Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Flesh gave way under my nails, and my blood mingled with the beast’s. The toxin was slower when injected, so instead of freezing immediately, Thing 2 and Thing 3 both began stumbling, their limbs gummed down by invisible weights.

  “Sit,” I said as they staggered and finally went down. “Roll over.”

  And then I smiled. “Play dead.”

  A quick glance at my watch (which I wore on the hand I hadn’t fed to the hellhound) told me that I needed to hurry this along. I had three hours until my dad got home and another six before dawn—enough time to heal, but just barely.

  “Knife,” I whispered. I felt a twinge, a ping in the back of my mind that told me exactly where my knife was, exactly how to retrieve it. Being what I was meant that I had a sixth sense for weapons—once I’d laid hands on a blade, a gun, a garrote, it was mine forever. I knew exactly how to use it. I could feel its presence like eyes staring straight at the back of my head.

  I’d never lost a weapon, and I never would.

  “Well,” I said, smiling at the blade as I tore it from Thing 3’s throat, “let’s get this show on the road.” The fact that I was talking to a knife probably said something revealing about my character and/or mental state, but the way I saw it, my weapon and I were in this together.

  We had work to do.

  Three decapitations later, my own blood wasn’t the only decoration on my body. Hellhound bits had splattered everywhere, coating me in gore. Another outfit down the drain.

  Story of my life.

  Glancing around to make sure I hadn’t been seen, I stripped down to my sports bra and jeans and rolled the bloody shirt into a small ball. It was dark enough out that stains on denim wouldn’t be visible from afar, and I had no intention of letting anyone get close enough to notice that I’d been Up to No Good.

  Luckily, people like me?

  We’re surprisingly good at fading into the background.

  “Be aggressive! Be, be aggressive!”

  My head was throbbing. My arm ached like I’d spent the entire night doing push-ups, and I was exhausted. So, of course, Heritage High was having a pep rally. A loud, crowded, too-early-in-the-morning, I’m-not-even-sure-what-sport-season-we’re-in pep rally.

  With cheerleaders.

  “Go Krakens!”

  High school was, without question, the ninth circle of you-know-what.

  As I slumped down in the bleachers, the sea of faces around me blurred, and I found myself longing for the University School, where at least the unidentified blur of my classmates would have been a familiar blur. I’d spent the first twelve years of my academic existence, from pre-K to grade ten, at the gifted program run by my father’s university. But halfway through my first semester junior year, Father Dearest had decided that such a “small environment” wasn’t good for my “developing social skills,” a decision that I deeply suspected had less to do with my ability to make friends and influence people and more to do with the fact that Paul Davis, the new head of my father’s department, had chosen to send his seventeen-year-old daughter, Bethany, to public school.

  Bethany Davis was a cheerleader.

  I was not.

  Leaning back against the gymnasium wall, I did my best to disappear into the bleachers. It would have been easier to lose myself in the crowd if I hadn’t claimed a spot on the back row, but I hated letting people sit behind me.

  Much better to keep my back to the wall.

  The compulsion reminded me, as it always did, that even on my human days, I was anything but normal.

  “Are you ready to beat the Trojans?” the principal asked, his voice booming from the loudspeakers as he leaned into a microphone positioned directly in the middle of the cheerleaders. To my right, some senior delinquent made a comment about “beating” and “Trojans” that I tried very hard not to hear.

  “Are you ready to show them what Krakens are made of?”

  A roar of assent went through the crowd, and I wondered for maybe the hundredth time how Heritage High had ended up with a giant, multiarmed sea monster as its mascot.

  “Are you ready to slip your tentacles around the Trojans and crush them like the ships of yore?”

  I didn’t wait to hear what the dirty minds of senior boys would make of the reference to “tentacles.” I really and truly did not want to know. Instead, I brought my feet up onto the bleacher, pulled my legs to my chest, and rested my chin on top of my knees. Sometimes, I felt like if I could just fold myself into a small enough ball, my body would collapse on itself like a star, and I could supernova myself into a new existence.

  One that didn’t involve Trojans, Krakens, tentacles, or early morning assemblies of any kind.

  With my right hand, I massaged the muscles in my left, tuning out the world around me and assessing the damage the hellhounds had wreaked the night before. There wouldn’t be a scar. There wasn’t so much as a scratch or a hint of redness. The only indication that muscle and bone had spent the night knitting themselves back together was the residual soreness.

  If I’d had another hour before dawn this morning, even that would have taken care of itself.

  Reflexively, I glanced down at my watch: twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes until my next switch. Twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes with no hunt-lust. Twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes as human as the next girl.

  Twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes for the things I hunted to hunt me.

  “Go Krakens!”

  I was 99 percent sure this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. That if there were any other people out there with my … skills, they weren’t that way one day and not the next, but ever since the puberty fairy had knocked me upside the head with her little wand, that was the way things had been for me.

  Every other day, I was human. And every other day, I was … not.

  “Kra-kens! Kra-kens! Kra-kens!”

  I put my feet back down on the ground and made a halfhearted effort at clapping to the beat. I even mouthed the words to the cheers coming at me from all sides. But what I really needed wasn’t a dose of school spirit; it was a glass of water, an aspirin the size of my fist, and the answers to the history exam that I hadn’t studied for the night before.

  “As long as I’m dreaming,” I muttered, my words lost to the cacophony of the gym, “I’d also like a pony, a convertible, and a couple of friends.”

  “That’s a tall order.”

  I’d known that there were people sitting next to me, but I couldn’t begin to imagine how one of them had heard me. I hadn’t even heard me.

  “Would you settle for a piece of gum, an orange Tic Tac, and an introduction to the school slut?”

  I tried to process the situation appropriately. The cheering had finally died down, the principal had begun dismissing us section by section to go back to class, and the girl sitting next to me—who looked all of twelve years old, but was probably closer to my age—was holding out a stick of Juicy Fruit, a lopsided grin on her pixie face.

  “Gum?” she repeated.

  It wasn’t a giant-sized aspirin, but it would do.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the gum and eyeing the box of orange Tic Tacs sticking out of her jeans pocket. Gum. Tic Tacs. Based on the power of inference and the fact that she looked like she was on the verge of introducing herself, I concluded that must make her …

  “Skylar Hayden,” the girl said, sticking out her hand. “School slut.”

  I shook her hand and tried to process. “The school …”

  “Slut,” Skylar chirped, the picture of perky. “Even says so, right across the front of my locker. The janitors have tried to paint over it, but the locker elves are a persistent bunch, so there it stays.”

  “That’s awful,” I said, trying to imagine myself coming face-to-face with that word scrawled across my locker each morning.

  Skylar blew a wisp of white-blonde hair out of her face. “It could be worse. I mean, I could have actually had to work for the title! Seriously, so
me of the girls on the student council have been angling for sensual supremacy for years, and all I had to do was let Justin Thomas kiss my neck for five seconds—which, quite frankly, could have been used as a medical substitute for bloodletting in medieval times. I’m talking total leech.”

  It took Skylar four, maybe five seconds to rattle off this entire statement and another two to catch her breath before she plowed on. “Anyway, Justin Thomas is Kelly Masterson’s boyfriend, and she’s the total alpha around here—captain of the cheerleading squad, student council vice president, and so on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera—so I got to jump straight to the front of the class. It’s unfair, really. A lot of people have worked really hard for the title to lose it to an upstart little dark horse like me, but c’est la vie.”

  I knew from the content of Skylar’s speech that it must have been served with a hefty dose of sarcasm, but there wasn’t so much as a hint of attitude in her tone. She did earnest and perky way too well, and the combined effect of her words and her manner took me so off guard that I actually swallowed my gum.

  “You sure you don’t want a Tic Tac?” Skylar asked.

  Dazed and confused didn’t even begin to cover my current state of mind, so I just held out a hand and allowed her to pour a couple of orange Tic Tacs into it. I popped one into my mouth. “Thanks.”

  “Not a problem,” she said, and then she grinned again, more pixie than not. “So what’s your deal? Rumor has it you’re a princess incognito.”

  I swallowed my Tic Tac. At this rate, I could only hope that Skylar knew the Heimlich maneuver, because sooner or later, I was going to need it.

  “Rumor has it I’m a princess?” I repeated.

  “Daughter of a foreign dignitary and a Hollywood Grace Kelly type,” Skylar confirmed. “But I might have just made that up. You’re not really on the Heritage High rumor radar yet—but don’t worry. If you spend a few more minutes talking to me, you will be.”

  For the first time, her blue eyes took on a hint of something that wasn’t pep: wariness, maybe, or an expectation that I’d take this opportunity to run far, far away and never look back. But a moment later, whatever glimmer I’d seen was gone, replaced with a steely, uncompromising optimism that must have grated on the girls trying their hardest to freeze her out.

  For less than a second, I considered my options: make a friend and become a social pariah, or walk away and spend my life in comfortable obscurity.

  No contest.

  “I’m Kali,” I said, smiling for the first time in what felt like years. “I transferred to Heritage a few weeks ago. When I’m not failing history tests, I spend my time as an insurgent superhero who lives in fear of being hunted down by monsters or bureaucrats.”

  Skylar didn’t balk for so much as a second. “Insurgent superhero! I love it. And your delivery was even better than mine—I could totally almost believe you.”

  Yeah. Totally.

  Time for a subject change.

  “So are the girls on the cheerleading squad really out to get you?” I asked, nodding toward the gym floor as our row began to trickle out of the bleachers.

  Skylar shrugged. “They’ve been at it for about six months. I haven’t cracked yet. It’s driving them nuts.”

  I glanced at the cheerleaders out of the corner of my eye. Down to a one, they were glaring at the girl next to me. Completely unbothered by their death stares, Skylar stood up on her tiptoes and waved at them like she was greeting her very bestest friends. The entire squad immediately averted their gazes. Apparently, it was a social no-no to acknowledge the wave of someone you’d thoroughly shunned.

  “Don’t you ever just get sick of it?” I asked, shivering at the enmity coming our way. Even without my powers, I would gladly have faced down hellspawn over high school mean girls any day.

  “Get sick of watching them scrambling, trying to figure out why I’m not sobbing in a puddle in the girls’ room?” Skylar asked, sounding for all the world like some kind of Zen master. “Not really. I’ve got five older brothers. Having the tampons stolen out of my gym locker on a regular basis kind of pales next to the power of the atomic noogie.”

  “They steal your tampons?” I asked incredulously, when really what I was thinking was more along the lines of define “atomic noogie.”

  “It’s a classic mean-girl tactic,” Skylar explained, and I had to remind myself that she was talking about the tampon-stealing, not the noogie. “Wearing white is like waving a cape in front of a bull.”

  “Good to know.”

  Part of me was still waiting to wake up and find out that this whole interaction had been one incredibly offbeat dream. It probably said something about my life that I didn’t doubt for a second that I’d killed three hellhounds the night before, but couldn’t quite believe that after three very long weeks, someone at this school was actually talking to me. Most girls my age spent no more time thinking about preternatural beasties than they did serial killers or the North American grizzly. Yes, they were out there, and no, you wouldn’t want to run into one in a dark alleyway, but that was about as far as it went.

  Most girls my age had friends.

  “So when’s your history test?” Skylar changed the subject so fast that I almost didn’t notice that we’d made it out of the gym. “The one you’re going to fail?”

  “Fifth period,” I replied, trying not to be melodramatic about it. Failing a test wasn’t the end of the world. This wasn’t the first time, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but I vastly preferred to reside firmly in B and C territory—not at the front of the pack and not at the rear.

  “You’re a junior, right?”

  I nodded, not bothering to question how Skylar knew anything about me other than what I’d already told her.

  “I’m a sophomore, so I’m taking European History, not US, but Mr. McCormick teaches them both, so I should have you covered. Find me at lunch, and we’ll talk.”

  And with those words, Skylar Hayden, force of nature and self-proclaimed school slut, disappeared into a nearby classroom, leaving me in the hallway alone.

  Good, I thought reflexively. It’s better that way.

  But for once, I disagreed with the part of my brain that couldn’t help but think like a hunter, even on my human days.

  Maybe I don’t want to be alone, I thought back. Maybe I don’t want to be a freak. Did you ever think of that?

  Cover your back.

  This time, I didn’t resist. I’d spent too much time tracking down monsters to believe even for a second, even in my own high school, that I was ever really safe. Angling my back toward the wall, I headed toward my biology class. The only good thing about this morning’s assembly was that it meant that I didn’t have to listen to my bio teacher waxing poetic about the differences between natural and preternatural species.

  The difference, I thought, is that the preternatural ones are too strong, too evil, and too human-hungry to live.

  If the rest of the world would just wake up and realize that no, the things I hunted weren’t just misunderstood, and that studying them wasn’t going to make them any less lethal, my job—not to mention my life—would have been so much easier. But no. My life wasn’t meant to be easy.

  Nothing ever was.

  My muscles ached. My stomach rumbled. I could feel a migraine coming on, and I wanted nothing more than to climb back into bed. It was always like this the day after a hunt. I felt pain. I got tired. I needed to eat.

  And I was anything but invincible.

  Ducking into the classroom and trudging toward my seat, I looked down at my watch for the third or fourth time since I’d gotten up that morning.

  Twenty-one hours and eight minutes until my next switch. Three hours until I saw Skylar at lunch.

  This is going to be a very long day.

  In the three weeks I’d been attending classes at Heritage, I’d learned more about primate social behavior than I’d gleaned from a lifetime of being plunked down in front of th
e Discovery Channel whenever my father didn’t want to deal with the fact that he had a kid. Social hierarchies, dominance displays, mating rituals … all of the above were present in abundance in our high school cafeteria. Up until today, I’d successfully remained invisible.

  And then I’d met Skylar Hayden.

  Apparently, she wasn’t kidding when she said talking to her would put me on the rumor radar like that. Already, I could feel the stares, like bugs crawling across the surface of my skin.

  Show no fear.

  If there was one thing that being what I was had taught me, it was that the difference between predator and prey was the rate of your heartbeat, the sweat trickling from your temples, the urge to shiver and run.

  Twelve hours earlier, I hadn’t even been capable of fear. Currently, however, I was feeling it in spades—not that I was about to let anyone else see that. Standing straight and holding my head high, I tossed my dark, glossy hair over one shoulder. The deep brown color was streaked with red highlights, so dark that in the right light, they could have passed for black. Even in a ponytail, my hair was the perfect length for tossing.

  Play to your strengths.

  Another compulsion, another rule. A good hunter knew her strengths and her weaknesses, her enemies and her prey. Right now, all I knew was that the A-list crowd liked to write derogatory things on people’s lockers, that they had it out for my one and only friend at this high school, and that I was an unknown entity who had just flung herself onto their radar.

  Given that the best defense was a good offense, I figured that I could at least be an unknown entity with good hair.

  “Kali!”

  I recognized Skylar’s voice the moment I heard it. Giving the rest of the school one more second to play Assess the New Girl, I turned in her direction. There, in the very center of the cafeteria, in what even a newcomer like me recognized as prime lunchtime real estate, she was holding court at a table full of … guys.

  Clearly, my new friend had no problems whatsoever with the idea of adding fuel to the rumor fire.