Chapters (52)
- Copyright
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Acknowledgments
- Read More from the Market of Monsters Series
- More Books from HMH Teen
- About the Author
- Connect with HMH on Social Media
He sighed softly, his face still eerily still. “Fine. I first met my girlfriend in the 1960s. This was before INHUP, before anything even like that existed. She was a monster hunter for hire, and she was damn good at it.”
Nita nodded. This was fitting perfectly with her mother’s story. Nita would have to question which version was right when they started to diverge, but the things they had in common, she thought it was safe to take as truth.
“What was her name?” Nita asked.
“Nadya.” He sighed softly. “But I suppose you’d know her as Nadezhda Novikova. The founder of INHUP.”
Twenty-Five
INHUP’S FOUNDER.
Nita tried to wrap her head around it. Not just that INHUP’s founder had been having a thing with a vampire for forty years and no one knew—no, actually, it wasn’t possible no one knew. How could INHUP not know?—but also the idea that Nita’s mother could have possibly been friends with INHUP’s founder. Nita’s mother hated INHUP. She was constantly deriding them, always wary of them. She despised them. Nita could never imagine her working with them.
But a dark, frightened part of her whispered that the most violent hate is born from the tightest love. And betrayal.
She cleared her throat. “Wait. Wait a minute. Nadezhda Novikova isn’t dead. She’s still head of INHUP.”
“Technically, she is.” Andrej agreed. “But she’s been a figurehead for the past, oh, twenty years or so, hasn’t she?”
“Yes . . .” Nita agreed slowly, dragging out the s. “But that’s just because she’s getting old. She’s got to be in her . . . eighties? By now.”
“But have you seen her at all, in any event, in the past twenty years? Surely an eighty-year-old could cut a ribbon at a ceremony, or give an interview.”
“I haven’t looked into it,” Nita admitted. Unsurprisingly, the head of INHUP hadn’t been someone she was interested in. She’d never really researched her.
Nita tried to think of any pictures of Nadezhda Novikova she’d seen, but all of them were too old. She seemed young, in her thirties, in most of the pictures Nita could recall. But most articles used pictures of people in their prime, so that was no surprise.
“If Nadezhda Novikova was dead, the world would have mourned. We’d all know. There’d have been a huge public funeral,” she pointed out.
Andrej sighed. “Well, she’s not . . . dead dead. She’s brain-dead. Her body has been in a coma for the last two decades, and for legal reasons, no one can unhook her. So everyone is just keeping it all under wraps for now, and hoping she passes away naturally soon.”
“Surely people would know, though.”
“You don’t think INHUP can hide one person in a coma? Have you seen how extensive some of their research and medical facilities are?”