“Hello, Kali. Welcome home.”
32
I woke up inside a cell made of concrete—four feet by four feet, only about a head taller than me. My body was slumped against the wall. I checked my watch.
Four hours and fifteen minutes.
This was not good.
I fought back the haze that had descended over my body and belatedly remembered the pinching feeling of a needle being inserted into my flesh.
They’d drugged me.
They’d drugged me, and I was lying in a concrete prison, and Zev knew. He’d helped them hurt me.
I thought of Skylar, poor, stupid Skylar, who’d followed me here and died for her effort. She’d been so sure that she was supposed to, sure that whatever the cost, coming with me would be worth it, because if she didn’t come, then I was going to die.
You made the wrong choice, I told her silently. You should have let them kill me when you had the chance.
But she hadn’t. Skylar had chosen me, and now she was dead, and I was boxed in, the way Zev had been for years.
Zev. He was the one who’d done this to me. After everything—
I struggled to my feet, still dizzy from whatever they’d dosed me with.
“It was supposed to keep you out until sunrise,” a female voice said. “I’m afraid we didn’t anticipate your feeding on the guards upstairs. We would have altered the dose if we’d known you were taking human blood.”
If the guards hadn’t killed Skylar, I wouldn’t have. Trying to rid my mind of that thought, I walked over to the thick metal door and stared out the slit, all too aware that this time, I was the one locked in. The eyes that stared back at me were a deep and mossy green. The eyelashes were light brown, the woman’s skin the color of cream.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I’ve had many names,” the woman said. She smiled—even though I couldn’t see her mouth, I could see it in her eyes. “You could say I’ve been around for a while.”
She waited for her words to sink in, and I could see her eyes flicker with interest the exact moment I got it.
“You’re a vampire.” The word felt silly on my lips, even now, and the woman actually laughed at me.
“That word,” she said, “never ceases to amuse me. I’m as human as you are. Though,” she added with faux thoughtfulness, “I suppose that’s a poor example—at least for another four hours or so.”
Great. My captor knew about my shifting from one form to another—which meant that she knew that in another four hours, I’d be even more at their mercy than I was now.
“Why are you working for Chimera?” I asked her, my mind racing, trying to find a way out of this. “Do you have any idea what they’re doing—to people like us? To the preternatural?”
“Kali,” the woman said, thoroughly amused. “I don’t work for Chimera. Chimera works for me.”
One of these days, I was going to stop being caught off guard. I was going to be able to look down the road and see how the pieces of a puzzle fit together—but that day wasn’t today.
“Chimera works for you,” I repeated dumbly.
“Founder, president, and CEO,” she said. “Guilty as charged.”
“But why?” The question tore its way out of my mouth before I could stop it.
“Do you know, Kali, what we are?”
I knew. We were strong and fast, and once we’d been bitten, we were stronger, faster, and thirsty—for blood.
“We’re hunters,” I said, unwilling to say the v-word again.
“Hunters,” the woman repeated. “Well, better predator than prey, I suppose.” She smiled, thoroughly delighted with herself and with me. “There’s a principle in evolutionary biology,” she continued indulgently. “It’s called the Red Queen’s Hypothesis. It’s taken from Alice in Wonderland—would you believe I actually knew Lewis Carroll? Tasty—but that’s neither here nor there. In the book, the Red Queen comments that it takes all the running in the world just to stay in the same place. Evolution’s like that, Kali. A species never reaches the point where it can stop evolving, because the rest of the world is always evolving, too. You can never stop, because the things you hunt will always be getting faster, stronger—and the same goes for the things that hunt you.”
I thought of the creatures I’d hunted in the past five years—beasts that normal humans never would have stood a chance against.
“Natural, preternatural—they’re just labels, Kali. If you took a giraffe and plopped it down in the middle of the Antarctic, it would look very strange, wouldn’t it?”
The question was rhetorical, but my mind connected the dots and led me to the meaning behind her words. We were the giraffes in the Antarctic—freakish and unnatural because this wasn’t the environment in which we’d evolved. My father’s lecture at the university rang in my ears.
Are preternatural creatures really unnatural? Or are they simply the product of a different kind of evolution—one with a different starting point, a different progression?
“Zev said that people like us are from another place,” I said slowly, my mind churning through the possibilities. “Another … planet?”
“Another planet?” the woman repeated, laughing gaily. “Little green men and life on Mars? How absolutely precious.”
If she’d let me out of this cage, I’d show her “absolutely precious.”
“We’re from another dimension, dear. Hasn’t that scientist father of yours taught you anything?” She held up her fist and then spread her fingers outward. “Big bang. Multiple earths. Flash forward forty million years, and all of those little differences from the beginning have yielded a very different environment—and very different creatures.”
Her eyes sparkled, and I bit back nausea. There was something deadly there, something cold.
“There have always been people who catch momentary glimpses of the other side. Myths, legends, all those little stories that humans just love to tell each other—they had to come from somewhere, yes?” She sighed, a delicate, girlish sound. “Unfortunately, a few hundred years ago, through circumstances far above anything your pretty little head can grasp—some of us ended up stuck here. Permanently.”
I got the feeling that she wasn’t just talking about “us” as in vampires. She was talking about “us” as in the preternatural. Hellhounds and zombies, will-o’-the-wisps and basilisks, and everything else I’d hunted on my less-than-human days.
“Humans from our world are relatively good at blending. The other creatures … not so much. We kept them under wraps for as long as we could, but eventually, the cat got out of the bag.”
Darwin. The hydra. My mind whirred with the implications. We’d always assumed that the preternatural had been here all along, that we’d only had to go looking to discover the truth, but if what my captor was saying was true …
She smiled, amused at the fact that she’d blown my mind. “Eventually, the existence of our kind will be common knowledge, too, and we’re outnumbered here about ten million to one.”
That meant there were others—like me, like Zev, like the crazy woman on the other side of the door.
“So you decided to, what? Join them in their scientific exploration?” I asked, but my voice came out more bewildered than sarcastic.
The woman’s eyes crinkled—another smile that sent a wave of nausea straight to my gut. “They say knowledge is power.” She leaned toward me, her eyelashes nearly brushing the glass. “Do you know what I say, Kali? Power is power. Pure, brute force. This world thinks they have the monsters our kind hunt under control. They protect them.” She shrugged. “So I’m giving them new monsters. The less control they have, the more they’ll need us. And the fewer humans there are …” She shrugged. “Well, evening up the numbers a bit can’t hurt.”
I thought of the scientists—my father and Dr. Davis and Rena and all the rest, who, at some point, had probably all told themselves that the things they were doing were justified by the greater good. Knowledge. Better medicine. Exploration.