“Skylar said she couldn’t get the image out of her mind and that she thought it might be important.” I felt silly even saying the words, but there was a part of me that actually believed Skylar was psychic. She’d known the men in suits were coming, she had an uncanny habit of responding to things I’d left unsaid, and her “instincts” had led us straight to the ice rink—and the man-eating, fire-breathing dragon.
And eventually, to the woman in heels.
Though, now that I thought about it, those last two weren’t exactly marks in her favor.
“Did Skylar say where she’d seen it?” Bethany asked, her enunciation a shade too crisp, each word a little too sharp.
Unsure why she was asking, I shrugged. “In her mind?”
For a second, looking at Bethany was like looking at Elliot when he’d told me not to encourage his sister in her delusions of psychic grandeur. Before Bethany could say something to that effect, I preempted the effort. “Have you seen this symbol before?”
Bethany didn’t reply, and that told me everything I needed to know. She had.
“Care to clue me in?”
Bethany took her eyes off mine. “Care to tell me how you’re going to get rid of that chupacabra at dawn?”
This time, the silence that descended on the car wasn’t so much awkward as charged. I would have laid money that wherever Bethany had seen this symbol, it had something to do with the work her father was doing for the suits. Given that she’d already told me that Daddy Dearest was involved in this up to his eyeballs, it was hard to imagine why she’d suddenly be playing things close to the vest.
You don’t want to know, I reminded myself, using the exact same words I’d said to Bethany earlier. The less I knew about her, the less she knew about me, the easier this would be on all of us. I was supposed to be invisible. I was supposed to fade into the background. I was supposed to do what I did—
Alone.
Shut up, I thought back fiercely. Just shut up. It was bad enough dealing with my own instincts, knowing that I’d never be able to tell anyone else what I really was. I didn’t need a bloodsucker reminding me that no matter what happened, at the end of the day, I’d still be me, and there’d still be a glass wall separating me from the rest of the world. I wouldn’t ever be human.
I could feel the shift coming, taste it on the tip of my tongue. It was a matter of minutes now. Twenty. Fifteen. Ten. The surface of my skin was electric. My bones itched. I became acutely aware of the blood in my veins, the length of each and every one of my limbs.
It always seemed strange to me that in the last few minutes before I became something else, I felt more human than ever. I was hungry, starving, and the wounds I’d scratched into my own stomach stung, bringing tears to my eyes. I wanted to cry, and I wanted to scream. I was tired, I was lonely, and an insane part of me wanted to stay that way. No matter how many times I went through this, I couldn’t convince my brain that shifting was different than dying, that when I was Other, I was still myself. Instead, I responded to the inevitability of the change like a girl facing down her own mortality, knowing that in nine minutes, eight minutes, seven, her life as she knew it would come to end.
“Are you all right?” Bethany’s concern cut through my haze, and I nodded.
“Can you drop me off here?” I asked, my voice quiet, my arms wrapping around my torso, like if I held on hard enough, I could stay human just that much longer.
This is what you wanted. This is what you’ve been waiting for. I tried to talk myself into it, but the rush of sensation all around me was deafening.
—Alone.
Alone, alone, alone. The word echoed through my body, and I had two reactions to it, each visceral and strong. Part of me said no, and part of me said yes. Part of me wanted the change, and part of me didn’t want to give up being what I was now.
It was kind of ironic—I spent my human days wishing I wasn’t human, but in the last moments before I made the switch, I didn’t want to give that up.
“I’m not dropping you off anywhere,” Bethany said. “You’re really pale, and your pupils are huge. Are you shaking?”
I was. I was trembling, my body vibrating with the knowledge that in a few minutes, everything would change.
I’m going to kill you, I thought, trying to focus on the chupacabra and not on the things I’d lose once I crossed over. You’re going to die.
Broken.
I might have actually laughed out loud at the word. The parasite in my head was calling me broken, and he was right. Didn’t mean I was any less likely to kill him dead. Didn’t make the tears in my eyes sting any less.