Bigger.
Stronger.
Harder to kill.
This time, I really did punch the wall.
Beside me, Skylar scrolled through more files on the computer. I couldn’t even look at them—I didn’t want to know, until she came upon the file for chupacabras.
Until I saw the photo of Zev.
His hair was onyx—darker than mine and so black it was nearly reflective. His skin was pale, and I wondered at the fact that in my mind, I’d always seen him tinged in shadow.
Beside me, Skylar seemed to realize that the photo had caught my attention—and why. She opened her mouth to say something, and then her eyes lit on Zev’s scientific classification.
Homo vampirus.
24
Skylar closed the file so quickly that you would have thought it had bit her. She glanced guiltily at me and then looked back at Bethany.
“How old do you think he is?” Bethany asked, tilting her head to the side. “Like, twenty?”
I hadn’t noticed Zev’s age in the picture, but I doubted he was twenty. He’d been in Chimera’s captivity for two years, and he talked about that length of time like it was nothing.
I’m older than I look, Zev said helpfully. We don’t age the way humans do. Not once we’ve taken on a Nibbler.
I didn’t ask him to clarify, because I was still staring at the space on the screen where that one word had been a moment before.
Vampirus.
I lived in a world where the mythological was real. We all did—and had for a very long time. The old stories about supernatural creatures were the kind of thing we saw as funny or quaint or just downright ridiculous—the equivalent of thinking that putting a leech on someone could rid them of the flu. But even taking into account everything we knew about the preternatural world, there were still some things that fell outside the realm of possibility, things that were nothing more than the product of overactive imaginations.
Things like vampires.
And werewolves.
And psychics.
The sarcastic half of my brain couldn’t help but wonder if Bethany went furry on the full moon, because if she did, we’d be batting three for three.
I’m a vampire, I thought. I’m part vampire.
We prefer the term Lonely Ones, Zev said. Because we’re meant to come in pairs.
If that wasn’t a loaded statement, I wasn’t sure what was. I’d spent so much time on the outside looking in that the idea of being half of a pair—yin to his yang—made my eyes sting with tears I’d never shed. I had tried so hard not to let loneliness overwhelm me, had never thought that a person like me could be anything else.
And then I’d been bitten.
And then there was Zev.
“What are they doing to him?” Bethany did a good job of inspecting her nails as she asked the question. “Mr. Tall, Dark, and Gorgeous—what are they doing to him? Skylar closed the document before I could see.”
Skylar met my eyes, and I knew that she’d closed it for my benefit—to keep Bethany from reading those two little words and figuring out what Skylar now knew.
What I was.
“They’re cutting him,” Skylar said. “Burning him, taking samples, injecting him with drugs. Sometimes, they cut off parts to see if they’ll grow back.” She paused. “They take a lot of blood.”
Somehow, I doubted she’d gotten that information from the scientific document she’d just read. I was beginning to suspect that Skylar might have undersold her psychic ability.
“We can’t leave him there, and we can’t let them capture you.” Skylar grimaced, like she was staring at the core of something physically painful to see. “This is bad—not just bad for Zev. Bad for … it’s just bad, okay?”
Now I was also beginning to suspect that she knew something that I didn’t. About Chimera. About Zev. About me. I couldn’t explain the feeling, but I couldn’t shake it, either, and this time, when I met Skylar’s eyes, she looked away.
I guess we all have our secrets, I thought. Since Skylar didn’t seem inclined to tell anyone mine, I could hardly hold her own against her. When she felt like telling me, she would. Until then—
Click. Click. Click.
My breath caught in my throat. I knew that sound. For a second, I thought that maybe it was in my head, but then I heard it again, loud and clear and just down the hall.
Click. Click. Click.
“What I don’t understand, Ms. Malik, is how, precisely, the test subjects who escaped from your facility made their way here.”
I recognized Bethany’s father’s voice a second before he rounded the corner. In a fraction of that time, I hit the POWER button on the computer, hooked an arm around Skylar, and pulled her into a corner, hugging the shadows and flattening both of our bodies against the wall.
The hard drives offered scant cover, but in this room, there was nothing else. As Bethany’s father came into view, I realized that I’d left Beth there, out in the open. I flexed my fingers, razor-sharp nails ready to tear through human flesh if he gave me even half a reason to think that she was in danger.
I shouldn’t have worried.
Bethany leaned back against the wall and crossed one ankle over the other. She looked down at her watch as if she’d been waiting for him to arrive. And when her father and the woman he was talking to—the woman from the school, the one from the ice rink—stepped into the room, Beth reoriented herself so that she was standing between them and us, giving us what little cover she could.
I lowered myself into a crouch, bringing Skylar with me, pushing back into the cover of the hard drives as far as I could.
“Well,” a female voice said. “What have we here?”
I’d heard her voice before, at the school, but we were closer this time, and for some reason, the sound of it filled me with dread, the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up, my stomach churning with … something.
“Here,” Bethany said, responding to the woman’s rhetorical question, “we have a teenager. And she’s pissed.”
Leave it to Bethany to play the queen bee card with a woman who had, in all likelihood, ordered my killing. A woman who might have sent zombies to Bethany’s house with the intention of cleaning up loose ends.
“Here I was, minding my own business, and my house—where my father left me alone, I might add—was overrun with zombies. Excuse me, test subjects.”
From the tone of her voice, you would have thought Bethany was talking to the populace back at school. She was the queen, and they had displeased her.
From the cover of the hard drives, I couldn’t quite make out her father’s response, or that of the woman who’d accompanied him, but I was going to go out on a limb and guess that it wasn’t good.
“Bethany,” Dr. Davis said calmly, “what are you doing in my lab?”
“Are you kidding me?” Bethany spat. “This is the most secure place in the entire house. Where would you go if the place was overrun with zombies?”
I could practically hear the woman in heels smiling. “So you’ve been here the whole time? You have no idea how the subjects’ transmitters malfunctioned or, say, where their bodies are now?”
I registered the woman’s words and drew the logical conclusion: Skylar’s brothers worked fast. Either Chimera didn’t know they’d been here, or Ms. Malik was playing dumb—either way, Reid had taken care of the bodies exactly the way Vaughn had said he would.
“Do I look like a zombie slayer to you?” Bethany asked. “This has been, like, the worst day ever.”
“Yes,” the woman said, a measuring tone in her voice. “I understand you had an accident this morning.”
Skylar made a face that I interpreted to mean I’ll show you accident, lady. Unfortunately, she looked more like a puppy than a pit bull, so even if the object of her glare had been able to see it, I didn’t think it would have done much good.
“Look, you guys asked me not to call the police, I didn’t call the police. You told me to stay home from school, and then zombies attacked. There had better be a Christmas trip to Saint Barts in my future, or else I’m going to get cranky, and you seriously do not want to see me cranky.”