37
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
The sky was dark and gray overhead, but as I watched them lower Skylar’s coffin into the ground, a tiny stream of light broke through the clouds. To my left, Bethany stood as immobile as I was.
Maybe we didn’t have a right to be here. Maybe the Haydens didn’t want us here.
Maybe, maybe, maybe—and none of it mattered.
Across the lawn, Elliot didn’t look at Bethany, didn’t look at me. I found myself trying to match Skylar’s many brothers to their descriptions and realized that I’d never hear her talk about them again.
They’d never see her again.
Handprints on the concrete, pictures on the walls—that’s what she was now.
There were words spoken and hymns sung and none of it made her any less dead. I stood there, thinking of those last moments, the expression of pure and unadulterated bliss on her face.
I could have saved her.
I should have.
And nothing Bethany said could change that. Nothing I said or did or didn’t do for as long as I lived would bring her back.
Beside me, my father reached out and put one hand on my shoulder, pulled me closer. On instinct, I stiffened at the physical contact, but after the moment of first contact passed, I leaned into his shoulder and watched them bury her.
I said goodbye.
And then I went home, cut the cast off my arm with a handsaw, and cried.
A week after we buried Skylar, I went back to school and found myself at the very center of the rumor radar. The investigation of Chimera’s facility had been all over the news. Arrests were still being made. And though the Feds had kept my name out of it, everyone knew.
They knew that Skylar had died.
They knew that I was there.
And they knew that Elliot couldn’t stand to look at me. That he wasn’t talking to Bethany. That she’d started eating her food at the “freak table” at lunch.
Suffice it to say, I was as surprised as anyone when Elliot approached me before school one morning and stiffly handed me an envelope bearing my name.
He didn’t say a word. He just stood there and waited. After a moment, I forced myself to open it. Hot-pink letters danced across the page.
She’d dotted the i in my name with a little pink heart.
I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, so I just handed the letter to Elliot and let him read.
“She wasn’t psychic,” he said. “She was just a kid.”
She was both, I thought, but I didn’t argue the point out loud. Instead, I thought of Bethany, whose father had been arrested. Bethany, who knew what it was like to carry someone else’s death on your shoulders for the rest of your life.
Bethany, who’d lost almost everything in the past few days.
“Elliot,” I said, surprised at how clear and steady my voice felt. “Quit being a tool.”
Eighteen Months Later …
The decision to take hellhounds off the endangered species list was a long time coming—whole lot of good that did me. Hunting them was still illegal; the only difference was now there were more to hunt.
“Here, puppy, puppy, puppy.”
I really shouldn’t have been doing this. If I got bloodstains on my graduation gown, Bethany was going to kill me, and Elliot was going to laugh. Adjusting the cap on my head, I spun my knife lazily in one hand.
Closer. You’re getting closer.
If someone had seen me from a distance, all they would have seen was a normal girl, just graduated from high school.
A girl who lived bit by bit and day by day.
I closed my eyes, tasting sulfur on the wind and waiting. Here, puppy, puppy, puppy.
Catching a hint of something in the air, I jerked to a stop. This was the place, but there was something … off.
And that was when I realized that the hellhound was already dead.
“Hello, Kali.”
I whirled around and found myself face-to-face with eyes I would have recognized anywhere: silver eyes, fringed in black.
Eighteen months. It had been eighteen months of radio silence in my head. Eighteen months without a word, and now, he was here.
“Hey, Zev,” I said. I nodded to the hellhound on the ground, noting the distance between its body and its head. “Just for the record, the next one’s mine.”
Zev smiled. “I think that can be arranged.” He raked his gaze over my body, and then his eyes drifted slowly to the side. I turned and followed his gaze to two men standing at the edge of the park.
They were wearing suits.
I stopped twirling my knife and took a single step forward before I realized that one of the men looked very familiar.
“Reid?”
Skylar’s brother nodded. He and the other man started walking toward us, and belatedly, I realized that the two of them—and Zev—moved like a team.
“Congratulations,” Reid said, gesturing toward my cap and gown. “Got any plans for after graduation?”
I’d been entertaining the idea of taking a few classes at the University That Shall Not Be Named, but as I glanced from Zev to Reid, something clicked inside of me, and I started spinning the knife in my hands again.
Zev was a vampire. Reid was FBI. And according to something I’d once overheard the mother I hadn’t seen in eighteen months saying, Chimera wasn’t exactly one of a kind.
PS: When they ask you what they’re going to ask you, say yes.
I brought my eyes to rest on Zev’s. “What exactly did you guys have in mind?”