Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  The glass shattered, needle-sharp shards digging into the flesh of my arm. Using the tip of my knife, I pried larger shards loose from the mirror’s frame—one for each hand.

  I slipped my knife hilt-first into my waistband at the small of my back, then tightened my grip on my makeshift blades. The rough edges of the glass dug into the flesh of my palms. Blood ran down my wrists like rain on a windshield.

  Here, snakey, snakey, snakey, I thought.

  There was a hiss and then a thump as it fell onto the concrete behind me.

  “That’s right,” I said softly, tracking its movement in the remaining mirrors. “Come to Kali.”

  The creature pulled back, holding itself aloft, swaying. Short arms, capped off by gray, gnarled hands, grew out of its snakelike body. It moved its fingers as it swayed, and its lips parted, revealing pearl-white fangs. I could smell the blood on them, smell this thing’s last meal.

  I waited. One second, two, three, four—the beast surged forward. With one last glance in the mirror, I spun, eyes closed, burying a glass shard in one glittering red eye.

  The basilisk screamed—an ugly, all-too-human sound—and lashed out with its tail, knocking me back into one of the mirrors. My head hit the glass with a sickening thunk, but I didn’t open my eyes.

  Didn’t wince.

  I smiled.

  Fangs the size of my index finger struck, burying themselves in my torso and ripping through my flesh. The venom should have burned like fire. It should have brought me to my knees—but it didn’t. Blood bubbled out of the puncture holes, and I felt a light breeze against my face as the basilisk pulled back and moved to strike again.

  I rolled sideways, turning my head away from the creature’s lethal gaze before opening my eyes and angling the remaining glass shard in my hand to give me a better view of its motion. The serpent looked long and skinny—clownish—in this lying little piece of glass. My blood dripped off its fangs.

  It wobbled, snarled, reached for me with ghastly hands—

  Too slow.

  “You poison me,” I said, driving my arm backward, aiming the shard at its one remaining eye. “I poison you. Karma’s a bitch.”

  It came for me again, but I turned, driving the shard back into its skull, obliterating the eye and, with it, the basilisk’s biggest weapon. Opening my own eyes, I stared it right in the bleeding face. It began shaking, bucking wildly, hissing-screaming.

  I brought my hand to the small of my back, withdrew the knife. Glancing down at the puncture holes in my side, I saw that they were already healing—an angry purple-black color giving way to the pink of baby-fresh skin.

  Moving impossibly fast, I was beside the basilisk in an instant. I tackled it, pinning the top half of its body to the ground, dodging its tail as it slammed down with enough force to shatter the concrete. With a final, gurgling hiss, the basilisk opened its mouth to strike again. I shoved the knife into its open mouth, ignoring the fangs and driving the blade back into its brain.

  Dizzy, I pulled myself to my feet and let go of my prey. I stumbled backward. It swayed. It gargled.

  It went down. Hard.

  My chest rose and fell as I watched the basilisk’s life fizzle out in front of me. After it stopped moving, I paced forward, examining its corpse. In the four years I’d been hunting, I’d only seen one other basilisk—and this one was easily twice its size. If I’d looked it in the eye, even once, it might have had me.

  If I hadn’t been so strong, so fast—if my wounds hadn’t started healing, if the venom coursing through my veins even now had been as fatal to me as my blood was to it—I’d be dead.

  I retrieved my knife, shoving the thing’s massive head to one side. “Not today.”

  I waited for the release that usually came from hunting, but it didn’t come. The air was thick with the smell of blood—the monster’s, mine. I could feel it, taste it.

  I wanted it.

  That’s not you, Kali. That’s the Nibbler.

  I barely heard Zev’s words, barely registered the fact that he was back, that whatever the men in masks had been doing to him, it was over now. I was too focused on the present to process. I’d hunted. I’d killed. And now, the only thing left was a burning, incessant hunger.

  Thirst.

  I could feel the lines of gold on my body pulsating, rearranging themselves. I could feel the ouroboros heating up. It didn’t hurt—but I felt it.

  I felt it everywhere.

  Hungry. Thirsty. Perfect, blessed heat.

  Giving into the urge, I brought my knife up, even with my face. I turned it sideways, watching the basilisk’s black-red blood drip down onto the concrete, one drop at a time.

  I brought the blade to my lips.

  I opened my mouth.

  And I fed.

  Nineteen hours and twenty-nine minutes.

  It was barely eleven thirty in the morning, and I was already on my third set of clothes for the day.

  This time, I didn’t need Zev to tell me to burn my old ones. I took another shower, too—as much to rid myself of the memory of what I’d just done as to wash my body clean of blood. Though my wounds were well on their way to healing completely, I bandaged my side before slipping on shirt number three and a pair of my own jeans.

  I wondered how long it would be before someone found the basilisk and called the police—and then I wondered how exactly Water World had come to play host to a creature that was native to climates far drier and more brutal than ours.

  More than that, though, I wondered if I’d ever forget the way its blood had tasted—bitter, like cocoa powder, with just a hint of sour milk.

  Human blood tastes better, Zev said, right on cue.

  I chose to ignore that comment, and focused instead on the fact that Zev was alive and seemingly well.

  “So,” I said, knowing that I didn’t need to speak out loud, but doing so, anyway, because it made his presence feel less intimate, less intrusive. “Chimera Biomedical.”

  I couldn’t say more than that without sounding flippant or sad, so I stopped.

  Chimera Biomedical is not your concern, Kali. I’m more than capable of taking care of myself.

  I pictured the cement cell, the men in masks.

  “So you’re enjoying their hospitality?”

  Zev snorted. I got stupid. They got lucky. Right now, the odds are stacked in their favor. That won’t always be the case.

  I dragged my fingertips through my wet hair, combing out the tangles and trying not to think about what, exactly, Zev might do once he got the upper hand. “How long have you been there?”

  There was a long pause, and I could practically feel Zev deciding whether or not to tell me the truth.

  Two years.

  I literally stopped breathing.

  It’s not such a long time, Zev said, his voice meditative and soft, for someone like us.

  I couldn’t help the way that last word echoed through my own thoughts.

  There was an us.

  I’d never had that, never known for a fact that I wasn’t one of a kind.

  “I’m going to get you out,” I said, my throat dry and my eyes tearing up. “You know that, right? I can’t just leave you there. I’m going to get you out.”

  That’s not a good idea, he said sharply, each word more implacable than the last. There’s a lot about this place you don’t know. You can’t win, Kali, and you shouldn’t try.

  “Wanna bet?” I asked, matching the steel in his tone with some of my own.

  Zev paused, and when he finally replied, his words were deliberate, like he was used to doling out cruelty in measured doses.

  You’re young, Kali, and you’re inexperienced, and if yesterday was any indication, you have an Achilles’ heel that I do not. Don’t let your Nibbler fool you into thinking you’re something you are not.

  Zev’s words hit their target. In another twenty hours, I’d be human again—basilisk bait, breakable, a normal teenage girl. If Chimera caught me and put
me in one of their little cells, I wouldn’t hold up nearly as well as Zev had.

  I wouldn’t last two years.

  I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans, staring myself down in the mirror. “I guess that means that whatever I’m going to do, I need to do it quick.”

  Zev must have sensed that arguing was useless, because he stopped trying to tell me what to do. Good. Maybe I’d actually managed to keep him from realizing exactly how hard that last comment of his had hit me.

  I’d only had a couple of seconds to marvel at the fact that there was someone else out there like me before that someone else had turned around and reminded me that even to our kind—his kind—I wasn’t quite right.

  I was still out of place.

  I was broken.

  I tried not wonder if I would ever fit in anywhere—ever feel like a whole person instead of two broken, disconnected halves.

  I looked away from my own reflection and picked up my toothbrush. I brushed my teeth—over and over again, until the only taste on my tongue was Aquafresh. I looped my hair back into a ponytail and then considered my options.

  I’d meant what I’d said to Zev. Broken or not, outlier or not, I wasn’t just going to leave him there to rot. I wasn’t going to sit back and hope that Chimera wasn’t going to come for me next.

  I needed to know where they were keeping Zev. Who was involved. What the company knew about me. I needed proof—the kind that could be used as insurance or taken to the police.

  And I only had twenty hours to get it.

  I thought my way through the situation, strangely alert now that the beast inside of me had fed. So far, I only had one real lead on Chimera—Bethany’s father. Since Beth was watching out for her own interests—and her mother’s—that left me with exactly one option for recon.

  Paul Davis’s place of work.

  Which—as it so happened—was also my father’s.

  “Unlike the full spectrum of species in the animal kingdom, preternatural creatures share no common ancestry with humans—or any other natural species. Any similarities we see—say, between a dragon and a Komodo dragon, a kraken and a giant squid—appear to be the product of convergent, rather than divergent, evolution.”

  My dad was a different person when he lectured: his eyes sparkled, his lips turned upward, and even from the back of the lecture hall, I could feel the energy he brought to the room. The students in his Introduction to Preternatural Biology class may or may not have understood what he was saying, but most of them appeared to be paying more attention to him than their inboxes, and I’d been hanging around college campuses long enough to know that that was something.

  Come to think of it, I’d spent more mornings than I cared to remember like this growing up: hanging out at the back of a lecture hall whenever a babysitter canceled last minute, or my father forgot that we’d been given the day off from school. I’d seen him in college-professor mode enough that it shouldn’t have surprised me, but it always did.

  In front of a class full of students, waxing on about evolution, he seemed so present. He seemed happy.

  “Think what it must have been like for Darwin, two hundred years ago. He took that voyage on the Beagle expecting to document the natural world, and he stumbled across something … impossible. A creature who could defy the laws of physics—straight out of the pages of mythology, hidden from human discovery for thousands upon thousands of years. In that one moment, the entire landscape of scientific investigation was drastically and irrevocably changed. The impossible became a widespread scientific reality, as omnipresent as gravity and, in some cases, nearly as hard to see.”

  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.