20

It’s not safe in that house. It’s never safe.

I couldn’t shake those words, no matter how hard I tried, so instead of slipping back into my father’s classroom and returning his ID card, I dropped it in the hallway outside his class—someone would find it, and I had bigger fish to fry. Ducking out of the building, it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the sudden change in brightness. The sunlight felt like a pinprick in the center of each of my eyes, but I was only vaguely aware of the discomfort as it spread outward, leaving them bloodshot and dry.

Where we come from, there isn’t much of a sun. The more like us you become, the less tolerance you’ll have for direct sunlight—but you’ll survive.

I didn’t know which part of that statement was the most disturbing—the idea that whatever I was, whatever I was becoming, the transformation wasn’t complete yet, or the suggestion that people like us came from somewhere else.

I could tell you all about it, Zev suggested.

I saw the ploy for what it was: he wanted me to forget about Chimera, forget about Bethany, forget about anything that might spur me into action. In his ideal world, I probably would have completely ignored the fact that he was caged, lying in wait for the moment he could tear off all of their heads.

Nice try, I said. But no.

I told you I could handle this, Kali, and I meant it.

For a split second, there was something else there, something he wasn’t telling me. I could almost see it, almost pinpoint the reason he wanted me to stay away, but a second later, it was gone.

Frustrated, I replied to his silent sentence out loud. “Yeah, well, you also spent the first twenty-four hours of our acquaintance appearing to me in shadows and stalking my dreams. Forgive me if I’m skeptical.”

His response came in images, not words, and I got the distinct sense that up until I’d shifted from my human form, he hadn’t been able to make himself heard more clearly—which meant there was a good chance that as soon as I shifted back, I’d lose the connection. Lose this.

I’d lose the boost that being bitten had given my already unnatural abilities—and the thirst.

I was used to watching my abilities slip away, leaving me vulnerable and human and raw. I was used to missing things, people, having a purpose, but this time, it would be worse.

Because this time, when I shifted, I’d lose Zev and the ability to save him.

Eighteen hours and twenty-four minutes.

I was on the clock—but I still couldn’t make myself focus only on Zev, not with Bethany’s mother’s words echoing in the recesses of my mind.

It’s not safe in that house. It’s never safe.

It was probably nothing. The woman had lost a child—how could any place feel safe after something like that? Bethany was probably fine—or, at least, as fine as she’d been when I’d left her—but given that she was almost as embroiled in this mess as I was, I couldn’t ignore the possibility that she might not be.

If her mother was here, Bethany was home alone—and I’d already had firsthand experience with the way the men in suits handled loose ends.

She’s fine, I told myself. If they were going to hurt her, they would have done it already.

In my head, Zev sighed. You’re going back there, aren’t you?

I chewed lightly on my bottom lip. Maybe.

That was the problem with caring about people—you had too much to lose.

I glanced down at my watch again, more out of habit than anything else, and then made a split-second decision. Bethany’s house was a good ten miles away, but there was nothing saying I had to run there on foot. I’d go by, eyeball the house, make sure that Chimera hadn’t sent anyone to pay Beth a visit—and then I’d find a way to get what I needed out of the mangled remains of Paul Davis’s phone.

Scanning the cars in the parking lot, my eyes came to rest on my father’s.

Hey, Zev? I said, sounding—to me, at least—oddly like Skylar. Any chance you know how to hot-wire a car?

I might have felt bad about stealing my father’s car, had he ever acknowledged the fact that I was old enough to drive—and had been for over a year. But sixteen and seventeen were just numbers to him, and we’d never been much for celebrating birthdays. Given that, I figured that just this once, he could rely on public transportation—or walk the five miles separating the university from our house.

All’s fair in love and war—and black ops.

Ignoring the quiet trill of guilt trying to sound off in my brain, I parked the car a couple of blocks away from Bethany’s house, figuring that if Chimera hadn’t figured out who I was yet, the last thing I needed to do was hand them my father’s license plate number on a silver platter. Closing the car door behind me, I started jogging toward Bethany’s house, making an effort at slowing the unnaturally fast pace my body wanted to take.

I wasn’t used to having to hold back, and it took the strain of pretending to be human to an all-new level.

My body wanted to run.

It wanted to blur.

It wanted to feed—

But I most emphatically wasn’t going to think about that. The last thing I needed was for the neighbors to see me running by at an inhuman blur.

So I held back. I paced myself. And then I heard the scream.

Go. Quickly.

I stopped holding back, stopped thinking. One second, I was running, and the next I was there, and everything in between was fuzzy and indefinite in my mind. This time, when I heard the scream, I recognized its owner.

Not Bethany. Skylar.

That, more than the whisper of Zev’s own hunt-lust in the corners of my mind, pushed me forward. I didn’t have many friends—I wasn’t entirely sure I had any—but Skylar was the closest thing I’d had to one in a very long time.

She was screaming.

I catapulted my way over the gate, lost myself to the blur of the motion, hit the front porch, and breathed in through my nose.

Death, I thought, the word oddly dull in my mind. The dead and the dying had a smell—a bit like rusted metal, a bit like rotting food. The scent of it set the hairs on the back of my neck on end.

Walkers, Zev said. Lots of them.

It took me a moment to translate, to know that by Walkers, he meant the walking dead.

Homo mortis.

Zombies.

I had my knife in hand before I realized I’d reached for it, and I had kicked open the Davises’ front door before it ever occurred to me that it might have been unlocked.

“Kali?” A familiar voice—tight with panic, tinged with disbelief—caught me off guard. The only thing that kept me from putting my knife straight through the top of Elliot’s spine was a surge of interest from the chupacabra inside me.

A realization that Elliot smelled human.

He smelled good.

“Where are they?” I asked. My voice sounded different—gravelly and low, humming with power and need and want.

“Beth’s down the hall, barricaded in. I can’t find Skylar—”

“No,” I said sharply. “The zombies. Where are they?”

On cue, one of the living dead dropped down from the stairway overhead. Its bones crunched as it landed, and when it stood, I realized that it was like me—it couldn’t feel pain, couldn’t tell that its legs were broken, the bones protruding through dead and rotting flesh.

Its mouth—or what was left of it—opened, revealing a cavernous hole. No tongue. I caught the faint whiff of sulfur in its blood and wondered how anyone could have ever thought that zombies started out human.

“Kali, look out!”

Elliot’s words were lost on me, his presence a distraction I didn’t need.

Kill it, I thought. Kill it now.

I flung the knife and a second later, I heard the sound it made cutting through flesh, lodging itself in rock-hard bone. I leapt forward, a wild thing, slamming the heel of my hand into the hilt of the blade. The creature’s spine gave way; its head detached, and a second later, my knife was back in my hand.

“Kali?” Every muscle in Elliot’s body was tense. His face was pale, but his eyes were hard.

I said nothing. Somewhere below us, Skylar screamed.

“Weapons,” I said, my voice a foreign thing in a throat that wanted nothing more than to be coated in the blood of the thing I’d just slayed. “Whatever you have, give it to me and get out.”

Elliot didn’t seem any more inclined to follow my instructions than I’d been to follow most of Zev’s.

“Beth’s dad collects guns,” he said. “They’re in the basement. That’s where I was headed.”

I didn’t have time for this. Not with Skylar screaming, not with the hunt-lust exploding inside of me, like there were a hundred zombies in this house, a thousand.

I left Elliot—left him standing there, light blue eyes, cheekbones sharp as any knife. Either he’d survive or he wouldn’t. Either way, I knew without asking that if it came down to a choice, he would have sent me after Skylar, told me to save her, protect her—

Kill them. Kill them now.

I didn’t know the halls of this house as well as the layout of the biology building, but this time, I didn’t have to rely on memory or a mental map or anything other than an unerring sense of where they were.

The things I needed to kill.

The closer I got to the sound of Skylar’s screaming, the more of them there were. I felt like I was swimming in corpses, cutting my way through one after another after another in my pursuit. Around number ten, I lost my knife, left it buried in a corpse still twitching with what was left of its mockery of life. Then all I had was my hands, nails as sharp as blades, and my blood.

I fought my way toward Skylar, my flesh shredded and bleeding, and when I found her, she was still screaming, but she didn’t look scared. She didn’t look hurt. She’d managed to crawl on top of what looked to be a very large safe—easily one and a half times her size—and she’d squished herself back against the wall, just out of range of the yellowed fingernails and white-gray hands groping for her body.

For her blood.

“You okay?” I asked her.

She nodded, then screamed again, the sound piercing the air like a siren—and for a moment, the horde of monsters in between us shrank back.

“Little Sisters’ Survival Guide, rule number thirty-seven,” Skylar said. “Scream before they hit you.”

And then she screamed again.

I didn’t have time to question her logic—or the existence of the little sisters’ survival guide. “Close your eyes,” I shouted, over her shrieks and the wet, gargling moans of the things that stood between us.

Skylar didn’t question the command, and I didn’t have time to think about why I’d given it. She closed her eyes, and I dragged one jagged fingernail across the length of my neck, drawing blood, waiting.

One by one, the horde turned their attention from Skylar to me. One by one, they stopped scrambling for her blood. One by one, their eyes—pupil-less and without color—focused in on the line of blood I’d drawn.

I noticed the red, blinking collars on their necks a second before they lunged—each moving in tandem with the one next to it, with coordination the walking dead should never have.

Zombies were stupid and slow and incapable of anything but eating—their own bodies, others’—but this set moved with purpose, like rats through a maze.

My last thought, in the second before they closed in, was that maybe you could train zombies as easily as Pavlov’s dogs.

At the sound of the bell, circle your prey and eat her flesh.

I had no weapons. No plan. Nothing but my blood and my hands. They were coming, and there were more of them than I’d realized. Despite their increased speed, there was no grace to their movements, no rhythm. Their mouths were open, their bodies jerking as they advanced on me.

I grabbed the closest one by the arm and wrenched it off with a sickening crack, but the monster didn’t blink, didn’t howl. Instead, it returned the favor, evenly spaced, triangular teeth going for the flesh in my arms.

I fought—kicked, punched, tore through whatever flesh I could lay a hand on, but no matter how many times I hit them, or how many of them I took down, there were always more.

I was drowning.

In sweat, in blood, in the smell of death and the mounting pressure of bodies on mine. Hands on mine. Teeth, mouths, flesh on mine.

They were above me and below me. They were everywhere, and I couldn’t tell now where my body ended and theirs began. I couldn’t tell how much of the blood coating my extremities was theirs and how much was mine.

Retreat.

In all the time I’d been a hunter, that was an instinct I’d never felt before. I’d never wanted to run from a fight, never doubted that I would come out on top.

I’d never cared that maybe I wouldn’t.

But right now, in that second, gasping for breath and breathing in rot and raglike skin, I felt like I had to get out of there. Bracing my heels against the ground, I shot forward, lashing out with my elbows and putting enough space between my body and theirs that I could slam the back of my head into something else’s jaw. I felt bones giving way, felt flesh tearing—I saw the opening, and I went for it.

I crossed the room in a heartbeat, and in a single, coordinated motion, the zombies reoriented. The ones I’d laid low climbed to their feet, bones jutting out every which way. They glanced at one another with those soulless, empty eyes, in a gesture far too human to be comforting for me, and then they spread out—half on my left, half on my right, ready to surround and mob me once more.

I could feel their saliva working its way through my system. To a human, it would have been fatal, with a brief detour through madness before the final bow—but even my body had its limits.

I wasn’t losing it. Not yet. But the colors in the room seemed like they’d been dyed neon, and I felt like I was moving in slow motion, each limb weighed down by something soggy and wet.

I felt myself stumble, forced my body to stay upright.

“Kali!” Skylar’s voice broke through my haze, and I realized that she wasn’t squatting on top of the safe anymore. She was standing beside it, and it was open.

I realized, belatedly, that it wasn’t the kind of safe that held money or top secret biomedical plans. It was the type of safe that held guns.

The sight of weapons sent a familiar thrill up the length of my spine, and unconsciously, my body straightened, my fingers curving inward in anticipation of the way they’d feel against a trigger.

I’d always preferred knives to firearms, always felt that people like me were made for killing at close range, not at a distance, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and just seeing the weapons laid out before me, I knew them—inside and out, from safety to barrel.

I didn’t have time to think. I had to move, had to keep moving, because the one thing I had on the zombies was that even though they were faster than any I’d ever seen, even though they appeared to be working as a team and their venom was slowing me down—

I was still faster than a human. And thanks to Skylar, I wasn’t fighting alone.

I ducked and dodged, slammed my way through their onslaught, and got close enough to Skylar that she could shove something cool and metallic into my hand.

Six bullets. Six hits. None of my targets down.

I dropped the gun, and Skylar handed me another one—longer, heavier, possibly illegal. I didn’t question why Bethany’s father might have one. You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

My skin sang with contact. My back arched as I shot. The sound was deafening, the splatter horrific.

Shot. Shot. Shot.

There was a rhythm to it, a beauty, and maybe it was sick that I could see that, that I felt each and every bullet like it was an extension of my own body, as they tore through flesh and bone, severing the spinal cord, blowing holes in heads.

With only a few bullets left, a suggestion flashed through my subconscious, Zev’s mind melding with mine so completely that he didn’t even have to speak. Without pause, I followed through on his unspoken suggestion, aiming at the collars around the zombies’ necks.

In rapid fire, the glowing red lights went out. Like someone had doused a fire, the eerie human quality drained out of the zombies’ eyes. Instead of focusing on me, they grappled with one another, undead teeth tearing through undead skin, nails making mincemeat of already shredded flesh.

Without thinking, I shoved Skylar back toward the safe, and with an empty shotgun still in my hand, I surged forward, driving the butt of the gun into a straggler’s forehead as another ripped a chunk out of my right shoulder.

My right hand shot out backward, grabbed the biter by the neck, twisted, tore—and soon there was nothing.

Nothing left in my hands.

Nothing left to fight.

Nothing but corpses.

Don’t look now, Zev said, but you’ve got an audience.

I looked up. Elliot and Bethany were standing in the doorway. Skylar had climbed back on top of the safe, and her legs were dangling over the front.

Absolute silence.

I knew how this must have looked, how I must have looked, drenched in blood with bodies spread like petals at my feet.

My heartbeat slowed. I followed Elliot’s gaze—steady, intense—from my chest to my stomach, my stomach to my arms. There was a hole in my side, bits and pieces missing from the fleshy parts of my arms and legs. My jeans were tattered, my body bruised. Bite marks dotted the surface of my skin, like bloody flowers just beginning to bloom.

Swish. Swish. Swish.

The sound of my heart was deafening. The sound of their silence was louder. Pressure built inside my head. The room closed in around me.

I stumbled and started to go down, but Elliot moved forward to catch me. He held me up, his gaze guarded, his eyes on Bethany’s across the room.

Vaguely aware of the fact that one bite from a zombie was enough to drive a human mad, I looked down at my own body, at Elliot’s hand on my arm.

At the gaping hole in my shoulder and the muscles just starting to knit themselves back together.

Bethany took a step toward us, her green eyes every bit as glassy and far away as her mother’s. “You went through the windshield,” she said shrilly. “You broke your neck. The chupacabra didn’t kill you. And those things, they tore you to pieces….”

This wasn’t the way I’d imagined telling them my secret—and I hadn’t imagined telling Elliot at all. But all of a sudden, I couldn’t hold the words back, couldn’t deny the obvious for a second more. My brain was muddled from poison, my body numb, my eyes dry. Every safeguard that had once stood between me and the outside world crumpled and fell—useless, dead, gone. There was no hiding it, no denial, nowhere else to run.

“I’m not like other girls,” I said, the words coming out in a whisper. “I’m not normal. I don’t feel things, I don’t fear things.” I held out my bloodied hands, palms up. “I don’t die.”

Sometimes, the biggest truths were the simple ones—inescapable, undeniable, pure. I’d worn my secrets like a robe, and now I was naked. I was bleeding and visibly healing and utterly exposed.

Heat spread out from my torso. My head felt fuzzy, light. I blinked and my eyes wouldn’t open. Elliot let go of me, and I went down.

I’d been bitten so many times. There was so much poison in my system.

“I don’t die. I don’t die. I don’t die.”

I heard the words, heard someone saying them over and over again. I didn’t recognize my own voice, didn’t realize until later that it was me.

I blinked and my eyes didn’t open. I’d finally told someone the truth, and fate was conspiring to make me a liar.

I don’t die, I’d said. I don’t die. I don’t die. I don’t die.

But people like me? Sometimes, we did.