“Skylar said she couldn’t get the image out of her mind and that she thought it might be important.” I felt silly even saying the words, but there was a part of me that actually believed Skylar was psychic. She’d known the men in suits were coming, she had an uncanny habit of responding to things I’d left unsaid, and her “instincts” had led us straight to the ice rink—and the man-eating, fire-breathing dragon.
And eventually, to the woman in heels.
Though, now that I thought about it, those last two weren’t exactly marks in her favor.
“Did Skylar say where she’d seen it?” Bethany asked, her enunciation a shade too crisp, each word a little too sharp.
Unsure why she was asking, I shrugged. “In her mind?”
For a second, looking at Bethany was like looking at Elliot when he’d told me not to encourage his sister in her delusions of psychic grandeur. Before Bethany could say something to that effect, I preempted the effort. “Have you seen this symbol before?”
Bethany didn’t reply, and that told me everything I needed to know. She had.
“Care to clue me in?”
Bethany took her eyes off mine. “Care to tell me how you’re going to get rid of that chupacabra at dawn?”
This time, the silence that descended on the car wasn’t so much awkward as charged. I would have laid money that wherever Bethany had seen this symbol, it had something to do with the work her father was doing for the suits. Given that she’d already told me that Daddy Dearest was involved in this up to his eyeballs, it was hard to imagine why she’d suddenly be playing things close to the vest.
You don’t want to know, I reminded myself, using the exact same words I’d said to Bethany earlier. The less I knew about her, the less she knew about me, the easier this would be on all of us. I was supposed to be invisible. I was supposed to fade into the background. I was supposed to do what I did—
Alone.
Shut up, I thought back fiercely. Just shut up. It was bad enough dealing with my own instincts, knowing that I’d never be able to tell anyone else what I really was. I didn’t need a bloodsucker reminding me that no matter what happened, at the end of the day, I’d still be me, and there’d still be a glass wall separating me from the rest of the world. I wouldn’t ever be human.
I could feel the shift coming, taste it on the tip of my tongue. It was a matter of minutes now. Twenty. Fifteen. Ten. The surface of my skin was electric. My bones itched. I became acutely aware of the blood in my veins, the length of each and every one of my limbs.
It always seemed strange to me that in the last few minutes before I became something else, I felt more human than ever. I was hungry, starving, and the wounds I’d scratched into my own stomach stung, bringing tears to my eyes. I wanted to cry, and I wanted to scream. I was tired, I was lonely, and an insane part of me wanted to stay that way. No matter how many times I went through this, I couldn’t convince my brain that shifting was different than dying, that when I was Other, I was still myself. Instead, I responded to the inevitability of the change like a girl facing down her own mortality, knowing that in nine minutes, eight minutes, seven, her life as she knew it would come to end.
“Are you all right?” Bethany’s concern cut through my haze, and I nodded.
“Can you drop me off here?” I asked, my voice quiet, my arms wrapping around my torso, like if I held on hard enough, I could stay human just that much longer.
This is what you wanted. This is what you’ve been waiting for. I tried to talk myself into it, but the rush of sensation all around me was deafening.
—Alone.
Alone, alone, alone. The word echoed through my body, and I had two reactions to it, each visceral and strong. Part of me said no, and part of me said yes. Part of me wanted the change, and part of me didn’t want to give up being what I was now.
It was kind of ironic—I spent my human days wishing I wasn’t human, but in the last moments before I made the switch, I didn’t want to give that up.
“I’m not dropping you off anywhere,” Bethany said. “You’re really pale, and your pupils are huge. Are you shaking?”
I was. I was trembling, my body vibrating with the knowledge that in a few minutes, everything would change.
I’m going to kill you, I thought, trying to focus on the chupacabra and not on the things I’d lose once I crossed over. You’re going to die.
Broken.
I might have actually laughed out loud at the word. The parasite in my head was calling me broken, and he was right. Didn’t mean I was any less likely to kill him dead. Didn’t make the tears in my eyes sting any less.
“Kali.” Bethany’s voice went up in pitch. “Kali, I need you to open your eyes and look at me.”
My eyelids fluttered, and I managed to look at her long enough to tell that she was dialing a cell phone—probably calling Elliot or Vaughn or someone else who didn’t know me from Adam.
From Eve.
Bethany cursed under her breath and hung up the phone. “If you die on me, I will kill you.”
I giggled.
She thought the chupacabra was draining me, the way it had the night before. She thought I was dying, drifting further and further away. She thought I was on the verge of going to sleep and never waking up.
The sound of the engine revving permeated my brain, and I forced myself to focus, to concentrate.
“You have to let me out now,” I said, fumbling with my seat belt, wrenching it off. “I need to—have to—go.”
“We’re being followed,” Bethany said, and that snapped me out of it. My back was arching, my blood was burning its way through my veins, but for once, my mind was on something other than the coming change. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the SUV accelerating toward us. Morning traffic was just starting to pick up, and Bethany zoomed around the other cars like she’d had a past life driving Indy 500s. She hit the exit, flew across an intersection, and hopped back on the highway going the other way. For a few seconds, I thought we’d lost our tail, but then the SUV appeared again, and this time, I saw the passenger-side window cracking.
I saw the gun.
“Specimen retrieval,” I told myself. That was what Bethany had said. They were here to retrieve me, to bring the chupacabra inside of me back to the lab. For whatever reason, to them it was worth tracking, and if it was worth tracking, it was worth taking alive.
Right?
Bethany cursed, each word punctuating the one before it, like shots coming off an automatic. The car behind us changed lanes and, without warning, swerved, sideswiping the BMW with brutal, unforgiving force.
Bethany’s fingers tightened over the steering wheel, and the last thing I saw before I lost all sense of reality was her white knuckles bulging under paper-thin skin, giving her the look of a skeleton, of Death itself.
Brakes squealing. Glass breaking. Shattering. My world is turned upside down. White-hot pain.
This time, my head really did go through the wind-shield.
Three minutes. Two. One.
And then I died.
12
I’m in a tunnel, lying very still, metal all around me. It’s loud and dark, and I’m so scared. My bones are shaking. I want it to be over. I want to get out.
“Hold on, baby. You’re doing great.”
The voice echoes through the tunnel. Mommy? Everything is humming—it’s humming so loudly I want to scream. I want to cover my ears, but I can’t.
Can’t move my arms.
Can’t move my legs.
I want to go home.
“The image quality is shot to hell.”
“She’s scared, Rena.”
Daddy?
“You have to be still, Kali. Be so still.”
Still as the grave.
Oxygen rushed into my lungs like water tearing its way through a dam. I gasped and bolted straight up. Glass crunched underneath me; shards flew off my body, sparkling like raindrops in the newborn sun. Slowly, the world came into focus. Bethany and the BMW were gone, the carnage around me the only evidence that they’d ever been there at all.
They left me here? They ran us off the road, I went through the windshield, and they just left?
So much for specimen retrieval.