Zombies Sold Separately

by Cheyenne McCray

  “Whoa.” Adam sounded like he had a hard time believing me. Couldn’t blame him. Wasn’t like every day you met someone who was two thousand years old. “So will you live that long?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “My mother is human, so I could take after that half of my makeup and only live as long as a human would.” I hadn’t really given it a lot of thought. “Or I could take after my father and live for who knows how long. Maybe it’ll be a combination—live longer than humans do, but eventually die.”

  “So your mother…”

  “Humans live longer in Otherworld,” I said. “She could make it a century or two, but eventually she will pass on.”

  “Tomorrow you’ll get to meet a bunch of true mortals.” Adam had a smile in his voice. “Can’t wait to introduce you to my parents, and my brother and sister.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.” A smile was in my tone, too.

  “Need to get going,” Adam said. “I’ll give you a call later.”

  “See you,” I said.

  “See you.”

  I disconnected and set the phone on my desk. Olivia was looking at me. “Adam doesn’t really know a whole lot about you, does he,” she stated.

  “A little of my life at a time goes a long way,” I said.

  “Sure does,” she said as my phone rang again.

  This time the screen showed RODÁN. I frowned, then realized I wasn’t really mad anymore. Maybe a little, but a part of me realized where he had been coming from, even if it was wrong.

  “Nyx,” Rodán said when I answered. “Lawan is missing.”

  “What?” My heart started pounding and my throat grew dry. “Did anyone see anything?”

  “Lawan left to track her territory last night,” he said.

  “The Financial District,” I said.

  “She never checked in this morning.” Concern was in Rodán’s voice. “I sent out several PTF agents to investigate her territory and the surrounding areas, as well as her apartment.”

  “The Paranormal Task Force isn’t as thorough as a Night Tracker.” I pushed my chair away from my desk. “I’ll go look for her now.”

  “I didn’t finish.” Rodán’s voice didn’t sound so calm this morning. “The PTF did find bodies when they were looking for Lawan. Several paranorms. Dopplers.”

  Cold washed over my skin. “Where?”

  He told me the location and I held my hand to my belly, pressing against the sick feeling I’d had ever since we discovered that Zombies were behind the massacres.

  When I told him I’d head there now, Rodán said, “I need you and Olivia to run down all of the angles and leads you can on your end. Pick two Trackers from your team to investigate the scene.”

  “Are you trying to hold me back, Rodán?” I said as I continued to stand at my desk.

  “No,” Rodán said. “I need you where you are because only you and Olivia can dig deep enough to find answers and angles that no one else can see.”

  It didn’t appease me, but I didn’t argue. What he said was true. We were the only ones who could do what needed to be done.

  “Angel, Ice, and Joshua,” I said. “I’ll call them now.”

  I didn’t know if Dragons needed time to recover so I wasn’t going to call Colin. I’d ask him about it later. And Penrod was a Sprite, so him in daylight around norms? Not happening.

  My jaws hurt from how hard I clenched my teeth before I spoke. “We’ve got to find Lawan.”

  “We will,” Rodán said before he disconnected the call.

  I stared at my phone and remembered how Lawan had looked last night and that she thought she was being watched. Had someone been watching her?

  “What happened to Lawan?” Olivia’s firm, but concerned voice cut into my thoughts.

  I told her everything Rodán had said to me.

  “Damn.” Olivia shook her head. “We’ve got to find Lawan. Those sonofabitch Zombies better not have hurt her.”

  I called Joshua, Angel, and Ice and told them what they needed to do.

  When I finished I sat down hard in my chair. “It’s happening here. Just like Otherworld.”

  The clack of Olivia’s keyboard was loud as she stared at her monitor. “Not only do we need to look for patterns, but we need to see if there have been a higher number of unexplained disappearances than usual.”

  “I’ll search the Internet for mentions of missing persons via reports, articles, et cetera,” I said.

  Olivia’s gaze flicked from one side of her screen to the other. “I’m accessing police reports now.”

  It didn’t take long before I realized something very strange was going on. I kept up my search, and the more I did, the more I found.

  After a good two hours, my eyes were crossing.

  “I think I’ve had it for the day,” Olivia said at the same time I came to the same conclusion. “At least as far as staring at a computer screen for hours.”

  “Agreed.” I motioned for her to check out the information on my monitor. “Take a look at this.”

  She pointed toward a wall where I had mounted swords, daggers, bows with quivers of diamond-tipped arrows, and other weapons forged by the Dark Elves. I looked at the wall and back at her.

  “You keep promising you’re going to get rid of those dust collectors so that we’ll have room for high tech instead of medieval,” she said. “Then we’ll be able to put all of the information we’ve gathered in one place to review together.” She shook her head. “Dark Ages around here.”

  “Believe me, I know Dark Ages and this isn’t it. You should try living in Otherworld.” I leaned back in my chair and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “As far as remodeling, the cases we’ve taken on over the past couple of months have kept me—us—a little busy.”

  “Demons, Werewolves, Vampires, Zombies, oh my,” Olivia said in a singsong tone.

  Instinctively I flinched at the word “Zombie.” Had to stop doing that. “Do me a favor and don’t say the ‘Z’ word for a while,” I said.

  “What? Zombie?” She batted her eyes in a look of innocence. “You don’t want me to say Zombie? Because if you don’t want me to say Zombie, I’ll try really, really hard not to say Zombie.”

  “You’re evil,” I said.

  She cackled like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. “At least I’m not a Zombie.”

  I narrowed my eyes and glared at her. “I’ll find out if it can be arranged.”

  “Now that we’re through talking about Zombies…” she said, and I glared more. “… Let’s talk about that wall. If you don’t take care of getting what we need, I will.”

  “Enjoy.” I waved off her complaint and threat and was very happy to have her stop teasing me. “I’ll make sure the weapons are moved, you take care of the rest.”

  Olivia gave me one of her devious smiles. “Just what I’ve been waiting for.”

  “Without going overboard,” I hurried to add, realizing my mistake and knowing it was too late to go back.

  “Don’t worry.” Her expression was one of someone who’d just been given the key to the Golden City. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  Groan.

  She tapped the side of her head. “Starting with headsets. I can’t believe you haven’t invested in them sooner.”

  “In the meantime.” I gave my screen a half-turn so that Olivia could see it better when she came up beside me. “Take a look at this.”

  I ignored the smug look on her face in her triumph over bringing the firm’s technology up to date and I started pointing to the various windows on my screen.

  “All of this is amazing,” I said. “Here we have a Navy admiral who couldn’t be found for two days and then he was back. He claimed to have been ill.”

  “Sounds familiar…” Olivia said.

  “This is Bill Huntington, a Fortune 500 exec who is worth a few billion. Give or take several million or so.” I looked at Olivia. “He was missing for two days. No one had any idea what had happened. Fam
ily members were prepared to receive a ransom note.”

  “Then he showed up after a two-day absence,” Olivia said. “Said he was ill.”

  “Right.” I nodded. “It gets interesting when government officials start to disappear, then reappear.”

  “You’re kidding me.” Olivia’s triumph in her victory over getting to do a high-tech makeover on the office seemed to be forgotten for the moment. “Who?”

  “Senator Dan Bourne to start with.” I rocked back in my chair. “Along with foreign ambassador Deb Ludlum and U.S. Representative Jason Roberts.”

  Olivia narrowed her brows. “Any others?”

  “In our very own nation’s capital,” I said.

  “Washington, D.C.” Olivia shook her head, amazement on her features. “This is crazy. Nuts.”

  “Beyond crazy.” I pointed to four more windows on my computer screen. “Each of these windows has information on a high-ranking official or prominent businessman or businesswoman. A judge, a bank executive, an Army general, and a police commissioner. There are also the articles on the same attacks we’ve been seeing. Not always but often the Zombie attacks are close to where the disappearance occurred.”

  I continued, “The fact that these attacks started at the same time as the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of these individuals, and the close proximity of the attacks often to the disappearance, tells me something.” I frowned as something clenched inside me. “My gut tells me that these cases are related.”

  “And no one has noticed this pattern of Houdini acts?” Olivia said. “That’s unbelievable.”

  I picked up a pencil and tapped the end on a bright pink sticky notepad. “When I dug deeper, I discovered that each case has been kept very hush-hush. I believe that someone in the government knew of the disappearances but didn’t want to panic people. It reminds me the way the government treated the UFOs in this world. Cover up and shut up.”

  “Found similar information in police reports and other databases.” Olivia jerked her thumb toward her computer monitor. “Something bad is going down. I think it goes way beyond a few Zombie attacks.”

  “All of the cases have been spread so far apart that no one has been connecting the dots,” I said.

  “Consider the dots connected.” Olivia rocked back on her heels and put her hands in her back pockets. “Now to figure out if there are any more dots and what kind of picture we’ve just made.”

  “Hold on.” I got up from my chair and went to a map of the U.S. and one of New York City that we’d put up on one wall some time ago.

  “Hold onto what?” Olivia said in her smartass tone.

  I opened a drawer in the map table beneath the maps and rummaged through the drawer until I found one for Washington, D.C. I pinned that map on the wall next to the one for New York City.

  “Speaking of dots.” I stared at the maps. “I’d like to see what the patterns look like on these.”

  “That’s something else we’ll be able to remodel when I take over,” Olivia said and I rolled my eyes. “With a wall of monitors, we can bring up several electronic maps at a time. Forget this manual stuff.”

  “For now we’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way.” I reached the wall and picked up a pushpin from a tray on top of the map table. “Start giving me locations.”

  Olivia did and I pushed pins in each area where we’d found reports of attacks. “New York City and D.C., mostly around financial and government centers.” I frowned. “With a few random areas.”

  “Those aren’t random areas,” Olivia said. “Those are places where paranorms tend to hang out.”

  She was right. “So we need to focus our teams on these areas in the city. Rodán can notify the D.C. Trackers.”

  I returned to my desk, planted my palms to either side of my monitor. I looked at the computer screen then Olivia again. “Could Lawan’s disappearance have anything to do with whatever happened to all of these people?”

  “If she shows up in two days claiming to have been ill, then we’ll see,” Olivia said.

  I straightened and she moved aside as I walked around my desk and started pacing the length of our office. My heels clicked on the tile floor and Olivia’s chair squeaked as she returned to her chair.

  “I do need to sit down with my father and have him give me more details about what happened in Otherworld twenty-two years ago,” I said. “I don’t remember a whole lot about it.”

  Olivia’s tone was dry. “That should be fun, getting King Ciar to tell you that kind of information.”

  She’d never met my father but she knew enough about him from me that she had a pretty good idea of just how difficult that task might be.

  I touched my collar as I paced. “And to get him to talk with me about Tristan will be even harder.

  “It started out slow in Otherworld, I think.” I continued pacing as I spoke. “But things escalated. Got worse.”

  “What happened that made the problem go away in Otherworld?” Olivia asked.

  “I don’t know.” I moved my hand away from my collar. “Not long after Tristan … was gone … it stopped. Just stopped.”

  “According to our research, I think it’s possible we won’t be so lucky.” Olivia tapped her computer monitor before she went on.

  “Humans don’t have magic like you do in Otherworld. That might have been why it stopped,” she said. “You had ways there of fighting the Zombies and whatever was causing the disappearances. Those skills and abilities your people have in Otherworld could have chased off whatever was responsible for the deaths and missing persons.”

  “That’s one theory.” I wiped my palms on my slacks as I slowly crossed the room and then back again. “I agree that something was different in Otherworld than it is in this Earth Otherworld. I need more information to give us a better idea of what happened there and what we’re looking at here.”

  “Regardless of what you learn from your father,” she said as she started tapping a red pencil on her desk, “I really believe we’re on the cusp of an epidemic.”

  “You could be right.” I stopped pacing and looked at Olivia. “If you are, we could very well be running out of time.”

  THIRTEEN

  Friday, December 24

  “I don’t know if I can do this.” I crossed my arms beneath my breasts as I stared at myself in the mirror. “What if Adam’s family doesn’t like me?”

  My reflection didn’t answer, of course, and I brushed down the lines of my simple plum Armani jersey dress with my palms and discovered my hands were shaking.

  Nerves made me feel like Faeries were being juggled in my belly. A lot like the Sprite juggler had done when he was in the talent competition. Yep. Spinning, colorful Faeries tucked into ball shapes and releasing sparkling Faerie dust as they tumbled.

  I thought I was going to be sick.

  I tracked down Metamorphs, rogue Werewolves, Vamps, Demons, and any other kind of bad paranorm there was … but I was scared to death to meet Adam’s family and see a few norms at a wedding reception.

  Adam’s familiar knock sent another burst of tingling through my abdomen, but this one was caused by excitement at seeing him rather than almost terror at meeting his family.

  My four-inch heels clicked on the wood flooring as I went to the door. I’d gone all out when I went shopping for an outfit for the reception. A princess had to dress her very best when meeting her boyfriend’s family for the first time.

  “So beautiful,” Adam said the moment he got a look at me. He stepped through the doorway, brought me into his arms, and kissed me. “You look unbelievable.”

  I felt the press of his suit against my body as he held me. When he raised his head he was smiling and I smiled back at him.

  As I stepped away, I ran my gaze over him from the shine of his black dress shoes to his tamed brown hair. “I’ve never seen you dressed up like this.” I ran my finger along the lapel. “You look amazing.”

  Then I gave him an evil grin. “F
irst chance I get, though, I’m going to mess up your hair. It’s too perfect.” I stopped and reached for his hands. “Do we need to go over my ‘story’ in case they ask?”

  Adam brought my hands to his mouth and kissed my knuckles. “We’ll keep it as simple as we can.”

  “I work as an assistant to a private investigator, which is how we met.” I started to recite the story we came up with. “If they ask who, I give them Olivia’s name and say she’s not in the book, takes referrals only.”

  “Yes.” Adam brought me close to him. “Your parents just moved from New York City to Alaska.”

  “Anchorage,” I said. “And I haven’t been there yet to see their new place but plan to soon.”

  “You grew up right here in the city and went to a private school for girls,” Adam said.

  I laughed. “Okay. I know just the school. But then you rescue me so that I don’t have to answer more questions.”

  “Get your coat,” he said still smiling. “It’s cold as hell—I mean it’s cold out there.”

  The cold wouldn’t bother me that much, but I grabbed one of my long dress coats from my closet. I had already selected a dressy clutch to carry my ID, credit cards, and cash in before going back into the living room where Adam was waiting.

  We closed the door behind us and he took my arm and walked with me down the steps.

  Adam had parked on the street in front of the apartment building. Before I could start to walk down the wet sidewalk, he scooped me up in his arms.

  I gave a little cry of surprise and instinctively wrapped my arms around his neck. He carried me to his SUV and I laughed. I didn’t argue that I could walk on my own. It was nice being held by him. Strangely it made me feel secure, protected.

  Once he had me settled in my seat and he was in his, Adam pulled his SUV on the road and drove it the short distance to West Fifty-eighth Street.

  When he neared the Hudson Hotel my stomach pitched. “The wedding reception is at the Hudson?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t.