Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  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.”

  The decision to take hellhounds off the endangered species list was a long time coming—whole lot of good that did me. Hunting them was still illegal; the only difference was now there were more to hunt.

  “Here, puppy, puppy, puppy.”

  I really shou
ldn’t have been doing this. If I got bloodstains on my graduation gown, Bethany was going to kill me, and Elliot was going to laugh. Adjusting the cap on my head, I spun my knife lazily in one hand.

  Closer. You’re getting closer.

  If someone had seen me from a distance, all they would have seen was a normal girl, just graduated from high school.

  A girl who lived bit by bit and day by day.

  I closed my eyes, tasting sulfur on the wind and waiting. Here, puppy, puppy, puppy.

  Catching a hint of something in the air, I jerked to a stop. This was the place, but there was something … off.

  And that was when I realized that the hellhound was already dead.

  “Hello, Kali.”

  I whirled around and found myself face-to-face with eyes I would have recognized anywhere: silver eyes, fringed in black.

  Eighteen months. It had been eighteen months of radio silence in my head. Eighteen months without a word, and now, he was here.

  “Hey, Zev,” I said. I nodded to the hellhound on the ground, noting the distance between its body and its head. “Just for the record, the next one’s mine.”

  Zev smiled. “I think that can be arranged.” He raked his gaze over my body, and then his eyes drifted slowly to the side. I turned and followed his gaze to two men standing at the edge of the park.

  They were wearing suits.

  I stopped twirling my knife and took a single step forward before I realized that one of the men looked very familiar.

  “Reid?”

  Skylar’s brother nodded. He and the other man started walking toward us, and belatedly, I realized that the two of them—and Zev—moved like a team.

  “Congratulations,” Reid said, gesturing toward my cap and gown. “Got any plans for after graduation?”

  I’d been entertaining the idea of taking a few classes at the University That Shall Not Be Named, but as I glanced from Zev to Reid, something clicked inside of me, and I started spinning the knife in my hands again.

  Zev was a vampire. Reid was FBI. And according to something I’d once overheard the mother I hadn’t seen in eighteen months saying, Chimera wasn’t exactly one of a kind.

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

  I brought my eyes to rest on Zev’s. “What exactly did you guys have in mind?”

  Take a sneak peek at

  Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s latest novel

  Available January 2013

  Prologue

  One week earlier …

  Nine letters. Two words. He refused to think of them as a name. With detached objectivity, his steady hands set the thin white paper, with its evenly spaced black lettering, to the side.

  He’d done this before.

  One, Two, Three …

  He’d do this again. More needles, more knives. More evenly spaced black letters that carved themselves, blood-red, into the recesses of his mind.

  The only way you can make a difference in this world is to kill.

  From the moment he’d opened the envelope and seen the name, the pictures; from the moment he’d committed those nine letters to memory, the outcome had been a foregone conclusion. His target had been marked. Death was coming.

  So be it.

  1

  Have a great summer! Stay sweet! Have a great summer and stay sweet!

  Claire Ryan had been reading permutations of those words in the pages of her yearbooks for almost as long as she could remember, but for some reason—either optimism or stupidity, she wasn’t sure which—she’d thought that high school would be different. That she would be different. That by the end of freshman year, someone would have bothered to learn her name, invited her over after school, or at the very least asked to copy her geometry homework. But even the most egregious cheaters had remained as oblivious to Claire’s existence as ever, and by the first day of her fifteenth summer, all she had to show for the year was a perfect attendance record and a yearbook filled with sugary, meaningless clichés.

  Her classmates didn’t like her. They didn’t dislike her. They just didn’t care.

  It’s not them. It’s you.

  Claire pushed the thought aside and sat down cross-legged on the floor. Sliding the offending yearbook very nearly out of reach, she tried to focus on something else. Her hands found their way to her cell phone, and before Claire knew it, her index finger was dialing a familiar number, just to hear the sound of the outgoing message.

  She could almost pretend that “please leave a message, and I will get back to you as soon as possible” was Motherese for “I miss you, and your dad and I will be home soon.”

  Then came the beep.

  “Hey, Mom. I wanted to let you know that the last day of school was—it was great. And things here are great. I’m …” Claire cursed herself, but couldn’t stop the word from rolling off her tongue, “… great.”

  With the amount of time she spent reading and watching television, she really should have been a better liar, or at least a more creative one.

  “Anyway, I hope you guys are having a good time. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be—”

  Not again, Claire told herself sternly. If you say great one more time, I swear to God, I’m never speaking to you again.

  “I’ll be fine.” Claire was spared the trouble of having to disown herself, but barely. She waited one beat, maybe two, and then she ended the Message That Kept Going and Going by clarifying one last point that might have somehow escaped her mother’s notice. “Ummm … this is Claire. Love you. Bye.”

  The moment she hung up, her phone joined the yearbook on the floor, and she closed her eyes.

  Have a great summer! Stay sweet! Please leave a message after the beep.

  “Story of my life,” Claire whispered, and the fact that the words came out quiet instead of hard was her first clue that the time for wallowing might be nigh. There couldn’t be something wrong with everyone else in the world. Common sense said that there had to be something wrong with her. If she could just say the right things, do the right things, be a little more interesting …

  It’s never going to happen.

  Claire Ryan was a ghost, a nothing, a nobody. Invisible would have been an upgrade. Oxygen was invisible, but it got breathed all the same. Sound waves were heard. Even clandestine farts had the distinction of being smelled.

  Oh, God. I’m jealous of farts. Claire uncrossed her legs and fell backward, allowing her head to thunk viciously against her bedroom’s wood floor. I envy the noxious, gaseous excretions of the human backside. And my head hurts.

  It was a new low, even for Claire.

  I should lie here. I should lie here forever and never, ever get up.

  Claire pressed her lips together and kept a tight rein on that thought. After a long moment, she forced herself to open her eyes, sat up, and reached first for the phone and then for the yearbook. Two minutes of wallowing, once a year. That was all she got, the closest she could allow herself to the edge of the abyss without letting it devour her whole.

  I’m better than this.

  Claire’s throat tightened, but she refused to let herself cry. Instead, she climbed to her feet and walked, one foot placed lightly in front of the other, to the bookshelf underneath her window. She’d made this trip many times before, to place other yearbooks on the bottom shelf and to pull old friends off more honored places near the middle and top.

  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Ender’s Game. The Secret Garden. I Capture the Castle.

  Claire closed her eyes and ran her hand along the spines of the books on the outermost row of the top shelf. Like a blind man reading Braille, she let her fingertips explore the cracks and lines on the books’ edges until she felt the zigging zag she was looking for, the near-velvet texture of a tome read so often that the paper on the cover had been worn to soft, threadbare nubs.

  Anne.

  Claire pulled the book gingerly from the shelf. She opened her eyes and took a ragged breath.

&nbs
p; Anne of the overactive imagination. Anne, who took it as a personal insult when people spelled her name without the E.

  Knowing she was too old for the book, but not really caring, Claire settled back down on the floor and opened it to the middle, confident that wherever she started, she’d know exactly where the story picked up.

  An orphan girl, desperate for a family. A family who’d hoped for a boy. Dares and dramatics and the indignity of having red hair.

  Claire actually felt her body let go of the harshness of reality. Her mouth curved upward. Her throat relaxed. And as she lost herself in Anne of Green Gables, she thought for maybe the thousandth time how lovely it would be to be the kind of girl who could smash a slate over the top of a boy’s head in a fit of temper, how nice it would be to have someone misspell her name.

  Clair or Clare, it wouldn’t matter—so long as they said or wrote or thought it at all.

  Nix slipped in and out of the crowd, weaving his way down the street with imperceptible but deadly grace. His was the light touch of a warm breeze, the flow of a silent, colorless, odorless liquid. Water over the edge of a dam. A black adder ready to strike.

  No one saw him. No one noticed. And if they had, moments later, his dark hair and light eyes, his scars and tattoos would have been forgotten. The small, arrow-shaped needle in his left hand would have disappeared from their minds, like a footprint from dry sand. The closeness of his body to his target’s, the sleight of hand that allowed him to slip the poison straight into the senator’s vein would never have registered to any passerby as more significant than an empty cup blowing haphazardly down the street.

  “Eleven.” Nix whispered the word into the air, knowing that the outside world would never hear or recognize the number for what it was.

  Nix’s sharp cheekbones and jet-black hair should have been striking. Nix should have been memorable. But he wasn’t. He was nothing. He was Nobody.

  And he never got caught.

  “Senator Evan Sykes was rushed to the hospital last night after suffering a major heart attack in his hometown of Des Moines. Doctors attempted a double bypass, but the junior senator from Iowa did not survive the procedure.”