The second I heard the words tracking system, my eyes went to my stomach and then to the bloody tips of my fingers.

What if I hadn’t been trying to scratch through the ouroboros? What if I’d been trying to gouge out the tracker?

“I don’t know what’s going on, Kali, but once my dad gets that tracking system up and running, they’ll be able to pinpoint your location. Unless you want them to know your name, too, you probably shouldn’t be at home when that happens.”

My brain finally kicked into high gear. Bethany was right—the last thing I wanted was for the men in suits to have my home address, especially since there was a decent chance that, if they were working with Bethany’s dad, they knew who my dad was, too. I could just imagine his reaction to being asked to bring me into the lab for testing.

In fact, the whole scenario—being tracked down, caught, thrown in a tiny room with bright lights, loud noises, white coats, needles … it was all too easy to imagine. I couldn’t let myself go there. I had to move.

Rolling out of bed, I stripped off my blood-soaked shirt and replaced it with a new one. Since I hadn’t bothered to change into pajamas the night before, I didn’t need to search for my jeans. Looping my hair into a loose ponytail, I glanced back over my shoulder at Bethany, half expecting her to have some kind of comment on my personal hygiene.

“Ready?” she asked me, not bothering to editorialize on my sense of fashion—or lack thereof. I nodded, and a second later, the two of us were creeping down the stairs and out the front door, my father fast asleep in his room and none the wiser.

The BMW was parked down the street, and without a word, the two of us made our way toward it. I knew this was a bad idea, knew that I should ditch Bethany before it was too late, but she had a car, and I didn’t want to do this alone.

“Where are we going?” Bethany turned the key in the ignition, and the car purred to life.

“As far away as we can get.” I hadn’t thought through this plan—in fact, I didn’t have a plan, but putting distance between the tracking device inside of me and any tie to my real life was the only option that made sense.

Fifty-nine minutes and thirteen seconds.

This close to the shift, I didn’t even need to look at my watch. I just knew. I had less than an hour until my blood turned toxic, which meant that I had less than an hour to evade capture, ditch Bethany, and hole up somewhere the real world wouldn’t dare to tread.

“Hit the highway.”

Bethany didn’t have to be told twice. The two of us fell into a loaded silence, and I couldn’t help but think how different we were. I was perpetually on the outside, looking in, and she was on the inside, oblivious to the fact that there was anything else out there at all.

And yet.

She was driving my getaway car, and I couldn’t help thinking that if things got ugly, maybe I could distract our pursuers long enough for her to disappear.

“Thanks,” I said, and the word hung awkwardly in the air, like humidity, thick enough to drown us both.

“You’re the one who saved my life,” Bethany replied. The words were closer to a complaint than to gratitude—not because she’d wanted to die, but because she wasn’t the kind of person who liked being indebted to anyone else.

Some people were born for the spotlight, and some of us lived on the fringe. I was beginning to suspect that you could keep people at an arm’s length regardless.

“We’re not friends,” I told Bethany, but the words came out more like a question.

“No,” she agreed. “We’re not.”

My gaze flickered over to her speedometer, and my eyebrows skyrocketed. Bethany drove the way I hunted: like she was invincible, like death was an inevitability and a friend.

“Do you really think your dad is working with these people?”

Bethany shrugged and tapped her fingernail impatiently against the steering wheel, like going ninety miles an hour wasn’t nearly fast enough. “He was sitting in his office discussing specimen retrieval, Kali. Whatever’s going on, my father is in it up to his eyeballs.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

Bethany spared a glance for me out of the corner of her eye, then switched her gaze back to the open road. “I’m not. My dad is a brilliant academic, Kali, but brilliant academics don’t suddenly up and move into multimillion-dollar houses and buy their daughters BMWs. He took the position here because the department didn’t mind him dabbling in the private sector. I’m guessing the goons in the suits are Private and Sector.”

“And the woman?” I found myself asking.

“As far as I can tell,” Bethany said, “she’s calling the shots.”

Click. Click. Click.

I hadn’t ever gotten a good enough look at the woman in question to conjure up the image of her face in my mind, but I could still hear the clicking of heels against pavement.

My stomach clenched.

I’d spent enough time around academics to know that there was more money in business than there ever would be in a university setting—but that didn’t make the people who funded that kind of research evil. Pharmaceutical companies had engineered countless medical advances; most new technology wasn’t developed by university professors. Still, I had to wonder: what kind of money was there in preternatural studies?

Want—use—now—us.

I breathed the shadow in. I breathed it out, and I ignored the voice in my head.

Half an hour. Just half an hour, and this would all be over. The chupacabra would die, and with any luck, the tracking device would go out with it. Bethany and I could go back to not knowing each other, and whatever her father was doing in the private sector could stay there.

“You’re not going to tell me your plan, are you?” More tapping of Bethany’s fingertip against the steering wheel, and another glance cast at me out of the corner of her eye.

“You don’t want to know.” That seemed to be a safe response. “We’re not friends. I don’t trust you, and you don’t like me, but I’m not lying when I say that I’m going to be okay. I’m not being stupid or optimistic or self-sacrificing. If you dropped me off on the side of the road right now, by the time I hitched my way home, I’d be fine.”

I half expected Bethany to stop the car and let me out, but she didn’t. Instead, her green eyes narrowed. The muscles in my throat tightened, and the bottom fell out of my stomach.

I knew better than to let people in. I knew better than to let them see even a fraction of what I was underneath this shell. So why had I just told Bethany that I could do the impossible? Chupacabra possession was always fatal once the ouroboros appeared. Always. My confidence in being able to cure myself had to strike her as either miraculous or bizarre.

“You’re right,” Bethany said, switching lanes and pressing down on the accelerator. “I don’t want to know.”

You also don’t want to be here, I thought dully. You don’t want to know what you know about your father, and you don’t want to be tangled up in this mess with me.

I realized then that even once I was cured, this wouldn’t be over for Bethany. She’d still have to go to bed at night knowing that her father was involved in something that could have killed me, something that could have killed her. She’d have to get in her BMW every single day and wonder where the money had come from.

Unable to meet her eyes, I busied my hands by reaching into my front pocket and pulling out the piece of paper Skylar had given me the day before. Catching a glimpse of it, Bethany slammed on the brakes. If I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt, I would have gone straight through the windshield. As it was, I was pretty sure I’d busted an ovary or two from the impact with the seat belt itself.

“Where did you get that?” Bethany’s eyes focused on the paper in my hand with an intensity that made me eye it like it might burst into flames at any moment.

“Skylar gave it to me.”

Bethany made an involuntary face the second I said Skylar’s name. “And what, exactly, did Miss Little Bit Psychic say when she gave it to you?” Bethany eased her foot off the brakes and began driving again, but this time, she kept to the speed limit—a surefire sign that her attention was on me and not the road.