Bigger.
Stronger.
Harder to kill.
This time, I really did punch the wall.
Beside me, Skylar scrolled through more files on the computer. I couldn’t even look at them—I didn’t want to know, until she came upon the file for chupacabras.
Until I saw the photo of Zev.
His hair was onyx—darker than mine and so black it was nearly reflective. His skin was pale, and I wondered at the fact that in my mind, I’d always seen him tinged in shadow.
Beside me, Skylar seemed to realize that the photo had caught my attention—and why. She opened her mouth to say something, and then her eyes lit on Zev’s scientific classification.
Homo vampirus.
Skylar closed the file so quickly that you would have thought it had bit her. She glanced guiltily at me and then looked back at Bethany.
“How old do you think he is?” Bethany asked, tilting her head to the side. “Like, twenty?”
I hadn’t noticed Zev’s age in the picture, but I doubted he was twenty. He’d been in Chimera’s captivity for two years, and he talked about that length of time like it was nothing.
I’m older than I look, Zev said helpfully. We don’t age the way humans do. Not once we’ve taken on a Nibbler.
I didn’t ask him to clarify, because I was still staring at the space on the screen where that one word had been a moment before.
Vampirus.
I lived in a world where the mythological was real. We all did—and had for a very long time. The old stories about supernatural creatures were the kind of thing we saw as funny or quaint or just downright ridiculous—the equivalent of thinking that putting a leech on someone could rid them of the flu. But even taking into account everything we knew about the preternatural world, there were still some things that fell outside the realm of possibility, things that were nothing more than the product of overactive imaginations.
Things like vampires.
And werewolves.
And psychics.
The sarcastic half of my brain couldn’t help but wonder if Bethany went furry on the full moon, because if she did, we’d be batting three for three.
I’m a vampire, I thought. I’m part vampire.
We prefer the term Lonely Ones, Zev said. Because we’re meant to come in pairs.
If that wasn’t a loaded statement, I wasn’t sure what was. I’d spent so much time on the outside looking in that the idea of being half of a pair—yin to his yang—made my eyes sting with tears I’d never shed. I had tried so hard not to let loneliness overwhelm me, had never thought that a person like me could be anything else.
And then I’d been bitten.
And then there was Zev.
“What are they doing to him?” Bethany did a good job of inspecting her nails as she asked the question. “Mr. Tall, Dark, and Gorgeous—what are they doing to him? Skylar closed the document before I could see.”
Skylar met my eyes, and I knew that she’d closed it for my benefit—to keep Bethany from reading those two little words and figuring out what Skylar now knew.
What I was.
“They’re cutting him,” Skylar said. “Burning him, taking samples, injecting him with drugs. Sometimes, they cut off parts to see if they’ll grow back.” She paused. “They take a lot of blood.”
Somehow, I doubted she’d gotten that information from the scientific document she’d just read. I was beginning to suspect that Skylar might have undersold her psychic ability.
“We can’t leave him there, and we can’t let them capture you.” Skylar grimaced, like she was staring at the core of something physically painful to see. “This is bad—not just bad for Zev. Bad for … it’s just bad, okay?”
Now I was also beginning to suspect that she knew something that I didn’t. About Chimera. About Zev. About me. I couldn’t explain the feeling, but I couldn’t shake it, either, and this time, when I met Skylar’s eyes, she looked away.
I guess we all have our secrets, I thought. Since Skylar didn’t seem inclined to tell anyone mine, I could hardly hold her own against her. When she felt like telling me, she would. Until then—
Click. Click. Click.
My breath caught in my throat. I knew that sound. For a second, I thought that maybe it was in my head, but then I heard it again, loud and clear and just down the hall.
Click. Click. Click.
“What I don’t understand, Ms. Malik, is how, precisely, the test subjects who escaped from your facility made their way here.”
I recognized Bethany’s father’s voice a second before he rounded the corner. In a fraction of that time, I hit the POWER button on the computer, hooked an arm around Skylar, and pulled her into a corner, hugging the shadows and flattening both of our bodies against the wall.