Every other day(39)

I wanted to hunt. I needed to kill. And when a human girl brushed past me and hopped into the shower stall next to mine, I caught the scent of her blood in the air.

Wet. Coppery. Honey.

Easy, Kali. The thirst isn’t yours. It’s the Nibbler’s.

I tried to process what he was saying. Wasn’t the chupacabra supposed to be draining my blood?

It’s a part of you now. It makes you stronger. It connects us. And sooner or later, you’ll have to feed it.

I had to get out of there—away from the smell of the girl in the shower, away from the suggestion that the chupacabra inside of me wanted blood. An uncomfortable idea—not to mention impossible—was taking form in my mind, and I didn’t want to give life to it.

I didn’t want to think about the kind of creature that could heal from any wound and thirsted for human blood.

You should burn the clothing.

I almost thanked Zev for changing the subject, but caught myself just in time. It was disturbing how natural having someone else in my head seemed, and I couldn’t push down that little whisper inside of me, the one that said that people like me were meant to come in pairs.

Lonely Ones. I remembered the phrase from the ice rink, and Zev echoed it, the timbre of his voice setting his words off from my own.

You never knew, he said, half questioning, half tender. What you are, what was missing.

I walked out of the bathroom, down the stairs, and out the door.

Talk to me, Kali. I tried to explain things to you yesterday, but you couldn’t hear me. The connection’s so much clearer now.…

I ignored him and set to work scrounging up a bottle of nail polish remover and a lighter. Ducking back behind one of the dorms, I zeroed in on an empty trash can, dumped my clothes, and followed Zev’s suggestion to a T.

I burned my clothes.

For a few seconds, I watched the flames. And then, unsure that it would work, I tried reaching for Zev’s mind. He’d taken over my body twice now—first with the dragon, then with Eddie. Turnaround was only fair play. Tit for tat.

My breathing slowed, and I felt it—the thing inside my body. And then, my skin tingling with unnatural charge, I felt the thing inside of Zev’s.

My body. My Nibbler. His Nibbler. Him.

For a second—a split second—I saw the world through Zev’s eyes, wore his body as my own.

Concrete walls. Concrete floor. A woman with ruby-red lips. Blood.

I came out of it without warning. My bloodied clothes were ashes, and the fire had burned itself out.

Where are you? I asked Zev silently. What was that?

The voice in my head was silent.

You wanted me to talk. I’m talking.

Still nothing. Whatever I’d seen, whatever Zev was hiding, he clearly wasn’t forthcoming about it. All he wanted to talk about was me. What I was. What was happening to my body. How to keep predators off my trail.

Even thinking about that last one sent a whisper of discontent through my arteries and veins—I wasn’t built for running away from the monsters. I wanted desperately to run toward them—track them down, kill them. Luckily, I was used to restraining myself, used to acting human even when I wasn’t, and the human part of my brain reminded me that right now, preternatural beasties weren’t exactly my primary concern.

Someone had made a strong attempt at killing me this morning. With any luck, between my transition from human to not and my trip through the windshield, I might have managed to knock out their tracking system, but whoever was calling the shots probably wouldn’t be thrilled if and when they found out I was still alive. Worse, I was pretty sure that Bethany had seen me fly through the windshield, and now she was missing. Had our pursuers taken her captive? Had they hurt her? What had she told them?

Was she dead?

Easy, Kali. Zev was back. My fingers curled slightly, like someone was stroking my palm. It’s not your fault.

“It is my fault,” I said softly, resisting the impulse to speak the words straight from my mind to his. “People like me don’t have friends. We don’t have enemies. We don’t carpool, we don’t argue, we don’t let other people care.”

But I had. I’d let Bethany help me, just because I’d helped her. Somehow, she’d crept under my skin. She’d seen a glimmer of the real me.

And now she was gone, possibly missing, possibly dead.

I’m going to find her, I said silently, daring Zev to argue, to try to tell me what to do when he couldn’t even answer a simple question himself. I’m going to find her, and I’m going to find out what they did to her—even if it means going straight to the belly of the beast.





The house looked more like a coliseum than an actual home. Enormous columns lined the front door on either side; the lawn was pristine. At the moment, however, I was more concerned with the ten-foot-tall security gate that marked the property’s borders on all sides.