Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Screw this.

  I may have been different, I may have been a loner, I may have been a freak, but I wasn’t a crier. Not about this, not about anything. Determined to quell the urge, I turned my attention to the piece of paper Skylar had pressed into my palm as I was leaving Vaughn’s house. I tugged it out of my pocket and unfolded it, careful not to tear the edges.

  It’s this thing, Skylar had said. I can’t get it out of my head. I think it might be important.

  Staring at the drawing, I had the oddest sense of déjà vu. The symbol was simple: an octagon bisected by a ribbon—or possibly a ladder, spiraling around an invisible line. The shape itself was uneven and asymmetrical, and I got the feeling that drawing was not a talent that Skylar had in any kind of abundance.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at the sketch and waiting for the lightbulb moment when everything clicked into place, but all I managed to accomplish was giving myself a headache.

  Your body’s working overtime, trying to replace the blood it’s lost.

  Thinking back on Vaughn’s diagnosis, I remembered—belatedly—that at lunch, Elliot had mentioned something about one of their brothers being a vet. I snorted.

  I passed out, and Skylar took me to a vet.

  The irony of the situation—that maybe I was an animal, no more human than the things I fought—did not escape me.

  Not—animal.

  “The bloodsucking parasite doesn’t think I’m an animal,” I said, my voice dry. “I feel so very comforted.”

  “Kali?” Belatedly, I realized that my father had stuck his head into my room, and I was torn between wondering what he wanted now and hoping that he hadn’t overheard me talking to thin air.

  “What do you want?” I asked, too tired to sugarcoat things and pretend that everything was okay between us, or that there was even an us to speak of at all.

  “I … erm …” My father rarely stuttered. Eloquence was kind of his thing, so the fact that he was stumbling over his words drew my attention more than the fact that he was here. “I just wanted you to know that I didn’t call Paul Davis,” he said. “If you and Bethany want to get together—that is, if you decide you want to—well, it’s up to you, okay?”

  This was about as close as he could possibly come to apologizing, and saying okay without meeting his eyes was as close as I could come to accepting it. A few seconds passed with neither one of us saying anything else, and then he turned to leave.

  “Night, Dad,” I called after him. There was a chance—and I didn’t know how big it was—that this might be the last conversation the two of us ever had. I owed it to him to say something, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to be saying.

  “Good night, Kali.”

  Around two in the morning, I finally fell asleep, but the only thing waiting for me in my dreams was more of the same: more monsters, more doubts, a nagging feeling that I was missing something, that I was screwing everything up.

  I dreamed I was dreaming.

  I dreamed I was dying.

  I dreamed I was covered in blood.

  I turned over in bed, my white sheets dyed in shades of red, and there was a man there, staring at me, drenched in shadow from head to toe. There was something beautiful about his features, something deadly, and his eyes …

  Those eyes.

  They were the color of tarnished silver, set deep in a face that wasn’t human, but wasn’t not.

  He reached out and touched me, trailing shadows everywhere he went, and I breathed in the darkness.

  Breathed it out.

  I dreamed I was dreaming.

  I dreamed I was dying.

  I woke up covered in blood.

  I woke in darkness. Before I could scream, someone pounced on me, covering my mouth with two hands. Without even thinking about it, I grabbed the person by the wrists, digging my fingers into her flesh. I would have kept squeezing as hard as my stillhuman hands could manage, but at some point, I came out of the fugue state my dream had left me in and recognized the person on top of me.

  “Bethany?”

  Half convinced I was still asleep, I stopped fighting, and Bethany pulled back to the foot of the bed, like she thought I might fly off the handle at any moment and go for her eyes.

  “What is your problem?” she huffed.

  “My problem?” I repeated dumbly. “You’re leering over me in the middle of the night, and you want to know what my problem is?”

  “You were having a nightmare,” Bethany retorted. “I was trying to wake you up.”

  “By smothering me to death?” My head felt like someone had taken a chain saw to the inside. I wasn’t feeling overly charitable.

  “You’re bleeding, Kali.” Bethany’s voice was matter-of-fact. “When I came in, you were clawing at the ouroboros. Your stomach’s a mess.”

  As soon as Bethany mentioned the ouroboros, I felt the sharp, burning sensation of cool air assaulting raw flesh. Even through the shadow-lit room, I could see that Bethany wasn’t exaggerating: I’d already bled through my shirt. Wincing as I pulled cotton away from the open wound, I sat up, trying to process.

  Bethany Davis had apparently broken into my house.

  I’d dreamed of something that wasn’t human, something that had eyes only for me.

  And while my dream-self had been making nice with Old Silver Eyes, my hands had apparently been trying to scratch their way through the chupacabra’s mark.

  Does not compute.

  “Bethany, what are you doing in my bedroom at”—I looked at the clock on my nightstand—“five forty-four in the morning? How did you even get in?”

  Bethany shrugged.

  “Forget it,” I said, deciding I had bigger things to worry about. “I don’t want to know.”

  We were getting close enough to dawn that I could almost taste the coming change. The idea that I might not die seemed disturbingly novel, like there was a bigger part of me than I’d realized that had believed, from the moment I’d decided to save Bethany, that it was all over for me.

  One hour and thirteen minutes.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Bethany’s pointed whisper broke into my thoughts, and I realized that I hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

  “We need to get out of here. Now.” Bethany crossed her arms over her chest. “Come on, Kali. Chop-chop.”

  “Bethany, it’s five forty-five in the morning. I slept maybe three hours last night, and I feel like someone’s coated my entire body in wet cement.” I wasn’t much of a morning person to begin with—and chupacabra possession wasn’t exactly helping the matter. “I just want to take a nice, long shower and forget that any of this ever happened.”

  “They were at my house, K.” Bethany’s words broke through the fog in my brain. She couldn’t meet my eyes, and in an uncharacteristically nervous gesture, she worried at the end of my comforter, rubbing it back and forth between manicured fingers. “That woman from school. Her little henchmen. I woke up in the middle of the night, and they were there. At first I thought they were looking for me, but then I heard my dad—he was talking to them, and it wasn’t about me.”

  “Okay,” I said, forcing my brain to wake up and process the situation. “What were they talking about?”

  Bethany angled her eyes upward, the comforter clutched in one hand. “Specimen retrieval.”

  Specimen.

  The word alone was enough to send a chill creeping across the back of my neck. I’d been raised in academia. I knew what people would do to get their hands on grant money, private funding, elite access. I could only imagine what those same people would do if they knew there was uncharted territory out there: a species they’d never studied, an impossibility no one had quantified.

  Me.

  “What kind of specimen?” My throat felt like sandpaper, the words catching as I pushed them out of my mouth.

  “The kind that can be injected into teenagers during random drug tests.” Bethany’s voice was higher and clearer tha
n mine, and in the course of that single sentence, it went from light and wispy to diamond-hard. “I know it sounds crazy, and I don’t have any proof whatsoever, but I’m telling you, Kali, I have a really bad feeling about this.”

  If I’d thought someone was purposely infecting teenagers with a lethal parasite, I probably would have had a really bad feeling about it, too.

  “Did they actually say that was what they were doing?”

  Bethany’s eyes flashed at my question, and she threw down the comforter. “Yeah, Kali. The woman in charge laid out all of their most unethical and illegal activities for my benefit. There was a PowerPoint presentation, followed by a musical number, and I caught it all on tape.”

  I ignored the sarcasm. “What did she say—exactly?”

  Bethany stood up, smoothing down her skirt and fixing me with a hundred-yard stare. “She said that one of the specimens had taken and that there were indications that it had selected a new and as yet unidentified host.”

  Well, that was something to be grateful for at least.

  “She also reported that the situation with the MC-407 model had been contained and that they’d squelched any reports about the incident in the press.” Bethany took a deep breath. “And then she asked my dad to activate the tracking system on the missing specimen.”

  The second I heard the words tracking system, my eyes went to my stomach and then to the bloody tips of my fingers.

  What if I hadn’t been trying to scratch through the ouroboros? What if I’d been trying to gouge out the tracker?

  “I don’t know what’s going on, Kali, but once my dad gets that tracking system up and running, they’ll be able to pinpoint your location. Unless you want them to know your name, too, you probably shouldn’t be at home when that happens.”

  My brain finally kicked into high gear. Bethany was right—the last thing I wanted was for the men in suits to have my home address, especially since there was a decent chance that, if they were working with Bethany’s dad, they knew who my dad was, too. I could just imagine his reaction to being asked to bring me into the lab for testing.

  In fact, the whole scenario—being tracked down, caught, thrown in a tiny room with bright lights, loud noises, white coats, needles … it was all too easy to imagine. I couldn’t let myself go there. I had to move.

  Rolling out of bed, I stripped off my blood-soaked shirt and replaced it with a new one. Since I hadn’t bothered to change into pajamas the night before, I didn’t need to search for my jeans. Looping my hair into a loose ponytail, I glanced back over my shoulder at Bethany, half expecting her to have some kind of comment on my personal hygiene.

  “Ready?” she asked me, not bothering to editorialize on my sense of fashion—or lack thereof. I nodded, and a second later, the two of us were creeping down the stairs and out the front door, my father fast asleep in his room and none the wiser.

  The BMW was parked down the street, and without a word, the two of us made our way toward it. I knew this was a bad idea, knew that I should ditch Bethany before it was too late, but she had a car, and I didn’t want to do this alone.

  “Where are we going?” Bethany turned the key in the ignition, and the car purred to life.

  “As far away as we can get.” I hadn’t thought through this plan—in fact, I didn’t have a plan, but putting distance between the tracking device inside of me and any tie to my real life was the only option that made sense.

  Fifty-nine minutes and thirteen seconds.

  This close to the shift, I didn’t even need to look at my watch. I just knew. I had less than an hour until my blood turned toxic, which meant that I had less than an hour to evade capture, ditch Bethany, and hole up somewhere the real world wouldn’t dare to tread.

  “Hit the highway.”

  Bethany didn’t have to be told twice. The two of us fell into a loaded silence, and I couldn’t help but think how different we were. I was perpetually on the outside, looking in, and she was on the inside, oblivious to the fact that there was anything else out there at all.

  And yet.

  She was driving my getaway car, and I couldn’t help thinking that if things got ugly, maybe I could distract our pursuers long enough for her to disappear.

  “Thanks,” I said, and the word hung awkwardly in the air, like humidity, thick enough to drown us both.

  “You’re the one who saved my life,” Bethany replied. The words were closer to a complaint than to gratitude—not because she’d wanted to die, but because she wasn’t the kind of person who liked being indebted to anyone else.

  Some people were born for the spotlight, and some of us lived on the fringe. I was beginning to suspect that you could keep people at an arm’s length regardless.

  “We’re not friends,” I told Bethany, but the words came out more like a question.

  “No,” she agreed. “We’re not.”

  My gaze flickered over to her speedometer, and my eyebrows skyrocketed. Bethany drove the way I hunted: like she was invincible, like death was an inevitability and a friend.

  “Do you really think your dad is working with these people?”

  Bethany shrugged and tapped her fingernail impatiently against the steering wheel, like going ninety miles an hour wasn’t nearly fast enough. “He was sitting in his office discussing specimen retrieval, Kali. Whatever’s going on, my father is in it up to his eyeballs.”

  “You don’t sound surprised.”

  Bethany spared a glance for me out of the corner of her eye, then switched her gaze back to the open road. “I’m not. My dad is a brilliant academic, Kali, but brilliant academics don’t suddenly up and move into multimillion-dollar houses and buy their daughters BMWs. He took the position here because the department didn’t mind him dabbling in the private sector. I’m guessing the goons in the suits are Private and Sector.”

  “And the woman?” I found myself asking.

  “As far as I can tell,” Bethany said, “she’s calling the shots.”

  Click. Click. Click.

  I hadn’t ever gotten a good enough look at the woman in question to conjure up the image of her face in my mind, but I could still hear the clicking of heels against pavement.

  My stomach clenched.

  I’d spent enough time around academics to know that there was more money in business than there ever would be in a university setting—but that didn’t make the people who funded that kind of research evil. Pharmaceutical companies had engineered countless medical advances; most new technology wasn’t developed by university professors. Still, I had to wonder: what kind of money was there in preternatural studies?

  Want—use—now—us.

  I breathed the shadow in. I breathed it out, and I ignored the voice in my head.

  Half an hour. Just half an hour, and this would all be over. The chupacabra would die, and with any luck, the tracking device would go out with it. Bethany and I could go back to not knowing each other, and whatever her father was doing in the private sector could stay there.

  “You’re not going to tell me your plan, are you?” More tapping of Bethany’s fingertip against the steering wheel, and another glance cast at me out of the corner of her eye.

  “You don’t want to know.” That seemed to be a safe response. “We’re not friends. I don’t trust you, and you don’t like me, but I’m not lying when I say that I’m going to be okay. I’m not being stupid or optimistic or self-sacrificing. If you dropped me off on the side of the road right now, by the time I hitched my way home, I’d be fine.”

  I half expected Bethany to stop the car and let me out, but she didn’t. Instead, her green eyes narrowed. The muscles in my throat tightened, and the bottom fell out of my stomach.

  I knew better than to let people in. I knew better than to let them see even a fraction of what I was underneath this shell. So why had I just told Bethany that I could do the impossible? Chupacabra possession was always fatal once the ouroboros appeared. Always. My confidence in being able to cure m
yself had to strike her as either miraculous or bizarre.

  “You’re right,” Bethany said, switching lanes and pressing down on the accelerator. “I don’t want to know.”

  You also don’t want to be here, I thought dully. You don’t want to know what you know about your father, and you don’t want to be tangled up in this mess with me.

  I realized then that even once I was cured, this wouldn’t be over for Bethany. She’d still have to go to bed at night knowing that her father was involved in something that could have killed me, something that could have killed her. She’d have to get in her BMW every single day and wonder where the money had come from.

  Unable to meet her eyes, I busied my hands by reaching into my front pocket and pulling out the piece of paper Skylar had given me the day before. Catching a glimpse of it, Bethany slammed on the brakes. If I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt, I would have gone straight through the windshield. As it was, I was pretty sure I’d busted an ovary or two from the impact with the seat belt itself.

  “Where did you get that?” Bethany’s eyes focused on the paper in my hand with an intensity that made me eye it like it might burst into flames at any moment.

  “Skylar gave it to me.”

  Bethany made an involuntary face the second I said Skylar’s name. “And what, exactly, did Miss Little Bit Psychic say when she gave it to you?” Bethany eased her foot off the brakes and began driving again, but this time, she kept to the speed limit—a surefire sign that her attention was on me and not the road.

  “Skylar said she couldn’t get the image out of her mind and that she thought it might be important.” I felt silly even saying the words, but there was a part of me that actually believed Skylar was psychic. She’d known the men in suits were coming, she had an uncanny habit of responding to things I’d left unsaid, and her “instincts” had led us straight to the ice rink—and the man-eating, fire-breathing dragon.

  And eventually, to the woman in heels.

  Though, now that I thought about it, those last two weren’t exactly marks in her favor.

  “Did Skylar say where she’d seen it?” Bethany asked, her enunciation a shade too crisp, each word a little too sharp.