“Not that it’s any of your business, but no, I don’t have a tattoo.”
The desire to say well, then, if you want to live, come with me was overwhelming, but I didn’t see the point in being cryptic or vague.
“You have an ouroboros on your back.” I said the words softly. I didn’t want to be saying them at all.
Bethany blinked several times, and I plowed on.
“It’s a symbol,” I told her, “of a snake eating its own tail. It has a lot of different mythological meanings, but only one scientific one.”
“You think I’ve been bitten,” Bethany said, and something about her tone of voice reminded me that I wasn’t the only one who’d grown up with a father in academia.
“I think you’ve been bitten. I think it burrowed inside of you. I think it’s drinking your blood and absorbing your memories—”
“I know what chupacabras do.” Bethany probably didn’t spend her nights hunting the preternatural, but I was beginning to suspect that she knew more than I’d given her credit for and that her sole exposure to the concept of chupacabra possession wasn’t some Lifetime Original Movie called Three Days to Live. “I know exactly what these things do, Kali.”
She was scared enough that she’d dropped the pretense of not knowing my name. Good. Maybe that meant she’d be scared enough to listen to me, too.
“I think I can get it out of you,” I said.
“Do you think I’m stupid?” she asked me, her voice equal parts vulnerability and venom. “My dad studies these things. It’s all he ever even talks about. If there’s an ouroboros on the subject’s skin, there’s nothing anyone can do. But at least, thanks to you, I know I’m doomed. Really appreciate that.”
Each second I put off taking action, my resolve faltered. What if I didn’t last seventeen hours? What if Bethany told her father what I’d done, and he told my father, and the entire university faculty figured out that I wasn’t Homo sapiens 24/7? What if I couldn’t get the parasite to jump ship, anyway? I was human. My blood was human. There was no real reason to think that it might work.
But what if it did?
Do it. Do it now.
“Knife,” I whispered, but of course, nothing happened. I wasn’t a weapon whisperer. I wasn’t invincible. I was just a seventeen-year-old girl who was about to do something very, very stupid.
“Close your eyes.”
Bethany arched one eyebrow, opening her eyes wider. Even with mortality staring her in the face, she was still one of those girls.
“I might be able to help you,” I said. “Close your eyes. Worst-case scenario, you lose fifteen seconds. Best-case scenario, you’re not a corpse in the morning.”
She closed her eyes.
I bent over and reached inside my boot. Heritage High wasn’t the kind of school that invested money that could be spent on pep rallies on something as trivial as metal detectors, and I’d learned the hard way never to go anywhere unarmed.
My fingers closed over the hilt of the knife, and I stood back up, blade in hand. The weapon felt heavier than it had the night before. The balance of the blade should have comforted me, it should have been familiar, but instead, it was a reminder that I had no idea what I was doing. I was weak. I was stupid. I was alone.
Do it.
I gritted my teeth together and sliced into my own arm. For a moment, all I felt was the coolness of the knife’s tip, but then the white-hot fire spread up my entire forearm, bringing tears to my eyes.
Biting down on my lip hard enough to draw blood there, too, I sheathed the knife and ran my right hand over the wound, until my fingertips were smeared with red. Taking a deep breath, I leaned forward and spread my blood across Bethany’s back.
Nine hours earlier, no preternatural creature would have been able to resist the lure, but right now, I was human.
“Oh. My. God. What are you doing?”
“Keep your eyes closed.” I barely recognized my own voice. I’d cut my arm deeper than I’d meant to, and the blood just kept coming and coming. I thrust my arm closer to the ouroboros symbol.
“Here, kitty-kitty,” I said, unwilling to let the enormity of the moment sink in. “Auntie Kali has num-nums for you.”
Nothing happened, and I lowered my voice in both volume and tone. The words came fast and then slow, and every single one of them sounded like it was being spoken through me more than by me.
“You want memories? I’ve got memories. You want blood? I’ve got blood. You don’t want her. You want me.”
Bethany stiffened. “Kali, what are you—”
“Bethany. Shut. Up.” I lowered my voice to a purr. “Is this what you want? Some cheerleader? What’s her best memory—getting to stand on the very top of the pyramid? Do you have any idea what I’ve seen? What I’ve done?”
Do you have any idea what I am? I wanted to say, but I didn’t. My plan required me playing bait, but it also required a certain amount of discretion. If my target figured out what I was before it took the bait, this wouldn’t end well for anyone.
“I know you can hear me. I know you can smell me. I know you’re sucking these words out of Bethany’s brain as fast as I can say them. I know that you know—you don’t want her. You want me. This girl is Denny’s. I’m gourmet.”
This was a bad plan, bad idea. I felt that with certainty as my arm went numb. As the little stars dancing at the periphery of my vision began to turn dark and spread like inkblots across a page.
I don’t want to die.
The thought came, quick and vicious, into my head, and then there was a sound like a gun going off and a smell like rotten eggs. Bethany stumbled forward and went down to her knees, and I sank into velvety nothingness. It caressed my skin, lapped at my temples, the nape of my neck. It circled me like smoke, its touch light, but all-consuming.
And just as I was about to lose consciousness, I heard the voice.
Hello, Kali. I’m Zev.
5
Consciousness came slowly, like the rising of the tide, my body and my mind falling gradually into sync with each other until I remembered that I was called Kali, that what I was feeling was known as pain, and that here—in this space, in this time, in this body—I wasn’t alone.
Hello, Kali.
The voice in my head was silent, but my memory of those words was ice slipping down my spine.
Everything hurts, I thought, clinging to the pain and pushing all other sensations away. A groan escaped my throat, and my eyelids fluttered. For a second, I thought I saw a person out of the corner of my eye: broad through the shoulders, muscular and sleek and made almost entirely of shadow, but even before I’d marked its existence, it was gone.
I blinked, and the hunter in me began automatically surveying my surroundings: bright lights, a padded surface, paper that crinkled beneath me as I moved, and on the opposite wall, I could almost make out a cartoon drawing of …
A kraken.
This time, when I groaned, I put some oomph in it. My entire body felt like someone had taken a Weed Whacker to it, then strung me up like a piñata. Awareness of where I was and how I’d gotten there did nothing to soothe me.
Chupacabra. Blacking out. Nurse’s office.
Well, crap.
I struggled to sit up, and as I did, the feeling that I wasn’t alone in my body spread from my brain to my chest and from my chest out to each of my limbs. To the outside world, I probably looked no different than I had before, but whether it was my imagination or my body’s reaction to being bitten, I could feel an alien presence in the warmth of my skin, the blush in my cheeks, the steady, but rapid beating of my heart.
A whisper in my ear.
A phantom hand on the small of my back.
I shivered and wondered if this was what it had been like for Bethany. If this was normal. And then I stopped wondering—because since when had I ever been normal?
Luring this thing from Bethany’s body to mine wasn’t normal.
Thinking that I could be bitten and survive wasn’t normal.
And the way I felt now?
I forced myself to stop thinking about it and concentrated on the thing—the only thing—that mattered now.