I hurt.
“Kali.” Suddenly, Zev was beside me, holding my head in his hands. “You’re going to be okay,” he said, checking me for injuries, staring into my pupils. “You’re going to be just fine.”
In his words, I heard an echo of Skylar’s. You’re going to be okay. I’m going to make you okay. Okay?
I gave myself over to the pain. Searing, blinding pain. I could get through this. I could.
The warmth of my skin built to an incredible, cleansing heat. I felt like I was wearing my body for the first time, like it was wearing me.
Here we go again, I thought.
I tried to smile, but it came out a sob. “Look,” I said, tears dripping down my cheeks, my breath catching raggedly in burning lungs. “Now we both have two.”
Zev followed my gaze to the ouroboros on my shoulder. His eyes went to Colette, lying still on the floor.
“You …”
He couldn’t finish the sentence. I laid my head back against the cement, insane laughter bubbling up inside of me.
There were two chupacabras inside my body. My very human body.
“Guess I do have a savior complex,” I said.
And then I laughed. It was a crazy, pitiful sound, like the mewling of kittens, but I couldn’t make myself stop.
It hurt.
Everything hurt.
“The Feds are here,” Zev said. “Colette moved some of her pet projects out, but the ones she left are … unpleasant. They’ll keep our friends occupied while we duck out, but if the Feds are lucky, they’ll survive.” He ran his hand lightly over my hair. “We should go.”
Before, when Rena had asked me to go, I’d said no because I didn’t want to leave Zev, didn’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder for the woman who’d been pulling his strings. But now …
“Come with me,” Zev said. “We’ll leave, Kali. You and me. There’s nothing here for you. We’ll slip out of here, and we’ll leave town, and we’ll disappear.”
I could see it—the two of us, spending our days in this world and our nights together in dreams. We’d hunt together, and we’d live together, and it would be so easy.
So right.
“I—” It was there, on the tip of my tongue, to say yes, but a volley of images flashed through my brain.
Faces.
One after another after another.
Bethany and Elliot.
Skylar.
My father.
If I left, he’d never know what happened to me. Even if I managed to say good-bye, he’d be alone.
Bethany and Elliot would never know what really happened to Skylar.
I’d never get to make this—any of this—right.
That was the second I realized that I had a choice. I could run and run, farther and farther away. I could make myself forget. I could be what Zev was, do what he did.
Or I could stop running.
Stop trying to be something I wasn’t.
Because at the end of the day, I wasn’t like Zev. I wasn’t like anyone. I was one of a kind. That wasn’t going to change—it wasn’t ever going to change.
“Go,” I told Zev as the sound of footsteps echoed through the hallway and orders, shouted by men, reached my ears. “I can’t.”
Why—not? He spoke the words silently, and they came to me in pieces, like a radio signal interrupted by static, a reminder that I wasn’t what I’d been an hour before.
Two chupacabras. Human body.
Twenty-three hours and fifty-four minutes.
“I’m tired of running,” I told Zev, forcing the words across my lips, rather than speaking them mind to mind. “I have to do this. You have to let me.”
Whatever Skylar had seen of my future, whatever had convinced her I was worth saving—I had a feeling I wouldn’t find it on the road.
I owed it to her to stay and fight—no matter how broken I was, no matter how lonely.
“I will come back for you,” Zev said.
I nodded, smiling and sobbing and hurting so badly, I could have screamed.
“What if they hurt you?” Zev whispered.
I met his eyes, then pushed him away. “They won’t do anything to me,” I said, remembering Skylar’s words about Reid. “Why would they? I’m just a kid.”
Just a girl.
A battered, broken human girl.
Zev pressed his lips to mine. He kissed me. And then he was gone.
I hugged my knees to my chest, folding myself into a tiny ball, and that was how Skylar’s oldest brother found me.
Just a girl—for now.
35
“Kali.” Reid crouched to my level, and in his eyes, I saw the Haydens’ house. The handprints on the driveway. The pictures on the walls.
“Skylar.” That was all I was able to say—just her name, nothing else.
He closed his eyes, head bowed. “I know.”
Another person might have looked at Reid and seen a complete lack of emotion. He might have looked like the consummate warrior, a blank slate. But I saw deeper, saw more.
I saw Skylar.
Gone.
I may have been the one bleeding, but the man in front of me was gutted.
“We have to get you out of here,” Reid said, opening his eyes to fix me with a familiar stare. “This place is going down.”
On some level, I was aware of the cacophony echoing all around us. Men fighting monsters. Monsters killing men. And even though I’d stayed for a reason, even though that had been my choice, I couldn’t help the whisper in the back of my mind that asked why it mattered.
What did any of it matter, when Skylar was dead?
“It matters,” Reid said, his voice cutting through the air like a knife, “because you’re not.”
I wondered if he was like Skylar—if he saw things, knew things—but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Gingerly, he lifted me off the ground, and I drew in a sharp breath.
“First we get out of here. Then we get you to the hospital.”
I wanted to tell Reid that I could walk out on my own two feet, that I hated hospitals, that I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d left me there to die. But I didn’t say any of that.
I said, “They killed her.”
And Reid said, “I know.”
He pulled a gun from his side and shouted something down the hallway. A shout came back, and a second later, the hallway was filled with men in bulletproof vests.
It figured the government would send the FBI into a facility filled with genetically enhanced monsters and expect bulletproof vests to do the trick.