Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (130 page)

Bethany left us in the foyer. She didn’t say a word, didn’t respond to the question. If I’d had more practice with the whole “friend” thing, maybe I would have known what to say or do next, but I didn’t.

“She’ll be back,” Skylar said. I wasn’t so sure, but up until now, Skylar’s instincts had been right on point. Unfortunately, she chose that moment to turn her focus from Bethany to me. “Bethany wasn’t wrong,” she said slowly. “Was she? About you going through the windshield, about your broken neck?”

Don’t tell her.

This time, I didn’t object to Zev weighing in or the advice he was dispensing. That was how I’d always gotten by, how I survived. By not opening my mouth. By keeping people at arm’s length.

“My neck isn’t broken,” I said stiffly. “I’m fine.”

“People only ever say they’re fine when they’re not.” With those words, Skylar’s eyes went from my face to my stomach. Even clothed in the tank top, I felt naked. I felt like she could see straight through me.

I don’t know what would have happened next, if Bethany’s mother hadn’t interrupted our little standoff. All
smiles, she came back into the room garbed in a twin set and jeans, every inch the suburban soccer mom. For a moment, I thought she was going to offer us lemonade or something, but instead, she fixed her gaze on a spot about a foot in front of Skylar and me.

“Tyler,” she said, in one of those mom voices—halfway between exasperation and indulgence. “Stop pestering Bethany’s friends.”

It took me a moment to digest her words. I stopped breathing.

“I am so sorry, girls,” Mrs. Davis continued, a smile dancing across her face, her eyes flitting back and forth, like she was tracking someone’s movement, even though there wasn’t anyone there.

I looked at Skylar. She looked at me. The two of us looked at the spot on the floor.

“C’mon, Ty,” Mrs. Davis said. “Leave the girls alone. I’ve got an omelet with your name on it and a big glass of milk.”

She held out her hand and beckoned. After a brief pause, she flitted away, her movements purposeful and graceful. As I watched, she reached out, like she was tousling someone’s hair and then she paused.

She turned and looked back over her shoulder.

And for a split second, maybe less, it looked like she might crumble to the ground. Like she knew there wasn’t anyone in this room but the three of us. Like wherever her Tyler had gone, Bethany’s mother wished she could go there, too.

That split second of clarity was fleeting, and a moment later, the bright smile returned, but I was left with an aching
sadness. I watched Mrs. Davis walk out of the room, murmuring gaily to nobody at all.

Beside me, Skylar wiped the back of her hand roughly across her face.

“You okay?” I asked her. After what we’d just seen, I wasn’t entirely certain that
I
was okay.

Skylar shook her head. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s just—she’s so sad. She’s drowning.”

For once, Skylar didn’t elaborate, and when Bethany came back in a moment later, I struggled to hide my own emotions, to make it seem like Skylar and I hadn’t just seen into the intimate depths of her mother’s broken mind.

“Here,” Bethany said, tersely. It took me a moment to realize that she was holding out a slip of paper. No, not paper—a brochure.

I took it from her. “Chimera Biomedical,” I read, but my eyes were drawn away from the words and to the image below it: an octagon bisected by a ladder, spiraling around an invisible line.

Only this time, the ladder looked less like a ladder and more like a DNA helix.

“They specialize in gene therapy,” Bethany said stiffly. “Regeneration.”

“Regeneration?”

Bethany stared pointedly at the tips of her toes. “Reviving brain cells. Stimulating nerve growth. Growing organs.”

“Do they do stem cell research?” Skylar asked, taking the brochure from my hand and staring intently at the symbol—the one she’d drawn for me the day before.

“Look,” Bethany said. “This is what you wanted to know,
isn’t it? You wanted to know what that symbol was, and I told you. You want to know who my dad is working for. Well, this is it. It has to be. It explains everything. Why he’s been working so much. Why he’d do something like this. Why Skylar drew the symbol.”

I processed Bethany’s words, but felt like I was missing something—the reason she hadn’t told me this company’s name the second she’d seen the symbol; the things she was saying about her dad.

“Your mom came back in here a second ago,” Skylar told her, gauging her reaction. “Looking for Tyler.”

This time, Bethany didn’t react to the sound of the name. She just raised one eyebrow, untouchable and cool. “So?”

I knew then, knew that Tyler wasn’t a figment of her mother’s imagination. Knew that he’d been real once, that he wasn’t anymore.

“You had a brother,” I said, thinking of all the times I’d wished for a sibling, for someone in my house other than just my dad and me. “But something happened.”

Bethany’s chin wavered, and I realized that she was biting the inside of her cheeks—anything to keep herself from showing a hint of weakness to the two of us.

Skylar sucked in a breath, that same sad smile painting her face, like if she let her lips tilt downward, she might start crying instead. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said, her voice soft, her tone even.

I thought of the things Bethany had said when she realized I was alive.
You were dead, and it was my fault. I couldn’t—I can’t do this again
.

“The accident today wasn’t your fault, either,” I told her.

“It’s always my fault,” Bethany said, voice steady, hands shaking. “My mom. My dad. Tyler. I was supposed to be watching him.
Me
. But he wanted to go to a friend’s house, and I wanted to watch something on TV, so I let him. I let him go, and he was goofing around on their diving board—it was the middle of winter. There wasn’t any water in the pool, and he should have known better. I shouldn’t have let him go.”

Bethany shrugged, like that could make the words she was about to say matter less. “He fell.”

I wondered how old she’d been at the time, how old her little brother was when he died.

“He’s not dead.” Skylar said the words suddenly, and I wasn’t sure whether she was responding to my thoughts or if she’d seen something in that exact moment that had started her lips moving. “He fell. On concrete. Hit his head, but he didn’t die.”

“Coma,” Bethany said flatly. “For the past four years. Once upon a time, the doctors thought he might wake up. There were some experimental treatments, but they didn’t work. Now they say he’s brain-dead. It doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s gone.”

I tried to imagine what must have been going through her head at that moment, how she must feel, but I couldn’t. I had my reasons for keeping people at arm’s length, and she had hers. My dad and I barely even spoke. My mother had left when I was three. But Bethany—

Her brother was brain-dead.

Her mother believed he was still running around the house.

And her father was conducting illegal experiments on unwitting teenagers—Bethany included.

Suddenly, it clicked in my head: the brochure I was holding, Bethany’s familiarity with Chimera Biomedical, her father’s willingness to break the law for them.

“You said there were experimental treatments.” I watched her reaction to my words. “When Tyler first got hurt, you said he underwent experimental treatments.”

Bethany turned her attention back to her toes. “So?”

“Whose experimental treatments were they?” I knew the answer before I asked the question. Bethany eyeballed me, and when she responded, her words were clipped.

“Who do you think?”

The brochure in my hand. The look on Bethany’s face the first time she’d seen the symbol
.

“Chimera Biomedical,” I said, expelling a breath and giving it a moment. “Are they still treating him?”

“No,” Bethany said too quickly.

“Beth—”

“Don’t call me Beth,” she snapped.

I didn’t need overly developed people skills to see that snapping at me about her name was probably easier than admitting that if her father was working for Chimera, he hadn’t just taken this job for the pay grade. He hadn’t agreed to experiment on teenagers for the money.

He was looking for a cure.

“Why chupacabras?” I asked. Bethany shrugged.

“Why not?” she said. “They’ve tried everything else. Nothing works—nothing is ever going to work, but try telling that to the great Paul Davis. Sometimes, I’d swear he’s more delusional than my mother, and as I’m sure you’ve gathered, that’s saying something. If Chimera Biomedical told my
dad that his research might jump-start Tyler’s brain, there’s nothing that he wouldn’t do.” Bethany swallowed hard. “Obviously.”

The wheels in my head turned slowly as I looked down at the pamphlet, Bethany’s earlier words about Chimera echoing in my head.

They specialized in regeneration: regrowing nerves, reviving dead brain cells. And right now, they were studying chupacabras.

My mind went to Zev and the things he’d told me about “Nibblers.”

Any comments from the peanut gallery?
I asked him.
What would a biomedical company want with a deadly preternatural parasite?

At first, I didn’t think Zev would respond, but then, he bit out four words, his voice decisive and harsh.

Leave it alone, Kali.

If anything, his words made me want to do the opposite, and the way he’d issued the command made me think that this was dangerous—and personal. I chewed on that for a moment. Chimera was studying chupacabras. Zev knew something about it, something he had no intention of telling me.

Chupacabras. Regeneration. Zev acting like pushing this was particularly dangerous for
me.

An insidious possibility took root in my mind, and a moment later, it seemed less like a possibility and more like a fact. All of a sudden, I
knew
why Dr. Davis thought that injecting someone with a chupacabra might not be a death sentence, why he might believe that the preternatural held the key to waking his son up from a deep and unforgiving sleep.

People like me didn’t get hungry. We never got tired. We couldn’t feel pain. And when we got bitten, we didn’t die.

We healed very, very quickly.

To a scientist, that would have seemed like a medical miracle. To a chupacabra expert whose son was dying, it might have seemed like a sign.

Chimera isn’t just playing around with chupacabras
, I realized, my mind reeling. They knew—about the effect that chupacabras had on certain people.

People like me.

“Kali?”

I must have looked about as good as I felt, because Skylar said my name in a tentative, talking-a-puppy-out-from-underneath-a-car type of tone.

I shook my head to clear it of unwanted thoughts—unwanted weakness.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

Bethany twirled a finger through her hair, a dangerous glint in her emerald eyes. “Isn’t it always?”

I didn’t want to take her meaning, but she didn’t leave me any other options.

“When you talked that chupacabra out of my body and into yours, it was nothing. And when you passed out at the skating rink, it was nothing. When you went through the windshield of my car and I thought you
died
—nothing. So, come on, Kali, share. What kind of nothing is it this time?”

The urge to answer her question fully and honestly took me completely by surprise. I wasn’t exactly the bare-my-soul type, but Bethany had just rattled off her sordid family history like it was some kind of halftime cheer. She’d let me in,
and for the first time, I actually wanted to do the same, to tell someone the truth.

That I wasn’t normal.

That I wasn’t human.

That even though I was used to being something else, being bitten by a chupacabra had changed things, changed me.

And that, somehow, Chimera knew—maybe not about me specifically, but about the fact that people like me existed and that being bitten by a chupacabra had a different effect on us than it had on normal people. If Bethany was right and Chimera had been infecting teens on purpose, then chances were good that they were either systematically looking for people like me—or trying to create them.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said out of habit, unable to make myself say anything else. Talking made me feel like I had the dry heaves, and all I wanted was to just throw up the truth and be done with it. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.” Skylar caught my gaze and held it, and even though her face still looked pixie-young and innocent, there was an alien weight to the set of her features, like she was a thousand years old instead of fifteen. “And it does matter. Everything that’s happened, everything that’s going to happen in the next twenty-four hours—it matters.
You
matter, and whether you want to believe this or not, you can’t do this alone, Kali.”

She paused and cast her eyes downward, her voice going very quiet. “You shouldn’t have to.”

I wanted to believe her. I wanted to tell her everything, tell
them
everything. I opened my mouth, and—nothing. I’d
been keeping secrets for so long that I wasn’t entirely sure I knew how to let them go.