Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I’ve had many names,” the woman said. She smiled—even though I couldn’t see her mouth, I could see it in her eyes. “You could say I’ve been around for a while.”

  She waited for her words to sink in, and I could see her eyes flicker with interest the exact moment I got it.

  “You’re a vampire.” The word felt silly on my lips, even now, and the woman actually laughed at me.

  “That word,” she said, “never ceases to amuse me. I’m as human as you are. Though,” she added with faux thoughtfulness, “I suppose that’s a poor example—at least for another four hours or so.”

  Great. My captor knew about my shifting from one form to another—which meant that she knew that in another four hours, I’d be even more at their mercy than I was now.

  “Why are you working for Chimera?” I asked her, my mind racing, trying to find a way out of this. “Do you have any idea what they’re doing—to people like us? To the preternatural?”

  “Kali,” the woman said, thoroughly amused. “I don’t work for Chimera. Chimera works for me.”

  One of these days, I was going to stop being caught off guard. I was going to be able to look down the road and see how the pieces of a puzzle fit together—but that day wasn’t today.

  “Chimera works for you,” I repeated dumbly.

  “Founder, president, and CEO,” she said. “Guilty as charged.”

  “But why?” The question tore its way out of my mouth before I could stop it.

  “Do you know, Kali, what we are?”

  I knew. We were strong and fast, and once we’d been bitten, we were stronger, faster, and thirsty—for blood.

  “We’re hunters,” I said, unwilling to say the v-word again.

  “Hunters,” the woman repeated. “Well, better predator than prey, I suppose.” She smiled, thoroughly delighted with herself and with me. “There’s a principle in evolutionary biology,” she continued indulgently. “It’s called the Red Queen’s Hypothesis. It’s taken from Alice in Wonderland—would you believe I actually knew Lewis Carroll? Tasty—but that’s neither here nor there. In the book, the Red Queen comments that it takes all the running in the world just to stay in the same place. Evolution’s like that, Kali. A species never reaches the point where it can stop evolving, because the rest of the world is always evolving, too. You can never stop, because the things you hunt will always be getting faster, stronger—and the same goes for the things that hunt you.”

  I thought of the creatures I’d hunted in the past five years—beasts that normal humans never would have stood a chance against.

  “Natural, preternatural—they’re just labels, Kali. If you took a giraffe and plopped it down in the middle of the Antarctic, it would look very strange, wouldn’t it?”

  The question was rhetorical, but my mind connected the dots and led me to the meaning behind her words. We were the giraffes in the Antarctic—freakish and unnatural because this wasn’t the environment in which we’d evolved. My father’s lecture at the university rang in my ears.

  Are preternatural creatures really unnatural? Or are they simply the product of a different kind of evolution—one with a different starting point, a different progression?

  “Zev said that people like us are from another place,” I said slowly, my mind churning through the possibilities. “Another … planet?”

  “Another planet?” the woman repeated, laughing gaily. “Little green men and life on Mars? How absolutely precious.”

  If she’d let me out of this cage, I’d show her “absolutely precious.”

  “We’re from another dimension, dear. Hasn’t that scientist father of yours taught you anything?” She held up her fist and then spread her fingers outward. “Big bang. Multiple earths. Flash forward forty million years, and all of those little differences from the beginning have yielded a very different environment—and very different creatures.”

  Her eyes sparkled, and I bit back nausea. There was something deadly there, something cold.

  “There have always been people who catch momentary glimpses of the other side. Myths, legends, all those little stories that humans just love to tell each other—they had to come from somewhere, yes?” She sighed, a delicate, girlish sound. “Unfortunately, a few hundred years ago, through circumstances far above anything your pretty little head can grasp—some of us ended up stuck here. Permanently.”

  I got the feeling that she wasn’t just talking about “us” as in vampires. She was talking about “us” as in the preternatural. Hellhounds and zombies, will-o’-the-wisps and basilisks, and everything else I’d hunted on my less-than-human days.

  “Humans from our world are relatively good at blending. The other creatures … not so much. We kept them under wraps for as long as we could, but eventually, the cat got out of the bag.”

  Darwin. The hydra. My mind whirred with the implications. We’d always assumed that the preternatural had been here all along, that we’d only had to go looking to discover the truth, but if what my captor was saying was true …

  She smiled, amused at the fact that she’d blown my mind. “Eventually, the existence of our kind will be common knowledge, too, and we’re outnumbered here about ten million to one.”

  That meant there were others—like me, like Zev, like the crazy woman on the other side of the door.

  “So you decided to, what? Join them in their scientific exploration?” I asked, but my voice came out more bewildered than sarcastic.

  The woman’s eyes crinkled—another smile that sent a wave of nausea straight to my gut. “They say knowledge is power.” She leaned toward me, her eyelashes nearly brushing the glass. “Do you know what I say, Kali? Power is power. Pure, brute force. This world thinks they have the monsters our kind hunt under control. They protect them.” She shrugged. “So I’m giving them new monsters. The less control they have, the more they’ll need us. And the fewer humans there are …” She shrugged. “Well, evening up the numbers a bit can’t hurt.”

  I thought of the scientists—my father and Dr. Davis and Rena and all the rest, who, at some point, had probably all told themselves that the things they were doing were justified by the greater good. Knowledge. Better medicine. Exploration.

  And all they were doing was building better monsters.

  “If you’re concerned about the numbers,” I said, my voice remarkably steady, “why am I locked up? Why is Zev?”

  Saying his name hurt.

  First Skylar. Then Zev. My mother.

  Why did I ever bother letting anyone in? People only hurt you in the end.

  “Oh, don’t look like that, love,” the vampire said. “It’s not as if the poor boy had a choice. There’s always a dominant partner in any pair—against someone like me, he never stood a chance.”

  People like us come in pairs. That was what Zev had said. I’d known it, deep down. It just hadn’t ever occurred to me that Zev might already be part of a pair. That I might not be his other half. That there might be someone else out there who could take control of his body, his will, the way he’d occasionally taken over mine.

  “If you and Zev are connected,” I said, forcing myself to say it, forcing it not to matter, “why are you doing this to him?”

  Assuming that Zev really was a lab rat—that everything I’d seen and felt from him hadn’t been a lie.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, Kali, but I needed to see if it was possible for one of our kind to play host to more than one chupacabra.” She seemed to find the scientific term amusing. “It took some tweaking, and some failures, and more than a little discomfort for poor Zev, but I have evidence now that it is possible. And if it’s possible for our kind to host two, then someday, it might be possible for regular humans to hold one. In the long run, anything that makes humans less human will be better for us.”

  I digested what she was saying—the reason for the experiment that had resulted in Bethany being infected, the possi
bilities she’d discovered experimenting on Zev.

  It was possible for Zev to have been bitten twice.

  Possible for him to be connected to two others.

  One who controlled him, and one he controlled.

  No. Zev’s voice was quiet in my mind, but it was still there. I wouldn’t do that to you. Not unless you were in danger—and even then, I didn’t do it on purpose.

  I wanted to believe him, but he’d brought me here. He’d strangled me. He hadn’t mentioned, even once, that this was a trap.

  I couldn’t. She wouldn’t let me. I tried.

  I could feel the hatred in his voice, loathing for himself, for her. I felt his emotions as intensely as my own and knew that he was wishing he’d killed himself before he could bring this kind of trouble to me.

  I tried.

  This was too much. It was just too much.

  I’m sorry, Kali.

  I wasn’t sure that mattered. I also wasn’t sure he had anything to apologize for—he’d tried to warn me; he’d tried to fight. The only thing I was sure about was that in another four hours, I would be human again. I would be weak, defenseless.

  I would hurt.

  “You keep looking at your watch. I have to say, that surprised us. We hypothesized that a successful hybrid might have a portion of our skills, perhaps muted. Maybe it has something to do with the exact graft we used on your DNA, but the idea that you shift from form to form according to some circadian rhythm …” She trailed off.

  “We?”

  On the other side of the door, the woman smiled and turned her head to the side. “Didn’t you tell her, Rena?”

  The woman’s use of my mother’s name was like a knife, straight to my heart.

  “I didn’t exactly have the chance, Colette.”

  Colette. So now the psychotic woman had a name. I tried to concentrate on that—and not on the sound of my mother’s voice.

  “How rude of me,” Colette said. “I haven’t even introduced myself. You may call me Colette, if you wish, Kali. Or,” she added, stepping back from the glass so that I could see her lips twisting into a smile, “you could always call me Mama.”

  Mama. The word rolled off her tongue, ugly and sickly sweet.

  I stared, uncomprehending, through the slit in the door at those delicately fringed eyelashes, and something gave way inside of me.

  Mommy.

  Mama.

  Sit still, Kali. Sit so still.

  “You remember,” the woman who’d told me to call her “Mama” said approvingly. “I thought you might.”

  I didn’t, not really. I was three when my mother left—No, I corrected myself. I was three when my father left her.

  “He didn’t know about you.” I thought my way through it out loud, my eyes on the vampire’s.

  “Your father?” Colette said. “No, he did not. I was your little secret—and Rena’s.”

  We had lots of secrets. Mommy, Mama, and me.

  “Colette—” Behind her, Rena started to say something, but Colette waved it away with a delicate swish of her hand.

  “She’s as much mine as she is yours, darling.” Even through the slit in the door, I could see Colette’s eyes sparkle. “I donated the, shall we say, extraordinary portion of your DNA, Kali. Imagine my dismay when you were born human.”

  As if having my entire life rewritten once in a single day wasn’t bad enough. All of my father’s revelations were half-truths, ones he’d believed.

  Guess I’m not the only one who was lied to.

  Somehow, that didn’t make me feel much better. In the past twelve hours, I’d gone from having no mother to having two—and if there was anything worse than Rena, it was Colette.

  “Well, enough chitchat, I suppose. It’s been lovely, Kali, but there’s much to be done in the next few hours.” Colette wriggled her eyebrows. “I hear the FBI is planning a raid.”

  She didn’t seem worried—and that terrified me.

  “I’m afraid it would be easier if you weren’t conscious for this next part,” she continued. “Rena, did you remember to double the dose?”

  Without thinking, I took a step back from the door, but there was nowhere to go.

  I was trapped.

  I’m sorry, Kali, Zev said, his sorrow bleeding over into my fear. I am so, so sorry.

  He wanted to help me, but couldn’t.

  Wanted to fight her. Couldn’t.

  The door opened, and I stumbled backward until I hit the concrete wall. I’d expected to see Colette, but to my surprise, it was Rena standing there. She had a pair of syringes in one hand, each filled with an amber-colored liquid.

  “A triple dose,” Rena said. She met my eyes, and for a second, a split second, I thought I saw something else there.

  A question.

  A plea.

  “Stay away from me,” I said, and the words left my mouth as a growl. Drowsy or not, drugged or not, I was stronger than this woman who used to be my mother.

  Much stronger.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said, moving toward me slowly. “I promise, Kali. It’s all going to be okay.”

  The words set off an explosion of memory in my mind. Everything is going to work out okay. You’re going to be okay. I’m going to make you okay. Okay?

  Skylar was dead. Rena was coming toward me, needle in hand. Nothing was okay.

  Nothing would ever be okay again.

  “What Rena means,” Colette said helpfully, “is that if you so much as move a muscle, I’ll dose you myself—and I won’t make it pleasant.”

  Now that the door was open, I could see that Collette’s hair was a shade lighter than her eyelashes—a light honey brown. There was a dusting of freckles across her nose and an unadulterated cruelness to the set of her features.

  She was a hunter. I was her prey.

  “Please, Kali.” Rena took my arm. I flinched, but she met my eyes again.

  Let me do this.

  That was what her eyes said to me, and I bit back the impulse to hit her again—harder, this time, than before. Hard enough to do some actual damage—but for better or for worse, I couldn’t kill someone I remembered loving as much as I’d once loved her.

  “I hate you,” I said instead, feeling little and powerless and like nothing I’d ever said or done had mattered in the least. “I really, really hate you.”

  Rena pursed her lips. The needle pierced my skin.

  “I know,” she said.

  At those words, Colette smiled and turned away. Rena pulled the needle out, putting her thumb over its tip. Then she pressed down on the back of the syringe.

  The liquid dribbled harmlessly down my arm.

  She did the same thing with a second syringe.

  Then she reached into her white lab coat and withdrew a third, pressing it into my palm.

  “Go to sleep, Kali-Kay.” She closed her eyes, and I realized her hands were trembling.

  Realized that Colette would kill her if she knew.

  My fingers closed around the third syringe. I held Rena’s gaze for another few seconds, and then I nodded. I closed my eyes and slumped against the concrete wall, like she’d knocked me unconscious.

  And I waited.

  I lay in my cell, feigning unconsciousness, for what felt like an eternity.

  Three hours and forty-seven minutes.

  Three hours and seventeen minutes.

  Two hours and twelve minutes.

  One hour.

  And the longer I sat there, pretending that Rena had knocked me out, the more I wondered what the plan was, if she even had one.

  I heard doors being opened and closed. Screams and calls and growls reminded me that I was surrounded on all sides by other creatures that didn’t belong on this earth.

  Experiments, like me.

  Maybe in another hour, I’d feel for them, feel connected to them, but for now, I was still a hunter, and every instinct I had was saying to claw my way through this prison and put the monsters down. />
  Instead, I focused on diagnosing the meaning behind their screeches and howls and realized that someone was moving them. Evacuating them. Colette must have called in the cavalry, and by the time Reid and his team got here—if they got here at all—they’d probably find the place empty.

  Fifty-five minutes.

  Forty.

  Thirty-five.

  Ten.

  I couldn’t lie there any longer. I couldn’t afford to wait. In just a few minutes, I’d be human again. I could already feel it creeping up on me, the way other people could tell they were coming down with a cold.

  Ten minutes.

  Nine.

  I was seconds away from standing and giving up my cover when the door to my cell opened. The smell of perfume told me it was a woman.

  A knowing in the pit of my stomach told me she wasn’t human.

  Colette.

  “The pièce de résistance,” she said. “Pretty, isn’t she? I can see why you got attached.”

  At first, I wasn’t sure who she was talking to, but as he came closer, warmth washed over my body, and each and every one of my nerve cells stood on end.

  Zev.

  If I’d been capable of feeling pain, being this close to him and knowing what he’d done to me would have hurt. Even if he hadn’t meant to. Even if he’d tried to stop it.

  “Here,” Zev said. “Let me.”

  “No.” Colette spoke sharply, and I felt Zev’s body freeze, felt her taking him over the way he’d taken control of my body at the ice rink, or in the car with Eddie.

  His silver eyes went wild, every muscle in his body tensing at once as he fought her hold. I could feel my chupacabra, feel his, feel the sweat pouring down his temples and the pain that came with disobeying.

  I felt him fight. And lose.

  His muscles relaxed, and Colette smiled.

  She’s too strong, Kali. Too old. I should have killed myself when I had the chance.

  I thought of his hands closing around my throat and couldn’t push down the part of me that said that maybe he should have.