Every other day(66)

Suddenly, the walls all around us gave way to images. Apparently, the monitor wasn’t just built into the wall. The monitor was the wall.

Glancing at Beth and Skylar out of the side of my eyes, I moved toward the keyboard and then double clicked on the first folder I saw. It was password protected, but Darryl’s program made mincemeat of that protection, and a few seconds later, the three of us were staring at gibberish.

Scientific gibberish.

There were Excel files, full of data—numbers and columns and dates that were more or less Greek to me. Then there were documents—each labeled with a serial number.

HB-42. LOS-129. MC-407.

Something about that last one sent a niggling feeling into my brain. I opened it, and a single word caught my eye.

Draco.

I wasn’t the world’s best student, and I’d never been particularly fond of science—for obvious reasons. But I knew enough to recognize the genus of almost any preternatural creature.

Genus Draco referred to dragons. As I read through the document—which was laced with references to nucleotides and alleles and oxytocin knockout mice—I caught a few other terms I recognized.

Terms like Equus aqua mysticalis and Pan yeti gigantea.

There was also a figure, with a bunch of millimeter-long bars on it.

“Does that look like one of those DNA gel things to anyone else?” Skylar asked.

Bethany shook her head. “It looks like a pregnancy test on crack.”

“No,” Skylar said slowly. “I skipped a year in science, so I’m taking bio this year. That’s definitely one of those gel things.”

As the two of them bickered back and forth, I stared at the words on the screen, willing them to make sense—and then willing them not to, because if I was reading this correctly, then Skylar was right.

That was a DNA sequencing gel.

Nucleotides.

Alleles.

DNA.

Before I was old enough to walk and talk, modern science had already uncovered the secret to cloning sheep. The entire human genome had been catalogued. And researchers had discovered that preternatural creatures had triple helix DNA.

Pan yeti gigantea. Equus aqua mysticalis. Those were the scientific classifications for the yeti—also known as the abominable snowman—and kelpies—also known as a pain in my ass.

It was like the beginning of some horrific joke—a kelpie, a yeti, and a fire-breathing dragon walk into a bar—but I already knew the punch line.

Kelpies could literally disappear into water.

Yetis were man-eating primates with an affinity for ice.

What do you get if you mix a kelpie, a yeti, and a dragon?

“That thing from the skating rink,” I said. “The ice dragon.”

Twenty-four hours earlier, Skylar’s psychic senses had led us straight to the ice rink—and the woman who appeared to be calling the shots at Chimera had shown up once the furor had started to die down. At the time, my mind had been a jumbled mess, and I hadn’t been able to put the pieces together.

I hadn’t been able to think.

And since I’d shifted, I hadn’t spared more than a thought or two for the dragon, so it hadn’t occurred to me that Chimera might have their fingers in more than one pot—that the chupacabra might not be the only creature they were studying.

Altering.

Experimenting with.

I felt sick—so sick that I brought my right hand to my mouth, for fear I might throw up.

There were thirty-nine varieties of preternatural creatures. They’d been documented, studied, protected by law. Some lived in locations so remote I’d never actually seen one; some hunted humans right in my backyard. I’d probably never be able to kill them all—for every monster I slew, there would always be a new one to take its place—but there was still some comfort in knowing that there was a limit to just how bad things could get.

Thirty-nine species, some of them endangered.

Thirty-nine was doable.

“They’re making more.” The words came out in a whisper, and for a second, I thought I might actually start crying. I did what I did because I had to. I fought every night I could and hated myself the nights I couldn’t. It wouldn’t ever stop, and they were making more.

More monsters.

Stronger ones. Unnatural ones.

That was the word Zev had used to describe the dragon at the ice rink, and I could see it now. As horrible as the rest of the preternatural world was, there was some rhyme or reason to it. There were limits.

But this?

There could be a thousand of me, and it still might not be enough to fight them back if Chimera had one too many successes, if those successes got out into the population the way the dragon had. Without meaning to, I thought of all the beasties I’d fought in the past few weeks. The hellhounds were just hellhounds. The zombies—aside from working as a team—were just zombies. And the basilisk …