He put his hand on top of mine. His heart thumped into my palm. I shut my eyes and felt each chamber contract and expand, squeezing the blood through his body. He had no idea what a miracle that was, and how easily it could stop.
“Regina has a new donor,” he said. “That stripper guy.”
I opened my eyes. “He means nothing to her.”
“That’s not why I brought it up. I’m available now. For you, if you want.”
“What about Jim?”
He tensed, his fingers spasming against mine. “Jim’s scaring me.”
“Me, too.”
“Last time I donated, he—he played a game I didn’t like. Didn’t clear the rules with me ahead of time. I think he’s developing a taste for fear.”
I shivered at the turn of phrase. “We have to do something about him. As soon as the zombies are gone.”
Jeremy tapped his fingers against the back of my hand. “Think about my offer.”
“I can’t be like Regina. I won’t… you know.”
“Jerk me off? That’s okay. I’m not into you like that.”
“Oh.” I was relieved but perplexed. I thought he was into every vampire like that. “Good.”
“There’s this girl at the coffee shop I’ve been wanting to ask out. But I felt weird about it while Regina and I were hooking up. So I’m looking for a totally platonic donation situation.”
“Then, yes. Thank you.” I wanted to fall to the floor weeping in gratitude. I also wanted to start our “situation” right that moment, but I had no idea how to safely bite a human. Maybe I could go get Spencer and—
Footsteps descended the stairs on the other side of the door. I pulled my hand into my lap so it wouldn’t look like I was about to rip out Jeremy’s heart.
Franklin appeared, carrying a pair of plastic shopping bags.
“Jer, which of these microwave soup thingies you want?” He saw me and dropped the bags. “Ciara.”
I kept my focus over his right shoulder, in case the effect of being in a room with two humans overwhelmed my infant self-control.
“How are you?” I asked him. Had it not even been a week since Aaron collapsed in front of class? It seemed like years, but to Franklin the wounds must be fresh and oozing.
“Hanging in there.” His voice was guarded, as usual. “You?”
I shrugged. “Can’t complain.”
“That doesn’t mean you won’t.”
I looked straight at him and grinned. If anyone could be trusted not to treat me differently, it was Franklin. He never much treated me as a human being to start with. Best of all, I didn’t want to drink him.
“It’s good to see you,” he said, with only a slight catch in his voice. Then he picked up the plastic bag. “And now that you’re a vampire, I don’t have to share my food with you anymore.”
The door to the exit slammed open, and Regina and Noah came through, dripping wet.
“Shit, shit, shit.” Regina squeezed the rain from the ends of her black hair. “This thunderstorm in April is bogus.”
“Lights are out all over Sherwood,” Noah told us.
Franklin jutted his thumb at the door. “Don’t forget: the town is cordoned off. So the phone and electric will have to be fixed by whatever skeleton crew of technicians already happens to be in Sherwood. Could take days.”
“It’s like Night of the Living Dead.” Jeremy looked at Regina. “Now you gotta make me a vampire to keep me safe from zombies.”
I shook my head as I dialed the hospital. “I long for the days when that sentence would’ve sounded strange.”
The nurses’ station patched me through to Tina’s room. Mrs. Petrea answered.
“Oh, Ciara,” she sniffled. “It’s nice of you to call. I never got a chance to thank you for finding her. Who knows how long that man would have kept her in his hovel?”
Hovel? Elijah’s apartment wasn’t exactly the Trump Plaza, but I’m pretty sure it had running water.
“How is Tina?”
“Already better now that she’s had some fluids. Her fever’s gone, though she’s itching like crazy. Did you want to speak with her?”
A flash of rage shot up my arm, as if it could snap through the phone connection. No, I did not want to talk to the girl who got me killed.
“Can I speak with Lieutenant Colonel Lanham, please?”
There was a muffled sound from the receiver, like someone’s hand was over it. Mrs. Petrea came back on the phone. “Dear, he’d like to call you back from a phone in the waiting area.”
Good thinking. Colonel Petrea’s vampire ears would hear every word I said, even from across the room.
“Have him call me at the station’s main number.” I paused, dying to ask her a million questions about her human life with a never-aging vampire. But those answers were irrelevant to me now. “Thanks.”
“Noah, if you could supervise the child—” Regina motioned to me “—around the humans, while I get a hot shower, that’d be great.” She swept through the hallway door without waiting for an answer.
Noah sighed and crossed to the sofa, where Jeremy quickly moved his feet so the vampire could sit down.
The phone trilled. Lanham.
“What do you have for me?” he asked without preliminaries, which was the way I liked him.
I explained my theory about Petrea and the Legion of the Archangel Michael, and how they could’ve secretly been vampire hunters. As I spoke, Franklin, Noah, and Jeremy stared at me in disbelief. I felt like a conspiracy theorist.
Franklin leaned over and whispered to Jeremy, “Next she’ll be blaming zombies for the JFK assassination.”
“I heard that!” I snapped, which just made them laugh louder. “Assholes. Not you,” I hurried to add to Colonel Lanham. “So can you find out Petrea’s original name?”
“I’ll ask my counterpart in the Anonymity Division. She owes me a favor.”
I had a feeling a lot of people owed Colonel Lanham favors.
“If Tina had help in raising the zombies,” I said, “then they might keep coming, even though she’s in the hospital.”
“Yes, until all the CAs she spelled are destroyed or—” He cut himself off, probably checking that no one could hear him. “Or until she is.”
My skin turned cold, and not just because I was due for a meal. “You can break the spell by killing Tina?” No wonder her parents had been so devastated.
“We are not in the business of killing humans.”
“Except when absolutely necessary.”
He didn’t argue. “That’s not the case here. Captain Fox feels that the CAs can be contained within the cemetery.”
“And his forces can stop them from attacking the town, even if they all rise at once?”
“They are trained to do so.”
I frowned at his non-answer. “So what about Colonel Petrea?”
Lanham got so silent, I couldn’t hear him breathing.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes.” He was almost whispering. “Petrea is very influential in the Control.”
“But if he’s really the zombie master and no one stops him, he could go to another town and do it again.”
“I acknowledge that he or his wife probably have the ability, but what’s their motive? Why would they risk their position by breaking such a taboo?”
“Maybe it’s an Immanence Corps thing.” I shut my mouth as soon as the idea was out, because I knew where it came from—Jonathan Fetter’s Project Blood Leash memo. Which I had officially never read.
Colonel Lanham fell quiet again for several moments, then he simply said, “I’ll be in touch,” before hanging up.
As soon as my line disconnected, the phone rang again. I answered, “WVMP, the Lifeblood of Rock ’n’ Roll. How may I help you?”
“Yeah, the 911 people said to listen to you guys for emergency information.” A local.
“That’s correct.” I opened the binder that contained all the pertinent details
. “Did you have a question?”
“How did you get that gig? I thought it would be the country station out on Route 32.”
“We’re technically inside the Sherwood town limits, which makes us the official local station. Did you need emergency assistance?”
“Sort of. Can you play some Trisha Yearwood?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I told him, then hung up, reminding myself that even compared to the blood-drinking, zombie-wrastling, stripper-stroking life I now inhabited, the human world was very, very odd.
“I’ll do the phones for a while,” I told the guys. “You two sunnysides need to eat.”
“Hoping to fatten us up?” Franklin said.
I started to say, “No need for that,” making my usual dig at his paunch, but caught myself in time.
He halted beside me on his way to the microwave. “Don’t stop insulting me just because I’m in mourning. I need it now more than ever.”
I gave him a grim smile. “Me, too. A little normal would be nice.”
“Good luck.” He patted my shoulder. “You’re not exactly a magnet for normal.”
“You’re proof of that.” The phone rang, and I turned to answer it with a glow of hope. Franklin hadn’t been afraid to touch me. My future work in the WVMP office would be only half insane.
The number on the caller ID made me yank the receiver off the hook. “Sir?”
“Developments.” Lanham’s voice was crisper than ever. “Tina has changed her story. She’s confessed to willfully raising CAs.”
“So it wasn’t about the ghosts after all?” Tina wasn’t a saint, but I couldn’t imagine her knowingly risking people’s lives.
“Also, she’s pinned Captain Fox as her accomplice.”
“Elijah? That’s even more impossible.”
“She says she was blackmailing him into helping her, threatening to reveal their relationship to his superiors. He’s up for a promotion to major soon. Fraternizing with a human recruit would not have helped.”
“I thought they broke up before she started orientation.”
“Indoc,” he corrected. “The details of the soap opera are irrelevant. What is relevant is that before the cadaveris accurrens rose in Sherwood, the CA division was on the verge of downsizing. Captain Fox’s company was slated for disbanding. He’s been detained by Internal Affairs pending an investigation.”
The pieces seemed to fit (a little too well), except one. “Elijah’s not a necromancer.”
“According to Agent Codreanu-Petrea, if Tina’s blood was spelled, someone else would need only to scatter it and say a few words. Captain Fox had access to the cemetery during the crucial times.”
“Wait. Agent who?”
“Codreanu-Petrea. Tina’s mother. It’s a hyphenated mouthful, but I respect a woman’s choice to—”
“Codreanu is her maiden name?” I squeezed the phone so hard, the receiver began to crack. “Is she a descendant of the Iron Guard leader Corneliu Codreanu?”
“Even if she were, why would she put her own daughter in danger?”
“To control vampires. Think about it: if you were married to one, wouldn’t you want an equalizer? Honoring her ancestors would be a bonus.”
Lanham fell silent again, which I took as a good sign. “I’ll look into it.”
“What about Elijah? Other than Tina’s accusation, which could be a lie, the evidence against him sounds pretty circumstantial.”
“The evidential elements of Internal Affairs investigations are not your concern. What is your concern is this: according to Tina, the rest of the CAs will rise tomorrow night.”
“The rest?” I blinked hard and fast. “All eleven hundred and some?”
“Correct.”
I couldn’t even picture that many zombies in one place. “What do they have planned this time? Touch football? Ballet? Maybe a Cirque du Soleil routine?”
“Nothing that elaborate. They’ll be reverting to form, she says.”
“What does that mean?”
“They’re going to attack the town.”
32
Rise
Wednesday morning, in the midst of helping the community cope with the quarantine and the worst spring nor’easter of the century, the radio station received, from the Control, the weirdest delivery ever.
Shane and I lined up the six gelatin torsos in the common room and passed out katana swords to the other vampire DJs—except Jim, who would stay at the station that night, as determined by unanimous vote (minus his own). We trained the others using the techniques Captain Fox had taught us.
According to Lanham, the IA investigators had found more stolen necromancy texts in Elijah’s apartment. Tina signed an affidavit saying she had given them to him to complete her spell, to put the period at the end of her sentence, so to speak. I worried how the Zombie Company would manage without its leader, tonight of all nights—when we were expecting a CA rampage so big we had to call in civilian vamps from across the entire region.
Just after evening twilight, I arrived with Shane and the other DJs at the Sherwood cemetery, finding what looked like a giant vampire reunion party. I recognized a couple of Noah’s and Spencer’s friends, and Colin from D.C., Regina’s old chum. By my best count, we were still outnumbered five to one. But we had several advantages: weapons, functioning brains, and help from the living.
During the day, human Control agents had erected a fiberglass barrier around the perimeter of the cemetery. Its height and emerald green color reminded me of a baseball stadium’s center field wall. Not only would it keep the zombies in, but it would keep out the prying eyes of any curious, curfew-breaking onlookers.
The Control had briefly considered trapping the zombies inside the wall until sunrise. But the resulting fire could burn down the cemetery, and its smoke and stench would attract human attention. Besides, if enough zombies piled on top of one another, they could easily crawl over the wall. It was our job to prevent that.
Sergeant Kaplan had been called in from headquarters to train the civilian vamps. Her experience teaching clueless orientation recruits would no doubt come in handy.
“Remember,” she said, pacing before the ragtag band of amateur sword wielders, “the only way a CA can kill a vampire is by tearing off your head. So protect your noggin at all costs.”
Regina raised her hand. “I thought zombies were after human blood. Why would they attack us?”
“Good question.” Kaplan repeated it so the whole line could hear. “Two reasons. One, you smell enough like us that a CA doesn’t realize you’re not human until after it’s ripped you apart and started to drink. Reason number two.” She shrugged. “You’re in their way.”
I looked up at Shane, waiting for the fear to weaken my knees or make my eyes shift in search of the closest escape route. But between the sword in my hand, the man at my side, and the new strength of my limbs, I felt invincible. Or at least ninety percent less vincible.
“Listen carefully.” Kaplan looked each of us in the eyes before continuing. “You’ve been trained all your unlives not to hurt humans, to treat us as the fragile creatures we are.” The corners of her mouth quirked at her words.
Then her face turned dead solemn. “Zombies. Aren’t. Human. Some still look human. But don’t be fooled. Not even by the children.”
My stomach knotted as I remembered a Vietnam war movie where a soldier had stopped to help a child, only to be blown up by a bomb strapped to the kid’s body. The next child his platoon came upon was shot on sight.
“They’re dead,” Kaplan said. “Not dead like you. Dead like a rotting log. They can’t think. They can’t cooperate. They’re simply meat puppets, with a necromancer pulling their strings.”
I raised my hand, unable to stop myself. “If they have strings, wouldn’t that technically make them meat marionettes?”
Everyone stared at me. I continued to my second point. “Also, they seemed cooperative the other night with the pyramid.”
&nbs
p; “I saw the film you took,” Kaplan said. “They were programmed to do a specific task until it was completed. They didn’t think on their feet. They didn’t improvise.” The sergeant paused, then pointed at me. “But Agent Griffin reminds me of a good point. We don’t know what they’ll be programmed to do tonight, and it could very well look like a coordinated attack. But it doesn’t change our tactics or your role. The ZC and the Enforcement agents will take on the bulk of the cadaveris. All you have to do is guard the perimeter—that means the fence—and clean up any CAs that make it past the first line of defense. Understood?”
We all nodded, with varying amounts of enthusiasm.
Her voice became almost gentle. “You’re doing these things a favor. If you don’t destroy them, they’ll roast come sunrise.” She cast one last gray-green gaze over us. “Now get into position, and good luck.”
We spread out along the inside of the iron fence surrounding the cemetery. Every light in the cemetery had been extinguished, so that not even aerial photographers could see what happened here.
But it was plenty bright for vampire eyes, even with a new moon. I could see the section to our right roped off with orange boundary tape. Colonel Petrea claimed to have undone Tina’s work over those fifty graves. The spell of undoing required much more time and pain than the original spell, so he hadn’t had time to neutralize the entire cemetery. But this at least allowed the ZC to move their forces inward.
We waited. For hours. Midnight passed, and I had lunch. When 2 a.m. arrived, I had a snack. By 4 a.m. a rumor spread through the ranks that Tina had been lying, that tonight’s zombie rampage was a hoax.
“If it isn’t a hoax,” Shane said, “it had better hurry up.”
I followed his nervous glance to the east. “Morning twilight is 6:09. Per union rules, all Control vampires have to be safely underground forty-five minutes before twilight, which would be 5:24. That barely gives us an hour to kill the CAs and clean them up before the humans take over.”
Regina lit another cigarette. “Whoever the hell this zombie master really is, that’s probably just what they want.”
“Why?” I asked her.
“Humans can’t fight these things as well we can, so with the right timing, the zombies’ll come out of the graves maybe half an hour before sunrise. No vamps to stand in their way but plenty of time to kill humans.” She pointed to the fence. “And when they get over that wall and flame out, they’ll keep running. Bags of burning flesh, booking up and down the streets of Sherwood.” Regina took another drag. “Kinda cool.”
Bring On the Night Page 29
