I could feel Gallagher’s gaze on me from the car as I stepped out of the restroom, my hands still wet from being washed because there were no paper towels in the grimy holder mounted on the wall. He’d wanted to come in with me, but I drew the line at him following me into the bathroom, and he couldn’t stand guard outside, where he would definitely be noticed.
I’d taken three steps toward the car when I felt a familiar psychic tug, seeming to pull me in the opposite direction. Toward the dumpster behind the building.
With dread weighing me down like concrete boots, I tried to just keep walking. To get in the car and let Lenore drive me far away from the dark urge building inside me. Yet I could only watch like a prisoner inside my own body as I turned and headed for the dumpster instead.
The car door squealed open at my back. I knew Gallagher was getting out, and that he was too smart to run or to shout for me and draw attention. But if he were noticed, he would be recognized, and he was too big not to be noticed in broad daylight.
With his heavy footsteps clomping after me, I rounded the corner of the dumpster, mentally fighting each step I took. I expected to find another anonymous man waiting for me, pulled toward me as I was pulled toward him, but instead—
I sucked in a sharp breath. My eyes narrowed as I studied her, trying to understand.
My own face stared back at me. Pale skin. Dark hair. Blue eyes. Freck—Wait. The face looking out at me from my own eyes had noticeably fewer freckles. As if it had been exposed to less sun.
“Elizabeth?” The syllables seemed to tremble as they fell from my lips. How was she here? Had the police realized she wasn’t me? Were they using her as bait?
“Who are you?” she asked, and it was like hearing myself speak. Not the way I heard myself in real life, with half of the sound coming from within my own head, but like I sounded on camera. The way everyone else heard me.
“I...” I wanted to tell her about her mother. Aboutmymother. About changelings, and thefae, and identities that weren’t so much mistaken as...tangled. Connected in ways I could hardly keep straight.
But then she reached for me, and in her gaze, I found that same feverish compulsion I’d seen in the faces of the men I’d killed. That hunger for something neither of us could understand, which brought them closer to their own deaths with every step they took.
And in response, that pull inside me strengthened.
Thefuriaewanted her, just like it had wanted those men. Which meant she couldn’t be Elizabeth, because Elizabeth was human.
Other than Elizabeth, the only other person who could be walking around withmyface was...
Erica.
I figured it out just as Gallagher rounded the corner of the huge trash bin. “Delilah, no!” He stopped cold when he saw us. When he sawher. But she didn’t even seem to hear him.
“You...” Erica sounded stunned. Confused.
“Delilah!” Gallagher whispered, and though I felt him hovering over me like a shield, he didn’t try to touch me.
“This...is all...your fault.” My tingling hand shot out, and though her eyes—myeyes—flashed with fear, she stood frozen while my palm landed on her forearm.
Something seemed to spark between us.
In an instant, her eyes dilated, though little sunlight fell behind the building. She flinched as her hand rose and she gripped her own throat, on either side of her esophagus. Then, jaw clenched, she pulled.
Gallagher lifted me out of the way, and the spray of blood missed me, other than a sparse sprinkling of tiny red dots across my bulging belly.
My doppelgänger made a horrific choking sound. Eyes like the ones I saw in the mirror every morning widened while her hands fluttered around her throat, trying to hold the blood in. As if she could just take it back.
But though she’d committed the act herself, the violence wasn’t hers to take back. It was mine.
I watched, horrified, and though I knew exactly who she was, deep down I felt like I was witnessing my own death.
“What the hell?” Gallagher whispered as she fell to her knees on the cracked pavement. Then she fell over sideways and her right shoulder slammed into the ground.
“Surrogate,” I whispered, clinging to him. Near panic. “Who else could she be?”
He dropped his hat onto the concrete, and it began to soak up the blood before the flow had even slowed. “You mean she was...?”
“Erica.” My grip on his arm must have hurt, but he didn’t seem to feel it. “We were right. She was left in my place. She killed my...siblings. She got my birth parents sent to prison. And she did it all wearingmy face.”
My face was the face of evil.
