Heavens, I was getting horny just contemplating him.
As a ghost, only I could see the weird image of him melded to Jason. Seeing that strange double-exposure effect of Dan’s delightful brawn on top of Jason’s slighter boyish frame just about made me cross-eyed. It’s a good thing ghosts don’t get nauseous, because that’s what I wanted to be looking at them.
As I drew closer, I saw the other two members of this grave looking company. They were shifters, Gerald and Eddie.
Talk about your yummy beasts. Not so much Eddie, who’s a werehog. Hogs and humans are not a pretty combination. Panthers and humans, on the other hand…
Gerald is as gorgeous as he is a rarity. Muscled almost to the point of too much bulk, he is sooo easy on the eyes. His braided cornrows reach to his chiseled chest, parted by the black furred triangles of his ears. His green eyes practically glow in his mocha-brown face, and his nose carries a slight suggestion of felineness as do the fangs that peek out over his luscious lips. Subtle black markings accentuate his handsome catman features. He looks like what he is: hired muscle. He’s Patricia’s bodyguard, though I’ve rarely known her to need that kind of protection. Tristan insists, however, and Gerald certainly has no complaints. He has a big case of unrequited infatuation with his vampire mistress, a terrible shame considering she doesn’t care for men in that way. When he smiles, he’s the handsomest male I’ve ever seen.
Gerald wasn’t smiling. His ears were flattened to the side, a sure sign he was worried. He snapped his fingers in front of his best friend Eddie’s face.
Eddie was sitting in Tristan’s chair, an event in and of itself. The werehog is more hired muscle, usually sticking close to my vampire sweetie. His brown hair had been shaved into a mohawk between his pointed piggy ears. Eddie wasn’t pretty to look at; no werehog is. But he wasn’t as ugly as most, his snout more a hint than obvious on his roundish face, and his tusks curled only a little bit over his upper lip. He’s one of the nicest guys I know when he’s not having to play the heavy.
His expression was totally blank, his eyes not seeing the men leaning towards him, not blinking as Gerald snapped those fingers only a couple inches away. Concerned, I quickened my pace as I hurried down the aisle towards them.
Dan noticed my approach and straightened. He was in full possession of Jason’s body, with the young channel in a trance elsewhere in his head. Channels are not aware of what is going on when they give control over to a ghost. I have to give Jason and Isabella credit; I sure wouldn’t trust someone else with my body.
I heard both Dan’s rumbly tones as well as Jason’s lighter tones whisper to Tristan, “Brandilynn’s here.”
Tristan’s worried gaze never left Eddie’s face. “Go ahead and bring her up to speed.”
Dan/Jason descended the bandstand to meet me. Out of habit, Dan attempted to stroke my hair when he reached me. Jason’s hands passed over me, sort of like an errant breeze. With a rueful snort, Dan dropped his arms.
“What’s up? What’s wrong with Eddie?” I asked.
“We think he’s been made a zombie. Lana will be able to tell us once she arrives.”
I gaped. “Holy crap.” Then I realized I didn’t know if this was one of those hard-to-fix situations or simply a hiccup in the usual passage of the universe. From the looks on everyone’s faces, I was betting on the more difficult option.
In other words, same doodie, different day. When you hang out with paras, drama is always on call.
So I admitted, “Okay, I’m not totally up on my knowledge of zombies. It’s like a possession, kind of, right?”
Dan shook his head and lowered his voice. Bad sign. “Not quite. This is going to be hard for you to hear, Brandilynn. I know you like Eddie, as we all do, and the situation is real bad.” He blew out a breath and raked his fingers through Jason’s stiffly gelled ‘do.
“Okay, I’m braced for the news.” Famous last words.
“I’m hoping it’s just some stupid witch’s spell, but it’s not looking good.”
Dan was waffling, something he doesn’t usually do. A cold tendril of real fear wormed into my stomach. But I’ve faced really bad stuff before, including being killed by a sadistic serial killer. Surely I could handle what was coming. So I gently prodded him. “Start from the beginning.”
He nodded. “Eddie’s been mentoring a kid who became a were six months ago. Kind of a big brother deal, you know?”
“Gotcha.” I hated it when kids caught the Zoo Flu, the animal-borne virus that had only two outcomes if caught by a human: life as a shapeshifter or death.
“His car broke down on the east side of the town limits after he dropped the kid off at his house.”
“Not a good spot.” That area of Fulton Falls is badly run down, a haven for drug deals, prostitution, and the like. It was also a ‘thin’ place, which meant the ghost and physical worlds tend to affect each other. The buried Old Fulton Falls in that area is rife with black magic dealings, sorcery, all sorts of bad stuff. As above, so below. It was hard to know which plane damaged the other more.
Dan continued. “Eddie called Gerald to come and pick him up, which he did. Gerald found him like this, standing in the middle of the road.”
“So he brought Eddie here, hoping somebody could help. He was lucky to find you guys, it being Thanksgiving and all.”
Dan/Jason gave me a smile. “You know how Tristan is. He never rests when there’s an election on the horizon. I had nothing else to do, what with all you ladies having your own celebration.”
Aw. He’d missed me. It made me all warm and gooey inside, and I blew him a kiss.
Patricia came in through the ballroom’s glass double doors, finally arriving. Slowpoke vampire. She beelined straight for Tristan, sparing a nod for Dan/Jason as she went by. Now that we were away from the power station, she could no longer see me. She reached Tristan less than a breath later. As Gerald stood helplessly by the blank-eyed Eddie, brother and sister moved to one side to talk quietly.
I asked Dan, “So what will happen if Eddie’s a zombie? I take it that will be hard to fix or everyone wouldn’t look so freaked out.”
Dan started to reach for me again and stopped himself. It’s tough remembering the restrictions a physical body puts on you when you’re used to being a ghost. He had to settle for giving me his most comforting yet concerned look. “If he’s a zombie, then his soul is gone. He can’t be fixed.”
“You mean … he’ll stay like that? Just an empty body?” I looked over Dan’s shoulder at the werehog, my stomach doing a slow, sick drop. Oh, this couldn’t be happening. Not to Eddie.
Dan spoke carefully, as if to a child. Normally I get ruffled if I’m condescended to, but in this case, I knew it was because I was not only clueless but ready to be upset. It turned out I had plenty more to get upset about.
“Zombies are dangerous creatures, sweetheart. If his soul is gone, he’ll have to be – his body will have to be destroyed.”
I tore my gaze from Eddie’s too-still form. Gerald was starting to shake as he stood next to his friend, and I was reminded of how good shifter hearing was. Though Gerald couldn’t hear my end of the conversation, he could probably hear Dan speaking through Jason.
“Destroyed? As in killed? What the heck, Dan?” My voice was rising.
Dan swallowed. “A zombie is like an automaton. All it knows is what its body tells it. If it’s tired, it stops where it is and goes to sleep. If it’s hungry, it grabs the closest thing and eats. And I’m not talking a cheeseburger and fries from the nearest drive thru, baby girl.”
A shudder ran through me and I went colder than cold. “People. You’re saying Eddie will eat people.”
“Zombies prefer fresh meat. So fresh that it’s still breathing.”
I felt ill. Again my mind insisted, this can’t be happening. But apparently, it was.
“I guess he’s not hungry then,” I said weakly.
“Not yet.”
“Who’s going to k
ill him if he’s a zombie?” My gaze went to Gerald. The werepanther was tough and bad to the bone, but no way the big man would be able to kill his best bud. I looked at Tristan and Patricia next, who stood to one side, their predator faces as sad as vampires could get. I really wanted to think my sweetie and his sister would find it too difficult to destroy someone who had stood ready to take a stake for them.
Dan said, “That’s a matter for the authorities. If Lana says Eddie’s gone, we’ll turn him over to the police, who will take him to the hospital. He’ll be sedated, his family called to say their goodbyes, then they’ll cremate him.”
I couldn’t stop shaking. “Cremate?”
“Much like a vampire, it’s the only way to make sure a zombie stays down. You have to turn it to ashes.”
Something occurred to me then, something that should have bothered me before this. But hey, Eddie was a sort of friend. I think in my shock I can be excused for overlooking the obvious right away. “How did Eddie become a zombie – if that’s what he is?”
A flicker of anger drove back the pain in Dan’s eyes. It was kind of good to see. I know from personal experience how much better being mad is to sorrow.
The dual expressions of controlled fury didn’t sit well on neither Dan nor Jason’s faces. “Somebody, a voodoo priest or priestess usually, separates the soul from the body in order to make the body their slave. No one’s quite sure what happens to the soul. It just disappears, kind of like when vampires suffer their final death. But somebody made this happen. If we find that person—”
He didn’t finish the statement. He was really mad, and the threat didn’t need to be spoken.
Getting revenge sounded pretty all right to me. But my own anger was tempered by a bigger, scarier worry. If someone had cast Eddie’s soul out to make a slave out of him, yet we had possession of his body, then that someone was potentially out there looking for another person to zombify to take his place.
This situation was only getting worse by the second.
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