I’m going to find you, I thought fiercely, willing my newly acquired parasite to absorb that particular thought and leave the rest alone. I’m going to find you, and I’m going to fight you, and I’m going to win.

Maybe it heard me. Maybe it didn’t. I had no idea if these things were picky little memory eaters, or if my brain was an all-you-can-eat chupacabra buffet. I didn’t know how this was supposed to work or why. For most people, it probably didn’t even matter, because by the time they realized they’d been bitten, they were as good as dead.

Pushing that cheery thought out of my mind, I did a quick injury check on my organs and bones. The routine was familiar, one I paced my way through every other morning as I went from dispassionately watching my body heal to wondering if this time, I might have pushed things too far.

Head, arms, wrists, ribs.

Feet, ankles, knees, hips.

“No broken bones.” I said the words out loud, more to fill the silence and empty space before me than for the benefit of any audience. “Arm’s still slashed up, though, and I feel …”

Awful.

Sluggish.

Violated.

Aware.

Of all of the answers on the tip of my tongue, the last one was the truest—and the most disconcerting. I’d learned the hard way to pay attention to my surroundings, but I’d never once felt so aware of my own body, like I was wearing it for the first time.

Like it was wearing me.

“Do you feel like a knife-toting freak with a hero complex? Because, no offense, but evidence would suggest that you probably should.”

Despite myself, I jumped. There was enough going on inside my head that somehow, I’d neglected to realize that I wasn’t the only person lying on one of these criminally uncomfortable cots.

“God, I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up. I managed to talk the nurse out of calling your dad. And mine. If anyone asks, you always get light-headed at that time of the month, and you cut your arm when you passed out.”

For someone who’d been on a downward spiral toward death a half hour before, Bethany Davis looked remarkably calm and collected as she propped herself up on both elbows, her red hair streaming down her back like she’d lifted the pose from some kind of sunscreen ad.

I processed her words and responded. “You didn’t tell the nurse I’d been, I don’t know, bitten by a chupacabra?”

I wasn’t big on confrontation—at least not with humans—but Bethany must have known as well as I did that the first few hours after a person was bitten were an open window for treatment. Anyone who’d seen the travesty that was Three Days to Live could tell you that until the ouroboros appeared on a patient’s body, modern science could theoretically extract and contain the chupacabra. I wasn’t exactly the poster child for Fans of Modern Science, and the last thing I wanted was an overzealous doctor turning me into a case study in the New England Journal of Preternatural Medicine, but Bethany had no way of knowing any of that.

As far as she was concerned, I was just an ordinary girl. A knife-toting freak whose hero complex had just saved her life. The least she could have done was make an attempt at saving mine.

“Kali.” Bethany’s voice was quiet, her tone soft, and she caught her pink lips between pearly white teeth, like the motion would keep the words she was about to say inside her mouth, keep them from being true. “Sweetie, look at your stomach.”

I knew what I was going to see before I glanced down at the bit of midriff peeking out over the band of my dark-wash jeans. A member of the cheerleading squad had just called me “sweetie.”

This could not possibly be good.

“A snake. Eating its own tail.” I said the words out loud to make them matter less. The symbol that had appeared as black ink on the small of Bethany’s back was golden against the gentle bronze of my own skin. Even though I could only see the tip of the ouroboros, I could suddenly feel the full measure of the symbol, like someone was tracing a fingernail lightly around its edge.

“I would have told them.” Bethany met my gaze and held it. “As soon as I woke up, I would have told them to get you to a hospital or my dad’s lab ASAP if I’d thought it would do any good, but I saw the ouroboros, and I knew that it wouldn’t.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes from the mark, couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for the fact that it had appeared only moments after I’d been bitten, when the incubation period was supposed to last hours or days.

This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.

“So what’s the plan?” Bethany asked.

“The plan?”

She gave me a look. “Kali, please. No messiah complex in the world is going to make someone like you take on a death sentence for someone like me. You deeply suspected the chupacabra would take the trade—even though that’s supposed to be impossible—and you had some kind of fail-safe in place for when it did. So again, I ask, what’s the plan?”

I ignored her question and hoped she’d take the message. Whatever my “plan”—and I was using the term fairly loosely—entailed, having Bethany Davis along for the ride was not a part of it.

“Has anyone else seen this?” I asked, nodding toward my stomach and then tugging on the edge of my shirt to cover the incriminating mark as best I could.

“The nurse might have.” Bethany turned to sit cross-legged on her cot. “She didn’t say anything, but I’m a pretty good judge of people, and there was a distinctly sketchy air about her when she agreed not to call our parents. Either I’m really convincing, she’s the worst school nurse ever, or something is up. Worst-case scenario, she called the CDC.”

“The CDC,” I repeated, unable to imagine why the nurse would agree not to call our parents, but feel compelled to dial up the CDC.

“The Centers for Disease Control?” Bethany gave an impatient roll of her eyes. “To whom all contagious and preternatural illnesses must be reported? Ringing any bells?”

Great.

As if dealing with my father, the legions of hell, and a variety of environmental protection agencies on a regular basis wasn’t bad enough.

“Where is the nurse?” I asked. What I really meant was something more along the lines of if I try to leave, will she try to stop me?

“No idea,” Bethany replied. “She bandaged your arm, gave me some orange juice, and lit out of here like the two of us had sprouted horns.” She paused for a brief second. “I’m not going to sprout horns, am I?”

If the situation hadn’t been so incredibly dire, it might have been funny. Who knew how much blood I’d lost from the cut in my arm? It was shallow, but long, and now a bloodsucker was mining me from the inside. There were memories I didn’t want to lose—my mother’s face, my best friend from kindergarten, the first time I’d sprayed a will-o’-the-wisp with liquid nitrogen—and thoughts that I couldn’t risk it getting ahold of. I had bigger things to worry about than Bethany’s fear of growing horns.

“Bethany, you’ll be fine. Just forget this ever happened and go back to life as usual.”

That was the nicest way I could think of to say leave me alone. All things considered, it should have worked. I’d always excelled at being the kind of girl other people left behind.

But Bethany didn’t take the bait. “So, what? You save my life and in exchange, you expect me to abandon you to the geek squad at the CDC, so they can chop you into pieces and stuff you in neatly labeled test tubes? Or maybe I’m supposed to pretend like if we don’t find a way to get that thing out of you, you won’t die, or that I totally won’t care at all if you do?”

Actually, yes. She was the kind of person who referred to her boyfriend’s baby sister as “Little Miss Loose Legs.” Leaving and never giving me another thought was exactly what I expected a girl like Bethany to do.

“Seriously, Kali? I’m shallow, not a sociopath. There’s a difference, and I am not leaving you here alone, so suck it up and deal me in.”

My mouth dropped open in abject shock, and Bethany began speaking very slowly, as if I were a small child or a very dense jock.