Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (145 page)

“Where is she?” Elliot said again, his voice echoing through darkness and desert, sharp as a whip.

I couldn’t do this, couldn’t think this, couldn’t explain that the same creatures that had messed with his memories had led his sister off the path.

That she was dead.

Gone.

Just a body—and not much of one at that.

Without meaning to, my gaze flitted toward what remained of my first—only—

Friend
, I thought dully.
The word is
friend.

Elliot followed my stare, and he flew to her side, no
questions, no hesitation. The few flames that hadn’t burnt themselves out licked at his clothes and hands, but he ignored them.

Touching her would only burn him. I knew that. It wouldn’t bring her back.

Moving slowly—for me, at least—I locked my hands around his shoulders and pulled him away from the fire, away from her. My eyes filled up with the things I couldn’t say, but Elliot stared straight through me.

He pushed me away.

“I’ll kill you,” he said.

I closed my eyes, the night air cool against my blood-damp face. I wouldn’t stop him. I wouldn’t fight.

“Elliot,” Bethany said, her voice breaking through the darkness. “This isn’t … Kali wouldn’t …”

She couldn’t form the words—not when they’d seen me tear out a man’s jugular with my teeth.

“Let’s just go.” Bethany’s voice was little more than a whisper, but I heard her just the same.

Just like I heard Elliot let out a strangled breath.

Just like I heard the two of them walking, then running away.

I watched them go, and once they were gone, I watched the place where they had been. Then, finally, I moved back to the doorway, stepped over the guards’ bodies, picked up the Taser, and pressed the button to open, then close the gate.

Nobody here but us monsters now
, I thought.

I half expected Zev’s voice to join the sound of my own, but if he was there, he was silent. Turning my attention from the inside of my head to what was going on outside it, I registered the ongoing ringing of alarms. I pressed another button on the Taser, and they stopped.

If anyone didn’t know I was here before, they knew it now.

But as I tossed the Taser to one side and began walking down the single hallway, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there wasn’t anyone else.

Just me and the monsters
.

I could feel them—close, but not too close, more of them than I could count. And yet, in this one, scant hallway, there was nothing but me and silence and the men I’d killed.

The ones who’d killed Skylar.

No
. I wouldn’t think her name. I wouldn’t think anything—but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find my way back to that place of pure rage. I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t frightened of the thing I’d done.

The thing I
was
.

Unarmed but for the gun at the small of my back and my smallest knife, I walked forward, my hands held out to the side, like I was some kind of dancer, like this was a tightrope instead of a hallway, and all eyes were on me.

I noticed a blinking red light in the corner. A camera.

“You wanted me,” I said. “Now you’ve got me.”

I waited for my words to sink in, then broke the camera.

My body warm with human blood, it took me two minutes to pace the entire length of the building.

Nothing.

No people.

No monsters.

No Zev.

There was, however, an elevator, and seeing it allowed me to make sense of the things I was sensing, feeling.

The hunter in me sensed prey, but no matter which direction I walked, the siren call of the preternatural stayed exactly the same.

I wasn’t getting any closer or any farther away, because getting to the beasties wasn’t a matter of turning right or left.

I went back to the entryway and snagged one of the guards’ IDs.

“Going down.”

The elevator door opened, feeding me out into another hallway. Unlike the first, however, this one boasted a light at the end of the tunnel—metaphorically speaking. Actually, the “light” was dark and shadowed, and the farther I walked through the hallway, the darker it got. As I rounded the corner, I realized that as ruined and rotting as this building looked from the outside, here, underground, it was immaculate. White walls lined a tile floor, and the room at the end of the tunnel wasn’t just a room.

It’s a mausoleum
.

Or at least, that was what it looked like. The antiseptic white of the hallway gave way to walls made of marble and stone. I stepped forward, feeling like I’d invaded the sanctuary of the dead, and fluorescent lights flooded the room.

Almost immediately, I located a camera identical to the one I’d destroyed, and I wondered if they’d brought up the lights for my benefit, or if the cameras were attached to motion sensors. Either way, I could make out a door on the other side of this cavernous room.

I could also see the shadows on the floor, each one vaguely human in shape. I retrieved my lone remaining knife, and then I looked up.

The ceiling was twenty feet high, maybe not quite that, which meant that the creatures hanging upside down from the rafters were eight or nine feet above my head. There were dozens of them, each with a human head, human limbs, a human body.

Each put together wrong.

“They’re called the Alan,” a voice said. I looked up and saw that the door on the far side of the room had opened. “We didn’t make them, if that’s what you’re thinking. We found them in the Philippines. They’re hybrids, natural ones—between our kind and yours.”

Overhead, one of the Alan opened its eyes. They were startlingly blue. It dropped down to the ground beside me, and my mind processed the reason its body had appeared nearly human, but not quite.

Its arms and legs were on backward, its neck so thin it could barely support its head.

“They die young and can’t reproduce without assistance.” Rena Malik leaned back against the doorway. “Two- and three-helixed organisms can’t naturally crossbreed with anything approaching success.”

The Alan stuttered toward me, heels first.

“Watch out,” my mother said. “It bites.”

The creature didn’t bite me. It came right up to me and nuzzled me, its skin so thin I could feel the contours of its bones.

I stepped back.

“You can kill it if you like,” Rena said. I wouldn’t think of her as my mother, not ever, not now. “I won’t mind.”

Can you say gun?

I thought of all the games, all the tests, and I dropped my knife arm to my side.

“Go back to sleep,” I told the thing in front of me, sidestepping it and closing the space between me and the real enemy here.

“You could kill me, too,” Rena said. “But right now, I’m the closest thing you have to a friend.”

Skylar’s face flashed into my mind. “You aren’t my friend,” I said sharply.

“No,” Rena agreed. “I suppose not. But I am your mother.”

Hearing her say that was worse than the feel of the Alan’s cheek against my own.

“It’s good to see you, Kali. If you wanted to see this, see me—all you had to do was ask.”

My fingers tightened around the blade in my hand, but I couldn’t make my arm move, because her voice, the way she said my name, the soft smile on her face—it was all exactly the same.

Like nothing had changed.

Like she hadn’t missed out on more than a decade of my life.

Like this was a house, not a laboratory.

Like her men hadn’t just killed Skylar.

Like I hadn’t killed her men.

“I didn’t know it was you until today,” she told me, like that made some kind of difference. “I didn’t know that the host was you, and now I do.”

Her words unlocked my frozen muscles. Claiming not to have ordered
my
death wasn’t enough—not when Skylar was ashes on the wind. In a single, fluid motion, I brought my knife down on the back of her head—hilt first.

She crumpled to the ground, and something threatened to give inside me. I pushed back against it.

Later
, I thought.

I could break down later.

I could miss her and hate her and wish I’d never heard her say my name later.

Right now, I had to find Zev.

After the Alan, I’d expected Chimera’s lab to be a little shop of horrors, but beyond the final door, it looked like any other research lab in any other facility in the country: clean, sterile, organized. Workstations lined a center island filled with enough equipment to give research types a geekgasm: electron microscopes and mass spectrometers and machinery I didn’t even come close to recognizing. It was easy to picture the place bustling with men and women in white coats.

So why was it empty?

A company like Chimera had to have hundreds of employees, if not thousands. Even if most of those people worked on aboveboard projects, there had to be more people involved in this one than just She Who Shall Not Be Named and the men in suits.

Then again, I’d triggered some kind of alarm upstairs, and the only reason I’d been able to find this place was because the FBI had already gotten a lock on it.

They’re already evacuating and shutting things down
, I thought, the silence echoing all around me.
What if I’m too late?

You’re not. You need to leave, Kali. Please.

Zev had been silent for so long that the sound of his voice took me by surprise, and I clamped my lips into a straight line, refusing to show any external sign of weakness.

Where are you?
I asked Zev silently, forcing myself to focus on the here and now.

Zev didn’t answer, but I quickly realized that he didn’t have to—hearing his voice had been enough, and now, I could feel his presence like a beacon, calling me home. My inner compass guided me toward the far wall.

Another door.

This place was such a labyrinth. Each time I thought I’d reached my destination, another door popped up, and I had to venture farther and farther into the belly of the beast.

Luckily, the card I’d swiped to get down here worked for access on this door, too, and I let myself into another hallway: one lined with metal doors. A tiny, slit-shaped window had been laid into each.

The smell of sulfur was overwhelming.

I walked down the hallway, trying not to look. I wasn’t here to hunt, but still, I felt them.

Closer, closer, just a little closer …

“No,” I said out loud, pushing down the urge to hunt. I was there for Zev. Everything else could wait. I forced myself to keep walking, and with each step, I felt a little warmer, a little more sure.

I caught sight of the clipboards hanging outside each door, but avoided reading the labels. I forcibly ignored the feeling of bugs crawling under my skin, the sound of scales scraping against concrete from behind one door, the near-human screams of some kind of primate, enraged, behind another.

Like clockwork, as I walked past each door, the beasts contained behind it came to life. They could smell me.

They wanted me dead.

My body quivered with the desire to return the favor, the
ouroboros
burning on my stomach, my chest, my back.