Every other day(89)

“Humans from our world are relatively good at blending. The other creatures … not so much. We kept them under wraps for as long as we could, but eventually, the cat got out of the bag.”

Darwin. The hydra. My mind whirred with the implications. We’d always assumed that the preternatural had been here all along, that we’d only had to go looking to discover the truth, but if what my captor was saying was true …

She smiled, amused at the fact that she’d blown my mind. “Eventually, the existence of our kind will be common knowledge, too, and we’re outnumbered here about ten million to one.”

That meant there were others—like me, like Zev, like the crazy woman on the other side of the door.

“So you decided to, what? Join them in their scientific exploration?” I asked, but my voice came out more bewildered than sarcastic.

The woman’s eyes crinkled—another smile that sent a wave of nausea straight to my gut. “They say knowledge is power.” She leaned toward me, her eyelashes nearly brushing the glass. “Do you know what I say, Kali? Power is power. Pure, brute force. This world thinks they have the monsters our kind hunt under control. They protect them.” She shrugged. “So I’m giving them new monsters. The less control they have, the more they’ll need us. And the fewer humans there are …” She shrugged. “Well, evening up the numbers a bit can’t hurt.”

I thought of the scientists—my father and Dr. Davis and Rena and all the rest, who, at some point, had probably all told themselves that the things they were doing were justified by the greater good. Knowledge. Better medicine. Exploration.

And all they were doing was building better monsters.

“If you’re concerned about the numbers,” I said, my voice remarkably steady, “why am I locked up? Why is Zev?”

Saying his name hurt.

First Skylar. Then Zev. My mother.

Why did I ever bother letting anyone in? People only hurt you in the end.

“Oh, don’t look like that, love,” the vampire said. “It’s not as if the poor boy had a choice. There’s always a dominant partner in any pair—against someone like me, he never stood a chance.”

People like us come in pairs. That was what Zev had said. I’d known it, deep down. It just hadn’t ever occurred to me that Zev might already be part of a pair. That I might not be his other half. That there might be someone else out there who could take control of his body, his will, the way he’d occasionally taken over mine.

“If you and Zev are connected,” I said, forcing myself to say it, forcing it not to matter, “why are you doing this to him?”

Assuming that Zev really was a lab rat—that everything I’d seen and felt from him hadn’t been a lie.

“Not that it’s any of your business, Kali, but I needed to see if it was possible for one of our kind to play host to more than one chupacabra.” She seemed to find the scientific term amusing. “It took some tweaking, and some failures, and more than a little discomfort for poor Zev, but I have evidence now that it is possible. And if it’s possible for our kind to host two, then someday, it might be possible for regular humans to hold one. In the long run, anything that makes humans less human will be better for us.”

I digested what she was saying—the reason for the experiment that had resulted in Bethany being infected, the possibilities she’d discovered experimenting on Zev.

It was possible for Zev to have been bitten twice.

Possible for him to be connected to two others.

One who controlled him, and one he controlled.

No. Zev’s voice was quiet in my mind, but it was still there. I wouldn’t do that to you. Not unless you were in danger—and even then, I didn’t do it on purpose.

I wanted to believe him, but he’d brought me here. He’d strangled me. He hadn’t mentioned, even once, that this was a trap.

I couldn’t. She wouldn’t let me. I tried.

I could feel the hatred in his voice, loathing for himself, for her. I felt his emotions as intensely as my own and knew that he was wishing he’d killed himself before he could bring this kind of trouble to me.

I tried.

This was too much. It was just too much.

I’m sorry, Kali.

I wasn’t sure that mattered. I also wasn’t sure he had anything to apologize for—he’d tried to warn me; he’d tried to fight. The only thing I was sure about was that in another four hours, I would be human again. I would be weak, defenseless.

I would hurt.

“You keep looking at your watch. I have to say, that surprised us. We hypothesized that a successful hybrid might have a portion of our skills, perhaps muted. Maybe it has something to do with the exact graft we used on your DNA, but the idea that you shift from form to form according to some circadian rhythm …” She trailed off.