by Stacey Jay
“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 the 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.
CHAPTER 22
“When we get there, I’ll take care of whatever’s on the altar and do my best to disperse the cheerleaders,” Monica said, barely panting, even though we were flat-out sprinting down the bike trail beside the river.
We’d left the majorly sketchy side of town behind a few minutes ago and were getting close to the newly revitalized downtown area. The sounds of people drinking and eating and dancing at the nearby bars and River Market restaurants got louder with every second. The zombies certainly wouldn’t have any trouble finding fresh meat once they were out of their graves. We had to hurry.
“You and your zombie pet should probably take Aaron if he’s really channeling someone else’s magic.”
“I’m not a pet,” Cliff growled. “And he is channeling Jess’s magic.”
“So it’s still talking?”
“Monica, please.” I wished she wouldn’t take her anger at me out on Cliff, but there wasn’t time to have a heart-to-heart about it. “I believe Aaron is channeling Jess’s spirit. There’s no other explanation for how a guy with no history of even dabbling in the black arts worked all this big-time magic. Besides, Ethan said Jess was still unconscious, right?”
Monica had called Ethan to give him the 411 and ask him to bring help ASAP. He’d said he and one of Jess’s guards were on their way and they’d call for more backup en route. They’d seen no reason to leave more than two guards with Jess since she was still blacked out, hooked up to a dozen different machines, and on the verge of going into a coma, if the SA doctor’s speculation was correct.
Wouldn’t that be high irony after what she’d tried to do for Aaron?
“That still doesn’t prove anything,” Monica said. “I’ve never heard of a living person channeling another living person.”
“It’s because Aaron was terminally ill. That’s why—”
“Whatever. Let’s just get there and take care of this mess.” Monica cut across a patch of stiff dead grass, making me jealous of her shoes. The whole running-in-socks thing wasn’t working for me. Heck, the whole running thing wasn’t working for me. I could barely breathe. I had to start training harder. Or maybe sleeping more.
Or maybe figure out another way to feed my pet zombie.
Cliff was taking his share of my energy. I could feel it now, a subtle draw on my reserves that I normally wouldn’t even notice, but it made me worry if I’d be strong enough to take on Jess. Or Jess in Aaron, or whatever. I mean, I was a heck of a Settler, and we had the same witch blood, but she’d been training to use hers for years, and I knew next to nothing about real magic. Settler commands didn’t really count in my mind, since they were only useful with the dead.
It made me worry I was going to follow in poor Bobbie Jane’s footsteps, that I was getting ready to fight the fight I couldn’t win.
No, no way. My inner voice rebelled against the concept of failure, but the rest of me couldn’t quite get on board the positivity train. Positivity is difficult to achieve when it feels like your lungs are about to collapse.
“I may have to take care of Aaron alone. I think Megan’s going to be busy.” Cliff, like Monica, was not at all out of breath. But then, he didn’t need to breathe. Lucky. “There’s something unnatural about the circle.”
“Yeah? What?” Monica asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Cliff said defensively. “But Megan’s going to have to use her power, her full power, and she doesn’t have much practice. So I think the rest of us should just stay out of the way.”
“Stay out of the way?” Monica laughed. “And just let the zombies take over—”
“Megan’s going to stop them. If we just let her handle—”
“Megan already got herself kidnapped and nearly killed. By a cheerleader. Call me crazy, but I’m not going to trust her to ‘handle’ anything.”
Ouch. But she was right. I’d definitely had better days. Better weeks
, for that matter.
“You’re going to have to trust her. You don’t have the power to—”
“Cliff, it’s okay,” I said, taking Cliff’s hand, knowing it would calm him the same way touching him calmed me. Unfortunately, Ethan picked that moment to pull up beside us. His Mini Cooper jumped the curb and rolled across the frozen grass with enough speed that for a second, I didn’t know if he was going to stop before he plowed right into me and Cliff.
I quickly dropped Cliff’s hand, but it was too late. Ethan’s überscowl as he and the man in the passenger’s seat jumped out of the car left no doubt that he’d witnessed what he saw as another sign of my betrayal. But he didn’t say a word about it. He didn’t even look at me as he and the tall black man—who looked vaguely familiar from SA headquarters in Little Rock—crossed the grass.
“This is Cruz. Cruz, Megan and Monica, the other Settlers,” Ethan said.
“And I’m Cliff,” Cliff said, reaching out to shake Cruz’s hand. Cruz nodded and clasped Cliff’s hand in his, thankfully not seeming to notice that Cliff was dead.
“Cliff?” Ethan asked, finally turning the full force of his glare in Cliff’s direction as he connected the dots. “You’re the guy from the other night. The zombie from my grandpa’s farm.”
“Unsettled. Not real fond of the zombie label,” Cliff said, glaring right back at Ethan.
“I don’t care what you’re fond of.” Ethan stepped closer to Cliff, looking ready to smash the shorter guy’s face in. “I don’t know what you are, or why you’re here, but—”
“He’s here to help me,” I said, stepping in between them. “He’s a seer and he’s not going back to his grave until we get all this black magic under control.”
“He’s a zombie, Megan,” Ethan repeated, looking me straight in the eye, the expression on his face leaving no doubt as to what he really wanted to say. Fortunately for me, he was too well mannered to call me a disgusting zombie-kissing cheater in front of Monica or Cruz. Still, the look connected like a sucker punch to the gut, taking the last of my breath away.
