“If we ask Reid not to tell, he won’t,” Skylar said. “You’re a kid, Kali. Reid would die before he’d hurt a kid.”

Vaughn took Skylar’s statement as a stamp of approval. Without a word, he stepped out of the room, fishing his cell phone out of a pocket as he went.

“So Reid will come and get rid of the zombie carnage?” Bethany asked. “And then what? He’ll start an investigation into Chimera on the down low?”

Elliot nodded. “Something like that. If your dad tries anything with your mom, we can bring in Nathan.”

“Nathan?” I repeated, glancing over at Skylar. “Wasn’t that the brother who taught you to hot-wire cars?”

Skylar shrugged. “When he’s not stealing cars, he’s a lawyer.”

I was beginning to think that there weren’t any bases the Hayden family didn’t have covered—but none of this changed my situation. Chimera still had Zev, and even if Reid could keep me out of the investigation, there was no guarantee that Chimera’s operation would be shut down, or that Zev wouldn’t be absorbed into some government lab once it was.

“Exactly,” Skylar said, nodding her head to emphasize the point—though I don’t think any of us were entirely sure what she was saying exactly to. “The good news is that Reid will handle it. The bad news is that Reid will handle it. He won’t want our help. He won’t accept our help, and if he thinks, even for a second, that any of us might be inclined to engage in helping of any kind, he will have us shipped off to a convent in Switzerland.”

“He wasn’t serious about the convent thing,” Elliot said with a roll of those icy, pale eyes. “And besides, Mom and Dad would never let him.”

“He’s Reid,” Skylar retorted. “Mom and Dad won’t even realize he’s talking them into it. I’ll end up sipping tea with the nuns, and you’ll be dropping and giving some drill sergeant twenty at military school. Kali and Beth will probably end up in convents, too, and he doesn’t even know them.”

“Don’t call me Beth.”

Before Bethany and Skylar could get into it, I intervened. “If your brother wants you to stay out of it,” I said, “maybe you should.” I paused, letting the suggestion sink in before adding the caveat. “That’s not an option for me.”

You don’t have to do this, Zev told me. You shouldn’t.

“I have to do this,” I said out loud, half for Zev’s benefit and half for theirs. “I don’t expect the rest of you to help me.”

“Of course you don’t,” Bethany replied. “Because you’re the hero, and we’re the ones who walk away.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, because she was right. I did expect them to walk away. They didn’t owe me anything. We barely knew each other.

What reason could I possibly give them to stay?

“If we’re going to break into Bethany’s dad’s lab,” Skylar interjected, with no segue whatsoever, “we should probably do it before Reid gets here for zombie cleanup.”

“Or,” Elliot suggested, “we could not.”

He crossed the room, so that he was standing next to me. Bethany tracked his progression with her eyes, but the expression on her face never changed.

“I get wanting to know what you are, where you come from,” Elliot told me, his voice even and sweet. “I get wanting to help someone who can’t help himself. But this is big, Kali, and you could get hurt.” He paused. “Seventeen hours from now, you could die.”

Sixteen hours and fifty-nine minutes, I corrected silently, but I didn’t say the words out loud.

I wanted to tell Elliot that this was more or less my life. That I’d known from the time I was twelve years old that I’d die hunting monsters—that the only thing different this time was that the monsters were human. But what came out of my mouth was something else.

“You don’t get it. You won’t ever get it, Elliot, because you have a family. You have friends, and you have a future—you don’t have to worry that tomorrow or a year from now or five years, someone will figure out what you are. You don’t have to wake up every morning wondering why, and you don’t have to go through the motions, pretending that someday it will stop, because it will never stop.”

Never, never, never.

“I can’t just walk away and forget about this—I am this, and the only person in the world who could ‘get’ that, the only one who might actually understand or, God forbid, have some answers—that person is the one you want me to walk away from.”

Protecting other people was what I was born for. I had to believe that, believe that I had a purpose, because otherwise, I was just a killer. I was sharp edges and violence and making myself bleed. Either I did it to make the world a safer place, or I really was a monster, less human than I was willing to believe.

“I’m doing this,” I said, shrugging off Elliot’s touch before I even realized that he’d lifted his hand to my shoulder. “I’m not asking for your help, and I’m certainly not asking for permission—”

“I don’t know the code.” Bethany said the words like she hadn’t just interrupted me, like she really couldn’t have cared less about what I was saying. “I have no idea how to get the door to my dad’s lab open, but I can show you where it is. Maybe the ‘psychic’ can intuit a few little bitty numbers for you.”

Bethany did a good job of coating that last sentence with sarcasm and pretending not to care—but I’d mastered that particular art when I was nine, and I saw straight through it. If Bethany had known the code, she would have given it to me.

“I’m not sure about the numbers,” Skylar said brightly, “but I can try.”

“For the last time, Skylar,” Elliot interjected. “You’re not psychic.”

“And Kali isn’t super girl,” Skylar cooed back. “Your brotherly wisdom has been absorbed. On a related note, your job is distracting Reid.”

Without waiting for a reply, Skylar darted across the room, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me out. Bethany followed on our heels.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked her. A few hours earlier, she’d refused to let us anywhere near the lab.

“Kali, a horde of zombies attacked my house. Vaughn said they were wearing some kind of high-tech collars, and I’m pretty sure that normal zombies aren’t supposed to coordinate their flesh-eating efforts. I may not be the sharpest eyeliner in the box, but even I can read in between those lines.” She paused. “Besides, I’m getting really tired of you being the hero. When people bite me, I bite back.”

“Boyfriend’s little sister’s in the room,” Skylar reminded her. “If you could avoid talking about biting people, I’d really appreciate it.”

Bethany rolled her eyes. “There.” She brought us down an extra set of steps and gestured to a thick, metal door. “If you can crack the code, be my guest.”

Skylar nodded and bit her bottom lip, but before she could place her hands on the door, I reached out and stopped her.

“Let me try something first.”

Skylar may have been a little bit psychic, but I’d spent the morning rifling through Dr. Davis’s desk. I’d almost forgotten that his cell phone hadn’t been the only thing I’d taken away from my little recon trip.

I’d also memorized the passwords taped to the bottom of his desk.

23

I don’t know what I expected to see in Paul Davis’s home lab, but what I saw was … nothing.

The walls were made of chrome. The floors were tile. The sound of my footsteps echoed through the room, and I could see the colors in my clothes reflected in the walls—blurry, indecipherable shapes.

Skylar and Bethany stepped into the room behind me. Besides the three of us, the only things in this entire room were a computer monitor built into the wall and stacks and stacks of hard drives, lining the floor like Legos.

“Got any more passwords?” Bethany said, gesturing to the computer.