There were Excel files, full of data—numbers and columns and dates that were more or less Greek to me. Then there were documents—each labeled with a serial number.
HB-42. los-129. MC-407.
Something about that last one sent a niggling feeling into my brain. I opened it, and a single word caught my eye.
Draco.
I wasn’t the world’s best student, and I’d never been particularly fond of science—for obvious reasons. But I knew enough to recognize the genus of almost any preternatural creature.
Genus Draco referred to dragons. As I read through the document—which was laced with references to nucleotides and alleles and oxytocin knockout mice—I caught a few other terms I recognized.
Terms like Equus aqua mysticalis and Pan yeti gigantea.
There was also a figure, with a bunch of millimeter-long bars on it.
“Does that look like one of those DNA gel things to anyone else?” Skylar asked.
Bethany shook her head. “It looks like a pregnancy test on crack.”
“No,” Skylar said slowly. “I skipped a year in science, so I’m taking bio this year. That’s definitely one of those gel things.”
As the two of them bickered back and forth, I stared at the words on the screen, willing them to make sense—and then willing them not to, because if I was reading this correctly, then Skylar was right.
That was a DNA sequencing gel.
Nucleotides.
Alleles.
DNA.
Before I was old enough to walk and talk, modern science had already uncovered the secret to cloning sheep. The entire human genome had been catalogued. And researchers had discovered that preternatural creatures had triple helix DNA.
Pan yeti gigantea. Equus aqua mysticalis. Those were the scientific classifications for the yeti—also known as the abominable snowman—and kelpies—also known as a pain in my ass.
It was like the beginning of some horrific joke—a kelpie, a yeti, and a fire-breathing dragon walk into a bar—but I already knew the punch line.
Kelpies could literally disappear into water.
Yetis were man-eating primates with an affinity for ice.
What do you get if you mix a kelpie, a yeti, and a dragon?
“That thing from the skating rink,” I said. “The ice dragon.”
Twenty-four hours earlier, Skylar’s psychic senses had led us straight to the ice rink—and the woman who appeared to be calling the shots at Chimera had shown up once the furor had started to die down. At the time, my mind had been a jumbled mess, and I hadn’t been able to put the pieces together.
I hadn’t been able to think.
And since I’d shifted, I hadn’t spared more than a thought or two for the dragon, so it hadn’t occurred to me that Chimera might have their fingers in more than one pot—that the chupacabra might not be the only creature they were studying.
Altering.
Experimenting with.
I felt sick—so sick that I brought my right hand to my mouth, for fear I might throw up.
There were thirty-nine varieties of preternatural creatures. They’d been documented, studied, protected by law. Some lived in locations so remote I’d never actually seen one; some hunted humans right in my backyard. I’d probably never be able to kill them all—for every monster I slew, there would always be a new one to take its place—but there was still some comfort in knowing that there was a limit to just how bad things could get.
Thirty-nine species, some of them endangered.
Thirty-nine was doable.
“They’re making more.” The words came out in a whisper, and for a second, I thought I might actually start crying. I did what I did because I had to. I fought every night I could and hated myself the nights I couldn’t. It wouldn’t ever stop, and they were making more.
More monsters.
Stronger ones. Unnatural ones.
That was the word Zev had used to describe the dragon at the ice rink, and I could see it now. As horrible as the rest of the preternatural world was, there was some rhyme or reason to it. There were limits.
But this?
There could be a thousand of me, and it still might not be enough to fight them back if Chimera had one too many successes, if those successes got out into the population the way the dragon had. Without meaning to, I thought of all the beasties I’d fought in the past few weeks. The hellhounds were just hellhounds. The zombies—aside from working as a team—were just zombies. And the basilisk …
Bigger.
Stronger.
Harder to kill.
This time, I really did punch the wall.
Beside me, Skylar scrolled through more files on the computer. I couldn’t even look at them—I didn’t want to know, until she came upon the file for chupacabras.
Until I saw the photo of Zev.
His hair was onyx—darker than mine and so black it was nearly reflective. His skin was pale, and I wondered at the fact that in my mind, I’d always seen him tinged in shadow.
Beside me, Skylar seemed to realize that the photo had caught my attention—and why. She opened her mouth to say something, and then her eyes lit on Zev’s scientific classification.
Homo vampirus.
24
Skylar closed the file so quickly that you would have thought it had bit her. She glanced guiltily at me and then looked back at Bethany.
“How old do you think he is?” Bethany asked, tilting her head to the side. “Like, twenty?”
I hadn’t noticed Zev’s age in the picture, but I doubted he was twenty. He’d been in Chimera’s captivity for two years, and he talked about that length of time like it was nothing.
I’m older than I look, Zev said helpfully. We don’t age the way humans do. Not once we’ve taken on a Nibbler.
I didn’t ask him to clarify, because I was still staring at the space on the screen where that one word had been a moment before.
Vampirus.
I lived in a world where the mythological was real. We all did—and had for a very long time. The old stories about supernatural creatures were the kind of thing we saw as funny or quaint or just downright ridiculous—the equivalent of thinking that putting a leech on someone could rid them of the flu. But even taking into account everything we knew about the preternatural world, there were still some things that fell outside the realm of possibility, things that were nothing more than the product of overactive imaginations.
Things like vampires.
And werewolves.
And psychics.
The sarcastic half of my brain couldn’t help but wonder if Bethany went furry on the full moon, because if she did, we’d be batting three for three.