Elliot winced. Vaughn’s expression never changed. Skylar’s bottom lip trembled.
“You promise?”
This was not how I’d expected this conversation going. “I promise.”
For a moment, you could have heard a pin drop in the room. Bethany broke the silence. “That’s too bad,” she said, “because right now, I’d kind of like to slap you, and it just won’t be the same if you can’t feel the pain.”
This was closer to the reaction I’d expected.
“I’ll go,” I said, sitting up, finding my way to my feet.
“Go?” Bethany repeated incredulously. “You’re not going anywhere. You are going to move your mouth, and words are going to come out, and you’re going to explain how any of this is even remotely possible.” She narrowed her eyes. “And … go.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” My arms hugged my chest, like I could keep my emotions from the surface by sheer force of will. “I already told you guys. I’m not normal. I’m a freak. I showed you the ouroboros—that’s not normal. Normal people die when they’re bitten. I got stronger. Normal people go crazy if a zombie takes a chunk out of their arm. I took a little nap. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. All I know is that I’m not normal.”
Skylar’s babbling tendencies must have been contagious, because I couldn’t stop myself from elaborating.
“I’m not even human.”
If I’d felt naked before, I felt vivisected now—like someone had taken a knife and sliced my body open, like the others were getting ready to paw through my insides, chunk by chunk.
Skylar was the first to recover. “Oh,” she said. “I thought maybe you were a little bit human.”
Inside my mind, Zev snorted, and I pushed back the insane urge to laugh. A little bit human, I thought. Story of my life.
“What are you?” Bethany’s words didn’t sound like an accusation, but she didn’t sound curious, either. If anything, her voice was hesitant, guarded.
“I don’t know,” I replied. Her eyes flashed, but before she could say a word, I preempted it. “I think I’m some kind of hunter. When there’s something preternatural around, I can feel it, and there’s this desire, this need to fight. I don’t get tired. I don’t feel pain. And as much as I’m capable of tracking the beasties down, they can track me.” I ran my fingertips gently over the length of my arm. The skin was puckered, still healing, and for the first time, I thought of what I must have looked like with pieces torn out of my flesh, my eyes bloodshot and feral.
“They like my blood,” I said lightly. “If they smell it, they come for me, so I go for them first. It’s illegal, and people think it’s wrong, but I have to.”
“So this is a regular thing for you?” Bethany asked, her eyebrows arched nearly into her hairline. “Killing zombies, playing cat and mouse with your friendly neighborhood dragon …”
“There was nothing normal about that dragon,” I retorted. “But to answer your question, yes. I hunt. If something kills people, I kill it.”
Bethany aimed her gaze heavenward. “This explains so, so much.”
I thought she was thinking about all the little things I’d said and done in the past two days, but she disabused me of that notion pretty quickly.
“I mean, no wonder you’ve got a savior complex. You do this for a living.”
I almost pointed out that nobody paid me, but Bethany was on a roll.
“And when you saw I had an ouroboros, you knew that if you could get it to swap, you could kill it.”
I thought of the parasite feeding me strength and thirsting for blood in return. Killing it had been the plan, but now it was as much a part of my body as my skin or my lungs.
“In theory.”
“So yesterday, when we were running all over the place trying to save you—that was all just a show?” Bethany’s words were crisp, and her voice went up an octave or two. “You were just pretending to be sick?”
“No.” The word burst out of my mouth with so much force that I realized that I really didn’t want her to think that yesterday was something I’d faked, that it somehow didn’t count.
“What I am,” I said carefully, “the things I can do … I can’t always do them.”
“This is ridiculous,” Elliot said, speaking up for the first time. “I can’t believe we’re even sitting here talking about this like it’s not insane. If there were people out there who were born to hunt the preternatural, don’t you think we’d know about them? Don’t you think the government would know about them? It makes no sense.”