Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (123 page)

One more brush with oblivion shouldn’t have bothered me.

I shouldn’t have been dwelling on the fact that the parasite that had saved my life was killing me now.

But I was.

Our standoff with Puff the Man-Eating, Fire-Breathing Creature of Doom had lasted minutes, but the police—not to mention a Preternatural Control team—had shown up before we could make ourselves scarce, and the resulting inquisition had been dragging on for over an hour. If Bethany and I had been adults, if the kids working at Skate Haven had been adults, then maybe we wouldn’t have had to answer the same questions sixteen times apiece.

But we weren’t adults.

We were teenagers who claimed to have had a run-in with some subspecies of dragon that could disappear into ice like a
kelpie into water. And, oh yeah, it breathed fire
and
ate people, and its scales were the color of ice.

“So let me get this straight,” the policewoman interviewing me said for maybe the fiftieth time. “It was some kind of … 
ice dragon
.”

I may as well have been telling her it belched gumdrops and had a weakness for Saturday morning cartoons. Forget the fact that there was obvious damage to the rink—not to mention the remains of the boy who’d actually placed the 911 call in the first place. It didn’t matter that our stories were consistent both with the damage and with one another’s accounts of what had gone down. Dragons stayed away from cities. They didn’t just hang out at local hot spots. And they didn’t have any kind of affinity for ice.

So obviously, the teenagers were lying. Or on drugs. Or both.

This is why you don’t call the police. Or Preternatural Control. No matter what. Ever
.

If I’d doubted the rule—and I was fairly sure I never had—I certainly never would again. My skin itched just talking to the authorities, and it was all I could do to meet my interrogator’s eyes, when what I really wanted to do was to get out of there, stat.

The police department had more than a few open cases with my name on them—figuratively, and I had no desire to make that literal. The chances that anyone would think to connect a witness in a horrific dragon mauling with the vigilante responsible for dozens of area beastie slayings was slim. It wasn’t like my usual MO involved laser light shows, but still—the sooner I got out of there, the better.

“Ice dragon,” I said, repeating the police officer’s incredulous words.

For some reason, my voice sounded very far away: slow and gummy and like I wasn’t quite speaking English. As I turned this thought over in my head, I noticed that my interrogator’s face was looking less like a face and more like a sea of unrelated features, each blurring into the next.

Weird
.

I blinked, and when that did me no good, I reached out for the railing to steady myself.

“Miss, are you feeling all right?” the officer asked.

Her voice sounded even farther away than mine.

“I’m fine,” I said—or at least, that’s what I think I said. The details are, to this day, a little unclear. “Just give me a minute.”

“Ohmigosh!”

It took me a few seconds to realize that the exclamation in question had come from Skylar, who, up until that point, had wisely stayed out of the fray. I’d entertained the notion that she’d had the common sense to go home and leave Bethany and me to sort this out on our own.

Apparently not.

“You look, like,
so pale
. Did you forget to eat lunch? Please tell me you didn’t forget to eat lunch!” Skylar shook her head morosely, laying on the teenage ingénue vibe so thick that I doubted that anyone—let alone Officer So What You’re Telling Me Is—would buy it.

I wasn’t suffering from low blood sugar.

I was—I was—it took me a minute to put the sensation into words.

Dying
.

“She’s hypoglycemic,” Skylar said, rattling off the word like she’d cut her teeth working in emergency rooms. “Are you guys done here? Because it’s almost six o’clock, and if we don’t get some food in her soon, her blood sugar is going to get dangerously low.”

The police officer blinked. Or maybe I did. Either way, words were exchanged and Skylar’s effervescence must have won the day, because a few minutes after she’d appeared on the scene, Bethany and I were free to go.

“In retrospect,” Skylar said, once we’d made it out the front door, “I’m not sure ice-skating was a good idea.”

“You think?” Bethany snorted. “Maybe if you were actually psychic, you could tell us why, in the name of all that is good and holy in this world, your little instincts led us
here
.”

I felt foggy and disconnected. I could barely keep up with the back and forth between the two of them, but the moment the question was out of Bethany’s mouth, a second Preternatural Control team shuffled by us, a dark-haired woman leading the way.

Click. Click. Click
.

The sound of heels against concrete penetrated the fog in my brain, and I froze. For a moment, I thought that the woman in heels—the one from the school, the one coming toward us now—was here for me, but she brushed past us on her way into the rink.

She never even turned around.

Click. Click. Click
.

Even after she was gone, I could still hear the sound of her heels echoing through the recesses of my brain.

Who is she? Why is she here? So tired …

My thoughts were a jumbled mess. I could barely move. And as Bethany and Skylar practically poured me into the backseat of the BMW, I thought about what had just happened—everything that had happened—and I managed to stave off the dizziness and nausea coursing through my entire body just long enough to spare a few words for the BMW’s belly-dancing owner.

“I can’t believe you did that,” I told Bethany, my words slurred and packing next to no heat. “You should have run.”

“I was providing a distraction so you could run,” Bethany retorted. “And that dragon was, I might add, totally distracted.”

I tried to tell Bethany exactly what I thought of her “distraction,” but somewhere between my brain and my mouth, the words got lost, and they came out in a jumble.

Bethany turned to Skylar. “What’s wrong with her?”

For once, Skylar was silent, and her silence was answer enough.

“She’s only been infected for four hours,” Bethany said, her voice going dry. “She should be fine.”

I closed my eyes, and somewhere inside of me, something shifted. I shouldn’t have been able to lure the beast from Bethany’s body to mine. I shouldn’t have developed an
ouroboros
the moment I’d been bitten. And I certainly shouldn’t have been hearing voices.

You—Promise—Fine.

I smelled wet grass, rain, honeysuckle. I saw the outline of a body, solid and sleek. I heard a voice shouting at me from a distance, but couldn’t make out a single word.

This time, I didn’t fight to hold on to consciousness—couldn’t—and my last thought as I drifted into oblivion was that the woman in the heels reminded me of someone.

And that could not possibly be good.

I woke up staring into eyes the exact shade of my comforter at home: faded turquoise, so light that I felt like if I stared at them long enough, I’d be able to see straight through. It took a moment before the rest of the features fell into place: blond hair, suntanned skin, cheekbones sharp enough to draw blood.

Elliot
.

His name came to me a second before the rest of my senses returned. I bolted straight up, realized I was in some kind of bed, and began scrambling backward on my hands and heels.

“Hey, hey—” He looked like he wanted to reach for me, but he must have had some sense of self-preservation, because he kept his hands right where they were. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. You passed out, and Skylar and Beth brought you here.”

It was weird to hear Bethany referred to as
Beth
—almost as weird as it was to wake up alone in a room with her boyfriend.

“Define ‘here,’ ” I said sharply. Or, at least, I meant to say it sharply. Despite my best efforts, the words came out little and vulnerable instead.

“We’re at my brother Vaughn’s house,” Elliot told me. “Skylar called me when Bethany went off the rails.”

I decided I did not want to know what Bethany “going off the rails” entailed.

“She was really worried about you,” Elliot continued. “We all were.”

I felt like I’d fallen into some kind of parallel universe. For years, I’d spent every other night fighting to the death with nightmares made flesh. I came home broken and bleeding, with bones poking through my skin, and no one had ever noticed. No one had ever worried. Even when I was little, before the changes started, I could remember bumps and bruises, waking up in a cold sweat, vicious bouts of the flu—and no one had ever sat next to my bed, waiting for me to wake up.

No one had
cared
.

“I’m fine,” I said, pulling my knees instinctively to my chest, like shielding my body from Elliot’s view might keep him from recognizing my words as a lie.

“You’re not fine.” His response was immediate. “You’ve been bitten by a chupacabra. You’re anemic, your blood pressure fell through the floor, and the only reason you’re not in a hospital right now is that Vaughn said you were sleeping, not unconscious. We figured you could use the rest.”

I didn’t know which part of what he said was the most surprising: the fact that Skylar and Bethany had told him about the chupacabra, or his proclamation that I could “use some rest.”

In the past twenty-four hours, I’d taken out a pack of hellhounds, offered myself up to a bloodsucker to save the life of a girl I barely knew, came
this close
to having my head torn off by a genetic impossibility of a dragon—and they thought I needed some
rest
?

“What time is it?” I asked, disturbed by the fact that I didn’t know. “And where’s everyone else?”

Bethany didn’t strike me as the kind of girl who willingly left her boyfriend alone with a member of the opposite sex. I didn’t know whether to be flattered that she trusted me or offended that she clearly didn’t think I was a threat.

“Skylar and Vaughn went to get some painkillers. Beth’s father called, and she had to go. She said to tell you that if you die while she’s gone, she’ll take it personally.”

It was funny—all I’d wanted since I’d woken up in the nurse’s office was to get Bethany out of the picture, but the fact that she’d just
left
me there didn’t feel like a relief.

“Anything else she said to tell me?” I asked, trying not to sound betrayed or offended or, God forbid, hurt.

Elliot smiled—it was a lopsided expression on his otherwise symmetrical face: wry and rueful and just a tiny bit sardonic. “She said to tell you that she was going to pump her father for information about chupacabras. She’s not holding her breath that he’ll have any answers, but given that he’s one of the foremost experts in the world, she’ll probably do you more good there than here. And she also said to tell you …” Elliot trailed off, and I couldn’t push down the impulse to look him straight in those gentle, turquoise eyes.

“What?”

“She said her best memory isn’t standing on top of some cheerleading pyramid.” Elliot leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “She said it was hide-and-seek, when she was nine.”

For some reason, my throat tightened when Elliot said
those words, and I swallowed, hard. That was playing dirty, and Bethany had to have known it. I’d saved her because I couldn’t just stand by and let her die. Not because I wanted to know her, not because I wanted anything in return.

All I wanted was to go home, go to bed, and wake up cured in the morning.

As a matter of reflex, my eyes were drawn to a clock on the wall. It was a quarter past eight.

Ten hours and forty-five minutes
.

“How’s my patient?” A new voice—deep and baritone, so gentle that I instinctively wanted to trust its owner—snapped me from my reverie.

“She’s awake,” Elliot said needlessly. “I should go. Come on, Skye.”

The second I heard Skylar’s name, my eyes sought her out. She was standing next to a man easily three times her size, but within seconds, it was clear who was calling the shots around here, and it wasn’t Elliot or the man with the soothing voice.

“Don’t be ridiculous, El. I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you.”

Elliot narrowed his eyes at his sister, but she just stared back and grinned. “I’m not telling you what to do,” she volunteered helpfully, “I’m just telling you what you’re
going
to do. There’s a difference.”

“Skylar,” Elliot said with the thinning patience of an older sibling much abused. “You are
not
psychic.”

Skylar sighed. “Elliot,” she informed me, “is a
skeptic
.” From her tone of voice, you would have thought it was a dirty word.

“Elliot,” the boy in question repeated, his tone mimicking hers exactly, “has common sense. If you run around sticking your nose into things that are none of your business, you’re going to get yourself hurt. You’re not psychic, you’re not super-woman, and if Mom and Dad had any idea you skipped school and almost got yourself eaten—”