by Aleah Barley
“Violent little thing.”
I gaped in amazement at his emerald green eyes, high cheekbones, and bowed caramel lips. “I gave you to the cops.”
“Thanks for that, by the way,” he snarled. His voice was surprisingly smooth for a dead man, one word following the other almost like he was a real person. “You know how many strings I had to pull to get out of lock up? I thought the cop who brought me in was going to vomit on the counter when he gave back my gun.”
Shit. My cousin Brody was going to be pissed. Collaring a dead man with a deadly weapon should have put him on the fast track to a promotion. I should have figured out the man had connections to risk carrying a gun openly. “You didn’t hurt him?”
“Just his pride. Why? He a friend of yours?” His gaze darted in, taking in my state of relative undress. “A boyfriend?”
“That’s disgusting.” I nearly threw up myself at the thought. “Brody’s my cousin. Besides, he’s like thirty.”
Green eyes darkened slightly. “If thirty’s off limits, then I guess I don’t have a shot.”
Eye roll. “You’re what, twenty-five?”
“I’m older than I look.”
Right, Biters didn’t age after their hearts stopped beating. If he’d been among the first killed, then he was probably closer to thirty-seven.
Not that it mattered.
Biters and live humans don’t mix. Not that way. Once a person’s dead, certain bodily functions just stop functioning. Hearts stop beating. Lungs stop drawing in air. Blood doesn’t flow… to certain vital parts.
Of course, the longer a Biter’s been dead, the more functions they regain. Who knows what will be possible in ten years, but for now sex is a definite no-no.
That didn’t stop my body from going ‘Hello, sailor.’ He might be dead, but I’m only human. Having his super sexy body pressed up against mine was making things buzz in all the right places.
“You want to let me go?” I demanded.
“And have you attack me again? No, thanks.”
His gaze dropped down slightly, taking in the loose cotton T-shirt that cupped my barely there b-cups and skimmed my muscular thighs. Nothing like an hour of yoga a day to keep a girl toned and taut.
His lips twitched up into a smile, the action subtle and almost human. “You’re not wearing any pants.”
“You don’t have a pulse.”
“Rude to point out.”
“I thought we were stating the obvious.” I attempted a quick shimmy away. No joy. “You got a name? Or, should I just call you D.O.A.?”
“More zombie jokes. Cute.”
My eyes widened in surprise. My hands went limp. I’m not exactly Miss Manners, with a stun gun, but Mom’s right. No one uses the ‘z word’ anymore.
Especially not Biters.
His grip released slightly in response to my surprise. “You can call me, D.S.”
“Dead Sexy?”
“Something like that.” He let me down off the wall. “You got somewhere we can talk?”
3.
My office isn’t exactly Tiger’s stadium on the best of days. With D.S. in it, the place felt tiny. Like all the air had left the room.
Not like he noticed.
He didn’t breathe.
I grabbed a pair of yoga pants from my desk drawer and pulled them on over my panties. There was no way I’d be able to get a clean bra on without serious contortions, so I pulled a thick wool sweater over my head. A quick glance in the mirror told me that I looked like hell.
I’ve got my mom’s pale skin and white blonde hair. I also have my dad’s spooky gray eyes. I look washed out on a good day. This wasn’t a good day. There were dark circles under my eyes and a line of smudges up the side of my neck where I’d landed in the mud.
Frankly, any person meeting us for the first time would assume that D.S. Was the human and I was the thing.
Too freaking bad.
I wrapped the sweater tight around my middle. “You want to sit down?”
“On that?” D.S. eyed my couch suspiciously for a moment before sinking into the red covered cushions. He was wearing the same outfit he’d been in earlier—black on black on black—and the scarlet sheet provided a sinful backdrop to his monochromatic appearance.
His arms spread expansively over the back of the couch. His legs opened wide. His black jeans fit him like a glove.
Damn. I felt another sizzle running across my skin.
The Biter grinned. He knew exactly the image he’d created, and he wasn’t about to move anytime soon.
In a show of iron self-control, I didn’t throw a pencil at his head.
I opened my bag and pulled out my stun gun. The same one I’d used to fry his behind a few hours earlier. I put the stun gun down flat on my desk—nice and visible—and perched on the edge beside it.
“Kinky,” the Biter said. “I like it.”
I rolled my eyes. “What do you want?”
“There aren’t enough dead people in Detroit.”
“Excuse me?” I frowned. There were dead people all over the city. I dealt with them every day. “Dead. Undead. Biters. Zombies. We’ve got all fifty shades. Want to see my work logs?”
“I’m sure they die here. They just don’t stay here. I should explain—” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin leather envelope. The kind cops use to keep their badges. “I’m from the DUA.”
The air left my lungs. Hell. I’d heard a rumor that the Department of Undead Americans was hiring Biters—some kind of equal opportunity thing—but I hadn’t seen one before. The DUA didn’t have an official Detroit office. Just a snub-nosed clerk named Harry, who showed up every once in a while from Toledo to check on our paperwork and hit on my mom.
I snagged his badge and took a quick look. It certainly looked like government issue, right down to the grainy picture in the corner. According to the text, his name was Thomas Conroy. D.S. Thomas Conroy. “What does the D.S. stand for?”
“Doesn’t Signify.”
Uh huh. That’s why it was printed in fat red letters. I flipped the badge shut and passed it back to him. “You were saying something about the dead?”
“We’ve been conducting a quiet head count—kind of like a census—proportionately, the dead just aren’t here.”
“Maybe they moved.”
“The dead don’t tend to move. Keeping their sanity—keeping themselves together—for the lesser dead, it’s all about recreating the patterns they had in life. You might have a few wandering, but not the kind of numbers we’ve found here.” There was a slight pause. Like he was making some kind of grand pronouncement. “The dead aren’t wandering in Detroit. They’re being systematically hunted. They’re being taken.”
“And I was your first suspect?” I pursed my lips. “Seems a little harsh, just because I put a stun gun in your ass.”
“You’re not a suspect,” the dead man growled. “I thought I could handle the investigation myself… I’m not without my resources… But I’m finding the city a little more difficult to navigate than I’d remembered.”
I bit back a laugh. Detroit hadn’t exactly been an easy city before the rising. These days, a slick looking dead man driving around the place was asking to get his ass kicked and his car stolen. “You need a partner.”
“I need an employee,” he corrected. “Someone with the necessary skills and contacts. Someone who can handle working with the dead.”
“You think that’s me?” I crossed my legs and considered kicking him out of my office. Just on principle. The man might be from the Department of Undead Americans, but he was still a Biter: one of the things that went bump in the night. “You’re kidding, right?”
“You handled yourself pretty well out there today. You had a full-blown zombie heading straight for you, and you kept cool. Not many people can say the same thing. You’ve got the necessary contacts—.”
“You don’t know that.”
You work at a funeral home. I assume yo
u know someone at the morgue.”
He wasn’t wrong. Still, there was a major problem with what he’d proposed.
“I don’t work with dead people. They give me the creeps.”
His head cocked to the side. His lips twitched up into a grin. “The sign on the door says you do government registration, career counseling, and behavioral training.”
“That’s my mom.” The woman might by a hyper-organized freak, but when it came to turning monsters into men she had a definite gift.
“Uh huh, and the secretary who showed me in?”
“Uncle Donny. He’s family.”
“He’s a first waver. Twelve years dead.” D.S. waved a hand dismissively. “He’s in pretty good shape, considering how little the general population knew about care and feeding of zombies back then. Not many first wavers made it past the first year. It must have taken some work to keep him in that condition.”
Feedings, every two hours, paying through the nose for raw beef. Yeah, it had taken some effort. Especially, back before government procedures about Biter victims had gone into effect.
In the early days, every new body that came through the door had to be watched in case it rose again.
Still, there’d never been any question about Donny. Sinclairs take care of their own. “Like I said, he’s family. You’re not. How do I know you’re not going to bite me?”
“Sweetheart, if I wanted to bite you then I’d have done it already. It’s not going to happen.” His cocoa eyes grew dark. Hungry. “Not unless you’re begging for it. On your knees. You want to get on your knees for me, sweetheart?”
Something melted inside me.
Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to work with him after all. His undead status might mean he had Zippity-Doo-dah when for follow through, but the man could flirt like nobody’s business.
I sucked in a deep breath. Damn. I was actually thinking about working with a Biter. Worse, I was considering working with a representative of the United States government.
The same bureaucratic organization that had told my dad he couldn’t have a heart transplant. It wouldn’t have been an issue in the old days, but—ever since the dead had started rising—they’re so worried about contaminating the blood supply, the only way to get a blood transfusion these days is through a private supply.
My father had died sucking for oxygen, all while Uncle Donny was pacing in the other room. Worrying about his brother. Offering to provide the only solution possible. My father hadn’t wanted to be a Biter—some horror movie zombie hanging on past his time—he’d wanted to die clean.
It had almost broken my mother.
“There’s not a chance in hell,” I said. “I don’t work with dead men, and I definitely don’t work with Feds.”
Curved lips set into a thin line. “I could make things difficult for you. Running a funeral home? I can slow down your paperwork, send extra inspectors.” There was a slight pause. “You won’t get far without a license.”
“My hunting license?” Fear clutched my heart. My breath was coming faster now. I’d gone through a battery of tests before receiving my license for ‘Specialty Handling of the Undead.’ It had been worth it. These days, I brought in close to half of the funeral home’s income all by myself.
The dead man laughed. “Not your hunting license. Your business license.”
My throat went dry. My lungs seized up. If we lost the funeral home’s business license, my mother’s head would explode. Literally. Uncle Donny and I would be picking up debris for a week.
I put my hands down on the desk, hard.
Could he really do it?
Probably. A Biter with a gun—who could have himself released from police custody—wasn’t someone to mess around with. It would be a mistake to underestimate him.
“I can get you in to talk with a guy at the morgue. After that, I’ve got a yoga class in Midtown, and I’ve got some supplies to buy.” Zombie bait to catch little Andrea Mitchell. “You want to talk payment?”
“A hundred and fifty an hour. I’ll double it if you let me go to your yoga class.”
“Not a chance in hell.” A hundred and fifty an hour was already more than my standard rate. I’d have to do some fancy footwork to keep my mother from seeing the government check, but at least she’d be happy about the money.
I stood up slowly and took stock of the situation.
If I was going to hit the morgue, I needed to refill my bag with supplies, wash my face, pull a brush through my hair, and throw on a pair of jeans.
The morgue attendants like me in jeans. I’ve got a tight ass, and they’re men.
“I need half an hour to clean up and change. You want to go wait in the car?”
“I’d prefer to wait in here.”
I rolled my eyes. “Not an option.
“Okay, I’ll go talk to your Biter. What did you say his name was?”
“Donny, and he’s not my biter. He’s my uncle.” And, despite being a ‘first waver,’ Donny wasn’t particularly talkative. He could grunt out a few words when the situation called for it, but he was nothing like D.S.—Thomas, only now I couldn’t think of him as anything but those bold red initials—maybe I’d been wrong.
Maybe he was human.
But there was the creepy way he’d lifted the car off of me and the cool touch of his hand against my skin…
The way he hadn’t taken a single breath through our entire conversation…
He was definitely dead, which meant my regularly scheduled life was completely done for.
4.
“Gemma, you’re looking good.”
All morgue attendants are creeps—they spend their days sorting through dead bodies and restraining brand new Biters—but Hickory Pickens is almost human. I went to elementary school with his sister, Moira, and my mom knows his mother. He gave me a long, lingering look, concentrating on the line where my black tank top met the slope of my breasts and my tight jeans cupped my thighs. “Very good.”
“Thanks.” I bit my lip to keep from rolling my eyes. “We’re here to ask a few questions.”
“We?” He glanced past me to where D.S. was lurking in the shadows. “You’re hanging around with a Biter? Since when?”
“Since I needed someone to do the heavy lifting.”
Hick’s gaze never left D.S. His lips pulled back into a thin smile. “He’s got a shifty look to him, Gemma. You need an assistant, let me set you up. I’ve got a dead secretary in holding who’ll be ready for prime time in a couple of days. You train her up, she’ll be able to get your coffee and type a hundred words a minute.”
“I like my guy,” I shifted uncomfortably.
“He’s a zombie.”
“He’s got a name.” I insisted.
“They’ve all got names. They’re still zombies.” The venom in his voice made me blink in surprise. Hick wasn’t exactly a poster boy for Biter rights, but I’d never thought of him as a bigot before.
Biter prejudice wasn’t exactly new. Hell, I didn’t exactly get the warm and fuzzies about dead people hanging around the place myself. In a perfect world, the rising never would have happened. There would be no Biters. No, zombies.
In a perfect world, my dad would still be alive.
This isn’t a perfect world. The Biters are here, and we have to live with them. That means living in the same neighborhoods, driving the same streets, and occasionally working together. I glanced past Hick towards a pair of Biters in ugly green scrubs moving a corpse from a stretcher onto a refrigerated shelf. The morgue attendant definitely had enough exposure to the undead to get over his dislike.
Maybe it was something about D.S. specifically? The Biter hadn’t done much since entering the morgue, but there was definitely a tension between the two men. They were staring each other down like two-alpha predators viewing each other across the tundra.
Men. I rolled my eyes. They might as well take them out and measure them.
“We’ve got a question,”
I said.
Hick crossed his arms in front of his chest. “What do you want to know, Gemma?”
Luckily, D.S. had prepped me on the way over. I leaned forward slightly, giving the morgue attendant another peek down my shirt. “I need to look at the release records.”
The hum of the morgue refrigerators filled the air. The tile basement was cool. The only natural light came from narrow windows near the ceiling. Everything else was illuminated by yellow fluorescent light, including Hick’s square jaw and dimpled jaw.
On a scale of one to ten he was a solid eight, not breathtaking, but certainly capable of holding his own on the cover of ‘Morgue Attendants Monthly.’
D.S. was a twelve. Not that I was keeping score.
“Release records are private, Gemma. They go straight from here to the local DUA office.”
“Where I can request them from the government. Come on, Hick,” I wheedled. “I’m just looking for a photocopy of the registration form I sent in last month. Don’t make me drive to Toledo.”
“It’d be a pity to see your ass leave town,” Hick allowed slowly. “Especially when there are so many other ways you could be spending your time…”
The dead man coughed. Not exactly the easiest move in the world, given the lack of oxygen in his lungs. I turned in his direction to give him a dark look.
D.S.’s cheeks were flushed. His lips twitched up at the side. Like he was trying not to laugh.
“Why not a date?” I grinned at Hick. The morgue attendant might not make my panties wet on sight, but he had a job and a pulse. I could do worse.
“Tonight?” Hick asked.
“It’ll take me a while to get through the files,” I said. “How about tomorrow?”
The dead man had stopped trying to hide his laughter. His jaw had gone tight. For the first time all day, he looked downright murderous.
He didn’t say a word.
Not while I made arrangements to meet up with Hick the next night. Not while the morgue attendant was leading us into the records room.
D.S. maintained his deathly silence even while the other man was giving me a too friendly hug goodbye.
