Page 5 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

Five. I was afraid for my life.

I stared at the thumb curling around my fist. This last part hadn’t been in our original plan.

The loud click warned of a door swinging open. Pale as a ghost, Alora floated out of the room while the doctor stretched her bright pink lips wide at me. My insides recoiled, and a gag tickled the back of my throat.

She held the door for me to pass. “Come on in, Kali.”

Unwillingly, I did.

“Why don’t you lie down? I’ll be with you shortly.”

Her command crawled up my arms in goosebumps, the tiny hairs bristling from the foreboding sense that my life was about to change.

I climbed onto what resembled a leather chair with its long legs straightened all the way, kind of like a bed. No, a table. A table where they prodded you, wanting to find out if you could have children or not.

The screeching of the door grated on my ears as the doctor returned. When her gloved fingers landed on me and latex pinched my hair, I shut my eyes and prayed. For the first time in my life, I prayed. To anyone who would listen, human, demon, or god. I didn’t care. I pleaded for my life, begged for my freedom, swore to do anything they wished for if they’d take me away from here.

I imagined a night sky, each star flickering with a color in response to my prayers. Red, a demon, its bared teeth dripping blood. Silver, a god with a crown, ignoring my pleas. Blue, a human drowning in the night’s ocean between the other two.

Please, please,please.

But the stars ceased their shimmering, and the harsh light overhead seared my eyelids. The gods had turned away from me. No one was coming to save me. The chill emanating from the leather seat under me slithered inside me, into my veins, and burrowed so deep it froze my bones into hard icicles.

Fine. If the gods wouldn’t do anything, I’d do it myself. I’d become one. A god. And I’d strike their ranks for ignoring me. I wasn’t the forgiving type.

“We’re all done.” A wrong pink smile framed Lamia’s statement.

That was what it was. Wrong.

A thump ricocheted from the walls, and our heads snapped toward the door. I abruptly sat up, ready to bolt. It sounded like a body had slumped to the ground.

But then it hit me.

Alora was probably completing her part of our plan.

“Wait right here,” she ordered, then hurried into the hallway.

I jumped down and grabbed the folders she’d left spread wide open on the pristine table. Flipping the pages, I perused the information—date of birth, location, heritage, genetics. Not a mention of the samples.

No, no, no.

A tablet device glinted in the sunlight, and I grabbed it, praying it would be unlocked. This time, the gods listened. Maybe my threat had worked.

Here, here was the sample number. The numbers blurred, and I blinked to dissipate the mist clouding my vision.

Okay, I could do this. I could memorize it.

I recounted the sample’s number five, ten, fifteen, twenty times, etching it into my brain for years to come.

The footsteps.

They were back.

Dropping the tablet back on the table, I climbed back onto that chair-table-thing right as the door opened. My heart raced so fast each beat rumbled like thunder rolling over to you from miles away during a storm.

“Your friend seems to have fainted. But she’s okay now,” she said with a pout, as if someone had slapped that wrongness off them.

I bared my teeth in the same manner as she’d done to me before, and asked in my sweetest voice, “You said we were done?”