Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“Don’t you think he’s going to be a little suspicious that we’re giving him a mangled SIM Card and a ‘Number One Brother’ key chain?” I asked Skylar as the two of us closed in on the back door to her house.
“Definitely,” Skylar agreed. “That’s why I altered the key chain on the way over.”
I took a closer look at it and realized that in addition to hiding the listening device, she’d also edited the slogan on the key chain.
“Number Four Brother?” I asked dryly. “Isn’t that kind of insulting?”
Skylar smiled angelically. “He won’t suspect a thing.”
The inside of the Haydens’ house was even smaller than it had looked from the outside. The walls were lined with school pictures, and there was music blaring from the kitchen.
“My mom’s cooking,” Skylar explained. “She requires a sound track.”
I tried not to feel a twinge at how easy it was for her to say those two little words—my mom—but I only succeeded partway.
Concentrate on something else, I told myself. Anything else.
And that was when I heard it: the steady, solid beating of Skylar’s heart.
Thirsty.
The thing inside me needed blood. This time, Zev didn’t say a single word to talk me down.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Skylar’s blood smelled like strawberries. Now I wasn’t thinking about family or betrayal or anything other than the fact that it had been hours since the basilisk blood, hours of hunting and healing and—
“Heya, Reid. Have you met Kali?”
Skylar said the words like she genuinely thought there was a chance that her oldest brother had met me before, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn she was completely guileless.
Apparently, Reid knew her better than that, too.
“We haven’t met,” he told me, ignoring his sister and bringing the full force of a miss-nothing stare to bear on my face. “But I believe I’m acquainted with some friends of yours.”
I tried to read in between the lines of his words. Beside me, Skylar helpfully made zombie motions, her head lolled to the side and her arms held out like claws.
“Right,” I said, at a complete loss for words. “The zombies. In case you didn’t notice, we didn’t exactly part on friendly terms.”
The strength of Reid’s stare never wavered, never lessened. “You don’t say.”
I took a moment to study him, even though there was a part of my mind that was still locked on to the rhythm of Skylar’s heartbeat, the smell of her blood. While Skylar and Elliot were blond, Reid’s hair—buzzed close to his scalp—had a reddish tint to it. He was a full head taller than me—wiry, but strong. And beyond the smile, the expression on his face was … blank. Completely blank.
Clearly, he was reserving judgment. On me. On the zombies. Or maybe he was just hoping I’d crack and spill out the whole story, from start to finish.
I looked down and away. Somehow, after meeting Elliot and Vaughn, I’d expected Reid to be more talkative. I hadn’t expected him to treat me like I was a suspect—or a criminal.
Even though I was.
Beside me, Skylar rolled her eyes. “He’s this way with everyone,” she told me. “You’d be getting the Death Stare Third Degree even if you’d just come over for dinner—which, by the way, should probably be ready soon.”
Reminded of Skylar’s presence, Reid fixed her with the same implacable stare he’d given me. “Are you okay?” he asked, clearly a man of few words.
She nodded. “Peachy keen.”
His stone-hard face softened, just a little. Then he turned back to me. I braced myself, but all he did was repeat the question he’d asked Skylar. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, sure that if I spoke, the words would sound like a lie.
“We brought you something,” Skylar said, before Reid could ask me anything else. “It’s the SIM card from Bethany’s dad’s phone. Or at least, it’s what’s left of the SIM card.”
Reid folded his arms over his chest. “Do I want to know how you got it?”
Skylar glanced at me.
Reid cast his eyes heavenward. “I’ll take that as a no.”
Skylar must have noticed her brother’s exasperation, but she expertly ignored it. “Do you think you might be able to pull something useful off the card?”
Reid gave her A Look, capital A, capital L.
“Hey, we’re the ones who—” Skylar didn’t even get to finish that sentence. Reid bent down to her level, Look still in place.
“You’re the ones who did what exactly?”
Skylar did a passing job of looking like she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “Vaughn probably told you everything, anyway,” she grumbled, sounding all of five years old.
“Vaughn probably did,” Reid agreed.
“Are you going to look into it?” Skylar asked.
Reid didn’t answer. He just took the SIM card and pocketed it. “If either of you hear anything else, if you see anything—I want you to call me.”
He handed me a business card and turned the full force of the Look on me. “Anything, any time, no matter how small. Do you understand?”
Actually, no. I didn’t. He didn’t know me. He had no reason to trust me. And if Vaughn had told him everything, he knew I wasn’t human, not really.
“If there’s something to take care of, I’ll take care of it. You shouldn’t have to.” He turned his attention back to Skylar. “And you,” he continued, “know better.”
“I know a lot of things,” Skylar said softly, and for the first time, I saw a familial resemblance between them. “More than I’d like to.”
“This could be dangerous.” Reid’s tone never changed. The Look never wavered.
“This isn’t just dangerous,” Skylar retorted. “It’s deadly.”
Blood and bleeding and my body lying on the side of the road, I thought. Poison tearing through my body, fangs through my chest.
“I’ll take care of it,” Reid said. “And I’ll be fine.”
“I know you will be,” Skylar said, rising on her tiptoes to give him a kiss on his cheek. “By the way, I got you a little something.”
Suspicion flickered across his face—until she handed him the key chain.
“Number Four Brother,” he said, trying very hard not to laugh. “Cute.”
This time, I could hear both of their hearts beating. I could smell strawberries and blood. There was warmth on my skin, and deep inside of me—hunger.
Thirst.
“You want to stay for dinner?” Skylar asked me. I looked from her to Reid to the pictures on the wall. In the kitchen, Skylar’s mother was singing along to the radio, and I heard the rumble of the garage door—her father, home from work.
“I have to go,” I said.
Go hunting.
Go home.
When I got home from hunting—feeding—my dad was in the kitchen. He seemed lost, like he’d forgotten where exactly the microwave was, and when I came in, he actually smiled.
“There you are.”
I so didn’t want to get into this—not now.
“I thought I might cook dinner tonight,” he said. “Today was my sexual selection lecture—the kids always love that one.”
It took me a moment to realize that he was trying to make conversation. It seemed ironic that he’d picked today, of all days, to remember my existence.
“Your school called,” he said suddenly. “They said you missed your classes.”
Why did I get the distinct feeling that my father had run an Internet search for “what to do when your child plays hooky”? Hence the homemade dinner and his best attempt at a heart-to-heart.
Considering my own mother might have ordered someone to kill me, my dad’s clumsy attempts to parent didn’t seem as bad as they otherwise might have. Then again, on any other day, I might have actually let myself believe that things were going to change.
That we were capabl
“I stole your car,” I said, because that seemed like as good a way as any to put an end to this father-daughter bonding session before it started.
“Oh,” my father replied, blinking rapidly. “I thought maybe I forgot where I parked it.”
That nearly startled a laugh out of me. It was comforting to know that the absentminded professor wasn’t just forgetful when it came to pesky little details like my birthday, my age, and when and where he was supposed to pick me up.
“I got you a new phone.” With an awkward little smile, my father turned back toward the counter and then handed me a new cell phone. “I remember you said you broke yours.”
“A month ago. I broke that one a month ago.” I hadn’t meant to say that out loud, and when the smile faded from his face, I wanted to kick myself. My father was what he was, but at least he was trying.
At least he wasn’t evil.
At least he’d stayed.
“I mean, thanks,” I said, taking the phone. “And sorry about the car.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Want to tell me where you were today?”
I tried to remember the last time he’d asked me a question that direct, but couldn’t. “I actually went by the university,” I said. “I saw part of your lecture.”
The expression on his face wavered, and for a second, I thought he was going to laugh, or cry, or both. Instead, he shrugged.
“Nothing you haven’t seen before, Kali.”
He hesitated, ever so slightly, when he said my name, and I couldn’t help hearing her say it.
Kali, baby. Kali-Kay.
I turned toward the sink and made a show of washing my hands. I waited for my father to say something else, and I told myself that if he asked, I’d tell him.
I’d tell him everything.
This was a game I played, one I always, always lost. If he asks me why there’s blood on my shirt, I’ll tell him. If he asks me where I’m going, I’ll tell him. If he asks why I don’t have any friends, or if I want to go out to dinner, or if I’m doing okay—I’ll tell him.
In the past few years, I’d made those bargains with myself—and with the universe—a million times. If, if, if—and it never came to anything.
He never asked.
Until now.
“What’s going on with you, Kali? You seem …” He trailed off, at a loss for words—clearly an unusual experience for a man known for giving eloquent lectures. “Are you okay?”
“No.” I hadn’t meant to say the word, but fair was fair. He’d asked. All those years, all those conditional statements, and now, he’d finally asked. “I saw my mother today.”
For a moment, he was silent. He wrinkled his forehead, like whatever language I was speaking, it wasn’t quite English. “Your mother?” he repeated finally.
“Contributor to half of my gene pool. About yea tall.” I raised my hand to demonstrate. “Looks a little bit like me, only prettier.”
“Kali, your mother—I’m sure it wasn’t her.”
If only that were true.
“This woman’s name was Rena. Rena Malik.”
I could tell by the look on his face that he knew that name, knew her.
“That was her name,” I said softly. “Wasn’t it?”
It was a funny thing not to know about your own mother, but since my father and I didn’t talk about her, I’d never actually known her name.
“Rena,” my father said, like she was standing right there in the kitchen with us, an ever-present ghost.
“Rena Malik,” I said again. “I guess she never took your last name.”
“We weren’t married,” my father said absently.
“You weren’t?”
I don’t know why that surprised me, but I guess I’d always just assumed that they were. My father wasn’t the type of guy to have a kid out of wedlock.
“Kali, your mother and I weren’t … together.” My father chose his words very carefully. “She moved in with me after you were born, but the two of us were never … that is to say …”
If I hadn’t wanted to hear my father give a lecture on sexual selection, I certainly didn’t want to hear a play-by-play of my own conception, via a one-night stand.
“Where did you see her?” With that question, my father seemed to gain his composure—and an intensity that I hadn’t heard anything but academia bring out in him in a very long time.
“She didn’t see me.” That wasn’t exactly what he’d asked, but it wasn’t like I could tell him that I’d seen my mother in Paul Davis’s basement lab.
“Okay,” he said. “Good.”
“Good?” I repeated.
“Your mother,” he said. “Rena—she … she’s not the motherly type, Kali.”
“And you’re the fatherly type?” I asked him. He blanched.
“Fair enough,” he said after a moment. “I know I’m not perfect, but—your mother didn’t leave, Kali.”
Of all the words he might have said, those were the last ones I was expecting.
“What?”
She didn’t want us, and she left. That was what he’d told me for as long as I could remember.
“I left. I left her, and I took you with me.”
I tried to imagine a world in which my father would have volunteered to be a single parent. I tried to imagine what could possibly have compelled him to do a thing like that.
The tests. The secrets. The games.
It was all hovering right out of reach, my memory hazy and incomplete.
“What did she do?” I asked, my voice hoarse, my hands shaking.
My father turned, busying himself with something at the counter. “It was a long time ago, Kali.”
Can you say gun? a voice whispered from somewhere in my memory.
“What did she do to me?” I asked, my body running cold, my muscles hardening to stone.
Sit still, Kali. Sit so still.
Time for my shot.
A possibility occurred to me, one I should have thought of much, much sooner. One that made sense of the splinters I’d seen of my own past, one that answered every question I’d ever had about why I was the way I was.
Maybe they’d made me that way.
I’d spent my entire life thinking that maybe my mother was like me, that maybe my condition was hereditary, but what if it wasn’t?
My father was a scientist.
My mother worked for Chimera.
Chimera specialized in making monsters.
Something snapped inside of me, and I walked over to the counter and opened the knife drawer. I pulled out a cutting knife, the largest of a set of five. I turned calmly back to my father. His brow wrinkled, and he realized what I was going to do a second before I did it.
He reached out to grab my hand, and I threw him off—threw him too hard, and he skidded across the floor, eyes wide. I took a step forward and brought the knife to my arm.
Slice, slice, slice.
Steel slid into my flesh. Blood welled up on the surface of my skin. I’d cut myself long and deep, and from his spot on the floor, my father made a choking, strangled sound.
I threw the knife down. With my right hand, I wiped the blood off my left. It smeared, and I turned to the sink and turned on the water. Mechanically, I washed off the cut.
I held my arm up, and my father watched in sick fascination as the skin began knitting itself back together.
“Am I even your daughter?” I asked. Maybe they’d just found me somewhere. Maybe I’d been their specimen, the way Zev was Chimera’s.
“Yes,” my father said, his voice shaking. “You’re my daughter. And Rena’s.”
There were words then, so many words, coming out of my father’s mouth. He’d been a junior professor. Rena had been a graduate student. She’d come to him with a mysterious blood sample.
“Get to the point.” I meant to sound brisk. I didn’t mean to beg. “Please.”
He stammered. “Th-th-the idea that there might be preternatu
I saw where this was going, saw it as clearly as the features on his face, but I didn’t make it any easier for him. I just waited, the blood-covered knife gleaming on the counter.
“The DNA was close enough to human that Rena thought that we could splice it into the human genome, if the intervention happened early enough in development.”
“How early?” I asked, wondering if I’d ever been normal. If I’d ever even had a chance.
“Conception,” my father said, his voice hoarser even than mine.
Conception, I thought. So that was my answer. I hadn’t ever been normal. I hadn’t ever had a chance.
From his position on the floor, my father begged me with his eyes to understand. “My DNA, your mother’s, our test subject’s … we knew it probably wouldn’t take. But it did, and suddenly, Rena was pregnant, and the two of us had to face the reality that this wasn’t just some abstract thing. It wasn’t just DNA. It was a baby.” He paused and climbed to his feet. “It was you.”
I’d spent the past five years wondering why I was the way I was, wondering what was wrong with me.
“Congratulations,” I said. “Guess your experiment worked.”
“But it didn’t!” The words burst out of my father’s mouth. “We ran the tests—ran them again and again, Kali, but they all came back human. You were human. And you were ours.”
Their experiment.
“Things were fine, for a while. You were such a good baby, and Rena—she adored you, Kali. The way she used to look at you … I thought that maybe it was worth it. All of the risks we’d taken, the laws we’d broken, the lines we’d crossed—because at the end of the day, we had you. But then, when you were about two, Rena got a new job, in the private sector. She started hearing rumors about an undiscovered preternatural species. And the more she heard about what they could do, the more convinced she became that you might have inherited something.”
It was all so clear in my mind now. The games. The trips to the lab. They’d taken my blood and hooked me up to machines and run every test known to man.