Zombies Sold Separately

by Cheyenne McCray

  “Nyx needs to move back home, Kathryn,” my father said as I stepped back from my mother. He looked and sounded rough, displeased. “It is more and more dangerous for my princess to stay in that Earth Otherworld.”

  Not this again.

  “New York has been my home for over two years now, Father.” I looked at the tall, big, and muscular male who looked every bit the king of the Dark Elves. He would be intimidating to most, but I’d had him wrapped around my little finger since I was born. “I love it there.”

  Mother smiled at my father. “None of this now, you big Troll. We’re going to enjoy having our daughter home for the next few days.”

  “And convince her to stay here where she belongs.” His long blue hair fell over his shoulders as he leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. “It is good to have you home, my princess.”

  “It’s good to be here,” I said and added, “To visit.”

  “Humph.” My father motioned to one of the guards stationed at the door to the transference room. In the language of the Dark Elves, he said to the guard, “Tell Locke we will be ready for dinner to be served in an hour.”

  The guard bowed. “Yes, my king,” he said before he exited the room.

  My father only spoke English with my mother and me. He spoke flawless English with only a hint of an Old World accent.

  “Do you ever get tired of people bowing to you and calling you things like ‘my king,’ or ‘my lord,’ or ‘your highness’?” I looked up at Father. “After all of these years hasn’t it grown a little old?”

  He looked surprised at my question. “I am king. Of course not.”

  I’d sure gotten tired of being called “my princess” before I left home. But then my father had been a king for over two thousand years. It was simply how things were with him.

  A bare-chested warrior with dark brown skin, silver hair, and silvery-gray eyes came to the transference chamber and bowed to my father. Rhain. He was built much the same as all of the other warriors, muscular and fit. But he was taller than most and to me he’d always been beautiful.

  Rhain’s refusal to meet my gaze could have been for a number of reasons, including the fact that my father was standing in front of him. Father didn’t approve of any warriors giving me attention. The truth is most males didn’t approve of me at all because I’d been allowed to train with them and females are supposed to be subservient. My father indulged me—he could never say no to me. And I think that he liked having someone to teach his warrior’s skills to.

  But I’d had what humans call a “crush” on Rhain since my teen years and at one time he’d been nice to me. So it stung as he pointedly ignored me as he said to my father, “Declan has returned with news.”

  “Have him meet me in the throne room,” Father said, and Rhain gave another quick bow before leaving.

  “Yestin,” my father said to the guard. “Take the princess’s haversack to her chamber.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Yestin came forward and bowed to my father before he took my pack and left.

  “I will see you at supper.” My father hugged me again and he kissed my mother before striding out of the chamber.

  It occurred to me that I was human right now, not Drow, so it would only have made me more different, separating me from all Dark Elves even more than I already was.

  I wondered how Adam would like my father and then how my father would like Adam. I frowned. I didn’t think he would be intimidated by my father, but I also didn’t think they’d be best buddies right off. I wasn’t sure my dad would approve to begin with just because Adam was human.

  “Is something wrong, Nyx?” Mother put her arm around my waist and I put mine around hers as we started out of the transference chamber. She was wearing a beautiful long gown in royal purple, a gown befitting a queen, and the material was soft beneath my arm as we walked together. She added, “You look like you’re thinking about something you’re not happy about.”

  Trust Mother to know when things weren’t right with me. I suppose that’s what mothers are for.

  When we reached the hall outside the chamber, I looked at Mother and gave a half smile. “Just thinking about things.”

  “Guy things?” she asked while we headed arm and arm toward my personal chamber.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged.

  Mother had always been my best friend and confidante growing up in the Drow Realm. I was more or less an outcast with females for the same reasons I was an outcast with males.

  It had taken time, but the Dark Elves had eventually fallen in love with my mother even though she was human. She didn’t practice the submissive lifestyle, but was beautiful, feminine, kind, caring, and obviously loved my father deeply.

  She’d proven herself to those who became her people, time and time again with her acts of kindness and generosity.

  “Tell me.” My mother said it in a way that only best friends could. “You’ve fallen for someone, haven’t you?”

  I looked at her. She was a couple of inches shorter and her skin fairer than mine from living underground for so many years, but she looked to be about my age. Once she had come to live belowground, she had stopped aging.

  “His name is Adam.” Usually his name sent pleasure through me, but right now I felt confusion. “He’s an NYPD detective. We’ve been dating for a few months but we’ve known each other longer than that.”

  “Ah.” Mother had grown up in New York City so she was familiar with the NYPD. “A human, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me about this Adam.” She gave me one of her brilliant smiles. “Are you in love with him?”

  “Very much so.” I wish I could have smiled, too, but after last night and the way it had left me feeling …

  “You’re having doubts,” she said as her expression grew more serious.

  We reached the heavy wood and iron door to my chamber and stopped. “Yes,” I said as I waited for the male guarding my door to open it.

  He bowed to Mother and me before we walked into my room and he shut the door behind us. My bag was waiting in the room. Burning wood crackled in the small fireplace, the smoke carried up through air vents that were released somewhere aboveground. Fat candles had been lit throughout my room and both the candles and the fireplace cast shadows on the walls.

  Mother had made sure my old room felt warm and welcoming, not cold and dreary. It didn’t have the musty odor shut off places normally did. Instead, I smelled the potpourri she had simmering in the fireplace along with burning wood and the tallow candles.

  The realm of the Dark Elves had been stuck in the Middle Ages like the rest of Otherworld, but my mother had made sure I had many comforts from the Earth Otherworld she’d grown up in. Like a huge mega-comfortable bed that I loved.

  I flopped down on the end of the bed, lay back on it, and stared up at the stone ceiling. The bed dipped as my mother sat beside me and then I felt the warmth of her palm on my knee.

  All of the nooks and crannies on my ceiling were so familiar. I’d stared up at this ceiling for the first twenty-five years of my life. The ceiling I looked at when I woke up in my apartment in the city had become normal, but this one made me feel like home. I wasn’t sure I liked that because New York was my home now, not Otherworld.

  “Tell me about this young man.” Then I heard the smile in Mother’s voice. “Around here anything under a century is young.”

  I pushed myself up so that I was sitting on the edge of the bed and smiled at my mother. “He does fit that bill. Adam is in his thirties, so Father would just consider him a babe.”

  “Adam,” my mother said. “I always liked that name when was I was growing up in the Earth Otherworld.”

  “Do you miss it, Mother?” My tone became more serious. “New York?”

  “Sometimes.” She braced her palms on the bed to either side of her and met my eyes. “But it’s been a very long time since I lived there. Over thirty years.”

  “You were young.” I swung my
legs back and forth as I talked. I was wearing a pair of Dior slacks and a cashmere sweater. Not being in a dress set me apart from other Drow women, too. “I’m surprised Father didn’t think eighteen was too young.”

  “Your father thinks that ‘too young’ applies to you because you are his little princess.” She smiled. “When we met it was magical. And I had always been mature for my age.”

  “Strange how you ended up in Otherworld,” I said. “One moment you were in Manhattan, and then poof, you were here.”

  “Down the rabbit hole, I always thought.” She started swinging her legs, too, her purple-slippered feet peeking out from beneath her dress. “I found out much later, after we were married, that your father had seen me in a vision. He had the Seer locate me and then your father used the transference to bring me here.

  “One day I was walking to my first class my freshman year at NYU,” she said, “and the next I found myself aboveground in Otherworld where it was night. I met him in the forest with only moonlight to see him by.”

  “I’ve never heard the whole story,” I said. “Didn’t you feel manipulated?”

  “It was romantic, exciting, new.” She smiled. “He was so handsome and strong. Intelligent, powerful. I fell for him the first night I met him.”

  “The blue hair and blue skin thing didn’t freak you out?” I said.

  Mother tilted her head to the side. “It was dark, so the first few nights I thought it was just a trick of the shadows in the forest. Each night he sent me home and then brought me to him again the next night. Night here, not in the Earth Otherworld. So it was like being in the night all of the time.”

  “And you just went with it?” I said.

  “I was young and rebellious.” She looked at me. “I’d spent my entire life as an orphan in foster care and I wasn’t your average eighteen-year-old.”

  “You must not have been average,” I said, “to have left behind everything you had and knew for a life here.”

  “It took some getting used to, but I was so in love with your father…” She sighed, a happy sigh. “I still am.”

  “What about all you left behind?” I said. “You didn’t have family, but what about friends?”

  “Because I was moved around so much, I never had a chance to develop many close relationships,” she said. “And your father was worth everything that I did give up.”

  “You are amazing, Mother.” I looked at her. “You came from a world where you were an independent young woman to the medieval male-dominated world of the Dark Elves.”

  “Nothing amazing about that,” she said. “I was in love with your father.” She raised her hand, only her pinky finger lifted up. “And I had him wrapped around here long before you had him wrapped around your little finger.” It was almost as if she had read my thoughts earlier.

  “You sure did.” I shook my head. “Although I can picture the kind of reception you got as a new human queen who refused to be submissive.”

  “I submitted to your father, Nyx,” she said, suddenly looking serious. “But it’s not about doing things against my will. He honors and loves me. It’s easy to want to please him. He has always treated me like a queen. And I treat him like a king. It’s why we still love each other and why we are still happily married after all these years.”

  I thought about her and my father for a few moments. “I went to a reception with Adam and met his family yesterday,” I said. “His family was nice, but it was so hard evading their questions and not being able to tell them the truth about me.”

  “I understand.” Mother squeezed my knee with her hand. I’d forgotten it was there. “Don’t let that hold you back in your relationship. Don’t shy away from it and don’t fight your feelings. There are no rights and no wrongs in love if it is love. It is what it is.”

  “No rights and no wrongs?” I said. “What about abusive males and females?”

  She stared at the fireplace. “Not every man is meant to be a lover, a husband, a father. Just like not every woman is meant to be a lover, a wife, a mother.” She turned her gaze to me. “I believe they have some need they want fulfilled and they can’t figure out what that is. The people they harm…”

  This time when she looked away I thought there might be a tear in her eye. “That child or adult doesn’t fill the need of their abuser so the abuser’s internal pain is taken out on the one they supposedly love.” She still didn’t look at me as she added, “A person like that doesn’t know what real love is.”

  I felt a deep sadness for the girl my mother had been as I placed my hand over hers. “You’ve never talked with me about your life growing up in foster care.”

  “Like most abused children, it’s not something we like to talk about,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. I leaned my head on her shoulder. “I had it so good growing up and I know that.” I gripped her hand. “I love you and Father so much. Even though I don’t come home often, I miss you.”

  “I know.” Mother kissed the top of my head. “I don’t have to tell you, though, to keep standing up to your father and live your life. Not the life he wants you to lead.”

  I raised my head and smiled at my mother. “Maybe one of these days he’ll ‘get it.’”

  Mother laughed. “Not likely.”

  FIFTEEN

  Supper was held in the huge banquet hall with my mother, father, and about twenty of his closest advisors, the highest ranking warriors, my uncle, and my step-uncle—the brother of my father’s previous wife. My father sat at the head of the table with me on his left, Mother on his right.

  “You look lovely, my princess,” Father said as he smiled at me. “You and your mother have always been the most beautiful females in the realm.”

  I smiled back. “Thank you, Father.”

  Because I knew it would make my father happy, I wore a velvety soft gown in royal blue as well as a circlet on my head. The circlet was simple, made of the same metal as my collar, but it had Drow-mined sapphires and diamonds on it that sparkled in the torchlight. I was still human, but I had a couple of hours before I’d have to excuse myself to transform to Drow.

  Father squeezed Mother’s hand on top of the table and she gave him a radiant look. She had changed into a crimson gown, her blond hair pulled back beneath her delicate crown. She looked beautiful and regal, every bit the queen she was.

  My father was a powerful male with a commanding presence and few would dare to question or argue with him. Rodán had been one of those few, for which I’d always be grateful. Rodán was the reason I had ended up in New York City as a Night Tracker.

  “You look quite handsome, Father,” I said.

  Tonight he wore jewel-encrusted chest straps over his muscular chest and he had on leather wrist bands. The jewel-makers had studded his crown with precious gems. The crown rested on his long, wavy blue hair that was almost the same shade of sapphire as my eyes.

  “To my daughter’s homecoming.” Father spoke in Drow as he raised his tankard of ale and everyone around the table did, too.

  “To the princess,” they responded in unison before taking huge swallows of the ale. Most of them said it without looking at me.

  After the toast, for the most part I was ignored by everyone at the table—all males with the exception of my mother. I’d been used to it before I left for Otherworld, but now it had a sting to it, like Rhain’s intentional dismissal of me had earlier.

  The only males who paid any attention to me were my uncle, Simon, and my step-uncle, Garf. I’d always liked Simon, but Garf was nothing but a lecher who’d love to take my father’s crown. He despised my mother even though he kissed up to her in front of my father.

  Because my brother was gone, Simon was next in line for the throne. Garf was in line after Simon—but only if Garf married me.

  As if.

  The thought made me ill.

  Garf and I weren’t blood-related, but it still creeped me out. Truth was that everything about Garf made my stomach churn. If F
ather had known the lecherous way Garf looked at me, starting when I was eighteen, he probably would have had my step-uncle’s head cut off. That really would have been for the best.

  “Have you enjoyed your time in the Earth Otherworld?” Simon asked me as he broke of a hunk of bread.

  After he handed me a too-large piece, I said, “Yes, Uncle.” I reached for the freshly churned butter—it was so good on hot, homemade bread. “I love it there. But it is nice to be home. For a visit.”

  My uncle Simon and I made some conversation, but most of the meal I talked with my mother and father, asking them about what they’d been doing, and they asked me questions in return. My father was gruff, but he managed to not bellow out anything about me staying in the Drow Realm and never returning to New York City.

  Dinner was a traditional celebratory three-course meal of roast chicken and a whole roasted pig, nuts, cheeses, fruits, and crisp vegetables. Dark Elves bartered with Light Elves for most of our food because it grew, was made, or was raised aboveground.

  “Yum,” I said in English as my favorite dessert was brought out by servers. Egg custard tart. “Thank you,” I said in Drow as I looked from my father to my mother. “This is all wonderful.”

  For my parents, the celebration was having me at home. For everyone else it was an excuse to drink my father’s best ale and to eat until they couldn’t stuff themselves anymore.

  After I finished my tart, I said, “I have important questions for you, Father.” I kept my voice low and spoke in English, a language few at the table would understand. I had intentionally waited until now to ask the questions that I needed to.

  “Ask.” He bit into his third tart.

  “It might be better somewhere else,” I said. “I want to talk with you about Tristan and what happened to him.” Even as quietly as I had spoken, several of the males at the table looked at me when I said my brother’s name.

  My father stopped in mid-chew. Without looking at me, he set his unfinished tart on his plate, picked up a wet piece of cloth and began wiping his fingers. “That topic is not open for discussion.”