Gallagher took Alina from me, so I could cover myself, then he laid her in her makeshift crib and retreated across the room to his chair in the corner.
“Everything. Or most of it, anyway. She must have. Rebecca grew up with the surrogate as her sister. She raised Elizabeth as her daughter. And taught me for nearly a year, until...”
Oh my God.
“Until what?” Lenore demanded.
“Until she died. After school one day, at the end of my fifth grade year. It happened right in front of me. This lady was driving through the school parking lot, too fast. She wasn’t paying attention. Ms. Essig shouted something. Shelley and I turned around, and the car just plowed right into her.”
“That must have been traumatic,” Lenore said. Gallagher was watching me with something unspoken behind his eyes. Something...important. But he wouldn’t say whatever he was thinking until he was good and ready.
“Itwastraumatic.” I accepted the stew from Zyanya with a nod of thanks, but the memory had chased away my appetite. “If the car hadn’t hit her, it might have hit Shelley and me. At the time, that’s all I could think about. How close I’d come to getting hit. But now...”
“She saved your life.” Gallagher’s voice echoed with a depth that was like looking into a deep hole. Like staring into the next dimension. “She knew who you were, and she put herself between you and death.”
Slowly, I nodded. “I think she did.”
But he was still staring at me with that look. Like he was waiting for me to understand something. Something...more. “She sacrificed herself for you, Delilah.”
“Yes, I think she did. For me and Shelley.”
“No.” He stepped out of the shadows, and I could feel the purpose behind each of his steps. Driving him toward me with some truth I couldn’t yet see. “She sacrificed herself foryou. That’s the event you were looking for. That’s what you asked me about all those months ago, when you sat in that menagerie cage, trying to figure out how you got there. How and why fate chose you. The universe saw the same thing in you that your sister saw. The same thing she thought worthy of saving, even at the expense of her own life. The same thingIsee in you.”
“Furiaesare chosen through sacrifice.” That’s what Gallagher had told me that night, in the menagerie.But not always self-sacrifice.“She made me what I am.”
“No. She loved you enough to protect you. Fate saw that same willingness to sacrifice in you and gave you the opportunity to live up to that potential. But you put the whole thing into motion,” he said. “The day you stood up for Genevieve, as a customer of the menagerie. That was the day you accepted your purpose.”
“That’s the ‘how.’” I stroked one finger gently down Alina’s cheek while her pursed lips sucked at nothing in her sleep. “But not the ‘why.’ What’s my purpose? Surely fate didn’t intend for me to hide out in a cabin while bloodshed all over the country goes unpunished? But that’s all I can do, now that we’re on the news. Now that they’re putting up roadblocks and administering random blood tests.” Even before that, thefuriaehadn’t avenged any unrighted wrongs in months. At least, not until the surrogates began to find me. “What am I supposed to do? Just wait until another surrogate wanders close enough for me to safely go after?”
“I don’t know,” Gallagher admitted with a shrug of powerful shoulders. “What I do know is that fate would not have given you this gift if it weren’t also going to give you an opportunity to use it. Until then, be patient. Be careful.” He sank onto the other side of the bed and laid one huge hand on our daughter’s tiny bulge of a belly as he met my gaze with a soft smile. “Be a mother. And try to be happy.”
Alina slept for a lifetime record of three and a half hours that night, then woke up starving and angry at two in the morning. I gently lifted Gallagher’s arm from my waist so I could feed her in the bed with us, and being sandwiched between them—with his firm warmth at my back and her soft warmth at my front—was the most amazingly peaceful feeling I’d ever experienced. I knew as I lay there that even if fate gave me a chance to go back and spare myself the pain and humiliation of captivity, I wouldn’t do a thing differently, for fear that I would never wind up there, in that one perfect moment.
When the baby was full, I eased us from the bed and returned her to her dresser drawer bassinet, which I set on the mattress next to Gallagher. He was snoring softly, but I knew from experience that he’d be awake the second either of us needed him. Even in his sleep, he was on alert. All the time.
In the main room, I tiptoed past the foldout couch, where Lenore, Genni and Zyanya were asleep, then stepped over Claudio, who’d rolled away from the front door and into my path in his sleep.
Overhead, the bed in the loft creaked as one of the oracles rolled over. Miri and Lala had filled the space Eryx’s absence left in Rommily’s life, as well as in the loft, and though sisters could never replace true love, I had to believe they were a comfort to her, in her loss.
Trying to be quiet, I plucked a clean glass from the dish drainer and ran cold tap water into it. I drained the glass, and as I was filling it for a second time, movement outside caught my eye through the window over the sink. I squinted, trying to find some meaningful shape in a nest of shadows cast by moonlight shining through the foliage, but the only thing I was sure I saw were limbs swaying in the wind.
I rinsed out my glass and returned it to the drainer, then was headed back toward the bedroom when the front door creaked open behind me.
I turned slowly, my heart hammering, and found a woman in jeans and a T-shirt standing in the doorway. Twigs and prickly stickers stuck to the laces of her sneakers, and there were several leaves snagged in her hair.
Her shirt bore a screen-printed high school mascot.
Though her pale brown ponytail and blue eyes were unfamiliar, I knew exactly who the woman was. “You’re a surrogate,” I whispered. It wasn’t a question, yet Ineededan answer.
“I’ve been called that.” The stranger cocked her head to the side as she studied me in the shadows. “What are you?” she said, and Zyanya began to stir on the sofa bed.
“Were you there today? At the naval academy?” She was dressed like a high school chaperone. A teacher, or maybe a parent. Someone the kids should have been able to trust.
“Guilty. But not in the regretful sense.” She gave me an odd smile, and with a jolt of shock, I realized I was looking at a mass murderer. The woman who’d brainwashed soldiers into opening fire on hundreds of defenseless teenagers. Standing in the middle of our living room with the door wide open behind her, as if she had every right to be where my friends and I lived. Where mydaughterwas asleep in the next room.
In my peripheral vision, Zyanya sat up. “Delilah?” Though she was in human form, she stood from the sofa bed with a cheetah’s eerie, lethal grace. “What’s happening?” she whispered as Lenore sat up on the other side of the couch.
“It’s okay. Stay back.” I already felt that familiar pull in my gut and the tingling in my fingers—thefuriaedemanding I put this surrogate to a violent end—but I was resisting the urge. This woman had information I needed.
