Every other day(25)

“Ice dragon,” I said, repeating the police officer’s incredulous words.

For some reason, my voice sounded very far away: slow and gummy and like I wasn’t quite speaking English. As I turned this thought over in my head, I noticed that my interrogator’s face was looking less like a face and more like a sea of unrelated features, each blurring into the next.

Weird.

I blinked, and when that did me no good, I reached out for the railing to steady myself.

“Miss, are you feeling all right?” the officer asked.

Her voice sounded even farther away than mine.

“I’m fine,” I said—or at least, that’s what I think I said. The details are, to this day, a little unclear. “Just give me a minute.”

“Ohmigosh!”

It took me a few seconds to realize that the exclamation in question had come from Skylar, who, up until that point, had wisely stayed out of the fray. I’d entertained the notion that she’d had the common sense to go home and leave Bethany and me to sort this out on our own.

Apparently not.

“You look, like, so pale. Did you forget to eat lunch? Please tell me you didn’t forget to eat lunch!” Skylar shook her head morosely, laying on the teenage ingénue vibe so thick that I doubted that anyone—let alone Officer So What You’re Telling Me Is—would buy it.

I wasn’t suffering from low blood sugar.

I was—I was—it took me a minute to put the sensation into words.

Dying.

“She’s hypoglycemic,” Skylar said, rattling off the word like she’d cut her teeth working in emergency rooms. “Are you guys done here? Because it’s almost six o’clock, and if we don’t get some food in her soon, her blood sugar is going to get dangerously low.”

The police officer blinked. Or maybe I did. Either way, words were exchanged and Skylar’s effervescence must have won the day, because a few minutes after she’d appeared on the scene, Bethany and I were free to go.

“In retrospect,” Skylar said, once we’d made it out the front door, “I’m not sure ice-skating was a good idea.”

“You think?” Bethany snorted. “Maybe if you were actually psychic, you could tell us why, in the name of all that is good and holy in this world, your little instincts led us here.”

I felt foggy and disconnected. I could barely keep up with the back and forth between the two of them, but the moment the question was out of Bethany’s mouth, a second Preternatural Control team shuffled by us, a dark-haired woman leading the way.

Click. Click. Click.

The sound of heels against concrete penetrated the fog in my brain, and I froze. For a moment, I thought that the woman in heels—the one from the school, the one coming toward us now—was here for me, but she brushed past us on her way into the rink.

She never even turned around.

Click. Click. Click.

Even after she was gone, I could still hear the sound of her heels echoing through the recesses of my brain.

Who is she? Why is she here? So tired …

My thoughts were a jumbled mess. I could barely move. And as Bethany and Skylar practically poured me into the backseat of the BMW, I thought about what had just happened—everything that had happened—and I managed to stave off the dizziness and nausea coursing through my entire body just long enough to spare a few words for the BMW’s belly-dancing owner.

“I can’t believe you did that,” I told Bethany, my words slurred and packing next to no heat. “You should have run.”

“I was providing a distraction so you could run,” Bethany retorted. “And that dragon was, I might add, totally distracted.”

I tried to tell Bethany exactly what I thought of her “distraction,” but somewhere between my brain and my mouth, the words got lost, and they came out in a jumble.

Bethany turned to Skylar. “What’s wrong with her?”

For once, Skylar was silent, and her silence was answer enough.

“She’s only been infected for four hours,” Bethany said, her voice going dry. “She should be fine.”

I closed my eyes, and somewhere inside of me, something shifted. I shouldn’t have been able to lure the beast from Bethany’s body to mine. I shouldn’t have developed an ouroboros the moment I’d been bitten. And I certainly shouldn’t have been hearing voices.

You—Promise—Fine.

I smelled wet grass, rain, honeysuckle. I saw the outline of a body, solid and sleek. I heard a voice shouting at me from a distance, but couldn’t make out a single word.

This time, I didn’t fight to hold on to consciousness—couldn’t—and my last thought as I drifted into oblivion was that the woman in the heels reminded me of someone.