Kovit closed his eyes, as though drawing strength, then opened them and whispered, “I don’t think I’ll be that lucky this time.”
Nita’s heart sank, pulled down by oozing strands of dread. “What does it say?”
“He says . . .” Kovit swallowed, eyes flicking over the screen. His voice was small and cracked. “He says if I don’t come back to him, he’ll release my photo and evidence that I’m a zannie to the public.”
Nita stared, horror widening her eyes and her heart popping like an overfull balloon.
No.
When Nita was seven, a woman in Los Angeles had been accused of being a zannie. The Dangerous Unnaturals List was in its infancy, and this was the first test of it. It had been in the media enough, and everyone knew there were no consequences to killing a zannie. So they went zannie hunting.
Problem was: the woman wasn’t a zannie.
A jealous ex-boyfriend had posted the information online and Photoshopped the official INHUP notification on it. Then he’d spread it on every message board and forum he could find, and word spread, so fast no one remembered the source. The local news reported like it was fact, the city went into a furor, trying to find this zannie.
And when they found her, they slaughtered her.
Brutally.
Similar stories had cropped up of other people in other cities. After a while, people became more aware of the need to verify the facts with INHUP. But once things were verified, it was still an all-out massacre.
It was bad enough Nita needed to hide her face. Most people outside of the market wouldn’t murder her on sight.
They would murder Kovit.
She could imagine the mob, a swarming mass of people, gunning down Kovit. In her mind’s eye, Mirella led the crowd, followed by a sea of faceless victims she knew were littered through his past. Kovit’s body would jerk when the bullets hit him, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. He’d fall to his knees, then down to the ground, the side of his face pressed into the pavement, blood trickling down the corner of his mouth. His bright eyes would go dim, his twisted, creepy smile slacken into emptiness.
No.
“Henry can claim anything he wants.” Nita’s voice was hard. “But it takes pretty damn good evidence for INHUP to convict someone as a zannie and put them on the watch list. And people are hyperaware of hoaxes these days.”
Kovit’s voice was thick. “He says he’s attached a piece of the evidence he’d leak.”
Nita’s heart sank. Attached? If the evidence was electronic, it would be hard to destroy. And once it was online, there was no escape.
That was something Nita knew well.
Kovit clicked on the attached file, and Nita leaned over his shoulder.
A man, somewhere in his forties, was strapped to a table in the middle of a white room. The stainless steel table reminded Nita of her dissection room. There was even a tray of dissection tools on a cart nearby.
The difference was this man was very much alive.
He was gagged, and his terrified eyes swung toward the camera, then away, searching, begging. Nita’s heart sped up, suspecting where this was going, but needing to see, to know, to confirm.
Kovit walked in.
He was young. Nita would have put him at ten or eleven. Before his growth spurt, his face still rounded with baby fat, eyes large and shining.
He smiled, wide and creepy, eyes laughing silently and his mouth curled into something almost inhuman.
His smile said, “I’m going to have fun. But you’re not.”
The video stopped, frozen with younger Kovit midstride. Nita blinked, thinking that was the end, until she saw Kovit’s thumb on the Pause button at the bottom of the screen.
Kovit shook beside her, his eyes as wide and frightened as the man he’d tortured.
Nita reached over to press the Play button, but he caught her hand.
“Don’t,” he whispered.
She licked her lips. “We need to know if it—”
“It’ll show what it needs to.”
“You remember?”
“That one? Not really. But others. It will have evidence.”
Nita licked her lips. “Maybe that you hurt him, but that you’re a zannie?”
“Does it matter? I’m pretty sure they’d put a wanted ad out for a mafia torturer, even if I weren’t a zannie.”
True, that.
Kovit’s voice was small. “If he outs me, I’ll have to go back anyway. I’ll need his help to hide and stay under the radar. I’d be doomed on my own.”
It was smart. It was the kind of thing her mother would do.
Nita cleared her throat. “Why did you stop the video?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” He turned to her, thick eyebrows pulled together. “I didn’t want you to see.”
Nita returned his gaze, unblinking. “Are you ashamed?”
“Not at all.” A hint of a smile crept back into his face.
“I know what you are.”
“I know.” He looked away. “But there’s a difference between knowing and seeing.”
Nita swallowed, remembering Mirella’s shrieks of agony echoing down the hallway, and Kovit’s mad laughter as he did . . . things.
Things she didn’t want to think about.
“If you see this,” he whispered softly, “you’ll run away. You’ll leave and never look back.”
She stared back at him, choking on her own breath.
He was right.
If she saw, she would run.
In all those stupid movies she’d watched as a kid, couples shared every dark secret, friends promised nothing hidden between them. They understood. They exposed each other, stripped each other bare, and loved even the ugly.
Nita was not those people.
If she saw this ugly, she would run. She would run far, and she would run fast, and she wouldn’t look back.
She didn’t want to know the darkest part of Kovit’s soul. Didn’t want to strip him of his secrets. His secrets were his to share or not. And sometimes people didn’t need to know every part of each other’s lives intimately.
Nita certainly didn’t want to talk about her dissection fetish with him. He knew about it, but she would never ever ask him to watch her take someone apart. Not because she was ashamed, but because she knew there were parts of what she did that went beyond the normal and verged on the deeply disturbing.
She’d seen the way he looked at her when she’d cut off Reyes’ thumb. The unease in his gaze, the crease between his brow.
But were they truly partners if they weren’t completely open? It wasn’t like he was lying to her. She understood what happened in that video without watching it.
She didn’t know.
But she didn’t want to lose him. And if she watched that video, she would.
Nita took her hand from the phone. “I understand. I won’t watch it.”
His shoulders slumped in relief, and he tipped his head up to the ceiling, as if thanking God. His voice was soft and scared. “I thought you were going to push.”
Nita shook her head. “It’s your past to share or hide. I respect you too much to push.”
He nodded, lips pressed together tightly, eyes closed, and released a huge breath followed by a short laugh. Then he turned a tired grin on her.
She returned it, and rose. “We’ve had a long day. We’ll make a plan tomorrow morning, after we’ve had some rest.”
He saluted. “Aye-aye, Captain.”
She rolled her eyes and went to brush her teeth.
* * *
Nita dreamed of the market.
Mirella was screaming.
In the past, Nita had been trapped in the cage when Kovit tortured the other girl. But in her dream, the cage was still shattered from when she’d escaped. And Mirella’s shrieks sounded like the skin of her throat had torn and each scream was made of blood. They gurgled.
Nita stood in front of the workroom door. Mirella and Kovit were behind it. If she opened it,
she’d know everything. There’d be no going back.
She turned away from the door.
The scene changed, and suddenly Nita was in her apartment in Lima, in the dissection room. A cage was bolted to the floor, and Fabricio stared out at her, the side of his face bloody from where his ear had been ripped off.
“Why didn’t you come?” he asked.
“You were right outside the door.” Mirella chimed in.
Nita turned around, to where Mirella had spoken. The door to the workroom was open now, and the small girl lay on the metal dissection table, gray skin dripping with blood.
And standing over her was Nita’s mother.
Who smiled.
Nita woke up with a start, body spasming as she jerked out of the bed, gasping for air. Her heart slammed in her chest, and her whole body shook.
Kovit rolled over in his sleep, his dark hair falling over his face. His expression was peaceful as he slept, lips turning up softly. He didn’t look creepy at all, just human, like any other sleeping boy.
Nita swallowed, throat dry, and stumbled into the bathroom. She splashed cold water on her face.
She had spent her whole life looking away from her mother’s crimes. If I didn’t see it, I couldn’t have stopped it. She’d ignored her mother, and by ignoring, she’d enabled who knew what kind of hideousness.
She’d refused to face any of the truths until she was forced. Until there was a boy chained in her room and her mother was standing over him hacking his ear off.
How was ignoring what Kovit did any different from with her mother? Wasn’t she just enabling him by pretending not to see his crimes?
For the first time, she let herself consider: was she just replacing one monster with another?
Twenty-Nine
NITA COULDN’T FALL BACK ASLEEP, and she didn’t want to wake Kovit, so she crept downstairs. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do in an empty pawnshop at night, but she knew she wasn’t going back to sleep yet. She didn’t want to have to lie down next to Kovit, hear his easy, peaceful breaths, untroubled by the things he’d done. She didn’t want to feel the heat of his body creeping over in the space between them on the bed.
Right now, she couldn’t be that close to him.
The light was still on when she went downstairs, and she opened the stairwell door and found Diana, cross-legged in one of the plush Victorian-style chairs, typing on her computer.
She looked up when Nita came in. “Oh, hey.”
“Hey.” Nita blinked at her. “It’s the middle of the night. What are you still doing here?”
Diana sighed. She’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail and taken out her mouthpiece, so Nita got a glimpse of her real teeth. They were small and sharp, and reminded her of cat’s teeth, but without the fangs. They didn’t look particularly dangerous, because they were so small, but they also didn’t look even the slightest bit human.
“I was working on decrypting the info from the phone you gave me.” Diana looked up, saw Nita staring at her mouth, and quickly shoved her fake teeth back in. There was a click as they hooked around her molars and the real teeth were gone, covered by a retainer.
Nita pretended she hadn’t noticed the teeth. “Any luck?”
She sighed. “No. Nothing.”
Diana rose and cracked her back. She put her computer down and looked outside. “I hadn’t realized how late it was. What time is it?”
Nita shrugged. “Around three, I think.”
Diana groaned and ran a hand through her hair. “Well, there goes my sleep schedule.”
Nita sat down on a dining chair across from her, careful not to knock over a hideous ceramic monkey in the process. “Did you have anything to wake up for tomorrow?”
“Not really. I’m doing some online courses in programming to get my diploma. Adair got me a new identity here, and I’m hoping I can have everything in place to go to college next year.”
Nita felt a spike of envy. She wanted to go to college next year. Even this year. Any year, really.
It was nice in a strange way, though, hearing her own goals echoed back at herself. It made her warm a little to Diana.
“You and Adair seem close,” Nita commented.
Diana looked away. “Who the hell knows with him. One minute he’s getting me a fake ID, the next he’s joking about murdering me in the basement.”
“But he listens to you.”
“Sometimes.” She sighed and looked away, changing the subject. “What are your plans for tomorrow?”
Nita stretched. “I’m going to get rid of the person who sold me to the black market.”
Diana shifted uncomfortably. “And by ‘get rid of,’ I assume you mean murder.”
“Obviously.”
“You know, Nita, murder doesn’t solve every problem.”
“But it will solve this one.”
“Just like it solved your problems earlier today?” Diana’s voice was hard. “That just got the police on your tail too.”
True enough.
“This is different. Today was”—Nita swallowed, forcing herself to admit the words aloud, to acknowledge she was smart enough to know when she’d screwed up—“a mistake. I miscalculated.”
Diana’s eyebrows shot up.
“This is personal,” Nita continued, before Diana could respond. “I saved his life, and he repaid me by selling mine.” She crossed her arms. “He’s already sold my location to the black market twice. If I don’t get rid of him now, there’s no telling what he’ll do next.”
Diana wrapped her arms around herself. She was silent for a long time, and her large eyes were lost in thought.
Finally, she brushed a stray hair from her face, and still not looking at Nita, she whispered, “You know, after I ran away from my foster family, I decided to kill my family’s murderer.”
Nita nodded. This seemed like a logical thing to do. Nita would have done the same in Diana’s shoes.
Then she frowned. “Wasn’t he in jail?”
“No. He was a minor when he committed the crime, and the courts were so divided on the whole ghouls-are-evil-and-eat-people issue, that he ended up with a really short sentence.” Diana’s smile was bitter. “I’m sure it didn’t help that we were brown and he was white. He was out in a couple of years.”
Nita scowled, wondering if her father’s murderer had been human, he would have gotten a shorter sentence because her father was brown. The thought made her blood boil.
“That’s a shit system,” Nita finally said, the words pale and weak compared to her feelings.
“It is. I was unhappy with the ruling, to say the least.” Diana sighed, folding and refolding her hands in her lap. “So I went after him myself. I was fifteen, homeless, and determined to make him pay.”
Diana’s eyes went distant, and her lips turned down. “It wasn’t easy, tracking him down. It took a while. But I did it. He was living in Boston, working in a coffee shop, making lattes ten hours a day, and doing community college in the evening.”
Diana swallowed. “I didn’t want to get caught, so I set everything up with the utmost care. I followed him every day to learn his schedule and figure out when he was alone. I eavesdropped when he ordered food at restaurants to see if he had allergies. I wanted to kill him without a trace.
“But the more I followed him, the more I got to know him. He did community service hours picking up garbage from the park, which I’m pretty sure was part of his parole. Sometimes he’d give directions to lost tourists when he saw them. He lived in a homeless shelter, but never got into fights.”
She sighed. “I’d been watching him for nearly a month when one of those UEA members—you know, the hate group?”
“I know them.”
The Unnatural Extermination Agenda. Fanatics who believed all unnaturals were evil and ought to be murdered. They were a huge group, often censored and arrested, but the more attention they got, the more they seemed to grow. There had been a Post article condemning t
hem last month after they burned a family’s house down to drive them out of town, and Nita swore that instead of making the UEA more hated, it had made them more popular.
This was why Nita hated people. They condemned things publicly then went and supported them in private. She didn’t trust them. People said that there were more good people than bad, but Nita actually thought there were more bad people than good—because all the people quietly doing nothing ended up supporting the bad people anyway.
Like Nita supported her mother with her silence. And Kovit.
She squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn’t think of this right now.
“Nita?”
“Sorry.” Nita cleared her throat, trying to purge her thoughts from her head. “You were stalking your family’s murderer. And the UEA came by?”
“Yeah. So, he was walking down the street, and a member of the UEA gave him one of their pamphlets. You know the ones telling people ‘unnaturals are a conspiracy of the devil’ or whatever?”
“Yep.” She saw them all over the streets in some cities. Hate pamphlets littered across the sidewalks like evil paving stones.
Diana swallowed. “He took it.”
Nita tilted her head to the side. “I mean, he did kill a family of ghouls. The UEA sounds up his alley.”
Diana shook her head. “But he looked at it a block away, just stared at it for a long while.” She paused for a fraction of a second. “Then he crumpled it up and threw it into the trash.”
Diana let down her ponytail, so her hair swirled around her face. “I didn’t know if he threw it out because it was part of his parole conditions or because it was a particularly crazy flyer. But my first thought wasn’t any of that, it was maybe he regrets it.” She blinked rapidly, like she was trying to dust tears from her eyes. “Maybe he regrets what he’s done.”
Diana looked away, over the shadowy outlines of the pawnshop, into some place in the past. “And that’s when I knew I couldn’t kill him.”
Nita shifted. “Why not?”
“Because I was making up excuses for him. I wanted him to realize he’d made a mistake. I wanted him to not be bad. And the minute I realized I was making excuses, I knew I could never kill him. I’d had a month, and I hadn’t done it. It just wasn’t in me. His death wouldn’t bring back my family. And I didn’t think he’d be killing anyone else—I’d seen enough to be reasonably sure of that.”
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