength and dark impulses constantly placing himself between me and danger. “But if your parents had survived, they would have just left you when you were old enough? You would have just left your own children when they turned eighteen?”
Gallagher chuckled. “Eighteen is a legal threshold, and that is meaningless tofear dearg. A male redcap is typically physically mature by fifteen. Unlike humans, who grow slowly, then age quickly, we spend the vast majority of our lives at physical peak.”
“Yeah, well, the male of the human species often doesn’t physically mature until around twenty, and emotional and mental maturity usually take quite a bit longer than that.” I ran one hand over the curve of my belly. “So are you just going to throw our child out when he or she is tall enough to see over the van?”
“Of course not.” With a sigh, Gallagher crossed the room again and sank onto the bed next to me, careful to preserve a thin slice of space between us. Since I’d healed from being shot during our escape from the Spectacle, he hadn’t once touched me without outright invitation. Not even to feel his child kick. He’d had no more choice than I in the act that conceived our baby, yet he seemed surprised and pleased every time I accepted his offer of a hug or a hand up from a low seat.
“Delilah, this child isn’t justfear dearg. And he or she definitely won’t grow up in the world I grew up in. That world doesn’t even exist anymore. We’re going to have to figure things out as we go, for this little one. Just like we’re figuring things out with...us. And if the past year is any indication, that’s only going to get more difficult and more complicated.”
The aching way he looked at my stomach, as if hereallywanted to feel the baby in that moment, made me tear up. “And you’re right. Itissimpler while the two of you are in the same place, but that won’t be the case for much longer. I’m still trying to figure most of this out, and that would be a lot easier for me if you wouldn’t put yourself—and the baby—in danger.”
I couldn’t think of any reasonable objection to that, so... “Then maybe I’ll go, but just wait in the van.”
He exhaled slowly. “Maybe we should readdress this once we actually have a plan of action.”
“Agreed.” He stood and I caught his hand as he headed for the door. “Gallagher, promise me you won’t pick me over the baby, should it ever come to that.”
“Part of my job is making sure itdoesn’tcome to that.”
“But if it does...” I squeezed his hand, holding him in that moment with me. “Save the baby. That’s what I want.”
“Delilah—”
“Let me make this easy for you.” I tightened my grip on his hand. “If you have a choice, and you let this baby die, I’m not sure I will want to live.” His eyes darkened and he opened his mouth to argue, but I spoke over him. “That’s not a threat. It’s not an ultimatum. It’s the truth. Now that I’ve felt her—now that I’ve imagined holding her and feeding her and watching her grow up—I’m not sure I will want to live in this world if she can’t. So there would be little sense in protecting me, if you can’t also protect her.”
“How can you possibly know it’s a she?”
“I don’t. But I object to ‘it’ as a pronoun for a child.” In greater society,itwas for monsters. And our baby wasn’t a monster, no matter how she’d been created. “Then there’s the fact that Rommily’s been referring to her as a girl for six months.” And if anyone would know, other than an ultrasound tech, it would be our beloved but communication-challenged oracle. “But stop trying to change the subject.”
Gallagher took a deep breath. Then he shifted his grip on my hand so that he was holding mine, instead of vice versa. “Delilah, my oath to protect you includes protecting you from yourself. Butpleasedon’t make me do that.”
Over a dinner of rabbit stew, we discussed our options for rescuing Mirela and Lala, and I used a few precious megabytes from the prepaid data plan on one of our phones to download a campus map and some pictures of the university lab they’d been sold to.
As near as I could tell, security at the lab was minimal, but as far-fetched as it seemed to me, we couldn’t afford to ignore the possibility that selling Miri and Lala to a low-security lab was a trap intended to draw out more of the Spectacle escapees. So I agreed that the next day, Gallagher, Lenore and Claudio—those of us best able to pass for human, other than Rommily and me—would drive to the university and do surveillance on the lab. After dark, when Gallagher would be better able to disguise his size.
Because even when people thought he was human, they tended to remember him.
When the stew was eaten and the dishes were done, I settled onto the couch with Genni to help her read a chapter from one of the old paperback novels that had come with the cabin.
Rommily and Eryx retreated to the loft, where I could hear her crying softly, and him trying to comfort her with soft, nonverbal sounds, and for the millionth time, I wished I could see what she saw. Or at least understand what she occasionally tried to tell us about what she saw.
When Genni started yawning, we all went to bed, and though in my premenagerie life I would never have retired before midnight, lately I valued rest anywhere and any way I could get it. I hadn’t slept well since early in my first trimester.
Could afear deargpregnancy even be measured in trimesters? I felt more like things had progressed into a fourth quarter.
Around midnight, according to the old alarm clock on the nightstand, the creak of floorboards woke me up as Gallagher stood from his pallet beneath the window and snuck out of the room. A couple of minutes later, I heard the van’s engine, then the crunch of tires on gravel.
I mentally crossed my fingers that he would find a suitable victim to satisfy the redcap’s bloodlust—someone who had earned a brutal, gory death. And that we wouldn’t need him while he was gone.
Hours later, the squeal of rusty hinges woke me again, and I opened my eyes to find that dawn had arrived, and Gallagher had come with it. Yet despite another night spent in a real bed—a luxury after months spent in the menagerie and at the Savage Spectacle—I didn’t feel rested.
