It took me a second too long to realize why a person trying to locate their phone would ask to borrow one from someone else—and in that second, Paul Davis called his own cell.
It lit up a second before it rang. I didn’t have time to figure out how to silence it, how to turn it off. Moving on instinct, I did the only thing a person like me knew how to do.
I killed it.
Snapped it in half like a twig, held my breath, waited.
“Did you hear something?” Through the thick metal door, Paul Davis’s voice was muted, but I had no way of knowing how soft it would have sounded to a human. Maybe they wouldn’t have been able to make out the words at all; maybe, on the other side of that metal door, the Davises wouldn’t have heard that half of a ring, the crunching of plastic and metal, at all.
Or maybe this time, I’d get caught.
I thought of all the laws I’d ever broken: the trespassing, the slaughter, obstruction of justice, cruelty to creatures who’d died choking on my blood. I thought of Zev, caged in concrete, and of my father, lecturing in the building next door.
And then the door to the lab space opened, and a familiar woman with strawberry blonde hair peeked in. She met my eyes, and for a moment, hers glossed over, and I wondered if Bethany’s mother was seeing things again: the boy her son had been, ghosts of everything he wouldn’t ever be. For a moment, that faraway glint in her eye gave way to focus, clarity.
She saw me.
And then she closed the door. “Not so much as a ring,” she said. “Are you sure you didn’t leave it in the lecture hall?”
This time, I couldn’t make out her husband’s response, but a second later, it was punctuated with the sound of another door opening, closing. I started breathing again, a tightness in my chest reminding me that I’d stopped. I should have headed for the other exit—the one I’d entered through in the first place, but I didn’t. Instead, I waited, and after a long moment, the door to Davis’s office opened again.
“I know you,” Bethany’s mother said in a tone that would have been more appropriate if we’d run into each other at some kind of country club soiree. “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t remember your name. I’m afraid I’m not much of a morning person.”
I tried to form a connection between this polite woman, put together from head to toe and fully coherent, and the woman I’d met that morning, but came up blank. The difference was night and day, like there were two people occupying the same body—neither of whom was 100 percent there.
“And when I say I’m not a morning person, what I mean is that I don’t know what you saw this morning. I can guess what you must think of me, but I love my children, and I love my husband, and I think it would be best if we both agreed that whatever you saw this morning never happened, and whatever I saw—here, with you—well, that never happened, either.”
I had no response, no words. She was supposed to be crazy. She wasn’t supposed to be bargaining with me.
“You learn,” she said. “After a while, you learn how to pretend—to see what you want to see, and ignore everything else.”
Listening to her speak, her cadence and tone an exact match for Bethany at her oh-so-popular iciest, I wondered which Adelaide Davis was the real one, and which was pretend. Was she crazy? Sane? Did she know her son was gone? Was what I’d seen this morning just an elaborate game? Or was this Adelaide—calm and cool, negotiating with me to keep her secret—just a cover, a mask constructed to hide the broken, jagged mind that lurked underneath?
“You’re a very pretty girl,” the woman in question said, tilting her head to the side. “Did you know that? Once upon a time, I had a pretty, pretty boy.” She reached forward and touched my cheek with one manicured hand.
And just like that, it was like I wasn’t even standing there anymore. She took her own cell phone out of her purse and started tapping impatiently on its keys.
“Mrs. Davis?” I said her name, unsure if I should leave her here, if I should call Bethany to bring her home.
She looked up. “Don’t slouch, Kali. It’s unbecoming.”
Her use of my given name nailed me to the floor. She turned her attention back to the phone, and finally, I coerced my feet into moving, made my way to the door.
“Don’t let them hurt her.” This time, Adelaide Davis’s voice was quiet, steady. “It’s not safe in that house. It’s never safe.”
She might as well have been rattling off a cookie recipe, for all the emphasis she placed on those words. I waited to see if she’d say anything else, but she didn’t.
I opened the door.
I slipped back into the hallway.
And as the door closed behind me, I heard a light and airy sigh.
I’d come here with a lead, and I was leaving with a broken cell phone and a ball of nausea expanding in my stomach. Leaving Bethany’s mother there, with her father, felt wrong—and it made me wonder. If Adelaide was here—alone—where was Bethany?
Why had Bethany just placed three calls to her father’s cell phone?
And what did Adelaide mean about it never being safe in their house?
20
It’s not safe in that house. It’s never safe.
I couldn’t shake those words, no matter how hard I tried, so instead of slipping back into my father’s classroom and returning his ID card, I dropped it in the hallway outside his class—someone would find it, and I had bigger fish to fry. Ducking out of the building, it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the sudden change in brightness. The sunlight felt like a pinprick in the center of each of my eyes, but I was only vaguely aware of the discomfort as it spread outward, leaving them bloodshot and dry.
Where we come from, there isn’t much of a sun. The more like us you become, the less tolerance you’ll have for direct sunlight—but you’ll survive.
I didn’t know which part of that statement was the most disturbing—the idea that whatever I was, whatever I was becoming, the transformation wasn’t complete yet, or the suggestion that people like us came from somewhere else.
I could tell you all about it, Zev suggested.
I saw the ploy for what it was: he wanted me to forget about Chimera, forget about Bethany, forget about anything that might spur me into action. In his ideal world, I probably would have completely ignored the fact that he was caged, lying in wait for the moment he could tear off all of their heads.
Nice try, I said. But no.