And yet.
She was driving my getaway car, and I couldn’t help thinking that if things got ugly, maybe I could distract our pursuers long enough for her to disappear.
“Thanks,” I said, and the word hung awkwardly in the air, like humidity, thick enough to drown us both.
“You’re the one who saved my life,” Bethany replied. The words were closer to a complaint than to gratitude—not because she’d wanted to die, but because she wasn’t the kind of person who liked being indebted to anyone else.
Some people were born for the spotlight, and some of us lived on the fringe. I was beginning to suspect that you could keep people at an arm’s length regardless.
“We’re not friends,” I told Bethany, but the words came out more like a question.
“No,” she agreed. “We’re not.”
My gaze flickered over to her speedometer, and my eyebrows skyrocketed. Bethany drove the way I hunted: like she was invincible, like death was an inevitability and a friend.
“Do you really think your dad is working with these people?”
Bethany shrugged and tapped her fingernail impatiently against the steering wheel, like going ninety miles an hour wasn’t nearly fast enough. “He was sitting in his office discussing specimen retrieval, Kali. Whatever’s going on, my father is in it up to his eyeballs.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
Bethany spared a glance for me out of the corner of her eye, then switched her gaze back to the open road. “I’m not. My dad is a brilliant academic, Kali, but brilliant academics don’t suddenly up and move into multimillion-dollar houses and buy their daughters BMWs. He took the position here because the department didn’t mind him dabbling in the private sector. I’m guessing the goons in the suits are Private and Sector.”
“And the woman?” I found myself asking.
“As far as I can tell,” Bethany said, “she’s calling the shots.”
Click. Click. Click.
I hadn’t ever gotten a good enough look at the woman in question to conjure up the image of her face in my mind, but I could still hear the clicking of heels against pavement.
My stomach clenched.
I’d spent enough time around academics to know that there was more money in business than there ever would be in a university setting—but that didn’t make the people who funded that kind of research evil. Pharmaceutical companies had engineered countless medical advances; most new technology wasn’t developed by university professors. Still, I had to wonder: what kind of money was there in preternatural studies?
Want—use—now—us.
I breathed the shadow in. I breathed it out, and I ignored the voice in my head.
Half an hour. Just half an hour, and this would all be over. The chupacabra would die, and with any luck, the tracking device would go out with it. Bethany and I could go back to not knowing each other, and whatever her father was doing in the private sector could stay there.
“You’re not going to tell me your plan, are you?” More tapping of Bethany’s fingertip against the steering wheel, and another glance cast at me out of the corner of her eye.
“You don’t want to know.” That seemed to be a safe response. “We’re not friends. I don’t trust you, and you don’t like me, but I’m not lying when I say that I’m going to be okay. I’m not being stupid or optimistic or self-sacrificing. If you dropped me off on the side of the road right now, by the time I hitched my way home, I’d be fine.”
I half expected Bethany to stop the car and let me out, but she didn’t. Instead, her green eyes narrowed. The muscles in my throat tightened, and the bottom fell out of my stomach.
I knew better than to let people in. I knew better than to let them see even a fraction of what I was underneath this shell. So why had I just told Bethany that I could do the impossible? Chupacabra possession was always fatal once the ouroboros appeared. Always. My confidence in being able to cure myself had to strike her as either miraculous or bizarre.
“You’re right,” Bethany said, switching lanes and pressing down on the accelerator. “I don’t want to know.”
You also don’t want to be here, I thought dully. You don’t want to know what you know about your father, and you don’t want to be tangled up in this mess with me.
I realized then that even once I was cured, this wouldn’t be over for Bethany. She’d still have to go to bed at night knowing that her father was involved in something that could have killed me, something that could have killed her. She’d have to get in her BMW every single day and wonder where the money had come from.
Unable to meet her eyes, I busied my hands by reaching into my front pocket and pulling out the piece of paper Skylar had given me the day before. Catching a glimpse of it, Bethany slammed on the brakes. If I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt, I would have gone straight through the windshield. As it was, I was pretty sure I’d busted an ovary or two from the impact with the seat belt itself.
“Where did you get that?” Bethany’s eyes focused on the paper in my hand with an intensity that made me eye it like it might burst into flames at any moment.
“Skylar gave it to me.”
Bethany made an involuntary face the second I said Skylar’s name. “And what, exactly, did Miss Little Bit Psychic say when she gave it to you?” Bethany eased her foot off the brakes and began driving again, but this time, she kept to the speed limit—a surefire sign that her attention was on me and not the road.
“Skylar said she couldn’t get the image out of her mind and that she thought it might be important.” I felt silly even saying the words, but there was a part of me that actually believed Skylar was psychic. She’d known the men in suits were coming, she had an uncanny habit of responding to things I’d left unsaid, and her “instincts” had led us straight to the ice rink—and the man-eating, fire-breathing dragon.
And eventually, to the woman in heels.
Though, now that I thought about it, those last two weren’t exactly marks in her favor.
“Did Skylar say where she’d seen it?” Bethany asked, her enunciation a shade too crisp, each word a little too sharp.
Unsure why she was asking, I shrugged. “In her mind?”
For a second, looking at Bethany was like looking at Elliot when he’d told me not to encourage his sister in her delusions of psychic grandeur. Before Bethany could say something to that effect, I preempted the effort. “Have you seen this symbol before?”