3

In the three weeks I’d been attending classes at Heritage, I’d learned more about primate social behavior than I’d gleaned from a lifetime of being plunked down in front of the Discovery Channel whenever my father didn’t want to deal with the fact that he had a kid. Social hierarchies, dominance displays, mating rituals … all of the above were present in abundance in our high school cafeteria. Up until today, I’d successfully remained invisible.

And then I’d met Skylar Hayden.

Apparently, she wasn’t kidding when she said talking to her would put me on the rumor radar like that. Already, I could feel the stares, like bugs crawling across the surface of my skin.

Show no fear.

If there was one thing that being what I was had taught me, it was that the difference between predator and prey was the rate of your heartbeat, the sweat trickling from your temples, the urge to shiver and run.

Twelve hours earlier, I hadn’t even been capable of fear. Currently, however, I was feeling it in spades—not that I was about to let anyone else see that. Standing straight and holding my head high, I tossed my dark, glossy hair over one shoulder. The deep brown color was streaked with red highlights, so dark that in the right light, they could have passed for black. Even in a ponytail, my hair was the perfect length for tossing.

Play to your strengths.

Another compulsion, another rule. A good hunter knew her strengths and her weaknesses, her enemies and her prey. Right now, all I knew was that the A-list crowd liked to write derogatory things on people’s lockers, that they had it out for my one and only friend at this high school, and that I was an unknown entity who had just flung herself onto their radar.

Given that the best defense was a good offense, I figured that I could at least be an unknown entity with good hair.

“Kali!”

I recognized Skylar’s voice the moment I heard it. Giving the rest of the school one more second to play Assess the New Girl, I turned in her direction. There, in the very center of the cafeteria, in what even a newcomer like me recognized as prime lunchtime real estate, she was holding court at a table full of … guys.

Clearly, my new friend had no problems whatsoever with the idea of adding fuel to the rumor fire.

“You made it,” Skylar greeted me. “And in one piece, too! Congrats. That was some impressive hair-flipping.”

In other circumstances, I might have been a little frightened by just how perceptive this girl was. At the moment, however, my eyes were trained on the other occupants of her table. There were three of them, and despite the fact that they looked nothing alike, they reminded me of those Russian stacking dolls, the kind that fit perfectly inside one another, in sizes small, medium, and large. The expressions on their faces were identical: curious, but wary.

“Darryl. John Michael. Genevieve.” Skylar said their names one by one, and I attempted to match the monikers to their owners. Darryl was Large. John Michael was Medium. And Genevieve was Small—and, judging by the name, female, which I hadn’t realized until I took a good look at her face. Her hair was cut almost to her scalp, and she was dressed in a nondescript hoodie. I wouldn’t have pegged her for a “Genevieve,” but who was I to judge?

I probably didn’t look like the ultimate predator. Or, for that matter, an environmental terrorist. Depending on the day and who you were talking to, I was both.

“Kali D’Angelo,” I said, introducing myself before Skylar had a chance to repeat my insurgent superhero line on my behalf. Given the illegal nature of my nightly activities, I needed to lie as low as I could. “I’m new. Sort of. I’ve only been here a few weeks….”

And now, I was babbling.

“Italian?” Genevieve asked, having latched on to my last name.

I figured that I owed her for having assumed she was a guy, so I cut her some slack and answered the question she hadn’t asked, which came with a “you don’t look Italian” clipped to the end. “My dad’s Italian. My mom was Indian. From India.”

Watching people try to figure out the mix of genes that had gone in to making me look so “exotic” (FYI: not my favorite word) always made me wonder why they couldn’t see beneath the surface to the power, the instinct, the difference underneath.

Eighteen hours and twelve minutes …

“Kali’s got a history test next period,” Skylar announced, and I couldn’t tell if she was deliberately changing the subject, or if she was just the type who said every thought that crossed her mind. “I told her we had her covered.”

Genevieve and John Michael didn’t react to this announcement at all, but a small smile worked its way onto Darryl’s lips. The light behind his dark brown eyes gave him a sort of gentle-giant vibe; I wondered exactly how tall he was and why the thought of a history exam made him happy.

“Six foot seven,” Skylar said helpfully. “And he’s psyched, because it’s not often we get to initiate someone into the code.”

“The code?” I repeated.

“Darryl’s a whiz with numbers,” Skylar explained. “It’s sort of his thing.”

Darryl ducked his head, and there was something in the motion that told me more about him than I’d known the moment before. He was quiet. Bashful. And I was willing to bet a lot of money that, like me, he had parents who didn’t quite get his so-called “thing.” My father would have preferred a social butterfly of a daughter; Darryl’s parents had probably been hoping for a football player. Instead, fate had dealt them a half-human demon slayer and an oversized mathlete, respectively.

Life’s a bitch.

“You have McCormick for history, yes?” Those were the first words John Michael had spoken since I sat down at the table. I tried to place his accent and failed miserably. It wasn’t American, even though he looked every inch the Boy Next Door. He was dressed from head to toe in black, but it was all too easy to imagine him fronting a boy band or dating a Disney starlet.

Since I was willing to bet that John Michael liked being compared to tween idols about as much as I liked being called exotic, I didn’t say word one about his appearance. Instead, I just nodded.

“McCormick’s tests are always multiple choice,” John Michael continued, the word multiple picking up the cadence and melody of his accent more than any of its neighbors. “Which makes you a very lucky girl.”

“Because even if I guess completely randomly, I’ll still probably end up getting some of the questions right?”

“No,” Skylar said. “Because all multiple-choice tests are subject to … the code!”

I must have looked as clueless as I felt.

“It is like this,” John Michael explained. “Multiple-choice tests are written by people, yes? And the people, they tend to write them in a certain way. The code is Darryl’s theory about the way the tests are written. And if you know how a test is written, you can pass it, even if you do not know the answers in and of themselves.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

Skylar nodded. “Darryl took the AP psychology exam last year, just for fun. He only missed two multiple-choice questions, and he never even took the class.”

Okay, that was kind of impressive.

“So what’s the code?” I couldn’t help lowering my voice to a whisper as I spoke. There was a certain solemnity to this moment.

“It’s pretty simple.”

It took me a minute to realize that Darryl was the one speaking. His voice was low in volume, but higher in pitch than I’d expected it to be, given his size.

“McCormick’s tests have four choices, A through D. One is the correct answer. Two are decoys. The fourth can be anything, except that it’s not related to the first three.”

I really wasn’t following here.

“All you have to do is figure out which answer matches up to two different decoys,” Skylar said. “So say you’ve got a test that asks you, I don’t know … what the color and consistency of a zombie’s tongue is.”

Genevieve giggled and then popped a french fry into her mouth. Clearly, she’d never been up close and personal with the walking dead, because ew.

“Ahem,” Skylar said, clearing her throat, but she spoiled the effect by reaching over and stealing one of Genevieve’s fries. “So, anyway, what is the color and consistency of a zombie’s tongue? (a) black and hardened, (b) black and rotting, (c) brown and rotting, or (d) blue and scabby?”

E, I thought, none of the above. Zombies didn’t have tongues. Like a caterpillar eating its way through its cocoon, the first thing Homo mortis did upon rising was eat the flesh out of its own mouth.

“Ummm … D?” I guessed, because I wasn’t about to share that little tidbit with the table as a whole. As far as the rest of the world knew, I didn’t have any more experience with zombies than the next girl. I knew that they existed. I knew to call Preternatural Control in the unlikely event that I saw one, but that was it. I didn’t know what a horde of zombies smelled like. I couldn’t feel them coming from a mile away. I’d certainly never snuck into my father’s lab and disemboweled twelve of them in one night.

“Wrong,” Darryl said softly.

Yeah, I thought back. Most people think what I do is very, very wrong. But then I remembered that, unless Darryl was psychic (and really, who believed in psychics these days?), he was referring to my answer, not my hunting habits.

Darryl smiled, as if softening the blow. “If the answer was ‘blue and scabby,’ what would the decoys be?”

Sensing that Darryl had just about reached his word limit for continuous speech, Skylar picked up where he’d left off. “When people write multiple-choice tests, they like to give you some answers that are almost right to keep you from picking the right one. Even if the teacher tries to write the answers randomly, it’s nearly impossible to do, so they end up coming up with at least a couple of alternatives that have something in common with the real answer. In this case, ‘blue and scabby’ is the complete oddball.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “So you throw that one out and you’ve got three choices left.”

“Right, so then you look and you find one choice that has something in common with the other two. In this case, the word black and the word rotting both appear twice.”

“So the ones that have black or rotting in it are the decoys, and the one that has both words in it is the answer?” I asked. The method didn’t seem foolproof to me, but it was probably better than my previous plan, which had involved playing eenie meenie miny moe.

“It does not always work,” John Michael said, echoing my thoughts, “but it is a lot better than guessing randomly.”

Again, I tried to place his accent, and again, I failed. Still, John Michael’s words had taken my mind off zombies. And hellhounds. And the other thirty-seven species of preternatural fauna identified since Darwin had gone public with the discovery of the Galápagos hydra, and mankind had started turning over stones better left unturned.

“Another one, Skylar?” The voice snapped me out of my thoughts, and without turning around, I knew that the person speaking was popular, good looking, and in the process of rolling his eyes. “Seriously, Skye, you’re worse about collecting strays than Vaughn is. And that’s saying something, given that he’s a vet.”

I resisted the urge to turn around in my seat and told myself I didn’t care what this holier-than-thou, cooler-than-you, condescending a-hole looked like. Even though his voice did have a way of wrapping itself around your body, heavy and warm.

“What? I’m not allowed to make friends? You afraid you’ll lose your position as the most popular member of the Hayden family?”

I heard the boy’s sigh a second before I felt it on the back of my neck. It was like he was standing directly behind me, even though I knew we had to be separated by at least a foot or two.

“At least it’s not another guy,” the boy muttered.

Skylar rolled her eyes, stood up, and practically skipped over to the boy behind me. I refused to turn around, but a moment later, Skylar came back into view, pushing an older, larger, male version of herself toward our table.

“This is Elliot,” she said. “He used to be my second-favorite brother, but he’s recently been demoted to third.”

I could feel Elliot’s eyes on my face, but couldn’t seem to bring myself to meet them.

“This is Kali,” Skylar said. “Be nice.”

I finally lifted my eyes and met Elliot’s lighter-colored ones. He was tall, not Darryl-tall, but at least three or four inches taller than my five seven. His hair was a shade or two darker than Skylar’s, but cut so short that it still looked almost white. His skin was just tan enough to make me wonder why he’d been spending so much time in the sun, and his cheekbones were a thing of beauty.

Not that I was looking or anything.

“Elliot is one of those guys,” Skylar said. “You know, the ones who hang out with those girls, even though those girls are constantly stealing his sister’s tampons.”

All of the boys, Elliot included, winced, and I made a mental note that the word tampon was male kryptonite.

“Hey, I told them to lay off you. And they did.” Elliot turned Skylar around and searched her eyes. “They did lay off, right?”

Skylar nodded. “’Course, El. You don’t need to worry about me.”

Elliot glanced back at the table, and it was suddenly very clear that he thought Darryl, John Michael, and Genevieve were social mistakes on his sister’s part. The football legacy who chose not to play. The exchange student with a predilection for eyeliner. The quiet, intense girl who didn’t look very girly.

And then, there was me. Clearly, Mr. Judgmental did not approve.

“Hi, Kali. Nice to meet you. I promise I’m not the tool I might appear.” Skylar poked her brother in the side, encouraging him to parrot her words. “Go on. Say it.”

Elliot flicked her in the back of the neck with his thumb. “Shut up, squirt.”

“You’re in serious danger of being bumped down to fourth-favorite-brother status,” Skylar told him. “And Lord knows I’m not really feeling like promoting Reid, so behave.”

Elliot rolled his eyes, but then he looked back at mine, and for the first time, he smiled. “Hi, Kali. It is nice to meet you.”

I tried to make my mouth form words, but couldn’t quite get it to obey, and a split second later, my moment had passed. A girl who looked vaguely familiar sidled up to Elliot, pressing her body close to his. Her hair was red, almost as dark as the streaks in mine, and offset by skin so flawless it was practically luminescent. Her white tank top looked simple and sweet, until she turned sideways to place a proprietary hand on Elliot’s arm, and I realized that her top was nearly backless.

“C’mon, El,” she said as my eyes were drawn to what appeared to be a tattoo on her lower back. “Everyone’s waiting.”

Everyone, her tone said, who’s anyone.

I tried to work myself up to a good hair toss, but failed, because I couldn’t take my eyes off the tattoo, which looked an awful lot like a serpent eating its own tail. Which meant that there was a distinct possibility that it wasn’t a tattoo.

No. Couldn’t be.

The girl turned again, tugging at Elliot, and this time, he allowed himself to be led away.

“Sorry about that,” Skylar said. “My brothers are a little protective. Elliot doesn’t understand why I’m not trying to work my way back into the popular crowd, where he can keep an eye on me. And Bethany is afraid if he spends more than five seconds talking to me, her social status might suffer. It’s a girlfriend/boyfriend, brother/sister thing.”

I nodded to show that I was listening, but couldn’t bring myself to actually respond, because in that instant, I realized why the girl with Elliot had looked so familiar. Skylar’s brother was dating Bethany Davis. The same Bethany Davis whose father was my father’s new boss. The one I’d been sent to Heritage High to rub elbows with.

Staring after the golden couple, I spent a few seconds really, really hoping that Bethany Davis had a tattoo. Because if the symbol on the small of her back wasn’t a tattoo, things were going to get very ugly, very soon.

The kind of ugly that ended with someone buried six feet under.

As much as I didn’t want to consider the possibility, I had to. If the ouroboros on Bethany’s back was real, she’d be dead by the end of the day.

And in my current state, there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it.