Stiffly, I brought my right hand up to my left shoulder, popping it back into place. I pulled bits and pieces of windshield from my face, my chest, my arms. I reached my blood-soaked hands up and manually tilted my head to the side, then snapped it backward. The sound of crunching bones was unpleasant, but not overly so.
Twenty-three hours and nineteen minutes.
That was more than enough time for me to heal. Already, the surface wounds were closing, leaving nothing but smears of blood in their wake. I could hear bones knitting themselves back together, could feel my spine righting itself with nothing more than a curious pressure at the nape of my neck.
Somebody tried to kill me. I should be dead.
That realization wasn’t as disturbing as it would have been on a human day. People like me weren’t scared to die, and we weren’t easy to kill. The scent of blood—coppery, wet—was familiar, but for some reason, this time, there were layers to the smell that I’d never inhaled before: iron, honey, sweat.
If you can smell your blood, they can smell it.
For a moment, I thought the warning was a product of my own mind, but then a glint of gold caught my eye. Under my ravaged shirt, under the blood, I could see part of an all-too-familiar symbol.
No.
I pulled at the fabric, wrenching it away from my stomach. The flesh underneath was smeared with messy streaks of blood, like someone had been finger-painting on my torso, but the red color did nothing to mask the image of a snake eating its own tail.
The ouroboros.
No. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t the plan. My blood was poison, and the thing inside me was supposed to be dying. It was supposed to be gone.
Kali.
I didn’t want to be hearing the voice. I didn’t want to still be infected, to know that come dawn, I might still be dying.
You’re not dying. The human body can’t handle the bite. Yours can.
In tandem with the words, the ouroboros on my stomach trembled and then an inklike substance began to bleed outward from its surface. Like vines climbing a wall, string-thin wisps of gold snaked their way across my skin, up my torso, around to my back.
I couldn’t tear my eyes from the mark’s progress. As it painted me in crisscrossing lines, the ouroboros glowed with an unearthly sheen. Beads of sweat gathered on the surface of my skin, and unable to resist, I dragged one bloody finger across the length of the symbol, tracing it, feeling it—
Your wounds are healing. At this rate, you’ll be fine within an hour, but until then, you need to mask the smell of your blood.
There was no way I’d be completely healed in an hour. I was fast, but not that fast.
There are some advantages to getting bitten.
The voice in my head was clearer than it had ever been, like its owner was whispering the words directly into the back of my neck. My eyes focused on a point in the distance, and I saw him.
The man from my dreams.
He was a head or so taller than me, his skin lighter, his eyes silver. Shadow clung to the surface of his body, but this time, I could see an unearthly light through the darkness.
He didn’t belong here.
Neither do you.
I met his silver eyes, so dark I could feel myself getting lost in them, and for a moment, I saw him somewhere else: cement walls, blackened floor, blood.
Kali. Focus.
The words were sharp, and it took me a minute to process the fact that the voice in my head was yelling at me.
The people who left you here will expect your body to be discovered soon. They’re counting on it being ruled a hit-and-run. They’ll be surprised enough when your body doesn’t turn up. The last thing you need is to draw every beast in a thirty-mile radius to your side.
I hated to admit it, but the chupacabra had a point.
The second that thought crossed my mind, a low, rumbling chuckle echoed through my brain. I’m not a Nibbler, Kali. Nibblers can’t talk.
Nibblers? Nibblers?
You’re not a chupacabra? I asked silently, because that was what he seemed to be implying.
No. I’m not.
He sounded fairly certain, but I couldn’t help asking again. You’re seriously not the chupacabra who bit me yesterday?
I’d started hearing the voice right after I’d been bitten. The simplest explanation was usually the right one—even if it involved assuming that a parasite was capable of speech.
I’m not a Nibbler, Kali. I have a Nibbler.
I looked down at the symbol on my stomach, pictured one on his.
So I have a chupacabra inside my body and you have one inside of yours and that lets us play psychic telephone?
He had to realize how ridiculous that sounded.
More ridiculous than thinking that a Nibbler can talk?
After spending the past eighteen hours trying to keep Skylar, Bethany, and the whole motley crew from thinking I was insane, I really wasn’t in the mood to be mocked by the voice in my head.
The voice that apparently did not belong to a chupacabra.
If you’re not the thing that bit me, I said sharply, who the hell are you?
I knew before the response came that he would give me his name—Zev.
What the hell are you? I amended my silent question, and Zev answered with a question of his own.
What the hell are you?
In the distance, the man I’d seen disappeared back into the depths of my mind. My body stiff, I climbed to my feet.
What the hell was I—how many times had I asked myself that same question?
I wanted answers—lots of them—but there was no denying that Zev’s suggestion about making myself scarce was a good one: I was injured, and even with my healing abilities kicked into overdrive, I wasn’t in any shape to fight off every monster that came creeping out of the woodwork. My blood was everywhere. The air was thick with it. It was only a matter of time before the wind carried the scent to the wrong nostrils.
This isn’t over, I told the mystery boy in my mind. You are going to answer my questions.
Silence.
Without another word—out loud or internal—I turned and walked up to the road, half naked and covered in blood, trying not to think about the mark on my stomach or the distinct feeling that life, as I knew it, was over.
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.