I wanted her life to be about living. About chasing dreams like butterflies, following wherever they led her with no chains or cages to get in her way. I wanted her to live without checking over her shoulder. Without feeling hatred and fear every time someone looked at her.
“Keep going. This is for Alina.”
It took us nearly an hour to drive twenty-eight miles, using back roads—sometimes little more than a wide trail cut into the dirt—to avoid checkpoints. Lenore and I both looked human at a glance, but she wouldn’t pass a blood test, and if anyone made me take off my sunglasses and let down my hair, I’d be recognized. So we took it slowly and carefully.
In town, we drove through a fast-food place for a cup of coffee, then pulled into a lot at the back of the park, on the opposite side from where the rally was being set up.
Then we sat, giving the surrogates time to feel my presence. Waiting to feel that tug from my own gut. Watching the crew assembling the stage and the audio for the rally.
The event wasn’t scheduled to start until 4:00 p.m. We planned to preempt it as soon as we were sure the sound system was working.
A military truck passed the park twice while we sat there, and both times my pulse rushed so fast my vision started to look strange. Several soldiers sat in the bed of the truck, all carrying rifles. Four more men in uniform walked the length of the park in pairs, patrolling. But they never looked our way.
“So...what if this doesn’t work?” Lenore asked as we sipped our coffee, watching the closest set of soldiers walk away from us, headed toward the stage.
“I don’t know. I guess we’ll be arrested.” Or shot.
“Gallagher would tear down the world to get to you.”
“I know.” But I was hoping—praying—that Alina would keep him from making a fatal mistake. He’dpromisedto do his best to protect her. Which he couldn’t do if he got himself killed.
“Delilah, if this goes bad, I want you to run. But don’t come back to the car. Meet me in the alley behind the drugstore, and we’ll regroup from there. We’ll find a way back to the cabin.”
I nodded. But I knew that would never happen. If this went badly, we wouldn’t make it out of the park.
“Lenore, thank you. I’m so sorry for having to drag you into this, but...thank you. I—” The rest of the words slid out of my grasp as that tugging sensation wrapped around my middle. Deep inside me, thefuriaestretched, coming to life slowly like a cat waking up from a nap.
Then, suddenly, she was on alert. Pacing furiously inside me, ready to attack the cage that was my body, if I didn’t set her loose soon.
“They’re here. Some of them, anyway.” But definitely more than one. Thefuriaewas fired up like I’d never felt her before, buzzing with destructive energy inside me.
“Okay. I’m going to head down there and start calling them this way.” She leaned over both of our armrests and pulled me into a hug. “In case this does go bad... I love you, Delilah. You’re like a sister to me. I hope you know that.”
“I do. And I love you, too.” And like my actual sister, I was afraid that love for me might be leading her toward her own death.
“Good luck,” she said as she pushed open her door.
“You, too.”
Pulse racing, I watched through the windshield as Lenore walked down the sidewalk on the west side of the park, headed for the main stage, where I could see a tiny podium already being set up. When she was about halfway there, one of the teams of soldiers intercepted her.
I held my breath, wishing I could hear what she was saying to them. But then she threw her head back and laughed, and I exhaled in relief. A minute later, the soldiers both tipped their uniform caps at her. Then they turned around and left the park at a brisk march, as if she’d given them a new route to patrol.
Which she probably had.
She glanced back at me once, then continued toward the stage.
Lenore became difficult to see on the other end of the park, but within minutes of her arrival, the crew members began to leave in ones and twos. Knowing Lenore, she’d probably convinced them all to take their breaks at the same time.
When she was the only one left onstage, she picked up a microphone from the cluster attached to the front of the podium and began to talk.
Speakers mounted around the entire perimeter of the park amplified her voice, aiming it not just into the park, but out into the town. Equipment that strong would carry her message for miles.
Her words didn’t matter. The real message was in her voice itself. In the way it made me—and any other human within hearing range—want to leave the park and go home. I was only able to fight that urge because I knew what I was hearing. What she was doing. And because I’d been inoculating myself against her influence for more than a year.
Alone at the microphone, Lenore told her story, and the words themselves were as moving as the compulsion carried in her voice.
She told the empty park about growing up as a siren born after the reaping. About hiding in plain sight and living in terror of discovery. She talked about the stupid mistake that got her captured, and about the cruelty she and the rest of us endured as captives in Metzger’s Menagerie. Though no one was around to hear, she told the world about our coup. About how we tried to find and buy our fellow cryptids, intending to free them at the southern border. Around the time she got to the part where Willem Vandekamp recaptured us, people began to step out of the wooded sections of the park onto the sidewalk. Into the clearing.
