Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (127 page)

“Hold on, baby. You’re doing great.”

The voice echoes through the tunnel
. Mommy?
Everything is humming—it’s humming so loudly I want to scream. I want to cover my ears, but I can’t
.

Can’t move my arms
.

Can’t move my legs
.

I want to go home
.

“The image quality is shot to hell.”

“She’s scared, Rena.”

Daddy?

“You have to be still, Kali. Be so still.”

Still as the grave
.

Oxygen rushed into my lungs like water tearing its way through a dam. I gasped and bolted straight up. Glass crunched underneath me; shards flew off my body, sparkling like raindrops in the newborn sun. Slowly, the world came into focus. Bethany and the BMW were gone, the carnage
around me the only evidence that they’d ever been there at all.

They left me here? They ran us off the road, I went through the windshield, and they just
left
?

So much for specimen retrieval.

Stiffly, I brought my right hand up to my left shoulder, popping it back into place. I pulled bits and pieces of windshield from my face, my chest, my arms. I reached my blood-soaked hands up and manually tilted my head to the side, then snapped it backward. The sound of crunching bones was unpleasant, but not overly so.

Twenty-three hours and nineteen minutes
.

That was more than enough time for me to heal. Already, the surface wounds were closing, leaving nothing but smears of blood in their wake. I could hear bones knitting themselves back together, could feel my spine righting itself with nothing more than a curious pressure at the nape of my neck.

Somebody tried to kill me. I should be dead
.

That realization wasn’t as disturbing as it would have been on a human day. People like me weren’t scared to die, and we weren’t easy to kill. The scent of blood—coppery, wet—was familiar, but for some reason, this time, there were layers to the smell that I’d never inhaled before: iron, honey, sweat.

If you can smell your blood, they can smell it.

For a moment, I thought the warning was a product of my own mind, but then a glint of gold caught my eye. Under my ravaged shirt, under the blood, I could see part of an all-too-familiar symbol.

No
.

I pulled at the fabric, wrenching it away from my stomach. The flesh underneath was smeared with messy streaks of blood, like someone had been finger-painting on my torso, but the red color did nothing to mask the image of a snake eating its own tail.

The
ouroboros
.

No
. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t the plan. My blood was poison, and the thing inside me was supposed to be dying. It was supposed to be gone.

Kali.

I didn’t want to be hearing the voice. I didn’t want to still be infected, to know that come dawn, I might still be dying.

You’re not dying. The human body can’t handle the bite. Yours can.

In tandem with the words, the
ouroboros
on my stomach trembled and then an inklike substance began to bleed outward from its surface. Like vines climbing a wall, string-thin wisps of gold snaked their way across my skin, up my torso, around to my back.

I couldn’t tear my eyes from the mark’s progress. As it painted me in crisscrossing lines, the
ouroboros
glowed with an unearthly sheen. Beads of sweat gathered on the surface of my skin, and unable to resist, I dragged one bloody finger across the length of the symbol, tracing it, feeling it—

Your wounds are healing. At this rate, you’ll be fine within an hour, but until then, you need to mask the smell of your blood.

There was no way I’d be completely healed in an hour. I was fast, but not that fast.

There are some advantages to getting bitten.

The voice in my head was clearer than it had ever been, like its owner was whispering the words directly into the back
of my neck. My eyes focused on a point in the distance, and I saw him.

The man from my dreams.

He was a head or so taller than me, his skin lighter, his eyes silver. Shadow clung to the surface of his body, but this time, I could see an unearthly light through the darkness.

He didn’t belong here.

Neither do you.

I met his silver eyes, so dark I could feel myself getting lost in them, and for a moment, I saw him somewhere else: cement walls, blackened floor, blood.

Kali. Focus.

The words were sharp, and it took me a minute to process the fact that the voice in my head was yelling at me.

The people who left you here will expect your body to be discovered soon. They’re counting on it being ruled a hit-and-run. They’ll be surprised enough when your body doesn’t turn up. The last thing you need is to draw every beast in a thirty-mile radius to your side.

I hated to admit it, but the chupacabra had a point.

The second that thought crossed my mind, a low, rumbling chuckle echoed through my brain.
I’m not a Nibbler, Kali. Nibblers can’t talk.

Nibblers?
Nibblers?

You’re not a chupacabra?
I asked silently, because that was what he seemed to be implying.

No. I’m not.

He sounded fairly certain, but I couldn’t help asking again.
You’re seriously not the chupacabra who bit me yesterday?

I’d started hearing the voice right after I’d been bitten. The simplest explanation was usually the right one—even
if it involved assuming that a parasite was capable of speech.

I’m not a Nibbler, Kali. I
have
a Nibbler.

I looked down at the symbol on my stomach, pictured one on his.

So I have a chupacabra inside my body and you have one inside of yours and that lets us play psychic telephone?

He had to realize how ridiculous that sounded.

More ridiculous than thinking that a Nibbler can talk?

After spending the past eighteen hours trying to keep Skylar, Bethany, and the whole motley crew from thinking I was insane, I really wasn’t in the mood to be mocked by the voice in my head.

The voice that apparently did not belong to a chupacabra.

If you’re not the thing that bit me
, I said sharply,
who the hell are you?

I knew before the response came that he would give me his name—Zev.

What the hell are you?
I amended my silent question, and Zev answered with a question of his own.

What the hell are
you
?

In the distance, the man I’d seen disappeared back into the depths of my mind. My body stiff, I climbed to my feet.

What the hell was I—how many times had I asked myself that same question?

I wanted answers—lots of them—but there was no denying that Zev’s suggestion about making myself scarce was a good one: I was injured, and even with my healing abilities kicked into overdrive, I wasn’t in any shape to fight off every monster that came creeping out of the woodwork. My blood was everywhere. The air was thick with it. It was only a matter
of time before the wind carried the scent to the wrong nostrils.

This isn’t over
, I told the mystery boy in my mind.
You
are
going to answer my questions
.

Silence.

Without another word—out loud or internal—I turned and walked up to the road, half naked and covered in blood, trying not to think about the mark on my stomach or the distinct feeling that life, as I knew it, was over.

I was fairly certain that the kind of person who picked up girls on the side of the road wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to be alone in a car with for any extended period of time. I suspected this was doubly true if you were covered in your own blood and wearing the shredded remains of a T-shirt that had most definitely seen better days.

Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers. I needed a shower. I needed fresh clothes, and I needed to get off the side of the highway before some well-meaning passerby called the cops. My options were severely limited, and of those, Eddie seemed like the best bet. He had a proto-beer belly and biceps that told me he liked to feel strong. I knew the second I saw him, pulling into the gas station, that he would pick me up when he pulled out, no questions asked.

I also knew he’d probably try to take a little something in return.

Don’t do this, Kali.

I wasn’t sure whether Zev meant those words as a warning or an order, but either way, I didn’t feel particularly compelled to listen. Whoever or whatever he was, he was nothing to me, and I was used to taking care of myself.

I had a knife strapped to my calf and the instincts of a killer.

I’ll be fine
.

Besides, I’d already almost died once today. That really had a way of putting things in perspective. So I got into Eddie’s car. I relegated Zev’s voice to the back of my mind, and I bided my time. We had made it to the outskirts of town, about a mile away from the university, when Eddie pulled off onto an access road and put one hand on my shoulder.

“I’ll kill you,” I said conversationally. The words weren’t a threat—more of an observation, really, and it disturbed me that I could be so matter-of-fact about taking human life. I’d never felt the need to hunt anyone who fell on that side of the natural/preternatural divide, but the hunt-lust was already building up inside of me, and I’d had a really bad morning.

“Excuse me?” Eddie asked, gob-smacked and so fatally stupid that I almost couldn’t stand to look at him.

“Don’t touch me,” I clarified, the air around me pulsing with a rhythm I recognized all too well. One that wanted me to lay a trap. To hunt. To kill.

“Hey now, sweetheart. I could have called the cops when I saw you. Still could. Girl like you, looking like that—”

Eddie’s hand ventured from my shoulder down my collarbone, and something inside of me snapped. One second I was me, and the next, I’d been pushed outside of my body, and I was watching my mouth move and listening to words that weren’t mine snaking their way out of my lips.

“She probably wouldn’t kill you. She has a certain fondness for humans, thinks she’s one of them.”

I watched, disembodied, as a dangerous, glittering smile cut across the features of my face, and I flashed back to the moment at the ice rink when I’d lost control of my body, when something or someone else had thrown it out of the dragon’s line of fire.

“What in the blazing hell are you talking about?” Eddie didn’t remove his hand from my collarbone, but it didn’t venture any lower, either.

“The girl won’t kill you, but I will. I’ll take this knife and slit you from the throat down, split your body in two along the lines of your delicate human spine.”

Zev’s voice was lower than mine, almost mechanical in the way it left my mouth.

I fought for control of my own body.

I can handle this!

I am handling this,
Zev said calmly, and I knew by his tone of voice that he wasn’t arguing with me. He was simply stating a fact.

I was beginning to wish I’d never gotten into a car with Eddie.

Eddie—who was likely coming to a similar conclusion himself—stupidly persisted in trying to make a point with the creature wearing my body.

“Now, look here, girl.”

“Leave.” In the span of a heartbeat, Zev had my knife in his hand, and he dragged the point gently across the surface of my assailant’s Adam’s apple. “Run.”

Eddie froze. “You crazy bitch.”

Within a second, Zev had the edge of the knife pressed to the underside of the man’s chin, hard enough to draw blood.
Small red spheres beaded up on the surface of Eddie’s skin, coating his stubble.

Zev licked his lips.

Or rather, he licked mine.

My tongue. My lips. My hand holding the knife
.

I clung to that thought, and somehow, my mind overpowered Zev’s and shoved him out.

The
ouroboros
on my stomach burned like dry ice, like fire.

“I don’t think he likes it when you call me a bitch,” I told Eddie dryly, trying not to sound as thrown as I felt.

“He?” Eddie’s Adam’s apple bobbed upward, and my eyes lit on a series of tiny cuts in the surface of his skin.

Blood
.

People like me didn’t get hungry. We didn’t even need to eat. But for a moment, a split second that rocked me to the core, I was very, very thirsty.

“I should go,” I said, forcing myself to pull the knife from Eddie’s throat, trying not to look at the blood beading up on its surface.

“I’m calling the cops!” Eddie seemed intent on proving that he wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box. I gave him a look.

“And telling them what? That you picked up a girl covered in blood, and when you tried to put the moves on her, the demon inside of her threatened your life?” I snorted. “Good luck with that one.”