Menagerie. Rachel Vincent
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shook her head.
“I’m telling you that my daughter Elizabeth was kidnapped. Her middle name was Delilah, so that’s what I called the changeling left in her place.”
For one long moment, neither the sheriff nor his deputy spoke. Charity couldn’t even be sure they were breathing.
“Changeling.” Pennington seemed to be tasting the word, as if he might want to spit it back out. “So, you’re saying the fae took your baby and left a surrogate in its place? There hasn’t been a confirmed surrogate exchange since the reaping.” The sheriff laid both thick hands flat on the table between them. “Mrs. Marlow, are you telling us that your daughter is part of a second wave of attack?”
Atherton slipped quietly out of the room.
“No.” Charity set her coffee down and looked straight into the sheriff’s eyes, so that he couldn’t possibly mistake any part of her bearing or intent. “This is different. I don’t know what those little monsters were, but Delilah isn’t one of them.”
The sheriff crossed his arms above his belly. “How can you be sure? Does she look like Elizabeth?”
“I haven’t seen Elizabeth in twenty-five years, Sheriff, but as infants, they were identical.”
Pennington’s scraggly gray brows rose. “Sounds like a surrogate to me.”
“You’re wrong.” Charity lifted her cup in one unsteady hand and took a sip of the cooling coffee. Then she set the cup down and took a long, deep breath. “Delilah was sent to deliver pain, but not by instilling terror on a national scale like the surrogates. She was left in Elizabeth’s place to punish me. And I got exactly what I asked for.”
“What—”
Charity held up one hand and spoke over the sheriff. “Elizabeth was a beautiful child, but she had an ugly temper. She cried for days and nights on end. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I couldn’t think straight. One day, when she was six weeks old, I prayed that the Lord would take my brand-new baby girl—the center of my existence—and send me a quieter, happier child in her place.”
She pulled a tissue from the purse in her lap and dabbed at first one eye, then the other. “Now, it may be that a lot of women in my position do the same thing, and nothing comes of it. But I...” She leaned forward, and fresh tears fell from her eyes. “Well, Sheriff, I said my prayer out loud. And it wasn’t the Lord who heard me.”
“Who heard you?” the remaining deputy whispered.
Charity twisted in her chair to give him a censuring glance. “Believe it or not, Deputy, no one claimed credit for replacing my daughter with a more pleasant doppelgänger.” She turned back to the sheriff. “So I did some research and learned that I could get in touch with whoever took my daughter if I were to nurse the child for a week, then smear a bit of her blood on a mirror and state my own child’s name.” More inclined toward logic than superstition, Charity had thought the whole thing sounded gruesome and crazy, but the truth was that since the reaping, anything seemed possible. The sheriff eyed her doubtfully, but she continued. “It worked! A woman appeared to me in my bathroom mirror, holding Elizabeth from some room I’ve never seen before.”
“What did she say?” the deputy asked, and the sheriff scowled, but let the question stand.
“She said that in a year, if I had taken proper care of the changeling and still wanted my daughter back, Elizabeth would be returned to me.”
“This woman in the mirror?” The sheriff’s skepticism was fading beneath undeniable curiosity. “Did you get her name? Her species?”
“She wouldn’t tell me any of that. But she looked and sounded as human as Delilah did.”
“So what did you do?” Pennington said, and from across the table, Charity could see that though he held a pen, the notebook page in front of him was completely blank.
“We cared for Lilah as if she were our own. She was a delightful child. Happy and affectionate. We came to love her—I felt guilty for how much I loved her, when my own daughter was missing.” Charity folded her hands on the table and took a deep breath. “Then the one-year mark came and went, and Elizabeth never reappeared.”
“Did you try the blood-on-the-mirror trick again?” the sheriff asked.
Charity nodded. “Several times, but my summons went unanswered.”
“And you never got her back?” the deputy guessed, clearly transfixed by the story.
Pennington waved one hand to silence the deputy, and when he turned back to Charity, she met his gaze with tear-filled eyes. “No, I never got Elizabeth back,” she said. Then she took a deep breath and gave voice to a fear that had lived in her soul for twenty-five years, but had never before been spoken aloud.
“Sheriff, I think my Elizabeth was never returned because I loved Delilah more.”
The weight of my mother’s confession steadily pressed the air from my lungs until psychological suffocation felt like a very real threat. I tried to lean forward, staring intently through the one-way glass into the room where she sat, but again chains and cuffs held me painfully short of where I wanted to be.
However, the real trauma went much, much deeper. Brandon had been wrong—there really was a Delilah Marlow. But I wasn’t her.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to take it all in. Trying to understand.
I wasn’t my mother’s daughter.
That devastating revelation triggered a landslide of loss, leaving me crushed by the debris of my own life. I had no real name or family. No birthplace or birth date. No true identity. Added to the confiscation of everything I’d ever owned, that left me with nothing but a body I could no longer trust. Though according to Pennington, that was now owned by the state of Oklahoma.
This can’t be real.
What was I, if I had no name, no friends, no family, no job, no home, no belongings, and no authority over my own body? What could I be?
Maybe I was just the good little girl my mother’d begged for. Or maybe I was the monster Sheriff Pennington believed me to be. Maybe I was the first enemy soldier in a secret war against humanity. But could that even be true, if I didn’t know about it?
A strange creak cut through my thoughts, and Deputy Atherton turned away from the window to look at me. “Delilah? Are you okay?”
When I opened my mouth to tell him just how far from okay I was, the creaking stopped. I’d been clenching my jaw so tightly we could both hear the stress.
“You really didn’t know about any of that?” he said, pointing beyond the glass at my mother.
I shook my head. Even after hearing it, I wasn’t sure I truly understood. All I knew for sure was that I was a changeling of unknown origin sent to torture my mother. And that somehow a punishment meant to last a year had lasted a lifetime. For what? For loving me too much?
That wasn’t fair to her. She was a good mother. Yet if whoever’d taken Elizabeth Delilah Marlow—the real Lilah—had brought her back, where would that have left me? Would I have been raised by the woman in the mirror? Was she my mother?
No.
Charity Marlow had been living with her secret for twenty-five years, maintaining her silence to protect me, mourning her real daughter—a baby who’d looked just like me—in private, because the world could not know of her loss. That made her my mother, even if we shared no blood.
Had my dad known?
Yes.
Suddenly my father’s