Toxic (Denazen #2)(5)

I crossed the street and hesitated at the corner. Where the hell was I going to go?

The hotel—but that was probably the first place Kale would look. I couldn’t see him right now. The look of guilt in his eyes had been like a steel knife jammed into my windpipe.

I could wander around for a while—but that seemed like a bad idea. My name was at the top of Dad’s bag-and-tag list. I’d never made things easy on him. No reason to start now.

It was the last official night of summer. School started up again in the morning and that meant the party scene would be hopping. There would be at least three major raves—one at Curd’s, since his parents were in Paris again, one in the woods by Putnam Mountain, and one in the fields behind Brandt’s old place.

Normally any one of those would have suited me, but being around people didn’t seem like the best bet at that moment. I wanted to be by myself.

So where did I end up? The one place I’d always been alone.

Home.

The key was still duct taped to the underside of the loose siding panel at the corner of the house. I was betting the only reason it survived there was because Dad never knew about it. I’d hidden it last year during my lose everything phase. Somewhere in Parkview, there were four house keys just waiting to be found. Well, three. One ended up at the bottom of Milford Lake after a tire swing stunt went horribly wrong.

The door opened with ease—for once it didn’t stick—and I stepped inside. Part of me wondered why it’d taken so long to come back here, while another part wanted to back away and never return. So much had happened, but the truth was, no matter how bad things got between me and Dad, this was—or had been—home. A part of me missed it.

Memories were memories regardless of the good or bad.

I closed the door, frowning. The place had been completely cleaned out. The big leather couch Dad was always telling me to get my feet off, the fluffy beige armchair I’d spilled rum punch on the night I threw my first party—even the carpet in the hallway had been pulled up. All that remained were the dirty wooden tack strips around the edges of the room and some dust.

The air smelled funky. Not like mold, really, but stale. Like it’d been closed up for months—which it probably had. With me out of the picture, Dad had no reason to keep up the charade. His domestic life had been nothing but bullshit from the beginning. He and Mom had never been married. Hell, I was nothing more than an experiment. Part of the new generation of Denazen’s Supremacy project. An operation with the sole purpose of producing stronger, more gifted flunkies for Denazen to pull the puppet strings on.

I’d mimicked—changed one thing into another—my first thing at the age of seven. Even then, I knew I was different. Not right. At least by society’s standards. So I kept it hidden.

As it turned out, that’d been a good plan. A few months ago, on top of finding out Dad was an assassin monger who used people like me, Sixes—called that due to an abnormality in our sixth chromosome—to do some really bad shit, I’d also learned he’d dosed my mom with some funky chemical while she was pregnant to enhance my gift. I wasn’t the only one, either. Somewhere out there, there were a handful of kids my age on the verge of turning eighteen—and possibly going nutzo—with über powers.

That chemical they used? Yeah. It had some seriously bad side effects.

I shook off a chill and rounded the corner. One at a time, up the stairs to my old room. Even though I knew Dad and his endless dickhead potential, I still hoped some of my things had been left behind. A shirt or book—hell, even a shoe. Anything that had been mine.

Should’ve known better.

All my memories, all the sentimental things I’d collected and saved over the years, gone. There wasn’t a hanger left in the closet or a dust bunny hiding in the corner. The antique dresser Brandt helped me drag home from a garage sale several years ago, the headboard Alex and I carved our names into, even the Powerman 5000 bumper stickers I’d plastered to the wall just to piss Dad off—all gone.

It was like my entire life had been erased.

“This blows camel ass.” I kicked the corner of the door. It bounced away and slammed against the wall with an echoing thud.

The whole thing shouldn’t have bothered me. It was just stuff, after all, but it made my stomach turn and caused a sick lump to rise in my throat. It’d been my stuff. Pieces of my life. I let out a hair-curling scream. “Bastard!”

I might have started smashing something—something being the window, since that’s all there was—but a noise downstairs stopped me.

Not a loud crash or a thundering boom, but something small. The tiniest creak. Like someone trying to be sneaky and channeling the fail whale. I’d done enough sneaking in this house over the years to know all its groans and whines by heart. This particular one came from the kitchen door.

Someone else was in the house.

For a second, I wondered if maybe Kiernan had followed me, after all. But I dismissed that pretty fast. She would have called out. No way would she be skulking in the dark. Three weeks ago she’d surprised me from behind, and I’d given her a fat lip. Lesson learned.

Flattening myself against the wall, I peered around the corner and into the hallway to listen. Nothing. I started to relax and chalk it all up to paranoia when, on the landing below, two figures drifted past the stairs, casting distorted shadows against the wall.