“And if you could push people to leave, you could probably draw them in, too. Right?”
Lenore cut into her omelet, but left the bite on her plate. “I assume we’re not talking about humans this time? We’re talking about surrogates?”
“Yes. Last night, you made that woman answer my questions. Which means they’re as susceptible to the siren’s call as humans are. If I gave you a microphone, could you pull them toward me?”
She frowned, her breakfast forgotten. “Delilah, they’re already drawn toward you.”
“Yes, but I need to amplify that. I need to get as many of them as possible into one place.”
“What place?”
“There’s going to be a rally next week, in support of outlawing cryptids altogether. I read about it in one of the papers you brought back. They’re only expecting a couple thousand people but the park could easily hold several times that.” I shrugged. “Rallies have microphones and speakers.”
“Yes, but what’s the reach? The surrogates could be spread out all over the country, and we’re not going to reach more than a couple of miles with a sound system.”
“They’re not all over the country. They escaped from a facility near DC, and they might have spread out a little immediately afterward, but for at least the past few months, they’ve been drawn here. Toward me. That’s why all the mass casualty events have been around here. And in another week there’ll be even more of them. I’m hoping we just need to tell them where to go.”
“Then what?” Lenore finally speared a bite of her omelet. “If you get them there, what’s the plan?”
I shrugged. “That’s not up to me. It never has been. This has always been thefuriae’s show, and I’m just going to...let her loose.”
Gallagher could tell something was wrong, but he seemed to be assuming that my stress level was about the possibility that another surrogate could wander into our cabin at any moment. And about the fact that I’d agreed to leave behind all my friends and honorary family members to get my daughter out of the eye of the surrogate hurricane we could all feel winding up toward full strength.
I insisted that we couldn’t sit in ignorance in our cabin, waiting for the Cryptid Containment Bureau to find us. We had to keep abreast of the news, despite the risk, for our own safety. To mitigate that risk, Lenore went out alone, and she never took the highway or any of the main roads, to avoid the possibility of being pulled over and administered a blood test.
Twice, she came close, but she was able to turn around without being noticed when she saw a line of cars backed up at a checkpoint that had appeared overnight.
As often as she could, she brought back newspapers and screenshots of online news reports. She also brought milk, eggs and bread bought from country gas stations, rather than grocery stores in town.
The food was always near its expiration date, and the news was always grim.
A charter bus driver had driven his bus off an overpass twenty miles from our cabin, killing everyone on board, as well as four people in the two cars the bus landed on. Thirty miles to our south, a restaurant manager killed more than eighty people in the span of an hour by serving a crystalline pesticide in the saltshakers at his restaurant. In the same town, a sheriff’s deputy had shot his boss at three in the morning, because he thought the sheriff was about to open fire on the inmates. People didn’t know whether to demand his head on a spike or hail him as a hero.
Gallagher read every word of every article Lenore brought back. He listened to every story she told about the increasingly paranoid and violent atmosphere in the cluster of small towns around our cabin. And while he and the others were absorbed with the daily dose of new information, I took the supplies Lenore had secretly acquired for me and packed them into a box I was hiding on the top shelf of the bedroom closet.
The night before the rally, Gallagher came in from his nearly hourly patrol around the cabin just as I was finishing up Alina’s 10:00 p.m. feeding. She’d slept nearly four hours straight the night before, after a big dinner, and I had high hopes for a repeat performance.
When she fell asleep in my arms, he took her from me and tucked her into her dresser drawer bassinet while I straightened my clothing, and when I looked up, I found him staring down at her. “She’s so beautiful,” he whispered.
“Yes. But you shouldn’t whisper while she’s napping. We don’t want her to become dependent upon silence for sleep.”
He turned to show me one arched brow. “Did you read that in the baby book?”
“Of course. It’s a gripping read. I highly recommend it.”
Gallagher scowled. “Fear dearghave been raising infants for millennia without the need of an instruction manual.”
“Yes. Butyouhave not. Promise me you’ll read it, Gallagher.”
His focus narrowed on my face, and I realized I’d gone too far. I rarely ever asked him to promise anything, because I knew he had to keep his word. “It means that much to you?”
“Yes. Promise me you’ll read the book. This week. And that you’ll always be patient with Alina. And that you won’t kill the first boy who asks for her phone number. Or laugh when she’s learning to apply eyeliner.”
“That’s a lot of promises to make for a two-week-old, Delilah.”
I shrugged. “Chalk it up to postpartum hormones. I grew your daughter in my body. The least you can do is make me a couple of simple promises.”
He sank onto the edge of the bed next to me and slid one arm around my waist. “Somehow, this doesn’t feel quite as simple as you’re suggesting it is.”
