That afternoon, after her first day of school, Erica had come running inside to beg Rebecca for money for the ice cream truck, because their parents weren’t home yet. Rebecca had given her a dollar and told her to come back with a cone for each of them. But on her way down the front steps, Erica had tripped and split her chin wide open on the sidewalk. She’d bled all over the ground, the dollar bill she’d been holding and the little purple dress.
The gash was bad enough that Natalie’d had to leave work early to take her youngest to the emergency room, where she’d received six stitches. They’d come home from the hospital with the little purple dress in a plastic bag.
But blood or no blood, Natalie had refused to throw away the dress all three of her daughters had worn on their first day of school. She’d dropped it, still in the plastic bag, into the “keep” box, which was still sitting in the garage, waiting to be sealed and put in the attic after the Essigs’ back-to-school clothing purge. Natalie had intended to wash the dress, but then football practice, and ballet class, and meet-the-teacher night had gotten in the way.
Thirteen days later, that unwashed dress had still been in the garage the night Rebecca’s parents were arrested. A few months after that, the box had been sealed and stacked in the storage unit with the other “keep” boxes, where it had sat for nearly five years.
Until Rebecca Essig saw a drop of blood on a bathroom towel and had an idea.
Three spiders and another half hour later, she was down to the last two unopened boxes in the storage unit. Both of them were labeled Keep. Rebecca used her car key to rip through the packing tape and opened the first box. There, right on top, was the hospital bag, just like she remembered. Inside was the dress, still stiff with dried blood.
Rebecca grabbed the bag and locked up the storage unit without bothering to reseal or restack any of the boxes. She drove straight back to her grandmother’s house and locked herself into the bathroom with the dress and the book where she’d found instructions for contacting a faerie who’d taken a human child.
“This is stupid,” she mumbled to herself as she ran water over the dried-stiff hem of the little purple dress. “This is never going to work.” According to the book, the mother of a stolen child could get in touch with whoever’d taken her baby by nursing the one left in its place, then smearing a bit of the child’s blood on the mirror and stating her own child’s full name.
Obviously the first half of the instructions would be impossible, but Natalie Essig had nursed all four of her children. Mentally crossing her fingers, Rebecca took the wet hem of the little purple dress and smeared a streak of the surrogate’s rehydrated blood across the mirror. Then she looked into the glass and said her sister’s name.
“Erica Ann Essig.”
The mirror began to shimmer, like light shining on the surface of a calm lake. Her reflection stretched and warped, as if she were seeing herself reflected in a puddle. Then it disappeared entirely.
Rebecca sucked in a startled breath. She hadn’ttrulybelieved this would work.
Then a stranger’s face appeared in the mirror.
Delilah
The squeal of the bedroom door woke me, and I levered myself up in bed as Gallagher stepped into the room. Covered in dirt. “Sorry,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
“I’m fine.” I started to throw the covers back. Then I noticed that it was still dark outside.
Gallagher leaned against the closed door and unlaced one boot at a time. “The grave is dug and everyone else is asleep.” Rommily sobbed from the front room, and I gave him a skeptical look, which he could obviously see just fine without any light. “Okay,nearlyeveryone else is asleep.” Tiny pellets of earth rained over the floor when he dropped his boots. “I’ll clean that up. I mean it, Delilah. Get some rest.”
I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted to go sit with Rommily. I wanted to find some way to help her. But I could hardly hold my eyes open.
I propped my pillow against the headboard while Gallagher headed into the bathroom. He turned on the shower to let the water heat up, then stripped down to his pants and knelt on the floor to clean up the dirt he’d tracked in. I turned on the nightstand lamp so he could better see what he was doing.
Gallagher chuckled. “You know I can see in the dark, right?”
I shrugged. “I was trying to help.”
When he realized I wasn’t going to go back to sleep, he rose onto his knees with a sigh. “I’ve been thinking about that man from the cage. Clearly he’s somehow related to the other men thefuriaekilled. At the very least, they’re the same species, whatever that species is. And they seem to have been drawn to you.”
“He said he walked for days before he got caught, because he felt drawn here. To me, presumably.”
Gallagher stood, holding the muddy rag. “Days?He felt some kind of pull toward you from that far away?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t really thought about the distance, or the implied strength of my...draw.
“Did you feel it?”
“Not until I was right outside the door to that room.”
“And he didn’t tell you his name?” Gallagher asked. I shook my head and took a sip from the water glass on the nightstand. “Whatdidhe say? Did he tell you where he got that collar?”
“He said he was in a government facility that started using the collars a couple of years ago. Then last year—last fall—they just stopped working.” I sat up straighter. “Gallagher, I think the system at his facility was being run from the control room at the Spectacle. I think that when we destroyed the control room, we disarmed all the collars at that other facility, too. And they would’ve had no idea what was going on until their captives could suddenly do whatever they wanted.”
“Good.” Gallagher took his rag into the bathroom to rinse it out at the sink. “Serves the bastards right.”
