Every Other Day (21 page)

I’d spent all of these years thinking he didn’t care. And maybe he didn’t, not the way fathers were supposed to, but there was something between us—something so powerful and awful and overwhelming that it hurt him to look at me.

“I was never good at this. She was, your mother. She knew how to play with you and how to talk to you, and God, you adored her. You asked for her every night, every single night….” He trailed off. “She loved you, in her own way, but this—her being here, you being different … it’s too much, Kali. It’s a risk.”

He didn’t know the half of it.

“It’s my risk to take,” I said finally. “One way or another, it’ll be over soon.”

I waited for him to ask what I meant.
If he asks, I’ll tell him
….

This time, he didn’t.

There comes a moment in every kid’s life when they look at their parents and realize that they’re people—stupid and fallible and as breakable as the rest of us. Standing there, an ocean of space between me and my father, I realized that maybe he had tried. That maybe it hadn’t been easy for him. That I’d never made it any easier.

I realized that maybe he did love me, just a little.

I hated him—for what he’d done to me and what he’d never done for me. I hated him because for years, I’d been going through this alone, and if he’d told me, given me even a single hint about the way I’d come into this world, I wouldn’t have had to.

I hated him, but I loved him, too. And when it came to family, I didn’t have anyone else—I wouldn’t ever have anyone else.

For better or worse, this was it.

“Don’t worry about me,” I told him, walking toward the door and pausing just long enough to press my lips to his temple. “I promise, Daddy—I can take care of myself.”

28

So now I knew—what I was, how I’d gotten that way, why my father had never been able to look me straight in the eyes.

I collapsed on the end of my bed and set the cell phone he’d bought me to the side.

My mother was a psychopath.

My father was the good parent.

And I was an experiment they’d whipped up in some test tube.

Kali?

Until I heard Zev’s voice, I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it. Missed him. But right now, I didn’t want someone else in my head. I didn’t want anyone or anything. I wanted to be left alone.

Close your eyes.

What was the point in convincing myself that I didn’t care if he could tell that I did? I wasn’t okay. I might never be okay again.

Just close your eyes, Kali.
It wasn’t an order—just a request—and I let my eyelids get very heavy, let them close all on their own.

And just like that, I wasn’t sitting on the edge of the bed. I was standing in a forest, and Zev was standing next to me. He lifted one hand and trailed it over my cheek.

“Hello.”

Laughter burst out of my mouth. We were having some kind of psychic rendezvous, and
that
was what he had to say for himself?

“Hello, Kali.” His breath was warm on my skin, his presence coating my body, beckoning me forward as he repeated the first words he’d ever spoken to me, back when I was human and half afraid I was losing my mind. “I’m Zev.”

“Hello, Zev,” I said, leaning into his touch. “Have you been enjoying the show?” My voice was sharp, bordering on bitter. “Drama, revelations, betrayal … just another day in the D’Angelo household.”

“You’re hurting,” he said.

“I’m an experiment,” I countered. “What did you call that thing at the ice rink? ‘Unnatural’? And what does that make me?”

Cooked up in a test tube. Manufactured so my parents could run tests on my blood. A
thing
.

“That makes you special,” Zev said, bringing his free hand to the other side of my cheek and cupping my face. “It makes you unique.”

He meant the words. I knew he did, but that didn’t make me believe them. It didn’t make them true.

“You’re my other self,” Zev said, sensing my refusal, pushing harder. “We’re two halves of the same whole.”

His hand trailed down my face, my neck. He lifted it off my skin, and my back arched, longing for the contact. His palm landed on my stomach, and I felt a burst of warmth under his touch. Suddenly, I was acutely aware of the parasite inside of me: I could feel it, like a tiny ball of light, and for the first time, I felt something from it other than
thirst
.

On instinct, I reached out my own hand, rested my palm on Zev’s chest, just over his heart. Another burst of warmth, a realignment of the world, a
yes
overtook my body, my mind.

“Nibblers come in pairs,” Zev said. “The one inside of you, the one inside of me—they’re matched.”

I thought through what Zev was saying and realized that it was his bad luck that the chupacabra matched to his had chosen someone like me. Not natural. Not normal. Not real.

“If given a choice,” Zev said, “believe me, I’d choose you.”

I closed my eyes, laid my head on his chest, listened to his beating heart.

“This isn’t real,” I murmured.

“No,” he agreed. “It’s all in my head. It’s all in yours.”

It didn’t feel imaginary. It didn’t feel fake. It felt safe and warm and like here, in our minds, we could make the world anything we wanted it to be.

“Now you know,” Zev said, “why two years is nothing.”

Two years. That was the amount of time he’d spent in Chimera’s possession. I wondered if he came here, to this place in his mind, whenever they took their pound of flesh.

People like us couldn’t feel pain.

We couldn’t feel fear.

And once we’d been bitten, we were connected.

Brrrriiiinnggggg!

I came out of the trance suddenly, and it took me a moment to pinpoint the sound that had brought me back—the ringing of a phone. I spent one second wondering who could possibly be calling a number I didn’t even know myself, but the answer became readily apparent the second I answered the phone.

“I have an address,” Skylar said. “According to Reid, it’s an old military base that hasn’t belonged to the government since the fifties. It’s supposed to be abandoned—something about radiation—but satellite scans suggest there’s geothermal activity.” She paused. “This
is
Kali, right?”

I made a face at the phone. “Did you just dial a number at random?”

I could practically hear her smiling. “Maybe?”

I glanced down at my watch.
Twelve hours and two minutes.

I wanted to see Zev—see him for real. I wanted to save him, and I didn’t have much time.

“Hey, Skylar?” I said. “Can you send me that address?”

29

If I can’t break out of here, what makes you think that you can break in?

Zev’s question may have been rhetorical, but I did him the favor of answering, anyway.

Easy
, I replied, slipping my cell into my pocket.
The bad guys
want
me in.

For the first time since I’d recognized my mother, I smiled without feeling nauseous. I could do this.

I would do this.

I had to.

Shutting my mind against Zev’s voice—velvet and smooth inside my head—I set to work. The moment I turned my mind to what needed to be done, I felt a slight vibration in the air, a song singing me closer, luring me in. The palms of my hands itched as I scanned the house for weapons.

I could do this.

I would do this.

I had to.

I started in my bedroom and worked my way quickly through the rest of the second floor. I didn’t have as many weapons as another person might have had in my position, but I’d been hunting for five years, and during that time, the weapons I did have had been stashed all over the house. A knife here, a dagger there, the occasional sword.

My dad had a gun.

One by one, I tracked each of them down and tucked them into my clothing, heightened awareness of each blade bringing what I was about to do fully into focus. I saved the gun for last and tucked it into the waistband of my jeans, nestled against the small of my back.

Ready
.

Armed to the teeth, I slipped out of the house, the way I had a thousand times before. This time, there was a chance my dad might actually miss me before I returned.

If I returned.

The thought gave me pause—but not nearly enough. I took one step away from the house, and then another. A moment later, I was walking, and a second after that, I broke into a run.

The address Skylar had given me was outside of town. Driving would have been easier and faster, but if things went well, I deeply suspected I wouldn’t want to leave even a trace of evidence behind.

Getting Zev out of there wouldn’t be enough. To end this, really end this, we’d have to make sure that there wasn’t anyone left to chase us.

We’d have to crush Chimera—and everyone who worked there—to dust.

Running toward Zev felt better than anything had in a very long time. It felt like I was doing something.

Like I was going home.

I don’t know how long it took me to get there. Time lost all meaning—a dangerous thing for someone like me—but by the time I came to a stop at a dead-end road, more desert than not, the sun was starting to set.

Prime hunting time
, I thought, my body relishing the darkness as it slowly kissed the earth.

Go. Hunt. Just do it somewhere else.

The closer I got to Zev, the harder it was to brace myself against the sound of his voice—and the harder his words were to ignore.

Believe me, Kali, I’d rather be trapped here for another year—or two or three or thirty—than risk something happening to you. And if you come here, something
will
—

He broke off, like he couldn’t bear to finish that sentence.

You can’t ask me to just leave you there
, I told him, and then, realizing that he could and had and probably was about to again, I clarified my words.
Don’t.

Why does it matter where my body is?
Zev asked.
It’s just a body, Kali. They can’t touch anything that matters.

All I heard was the word
body
, and all I could think of were the things they were doing to his. It was like living through an autopsy—over and over and over again.

I don’t want you here,
Zev said. I knew, in the pit of my stomach, that he was entirely aware how those words would sound to someone who’d never really felt wanted by anyone, until now.

Just go away.

That was what Zev said, but I was so close now that I could feel him thinking other things. I remembered the feel of my hand on his stomach, the feel of his on mine. Zev could tell me I wasn’t wanted until my ears rang with the words, and it still wouldn’t matter.

People like us were meant to come in pairs.

That thought fresh in my mind, I stopped running. I was close enough now that I could almost smell Zev’s blood, could see the way they’d bled him again and again. The road itself wasn’t abandoned, but the address Skylar had given me didn’t exactly look commercial, either.

The entire complex was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, rusted and rotting, like it hadn’t been replaced in decades. There was a sign out front that warned would-be trespassers that the land beyond this fence had once been used to test explosives. Like the fence, the sign had seen better days:
WARNING
, it read,
UNDE ONATED INES.

“Undetonated mines,” I said, feeling like I’d solved the puzzle on
Wheel of Fortune.
“Isn’t that convenient?”

I scanned the perimeter of the fence—there was only one access road. It led up to a single gate, with an abandoned guard post.

The gate was open. I took a step toward it, and Zev’s voice echoed with bone-shaking vehemence through my entire body.

You don’t have to do this.

I looked at the fence, the gate, the building in the distance. “Yeah,” I said softly. “I do.”

“Do what?”

My hand tightened over the handle of one of my knives, but as my eyes adjusted to the newborn darkness, I saw the very last person I’d expected to see gracing a deserted road with her presence.

Bethany Davis.

“This is the place, right?” Bethany said. I looked past her—she’d parked her BMW just on the other side of the gate. “This is the address Skylar gave me.”

“Skylar told you to come here?” I asked dumbly.

“No,” Bethany said. “Skylar told me
not
to come here. Same dif.”

“I knew you’d come if I told you not to.” Skylar rounded the bend in the road a second after I heard her voice. “Reverse psychology. Behold my genius.”

As Skylar walked fully into view, I realized she wasn’t alone.

“Elliot?” Bethany said, sounding as surprised as I felt. “What are you doing here?”

“My little sister snuck out of the house carrying a circular-saw blade and a can of Mace.” Elliot gave Skylar a look. “I couldn’t exactly let her come alone.”

A can of Mace? What did Skylar think she was going to do, pepper-spray the big, bad biomedical conglomerate into submission?

“Look,” I said. “I appreciate the gesture, but whatever Chimera is keeping in there”—I gestured to the land that lay beyond the barbed wire—“I’m betting it’s not pretty, and I can’t do what I need to do if I have to worry about the three of you.”

“You can’t do it without us,” Skylar corrected. “I’ve seen it, Kali—seen it for as long as I can remember. Most of the psychic stuff, it’s pretty new, but this place, tonight, us—I’ve been dreaming it since I was twelve.”

Elliot ground his teeth together. “For the last time, Skye, you aren’t psychic.”

She met his eyes, and I was reminded of the things she’d told me in Bethany’s dad’s lab—
It’s going to get better. But first, it’s going to get worse.

“Yeah, El,” Skylar said softly, “I am psychic. And you can pretend to be a skeptic, but if you hadn’t believed me when I said we should come, you would have duct-taped me to a chair in the kitchen instead of coming with.” Skylar must have seen the question in my eyes, because she clarified for me: “I’ve been duct-taped to chairs
a lot
.”

Sensing that she’d gone off topic, Skylar smiled—a sad smile, the kind strangers exchange in cemeteries when they don’t know what to say.

Sometimes there aren’t any good choices,
she’d told me.
Sometimes making the right one is hard
.

“You don’t have to do this,” I told her, unsure what it was that she thought she had to do, but feeling the weight of it in the air between us.

“Yeah,” Skylar replied, responding to my assertion the exact same way I had replied to Zev’s. “I do. If you go in there by yourself, they’ll kill you. You’ll die.”

There was something about the way she said the words that made me believe her, absolutely and without reserve.

“If we don’t go with you, you’ll die, and a hundred thousand things that are supposed to happen—things that you could do—will die, too.”

I wanted to ask her how I could do anything, how one genetic freak of a girl could be of any importance at all, but before I could, Skylar switched from psychic proclamations to good old-fashioned logic. “Evidence has a way of disappearing when it implicates powerful people, Kali. You’re evidence, and they’ve already tried to kill you once. They’re obviously going to try again.”

“As much as it pains me to admit this,” Bethany interjected, “Skylar’s right. One dead teenager in the middle of nowhere is easy enough to explain. Four dead teenagers, two of whom have a brother in the FBI? That gets tricky no matter who the CEO is bribing, blackmailing, or sleeping with.”

In Bethany-ese, I took that to mean something along the line of “there’s safety in numbers.”

And maybe that would have been true—if there was any safety to be had. Glancing out over the dirt-dry land to the building in the distance, I got the feeling that there wasn’t.

The sign in front of this complex might as well have been labeled
POINT OF NO RETURN
.

“I’m bulletproof.” I countered Bethany’s logic with fact. “You guys aren’t. Worst-case scenario, they catch me. Worst-case scenario, you die.”

I saw my words hit home with Elliot. Bethany pursed her lips. Sensing the chink in their armor, I turned the full force of my gaze on Skylar.

“You either let the bad things happen,” she said softly. “Or you don’t.”

Her eyes shone—with certainty or tears, I wasn’t sure which. “Everybody has choices. This is mine.”

And then, before any of the rest of us could sort out the exact meaning of her words, she turned on her heels and ran.

Right through the gate.

I caught up with Skylar quickly enough, but by the time I did, the gate that had separated the premises from the rest of the desert had clamped shut behind us.

Someone knew we were here.

“Stay behind me,” I hissed. She melted into my back. The sound of footsteps told me that Elliot and Bethany weren’t far behind. For better or worse now, the four of us were in this together—at least until I could find a way to get the three of them out.

“We get in, we get Zev, and we get out,” I said, revising my earlier plan. Reducing this facility to ashes and dust would have to wait. I had more to think about now than just Zev.

“It’s a search and rescue,” Skylar said, nodding. “Got it. My brother Charlie is in the marines.”

Of course he was. One of these days, Skylar and Elliot were going to run out of brothers. It was only a matter of time.

“Kali,” Bethany said, her voice a ghost of a whisper, lost to the desert night. “We have visitors.”

I expected to see the men in suits, or, worse, Rena, but instead, I saw eight pairs of blood-red eyes, glowing with hunger.

Hellhounds. Again.

“Seriously,” I said. “These things are not endangered.”

Automatically, my mind started playing out ways this fight could go. I was faster and stronger than I’d been two days earlier, but there were eight of them this time. Three adults, five juveniles—all bigger, heavier, and uglier than me.

“Stay back,” I told the others, keeping my voice low and praying that Skylar wouldn’t get any more crazy ideas and that Beth wouldn’t feel compelled to give a repeat belly-dancing performance.

I continued eyeing the beasts. “No sudden movements.”

I’d bled enough in these clothes that if given the choice, the hellhounds would probably go for me and not my friends, but
probably
wasn’t good enough—not when there was anyone’s life at stake but my own.

“Stay back,” I said again as I wracked my mind, trying to find a way that this didn’t end in human bloodshed. “I can handle this.”