“The manhunt is over? What the hell does that mean?” Gallagher’s growl echoed in my head as I gripped Lenore’s phone, reading the headline over and over.
“They think they caught Delilah, but obviously they have the wrong woman. It’ssostrange. Zoom in.” Lenore was practically bouncing on her toes behind my chair, and the amusement emanating from the siren’s voice made me want to laugh, though I found nothing funny in the idea that some poor innocent woman had been arrested in my place. “I took several screenshots. You can read the whole story. And there are pictures of the cops arresting ‘you’!”
“Yet somehow here I sit, mysteriously handcuff and jail-cell free.”
“I know. You have a doppelgänger. Seriously. She looks just like you! Only with better hair.”
I twisted to glare up at her, still fighting a totally inappropriate urge to smile as the siren’s amusement rolled over me, along with her voice. “It’s not like I’ve had access to a salon in the past year.”
“What’s going on?” Lala bounded downstairs from the loft, where she’d evidently been napping.
“It appears that the police have arrested Delilah’s lookalike in...” Miri leaned over my shoulder to read the first line of the article. “Oklahoma.”
“That’s weird. I’m from Oklahoma.” Standing, with the phone, I zoomed in on the text as I headed for the padded window seat overlooking the largely grassless front yard. And Eryx’s fresh grave.
“Hey, we can’t read over your shoulder from there,” Zyanya complained.
But I wanted a little privacy with the story of my arrest before I shared it with everyone else. I scrolled down until I found pictures.
Lenore was right. Whoever this woman was, she lookedexactlylike me, but with better hair. And actual makeup. And a much less pregnant silhouette.
“Who is she?” Zy perched on the arm of the couch, impatience on display as clearly as her golden cheetah eyes.
I scrolled back up to the text of the article. “According to this, she’s Delilah Marlow, long-time resident of a town about two hours from where I grew up. It says she’s been living under an alias there for years.” I looked up with a frown. “Which makes no sense, because the police know for a fact that, until last year, I was living in Franklin, Oklahoma, under my own name.” As evidenced by my lease, my car payment, my employment record and the eyewitness accounts of everyone I’d known. “I understand that they have to investigate someone who matches my physical description, outdated though that is.” I ran one hand over my baby bulge. “But how are they possibly explaining the conflicting information?”
“No idea. The whole thing is so bizarre,” Lenore said.
“What are we going to do?” Miri stood from her chair at the table when Claudio began spreading a sheet of plastic over it, preparing to skin another rabbit. “We can’t just let her rot in jail.”
“She won’t.” I scrolled back to the top of the article to start reading again. “She shouldn’t have any trouble proving she was somewhere else during the time I was a captive in the menagerie. Then at the Spectacle. Though I can’t imagine her life will get any easier, now that people know she looks just like a notorious ‘cryptid’ fugitive.”
When I’d been “outed,” I’d lost every friend I’d ever had.No onehad tried to help me, except my mother. And she’d paid for that with her life.
Mirela looked skeptical. “But if she looks as much like you in person as she does in those pictures, even if she has an alibi, they’re going to assume she has some connection to you.”
“Probably.” I felt guilty thinking about how much trouble that poor woman could be in, just because she looked like me. “But I’m assuming she’s human, and her blood test will tell them that.”
Gallagher snorted. “For all the good that did you.”
“Fair point. But with any luck, no one’s seen her grow claws and gravity-resistant hair. If that, plus an alibi, don’t help her, nothing I could say or do would help, either.”
Lala looked openly dubious.
“Fine, if I were to turn myself in, they might believe they arrested the wrong woman. But they wouldn’t let her go. Mirela’s right. They’re going to believe that if she looks that much like me, she’s somehow involved with us. Turning myself in would only mean puttingbothof us in captivity, and increasing the risk of the rest of you being caught.” I turned to Gallagher, one hand on the curve of my belly. “Ican’tdo that to our child.” No matter how guilty I felt about the utter destruction of that other woman’s life.
And the truth was that I wouldn’t, even if turning myself in would set her free. If I had to choose between a stranger and my baby, my baby would win every time.
“I wouldn’t let you even if you wanted to,” he assured me. “Letting you put yourself in danger would go against my oath to protect you.”
“So, who do you think she is?” Claudio asked.
“I have no idea.” The article contained very little actual information, so I scrolled back down to the pictures and zoomed in again. It was bizarre to see myself in handcuffs. Being stuffed into the back of a familiar cryptid containment van. Wearing an orange inmate uniform.
It was like going back in time to the day I was arrested, and watching from outside my own body.
When I looked up, I found Gallagher studying me. “What? Do you know something about this?” He’d known I was afuriaebefore I knew, and he wouldn’t hesitate to keep something from me if he thought that would be in my best interest.
“No.”
