back of one hand. “No, and I wouldn’t arrest a dog for bitin’ either. I’d just put the bitch down in the interest of public safety. You won’t be charged, and you won’t be Mirandized, because you no longer have any rights, you devious piece of shit. As long as you’re under my jurisdiction, I can do whatever I want with you, and I can’t imagine your lot would improve if the feds take over.”
His blatant threat bounced around the inside of my skull, and anger overtook my fear for the first time since I’d woken up in a jail cell. “This isn’t right, Sheriff.”
“I deal in law, not morality.” Pennington paused for a moment, evidently to let that little cow chip of irony sink in. “What are you exactly, Delilah Marlow?”
“I don’t know,” I repeated. He lifted one skeptical eyebrow, and I shrugged as best I could with my hands tightly bound behind me. “Look, if I knew, I’d tell you just to prove I’m not a surrogate.”
“Unless you are a surrogate.”
“If I were a surrogate, I’d lie. Either way, you’d have an answer. But I don’t know what I am. I didn’t know I wasn’t human until tonight.”
“We don’t know what the surrogates were either, do we?” Pennington pulled a palm-sized notebook from his front pocket. “So that doesn’t really rule anything out for you.”
I tried to find a more comfortable position, but the chains kept relief just out of reach. “Well, we know what they weren’t, and none of those little monsters looked anything like I did tonight.”
“About that...” the sheriff continued, flipping open his notebook to reveal a single page of pencil scrawling. “Let’s put our heads together and come up with some possibilities that might keep you out of federal custody, shall we?”
And finally something in his voice clued me in. Sheriff Pennington didn’t want me to be a surrogate either, because that would put me beyond his authority. The Justice Department had claimed jurisdiction over all of those cases before I was even born.
“Here’re the facts, as they were relayed to me. One, your voice changed in depth and—” Pennington glanced at the notebook on the table in front of him “—quality. Says here it was deeper than it shoulda been, and it felt—” another glance at his notes “—large. Whatever that means. Two, your eyes changed color. Not just the irises, but the entirety of your eyeballs.” He made a vague gesture encompassing most of my face, and I shuddered at the thought. “They became white, shot through with dark veins. Does that sound about right?”
I could only give him a painfully wrenching shrug, trying to hide the tide of horror washing over me. “I couldn’t see my own eyes.” And I’d never heard of a cryptid species which fit that description.
“It also says here that the veins in your face became black, like dark spiderwebs beneath your skin. Do you know anything about that?”
“No.” But I could imagine how terrifying it would have been to see. No wonder Shelley was scared. No wonder Brandon could hardly look at me. I’d spent four years studying cryptid species, yet couldn’t even identify my own. If I couldn’t understand what I’d become, how could they?
Pennington glanced at his notebook again.
“What about your hair? Witnesses say your hair took on a life of its own.”
“Sheriff, I’m assuming that if you spoke to my friends, you know that I was a crypto-biology major, with an emphasis in human hybrid species. I should know what I am. But I truly have no clue. Before tonight, I didn’t even know the question needed to be asked. All I know for sure at this point is that I’m no longer a bank teller.” I was no longer a driver, or a tenant, or a girlfriend, or a best friend.
I was nothing other than the property of the state of Oklahoma.
My eyes fell shut and I sucked in a deep breath.
The reality—the true enormity—of my loss suddenly hit me in a way that the mere intellectual understanding of it hadn’t been able to. When the interrogation was over, they weren’t going to send me home. I had no home. I was never going to count another cash drawer or make another pot of coffee ever again, no matter what I did or said. Everything that I had ever been or done or loved was gone. Delilah Marlow no longer existed.
No, Brandon was right. Delilah Marlow had never existed. My entire life was a delusion. A fantasy. A lie I hadn’t even known I was telling.
The reality was pure hell.
Pennington closed his notebook and crossed his arms on the table again, watching calmly as I fought total, devastating terror. “Before you start feeling too sorry for yourself, keep in mind that a man almost died because of you, and up at County General, they’re not sure he’ll ever regain normal brain function.”
A bright spark of anger surged up through my fear, and I seized it. “He electrified a little girl!”
Pennington turned to Atherton, who was stationed next to the door. “She’s talking about one of the beasts?”
The deputy nodded and pulled his own notebook from the pocket of his khaki uniform pants. “A pubescent canis lupus lycanus. Female.” He looked up and pocketed the notebook. “A thirteen-year-old wolf bitch. The rep from Metzger’s says they have trouble with her all the time, and the customary motivational method is a low-voltage poke with a standard cattle prod.”
“She was covered with electrical burns!” For a second, I forgot I was chained to the floor, and when I tried to stand, I nearly dislocated my shoulder. Both Pennington and Atherton reached for their guns.
I froze. “Relax.” My pulse raced so fast the room started to look warped. “I can’t even open a jar of pickles, much less break through solid steel and iron.”
Atherton glared at me. “Delilah, she’s not a child, she’s a wolf.” The deputy slid his gun back into its holster, but the fact that he didn’t snap it closed made me nervous. “An animal.”
“Then why was she wearing underwear?” I demanded, and the sheriff and his deputy looked at me as if I’d lapsed into Latin. “Okay, just think about it. When we put wolves on display in a zoo—a regular zoo—we don’t put underwear on them because they aren’t self-aware enough to feel modesty or adapt to social conventions and restrictions. But Geneviève was wearing underwear, which means the menagerie understands that she’s thoroughly self-aware. And if she’s self-aware, why is it okay to put a child on display in skimpy undergarments, then shock her with a cattle prod when she doesn’t want to be seen in nothing but her underwear? You can’t have it both ways.”
I sank back into my chair, only aware that I’d been straining against my restraints when my joints started screaming at me in protest.
Atherton and the sheriff stared at me for a moment, obviously unsure what to say. Then Pennington dragged his chair closer to the table and scowled at me with confidence born of ignorance. “According to the law, your werewolf bitch isn’t a person. She’s a monster, and monsters are offered no protection under the law because them and their kind slaughtered more than a million innocent children during the reaping alone. Who knows how many others they’ve killed one at a time? If werewolves are self-aware, why didn’t the pack that tore that family apart up in the Ozarks last month use that self-awareness to decide not to kill innocent people?”
“First of all, that was a pair of adlets, not a pack of werewolves, and second, self-awareness isn’t the same as a moral compass,” I argued. “I don’t believe every cryptid should be allowed to roam free, just like I don’t believe every human should be allowed to roam free. We have psychos, too. People kill their coworkers. Kids kill their classmates. Parents kill their own children. Those people are every bit as monstrous as the worst cryptid predator you can point to, yet they’re human, just like we are.”
Atherton and Pennington stared at me, and unease churned in my stomach.