“What does that mean, another one?” Rebecca asked. “Another...murder?”
“I’m not sure. Just a minute.” Dr. Emory stepped out of the car and closed the door.
Rebecca tried to open her own door, determined to ask more questions, yet there was no handle. She and Erica were locked in. But the cops’ voices carried through the door.
“...call just came in. Four-year-old drowned in the tub. Parents drenched in bathwater.”
“And why do they need me?” Dr. Emory asked with a concerned glance at Rebecca and Erica through the closed window.
“There’s one surviving sibling. A kindergartner, found naked and soaking wet. Guys on the scene think he was in the tub with the little one when it happened. They think he saw the whole damn thing.”
Delilah
“Where were they arrested?” Stationed at the scarred, uneven table, which had been draped in black plastic, Claudio pulled the skin from the first rabbit with skill that spoke of experience, though if he and his daughter, Genni, had been on their own, they would have eaten their kill raw, in wolf form, in the woods. The shifters had brought the meat back to help feed the rest of us.
Lenore lined up the last of the potatoes on the counter, where Gallagher was on chopping duty. “In a town about an hour north of here,” she said. “Initially, Miri and Lala were held in the local police station’s cryptid containment cell—because we all know how vicious and deadly oracles are.” She rolled her eyes. “But before we fled the land of free Wi-Fi, we checked for an update on the story and the police had already handed them over to a research lab in the cryptid biology department at the University of Maryland.” She shrugged and began rinsing the carrots. “No trial. No court order. Nothing.”
“That’s how I wound up in the menagerie after I was arrested,” I told her. “Most states leave those decisions up to the police or sheriff’s department.”
Gallagher lifted the cutting board and scraped cubed potatoes into our big, dented stew pot. “UMD is just under two hours from here. Which means Rommily was right when she led us here. To the cabin.”
Although “led” might be overstating things a bit. It had actually taken us several days to interpret the oracle’s vision, which had eventually sent us to the general area, then to the cabin, and I hadn’t been sure we’d interpreted her correctly until this very afternoon, when Zy, Lenore and I had seen Rommily’s sisters on the news.
My gaze strayed to where Rommily was curled up next to Eryx, the minotaur, in front of the large front window, his huge hand slowly stroking her long, dark hair down her back. She was staring out at the woods, but her eyes—though not cloudy with a premonition—looked unfocused. I couldn’t tell that she was processing anything we were saying, or that she was even listening, and for the millionth time, I wondered what she was seeing, when she was obviously not seeing us.
Eryx, meanwhile, seemed to see and hear everything, which made the fact that his bovine face left him mute that much more tragic and frustrating. He glanced at the whiteboard Genevieve was drawing on in front of the unlit fireplace, and for a second, I thought he’d reach for it. But then he wrapped his free arm around Rommily instead, in silent comfort.
The bull could read and write better than any of the other former captives, other than Lenore, but his thick, strong hands had crushed every dry-erase marker he’d tried to use to communicate with us. Eventually, he’d given the board and the remaining markers to Genni, who used it to practice her own handwriting.
“What kind of lab are we talking about?” Zyanya asked from the couch, where she sat sideways so she could see the rest of the room.
“It’s a research lab, where they do biological studies and experiments in an academic setting,” I explained. “Miri and Lala are better off than if they’d been sent to a product testing lab, but not by much.”
“Okay, but that’s good news, right?” Claudio’s cleaver thunked through the skinless rabbit into the cutting block. “Surely Mirela and Lala will be easier to get to at this lab than at the police station. Or prison.”
Lenore nodded as she began peeling the carrots over the trash can. “In theory. I mean, it’ll be easier for me to talk my way past a university cop than a real police officer, assuming we even run into any, but the real problem is visibility. With Kevin’s conviction and the oracles’ arrest, we’re all back in the news again, and half the country seems convinced that we’re to blame for every human who commits a heinous crime.”
“There was a riot in town today,” Zyanya explained. “People think we’re responsible for that aquarium shooting. Or maybe for that teacher who served poison milk. Or both.”
“I suspect it’s both.” I shifted in my chair at the table to take some of the pressure off my bladder. “And it was more like a demonstration than a riot. Though there’s definitely enough tension for things to escalate.”
“Wait.” Claudio frowned at me from across the table, his cleaver in a loose left-handed grip. “They blame us specifically? Or cryptids in general?”
“The latter,” I told him. “If anyone knew we were here, they would already have dropped a bomb on the cabin.”
“It sounds to me like more paranoia about a second reaping,” Lenore assured him. “‘Don’t trust your neighbors. Report suspicious activity.’ People seem convinced that the bogeyman is coming for them, even though they rounded up all the surrogates thirty years ago. But paranoid or not, this tense fear is making it riskier than ever for us to appear in public.”
I shrugged. “Then I propose we not show up on the steps of the lab in broad daylight, carrying bolt cutters and wearing ski masks.”
The siren broke off a chunk of carrot and threw it at me with a good-natured frown.
“Seriously, though...” I tossed the carrot into my mouth and spoke around it. “Everything we do is a risk. But Rommily is family. Miri and Lala are family. We owe them our best effort.”
Genni looked up from her whiteboard and gave me a firm nod.
Eryx made a bovine snort of approval.
“I’m not arguing otherwise,” Lenore insisted. “I’m just saying...we need a pretty solid plan. And maybe we should be ready to abandon the cabin immediately afterward, because once they find out we’re in the area, they’ll knock down every door in a three-state radius to find us.”
