35

“Kali.” Reid crouched to my level, and in his eyes, I saw the Haydens’ house. The handprints on the driveway. The pictures on the walls.

“Skylar.” That was all I was able to say—just her name, nothing else.

He closed his eyes, head bowed. “I know.”

Another person might have looked at Reid and seen a complete lack of emotion. He might have looked like the consummate warrior, a blank slate. But I saw deeper, saw more.

I saw Skylar.

Gone.

I may have been the one bleeding, but the man in front of me was gutted.

“We have to get you out of here,” Reid said, opening his eyes to fix me with a familiar stare. “This place is going down.”

On some level, I was aware of the cacophony echoing all around us. Men fighting monsters. Monsters killing men. And even though I’d stayed for a reason, even though that had been my choice, I couldn’t help the whisper in the back of my mind that asked why it mattered.

What did any of it matter, when Skylar was dead?

“It matters,” Reid said, his voice cutting through the air like a knife, “because you’re not.”

I wondered if he was like Skylar—if he saw things, knew things—but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Gingerly, he lifted me off the ground, and I drew in a sharp breath.

“First we get out of here. Then we get you to the hospital.”

I wanted to tell Reid that I could walk out on my own two feet, that I hated hospitals, that I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d left me there to die. But I didn’t say any of that.

I said, “They killed her.”

And Reid said, “I know.”

He pulled a gun from his side and shouted something down the hallway. A shout came back, and a second later, the hallway was filled with men in bulletproof vests.

It figured the government would send the FBI into a facility filled with genetically enhanced monsters and expect bulletproof vests to do the trick.

A man who might have been Reid’s boss spared a glance for me. “Preternatural Control has the first level secured. We’ve planted the explosives. Get her out of here. We detonate in three.”

Three minutes, I thought, and the insane urge to laugh bubbled up in me again. I’d intended to burn this place to ash, and in three minutes, that was exactly what it would be. But as Reid carried me to safety, and I left the closest thing I’d ever seen to a war zone behind, all I could think about was the bodies we passed.

A miniature griffin with broken wings and a blood-smeared mouth.

A reptile whose eyes looked all too human.

The Alan.

All dead.

“They’re going to want to ask you some questions,” Reid said quietly, once we’d made it out and to the road.

I watched the building go up in flames. Watched the windows explode outward and the structure collapse. I thought of the will-o’-the-wisps, of Skylar, of Colette’s body in the basement cell.

“I know.”