He waved a hand toward the appliance’s contents. “It’s in the same color family.”
She snorted. “I’ll take that as ano. Fine, then. I’ll wash down my burrito with water.”
After opening a few empty cabinets, she found two flutedwineglasses, claimed one, filled it at the kitchen sink, and set it on the island. Then she traversed the polished-concrete plain in search of her lost burrito. It remained where she’d abandoned it on the console table, sadly smushed but otherwise intact.
“You’re…” He sounded horrified. “You’re still going to eat that?”
Dramatically, she flattened her hand over her eyes and scanned her environs. “What? Am I missing the four-course meal your chef prepared for me?”
“You used it towhack a zombie.” His expression of stunned dismay transformed him into Bro Chad—whose mouth hung slightly open, always—for several entertaining moments. “Edie,no. Those creatures are founts of disease.”
“The foil didn’t rip, so it’s cool.” Returning to the kitchen, she reclaimed her wineglass, settled herself on a low-backed stool at the island, and unwrapped her burrito. Which was literally cool now, but fine. Needs must. “Do you have a plate? Or silverware? How about napkins?”
He was muttering to himself, elbows again propped on the island, his face in his hands.
“Did I offend you and your delicate sheepskin-thonged sensibilities? My apologies,dude,” she said sweetly. “Never mind. I can look for everything while you recover.”
“I’m offended atmyself.” Muffled by his palms, his voice sounded plaintive. “How is this even possible?”
Her brow furrowed. “How iswhateven possible?”
Apart from a tool to open his blood packs, his drawers proved empty, and she didn’t find any plates either. No matter. She’d simply eat with her hands. Luckily, his desolate pantry contained a stack of cloth napkins, several of which she filched.
His muttering continued uninterrupted.
She sat on the stool again and picked up her burrito. “Okay, then. If you won’t answer that question, here are four more: What’s your actual name, Chad? How do you know about those cameras still working inside the compound? Do all vampires have fancy underground estates like yours? And if you’re a vampire, why have I seen you in broad daylight?”
He raised his head, cynicism hardening his face once more.
“I mean…” After taking a bite, she shielded her mouth with one hand and kept talking. “You have a freakingtan. How does that work?”
He turned up his perfect nose. “There is such a thing as self-tanner, human.”
Sounded like a dodge to her. “Is that how you got your tan, then?”
When she didn’t wither under his suspicious scrutiny, he eventually sighed and relaxed a tad, his expression softening. Did that mean he was trusting her with the truth? Or had he simply come up with a plausible lie to sell her?
“My kind once avoided sunlight because darkness allowed us to feed from humans without drawing undue attention,” he told her.
She chewed her burrito and listened intently, hoping he’d be honest. Hoping he’d tell her something beyond what she’d already discovered in her years of research and close scrutiny of recently declassified documents.
For millennia, people had whispered about the existence of creatures with abilities beyond normal human understanding, but without evidence, those whispers had always been discounted as the wild-eyed speculation of the gullible and overdramatic.Until approximately thirty years ago, when a feral werewolf’s attack on a hiker was caught on crystal-clear video, which the government promptly confiscated and proclaimed fake.
Publicly, anyway. As the declassified documents confirmed, that was when secret preparations began for what high-level officials considered an inevitable war for human survival against the newly discovered werewolves.
In a compound just outside the nation’s capital, Project Hunter was born. The scientists recruited to the project worked around the clock for years and were encouraged to manipulate genetics, formulate proprietary serums, and do whatever they felt necessary—however untested, however ethically abhorrent—to create nonhuman supersoldiers that could track and kill werewolves or die in the attempt, with no need for further human bloodshed.
The lone werewolf the government managed to capture alive fought hard to survive the scientists’ experiments, but eventually bled to death when its—her—throat was slit. With that new knowledge of their enemy’s vulnerabilities, the trainers focused their efforts. The supersoldiers were taught to carry silver knives and slash at the necks of their victims, and the third iteration of the creatures seemed to be nearing optimal performance…until the scientists gave them a final, fatal serum and scrambled their DNA a final, fatal time.
Afterward, the supersoldiers could no longer wield tools, even a knife. They couldn’t swim, climb, or reason beyond a certain animal cunning. What they could do: rip out throats with their claws and teeth, tear off their victims’ heads, and eat their brains. Starting with the scientists and officials holding them captive, continuing with the previous generations of supersoldiers,and eventually moving on to the hapless world outside the compound.
Their hunger was endless, their strength and speed monstrous. They claimed countless victims. Not only common humans like herself, but the Enhanced too, those rare beneficiaries of a fickle genetic lottery, born with special abilities. Witches, warlocks, oracles, pyrokinetics, telepaths…no matter their talents, they all fell beneath the onslaught. As did an untold number of werewolves, vampires, trolls, and other Supernatural beings who could be killed by decapitation.
Common human opposition alone couldn’t stop the zombies. For their own survival, many—but not all—Supernaturals and Enhanced humans chose to battle the creatures as well, and they did so publicly and calculatedly. The revelation of their existence had become inevitable after the discovery of their werewolf brethren, as they explained to the president and her closest advisers, and they intended to control the circumstances under which they too were discovered. By emerging into public view as they fought for common humans as well as themselves, they hoped to foster trust and forestall any future eradication efforts by the government.
And vampires like Not-Chad evidently no longer had to feed in darkness. “So before the zombies, you avoided sunlight simply because you were trying to escape human notice?”
“Yes.” Tiredly, he rubbed a hand over his bristly jaw. “We had to be discreet. If our existence had become known before public opinion turned in our favor, common humans would have hunted and killed us all. But we needed human blood to survive, so we were careful to prevent witnesses to our feeding.”
