Every Other Day by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

backhanded me, and I couldn’t even hate him for it. He meant well. He meant to love me.
    Then again, you know what they say about the road to hell.
    “Elliot’s not my friend,” I said, my voice as neutral and pleasant as the professor’s. “He’s dating Bethany Davis.”
    Bethany’s name caught my father’s attention, the way I’d known it would.
    “Is he now? I had a feeling you two would hit it off.”
    For one horrific moment, I thought my father might reach over and pat me on the head, like a little kid. Like a dog.
    “You should invite Bethany over here one day after school,” he said. “Or perhaps I could talk to Paul about the four of us going out for a father-daughter dinner?”
    In that instant, I hated Bethany, hated her so much that I wished I’d never seen the ouroboros on her back or that I’d turned a blind eye to it once I had. I knew it wasn’t rational, knew that this conversation wasn’t any more her fault than it was mine, but I didn’t feel like being rational.
    I felt like puking all over my father’s dress-for-success designer shoes.
    “Kali?”
    I got bitten by a chupacabra, and I might not make it to morning. Just thought you should know .
    I couldn’t coerce my lips into saying the words. What was the point? Instead, I took the easy way out, the way I always did with him, the way he always did with me.
    “I’m really tired,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”
    Another parent might have gotten upset that I hadn’t replied to his suggestion, but my father never yelled at me. The two of us never fought. I’d go on my merry way, and he’d go on his, and if I died in the middle of the night, he’d live.
    He’d just have to find another way to cozy up to Paul Davis.
    By some miracle, I made it upstairs without breaking down or passing out. I closed my bedroom door behind me and sank down onto the floor.
    Eight hours and fifty-one minutes .
    I was tired, I was light-headed, and all I wanted was to go to sleep and bring on the dawn, but I knew with sudden prescience that it wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to be able to stop thinking about it, any of it—not about my dad, or the thing inside of me, or the fact that somewhere out there, someone was looking for me.
    For Bethany.
    How did I get myself into this?
    I was normally good at lying low, but this was pretty much the opposite. Assuming the best happened, and I did survive the night, that would be a giant red flag right there—to Bethany, to Skylar and her brothers, to the woman in heels.
    —Hurt—You.
    With everything going on inside my head, the return of the voice was almost a relief. I was the kind of person who needed an enemy. I needed something I could fight, something I could kill.
    Back again ? I asked silently, disregarding the fact that according to modern science, chupacabras had the mental capacity of an amoeba. And here I thought Elliot and Vaughn had scared you away .
    No response. Then again, what did I expect? I was talking to a parasite. I was dying. And there was a part of me that couldn’t help wishing that Elliot hadn’t left just so I wouldn’t have to be going through this alone.
    Not like you.
    That was the clearest thing the little interloper had said since the ice rink—like I needed a reminder that I was different. Like I’d ever been able to forget, even for a second, that I wasn’t like other girls—that I wasn’t like anyone.
    This wasn’t how I’d pictured spending what could end up being my last night on earth: alone in my bedroom, talking to the voice in my head and feeling sorry for myself. I needed to do something.
    At that moment, I would have given anything for the hunt-lust, the restlessness, the purpose I’d felt the night before. Every other day, I was a demon hunter. I was powerful. I was something.
    But now?
    Now I was just lost and lonely and dying, and the closest thing I had to company was the creature that was kill-ing me.
    Lovely .
    I could feel my