She wobbled on her feet, but didn’t fall. “Oh, I am going to kill that—”
She never got to finish that sentence, because a second later, she went down.
It took me a moment to process the sound of gunfire echoing in the chamber and to see the tiny hole in the back of her head, the blood dying her light hair red.
Someone shot her, I thought dully. I drugged Colette, and someone shot her.
I lifted my eyes to the open doorway—toward Rena and her smoking gun. All business, she walked forward and knelt next to Colette’s prone body.
She put the gun to the vampire’s temple and pulled the trigger.
Again. And again. And again.
“She won’t stay down long,” she said finally. “An hour or two at most. We have to get you out of here. Now.”
“You shot her. In the head. Five times.” I processed those facts. “I couldn’t heal from that.”
Rena dropped the gun onto the floor, her creamy brown skin tinged gray and pale. “She can.”
I heard a scream—human, this time—and took a step toward the door.
“Anything we couldn’t transport, Colette ordered let loose,” Rena said. “The paperwork shows this facility as belonging to one of Chimera’s competitors. They’ll be faced with the fallout, and if the Feds get anyone from Chimera, it will be Paul or me.”
Poor you, I thought, but after everything that had happened, I still wasn’t the kind of person who could say something like that out loud. It must have shown on my face, though, because Rena responded like I’d slapped her.
“You have no idea what I just risked for you, Kali.”
“I do know,” I said, my voice soft. What I didn’t say was that it wasn’t enough, might not ever be enough.
“We have to get out of here.” Rena reached to steady me, and she frowned. “You’re bleeding.”
Out of habit, I surveyed the damage. “Two broken ribs. A concussion. And I’m pretty sure she snapped my wrist.”
Three minutes.
Not enough time to heal.
Rena latched her hand over my good arm and tugged gently. “There’s a back way,” she said. “We’ll leave and seal it off. The Feds could be here any minute.”
Realizing the implication of her words, I pulled back away from her grasp. “Where’s Zev?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Does it matter?”
I considered her question. I saw Zev in my mind’s eye. I felt his fingers closing around my neck, felt him cutting off the flow of air. I saw him, wild-eyed and fighting vainly against Colette’s hold.
He’d betrayed me, but he hadn’t meant to. Hadn’t wanted to. And Rena was just going to leave him here—with the place in chaos and Colette a ticking time bomb, waiting to wake up on the floor. And once Colette woke up, she’d be able to control Zev again. She’d stick him in another cage—if the FBI didn’t beat her to it first.
He’d still be in my head. I’d still be in his. Eventually, someone would use him to find me, and the whole thing would start all over again.
“No.”
“No, what?” Rena’s voice was tinged with desperation, and the din in the background rose to new heights; a man’s screams melding in with inhuman ones, as an alarm—jarring and violent—pierced the air.
“The Feds are here. This place is coming down, Kali. As your mother, I am telling you to move.”
I looked at her, and my stomach lurched. She’d saved my life. That didn’t make her my mother.
Without a word, I sat down next to Colette’s body. Almost on cue, a bullet fell from her skull. She was already healing, faster than I ever had before.
It’s the Nibbler. You feed it. It heals you.
The words Zev had once spoken came back to me with a vengeance, and I did the math. Colette probably kept her parasite very well fed.
“Kali, I have to go. Please don’t make me leave you here.” Rena’s voice broke. “Please.”
“Knife,” I said.
Apparently, that wasn’t what she’d expected as a response.
“You have my knife,” I said, lifting my eyes to hers, falling back on my senses while I still had them. “I’d like it back.”
“Kali, the FBI is going to find you here. Eventually, Colette is going to wake up. You can’t—”
“Give me the knife,” I said. “And then go.”
There was a long moment, an elongated silence, and then she nodded, her face going as blank and calm as mine. She reached down to her boot and pulled out my knife, the motion eerily similar to one I’d made myself a million times.
She handed it to me, hilt first. She brushed one hand over my cheek. And then she turned and walked—no, ran— away.
One minute.
I had sixty seconds—no time to heal, no time to think, no time to process the sounds of animal screams and gunshots in the distance.
All I had time to do was act.
Kneeling next to Colette’s body, I cut open her shirt. The swirling pattern laid into her skin was complicated, and my eyes traced the interweaving circles and lines back to a central point, just over her collarbone.
An ouroboros.
“You don’t want her,” I said, my voice shaking as I brought the tip of my knife to my left arm.
Cut. Cut. Cut.
“You want me,” I said. “I’m smarter. I’m younger. And I’m one of a kind.”
Now that was the truth.
“You don’t want her.” I painted Colette’s body with my blood, flashing back to that moment in the hallway with Bethany. “You want me.”
I willed it to be true.
Ten seconds.
Nine.
Nine seconds, and I would be human.
I couldn’t do this.
Darkness lapped at the edges of my mind. My temples pounded. My breath came fast and short—and then there was a sound like a gun going off, and a smell like rotten eggs.
I stumbled backward, hit the wall, and sank to the floor.
Four seconds.
Three seconds.
Colette’s body twitched, the lines on her skin disappearing like sidewalk chalk under the force of a hose. For one horrifying moment, I thought she might wake up.
But she didn’t. Her limbs stopped twitching. Her mouth went slack. And that feeling in my stomach, the one that told me that something preternatural was close, flickered like a lightbulb and died.
One.
The second I shifted, the pain was blinding, overwhelming, everywhere. I was little and human and bleeding.