16
Bethany left us in the foyer. She didn’t say a word, didn’t respond to the question. If I’d had more practice with the whole “friend” thing, maybe I would have known what to say or do next, but I didn’t.
“She’ll be back,” Skylar said. I wasn’t so sure, but up until now, Skylar’s instincts had been right on point. Unfortunately, she chose that moment to turn her focus from Bethany to me. “Bethany wasn’t wrong,” she said slowly. “Was she? About you going through the windshield, about your broken neck?”
Don’t tell her.
This time, I didn’t object to Zev weighing in or the advice he was dispensing. That was how I’d always gotten by, how I survived. By not opening my mouth. By keeping people at arm’s length.
“My neck isn’t broken,” I said stiffly. “I’m fine.”
“People only ever say they’re fine when they’re not.” With those words, Skylar’s eyes went from my face to my stomach. Even clothed in the tank top, I felt naked. I felt like she could see straight through me.
I don’t know what would have happened next, if Bethany’s mother hadn’t interrupted our little standoff. All smiles, she came back into the room garbed in a twin set and jeans, every inch the suburban soccer mom. For a moment, I thought she was going to offer us lemonade or something, but instead, she fixed her gaze on a spot about a foot in front of Skylar and me.
“Tyler,” she said, in one of those mom voices—halfway between exasperation and indulgence. “Stop pestering Bethany’s friends.”
It took me a moment to digest her words. I stopped breathing.
“I am so sorry, girls,” Mrs. Davis continued, a smile dancing across her face, her eyes flitting back and forth, like she was tracking someone’s movement, even though there wasn’t anyone there.
I looked at Skylar. She looked at me. The two of us looked at the spot on the floor.
“C’mon, Ty,” Mrs. Davis said. “Leave the girls alone. I’ve got an omelet with your name on it and a big glass of milk.”
She held out her hand and beckoned. After a brief pause, she flitted away, her movements purposeful and graceful. As I watched, she reached out, like she was tousling someone’s hair and then she paused.
She turned and looked back over her shoulder.
And for a split second, maybe less, it looked like she might crumble to the ground. Like she knew there wasn’t anyone in this room but the three of us. Like wherever her Tyler had gone, Bethany’s mother wished she could go there, too.
That split second of clarity was fleeting, and a moment later, the bright smile returned, but I was left with an aching sadness. I watched Mrs. Davis walk out of the room, murmuring gaily to nobody at all.
Beside me, Skylar wiped the back of her hand roughly across her face.
“You okay?” I asked her. After what we’d just seen, I wasn’t entirely certain that
I
was okay.
Skylar shook her head. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s just—she’s so sad. She’s drowning.”
For once, Skylar didn’t elaborate, and when Bethany came back in a moment later, I struggled to hide my own emotions, to make it seem like Skylar and I hadn’t just seen into the intimate depths of her mother’s broken mind.
“Here,” Bethany said, tersely. It took me a moment to realize that she was holding out a slip of paper. No, not paper—a brochure.
I took it from her. “Chimera Biomedical,” I read, but my eyes were drawn away from the words and to the image below it: an octagon bisected by a ladder, spiraling around an invisible line.
Only this time, the ladder looked less like a ladder and more like a DNA helix.
“They specialize in gene therapy,” Bethany said stiffly. “Regeneration.”
“Regeneration?”
Bethany stared pointedly at the tips of her toes. “Reviving brain cells. Stimulating nerve growth. Growing organs.”
“Do they do stem cell research?” Skylar asked, taking the brochure from my hand and staring intently at the symbol—the one she’d drawn for me the day before.
“Look,” Bethany said. “This is what you wanted to know, isn’t it? You wanted to know what that symbol was, and I told you. You want to know who my dad is working for. Well, this is it. It has to be. It explains everything. Why he’s been working so much. Why he’d do something like this. Why Skylar drew the symbol.”
I processed Bethany’s words, but felt like I was missing something—the reason she hadn’t told me this company’s name the second she’d seen the symbol; the things she was saying about her dad.
“Your mom came back in here a second ago,” Skylar told her, gauging her reaction. “Looking for Tyler.”
This time, Bethany didn’t react to the sound of the name. She just raised one eyebrow, untouchable and cool. “So?”
I knew then, knew that Tyler wasn’t a figment of her mother’s imagination. Knew that he’d been real once, that he wasn’t anymore.
“You had a brother,” I said, thinking of all the times I’d wished for a sibling, for someone in my house other than just my dad and me. “But something happened.”
Bethany’s chin wavered, and I realized that she was biting the inside of her cheeks—anything to keep herself from showing a hint of weakness to the two of us.
Skylar sucked in a breath, that same sad smile painting her face, like if she let her lips tilt downward, she might start crying instead. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said, her voice soft, her tone even.
I thought of the things Bethany had said when she realized I was alive.
You were dead, and it was my fault. I couldn’t—I can’t do this again
.
“The accident today wasn’t your fault, either,” I told her.
“It’s always my fault,” Bethany said, voice steady, hands shaking. “My mom. My dad. Tyler. I was supposed to be watching him.
Me
. But he wanted to go to a friend’s house, and I wanted to watch something on TV, so I let him. I let him go, and he was goofing around on their diving board—it was the middle of winter. There wasn’t any water in the pool, and he should have known better. I shouldn’t have let him go.”
Bethany shrugged, like that could make the words she was about to say matter less. “He fell.”
I wondered how old she’d been at the time, how old her little brother was when he died.
“He’s not dead.” Skylar said the words suddenly, and I wasn’t sure whether she was responding to my thoughts or if she’d seen something in that exact moment that had started her lips moving. “He fell. On concrete. Hit his head, but he didn’t die.”
“Coma,” Bethany said flatly. “For the past four years. Once upon a time, the doctors thought he might wake up. There were some experimental treatments, but they didn’t work. Now they say he’s brain-dead. It doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s gone.”
I tried to imagine what must have been going through her head at that moment, how she must feel, but I couldn’t. I had my reasons for keeping people at arm’s length, and she had hers. My dad and I barely even spoke. My mother had left when I was three. But Bethany—
Her brother was brain-dead.
Her mother believed he was still running around the house.
And her father was conducting illegal experiments on unwitting teenagers—Bethany included.
Suddenly, it clicked in my head: the brochure I was holding, Bethany’s familiarity with Chimera Biomedical, her father’s willingness to break the law for them.
“You said there were experimental treatments.” I watched her reaction to my words. “When Tyler first got hurt, you said he underwent experimental treatments.”
Bethany turned her attention back to her toes. “So?”
“Whose experimental treatments were they?” I knew the answer before I asked the question. Bethany eyeballed me, and when she responded, her words were clipped.
“Who do you think?”
The brochure in my hand. The look on Bethany’s face the first time she’d seen the symbol.
“Chimera Biomedical,” I said, expelling a breath and giving it a moment. “Are they still treating him?”
“No,” Bethany said too quickly.
“Beth—”
“Don’t call me Beth,” she snapped.
I didn’t need overly developed people skills to see that snapping at me about her name was probably easier than admitting that if her father was working for Chimera, he hadn’t just taken this job for the pay grade. He hadn’t agreed to experiment on teenagers for the money.
He was looking for a cure.
“Why chupacabras?” I asked. Bethany shrugged.
“Why not?” she said. “They’ve tried everything else. Nothing works—nothing is ever going to work, but try telling that to the great Paul Davis. Sometimes, I’d swear he’s more delusional than my mother, and as I’m sure you’ve gathered, that’s saying something. If Chimera Biomedical told my dad that his research might jump-start Tyler’s brain, there’s nothing that he wouldn’t do.” Bethany swallowed hard.
“Obviously.”
The wheels in my head turned slowly as I looked down at the pamphlet, Bethany’s earlier words about Chimera echoing in my head.
They specialized in regeneration: regrowing nerves, reviving dead brain cells. And right now, they were studying chupacabras.
My mind went to Zev and the things he’d told me about “Nibblers.”
Any comments from the peanut gallery? I asked
him.
What would a biomedical company want with a deadly preternatural parasite?
At first, I didn’t think Zev would respond, but then, he bit out four words, his voice decisive and harsh.
Leave it alone, Kali.
If anything, his words made me want to do the opposite, and the way he’d issued the command made me think that this was dangerous—and personal. I chewed on that for a moment. Chimera was studying chupacabras. Zev knew something about it, something he had no intention of telling me.
Chupacabras. Regeneration. Zev acting like pushing this was particularly dangerous for
me.
An insidious possibility took root in my mind, and a moment later, it seemed less like a possibility and more like a fact. All of a sudden, I
knew
why Dr. Davis thought that injecting someone with a chupacabra might not be a death sentence, why he might believe that the preternatural held the key to waking his son up from a deep and unforgiving sleep.
People like me didn’t get hungry. We never got tired. We couldn’t feel pain. And when we got bitten, we didn’t die.
We healed very, very quickly.
To a scientist, that would have seemed like a medical miracle. To a chupacabra expert whose son was dying, it might have seemed like a sign.
Chimera isn’t just playing around with chupacabras
, I realized, my mind reeling. They knew—about the effect that chupacabras had on certain people.
People like me.
17
“Kali?”
I must have looked about as good as I felt, because Skylar said my name in a tentative, talking-a-puppy-out-from-underneath-a-car type of tone.
I shook my head to clear it of unwanted thoughts—unwanted weakness.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
Bethany twirled a finger through her hair, a dangerous glint in her emerald eyes. “Isn’t it always?”
I didn’t want to take her meaning, but she didn’t leave me any other options.
“When you talked that chupacabra out of my body and into yours, it was nothing. And when you passed out at the skating rink, it was nothing. When you went through the windshield of my car and I thought you
died
—nothing. So, come on, Kali, share. What kind of nothing is it this time?”
The urge to answer her question fully and honestly took me completely by surprise. I wasn’t exactly the bare-my-soul type, but Bethany had just rattled off her sordid family history like it was some kind of halftime cheer. She’d let me in, and for the first time, I actually wanted to do the same, to tell someone the truth.
That I wasn’t normal.
That I wasn’t human.
That even though I was used to being something else, being bitten by a chupacabra had changed things, changed me.
And that, somehow, Chimera knew—maybe not about me specifically, but about the fact that people like me existed and that being bitten by a chupacabra had a different effect on us than it had on normal people. If Bethany was right and Chimera had been infecting teens on purpose, then chances were good that they were either systematically looking for people like me—or trying to create them.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said out of habit, unable to make myself say anything else. Talking made me feel like I had the dry heaves, and all I wanted was to just throw up the truth and be done with it. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” Skylar caught my gaze and held it, and even though her face still looked pixie-young and innocent, there was an alien weight to the set of her features, like she was a thousand years old instead of fifteen. “And it does matter. Everything that’s happened, everything that’s going to happen in the next twenty-four hours—it matters.
You
matter, and whether you want to believe this or not, you can’t do this alone, Kali.”
She paused and cast her eyes downward, her voice going very quiet. “You shouldn’t have to.”
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to tell her everything, tell
them
everything. I opened my mouth, and—nothing. I’d been keeping secrets for so long that I wasn’t entirely sure I knew how to let them go.
Don’t. The humans won’t understand. They never do.
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that Zev was weighing in, telling me that every instinct I’d ever had to keep other people at bay was right on the mark. Then again, he’d also told me to leave Chimera Biomedical Corp. alone.
That wasn’t going to happen.
The past twenty-four hours had whetted my appetite for answers, and I needed to know—what I was, what Zev was, what the men in suits and the Paul Davises of the world knew that I didn’t.
Leave it, Kali. You’re better off if they think you’re dead.
I wondered briefly how old Zev was—because he was talking to me like I was a child.
That, as much as Skylar’s vehement claim that I didn’t have to do this alone, prodded me into taking a small, terrifying step toward telling the others the truth. “I think I know what Chimera is trying to do.” Admitting that out loud sounded funny, even to my own ears. Deep inside me, Zev cursed in a language that I neither recognized nor understood. I ignored it—and him.
“I think I know why the Chimera scientists are playing around with chupacabras—why they’d kill to keep that kind of experiment to themselves.”
Interest flickered across Bethany’s face, but in the bat of an eyelash, she’d wiped her face completely clean, and it was gone. “And we’re just supposed to take your word on this because the almighty Kali D’Angelo can’t be bothered to deal us in?”
“I’ll tell you,” I said, pushing back against Zev’s objections. “Once I’m sure.”
Making that promise—meaning it—hurt, like I’d been keeping secrets for so long that prying them loose would require the shredding of flesh—most likely mine.
“What do you need to be sure about?” Skylar asked. The question set me up to ask Bethany for something that I was 90 percent certain she wouldn’t want to give, so I crossed my fingers and took the plunge.
“I need access to your dad’s files.”
For a moment, Beth stood very still, like there was a snake on the floor in front of her and any movement might tempt it to strike.
“Kali, they already tried to kill you once,” she said finally. “The people my dad’s working for don’t kid around, and I’m already on their watch list. They probably know you’re here, talking to me. If I let you into the lab, they’ll know that, too.”
“Is that a no?” Skylar asked, wide-eyed and far too innocent.
Bethany didn’t dignify that question with a response.
After a few seconds of silence, I decided I’d have to give Bethany something—a tiny piece of myself, tit for tat for the secrets she’d already given me. Slowly, painfully, I brought my hands to the bottom of my stolen tank top. I pulled the fabric up, inch by inch and bit by bit, until I was standing in Bethany’s foyer uncovered from the waist up, save for my chest.
I heard Skylar’s sharp intake of breath, saw Bethany blink one, two, three times as she took in the sight of my stomach, my rib cage, my waist. I didn’t look down, but dragged my fingertips across my flesh.
Across the
ouroboros
and the pattern—golden, intricate, overwhelming—inked into the surface of my skin.
“What is that?” Bethany asked. Somehow, she pulled off sounding unimpressed, even though her face betrayed her horror, her fascination, her awe.
“That,” I said, “is why I think I know what your father’s endgame is. It’s why I need you to let me into his lab.”
That wasn’t exactly the truth, and it wasn’t full disclosure, but it was something.
Skylar reached forward and ran her index finger lightly over the surface of my skin. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, offering her face up to the ceiling. When she opened her eyes again, she seemed lighter, more sure of herself—like whatever burden she’d been carrying since she’d met me on the Davises’ front lawn had been somehow lifted from her shoulders.
“I knew it,” she said simply. “This is it.” In typical Skylar fashion, she didn’t wait for either of us to process that statement; she just plowed right on, talking and switching subjects with no warning whatsoever. “Is the lab in the basement?” she asked Bethany, who still hadn’t managed to tear her eyes away from the markings on my skin. “Because I kind of feel like the lab might be in the basement.”
“Would you just stop it with the feelings?” Bethany snapped. Skylar recoiled, but recovered quickly, and I wondered how many times her peppy you-can’t-hurt-me facade had rebounded too quickly for the outside world to notice that she wasn’t quite as bulletproof as she seemed.
“I don’t care about your
feelings
, Skylar, and I don’t care about Kali’s questionable taste in body art.” Bethany was a good liar—but not good enough. Sensing that I wasn’t buying her outright dismissal of the situation, she continued, her voice softer, her face every bit as guarded as it had been a moment before. “I can’t do this anymore. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”
Bethany’s eyes flickered toward the kitchen, and I thought about her mother, dressed in a twin set and talking to the air.
“What exactly did your father say to keep you from calling the police?” I asked, gauging her reaction to my question and seeing the moment it hit its mark.
“Does it matter?” Bethany asked bitterly. “Either way, I can’t help you. You should get out of here before he gets home.”
I thought about my dad—about the painful silences and well-rehearsed lies, the fact that he knew less about me than the people in this room, neither of whom I’d known for longer than a day.
“Your dad wouldn’t hurt your mom … would he?” Skylar sounded painfully young, and I wondered how someone with any psychic ability at all could still believe the best about the world.
In response to Skylar’s question, Bethany straightened her shoulders and stared at the wall behind the younger girl’s head as she answered. “My father wouldn’t hit my mom. He wouldn’t put a gun to her head. But would he take her to see Tyler, force her to look at him until she had a very public breakdown in close proximity to the hospital’s psych ward?” Bethany shrugged. “It’s hard to say, really.”
The idea that Bethany’s father would even think of holding something like that over her head was disgusting. As much as I wanted access to the lab in the basement, I wasn’t about to press her to take that kind of risk for me. She had someone else to think about, someone to take care of. I, of all people, could understand that.
If I’d had a mother, I would have done anything to protect her.
“It’s okay, Bethany.” I caught her eyes; she looked away. “You do what you need to do. We’ll go.”
Don’t think this means I’m giving up
, I told Zev silently as I nudged Skylar toward the door.
There’s more than one way to decapitate a hellhound, and as it so happens, I know them all
.
Zev didn’t respond, and something about the silence felt unnatural. Wrong. One second he was there, and the next, my mind felt … empty. If our chupacabras served as a two-way radio between my mind and his, it felt like he’d just hung up. A small sliver of panic rose up inside of me, and for the second time, I went looking for him.
I started the way I had before, by thinking about the parasite that had burrowed deep inside of me. I felt it, and a second later, I felt Zev’s. Felt
Zev
—
And then I was in. I saw the world through his eyes.
Saw men in masks.
Saw needles, scalpels, concrete walls.
Saw blood.
I came back into my own body a second later, my skin an odd fit for my soul, like a shoe crammed onto the wrong foot or a sweater two sizes too large. Was this what Zev had felt like after he’d taken over my body in Eddie’s car?
“Kali? Are we going?” Skylar was still standing next to Bethany, who’d wrapped her arms around her torso, like she’d been tasked with holding her own entrails in. “You said we should go. But then you didn’t go.”
“We should go,” I said roughly, turning my back on them both. No matter where I looked, all I could see was the men in the masks, the concrete cell. It was clear now—too clear—how Chimera Biomedical knew that there were people out there like me, why Zev had asked me to stay out of it.
They had him.
I could talk to him and he could talk to me. I could enter his mind, and he’d spent time in mine, but physically, he was
trapped
. His body was locked up somewhere—in some kind of cell.
Some kind of cage.
Every nightmare I’d ever had about being caught, cut into pieces, studied like a rat in a maze—that was Zev’s reality. Suddenly, the fact that Bethany couldn’t help me didn’t seem like as much of a roadblock because, come hell or high water, I was going to find a way in.
I had to.
There was one person in this world—that I knew of for sure—who was like me.
One
. A person who’d haunted my dreams, taken over my body, protected me, even when I didn’t want protection.
And that person, that one person, was somebody’s
specimen
.
Before, I’d wanted to know what Chimera knew. Now, I wanted them gone.
“Kali?” This time, Bethany was the one who said my name, and the tone in her voice reminded me of the way she’d sounded talking to her mom.
She thinks I’ve lost it. Maybe she’s right
. My hands were fisted, my steely fingernails digging into the flesh of my palms. It didn’t hurt. I didn’t even feel it, but I could smell the beads of blood as they dribbled down the insides of my hands.
“I’m fine,” I said, because that was exactly what you said when you really, really weren’t. “I should go.”
I was halfway past Bethany and headed for the front door when she grabbed my arm. I wrenched out of her grasp and resisted the reflex to send the heel of my palm crashing into her throat.
Throat. Blood.
Chimera had Zev, Bethany wanted to help me, but couldn’t, and all I could think about was how much I wanted this all to be over and how very, very thirsty I was.
“I’m going,” I said, more for Skylar’s benefit than Beth’s. “Don’t worry about me. Don’t follow.”
I didn’t give them a chance to react. I just took off out the front door, darting across the lawn—
Twenty hours and forty-two minutes.
I’d find a way to take down Chimera. But first, I needed to hunt.