Every other day(10)

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.





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?