Erica’s eyes fluttered open, then focused on her. “Becca?”
“Shh...” She carried her only living sibling down the hall and across the living room and didn’t set her on her tiny, bare feet until they were out front on the sidewalk. “Come on.” She took Erica’s hand and tugged her toward the nearest neighbor.
“Where are we going? I’m sleepy, Becca.” Erica’s eyes were only half-open. Her hand was limp in her sister’s grip. And when Rebecca turned back toward the house, she could see a faint trace of her sister’s small footprints trailing behind them in the light from the streetlamp, in what was left of the blood on the soles of her feet.
“We’re going to Mrs. Madsen’s house, to use the phone.”
“What’s wrong with our phone?”
“It’s in our house,” Rebecca muttered as she reached over the neighbor’s waist-high white picket gate, to unlock it. The gate closed behind them as she tugged Erica up the steps onto the neighbor’s front porch.
Her vision unsteady from the race of her pulse, Rebecca poked the doorbell three times, and when she got no reply, she began banging on the door.
A light flickered on to her right, and Rebecca glanced at her own house to see that the front porch was lit up. Her father stepped out of the house. “Erica? Rebecca?” he called, and even from next door, Becca could see the dark stains on his shirt and pajama pants.
Terror glued her tongue to the roof of her mouth.
Rebecca pounded on Mrs. Madsen’s door again.
“Becca?” Erica tugged on her sister’s hand. “Daddy’s calling us.”
“Shh...” Rebecca poked the doorbell again, and finally a light came on inside the house, spilling onto the porch through the transom windows on either side of the door.
“Rebecca?” Her father jogged down the front steps, shielding his face from the glare of the streetlight with one hand. “Is Erica with you? What are you doing?”
“Please, open up,” Rebecca whispered as she poked the doorbell again.“Please, please...”And finally, through the transom window, she saw Mrs. Madsen make her way down the stairs from the second floor, thin, furry goat legs and narrow hooves peeking from beneath a purple robe tied around her waist. Light from the foyer fixture shined on two short horns curving out from her cropped gray curls.
“Becca?” a new voice called from next door.
“Mom?” Rebecca let go of her sister’s hand and jogged down Mrs. Madsen’s front steps, relief rushing through her veins with every heartbeat. “Mom, I thought you were... Get out of the house! Something’s wrong with—” She bit off the rest of her warning when she saw that her mother’s pink satin robe was soaked with a dark stain.
“Becca, come home,” her mother called. “We need to talk.”
Rebecca turned back to Mrs. Madsen’s door as her elderly neighbor finally made it off the stairs and clomped into the foyer, limping from pain in her knees. “Mrs. Madsen! Open the door! Please!”
“Rebecca!” Her father marched down the sidewalk, barefoot. “Come home this instant!”
Mrs. Madsen’s door opened. “Rebecca? What’s wrong, dear?”
Rebecca pushed past her neighbor into the house, dragging Erica with her and knocking the elderly satyr off balance. She grabbed Mrs. Madsen’s arm before she could fall, then slammed the front door shut, just as her father pushed through the white picket front gate.
“Call the police.” Rebecca threw the bolt on Mrs. Madsen’s front door. “I think my parents killed Laura and John.”
Delilah
“Trust your instincts!” a digitally amplified voice called out from about a block down, where a small crowd had gathered in front of a family-run pizzeria I was too cautious to patronize, even though the baby and I had been craving pizza for a month. “Humans and cryptids were not meant to coexist!”
“Well, that’s new.” Lenore leaned forward to stare out the windshield between the two front seats at the small town about a half hour away from our hidden cabin. “Not the sentiment. The...crowd.”
Zyanya slowed the van as we approached the gathering on the broad stretch of sidewalk in front of the town hall.
“That chill you get when you walk by a stranger?” the lady with the megaphone shouted amid the crowd of angry protesters. “That uncomfortable feeling when someone’s staring at you from across the room? Sometimes that’s nothing. But sometimes it’s your own instinct trying to save you. To tell you you’re in the presence of somethingwrong. Something that wasn’t meant to walk among us. Something that can’t be trusted. If the employees at the Baltimore aquarium had listened to their instinct, they might still be alive today.”
“I call bullshit,” Lenore whispered as we drove past the cluster of about a hundred people, as if anyone could hear us with the windows rolled up. “They can’t blame us every time some psycho walks into a building with a loaded gun.” She and Zy avoided looking directly at the crowd, for fear that they’d be recognized as cryptids, but I was afraid it’d look more suspicious if we all three ignored the crowd. So I watched from behind the fragile shield of my sunglasses.
“Of course they can blame us.” Zy shrugged. “They’ve been doing that since the reaping.”
“They’ve been doing it longer than that,” I said. “But it’s only been supported by legislation since then.”
