Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “Boyfriend’s little sister’s in the room,” Skylar reminded her. “If you could avoid talking about biting people, I’d really appreciate it.”

  Bethany rolled her eyes. “There.” She brought us down an extra set of steps and gestured to a thick, metal door. “If you can crack the code, be my guest.”

  Skylar nodded and bit her bottom lip, but before she could place her hands on the door, I reached out and stopped her.

  “Let me try something first.”

  Skylar may have been a little bit psychic, but I’d spent the morning rifling through Dr. Davis’s desk. I’d almost forgotten that his cell phone hadn’t been the only thing I’d taken away from my little recon trip.

  I’d also memorized the passwords taped to the bottom of his desk.

  I don’t know what I expected to see in Paul Davis’s home lab, but what I saw was … nothing.

  The walls were made of chrome. The floors were tile. The sound of my footsteps echoed through the room, and I could see the colors in my clothes reflected in the walls—blurry, indecipherable shapes.

  Skylar and Bethany stepped into the room behind me. Besides the three of us, the only things in this entire room were a computer monitor built into the wall and stacks and stacks of hard drives, lining the floor like Legos.

  “Got any more passwords?” Bethany said, gesturing to the computer.

  “Got a keyboard?” I returned.

  It took us five minutes to find it—hidden beneath a panel in the wall. I ran through every password I’d seen taped to Dr. Davis’s desk and came up empty.

  In unison, Bethany and I turned toward Skylar.

  “I got nothing,” she said.

  I resisted the urge to send my fist into the shiny chrome walls. If I let myself hit something, let myself want to …

  I could feel the need rising inside of me, except this time, it wasn’t hunt-lust. It was an ache, an emptiness.

  Blood.

  The thought was overwhelming, all-consuming, and suddenly, I could smell the scents of the room so clearly.

  I could smell Bethany—Skylar—

  I could smell their blood.

  “What?” Bethany said defensively. “Do I have something on my face?”

  I tore my eyes away from her neck, but I could still hear the beating of her heart.

  Thirsty. Thirsty. Thirsty.

  Suddenly, Zev’s warning about needing to feed when I hunted seemed a lot more reasonable. In retrospect, pushing my healing ability to the limit and then locking myself in a small room with two walking bags of blood probably wasn’t my finest idea ever.

  Stop it, I thought firmly. They’re my friends.

  The word might not have meant anything to the mindless, senseless parasite inside of me, but it meant something to me.

  “What are you doing?” Bethany asked.

  I’m trying not to tear out your jugular, I thought in response. When I told you I didn’t know what I was, it’s possible that I was not being 100 percent honest.

  Then I realized that Bethany hadn’t addressed her acerbic comment to me. She was talking to Skylar, who was down on all fours, investigating the hard drives.

  “I’m looking for a USB port,” she said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Move your foot.”

  Bethany didn’t move. “Why are you looking for a USB port?”

  “Because I thought it might annoy you,” Skylar answered, the picture of innocence. “And also because Darryl gave me this.”

  She held up a USB drive.

  “Darryl?” Bethany repeated, utterly lost. “Who’s Darryl?”

  “Big guy? Sits with me at lunch?” Skylar continued running her hands over the various drives, looking for a port. “Sound familiar?”

  “Mute?” Bethany said finally. “You’re crawling all over the floor because of something you got from Mute?”

  If the popular crowd called Darryl “Mute,” I really didn’t want to know what they called the rest of us.

  “Darryl does talk,” Skylar said. “If you listen. And FYI, I have a really strong feeling that he’s going to be the next Bill Gates, so you might want to be a little nicer to him.”

  “I have a really strong feeling,” Bethany deadpanned, “that if you don’t tell me what’s on that USB drive, I will end you.”

  “Aha!” Skylar brandished the hard drive like she was getting ready to embark on a three-gun salute. Without answering Bethany’s question, she plugged it in, and the blank screen on the monitor gave way to a matrix of letters and numbers, rotating through the screen in multiple directions.

  “Darryl likes codes,” Skylar explained. “A few weeks ago, I asked him what someone might hypothetically need to break into a supercomputer. He hypothetically made me this.”

  Suddenly, the walls all around us gave way to images. Apparently, the monitor wasn’t just built into the wall. The monitor was the wall.

  Glancing at Beth and Skylar out of the side of my eyes, I moved toward the keyboard and then double clicked on the first folder I saw. It was password protected, but Darryl’s program made mincemeat of that protection, and a few seconds later, the three of us were staring at gibberish.

  Scientific gibberish.

  There were Excel files, full of data—numbers and columns and dates that were more or less Greek to me. Then there were documents—each labeled with a serial number.

  HB-42. LOS-129. MC-407.

  Something about that last one sent a niggling feeling into my brain. I opened it, and a single word caught my eye.

  Draco.

  I wasn’t the world’s best student, and I’d never been particularly fond of science—for obvious reasons. But I knew enough to recognize the genus of almost any preternatural creature.

  Genus Draco referred to dragons. As I read through the document—which was laced with references to nucleotides and alleles and oxytocin knockout mice—I caught a few other terms I recognized.

  Terms like Equus aqua mysticalis and Pan yeti gigantea.

  There was also a figure, with a bunch of millimeter-long bars on it.

  “Does that look like one of those DNA gel things to anyone else?” Skylar asked.

  Bethany shook her head. “It looks like a pregnancy test on crack.”

  “No,” Skylar said slowly. “I skipped a year in science, so I’m taking bio this year. That’s definitely one of those gel things.”

  As the two of them bickered back and forth, I stared at the words on the screen, willing them to make sense—and then willing them not to, because if I was reading this correctly, then Skylar was right.

  That was a DNA sequencing gel.

  Nucleotides.

  Alleles.

  DNA.

  Before I was old enough to walk and talk, modern science had already uncovered the secret to cloning sheep. The entire human genome had been catalogued. And researchers had discovered that preternatural creatures had triple helix DNA.

  Pan yeti gigantea. Equus aqua mysticalis. Those were the scientific classifications for the yeti—also known as the abominable snowman—and kelpies—also known as a pain in my ass.

  It was like the beginning of some horrific joke—a kelpie, a yeti, and a fire-breathing dragon walk into a bar—but I already knew the punch line.

  Kelpies could literally disappear into water.

  Yetis were man-eating primates with an affinity for ice.

  What do you get if you mix a kelpie, a yeti, and a dragon?

  “That thing from the skating rink,” I said. “The ice dragon.”

  Twenty-four hours earlier, Skylar’s psychic senses had led us straight to the ice rink—and the woman who appeared to be calling the shots at Chimera had shown up once the furor had started to die down. At the time, my mind had been a jumbled mess, and I hadn’t been able to put the pieces together.

  I hadn’t been able to think.

  And since I’d shifted, I hadn’t spared more than a thought or two for the dragon, so it hadn’t occurred
to me that Chimera might have their fingers in more than one pot—that the chupacabra might not be the only creature they were studying.

  Altering.

  Experimenting with.

  I felt sick—so sick that I brought my right hand to my mouth, for fear I might throw up.

  There were thirty-nine varieties of preternatural creatures. They’d been documented, studied, protected by law. Some lived in locations so remote I’d never actually seen one; some hunted humans right in my backyard. I’d probably never be able to kill them all—for every monster I slew, there would always be a new one to take its place—but there was still some comfort in knowing that there was a limit to just how bad things could get.

  Thirty-nine species, some of them endangered.

  Thirty-nine was doable.

  “They’re making more.” The words came out in a whisper, and for a second, I thought I might actually start crying. I did what I did because I had to. I fought every night I could and hated myself the nights I couldn’t. It wouldn’t ever stop, and they were making more.

  More monsters.

  Stronger ones. Unnatural ones.

  That was the word Zev had used to describe the dragon at the ice rink, and I could see it now. As horrible as the rest of the preternatural world was, there was some rhyme or reason to it. There were limits.

  But this?

  There could be a thousand of me, and it still might not be enough to fight them back if Chimera had one too many successes, if those successes got out into the population the way the dragon had. Without meaning to, I thought of all the beasties I’d fought in the past few weeks. The hellhounds were just hellhounds. The zombies—aside from working as a team—were just zombies. And the basilisk …

  Bigger.

  Stronger.

  Harder to kill.

  This time, I really did punch the wall.

  Beside me, Skylar scrolled through more files on the computer. I couldn’t even look at them—I didn’t want to know, until she came upon the file for chupacabras.

  Until I saw the photo of Zev.

  His hair was onyx—darker than mine and so black it was nearly reflective. His skin was pale, and I wondered at the fact that in my mind, I’d always seen him tinged in shadow.

  Beside me, Skylar seemed to realize that the photo had caught my attention—and why. She opened her mouth to say something, and then her eyes lit on Zev’s scientific classification.

  Homo vampirus.

  Skylar closed the file so quickly that you would have thought it had bit her. She glanced guiltily at me and then looked back at Bethany.

  “How old do you think he is?” Bethany asked, tilting her head to the side. “Like, twenty?”

  I hadn’t noticed Zev’s age in the picture, but I doubted he was twenty. He’d been in Chimera’s captivity for two years, and he talked about that length of time like it was nothing.

  I’m older than I look, Zev said helpfully. We don’t age the way humans do. Not once we’ve taken on a Nibbler.

  I didn’t ask him to clarify, because I was still staring at the space on the screen where that one word had been a moment before.

  Vampirus.

  I lived in a world where the mythological was real. We all did—and had for a very long time. The old stories about supernatural creatures were the kind of thing we saw as funny or quaint or just downright ridiculous—the equivalent of thinking that putting a leech on someone could rid them of the flu. But even taking into account everything we knew about the preternatural world, there were still some things that fell outside the realm of possibility, things that were nothing more than the product of overactive imaginations.

  Things like vampires.

  And werewolves.

  And psychics.

  The sarcastic half of my brain couldn’t help but wonder if Bethany went furry on the full moon, because if she did, we’d be batting three for three.

  I’m a vampire, I thought. I’m part vampire.

  We prefer the term Lonely Ones, Zev said. Because we’re meant to come in pairs.

  If that wasn’t a loaded statement, I wasn’t sure what was. I’d spent so much time on the outside looking in that the idea of being half of a pair—yin to his yang—made my eyes sting with tears I’d never shed. I had tried so hard not to let loneliness overwhelm me, had never thought that a person like me could be anything else.

  And then I’d been bitten.

  And then there was Zev.

  “What are they doing to him?” Bethany did a good job of inspecting her nails as she asked the question. “Mr. Tall, Dark, and Gorgeous—what are they doing to him? Skylar closed the document before I could see.”

  Skylar met my eyes, and I knew that she’d closed it for my benefit—to keep Bethany from reading those two little words and figuring out what Skylar now knew.

  What I was.

  “They’re cutting him,” Skylar said. “Burning him, taking samples, injecting him with drugs. Sometimes, they cut off parts to see if they’ll grow back.” She paused. “They take a lot of blood.”

  Somehow, I doubted she’d gotten that information from the scientific document she’d just read. I was beginning to suspect that Skylar might have undersold her psychic ability.

  “We can’t leave him there, and we can’t let them capture you.” Skylar grimaced, like she was staring at the core of something physically painful to see. “This is bad—not just bad for Zev. Bad for … it’s just bad, okay?”

  Now I was also beginning to suspect that she knew something that I didn’t. About Chimera. About Zev. About me. I couldn’t explain the feeling, but I couldn’t shake it, either, and this time, when I met Skylar’s eyes, she looked away.

  I guess we all have our secrets, I thought. Since Skylar didn’t seem inclined to tell anyone mine, I could hardly hold her own against her. When she felt like telling me, she would. Until then—

  Click. Click. Click.

  My breath caught in my throat. I knew that sound. For a second, I thought that maybe it was in my head, but then I heard it again, loud and clear and just down the hall.

  Click. Click. Click.

  “What I don’t understand, Ms. Malik, is how, precisely, the test subjects who escaped from your facility made their way here.”

  I recognized Bethany’s father’s voice a second before he rounded the corner. In a fraction of that time, I hit the POWER button on the computer, hooked an arm around Skylar, and pulled her into a corner, hugging the shadows and flattening both of our bodies against the wall.

  The hard drives offered scant cover, but in this room, there was nothing else. As Bethany’s father came into view, I realized that I’d left Beth there, out in the open. I flexed my fingers, razor-sharp nails ready to tear through human flesh if he gave me even half a reason to think that she was in danger.

  I shouldn’t have worried.

  Bethany leaned back against the wall and crossed one ankle over the other. She looked down at her watch as if she’d been waiting for him to arrive. And when her father and the woman he was talking to—the woman from the school, the one from the ice rink—stepped into the room, Beth reoriented herself so that she was standing between them and us, giving us what little cover she could.

  I lowered myself into a crouch, bringing Skylar with me, pushing back into the cover of the hard drives as far as I could.

  “Well,” a female voice said. “What have we here?”

  I’d heard her voice before, at the school, but we were closer this time, and for some reason, the sound of it filled me with dread, the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up, my stomach churning with … something.

  “Here,” Bethany said, responding to the woman’s rhetorical question, “we have a teenager. And she’s pissed.”

  Leave it to Bethany to play the queen bee card with a woman who had, in all likelihood, ordered my killing. A woman who might have sent zombies to Bethany’s house with the intention of cleaning up loose ends.

  “H
ere I was, minding my own business, and my house—where my father left me alone, I might add—was overrun with zombies. Excuse me, test subjects.”

  From the tone of her voice, you would have thought Bethany was talking to the populace back at school. She was the queen, and they had displeased her.

  From the cover of the hard drives, I couldn’t quite make out her father’s response, or that of the woman who’d accompanied him, but I was going to go out on a limb and guess that it wasn’t good.

  “Bethany,” Dr. Davis said calmly, “what are you doing in my lab?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Bethany spat. “This is the most secure place in the entire house. Where would you go if the place was overrun with zombies?”

  I could practically hear the woman in heels smiling. “So you’ve been here the whole time? You have no idea how the subjects’ transmitters malfunctioned or, say, where their bodies are now?”

  I registered the woman’s words and drew the logical conclusion: Skylar’s brothers worked fast. Either Chimera didn’t know they’d been here, or Ms. Malik was playing dumb—either way, Reid had taken care of the bodies exactly the way Vaughn had said he would.

  “Do I look like a zombie slayer to you?” Bethany asked. “This has been, like, the worst day ever.”

  “Yes,” the woman said, a measuring tone in her voice. “I understand you had an accident this morning.”

  Skylar made a face that I interpreted to mean I’ll show you accident, lady. Unfortunately, she looked more like a puppy than a pit bull, so even if the object of her glare had been able to see it, I didn’t think it would have done much good.

  “Look, you guys asked me not to call the police, I didn’t call the police. You told me to stay home from school, and then zombies attacked. There had better be a Christmas trip to Saint Barts in my future, or else I’m going to get cranky, and you seriously do not want to see me cranky.”

  “Bethany,” her father said. “Calm down. Ms. Malik assures me they had nothing to do with this unfortunate incident with the zombies, and I’m assuring her that you know the meaning of the word discretion. Now, if you could go upstairs and check on your mother, she’s had a really taxing day.”