I was still out of place.

I was broken.

I tried not wonder if I would ever fit in anywhere—ever feel like a whole person instead of two broken, disconnected halves.

I looked away from my own reflection and picked up my toothbrush. I brushed my teeth—over and over again, until the only taste on my tongue was Aquafresh. I looped my hair back into a ponytail and then considered my options.

I’d meant what I’d said to Zev. Broken or not, outlier or not, I wasn’t just going to leave him there to rot. I wasn’t going to sit back and hope that Chimera wasn’t going to come for me next.

I needed to know where they were keeping Zev. Who was involved. What the company knew about me. I needed proof—the kind that could be used as insurance or taken to the police.

And I only had twenty hours to get it.

I thought my way through the situation, strangely alert now that the beast inside of me had fed. So far, I only had one real lead on Chimera—Bethany’s father. Since Beth was watching out for her own interests—and her mother’s—that left me with exactly one option for recon.

Paul Davis’s place of work.

Which—as it so happened—was also my father’s.

19

“Unlike the full spectrum of species in the animal kingdom, preternatural creatures share no common ancestry with humans—or any other natural species. Any similarities we see—say, between a dragon and a Komodo dragon, a kraken and a giant squid—appear to be the product of convergent, rather than divergent, evolution.”

My dad was a different person when he lectured: his eyes sparkled, his lips turned upward, and even from the back of the lecture hall, I could feel the energy he brought to the room. The students in his Introduction to Preternatural Biology class may or may not have understood what he was saying, but most of them appeared to be paying more attention to him than their inboxes, and I’d been hanging around college campuses long enough to know that that was something.

Come to think of it, I’d spent more mornings than I cared to remember like this growing up: hanging out at the back of a lecture hall whenever a babysitter canceled last minute, or my father forgot that we’d been given the day off from school. I’d seen him in college-professor mode enough that it shouldn’t have surprised me, but it always did.

In front of a class full of students, waxing on about evolution, he seemed so present. He seemed happy.

“Think what it must have been like for Darwin, two hundred years ago. He took that voyage on the Beagle expecting to document the natural world, and he stumbled across something … impossible. A creature who could defy the laws of physics—straight out of the pages of mythology, hidden from human discovery for thousands upon thousands of years. In that one moment, the entire landscape of scientific investigation was drastically and irrevocably changed. The impossible became a widespread scientific reality, as omnipresent as gravity and, in some cases, nearly as hard to see.”

I’d heard this lecture so often, I could have given it myself. Instead, I stuck to the shadows and moved my way toward the front of the auditorium. A couple of his students might have noticed me, but the professor went on, oblivious.

“What are the three key markers of preternatural evolution?” The question was rhetorical, and he went right into the answer—just as I went right for a chair near the front of the auditorium, where he’d left his briefcase and keys.

“It’s all right there in the DNA: preternaturality is typically marked by a triple, rather than double, helix structure; the presence of base pairs that themselves appear to have distinctly unnatural properties; and the secretion of amino acids—or, as they are more commonly called, preter-proteins—that defy our most basic natural laws, and in doing so, caused a resurgent interest in the pseudoscience of alchemy for a large part of the twentieth century.”

I slipped my hand into my father’s blazer jacket, which he’d left on his chair when he’d taken to the stage to lecture. As a kid, I’d completed the exact same motion searching for change for the vending machines, but this time, I was looking for something slightly less benign: his university ID card.

Got it.

My hand closed around its target, and I slipped back into the shadows and made for the exit.

“But given these differences, are preternatural creatures really unnatural? Or are they simply the product of a different kind of evolution—one with a different starting point, a different progression? Were they always here? Where did they come from? And are their fundamental and most basic natures really all that different from ours? Which leads me to …”

My father actually started tapping out a drumroll on his podium. A handful of students joined in. A new PowerPoint slide appeared on the projector screen, and my father’s voice boomed out over the drumroll.

“Sexual Selection and Preternatural Mating Behavior! Or, if you prefer: sex and the supernatural—when demons get down and dirty.”

That was my cue to leave. The one benefit of having a father who only remembered my existence every other Thursday was that we’d never had a sit-down talk about the birds and the bees. Hearing him say the word “sex” twice in one minute was more than enough for me.

As I slipped out the back of the room, and the door closed behind me, I glanced back over my shoulder, half expecting him to have snapped out of lecture mode and noticed my exit—but he didn’t. I wasn’t suprised. People like me were good at fading into the background, and I’d probably had more practice than most.

Mousy little Kali … wasn’t that what Bethany had called me? I’d spent my whole human life not making waves, hiding what I was, trying not to be noticed.

Until now.

Breaking into Paul Davis’s lab—for a purpose completely unrelated to hunting—wasn’t exactly the work of a human chameleon. It wasn’t low risk, it wasn’t subtle.

Oh well.

Like Theseus working his way through the labyrinth, I wound my way through hallway after hallway, took to the stairs, and made my way to my father’s lab. I swiped his ID, and the door unlocked itself. Since I’d relieved him of his last subject pool with the Great Zombie Raid of Sophomore Year, he’d been doing mostly theoretical research, but his office still backed up to his old lab space—which, in turn, was located adjacent to the space that had been given to the new head of the department.

Two more key-card swipes, and I was in a restricted-access hallway. Facial masks and foot covers sat just outside one door. The entire place reeked of plastic and human sweat, but the part of me that wasn’t human could smell a hint of something animal among the antiseptic.

CAUTION, read the sign on the door. LIVE SPECIMENS.

Caution, I thought, my eyes narrowing, illegal biomedical experimentation. My father’s card didn’t grant me direct access to the other labs, but I could still feel a light buzz of power from the blood I’d ingested.

Stronger. Faster. More invincible.

I fed the chupacabra, and it fed me. Trying not to think about what exactly I’d fed it, I made use of the increased strength and forced the door open. The lock gave way with a sickening creak, and I slipped into the room, expecting to see … something.

Something other than empty aquariums, empty cages. Something other than petri dishes, carefully labeled and stored away.

A clipboard on the far wall drew my attention, and I crossed the room, moving silently, so light on my toes that I might as well have been floating. Careful not to touch anything, I skimmed the top sheet, then helped myself to a pair of latex gloves.

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: PAUL DAVIS

PROTOCOL #: 85477892

GENETIC MUTATION IN THE NORTHERN CHUPACABRA.

It wasn’t exactly the kind of evidence I’d hoped for, but really, what was I expecting? It wasn’t like Paul Davis was going to apply for university approval for his real research program. Methodically, I made my way through the room, mentally dividing it into a grid and searching every square from ceiling to floor, wall to wall.

Whatever Dr. Davis was doing for Chimera, he wasn’t doing it here.

Determined to find something, lest my latest stint as a hardened criminal be for naught, I made my way from Davis’s lab to the attached office.