Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Run.

  I couldn’t run. All I could do was stand there, an ice skate in each hand, my heart pounding and a stale breath caught in the back of my throat.

  Dragon. Genus: Draco.

  For most of our evolutionary history, the three most dangerous kinds of predators had been large cats, snakes, and birds of prey. The human brain was wired to fear them, and dragons—talons, scales, slit pupils—sent that system into overdrive. I knew what was happening, but that didn’t keep me from feeling it, and the fear—such a little, stupid word—reminded me that I was human.

  That I was nothing.

  That I was screwed.

  My hold on the makeshift blades in my hands tightened, and I saw the moments leading up to this one, shattered and interlocked, like shards of glass. From the second I’d stepped onto the ice, I’d known that something wasn’t right. The thing inside me had known, too. Even now, the parasite slurping down my blood was telling me to get out, its voice low and silky, like it belonged to someone who was used to being obeyed.

  Run. Now.

  Why? I replied, taking a single step forward and drawing the dragon’s attention from Bethany to me. Afraid something might happen to your all-you-can-eat buffet?

  Don’t—foolish. Can’t—you must—Now!

  I’m sorry, I thought, sizing up the dragon and running through my very limited options. I’m afraid this is a bad connection. I can’t quite make out what you’re saying. Oh well.

  The monster opposite me leapt into the air and crashed back down onto the ice. Cracks ricocheted across the surface, and I took another step forward.

  Objectively, I knew I was powerless, but I couldn’t shake the memory of what it was like to be a hunter, couldn’t rid my body—my fragile, human body—of the sense that it knew exactly what to do. Rationally, I knew better, knew that I should turn tail and run, but I couldn’t—not with Bethany scrambling across the ice, close enough that the dragon could bisect her with a single slice of its talons. Not with Skylar beside me, her mouth frozen in a perfect, rounded O.

  “When I move,” I said softly, my voice nearly lost under the sound of the dragon’s equine snorts, “back away slowly. Don’t look it in the eye. Don’t draw its attention. You just get outside, and then you run.”

  Skylar nodded almost imperceptibly, but it was enough that the dragon’s liquid gaze switched from my form to hers.

  I had to act fast.

  “Hey, Ugly! Eyes on me.” I moved sideways across the ice, and the dragon whirled to follow, its mammoth tail taking out the side of the rink. Debris scattered like shrapnel, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Skylar backing away and prayed that Bethany had the sense to do the same.

  “That’s right, Godzilla. I’m the threat here. Me.”

  My target reared up on its back legs, and I prepared myself for the aftershock when it slammed back down onto the ice. Smoke poured from its nostrils, and I filed that information away as calmly and rationally as I could. There were several subspecies of dragons. Some were harmless. Some ate people. Some breathed fire.

  None of them were native to the area.

  Based on the smoke, I was going to go out on a limb and guess this was a fire-breather. Not ideal, but on the bright side, at least I didn’t have to worry about being eaten alive.

  “Don’t worry—I called Preternatural Control!” The boy who’d given us our skates was either very brave or very stupid. Given that he didn’t seem to have armed himself with so much as a fire extinguisher, I was guessing the latter. “They should be here any sec—”

  Without warning, the dragon turned its pursuit from me, and its gleaming teeth closed around the boy’s middle. One second the boy was there, and the next, he was splatter.

  I flinched—and hated myself for flinching, almost as much as I hated myself for not saving the boy.

  It looks like we’re dealing with Draco carnus, I thought, desperately clinging to the cold, hard facts and trying so hard not to care. A man-eater.

  Dully, I told myself that at least I didn’t have to worry about it breathing fire. Dragons were one or the other, not both.

  Or so modern science would have had me believe.

  I heard the flames before I saw them, and for a split second, I lost control of my body. I couldn’t feel my arms, couldn’t feel my legs, could only feel a hand on the small of my back and rage bubbling inside of me, like a long-dormant volcano getting ready to spew.

  Not my hand.

  Not my rage.

  But somehow, my body dove out of the line of fire, just as a wall of flame sliced through the ice that had been directly under my feet.

  The sensation lasted a second, maybe two, and then I was in control of my body again. I climbed unsteadily to my feet and tightened my grip on the ice skates in my hand, angling the blades outward.

  Here goes nothing. I took aim and fired.

  I knew it wouldn’t make a dent in the dragon’s armor, knew that I didn’t have the aim or the power or the fearlessness I needed to take down an opponent twenty times my size, but as the skate flew through the air, the dragon tore its gleaming onyx eyes from mine and followed the blade’s trajectory.

  Dragons liked shiny things.

  While it was distracted, I wracked my brain for a way out. Unless I could get close enough to reach the soft spot under its breastplate, I didn’t stand a chance of inflicting any kind of lasting damage, and Bethany was still there, her back pressed against the side of the rink, her eyes following the dragon’s every move.

  I jerked my head to the side, motioning for her to go. She jerked her head, motioning for me to do the same.

  If we got out of this alive, I was going to kill her.

  Think, Kali, I told myself. There had to be a way out. There had to be. I didn’t want to die like this, scared and weak and unable to even remember what it felt like to be anything else.

  Fifteen hours and twenty-four minutes.

  Like that did me a hell of a lot of good.

  I told you to run. Don’t make me tell you again.

  The voice was implacable and fierce, and the fact that my enemy—who shouldn’t have even been able to talk—was ordering me around swung the pendulum of my emotions from scared to angry and from angry to pissed. Before I could make use of that, however, Bethany snapped. One second she was cowering behind the dragon, and the next, she was on her feet, poised on top of the remaining exterior wall of the rink. She didn’t say anything. She barely even moved. She just swayed—first her hips, then her arms.

  I tried to process. The two of us were on the verge of death, and she was belly dancing?

  Go. Now. Must—lights.

  I watched as the dragon turned its head to the side, absorbing Bethany’s movement whole. I could have streaked across the ice, yodeling the national anthem, and it wouldn’t have mattered.

  The beast had marked its prey. For the moment, it seemed content just watching her, but I knew that wouldn’t last. I had a minute at most, maybe less, and I did the only thing I could think of—

  I ran.

  Not away.

  Not for safety.

  To the control booth, where I found a pair of employees huddled on the floor.

  “Dim the lights,” I told them, out of breath and running out of time, my mind echoing with the broken instructions Zev had tried to impart.

  Must—lights.

  Neither of the employees moved. I glanced out at the rink. The dragon, its eyes still locked on Bethany’s, began to cross the ice. Soon, it would be close enough that she would be able to smell the blood and smoke on its breath, close enough that I didn’t have even a second to spare.

  “Turn the lights off. Now! And if you have any kind of special effects—a light show, disco ball, whatever—turn those on, too.”

  One of the employees pointed a single, shaky finger to the control panel, and I scanned it, looking for the switch. Out on the ice, Bethany continued her impromptu belly dance. She swayed. The dragon swayed
. She blinked. It blinked. Any moment, any second, it could snap out of it, go in for the kill—

  I flipped the switch. The rink went dark. And then, a second later, a smattering of lights appeared on the ceiling, swirling steadily.

  That’s right, I told the dragon silently. Swirly, shiny lights.

  Slowly, the beast stopped swaying. It tore its eyes from Bethany’s, and it lay down on its front paws in the middle of the ravaged rink. Its scales—the exact color of the ice—glistened in the uneven lighting. Even from a distance, I could make out the crystalline texture of its skin.

  Slowly, painfully, the dragon’s breathing became even, its mammoth chest rising and falling, its eyes fixed on the ceiling above. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the creature was gone, its body melding into the ice underneath.

  Unnatural, the voice in my head whispered, disturbingly clear. Even though I agreed with the sentiment, I tried to shut out the voice and did everything in my power not to think about the fact that if it hadn’t been for his suggestion, I might not have thought to go for the lights.

  Bethany would have been dragon bait.

  And I would probably have been dead.

  If I had a nickel for every time I almost died, I would have been driving to school in a Ferrari and flying off to Bora-Bora on the weekends. One of these days, I’d cut it too close to dawn or run into a monster that was too strong. With the way I lived, the things I hunted, death was only a matter of time.

  One more brush with oblivion shouldn’t have bothered me.

  I shouldn’t have been dwelling on the fact that the parasite that had saved my life was killing me now.

  But I was.

  Our standoff with Puff the Man-Eating, Fire-Breathing Creature of Doom had lasted minutes, but the police—not to mention a Preternatural Control team—had shown up before we could make ourselves scarce, and the resulting inquisition had been dragging on for over an hour. If Bethany and I had been adults, if the kids working at Skate Haven had been adults, then maybe we wouldn’t have had to answer the same questions sixteen times apiece.

  But we weren’t adults.

  We were teenagers who claimed to have had a run-in with some subspecies of dragon that could disappear into ice like a kelpie into water. And, oh yeah, it breathed fire and ate people, and its scales were the color of ice.

  “So let me get this straight,” the policewoman interviewing me said for maybe the fiftieth time. “It was some kind of … ice dragon.”

  I may as well have been telling her it belched gumdrops and had a weakness for Saturday morning cartoons. Forget the fact that there was obvious damage to the rink—not to mention the remains of the boy who’d actually placed the 911 call in the first place. It didn’t matter that our stories were consistent both with the damage and with one another’s accounts of what had gone down. Dragons stayed away from cities. They didn’t just hang out at local hot spots. And they didn’t have any kind of affinity for ice.

  So obviously, the teenagers were lying. Or on drugs. Or both.

  This is why you don’t call the police. Or Preternatural Control. No matter what. Ever.

  If I’d doubted the rule—and I was fairly sure I never had—I certainly never would again. My skin itched just talking to the authorities, and it was all I could do to meet my interrogator’s eyes, when what I really wanted to do was to get out of there, stat.

  The police department had more than a few open cases with my name on them—figuratively, and I had no desire to make that literal. The chances that anyone would think to connect a witness in a horrific dragon mauling with the vigilante responsible for dozens of area beastie slayings was slim. It wasn’t like my usual MO involved laser light shows, but still—the sooner I got out of there, the better.

  “Ice dragon,” I said, repeating the police officer’s incredulous words.

  For some reason, my voice sounded very far away: slow and gummy and like I wasn’t quite speaking English. As I turned this thought over in my head, I noticed that my interrogator’s face was looking less like a face and more like a sea of unrelated features, each blurring into the next.

  Weird.

  I blinked, and when that did me no good, I reached out for the railing to steady myself.

  “Miss, are you feeling all right?” the officer asked.

  Her voice sounded even farther away than mine.

  “I’m fine,” I said—or at least, that’s what I think I said. The details are, to this day, a little unclear. “Just give me a minute.”

  “Ohmigosh!”

  It took me a few seconds to realize that the exclamation in question had come from Skylar, who, up until that point, had wisely stayed out of the fray. I’d entertained the notion that she’d had the common sense to go home and leave Bethany and me to sort this out on our own.

  Apparently not.

  “You look, like, so pale. Did you forget to eat lunch? Please tell me you didn’t forget to eat lunch!” Skylar shook her head morosely, laying on the teenage ingénue vibe so thick that I doubted that anyone—let alone Officer So What You’re Telling Me Is—would buy it.

  I wasn’t suffering from low blood sugar.

  I was—I was—it took me a minute to put the sensation into words.

  Dying.

  “She’s hypoglycemic,” Skylar said, rattling off the word like she’d cut her teeth working in emergency rooms. “Are you guys done here? Because it’s almost six o’clock, and if we don’t get some food in her soon, her blood sugar is going to get dangerously low.”

  The police officer blinked. Or maybe I did. Either way, words were exchanged and Skylar’s effervescence must have won the day, because a few minutes after she’d appeared on the scene, Bethany and I were free to go.

  “In retrospect,” Skylar said, once we’d made it out the front door, “I’m not sure ice-skating was a good idea.”

  “You think?” Bethany snorted. “Maybe if you were actually psychic, you could tell us why, in the name of all that is good and holy in this world, your little instincts led us here.”

  I felt foggy and disconnected. I could barely keep up with the back and forth between the two of them, but the moment the question was out of Bethany’s mouth, a second Preternatural Control team shuffled by us, a dark-haired woman leading the way.

  Click. Click. Click.

  The sound of heels against concrete penetrated the fog in my brain, and I froze. For a moment, I thought that the woman in heels—the one from the school, the one coming toward us now—was here for me, but she brushed past us on her way into the rink.

  She never even turned around.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Even after she was gone, I could still hear the sound of her heels echoing through the recesses of my brain.

  Who is she? Why is she here? So tired …

  My thoughts were a jumbled mess. I could barely move. And as Bethany and Skylar practically poured me into the backseat of the BMW, I thought about what had just happened—everything that had happened—and I managed to stave off the dizziness and nausea coursing through my entire body just long enough to spare a few words for the BMW’s belly-dancing owner.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” I told Bethany, my words slurred and packing next to no heat. “You should have run.”

  “I was providing a distraction so you could run,” Bethany retorted. “And that dragon was, I might add, totally distracted.”

  I tried to tell Bethany exactly what I thought of her “distraction,” but somewhere between my brain and my mouth, the words got lost, and they came out in a jumble.

  Bethany turned to Skylar. “What’s wrong with her?”

  For once, Skylar was silent, and her silence was answer enough.

  “She’s only been infected for four hours,” Bethany said, her voice going dry. “She should be fine.”

  I closed my eyes, and somewhere inside of me, something shifted. I shouldn’t have been able to lure the beast from Bethany’s body to mine.
I shouldn’t have developed an ouroboros the moment I’d been bitten. And I certainly shouldn’t have been hearing voices.

  You—Promise—Fine.

  I smelled wet grass, rain, honeysuckle. I saw the outline of a body, solid and sleek. I heard a voice shouting at me from a distance, but couldn’t make out a single word.

  This time, I didn’t fight to hold on to consciousness—couldn’t—and my last thought as I drifted into oblivion was that the woman in the heels reminded me of someone.

  And that could not possibly be good.

  I woke up staring into eyes the exact shade of my comforter at home: faded turquoise, so light that I felt like if I stared at them long enough, I’d be able to see straight through. It took a moment before the rest of the features fell into place: blond hair, suntanned skin, cheekbones sharp enough to draw blood.

  Elliot.

  His name came to me a second before the rest of my senses returned. I bolted straight up, realized I was in some kind of bed, and began scrambling backward on my hands and heels.

  “Hey, hey—” He looked like he wanted to reach for me, but he must have had some sense of self-preservation, because he kept his hands right where they were. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. You passed out, and Skylar and Beth brought you here.”

  It was weird to hear Bethany referred to as Beth—almost as weird as it was to wake up alone in a room with her boyfriend.

  “Define ‘here,’ ” I said sharply. Or, at least, I meant to say it sharply. Despite my best efforts, the words came out little and vulnerable instead.

  “We’re at my brother Vaughn’s house,” Elliot told me. “Skylar called me when Bethany went off the rails.”

  I decided I did not want to know what Bethany “going off the rails” entailed.

  “She was really worried about you,” Elliot continued. “We all were.”

  I felt like I’d fallen into some kind of parallel universe. For years, I’d spent every other night fighting to the death with nightmares made flesh. I came home broken and bleeding, with bones poking through my skin, and no one had ever noticed. No one had ever worried. Even when I was little, before the changes started, I could remember bumps and bruises, waking up in a cold sweat, vicious bouts of the flu—and no one had ever sat next to my bed, waiting for me to wake up.