Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (120 page)

Actually, yes. She was the kind of person who referred to her boyfriend’s baby sister as “Little Miss Loose Legs.” Leaving and never giving me another thought was exactly what I expected a girl like Bethany to do.

“Seriously, Kali? I’m shallow, not a sociopath. There’s a difference, and I am not leaving you here alone, so suck it up and deal me in.”

My mouth dropped open in abject shock, and Bethany
began speaking very slowly, as if I were a small child or a very dense jock.

“What. Is. The. Plan.” She narrowed her eyes. “I’d offer to call my dad, but he’d just put you in quarantine. And call the CDC.
And
you’d still die. Whatever your plan is, it has to be better than that.”

I have a plan, and I don’t need your help
.

For once, my mouth and brain were in complete and total accord, so I said exactly what I was thinking. Bethany blinked several times, but before she could reply, a familiar blonde head peeked over the edge of the doorframe, and Bethany’s nonsociopathic tendencies flew right out the door.

“Can I help you?” she asked, every inch the ice queen.

Skylar shook her head, sending wisps of blonde hair flying. “No, you can’t help me, but I think I can help you. Both of you.” Skylar paused for a breath, and that was my first clue she was on the verge of a truly epic babble. “I can’t tell you why, and I can’t tell you how I know, but the two of you need to get out of here in the next two minutes and forty-five seconds, or something really, really bad is going to happen to one and/or both of you, and it’s going to make someone with a soul the color and consistency of bubbling tar very, very happy.”

The end of Skylar’s run-on sentence was punctuated by a moment of absolute silence.

Listen to her.

This time, the voice in my head
wasn’t
mine, and I felt the words in the pit of my stomach, all the way down to the soles of my feet. I wanted to argue or disobey on principle, but even to human eyes, the world looks different in the calm before
the storm. Every instinct my hunting habit had taught me said that it was time to take to higher ground.

Now.

In an instant, I was beside Skylar, and Bethany followed reluctantly on my heels. Skylar shrugged off her hoodie, handed it to Bethany, and spoke in an eerily calm and measured voice. “Put this on and pull up the hood. Then walk, don’t run, toward the cafeteria. When we hit the corner, turn right.”

Something about the younger girl’s unnaturally even keel must have penetrated Bethany’s bitch shields, because she put on Skylar’s worn blue hoodie—which had probably once belonged to one of her older brothers—without batting an eye. The three of us walked toward the end of the hallway, and just as we turned right, I heard the telltale tone of a single woman flirting with a slightly older man.

“They said to call you if any of the cheerleaders showed signs of anemia, and once I saw the
ouroboros
, well …” The school nurse let her words trail off, and I stopped breathing.

Someone knew
.

Maybe not about Bethany specifically, but someone had known to be on the lookout for Heritage High cheerleaders showing signs of chupacabra possession. And if they’d known and hadn’t done a thing to stop it …

Not good
.

I didn’t so much as glance back over my shoulder, but as Skylar, Bethany, and I hit the glass doors at the end of the hallway, I saw a reflection of the people rounding the corner to the nurse’s office. In addition to the nurse, there were two men dressed in suits, and a woman with skin a shade darker
and infinitely more flawless than my own. She wore her hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck, and she walked with purpose, the staccato click of heels against tile cutting through the air like gunshots.

“You did the right thing by calling us,” the woman said. “We’ll take care of everything now.”

Her voice was soft, but I heard it, heard every word, and in that moment, I knew two things with absolute, unerring certainty: one, the suits on their way to the nurse’s office weren’t from the CDC, and two—whether they knew it yet or not—they weren’t here for a cheerleader.

They were here for the girl with the
ouroboros
. And as of five minutes ago, that girl was me.

I didn’t say a word until the three of us hit the parking lot, and even then, I only opened my mouth to ask whether either of the others had a car.

“No wheels,” Skylar replied, her expression mournful. “And no driver’s license. Yet. That said, my brother Nathan knows how to hot-wire, and I might have picked up a few tricks along the way.”

“Take it easy, Grand Theft Auto.” Bethany pulled a pair of keys out of her purse. “No one is hot-wiring anything. I have wheels
and
tinted windows, which means you can help yourself to the backseat, and as long as no one sees you get in or out, I don’t have to deal with the social fallout.”

The redhead didn’t bother waiting for a response—she just pushed a button on her keys and flounced toward the silver BMW that lit up in response. Watching Bethany reverting to type, I thought that maybe cattiness was its own kind of invincibility, as much of a crutch for Bethany as my powers were for me.

Sixteen hours and nine minutes
.

Sliding into the passenger seat of the BMW and closing
the door behind me, I shut out the constant countdown in my mind and tried to concentrate on the here and now.

Right here, right now, I was infected.

Right here, right now, I was on the run.

Right here, right now … I had no earthly idea what I’d gotten myself into. Without meaning to, I glanced down, and my hands began gravitating toward the bottom of my shirt.

Don’t touch it
, I told myself sternly.
Don’t think about it. Don’t give in
.

Unable to help myself, I pulled the bottom of my shirt upward and the band of my jeans down, rotating my hips forward in the seat to give myself a full view of the
ouroboros
etched into my skin.

The lines were thick and looked like they’d been poured onto my body as melted gold. Tentatively, I ran my hand over the surface of my skin, expecting the symbol to be raised, but felt nothing other than the muscles in my stomach and the kind of dull heat given off by a day-old sunburn.

My flesh wasn’t red.

The mark didn’t hurt.

But for a split second, maybe less, the hand touching it didn’t feel like mine.

I can do this. I can beat this
. Knowing that the parasite was already absorbing my blood and, with it, my thoughts and memories, I cut the mental pep talk off short.

I wouldn’t let myself be scared.

I wouldn’t let the thing inside me know that it was winning.

I wouldn’t think its name.

“Kali?” Skylar said my name and pulled me back down to earth. “Any chance you want to tell me what’s going on?”

I shifted so that my shirt covered the glaring beacon of obvious on my stomach and turned the tables back on Skylar. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

Skylar was the one who’d known that someone was coming for us. She was the one who’d told us where to go and how to act, the one who’d given Bethany a hoodie to cover her trademark red locks.

“What’s going on?” Skylar repeated, and then, without pausing a beat, she gave her answer. “You keep touching your stomach, Bethany has accelerated through four yellow lights, both of you know something that the other one doesn’t, and I’m …”

She mumbled the last bit.

“You’re what?” I asked. Bethany looked like she was on the verge of offering up an answer of her own to that question, but she managed to restrain herself.

Skylar cleared her throat. “I’m …”

“You’re …?”

Skylar gave me a hopeful little smile and then stopped beating around the bush. “I’m a little bit psychic.”

“Psychic?” Bethany and I repeated in unison.

“Just a little bit,” Skylar said, like that made her claim significantly more feasible than it would have been had she claimed to be psychic
a lot
.

“No offense,” Bethany began—a surefire sign that she was getting ready to say something highly offensive—“but you two totally deserve each other. Mousy little Kali carries a hunting knife to high school, and my boyfriend’s social mistake of a
sister thinks she’s got magical powers. If you guys can find yourselves a person who swallows swords, you can totally take this act on the road.”

“Hey,” I said, sounding only about half as put out as I felt. “Nobody asked you to be here.”

“It’s my car,” Bethany retorted. “And speaking of which, where are we going?”

Skylar leaned forward from the backseat. “Turn right here,” she said helpfully.

“Why?” Bethany’s hands tightened almost imperceptibly over the steering wheel. In the rearview mirror, I could see Skylar shrug in response.

“I just kind of feel like you should turn right here.”

Bethany shot dagger eyes at her in the mirror. “Because you’re psychic.”

“Just a little.”

To everyone’s surprise—probably even her own—Bethany did turn right, but she made up for it by rolling her eyes so hard that I had doubts about whether or not she could still make out oncoming traffic. Cast in the role of mediator between two extremes, I tried rephrasing Bethany’s “no offense” statement in a way that was actually less offensive.

“Skylar, I get that maybe you have … really good intuition about people sometimes, but you know there’s no such thing as actual psychics, right?”

That was what had made Eigelmeier’s discovery of the chupacabra such an astonishing scientific find. Even with the preternatural, psychic phenomena was outside the norm. With humans, it was unheard of.

Then again, so was I.

Skylar, sensing my weakness, pressed the point. “Before Darwin, most scientists thought that kelpies and griffins weren’t real, either, but anyone who’s ever been to the San Francisco Zoo knows that they are.”

Demonic water horses that lived to drown passersby.

Flying lions with a nearly immortal life span.

Kelpies. Griffins. Hellhounds. Zombies. And … psychics?

“Sometimes,” Skylar said solemnly, “
make-believe
is just another word for rare. Turn left at the next stop sign, Bethany.”

“What am I, your chauffeur?” The question was clearly rhetorical, because Bethany didn’t wait for an answer. “Tell me where we’re going, or I’m pulling over, and you two are walking home.”

I was severely tempted to take her up on the offer. The sooner I could convince Bethany she wanted no part of this, the better off I’d be. Unfortunately, the men in suits and the woman who’d accompanied them—the one who’d promised she’d “take care of things”—had been on the lookout for a cheerleader showing signs of chupacabra possession. Without knowing exactly what the nurse had told them, I couldn’t convince myself that Bethany would be better off without me. And that meant that I couldn’t just send her on her merry way, no matter how much I didn’t want an entourage for the things to come.

Maybe I really do have a hero complex
.

The thought engendered a response in my body: a knowing feeling, a tightening of the muscles in my throat, a yes.

“Bethany, chill. Skylar, tell us where we’re going.” Those sentences burst out of my mouth with all of the bite I wanted
to direct to the thing inside my head, and I immediately wished I could take it back.

“I won’t know where we’re going until we get there.” Skylar was completely unfazed by my snapping. “And once we get there, I probably won’t know why until you guys tell me what’s going on.”

“You’re the psychic,” Bethany muttered. “Shouldn’t you be able to figure it out for yourself?”

If anything, Skylar seemed enthused by the pointed question. “Reading your minds on command would require being significantly psychic, and I’m not. I never know when I’m going to pick up something, and it comes in pieces and feelings, not in words. So who wants to clue the sophomore in?”

Not me
.

I didn’t want to drag Skylar into this. There was just something about her that screamed
protect me!
Whoever the men looking for the “anemic cheerleader” were, I was fairly certain I didn’t want them anywhere near the Little Optimist That Could.

Unfortunately, Bethany had no such predilection. “Sometime in the past week, I got bitten by a chupacabra. Somehow—no idea how—Kali lured it out of my body and into hers. She’s already far enough gone that medical science can’t do a thing to save her, and she’s got some kind of plan—probably a risky, unreliable one riddled with holes—to get the bloodsucker out.” Bethany blew out a long breath and then glanced back over her shoulder at Skylar. “There. You know what I know about the current situation. So, any time now, feel free to do your whole ‘psychic’ thing and tell me where the bedazzler we’re going, or I might be forced to physically hurt you.”

Skylar made a
pfft
sound with her lips. “Five brothers,” she said, pointing to herself. Then she pointed to Bethany. “Only child. I could totally take you. Turn left.”