Every other day(64)

“Don’t call me Beth.”

Before Bethany and Skylar could get into it, I intervened. “If your brother wants you to stay out of it,” I said, “maybe you should.” I paused, letting the suggestion sink in before adding the caveat. “That’s not an option for me.”

You don’t have to do this, Zev told me. You shouldn’t.

“I have to do this,” I said out loud, half for Zev’s benefit and half for theirs. “I don’t expect the rest of you to help me.”

“Of course you don’t,” Bethany replied. “Because you’re the hero, and we’re the ones who walk away.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, because she was right. I did expect them to walk away. They didn’t owe me anything. We barely knew each other.

What reason could I possibly give them to stay?

“If we’re going to break into Bethany’s dad’s lab,” Skylar interjected, with no segue whatsoever, “we should probably do it before Reid gets here for zombie cleanup.”

“Or,” Elliot suggested, “we could not.”

He crossed the room, so that he was standing next to me. Bethany tracked his progression with her eyes, but the expression on her face never changed.

“I get wanting to know what you are, where you come from,” Elliot told me, his voice even and sweet. “I get wanting to help someone who can’t help himself. But this is big, Kali, and you could get hurt.” He paused. “Seventeen hours from now, you could die.”

Sixteen hours and fifty-nine minutes, I corrected silently, but I didn’t say the words out loud.

I wanted to tell Elliot that this was more or less my life. That I’d known from the time I was twelve years old that I’d die hunting monsters—that the only thing different this time was that the monsters were human. But what came out of my mouth was something else.

“You don’t get it. You won’t ever get it, Elliot, because you have a family. You have friends, and you have a future—you don’t have to worry that tomorrow or a year from now or five years, someone will figure out what you are. You don’t have to wake up every morning wondering why, and you don’t have to go through the motions, pretending that someday it will stop, because it will never stop.”

Never, never, never.

“I can’t just walk away and forget about this—I am this, and the only person in the world who could ‘get’ that, the only one who might actually understand or, God forbid, have some answers—that person is the one you want me to walk away from.”

Protecting other people was what I was born for. I had to believe that, believe that I had a purpose, because otherwise, I was just a killer. I was sharp edges and violence and making myself bleed. Either I did it to make the world a safer place, or I really was a monster, less human than I was willing to believe.

“I’m doing this,” I said, shrugging off Elliot’s touch before I even realized that he’d lifted his hand to my shoulder. “I’m not asking for your help, and I’m certainly not asking for permission—”

“I don’t know the code.” Bethany said the words like she hadn’t just interrupted me, like she really couldn’t have cared less about what I was saying. “I have no idea how to get the door to my dad’s lab open, but I can show you where it is. Maybe the ‘psychic’ can intuit a few little bitty numbers for you.”

Bethany did a good job of coating that last sentence with sarcasm and pretending not to care—but I’d mastered that particular art when I was nine, and I saw straight through it. If Bethany had known the code, she would have given it to me.

“I’m not sure about the numbers,” Skylar said brightly, “but I can try.”

“For the last time, Skylar,” Elliot interjected. “You’re not psychic.”

“And Kali isn’t super girl,” Skylar cooed back. “Your brotherly wisdom has been absorbed. On a related note, your job is distracting Reid.”

Without waiting for a reply, Skylar darted across the room, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me out. Bethany followed on our heels.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked her. A few hours earlier, she’d refused to let us anywhere near the lab.

“Kali, a horde of zombies attacked my house. Vaughn said they were wearing some kind of high-tech collars, and I’m pretty sure that normal zombies aren’t supposed to coordinate their flesh-eating efforts. I may not be the sharpest eyeliner in the box, but even I can read in between those lines.” She paused. “Besides, I’m getting really tired of you being the hero. When people bite me, I bite back.”