13

I was fairly certain that the kind of person who picked up girls on the side of the road wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to be alone in a car with for any extended period of time. I suspected this was doubly true if you were covered in your own blood and wearing the shredded remains of a T-shirt that had most definitely seen better days.

Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers. I needed a shower. I needed fresh clothes, and I needed to get off the side of the highway before some well-meaning passerby called the cops. My options were severely limited, and of those, Eddie seemed like the best bet. He had a proto-beer belly and biceps that told me he liked to feel strong. I knew the second I saw him, pulling into the gas station, that he would pick me up when he pulled out, no questions asked.

I also knew he’d probably try to take a little something in return.

Don’t do this, Kali.

I wasn’t sure whether Zev meant those words as a warning or an order, but either way, I didn’t feel particularly compelled to listen. Whoever or whatever he was, he was nothing to me, and I was used to taking care of myself.

I had a knife strapped to my calf and the instincts of a killer.

I’ll be fine.

Besides, I’d already almost died once today. That really had a way of putting things in perspective. So I got into Eddie’s car. I relegated Zev’s voice to the back of my mind, and I bided my time. We had made it to the outskirts of town, about a mile away from the university, when Eddie pulled off onto an access road and put one hand on my shoulder.

“I’ll kill you,” I said conversationally. The words weren’t a threat—more of an observation, really, and it disturbed me that I could be so matter-of-fact about taking human life. I’d never felt the need to hunt anyone who fell on that side of the natural/preternatural divide, but the hunt-lust was already building up inside of me, and I’d had a really bad morning.

“Excuse me?” Eddie asked, gob-smacked and so fatally stupid that I almost couldn’t stand to look at him.

“Don’t touch me,” I clarified, the air around me pulsing with a rhythm I recognized all too well. One that wanted me to lay a trap. To hunt. To kill.

“Hey now, sweetheart. I could have called the cops when I saw you. Still could. Girl like you, looking like that—”

Eddie’s hand ventured from my shoulder down my collarbone, and something inside of me snapped. One second I was me, and the next, I’d been pushed outside of my body, and I was watching my mouth move and listening to words that weren’t mine snaking their way out of my lips.

“She probably wouldn’t kill you. She has a certain fondness for humans, thinks she’s one of them.”

I watched, disembodied, as a dangerous, glittering smile cut across the features of my face, and I flashed back to the moment at the ice rink when I’d lost control of my body, when something or someone else had thrown it out of the dragon’s line of fire.

“What in the blazing hell are you talking about?” Eddie didn’t remove his hand from my collarbone, but it didn’t venture any lower, either.

“The girl won’t kill you, but I will. I’ll take this knife and slit you from the throat down, split your body in two along the lines of your delicate human spine.”

Zev’s voice was lower than mine, almost mechanical in the way it left my mouth.

I fought for control of my own body.

I can handle this!

I am handling this, Zev said calmly, and I knew by his tone of voice that he wasn’t arguing with me. He was simply stating a fact.

I was beginning to wish I’d never gotten into a car with Eddie.

Eddie—who was likely coming to a similar conclusion himself—stupidly persisted in trying to make a point with the creature wearing my body.

“Now, look here, girl.”

“Leave.” In the span of a heartbeat, Zev had my knife in his hand, and he dragged the point gently across the surface of my assailant’s Adam’s apple. “Run.”

Eddie froze. “You crazy bitch.”

Within a second, Zev had the edge of the knife pressed to the underside of the man’s chin, hard enough to draw blood. Small red spheres beaded up on the surface of Eddie’s skin, coating his stubble.

Zev licked his lips.

Or rather, he licked mine.

My tongue. My lips. My hand holding the knife.

I clung to that thought, and somehow, my mind overpowered Zev’s and shoved him out.

The ouroboros on my stomach burned like dry ice, like fire.

“I don’t think he likes it when you call me a bitch,” I told Eddie dryly, trying not to sound as thrown as I felt.

“He?” Eddie’s Adam’s apple bobbed upward, and my eyes lit on a series of tiny cuts in the surface of his skin.

Blood.

People like me didn’t get hungry. We didn’t even need to eat. But for a moment, a split second that rocked me to the core, I was very, very thirsty.

“I should go,” I said, forcing myself to pull the knife from Eddie’s throat, trying not to look at the blood beading up on its surface.

“I’m calling the cops!” Eddie seemed intent on proving that he wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box. I gave him a look.

“And telling them what? That you picked up a girl covered in blood, and when you tried to put the moves on her, the demon inside of her threatened your life?” I snorted. “Good luck with that one.”

I am not a demon. Zev sounded extremely put out. Demon is a very offensive word.

I rolled my eyes. You would have killed him, Zev.

Yes.

And you don’t see anything wrong with that?

He would have hurt you, came the reply. He may well hurt someone else.

One hand on the hilt of my knife and the other on the door handle, I turned my gaze back to Eddie. The last thing I wanted was him doing this to someone else—someone who might not have a knife strapped to one leg and a would-be murderer inside her brain.

“We have your scent now,” I said, sounding less than human myself. “I wouldn’t recommend picking up any more teenage girls.”

To hit home the point, I brought the bloodstained knife to my nose and breathed in deeply. My tongue flickered out between my lips, but I pulled the blade back before the two could touch.

“Good-bye, Eddie.”

I opened the car door, hopped to the ground, and without ever turning back to look over my shoulder, walked back toward the highway and started to jog.

With my endurance, I could have run all the way home, but I was still covered in my own blood and didn’t want to risk being seen any more than I had to.

I needed a shower and a change of clothing. I needed to blend, and growing up in academia, I knew college campuses the way other girls knew the layout of the local mall. The university was close enough, and it wasn’t hard to find a block of dorms. Sticking to the shadows as much as possible, I found a door that had been propped open and headed to the second-floor communal bathroom.

As I’d suspected, there weren’t many people up this early in the morning. I took my hair down from its ponytail and let it hang in my face, masking the blood there and praying that my dark T-shirt—or at least, what was left of it—would hide the rest.

I made it to the bathroom without being spotted and surveyed my surroundings. One shower was already in use, and the occupant had hung her clothes on a hook outside the curtain: jeans, a tank top, a sizeable bra. Deciding the third item wouldn’t fit, I gently slipped the first two off the hook and walked back out the door, up another flight of stairs, and into the third-floor bathroom. I tossed the clothes over the shower rod, pulled the curtain, and started stripping off my own.

Hot water should have felt good on my ravaged body, but it didn’t. I could feel the warmth, but my muscles weren’t sore and they weren’t looking for relief. Mechanically, I ran my hands over my limbs, checking for injuries that hadn’t yet healed. A few areas were raw and red, but as I washed the blood and dirt from my pores, decorating the drain in shades of black and red, even those areas began to fade, leaving my light brown skin creamy and smooth.

Untouched.

As I turned my attention to my hair, it occurred to me that if Zev was there, in my mind, he might be getting quite the show. I paused, searching for him, but for the first time, I felt nothing. I dug deeper, pushed harder, and the image I’d seen while I was lying on the side of the road pulsed like a strobe light in front of my eyes.

Cement walls, scorch marks on the floor, and a figure swathed in shadow, lying on one side.

As quick as a camera flash, the image was gone. The steam from the shower settled on my skin, and I could feel my mind loosening up, until an idea took shape.

Zev had said that chupacabra bites were fatal in humans, but that some people could handle being bitten. Some people benefited from it. People like me.

And when I’d asked Zev what he was, he’d thrown the question back to me, like we were the same.

I’d spent my entire life looking for answers, and now, against all odds, they were there, in my head.

I wrung the last of the bloodied water from my hair and wrenched the shower knob into the OFF position. Quickly, silently, I put on the jeans I’d stolen and slipped the tank top over my head. My boots had survived the crash mostly intact, and without even thinking, I sheathed my knife, securing it in place beneath the leg of the pilfered Sevens. My body hummed where it came in contact with the blade, and a familiar urge began to beckon to me in rhythm with my own heartbeat.

I wanted to hunt. I needed to kill. And when a human girl brushed past me and hopped into the shower stall next to mine, I caught the scent of her blood in the air.

Wet. Coppery. Honey.

Easy, Kali. The thirst isn’t yours. It’s the Nibbler’s.

I tried to process what he was saying. Wasn’t the chupacabra supposed to be draining my blood?

It’s a part of you now. It makes you stronger. It connects us. And sooner or later, you’ll have to feed it.

I had to get out of there—away from the smell of the girl in the shower, away from the suggestion that the chupacabra inside of me wanted blood. An uncomfortable idea—not to mention impossible—was taking form in my mind, and I didn’t want to give life to it.

I didn’t want to think about the kind of creature that could heal from any wound and thirsted for human blood.

You should burn the clothing.

I almost thanked Zev for changing the subject, but caught myself just in time. It was disturbing how natural having someone else in my head seemed, and I couldn’t push down that little whisper inside of me, the one that said that people like me were meant to come in pairs.

Lonely Ones. I remembered the phrase from the ice rink, and Zev echoed it, the timbre of his voice setting his words off from my own.

You never knew, he said, half questioning, half tender. What you are, what was missing.

I walked out of the bathroom, down the stairs, and out the door.

Talk to me, Kali. I tried to explain things to you yesterday, but you couldn’t hear me. The connection’s so much clearer now….

I ignored him and set to work scrounging up a bottle of nail polish remover and a lighter. Ducking back behind one of the dorms, I zeroed in on an empty trash can, dumped my clothes, and followed Zev’s suggestion to a T.

I burned my clothes.

For a few seconds, I watched the flames. And then, unsure that it would work, I tried reaching for Zev’s mind. He’d taken over my body twice now—first with the dragon, then with Eddie. Turnaround was only fair play. Tit for tat.

My breathing slowed, and I felt it—the thing inside my body. And then, my skin tingling with unnatural charge, I felt the thing inside of Zev’s.

My body. My Nibbler. His Nibbler. Him.

For a second—a split second—I saw the world through Zev’s eyes, wore his body as my own.

Concrete walls. Concrete floor. A woman with ruby-red lips. Blood.

I came out of it without warning. My bloodied clothes were ashes, and the fire had burned itself out.

Where are you? I asked Zev silently. What was that?

The voice in my head was silent.

You wanted me to talk. I’m talking.

Still nothing. Whatever I’d seen, whatever Zev was hiding, he clearly wasn’t forthcoming about it. All he wanted to talk about was me. What I was. What was happening to my body. How to keep predators off my trail.

Even thinking about that last one sent a whisper of discontent through my arteries and veins—I wasn’t built for running away from the monsters. I wanted desperately to run toward them—track them down, kill them. Luckily, I was used to restraining myself, used to acting human even when I wasn’t, and the human part of my brain reminded me that right now, preternatural beasties weren’t exactly my primary concern.

Someone had made a strong attempt at killing me this morning. With any luck, between my transition from human to not and my trip through the windshield, I might have managed to knock out their tracking system, but whoever was calling the shots probably wouldn’t be thrilled if and when they found out I was still alive. Worse, I was pretty sure that Bethany had seen me fly through the windshield, and now she was missing. Had our pursuers taken her captive? Had they hurt her? What had she told them?

Was she dead?

Easy, Kali. Zev was back. My fingers curled slightly, like someone was stroking my palm. It’s not your fault.

“It is my fault,” I said softly, resisting the impulse to speak the words straight from my mind to his. “People like me don’t have friends. We don’t have enemies. We don’t carpool, we don’t argue, we don’t let other people care.”

But I had. I’d let Bethany help me, just because I’d helped her. Somehow, she’d crept under my skin. She’d seen a glimmer of the real me.

And now she was gone, possibly missing, possibly dead.

I’m going to find her, I said silently, daring Zev to argue, to try to tell me what to do when he couldn’t even answer a simple question himself. I’m going to find her, and I’m going to find out what they did to her—even if it means going straight to the belly of the beast.