Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Unsure why she was asking, I shrugged. “In her mind?”

  For a second, looking at Bethany was like looking at Elliot when he’d told me not to encourage his sister in her delusions of psychic grandeur. Before Bethany could say something to that effect, I preempted the effort. “Have you seen this symbol before?”

  Bethany didn’t reply, and that told me everything I needed to know. She had.

  “Care to clue me in?”

  Bethany took her eyes off mine. “Care to tell me how you’re going to get rid of that chupacabra at dawn?”

  This time, the silence that descended on the car wasn’t so much awkward as charged. I would have laid money that wherever Bethany had seen this symbol, it had something to do with the work her father was doing for the suits. Given that she’d already told me that Daddy Dearest was involved in this up to his eyeballs, it was hard to imagine why she’d suddenly be playing things close to the vest.

  You don’t want to know, I reminded myself, using the exact same words I’d said to Bethany earlier. The less I knew about her, the less she knew about me, the easier this would be on all of us. I was supposed to be invisible. I was supposed to fade into the background. I was supposed to do what I did—

  Alone.

  Shut up, I thought back fiercely. Just shut up. It was bad enough dealing with my own instincts, knowing that I’d never be able to tell anyone else what I really was. I didn’t need a bloodsucker reminding me that no matter what happened, at the end of the day, I’d still be me, and there’d still be a glass wall separating me from the rest of the world. I wouldn’t ever be human.

  I could feel the shift coming, taste it on the tip of my tongue. It was a matter of minutes now. Twenty. Fifteen. Ten. The surface of my skin was electric. My bones itched. I became acutely aware of the blood in my veins, the length of each and every one of my limbs.

  It always seemed strange to me that in the last few minutes before I became something else, I felt more human than ever. I was hungry, starving, and the wounds I’d scratched into my own stomach stung, bringing tears to my eyes. I wanted to cry, and I wanted to scream. I was tired, I was lonely, and an insane part of me wanted to stay that way. No matter how many times I went through this, I couldn’t convince my brain that shifting was different than dying, that when I was Other, I was still myself. Instead, I responded to the inevitability of the change like a girl facing down her own mortality, knowing that in nine minutes, eight minutes, seven, her life as she knew it would come to end.

  “Are you all right?” Bethany’s concern cut through my haze, and I nodded.

  “Can you drop me off here?” I asked, my voice quiet, my arms wrapping around my torso, like if I held on hard enough, I could stay human just that much longer.

  This is what you wanted. This is what you’ve been waiting for. I tried to talk myself into it, but the rush of sensation all around me was deafening.

  —Alone.

  Alone, alone, alone. The word echoed through my body, and I had two reactions to it, each visceral and strong. Part of me said no, and part of me said yes. Part of me wanted the change, and part of me didn’t want to give up being what I was now.

  It was kind of ironic—I spent my human days wishing I wasn’t human, but in the last moments before I made the switch, I didn’t want to give that up.

  “I’m not dropping you off anywhere,” Bethany said. “You’re really pale, and your pupils are huge. Are you shaking?”

  I was. I was trembling, my body vibrating with the knowledge that in a few minutes, everything would change.

  I’m going to kill you, I thought, trying to focus on the chupacabra and not on the things I’d lose once I crossed over. You’re going to die.

  Broken.

  I might have actually laughed out loud at the word. The parasite in my head was calling me broken, and he was right. Didn’t mean I was any less likely to kill him dead. Didn’t make the tears in my eyes sting any less.

  “Kali.” Bethany’s voice went up in pitch. “Kali, I need you to open your eyes and look at me.”

  My eyelids fluttered, and I managed to look at her long enough to tell that she was dialing a cell phone—probably calling Elliot or Vaughn or someone else who didn’t know me from Adam.

  From Eve.

  Bethany cursed under her breath and hung up the phone. “If you die on me, I will kill you.”

  I giggled.

  She thought the chupacabra was draining me, the way it had the night before. She thought I was dying, drifting further and further away. She thought I was on the verge of going to sleep and never waking up.

  The sound of the engine revving permeated my brain, and I forced myself to focus, to concentrate.

  “You have to let me out now,” I said, fumbling with my seat belt, wrenching it off. “I need to—have to—go.”

  “We’re being followed,” Bethany said, and that snapped me out of it. My back was arching, my blood was burning its way through my veins, but for once, my mind was on something other than the coming change. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the SUV accelerating toward us. Morning traffic was just starting to pick up, and Bethany zoomed around the other cars like she’d had a past life driving Indy 500s. She hit the exit, flew across an intersection, and hopped back on the highway going the other way. For a few seconds, I thought we’d lost our tail, but then the SUV appeared again, and this time, I saw the passenger-side window cracking. I saw the gun.

  “Specimen retrieval,” I told myself. That was what Bethany had said. They were here to retrieve me, to bring the chupacabra inside of me back to the lab. For whatever reason, to them it was worth tracking, and if it was worth tracking, it was worth taking alive.

  Right?

  Bethany cursed, each word punctuating the one before it, like shots coming off an automatic. The car behind us changed lanes and, without warning, swerved, sideswiping the BMW with brutal, unforgiving force.

  Bethany’s fingers tightened over the steering wheel, and the last thing I saw before I lost all sense of reality was her white knuckles bulging under paper-thin skin, giving her the look of a skeleton, of Death itself.

  Brakes squealing. Glass breaking. Shattering. My world is turned upside down. White-hot pain.

  This time, my head really did go through the windshield.

  Three minutes. Two. One.

  And then I died.

  I’m in a tunnel, lying very still, metal all around me. It’s loud and dark, and I’m so scared. My bones are shaking. I want it to be over. I want to get out.

  “Hold on, baby. You’re doing great.”

  The voice echoes through the tunnel. Mommy? Everything is humming—it’s humming so loudly I want to scream. I want to cover my ears, but I can’t.

  Can’t move my arms.

  Can’t move my legs.

  I want to go home.

  “The image quality is shot to hell.”

  “She’s scared, Rena.”

  Daddy?

  “You have to be still, Kali. Be so still.”

  Still as the grave.

  Oxygen rushed into my lungs like water tearing its way through a dam. I gasped and bolted straight up. Glass crunched underneath me; shards flew off my body, sparkling like raindrops in the newborn sun. Slowly, the world came into focus. Bethany and the BMW were gone, the carnage around me the only evidence that they’d ever been there at all.

  They left me here? They ran us off the road, I went through the windshield, and they just left?

  So much for specimen retrieval.

  Stiffly, I brought my right hand up to my left shoulder, popping it back into place. I pulled bits and pieces of windshield from my face, my chest, my arms. I reached my blood-soaked hands up and manually tilted my head to the side, then snapped it backward. The sound of crunching bones was unpleasant, but not overly so.

  Twenty-three hours and nineteen minutes.

  That was more than enough time for me to heal. Already, the surface wounds were closing,
leaving nothing but smears of blood in their wake. I could hear bones knitting themselves back together, could feel my spine righting itself with nothing more than a curious pressure at the nape of my neck.

  Somebody tried to kill me. I should be dead.

  That realization wasn’t as disturbing as it would have been on a human day. People like me weren’t scared to die, and we weren’t easy to kill. The scent of blood—coppery, wet—was familiar, but for some reason, this time, there were layers to the smell that I’d never inhaled before: iron, honey, sweat.

  If you can smell your blood, they can smell it.

  For a moment, I thought the warning was a product of my own mind, but then a glint of gold caught my eye. Under my ravaged shirt, under the blood, I could see part of an all-too-familiar symbol.

  No.

  I pulled at the fabric, wrenching it away from my stomach. The flesh underneath was smeared with messy streaks of blood, like someone had been finger-painting on my torso, but the red color did nothing to mask the image of a snake eating its own tail.

  The ouroboros.

  No. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t the plan. My blood was poison, and the thing inside me was supposed to be dying. It was supposed to be gone.

  Kali.

  I didn’t want to be hearing the voice. I didn’t want to still be infected, to know that come dawn, I might still be dying.

  You’re not dying. The human body can’t handle the bite. Yours can.

  In tandem with the words, the ouroboros on my stomach trembled and then an inklike substance began to bleed outward from its surface. Like vines climbing a wall, string-thin wisps of gold snaked their way across my skin, up my torso, around to my back.

  I couldn’t tear my eyes from the mark’s progress. As it painted me in crisscrossing lines, the ouroboros glowed with an unearthly sheen. Beads of sweat gathered on the surface of my skin, and unable to resist, I dragged one bloody finger across the length of the symbol, tracing it, feeling it—

  Your wounds are healing. At this rate, you’ll be fine within an hour, but until then, you need to mask the smell of your blood.

  There was no way I’d be completely healed in an hour. I was fast, but not that fast.

  There are some advantages to getting bitten.

  The voice in my head was clearer than it had ever been, like its owner was whispering the words directly into the back of my neck. My eyes focused on a point in the distance, and I saw him.

  The man from my dreams.

  He was a head or so taller than me, his skin lighter, his eyes silver. Shadow clung to the surface of his body, but this time, I could see an unearthly light through the darkness.

  He didn’t belong here.

  Neither do you.

  I met his silver eyes, so dark I could feel myself getting lost in them, and for a moment, I saw him somewhere else: cement walls, blackened floor, blood.

  Kali. Focus.

  The words were sharp, and it took me a minute to process the fact that the voice in my head was yelling at me.

  The people who left you here will expect your body to be discovered soon. They’re counting on it being ruled a hit-and-run. They’ll be surprised enough when your body doesn’t turn up. The last thing you need is to draw every beast in a thirty-mile radius to your side.

  I hated to admit it, but the chupacabra had a point.

  The second that thought crossed my mind, a low, rumbling chuckle echoed through my brain. I’m not a Nibbler, Kali. Nibblers can’t talk.

  Nibblers? Nibblers?

  You’re not a chupacabra? I asked silently, because that was what he seemed to be implying.

  No. I’m not.

  He sounded fairly certain, but I couldn’t help asking again. You’re seriously not the chupacabra who bit me yesterday?

  I’d started hearing the voice right after I’d been bitten. The simplest explanation was usually the right one—even if it involved assuming that a parasite was capable of speech.

  I’m not a Nibbler, Kali. I have a Nibbler.

  I looked down at the symbol on my stomach, pictured one on his.

  So I have a chupacabra inside my body and you have one inside of yours and that lets us play psychic telephone?

  He had to realize how ridiculous that sounded.

  More ridiculous than thinking that a Nibbler can talk?

  After spending the past eighteen hours trying to keep Skylar, Bethany, and the whole motley crew from thinking I was insane, I really wasn’t in the mood to be mocked by the voice in my head.

  The voice that apparently did not belong to a chupacabra.

  If you’re not the thing that bit me, I said sharply, who the hell are you?

  I knew before the response came that he would give me his name—Zev.

  What the hell are you? I amended my silent question, and Zev answered with a question of his own.

  What the hell are you?

  In the distance, the man I’d seen disappeared back into the depths of my mind. My body stiff, I climbed to my feet.

  What the hell was I—how many times had I asked myself that same question?

  I wanted answers—lots of them—but there was no denying that Zev’s suggestion about making myself scarce was a good one: I was injured, and even with my healing abilities kicked into overdrive, I wasn’t in any shape to fight off every monster that came creeping out of the woodwork. My blood was everywhere. The air was thick with it. It was only a matter of time before the wind carried the scent to the wrong nostrils.

  This isn’t over, I told the mystery boy in my mind. You are going to answer my questions.

  Silence.

  Without another word—out loud or internal—I turned and walked up to the road, half naked and covered in blood, trying not to think about the mark on my stomach or the distinct feeling that life, as I knew it, was over.

  I was fairly certain that the kind of person who picked up girls on the side of the road wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to be alone in a car with for any extended period of time. I suspected this was doubly true if you were covered in your own blood and wearing the shredded remains of a T-shirt that had most definitely seen better days.

  Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers. I needed a shower. I needed fresh clothes, and I needed to get off the side of the highway before some well-meaning passerby called the cops. My options were severely limited, and of those, Eddie seemed like the best bet. He had a proto-beer belly and biceps that told me he liked to feel strong. I knew the second I saw him, pulling into the gas station, that he would pick me up when he pulled out, no questions asked.

  I also knew he’d probably try to take a little something in return.

  Don’t do this, Kali.

  I wasn’t sure whether Zev meant those words as a warning or an order, but either way, I didn’t feel particularly compelled to listen. Whoever or whatever he was, he was nothing to me, and I was used to taking care of myself.

  I had a knife strapped to my calf and the instincts of a killer.

  I’ll be fine.

  Besides, I’d already almost died once today. That really had a way of putting things in perspective. So I got into Eddie’s car. I relegated Zev’s voice to the back of my mind, and I bided my time. We had made it to the outskirts of town, about a mile away from the university, when Eddie pulled off onto an access road and put one hand on my shoulder.

  “I’ll kill you,” I said conversationally. The words weren’t a threat—more of an observation, really, and it disturbed me that I could be so matter-of-fact about taking human life. I’d never felt the need to hunt anyone who fell on that side of the natural/preternatural divide, but the hunt-lust was already building up inside of me, and I’d had a really bad morning.

  “Excuse me?” Eddie asked, gob-smacked and so fatally stupid that I almost couldn’t stand to look at him.

  “Don’t touch me,” I clarified, the air around me pulsing with a rhythm I recognized all too well. One that wanted me to lay a tra
p. To hunt. To kill.

  “Hey now, sweetheart. I could have called the cops when I saw you. Still could. Girl like you, looking like that—”

  Eddie’s hand ventured from my shoulder down my collarbone, and something inside of me snapped. One second I was me, and the next, I’d been pushed outside of my body, and I was watching my mouth move and listening to words that weren’t mine snaking their way out of my lips.

  “She probably wouldn’t kill you. She has a certain fondness for humans, thinks she’s one of them.”

  I watched, disembodied, as a dangerous, glittering smile cut across the features of my face, and I flashed back to the moment at the ice rink when I’d lost control of my body, when something or someone else had thrown it out of the dragon’s line of fire.

  “What in the blazing hell are you talking about?” Eddie didn’t remove his hand from my collarbone, but it didn’t venture any lower, either.

  “The girl won’t kill you, but I will. I’ll take this knife and slit you from the throat down, split your body in two along the lines of your delicate human spine.”

  Zev’s voice was lower than mine, almost mechanical in the way it left my mouth.

  I fought for control of my own body.

  I can handle this!

  I am handling this, Zev said calmly, and I knew by his tone of voice that he wasn’t arguing with me. He was simply stating a fact.

  I was beginning to wish I’d never gotten into a car with Eddie.

  Eddie—who was likely coming to a similar conclusion himself—stupidly persisted in trying to make a point with the creature wearing my body.

  “Now, look here, girl.”

  “Leave.” In the span of a heartbeat, Zev had my knife in his hand, and he dragged the point gently across the surface of my assailant’s Adam’s apple. “Run.”

  Eddie froze. “You crazy bitch.”

  Within a second, Zev had the edge of the knife pressed to the underside of the man’s chin, hard enough to draw blood. Small red spheres beaded up on the surface of Eddie’s skin, coating his stubble.

  Zev licked his lips.

  Or rather, he licked mine.