Great.
As if dealing with my father, the legions of hell, and a variety of environmental protection agencies on a regular basis wasn’t bad enough.
“Where is the nurse?” I asked. What I really meant was something more along the lines of if I try to leave, will she try to stop me?
“No idea,” Bethany replied. “She bandaged your arm, gave me some orange juice, and lit out of here like the two of us had sprouted horns.” She paused for a brief second. “I’m not going to sprout horns, am I?”
If the situation hadn’t been so incredibly dire, it might have been funny. Who knew how much blood I’d lost from the cut in my arm? It was shallow, but long, and now a bloodsucker was mining me from the inside. There were memories I didn’t want to lose—my mother’s face, my best friend from kindergarten, the first time I’d sprayed a will-o’-the-wisp with liquid nitrogen—and thoughts that I couldn’t risk it getting ahold of. I had bigger things to worry about than Bethany’s fear of growing horns.
“Bethany, you’ll be fine. Just forget this ever happened and go back to life as usual.”
That was the nicest way I could think of to say leave me alone. All things considered, it should have worked. I’d always excelled at being the kind of girl other people left behind.
But Bethany didn’t take the bait. “So, what? You save my life and in exchange, you expect me to abandon you to the geek squad at the CDC, so they can chop you into pieces and stuff you in neatly labeled test tubes? Or maybe I’m supposed to pretend like if we don’t find a way to get that thing out of you, you won’t die, or that I totally won’t care at all if you do?”
Actually, yes. She was the kind of person who referred to her boyfriend’s baby sister as “Little Miss Loose Legs.” Leaving and never giving me another thought was exactly what I expected a girl like Bethany to do.
“Seriously, Kali? I’m shallow, not a sociopath. There’s a difference, and I am not leaving you here alone, so suck it up and deal me in.”
My mouth dropped open in abject shock, and Bethany began speaking very slowly, as if I were a small child or a very dense jock.
“What. Is. The. Plan.” She narrowed her eyes. “I’d offer to call my dad, but he’d just put you in quarantine. And call the CDC. And you’d still die. Whatever your plan is, it has to be better than that.”
I have a plan, and I don’t need your help.
For once, my mouth and brain were in complete and total accord, so I said exactly what I was thinking. Bethany blinked several times, but before she could reply, a familiar blonde head peeked over the edge of the doorframe, and Bethany’s nonsociopathic tendencies flew right out the door.
“Can I help you?” she asked, every inch the ice queen.
Skylar shook her head, sending wisps of blonde hair flying. “No, you can’t help me, but I think I can help you. Both of you.” Skylar paused for a breath, and that was my first clue she was on the verge of a truly epic babble. “I can’t tell you why, and I can’t tell you how I know, but the two of you need to get out of here in the next two minutes and forty-five seconds, or something really, really bad is going to happen to one and/or both of you, and it’s going to make someone with a soul the color and consistency of bubbling tar very, very happy.”
The end of Skylar’s run-on sentence was punctuated by a moment of absolute silence.
Listen to her.
This time, the voice in my head wasn’t mine, and I felt the words in the pit of my stomach, all the way down to the soles of my feet. I wanted to argue or disobey on principle, but even to human eyes, the world looks different in the calm before the storm. Every instinct my hunting habit had taught me said that it was time to take to higher ground.
Now.
In an instant, I was beside Skylar, and Bethany followed reluctantly on my heels. Skylar shrugged off her hoodie, handed it to Bethany, and spoke in an eerily calm and measured voice. “Put this on and pull up the hood. Then walk, don’t run, toward the cafeteria. When we hit the corner, turn right.”
Something about the younger girl’s unnaturally even keel must have penetrated Bethany’s bitch shields, because she put on Skylar’s worn blue hoodie—which had probably once belonged to one of her older brothers—without batting an eye. The three of us walked toward the end of the hallway, and just as we turned right, I heard the telltale tone of a single woman flirting with a slightly older man.
“They said to call you if any of the cheerleaders showed signs of anemia, and once I saw the ouroboros, well …” The school nurse let her words trail off, and I stopped breathing.
Someone knew.
Maybe not about Bethany specifically, but someone had known to be on the lookout for Heritage High cheerleaders showing signs of chupacabra possession. And if they’d known and hadn’t done a thing to stop it …
Not good.
I didn’t so much as glance back over my shoulder, but as Skylar, Bethany, and I hit the glass doors at the end of the hallway, I saw a reflection of the people rounding the corner to the nurse’s office. In addition to the nurse, there were two men dressed in suits, and a woman with skin a shade darker and infinitely more flawless than my own. She wore her hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck, and she walked with purpose, the staccato click of heels against tile cutting through the air like gunshots.
“You did the right thing by calling us,” the woman said. “We’ll take care of everything now.”
Her voice was soft, but I heard it, heard every word, and in that moment, I knew two things with absolute, unerring certainty: one, the suits on their way to the nurse’s office weren’t from the CDC, and two—whether they knew it yet or not—they weren’t here for a cheerleader.
They were here for the girl with the ouroboros. And as of five minutes ago, that girl was me.
6
I didn’t say a word until the three of us hit the parking lot, and even then, I only opened my mouth to ask whether either of the others had a car.
“No wheels,” Skylar replied, her expression mournful. “And no driver’s license. Yet. That said, my brother Nathan knows how to hot-wire, and I might have picked up a few tricks along the way.”
“Take it easy, Grand Theft Auto.” Bethany pulled a pair of keys out of her purse. “No one is hot-wiring anything. I have wheels and tinted windows, which means you can help yourself to the backseat, and as long as no one sees you get in or out, I don’t have to deal with the social fallout.”