Twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes for the things I hunted to hunt me.

“Go Krakens!”

I was 99 percent sure this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. That if there were any other people out there with my … skills, they weren’t that way one day and not the next, but ever since the puberty fairy had knocked me upside the head with her little wand, that was the way things had been for me.

Every other day, I was human. And every other day, I was … not.

“Kra-kens! Kra-kens! Kra-kens!”

I put my feet back down on the ground and made a halfhearted effort at clapping to the beat. I even mouthed the words to the cheers coming at me from all sides. But what I really needed wasn’t a dose of school spirit; it was a glass of water, an aspirin the size of my fist, and the answers to the history exam that I hadn’t studied for the night before.

“As long as I’m dreaming,” I muttered, my words lost to the cacophony of the gym, “I’d also like a pony, a convertible, and a couple of friends.”

“That’s a tall order.”

I’d known that there were people sitting next to me, but I couldn’t begin to imagine how one of them had heard me. I hadn’t even heard me.

“Would you settle for a piece of gum, an orange Tic Tac, and an introduction to the school slut?”

I tried to process the situation appropriately. The cheering had finally died down, the principal had begun dismissing us section by section to go back to class, and the girl sitting next to me—who looked all of twelve years old, but was probably closer to my age—was holding out a stick of Juicy Fruit, a lopsided grin on her pixie face.

“Gum?” she repeated.

It wasn’t a giant-sized aspirin, but it would do.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the gum and eyeing the box of orange Tic Tacs sticking out of her jeans pocket. Gum. Tic Tacs. Based on the power of inference and the fact that she looked like she was on the verge of introducing herself, I concluded that must make her …

“Skylar Hayden,” the girl said, sticking out her hand. “School slut.”

I shook her hand and tried to process. “The school …”

“Slut,” Skylar chirped, the picture of perky. “Even says so, right across the front of my locker. The janitors have tried to paint over it, but the locker elves are a persistent bunch, so there it stays.”

“That’s awful,” I said, trying to imagine myself coming face-to-face with that word scrawled across my locker each morning.

Skylar blew a wisp of white-blonde hair out of her face. “It could be worse. I mean, I could have actually had to work for the title! Seriously, some of the girls on the student council have been angling for sensual supremacy for years, and all I had to do was let Justin Thomas kiss my neck for five seconds—which, quite frankly, could have been used as a medical substitute for bloodletting in medieval times. I’m talking total leech.”

It took Skylar four, maybe five seconds to rattle off this entire statement and another two to catch her breath before she plowed on. “Anyway, Justin Thomas is Kelly Masterson’s boyfriend, and she’s the total alpha around here—captain of the cheerleading squad, student council vice president, and so on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera—so I got to jump straight to the front of the class. It’s unfair, really. A lot of people have worked really hard for the title to lose it to an upstart little dark horse like me, but c’est la vie.”

I knew from the content of Skylar’s speech that it must have been served with a hefty dose of sarcasm, but there wasn’t so much as a hint of attitude in her tone. She did earnest and perky way too well, and the combined effect of her words and her manner took me so off guard that I actually swallowed my gum.

“You sure you don’t want a Tic Tac?” Skylar asked.

Dazed and confused didn’t even begin to cover my current state of mind, so I just held out a hand and allowed her to pour a couple of orange Tic Tacs into it. I popped one into my mouth. “Thanks.”

“Not a problem,” she said, and then she grinned again, more pixie than not. “So what’s your deal? Rumor has it you’re a princess incognito.”

I swallowed my Tic Tac. At this rate, I could only hope that Skylar knew the Heimlich maneuver, because sooner or later, I was going to need it.

“Rumor has it I’m a princess?” I repeated.

“Daughter of a foreign dignitary and a Hollywood Grace Kelly type,” Skylar confirmed. “But I might have just made that up. You’re not really on the Heritage High rumor radar yet—but don’t worry. If you spend a few more minutes talking to me, you will be.”

For the first time, her blue eyes took on a hint of something that wasn’t pep: wariness, maybe, or an expectation that I’d take this opportunity to run far, far away and never look back. But a moment later, whatever glimmer I’d seen was gone, replaced with a steely, uncompromising optimism that must have grated on the girls trying their hardest to freeze her out.

For less than a second, I considered my options: make a friend and become a social pariah, or walk away and spend my life in comfortable obscurity.

No contest.

“I’m Kali,” I said, smiling for the first time in what felt like years. “I transferred to Heritage a few weeks ago. When I’m not failing history tests, I spend my time as an insurgent superhero who lives in fear of being hunted down by monsters or bureaucrats.”

Skylar didn’t balk for so much as a second. “Insurgent superhero! I love it. And your delivery was even better than mine—I could totally almost believe you.”

Yeah. Totally.

Time for a subject change.

“So are the girls on the cheerleading squad really out to get you?” I asked, nodding toward the gym floor as our row began to trickle out of the bleachers.

Skylar shrugged. “They’ve been at it for about six months. I haven’t cracked yet. It’s driving them nuts.”

I glanced at the cheerleaders out of the corner of my eye. Down to a one, they were glaring at the girl next to me. Completely unbothered by their death stares, Skylar stood up on her tiptoes and waved at them like she was greeting her very bestest friends. The entire squad immediately averted their gazes. Apparently, it was a social no-no to acknowledge the wave of someone you’d thoroughly shunned.

“Don’t you ever just get sick of it?” I asked, shivering at the enmity coming our way. Even without my powers, I would gladly have faced down hellspawn over high school mean girls any day.

“Get sick of watching them scrambling, trying to figure out why I’m not sobbing in a puddle in the girls’ room?” Skylar asked, sounding for all the world like some kind of Zen master. “Not really. I’ve got five older brothers. Having the tampons stolen out of my gym locker on a regular basis kind of pales next to the power of the atomic noogie.”

“They steal your tampons?” I asked incredulously, when really what I was thinking was more along the lines of define “atomic noogie.”

“It’s a classic mean-girl tactic,” Skylar explained, and I had to remind myself that she was talking about the tampon-stealing, not the noogie. “Wearing white is like waving a cape in front of a bull.”

“Good to know.”

Part of me was still waiting to wake up and find out that this whole interaction had been one incredibly offbeat dream. It probably said something about my life that I didn’t doubt for a second that I’d killed three hellhounds the night before, but couldn’t quite believe that after three very long weeks, someone at this school was actually talking to me. Most girls my age spent no more time thinking about preternatural beasties than they did serial killers or the North American grizzly. Yes, they were out there, and no, you wouldn’t want to run into one in a dark alleyway, but that was about as far as it went.

Most girls my age had friends.

“So when’s your history test?” Skylar changed the subject so fast that I almost didn’t notice that we’d made it out of the gym. “The one you’re going to fail?”

“Fifth period,” I replied, trying not to be melodramatic about it. Failing a test wasn’t the end of the world. This wasn’t the first time, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but I vastly preferred to reside firmly in B and C territory—not at the front of the pack and not at the rear.