“You can drink from me. We have to do this anyway, right?” I didn’t have to offer, but I felt responsible for the altercation, and he looked so beat up and . . . I cared for him. The very questions running through my head seemed to cross his face, but he didn’t voice them.
“Are you sure?” he asked, diverting his gaze from my neck.
“Yes.”
He ran his fingers through my hair, twining the strands between his fingers while studying me. His fangs elongated, eliciting a predatory smile, and I trembled, remembering the last time he drank my blood. He tugged at my hair, exposing my neck and licked at the spot just above the jugular. I emitted a stuttered sigh. I felt his hot breath and the slight prick of his fang on my neck. My skin and blood burned in molten heat as he pierced through to the vein and sucked deeply. I lay immobile in his arms for a few long, languid moments until he withdrew and licked the punctures. I didn’t orgasm like before, but my body throbbed with an easy pleasure. He tugged me against his chest and held me until I managed to open my eyes. He nuzzled my neck and ran his tongue up to my ear, nibbled the lobe, then drew back with a ragged sigh. The bruises on his face were gone and the cuts mended.
I wish I could have said the same for my heart.
Chapter Eleven
“GET OFF THE road!”
I skirted past the jerk yelling at me from the window of his Escalade and tried to ignore the incessant honking from the cars stuck in a traffic jam. Exhaust fumes enveloped me in a noxious fog. And cars weren’t the only thing after me. I narrowly avoided a collision with a zealous biker the minute my feet touched the sidewalk. I increased my pace when a Doberman lunged at me, his sharp teeth inches from my ankles before his chain yanked him back. What the hell? Once I got close to the beach, I sat on a small bench, clutched my head, and let my heart settle from the chaos swarming around me.
I’d left the demon lair with Ly last night, who’d dropped me at my house with a small, bittersweet goodnight kiss. Malthus had wanted me to stay after the others had left, but the confrontation and brawl had left my mind too frazzled to deal with him. Shit had piled up fast, and I had to shovel things one at a time before they completely buried me. Ly had promised to further investigate our attack, so that left me with Olive to track down. Only four of us knew of her undead situation, but nothing stayed hidden for long in the community, its own Peyton Place conclave in San Francisco. Once the witches decided to send out an all-points bulletin for Olive, they’d come knocking at Malthus’s door, armed with accusation.
I descended the steep stairs to China Beach, a cove sheltered by a gray seawall and rocky cliffs, adjacent to the Presidio and sporting a fantastic view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Snuggled in one of the crags along the cliff wall, a couple made out, and a woman struck a yoga pose on the shoreline. I grimaced. It was going to take a hell of a lot more than downward dog to balance my chakras.
I spotted Kara sitting on a rock thrusting out of the sand. The tide hadn’t yet invaded the beach, giving access to the many rocks that broke up the shifting boundary where waves met shore.
Chinese fisherman used to camp out here during the gold rush. They’d been outcasts at that time, but a necessary force behind the growth of this city. Fortunately, the Chinese had built a vibrant community and no longer need to hide out in the cove. It was just Kara and me.
I hoisted myself up the slippery rock and scooted next to her. I removed my Vans and let my legs hang down the rock’s side, brushing the sand with my toes. The ocean smelled briny today, as if it hadn’t yet purged itself of the dead fish carcasses or rotting seaweed that the tide would vomit onto the beach in a day or two. The last lingering rays of the sun stained the clouds orange.
“How was class today?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Routine, I suppose, which is good. Right now, routine is fucking fantastic.”
Kara smiled. “I never thought I’d agree with such a boring sentiment, but I’d give anything for a simple coven meeting where the top agenda item involved the merits of cloaking spells instead of funeral arrangements.”
“Has anyone mentioned Olive yet?”
“Some have commented on her absence, but no alarms have sounded, not yet. Sybil cornered me today, though, asking questions.” Kara tilted her head toward me.
“So what’s your next move?” I asked.
“I’m meeting with a few witches tonight, ones that sympathized with Matilda. Only we can’t let anyone see us. That would imply we were forming our own coven, which would give the current coven reason to retaliate. Of course, the words they would use would be ‘discipline’ or ‘rein in’. In either case, Sybil would raise a fuss, and I’d lose any chance I had at Wiseacre.”
“But you’re going to discuss a coven coup?”
She picked up a charcoal-black rock and chucked it into one of the breaking waves. “An alliance.” She sighed heavily. “They’re looking to me to lead them. I’m no rebellion leader.”
I laughed. “Coming from the woman who takes pride in walking on the wrong side of the fence, who wears red on green day.”
“That’s just it. I’m a rebel without a cause. That’s easy. When you have a cause, have people who believe in you . . .” She shook her head.
“They support you for a reason. Matilda believed in you.”
The waves began extending past the rock, closer to the sea wall. Soon, the encroaching tide would engulf us.
“It’s hard leading people, having them believe in you when you have a hard time believing in others. My father committed me to an institution when I was sixteen. My mother never revealed the truth to him about us,” she said.
A wave slapped the rock at the same moment shock enveloped me in a turgid, salty mist. Kara paused before continuing, letting me gather my fractured thoughts.
“When my mom died, he got custody of me. Only he had no idea how to catalog me in his lawyer’s mind. When I almost incinerated the school mean girl, he petitioned the court to commit me in an institution instead of juvie.”
“I’m really sorry. I feel like such a whiner in comparison. At least my family members were all supes.”
She squeezed my hand. “Don’t diminish your hardships. They’re as legitimate as mine. We all handle things differently.”
“So what happened in the nuthouse?”
“I was the ‘rebel.’ The Randle McMurphy to Nurse Ratched. All the other girls expected me to save them. Give them some hope. They’d watched too many damn movies. One of the girls—they did something to her after a fight she had with another girl. She returned from ‘isolation’ different. Her eyes were vacant.” Her voice slid on the ice box she’d built to encase her emotions, wavered for a fraction of a second, before she hardened it again. “The rest of the girls looked to me, expected me to exact revenge. I was just as scared.”
I grabbed the fist she started banging against her head. The pendulum. A movement she often repeated in times of high stress—as when Matilda died—usually sitting on the floor. I pictured her sitting in a cold hallway of the institution, swinging her pendulum. “You’re not in an institution anymore. No nurse with drugs. You have power.”
She closed her eyes, and a familiar cold wrapped around us. It was something Kara did with her power when her emotions escaped from the freezer. I wrapped my hands around myself.
“Sorry. I don’t feel that. I forget it happens sometimes. I finally found out what isolation meant. The nurse locked me up overnight in the cooler where they stored food.”
Anger and despair welled up inside my chest. “How come you never told me this before?”
“Probably the same reason you never told me your mom killed herself.”
She had a point. Some things are easier left unexplained.
“The worst thing about that fucking place was the endless blank, white walls. No decoration, no f
lowers, no color. There was nothing to anchor your sanity. Monotony after monotony, droning routine. Day in. Day out. No wonder so many girls gave in and took the drugs. A blank mind can better tolerate a blank place.”
“Did you ever take the drugs?”
“Only when they forced me. Other times, I closed my eyes and thrived on the color in my mind.”
“And you couldn’t use your power?”
“Not enough to do anything. There were no elements. Only the cold, as you know, absorbed into me and never left—an endless reserve of cold.” She shivered, and I hugged her until the frigid air from her tortured subconscious melted into the normal cool ocean breeze.
“Thank goodness they dispensed with the brain scramble.” I wiggled two fingers against the ridges of my eyes.
She grimaced. “They replaced the chopstick lobotomies with Prozac.” She leaned back, her elbows on the rock. “So what do we do about Olive?”
I had to fix this for her. Even though she complained about the coven, she needed it and the acceptance it offered, the assurance that she wouldn’t wind up in another institution. I dreaded to contemplate how many supes wound up in institutions due to a frightened family members or a run-in with the authorities.
“Three days have passed. My fervent hope is she’s dead somewhere.” I rubbed my forehead. “That sounds terrible. But it’s just not possible for the arcane energy keeping her animated to linger inside her for very long. I didn’t make her a zombie. I don’t understand.”
“We need to find her, dead or undead.”
“Greg hasn’t called me about unusual activity.” Waves slapped against the rock, depositing cold froth to tickle my toes. “But I have an idea.”
She raised one eyebrow.
“What’s the best way to sniff out a lost dog?”
Her eyes perked up for the first time since I joined her on the beach. “You’re going to make another zombie.”
Zombies born from the same necromancer are drawn to each other. I didn’t know why, but right now, I was glad for the connection.
“Technically, Olive’s not a zombie, so I’m not sure it’ll work, but yes. I don’t know how else to locate her. Now all I need is a body.”
The water splashed further up the rock, hit my knees, then retreated and returned. “We better move before we get trapped on this rock,” I said, hopping onto the cold, wet sand.
She landed next to me.
“We’re gonna get through all this,” I said, swinging an arm around her shoulders.
“If it doesn’t destroy us first.”
“WHY IS IT WE’RE always forced to skulk around at night, whether in a cemetery or morgue?” Kara asked, sticking so close to my rear, she twice nipped my heels with her boots while we snuck down the hallway of the hospital. We’d left the beach and researched potential sites at my house until eleven, settling on this mid-city hospital immersed in one of the grittier parts of town, figuring it would have several potential John Doe zombie candidates.
“Yeah. The coroners, lab techs and cemetery caretakers should leave time during the day, like a European siesta, so that witches, necromancers and vampires can access dead bodies without having to sneak around,” I said with a sarcastic snort.
“See, the European supes have it made.”
“Just make sure no one follows us.”
Kara used deflection spells to mask our movement through the wide, well-lit corridors. Anytime someone noticed us, the spell would muddle their perception, causing them to shrug off the disturbance and continue down the hall.
“Why didn’t we do the cemetery thing? I’d prefer to be outside instead of skulking around this hospital,” Kara said. She paused, then added in a quiet voice, “It reminds me of the institution.”
I glanced at her, saw her scratching her cheek. “I’m sorry, but the cemetery is out of the question. That’s the last place a necro would search for a body unless they wanted to set up a Halloween house of horrors.” The recently deceased were less decayed, their minds that much more functional. A decomposed body in a grave never made for a nice, happy zombie. Lying in a box, buried under tons of dirt, tended to sour a corpse. Fresh bodies were easier to control. It was the difference between a somewhat docile dog and a foaming, rabid one.
We reached the double doors leading into the morgue.
Footsteps clomped toward us. Kara and I flattened against the cold, sterile wall of the hallway. “Tell me you spelled this hallway,” I whispered, spotting a young guy in blue nurse scrubs turn the corner and stop.
“Of course. An overwhelming desire to leave will consume our intrepid nurse, and he will immediately go home and watch The Walking Dead.”
I muffled a giggle on her shoulder. “You chose The Walking Dead?”
“I thought it appropriate, given our current objective,” she said with mock seriousness.
I rolled my eyes while keeping them trained on the lab tech. He looked down the hall in our direction, his face scrunched in confusion. “Why is he still there?” I whispered. He lingered a few more minutes that stretched on and on before he turned and headed in the other direction.
“We don’t have a whole lot of time before the deflection spells dissipate,” Kara said.
We faced the doors to the morgue. “They’re going to be locked,” I said, turning the knob anyway. I tapped my foot and waited for her to open the locked door. “Well?” I said, when she stared at me, mouth unmoving.
“What? If you’re expecting me to open the door, you’re out of luck. I only have so much juice, and I need to save some to distract any more curious hospital staff, who maybe like dead bodies a little too much.”
I scrunched my nose at her in disgust.
“I’ve read stories on the Internet.”
“That’s unthinkable.” I eyed the very industrial deadbolt securing the doors. “So how are we supposed to get in?”
“I don’t know. You planned this zombie escapade.”
“Shit.” I glanced around the hallway, as if a solution for unlocking the door would magically appear on the wall.
Damn, damn. We didn’t come sneaking into the bowels of this hospital only to be thwarted by a stupid locked door. Why hadn’t I planned for this contingency? It seemed that human trappings were beginning to escape me in the face of portals and demon manipulation of matter. Demon . . . the chagur twinged. What had Malthus said about the way I’d escaped the record in the demon realm? My inner eye? I squinted in concentration at the lock. Looked like metal to me.
“What’s flopping around in that head of yours?” Kara asked.
“Lately some demon powers have surfaced in me.”
“You think you can open the door?”
“I don’t know,” I said, impatience making my voice rise. “Malthus explained stuff about changing my perception in order to manipulate the environment.”
“Well, that makes a lot of sense.” She rolled her eyes, matching my frustration with demon metaphysics.
“When Ewan led me to the portal the first time, he used a mental projection to alter the landscape. When I escaped from the demon record, my mind immersed me in a mental landscape that provided the means to escape.” God, I hoped I wasn’t going to have to flee another zombie horde to open a damn door.
“None of this makes any sense, and we don’t have time for a Jungian self-analysis,” Kara said, eyeing me skeptically.
I plundered my brain for something. Only one memory surfaced. When I was twelve years old, I’d accidently locked myself in the basement with rats. That had majorly sucked. I squeezed my eyes at the doorknob. Nothing.
“Are you thinking of something? Come on, try,” Kara prodded.
“I’m trying, but you’re not helping,” I said through my teeth and rubbed the mark, now throbbing. “Stop pressuring me.”<
br />
Kara often drove me crazy. Her forceful personality easily shadowed my more methodical one. She’d always bugged me the few times I patronized her bookstore. She’d pop into the aisle, ask me about my interest in necromancy, and whether I wanted to buy the book. She never asked me my name, but after we became friends, I found out she’d pestered me to drag me out of the closet.
“Hey.” Her surprised voice drew me out of my thoughts. “You did it.”
I looked at the door, now slightly ajar.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Thought about how much you used to annoy me at your bookstore.” I’d have to figure out the demon reality bending, and learn why that particular memory worked.
“I annoyed you? And you, poking around the shelves, never buying anything,” she said, her tone more amused than irritated. We often mocked our friendship, but it meant more than either of us was willing to admit.
We passed a desk to an observation window overlooking the autopsy area. The door was locked, of course, but thankfully Kara waved a key she’d snatched off the desk, sparing me further demon mind tricks. I wheezed and coughed the moment we entered the room. The smell of sterilized death invaded my nose, as if someone had mixed bleach, formalin, and a tincture of dead bodies, filled an air freshener container, and plugged it into a wall socket. We rubbed our arms at the frigid interior, and I cast a worried glance at Kara, hoping she wouldn’t relapse into another flashback. But neither the smell nor the cold air seemed to bother her while she checked the metal drawers for dead bodies.
“Looks like we have three lucky candidates,” she said, peering at one of the bodies. “This one is pretty well done.”
I looked at the body and turned my eyes away, gagging at the sight of the charred corpse. “Close it up.” I was starting to think this was a bad idea. The smell was overwhelming, and the reality of making a zombie was breaking my resolve.
“This one might work,” Kara said. She held a clipboard in her hand. “Charlie here died of an aneurism, and they haven’t performed the autopsy yet.” She glanced up from the board. “Are you okay? You look a little pale.”
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