“I don’t have a cap. This baby doesn’t have a cap. How would either of us have even absorbed the blood, if it was the baby that made me kill?”
“I don’t know.” He seemed startled by the question itself. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see if you’re driven to dip anything in Malloy’s blood. Often instinct understands more than intellect does. That’s something humans tend to forget.” Gallagher’s focus dropped to the curve of my stomach. “But you are less human now than you’ve ever been.”
December 12, 1986
“She doesn’t want to go,” Grandpa Frank snapped softly from the bedroom down the hall. But as usual, he underestimated his own volume. Rebecca heard him perfectly.
“It’s just down the street, Frank. And sheneedsto go,” Grandma Janice insisted. “We all do. If we want things to get back to normal, we have to start doing normal things again.”
“A kid got shot yesterday, Janice. None of this is normal.” His cane thumped against the floor as he headed for the hall. “What’s the use in pretending?”
“We need to focus on the positives. Ninety percent of how you feel is how you look and act.”
“One hundred percent of your statistics are made up,” Grandpa Frank grumbled. But he gave in, as he always did, because he believed that even when his wife was wrong, she had their best interests at heart.
And, Rebecca knew, because he really needed a drink. The flyers tacked up all over the neighborhood had promised spiked eggnog and homemade “adult” apple cider at the Coopers’ annual Christmas party.
Rebecca planned to sneak a glass of her own, if she got a chance.
“You look nice, sweetheart!” Grandma Janice patted Rebecca’s shoulder as they made their way down the front porch steps onto the frozen, stiff grass. And Becca was pretty sure her grandmother meant it. In the nearly four months since her parents had killed two of her siblings and the eight weeks since the federal government had declared her six-year-old sister to be a Trojan-horse-style cryptid terrorist, Becca had stopped crying. She’d stopped feeling sorry for herself.
She’d moved into her mother’s old room and redecorated it with a little of the money from her parents’ savings account—which they’d signed over to her grandparents, to help with the financial burden of raising a teenager in their twilight years.
Rebecca had started watching the evening news with her grandfather and she’d given up on ever discovering the true identity of the little girl the police had taken custody of in her grandparents’ front yard. But at night, when she stared up at the ceiling trying to sleep, shedidwonder what had happened to the human baby her mother had actually given birth to, six and two-thirds years ago.
Together, Rebecca Essig and her grandparents walked down the salted sidewalk toward the Cooper house, which was lit up like an airport runway with blinking lights and plastic Santa displays on the front lawn. Through the windows, they could see their neighbors chatting, holding steaming Styrofoam cups and clear plastic glasses of eggnog.
While her grandparents headed up the front steps and into the living room, Rebecca went through the gate and around the side of the house to the backyard, drawn by the crackle of a fire and the laughter of kids her own age.
Several adults she didn’t know had congregated near the fence, around a freestanding bench swing. Their raucous laughter suggested they were each several cups into the eggnog. But in the middle of the yard, clustered around an in-ground fire pit lined with river rocks, sat several kids from Rebecca’s school, toasting marshmallows and hot dogs on straightened wire hangers.
They looked so happy. So normal. Maybe Grandma Janice was right. Maybe she really could fake normal until it became a reality.
For several minutes, Rebecca stood shivering on the edge of the flickering glow from the fire, unseen in the dark, listening to her classmates talk.
“She shot him in the face,” the redheaded senior boy said as he forced a hot dog onto his hanger, lengthwise. “Right through the driver’s side window. Just...bang.” He mimed shooting a pistol with one hand. “Dead werewolf.”
“His sister’s in my English class,” the cheerleader said, her dark ponytail sweeping the shoulder of her boyfriend’s letter jacket. “She said he had a flat tire. He just needed help getting it changed.”
“Well, how was the lady in the car supposed to know that?” the redhead said. “He shouldn’t have even been out in public. What the hell did he think ‘house arrest’ meant?”
The federal decree had come down in October, placing cryptid citizens on twenty-four-hour curfew, except for essential travel to shop for food or go to work and school. According to Grandpa Frank’s favorite nightly news program, more than 1.3 million cryptid employees had been fired from their jobs in the two months since the decree, which meant that many were now confined to their homes seven days a week.
The cheerleader rolled her eyes. “He was Christmas shopping. That shouldn’t get you killed.”
The senior shrugged and shoved his hot dog into the flames. “That’s one dead cryptid kid who was out where he didn’t belong. They killed more than a million of ours. As far as I’m concerned, we’re a long way from being even.”
Rebecca took a step back, intending to retreat to the front yard and hide until her grandparents had gotten their fill of the neighbors. But then her foot snapped a twig. One of the girls roasting marshmallows turned and saw her.
“Becca!” Sara Cooper waved her forward, then scooted to make room for her on the thick section of log she was using as a chair. “Grab a hot dog!”
Rebecca accepted the offer, though she understood perfectly well what drove it. Everyone knew what had happened to her family. They knew Erica had been taken and that her parents would be among the first perpetrators of “the reaping” to face trial. The kids around the fire pit weren’t being friendly. They were being curious.
But she would take what she could get.
She sat on the left half of the log and took a hanger from the pile near her feet. A boy with bright blue eyes passed her a bag of marshmallows and she took two, then impaled them on the end of her straightened hanger. “We have graham crackers and chocolate, too.” He pointed to a platter where the s’mores makings were stacked. “Help yourself.”
“Thanks.” Rebecca held her marshmallows over the fire, turning the hanger slowly so that they browned evenly. The blue-eyed boy held his too low, and it burst into flames. Rebecca stared at the burning hunk of sugar. Her brother John had always done the same thing, insisting that he liked them best when they were charred.
