No response. Then again, what did I expect? I was talking to a parasite. I was dying. And there was a part of me that couldn’t help wishing that Elliot hadn’t left just so I wouldn’t have to be going through this alone.
Not like you.
That was the clearest thing the little interloper had said since the ice rink—like I needed a reminder that I was different. Like I’d ever been able to forget, even for a second, that I wasn’t like other girls—that I wasn’t like anyone.
This wasn’t how I’d pictured spending what could end up being my last night on earth: alone in my bedroom, talking to the voice in my head and feeling sorry for myself. I needed to do something.
At that moment, I would have given anything for the hunt-lust, the restlessness, the purpose I’d felt the night before. Every other day, I was a demon hunter. I was powerful. I was something.
But now?
Now I was just lost and lonely and dying, and the closest thing I had to company was the creature that was kill-ing me.
Lovely.
I could feel my throat tightening, and my eyes started to burn.
Screw this.
I may have been different, I may have been a loner, I may have been a freak, but I wasn’t a crier. Not about this, not about anything. Determined to quell the urge, I turned my attention to the piece of paper Skylar had pressed into my palm as I was leaving Vaughn’s house. I tugged it out of my pocket and unfolded it, careful not to tear the edges.
It’s this thing, Skylar had said. I can’t get it out of my head. I think it might be important.
Staring at the drawing, I had the oddest sense of déjà vu. The symbol was simple: an octagon bisected by a ribbon—or possibly a ladder, spiraling around an invisible line. The shape itself was uneven and asymmetrical, and I got the feeling that drawing was not a talent that Skylar had in any kind of abundance.
I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at the sketch and waiting for the lightbulb moment when everything clicked into place, but all I managed to accomplish was giving myself a headache.
Your body’s working overtime, trying to replace the blood it’s lost.
Thinking back on Vaughn’s diagnosis, I remembered—belatedly—that at lunch, Elliot had mentioned something about one of their brothers being a vet. I snorted.
I passed out, and Skylar took me to a vet.
The irony of the situation—that maybe I was an animal, no more human than the things I fought—did not escape me.
Not—animal.
“The bloodsucking parasite doesn’t think I’m an animal,” I said, my voice dry. “I feel so very comforted.”
“Kali?” Belatedly, I realized that my father had stuck his head into my room, and I was torn between wondering what he wanted now and hoping that he hadn’t overheard me talking to thin air.
“What do you want?” I asked, too tired to sugarcoat things and pretend that everything was okay between us, or that there was even an us to speak of at all.
“I … erm …” My father rarely stuttered. Eloquence was kind of his thing, so the fact that he was stumbling over his words drew my attention more than the fact that he was here. “I just wanted you to know that I didn’t call Paul Davis,” he said. “If you and Bethany want to get together—that is, if you decide you want to—well, it’s up to you, okay?”
This was about as close as he could possibly come to apologizing, and saying okay without meeting his eyes was as close as I could come to accepting it. A few seconds passed with neither one of us saying anything else, and then he turned to leave.
“Night, Dad,” I called after him. There was a chance—and I didn’t know how big it was—that this might be the last conversation the two of us ever had. I owed it to him to say something, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to be saying.
“Good night, Kali.”
Around two in the morning, I finally fell asleep, but the only thing waiting for me in my dreams was more of the same: more monsters, more doubts, a nagging feeling that I was missing something, that I was screwing everything up.
I dreamed I was dreaming.
I dreamed I was dying.
I dreamed I was covered in blood.
I turned over in bed, my white sheets dyed in shades of red, and there was a man there, staring at me, drenched in shadow from head to toe. There was something beautiful about his features, something deadly, and his eyes …
Those eyes.
They were the color of tarnished silver, set deep in a face that wasn’t human, but wasn’t not.
He reached out and touched me, trailing shadows everywhere he went, and I breathed in the darkness.
Breathed it out.
I dreamed I was dreaming.
I dreamed I was dying.
I woke up covered in blood.
11
I woke in darkness. Before I could scream, someone pounced on me, covering my mouth with two hands. Without even thinking about it, I grabbed the person by the wrists, digging my fingers into her flesh. I would have kept squeezing as hard as my still-human hands could manage, but at some point, I came out of the fugue state my dream had left me in and recognized the person on top of me.
“Bethany?”
Half convinced I was still asleep, I stopped fighting, and Bethany pulled back to the foot of the bed, like she thought I might fly off the handle at any moment and go for her eyes.
“What is your problem?” she huffed.
“My problem?” I repeated dumbly. “You’re leering over me in the middle of the night, and you want to know what my problem is?”
“You were having a nightmare,” Bethany retorted. “I was trying to wake you up.”
“By smothering me to death?” My head felt like someone had taken a chain saw to the inside. I wasn’t feeling overly charitable.
“You’re bleeding, Kali.” Bethany’s voice was matter-of-fact. “When I came in, you were clawing at the ouroboros. Your stomach’s a mess.”
As soon as Bethany mentioned the ouroboros, I felt the sharp, burning sensation of cool air assaulting raw flesh. Even through the shadow-lit room, I could see that Bethany wasn’t exaggerating: I’d already bled through my shirt. Wincing as I pulled cotton away from the open wound, I sat up, trying to process.
Bethany Davis had apparently broken into my house.
I’d dreamed of something that wasn’t human, something that had eyes only for me.
And while my dream-self had been making nice with Old Silver Eyes, my hands had apparently been trying to scratch their way through the chupacabra’s mark.