She waited for her words to sink in, and I could see her eyes flicker with interest the exact moment I got it.
“You’re a vampire.” The word felt silly on my lips, even now, and the woman actually laughed at me.
“That word,” she said, “never ceases to amuse me. I’m as human as you are. Though,” she added with faux thoughtfulness, “I suppose that’s a poor example—at least for another four hours or so.”
Great. My captor knew about my shifting from one form to another—which meant that she knew that in another four hours, I’d be even more at their mercy than I was now.
“Why are you working for Chimera?” I asked her, my mind racing, trying to find a way out of this. “Do you have any idea what they’re doing—to people like us? To the preternatural?”
“Kali,” the woman said, thoroughly amused. “I don’t work for Chimera. Chimera works for me.”
One of these days, I was going to stop being caught off guard. I was going to be able to look down the road and see how the pieces of a puzzle fit together—but that day wasn’t today.
“Chimera works for you,” I repeated dumbly.
“Founder, president, and CEO,” she said. “Guilty as charged.”
“But why?” The question tore its way out of my mouth before I could stop it.
“Do you know, Kali, what we are?”
I knew. We were strong and fast, and once we’d been bitten, we were stronger, faster, and thirsty—for blood.
“We’re hunters,” I said, unwilling to say the v-word again.
“Hunters,” the woman repeated. “Well, better predator than prey, I suppose.” She smiled, thoroughly delighted with herself and with me. “There’s a principle in evolutionary biology,” she continued indulgently. “It’s called the Red Queen’s Hypothesis. It’s taken from Alice in Wonderland—would you believe I actually knew Lewis Carroll? Tasty—but that’s neither here nor there. In the book, the Red Queen comments that it takes all the running in the world just to stay in the same place. Evolution’s like that, Kali. A species never reaches the point where it can stop evolving, because the rest of the world is always evolving, too. You can never stop, because the things you hunt will always be getting faster, stronger—and the same goes for the things that hunt you.”
I thought of the creatures I’d hunted in the past five years—beasts that normal humans never would have stood a chance against.
“Natural, preternatural—they’re just labels, Kali. If you took a giraffe and plopped it down in the middle of the Antarctic, it would look very strange, wouldn’t it?”
The question was rhetorical, but my mind connected the dots and led me to the meaning behind her words. We were the giraffes in the Antarctic—freakish and unnatural because this wasn’t the environment in which we’d evolved. My father’s lecture at the university rang in my ears.
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?
“Zev said that people like us are from another place,” I said slowly, my mind churning through the possibilities. “Another … planet?”
“Another planet?” the woman repeated, laughing gaily. “Little green men and life on Mars? How absolutely precious.”
If she’d let me out of this cage, I’d show her “absolutely precious.”
“We’re from another dimension, dear. Hasn’t that scientist father of yours taught you anything?” She held up her fist and then spread her fingers outward. “Big bang. Multiple earths. Flash forward forty million years, and all of those little differences from the beginning have yielded a very different environment—and very different creatures.”
Her eyes sparkled, and I bit back nausea. There was something deadly there, something cold.
“There have always been people who catch momentary glimpses of the other side. Myths, legends, all those little stories that humans just love to tell each other—they had to come from somewhere, yes?” She sighed, a delicate, girlish sound. “Unfortunately, a few hundred years ago, through circumstances far above anything your pretty little head can grasp—some of us ended up stuck here. Permanently.”
I got the feeling that she wasn’t just talking about “us” as in vampires. She was talking about “us” as in the preternatural. Hellhounds and zombies, will-o’-the-wisps and basilisks, and everything else I’d hunted on my less-than-human days.