As Celeste shifted her attention from her mystical herb pamphlets to the yellow pages, where she was attempting to locate a nearby shaman in Mike’s absence, Willow’s childhood tabby cat sauntered in through the open window, attracted by the bowl of warmed goat’s milk resting a few inches away from the baby. Mangy, nearly-blind, and missing an ear from its numerous neighborhood fights, the old cat jumped in Lilah’s cradle, lapping at the orange-tinted concoction with an entitled air.
Unfortunately, it was at that exact moment that Lilah’s happy gurgles broke off, disrupted by her first seizure of the day. Before Willow could cry “scat!” the poor cat was dead – a fetid, decomposing pile of bones and fur resting on the crumbled remnants of a timeworn fleece blanket. Willow clamped her hands over her open mouth to stifle a scream, her eyes bulging above her fingertips. The gruesome scene lay just inches from the baby, but she didn’t dare go near the child, not while her round eyes stared at nothing and her body was rigid. Celeste stared wordlessly from the kitchen table, letting the phonebook drop from her fingers to the linoleum floor without a second glance.
After a long moment, the baby’s fit passed, and both the cat and the blanket returned to their previous, intact condition. But the animal didn’t move. Moments became minutes, and minutes eventually became hours. By late afternoon, Willow had to accept that her poor Pebbles was gone, his early-morning yowls never to be heard again. Tears burning her eyes, she carefully laid his blanket-wrapped body in an old Sears shoe box and left it under the back porch with a little prayer, as well as several handfuls of his favorite brand of tuna-flavored cat food just beside the box – just in case.
That night, well after the last bedroom light in the neighborhood had been flicked off and the moon had once more sunk below the horizon, Willow and her mother wrapped Lilah in the warmest blankets they could find, pinned a note beneath her chin, and left her on the doorstep of the fire station two towns over.
Their van was found on the side of the freeway the next morning, the key in the ignition and the engine still running. Willow and Celeste had never made it back home that night. Rumors and wild conjectures churned through their small town, whose inhabitants scarcely knew their reclusive neighbors, but no one was able to provide the chief of police any leads. As for the baby, only the traveling shaman knew of her existence, for Celeste had delivered her granddaughter herself, in hopes of hiding her young daughter’s shameful deeds. And so, with no clues to link to their disappearance, and no record of Lilah ever having existed, no one ever found out what had happened to the three of them. After a few years, their names were forgotten altogether.
Time has a way of doing that.
· · ·
PART
I
· · ·
Chapter 1
Secrets
“Dad?” Lilah asked, waving a hand at her father across the kitchen table. “Hellooo? Earth to Stanley, do you copy?” Chief Stanley Quinn had been staring at the same headline in the morning newspaper for the last five minutes, though he hadn’t registered a single word of it. His thoughts were elsewhere.
“Hmm?” He glanced at his daughter over the top of the Tri-Forks Tribunal. She was arching an exasperated eyebrow at him.
“I was wondering if I could possibly, maybe, hopefully have a late curfew tonight?” she asked, flashing him that innocent smile of hers.
That got his attention. He sighed, then folded up the paper he hadn’t been reading anyway. “It’s a school night, Li.”
“Since when is Friday a school night?”
“Well, I’m sure you have plenty of homework. You’ve got, what? Two weeks of school left before winter break?”
“I finished it.”
“All of it?” he asked, arching a bushy eyebrow.
Lilah sighed, then started ticking subjects off on her long, slender fingers, the nails of which had been painted sour apple green. “Algebra II, no homework because there was an exam yesterday – which I totally aced,” she added in a tone that was rather more confident than she felt about it. “English was analyzing a poem by Robert Frost: Is it destiny? Is it free will? Is it maybe just a road that goes in two different directions? For World History we had to read a chapter on Marie Antoinette. Spoiler alert, she won’t have to worry about those recurring headaches for long—”
“Okay, okay, I get the point.” Stanley rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to invent another plausible reason for enforcing Lilah’s strict nine o’clock curfew. It didn’t help that he was trying to function on a measly three hours of sleep, after some hooligan had pulled the school fire alarm in the middle of the night. “Look, Li…”
“Dad, I already know what you’re going to say,” she interrupted, her hazel eyes twinkling. “So, let me save you the effort, since you’re obviously tired this morning.”
“I’m not—”
“Your shirt’s on inside out,” she pointed, rising from the table to grab the pastries that had just popped up from the toaster. Her father gaped at his collar indignantly. “Anyway, it’s not a party or anything like that. We’re just having a sci-fi movie marathon at Seth’s house. And there won’t be any drugs or alcohol, apart from heroin.”
“Very funny,” he grunted from beneath his flannel shirt, which he was struggling to yank past his bushy beard without unbuttoning the collar. “Will his mother be home?”
“Uh-huh,” Lilah replied, wrapping one of the blue-frosted Pop-Tarts in a paper towel to save for later.
“So, what’s going on in the world of sci-fi these days?”
“You’d know if you ever got out of the station.”
“I will,” he replied as he turned his shirt right-side out. “As soon as fires learn to put themselves out and the stacks of paper on my desk are magically processed by taxpayer-funded fairies. Do you mind using a glass for that?”
“Sorry.” Lilah wiped a drop of milk from her chin. She put the carton back in the refrigerator, then grabbed the plate with Stanley’s Pop-Tart from the counter. “Anyway, yes, Seth’s mom will be home, I’ll be with the one boy at my school who’s more interested in fashion than boobs, and I have my medication.” She patted the pocket in her jeans, where a small bottle of little blue pills rattled.
That seemed to pacify her father somewhat. Lilah set his Pop-Tart down in front of him, her eyes darting away from the wide scar that puckered across the back of his shoulder. When he finally tugged his shirt back over his head, he sighed in resignation. As much as he would have preferred to keep Lilah under protective glass at all times, she was sixteen years old. And a good kid, he had to admit. Far better than he had been at her age, anyway. Has it really been thirty years since I was in high school? The thought made him feel old – and so did the tired lecture he found himself repeating for the third time that month.
Stanley let out a long sigh. “What if you have a…an episode?” he pressed. “Seth’s house is twenty minutes away from the hospital.”
Lilah suppressed a groan. “Dad, I haven’t had a seizure since I was a kid. I don’t even remember having them, it was so long ago. For all we know, I don’t even need to be taking these pills anymore—”