“Anyway, glad you made it. You’re like our official lucky charm, girl. We can’t go into battle without you.”
I scowled at him without serious irritation. Of all of Gabriel’s remaining friends, he was one of my favorites, and also a newly minted sentinel with a license of his own stationed at PNRU while he attended graduate school.
“I’m not a leprechaun, asshole.”
“Sure you are. Short enough to be one.” He dodged my swat, chuckling before he added, “You have an advantage over some of the rest of the sentinels here. You can fly. When it comes to zombies, you don’t want to be trapped in a horde. They’ll tear your throat out in seconds. We’re all waiting for Simon to get the training refresher video up on the screen. All that magic knowledge, and he can’t operate a damn—”
“Listen up!” Sebastian’s voice boomed. “We don’t have much time to prepare you for what you’re about to face. Timing is critical. According to communication between survivors and local law enforcement, we have a massive outbreak at Woodfield Mall.” He tapped a button on a remote and the big projector cast an image of the bloody mall floor. Shamblers wandered the scarlet-stained tiles, and in a corner, a cluster of them devoured a motionless figure.
“Christ,” slipped out of Stark, all humor and color draining from the fair-skinned raven.
“How’d it start?” a hulking werebear called out. “Like, seriously. Isn’t this shit supposed to be dead like the measles?”
“Yeah, but how dead is the measles right now?” a smart-mouthed raven muttered, causing another wave of nervous giggles. Nobody really found it funny, but sometimes you needed a little humor to temper the terror of going up against creatures that wouldn’t just try to suck some blood from you. Zombies always went for the throat and guts.
Stark pressed an energy drink into my hand. “If we’re in for a lot of fighting, you’ll be glad you have some energy. If you puke, you’ll be glad, too. Dry-heaving is a bitch.”
I took it, wise enough to accept advice from a licensed pro.
“A shopper bit a store clerk, who bit another employee, and you can imagine what happened from there. The police remain on standby, but they don’t have our training in dealing with magical infections. The magic in our blood makes us immune, so it’s us instead of them.”
A snooty werewolf girl wrinkled her nose, glanced at me like I was refuse on her overpriced combat boots, then scoffed. I recognized her from the group of shifter chicks who used to hang with Jada, Gabe’s ex. “Uh, what about Tinker Bell over there? She’s immune, too, right? We don’t need a zombie fae flying at us.”
“If you’d bothered to study more than your nail polish, you’d already know the answer to that, Miss Campbell,” Sebastian replied.
She frowned.
“Evacuation procedures have already taken place,” Simon said in his mellow, low baritone, “but a number of civilians remain barricaded throughout the structure. It’s up to us to neutralize any threats. All humans are to be thoroughly vetted and escorted to safety. Anyone with a bite comes to me and Sebastian to administer the cure.”
We nodded, a sea of bobbing heads staring at the carnage on the white screen.
“A young woman working the On Fleek Brow Bar”—a bunch of students dissolved into nervous giggles, earning a hard stare from Simon before he continued—“is live-tweeting the entire thing. From what we know, there’s some kind of…monster on the premises. Keep your heads on a swivel, and don’t let down your guard for anything.”
“Any questions?” the wolf asked next, crossing his huge arms across his chest.
Once we all had our assignments, we geared up. Lots of handguns. Lots of knives. Lots of bullets. Normally, I wouldn’t have been qualified to carry a gun until our first midterm, when they issued firearms to the junior class, but zombies warranted an exception.
Simon opened a portal at the front of the class, a swirling vortex of orange and purple. The spell never failed to wow me, and Ben constantly bemoaned the fact that it took close to a decade to master.
“Our base is in Victoria’s Secret,” the senior wizard announced. “No, don’t ask me why, I’m not the one who set it up. Let’s move, people. Get to your assigned quadrants and help give the place a thorough sweep. Try not to get bitten, or you’ll be sick as a dog.”
Sebastian glanced at him, cocking a brow. I sensed an inside joke.
Shifters, fae, vamps, and mages may have been immune to the endgame of the zombie virus, but we could still run a fever and was one hell of a sickness. Gabriel wrinkled his nose and stepped through at my side with a hand resting over the hilt of his sword. We went from college campus to pink-walled boutique in three seconds flat.
I passed a display of overpriced lace panties and approached the magical barricade. Two stern, older sentinels with grizzled beards stood watch and occasionally popped a stumbling corpse. I shuddered, telling myself it would be no different than shooting and staking nosferatu. We weren’t killing living, breathing human beings.
Monsters. I repeated that in my head as a mantra. Monsters.
Gabriel’s hand touched the small of my back. He nodded toward the hall. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
We all split into small groups and pairs assigned by Simon and Sebastian. As I unfurled my sylph wings, Gabriel took his raven form and soared to the upper floor. Flying had its uses. The moment we touched down Gabriel was human again. He drew his katana and nodded to the left.
We slipped inside a high-end millennial clothing store and came across our first body by a rack of designer jeans. The corpse had been handsome in life, though half of his face was a lipless and grinning meaty skull. The employee name tag on his shredded, bloody shirt identified him as Brayden.
Gabriel didn’t waste a bullet on him. His magic sword separated the head from the body in one effortless pass.
My belly lurched.
Nosferatu didn’t bleed or leak body fluids. Not like this, and they didn’t lose their guts and make wet, gross sounds. They disintegrated into blood-scented ash and left little evidence behind.
And if I couldn’t get over this, I didn’t deserve to be a sentinel. I’d waited for this moment my entire life, and I wouldn’t let some blood and guts get in the way. I had to approach it from a position of detachment, like watching a medical show or televised surgery.
Slurping noises reached my ears from somewhere ahead.
Gabriel tapped the side of my boot with his toe. “Behind the store counter,” he whispered.
“I’ll play bait, you be ready with your sword.” Because from the sound of things, there was no saving this one.
“Be prepared to phase through the Twilight.”
Once I got into position, I grabbed a shoe from a nearby rack, and then I tossed it across the room. The pricey ankle boot clattered against the floor and the disgusting noises stopped. A blonde head popped into view, the woman’s lips turned back in a snarl. She would have been pretty if not for the blood and fleshy bits all over her face. At first, her attention focused on the shoe. She sniffed the air and shambled out from her cover.
Something was off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. She hadn’t noticed me yet, but she also wasn’t taking the bait and moving closer. She sniffed again and twisted. Suddenly she bolted at me with a speed contrary to all zombie flicks I’d ever watched. Simon and Sebastian’s brief primer video didn’t prepare me for the reality.
No way I was going to die in a damned Abercrombie and Fitch.
As I melted to safety in the Twilight, Gabriel lunged forward and sliced his blade through her neck. Shōki cut through her spine effortlessly.
In the same instant her head hit the floor, two more zombies charged from the changing rooms. A third rose from behind the counter; the blonde’s meal, no doubt.
Gabriel shifted his stance and swung at the nearest attacker while I stepped back into the mortal plane and fired off three successive shots with my pistol. The counter zombie stumbled back,
and the really eerie part was how he barely grunted. Nossies tended to shriek in a way that made a person worry for their eardrums.
Something slammed into me from the right, a fourth zombie I hadn’t seen. It bowled me over, right into shirt display. I hit the floor alongside a mannequin, rolled, and bounced back to my feet in a move our instructors had drilled into our heads. The heavyset zombie stayed with me, swinging out its heavy fists, keeping me on the defensive.
Gabe had his own opponent to deal with. He shifted into his raven form the instant she would have grabbed him, soared past her, then became human after clearing her reach. One backswing of the sword removed her head, gliding through tendon, muscle, and bone like softened butter.
Damn, that was some sword.
My moment of distraction cost me. My zombie lunged forward and dragged sharp nails across my neck.
“Mother fu—ahh!” It stung like hell.
A gunshot echoed across the shop. My zombie abandoned me for Gabriel, granting me a clear look at the bullet hole in its back. Ignoring my pain, and grateful for the brief reprieve, I set out to assist my raven. We took down the tough guy with bullets and Japanese steel, and then there was silence.
“Let’s hope that’s the last of them,” Gabe said after a few recovery breaths. “We need to walk through to be sure.”
“Right.”
I only had to ensure one corpse stayed dead, which took a bullet to the head. From the other side of the store, I heard Gabriel fire twice. This had to be the worst part about zombies. Beheading them. Or blowing their brains out. Or burning them. It was the only way to ensure the dead stayed, well, dead.
We met back up at the counter, where I caught him giving me a once-over. Gabriel cupped my chin, turning my face left then right. His brows drew close together, and his lips pressed tight.
“It’s just a scratch.”
“Could have been worse, Sky. What if he’d gone in for a bite and torn out your—”
“He didn’t. I’m fine. You’re fine. He had a longer reach than I expected. It won’t happen again.”
Gabriel’s frown deepened. He wiped the blood oozing from my neck, took something from his pocket, then bit off the cap of a weird pen. The stuff he smeared over the cut burned like salt in my veins.
“Ow!”
“Zombies have all kinds of nastiness under their nails. There. Now that’s covered and we can move on to the next shop.”
I jinxed the doors and sealed them behind us with a locking spell as instructed. The next two storefronts were clear so we secured them as well. In the candle shop, we discovered a group of people huddled in the back storeroom with the door barricaded. “Do we call Simon up here or just lock them in until the rest is all cleared up?”
“Safer to leave them here since there’s so many. But we gotta check them all first.”
If one of the survivors had even a nibble it’d be a massacre.
After I coaxed them into opening the door, we verified none of the humans had a bite.
“You all look safe. We’re going to leave you locked here and inform the authorities of your location,” Gabe told the guy who had stepped into the leadership position, an off-duty fireman shopping for his wife’s birthday. He was worried about her, unable to get in contact.
I touched his mind with pleasant thoughts and eased his concerns as we left.
Then an update came over our comms. “If you’ve cleared your assigned zones, report in at Vicky’s again.”
“Any sign of this supposed monster?” another sentinel asked.
“Nah. May have been someone’s imagination. You know how mortals get when they see anything unusual.”
We cleared the last few shops assigned to us then returned to the lower level. The healers had set up a temporary clinic in the spacious changing rooms at the back. “We killed several upstairs,” I reported to Sebastian.
Gabriel followed with, “But there’s a half-dozen survivors in the Yankee Candle storeroom. They’re all clean and we locked them in since evac downstairs hadn’t been cleared yet.”
“All right. Hit the road, you two. Portals in the b—” Sebastian sniffed and honed in on my scratches. “Oh, better get that disinfected unless you want to spend the weekend sick in bed.”
Simon stood beside him with a clipboard, taking names as he dismissed students back to the school. “Looks like everyone is accounted for except for Stark and Gunthrie.”
Gabriel stiffened. “Stark hasn’t reported in?”
“Not a word,” Sebastian said. “That’s not like him.”
“Where were they assigned?” Sky asked. “Upstairs at the other end of the floor, right?”
Simon nodded. “By the food court. We’re on our way out to look for him.”
“We’ve got it,” I offered. My scratches could wait a few more minutes. Finding Stark and his partner couldn’t.
“Thanks,” Gabriel said quietly once we were on the path to the escalators.
I gave his hand a quick squeeze then released him. Not because it was improper but because we needed our hands free. For a place that was usually full of noise, the mall was eerily quiet, the stillness interrupted by the occasional report of a handgun or shotgun blast reverberating over the halls. Then all went silent again. It gave me the creeps.
“Try calling him,” I suggested in a low voice. “Just let it ring. Maybe we’ll find him if we follow that ridiculous ringtone he assigned to you.” Stark identified all of his friends with horror movie ringtones. Michael Myers’s Halloween theme played whenever Gabriel called him.
For me, Stark’s phone played the flute solo from the Leprechaun movie. Fucker.
“It’s not ridiculous,” he muttered, walking alongside me with a hand resting on the hilt of his sword. “Besides, we won’t be the only ones alerted.”
“Point.” Zombies could hear ringing phones.
“Shit. Fuck it. If he’s in a bind, he’ll want help there sooner rather than later, too.”
Gabe whipped out his phone and made the call. Michael’s theme song pierced the silent food court like a knife through paper, loud against the noiseless atmosphere. We flew toward the source and found the abandoned phone beneath a table. The screen was cracked.
More bodies littered the floor here than anywhere else in the building. All were either decapitated or shot in the head by a single round.
“This has to be where it started,” I whispered. “There’s so many of them.”
“This doesn’t feel right. The phone should have been stashed on him when he shifted. Why’d he drop it here?”
“Startled by something—”
“Shh!” Gabe cocked his head, listening. “Go get the other sentinels and tell them we have trouble on the upper level.”
As if on cue, a raven screamed louder than the usual caw, like the sound of someone desperately hoping help arrived. Without waiting for me, Gabriel took off, almost stumbling over a corpse. He caught himself by flying over it to the walkway of the deserted mall, where he returned to human feet.
Down the way, there wasn’t much more besides a department store and an entertainment shop full of CDs, movies, and audio gear. Gabriel almost didn’t see it until it was too late—an enormous white wolf charged him. Dark blood and gore were caked around his muzzle, and had I not seen that lupine face twice a month for a full school year, I’d have never recognized him.
“Blaire?” Gabriel blurted. He twisted into the air and dove, tucked into a roll. He pulled off an acrobatic maneuver that took him from human to raven body, then he flew up into the air and denied the wolf its snack.
The wolf turned, snarling. Thick strings of pink saliva dangled from his maw, and bits of flesh clung to his huge teeth. Then I saw half Blaire’s side had been ripped open to expose the gooey innards that should not have been outside and—I wanted to puke. Wanted to scream. But I didn’t do either of those things. Instead, I froze in place, petrified until the moment I realized he was speeding across the walkway towar
d me.
Even then, I still couldn’t force my body to move.
“Skylar, get away from over there!” The rapid report of a discharging handgun snapped me out of it.
Hands sweeping through the air, I channeled a tempest of Faerie Fire point-blank into Blaire’s open maw. Then my Prismatic Barrier came up.
Not that it did much good. He crashed into me, barrier and all, but it was like trying to stop a freight train with a paper plate.
So much force and raw power pushed me backward. My barrier cracked beneath the force, a dozen fissures and hairline fractures splintering across the surface before I toppled over the rail and plummeted down below. I tried to grasp the Twilight, tried to phase through it, but my concentration was shot.
“Sky!”
I had no idea how many feet we fell, or how many bullets Gabriel discharged, only that it hurt when I hit the bottom floor with only a flimsy, disintegrating barrier between myself and a zombie werewolf. The impact knocked the breath from my lungs and stars danced in my dazzled vision, but somehow I kept Faerie Fire channeled in both of my hands to protect my throat.
Lightning sizzled in a blinding arc from somewhere to my left. A split-second prior to its strike, I renewed the magical barrier with a fresh pulse of magic, abandoning my fire. I needed protection more than I needed offense.
The bolt knocked my attacker aside, then Gabriel was over me, sweeping me into his arms and moving as fast on two legs as he flew with his wings. From the corner of my eye, I saw Simon stalking forward with his staff in hand.
“Are you okay?” Gabe asked while he examined me in a panic, sliding his fingers over my arms, feeling my ribs, touching my face and turning it to each side.
“I’m fine!”
“Did he bite you, Sky?”
“Gabriel, I’m—”
He was still searching, looking so distressed I hated that my moment of indecision had done this to him. There were tears in his eyes.
Meanwhile, the zombie wolf leapt at Simon’s shield and hit a brick wall. It landed on all fours, snarled, and threw itself at the magical spell again. It was mindless, unlike a wendigo who kept its intelligence.
The Plague Doctor: The Paranormal University Files: Skylar, Year 3 Page 4