10

My father came home. Elliot left, and there was a moment—a single moment—when I thought my dad might look at me and see: the pallor to my skin, the dark circles under my eyes, the bruises, the swollen joints. I laid my hand over the bottom of my T-shirt, playing with the edge, flicking the bottom up and down, up and down, waiting for him to look at me.

To see.

“Your friend seems nice,” he said absentmindedly. He might as well have backhanded me, and I couldn’t even hate him for it. He meant well. He meant to love me.

Then again, you know what they say about the road to hell.

“Elliot’s not my friend,” I said, my voice as neutral and pleasant as the professor’s. “He’s dating Bethany Davis.”

Bethany’s name caught my father’s attention, the way I’d known it would.

“Is he now? I had a feeling you two would hit it off.”

For one horrific moment, I thought my father might reach over and pat me on the head, like a little kid. Like a dog.

“You should invite Bethany over here one day after school,” he said. “Or perhaps I could talk to Paul about the four of us going out for a father-daughter dinner?”

In that instant, I hated Bethany, hated her so much that I wished I’d never seen the ouroboros on her back or that I’d turned a blind eye to it once I had. I knew it wasn’t rational, knew that this conversation wasn’t any more her fault than it was mine, but I didn’t feel like being rational.

I felt like puking all over my father’s dress-for-success designer shoes.

“Kali?”

I got bitten by a chupacabra, and I might not make it to morning. Just thought you should know.

I couldn’t coerce my lips into saying the words. What was the point? Instead, I took the easy way out, the way I always did with him, the way he always did with me.

“I’m really tired,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

Another parent might have gotten upset that I hadn’t replied to his suggestion, but my father never yelled at me. The two of us never fought. I’d go on my merry way, and he’d go on his, and if I died in the middle of the night, he’d live.

He’d just have to find another way to cozy up to Paul Davis.

By some miracle, I made it upstairs without breaking down or passing out. I closed my bedroom door behind me and sank down onto the floor.

Eight hours and fifty-one minutes.

I was tired, I was light-headed, and all I wanted was to go to sleep and bring on the dawn, but I knew with sudden prescience that it wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to be able to stop thinking about it, any of it—not about my dad, or the thing inside of me, or the fact that somewhere out there, someone was looking for me.

For Bethany.

How did I get myself into this?

I was normally good at lying low, but this was pretty much the opposite. Assuming the best happened, and I did survive the night, that would be a giant red flag right there—to Bethany, to Skylar and her brothers, to the woman in heels.

—Hurt—You.

With everything going on inside my head, the return of the voice was almost a relief. I was the kind of person who needed an enemy. I needed something I could fight, something I could kill.

Back again? I asked silently, disregarding the fact that according to modern science, chupacabras had the mental capacity of an amoeba. And here I thought Elliot and Vaughn had scared you away.

No response. Then again, what did I expect? I was talking to a parasite. I was dying. And there was a part of me that couldn’t help wishing that Elliot hadn’t left just so I wouldn’t have to be going through this alone.

Not like you.

That was the clearest thing the little interloper had said since the ice rink—like I needed a reminder that I was different. Like I’d ever been able to forget, even for a second, that I wasn’t like other girls—that I wasn’t like anyone.

This wasn’t how I’d pictured spending what could end up being my last night on earth: alone in my bedroom, talking to the voice in my head and feeling sorry for myself. I needed to do something.

At that moment, I would have given anything for the hunt-lust, the restlessness, the purpose I’d felt the night before. Every other day, I was a demon hunter. I was powerful. I was something.

But now?

Now I was just lost and lonely and dying, and the closest thing I had to company was the creature that was kill-ing me.

Lovely.

I could feel my throat tightening, and my eyes started to burn.

Screw this.

I may have been different, I may have been a loner, I may have been a freak, but I wasn’t a crier. Not about this, not about anything. Determined to quell the urge, I turned my attention to the piece of paper Skylar had pressed into my palm as I was leaving Vaughn’s house. I tugged it out of my pocket and unfolded it, careful not to tear the edges.

It’s this thing, Skylar had said. I can’t get it out of my head. I think it might be important.

Staring at the drawing, I had the oddest sense of déjà vu. The symbol was simple: an octagon bisected by a ribbon—or possibly a ladder, spiraling around an invisible line. The shape itself was uneven and asymmetrical, and I got the feeling that drawing was not a talent that Skylar had in any kind of abundance.

I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at the sketch and waiting for the lightbulb moment when everything clicked into place, but all I managed to accomplish was giving myself a headache.

Your body’s working overtime, trying to replace the blood it’s lost.

Thinking back on Vaughn’s diagnosis, I remembered—belatedly—that at lunch, Elliot had mentioned something about one of their brothers being a vet. I snorted.

I passed out, and Skylar took me to a vet.

The irony of the situation—that maybe I was an animal, no more human than the things I fought—did not escape me.

Not—animal.

“The bloodsucking parasite doesn’t think I’m an animal,” I said, my voice dry. “I feel so very comforted.”

“Kali?” Belatedly, I realized that my father had stuck his head into my room, and I was torn between wondering what he wanted now and hoping that he hadn’t overheard me talking to thin air.

“What do you want?” I asked, too tired to sugarcoat things and pretend that everything was okay between us, or that there was even an us to speak of at all.

“I … erm …” My father rarely stuttered. Eloquence was kind of his thing, so the fact that he was stumbling over his words drew my attention more than the fact that he was here. “I just wanted you to know that I didn’t call Paul Davis,” he said. “If you and Bethany want to get together—that is, if you decide you want to—well, it’s up to you, okay?”

This was about as close as he could possibly come to apologizing, and saying okay without meeting his eyes was as close as I could come to accepting it. A few seconds passed with neither one of us saying anything else, and then he turned to leave.

“Night, Dad,” I called after him. There was a chance—and I didn’t know how big it was—that this might be the last conversation the two of us ever had. I owed it to him to say something, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to be saying.

“Good night, Kali.”

Around two in the morning, I finally fell asleep, but the only thing waiting for me in my dreams was more of the same: more monsters, more doubts, a nagging feeling that I was missing something, that I was screwing everything up.

I dreamed I was dreaming.

I dreamed I was dying.

I dreamed I was covered in blood.

I turned over in bed, my white sheets dyed in shades of red, and there was a man there, staring at me, drenched in shadow from head to toe. There was something beautiful about his features, something deadly, and his eyes …

Those eyes.

They were the color of tarnished silver, set deep in a face that wasn’t human, but wasn’t not.

He reached out and touched me, trailing shadows everywhere he went, and I breathed in the darkness.

Breathed it out.

I dreamed I was dreaming.

I dreamed I was dying.

I woke up covered in blood.