Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (126 page)

“Hit the highway.”

Bethany didn’t have to be told twice. The two of us fell into a loaded silence, and I couldn’t help but think how different we were. I was perpetually on the outside, looking in, and she was on the inside, oblivious to the fact that there was anything else out there at all.

And yet
.

She was driving my getaway car, and I couldn’t help thinking that if things got ugly, maybe I could distract our pursuers long enough for her to disappear.

“Thanks,” I said, and the word hung awkwardly in the air, like humidity, thick enough to drown us both.

“You’re the one who saved my life,” Bethany replied. The words were closer to a complaint than to gratitude—not because she’d wanted to die, but because she wasn’t the kind of person who liked being indebted to anyone else.

Some people were born for the spotlight, and some of us lived on the fringe. I was beginning to suspect that you could keep people at an arm’s length regardless.

“We’re not friends,” I told Bethany, but the words came out more like a question.

“No,” she agreed. “We’re not.”

My gaze flickered over to her speedometer, and my eyebrows skyrocketed. Bethany drove the way I hunted: like she was invincible, like death was an inevitability and a friend.

“Do you really think your dad is working with these people?”

Bethany shrugged and tapped her fingernail impatiently against the steering wheel, like going ninety miles an hour wasn’t nearly fast enough. “He was sitting in his office discussing specimen retrieval, Kali. Whatever’s going on, my father is in it up to his eyeballs.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

Bethany spared a glance for me out of the corner of her eye, then switched her gaze back to the open road. “I’m not. My dad is a brilliant academic, Kali, but brilliant academics don’t suddenly up and move into multimillion-dollar houses and buy their daughters BMWs. He took the position here because the department didn’t mind him dabbling in the private sector. I’m guessing the goons in the suits are Private and Sector.”

“And the woman?” I found myself asking.

“As far as I can tell,” Bethany said, “she’s calling the shots.”

Click. Click. Click
.

I hadn’t ever gotten a good enough look at the woman in
question to conjure up the image of her face in my mind, but I could still hear the clicking of heels against pavement.

My stomach clenched.

I’d spent enough time around academics to know that there was more money in business than there ever would be in a university setting—but that didn’t make the people who funded that kind of research evil. Pharmaceutical companies had engineered countless medical advances; most new technology wasn’t developed by university professors. Still, I had to wonder: what kind of money was there in preternatural studies?

Want—use—now—us.

I breathed the shadow in. I breathed it out, and I ignored the voice in my head.

Half an hour
. Just half an hour, and this would all be over. The chupacabra would die, and with any luck, the tracking device would go out with it. Bethany and I could go back to not knowing each other, and whatever her father was doing in the private sector could stay there.

“You’re not going to tell me your plan, are you?” More tapping of Bethany’s fingertip against the steering wheel, and another glance cast at me out of the corner of her eye.

“You don’t want to know.” That seemed to be a safe response. “We’re not friends. I don’t trust you, and you don’t like me, but I’m not lying when I say that I’m going to be okay. I’m not being stupid or optimistic or self-sacrificing. If you dropped me off on the side of the road right now, by the time I hitched my way home, I’d be fine.”

I half expected Bethany to stop the car and let me out, but she didn’t. Instead, her green eyes narrowed. The
muscles in my throat tightened, and the bottom fell out of my stomach.

I knew better than to let people in. I knew better than to let them see even a fraction of what I was underneath this shell. So why had I just told Bethany that I could do the impossible? Chupacabra possession was always fatal once the
ouroboros
appeared.
Always
. My confidence in being able to cure myself had to strike her as either miraculous or bizarre.

“You’re right,” Bethany said, switching lanes and pressing down on the accelerator. “I don’t want to know.”

You also don’t want to be here
, I thought dully.
You don’t want to know what you know about your father, and you don’t want to be tangled up in this mess with me
.

I realized then that even once I was cured, this wouldn’t be over for Bethany. She’d still have to go to bed at night knowing that her father was involved in something that could have killed me, something that could have killed her. She’d have to get in her BMW every single day and wonder where the money had come from.

Unable to meet her eyes, I busied my hands by reaching into my front pocket and pulling out the piece of paper Skylar had given me the day before. Catching a glimpse of it, Bethany slammed on the brakes. If I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt, I would have gone straight through the windshield. As it was, I was pretty sure I’d busted an ovary or two from the impact with the seat belt itself.

“Where did you get that?” Bethany’s eyes focused on the paper in my hand with an intensity that made me eye it like it might burst into flames at any moment.

“Skylar gave it to me.”

Bethany made an involuntary face the second I said Skylar’s name. “And what, exactly, did Miss Little Bit Psychic say when she gave it to you?” Bethany eased her foot off the brakes and began driving again, but this time, she kept to the speed limit—a surefire sign that her attention was on me and not the road.

“Skylar said she couldn’t get the image out of her mind and that she thought it might be important.” I felt silly even saying the words, but there was a part of me that actually believed Skylar was psychic. She’d known the men in suits were coming, she had an uncanny habit of responding to things I’d left unsaid, and her “instincts” had led us straight to the ice rink—and the man-eating, fire-breathing dragon.

And eventually, to the woman in heels.

Though, now that I thought about it, those last two weren’t exactly marks in her favor.

“Did Skylar say where she’d seen it?” Bethany asked, her enunciation a shade too crisp, each word a little too sharp.

Unsure why she was asking, I shrugged. “In her mind?”

For a second, looking at Bethany was like looking at Elliot when he’d told me not to encourage his sister in her delusions of psychic grandeur. Before Bethany could say something to that effect, I preempted the effort. “Have you seen this symbol before?”

Bethany didn’t reply, and that told me everything I needed to know. She had.

“Care to clue me in?”

Bethany took her eyes off mine. “Care to tell me how you’re going to get rid of that chupacabra at dawn?”

This time, the silence that descended on the car wasn’t so much awkward as charged. I would have laid money that wherever Bethany had seen this symbol, it had something to do with the work her father was doing for the suits. Given that she’d already told me that Daddy Dearest was involved in this up to his eyeballs, it was hard to imagine why she’d suddenly be playing things close to the vest.

You don’t want to know
, I reminded myself, using the exact same words I’d said to Bethany earlier. The less I knew about her, the less she knew about me, the easier this would be on all of us. I was supposed to be invisible. I was supposed to fade into the background. I was supposed to do what I did—

Alone.

Shut up
, I thought back fiercely.
Just shut up
. It was bad enough dealing with my own instincts, knowing that I’d never be able to tell anyone else what I really was. I didn’t need a bloodsucker reminding me that no matter what happened, at the end of the day, I’d still be me, and there’d still be a glass wall separating me from the rest of the world. I wouldn’t ever be human.

I could feel the shift coming, taste it on the tip of my tongue. It was a matter of minutes now.
Twenty. Fifteen. Ten
. The surface of my skin was electric. My bones itched. I became acutely aware of the blood in my veins, the length of each and every one of my limbs.

It always seemed strange to me that in the last few minutes before I became something else, I felt more human than ever. I was hungry, starving, and the wounds I’d scratched into my own stomach stung, bringing tears to my eyes. I wanted to cry, and I wanted to scream. I was tired, I was lonely, and
an insane part of me wanted to stay that way. No matter how many times I went through this, I couldn’t convince my brain that shifting was different than dying, that when I was Other, I was still myself. Instead, I responded to the inevitability of the change like a girl facing down her own mortality, knowing that in
nine minutes, eight minutes, seven
, her life as she knew it would come to end.

“Are you all right?” Bethany’s concern cut through my haze, and I nodded.

“Can you drop me off here?” I asked, my voice quiet, my arms wrapping around my torso, like if I held on hard enough, I could stay human just that much longer.

This is what you wanted. This is what you’ve been waiting for
. I tried to talk myself into it, but the rush of sensation all around me was deafening.

—Alone.

Alone, alone, alone
. The word echoed through my body, and I had two reactions to it, each visceral and strong. Part of me said no, and part of me said yes. Part of me wanted the change, and part of me didn’t want to give up being what I was now.

It was kind of ironic—I spent my human days wishing I wasn’t human, but in the last moments before I made the switch, I didn’t want to give that up.

“I’m not dropping you off anywhere,” Bethany said. “You’re really pale, and your pupils are huge. Are you shaking?”

I was. I was trembling, my body vibrating with the knowledge that in a few minutes, everything would change.

I’m going to kill you
, I thought, trying to focus on the
chupacabra and not on the things I’d lose once I crossed over.
You’re going to die
.

Broken.

I might have actually laughed out loud at the word. The parasite in my head was calling me broken, and he was right. Didn’t mean I was any less likely to kill him dead. Didn’t make the tears in my eyes sting any less.

“Kali.” Bethany’s voice went up in pitch. “Kali, I need you to open your eyes and look at me.”

My eyelids fluttered, and I managed to look at her long enough to tell that she was dialing a cell phone—probably calling Elliot or Vaughn or someone else who didn’t know me from Adam.

From Eve.

Bethany cursed under her breath and hung up the phone. “If you die on me, I will kill you.”

I giggled.

She thought the chupacabra was draining me, the way it had the night before. She thought I was dying, drifting further and further away. She thought I was on the verge of going to sleep and never waking up.

The sound of the engine revving permeated my brain, and I forced myself to focus, to concentrate.

“You have to let me out now,” I said, fumbling with my seat belt, wrenching it off. “I need to—have to—go.”

“We’re being followed,” Bethany said, and that snapped me out of it. My back was arching, my blood was burning its way through my veins, but for once, my mind was on something other than the coming change. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the SUV accelerating toward us. Morning
traffic was just starting to pick up, and Bethany zoomed around the other cars like she’d had a past life driving Indy 500s. She hit the exit, flew across an intersection, and hopped back on the highway going the other way. For a few seconds, I thought we’d lost our tail, but then the SUV appeared again, and this time, I saw the passenger-side window cracking. I saw the gun.

“Specimen retrieval,” I told myself. That was what Bethany had said. They were here to retrieve me, to bring the chupacabra inside of me back to the lab. For whatever reason, to them it was worth tracking, and if it was worth tracking, it was worth taking alive.

Right?

Bethany cursed, each word punctuating the one before it, like shots coming off an automatic. The car behind us changed lanes and, without warning, swerved, sideswiping the BMW with brutal, unforgiving force.

Bethany’s fingers tightened over the steering wheel, and the last thing I saw before I lost all sense of reality was her white knuckles bulging under paper-thin skin, giving her the look of a skeleton, of Death itself.

Brakes squealing. Glass breaking. Shattering. My world is turned upside down. White-hot pain
.

This time, my head really did go through the windshield.

Three minutes. Two. One
.

And then I died.

I’m in a tunnel, lying very still, metal all around me. It’s loud and dark, and I’m so scared. My bones are shaking. I want it to be over. I want to get out
.