Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (134 page)

It’s not safe in that house. It’s never safe
.

I couldn’t shake those words, no matter how hard I tried, so instead of slipping back into my father’s classroom and returning his ID card, I dropped it in the hallway outside his class—someone would find it, and I had bigger fish to fry. Ducking out of the building, it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the sudden change in brightness. The sunlight felt like a pinprick in the center of each of my eyes, but I was only vaguely aware of the discomfort as it spread outward, leaving them bloodshot and dry.

Where we come from, there isn’t much of a sun. The more like us you become, the less tolerance you’ll have for direct sunlight—but you’ll survive.

I didn’t know which part of that statement was the most disturbing—the idea that whatever I was, whatever I was becoming, the transformation wasn’t complete yet, or the suggestion that people like us came from somewhere else.

I could tell you all about it,
Zev suggested.

I saw the ploy for what it was: he wanted me to forget about Chimera, forget about Bethany, forget about anything that might spur me into action. In his ideal world, I probably
would have completely ignored the fact that he was caged, lying in wait for the moment he could tear off all of their heads.

Nice try
, I said.
But no
.

I told you I could handle this, Kali, and I meant it.

For a split second, there was something else there, something he wasn’t telling me. I could almost see it, almost pinpoint the reason he wanted me to stay away, but a second later, it was gone.

Frustrated, I replied to his silent sentence out loud. “Yeah, well, you also spent the first twenty-four hours of our acquaintance appearing to me in shadows and stalking my dreams. Forgive me if I’m skeptical.”

His response came in images, not words, and I got the distinct sense that up until I’d shifted from my human form, he hadn’t been able to make himself heard more clearly—which meant there was a good chance that as soon as I shifted back, I’d lose the connection. Lose
this
.

I’d lose the boost that being bitten had given my already unnatural abilities—and the thirst.

I was used to watching my abilities slip away, leaving me vulnerable and human and raw. I was used to missing things, people, having a purpose, but this time, it would be worse.

Because this time, when I shifted, I’d lose Zev
and
the ability to save him.

Eighteen hours and twenty-four minutes
.

I was on the clock—but I still couldn’t make myself focus only on Zev, not with Bethany’s mother’s words echoing in the recesses of my mind.

It’s not safe in that house. It’s never safe
.

It was probably nothing. The woman had lost a child—how
could any place feel safe after something like that? Bethany was probably fine—or, at least, as fine as she’d been when I’d left her—but given that she was almost as embroiled in this mess as I was, I couldn’t ignore the possibility that she might not be.

If her mother was here, Bethany was home alone—and I’d already had firsthand experience with the way the men in suits handled loose ends.

She’s fine
, I told myself.
If they were going to hurt her, they would have done it already
.

In my head, Zev sighed.
You’re going back there, aren’t you?

I chewed lightly on my bottom lip.
Maybe
.

That was the problem with caring about people—you had too much to lose.

I glanced down at my watch again, more out of habit than anything else, and then made a split-second decision. Bethany’s house was a good ten miles away, but there was nothing saying I had to run there on foot. I’d go by, eyeball the house, make sure that Chimera hadn’t sent anyone to pay Beth a visit—and then I’d find a way to get what I needed out of the mangled remains of Paul Davis’s phone.

Scanning the cars in the parking lot, my eyes came to rest on my father’s.

Hey, Zev?
I said, sounding—to me, at least—oddly like Skylar.
Any chance you know how to hot-wire a car?

I might have felt bad about stealing my father’s car, had he ever acknowledged the fact that I was old enough to drive—and
had been for over a year. But sixteen and seventeen were just numbers to him, and we’d never been much for celebrating birthdays. Given that, I figured that just this once,
he
could rely on public transportation—or walk the five miles separating the university from our house.

All’s fair in love and war—and black ops.

Ignoring the quiet trill of guilt trying to sound off in my brain, I parked the car a couple of blocks away from Bethany’s house, figuring that if Chimera hadn’t figured out who I was yet, the last thing I needed to do was hand them my father’s license plate number on a silver platter. Closing the car door behind me, I started jogging toward Bethany’s house, making an effort at slowing the unnaturally fast pace my body wanted to take.

I wasn’t used to having to hold back, and it took the strain of pretending to be human to an all-new level.

My body wanted to run.

It wanted to blur.

It wanted to
feed—

But I most emphatically wasn’t going to think about that. The last thing I needed was for the neighbors to see me running by at an inhuman blur.

So I held back. I paced myself. And then I heard the scream.

Go. Quickly.

I stopped holding back, stopped thinking. One second, I was running, and the next I was there, and everything in between was fuzzy and indefinite in my mind. This time, when I heard the scream, I recognized its owner.

Not Bethany. Skylar.

That, more than the whisper of Zev’s own hunt-lust in the corners of my mind, pushed me forward. I didn’t have many friends—I wasn’t entirely sure I had any—but Skylar was the closest thing I’d had to one in a very long time.

She was screaming.

I catapulted my way over the gate, lost myself to the blur of the motion, hit the front porch, and breathed in through my nose.

Death
, I thought, the word oddly dull in my mind. The dead and the dying had a smell—a bit like rusted metal, a bit like rotting food. The scent of it set the hairs on the back of my neck on end.

Walkers,
Zev said.
Lots of them.

It took me a moment to translate, to know that by Walkers, he meant the walking dead.

Homo mortis
.

Zombies.

I had my knife in hand before I realized I’d reached for it, and I had kicked open the Davises’ front door before it ever occurred to me that it might have been unlocked.

“Kali?” A familiar voice—tight with panic, tinged with disbelief—caught me off guard. The only thing that kept me from putting my knife straight through the top of Elliot’s spine was a surge of interest from the chupacabra inside me.

A realization that Elliot smelled human.

He smelled good.

“Where are they?” I asked. My voice sounded different—gravelly and low, humming with power and need and want.

“Beth’s down the hall, barricaded in. I can’t find Skylar—”

“No,” I said sharply. “The zombies. Where are
they
?”

On cue, one of the living dead dropped down from the stairway overhead. Its bones crunched as it landed, and when it stood, I realized that it was like me—it couldn’t feel pain, couldn’t tell that its legs were broken, the bones protruding through dead and rotting flesh.

Its mouth—or what was left of it—opened, revealing a cavernous hole.
No tongue
. I caught the faint whiff of sulfur in its blood and wondered how anyone could have ever thought that zombies started out human.

“Kali, look out!”

Elliot’s words were lost on me, his presence a distraction I didn’t need.

Kill it
, I thought.
Kill it now
.

I flung the knife and a second later, I heard the sound it made cutting through flesh, lodging itself in rock-hard bone. I leapt forward, a wild thing, slamming the heel of my hand into the hilt of the blade. The creature’s spine gave way; its head detached, and a second later, my knife was back in my hand.

“Kali?” Every muscle in Elliot’s body was tense. His face was pale, but his eyes were hard.

I said nothing. Somewhere below us, Skylar screamed.

“Weapons,” I said, my voice a foreign thing in a throat that wanted nothing more than to be coated in the blood of the thing I’d just slayed. “Whatever you have, give it to me and get out.”

Elliot didn’t seem any more inclined to follow my instructions than I’d been to follow most of Zev’s.

“Beth’s dad collects guns,” he said. “They’re in the basement. That’s where I was headed.”

I didn’t have time for this. Not with Skylar screaming, not with the hunt-lust exploding inside of me, like there were a hundred zombies in this house, a thousand.

I left Elliot—left him standing there, light blue eyes, cheekbones sharp as any knife. Either he’d survive or he wouldn’t. Either way, I knew without asking that if it came down to a choice, he would have sent me after Skylar, told me to save her, protect her—

Kill them. Kill them
now.

I didn’t know the halls of this house as well as the layout of the biology building, but this time, I didn’t have to rely on memory or a mental map or anything other than an unerring sense of where
they
were.

The things I needed to kill.

The closer I got to the sound of Skylar’s screaming, the more of them there were. I felt like I was swimming in corpses, cutting my way through one after another after another in my pursuit. Around number ten, I lost my knife, left it buried in a corpse still twitching with what was left of its mockery of life. Then all I had was my hands, nails as sharp as blades, and my blood.

I fought my way toward Skylar, my flesh shredded and bleeding, and when I found her, she was still screaming, but she didn’t look scared. She didn’t look hurt. She’d managed to crawl on top of what looked to be a very large safe—easily one and a half times her size—and she’d squished herself back against the wall, just out of range of the yellowed fingernails and white-gray hands groping for her body.

For her blood.

“You okay?” I asked her.

She nodded, then screamed again, the sound piercing the air like a siren—and for a moment, the horde of monsters in between us shrank back.

“Little Sisters’ Survival Guide, rule number thirty-seven,” Skylar said. “Scream
before
they hit you.”

And then she screamed again.

I didn’t have time to question her logic—or the existence of the little sisters’ survival guide. “Close your eyes,” I shouted, over her shrieks and the wet, gargling moans of the things that stood between us.

Skylar didn’t question the command, and I didn’t have time to think about why I’d given it. She closed her eyes, and I dragged one jagged fingernail across the length of my neck, drawing blood, waiting.

One by one, the horde turned their attention from Skylar to me. One by one, they stopped scrambling for her blood. One by one, their eyes—pupil-less and without color—focused in on the line of blood I’d drawn.

I noticed the red, blinking collars on their necks a second before they lunged—each moving in tandem with the one next to it, with coordination the walking dead should never have.

Zombies were stupid and slow and incapable of anything but eating—their own bodies, others’—but this set moved with purpose, like rats through a maze.

My last thought, in the second before they closed in, was that maybe you
could
train zombies as easily as Pavlov’s dogs.

At the sound of the bell, circle your prey and eat her flesh
.

I had no weapons. No plan. Nothing but my blood and my
hands. They were coming, and there were more of them than I’d realized. Despite their increased speed, there was no grace to their movements, no rhythm. Their mouths were open, their bodies jerking as they advanced on me.

I grabbed the closest one by the arm and wrenched it off with a sickening crack, but the monster didn’t blink, didn’t howl. Instead, it returned the favor, evenly spaced, triangular teeth going for the flesh in my arms.

I fought—kicked, punched, tore through whatever flesh I could lay a hand on, but no matter how many times I hit them, or how many of them I took down, there were always more.

I was drowning.

In sweat, in blood, in the smell of death and the mounting pressure of bodies on mine. Hands on mine. Teeth, mouths, flesh on mine.

They were above me and below me. They were everywhere, and I couldn’t tell now where my body ended and theirs began. I couldn’t tell how much of the blood coating my extremities was theirs and how much was mine.

Retreat
.

In all the time I’d been a hunter, that was an instinct I’d never felt before. I’d never wanted to run from a fight, never doubted that I would come out on top.