by Stacey Jay
“Thanks for the power, Megan,” Aaron/Jess said, yelling to be heard over the rumbling of the earth. “I appreciate the gift.”
Oh God, what had I done? Settler magic made a corpse channeling a living soul stronger. We’d only studied that particular phenomenon for about ten seconds in Enforcer training, but I should have remembered.
That was what was weird about this circle—that was what Cliff had felt from the start. There was a living person inside a dead body, which meant the only way to take down Aaron/Jess was with a mixture of magic for the living and the dead. A Settler with witch blood was Arkansas’s only hope. I was Arkansas’s only hope, and I’d gone and screwed it up and given Jess exactly what she needed.
Now all they needed was blood—the blood of an innocent, to be precise.
“Haustum,” Aaron/Jess gurgled, a smile stretching across Aaron’s ravaged lips as Jess watched realization dawn in my eyes.
The zombie bite on my shoulder suddenly broke open and blood gushed, hot and wet, across the altar behind me. I screamed, doing my best to pull away, but it was as if I’d been glued to the stone. The pain ripped through me with enough force to make my bones ache, and I could feel my power draining away even as the blood drained from my body.
Never had I wished so desperately that I was issue-free when it came to sex. If Ethan and I had just gone ahead and done it already, Jess wouldn’t have been able to use my blood to raise her army of the dead. Now it was too late. I could feel the dead coming, squirming through the ground below, yearning toward the surface and the blood they craved. I’d failed. Jess had won, and there was nothing to do but lie here and wait for—
No! My inner voice had never been so loud. It was so adamant, in fact, that it actually made me flinch. You’ve got the same power she does, and every word she says is a weapon.
The inner voice was right. I might not have spent years studying black magic, but I had ears and a mouth, and so far both were working just fine. I also had a great memory, at least good enough to recall the word she’d used to make me bleed, and I was suddenly having a lot fewer issues with dabbling in the dark arts.
“Haustum,” I yelled, summoning both my Settler power and the darker power lurking beneath it. I aimed my palms in Aaron/Jess’s direction just as skeletal hands thrust up from the ground all around me.
The obvious wounds on Aaron’s neck and head and what I was guessing were internal injuries began to gush blood. At first, Aaron/ Jess didn’t even seem to notice, since the dead can’t feel pain, but then Aaron’s knees buckled and his bloodshot eyes widened in alarm.
“No. No freaking . . . way . . . ” Jess’s words faded away, and, within a few seconds, the body that had been Aaron crumpled to the ground, finally as lifeless as it should have been an hour ago.
“Oh crap,” Dana said. “I don’t think that’s supposed to happen.”
“What do you mean you don’t think—Ah!” Felicity’s words ended in a scream as a rotted face burst from the ground and a zombie mouth latched around her ankle. “They’re going to eat us! Jess and Aaron were wrong!”
“Run, everyone! Get to the barge!” Dana and the other girls turned and ran for it while Felicity kicked at the zombie that had her in its jaws, making her escape in time to catch up with the others as they fled toward the river.
I jumped to my feet, wavering unsteadily. I’d lost a lot of blood and used up a lot of power. There was no way I’d be able to take down all the zombies bursting from the ground by myself. I needed help.
I turned toward the burning candles under the bridge, determined to find a way to free Ethan, Cruz, and Monica, when I tripped over Cliff and went down hard.
“Behind you,” he said, the open wound at his neck gurgling sickly. He’d managed to pull out the machete and was clutching it between his hands, but lacked the strength to put it to use—as evidenced by the fact that all he could do was lie there as the now-bloodless Aaron hurled himself on top of me.
“You suck! So hard!” he screamed, Jess’s voice coming through clearer than ever, hands clawing into my calves when I tried to scramble away.
I sucked? Really, that was what she came up with? After she’d killed and lied and pretty much doomed our state to zombie plague unless we stopped the RCs crawling out of the ground? I sucked?
“Let go!” I kicked Aaron’s body in the face, but Jess clung tight, holding me still as two zombies with glowing red eyes emerged from the earth right in front of me. “Pax frater corpus postestatum.” I smacked each of them in the head and they froze, which was a relief after the week of zombies who wouldn’t say die. These were just normal RCs, after all, just—
“Ahh!” I screamed as the two dudes I’d just pax frater-ed surged back to life and started snapping at my yummy flesh.
“They were raised partly with your power, you idiot. You can’t stop them!”
“Then you stop them, or I’ll—Absisto!” I froze the Munch Brothers in place, but knew the freezing command wouldn’t hold for long.
“I wouldn’t even if I could. No one here has the power to make them go back to their graves.” Aaron/Jess gouged cold, corpselike fingers even deeper into my leg. “You’re finally going to pay for everything you’ve done.”
I surged into a seated position away from zombie mouths, grabbed what was left of Aaron’s hair, and tugged—hard, distracting him/her just long enough to twist my leg free.
“Megan! Put out the fire!” Kitty screamed. I looked up to see Ethan, Monica, Cruz, and Kitty at the edge of the circle, which unfortunately looked like it hadn’t been broken when the cheerleaders made a mad dash for the river. Ethan, Cruz, and Monica were kicking the tails of the zombies who made it out of the circle, but when they tried to get too close to the altar, they were repelled by the invisible walls of the spell. “Put out the fire so we can help you.”
I scrambled to my feet and lunged for the altar, willing to throw my body on there to smother the flames if that was what I had to do, but Aaron/Jess tripped me, flipping me onto my back. She leapt on top of me a second later, pinning me to the ground and sliding her large, Aaron hands around my neck for the second time that night.
Argh! No way was I blacking out again.
“Get off!” I tried to buck Jess off, but Aaron’s body was too heavy and his hands too strong. Spots danced in front of my eyes while zombies continued to pour from the earth.
Two dozen or more were out of the ground now, shuffling toward me and Aaron/Jess with eyes glowing red in the leathery remains of their faces. Scraps of weathered blue and gray uniforms hung on their bleached bones, blowing like miniature flags in the cold wind sweeping in from the river.
“They won’t stay down!” I heard someone scream from outside the circle.
“Stop them before they cross the street. Contain the area!” Kitty yelled.
God, no. Jess wasn‘t lying. Nothing could stop these things. We were fighting a losing battle, shoveling shit against the tide, as my grandmother would say. Cliff’s horrible vision was going to come to pass, despite all his efforts to stop it.
My eyes drifted to what remained of Cliff, and I was shocked to see his eyes were still open. Open and latched onto me.
“Habeo are transit,” he whispered, his voice so soft I could barely hear it over the groans of the Undead and the shouts of the Settlers.
“Habeo are transit,” I repeated, recognizing the spell he’d warned me we might need. I had no idea what speaking the words would do, but after all the times he’d tried to guide me to the right path and I’d stubbornly insisted on doing what I damned well pleased, I owed him a little bit of faith.
Heck, I owed him a lot of faith.
So I repeated it again, and again, chanting with him even though Aaron/Jess intensified her efforts at my throat and I could barely force the words out. I chanted until the zombies falling to their knees beside me faded from my awareness, until I couldn’t feel the cold of the hard, snowy ground or the heat from the nearby fire or the
pain from being strangled or my dozen other wounds, until I was so at peace I couldn’t feel my body at all.
In fact, I felt like I was outside myself looking in, like I was watching the zombies begin to pile on top of me and Aaron/Jess from a few feet away, watching from inside . . . Cliff.
Hurry, Megan! Now we can put them back.
“Cliff?” I asked, but the words came out all gurgly sounding, because I was actually using Cliff’s lips to talk instead of my own.
I wasn’t losing it—I really was inside Cliff’s body, hearing Cliff’s voice in the head we now shared. I could feel Cliff ’s . . . Cliffness, for lack of a better word, snuggled close beside my me-ness, and it felt right. It felt like I’d known his soul for ages, longer than I’d been alive, like he was a part of me I’d misplaced and finally gotten back.
If there had been time, I’m sure I would have spent a good hour or two freaking out about how unbelievably weird all of that was, but unless I wanted to watch myself be eaten alive, I had to do something. Fast.
Put them under!
I can’t! I replied, finding it easier to communicate with my thoughts than through Cliff’s poor ravaged throat. They’ll just come right back up again. The freezing command won’t do much either. And I can’t work the reverto spell because my blood raised them and my body really doesn’t need a few hundred more bite marks.
Oh. God. A few hundred. There really were a few hundred zombies burbling from the ground, clawing their way free from the cold earth inside the circle. Those who didn’t linger for a taste of Megan were spilling out onto the snow-covered grass like ants on a Hostess snowball snack cake, intent on reaching downtown and the warm, beating hearts of a thousand or more Little Rock citizens.
Warm, beating hearts. There are so many . . . but they only need one. Cliff echoed my thought in that faraway voice he got when he was getting all “seer” on me. One heart. One human heart could stop all this, and now I knew exactly where we were going to get it.
We had shoved ourselves to our feet and started toward the pile of zombies swarming around Aaron/Jess and my spiritless body before I could consciously agree to the plan I saw forming in his mind, but that was okay.
There was a reason Cliff didn’t go back to his grave, and it wasn’t just to guide me to where I needed to be tonight, or to face whatever Very Bad Thing was coming next. If I hadn’t realized it before, I certainly did now. Cliff gave me strength in the same way that I gave him the vital energy he needed to stay out of his grave. I certainly never would have been able to shove my hand into someone’s chest and pull out their still-beating heart on my own. Even to save the world, let alone Arkansas.
You have no idea what you’re capable of. I didn’t know if it was my thought or Cliff’s, a condemnation or a compliment, and pretty soon I didn’t care.
“No!” Aaron/Jess screamed as Cliff’s/my hand disappeared into Aaron’s body, parting through flesh and bone like a knife through butter, our fingers closing around the surprisingly hard muscle at the center of his chest. We didn’t pause for dramatic effect, we didn’t meet Aaron/Jess’s eyes for one last moment of grim recognition, we just pulled the sticky organ free and hurled it across the grass.
Even though there was hardly any blood left in the heart after the spell I’d cast earlier, the zombies still swarmed, abandoning my body, returning from where they had prowled outside the magic circle to pounce on the heart of the one who’d raised them, the one who had put this entire nightmarish sequence of events in motion. Any heart would have served the same purpose, but Cliff and I found it rather fitting that it was Jess/Aaron’s.
You’ve got to go, Megan, Cliff urged as more and more Reanimated Corpses surged into the circle to feed on the vital energy of the heart and return to their graves. Go back to your body.
But I don’t know how. And what about you?
I’m not sure I’m going to make it, and you don’t want to be trapped here.
No! What do you need? What can I—
Goodbye, Megan. I’ll miss you. The next thing I knew, Cliff had somehow drop-kicked me out of his body. At least that’s what it felt like.
One second I was inside him not feeling much of anything, the next I was landing in my body with a groan, barely opening my eyes in time to see Ethan bending down over me.
“Megan? Are you okay?” he asked. His feelings were clear in his eyes.
Ethan still loved me, even after everything he’d seen tonight—corpse-kissing, hand-holding, heart-ripping, and all. For some reason, that was the straw that broke the camel’s hump. Or back. Or whatever.
I reached for him and he hugged me and I cried. And cried. And cried.
CHAPTER 24
“You want some more popcorn? Or maybe an extremely large box of Swedish fish?” Dad asked from his seat beside me. “I know the lady working the register—bet I can get us a deal.”
I followed his gaze across the basketball court to the booster club snack table, where Mom was working the first shift at the cash box. As if sensing she was being observed, she looked up and smiled. I tried to smile back, but it wasn’t easy. So I waved instead, mostly to make Dad happy.
We’d had a long family talk over Saturday morning pancakes, but it was going to take time for my and Mom’s relationship to recover. Though after hearing her side of the story, I could sort of understand why she hadn’t told me the truth, at least at first.
My bio dad was a creep who had wooed Mom while Dad was deployed to Korea for a year. He’d known she was a Settler and had thought she could help him learn more black magic if he seduced it out of her. When he’d figured out she didn’t know the kind of spells he was looking for, he’d drained her blood and left her to die alone in our house. If Dad hadn’t come home a day later, she never would have made it.
After that, she’d confessed everything to SA and that was why she and Dad had been relocated—not the “discovered Settling a corpse” story she’d always told me. She’d found out she was pregnant a few weeks after the move. Dad had already forgiven her for cheating—he felt he hadn’t been a very good deployed husband and had probably contributed to the whole tempted-by-a-hot-but-evil-witch thing—but they decided to go in for tests to see if the baby was his anyway.
Turns out “it”—me—wasn’t his child, and an amnio revealed “it” had the WB virus, just like “its” dad.
Mom, who had wanted me even though I had an evil daddy, had been scared to death that SA would make her have an abortion since the WB virus had been proven to cause psychotic evilness in Settlers before. But Elder Thomas had agreed to keep the results of the test secret. She’d buried the report and promised she wouldn’t say anything to anyone as long as the baby seemed okay.
So I guessed I owed Thomas big-time. Owed her my life, really, but that didn’t make me like her any more than I did before. And I didn’t feel the slightest smidgen of guilt that she and the entire Carol and Little Rock SA councils were under investigation by the National High Council, especially since I hadn’t been the one to blow the whistle, after all.
Kitty was responsible for that. Apparently, she’d been investigating the Carol Settlers’ Affairs office since all the crap went down last September, and had become convinced there was a mole somewhere in the Arkansas organization. A very high-ranking mole who was behind the entire “Arkansas taken over by zombies” plot!
Crazy to believe, but Kitty had all the evidence to prove that Jess’s efforts had been facilitated by someone inside SA and that Aaron hadn’t even been the first terminal patient she’d hooked up with. Several others had died while Jess was figuring out how to work the channeling spell without killing the body she was inhabiting.
Of course, why someone in SA would want Arkansas zombieapocalypsed and, more important, who was guilty were things Kitty hadn’t been able to figure out. Whoever it was had covered their tracks and had enough power to wipe the memories of the few people who might have witnessed something sketchy.
So we wer
e all in wait-and-be-highly-suspicious-of-each-other-while-we-see-what-the-High-Council-investigation-comes-up-with mode. Which was fine with me. I liked wait-and-see mode. It was highly preferable to everyone-trying-to-put-Megan-in-jail mode, and the High Council people seemed to really know what they were doing. They made Kitty look like a disorganized spaz in comparison, and she was clearly my hero at the moment.
She’d used the fresh blood sample she took from me to prove that the virus in my blood was active, but not mutating the way it would be if I were manifesting large amounts of black magic, confirming I was as innocent as she’d thought. She hadn’t been able to tell me or anyone else she’d been working with to clear my name because of the high-ranking mole, but I still totally wanted to be like her when I grew up.
Ethan was also my hero, of course. He’d figured out the Jess/ Aaron connection, which had stumped even Kitty. She’d known she was looking for a terminal patient, but hadn’t suspected Aaron was her guy thanks to his studly cheerleader front. Needless to say, she was impressed with Ethan, and word was that he was going to be offered an Enforcement job in the next few months.
I was sure he was thrilled. Not that we’d talked . . .
“So what do you say? Nasty gummy fish or more popcorn?” Dad asked.
“I’m already stuffed.” I turned back to him with a smile, trying not to think about Ethan or the fact that he hadn’t called to see how I was feeling today.
Using my latent power had increased my ability to heal, but Ethan wouldn’t know that. All the specifics of what I was were being kept tightly under wraps. Settlers’ Affairs didn’t want it to get out that they had a Settler with WB virus on active duty. They were afraid it would attract the wrong kind of attention from people like Jess and Aaron, and whoever this mystery mole was, who would want to use my power and blood for their own evil purposes.
They were so afraid that, even though the Enforcers had mind-wiped everyone who’d seen the pond zombies, instilling the injured with memories of rabid dogs loose on the ice and erasing the memories of their coven days from the cheerleading squads’ bleached-blond heads, I’d been worried they were going to lock me up just to keep anyone else from getting their hands on me.
