She glanced guiltily at me and then looked back at Bethany. “How old do you think he is?” Bethany asked, tilting her head to the side. “Like, twenty?” I hadn’t noticed Zev’s age in the picture, but I doubted he was twenty. He’d been in Chimera’s captivity for two years, and he talked about that length of time like it was nothing. I’m older than I look, Zev said helpfully. We don’t age the way humans do. Not once we’ve taken on a Nibbler. I didn’t ask him to clarify, because I was still staring at the space on the screen where that one word had been a moment before. Vampirus. I lived in a world where the mythological was real. We all did—and had for a very long time. The old stories about supernatural creatures were the kind of thing we saw as funny or quaint or just downright ridiculous—the equivalent of thinking that putting a leech on someone could rid them of the flu. But even taking into account everything we knew about the preternatural world, there were still some things that fell outside the realm of possibility, things that were nothing more than the product of overactive imaginations.
