Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“You’re a killer.”
I brought my face down near the man’s. My lips nearly touching his face, I lifted my bloodied hands to his cheeks, painted them red.
Thirsty.
This time, I didn’t fight it. I looked at the man. He looked at me. And then I buried my head in his neck.
Teeth met skin.
Skin broke.
And I fed.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes to killing the man who’d killed Skylar.
Yes to the blood.
Yes to the red-hot fire and the feel of it against my throat and the living, breathing rage.
I could feel my pupils expanding, feel the man beneath me struggling, right up until the point when he didn’t.
The phrase “go for the jugular” had always sounded merciless, but this—this was sweet.
I couldn’t remember being human, couldn’t fathom the fact that I ever would be again. And that was the way I liked it, because being human meant knowing, remembering … it meant looking back over my shoulder and seeing the girl I couldn’t save.
The one who’d chosen to come here.
Chosen me.
You don’t have to do this alone. You shouldn’t have to.
Sometimes there are no good choices.
I’m glad.
Skylar’s voice ringing in my mind, I let loose my prey and sat up. Power crackled through my body. I felt strong, like I could pinch a bone ever-so-lightly between my fingers and watch it crumble to dust.
A rustle of sound caught my ears, and I whirled around, catching the scent of sweat and human tears. Elliot was standing in the middle of the path, Bethany lying on the ground beside him. Her eyes locked on to my blood-smeared mouth, and she scrambled backward on all fours, like I might kill her next.
Like she was scared of me.
I’m scared of me, I thought. Blood on my face, my own heartbeat accelerating, I met Elliot’s eyes.
“Skylar,” he said roughly. “Where’s Skylar?”
The name hurt. Just hearing it made me want to cling to the rage, the distance, the thirst … anything but this.
“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 nea
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.
“Zev. Zev. Zev.” I said his name out loud, focusing on the reason I’d come here—the reason I’d risked my life and others’.
Finally, at the end of the hallway, there was a door.
Unlike the rest, it didn’t have a window. I couldn’t peek in to see what it was hiding, but I knew. I tested the handle, then swiped the identification card. The lock gave, and a second later, I was standing in another hallway.
This place was a nightmare. An endless nightmare, with door after door after door, and I was never going to find him, never going to get out.
“Kali.”
It took me a moment to realize that the voice wasn’t in my head.
“Zev?” I rushed toward the end of this hallway. Toward the last door. I pressed my hands flat against the metal. My eyes were level with the viewing slit.
On the other side of the slit, there were eyes.
Dark eyes, light skin, lashes that belonged on a softer, more delicate face. They framed his eyes in a thick, ink-black fringe.
“Zev,” I said, his name catching in my throat.
On the other side of the door, I could feel him placing his hands against the metal. I could almost feel his touch against mine, his breath against my skin.
I tried my card on this door, and the second I heard the lock give, the barrier holding back my emotions threatened to do the same.
I was so close now. So, so close.
Disbelief coloring his features, Zev pressed the door open, slowly, and stepped out into the hallway. He was taller than I’d thought he’d be, thinner than he’d looked in my dreams. He brought his hands to either side of my face, and I had one moment of utter peace, of feeling that this was how it was supposed to be.
He tilted his head to the side and looked at me like I was something precious. He ran his thumb over the skin of my cheek, and then he whispered, “I told you not to come here.” His voice was tender, and then it broke. “You should have listened.”
One second, his hands were on my cheeks. The next, they’d encircled my neck.
No.
My palms pressed back against his shoulders, but he didn’t move.
I was fast. Strong. Inhuman. He was faster, stronger, older.
No matter how hard I fought, his hands stayed around my neck, like a metal collar. He squeezed, squeezed hard enough that a normal girl’s head would have popped right off.
I can’t breathe, I realized. His hands are on my neck, and I can’t breathe.
This couldn’t be hap
Behind us, the animal screams of the other test subjects built to a crescendo, and I struggled against Zev’s hold.
People like me didn’t get scared, I reminded myself. We couldn’t feel pain. But we could feel betrayal.
We needed to breathe.
“I told you not to come,” Zev said, his voice wrapping its way around my body, steady and warm. “I tried.”
The last thing I was conscious of before darkness claimed me—other than an incredible tightness in my lungs—was the sound of yet another door opening and closing. Footsteps crossing the hallway. And then, a pinch in my arm and a woman’s voice.
“Hello, Kali. Welcome home.”
I woke up inside a cell made of concrete—four feet by four feet, only about a head taller than me. My body was slumped against the wall. I checked my watch.
Four hours and fifteen minutes.
This was not good.
I fought back the haze that had descended over my body and belatedly remembered the pinching feeling of a needle being inserted into my flesh.
They’d drugged me.
They’d drugged me, and I was lying in a concrete prison, and Zev knew. He’d helped them hurt me.
I thought of Skylar, poor, stupid Skylar, who’d followed me here and died for her effort. She’d been so sure that she was supposed to, sure that whatever the cost, coming with me would be worth it, because if she didn’t come, then I was going to die.
You made the wrong choice, I told her silently. You should have let them kill me when you had the chance.
But she hadn’t. Skylar had chosen me, and now she was dead, and I was boxed in, the way Zev had been for years.
Zev. He was the one who’d done this to me. After everything—
I struggled to my feet, still dizzy from whatever they’d dosed me with.
“It was supposed to keep you out until sunrise,” a female voice said. “I’m afraid we didn’t anticipate your feeding on the guards upstairs. We would have altered the dose if we’d known you were taking human blood.”
If the guards hadn’t killed Skylar, I wouldn’t have. Trying to rid my mind of that thought, I walked over to the thick metal door and stared out the slit, all too aware that this time, I was the one locked in. The eyes that stared back at me were a deep and mossy green. The eyelashes were light brown, the woman’s skin the color of cream.