“Should I pull on a shirt?” he asked with a hint of amusement.
I will not blush. “No.” He’d be doing the world a favor if he never wore a shirt again, but I wasn’t going to tell him that part. “You’re fine.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
Okay, so I blushed. “I didn’t mean…that was… Oh, never mind!” I was too frazzled to be witty.
He chuckled.
“So what do the words mean?” I asked.
“They’re names,” he said, fingers brushing over the ink. “Friends I’ve lost in the fight against the zombies.”
A way to honor them, I realized, and in that moment I knew I would one day have the names of my family tattooed somewhere on my body. “My first day of school, Kat mentioned that two boys in your group died from some kind of disease last year. Did that have something to do with the zombies?”
He nodded. “They were bitten and couldn’t fight the infection.”
An ice-cold lump formed in my throat. “I was bitten.”
“Yeah, but I administered the antidote in time, saving you from having to fight the toxin. You remember a sting in your neck, right after I found you, right? You’ll be fine.”
I did remember a sting. Gradually the lump melted and I warmed. “You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
Well all right, then.
“Come on.” He held out his hand. “You want the rest of your questions answered, I’m sure.”
Overjoyed that that was still an option, I closed the distance and linked our fingers. The calluses on his palms comforted me, reminding me of his strength and his ability to take down anyone or thing that threatened us.
He led me into the living room, where Frosty, Mackenzie, Bronx and two people I’d never met waited. They all stopped what they were doing and got real quiet the moment they spotted me. When their gazes moved to my hand, still joined with Cole’s, they donned rabid-mean expressions.
I tried to extract myself but Cole held tight. He lifted his chin in a sign of pure stubbornness, kinda reminding me of, well, me. “You got something to say?” he demanded of the group.
They sure did. A rapid-fire conversation ensued.
Frosty: “She shouldn’t be here.”
Cole: “Maybe not, but she is.”
Unknown boy number two: “We know nothing about her.”
I’d call him Spike. His dark brown hair stuck out all over his head, as if he’d come into contact with a very mean light socket.
Cole: “We’ll learn.”
Mackenzie: “She’s a liability. She’ll tattle.”
Cole: “Please. I practically had to torture the information I do have from her.”
Unknown boy number one: “What about the mind-screw she was doing on you?”
I’d call him Turd. No explanation needed.
Cole: “Apparently I was doing the same to her. We don’t know what’s causing those visions or why, but they’re happening to both of us.”
Spike: “And you trust everything she says?”
Cole: “Look, she stays and that’s final.”
Everyone else: grumbling and muttering.
I noticed Cole had ignored the question about trusting me. “Thanks for the welcome, everyone,” I said. “Really. Means a lot to me.”
That earned me several (more) glares. Cole squeezed my hand, but whether it was in comfort or in warning, I could only guess—and I guessed warning. His friends were important to him, and he wouldn’t want me to smart-aleck.
I once again tried to pull from his grip, and he once again held on with vise-tightness.
“Try to get away now,” he muttered. “Dare you.”
“I wasn’t trying to get away,” I muttered back. “I just wanted a free hand to slap you with.”
He tried not to grin as he pointed out, “You have a free hand.”
“Well, the urge to hurt you has passed.”
“Lucky me.”
“You have no idea.”
“Well, I just figured out the problem,” Turd said drily.
The problem with me? Oh, that burned. “This doesn’t have to be about me,” I said, doing my best to sound calm. “Either you trust him or you don’t.” These people were his friends, but they’d put him in the leadership role. That meant his judgment ruled, and they could suck it. “Besides, what is it, exactly, that you think I’m going to do?”
“Tell people what we can do,” Mackenzie said.
At the same time, Frosty said, “Show the wrong people where we keep our weapons, and turn this into another JS situation.”
JS?
Spike said, “All that, plus she’ll get us into a whole lot of legal trouble.”
That was followed by “She’ll make us look crazier than crazy and get us locked away for good.” Which was followed by “Turn us into a joke.” And finally “Mess up and bring a nest of zombies right to our door.”
O-kay. Clearly nothing I said would soothe their doubts. No need to even try.
“She can be trained,” Cole announced. “And really, she’s a halfway decent fighter already. We can use her.”
Halfway decent? Use? Nice. He knew how to make a girl feel special, didn’t he? “Soon I’ll be even better. You’ll see. I learn fast, and I’m dedicated. Just give me a chance.”
Uh, what had I just said? I wondered, shocked.
On the drive to the cabin, I’d wanted to forever hide and never have to face the zombies again. But, as my shock began to thin, I realized I’d meant what I’d just said. Seeing these kids, knowing they made a difference and that I could make a difference, too, I wanted in. I owed it to my family.
Murmurs of doubt surfaced.
“You’re not slayer material,” Mackenzie said.
“I am.” Maybe. “You just haven’t seen me in action.” The entire group needed time to think about this, otherwise one—or all—would say something that could never be taken back. Same for me. I hurried to change the subject. “Before I forget, Kat told me to tell you she hates you,” I said to Frosty.
Those dark eyes pinned me in place. Gone was the affable personality I’d come to expect at school. “What are you going to tell her about tonight?”
Great. I’d just opened a bag of vipers.
“She’s not planning to tell Kat anything about the zombies, and that’s all you need to know.” Amid Frosty’s protests, Cole added, “If it makes you feel any better, I’ll take full responsibility for Ali. Now give us some space. I need to talk to her alone.”
“Alone? Don’t be stupid,” Mackenzie snapped.
Ignoring her, Cole tugged me through the group, forcing everyone to jump out of the way or be mowed down. At the couch, he positioned me where he wanted me. Gently, of course, but with enough force to ensure I wouldn’t be going anywhere until he was ready for me to go.
He tugged the coffee table closer to me, then used it as a chair so that he was directly in front of me, caging my legs between his. That purple gaze bored into me. “What do you want to know first?”
I waited for a moment as Frosty and Mackenzie stomped to one of the back rooms together and Bronx and the other two boys marched outside. The door banged shut behind them.
I’ll prove my worth, I told myself. They won’t always feel this way about me.
“Ali.”
Questions. Right. “Why can’t anyone but us see the zombies? Why didn’t the zombies see anyone but us?” There’d been a lot of people coming and going in that parking lot, and yet, the zombies had wanted only Cole and me.
Except…wait. They’d seen my mother. She’d once told me that she’d never seen them, only the end results of their evil, yet still they’d spotted her and dragged her out of our car.
“Zombies are evil,” Cole said. “Flat-out, full-on evil. There’s no longer any goodness to them, and they want all goodness destroyed. I guess because it’s a reminder of what they’ve lost.”
My brow crinkled. “So we’re good?”
> “Well, we’re certainly capable of being good.”
“But I can think of a thousand different people gooder—” Please tell me I had not just said that “—I mean, a thousand different people better on the potential-for-goodness scale than us, yet we’re the ones they come after.”
“People like us, who can see them, are like magnets to them. They scent us, instinct kicks in, and they track us.”
“But they do go after regular people,” I said.
“Yes. They scent fear just as easily as they scent us, no matter who is feeling it. They sense other negative things, too, though not quite as potently as fear.”
“But fear isn’t a good thing, and you said the zombies only want to destroy good things.”
He shook his head, as though pitying me for my ignorance. “They want to destroy good, but they’re attracted to bad. That doesn’t mean they won’t attack what attracts them. Make sense? More than that, the good are not always easy to destroy, as we proved tonight. How do you think the zombies maintain their strength in the meantime? By eating anyone they can, good or bad, seers or nonseers, slayers or nonslayers.”
Every time he answered me, a new question popped up. “But they can’t get to our flesh, so what is it exactly that they eat?”
“They are spirits, and so they eat of the spirit. And then, whatever they do to the spirit manifests in the flesh, causing an infection to spread from there.”
The bites I’d endured began to ache all over again, as if to remind me they were there and I’d come close to dying. “Is that how other zombies are made? And where do they live? Why can they only come out at night?”
He thought for a moment, then nodded as though he’d just made a decision. “Let’s tackle this one part at a time. First question, first answer. Yes, that’s how other zombies are made. The infection spreads faster in some, slower in others. Some people can fight that infection on their own and survive. Most die. If they die, their spirit will rise and night by night they will more fully embrace their new afterlife.”
“Nothing can be done to save them?”
“Not after a certain point, no.”
“But what about the antidote you mentioned?” I said.
“It won’t do anything to a full-on zombie, but if it’s administered fast enough to a human spirit, the infection never has a chance to spread and it will die.”
“And you’re sure it was administered to me in time?”
“We’ve already gone over this.”
“And we’ll probably have to go over it a bazillion more times! Deal with it.”
He chuckled, the humor lighting his entire face. “Near-death experiences make you cranky. Good to know.”
“Cole! Be serious.”
Still smiling, he said, “Yes. I’m sure it was administered in time. I never do anything half-measure, and I never fail.”
Yeah, I really had to get me some of that confidence. One by one I plucked my nails out of my thighs. “Okay, so how does a natural medicine get into our spirits, where the infection starts?”
“It’s not a natural medicine, it’s a spiritual medicine and it was administered to your spirit. Only after I’d shot you up did I put you back into your body. And before you go on another question spree about what would happen if you were given the medicine after your spirit was put back into your body, let me just say that there is a way. That’s all you need to know right now.”
“Great, but I don’t understand any of that.”
He sighed. “I told you that what manifests in your spirit will manifest in your body, right? That’s how your body ended up in this condition when it never actually threw or received a punch. That’s how what I injected into your spirit made it into your body.”
Better. “All right, so how was a spiritual medicine created?” What was now running through my veins?
“The only way I know to describe it is to say it’s a type of holy water. Like I said, it doesn’t cure zombies, and it doesn’t kill them, but it does hurt them. However, it’s too valuable to waste that way unless absolutely necessary.”
Overwhelmed, I rubbed my arms. There was so much more to learn than I’d ever realized. I mean, how could I have known being crazy would have been way easier?
He continued, “Going back to the timing thing. A dose has to be administered to a spirit within the first hour of infection. We have vials and syringes in my Jeep, and I carry one in my pocket like an EpiPen. You’ll need to do the same. Never leave home without it.”
“I won’t,” I vowed.
“As for where they live, they create nests. They group together in caves, in basements, anywhere and everywhere away from the light. They sleep during the day, because their eyes and skin are too sensitive for the sun. Your spirit does better in the light, but you haven’t learned to hide yourself from prying eyes yet, so don’t try it. Plus, your senses haven’t been trained.”
“I’m not even sure how I did it tonight!”
“We’ll work on that, I promise.”
That, and about a thousand other things I hoped. Right now I was seriously handicapped.
“What was the first thing you noticed when you were in that form?” he asked.
“How cold I was,” I said, even the memory making me shiver.
“Exactly. Without the shield of our body, we experience extreme cold. We’re more sensitive. Also, you must never—and I mean never—speak while in that form, unless you want to have what you say.”
Again I found myself mumbling, “I don’t understand.”
“Just like there are rules in this natural realm, there are rules in the spirit realm. We’ve learned that whatever we speak while in spirit form happens, good or bad, as long as it doesn’t violate someone’s free will and as long as we believe it. So, if you say something like, ‘This zombie is killing me,’ and you’re convinced that he is, in fact, killing you, he absolutely will succeed in killing you, and there will be nothing more you can do to stop him.”
After everything I’d seen, I shouldn’t doubt him, but that was just a little too out there. “So we just speak, and boom, it happens?”
“Yes. Sometimes it takes time, but yes.” His hand tightened on my knee. “Trust me on that until I can prove it, okay?”
Rather than telling him he’d have to do a lot to convince me, I nodded.
“Good. Any other questions?”
How cute. Of course I had more questions! “How did you kill them? What was that light in your hand?”
“That was a purified fire. The zombies disintegrate when they come into prolonged contact with it.”
Prolonged? “Seemed to only take a few seconds.”
“You were out of it, so time wasn’t registering properly. That’s why we do everything we can to disable the zombies first. The less they fight us, the easier it is to get our hands on their chests without having our wrists chewed.”
A spark of excitement zinged just under my skin. “Will I be able to produce that fire?” The thought of wielding such a potent weapon against the zombies…oh, yeah! Ali liked.
“With time you will. Now, I’ll give you one more question,” he said. “I don’t want to overwhelm you.”
Too late. But I thought for a moment, trying to pick from an endless pit of potentials. “Why don’t the zombies enter our homes? Why do they only come out once every two weeks or so? Or, as with tonight, every few days?”
“Someone needs lessons in math, too. That was three questions.”
I shrugged. “I like to round up.”
A laugh escaped him, far hardier than his chuckle, yet rough also, as if he hadn’t experienced this much amusement in a long time. “If you’ve still got a sense of humor I guess you’re better off than I thought.” This time he patted my knee in a sweet, brotherly gesture that kind of irritated me. “They don’t enter our homes because we create what’s called a Blood Line.”
“And that is?”
“When we pour a specific mix of chemicals aroun
d the foundation of a home, the zombies cannot get in, no matter what they try.”
Well, then. “I want—”
“The mixture has already been poured around your house.”
“When?” The zombies had stayed outside my grandparents’ house all summer, before I’d met Cole.
“Since the day I met you.”
See. The timing was off—and I wasn’t going to touch the realization that Cole had been looking out for me since day one. My dad had to have poured the mixture around my grandparents’ house during his high school days. But how had he known about it, whatever it was?
“What?” Cole asked.
“Nothing,” I replied, not yet ready to voice my thoughts.
He eyed me with suspicion, but let the subject drop. “All right then, back to your barrage of questions. I think I have only one left. The zombies come out so infrequently because they need to rest and rebuild their energy. Also, it takes them a while to digest what they ate.”
They digested goodness. What a lovely image.
“Now I have a question for you.” He waited until I nodded before he continued. “Do you want to fight them? You made it sound like you did, but I have to be sure.”
“Yes, I do.” Very much. The more I learned, the more sure I was.
“Good. I want to get you on rotation as soon as possible. On any given night, some of us are patrolling the city, just in case they emerge. Some of us are training. Some of us are relaxing. On the nights they emerge, we all fight.”
So organized. So precise. But I couldn’t see my grandparents going for that.
“The zombies are growing in number while we are dwindling, and we need all the help we can get.”
“You would trust me to help?” None of his friends had, and he’d avoided that question when they’d issued it.
“I’m willing to give you a chance.”
Another avoidance. Whatever. I wanted this; I’d take it. “I’ll find a way to make it work,” I vowed.
“If you have problems…”
He’d kick me out, whether he needed me or not. Well, time for a little reminder. “In our visions, we saw ourselves kissing each other, and now we have. We saw ourselves fighting zombies together, and now we have. That has to mean something.”
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