(School Slut)
P.S.: When they ask you what they’re going to ask you, say yes.
P.P.S.: Tell Elliot I love him—and to stop being a tool.
I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, so I just handed the letter to Elliot and let him read.
“She wasn’t psychic,” he said. “She was just a kid.”
She was both, I thought, but I didn’t argue the point out loud. Instead, I thought of Bethany, whose father had been arrested. Bethany, who knew what it was like to carry someone else’s death on your shoulders for the rest of your life.
Bethany, who’d lost almost everything in the past few days.
“Elliot,” I said, surprised at how clear and steady my voice felt. “Quit being a tool.”
The decision to take hellhounds off the endangered species list was a long time coming—whole lot of good that did me. Hunting them was still illegal; the only difference was now there were more to hunt.
“Here, puppy, puppy, puppy.”
I really shouldn’t have been doing this. If I got bloodstains on my graduation gown, Bethany was going to kill me, and Elliot was going to laugh. Adjusting the cap on my head, I spun my knife lazily in one hand.
Closer. You’re getting closer.
If someone had seen me from a distance, all they would have seen was a normal girl, just graduated from high school.
A girl who lived bit by bit and day by day.
I closed my eyes, tasting sulfur on the wind and waiting. Here, puppy, puppy, puppy.
Catching a hint of something in the air, I jerked to a stop. This was the place, but there was something … off.
And that was when I realized that the hellhound was already dead.
“Hello, Kali.”
I whirled around and found myself face-to-face with eyes I would have recognized anywhere: silver eyes, fringed in black.
Eighteen months. It had been eighteen months of radio silence in my head. Eighteen months without a word, and now, he was here.
“Hey, Zev,” I said. I nodded to the hellhound on the ground, noting the distance between its body and its head. “Just for the record, the next one’s mine.”
Zev smiled. “I think that can be arranged.” He raked his gaze over my body, and then his eyes drifted slowly to the side. I turned and followed his gaze to two men standing at the edge of the park.
They were wearing suits.
I stopped twirling my knife and took a single step forward before I realized that one of the men looked very familiar.
“Reid?”
Skylar’s brother nodded. He and the other man started walking toward us, and belatedly, I realized that the two of them—and Zev—moved like a team.
“Congratulations,” Reid said, gesturing toward my cap and gown. “Got any plans for after graduation?”
I’d been entertaining the idea of taking a few classes at the University That Shall Not Be Named, but as I glanced from Zev to Reid, something clicked inside of me, and I started spinning the knife in my hands again.
Zev was a vampire. Reid was FBI. And according to something I’d once overheard the mother I hadn’t seen in eighteen months saying, Chimera wasn’t exactly one of a kind.
PS: When they ask you what they’re going to ask you, say yes.
I brought my eyes to rest on Zev’s. “What exactly did you guys have in mind?”
Take a sneak peek at
Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s latest novel
Available January 2013
Prologue
One week earlier …
Nine letters. Two words. He refused to think of them as a name. With detached objectivity, his steady hands set the thin white paper, with its evenly spaced black lettering, to the side.
He’d done this before.
One, Two, Three …
He’d do this again. More needles, more knives. More evenly spaced black letters that carved themselves, blood-red, into the recesses of his mind.
The only way you can make a difference in this world is to kill.
From the moment he’d opened the envelope and seen the name, the pictures; from the moment he’d committed those nine letters to memory, the outcome had been a foregone conclusion. His target had been marked. Death was coming.
So be it.
1
Have a great summer! Stay sweet! Have a great summer and stay sweet!
Claire Ryan had been reading permutations of those words in the pages of her yearbooks for almost as long as she could remember, but for some reason—either optimism or stupidity, she wasn’t sure which—she’d thought that high school would be different. That she would be different. That by the end of freshman year, someone would have bothered to learn her name, invited her over after school, or at the very least asked to copy her geometry homework. But even the most egregious cheaters had remained as oblivious to Claire’s existence as ever, and by the first day of her fifteenth summer, all she had to show for the year was a perfect attendance record and a yearbook filled with sugary, meaningless clichés.