Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (149 page)

The Alan.

All dead.

“They’re going to want to ask you some questions,” Reid said quietly, once we’d made it out and to the road.

I watched the building go up in flames. Watched the windows explode outward and the structure collapse. I thought of the will-o’-the-wisps, of Skylar, of Colette’s body in the basement cell.

“I know.”

The doctors patched me up. The FBI asked their questions, and I did my best to answer them quickly and efficiently—and most important,
before
the sun came up the next morning.

No, I didn’t know the details of Chimera’s operations.

No, I couldn’t tell them what—if anything—had escaped before the facility had gone down.

No, I hadn’t been in on this plan from the beginning.

Yes, I was just a kid.

No, I shouldn’t have been there.

Yes, they’d killed my friend.

It was only after I’d told the agents that the woman whose remains they had found in the basement was the one calling the shots that they left me alone for a few blessed hours. When they came back, they had more questions.

No, those weren’t real
ouroboroi
on my stomach.

No, I had no idea
what
the woman in question was, or why her remains weren’t testing positive for human DNA.

Sure, they could take a sample of
my
blood.

Everyone but Reid must have been scratching their heads when the results came back human.

Three hours and fourteen minutes
.

I could feel dawn coming, more strongly now than ever before. Soon, the doctors would come in and sign my release papers. Like the Feds, they must have suspected I was holding something back, but since—as far as modern science was concerned—it was impossible to play host to multiple chupacabras at the same time, they didn’t have any reason to believe that I needed to be quarantined.

They just thought I had really tacky taste in tattoos.

Three hours and twelve minutes
.

The stitches in my scalp itched. My wrist throbbed inside its cast. Each breath I took sent a sharp and jarring pain straight to my rib cage, and I was starving.

“That is a truly unfortunate haircut.”

They’d had to shave a patch of hair to treat my head wounds. It figured that Bethany would comment on it. What didn’t figure was that she was here. Pale, with her hair pulled into a messy ponytail, she stood in the doorway of my hospital room. Her hands were clasped together, and the thumb of her right hand worried at the palm on her left.

I couldn’t bring myself to meet her eyes. I didn’t want to know what I would see there.

“I might be able to fix it,” Bethany said, and I glanced up long enough to see that she was looking down at her feet as well. “Your hair.”

That didn’t sound like the kind of thing you would offer a murderer, but the last time she’d seen me, she and Elliot had woken from a trance to find Skylar dead. The last time she’d seen me, my face had been covered in the guard’s blood.

“Bethany—”

She interrupted me before I could say anything else.
“Don’t make me tell you that I’m glad you’re not dead.”

“But I—”

Bethany held up a hand. “Don’t want to hear it,” she said. “And I really don’t need to know.” Without another word, she held up her keys and cocked an eyebrow in invitation.

I thought of the doctors, who were supposed to sign my release forms this morning.

I thought of the three hours left until dawn.

“Let’s go.”

We drove in silence for a long time. It occurred to me that my dad might return to my hospital room and wonder where I’d gone, but I’d lost my phone in the shuffle, and old habits died hard.

“The FBI came to talk to me,” Bethany said finally. “I’m pretty sure they’re going to arrest my dad.”

Two days ago, I would have asked her what she’d told them—about me, about what I could do. But I didn’t.

Didn’t have to.

“If it makes you feel any better,” I replied, “they’ll probably arrest my mom.” I paused and let myself picture Rena’s face in my mind. “If they can find her.”

“Are they going to arrest you?” Bethany never was one to beat around the bush.

“I didn’t kill Skylar.” That wasn’t what she’d asked, but I had to say it. Hearing the words hurt. Meaning them hurt more.

“Kali. You
did not
kill Skylar.” Bethany took her eyes off the road and looked at me. “You didn’t.”

This wasn’t how I’d expected the conversation to go. She sounded like she was trying to convince me, instead of the reverse.

“I brought her there,” I said, looking down at my hands, down at my stomach.

Two hours and twenty minutes
.

“She brought herself there.”

“If she hadn’t met me,” I said, my voice hard, “she’d still be alive.”

“And if I hadn’t let my little brother play in a friend’s backyard, he wouldn’t be brain-dead.” Bethany’s voice was matter-of-fact, but I knew the words cost her. “Hell, Kali, if Tyler were alive and well, my father never would have gone off the deep end, I wouldn’t have been infected in the first place, and none of us would have ever even heard of Chimera.”

If Bethany hadn’t been bitten by the chupacabra …

If I hadn’t saved her …

If I’d never met Zev …

If, if, if—and at the end of the day, none of it mattered.

“How long until sunrise?” Beth’s abrupt change of subject did not go unnoticed. I didn’t question it, or her, or the fact that the two of us were in this car together.

I just answered the question. “Two hours and fourteen minutes.”

Two hours and fourteen minutes, as human as the next girl.

Bethany smiled. “Good,” she said. “That might actually be enough time to do something about that hair.”

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

The sky was dark and gray overhead, but as I watched them lower Skylar’s coffin into the ground, a tiny stream of light broke through the clouds. To my left, Bethany stood as immobile as I was.

Maybe we didn’t have a right to be here. Maybe the Haydens didn’t want us here.

Maybe, maybe, maybe—and none of it mattered.

Across the lawn, Elliot didn’t look at Bethany, didn’t look at me. I found myself trying to match Skylar’s many brothers to their descriptions and realized that I’d never hear her talk about them again.

They’d never see her again.

Handprints on the concrete, pictures on the walls—that’s what she was now.

There were words spoken and hymns sung and none of it made her any less dead. I stood there, thinking of those last moments, the expression of pure and unadulterated bliss on her face.

I could have saved her.

I should have.

And nothing Bethany said could change that. Nothing I said or did or didn’t do for as long as I lived would bring her back.

Beside me, my father reached out and put one hand on my shoulder, pulled me closer. On instinct, I stiffened at the physical contact, but after the moment of first contact passed, I leaned into his shoulder and watched them bury her.

I said goodbye.

And then I went home, cut the cast off my arm with a handsaw, and cried.

A week after we buried Skylar, I went back to school and found myself at the very center of the rumor radar. The investigation of Chimera’s facility had been all over the news. Arrests were still being made. And though the Feds had kept my name out of it, everyone knew.

They knew that Skylar had died.

They knew that I was there.

And they knew that Elliot couldn’t stand to look at me. That he wasn’t talking to Bethany. That she’d started eating her food at the “freak table” at lunch.

Suffice it to say, I was as surprised as anyone when Elliot approached me before school one morning and stiffly handed me an envelope bearing my name.

He didn’t say a word. He just stood there and waited. After a moment, I forced myself to open it. Hot-pink letters danced across the page.

She’d dotted the
i
in my name with a little pink heart.

Dear Kali,

I don’t know you yet, but I will. I’m going to say hi, and you’re going to say hi, and we’re going to be friends. At some point, I’m probably going to tell you that I’m a little bit psychic, and you probably won’t believe me.

And the truth, Kali, is that you shouldn’t believe me. Because, honest to God, I’m psychic
a lot
.

I don’t even remember when it started, but there it is. So when I tell you that everything that’s going to happen—that it’s worth it—I need you to believe me, because it is. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way right now—but five years from now or ten or twenty, it all works out.

This is how it’s supposed to go.

That’s why I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and that’s why you’re reading this, and why I’m not there to say anything myself. Don’t be mad at yourself, and please don’t be mad at me.

We’re going to be friends.

So do me a favor, Kali, and watch out for Genevieve—once I’m gone, the other girls (but not Beth, of course!) are going to give her a really hard time. And make Darryl ask that cute freshman to the prom. And give yourself a break every now and then, because you deserve one.

XOXO,

Skylar Hayden

(School Slut)

P.S.: When they ask you what they’re going to ask you, say yes.

P.P.S.: Tell Elliot I love him—and to stop being a tool.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, so I just handed the letter to Elliot and let him read.

“She wasn’t psychic,” he said. “She was just a kid.”

She was both
, I thought, but I didn’t argue the point out loud. Instead, I thought of Bethany, whose father had been arrested. Bethany, who knew what it was like to carry someone else’s death on your shoulders for the rest of your life.

Bethany, who’d lost almost everything in the past few days.

“Elliot,” I said, surprised at how clear and steady my voice felt. “Quit being a tool.”