Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (116 page)

Skylar didn’t balk for so much as a second. “Insurgent superhero! I love it. And your delivery was even better than mine—I could totally almost believe you.”

Yeah. Totally.

Time for a subject change.

“So are the girls on the cheerleading squad really out to get you?” I asked, nodding toward the gym floor as our row began to trickle out of the bleachers.

Skylar shrugged. “They’ve been at it for about six months. I haven’t cracked yet. It’s driving them nuts.”

I glanced at the cheerleaders out of the corner of my eye. Down to a one, they were glaring at the girl next to me. Completely unbothered by their death stares, Skylar stood up on her tiptoes and waved at them like she was greeting her very bestest friends. The entire squad immediately averted their gazes. Apparently, it was a social no-no to acknowledge the wave of someone you’d thoroughly shunned.

“Don’t you ever just get sick of it?” I asked, shivering at the enmity coming our way. Even without my powers, I would gladly have faced down hellspawn over high school mean girls any day.

“Get sick of watching them scrambling, trying to figure out why I’m not sobbing in a puddle in the girls’ room?” Skylar asked, sounding for all the world like some kind of Zen master. “Not really. I’ve got five older brothers. Having the tampons stolen out of my gym locker on a regular basis kind of pales next to the power of the atomic noogie.”

“They steal your tampons?” I asked incredulously, when really what I was thinking was more along the lines of
define “atomic noogie.”

“It’s a classic mean-girl tactic,” Skylar explained, and I had to remind myself that she was talking about the tampon-stealing, not the noogie. “Wearing white is like waving a cape in front of a bull.”

“Good to know.”

Part of me was still waiting to wake up and find out that this whole interaction had been one incredibly offbeat dream. It probably said something about my life that I didn’t doubt for a second that I’d killed three hellhounds the night before, but couldn’t quite believe that after three very long weeks, someone at this school was actually talking to me. Most girls my age spent no more time thinking about preternatural beasties than they did serial killers or the North American grizzly. Yes, they were out there, and no, you wouldn’t want to run into one in a dark alleyway, but that was about as far as it went.

Most girls my age had friends.

“So when’s your history test?” Skylar changed the subject so fast that I almost didn’t notice that we’d made it out of the gym. “The one you’re going to fail?”

“Fifth period,” I replied, trying not to be melodramatic about it. Failing a test wasn’t the end of the world. This wasn’t the first time, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but I vastly preferred to reside firmly in B and C territory—not at the front of the pack and not at the rear.

“You’re a junior, right?”

I nodded, not bothering to question how Skylar knew anything about me other than what I’d already told her.

“I’m a sophomore, so I’m taking European History, not US, but Mr. McCormick teaches them both, so I should have you covered. Find me at lunch, and we’ll talk.”

And with those words, Skylar Hayden, force of nature and self-proclaimed school slut, disappeared into a nearby classroom, leaving me in the hallway alone.

Good
, I thought reflexively.
It’s better that way
.

But for once, I disagreed with the part of my brain that couldn’t help but think like a hunter, even on my human days.

Maybe I don’t want to be alone
, I thought back.
Maybe I don’t want to be a freak. Did you ever think of that?

Cover your back
.

This time, I didn’t resist. I’d spent too much time tracking down monsters to believe even for a second, even in my own high school, that I was ever really safe. Angling my back toward the wall, I headed toward my biology class. The only good thing about this morning’s assembly was that it meant that I didn’t have to listen to my bio teacher waxing poetic about the differences between natural and preternatural species.

The difference
, I thought,
is that the preternatural ones are too strong, too evil, and too human-hungry to live
.

If the rest of the world would just wake up and realize that no, the things I hunted weren’t just misunderstood, and that
studying
them wasn’t going to make them any less lethal, my job—not to mention my life—would have been so much easier. But no. My life wasn’t meant to be easy.

Nothing ever was.

My muscles ached. My stomach rumbled. I could feel a migraine coming on, and I wanted nothing more than to climb back into bed. It was always like this the day after a hunt. I felt pain. I got tired. I needed to eat.

And I was anything but invincible.

Ducking into the classroom and trudging toward my seat, I looked down at my watch for the third or fourth time since I’d gotten up that morning.

Twenty-one hours and eight minutes until my next switch. Three hours until I saw Skylar at lunch.

This is going to be a very long day
.

In the three weeks I’d been attending classes at Heritage, I’d learned more about primate social behavior than I’d gleaned from a lifetime of being plunked down in front of the Discovery Channel whenever my father didn’t want to deal with the fact that he had a kid. Social hierarchies, dominance displays, mating rituals … all of the above were present in abundance in our high school cafeteria. Up until today, I’d successfully remained invisible.

And then I’d met Skylar Hayden.

Apparently, she wasn’t kidding when she said talking to her would put me on the rumor radar
like that
. Already, I could feel the stares, like bugs crawling across the surface of my skin.

Show no fear
.

If there was one thing that being what I was had taught me, it was that the difference between predator and prey was the rate of your heartbeat, the sweat trickling from your temples, the urge to shiver and run.

Twelve hours earlier, I hadn’t even been capable of fear. Currently, however, I was feeling it in spades—not that I was about to let anyone else see that. Standing straight and
holding my head high, I tossed my dark, glossy hair over one shoulder. The deep brown color was streaked with red highlights, so dark that in the right light, they could have passed for black. Even in a ponytail, my hair was the perfect length for tossing.

Play to your strengths
.

Another compulsion, another rule. A good hunter knew her strengths and her weaknesses, her enemies and her prey. Right now, all I knew was that the A-list crowd liked to write derogatory things on people’s lockers, that they had it out for my one and only friend at this high school, and that I was an unknown entity who had just flung herself onto their radar.

Given that the best defense was a good offense, I figured that I could at least be an unknown entity with good hair.

“Kali!”

I recognized Skylar’s voice the moment I heard it. Giving the rest of the school one more second to play Assess the New Girl, I turned in her direction. There, in the very center of the cafeteria, in what even a newcomer like me recognized as prime lunchtime real estate, she was holding court at a table full of … guys.

Clearly, my new friend had no problems whatsoever with the idea of adding fuel to the rumor fire.

“You made it,” Skylar greeted me. “And in one piece, too! Congrats. That was some impressive hair-flipping.”

In other circumstances, I might have been a little frightened by just how perceptive this girl was. At the moment, however, my eyes were trained on the other occupants of her table. There were three of them, and despite the fact that
they looked nothing alike, they reminded me of those Russian stacking dolls, the kind that fit perfectly inside one another, in sizes small, medium, and large. The expressions on their faces were identical: curious, but wary.

“Darryl. John Michael. Genevieve.” Skylar said their names one by one, and I attempted to match the monikers to their owners. Darryl was Large. John Michael was Medium. And Genevieve was Small—and, judging by the name, female, which I hadn’t realized until I took a good look at her face. Her hair was cut almost to her scalp, and she was dressed in a nondescript hoodie. I wouldn’t have pegged her for a “Genevieve,” but who was I to judge?

I probably didn’t look like the ultimate predator. Or, for that matter, an environmental terrorist. Depending on the day and who you were talking to, I was both.

“Kali D’Angelo,” I said, introducing myself before Skylar had a chance to repeat my insurgent superhero line on my behalf. Given the illegal nature of my nightly activities, I needed to lie as low as I could. “I’m new. Sort of. I’ve only been here a few weeks.…”

And now, I was babbling.

“Italian?” Genevieve asked, having latched on to my last name.

I figured that I owed her for having assumed she was a guy, so I cut her some slack and answered the question she hadn’t asked, which came with a “you don’t look Italian” clipped to the end. “My dad’s Italian. My mom was Indian. From India.”

Watching people try to figure out the mix of genes that had gone in to making me look so “exotic” (FYI: not my
favorite word) always made me wonder why they couldn’t see beneath the surface to the power, the instinct, the
difference
underneath.

Eighteen hours and twelve minutes …

“Kali’s got a history test next period,” Skylar announced, and I couldn’t tell if she was deliberately changing the subject, or if she was just the type who said every thought that crossed her mind. “I told her we had her covered.”

Genevieve and John Michael didn’t react to this announcement at all, but a small smile worked its way onto Darryl’s lips. The light behind his dark brown eyes gave him a sort of gentle-giant vibe; I wondered exactly how tall he was and why the thought of a history exam made him happy.

“Six foot seven,” Skylar said helpfully. “And he’s psyched, because it’s not often we get to initiate someone into the code.”

“The code?” I repeated.

“Darryl’s a whiz with numbers,” Skylar explained. “It’s sort of his thing.”

Darryl ducked his head, and there was something in the motion that told me more about him than I’d known the moment before. He was quiet. Bashful. And I was willing to bet a lot of money that, like me, he had parents who didn’t quite get his so-called “thing.” My father would have preferred a social butterfly of a daughter; Darryl’s parents had probably been hoping for a football player. Instead, fate had dealt them a half-human demon slayer and an oversized mathlete, respectively.

Life’s a bitch.

“You have McCormick for history, yes?” Those were the
first words John Michael had spoken since I sat down at the table. I tried to place his accent and failed miserably. It wasn’t American, even though he looked every inch the Boy Next Door. He was dressed from head to toe in black, but it was all too easy to imagine him fronting a boy band or dating a Disney starlet.

Since I was willing to bet that John Michael liked being compared to tween idols about as much as I liked being called exotic, I didn’t say word one about his appearance. Instead, I just nodded.

“McCormick’s tests are always multiple choice,” John Michael continued, the word
multiple
picking up the cadence and melody of his accent more than any of its neighbors. “Which makes you a very lucky girl.”

“Because even if I guess completely randomly, I’ll still probably end up getting some of the questions right?”

“No,” Skylar said. “Because all multiple-choice tests are subject to … the code!”

I must have looked as clueless as I felt.

“It is like this,” John Michael explained. “Multiple-choice tests are written by people, yes? And the people, they tend to write them in a certain way. The code is Darryl’s theory about the way the tests are written. And if you know how a test is written, you can pass it, even if you do not know the answers in and of themselves.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

Skylar nodded. “Darryl took the AP psychology exam last year, just for fun. He only missed two multiple-choice questions, and he never even took the class.”

Okay, that was kind of impressive.

“So what’s
the code
?” I couldn’t help lowering my voice to a whisper as I spoke. There was a certain solemnity to this moment.

“It’s pretty simple.”

It took me a minute to realize that Darryl was the one speaking. His voice was low in volume, but higher in pitch than I’d expected it to be, given his size.

“McCormick’s tests have four choices, A through D. One is the correct answer. Two are decoys. The fourth can be anything, except that it’s not related to the first three.”

I really wasn’t following here.

“All you have to do is figure out which answer matches up to two different decoys,” Skylar said. “So say you’ve got a test that asks you, I don’t know … what the color and consistency of a zombie’s tongue is.”