Gallagher frowned. “Isn’t thatexactlyhow she operates? You’ve never really been in control of thefuriae, Delilah.”
“Yes, but it’s never felt like this. It’s always been vengeance in a moment of passion. If we happened to see some man hitting his wife, thefuriaewould make him punch himself in the gut until he ruptured an organ. But she’s never hijacked my legs andtakenme somewhere. She’s never outright killed anyone. And she’s never attacked someone I haven’t seen commit a crime.”
“Did he try to hurt you?” Gallagher asked as the van bumped over a crack in the highway.
“No. If he had, thefuriaewouldn’t have been able to act.” She could only exact justice on someone else’s behalf.
“Did he say anything?” Gallagher’s voice was deep with what I’d learned to recognize as anxiety, an emotion he only ever seemed to feel when I was involved. “Do you have any idea how he got there? Whether he knew you would be there?”
“He started to ask who I was, then thefuriaejust...grabbed him.” A sob caught in my throat. “It can’t be coincidence, though. She used me to kill two identical men. Something seems to havebroughtthem to me. Or me to them,” I amended, thinking of the pull I’d felt deep inside. “Gallagher, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the baby. But I’m starting to worry that it’s not thefuriae, either. I mean, the ‘how’ was definitely her—my hair took on a life of its own and I could feel her rage pulse into him from my touch. But the ‘why’...? I don’t have a why. What if I’m not the only one being used here? What if someone or something is using thefuriae—and using me through her?”
February 3, 1987
“Do you want me to go in with you?” Grandma Janice asked. Rebecca shook her head and slid her hands into the pockets of her stonewashed jeans. She’d been patted down by prison security guards and warned of the consequences if she tried to pass contraband to an inmate.
Surely actually seeing her mother would be the easy part.
Grandma Janice had visited at least once a month since the night her daughter was arrested, but Rebecca never asked how her mom was doing. She’d never asked about her father, though she knew that Grandma Betty had seen her son several times, mostly to work out payment for legal services.
Rebecca had never read any of the letters her parents had sent, either, though the bundle under her bed was nearly an inch thick now.
“Okay. I’ll be right out here.” Grandma Janice sat on a hard plastic bench in the open visitation room. Rebecca’s mother wasn’t allowed to see visitors out there. The parents arrested in connection with the reaping—Beccahatedthat term—were only allowed to see visitors, including their lawyers, through security glass.
A female prison guard led Rebecca down the hall into a long, narrow room. The left wall was made of security glass from the waist up, divided by a series of privacy screens to form a dozen small booths.
Each booth had a pair of telephone receivers—one on each side of the glass—and a stool bolted to the floor for the visitor to sit in.
“Third one down,” the guard escorting Rebecca said. “Your mother will be there in just a second.” She gave the teenager a sympathetic look, and Becca wondered how many “reaping parents” this prison currently had locked up. Hundreds had been arrested in Tennessee alone. Thousands across the country.
Rebecca sat on the stool and slid her hands beneath her thighs to keep from biting her nails. She’d kicked the childhood habit years before, but had relapsed shortly after the police came for Erica.
That wasn’t Erica.
At least, that’s what the FBI’s blood test had said. She wasn’t even human, so she couldn’t have been Rebecca’s sister. Yet it still felt like every member of her family had either been carried off by the police or by the county medical examiner.
On the other side of the glass, a door opened, and Natalie Essig stepped into the room, but it took Rebecca a second to recognize her own mother. She’d lost weight. She was wearing a prison uniform. And her face was bare of any makeup. But her eyes lit up the moment she saw her daughter.
She glanced at the guard who’d escorted her in, and when the guard nodded, she crossed the room at a jog and sank onto the stool across from Rebecca.
Her gaze roamed her daughter’s face over and over, flitting from feature to feature again and again, noticing changes. She seemed to be trying to memorize every detail, in case another six months passed without a visit.
Natalie picked up the telephone handset on her side of the glass, but at first Becca could only stare at her. Even when her mother pointed to the telephone and tapped on the glass. Even when she said Rebecca’s name with a question in her muted voice. With pain swimming in her eyes.
Finally, Rebecca picked up the phone.
“Becca, I’m so glad you came!” her mother said. Yet her eyes were full of tears. “Are you okay? You look like you haven’t been eating well.” When Rebecca only continued to stare at her, Natalie cleared her throat and tried another approach. “How... How’s school going?”
“How’sschoolgoing?” Rebecca spat the words out as if they burned her tongue. “That’swhat you’re going to ask me?”
“Becca, this is hard for me, too, but—”
“This ishardfor you?”
Natalie’s expression collapsed into despair and she burst into tears. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t rememberanythingfrom that night.” Natalie’s words spilled out in a torrent of pain and confusion, one syllable melting into the next while she clutched the receiver, as if she were convinced this might be her only chance to explain herself. Ever. “My memory’s one big blank from the time your father and I got home from the restaurant until I woke up in a police car in the middle of the night. Covered in blood. Your dad was saying my name over and over.” She sobbed and wiped a drip from her nose. “Like he was begging me to wake up. And I could hear him, but it was like hearing the neighbor’s lawn mower on Saturday morning, while you’re still asleep. I didn’t want to wake up. I think I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t understand until—”
“Until what?” Becca’s voice carried almost no sound.
Instead of answering, her mother bowed her head slowly until she was staring down at her own prison uniform. Her hands began to shake, and the receiver with them. Rebecca could tell that her mother wasn’t seeing the uniform.
