Every other day(46)

People like me.





“Kali?”

I must have looked about as good as I felt, because Skylar said my name in a tentative, talking-a-puppy-out-from-underneath-a-car type of tone.

I shook my head to clear it of unwanted thoughts—unwanted weakness.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

Bethany twirled a finger through her hair, a dangerous glint in her emerald eyes. “Isn’t it always?”

I didn’t want to take her meaning, but she didn’t leave me any other options.

“When you talked that chupacabra out of my body and into yours, it was nothing. And when you passed out at the skating rink, it was nothing. When you went through the windshield of my car and I thought you died—nothing. So, come on, Kali, share. What kind of nothing is it this time?”

The urge to answer her question fully and honestly took me completely by surprise. I wasn’t exactly the bare-my-soul type, but Bethany had just rattled off her sordid family history like it was some kind of halftime cheer. She’d let me in, and for the first time, I actually wanted to do the same, to tell someone the truth.

That I wasn’t normal.

That I wasn’t human.

That even though I was used to being something else, being bitten by a chupacabra had changed things, changed me.

And that, somehow, Chimera knew—maybe not about me specifically, but about the fact that people like me existed and that being bitten by a chupacabra had a different effect on us than it had on normal people. If Bethany was right and Chimera had been infecting teens on purpose, then chances were good that they were either systematically looking for people like me—or trying to create them.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said out of habit, unable to make myself say anything else. Talking made me feel like I had the dry heaves, and all I wanted was to just throw up the truth and be done with it. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.” Skylar caught my gaze and held it, and even though her face still looked pixie-young and innocent, there was an alien weight to the set of her features, like she was a thousand years old instead of fifteen. “And it does matter. Everything that’s happened, everything that’s going to happen in the next twenty-four hours—it matters. You matter, and whether you want to believe this or not, you can’t do this alone, Kali.”

She paused and cast her eyes downward, her voice going very quiet. “You shouldn’t have to.”

I wanted to believe her. I wanted to tell her everything, tell them everything. I opened my mouth, and—nothing. I’d been keeping secrets for so long that I wasn’t entirely sure I knew how to let them go.

Don’t. The humans won’t understand. They never do.

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that Zev was weighing in, telling me that every instinct I’d ever had to keep other people at bay was right on the mark. Then again, he’d also told me to leave Chimera Biomedical Corp. alone.

That wasn’t going to happen.

The past twenty-four hours had whetted my appetite for answers, and I needed to know—what I was, what Zev was, what the men in suits and the Paul Davises of the world knew that I didn’t.

Leave it, Kali. You’re better off if they think you’re dead.

I wondered briefly how old Zev was—because he was talking to me like I was a child.

That, as much as Skylar’s vehement claim that I didn’t have to do this alone, prodded me into taking a small, terrifying step toward telling the others the truth. “I think I know what Chimera is trying to do.” Admitting that out loud sounded funny, even to my own ears. Deep inside me, Zev cursed in a language that I neither recognized nor understood. I ignored it—and him.

“I think I know why the Chimera scientists are playing around with chupacabras—why they’d kill to keep that kind of experiment to themselves.”

Interest flickered across Bethany’s face, but in the bat of an eyelash, she’d wiped her face completely clean, and it was gone. “And we’re just supposed to take your word on this because the almighty Kali D’Angelo can’t be bothered to deal us in?”

“I’ll tell you,” I said, pushing back against Zev’s objections. “Once I’m sure.”

Making that promise—meaning it—hurt, like I’d been keeping secrets for so long that prying them loose would require the shredding of flesh—most likely mine.

“What do you need to be sure about?” Skylar asked. The question set me up to ask Bethany for something that I was 90 percent certain she wouldn’t want to give, so I crossed my fingers and took the plunge.

“I need access to your dad’s files.”