Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
That was a low blow, and everyone in this room knew it. Bethany weathered it like a pro and flounced off, without once breaking her cover. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn she was a spoiled, shallow little princess who would forget all of this for a trip to St. Barts.
I just hoped the woman in heels bought it as well.
“She’s charming,” the woman in question told Bethany’s father. “Really. I can see why you enrolled her in the protocol.”
“She wasn’t supposed to be there when we attempted inoculation,” Dr. Davis said, a vein in his forehead bulging. “It was a mistake—very nearly a tragic mistake.”
I didn’t know whether it was comforting that Bethany’s father hadn’t specifically infected her, or whether it was disturbing that he thought infecting other teenagers was okay.
“Shall we proceed to round two?” he asked, moving on. “Or should I expect to be retired soon, like Dr. Vincent?”
“Dr. Vincent moved to Florida,” the woman said, her voice crisp.
Bethany’s father met her gaze. “Sure he did.”
Listening to the sounds of the room—their words, their heartbeats, mine and Skylar’s—it would have been so easy to give up my hiding spot and make myself known.
So easy to tear out their throats.
Fight it, Kali.
I absorbed Zev’s words. I fought it. And then the woman in heels stepped directly into my line of sight. If she turned, even a bit, to the side, she’d be able to see me.
As it was, I could see her.
She had dark hair pulled into a tight ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her features were even and pretty; her eyes were soft and brown, just a shade darker then her perfect, glowing skin. She was wearing a suit.
I’d seen her before—at the ice rink. At the school. I’d seen her reflection. I’d seen her when I was on the verge of passing out, but I’d never been this close, never fully taken in her features, never looked straight at her, my mind completely my own.
I’ve seen her before, I realized. Not just at the school. Not just at the ice rink. Seen her, seen her, seen her.
The sense of déjà vu was so strong, so violent, that I couldn’t move.
“We’ll hold off on round two,” she said, and her voice washed over me—far too familiar for comfort. “We still don’t know what happened to the body. If one of our competitors has acquired it …,” she trailed off. “Well, then, you can look forward to your retirement.”
“Rena.” Dr. Davis said the woman’s first name. I recognized the attempt at intimacy and might have read into it more, but for the fact that those four little letters—R-E-N-A—unlocked something incomprehensible and vast in the corridors of my mind.
She’s just a child, Rena.
Almost finished, baby.
Can you say gun?
I’d seen this woman before—not just at the ice rink or at the school, but in my dreams, all of them, for as long as I could remember. I’d held her face—not this detailed, not this clear—in my mind for what seemed like forever.
She’d been the memory I’d least wanted to lose.
The woman in heels—Rena Malik—was my mother.
A lifetime of broken memories came crashing down around me—flashes of the past, things I’d seen in dreams, pretty pictures I’d painted for myself. The air was so thick with it, I couldn’t breathe.
Beside me, Skylar squeezed my hand, and I looked down, concentrating on the way her fingers—delicate, pale—looked interwoven with mine.
Do you know what this is, Kali-Kay? Can you say gun?
I wanted to bring my knees to my chest and my hand to my mouth. I wanted to rock back on my heels. I wanted to throw up. But I couldn’t do any of that, because Bethany’s father was standing five feet away—right next to my mother.
“I don’t like being threatened, Rena.”
How could I have missed this? Even looking at a distorted reflection, even on the verge of passing out—I should have known.
“I don’t like threatening you, Paul, but you knew the score when you signed up. You knew we were on the cutting edge. You, better than anyone, know that there’s a cost to every scientific advancement.”
I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but there was a part of me that had always thought she was dead. I’d thought—stupidly, naively—that if she was really still out there, she would have made some effort to see me.
To know me.
But in all of my imaginings, I’d never considered the possibility that she might be alive and well and playing around with the forces of nature, that she might be the kind of person capable of threatening to “retire” someone if his research fell into a competitor’s hands.
That’s not all she ordered, my insides whispered, and I thought about the view from Bethany’s car, about the men in suits, about lying in pieces on the side of the road, waiting for my body to make the switch.
You don’t know that she ordered that, I told myself. You don’t know that she’s in charge.
That was the problem—I didn’t know anything.
“Costs are acceptable,” Dr. Davis said. “But let me be very clear, with you and with your employers: my daughter is not collateral damage. We all have our limits. That’s mine.”
The woman who was my mother smiled. “So noted.”
I wanted to ask her if she knew—who I was, what I was. I wanted to ask what her limits were and if I was collateral damage.
I wanted to scream—or maybe die.
It was one thing to think that your mother had left you when you were three years old, that she’d walked out the door and never even looked back.
It was another thing to think she’d never loved you in the first place.
Almost finished, baby.
We’re going to play a game, Kali.
Mommy’s secret girl.
The memories came faster and more violently into my mind. I choked on them. My eyes burned, worse than they had in the sun, and I realized that I was on the verge of tears.
They hung there, unshed, in my eyes, and I willed something calm and cool and animal to take over my body. I wasn’t going to cry.
I wasn’t going to remember.
You’re all right, Kali. Zev’s voice wasn’t gentle; I couldn’t have taken it if it were. He was matter-of-fact, and I accepted his words at face value. I’m here. You’re all right. You’re going to be all right.
“You do your job, Paul. Let me take care of mine. Keep your daughter on her leash, and we’ll all be just fine.”
The words rhymed, making the ultimatum sound like some kind of sick nursery rhyme and threatening to send me back in time—to lying on my bed, while she brushed my hair out of my face.
She sang me to sleep, I thought dully.
And then she was gone—not just gone from my memories, or gone from my life, but gone from this room. The woman in heels—Rena Malik, my mother—followed Paul Davis out of the room, leaving Skylar and me hidden behind the hard drives, neither one of us willing to say a word out loud.
Seconds crept into minutes, and finally, I let out a long and jagged breath.
“You okay?” Skylar asked quietly, and I realized I was still holding her hand, still squeezing it.
“Sorry,” I said, letting go.
“Sorry you’re not okay?” Skylar asked, eyeing me with concern.
“Sorry about your hand,” I corrected. She looked down, surprised, as if she’d forgotten she even had a hand. Then she smiled.
“Don’t worry,” she said, wiggling her fingers. “I have two.” To demonstrate, she held up her left hand, and I smiled—or at least, I tried to.
The simple motion—my lips curving upward—brought bile into my throat. How could I smile? How could I do anything except lie there and hurt?
“Kali?” Skylar’s voice was very small. “If this is about what I saw, when we were looking at those files—I won’t tell anyone. Ever. I mean, we all have our things, right? I talk too much, an
“A vampire?” I suggested. It was the first time I’d said the word out loud, but worrying about a thing like that seemed so stupid all of a sudden. It was just a word.
And that woman was just my mother.
“It’s not about that,” I told Skylar. “It’s …”
I couldn’t form the words, physically could not do it.
Skylar nodded. “It’s okay, Kali. I may not be significantly psychic, but I know that it’s going to be okay. Everything is going to work out, and you’re going to be okay. I’m going to make you okay. Okay?”
The repetition of the word made me want to smile. Smiling made me want to puke. This wasn’t okay. I wasn’t okay.
Moving on autopilot, I dug something out of my pocket. The cell phone I’d stolen from Davis’s office was in even worse shape now than it had been when I’d snapped it in two. The plastic casing was pulverized, assorted keys hanging off it like a loose tooth dangling by a single thread of gum. It looked like it had been run over by a semi.
I ran my thumb over the broken, jagged surface.
This phone looked how I felt.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that isn’t your phone,” Skylar said, hooking her thumbs through the pocket of her jeans. “Am I right?”
I nodded, unable to take my eyes off the broken, mangled frame. “It used to be Bethany’s dad’s. Now, it’s nothing.”
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
I used to have a memory of my mother—smiling, soft.
Now I had nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
“Reid could probably pull some data off the phone,” Skylar said, a look of comic concentration on her elfin features. “He’s got guys. Lots of guys. One of them could reassemble the memory card, and then pull the incoming calls.”
“There were some numbers on there,” I said, like that mattered. Like anything mattered anymore. “Incoming calls.”
Quick as a whip, Skylar slipped her own cell phone out of her pocket and hit the speed dial. “Hey, Gen? It’s Skylar. Quick question—if you have a cell phone number, can you track the location a call was placed from?” Skylar paused. “Not you specifically, but like, somebody-you? With the right equipment?” Skylar fell into silence again, twirling a stray piece of blonde hair around her index finger. “Okay, and say I wanted to keep tabs on the person who was running the number. And say that this person totally wouldn’t expect me to be doing that, because he still thinks I’m five years old. Do you think …”
Skylar trailed off again and then beamed. “Excellent! Tell John Michael he’s never allowed to make fun of you for watching police procedurals again. See you in five.”
Skylar hit the key to end the call with more flourish than was purely necessary. “That was Genevieve,” she said needlessly. “She says that Reid and company should be able to track the incoming calls on this phone back to the locations from which they were placed even if they’re not listed. Same goes for the calls made from this number, so if Bethany’s dad has ever been to the facility where they’re keeping Zev, or if he’s ever gotten a call from them, we should be able to track it. Or technically, Reid should be able to track it, but Gen said she could loan me a couple of bugs, so we should be able to keep tabs on Reid.”
I tried to process Skylar’s babbles and came to an utterly ridiculous conclusion. “Are you actually suggesting we bug the FBI?”
Skylar held up her right hand, holding her index finger a centimeter or so above her thumb. “Just a little.”
“This is never going to work.”
“Kali, if I want pessimism and brooding foreheads, I’ll talk to Elliot. At least try to think positively.”
“Sure,” I said, forcing my fingers to let loose of their grip on the cell phone. “I guess it’s worth a try.”
I wanted to laugh hysterically—or possibly throw up. Zev was a lab rat, my mother was evil, and Skylar and I were discussing bugging the FBI.
“Yeah,” Skylar said, and she had the decency to sound a little sheepish. “It’s crazy. But sometimes, crazy is all you’ve got.”
She reached out to take the phone, and the moment her fingers touched mine, an odd gleam came into her eyes, like a candle bringing light to a jack-o’-lantern’s. For a moment, there was an unnatural silence between us, and I wondered what she’d seen.
“It’s going to get better.” Skylar’s voice was very quiet, very small. “But first, it’s going to get worse.” She played with the end of her T-shirt, avoiding my gaze. “And when it gets worse … well, just remember that it’s going to get better, okay?” She brought her eyes up to mine, and I felt like she needed something from me—acceptance maybe, or absolution.
“Sometimes, there aren’t any good choices. Sometimes, making the right one is hard.” She blinked and then cleared her throat. “It’s funny,” she said, “but when you really think about it, we’re all broken. That’s just what life does. It knocks you down and it breaks you and you either get back up again, or you don’t. You either do things on your terms, or you don’t.” She grabbed my hand, and I was surprised at the strength of her grip. “You let the bad things win, or you don’t.”
It would have been so easy to stay down, to deal myself out, to stop caring. There was a part of me that wanted to say that I’d been fighting since I was twelve, and look what it got me.
But I couldn’t. And even though I had no idea what Skylar had seen in our future, what she was holding back, the one thing I knew for sure was that she couldn’t, either.
Crazy, insane, impossible, broken—it didn’t matter. Some people were born to fight back.
Skylar squeezed my hand and then dropped it. “You know what the worst part is about being psychic?” she asked. In typical Skylar fashion, she didn’t wait for a response to continue. “You always know when it’s going to get worse. I get up in the morning and get ready for school, and I know that word is going to be written on my locker. I know that given half a chance, they’d write it on my face. Last year, when it first started, I knew—I knew it was going to go on and on and on; every day, every single day, it was just going to get worse. But you know what? Screw that, Kali. Whatever it is, whatever hurts so bad you can’t even unball your fists—you either let it break you, or you don’t.”
This was the first time I’d heard Skylar admit, even for a second, that she wasn’t invincible—that the things people said and did to her at school hurt. And maybe, compared to what I was going through, it should have seemed little and petty and so very high school, but it didn’t, because fighting, getting hurt, letting the baddies break my bones and tear my flesh—that was the easy part.
That had always been the easy part.
Letting people in, caring, wanting them to care about me—that was hard.
“That woman?” I said, my voice husky and low. “The one who was just here? I’m pretty sure she’s my mom.”
Skylar blinked. And then she blinked again. “Do you think she knows?” Skylar said finally. “That you’re involved in all of this? That you’re … you?”
That was the question, wasn’t it?
“I don’t know. I’m not even sure I care.” I brought the heel of my hand up to my face, wiped roughly at the tears as they fell from my bloodshot eyes. “If we’re going to illegally bug the FBI, we should probably get on that.”
I had fourteen hours and twenty-nine minutes until my next shift. Fourteen hours and twenty-nine minutes to fight back—but until I knew where Zev was, there wasn’t anything else I could do.
Fourteen hours and twenty-nine minutes.
I wasn’t going to waste even one second thinking about Rena Malik.
Skylar’s house was half the size of Bethany’s, but even from the outside, there was something distinctly comfortable ab
A worn, wooden fence sectioned off the backyard, and the second Skylar stepped out of my (stolen) car, she made a beeline for the gate.
I paused at the curb and hesitated. Under my feet, there was a line of handprints, pressed into the cement like a Hollywood star. Tiny handprints and chubby ones, gangly and nearly full grown.
It may as well have been a line in the sand, a barbed-wire fence at a border crossing.
You don’t belong here, it seemed to say. Family and happy memories and home—those things aren’t for you.
“You coming?” Skylar called.
From somewhere in the distance, darkness beckoned. If I ran long enough, looked hard enough, I could follow the trail. I could hit the outskirts of town and find something to hunt. I could let the hunter take over and turn off all feelings, emotions, longing.
I could feed.
But instead, I stepped over the line of handprints and followed Skylar into the backyard, trying with every step not to think about all of the things I’d never had, would never have. I tried not to think about the bits and pieces of memory I’d held on to my entire life: my mother’s face, the way she’d held me, the way she smelled.
Not for me. Lies.
If Skylar sensed my thoughts, she had the decency not to comment on them and instead just hooked an arm through mine. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go make trouble.”
“You know,” I replied, half joking and half not, “that might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
Skylar smiled and shrugged. “Not for long.” With eyes alight with mischief, she pulled a key chain out of her pocket with her free hand. “Remember,” she said. “Let me do the talking.”
She didn’t even need to ask. I’d broken my share of laws, but none of them had involved facing off against people. They certainly hadn’t involved giving an FBI agent a key chain in which we’d planted a listening device that one of Skylar’s friends had just happened to have on hand.