“Could she be some kind of shifter?” I wondered aloud. “Orfae, glamoured to look like me?”
“Why would anyone choose to wear the face of a woman wanted by the police?” Zyanya asked.
“Another valid point.” I squinted at the picture again. “But it’s not just her face. It looks like she’s around my height. And it’s hard to tell through the jail uniform, but she seems to be built just like I was before my million-month pregnancy. And she’s evidently been living in Oklahoma since long before I was sold into the menagerie, so it’s not like she’s just trying on my face for the notoriety.”
“Does it say what her ‘alias’ is?” Lala plopped onto the closest couch cushion and leaned around Zy to stare at me.
I scrolled through the article again, in case I’d just missed that information. “No.”
“Yes, it does.” Lenore crunched into a carrot she was peeling for what would surely become yet another batch of rabbit stew. Ireallywanted fried chicken. And mashed potatoes with spicy gravy. And buttered biscuits. “Check out the next article.”
I swiped to the next screenshot, where I discovered even more pictures and a few personal details about my doppelgänger. “Elizabeth Essig.” I zoomed in on the picture, which appeared to have been taken from a social media profile. In that moment I would have given one of my pinkie fingers for a Wi-Fi connection. “This image of her profile says she goes by ‘Beth,’ and she’s a year younger than I am, though she doesn’t list a month or day. No kids. Never married. And she’s a teacher at an elementary school.”
“Not anymore,” Lenore said. “Not after being arrested as a cryptid.”
I couldn’t look away from the face on my screen. “Whoever she is, she doesn’t deserve this.”
“Have you ever met her?” Claudio dropped the skinned rabbit onto a huge butcher block and grabbed the cleaver. “Do you know anyone named Elizabeth?”
“No. I don’t know any Beths, either.”
“You do knowofsomeone named Elizabeth,” Gallagher said, and his steady eye contact said he was waiting for me to remember something.
“I don’t—” Then, suddenly, the memory was there.
My mother, in one of the interrogation rooms at the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. Telling Sheriff Pennington about her daughter. Herrealdaughter, who’d been exchanged for me when she was still an infant.
Elizabeth.
“Oh my God.” My hand clenched around the phone. “She looks like me, because sheisme. Or...maybe I’m her.”
“What?” Lenore’s chopping knife stilled. Zy, Miri and Lala wore identical confused expressions.
“Delilah was a changeling,” Gallagher explained. “At about a month old, she was exchanged for a baby named Elizabeth.”
I couldn’t look away from the image still centered on the screen. Was Elizabeth Essig the woman I was supposed to be?
“So, does she look like you, or do you look like her?” Claudio asked. “Was one of you glamoured? Or were you exchanged because you already looked alike?”
“Peut-être qu’ils sont jumeaux,”Genni said. “Twins.” She pointed to one of the books on the shelf over the fireplace. “I read a book about two girls who didn’t know they were twins.”
“LikeThe Parent Trap!” Lenore laughed.
I gave Genni a smile. “Great idea, but I’m not a twin. Not that I know of, anyway.” I frowned. “At least, Elizabeth isn’t a twin.” Unless my mother had left out a huge part of her story. “But I have no idea why we would still look alike, twenty-six years after being exchanged. Ideas?” I aimed the question at Gallagher. “Is there some kind of glamour that lasts a lifetime?”
He shrugged. “Glamour lasts as long as it’s being cast. But I don’t know of anyfaethat can cast glamour on another person. Which means that either you’re casting it on yourself, she’s casting it onherself or this isn’t glamour. Or there’s a species out there with abilities I’ve never heard of.” Another shrug. “None of those possibilities are likely. But the last two are the least unlikely.”
It took me a moment to puzzle through his answer. “You know, it’s okay to just say ‘I don’t know’ when the sentiment is appropriate.” I pressed the button on the side of the phone to put the screen in sleep mode. “What if Sheriff Pennington was right? What if Iama surrogate? I replaced a kidnapped baby, just like they did.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible.” Gallagher stood and pushed his chair out. “You were born four years after the reaping. A full decade after the surrogates were born. And not all changelings are surrogates. Certain species offaehave been exchanging their young with other people’s for generations without ever committing mass slaughter.”
“And if I may state the obvious,” Mirela added. “You’ve never made people kill their own children.”
“But Ihavemade people kill themselves. And if Rommily’s right, I’ll do it again.” The very memory of her dream gave me chills.
“Delilah, that’s not you.” The cabin shuddered beneath Gallagher’s steps as he crossed the room and settled next to me on the window seat. “That’s thefuriae. And what she’s doing—mystifying though it may be—is nothing like the reaping.”
“What if that’s because the reaping has evolved?” I took his hand, a physical appeal for him to take my suspicion seriously. “What if a second wave is already here, and it looks different than the first wave, because the surrogates got smarter. What if I’m a part of that second wave?”
