Bethany turned to Skylar. “What’s wrong with her?”
For once, Skylar was silent, and her silence was answer enough.
“She’s only been infected for four hours,” Bethany said, her voice going dry. “She should be fine.”
I closed my eyes, and somewhere inside of me, something shifted. I shouldn’t have been able to lure the beast from Bethany’s body to mine. I shouldn’t have developed an ouroboros the moment I’d been bitten. And I certainly shouldn’t have been hearing voices.
You—Promise—Fine.
I smelled wet grass, rain, honeysuckle. I saw the outline of a body, solid and sleek. I heard a voice shouting at me from a distance, but couldn’t make out a single word.
This time, I didn’t fight to hold on to consciousness—couldn’t—and my last thought as I drifted into oblivion was that the woman in the heels reminded me of someone.
And that could not possibly be good.
I woke up staring into eyes the exact shade of my comforter at home: faded turquoise, so light that I felt like if I stared at them long enough, I’d be able to see straight through. It took a moment before the rest of the features fell into place: blond hair, suntanned skin, cheekbones sharp enough to draw blood.
Elliot.
His name came to me a second before the rest of my senses returned. I bolted straight up, realized I was in some kind of bed, and began scrambling backward on my hands and heels.
“Hey, hey—” He looked like he wanted to reach for me, but he must have had some sense of self-preservation, because he kept his hands right where they were. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. You passed out, and Skylar and Beth brought you here.”
It was weird to hear Bethany referred to as Beth—almost as weird as it was to wake up alone in a room with her boyfriend.
“Define ‘here,’ ” I said sharply. Or, at least, I meant to say it sharply. Despite my best efforts, the words came out little and vulnerable instead.
“We’re at my brother Vaughn’s house,” Elliot told me. “Skylar called me when Bethany went off the rails.”
I decided I did not want to know what Bethany “going off the rails” entailed.
“She was really worried about you,” Elliot continued. “We all were.”
I felt like I’d fallen into some kind of parallel universe. For years, I’d spent every other night fighting to the death with nightmares made flesh. I came home broken and bleeding, with bones poking through my skin, and no one had ever noticed. No one had ever worried. Even when I was little, before the changes started, I could remember bumps and bruises, waking up in a cold sweat, vicious bouts of the flu—and no one had ever sat next to my bed, waiting for me to wake up.
No one had cared.
“I’m fine,” I said, pulling my knees instinctively to my chest, like shielding my body from Elliot’s view might keep him from recognizing my words as a lie.
“You’re not fine.” His response was immediate. “You’ve been bitten by a chupacabra. You’re anemic, your blood pressure fell through the floor, and the only reason you’re not in a hospital right now is that Vaughn said you were sleeping, not unconscious. We figured you could use the rest.”
I didn’t know which part of what he said was the most surprising: the fact that Skylar and Bethany had told him about the chupacabra, or his proclamation that I could “use some rest.”
In the past twenty-four hours, I’d taken out a pack of hellhounds, offered myself up to a bloodsucker to save the life of a girl I barely knew, came this close to having my head torn off by a genetic impossibility of a dragon—and they thought I needed some rest?
“What time is it?” I asked, disturbed by the fact that I didn’t know. “And where’s everyone else?”
Bethany didn’t strike me as the kind of girl who willingly left her boyfriend alone with a member of the opposite sex. I didn’t know whether to be flattered that she trusted me or offended that she clearly didn’t think I was a threat.
“Skylar and Vaughn went to get some painkillers. Beth’s father called, and she had to go. She said to tell you that if you die while she’s gone, she’ll take it personally.”
It was funny—all I’d wanted since I’d woken up in the nurse’s office was to get Bethany out of the picture, but the fact that she’d just left me there didn’t feel like a relief.
“Anything else she said to tell me?” I asked, trying not to sound betrayed or offended or, God forbid, hurt.
Elliot smiled—it was a lopsided expression on his otherwise symmetrical face: wry and rueful and just a tiny bit sardonic. “She said to tell you that she was going to pump her father for information about chupacabras. She’s not holding her breath that he’ll have any answers, but given that he’s one of the foremost experts in the world, she’ll probably do you more good there than here. And she also said to tell you …” Elliot trailed off, and I couldn’t push down the impulse to look him straight in those gentle, turquoise eyes.
“What?”
“She said her best memory isn’t standing on top of some cheerleading pyramid.” Elliot leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “She said it was hide-and-seek, when she was nine.”
For some reason, my throat tightened when Elliot said those words, and I swallowed, hard. That was playing dirty, and Bethany had to have known it. I’d saved her because I couldn’t just stand by and let her die. Not because I wanted to know her, not because I wanted anything in return.
All I wanted was to go home, go to bed, and wake up cured in the morning.
As a matter of reflex, my eyes were drawn to a clock on the wall. It was a quarter past eight.
Ten hours and forty-five minutes.
“How’s my patient?” A new voice—deep and baritone, so gentle that I instinctively wanted to trust its owner—snapped me from my reverie.
“She’s awake,” Elliot said needlessly. “I should go. Come on, Skye.”
The second I heard Skylar’s name, my eyes sought her out. She was standing next to a man easily three times her size, but within seconds, it was clear who was calling the shots around here, and it wasn’t Elliot or the man with the soothing voice.
“Don’t be ridiculous, El. I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you.”
Elliot narrowed his eyes at his sister, but she just stared back and grinned. “I’m not telling you what to do,” she volunteered helpfully, “I’m just telling you what you’re going to do. There’s a difference.”