22
Elliot was indeed the only person present who thought we should call the police. Skylar closed her eyes, hummed for a moment, and declared that she didn’t think that was a very good idea. Bethany was positive her phone and the landline were tapped and that Chimera would know the second we placed the call. And Vaughn had a different suggestion.
“Call Reid.”
Skylar made a face, and even though Elliot wouldn’t have admitted it, he did the same.
“Who’s Reid?” I asked.
“The brother I would have to promote if Elliot doesn’t stop treating me like I’m five,” Skylar said. “He’s … difficult.”
“And by that, she means that he’s a hard-ass.” Elliot leaned back against the wall. “Black-and-white moral code, nobody else ever measures up.”
I turned to Vaughn, expecting him to weigh in, but he just shrugged. “He’s a Fed.”
Right. Because the one thing that could make this situation better was the involvement of the federal government. Why didn’t I just take out a billboard, volunteering to let the army play Dissect the Kali for fun?
“If we ask Reid not to tell, he won’t,” Skylar said. “You’re a kid, Kali. Reid would die before he’d hurt a kid.”
Vaughn took Skylar’s statement as a stamp of approval. Without a word, he stepped out of the room, fishing his cell phone out of a pocket as he went.
“So Reid will come and get rid of the zombie carnage?” Bethany asked. “And then what? He’ll start an investigation into Chimera on the down low?”
Elliot nodded. “Something like that. If your dad tries anything with your mom, we can bring in Nathan.”
“Nathan?” I repeated, glancing over at Skylar. “Wasn’t that the brother who taught you to hot-wire cars?”
Skylar shrugged. “When he’s not stealing cars, he’s a lawyer.”
I was beginning to think that there weren’t any bases the Hayden family didn’t have covered—but none of this changed my situation. Chimera still had Zev, and even if Reid could keep me out of the investigation, there was no guarantee that Chimera’s operation would be shut down, or that Zev wouldn’t be absorbed into some government lab once it was.
“Exactly,” Skylar said, nodding her head to emphasize the point—though I don’t think any of us were entirely sure what she was saying exactly to. “The good news is that Reid will handle it. The bad news is that Reid will handle it. He won’t want our help. He won’t accept our help, and if he thinks, even for a second, that any of us might be inclined to engage in helping of any kind, he will have us shipped off to a convent in Switzerland.”
“He wasn’t serious about the convent thing,” Elliot said with a roll of those icy, pale eyes. “And besides, Mom and Dad would never let him.”
“He’s Reid,” Skylar retorted. “Mom and Dad won’t even realize he’s talking them into it. I’ll end up sipping tea with the nuns, and you’ll be dropping and giving some drill sergeant twenty at military school. Kali and Beth will probably end up in convents, too, and he doesn’t even know them.”
“Don’t call me Beth.”
Before Bethany and Skylar could get into it, I intervened. “If your brother wants you to stay out of it,” I said, “maybe you should.” I paused, letting the suggestion sink in before adding the caveat. “That’s not an option for me.”
You don’t have to do this, Zev told me. You shouldn’t.
“I have to do this,” I said out loud, half for Zev’s benefit and half for theirs. “I don’t expect the rest of you to help me.”
“Of course you don’t,” Bethany replied. “Because you’re the hero, and we’re the ones who walk away.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, because she was right. I did expect them to walk away. They didn’t owe me anything. We barely knew each other.
What reason could I possibly give them to stay?
“If we’re going to break into Bethany’s dad’s lab,” Skylar interjected, with no segue whatsoever, “we should probably do it before Reid gets here for zombie cleanup.”
“Or,” Elliot suggested, “we could not.”
He crossed the room, so that he was standing next to me. Bethany tracked his progression with her eyes, but the expression on her face never changed.
“I get wanting to know what you are, where you come from,” Elliot told me, his voice even and sweet. “I get wanting to help someone who can’t help himself. But this is big, Kali, and you could get hurt.” He paused. “Seventeen hours from now, you could die.”
Sixteen hours and fifty-nine minutes, I corrected silently, but I didn’t say the words out loud.
I wanted to tell Elliot that this was more or less my life. That I’d known from the time I was twelve years old that I’d die hunting monsters—that the only thing different this time was that the monsters were human. But what came out of my mouth was something else.
“You don’t get it. You won’t ever get it, Elliot, because you have a family. You have friends, and you have a future—you don’t have to worry that tomorrow or a year from now or five years, someone will figure out what you are. You don’t have to wake up every morning wondering why, and you don’t have to go through the motions, pretending that someday it will stop, because it will never stop.”
Never, never, never.
“I can’t just walk away and forget about this—I am this, and the only person in the world who could ‘get’ that, the only one who might actually understand or, God forbid, have some answers—that person is the one you want me to walk away from.”
Protecting other people was what I was born for. I had to believe that, believe that I had a purpose, because otherwise, I was just a killer. I was sharp edges and violence and making myself bleed. Either I did it to make the world a safer place, or I really was a monster, less human than I was willing to believe.
“I’m doing this,” I said, shrugging off Elliot’s touch before I even realized that he’d lifted his hand to my shoulder. “I’m not asking for your help, and I’m certainly not asking for permission—”
“I don’t know the code.” Bethany said the words like she hadn’t just interrupted me, like she really couldn’t have cared less about what I was saying. “I have no idea how to get the door to my dad’s lab open, but I can show you where it is. Maybe the ‘psychic’ can intuit a few little bitty numbers for you.”