Sensing that I wasn’t going to win this one, I dialed my father’s cell number. I wasn’t at all surprised when it went to voice mail, too.
“Hi,” I said, feeling nine kinds of awkward leaving a message, when the two of us spoke so rarely face-to-face. “It’s Kali. I’m calling because I got a little sick today, and my friend’s older brother thought I should call you. I guess he’s a doctor or something.”
I paused, wondering why I was doing this. My dad probably wouldn’t even listen to his messages.
“Anyway, I’ll be home soon.”
Another pause, another reminder that this was the most I’d said to my father in months.
“Bye.”
I hung up the phone and handed it back to Vaughn. “He wasn’t there,” I explained needlessly. “I left a message.”
I half expected Vaughn to hand the phone back and suggest I call my mother, but he didn’t. Maybe Skylar wasn’t the only person in her family with good instincts.
“Elliot can drive you home,” he said instead. “He’ll stay with you until your dad gets there.”
Elliot looked like he was on the verge of replying, but Vaughn silenced him with another one of those looks. Before I knew what was happening, Skylar’s brothers were helping me to Elliot’s car, even though I could have walked on my own just fine.
Elliot opened the passenger door for me, a gesture completely at odds with the tight set of his lips and the dagger eyes he was shooting at Vaughn. I climbed in and managed to thank Vaughn for his help. As Elliot rounded to his side of the car, Skylar poked her head in my side and pressed a folded white square of paper into my hand.
“It’s this thing,” she said, which was, quite frankly, less than illuminating. “I can’t get it out of my head. I think it might be important.”
“Thanks, Skylar.” I realized as I said the words that it wasn’t just the paper I was thanking her for. It was introducing herself to me at the pep rally that morning and sitting with me at lunch and coming back for me after the drama with the dragon.
I wasn’t used to being the kind of person that other people came back for.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Skylar said. “I know I will.” She tapped her forefinger against her temple and winked.
She thinks I’ll live through the night.
The thought was strangely comforting, and as the door closed between us, leaving me alone with Elliot, I tightened my grip on the paper in my hand. Maybe Skylar was psychic, and maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she just had really good instincts and a thousand-watt smile.
“She’s not psychic,” Elliot told me tersely. “There’s no such thing as psychics, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t encourage her.”
“I’m not.”
Elliot didn’t look like he believed me, but he managed a weak smile that did absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that he probably didn’t want to be stuck on Kali babysitting duty until my father got home.
I could hardly blame him. Hanging out with a good-as-dead girl probably wasn’t anyone’s idea of a stellar time.
Nine hours and fifty-nine minutes.
This day was never going to end.
10
My father came home. Elliot left, and there was a moment—a single moment—when I thought my dad might look at me and see: the pallor to my skin, the dark circles under my eyes, the bruises, the swollen joints. I laid my hand over the bottom of my T-shirt, playing with the edge, flicking the bottom up and down, up and down, waiting for him to look at me.
To see.
“Your friend seems nice,” he said absentmindedly. He might as well have backhanded me, and I couldn’t even hate him for it. He meant well. He meant to love me.
Then again, you know what they say about the road to hell.
“Elliot’s not my friend,” I said, my voice as neutral and pleasant as the professor’s. “He’s dating Bethany Davis.”
Bethany’s name caught my father’s attention, the way I’d known it would.
“Is he now? I had a feeling you two would hit it off.”
For one horrific moment, I thought my father might reach over and pat me on the head, like a little kid. Like a dog.
“You should invite Bethany over here one day after school,” he said. “Or perhaps I could talk to Paul about the four of us going out for a father-daughter dinner?”
In that instant, I hated Bethany, hated her so much that I wished I’d never seen the ouroboros on her back or that I’d turned a blind eye to it once I had. I knew it wasn’t rational, knew that this conversation wasn’t any more her fault than it was mine, but I didn’t feel like being rational.
I felt like puking all over my father’s dress-for-success designer shoes.
“Kali?”
I got bitten by a chupacabra, and I might not make it to morning. Just thought you should know.
I couldn’t coerce my lips into saying the words. What was the point? Instead, I took the easy way out, the way I always did with him, the way he always did with me.
“I’m really tired,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”
Another parent might have gotten upset that I hadn’t replied to his suggestion, but my father never yelled at me. The two of us never fought. I’d go on my merry way, and he’d go on his, and if I died in the middle of the night, he’d live.
He’d just have to find another way to cozy up to Paul Davis.
By some miracle, I made it upstairs without breaking down or passing out. I closed my bedroom door behind me and sank down onto the floor.
Eight hours and fifty-one minutes.
I was tired, I was light-headed, and all I wanted was to go to sleep and bring on the dawn, but I knew with sudden prescience that it wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to be able to stop thinking about it, any of it—not about my dad, or the thing inside of me, or the fact that somewhere out there, someone was looking for me.
For Bethany.
How did I get myself into this?
I was normally good at lying low, but this was pretty much the opposite. Assuming the best happened, and I did survive the night, that would be a giant red flag right there—to Bethany, to Skylar and her brothers, to the woman in heels.
—Hurt—You.
With everything going on inside my head, the return of the voice was almost a relief. I was the kind of person who needed an enemy. I needed something I could fight, something I could kill.
Back again? I asked silently, disregarding the fact that according to modern science, chupacabras had the mental capacity of an amoeba. And here I thought Elliot and Vaughn had scared you away.