My mother worked for Chimera.
Chimera specialized in making monsters.
Something snapped inside of me, and I walked over to the counter and opened the knife drawer. I pulled out a cutting knife, the largest of a set of five. I turned calmly back to my father. His brow wrinkled, and he realized what I was going to do a second before I did it.
He reached out to grab my hand, and I threw him off—threw him too hard, and he skidded across the floor, eyes wide. I took a step forward and brought the knife to my arm.
Slice, slice, slice.
Steel slid into my flesh. Blood welled up on the surface of my skin. I’d cut myself long and deep, and from his spot on the floor, my father made a choking, strangled sound.
I threw the knife down. With my right hand, I wiped the blood off my left. It smeared, and I turned to the sink and turned on the water. Mechanically, I washed off the cut.
I held my arm up, and my father watched in sick fascination as the skin began knitting itself back together.
“Am I even your daughter?” I asked. Maybe they’d just found me somewhere. Maybe I’d been their specimen, the way Zev was Chimera’s.
“Yes,” my father said, his voice shaking. “You’re my daughter. And Rena’s.”
There were words then, so many words, coming out of my father’s mouth. He’d been a junior professor. Rena had been a graduate student. She’d come to him with a mysterious blood sample.
“Get to the point.” I meant to sound brisk. I didn’t mean to beg. “Please.”
He stammered. “Th-th-the idea that there might be preternatural humans, as similar to us as a yeti is to a gorilla … it was incredible, Kali. But we only had that one sample, and it wasn’t enough.”
I saw where this was going, saw it as clearly as the features on his face, but I didn’t make it any easier for him. I just waited, the blood-covered knife gleaming on the counter.
“The DNA was close enough to human that Rena thought that we could splice it into the human genome, if the intervention happened early enough in development.”
“How early?” I asked, wondering if I’d ever been normal. If I’d ever even had a chance.
“Conception,” my father said, his voice hoarser even than mine.
Conception, I thought. So that was my answer. I hadn’t ever been normal. I hadn’t ever had a chance.
From his position on the floor, my father begged me with his eyes to understand. “My DNA, your mother’s, our test subject’s … we knew it probably wouldn’t take. But it did, and suddenly, Rena was pregnant, and the two of us had to face the reality that this wasn’t just some abstract thing. It wasn’t just DNA. It was a baby.” He paused and climbed to his feet. “It was you.”
I’d spent the past five years wondering why I was the way I was, wondering what was wrong with me.
“Congratulations,” I said. “Guess your experiment worked.”
“But it didn’t!” The words burst out of my father’s mouth. “We ran the tests—ran them again and again, Kali, but they all came back human. You were human. And you were ours.”
Their experiment.
“Things were fine, for a while. You were such a good baby, and Rena—she adored you, Kali. The way she used to look at you … I thought that maybe it was worth it. All of the risks we’d taken, the laws we’d broken, the lines we’d crossed—because at the end of the day, we had you. But then, when you were about two, Rena got a new job, in the private sector. She started hearing rumors about an undiscovered preternatural species. And the more she heard about what they could do, the more convinced she became that you might have inherited something.”
It was all so clear in my mind now. The games. The trips to the lab. They’d taken my blood and hooked me up to machines and run every test known to man.
And when that hadn’t worked, Mommy and I had started playing games at home.
“She quit her job to stay home with you full-time. I should have known, Kali, but I didn’t. We were … happy. You adored her. And then one day, I came home, and you were holding a gun. You were playing with it, and she was just staring at you.” His voice started catching in his throat. “We’d been told that alt-humans—that’s what they were calling them then—that alt-humans had an affinity for weapons. But you didn’t. You were just a three-year-old kid, and that gun was loaded.”
I thought of the gun safe at Bethany’s house, of the zombies mobbing me and the way the weapons sung in my hand.
“I’m not three years old anymore,” I said. “And I’m not human.”
After all these years of keeping secrets, of dancing around even the simplest truths in our relationship, it was suddenly very easy to say.
“It started when I was twelve—right after my first period. I woke up really early one morning, and everything was different. I needed to get out of the house. To hunt.” I looked back at the knife on the counter. “That’s what we do, you know. People like me. We hunt the things that go bump in the night. We feel them like bugs crawling beneath our skin, and we hunt them down, and we keep them from killing anyone else.”
My father didn’t say a word—not a single word.
“Didn’t you ever wonder?” I asked. “Didn’t you ever see the clothes in the trash, the blood? Did you even notice when I wasn’t in my bed at night? And in the papers, they were always talking about vigilantes and poachers and whatever else they call people who hunt the monsters instead of calling Preternatural Control. God, Dad, I broke into your lab.”
“The zombies,” he said dully. “My work. That was you?”
“It was always me,” I said roughly. “Because that’s what I am. That’s what you made me—only I didn’t know that. I never knew why. I didn’t even know what.”
“But that’s impossible,” my father said, shaking his head, as if that could make what I was saying any less true. “I tested you, every year, just to be sure. You took physicals. And your blood work always came up clean.”
I shrugged. “Sometimes I’m human. Sometimes I’m not. It’s not all that difficult to miss an appointment and reschedule it for a time when I’m just a girl.”
Just an ordinary girl.
Yeah, right.
“Does your mother know?” His voice was honey-smooth and clear, like he’d recovered his composure, but his eyes were as dead as any zombie’s. “If she does, we have to leave. Now. Tonight. It won’t be easy, but I have some money set aside. We’ll be fine for a while….”