21

I’m in the room again—the room where it hurts. Sometimes it’s loud and sometimes it’s bright and sometimes I have to sit still. Mommy swabs my cheek. Daddy gets out the polka dots—dot, dot, dot all over my head. I make a face at him.

“EKG is clean,” he says.

I know those letters. E! K! G! I know lots of letters. So does Mommy.

“DNA.” She says other things, too, but they aren’t letters, so I don’t listen much.

EKG. DNA.

I don’t think those are good letters. I want to go home.

“Almost done, baby.” Mommy smiles, tickles my chin. I reach up to tickle hers.

And that’s when it’s time for my shot.

I blinked, but the world around me didn’t settle into focus. Everything was bright and blurry and warped around the edges.

“I think she’s awake. Kali? Can you hear me?”

I tried to separate the sounds into words, but couldn’t do it. My body felt … heavy.

Without the Nibbler, you’d be dead.

Zev’s voice was low and serious, and I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that I’d lived through attack after attack, that I could have survived anything—but one bite from a zombie was enough to kill a regular person, and I’d been bitten, scratched, and clawed dozens of times.

Even my body had its limits.

“Dead,” I repeated out loud. The word came out sounding garbled.

“Dead? Dead? Oh, no. You don’t get to tell us something like that and then die.” Bethany put her face right next to mine, and it came into focus.

More or less.

“That’s not how this works, Super Girl. You don’t get to go to sleep. You don’t get to pass out. You don’t get to die. The only thing you get to do is wake up and tell us what the hell is going on.” Beth’s words were harsh, but her touch was gentle as she pressed something warm to my skin—a warm washcloth, damp and soft. “And then,” she added, working the cloth across the surface of my body, “we’re going to have a nice, long chat about lying to the Bethany. Surface wounds, my ass.”

My last thought before I drifted back into darkness was that Bethany appeared to be referring to herself in the third person.

This could not possibly be good.

“Do you know what this is, Kali-Kay?”

Mommy is in a good mood. I think. I look at the object in her hand and then shake my head.

“Nuh-uh,” I say. I stick my fingers in my mouth and give them a light chew. “What?”

Mommy gently takes my hand out of my mouth. “This is a gun. Can you say gun?”

“Gun,” I repeat dutifully.

Mommy takes my still-damp hand, brushes it over the surface of the barrel. It is cold and hard. It feels like a doorknob. It looks funny, too.

“Do you want to play a game, Kali?”

Mommy and I play lots of games. Secret games. I am her secret girl.

“Close your eyes and count to ten,” Mommy says. I close my eyes and count to four. I like four.

“Okay, now open your eyes.” Mommy smiles, but it does not reach her eyes. It makes my tummy hurt. “Where’s the gun, Kali?”

I can’t see the gun anymore. She hid it, and I don’t know where it is. I wish I did. I wish I could tell her. I wish I could be good.

“Find the gun, baby.”

I’m not good at this game, the secret game. I put my fingers back in my mouth. We have lots of secrets, Mommy, Mama, and me.

This time, when I woke up, the world was the right color and the right shape, and I recognized the person looking down at me instantly.

Vaughn.

It figured—the almost invincible girl gets hurt, and they call a vet. Given that the others had seen me tearing through a zombie horde like a wild animal, it seemed highly appropriate—if a bit insulting.

You’re not an animal. They’re human. You’re more.

Maybe I was just in a bit of a mood after being zombie chow, but instead of warming me from the inside out, Zev’s words made me want to roll my eyes. I’d never asked to share my brain with a two-bit motivational speaker.

I hadn’t asked for any of this.

“Your vitals are good. Your wounds are healing, and based on your body temperature, I’d guess your system is burning through the mortis bacteria instead of allowing it to shred your brain.” Vaughn paused, his brown eyes searching mine. “How do you feel?”

I felt fine, naked, and thirsty—in that order. I remembered the looks on my friends’ faces when I’d made my confession all too well. Physically, I was doing okay, but I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so open to attack.

So vulnerable.

So much for keeping my back to the wall.

“I’m fine,” I said, not meeting Vaughn’s eyes. “Thirsty.”

I very purposefully did not specify what, exactly, I was thirsting for.

Hunting without feeding is ill-advised, Zev told me, undeterred by my response to his last comment. Healing you makes the Nibbler that much hungrier. You’ll have to feed it soon.

Well, forgive me for having been too busy being eaten by zombies and trying to kill them dead to stop and think about drinking their blood to keep the parasite inside me plump and well fed.

Anyone ever tell you you’re cranky when you almost die?

There was a retort on the tip of my mental tongue, but I realized that Vaughn was giving me a very odd look, and I wondered if a bevy of emotions had passed over my face with Zev’s words.

The last thing I needed was for the vet to think I’d caught some kind of zombie-induced insanity. He’d be forced to report me for quarantine, and I’d spend the rest of the day unable to do a thing to save Zev.

“I know this probably seems really weird to you,” I told Vaughn, thinking understatement all the while, “but I’m okay. Nothing hurts. Nothing’s broken. And I’m about as sane as I get.”

I waited for Vaughn to ask me how my recovery was possible, but he didn’t. He just nodded. “I’d tell you to take it easy,” he said, “but based on the pile of bodies in the basement, I’m guessing that ‘easy’ isn’t really your style.”

There was a light note of censure in his voice—though I was pretty sure he disapproved more of my aversion to bed rest than to the fact that I’d dispatched a horde of zombies to the great beyond.

“What time is it?”

Giving voice to the question felt like showing my hand, but I wasn’t used to not knowing, and today, more than any other day, each minute, each second, was crucial.

Every second I lay here was another second that Chimera Biomedical had Zev—another second that they could be coming for me.

“You were out for just over an hour,” Vaughn said, “assuming Skylar’s timeline of the ‘you-know-what incident’ is somewhere close to the mark.”

My lips curved upward at the idea of Skylar referring to zombies as “you-know-whats,” but the second my brain registered the fact that I was smiling, a wave of nausea passed through my body, bringing with it a kind of bleak hopelessness I recognized as regret.

Skylar.

Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I liked her. She was brave and openhearted and insane—and now she knew. She knew what I was, or—more to the point—what I wasn’t.

I wasn’t normal.

I wasn’t human.

I was a liar.

I shouldn’t have cared what she thought about me. I should have been more worried about who she and the others might tell, but instead, all I could think about was the fact that they’d hate me now.

They’d have to.

“Hey.” Vaughn’s voice was soft as he chucked me under the chin. “None of that.”

“None of what?” I said, wiping all trace of emotion from my face.

“Don’t go working yourself up over nothing.”

“Nothing?” I was incredulous.

“You should rest.” With those words, Vaughn stood, and I followed his gaze to the doorway. Elliot was standing there, his face as unreadable as his brother’s. Beside him, Bethany had both arms crossed over her chest. Her mascara was smeared, her clothes torn, and I knew just by the way she was holding her chin that she wasn’t going to be giving in to tears again any time soon.

From somewhere behind them, Skylar pushed her way into the room. “You’re okay,” she said, her voice uncharacteristically low. “I was pretty sure you would be, but you never really know, and then when you wouldn’t wake up …”

I tried to say something, but the words stayed in my throat, unspoken, unsure.

“I am so, so sorry Kali. I swear, I didn’t mean for you to have to save me. I heard a noise downstairs, and Bethany was all ‘see yourself out,’ and so I did … via, you know, the basement. I thought I was supposed to be there. I had a feeling, but maybe it was a bad feeling, because the next thing I knew, there was a zombie. And then there were two. And then there were three….”

“Skylar,” Elliot interjected. “Breathe.”

Obediently, she took a breath.

“So I climbed on top of the safe, because I knew I just had to wait. I knew you’d come back. I knew you’d … do something.” Skylar frowned. “But I didn’t know it would be like that. I didn’t know they’d hurt you. I didn’t!”

“Skylar.” This time, I was the one who interrupted her babbling. “I’m fine.” She didn’t look convinced, and I felt compelled to elaborate. “It didn’t even hurt.” Realizing how close I was treading to the edge, to speaking words I’d never said out loud, I looked down and made a thorough study of the back of my hands. “I can’t—when I’m like this, nothing hurts. I could take a bullet to the gut, and I wouldn’t even feel it.”

Elliot winced. Vaughn’s expression never changed. Skylar’s bottom lip trembled.

“You promise?”

This was not how I’d expected this conversation going. “I promise.”

For a moment, you could have heard a pin drop in the room. Bethany broke the silence. “That’s too bad,” she said, “because right now, I’d kind of like to slap you, and it just won’t be the same if you can’t feel the pain.”

This was closer to the reaction I’d expected.

“I’ll go,” I said, sitting up, finding my way to my feet.

“Go?” Bethany repeated incredulously. “You’re not going anywhere. You are going to move your mouth, and words are going to come out, and you’re going to explain how any of this is even remotely possible.” She narrowed her eyes. “And … go.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” My arms hugged my chest, like I could keep my emotions from the surface by sheer force of will. “I already told you guys. I’m not normal. I’m a freak. I showed you the ouroboros—that’s not normal. Normal people die when they’re bitten. I got stronger. Normal people go crazy if a zombie takes a chunk out of their arm. I took a little nap. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. All I know is that I’m not normal.”

Skylar’s babbling tendencies must have been contagious, because I couldn’t stop myself from elaborating.

“I’m not even human.”

If I’d felt naked before, I felt vivisected now—like someone had taken a knife and sliced my body open, like the others were getting ready to paw through my insides, chunk by chunk.

Skylar was the first to recover. “Oh,” she said. “I thought maybe you were a little bit human.”

Inside my mind, Zev snorted, and I pushed back the insane urge to laugh. A little bit human, I thought. Story of my life.

“What are you?” Bethany’s words didn’t sound like an accusation, but she didn’t sound curious, either. If anything, her voice was hesitant, guarded.

“I don’t know,” I replied. Her eyes flashed, but before she could say a word, I preempted it. “I think I’m some kind of hunter. When there’s something preternatural around, I can feel it, and there’s this desire, this need to fight. I don’t get tired. I don’t feel pain. And as much as I’m capable of tracking the beasties down, they can track me.” I ran my fingertips gently over the length of my arm. The skin was puckered, still healing, and for the first time, I thought of what I must have looked like with pieces torn out of my flesh, my eyes bloodshot and feral.

“They like my blood,” I said lightly. “If they smell it, they come for me, so I go for them first. It’s illegal, and people think it’s wrong, but I have to.”

“So this is a regular thing for you?” Bethany asked, her eyebrows arched nearly into her hairline. “Killing zombies, playing cat and mouse with your friendly neighborhood dragon …”

“There was nothing normal about that dragon,” I retorted. “But to answer your question, yes. I hunt. If something kills people, I kill it.”

Bethany aimed her gaze heavenward. “This explains so, so much.”

I thought she was thinking about all the little things I’d said and done in the past two days, but she disabused me of that notion pretty quickly.

“I mean, no wonder you’ve got a savior complex. You do this for a living.”

I almost pointed out that nobody paid me, but Bethany was on a roll.

“And when you saw I had an ouroboros, you knew that if you could get it to swap, you could kill it.”

I thought of the parasite feeding me strength and thirsting for blood in return. Killing it had been the plan, but now it was as much a part of my body as my skin or my lungs.

“In theory.”

“So yesterday, when we were running all over the place trying to save you—that was all just a show?” Bethany’s words were crisp, and her voice went up an octave or two. “You were just pretending to be sick?”

“No.” The word burst out of my mouth with so much force that I realized that I really didn’t want her to think that yesterday was something I’d faked, that it somehow didn’t count.

“What I am,” I said carefully, “the things I can do … I can’t always do them.”

“This is ridiculous,” Elliot said, speaking up for the first time. “I can’t believe we’re even sitting here talking about this like it’s not insane. If there were people out there who were born to hunt the preternatural, don’t you think we’d know about them? Don’t you think the government would know about them? It makes no sense.”

“Yeah, well, take a time machine back to middle school and tell me that,” I snapped, but the words came out wispy and small. “Because I was twelve when this started happening, and I didn’t know why, or what was going on, or who I could tell, because it was crazy. It’s still crazy. It makes no sense. Sometimes I’m human, and sometimes I’m not. If Bethany really wants to slap me, all she has to do is wait seventeen hours and change, and I’ll feel it the same way anyone else would.”

“Seventeen hours?” Elliot repeated. “That would be around seven a.m.”

“Dawn,” Skylar supplied helpfully. “You’ll be human again at dawn.”

I nodded. I’d already said enough. Too much, probably.

“So when you took the chupacabra, you didn’t know if you could kill it?” Bethany was stuck on that one moment in time—though considering it had been life-or-death for her, I could understand the fixation.

“I thought if I made it to sunrise, the chupacabra would die, and I’d be fine.” I shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“And none of this—the healing, the warrior-princess act, the crazy eyes … none of that is because of the chupacabra?”

Beth’s face was guarded, but I found that I could get inside her head as easily as if I were the psychic one. She’d seen the way the ouroboros had spread out over my torso. She’d known her father was experimenting on chupacabras. And then she’d seen me do the impossible.

It made perfect sense that she’d wondered if the two were related. And, yeah, they kind of were—but not in the way she thought.

“It would have killed you,” I said, keeping things simple. “Whoever injected you had no way of knowing that it wouldn’t.”

I realized a second after saying it that for an hour, Bethany might have been able to tell herself that her father hadn’t been playing around with her life—that he’d found a way to make her faster, stronger. That whatever cure he was after for Tyler, there might have been hope.

And there I was, telling her she was wrong.

“People like me”—it felt weird to say that phrase out loud, I’d spent so much time thinking it to myself—“we have a different reaction to chupacabras. When I was human, it was killing me, but when I switched …” I gestured to the newly healed skin on my arms. “I don’t normally heal this fast. A couple of days ago, I might not have been able to bounce back from this at all. Whatever chupacabras do to humans, they do the opposite to me.”

Don’t tell them about the blood, Zev advised in what I’m sure he thought passed for a very sage tone. Humans are remarkably queasy about our liquid diet.

“Would you just shut up?” I didn’t realize I’d said the words out loud until everyone else in the room started giving me the “she’s losing it again” look in a single, synchronized motion.

“Not you guys,” I clarified. “It’s like this …”

If explaining the whole “every other day” thing was hard, trying to tell them that being bitten had given me a psychic bond with another person—who’d also been bitten—was darn near impossible, but I gave it my best shot.

Skylar was the first to recover. “So he’s in your head, and you’re in his? That’s significantly psychic phenomena.” She seemed enthused. “Can you guys actually speak, or is it just images? Do you feel what he feels? Can you swap bodies at will?”

I got the feeling she would have gone on indefinitely, but Bethany stopped her.

“We have bigger problems right now than the fact that if Kali makes out with someone, it might qualify as a ménage à trois,” she said. “Do you have any idea what will happen if my father figures out what you can do? If the company he works for does? They’ll want to take you apart piece by piece, just to see how it all works.”

I could see Bethany wondering herself—how it worked, whether or not my cells really did hold the answer her father was looking for.

For Tyler.

“That can’t happen,” Bethany said finally, and I got the distinct feeling she was saying that as much for her own benefit as for mine. “They’d use you as a guinea-pig lab rat and bleed you dry. That can’t happen.”

Guinea-pig lab rat? Zev sounded either amused or insulted—I wasn’t sure which.

“I know exactly what they’d do to me, Beth.” For once, she didn’t correct me on the use of the nickname. I took that as a good sign and plowed on. “I know because that’s exactly what they’re doing to Zev.”

In the silence that followed, I realized that I was almost out of secrets. I hadn’t meant to tell them about Zev. I hadn’t meant to ask for help. Bethany had already told me no once today. Now that she knew what I was, I couldn’t imagine that the answer would be any different. She still had her mother to think about, and if one thing was perfectly, crystalline clear, it was that I could take care of myself.

I just kept coming and coming and coming.

I was what I was.

“You know Chimera has your psychic boy toy. You also know that they’d probably love to add you to their collection, too.” Bethany’s hands snaked out to her hips. “Please tell me you’re not planning a rescue mission.”

The look on my face must have said it all.

Bethany rolled her eyes, and I wondered if I’d imagined the way she’d washed my body clean of blood, her touch light, her bedside manner gentle. “Right. You’re Kali. Of course you’re planning a rescue mission. Stupid self-sacrifice is kind of your thing.”

Beside her, Elliot cleared his throat. At first, I thought he was trying to get her to show a little tact, but then I realized the throat-clearing was for my benefit, not hers.

“Yes?” I said, meeting his eyes, feeling his gaze on my body and not knowing whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

Elliot opened his mouth, a muscle in his jaw tensing and betraying the seemingly calm tone in his voice. “Forget rescue missions,” he said. “Am I the only one here who thinks we should call the police?”