Every Other Day by Jennifer Lynn Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

words out loud, more to fill the silence and empty space before me than for the benefit of any audience. “Arm’s still slashed up, though, and I feel …”
    Awful .
    Sluggish .
    Violated .
    Aware .
    Of all of the answers on the tip of my tongue, the last one was the truest—and the most disconcerting. I’d learned the hard way to pay attention to my surroundings, but I’d never once felt so aware of my own body, like I was wearing it for the first time.
    Like it was wearing me.
    “Do you feel like a knife-toting freak with a hero complex? Because, no offense, but evidence would suggest that you probably should.”
    Despite myself, I jumped. There was enough going on inside my head that somehow, I’d neglected to realize that I wasn’t the only person lying on one of these criminally uncomfortable cots.
    “God, I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up. I managed to talk the nurse out of calling your dad. And mine. If anyone asks, you always get light-headed at that time of the month, and you cut your arm when you passed out.”
    For someone who’d been on a downward spiral toward death a half hour before, Bethany Davis looked remarkably calm and collected as she propped herself up on both elbows, her red hair streaming down her back like she’d lifted the pose from some kind of sunscreen ad.
    I processed her words and responded. “You didn’t tell the nurse I’d been, I don’t know, bitten by a chupacabra ?”
    I wasn’t big on confrontation—at least not with humans—but Bethany must have known as well as I did that the first few hours after a person was bitten were an open window for treatment. Anyone who’d seen the travesty that was Three Days to Live could tell you that until the ouroboros appeared on a patient’s body, modern science could theoretically extract and contain the chupacabra. I wasn’t exactly the poster child for Fans of Modern Science, and the last thing I wanted was an overzealous doctor turning me into a case study in the New England Journal of Preternatural Medicine , but Bethany had no way of knowing any of that.
    As far as she was concerned, I was just an ordinary girl. A knife-toting freak whose hero complex had just saved her life. The least she could have done was make an attempt at saving mine.
    “Kali.” Bethany’s voice was quiet, her tone soft, and she caught her pink lips between pearly white teeth, like the motion would keep the words she was about to say inside her mouth, keep them from being true. “Sweetie, look at your stomach.”
    I knew what I was going to see before I glanced down at the bit of midriff peeking out over the band of my dark-wash jeans. A member of the cheerleading squad had just called me “sweetie.”
    This could not possibly be good.
    “A snake. Eating its own tail.” I said the words out loud to make them matter less. The symbol that had appeared as black ink on the small of Bethany’s back was golden against the gentle bronze of my own skin. Even though I could only see the tip of the ouroboros , I could suddenly feel the full measure of the symbol, like someone was tracing a fingernail lightly around its edge.
    “I would have told them.” Bethany met my gaze and held it. “As soon as I woke up, I would have told them to get you to a hospital or my dad’s lab ASAP if I’d thought it would do any good, but I saw the ouroboros , and I knew that it wouldn’t.”
    I couldn’t tear my eyes from the mark, couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for the fact that it had appeared only moments after I’d been bitten, when the incubation period was supposed to last hours or days.
    This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.
    “So what’s the plan?” Bethany asked.
    “The plan?”
    She gave me a look. “Kali, please. No messiah complex in the world is going to make someone like you take on a death sentence for someone like me. You deeply suspected the chupacabra would take the trade—even though