“Got a keyboard?” I returned.
It took us five minutes to find it—hidden beneath a panel in the wall. I ran through every password I’d seen taped to Dr. Davis’s desk and came up empty.
In unison, Bethany and I turned toward Skylar.
“I got nothing,” she said.
I resisted the urge to send my fist into the shiny chrome walls. If I let myself hit something, let myself want to …
I could feel the need rising inside of me, except this time, it wasn’t hunt-lust. It was an ache, an emptiness.
Blood.
The thought was overwhelming, all-consuming, and suddenly, I could smell the scents of the room so clearly.
I could smell Bethany—Skylar—
I could smell their blood.
“What?” Bethany said defensively. “Do I have something on my face?”
I tore my eyes away from her neck, but I could still hear the beating of her heart.
Thirsty. Thirsty. Thirsty.
Suddenly, Zev’s warning about needing to feed when I hunted seemed a lot more reasonable. In retrospect, pushing my healing ability to the limit and then locking myself in a small room with two walking bags of blood probably wasn’t my finest idea ever.
Stop it, I thought firmly. They’re my friends.
The word might not have meant anything to the mindless, senseless parasite inside of me, but it meant something to me.
“What are you doing?” Bethany asked.
I’m trying not to tear out your jugular, I thought in response. When I told you I didn’t know what I was, it’s possible that I was not being 100 percent honest.
Then I realized that Bethany hadn’t addressed her acerbic comment to me. She was talking to Skylar, who was down on all fours, investigating the hard drives.
“I’m looking for a USB port,” she said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Move your foot.”
Bethany didn’t move. “Why are you looking for a USB port?”
“Because I thought it might annoy you,” Skylar answered, the picture of innocence. “And also because Darryl gave me this.”
She held up a USB drive.
“Darryl?” Bethany repeated, utterly lost. “Who’s Darryl?”
“Big guy? Sits with me at lunch?” Skylar continued running her hands over the various drives, looking for a port. “Sound familiar?”
“Mute?” Bethany said finally. “You’re crawling all over the floor because of something you got from Mute?”
If the popular crowd called Darryl “Mute,” I really didn’t want to know what they called the rest of us.
“Darryl does talk,” Skylar said. “If you listen. And FYI, I have a really strong feeling that he’s going to be the next Bill Gates, so you might want to be a little nicer to him.”
“I have a really strong feeling,” Bethany deadpanned, “that if you don’t tell me what’s on that USB drive, I will end you.”
“Aha!” Skylar brandished the hard drive like she was getting ready to embark on a three-gun salute. Without answering Bethany’s question, she plugged it in, and the blank screen on the monitor gave way to a matrix of letters and numbers, rotating through the screen in multiple directions.
“Darryl likes codes,” Skylar explained. “A few weeks ago, I asked him what someone might hypothetically need to break into a supercomputer. He hypothetically made me this.”
Suddenly, the walls all around us gave way to images. Apparently, the monitor wasn’t just built into the wall. The monitor was the wall.
Glancing at Beth and Skylar out of the side of my eyes, I moved toward the keyboard and then double clicked on the first folder I saw. It was password protected, but Darryl’s program made mincemeat of that protection, and a few seconds later, the three of us were staring at gibberish.
Scientific gibberish.
There were Excel files, full of data—numbers and columns and dates that were more or less Greek to me. Then there were documents—each labeled with a serial number.
HB-42. los-129. MC-407.
Something about that last one sent a niggling feeling into my brain. I opened it, and a single word caught my eye.
Draco.
I wasn’t the world’s best student, and I’d never been particularly fond of science—for obvious reasons. But I knew enough to recognize the genus of almost any preternatural creature.
Genus Draco referred to dragons. As I read through the document—which was laced with references to nucleotides and alleles and oxytocin knockout mice—I caught a few other terms I recognized.
Terms like Equus aqua mysticalis and Pan yeti gigantea.
There was also a figure, with a bunch of millimeter-long bars on it.
“Does that look like one of those DNA gel things to anyone else?” Skylar asked.
Bethany shook her head. “It looks like a pregnancy test on crack.”
“No,” Skylar said slowly. “I skipped a year in science, so I’m taking bio this year. That’s definitely one of those gel things.”
As the two of them bickered back and forth, I stared at the words on the screen, willing them to make sense—and then willing them not to, because if I was reading this correctly, then Skylar was right.
That was a DNA sequencing gel.
Nucleotides.
Alleles.
DNA.
Before I was old enough to walk and talk, modern science had already uncovered the secret to cloning sheep. The entire human genome had been catalogued. And researchers had discovered that preternatural creatures had triple helix DNA.
Pan yeti gigantea. Equus aqua mysticalis. Those were the scientific classifications for the yeti—also known as the abominable snowman—and kelpies—also known as a pain in my ass.
It was like the beginning of some horrific joke—a kelpie, a yeti, and a fire-breathing dragon walk into a bar—but I already knew the punch line.
Kelpies could literally disappear into water.
Yetis were man-eating primates with an affinity for ice.
What do you get if you mix a kelpie, a yeti, and a dragon?
“That thing from the skating rink,” I said. “The ice dragon.”
Twenty-four hours earlier, Skylar’s psychic senses had led us straight to the ice rink—and the woman who appeared to be calling the shots at Chimera had shown up once the furor had started to die down. At the time, my mind had been a jumbled mess, and I hadn’t been able to put the pieces together.
I hadn’t been able to think.
And since I’d shifted, I hadn’t spared more than a thought or two for the dragon, so it hadn’t occurred to me that Chimera might have their fingers in more than one pot—that the chupacabra might not be the only creature they were studying.
Altering.
Experimenting with.
I felt sick—so sick that I brought my right hand to my mouth, for fear I might throw up.
There were thirty-nine varieties of preternatural creatures. They’d been documented, studied, protected by law. Some lived in locations so remote I’d never actually seen one; some hunted humans right in my backyard. I’d probably never be able to kill them all—for every monster I slew, there would always be a new one to take its place—but there was still some comfort in knowing that there was a limit to just how bad things could get.
Thirty-nine species, some of them endangered.
Thirty-nine was doable.
“They’re making more.” The words came out in a whisper, and for a second, I thought I might actually start crying. I did what I did because I had to. I fought every night I could and hated myself the nights I couldn’t. It wouldn’t ever stop, and they were making more.
More monsters.
Stronger ones. Unnatural ones.
That was the word Zev had used to describe the dragon at the ice rink, and I could see it now. As horrible as the rest of the preternatural world was, there was some rhyme or reason to it. There were limits.
But this?
There could be a thousand of me, and it still might not be enough to fight them back if Chimera had one too many successes, if those successes got out into the population the way the dragon had. Without meaning to, I thought of all the beasties I’d fought in the past few weeks. The hellhounds were just hellhounds. The zombies—aside from working as a team—were just zombies. And the basilisk …