All that love I’d poured toward Bellanger—my father, my creator, my guide—had gone in the wrong direction. I didn’t know what to do with it now. It was like an empty spot at my core where all that adoration used to fit. Whenever I thought about him too closely, there was a hollow ache of loss and anger.
“Knowing what we do about the way we are,” Cate said, softer now. The way we are. A quick throb under my rib cage, muscle memory of when she’d eased that bullet from inside me. “Doesn’t it make you wonder how many more of us have been scattered throughout history?”
There weren’t many cars on this stretch of freeway. We were alone.
“All the stories about vampires. Witches. Werewolves, monsters. They had to come from somewhere,” Cate said. “Maybe it was from women like our mothers. Women who didn’t have men in their lives. Women who wanted children more than they wanted men. All those fairy tales about the couple desperate for a child and they magically get one, but the kid is a freak.”
My mother had told me stories like this when I was little. Rapunzel born of cabbages, with her too-long hair. Isis procuring a son, Horus, from her husband’s dead body. Princess Kaguya inside a bamboo stalk. I’d memorized other myths on my own as a kid, desperately intrigued by any story that reminded me of my own. My classmates could make construction paper family trees for Father’s Day, tracing themselves back for generations. I had to rely on heroes, legends, myths, and rumors.
“It must’ve happened before, if Lily-Anne was able to do it back in the seventies,” Cate said. “There must be women throughout history who got pregnant all by themselves, maybe on purpose, maybe accidentally, and they had children like us. And those children ended up dark secrets, but they managed to show up in rumors and fairy tales anyway. The nine of us might not be groundbreaking at all, Morrow. We might just be the first ones to appear in textbooks instead of as bedtime stories.”
“Cate,” I said. “Catherine.” I was tired; it was late. But when she’d talked, just then, I’d seen my own small story expand and expand until it took up everything, until it was everywhere, and I was just a tiny part of something enormous and all-encompassing. I felt wild and full. How many more of us were out there?
“You think it’s stupid,” she said.
“No,” I said. “Never. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met.”
The very air around me turned warmer with her laugh.
She leaned over the headrest and kissed my cheek. It was so intimate and gentle that I almost shied away; everything about it made me skittish, thrilled and nervous at the same time. Cate, sensing this maybe, pulled back. I turned my head from the road, quickly, just enough to smile at her. Cate murmured my name with an intonation I didn’t quite understand. She kissed my cheek again. She moved down to my neck, pressing her lips against the soft, downy part of my neck just beneath my ear. Right where a vein throbbed. My body came to life, as purely as that night in the motel.
Next to us, Tom shifted, blinking, and sat up. Quietly, Cate retreated into the backseat again. When I glanced in the rearview mirror a few minutes later, she glanced at me, our eyes meeting quickly, charged, before I was forced to look back at the road. My heartbeat was a wild rush.
* * *
“You should get your own room tonight,” I said to Tom, watching Cate and Isabelle carry our suitcases into the motel room. “For a change.” It was two in the morning, and this little town we’d stopped in—the edges of Tennessee—was dark and drowsy, our secret. “It’s too dangerous to stay in the car if the Bellangers are on our tail. Or the Kithira men. Or god knows who else.”
“I could use some actual lumbar support,” Tom said. “But honestly? I’m not even tired.”
“Neither am I.” Half a lie.
“You’ve been driving for the past ten hours. Get some sleep.”
I hesitated, spotting the dive bar that stood across the street, the type of all-night seedy place that you could retreat to with no questions asked. Muffled music floated across the street. The only outpost left open in all of Tennessee and here we were, right next to it. I didn’t want to be alone. I was bristling, restless, and being in the motel room with Cate felt like being too close to a live wire.
“Tom,” I said impulsively. “You know what? Maybe this is it. Maybe this is the right time for our big interview.”
“Now?” His eyes brightened, but he was surprised, almost suspicious. “I thought you said it would be when this is all over.”