Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  They specialized in regeneration: regrowing nerves, reviving dead brain cells. And right now, they were studying chupacabras.

  My mind went to Zev and the things he’d told me about “Nibblers.”

  Any comments from the peanut gallery? I asked him. What would a biomedical company want with a deadly preternatural parasite?

  At first, I didn’t think Zev would respond, but then, he bit out four words, his voice decisive and harsh.

  Leave it alone, Kali.

  If anything, his words made me want to do the opposite, and the way he’d issued the command made me think that this was dangerous—and personal. I chewed on that for a moment. Chimera was studying chupacabras. Zev knew something about it, something he had no intention of telling me.

  Chupacabras. Regeneration. Zev acting like pushing this was particularly dangerous for me.

  An insidious possibility took root in my mind, and a moment later, it seemed less like a possibility and more like a fact. All of a sudden, I knew why Dr. Davis thought that injecting someone with a chupacabra might not be a death sentence, why he might believe that the preternatural held the key to waking his son up from a deep and unforgiving sleep.

  People like me didn’t get hungry. We never got tired. We couldn’t feel pain. And when we got bitten, we didn’t die.

  We healed very, very quickly.

  To a scientist, that would have seemed like a medical miracle. To a chupacabra expert whose son was dying, it might have seemed like a sign.

  Chimera isn’t just playing around with chupacabras, I realized, my mind reeling. They knew—about the effect that chupacabras had on certain people.

  People like me.

  “Kali?”

  I must have looked about as good as I felt, because Skylar said my name in a tentative, talking-a-puppy-out-from-underneath-a-car type of tone.

  I shook my head to clear it of unwanted thoughts—unwanted weakness.

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  Bethany twirled a finger through her hair, a dangerous glint in her emerald eyes. “Isn’t it always?”

  I didn’t want to take her meaning, but she didn’t leave me any other options.

  “When you talked that chupacabra out of my body and into yours, it was nothing. And when you passed out at the skating rink, it was nothing. When you went through the windshield of my car and I thought you died—nothing. So, come on, Kali, share. What kind of nothing is it this time?”

  The urge to answer her question fully and honestly took me completely by surprise. I wasn’t exactly the bare-my-soul type, but Bethany had just rattled off her sordid family history like it was some kind of halftime cheer. She’d let me in, and for the first time, I actually wanted to do the same, to tell someone the truth.

  That I wasn’t normal.

  That I wasn’t human.

  That even though I was used to being something else, being bitten by a chupacabra had changed things, changed me.

  And that, somehow, Chimera knew—maybe not about me specifically, but about the fact that people like me existed and that being bitten by a chupacabra had a different effect on us than it had on normal people. If Bethany was right and Chimera had been infecting teens on purpose, then chances were good that they were either systematically looking for people like me—or trying to create them.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said out of habit, unable to make myself say anything else. Talking made me feel like I had the dry heaves, and all I wanted was to just throw up the truth and be done with it. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine.” Skylar caught my gaze and held it, and even though her face still looked pixie-young and innocent, there was an alien weight to the set of her features, like she was a thousand years old instead of fifteen. “And it does matter. Everything that’s happened, everything that’s going to happen in the next twenty-four hours—it matters. You matter, and whether you want to believe this or not, you can’t do this alone, Kali.”

  She paused and cast her eyes downward, her voice going very quiet. “You shouldn’t have to.”

  I wanted to believe her. I wanted to tell her everything, tell them everything. I opened my mouth, and—nothing. I’d been keeping secrets for so long that I wasn’t entirely sure I knew how to let them go.

  Don’t. The humans won’t understand. They never do.

  Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that Zev was weighing in, telling me that every instinct I’d ever had to keep other people at bay was right on the mark. Then again, he’d also told me to leave Chimera Biomedical Corp. alone.

  That wasn’t going to happen.

  The past twenty-four hours had whetted my appetite for answers, and I needed to know—what I was, what Zev was, what the men in suits and the Paul Davises of the world knew that I didn’t.

  Leave it, Kali. You’re better off if they think you’re dead.

  I wondered briefly how old Zev was—because he was talking to me like I was a child.

  That, as much as Skylar’s vehement claim that I didn’t have to do this alone, prodded me into taking a small, terrifying step toward telling the others the truth. “I think I know what Chimera is trying to do.” Admitting that out loud sounded funny, even to my own ears. Deep inside me, Zev cursed in a language that I neither recognized nor understood. I ignored it—and him.

  “I think I know why the Chimera scientists are playing around with chupacabras—why they’d kill to keep that kind of experiment to themselves.”

  Interest flickered across Bethany’s face, but in the bat of an eyelash, she’d wiped her face completely clean, and it was gone. “And we’re just supposed to take your word on this because the almighty Kali D’Angelo can’t be bothered to deal us in?”

  “I’ll tell you,” I said, pushing back against Zev’s objections. “Once I’m sure.”

  Making that promise—meaning it—hurt, like I’d been keeping secrets for so long that prying them loose would require the shredding of flesh—most likely mine.

  “What do you need to be sure about?” Skylar asked. The question set me up to ask Bethany for something that I was 90 percent certain she wouldn’t want to give, so I crossed my fingers and took the plunge.

  “I need access to your dad’s files.”

  For a moment, Beth stood very still, like there was a snake on the floor in front of her and any movement might tempt it to strike.

  “Kali, they already tried to kill you once,” she said finally. “The people my dad’s working for don’t kid around, and I’m already on their watch list. They probably know you’re here, talking to me. If I let you into the lab, they’ll know that, too.”

  “Is that a no?” Skylar asked, wide-eyed and far too innocent.

  Bethany didn’t dignify that question with a response.

  After a few seconds of silence, I decided I’d have to give Bethany something—a tiny piece of myself, tit for tat for the secrets she’d already given me. Slowly, painfully, I brought my hands to the bottom of my stolen tank top. I pulled the fabric up, inch by inch and bit by bit, until I was standing in Bethany’s foyer uncovered from the waist up, save for my chest.

  I heard Skylar’s sharp intake of breath, saw Bethany blink one, two, three times as she took in the sight of my stomach, my rib cage, my waist. I didn’t look down, but dragged my fingertips across my flesh.

  Across the ouroboros and the pattern—golden, intricate, overwhelming—inked into the surface of my skin.

  “What is that?” Bethany asked. Somehow, she pulled off sounding unimpressed, even though her face betrayed her horror, her fascination, her awe.

  “That,” I said, “is why I think I know what your father’s endgame is. It’s why I need you to let me into his lab.”

  That wasn’t exactly the truth, and it wasn’t full disclosure, but it was something.

  Skylar reached forward and ran her index finger lightly over the surface of my skin. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, offering her face up to the ceiling. When she opened
her eyes again, she seemed lighter, more sure of herself—like whatever burden she’d been carrying since she’d met me on the Davises’ front lawn had been somehow lifted from her shoulders.

  “I knew it,” she said simply. “This is it.” In typical Skylar fashion, she didn’t wait for either of us to process that statement; she just plowed right on, talking and switching subjects with no warning whatsoever. “Is the lab in the basement?” she asked Bethany, who still hadn’t managed to tear her eyes away from the markings on my skin. “Because I kind of feel like the lab might be in the basement.”

  “Would you just stop it with the feelings?” Bethany snapped. Skylar recoiled, but recovered quickly, and I wondered how many times her peppy you-can’t-hurt-me facade had rebounded too quickly for the outside world to notice that she wasn’t quite as bulletproof as she seemed.

  “I don’t care about your feelings, Skylar, and I don’t care about Kali’s questionable taste in body art.” Bethany was a good liar—but not good enough. Sensing that I wasn’t buying her outright dismissal of the situation, she continued, her voice softer, her face every bit as guarded as it had been a moment before. “I can’t do this anymore. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”

  Bethany’s eyes flickered toward the kitchen, and I thought about her mother, dressed in a twin set and talking to the air.

  “What exactly did your father say to keep you from calling the police?” I asked, gauging her reaction to my question and seeing the moment it hit its mark.

  “Does it matter?” Bethany asked bitterly. “Either way, I can’t help you. You should get out of here before he gets home.”

  I thought about my dad—about the painful silences and well-rehearsed lies, the fact that he knew less about me than the people in this room, neither of whom I’d known for longer than a day.

  “Your dad wouldn’t hurt your mom … would he?” Skylar sounded painfully young, and I wondered how someone with any psychic ability at all could still believe the best about the world.

  In response to Skylar’s question, Bethany straightened her shoulders and stared at the wall behind the younger girl’s head as she answered. “My father wouldn’t hit my mom. He wouldn’t put a gun to her head. But would he take her to see Tyler, force her to look at him until she had a very public breakdown in close proximity to the hospital’s psych ward?” Bethany shrugged. “It’s hard to say, really.”

  The idea that Bethany’s father would even think of holding something like that over her head was disgusting. As much as I wanted access to the lab in the basement, I wasn’t about to press her to take that kind of risk for me. She had someone else to think about, someone to take care of. I, of all people, could understand that.

  If I’d had a mother, I would have done anything to protect her.

  “It’s okay, Bethany.” I caught her eyes; she looked away. “You do what you need to do. We’ll go.”

  Don’t think this means I’m giving up, I told Zev silently as I nudged Skylar toward the door. There’s more than one way to decapitate a hellhound, and as it so happens, I know them all.

  Zev didn’t respond, and something about the silence felt unnatural. Wrong. One second he was there, and the next, my mind felt … empty. If our chupacabras served as a two-way radio between my mind and his, it felt like he’d just hung up. A small sliver of panic rose up inside of me, and for the second time, I went looking for him.

  I started the way I had before, by thinking about the parasite that had burrowed deep inside of me. I felt it, and a second later, I felt Zev’s. Felt Zev—

  And then I was in. I saw the world through his eyes.

  Saw men in masks.

  Saw needles, scalpels, concrete walls.

  Saw blood.

  I came back into my own body a second later, my skin an odd fit for my soul, like a shoe crammed onto the wrong foot or a sweater two sizes too large. Was this what Zev had felt like after he’d taken over my body in Eddie’s car?

  “Kali? Are we going?” Skylar was still standing next to Bethany, who’d wrapped her arms around her torso, like she’d been tasked with holding her own entrails in. “You said we should go. But then you didn’t go.”

  “We should go,” I said roughly, turning my back on them both. No matter where I looked, all I could see was the men in the masks, the concrete cell. It was clear now—too clear—how Chimera Biomedical knew that there were people out there like me, why Zev had asked me to stay out of it.

  They had him.

  I could talk to him and he could talk to me. I could enter his mind, and he’d spent time in mine, but physically, he was trapped. His body was locked up somewhere—in some kind of cell.

  Some kind of cage.

  Every nightmare I’d ever had about being caught, cut into pieces, studied like a rat in a maze—that was Zev’s reality. Suddenly, the fact that Bethany couldn’t help me didn’t seem like as much of a roadblock because, come hell or high water, I was going to find a way in.

  I had to.

  There was one person in this world—that I knew of for sure—who was like me. One. A person who’d haunted my dreams, taken over my body, protected me, even when I didn’t want protection.

  And that person, that one person, was somebody’s specimen.

  Before, I’d wanted to know what Chimera knew. Now, I wanted them gone.

  “Kali?” This time, Bethany was the one who said my name, and the tone in her voice reminded me of the way she’d sounded talking to her mom.

  She thinks I’ve lost it. Maybe she’s right. My hands were fisted, my steely fingernails digging into the flesh of my palms. It didn’t hurt. I didn’t even feel it, but I could smell the beads of blood as they dribbled down the insides of my hands.

  “I’m fine,” I said, because that was exactly what you said when you really, really weren’t. “I should go.”

  I was halfway past Bethany and headed for the front door when she grabbed my arm. I wrenched out of her grasp and resisted the reflex to send the heel of my palm crashing into her throat.

  Throat. Blood.

  Chimera had Zev, Bethany wanted to help me, but couldn’t, and all I could think about was how much I wanted this all to be over and how very, very thirsty I was.

  “I’m going,” I said, more for Skylar’s benefit than Beth’s. “Don’t worry about me. Don’t follow.”

  I didn’t give them a chance to react. I just took off out the front door, darting across the lawn—

  Twenty hours and forty-two minutes.

  I’d find a way to take down Chimera. But first, I needed to hunt.

  Closer. Closer. You’re getting closer. This way, Kali. This way.

  If the hunt-lust had been a hum under my skin before, it was a full-blown song now: sweet, melodic, unearthly.

  I wanted to hunt. The thing inside me wanted to feed. No room in my mind for anything else, I wove in and out of the shadows, my inner compass set toward something that reeked of sulfur—something sleek and quiet, something wrong.

  Normally, I scanned the papers for reports on preternatural activity. I liked going in knowing what brand of beastie I’d be fighting, but at the moment, I didn’t care what the instinct was driving me toward.

  All I cared about was making it dead.

  The trail ended a mile, maybe two, away from Bethany’s house, at a water park that was closed and abandoned for the winter. Getting in was easy enough, and soon, I was prowling the length of the park, surrounded by bright colors, mammoth slides, and empty, waterless pools.

  On the horizon, across a sprawling parking lot, I could see the outline of a Ferris wheel—the fair coming to call and pick up the seasonal slack, while Water World stood empty, save for the shadows, the slides, and me.

  I paused, tilting my head to the side, letting the sights and sounds, the smells wash over my senses, each one heightened almost to the point of pain.

  Peeling paint.

  Wet concrete.

  A nearly inaudible hiss.

 
; I whirled around, but saw nothing except the barest hint of shadow. I smelled something cold and wet and rotting.

  I bent down to unsheathe my knife. I was close now, very close. The question was—close to what?

  Beads of sweat rose on my skin, not because I was nervous—I wasn’t—and not because I was hot. It was adrenaline, plain and simple, and when I caught a glimpse of myself in a fun house–style mirror—installed, no doubt, to entertain the masses while they waited in hot summer lines—my brown eyes were glowing with an unholy sheen.

  You’re close now. So very close.

  I could almost picture myself here on a human day, standing in line for the Silver Bullet and stealing peeks at myself in the long line of mirrors, each a distortion, none an exact reflection of this body.

  None of them the real me.

  Somewhere, overhead, there was a creak—rusted metal, giving under the weight of something … something.…

  I looked up.

  For a split second, there was nothing but the metal staircase, winding its way up to the top of the Silver Bullet, but then I heard the telltale sound of scales scraping against metal—a light swoosh, a tongue flickering out to taste the stale and humid air.

  Whatever it was, my prey was tasting for me.

  I averted my eyes a second before the creature came into view. It swung down from the rafters, its tail—the width of an oak tree, the length of my legs—wrapping around the creaking, rusted stairs.

  Basilisk, I realized, a second too late. Its snakelike body gave way to a triangular head with slit nostrils, a nearly human mouth, and eyes the exact color and cut of a ruby.

  Knowledge of how to kill the thing flooded my brain. I might have been failing history, but this was the kind of pop quiz I was built for. To kill a basilisk, I’d have to drive my blade into its brain—easier said than done, given that my point of entry was a soft spot inside the creature’s mouth, and the fact that I’d die if I looked a basilisk straight in the eyes.

  Moving swiftly, I turned my attention to the line of mirrors. In the right person’s hand, anything was a weapon, and with prey I couldn’t physically look at, I needed to get creative. Knife in one hand, I drove my elbow into the closest mirror as hard as I could—again and again and again.