Delilah
Pagano came for me the next morning, before my breakfast arrived. Before the sun had truly topped the horizon. He led me to the basement lab, where the elevator doors slid open to reveal Tabitha Vandekamp standing next to a doctor in a white lab coat.
The sight of her there, next to the padded table already prepared for me, struck me with a startling sense of déjà vu.
We’ve been here before. Together. Was that during my initial pregnancy test?
“Delilah,” the doctor said by way of a greeting. “Lie down.”
As I settled onto the table, he pulled a wheeled tray of instruments closer, then rolled an ultrasound machine toward the head of the table. He didn’t look me in the eye or tell me what he was doing, but not because he was scared. In fact, he didn’t seem nervous at all. Somehow, the Vandekamps had actually managed to keep his colleague’s condition from him.
Tabitha rounded the table to stand on my other side, where she had a much better view of the machinery than I had.
“Because she’s not yet in her second trimester, it’s too early to safely use amniocentesis, so we’re going to try chorionic villus sampling instead,” Dr. Grantham said to Tabitha, without even glancing at me. “Rather than sampling the amniotic fluid, which isn’t present in large amounts at this stage, we’re going to take a sample of the placenta.”
“Is that safe for the baby?” Tabitha asked, while I tried to swallow my rage over the fact that neither of them seemed to think I belonged in the discussion about what was about to happen to my body.
“There are risks with CVS, but they’re much fewer than with amniocentesis.” Dr. Grantham pulled on a pair of latex gloves, then ducked to take something from beneath the table.
Fear obliterated all logic when I saw the padded restraint, and when he took my arm, I jerked it free. “That won’t be necessary, Doctor.”
He looked across the table at Tabitha. “I can’t paralyze her without affecting the procedure. If she won’t cooperate, we’ll have to sedate her again.”
Again? When had I been sedated?
Tabitha leaned forward until her face appeared over mine. “Delilah. It’s in your best interest to cooperate...”
But her words faded into indistinct syllables as her familiar posture and tone triggered a buried memory.
Tabitha Vandekamp wears a light blue dress, tailored to her shape. Her hair is pulled back in an artful bun, and her eyes are alight with hope. But I can hardly keep her face in focus. I can hardly make sense of her words.
My eyes close, and it’s an effort to force them open again. That’s the sedation. I can’t fight it.
“This is fate, Dr. Grantham,” she says. “What else could it be?”
She believes everything she is saying. I am so tired, but I can see that. I can hear it.
“She won’t remember this, will she, Doctor?”
“No. The sedation is retroactive. But if this takes, she’ll figure it out eventually.”
“I’ll deal with that when the time comes. These next nine months are going to fly by!”
My sudden wave of nausea had nothing to do with pregnancy. “What happened in this lab?” I demanded, staring up at her. “What did you do?” The resemblance between my present reality and the hazy memory were startling, but there was one clear difference.
There’d been no reluctance or hesitation in Tabitha’s words, in my recovered memory. There’d been no doubt on her face. She hadn’t been preparing herself for the chance that my baby might be human. She’d been convinced that would be the case.
How could she be so certain, after what she knew about Gallagher?
“Delilah, you asked for this test,” Tabitha said, ignoring my question. “We’re giving you what you want, but the doctor has to take basic safety precautions. Let him use the cuffs so we can get on with this.”
I hardly heard her, because my mind was still mired in the hazily remembered past. In a time when Tabitha Vandekamp knew my baby would be human. When she’d looked forward to the next nine months.
But it takes a minimum of two or three weeks to notice pregnancy symptoms, and I definitely would not have reported any even once I’d noticed them, because Tabitha had a history of forcing abortions. So she shouldn’t have known about my pregnancy until I could no longer hide the symptoms.
She still shouldn’t know, even eight weeks in. Especially considering that the first two weeks of the nine-month pregnancy calendar are actually preimplantation of the fertilized egg. Even in most cryptids, according to my college classes. So how had she known from the very beginning? From before implantation?
She couldn’t have. And she certainly couldn’t have been sure that the baby was human.
Unless...
“What the hell did you do?” I sat up on the table, and Dr. Grantham backed away from me, startled. “I’ve been here before, but it wasn’t for an ultrasound, was it?”
“You’ve been here twice, for your initial exam, then the ultrasound. If you hadn’t lost your memory, you’d remember,” Tabitha insisted calmly.
“But I wouldn’t remember the very first time, would I?” I demanded, as pieces of the puzzle began to slide into place, forming a horrifying picture. “You made sure I wouldn’t.”
“Mrs. Vandekamp?” Dr. Grantham backed farther from the table, reaching for a preloaded syringe lying on the rolling tray to his left. “Calm her down, or I’m going to have to use this. But that’s not ideal.”
“Tabitha?” I demanded, boldly using her first name. “What did you do?”
She glanced back and forth between me and the doctor. “I only helped fate along. The oracle told me you’d give me a baby. I just wanted to speed things along. And make sure it was Willem’s.”
No.
I clutched my stomach. “This is your husband’s baby?” I turned to the doctor, my hands shaking against my scrubs top. “You inseminated me? Without my permission? Without my knowledge?”
“I had you sedated,” Tabitha admitted. “Willem wasn’t ready to know, and you didn’t need to know until you started having symptoms. Dr. Grantham wasn’t even sure it would take.”
“You didn’t tell your husband. How did you even—” I bit off the end of my question. I didn’t want to know how she’d gotten a donation from Vandekamp without his knowledge.
And since he didn’t know, he’d had no reason to take me off that sadistic full-contact roster. “Now you don’t know whose baby I’m carrying.” I swung my legs over the bed and stood on the cold tile floor. “You and your husband are both sick. You deserve each other. But neither one of you deserves a kid, and you’re sure as hell not getting mine.”
I marched past them both, my focus on the glass door, beyond which Pagano stood watching the whole thing unfold, wide-eyed. Waiting for instructions.
“Grab her!” Tabitha ordered, and the doctor’s shoes shuffled behind me. I didn’t think he’d touch me—surely he knew what I was capable of—until pain stabbed into my right thigh.
I stumbled backward and made it four steps before the room started to look...fuzzy. “Help me catch her!” Dr. Grantham shouted as I began to wobble, and though Tabitha didn’t move, someone caught me from behind. Someone braced my back with one arm and swung my legs up with the other, until I was being carried like a child.
Pagano stared down at me, frowning.
“Put her on the table,” Dr. Grantham ordered, and a second later I felt cold paper beneath me.
I tried to sit up, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. My limbs were too heavy.
“Help me strap her down.” The doctor’s voice sounded like it was being stretched, and Tabitha’s face seemed to have suffered the same fate.
“No. Let me up,” I insisted, but the syllables came out all mashed together. As if I were somehow speaking without the use of my teeth.
Tabitha’s oddly loose and stretchy face turned toward the end of the table. “I’ll get her feet.”
Something soft surrounded my wrists and ankles, but I no longer felt like struggling. My head rolled to the side, where the doctor’s gut took up most of my field of vision. The weave in the sweater beneath his lab coat began to scroll strangely, as if the threads were constantly moving, stitching themselves together over and over.
While I knew that that made no sense, I found the whole thing more fascinating than truly bizarre.
Someone lifted my shirt up to my rib cage, and I gasped when something cold and wet landed on my stomach.
“What’s that for?” Tabitha asked, but I had to listen carefully to understand her. Time seemed to be stretching, and taking the rest of us along for the ride.
“We use an ultrasound to guide the needle.” The doctor pressed something into the goop on my stomach and began to move it back and forth in small motions that spread the goo. The machine on my right beeped, then erupted in a soft whooshing sound. “That’s the baby’s heartbeat.”
Tabitha’s hands flew to her mouth and her eyes widened.
Mine filled with tears.
“Don’t get too attached...” the doctor warned, his voice fading in and out, along with my vision “...won’t have the results for a few days.”
Tabitha nodded, staring at the screen as if it were a glass ball about to show her future.
“Delilah, I need...hold still,” the doctor said.
“And I need you to go fuck yourself.” I’m not sure anyone understood me, but that didn’t matter. Even if all the energy hadn’t been sucked from my body by the sedative, I wouldn’t have moved. That would only mean hurting myself or the baby.
My plan was to hurt everyone else.
“Okay, I think we’re ready.”
I gasped at the pinch in my abdomen, then I let my head fall to the side again, where the threads in the doctor’s shirt were still weaving their way around his soft belly toward his back.
When I blinked, tears ran down my face onto the padded table.
“I think that will do it...the heartbeat is still strong.” The doctor set something on the wheeled tray, then began wiping goop from my belly. “She’ll need to rest... No work, no intercourse and obviously no travel. A little fluid leakage from the site is... If there are any other symptoms...me immediately.” He finished wiping my stomach, then tugged my shirt over my still-sticky skin, and I struggled to bring the world back into crisp focus. “And in a few days, we’ll know whether we need to reorder those prenatal vitamins or schedule an end to this whole thing.”
Dr. Grantham picked up the sample he’d pulled from my womb and as he walked away, I stared at his back and willed the furiae to wake up. To find a reason—any reason—to give him the self-inflicted, gory end he so richly deserved.