“You said there were experimental treatments.” I watched her reaction to my words. “When Tyler first got hurt, you said he underwent experimental treatments.”
Bethany turned her attention back to her toes. “So?”
“Whose experimental treatments were they?” I knew the answer before I asked the question. Bethany eyeballed me, and when she responded, her words were clipped.
“Who do you think?”
The brochure in my hand. The look on Bethany’s face the first time she’d seen the symbol.
“Chimera Biomedical,” I said, expelling a breath and giving it a moment. “Are they still treating him?”
“No,” Bethany said too quickly.
“Beth—”
“Don’t call me Beth,” she snapped.
I didn’t need overly developed people skills to see that snapping at me about her name was probably easier than admitting that if her father was working for Chimera, he hadn’t just taken this job for the pay grade. He hadn’t agreed to experiment on teenagers for the money.
He was looking for a cure.
“Why chupacabras?” I asked. Bethany shrugged.
“Why not?” she said. “They’ve tried everything else. Nothing works—nothing is ever going to work, but try telling that to the great Paul Davis. Sometimes, I’d swear he’s more delusional than my mother, and as I’m sure you’ve gathered, that’s saying something. If Chimera Biomedical told my dad that his research might jump-start Tyler’s brain, there’s nothing that he wouldn’t do.” Bethany swallowed hard.
“Obviously.”
The wheels in my head turned slowly as I looked down at the pamphlet, Bethany’s earlier words about Chimera echoing in my head.
They specialized in regeneration: regrowing nerves, reviving dead brain cells. And right now, they were studying chupacabras.
My mind went to Zev and the things he’d told me about “Nibblers.”
Any comments from the peanut gallery? I asked him. What would a biomedical company want with a deadly preternatural parasite?
At first, I didn’t think Zev would respond, but then, he bit out four words, his voice decisive and harsh.
Leave it alone, Kali.
If anything, his words made me want to do the opposite, and the way he’d issued the command made me think that this was dangerous—and personal. I chewed on that for a moment. Chimera was studying chupacabras. Zev knew something about it, something he had no intention of telling me.
Chupacabras. Regeneration. Zev acting like pushing this was particularly dangerous for me.
An insidious possibility took root in my mind, and a moment later, it seemed less like a possibility and more like a fact. All of a sudden, I knew why Dr. Davis thought that injecting someone with a chupacabra might not be a death sentence, why he might believe that the preternatural held the key to waking his son up from a deep and unforgiving sleep.
People like me didn’t get hungry. We never got tired. We couldn’t feel pain. And when we got bitten, we didn’t die.
We healed very, very quickly.
To a scientist, that would have seemed like a medical miracle. To a chupacabra expert whose son was dying, it might have seemed like a sign.
Chimera isn’t just playing around with chupacabras, I realized, my mind reeling. They knew—about the effect that chupacabras had on certain people.
People like me.
17
“Kali?”
I must have looked about as good as I felt, because Skylar said my name in a tentative, talking-a-puppy-out-from-underneath-a-car type of tone.
I shook my head to clear it of unwanted thoughts—unwanted weakness.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
Bethany twirled a finger through her hair, a dangerous glint in her emerald eyes. “Isn’t it always?”
I didn’t want to take her meaning, but she didn’t leave me any other options.
“When you talked that chupacabra out of my body and into yours, it was nothing. And when you passed out at the skating rink, it was nothing. When you went through the windshield of my car and I thought you died—nothing. So, come on, Kali, share. What kind of nothing is it this time?”
The urge to answer her question fully and honestly took me completely by surprise. I wasn’t exactly the bare-my-soul type, but Bethany had just rattled off her sordid family history like it was some kind of halftime cheer. She’d let me in, and for the first time, I actually wanted to do the same, to tell someone the truth.
That I wasn’t normal.
That I wasn’t human.
That even though I was used to being something else, being bitten by a chupacabra had changed things, changed me.
And that, somehow, Chimera knew—maybe not about me specifically, but about the fact that people like me existed and that being bitten by a chupacabra had a different effect on us than it had on normal people. If Bethany was right and Chimera had been infecting teens on purpose, then chances were good that they were either systematically looking for people like me—or trying to create them.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said out of habit, unable to make myself say anything else. Talking made me feel like I had the dry heaves, and all I wanted was to just throw up the truth and be done with it. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” Skylar caught my gaze and held it, and even though her face still looked pixie-young and innocent, there was an alien weight to the set of her features, like she was a thousand years old instead of fifteen. “And it does matter. Everything that’s happened, everything that’s going to happen in the next twenty-four hours—it matters. You matter, and whether you want to believe this or not, you can’t do this alone, Kali.”
She paused and cast her eyes downward, her voice going very quiet. “You shouldn’t have to.”
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to tell her everything, tell them everything. I opened my mouth, and—nothing. I’d been keeping secrets for so long that I wasn’t entirely sure I knew how to let them go.
Don’t. The humans won’t understand. They never do.
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that Zev was weighing in, telling me that every instinct I’d ever had to keep other people at bay was right on the mark. Then again, he’d also told me to leave Chimera Biomedical Corp. alone.
That wasn’t going to happen.
The past twenty-four hours had whetted my appetite for answers, and I needed to know—what I was, what Zev was, what the men in suits and the Paul Davises of the world knew that I didn’t.