Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (133 page)

I’d heard this lecture so often, I could have given it myself. Instead, I stuck to the shadows and moved my way toward the front of the auditorium. A couple of his students might have noticed me, but the professor went on, oblivious.

“What are the three key markers of preternatural evolution?” The question was rhetorical, and he went right into the answer—just as I went right for a chair near the front of the auditorium, where he’d left his briefcase and keys.

“It’s all right there in the DNA: preternaturality is typically marked by a triple, rather than double, helix structure; the presence of base pairs that themselves appear to have distinctly unnatural properties; and the secretion of amino acids—or, as they are more commonly called, preter-proteins—that defy our most basic natural laws, and in doing so, caused a resurgent interest in the pseudoscience of alchemy for a large part of the twentieth century.”

I slipped my hand into my father’s blazer jacket, which he’d left on his chair when he’d taken to the stage to lecture.
As a kid, I’d completed the exact same motion searching for change for the vending machines, but this time, I was looking for something slightly less benign: his university ID card.

Got it
.

My hand closed around its target, and I slipped back into the shadows and made for the exit.

“But given these differences, are preternatural creatures really unnatural? Or are they simply the product of a different kind of evolution—one with a different starting point, a different progression? Were they always here? Where did they come from? And are their fundamental and most basic natures really all that different from ours? Which leads me to …”

My father actually started tapping out a drumroll on his podium. A handful of students joined in. A new PowerPoint slide appeared on the projector screen, and my father’s voice boomed out over the drumroll.

“Sexual Selection and Preternatural Mating Behavior! Or, if you prefer: sex and the supernatural—when demons get down and dirty.”

That was my cue to leave. The one benefit of having a father who only remembered my existence every other Thursday was that we’d never had a sit-down talk about the birds and the bees. Hearing him say the word “sex” twice in one minute was more than enough for me.

As I slipped out the back of the room, and the door closed behind me, I glanced back over my shoulder, half expecting him to have snapped out of lecture mode and noticed my exit—but he didn’t. I wasn’t suprised. People like me were good at fading into the background, and I’d probably had more practice than most.

Mousy little Kali …
wasn’t that what Bethany had called me? I’d spent my whole human life not making waves, hiding what I was, trying not to be noticed.

Until now.

Breaking into Paul Davis’s lab—for a purpose completely unrelated to hunting—wasn’t exactly the work of a human chameleon. It wasn’t low risk, it wasn’t subtle.

Oh well
.

Like Theseus working his way through the labyrinth, I wound my way through hallway after hallway, took to the stairs, and made my way to my father’s lab. I swiped his ID, and the door unlocked itself. Since I’d relieved him of his last subject pool with the Great Zombie Raid of Sophomore Year, he’d been doing mostly theoretical research, but his office still backed up to his old lab space—which, in turn, was located adjacent to the space that had been given to the new head of the department.

Two more key-card swipes, and I was in a restricted-access hallway. Facial masks and foot covers sat just outside one door. The entire place reeked of plastic and human sweat, but the part of me that wasn’t human could smell a hint of something animal among the antiseptic.

CAUTION
, read the sign on the door.
LIVE SPECIMENS
.

Caution
, I thought, my eyes narrowing,
illegal biomedical experimentation
. My father’s card didn’t grant me direct access to the other labs, but I could still feel a light buzz of power from the blood I’d ingested.

Stronger. Faster. More invincible.

I fed the chupacabra, and it fed me. Trying not to think about what exactly I’d fed it, I made use of the increased
strength and forced the door open. The lock gave way with a sickening creak, and I slipped into the room, expecting to see … something.

Something other than empty aquariums, empty cages. Something other than petri dishes, carefully labeled and stored away.

A clipboard on the far wall drew my attention, and I crossed the room, moving silently, so light on my toes that I might as well have been floating. Careful not to touch anything, I skimmed the top sheet, then helped myself to a pair of latex gloves.

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: PAUL DAVIS

PROTOCOL
#: 85477892

GENETIC MUTATION IN THE NORTHERN CHUPACABRA
.

It wasn’t exactly the kind of evidence I’d hoped for, but really, what was I expecting? It wasn’t like Paul Davis was going to apply for university approval for his real research program. Methodically, I made my way through the room, mentally dividing it into a grid and searching every square from ceiling to floor, wall to wall.

Whatever Dr. Davis was doing for Chimera, he wasn’t doing it here.

Determined to find something, lest my latest stint as a hardened criminal be for naught, I made my way from Davis’s lab to the attached office.

Filing cabinets.

Computers.

Papers covering every available surface.

Bingo
.

I started with his desk and looked for anything with
Chimera letterhead. Nada. I looked through every scrap of paper, every Post-it note, the passwords taped to the bottom of one of his drawers. After committing that last one to memory, I moved on.

All I needed was a lead—the location of the main lab, the name of the project, Davis’s contact at Chimera … 
anything
.

A light flickered somewhere in the distance, and I glanced out through the thick, opaque window separating the office from the hallway on the other side.

Someone was coming.

I pressed myself back against a wall, willing my body flat, hiding my face in the shadows. I waited—and whoever it was walked right by. As the sound of footsteps became softer, more distant, I set back to work, all too aware that the next time, I might not be so lucky.

It didn’t take me long to find the keys to the filing cabinet, but the files they contained weren’t exactly what I would call helpful—more protocols, long printouts of data, medical information for the graduate assistants who worked in the Davis lab. Next, I turned my attention to the desk drawers, the credenza, the cushions in his black IKEA sofa.

And that’s when I hit pay dirt: a cell phone, presumably Professor Davis’s, was wedged in the crack between the cushions and the back of the sofa. I pried it loose and started scrolling through the recent calls.

BETHANY
.

BETHANY
.

BETHANY
.

I tried not to feel guilty, seeing Beth’s name, and forced myself onward.

ADELAIDE
.

HOME
.

And then, finally, a number that wasn’t in his contacts. Two numbers. A third.

There had to be a way to trace the phone numbers to a location—and if I was lucky, that location might give me something: if not the actual lab where they were holding Zev, at least another name, another person whose office I could rifle through, more laws to break.

This time, the sound of footsteps treading through the exterior hallway was crisp and pert, and it stopped right outside the door. Pocketing the cell phone, I leapt for the door to the lab space, squeezing back through it and shutting it behind me an instant before the door to the hallway opened.

“Honestly, Paul, that’s the third phone this month. You can hardly complain about Bethany’s overage fees when you can’t keep track of a BlackBerry to save your life.”

In the time it took me to recognize that voice as belonging to Bethany’s mother, her father was already speaking in reply. “What our daughter doesn’t know won’t hurt her—and the phone isn’t lost. It’s in here somewhere. Here, give me your phone.”

It took me a second too long to realize why a person trying to locate their phone would ask to borrow one from someone else—and in that second, Paul Davis called his own cell.

It lit up a second before it rang. I didn’t have time to figure out how to silence it, how to turn it off. Moving on instinct, I did the only thing a person like me knew how to do.

I killed it.

Snapped it in half like a twig, held my breath, waited.

“Did you hear something?” Through the thick metal door, Paul Davis’s voice was muted, but I had no way of knowing how soft it would have sounded to a human. Maybe they wouldn’t have been able to make out the words at all; maybe, on the other side of that metal door, the Davises wouldn’t have heard that half of a ring, the crunching of plastic and metal, at all.

Or maybe this time, I’d get caught.

I thought of all the laws I’d ever broken: the trespassing, the slaughter, obstruction of justice, cruelty to creatures who’d died choking on my blood. I thought of Zev, caged in concrete, and of my father, lecturing in the building next door.

And then the door to the lab space opened, and a familiar woman with strawberry blonde hair peeked in. She met my eyes, and for a moment, hers glossed over, and I wondered if Bethany’s mother was seeing things again: the boy her son had been, ghosts of everything he wouldn’t ever be. For a moment, that faraway glint in her eye gave way to focus, clarity.

She saw me.

And then she closed the door. “Not so much as a ring,” she said. “Are you sure you didn’t leave it in the lecture hall?”

This time, I couldn’t make out her husband’s response, but a second later, it was punctuated with the sound of another door opening, closing. I started breathing again, a tightness in my chest reminding me that I’d stopped. I should have headed for the other exit—the one I’d entered through in the first place, but I didn’t. Instead, I waited, and after a long moment, the door to Davis’s office opened again.

“I know you,” Bethany’s mother said in a tone that would
have been more appropriate if we’d run into each other at some kind of country club soiree. “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t remember your name. I’m afraid I’m not much of a morning person.”

I tried to form a connection between this polite woman, put together from head to toe and fully coherent, and the woman I’d met that morning, but came up blank. The difference was night and day, like there were two people occupying the same body—neither of whom was 100 percent there.

“And when I say I’m not a morning person, what I mean is that I don’t know what you saw this morning. I can guess what you must think of me, but I love my children, and I love my husband, and I think it would be best if we both agreed that whatever you saw this morning never happened, and whatever I saw—here, with you—well, that never happened, either.”

I had no response, no words. She was supposed to be crazy. She wasn’t supposed to be bargaining with me.

“You learn,” she said. “After a while, you learn how to pretend—to see what you want to see, and ignore everything else.”

Listening to her speak, her cadence and tone an exact match for Bethany at her oh-so-popular iciest, I wondered which Adelaide Davis was the real one, and which was pretend. Was she crazy? Sane? Did she know her son was gone? Was what I’d seen this morning just an elaborate game? Or was this Adelaide—calm and cool, negotiating with me to keep her secret—just a cover, a mask constructed to hide the broken, jagged mind that lurked underneath?

“You’re a very pretty girl,” the woman in question said, tilting her head to the side. “Did you know that? Once upon
a time, I had a pretty, pretty boy.” She reached forward and touched my cheek with one manicured hand.

And just like that, it was like I wasn’t even standing there anymore. She took her own cell phone out of her purse and started tapping impatiently on its keys.

“Mrs. Davis?” I said her name, unsure if I should leave her here, if I should call Bethany to bring her home.

She looked up. “Don’t slouch, Kali. It’s unbecoming.”

Her use of my given name nailed me to the floor. She turned her attention back to the phone, and finally, I coerced my feet into moving, made my way to the door.

“Don’t let them hurt her.” This time, Adelaide Davis’s voice was quiet, steady. “It’s not safe in that house. It’s never safe.”

She might as well have been rattling off a cookie recipe, for all the emphasis she placed on those words. I waited to see if she’d say anything else, but she didn’t.

I opened the door.

I slipped back into the hallway.

And as the door closed behind me, I heard a light and airy sigh.

I’d come here with a lead, and I was leaving with a broken cell phone and a ball of nausea expanding in my stomach. Leaving Bethany’s mother there, with her father, felt wrong—and it made me wonder. If Adelaide was here—alone—where was Bethany?

Why had Bethany just placed three calls to her father’s cell phone?

And what did Adelaide mean about it never being safe in their house?