The redhead didn’t bother waiting for a response—she just pushed a button on her keys and flounced toward the silver BMW that lit up in response. Watching Bethany reverting to type, I thought that maybe cattiness was its own kind of invincibility, as much of a crutch for Bethany as my powers were for me.
Sixteen hours and nine minutes.
Sliding into the passenger seat of the BMW and closing the door behind me, I shut out the constant countdown in my mind and tried to concentrate on the here and now.
Right here, right now, I was infected.
Right here, right now, I was on the run.
Right here, right now … I had no earthly idea what I’d gotten myself into. Without meaning to, I glanced down, and my hands began gravitating toward the bottom of my shirt.
Don’t touch it, I told myself sternly. Don’t think about it. Don’t give in.
Unable to help myself, I pulled the bottom of my shirt upward and the band of my jeans down, rotating my hips forward in the seat to give myself a full view of the ouroboros etched into my skin.
The lines were thick and looked like they’d been poured onto my body as melted gold. Tentatively, I ran my hand over the surface of my skin, expecting the symbol to be raised, but felt nothing other than the muscles in my stomach and the kind of dull heat given off by a day-old sunburn.
My flesh wasn’t red.
The mark didn’t hurt.
But for a split second, maybe less, the hand touching it didn’t feel like mine.
I can do this. I can beat this. Knowing that the parasite was already absorbing my blood and, with it, my thoughts and memories, I cut the mental pep talk off short.
I wouldn’t let myself be scared.
I wouldn’t let the thing inside me know that it was winning.
I wouldn’t think its name.
“Kali?” Skylar said my name and pulled me back down to earth. “Any chance you want to tell me what’s going on?”
I shifted so that my shirt covered the glaring beacon of obvious on my stomach and turned the tables back on Skylar. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
Skylar was the one who’d known that someone was coming for us. She was the one who’d told us where to go and how to act, the one who’d given Bethany a hoodie to cover her trademark red locks.
“What’s going on?” Skylar repeated, and then, without pausing a beat, she gave her answer. “You keep touching your stomach, Bethany has accelerated through four yellow lights, both of you know something that the other one doesn’t, and I’m …”
She mumbled the last bit.
“You’re what?” I asked. Bethany looked like she was on the verge of offering up an answer of her own to that question, but she managed to restrain herself.
Skylar cleared her throat. “I’m …”
“You’re …?”
Skylar gave me a hopeful little smile and then stopped beating around the bush. “I’m a little bit psychic.”
“Psychic?” Bethany and I repeated in unison.
“Just a little bit,” Skylar said, like that made her claim significantly more feasible than it would have been had she claimed to be psychic a lot.
“No offense,” Bethany began—a surefire sign that she was getting ready to say something highly offensive—“but you two totally deserve each other. Mousy little Kali carries a hunting knife to high school, and my boyfriend’s social mistake of a sister thinks she’s got magical powers. If you guys can find yourselves a person who swallows swords, you can totally take this act on the road.”
“Hey,” I said, sounding only about half as put out as I felt. “Nobody asked you to be here.”
“It’s my car,” Bethany retorted. “And speaking of which, where are we going?”
Skylar leaned forward from the backseat. “Turn right here,” she said helpfully.
“Why?” Bethany’s hands tightened almost imperceptibly over the steering wheel. In the rearview mirror, I could see Skylar shrug in response.
“I just kind of feel like you should turn right here.”
Bethany shot dagger eyes at her in the mirror. “Because you’re psychic.”
“Just a little.”
To everyone’s surprise—probably even her own—Bethany did turn right, but she made up for it by rolling her eyes so hard that I had doubts about whether or not she could still make out oncoming traffic. Cast in the role of mediator between two extremes, I tried rephrasing Bethany’s “no offense” statement in a way that was actually less offensive.
“Skylar, I get that maybe you have … really good intuition about people sometimes, but you know there’s no such thing as actual psychics, right?”
That was what had made Eigelmeier’s discovery of the chupacabra such an astonishing scientific find. Even with the preternatural, psychic phenomena was outside the norm. With humans, it was unheard of.
Then again, so was I.
Skylar, sensing my weakness, pressed the point. “Before Darwin, most scientists thought that kelpies and griffins weren’t real, either, but anyone who’s ever been to the San Francisco Zoo knows that they are.”
Demonic water horses that lived to drown passersby.
Flying lions with a nearly immortal life span.
Kelpies. Griffins. Hellhounds. Zombies. And … psychics?
“Sometimes,” Skylar said solemnly, “make-believe is just another word for rare. Turn left at the next stop sign, Bethany.”
“What am I, your chauffeur?” The question was clearly rhetorical, because Bethany didn’t wait for an answer. “Tell me where we’re going, or I’m pulling over, and you two are walking home.”
I was severely tempted to take her up on the offer. The sooner I could convince Bethany she wanted no part of this, the better off I’d be. Unfortunately, the men in suits and the woman who’d accompanied them—the one who’d promised she’d “take care of things”—had been on the lookout for a cheerleader showing signs of chupacabra possession. Without knowing exactly what the nurse had told them, I couldn’t convince myself that Bethany would be better off without me. And that meant that I couldn’t just send her on her merry way, no matter how much I didn’t want an entourage for the things to come.
Maybe I really do have a hero complex.
The thought engendered a response in my body: a knowing feeling, a tightening of the muscles in my throat, a yes.
“Bethany, chill. Skylar, tell us where we’re going.” Those sentences burst out of my mouth with all of the bite I wanted to direct to the thing inside my head, and I immediately wished I could take it back.