Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (115 page)

Not so fast, Fido
.

In a single, fluid motion, I jerked my dagger out of the monster’s eye and thrust my other arm into its mouth. Razor-sharp teeth clamped down over the bait, cutting through the flesh of my forearm like butter and snapping the bone.

The crunching sound wasn’t exactly pleasant, and the hellhound’s breath was killer, but other than that, I wasn’t really bothered. People like me?

We didn’t feel pain.

My blood splattered everywhere, but messy eater or not, the hellhound managed to get some of my flesh in its mouth, and the moment my blood touched its tar-black tongue, the beast froze, paralyzed. I jerked what was left of my arm out of its mouth and managed to drag myself out from underneath its carcass as it fell.

Game. Set. Match
.

My prey wasn’t dead, not yet, but it would be soon. Even now, my blood was spreading through the hellhound’s nervous system, a toxin every bit as lethal as a serpent’s venom. I wasn’t planning on waiting for the creature to die from the poison, though. It couldn’t move. It couldn’t fight back.

Might as well cut off its head.

But first, I had to deal with its friends, who I mentally christened Thing 2 and Thing 3. Having seen their buddy’s demise, Things 2 and 3 must have known what I was (which, quite frankly, probably put them several steps up on me, since I had nothing more than a string of educated guesses). But even with the instinctual knowledge that they were about to see the ugly end of the Circle of Life, the ’hounds didn’t turn tail and run.

They couldn’t.

My blood smelled too, too good.

Since I wasn’t keen on the idea of letting either of the remaining beasts take a nibble of Kali-bits, I pressed the flat of my knife against the already-closing wounds on my left arm, coating the blade with my blood.

There was more than one way to skin a cat/decapitate a hellhound.

With my good arm, I flung my blade at Thing 3 in a practiced motion that left it buried in my target’s throat. Thing 2 was not amused. With a roar of fury that sent the smell of sulfur, already thick in the air, surging, the ’hound charged. Left with nothing but my own bloody fingertips, I let out a war cry of my own, raked my nails over its face, and fought like a girl.

Breaking the beast’s thick, leathery skin wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination easy, even with fingernails sharper than most blades, but I managed, because the imperative—
you have to fight, you have to kill it, kill it
now—was that powerful, that insistent.

Flesh gave way under my nails, and my blood mingled with the beast’s. The toxin was slower when injected, so instead of
freezing immediately, Thing 2 and Thing 3 both began stumbling, their limbs gummed down by invisible weights.

“Sit,” I said as they staggered and finally went down. “Roll over.”

And then I smiled. “Play dead.”

A quick glance at my watch (which I wore on the hand I
hadn’t
fed to the hellhound) told me that I needed to hurry this along. I had three hours until my dad got home and another six before dawn—enough time to heal, but just barely.

“Knife,” I whispered. I felt a twinge, a
ping
in the back of my mind that told me exactly where my knife was, exactly how to retrieve it. Being what I was meant that I had a sixth sense for weapons—once I’d laid hands on a blade, a gun, a garrote, it was mine forever. I knew exactly how to use it. I could feel its presence like eyes staring straight at the back of my head.

I’d never lost a weapon, and I never would.

“Well,” I said, smiling at the blade as I tore it from Thing 3’s throat, “let’s get this show on the road.” The fact that I was talking to a knife probably said something revealing about my character and/or mental state, but the way I saw it, my weapon and I were in this together.

We had work to do.

Three decapitations later, my own blood wasn’t the only decoration on my body. Hellhound bits had splattered everywhere, coating me in gore. Another outfit down the drain.

Story of my life.

Glancing around to make sure I hadn’t been seen, I stripped down to my sports bra and jeans and rolled the
bloody shirt into a small ball. It was dark enough out that stains on denim wouldn’t be visible from afar, and I had no intention of letting anyone get close enough to notice that I’d been Up to No Good.

Luckily, people like me?

We’re surprisingly good at fading into the background.

“Be aggressive! Be, be aggressive!”

My head was throbbing. My arm ached like I’d spent the entire night doing push-ups, and I was exhausted. So, of course, Heritage High was having a pep rally. A loud, crowded, too-early-in-the-morning, I’m-not-even-sure-what-sport-season-we’re-in pep rally.

With cheerleaders.

“Go Krakens!”

High school was, without question, the ninth circle of you-know-what.

As I slumped down in the bleachers, the sea of faces around me blurred, and I found myself longing for the University School, where at least the unidentified blur of my classmates would have been a familiar blur. I’d spent the first twelve years of my academic existence, from pre-K to grade ten, at the gifted program run by my father’s university. But halfway through my first semester junior year, Father Dearest had decided that such a “small environment” wasn’t good for my “developing social skills,” a decision that I deeply suspected had less to do with my ability to make friends and influence people and more to do with the fact that Paul Davis,
the new head of my father’s department, had chosen to send his seventeen-year-old daughter, Bethany, to public school.

Bethany Davis was a cheerleader.

I was not.

Leaning back against the gymnasium wall, I did my best to disappear into the bleachers. It would have been easier to lose myself in the crowd if I hadn’t claimed a spot on the back row, but I hated letting people sit behind me.

Much better to keep my back to the wall.

The compulsion reminded me, as it always did, that even on my human days, I was anything but normal.

“Are you ready to beat the Trojans?” the principal asked, his voice booming from the loudspeakers as he leaned into a microphone positioned directly in the middle of the cheerleaders. To my right, some senior delinquent made a comment about “beating” and “Trojans” that I tried very hard not to hear.

“Are you ready to show them what Krakens are made of?”

A roar of assent went through the crowd, and I wondered for maybe the hundredth time how Heritage High had ended up with a giant, multiarmed sea monster as its mascot.

“Are you ready to slip your tentacles around the Trojans and crush them like the ships of yore?”

I didn’t wait to hear what the dirty minds of senior boys would make of the reference to “tentacles.” I really and truly did not want to know. Instead, I brought my feet up onto the bleacher, pulled my legs to my chest, and rested my chin on top of my knees. Sometimes, I felt like if I could just fold myself into a small enough ball, my body would collapse on itself like a star, and I could supernova myself into a new existence.

One that didn’t involve Trojans, Krakens, tentacles, or early morning assemblies of any kind.

With my right hand, I massaged the muscles in my left, tuning out the world around me and assessing the damage the hellhounds had wreaked the night before. There wouldn’t be a scar. There wasn’t so much as a scratch or a hint of redness. The only indication that muscle and bone had spent the night knitting themselves back together was the residual soreness.

If I’d had another hour before dawn this morning, even that would have taken care of itself.

Reflexively, I glanced down at my watch: twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes until my next switch. Twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes with no hunt-lust. Twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes as human as the next girl.

Twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes for the things I hunted to hunt me.

“Go Krakens!”

I was 99 percent sure this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. That if there were any other people out there with my … 
skills
, they weren’t that way one day and not the next, but ever since the puberty fairy had knocked me upside the head with her little wand, that was the way things had been for me.

Every other day, I was human. And every other day, I was … not.

“Kra-kens! Kra-kens! Kra-kens!”

I put my feet back down on the ground and made a halfhearted effort at clapping to the beat. I even mouthed the words to the cheers coming at me from all sides. But what I
really needed wasn’t a dose of school spirit; it was a glass of water, an aspirin the size of my fist, and the answers to the history exam that I hadn’t studied for the night before.

“As long as I’m dreaming,” I muttered, my words lost to the cacophony of the gym, “I’d also like a pony, a convertible, and a couple of friends.”

“That’s a tall order.”

I’d known that there were people sitting next to me, but I couldn’t begin to imagine how one of them had heard me.
I
hadn’t even heard me.

“Would you settle for a piece of gum, an orange Tic Tac, and an introduction to the school slut?”

I tried to process the situation appropriately. The cheering had finally died down, the principal had begun dismissing us section by section to go back to class, and the girl sitting next to me—who looked all of twelve years old, but was probably closer to my age—was holding out a stick of Juicy Fruit, a lopsided grin on her pixie face.

“Gum?” she repeated.

It wasn’t a giant-sized aspirin, but it would do.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the gum and eyeing the box of orange Tic Tacs sticking out of her jeans pocket. Gum. Tic Tacs. Based on the power of inference and the fact that she looked like she was on the verge of introducing herself, I concluded that must make her …

“Skylar Hayden,” the girl said, sticking out her hand. “School slut.”

I shook her hand and tried to process. “The school …”

“Slut,” Skylar chirped, the picture of perky. “Even says so, right across the front of my locker. The janitors have tried to
paint over it, but the locker elves are a persistent bunch, so there it stays.”

“That’s awful,” I said, trying to imagine myself coming face-to-face with that word scrawled across my locker each morning.

Skylar blew a wisp of white-blonde hair out of her face. “It could be worse. I mean, I could have actually had to work for the title! Seriously, some of the girls on the student council have been angling for sensual supremacy for years, and all I had to do was let Justin Thomas kiss my neck for five seconds—which, quite frankly, could have been used as a medical substitute for bloodletting in medieval times. I’m talking
total leech
.”

It took Skylar four, maybe five seconds to rattle off this entire statement and another two to catch her breath before she plowed on. “Anyway, Justin Thomas is Kelly Masterson’s boyfriend, and she’s the total alpha around here—captain of the cheerleading squad, student council vice president, and so on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera—so I got to jump straight to the front of the class. It’s unfair, really. A lot of people have worked really hard for the title to lose it to an upstart little dark horse like me, but c’est la vie.”

I knew from the content of Skylar’s speech that it must have been served with a hefty dose of sarcasm, but there wasn’t so much as a hint of attitude in her tone. She did earnest and perky way too well, and the combined effect of her words and her manner took me so off guard that I actually swallowed my gum.

“You sure you don’t want a Tic Tac?” Skylar asked.

Dazed and confused didn’t even begin to cover my current
state of mind, so I just held out a hand and allowed her to pour a couple of orange Tic Tacs into it. I popped one into my mouth. “Thanks.”

“Not a problem,” she said, and then she grinned again, more pixie than not. “So what’s your deal? Rumor has it you’re a princess incognito.”

I swallowed my Tic Tac. At this rate, I could only hope that Skylar knew the Heimlich maneuver, because sooner or later, I was going to need it.

“Rumor has it I’m a princess?” I repeated.

“Daughter of a foreign dignitary and a Hollywood Grace Kelly type,” Skylar confirmed. “But I might have just made that up. You’re not really on the Heritage High rumor radar yet—but don’t worry. If you spend a few more minutes talking to me, you will be.”

For the first time, her blue eyes took on a hint of something that wasn’t pep: wariness, maybe, or an expectation that I’d take this opportunity to run far, far away and never look back. But a moment later, whatever glimmer I’d seen was gone, replaced with a steely, uncompromising optimism that must have grated on the girls trying their hardest to freeze her out.

For less than a second, I considered my options: make a friend and become a social pariah, or walk away and spend my life in comfortable obscurity.

No contest.

“I’m Kali,” I said, smiling for the first time in what felt like years. “I transferred to Heritage a few weeks ago. When I’m not failing history tests, I spend my time as an insurgent superhero who lives in fear of being hunted down by monsters or bureaucrats.”