Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Elliot winced. Vaughn’s expression never changed. Skylar’s bottom lip trembled.

  “You promise?”

  This was not how I’d expected this conversation going. “I promise.”

  For a moment, you could have heard a pin drop in the room. Bethany broke the silence. “That’s too bad,” she said, “because right now, I’d kind of like to slap you, and it just won’t be the same if you can’t feel the pain.”

  This was closer to the reaction I’d expected.

  “I’ll go,” I said, sitting up, finding my way to my feet.

  “Go?” Bethany repeated incredulously. “You’re not going anywhere. You are going to move your mouth, and words are going to come out, and you’re going to explain how any of this is even remotely possible.” She narrowed her eyes. “And … go.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.” My arms hugged my chest, like I could keep my emotions from the surface by sheer force of will. “I already told you guys. I’m not normal. I’m a freak. I showed you the ouroboros—that’s not normal. Normal people die when they’re bitten. I got stronger. Normal people go crazy if a zombie takes a chunk out of their arm. I took a little nap. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. All I know is that I’m not normal.”

  Skylar’s babbling tendencies must have been contagious, because I couldn’t stop myself from elaborating.

  “I’m not even human.”

  If I’d felt naked before, I felt vivisected now—like someone had taken a knife and sliced my body open, like the others were getting ready to paw through my insides, chunk by chunk.

  Skylar was the first to recover. “Oh,” she said. “I thought maybe you were a little bit human.”

  Inside my mind, Zev snorted, and I pushed back the insane urge to laugh. A little bit human, I thought. Story of my life.

  “What are you?” Bethany’s words didn’t sound like an accusation, but she didn’t sound curious, either. If anything, her voice was hesitant, guarded.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. Her eyes flashed, but before she could say a word, I preempted it. “I think I’m some kind of hunter. When there’s something preternatural around, I can feel it, and there’s this desire, this need to fight. I don’t get tired. I don’t feel pain. And as much as I’m capable of tracking the beasties down, they can track me.” I ran my fingertips gently over the length of my arm. The skin was puckered, still healing, and for the first time, I thought of what I must have looked like with pieces torn out of my flesh, my eyes bloodshot and feral.

  “They like my blood,” I said lightly. “If they smell it, they come for me, so I go for them first. It’s illegal, and people think it’s wrong, but I have to.”

  “So this is a regular thing for you?” Bethany asked, her eyebrows arched nearly into her hairline. “Killing zombies, playing cat and mouse with your friendly neighborhood dragon …”

  “There was nothing normal about that dragon,” I retorted. “But to answer your question, yes. I hunt. If something kills people, I kill it.”

  Bethany aimed her gaze heavenward. “This explains so, so much.”

  I thought she was thinking about all the little things I’d said and done in the past two days, but she disabused me of that notion pretty quickly.

  “I mean, no wonder you’ve got a savior complex. You do this for a living.”

  I almost pointed out that nobody paid me, but Bethany was on a roll.

  “And when you saw I had an ouroboros, you knew that if you could get it to swap, you could kill it.”

  I thought of the parasite feeding me strength and thirsting for blood in return. Killing it had been the plan, but now it was as much a part of my body as my skin or my lungs.

  “In theory.”

  “So yesterday, when we were running all over the place trying to save you—that was all just a show?” Bethany’s words were crisp, and her voice went up an octave or two. “You were just pretending to be sick?”

  “No.” The word burst out of my mouth with so much force that I realized that I really didn’t want her to think that yesterday was something I’d faked, that it somehow didn’t count.

  “What I am,” I said carefully, “the things I can do … I can’t always do them.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Elliot said, speaking up for the first time. “I can’t believe we’re even sitting here talking about this like it’s not insane. If there were people out there who were born to hunt the preternatural, don’t you think we’d know about them? Don’t you think the government would know about them? It makes no sense.”

  “Yeah, well, take a time machine back to middle school and tell me that,” I snapped, but the words came out wispy and small. “Because I was twelve when this started happening, and I didn’t know why, or what was going on, or who I could tell, because it was crazy. It’s still crazy. It makes no sense. Sometimes I’m human, and sometimes I’m not. If Bethany really wants to slap me, all she has to do is wait seventeen hours and change, and I’ll feel it the same way anyone else would.”

  “Seventeen hours?” Elliot repeated. “That would be around seven a.m.”

  “Dawn,” Skylar supplied helpfully. “You’ll be human again at dawn.”

  I nodded. I’d already said enough. Too much, probably.

  “So when you took the chupacabra, you didn’t know if you could kill it?” Bethany was stuck on that one moment in time—though considering it had been life-or-death for her, I could understand the fixation.

  “I thought if I made it to sunrise, the chupacabra would die, and I’d be fine.” I shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “And none of this—the healing, the warrior-princess act, the crazy eyes … none of that is because of the chupacabra?”

  Beth’s face was guarded, but I found that I could get inside her head as easily as if I were the psychic one. She’d seen the way the ouroboros had spread out over my torso. She’d known her father was experimenting on chupacabras. And then she’d seen me do the impossible.

  It made perfect sense that she’d wondered if the two were related. And, yeah, they kind of were—but not in the way she thought.

  “It would have killed you,” I said, keeping things simple. “Whoever injected you had no way of knowing that it wouldn’t.”

  I realized a second after saying it that for an hour, Bethany might have been able to tell herself that her father hadn’t been playing around with her life—that he’d found a way to make her faster, stronger. That whatever cure he was after for Tyler, there might have been hope.

  And there I was, telling her she was wrong.

  “People like me”—it felt weird to say that phrase out loud, I’d spent so much time thinking it to myself—“we have a different reaction to chupacabras. When I was human, it was killing me, but when I switched …” I gestured to the newly healed skin on my arms. “I don’t normally heal this fast. A couple of days ago, I might not have been able to bounce back from this at all. Whatever chupacabras do to humans, they do the opposite to me.”

  Don’t tell them about the blood, Zev advised in what I’m sure he thought passed for a very sage tone. Humans are remarkably queasy about our liquid diet.

  “Would you just shut up?” I didn’t realize I’d said the words out loud until everyone else in the room started giving me the “she’s losing it again” look in a single, synchronized motion.

  “Not you guys,” I clarified. “It’s like this …”

  If explaining the whole “every other day” thing was hard, trying to tell them that being bitten had given me a psychic bond with another person—who’d also been bitten—was darn near impossible, but I gave it my best shot.

  Skylar was the first to recover. “So he’s in your head, and you’re in his? That’s significantly psychic phenomena.” She seemed enthused. “Can you guys actually speak, or is it just images? Do you feel what he feels? Can you swap bodies at will?”

  I got the feeling she would have gone on indefinit
ely, but Bethany stopped her.

  “We have bigger problems right now than the fact that if Kali makes out with someone, it might qualify as a ménage à trois,” she said. “Do you have any idea what will happen if my father figures out what you can do? If the company he works for does? They’ll want to take you apart piece by piece, just to see how it all works.”

  I could see Bethany wondering herself—how it worked, whether or not my cells really did hold the answer her father was looking for.

  For Tyler.

  “That can’t happen,” Bethany said finally, and I got the distinct feeling she was saying that as much for her own benefit as for mine. “They’d use you as a guinea-pig lab rat and bleed you dry. That can’t happen.”

  Guinea-pig lab rat? Zev sounded either amused or insulted—I wasn’t sure which.

  “I know exactly what they’d do to me, Beth.” For once, she didn’t correct me on the use of the nickname. I took that as a good sign and plowed on. “I know because that’s exactly what they’re doing to Zev.”

  In the silence that followed, I realized that I was almost out of secrets. I hadn’t meant to tell them about Zev. I hadn’t meant to ask for help. Bethany had already told me no once today. Now that she knew what I was, I couldn’t imagine that the answer would be any different. She still had her mother to think about, and if one thing was perfectly, crystalline clear, it was that I could take care of myself.

  I just kept coming and coming and coming.

  I was what I was.

  “You know Chimera has your psychic boy toy. You also know that they’d probably love to add you to their collection, too.” Bethany’s hands snaked out to her hips. “Please tell me you’re not planning a rescue mission.”

  The look on my face must have said it all.

  Bethany rolled her eyes, and I wondered if I’d imagined the way she’d washed my body clean of blood, her touch light, her bedside manner gentle. “Right. You’re Kali. Of course you’re planning a rescue mission. Stupid self-sacrifice is kind of your thing.”

  Beside her, Elliot cleared his throat. At first, I thought he was trying to get her to show a little tact, but then I realized the throat-clearing was for my benefit, not hers.

  “Yes?” I said, meeting his eyes, feeling his gaze on my body and not knowing whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

  Elliot opened his mouth, a muscle in his jaw tensing and betraying the seemingly calm tone in his voice. “Forget rescue missions,” he said. “Am I the only one here who thinks we should call the police?”

  Elliot was indeed the only person present who thought we should call the police. Skylar closed her eyes, hummed for a moment, and declared that she didn’t think that was a very good idea. Bethany was positive her phone and the landline were tapped and that Chimera would know the second we placed the call. And Vaughn had a different suggestion. “Call Reid.”

  Skylar made a face, and even though Elliot wouldn’t have admitted it, he did the same.

  “Who’s Reid?” I asked.

  “The brother I would have to promote if Elliot doesn’t stop treating me like I’m five,” Skylar said. “He’s … difficult.”

  “And by that, she means that he’s a hard-ass.” Elliot leaned back against the wall. “Black-and-white moral code, nobody else ever measures up.”

  I turned to Vaughn, expecting him to weigh in, but he just shrugged. “He’s a Fed.”

  Right. Because the one thing that could make this situation better was the involvement of the federal government. Why didn’t I just take out a billboard, volunteering to let the army play Dissect the Kali for fun?

  “If we ask Reid not to tell, he won’t,” Skylar said. “You’re a kid, Kali. Reid would die before he’d hurt a kid.”

  Vaughn took Skylar’s statement as a stamp of approval. Without a word, he stepped out of the room, fishing his cell phone out of a pocket as he went.

  “So Reid will come and get rid of the zombie carnage?” Bethany asked. “And then what? He’ll start an investigation into Chimera on the down low?”

  Elliot nodded. “Something like that. If your dad tries anything with your mom, we can bring in Nathan.”

  “Nathan?” I repeated, glancing over at Skylar. “Wasn’t that the brother who taught you to hot-wire cars?”

  Skylar shrugged. “When he’s not stealing cars, he’s a lawyer.”

  I was beginning to think that there weren’t any bases the Hayden family didn’t have covered—but none of this changed my situation. Chimera still had Zev, and even if Reid could keep me out of the investigation, there was no guarantee that Chimera’s operation would be shut down, or that Zev wouldn’t be absorbed into some government lab once it was.

  “Exactly,” Skylar said, nodding her head to emphasize the point—though I don’t think any of us were entirely sure what she was saying exactly to. “The good news is that Reid will handle it. The bad news is that Reid will handle it. He won’t want our help. He won’t accept our help, and if he thinks, even for a second, that any of us might be inclined to engage in helping of any kind, he will have us shipped off to a convent in Switzerland.”

  “He wasn’t serious about the convent thing,” Elliot said with a roll of those icy, pale eyes. “And besides, Mom and Dad would never let him.”

  “He’s Reid,” Skylar retorted. “Mom and Dad won’t even realize he’s talking them into it. I’ll end up sipping tea with the nuns, and you’ll be dropping and giving some drill sergeant twenty at military school. Kali and Beth will probably end up in convents, too, and he doesn’t even know them.”

  “Don’t call me Beth.”

  Before Bethany and Skylar could get into it, I intervened. “If your brother wants you to stay out of it,” I said, “maybe you should.” I paused, letting the suggestion sink in before adding the caveat. “That’s not an option for me.”

  You don’t have to do this, Zev told me. You shouldn’t.

  “I have to do this,” I said out loud, half for Zev’s benefit and half for theirs. “I don’t expect the rest of you to help me.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Bethany replied. “Because you’re the hero, and we’re the ones who walk away.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, because she was right. I did expect them to walk away. They didn’t owe me anything. We barely knew each other.

  What reason could I possibly give them to stay?

  “If we’re going to break into Bethany’s dad’s lab,” Skylar interjected, with no segue whatsoever, “we should probably do it before Reid gets here for zombie cleanup.”

  “Or,” Elliot suggested, “we could not.”

  He crossed the room, so that he was standing next to me. Bethany tracked his progression with her eyes, but the expression on her face never changed.

  “I get wanting to know what you are, where you come from,” Elliot told me, his voice even and sweet. “I get wanting to help someone who can’t help himself. But this is big, Kali, and you could get hurt.” He paused. “Seventeen hours from now, you could die.”

  Sixteen hours and fifty-nine minutes, I corrected silently, but I didn’t say the words out loud.

  I wanted to tell Elliot that this was more or less my life. That I’d known from the time I was twelve years old that I’d die hunting monsters—that the only thing different this time was that the monsters were human. But what came out of my mouth was something else.

  “You don’t get it. You won’t ever get it, Elliot, because you have a family. You have friends, and you have a future—you don’t have to worry that tomorrow or a year from now or five years, someone will figure out what you are. You don’t have to wake up every morning wondering why, and you don’t have to go through the motions, pretending that someday it will stop, because it will never stop.”

  Never, never, never.

  “I can’t just walk away and forget about this—I am this, and the only person in the world who could ‘get’ that, the only one who might actually understand or, Go
d forbid, have some answers—that person is the one you want me to walk away from.”

  Protecting other people was what I was born for. I had to believe that, believe that I had a purpose, because otherwise, I was just a killer. I was sharp edges and violence and making myself bleed. Either I did it to make the world a safer place, or I really was a monster, less human than I was willing to believe.

  “I’m doing this,” I said, shrugging off Elliot’s touch before I even realized that he’d lifted his hand to my shoulder. “I’m not asking for your help, and I’m certainly not asking for permission—”

  “I don’t know the code.” Bethany said the words like she hadn’t just interrupted me, like she really couldn’t have cared less about what I was saying. “I have no idea how to get the door to my dad’s lab open, but I can show you where it is. Maybe the ‘psychic’ can intuit a few little bitty numbers for you.”

  Bethany did a good job of coating that last sentence with sarcasm and pretending not to care—but I’d mastered that particular art when I was nine, and I saw straight through it. If Bethany had known the code, she would have given it to me.

  “I’m not sure about the numbers,” Skylar said brightly, “but I can try.”

  “For the last time, Skylar,” Elliot interjected. “You’re not psychic.”

  “And Kali isn’t super girl,” Skylar cooed back. “Your brotherly wisdom has been absorbed. On a related note, your job is distracting Reid.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Skylar darted across the room, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me out. Bethany followed on our heels.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked her. A few hours earlier, she’d refused to let us anywhere near the lab.

  “Kali, a horde of zombies attacked my house. Vaughn said they were wearing some kind of high-tech collars, and I’m pretty sure that normal zombies aren’t supposed to coordinate their flesh-eating efforts. I may not be the sharpest eyeliner in the box, but even I can read in between those lines.” She paused. “Besides, I’m getting really tired of you being the hero. When people bite me, I bite back.”