Bethany shrugged, like that could make the words she was about to say matter less. “He fell.”
I wondered how old she’d been at the time, how old her little brother was when he died.
“He’s not dead.” Skylar said the words suddenly, and I wasn’t sure whether she was responding to my thoughts or if she’d seen something in that exact moment that had started her lips moving. “He fell. On concrete. Hit his head, but he didn’t die.”
“Coma,” Bethany said flatly. “For the past four years. Once upon a time, the doctors thought he might wake up. There were some experimental treatments, but they didn’t work. Now they say he’s brain-dead. It doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s gone.”
I tried to imagine what must have been going through her head at that moment, how she must feel, but I couldn’t. I had my reasons for keeping people at arm’s length, and she had hers. My dad and I barely even spoke. My mother had left when I was three. But Bethany—
Her brother was brain-dead.
Her mother believed he was still running around the house.
And her father was conducting illegal experiments on unwitting teenagers—Bethany included.
Suddenly, it clicked in my head: the brochure I was holding, Bethany’s familiarity with Chimera Biomedical, her father’s willingness to break the law for them.
“You said there were experimental treatments.” I watched her reaction to my words. “When Tyler first got hurt, you said he underwent experimental treatments.”
Bethany turned her attention back to her toes. “So?”
“Whose experimental treatments were they?” I knew the answer before I asked the question. Bethany eyeballed me, and when she responded, her words were clipped.
“Who do you think?”
The brochure in my hand. The look on Bethany’s face the first time she’d seen the symbol.
“Chimera Biomedical,” I said, expelling a breath and giving it a moment. “Are they still treating him?”
“No,” Bethany said too quickly.
“Beth—”
“Don’t call me Beth,” she snapped.
I didn’t need overly developed people skills to see that snapping at me about her name was probably easier than admitting that if her father was working for Chimera, he hadn’t just taken this job for the pay grade. He hadn’t agreed to experiment on teenagers for the money.
He was looking for a cure.
“Why chupacabras?” I asked. Bethany shrugged.
“Why not?” she said. “They’ve tried everything else. Nothing works—nothing is ever going to work, but try telling that to the great Paul Davis. Sometimes, I’d swear he’s more delusional than my mother, and as I’m sure you’ve gathered, that’s saying something. If Chimera Biomedical told my dad that his research might jump-start Tyler’s brain, there’s nothing that he wouldn’t do.” Bethany swallowed hard. “Obviously.”
The wheels in my head turned slowly as I looked down at the pamphlet, Bethany’s earlier words about Chimera echoing in my head.
They specialized in regeneration: regrowing nerves, reviving dead brain cells. And right now, they were studying chupacabras.
My mind went to Zev and the things he’d told me about “Nibblers.”
Any comments from the peanut gallery? I asked him. What would a biomedical company want with a deadly preternatural parasite?
At first, I didn’t think Zev would respond, but then, he bit out four words, his voice decisive and harsh.
Leave it alone, Kali.
If anything, his words made me want to do the opposite, and the way he’d issued the command made me think that this was dangerous—and personal. I chewed on that for a moment. Chimera was studying chupacabras. Zev knew something about it, something he had no intention of telling me.
Chupacabras. Regeneration. Zev acting like pushing this was particularly dangerous for me.
An insidious possibility took root in my mind, and a moment later, it seemed less like a possibility and more like a fact. All of a sudden, I knew why Dr. Davis thought that injecting someone with a chupacabra might not be a death sentence, why he might believe that the preternatural held the key to waking his son up from a deep and unforgiving sleep.
People like me didn’t get hungry. We never got tired. We couldn’t feel pain. And when we got bitten, we didn’t die.
We healed very, very quickly.
To a scientist, that would have seemed like a medical miracle. To a chupacabra expert whose son was dying, it might have seemed like a sign.
Chimera isn’t just playing around with chupacabras, I realized, my mind reeling. They knew—about the effect that chupacabras had on certain people.