“Here,” Bethany said, tersely. It took me a moment to realize that she was holding out a slip of paper. No, not paper—a brochure.
I took it from her. “Chimera Biomedical,” I read, but my eyes were drawn away from the words and to the image below it: an octagon bisected by a ladder, spiraling around an invisible line.
Only this time, the ladder looked less like a ladder and more like a DNA helix.
“They specialize in gene therapy,” Bethany said stiffly. “Regeneration.”
“Regeneration?”
Bethany stared pointedly at the tips of her toes. “Reviving brain cells. Stimulating nerve growth. Growing organs.”
“Do they do stem cell research?” Skylar asked, taking the brochure from my hand and staring intently at the symbol—the one she’d drawn for me the day before.
“Look,” Bethany said. “This is what you wanted to know, isn’t it? You wanted to know what that symbol was, and I told you. You want to know who my dad is working for. Well, this is it. It has to be. It explains everything. Why he’s been working so much. Why he’d do something like this. Why Skylar drew the symbol.”
I processed Bethany’s words, but felt like I was missing something—the reason she hadn’t told me this company’s name the second she’d seen the symbol; the things she was saying about her dad.
“Your mom came back in here a second ago,” Skylar told her, gauging her reaction. “Looking for Tyler.”
This time, Bethany didn’t react to the sound of the name. She just raised one eyebrow, untouchable and cool. “So?”
I knew then, knew that Tyler wasn’t a figment of her mother’s imagination. Knew that he’d been real once, that he wasn’t anymore.
“You had a brother,” I said, thinking of all the times I’d wished for a sibling, for someone in my house other than just my dad and me. “But something happened.”
Bethany’s chin wavered, and I realized that she was biting the inside of her cheeks—anything to keep herself from showing a hint of weakness to the two of us.
Skylar sucked in a breath, that same sad smile painting her face, like if she let her lips tilt downward, she might start crying instead. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said, her voice soft, her tone even.
I thought of the things Bethany had said when she realized I was alive. You were dead, and it was my fault. I couldn’t—I can’t do this again.
“The accident today wasn’t your fault, either,” I told her.
“It’s always my fault,” Bethany said, voice steady, hands shaking. “My mom. My dad. Tyler. I was supposed to be watching him. Me. But he wanted to go to a friend’s house, and I wanted to watch something on TV, so I let him. I let him go, and he was goofing around on their diving board—it was the middle of winter. There wasn’t any water in the pool, and he should have known better. I shouldn’t have let him go.”
Bethany shrugged, like that could make the words she was about to say matter less. “He fell.”
I wondered how old she’d been at the time, how old her little brother was when he died.
“He’s not dead.” Skylar said the words suddenly, and I wasn’t sure whether she was responding to my thoughts or if she’d seen something in that exact moment that had started her lips moving. “He fell. On concrete. Hit his head, but he didn’t die.”
“Coma,” Bethany said flatly. “For the past four years. Once upon a time, the doctors thought he might wake up. There were some experimental treatments, but they didn’t work. Now they say he’s brain-dead. It doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s gone.”
I tried to imagine what must have been going through her head at that moment, how she must feel, but I couldn’t. I had my reasons for keeping people at arm’s length, and she had hers. My dad and I barely even spoke. My mother had left when I was three. But Bethany—
Her brother was brain-dead.
Her mother believed he was still running around the house.
And her father was conducting illegal experiments on unwitting teenagers—Bethany included.
Suddenly, it clicked in my head: the brochure I was holding, Bethany’s familiarity with Chimera Biomedical, her father’s willingness to break the law for them.
“You said there were experimental treatments.” I watched her reaction to my words. “When Tyler first got hurt, you said he underwent experimental treatments.”
Bethany turned her attention back to her toes. “So?”
“Whose experimental treatments were they?” I knew the answer before I asked the question. Bethany eyeballed me, and when she responded, her words were clipped.
“Who do you think?”
The brochure in my hand. The look on Bethany’s face the first time she’d seen the symbol.
“Chimera Biomedical,” I said, expelling a breath and giving it a moment. “Are they still treating him?”
“No,” Bethany said too quickly.
“Beth—”
“Don’t call me Beth,” she snapped.
I didn’t need overly developed people skills to see that snapping at me about her name was probably easier than admitting that if her father was working for Chimera, he hadn’t just taken this job for the pay grade. He hadn’t agreed to experiment on teenagers for the money.
He was looking for a cure.
“Why chupacabras?” I asked. Bethany shrugged.
“Why not?” she said. “They’ve tried everything else. Nothing works—nothing is ever going to work, but try telling that to the great Paul Davis. Sometimes, I’d swear he’s more delusional than my mother, and as I’m sure you’ve gathered, that’s saying something. If Chimera Biomedical told my dad that his research might jump-start Tyler’s brain, there’s nothing that he wouldn’t do.” Bethany swallowed hard.
“Obviously.”
The wheels in my head turned slowly as I looked down at the pamphlet, Bethany’s earlier words about Chimera echoing in my head.
They specialized in regeneration: regrowing nerves, reviving dead brain cells. And right now, they were studying chupacabras.
My mind went to Zev and the things he’d told me about “Nibblers.”
Any comments from the peanut gallery? I asked him. What would a biomedical company want with a deadly preternatural parasite?
At first, I didn’t think Zev would respond, but then, he bit out four words, his voice decisive and harsh.
Leave it alone, Kali.
If anything, his words made me want to do the opposite, and the way he’d issued the command made me think that this was dangerous—and personal. I chewed on that for a moment. Chimera was studying chupacabras. Zev knew something about it, something he had no intention of telling me.
Chupacabras. Regeneration. Zev acting like pushing this was particularly dangerous for me.
An insidious possibility took root in my mind, and a moment later, it seemed less like a possibility and more like a fact. All of a sudden, I knew why Dr. Davis thought that injecting someone with a chupacabra might not be a death sentence, why he might believe that the preternatural held the key to waking his son up from a deep and unforgiving sleep.
People like me didn’t get hungry. We never got tired. We couldn’t feel pain. And when we got bitten, we didn’t die.
We healed very, very quickly.
To a scientist, that would have seemed like a medical miracle. To a chupacabra expert whose son was dying, it might have seemed like a sign.
Chimera isn’t just playing around with chupacabras, I realized, my mind reeling. They knew—about the effect that chupacabras had on certain people.
People like me.
17
“Kali?”
I must have looked about as good as I felt, because Skylar said my name in a tentative, talking-a-puppy-out-from-underneath-a-car type of tone.
I shook my head to clear it of unwanted thoughts—unwanted weakness.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
Bethany twirled a finger through her hair, a dangerous glint in her emerald eyes. “Isn’t it always?”
I didn’t want to take her meaning, but she didn’t leave me any other options.