Every other day(52)

I’d heard this lecture so often, I could have given it myself. Instead, I stuck to the shadows and moved my way toward the front of the auditorium. A couple of his students might have noticed me, but the professor went on, oblivious.

“What are the three key markers of preternatural evolution?” The question was rhetorical, and he went right into the answer—just as I went right for a chair near the front of the auditorium, where he’d left his briefcase and keys.

“It’s all right there in the DNA: preternaturality is typically marked by a triple, rather than double, helix structure; the presence of base pairs that themselves appear to have distinctly unnatural properties; and the secretion of amino acids—or, as they are more commonly called, preter-proteins—that defy our most basic natural laws, and in doing so, caused a resurgent interest in the pseudoscience of alchemy for a large part of the twentieth century.”

I slipped my hand into my father’s blazer jacket, which he’d left on his chair when he’d taken to the stage to lecture. As a kid, I’d completed the exact same motion searching for change for the vending machines, but this time, I was looking for something slightly less benign: his university ID card.

Got it.

My hand closed around its target, and I slipped back into the shadows and made for the exit.

“But given these differences, are preternatural creatures really unnatural? Or are they simply the product of a different kind of evolution—one with a different starting point, a different progression? Were they always here? Where did they come from? And are their fundamental and most basic natures really all that different from ours? Which leads me to …”

My father actually started tapping out a drumroll on his podium. A handful of students joined in. A new PowerPoint slide appeared on the projector screen, and my father’s voice boomed out over the drumroll.

“Sexual Selection and Preternatural Mating Behavior! Or, if you prefer: sex and the supernatural—when demons get down and dirty.”

That was my cue to leave. The one benefit of having a father who only remembered my existence every other Thursday was that we’d never had a sit-down talk about the birds and the bees. Hearing him say the word “sex” twice in one minute was more than enough for me.

As I slipped out the back of the room, and the door closed behind me, I glanced back over my shoulder, half expecting him to have snapped out of lecture mode and noticed my exit—but he didn’t. I wasn’t suprised. People like me were good at fading into the background, and I’d probably had more practice than most.

Mousy little Kali … wasn’t that what Bethany had called me? I’d spent my whole human life not making waves, hiding what I was, trying not to be noticed.

Until now.

Breaking into Paul Davis’s lab—for a purpose completely unrelated to hunting—wasn’t exactly the work of a human chameleon. It wasn’t low risk, it wasn’t subtle.

Oh well.

Like Theseus working his way through the labyrinth, I wound my way through hallway after hallway, took to the stairs, and made my way to my father’s lab. I swiped his ID, and the door unlocked itself. Since I’d relieved him of his last subject pool with the Great Zombie Raid of Sophomore Year, he’d been doing mostly theoretical research, but his office still backed up to his old lab space—which, in turn, was located adjacent to the space that had been given to the new head of the department.

Two more key-card swipes, and I was in a restricted-access hallway. Facial masks and foot covers sat just outside one door. The entire place reeked of plastic and human sweat, but the part of me that wasn’t human could smell a hint of something animal among the antiseptic.

CAUTION, read the sign on the door. LIVE SPECIMENS.

Caution, I thought, my eyes narrowing, illegal biomedical experimentation. My father’s card didn’t grant me direct access to the other labs, but I could still feel a light buzz of power from the blood I’d ingested.

Stronger. Faster. More invincible.

I fed the chupacabra, and it fed me. Trying not to think about what exactly I’d fed it, I made use of the increased strength and forced the door open. The lock gave way with a sickening creak, and I slipped into the room, expecting to see … something.

Something other than empty aquariums, empty cages. Something other than petri dishes, carefully labeled and stored away.

A clipboard on the far wall drew my attention, and I crossed the room, moving silently, so light on my toes that I might as well have been floating. Careful not to touch anything, I skimmed the top sheet, then helped myself to a pair of latex gloves.

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: PAUL DAVIS