by Stacey Jay
“This guy talks more than you do,” Ethan mumbled as he opened the door and grabbed my bright red peacoat.
“Thanks a lot.” I shrugged my coat on and reached past Ethan for my scarf.
I got it that he was annoyed, but no need to take it out on me. I couldn’t help my job any more than he could. So I drew a larger number of Unsettled than the average girl, and I hadn’t dared ask another Settler to cover for me because I wanted to save up my favors for nights the pom squad had to dance at basketball games. It wasn’t my fault I was still in high school. And balancing stage-two responsibilities was a lot harder than stage three—the level Ethan had been since his nineteenth birthday. He only had to be on duty a couple nights a week, and the rest of the time he could shut off his power and not worry about drawing the Undead.
I, however, was not granted such luxuries . . . even though I knew I could figure out how to turn my power off if I tried. I was abnormally advanced, after all.
Unfortunately, I’d also landed myself in an abnormally large amount of trouble a few months back while trying to get ahead, so now I was trying to walk the straight and narrow. Seemed like my boyfriend, who worked Protocol and was basically a Settler cop, should have been a little more supportive of that!
“I was just kidding.” He rubbed my back as I wrapped my scarf around my neck. “You know I love listening to you ramble.”
He kissed me on the cheek and I melted. I couldn’t stay mad at him. “Then come with us. I’m sure Cliff wouldn’t mind. He seems friendly.”
“Too friendly,” Ethan whispered. “I’m not sure he’s giving you the real four-one-one on why he left his grave. Maybe he’s holding back until you two are alone.”
“Or maybe he’s just . . . different?”
“Oh, he’s different all right, but not that different. He knows your name, Meg, and didn’t you say the only Unsettled who have known who you are right off the bat were—”
“The ones who died. Badly.” I cut him off before he could mention “murder.”
In the past few months I’d had a couple of kids who were murdered by black magic practitioners. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to describe the practitioner very well, probably due to the trauma of being murdered and all that. They were the ones who knew who I was before I made the proper introductions. And no one, not even the most experienced Elders over at Settlers’ Affairs headquarters, could guess how the dead kids knew who I was. It was a mystery, like so many other things about me.
For instance, why I had this incredible power and whether or not I’d be able to control it sufficiently to lead a relatively average life. Or why I still felt like I was living on borrowed time even though the people raising killer zombies had been locked away. No matter how normal I acted in front of Ethan and my parents, I still wasn’t my old self . . . and I was beginning to think I never would be.
With those cheery thoughts in mind, I turned back to Cliff. “Okay, let’s get strolling.” Might as well get him taken care of and back in his grave, and maybe Ethan and I would have a few minutes to talk before my ten-o’clock-on-school-nights curfew.
“Call me if you need me,” Ethan shouted as Cliff and I set off across the pasture.
“You won’t need him. I’m harmless, I promise,” Cliff said in a chummy whisper. “Not like the others.”
I huddled deeper into my coat as a weird shiver raced down my spine. “The others? What others?”
“The . . . others. The . . . um . . . ” His smile faded and he looked as confused as I felt, but seconds later his grin returned. “You know what? I can’t remember. Let’s just forget it and enjoy the walk. Cool?”
“Cool,” I said. But it wasn’t.
Nothing about the way this night was ending was cool. But then, what else was new?
CHAPTER 2
“Wow, Megan, looks like winter break really didn’t agree with you.”
“Thanks, Monica. Nice to see you too.” I grinned, determined not to let the Monicster get to me. It was only our first afternoon back at practice. I couldn’t let her evilness wear me down until at least February.
“Really, you could pack luggage in those bags.” Monica Parsons wiggled into the girls’ locker room like it was filled with guys ready to ogle her tiny size-two body instead of a bunch of girls changing into workout clothes for after-school basketball, cheer, and pom squad practice. “How is it possible to look so rough after a three-week vacation?”
As if she didn’t know. She’d been training right next to Ethan and me every day down at the Settlers’ Affairs compound. Monica was as obsessed as Ethan was with becoming an Enforcer candidate, even thinking she would be the first Settler to be accepted right out of high school.
She was delusional, of course, but I’d resisted the urge to tell her so. We’d finally forged an uneasy truce after helping contain a bunch of black-magically raised zombies last fall, and I was doing my best to keep the peace. She was captain of the pom squad, after all, and we were both bound to keep our identity as Settlers of the Dead top secret from the human world.
Still, that didn’t mean I had to put up with her crap.
“I don’t know, Monica, how is it possible to look so ho-like in jeans and a sweatshirt?” I asked, my tone sweet as honey. Shocked gasps erupted from London and Alana, the Monicster’s partners in crime. Well, the ones left over after her ex-BFF, Beth, had gotten locked up for seriously creepy voodoo . . .
“It’s easy.” Monica tossed her long, silky, nearly black hair over her shoulder, clearly taking my insult as a compliment. “What’s baffling is how you manage to make a perfectly cute miniskirt look so fugly.”
“It’s the cable tights.” Alana smacked her gum. “They’re totally short bus.”
“Short bus means retarded, idiot,” Monica said, turning on Alana with a critical glare.
“Right, those tights are retarded. Right?”
“It’s pretty wrong to make fun of retarded people, Alana.” London twisted her long auburn hair into a knot on the top of her head. “It’s not like they can help it.”
“Exactly. What’s up with you today?” Monica shook her head sadly, obviously disappointed with the insult quality of her third-in-command.
Assuming I’d been forgotten now that Monica had found someone else to pick on, I wiggled into my black spandex dance pants, hoping I could get changed before I attracted any more attention.
“And what’s up with that bruise, Megan? Has Ethan been beating you?” Monica asked, honing in on the giant black mark on my thigh. “That’s totally going to show if we wear the black uniforms on Saturday night.”
“I’ll cover it up with base,” I said, ignoring her questions.
For some reason, I couldn’t think of a reasonable lie. All I could think about was the way Cliff had freaked out when I’d fallen down last night during our walk. We hadn’t made it ten feet from the car when I’d tripped on a frozen cow patty—aka a large lump of bovine excrement—and bitten it big-time. Just average klutzy Megan stuff, but Cliff had been really worried, acting like the world would end if something bad happened to Megan Berry. It had creeped me out. Especially considering he still hadn’t copped to any unfinished business besides a burning desire to traipse around in a winter wonderland.
Despite his sweetness, I’d been glad to get Cliff back in his crypt, all tucked in for a nice, long rest after his first—and final—walk in the snow.
“Makeup will rub off on the spandex.” Monica sighed. “We’re just going to have to wear the white and gold. Write that down for me, Alana.”
Alana jumped to do her evil mistress’s bidding while the rest of us finished changing. Or tried to finish changing. It wasn’t easy, what with the twelve cheerleaders standing in a knot by the sinks, whispering and staring.
What was up with everyone today? You’d think three weeks off would make people less cranky. Apparently not.
But then, the cheerleaders and the pom squad had been enemies ever since the incep
tion of the much more awesome dance team—aka pom squad—ten years ago. I personally believed the animosity stemmed from the fact that the cheerleaders were jealous that all they got to do was yell and jump around on the sidelines, while the pom squad commanded center floor and the entire crowd’s attention during halftime when we did our latest routine. I mean, our superiority was clear to anyone with half a brain—which even most of the cheerleaders possessed.
I whipped my sweater off and was reaching for my sports bra just as giggles erupted from the cheer huddle, freezing me in place. I managed not to flinch or hunch my shoulders, but it wasn’t easy. Old habits died hard, and I’d been the weirdly flat girl for too long to be able to strip with complete confidence even now that I had something up top. Penny, another sophomore on the pom squad, and a couple of the basketball girls also froze mid-strip, making me suspect I wasn’t the only one with body-image concerns.
Monica, however, had no such issues.
“Is there a reason you and your clones are staring at us, Dana?” She unhooked her bra and flung it into her locker, then took her time grabbing her black sports bra from the top shelf.
“We’re not staring, we were just . . . observing.” Dana, the barely five-foot captain of the cheer squad stepped slightly in front of her clones.
Normally I wouldn’t judge, but Monica was right. The cheerleaders were eerily similar. Every last one of them sported shoulder-length blond hair—some natural, but most from the bottle. Even Lee Chin, the Asian girl, was a blonde, as were Kimberly and Kate, the African-American twins.
“Well, I’m not really down for a strip show right now, so why don’t you take your observation elsewhere?” Monica tugged her sports bra on and began pulling her hair back into a ponytail. “Maybe you could try, I don’t know, practicing?”
Alana laughed and a few other pom girls stifled giggles. The cheerleaders were notoriously lazy, thinking that a bunch of backflips could make up for the fact that they spent most of their practices touching up each other’s toenails and that no one would notice if they misspelled “Cougars” during the fight song. They’d managed to win the state cheerleading competition the year before, but only because Dana’s aunt’s friend’s daughter was one of the judges. Otherwise, not even an unholy deal with the devil could have made up for all their slacking.
“Oh, we’ve been practicing. We’ve been working on new routines all winter break, enough to keep the crowd fired up through the entire basketball season.”
“Fired up?” London muttered, making everyone giggle this time. Even me, I admit it.
The cheerleaders were like time travelers from a different age, a gentler time when people still said things like “gee whiz” and “golly” and meant it. It would have been kind of cute, if they weren’t our sworn enemies.
“Yep, fired up and inspired to cheer the Cougars on to another state championship.” Dana smiled and fisted her hands on her hips, every muscle going tight as if she were already standing on top of a pyramid. It made me wonder if it hurt when she sat down, like, if her muscles got sore from having her butt perpetually clenched. “And Principal Watkins and the booster club are totally behind us. They’ve got something special planned for the opening of the new gym, and they think it’s a great idea for the cheerleaders to take their turn on the court at halftime.”
A hush fell over our side of the room and the last of the lingering basketball players hustled out in a hurry. They were unusually tall and more athletic than the average girl, but they still knew a catfight in the making when they saw one.
After all, this wasn’t just any basketball game. It was the first game of the season and the first game ever to be played on the new gym floor. This game was going to be broadcast on Little Rock’s local station, photographed by every paper in the area, and generally be the biggest deal Carol, Arkansas, had seen in a long time. We’d prepped a dance routine more than worthy of the event. The cheerleaders trying to take over halftime was tantamount to replacing a famous-name Broadway star with some no-name understudy with badly conditioned hair.
It just wasn’t going to happen, not if we had anything to say about it.
“What?” Monica’s ice-blue eyes narrowed. “I’m not sure I heard you correctly.”
“It’s already been decided.” Dana flipped her blond ponytail and grinned, making her twin dimples pop. “We’re going to be the ones performing at halftime this basketball season.”
“No, you’re the ones who’ve been smoking crack,” Alana said, stepping up her insult game. “The pom squad owns halftime. Everyone knows that.”
“Not Principal Watkins or the booster club,” Dana said with a smug little grin. “They agree with the rest of us and would like to see something a little more wholesome on our court.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” London asked.
“It means we’re tired of watching a bunch of stripper wannabes roll around on the floor for five minutes every game,” Kimberly said.
“It’s trashy,” her twin, Kate, seconded. “Boys from other schools think Carol girls are easy.”
“It’s no wonder.” Dana’s eyes raked over every one of us, silently judging our bare midriffs and tight spandex pants. “The Slut Squad gives us all a bad rep.”
Oh no she didn’t.
Moving with a single-minded purpose, the rest of the pom squad filed in behind Monica, lending our silent support to our captain. If they wanted to rumble, we’d rumble, by God. I’d never scratched faces or pulled hair before, but I was getting in the mood to.
Or maybe Monica and I could try out some of our new moves on the platinum brats. Our Enforcer training had included hours of training in self-defense and combat strategy as well as spell work. It seemed a shame for all that to go to waste now that the black-magically raised zombie situation around Carol was under control.
“So you’re telling me Principal Watkins and the boosters did this without even notifying the captain of the pom squad?” Monica asked, her voice surprisingly cool and controlled. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Believe what you want. We’ll all see I’m telling the truth come Saturday when we take the court at halftime.” Dana nodded her head in that twitchy way she did right after giving the “ready, okay” that signaled her minions should begin a new cheer. “Come on, girls. We’d better go—Aaron said he found a top-secret place for us to practice.”
Aaron was the only dude cheerleader as well as the newest member of the squad. He was a junior, vice president of the Honor Society, cute in an all-American kind of way, and had naturally blond hair, so it wasn’t like he could help fitting in with the clones. But he was obviously a passenger on the cheerleader cruise liner of evil if he was scoping out “top-secret” practice locations.
What was with that? Like we were going to steal one of their lame routines? Between us we had over fifty years of combined dance training. We were the experts—they were the pretenders to the throne.
“What are we going to do?” Alana asked, as soon as the cheerleaders from heck had vacated the locker room.
“You’re going to hit the old gym and practice,” Monica said. “I’m going to hit Principal Watkins’s office and remind him how things work here at CHS.”
“Don’t you think you should put on a shirt first?” I asked, then immediately wished I’d kept my mouth shut. “I mean, if what she was saying about Watkins is true, then wouldn’t it pay to tone it down?”
Monica glared while I did my best not to cringe. Geez, she still scared me, even though I had stuff on her that would keep her from a full-out attack. She’d been dabbling in black magic last fall, in an attempt to steal Ethan away from the sophomore nobody who had somehow captured his attention. (The nobody would be me.)
I’d agreed not to tell Settlers’ Affairs about her journey to the dark side as long as she let me have a special tryout for the pom squad—since I’d missed the first one due to potentially deadly situations beyond my control. But now that I was on t
he squad, she couldn’t kick me off. I could, however, spill my guts to the Elders at SA and get her kicked out of Enforcer training. Not that I would, but it was a nice ace to have at times when Monica seemed primed to revert to her old Megan’s-life-destroying ways.
Times like this one, for example.
But instead of ripping me a new one, she smiled. “Megan, I think I know how to handle men—even men old enough to be my grandfather.” She pulled the ponytail holder from her hair, shaking her head until her glossy locks spilled over her shoulders in a sexy tangle.
How did she do that? Make it look so effortless?
“Okay, fine. I was just trying to help.”
“Well don’t. I don’t need . . .” She paused at the door and turned back to me with this little gleam in her eyes. I knew I was in trouble before she opened her mouth. “No, you know what? Helping is a good thing. We’re all sisters here, and we should help each other out.”
“Right! We must stand united against our common enemy,” I said, knowing Monica would get my insider reference.
We’d been forced to unite our powers before. Monica’s former BFF, Beth, and my BFF, Jess, had been special friends (um, okay girlfriends) and partners in a plan to kill me and Monica for causing Jess’s mom’s death when we were just kids. Which was a totally bogus charge. Jess’s mom had been raising the dead, and all Monica and I had done was work a reverto spell to send them back to their maker. We’d had no idea the zombies would munch on her until there was nothing left but bones.
But Jess and Beth didn’t care that we hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. They’d nearly killed me and Monica with a bunch of skeleton zombies. They’d even planned to film the event so they could enjoy the magic of our deaths again and again—the freaks. Sure, they were suffering for their evil now—Beth was in a mental institution in upstate New York and Jess was in SA prison and had been hospitalized twice for seizures brought on by working black magic—but the entire experience had still been pretty horrific.