“Kali.” Bethany’s voice went up in pitch. “Kali, I need you to open your eyes and look at me.”
My eyelids fluttered, and I managed to look at her long enough to tell that she was dialing a cell phone—probably calling Elliot or Vaughn or someone else who didn’t know me from Adam.
From Eve.
Bethany cursed under her breath and hung up the phone. “If you die on me, I will kill you.”
I giggled.
She thought the chupacabra was draining me, the way it had the night before. She thought I was dying, drifting further and further away. She thought I was on the verge of going to sleep and never waking up.
The sound of the engine revving permeated my brain, and I forced myself to focus, to concentrate.
“You have to let me out now,” I said, fumbling with my seat belt, wrenching it off. “I need to—have to—go.”
“We’re being followed,” Bethany said, and that snapped me out of it. My back was arching, my blood was burning its way through my veins, but for once, my mind was on something other than the coming change. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the SUV accelerating toward us. Morning traffic was just starting to pick up, and Bethany zoomed around the other cars like she’d had a past life driving Indy 500s. She hit the exit, flew across an intersection, and hopped back on the highway going the other way. For a few seconds, I thought we’d lost our tail, but then the SUV appeared again, and this time, I saw the passenger-side window cracking. I saw the gun.
“Specimen retrieval,” I told myself. That was what Bethany had said. They were here to retrieve me, to bring the chupacabra inside of me back to the lab. For whatever reason, to them it was worth tracking, and if it was worth tracking, it was worth taking alive.
Right?
Bethany cursed, each word punctuating the one before it, like shots coming off an automatic. The car behind us changed lanes and, without warning, swerved, sideswiping the BMW with brutal, unforgiving force.
Bethany’s fingers tightened over the steering wheel, and the last thing I saw before I lost all sense of reality was her white knuckles bulging under paper-thin skin, giving her the look of a skeleton, of Death itself.
Brakes squealing. Glass breaking. Shattering. My world is turned upside down. White-hot pain.
This time, my head really did go through the windshield.
Three minutes. Two. One.
And then I died.
I’m in a tunnel, lying very still, metal all around me. It’s loud and dark, and I’m so scared. My bones are shaking. I want it to be over. I want to get out.
“Hold on, baby. You’re doing great.”
The voice echoes through the tunnel. Mommy? Everything is humming—it’s humming so loudly I want to scream. I want to cover my ears, but I can’t.
Can’t move my arms.
Can’t move my legs.
I want to go home.
“The image quality is shot to hell.”
“She’s scared, Rena.”
Daddy?
“You have to be still, Kali. Be so still.”
Still as the grave.
Oxygen rushed into my lungs like water tearing its way through a dam. I gasped and bolted straight up. Glass crunched underneath me; shards flew off my body, sparkling like raindrops in the newborn sun. Slowly, the world came into focus. Bethany and the BMW were gone, the carnage around me the only evidence that they’d ever been there at all.
They left me here? They ran us off the road, I went through the windshield, and they just left?
So much for specimen retrieval.
Stiffly, I brought my right hand up to my left shoulder, popping it back into place. I pulled bits and pieces of windshield from my face, my chest, my arms. I reached my blood-soaked hands up and manually tilted my head to the side, then snapped it backward. The sound of crunching bones was unpleasant, but not overly so.
Twenty-three hours and nineteen minutes.
That was more than enough time for me to heal. Already, the surface wounds were closing, leaving nothing but smears of blood in their wake. I could hear bones knitting themselves back together, could feel my spine righting itself with nothing more than a curious pressure at the nape of my neck.
Somebody tried to kill me. I should be dead.
That realization wasn’t as disturbing as it would have been on a human day. People like me weren’t scared to die, and we weren’t easy to kill. The scent of blood—coppery, wet—was familiar, but for some reason, this time, there were layers to the smell that I’d never inhaled before: iron, honey, sweat.
If you can smell your blood, they can smell it.
For a moment, I thought the warning was a product of my own mind, but then a glint of gold caught my eye. Under my ravaged shirt, under the blood, I could see part of an all-too-familiar symbol.