30

“Lay down your weapons, come with us, and no one else has to die.” The man’s voice was soulless and calm, as he aimed his gun at Elliot and Beth, and that was when I realized—

They’d killed Skylar to make a point. To make me malleable. To hurt me.

No.

Rage was a physical thing. It washed over my body until I was drowning in it, bubbled up from inside of me, like a volcano ready to explode. Inside and outside, hot and cold, it was everywhere, absolute.

I breathed it in, and I breathed it out. I swallowed the full force of it whole, because the alternative was giving into something else, that tiny voice in the back of my head that said that Skylar was …

No.

I tore my eyes away from the body that didn’t even look like her, not anymore, and I gave myself over to fury.

Blessed fury.

My eyes narrowed into slits. My fingers curled to claws. The man who’d killed Skylar must have sensed the danger, because he turned his gun from Bethany and Elliot to me.

I was on him in an instant.

He went down, hard, and his gun clattered down the hallway like a rock skipping across water. I could have snapped his neck like a twig, a Popsicle stick, a toothpick.

But I didn’t.

I straddled his body and backhanded him. I felt the crack of his cheekbone. I smelled his blood.

Beside us, his partner attempted to jab me with some sort of Taser. I reached back, grabbed him by the wrist and snapped it, angling the weapon back at his chest, his torso.

I smelled the scent of his charring flesh.

The second that Partner Guy went down, the lights in the air dissipated. Whatever I’d become, whatever I was on the verge of doing, even the will-o’-the-wisps seemed to know that now was the time to run.

I moved to toss the Taser to the side, but noticed a variety of controls across the bottom. Mechanically, I pressed each button. A blade popped out of the back end of the Taser. An alarm sounded.

And then, finally, the gate to the complex opened in the distance.

“Don’t—,” the man underneath me—still breathing, still alive, the way Skylar wouldn’t ever be again—said. “You’ll let them out.”

“You killed her,” I said, pinning him with my knees. “She never hurt anyone, and you killed her, just because you could.” I looked him in the eye and dug my needle-sharp thumbnails into the balls of his shoulders, tearing through flesh until I hit bone.

He screamed.

“You killed her dead.”

The voice that said those words didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded old and angry, nearly feral.

“You’re a killer.”

I brought my face down near the man’s. My lips nearly touching his face, I lifted my bloodied hands to his cheeks, painted them red.

Thirsty.

This time, I didn’t fight it. I looked at the man. He looked at me. And then I buried my head in his neck.

Teeth met skin.

Skin broke.

And I fed.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes to killing the man who’d killed Skylar.

Yes to the blood.

Yes to the red-hot fire and the feel of it against my throat and the living, breathing rage.

I could feel my pupils expanding, feel the man beneath me struggling, right up until the point when he didn’t.

The phrase “go for the jugular” had always sounded merciless, but this—this was sweet.

I couldn’t remember being human, couldn’t fathom the fact that I ever would be again. And that was the way I liked it, because being human meant knowing, remembering … it meant looking back over my shoulder and seeing the girl I couldn’t save.

The one who’d chosen to come here.

Chosen me.

You don’t have to do this alone. You shouldn’t have to.

Sometimes there are no good choices.

I’m glad.

Skylar’s voice ringing in my mind, I let loose my prey and sat up. Power crackled through my body. I felt strong, like I could pinch a bone ever-so-lightly between my fingers and watch it crumble to dust.

A rustle of sound caught my ears, and I whirled around, catching the scent of sweat and human tears. Elliot was standing in the middle of the path, Bethany lying on the ground beside him. Her eyes locked on to my blood-smeared mouth, and she scrambled backward on all fours, like I might kill her next.

Like she was scared of me.

I’m scared of me, I thought. Blood on my face, my own heartbeat accelerating, I met Elliot’s eyes.

“Skylar,” he said roughly. “Where’s Skylar?”

The name hurt. Just hearing it made me want to cling to the rage, the distance, the thirst … anything but this.

“Where is she?” Elliot said again, his voice echoing through darkness and desert, sharp as a whip.

I couldn’t do this, couldn’t think this, couldn’t explain that the same creatures that had messed with his memories had led his sister off the path.

That she was dead.

Gone.

Just a body—and not much of one at that.

Without meaning to, my gaze flitted toward what remained of my first—only—

Friend, I thought dully. The word is friend.

Elliot followed my stare, and he flew to her side, no questions, no hesitation. The few flames that hadn’t burnt themselves out licked at his clothes and hands, but he ignored them.

Touching her would only burn him. I knew that. It wouldn’t bring her back.

Moving slowly—for me, at least—I locked my hands around his shoulders and pulled him away from the fire, away from her. My eyes filled up with the things I couldn’t say, but Elliot stared straight through me.

He pushed me away.

“I’ll kill you,” he said.

I closed my eyes, the night air cool against my blood-damp face. I wouldn’t stop him. I wouldn’t fight.

“Elliot,” Bethany said, her voice breaking through the darkness. “This isn’t … Kali wouldn’t …”

She couldn’t form the words—not when they’d seen me tear out a man’s jugular with my teeth.

“Let’s just go.” Bethany’s voice was little more than a whisper, but I heard her just the same.

Just like I heard Elliot let out a strangled breath.

Just like I heard the two of them walking, then running away.

I watched them go, and once they were gone, I watched the place where they had been. Then, finally, I moved back to the doorway, stepped over the guards’ bodies, picked up the Taser, and pressed the button to open, then close the gate.

Nobody here but us monsters now, I thought.

I half expected Zev’s voice to join the sound of my own, but if he was there, he was silent. Turning my attention from the inside of my head to what was going on outside it, I registered the ongoing ringing of alarms. I pressed another button on the Taser, and they stopped.

If anyone didn’t know I was here before, they knew it now.

But as I tossed the Taser to one side and began walking down the single hallway, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there wasn’t anyone else.

Just me and the monsters.

I could feel them—close, but not too close, more of them than I could count. And yet, in this one, scant hallway, there was nothing but me and silence and the men I’d killed.

The ones who’d killed Skylar.

No. I wouldn’t think her name. I wouldn’t think anything—but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find my way back to that place of pure rage. I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t frightened of the thing I’d done.

The thing I was.

Unarmed but for the gun at the small of my back and my smallest knife, I walked forward, my hands held out to the side, like I was some kind of dancer, like this was a tightrope instead of a hallway, and all eyes were on me.

I noticed a blinking red light in the corner. A camera.

“You wanted me,” I said. “Now you’ve got me.”

I waited for my words to sink in, then broke the camera.

My body warm with human blood, it took me two minutes to pace the entire length of the building.

Nothing.

No people.

No monsters.

No Zev.

There was, however, an elevator, and seeing it allowed me to make sense of the things I was sensing, feeling.

The hunter in me sensed prey, but no matter which direction I walked, the siren call of the preternatural stayed exactly the same.

I wasn’t getting any closer or any farther away, because getting to the beasties wasn’t a matter of turning right or left.

I went back to the entryway and snagged one of the guards’ IDs.

“Going down.”

The elevator door opened, feeding me out into another hallway. Unlike the first, however, this one boasted a light at the end of the tunnel—metaphorically speaking. Actually, the “light” was dark and shadowed, and the farther I walked through the hallway, the darker it got. As I rounded the corner, I realized that as ruined and rotting as this building looked from the outside, here, underground, it was immaculate. White walls lined a tile floor, and the room at the end of the tunnel wasn’t just a room.

It’s a mausoleum.

Or at least, that was what it looked like. The antiseptic white of the hallway gave way to walls made of marble and stone. I stepped forward, feeling like I’d invaded the sanctuary of the dead, and fluorescent lights flooded the room.

Almost immediately, I located a camera identical to the one I’d destroyed, and I wondered if they’d brought up the lights for my benefit, or if the cameras were attached to motion sensors. Either way, I could make out a door on the other side of this cavernous room.

I could also see the shadows on the floor, each one vaguely human in shape. I retrieved my lone remaining knife, and then I looked up.

The ceiling was twenty feet high, maybe not quite that, which meant that the creatures hanging upside down from the rafters were eight or nine feet above my head. There were dozens of them, each with a human head, human limbs, a human body.

Each put together wrong.

“They’re called the Alan,” a voice said. I looked up and saw that the door on the far side of the room had opened. “We didn’t make them, if that’s what you’re thinking. We found them in the Philippines. They’re hybrids, natural ones—between our kind and yours.”

Overhead, one of the Alan opened its eyes. They were startlingly blue. It dropped down to the ground beside me, and my mind processed the reason its body had appeared nearly human, but not quite.

Its arms and legs were on backward, its neck so thin it could barely support its head.

“They die young and can’t reproduce without assistance.” Rena Malik leaned back against the doorway. “Two- and three-helixed organisms can’t naturally crossbreed with anything approaching success.”

The Alan stuttered toward me, heels first.

“Watch out,” my mother said. “It bites.”

The creature didn’t bite me. It came right up to me and nuzzled me, its skin so thin I could feel the contours of its bones.

I stepped back.

“You can kill it if you like,” Rena said. I wouldn’t think of her as my mother, not ever, not now. “I won’t mind.”

Can you say gun?

I thought of all the games, all the tests, and I dropped my knife arm to my side.

“Go back to sleep,” I told the thing in front of me, sidestepping it and closing the space between me and the real enemy here.

“You could kill me, too,” Rena said. “But right now, I’m the closest thing you have to a friend.”

Skylar’s face flashed into my mind. “You aren’t my friend,” I said sharply.

“No,” Rena agreed. “I suppose not. But I am your mother.”

Hearing her say that was worse than the feel of the Alan’s cheek against my own.

“It’s good to see you, Kali. If you wanted to see this, see me—all you had to do was ask.”

My fingers tightened around the blade in my hand, but I couldn’t make my arm move, because her voice, the way she said my name, the soft smile on her face—it was all exactly the same.

Like nothing had changed.

Like she hadn’t missed out on more than a decade of my life.

Like this was a house, not a laboratory.

Like her men hadn’t just killed Skylar.

Like I hadn’t killed her men.

“I didn’t know it was you until today,” she told me, like that made some kind of difference. “I didn’t know that the host was you, and now I do.”

Her words unlocked my frozen muscles. Claiming not to have ordered my death wasn’t enough—not when Skylar was ashes on the wind. In a single, fluid motion, I brought my knife down on the back of her head—hilt first.

She crumpled to the ground, and something threatened to give inside me. I pushed back against it.

Later, I thought.

I could break down later.

I could miss her and hate her and wish I’d never heard her say my name later.

Right now, I had to find Zev.