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.

I’m going to find you, I thought fiercely, willing my newly acquired parasite to absorb that particular thought and leave the rest alone. I’m going to find you, and I’m going to fight you, and I’m going to win.

Maybe it heard me. Maybe it didn’t. I had no idea if these things were picky little memory eaters, or if my brain was an all-you-can-eat chupacabra buffet. I didn’t know how this was supposed to work or why. For most people, it probably didn’t even matter, because by the time they realized they’d been bitten, they were as good as dead.

Pushing that cheery thought out of my mind, I did a quick injury check on my organs and bones. The routine was familiar, one I paced my way through every other morning as I went from dispassionately watching my body heal to wondering if this time, I might have pushed things too far.

Head, arms, wrists, ribs.

Feet, ankles, knees, hips.

“No broken bones.” I said the words out loud, more to fill the silence and empty space before me than for the benefit of any audience. “Arm’s still slashed up, though, and I feel …”

Awful.

Sluggish.

Violated.

Aware.

Of all of the answers on the tip of my tongue, the last one was the truest—and the most disconcerting. I’d learned the hard way to pay attention to my surroundings, but I’d never once felt so aware of my own body, like I was wearing it for the first time.

Like it was wearing me.

“Do you feel like a knife-toting freak with a hero complex? Because, no offense, but evidence would suggest that you probably should.”

Despite myself, I jumped. There was enough going on inside my head that somehow, I’d neglected to realize that I wasn’t the only person lying on one of these criminally uncomfortable cots.

“God, I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up. I managed to talk the nurse out of calling your dad. And mine. If anyone asks, you always get light-headed at that time of the month, and you cut your arm when you passed out.”

For someone who’d been on a downward spiral toward death a half hour before, Bethany Davis looked remarkably calm and collected as she propped herself up on both elbows, her red hair streaming down her back like she’d lifted the pose from some kind of sunscreen ad.

I processed her words and responded. “You didn’t tell the nurse I’d been, I don’t know, bitten by a chupacabra?”

I wasn’t big on confrontation—at least not with humans—but Bethany must have known as well as I did that the first few hours after a person was bitten were an open window for treatment. Anyone who’d seen the travesty that was Three Days to Live could tell you that until the ouroboros appeared on a patient’s body, modern science could theoretically extract and contain the chupacabra. I wasn’t exactly the poster child for Fans of Modern Science, and the last thing I wanted was an overzealous doctor turning me into a case study in the New England Journal of Preternatural Medicine, but Bethany had no way of knowing any of that.

As far as she was concerned, I was just an ordinary girl. A knife-toting freak whose hero complex had just saved her life. The least she could have done was make an attempt at saving mine.

“Kali.” Bethany’s voice was quiet, her tone soft, and she caught her pink lips between pearly white teeth, like the motion would keep the words she was about to say inside her mouth, keep them from being true. “Sweetie, look at your stomach.”

I knew what I was going to see before I glanced down at the bit of midriff peeking out over the band of my dark-wash jeans. A member of the cheerleading squad had just called me “sweetie.”

This could not possibly be good.

“A snake. Eating its own tail.” I said the words out loud to make them matter less. The symbol that had appeared as black ink on the small of Bethany’s back was golden against the gentle bronze of my own skin. Even though I could only see the tip of the ouroboros, I could suddenly feel the full measure of the symbol, like someone was tracing a fingernail lightly around its edge.

“I would have told them.” Bethany met my gaze and held it. “As soon as I woke up, I would have told them to get you to a hospital or my dad’s lab ASAP if I’d thought it would do any good, but I saw the ouroboros, and I knew that it wouldn’t.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes from the mark, couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for the fact that it had appeared only moments after I’d been bitten, when the incubation period was supposed to last hours or days.

This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.

“So what’s the plan?” Bethany asked.

“The plan?”

She gave me a look. “Kali, please. No messiah complex in the world is going to make someone like you take on a death sentence for someone like me. You deeply suspected the chupacabra would take the trade—even though that’s supposed to be impossible—and you had some kind of fail-safe in place for when it did. So again, I ask, what’s the plan?”

I ignored her question and hoped she’d take the message. Whatever my “plan”—and I was using the term fairly loosely—entailed, having Bethany Davis along for the ride was not a part of it.

“Has anyone else seen this?” I asked, nodding toward my stomach and then tugging on the edge of my shirt to cover the incriminating mark as best I could.

“The nurse might have.” Bethany turned to sit cross-legged on her cot. “She didn’t say anything, but I’m a pretty good judge of people, and there was a distinctly sketchy air about her when she agreed not to call our parents. Either I’m really convincing, she’s the worst school nurse ever, or something is up. Worst-case scenario, she called the CDC.”

“The CDC,” I repeated, unable to imagine why the nurse would agree not to call our parents, but feel compelled to dial up the CDC.

“The Centers for Disease Control?” Bethany gave an impatient roll of her eyes. “To whom all contagious and preternatural illnesses must be reported? Ringing any bells?”

Great.

As if dealing with my father, the legions of hell, and a variety of environmental protection agencies on a regular basis wasn’t bad enough.

“Where is the nurse?” I asked. What I really meant was something more along the lines of if I try to leave, will she try to stop me?

“No idea,” Bethany replied. “She bandaged your arm, gave me some orange juice, and lit out of here like the two of us had sprouted horns.” She paused for a brief second. “I’m not going to sprout horns, am I?”

If the situation hadn’t been so incredibly dire, it might have been funny. Who knew how much blood I’d lost from the cut in my arm? It was shallow, but long, and now a bloodsucker was mining me from the inside. There were memories I didn’t want to lose—my mother’s face, my best friend from kindergarten, the first time I’d sprayed a will-o’-the-wisp with liquid nitrogen—and thoughts that I couldn’t risk it getting ahold of. I had bigger things to worry about than Bethany’s fear of growing horns.

“Bethany, you’ll be fine. Just forget this ever happened and go back to life as usual.”

That was the nicest way I could think of to say leave me alone. All things considered, it should have worked. I’d always excelled at being the kind of girl other people left behind.

But Bethany didn’t take the bait. “So, what? You save my life and in exchange, you expect me to abandon you to the geek squad at the CDC, so they can chop you into pieces and stuff you in neatly labeled test tubes? Or maybe I’m supposed to pretend like if we don’t find a way to get that thing out of you, you won’t die, or that I totally won’t care at all if you do?”

Actually, yes. She was the kind of person who referred to her boyfriend’s baby sister as “Little Miss Loose Legs.” Leaving and never giving me another thought was exactly what I expected a girl like Bethany to do.

“Seriously, Kali? I’m shallow, not a sociopath. There’s a difference, and I am not leaving you here alone, so suck it up and deal me in.”

My mouth dropped open in abject shock, and Bethany began speaking very slowly, as if I were a small child or a very dense jock.

“What. Is. The. Plan.” She narrowed her eyes. “I’d offer to call my dad, but he’d just put you in quarantine. And call the CDC. And you’d still die. Whatever your plan is, it has to be better than that.”

I have a plan, and I don’t need your help.

For once, my mouth and brain were in complete and total accord, so I said exactly what I was thinking. Bethany blinked several times, but before she could reply, a familiar blonde head peeked over the edge of the doorframe, and Bethany’s nonsociopathic tendencies flew right out the door.

“Can I help you?” she asked, every inch the ice queen.

Skylar shook her head, sending wisps of blonde hair flying. “No, you can’t help me, but I think I can help you. Both of you.” Skylar paused for a breath, and that was my first clue she was on the verge of a truly epic babble. “I can’t tell you why, and I can’t tell you how I know, but the two of you need to get out of here in the next two minutes and forty-five seconds, or something really, really bad is going to happen to one and/or both of you, and it’s going to make someone with a soul the color and consistency of bubbling tar very, very happy.”

The end of Skylar’s run-on sentence was punctuated by a moment of absolute silence.

Listen to her.

This time, the voice in my head wasn’t mine, and I felt the words in the pit of my stomach, all the way down to the soles of my feet. I wanted to argue or disobey on principle, but even to human eyes, the world looks different in the calm before the storm. Every instinct my hunting habit had taught me said that it was time to take to higher ground.

Now.

In an instant, I was beside Skylar, and Bethany followed reluctantly on my heels. Skylar shrugged off her hoodie, handed it to Bethany, and spoke in an eerily calm and measured voice. “Put this on and pull up the hood. Then walk, don’t run, toward the cafeteria. When we hit the corner, turn right.”

Something about the younger girl’s unnaturally even keel must have penetrated Bethany’s bitch shields, because she put on Skylar’s worn blue hoodie—which had probably once belonged to one of her older brothers—without batting an eye. The three of us walked toward the end of the hallway, and just as we turned right, I heard the telltale tone of a single woman flirting with a slightly older man.

“They said to call you if any of the cheerleaders showed signs of anemia, and once I saw the ouroboros, well …” The school nurse let her words trail off, and I stopped breathing.

Someone knew.

Maybe not about Bethany specifically, but someone had known to be on the lookout for Heritage High cheerleaders showing signs of chupacabra possession. And if they’d known and hadn’t done a thing to stop it …

Not good.

I didn’t so much as glance back over my shoulder, but as Skylar, Bethany, and I hit the glass doors at the end of the hallway, I saw a reflection of the people rounding the corner to the nurse’s office. In addition to the nurse, there were two men dressed in suits, and a woman with skin a shade darker and infinitely more flawless than my own. She wore her hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck, and she walked with purpose, the staccato click of heels against tile cutting through the air like gunshots.

“You did the right thing by calling us,” the woman said. “We’ll take care of everything now.”

Her voice was soft, but I heard it, heard every word, and in that moment, I knew two things with absolute, unerring certainty: one, the suits on their way to the nurse’s office weren’t from the CDC, and two—whether they knew it yet or not—they weren’t here for a cheerleader.

They were here for the girl with the ouroboros. And as of five minutes ago, that girl was me.