by Stacey Jay
I hadn’t had any success disabling living zombies on my own up until this point, but then, I’d never dared cast this way before. As I sent my power sweeping out toward the man chewing my leg, I held nothing back. I hit Willie with everything in me. I used every ounce of my Settler power as well as that curled, sleeping thread of dark energy I’d never dared use before.
I’d always been afraid to call upon that black force, what I now suspected was a legacy of my witch blood, but at the moment, I didn’t care. I didn’t care who got hurt; I didn’t care what karmic price I paid; I just wanted to destroy the thing that threatened me, to make Aaron and this man on top of me disappear. Forever.
No sooner had I recovered from the recoil of the reveto spell when the man’s mouth went slack and a shudder ran through his body. The smell of burning skin and hair filled the air, mingling with the odor of fresh blood wafting from Aaron and Cliff’s side of the roof. Then, slowly, Willie stood and turned back toward the one who had raised him, the one whose blood he had to taste to return to his rest.
Cliff-who had Aaron pinned to the ground-stood up and backed away, swiping at his bloodstained hands as he went.
“Thank God, I-no. No!” Aaron barely had time to get to his feet before Willie fell on him, his open mouth latching around the tear Cliff had made in Aaron’s arm.
Braid Dude’s jaw muscles clenched and blood gushed down his chin, but it didn’t seem to quiet him in the least. In fact, he only grew more frenzied, his fingers clawing at Aaron, knocking him backwards, the pair of them locked in a deadly embrace that ended a few short feet away when Aaron’s knees hit the wall surrounding the roof and they began to fall.
“No!” As soon as I realized what was happening, I shoved my back into the wall, pushed myself into a standing position, and ran, but it was too late. By the time I reached the edge, they’d had already smashed onto the pavement below.
“Oh my God.” Cliff joined me, leaning over to peer at the broken bodies. Neither of them was moving, and it didn’t look like they ever would again. “It happened so fast.”
I didn’t say anything, just stared down the seven stories to the ground, trying to come to terms with the fact that I was a murderer.
“This isn’t your fault,” Cliff said, sounding remarkably calm for a guy who had just ripped another person open right in front of me. But at least he pulled back before anyone was seriously hurt, let alone killed.
“No, it is. When I cast, I-I knew what I was doing.” I bit my lip and backed away from the edge. “I wanted to make them both disappear and-”
“You were only defending yourself.”
I turned to face Cliff, wondering why the trace of blood on his right cheek didn’t trouble me the way it usually would. Maybe I was turning into a monster, finally losing touch with whatever it was that made me a normal, freaked-out-by-bloodshed-and-death girl. “That man was innocent, and Aaron was-I could have figured something out… I didn’t have to kill them.”
“You didn’t kill them. Don’t do this to yourself. Aaron was trying to kill you. And that poor man looked like he’d been in a coma for a long time. Death was probably a blessing.”
“I don’t care! I still didn’t want to-”
“I know, I know.” Cliff brushed my hair out of my face, then turned me around to work on the knots binding my wrists behind my back, his touch as soft and gentle as always.
He’d just gone rabid zombie on a guy five minutes ago, and now he was back to playing the sweet, supportive friend. It was enough to freak me out. As soon as my hands were free, I wasted no time pulling away from him and spinning around.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.
“Like what? Like you’re a killer too?”
“I’ve never killed anyone and neither have you.” He sighed and swiped at his hands, wiping away the last of Aaron’s blood with a calm that only made my freak out worse.
“But you told me you’ve been feeding on me. How do I know you haven’t been chowing down on human flesh when I’m not around?”
“I’ve been feeding on your energy, your magic. Believe me, you’ve got plenty to spare.”
“I do not. I get dizzy when I’m around you.”
“I’m sorry, I’ll try not to take so much,” he said, his look growing harder. “But I’m not going to stop taking what I need to survive, and I’m not going back to my grave. We’re at the beginning of something bad, Megan. Something really bad.”
“We are, aren’t we?” I didn’t know exactly what Cliff was talking about, but I’d felt the same way for weeks. There was something bad coming, and my gut told me it was something more than Jess and her plans to kill me or raise a zombie army.
“We are. And you need me. That’s why I came back after I died, to help you. There are lots of people like me,” he said, then quickly added, “Well, not a lot, but more than you’d think.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “I thought you didn’t know what-”
“I didn’t, at first.” He glanced down at his feet, having the grace to look embarrassed for withholding information for once. “You know my vision the other night? A woman like me came to me in-”
“Like you?”
“Dead but… not,” he said, noticeably refusing to use the word zombie. “She explained what I am. She told me that when the balance of the world is threatened, seers don’t die. We come back to help the living, especially people like you who have the power to help more people than we ever could alone. I believed her, and I need you to believe me.”
“I do.” And, weirdly enough, I did. Just like my gut told me trouble was coming, it told me Cliff was an ally I needed on my side. Besides, hadn’t I more than learned my lesson about ignoring what this boy had to say? “I don’t really understand it all, but-”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to understand. You just have to trust me.”
“I do, and I should have listened.” I fought the shivers that threatened to overtake me as the horror of the past hour and a half set in. “Thank you for coming. If you hadn’t-”
“You saved yourself-all I did was provide a distraction. Besides, if I hadn’t messed up, you wouldn’t have been here in the first place. It’s my fault,” he said, pulling me in for a hug I appreciated, even if I had experienced a breakthrough about my true feelings for him and Ethan. Just friends or not, Cliff gave good hug. “I should have made you come to the river with me today.”
“You’re too nice, that’s your problem.” I pulled away and smiled.
“Probably my fatal flaw.” He returned my smile, but his grin only lasted a second. “Maybe everyone’s fatal flaw if we don’t get down to the water. I saw the place in my vision-it’s not far from the bridge, right next to downtown, and there are a lot of dead bodies resting there. It’s some sort of mass grave from the Civil War.”
“Aaron said he and Jess tricked the cheerleaders into forming a coven so they could raise an army of zombies. Guess they meant it literally,”
I said. “I’m guessing they’re going to attack downtown, make the Settlers expose what they really are and-”
“Start a zombie apocalypse. I know, I saw it,” he said, heading toward the stairs. I followed, being careful not to step in the circle of blood Aaron had drawn. “I also saw that you’re the only one who can stop it. You’re going to have to use your power. All your power. Like you did up here.”
Great. Well, at least he wasn’t talking about the heart thing anymore.
“And be ready to use the spell if we absolutely have to. The habeo are transit spell will help you get the… thing you’ll need.”
Scratch that, spoke too soon. Or thought too soon, anyway.
I didn’t say anything, but there was no way in heck I planned to work spells I didn’t know, especially ones involving human organs. I didn’t even want to dip my baby toe back into the dark place inside me. Not if there was any other way. That shadowy place was dangerous, to me and everyone else.
The sharp, pungent smell of rot and rodent droppings assaulted my nose as Cliff and I started down the stairs. It was crazy dark in the stairwell-the only light coming from a skylight-but I could still see well enough to pick my way around the debris. Thank God. The last thing I needed was to step on a used needle in my sock feet and contract some sort of human cooties. I had enough to handle with my supernatural virus.
Speaking of my supernatural virus…
“Aaron knew about my virus, and my dad,” I said as we circled around the fifth-floor landing and kept moving toward the ground. “But I didn’t get a name or anything.”
“Why do you need a name?” Cliff asked in this overly casual voice. “You don’t want to get to know the guy, do you?”
I sighed, not even wanting to ask what Cliff wasn’t telling me. “Maybe.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know.” Did I want to get to know my bio dad? I mean, if he was as rotten as my mom had made him out to be, it would probably only make me feel really bad to realize I was related to such a piece of scat. Make me wonder if I had inherited his evil along with his witch blood. But then, there was a part of me that said it was something I had to do. “I sort of feel like I should, even if I don’t want to.”
“Sounds pretty hard.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Maybe we’ll all die tonight and I won’t have to worry about it.”
“Very funny.”
“I try.” We pushed the door open at the bottom of the stairs and picked our way across the lobby, which was littered with signs of recent human habitation. Guess if you’re a homeless person, you don’t care about mouse droppings or seriously creepy atmosphere.
We stopped at the chain-link fence and Cliff pulled aside a broken section so I could duck through, while I briefly filled him in on the whole Aaron and Jess connection. “Aaron said he and Jess needed a coven of thirteen. With Aaron… gone, they’re not going to have enough people.”
“I don’t know.” Cliff slipped through the fence after me, and we shuffled slowly through the pitch-blackness near the entrance to the building. “I’m thinking we should still-”
A shadow detached itself from the side of the building and tackled Cliff before I could move a muscle to help him. Cliff cried out in surprise as he fell to the ground, but he rallied with a swiftness that was scary, going from zero to zombie in less than a second.
With a feral growl he bucked the black-clad figure off his back and flipped her over, pinning the flailing girl beneath him to the ground without any more effort than it took to pin a bug to a board
The girl screamed into Cliff’s face-which seemed to have no effect except to annoy the heck out of him, which wasn’t a good idea when he was in zombie mode-and let forth a stream of obscenities before finally stringing words together in sentence form. “What the hell are you?”
“Wait!” I grabbed Cliff’s arm and tugged, recognizing the “you are unworthy of licking my shoe” tone immediately. “It’s Monica. She’s a Settler, and a friend.”
Cliff made a surprised sound in the back of his throat. He still didn’t move, but at least he quit with the growling.
“Berry, call this thing off. Now!”
“Let her up, Cliff.”
Cliff slowly released Monica’s wrists and stood up. “Hey, you attacked me. I was just defending myself.”
“It talks. Like, really talks.” Monica scrambled to her feet and moved out of the shadows, darting freaked looks between me and Cliff. “What have you done, Megan? Did you raise-”
“I didn’t raise Cliff. He’s a normal Unsettled.” Monica’s arched eyebrows made it clear what she thought of that explanation. “Okay, so he’s not normal. I’ve tried to Settle him, but he won’t-” God, I really didn’t want to get into the zombie-psychic-who-is-feeding-off-my-energy-and-bad-things-are-going-to-happen-he-saw-it-in-his- vision stuff, so I chose the simplest explanation. “He’s a seer. He saw what was going to happen tonight and he’s trying to help me.”
“Right.” She laughed, a frustrated bark of a sound that revealed the level of her pissed-offedness.
“No, really. He is. He’s been helping me all week. We can trust him.”
Monica shot a slightly less suspicious look between me and Cliff before sighing in defeat. “Okay, fine. Whatever. We’ll talk about how much you suck for keeping secrets later.” She still didn’t look appeased, but evidently figured we didn’t have time to argue. “Where’s Aaron? He’s the one responsible for-”
“Yeah, I know. He just tried to kill me.”
“Shit! Well, where is he? I used a tracking spell to find you, but I didn’t-”
“He’s… gone. He fell off the roof.”
“Good,” Monica said, though that didn’t make me feel any better that I’d accidentally killed people. Even someone crazy and evil with an inoperable brain tumor or someone who’d been in a coma for years. “He was the one who raised all those RCs at the pond. His fingerprints were all over the gravestones.”
“SA actually ran fingerprints?”
“No, Ethan did. Luckily, Aaron’s were on file from some FBI missing-children-prevention packet or something,” Monica said, still inching further away from Cliff, as though he gave her the creeps. “Ethan figured out that Jess had to have an accomplice on the outside and-”
“He knew it was Jess? Why didn’t he tell me?” I asked, my voice rising to a pitch that made Cliff wince. “Talk about keeping secrets. I can’t-”
“Ethan only figured it out tonight, freak. He noticed that Jess ended up at the SA clinic right after both the weird zombie attacks. He convinced SA to run additional tests on her blood, and they just found out she’s AB negative and positive for the same weird blood thing you’ve got.”
“It’s a virus, a blood virus.”
“So what? Who cares?” She shrugged, somehow making me feel better with her utter lack of compassion. “The good news is that you’re cleared. They can’t run DNA tests to prove who t
he blood belonged to, but anyone with a brain will know it was Jess. Ethan is at the hospital and is going to try to get her to confess. She started having seizures again after-”
“Good. Call Ethan and tell him to keep her there. Don’t let her out.”
“Of course she’s not getting out. Even with practically every Settler in the area up in Carol, they didn’t leave her unguarded,” Monica said. “Which reminds me, we’ve got to get back up there and help Enforcement get this contained. Tons of people saw us, and everyone’s already losing power. It’s crazy! We’ve got to get memories wiped or-”
“No, we’ve got to get down to the river now,” Cliff said, his jaw muscle jumping. “We’ve got ten, maybe fifteen minutes tops. They’re raising them at ten o’clock.”
“What the heck is he talking about?” Monica snapped.
“The stuff in Carol was just a diversion,” I said, following Cliff as he started across the parking lot. “A distraction while Jess’s coven raises an army of zombies to attack downtown. They wanted to make sure Settlers couldn’t contain it before tons of people saw the zombies.”
“Oh my God,” Monica said, her face growing even paler than normal. “So that means-”
“If we don’t get moving, there won’t be any functioning Settlers left in Arkansas, and we’re going to have a plague on our hands.” Cliff pointed to the ground as we circled around the building. “They’re going to have their thirteen after all.”
I turned to look at the spot where Aaron and the other man had fallen to their deaths less than fifteen minutes ago. Only one form was still on the ground. Despite the massive amounts of blood coating the cracked pavement, Aaron was gone.