Every Other Day by Jennifer Lynn Barnes Page B

fugue state my dream had left me in and recognized the person on top of me.
    “Bethany?”
    Half convinced I was still asleep, I stopped fighting, and Bethany pulled back to the foot of the bed, like she thought I might fly off the handle at any moment and go for her eyes.
    “What is your problem?” she huffed.
    “My problem?” I repeated dumbly. “You’re leering over me in the middle of the night, and you want to know what my problem is?”
    “You were having a nightmare,” Bethany retorted. “I was trying to wake you up.”
    “By smothering me to death?” My head felt like someone had taken a chain saw to the inside. I wasn’t feeling overly charitable.
    “You’re bleeding, Kali.” Bethany’s voice was matter-of-fact. “When I came in, you were clawing at the ouroboros . Your stomach’s a mess.”
    As soon as Bethany mentioned the ouroboros , I felt the sharp, burning sensation of cool air assaulting raw flesh. Even through the shadow-lit room, I could see that Bethany wasn’t exaggerating: I’d already bled through my shirt. Wincing as I pulled cotton away from the open wound, I sat up, trying to process.
    Bethany Davis had apparently broken into my house.
    I’d dreamed of something that wasn’t human, something that had eyes only for me.
    And while my dream-self had been making nice with Old Silver Eyes, my hands had apparently been trying to scratch their way through the chupacabra’s mark.
    Does not compute .
    “Bethany, what are you doing in my bedroom at”—I looked at the clock on my nightstand—“five forty-four in the morning? How did you even get in?”
    Bethany shrugged.
    “Forget it,” I said, deciding I had bigger things to worry about. “I don’t want to know.”
    We were getting close enough to dawn that I could almost taste the coming change. The idea that I might not die seemed disturbingly novel, like there was a bigger part of me than I’d realized that had believed, from the moment I’d decided to save Bethany, that it was all over for me.
    One hour and thirteen minutes .
    “Are you even listening to me?” Bethany’s pointed whisper broke into my thoughts, and I realized that I hadn’t heard a word she’d said.
    “We need to get out of here. Now.” Bethany crossed her arms over her chest. “Come on, Kali. Chop-chop.”
    “Bethany, it’s five forty-five in the morning. I slept maybe three hours last night, and I feel like someone’s coated my entire body in wet cement.” I wasn’t much of a morning person to begin with—and chupacabra possession wasn’t exactly helping the matter. “I just want to take a nice, long shower and forget that any of this ever happened.”
    “They were at my house, K.” Bethany’s words broke through the fog in my brain. She couldn’t meet my eyes, and in an uncharacteristically nervous gesture, she worried at the end of my comforter, rubbing it back and forth between manicured fingers. “That woman from school. Her little henchmen. I woke up in the middle of the night, and they were there. At first I thought they were looking for me, but then I heard my dad—he was talking to them, and it wasn’t about me.”
    “Okay,” I said, forcing my brain to wake up and process the situation. “What were they talking about?”
    Bethany angled her eyes upward, the comforter clutched in one hand. “Specimen retrieval.”
    Specimen .
    The word alone was enough to send a chill creeping across the back of my neck. I’d been raised in academia. I knew what people would do to get their hands on grant money, private funding, elite access. I could only imagine what those same people would do if they knew there was uncharted territory out there: a species they’d never studied, an impossibility no one had quantified.
    Me .
    “What kind of specimen?” My throat felt like sandpaper, the words catching as I pushed them out of my mouth.
    “The kind that can be injected into teenagers during random drug tests.” Bethany’s voice was