I tried to make my mouth form words, but couldn’t quite get it to obey, and a split second later, my moment had passed. A girl who looked vaguely familiar sidled up to Elliot, pressing her body close to his. Her hair was red, almost as dark as the streaks in mine, and offset by skin so flawless it was practically luminescent. Her white tank top looked simple and sweet, until she turned sideways to place a proprietary hand on Elliot’s arm, and I realized that her top was nearly backless.
“C’mon, El,” she said as my eyes were drawn to what appeared to be a tattoo on her lower back. “Everyone’s waiting.”
Everyone, her tone said, who’s anyone.
I tried to work myself up to a good hair toss, but failed, because I couldn’t take my eyes off the tattoo, which looked an awful lot like a serpent eating its own tail. Which meant that there was a distinct possibility that it wasn’t a tattoo.
No. Couldn’t be.
The girl turned again, tugging at Elliot, and this time, he allowed himself to be led away.
“Sorry about that,” Skylar said. “My brothers are a little protective. Elliot doesn’t understand why I’m not trying to work my way back into the popular crowd, where he can keep an eye on me. And Bethany is afraid if he spends more than five seconds talking to me, her social status might suffer. It’s a girlfriend/boyfriend, brother/sister thing.”
I nodded to show that I was listening, but couldn’t bring myself to actually respond, because in that instant, I realized why the girl with Elliot had looked so familiar. Skylar’s brother was dating Bethany Davis. The same Bethany Davis whose father was my father’s new boss. The one I’d been sent to Heritage High to rub elbows with.
Staring after the golden couple, I spent a few seconds really, really hoping that Bethany Davis had a tattoo. Because if the symbol on the small of her back wasn’t a tattoo, things were going to get very ugly, very soon.
The kind of ugly that ended with someone buried six feet under.
As much as I didn’t want to consider the possibility, I had to. If the ouroboros on Bethany’s back was real, she’d be dead by the end of the day.
And in my current state, there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it.
4
During World War II, what was the main source of information used by the Allies to gather intelligence from inside the opposing camp?
(a) Human spies
(b) Advances in technological surveillance
(c) Chupacabra informants
(d) Postmortem interrogation
The world was mocking me. I was sure of it. The fact that I was sitting in Mr. McCormick’s fifth-period history class, taking a multiple-choice exam while Bethany Davis was out there with a death sentence inked into her flesh, would have been bad enough. That the first question on the test involved chupacabras pushed the scenario to downright ironic.
Somebody up there hates me.
Staring at the test until the question started to blur, I tried my hardest not to think about the c-word. Not about the legends that said chupacabras were the size of a large wolf, with spines decorating their backs, like some kind of mammoth porcupine or a miniature stegosaurus brought back to life. Not about the smaller, deadlier, and less fictional variety that every preternatural biologist in the world would have given their right arm to study.
Translated, chupacabra meant “goat-sucker.” I had a few other names for them, at least one of which rhymed with the latter half of the literal translation.
Don’t think about it, I told myself. There’s nothing you can do, anyway. Just answer the question.
I took a few calming breaths and purged my mind of the unwanted mental image of a fatally still Bethany Davis, her face pale, her veins empty.
Just concentrate on the question. Use the code.
It was easy to imagine Skylar’s voice in my mind, and to see Darryl’s eyes light up the way they had when we’d talked about his test-taking strategy. That helped.
A little.
First, identify the oddball.
That was easy enough. “Technological surveillance” had less than nothing to do with the other three. I pressed my pencil to the page and dragged it over choice (b). I was trying so hard to stay in control of the situation that it was a miracle I didn’t inadvertently snap my pencil in half.
Step two, identify the decoys.
An informant and a spy were pretty much the same thing, which meant that one of those answers was probably a decoy, and one of them was probably the correct choice. Unwittingly, my gaze flickered to choice (d), which, by default, had to be the second decoy.
Postmortem interrogation.
Again with the zombies. Even if I hadn’t been “initiated” into the code, I would have been able to rule out that answer. A lack of tongue meant that zombies couldn’t speak. An insatiable hunger for human flesh meant that trying to talk to one was highly inadvisable.
Postmortem interrogation. And hellhounds are just overgrown puppies. Yeah, right.
My eyes flicked back up to the other two choices, and I knew in the pit of my stomach that the correct answer was the one I least wanted to look at, let alone circle.
Informants and spies were the same thing. Chupacabras and zombies were both supernatural creatures. Ergo, the correct answer, the one with two decoys, was (c) Chupacabra informants.
Chupacabras are remarkable creatures. This time, it was my father’s voice that I heard in my head. Absolutely remarkable. At first, we thought they were little more than overgrown ticks, preternatural only in their ability to literally disappear into the creatures they feed on. But when Klaus Eigelmeier discovered that in sucking a victim’s blood, chupacabras also absorb their memories … psychic phenomena, Kali! Bona fide psychic phenomena in a biological species!
I’d been four or five when Klaus had proved what the Allies’ strategists must have strongly suspected: chupacabras weren’t just bloodsuckers. They were memory eaters as well.
In a different world, the idea of psychic memory transfers probably wouldn’t have seemed any stranger than the fact that after Darwin’s fateful voyage on the Beagle, the rest of the preternatural world had fallen to discovery like dominoes, with new species crawling out of the woodwork en masse. Where had they come from? Why hadn’t we discovered them sooner? No one knew. But two hundred years after the fact, science had more or less gotten a handle on the limitations of preternatural ability. And psychic phenomena?
That kind of thing was unheard of, and no other species—natural or preternatural—had demonstrated any kind of psychic power, before or since. My father’s enthusiasm at Eigelmeier’s announcement had actually led him to look me straight in the eye. To this day, it was the most he’d ever said to me in one sitting.
Maybe that was why I could still hear him saying every word.
Maybe that was why I knew that when a chupacabra started draining its victim, the image I’d seen on Bethany’s lower back—a snake eating its own tail—appeared somewhere on the victim’s body.
Maybe that was why I couldn’t stop picturing Bethany’s eyes going vacant and empty as the chupacabra stole her memories. Her lifeblood.
And then her life.
B.
I scrawled the letter onto the page in big, defiant script, even though I knew the answer was wrong. And then, I folded my test paper in half, walked to the front of the room, handed it to the teacher, and asked to be excused.
“Excused?” Mr. McCormick gave me one of those looks that said something along the lines of look here, Missy, I know what you’re up to, but then he seemed to realize that he did not, in fact, have any idea what my agenda was. He appeared to find this somewhat unsettling.
“If you leave now, I won’t be able to let you take a makeup exam,” he warned me.
I looked him straight in the eye, even though it physically hurt me to do it.
Blend in. Don’t make waves. Don’t look up.
That was the mantra I lived by. But not today.
“I understand,” I said softly. “I just really need to go, anyway.”
“You could at least guess,” McCormick replied. “It’s multiple choice. It wouldn’t take you very long, and it would be better than a zero.”
Chupacabras, I thought.
Puncture holes in perfect, luminescent skin.