It would have been so easy to stay down, to deal myself out, to stop caring. There was a part of me that wanted to say that I’d been fighting since I was twelve, and look what it got me.
But I couldn’t. And even though I had no idea what Skylar had seen in our future, what she was holding back, the one thing I knew for sure was that she couldn’t, either.
Crazy, insane, impossible, broken—it didn’t matter. Some people were born to fight back.
Skylar squeezed my hand and then dropped it. “You know what the worst part is about being psychic?” she asked. In typical Skylar fashion, she didn’t wait for a response to continue. “You always know when it’s going to get worse. I get up in the morning and get ready for school, and I know that word is going to be written on my locker. I know that given half a chance, they’d write it on my face. Last year, when it first started, I knew—I knew it was going to go on and on and on; every day, every single day, it was just going to get worse. But you know what? Screw that, Kali. Whatever it is, whatever hurts so bad you can’t even unball your fists—you either let it break you, or you don’t.”
This was the first time I’d heard Skylar admit, even for a second, that she wasn’t invincible—that the things people said and did to her at school hurt. And maybe, compared to what I was going through, it should have seemed little and petty and so very high school, but it didn’t, because fighting, getting hurt, letting the baddies break my bones and tear my flesh—that was the easy part.
That had always been the easy part.
Letting people in, caring, wanting them to care about me—that was hard.
“That woman?” I said, my voice husky and low. “The one who was just here? I’m pretty sure she’s my mom.”
Skylar blinked. And then she blinked again. “Do you think she knows?” Skylar said finally. “That you’re involved in all of this? That you’re … you?”
That was the question, wasn’t it?
“I don’t know. I’m not even sure I care.” I brought the heel of my hand up to my face, wiped roughly at the tears as they fell from my bloodshot eyes. “If we’re going to illegally bug the FBI, we should probably get on that.”
I had fourteen hours and twenty-nine minutes until my next shift. Fourteen hours and twenty-nine minutes to fight back—but until I knew where Zev was, there wasn’t anything else I could do.
Fourteen hours and twenty-nine minutes.
I wasn’t going to waste even one second thinking about Rena Malik.
26
Skylar’s house was half the size of Bethany’s, but even from the outside, there was something distinctly comfortable about it, something comforting. There was a basketball hoop in the driveway and a scattering of brightly colored leaves on the lawn. In the summer, the beds were probably full of flowers, and there was a slope to the driveway that looked like it had been handcrafted for snow days and sledding.
A worn, wooden fence sectioned off the backyard, and the second Skylar stepped out of my (stolen) car, she made a beeline for the gate.
I paused at the curb and hesitated. Under my feet, there was a line of handprints, pressed into the cement like a Hollywood star. Tiny handprints and chubby ones, gangly and nearly full grown.
It may as well have been a line in the sand, a barbed-wire fence at a border crossing.
You don’t belong here, it seemed to say. Family and happy memories and home—those things aren’t for you.
“You coming?” Skylar called.
From somewhere in the distance, darkness beckoned. If I ran long enough, looked hard enough, I could follow the trail. I could hit the outskirts of town and find something to hunt. I could let the hunter take over and turn off all feelings, emotions, longing.
I could feed.
But instead, I stepped over the line of handprints and followed Skylar into the backyard, trying with every step not to think about all of the things I’d never had, would never have. I tried not to think about the bits and pieces of memory I’d held on to my entire life: my mother’s face, the way she’d held me, the way she smelled.
Not for me. Lies.
If Skylar sensed my thoughts, she had the decency not to comment on them and instead just hooked an arm through mine. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go make trouble.”
“You know,” I replied, half joking and half not, “that might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
Skylar smiled and shrugged. “Not for long.” With eyes alight with mischief, she pulled a key chain out of her pocket with her free hand. “Remember,” she said. “Let me do the talking.”
She didn’t even need to ask. I’d broken my share of laws, but none of them had involved facing off against people. They certainly hadn’t involved giving an FBI agent a key chain in which we’d planted a listening device that one of Skylar’s friends had just happened to have on hand.
“Don’t you think he’s going to be a little suspicious that we’re giving him a mangled SIM Card and a ‘Number One Brother’ key chain?” I asked Skylar as the two of us closed in on the back door to her house.
“Definitely,” Skylar agreed. “That’s why I altered the key chain on the way over.”
I took a closer look at it and realized that in addition to hiding the listening device, she’d also edited the slogan on the key chain.
“Number Four Brother?” I asked dryly. “Isn’t that kind of insulting?”
Skylar smiled angelically. “He won’t suspect a thing.”
The inside of the Haydens’ house was even smaller than it had looked from the outside. The walls were lined with school pictures, and there was music blaring from the kitchen.
“My mom’s cooking,” Skylar explained. “She requires a sound track.”
I tried not to feel a twinge at how easy it was for her to say those two little words—my mom—but I only succeeded partway.
Concentrate on something else, I told myself. Anything else.
And that was when I heard it: the steady, solid beating of Skylar’s heart.
Thirsty.
The thing inside me needed blood. This time, Zev didn’t say a single word to talk me down.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Skylar’s blood smelled like strawberries. Now I wasn’t thinking about family or betrayal or anything other than the fact that it had been hours since the basilisk blood, hours of hunting and healing and—