Every Other Day by Jennifer Lynn Barnes Page A

throat tightening, and my eyes started to burn.
    Screw this .
    I may have been different, I may have been a loner, I may have been a freak , but I wasn’t a crier. Not about this, not about anything. Determined to quell the urge, I turned my attention to the piece of paper Skylar had pressed into my palm as I was leaving Vaughn’s house. I tugged it out of my pocket and unfolded it, careful not to tear the edges.
    It’s this thing , Skylar had said. I can’t get it out of my head. I think it might be important .
    Staring at the drawing, I had the oddest sense of déjà vu. The symbol was simple: an octagon bisected by a ribbon—or possibly a ladder, spiraling around an invisible line. The shape itself was uneven and asymmetrical, and I got the feeling that drawing was not a talent that Skylar had in any kind of abundance.
    I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at the sketch and waiting for the lightbulb moment when everything clicked into place, but all I managed to accomplish was giving myself a headache.
    Your body’s working overtime, trying to replace the blood it’s lost .
    Thinking back on Vaughn’s diagnosis, I remembered—belatedly—that at lunch, Elliot had mentioned something about one of their brothers being a vet. I snorted.
    I passed out, and Skylar took me to a vet.
    The irony of the situation—that maybe I was an animal, no more human than the things I fought—did not escape me.
    Not—animal.
    “The bloodsucking parasite doesn’t think I’m an animal,” I said, my voice dry. “I feel so very comforted.”
    “Kali?” Belatedly, I realized that my father had stuck his head into my room, and I was torn between wondering what he wanted now and hoping that he hadn’t overheard me talking to thin air.
    “What do you want?” I asked, too tired to sugarcoat things and pretend that everything was okay between us, or that there was even an us to speak of at all.
    “I … erm …” My father rarely stuttered. Eloquence was kind of his thing, so the fact that he was stumbling over his words drew my attention more than the fact that he was here. “I just wanted you to know that I didn’t call Paul Davis,” he said. “If you and Bethany want to get together—that is, if you decide you want to—well, it’s up to you, okay?”
    This was about as close as he could possibly come to apologizing, and saying okay without meeting his eyes was as close as I could come to accepting it. A few seconds passed with neither one of us saying anything else, and then he turned to leave.
    “Night, Dad,” I called after him. There was a chance—and I didn’t know how big it was—that this might be the last conversation the two of us ever had. I owed it to him to say something , even if it wasn’t what I wanted to be saying.
    “Good night, Kali.”

    Around two in the morning, I finally fell asleep, but the only thing waiting for me in my dreams was more of the same: more monsters, more doubts, a nagging feeling that I was missing something, that I was screwing everything up.
    I dreamed I was dreaming.
    I dreamed I was dying.
    I dreamed I was covered in blood.
    I turned over in bed, my white sheets dyed in shades of red, and there was a man there, staring at me, drenched in shadow from head to toe. There was something beautiful about his features, something deadly, and his eyes …
    Those eyes.
    They were the color of tarnished silver, set deep in a face that wasn’t human, but wasn’t not.
    He reached out and touched me, trailing shadows everywhere he went, and I breathed in the darkness.
    Breathed it out.
    I dreamed I was dreaming.
    I dreamed I was dying.
    I woke up covered in blood.

11

    I woke in darkness. Before I could scream, someone pounced on me, covering my mouth with two hands. Without even thinking about it, I grabbed the person by the wrists, digging my fingers into her flesh. I would have kept squeezing as hard as my still-human hands could manage, but at some point, I came out of the