by Amy Braun
“You got a problem?” I called to them.
They didn’t move. I don’t think they even blinked.
“Whatever,” I muttered, turning and walking away.
If they wanted to be zombies, they could be zombies. I had better things to do with my time. I had to go… somewhere. Meet up with my sister. I think. Maybe. I didn’t really care.
As I walked through the center of the market, I saw the weapons I had dropped during my fight with Drake and Mateo. Drake. Still hated that beef-headed prick. Mateo was a thorn in my side too, no pun intended, but it had been a rush to see him again. No matter how badly I wanted to kill him, I couldn’t deny that he still looked as sexy as the first moment I saw him.
Wait, didn’t I have a new boyfriend? Why was I thinking about my ex?
I mentally shrugged again. Another thing in my life that didn’t matter.
I stopped to pick the weapons up. As I started to lift my head, I noticed five more people approaching from the opposite side of the market. They had the same blank stares as the morons behind me. I tucked my blades away until I was holding only my hatchet and one throwing knife. More figures started revealing themselves from the alleys, some of them even crawling down from apartment windows.
They edged closer, moving with caution but curiosity, the same way they would move if they saw a wounded animal and were debating on putting it out of its misery.
I spun the hatchet lazily in my hand. They continued to close in around me.
“Looks like the market’s closed today, folks,” I told them. “I don’t know why for sure, but let’s just assume that all the vendors are dead.”
Nobody in the zombie crowd flinched when I said that. I’m not sure if a collective shiver would have been more disturbing than the lifeless eyes boring into my skull at every conceivable angle. And I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.
“Okay, my creepiness scale has officially gone off the charts. You all take care now.”
I turned and started walking for the spot where the crowd was still semi-spaced out. I shouldered between two construction workers and actually broke away from the circle, until one of them grabbed my wrist.
I jerked to a stop and glared at his hand. Rage burned in my heart. Who the fuck did this asshole think he was, touching me as if he could own me? I didn’t belong to him. I didn’t belong to anyone.
“If you want to keep that hand, you better take it off me,” I warned him.
His hand remained in place.
“You have it,” he whispered.
I looked up. He stared at me with the same dead eyes, though they had begun to widen.
“Last chance,” I told him.
“You were chosen. You have it.”
You can’t say I didn’t warn him.
I raised my arm and hacked the hatchet down onto his wrist. It was a strong, powerful strike that split apart his skin all the way to the bone. His half-severed hand fell from mine while his scream rang in my ears.
I grinned.
The crowd exploded into chaos.
I turned and bolted, moving onto the sidewalk and running behind the carts. The heavier, clumsier people stumbled and tripped over each other. Sometimes they even dragged the faster runners down with them. Unlucky tumblers were trampled by the rest of the horde.
I laughed.
All two dozen of us ended up in the middle of the main street. I spun on my heel and waited for the first person to reach me. She was a speedy, scrawny little girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Maybe she played soccer or ran track in high school.
She damn sure wasn’t involved in martial arts. She practically walked into my kick.
Her body crumpled in half and flew back into the crowd. The effect reminded me of bowling pins. I smiled again. I’ll count that as a strike.
The crowd turned against the girl, furious that she’d been pushed into them. They started hitting her and pulling her hair. She screamed defiantly and fought back, but she was just skin and bones. No fighting experience would save her from the three men and two women who swarmed her. It wasn’t long before her screams of anger turned into screams of fear. It wasn’t long before she stopped screaming all together.
One down, twenty-three to go.
The girl wasn’t the only one who suffered from accidently bumping into someone. She was just the powder to the keg. Anyone who was shoved would push back twice as hard, and it took seconds for the rest of the crowd to erupt into violence.
Fists flew, bones cracked, and blood sprayed. I could feel my heart pumping with adrenaline, watching the chaos and loving every second of it. I hoped the crowd hadn’t forgotten about me.
A man in a suit twisted his head in my direction and left himself open to a strike in the side of the head. Rather than go back at his attacker, he locked eyes with me. I was smaller than him, so he probably thought he had a better chance. I smiled and tucked my knife and hatchet into my belt, then beckoned him. He didn’t need a lot of encouragement.
He flew out of the crowd and darted for me, pulling his right fist back way too early. I stood there and smiled until the last possible moment, then twisted around his left side. I curled my arm around his throat while he skidded to a stop, then used his momentum to drag him onto the ground. His head cracked loudly against the pavement, but he was still alive.
For now, at least.
I would have kept going at him, but someone was coming up behind me. I spun around and rocketed my fist into the chin of the woman thinking she had me. Her head snapped back, making it easy to punch her in the throat and kick her away.
The crowd started to realize that I was the real danger here, and began splitting off from their pathetic scuffles to try their luck against a true predator.
The next two that came at me held knives in their bloody hands. I drew my own knife and waited. The smile was still plastered on my face.
The first man who reached me was wearing a grubby shirt and sweats. He must have been homeless once upon a time. His knife looked more like a shank. He stabbed the weapon toward my face. I leaned away, grabbing his wrist and slashing it. He yelped and dropped the weapon.
I turned to his front and kicked his knee, making him stumble forward. He grunted and swung an awkward punch that I smoothly ducked. I ripped the shank from his hand and drove it into his stomach. As he crumpled in pain and shock, I used my knife to stab him in the back of the neck.
He jerked once, then stopped moving all together. I pulled the knife and shank free and flipped both into a reversed grip. The second man was a teenager wearing a flat baseball hat and clothes two sizes too big for him. Maybe he thought dressing like a gangster would make him one. Maybe he thought killing me would prove his toughness.
In the end, it didn’t matter. He was still pulling back his knife when I bent my knees and shouldered close. I stabbed both knives into his chest and pulled them down to his ribs. His blood sprayed onto my face as he fell back screaming.
I took a step back and was ready for the next fight when a heavy body slammed into me. I tried to roll away, but my attacker refused to release me. His weight finally turned into his advantage when he pinned me underneath him.
He locked eyes with me, and I noticed that he wasn’t that unattractive. Dark hair, dark eyes, nice lips, nice skin. Sure, he wasn’t a closet male model like Mateo, and he wasn’t even close to the realm of sexiness that Warrick conquered...
But I still wanted him.
And he wanted me.
With my arms pinned at my side, I couldn’t stop him from snapping his head down and kissing me. He forced his tongue into my mouth, pushing it around like he was looking for hidden treasure. I let him play around my mouth for a couple seconds before I decided to get rough. I caught his bottom lip in my teeth and bit down hard.
He yelped and pulled back, and I just bit down harder. Soon I could taste his blood.
The man finally tore away from me. Blood dribbled down his chin as he scowle
d menacingly at me. Somehow I was still smiling, even when he pulled back his fist to hit me.
The strike never connected, because the man’s arm was grabbed. He whipped his head around, and had his face punched so hard I swore I heard every bone in it crack. The man toppled off me, completely unconscious. Another man knelt down beside me, reaching down to cup my face in his hands.
I smiled seductively at Warrick and looped my arms around his neck.
“Hey, handsome.”
He seemed torn, like he was fighting every urge he ever knew. “We need to get out of here.” Instead of draping himself over me like I wanted, he scooped me up and pulled me to my feet. I staggered onto my feet and looked over his shoulder to the riot.
The crowd was pushing forward, aiming for his back. Aiming for me.
I unwrapped myself from Warrick and shoved him away, rushing the crowd. I heard him shouting my name, him and other voices I knew, but I ignored them and threw myself at the crowd.
The first woman to reach me had a butcher knife, oblivious to the two blades I was holding. She shoved the wide knife at my face, but I spun around her back. I kicked the chest of the man behind her to get more space, then turned to her and stabbed the tops of her shoulders. She stiffened and screamed, but I was still moving. I swung around and drove both of my knives into her throat. Blood sprayed and when I pulled my knives back. She dropped to the ground and stopped moving.
It was impossible to keep track of the people I was stabbing. Every time I saw a hand curled around a weapon, I struck first. Shallow cuts traced along my lower back and arms and ribs, but they were paper cuts compared to what I was doing. The occasional fist caught me off balance, but I wasn’t feeling any pain.
I was fighting, I was killing, and I was having the time of my life.
Two more bodies threw themselves into the remaining crush, using their hands and feet to push attackers away from me. I stopped smiling as I saw Sephiel glide in front of me, knocking away punches with ease. Once he had the space, he whirled a powerful roundhouse kick that took down two men at once. Warrick was at my right side, forcing people back with single, powerful hits. Before I could figure out why they weren’t killing anyone, he spun on his heel, grabbed my waist, and started taking me out of the crowd.
It took effort not to stab him. I screamed and kicked, desperate to get back in the fight and get more blood on my knives. The only reason I wasn’t attacking Warrick was because deep down, something told me that he mattered to me.
But God, was I ever tempted to ignore those feelings.
“Seph!” Warrick shouted. “Get back here!”
The red-haired angel obeyed, turning toward us. Half of the crowd collapsed behind him, and the rest were fighting each other without restraint. Warrick’s grip loosened just enough for me to slip out of his arms. I tried to run, but he spun around and caught me again.
“Constance! Stop!”
“Fuck you!” I screamed back. “Let me go!”
“Con!”
Her voice cut through the violent haze that had taken over my mind. I looked over my shoulder and saw the only person I ever really listened to.
Dro stood a couple feet back with Max, who was holding the movens caeli in his hands. He stared at the crowd with wide, horrified eyes, but my sister was entirely focused on me. There was something different about her. Physically, there was nothing out of place. She was still wearing the same oversize green sweater, dirty jeans, and ratty boots. Her skin and hair were still paper white, and she still held her regal beauty.
But her eyes were maelstroms, wide with horror and shock, glistening with disbelief and sadness.
The urge to kill was still threatening to overwhelm me, but now something else was breaking through. Slowly, I was beginning to realize what was happening, and that was when the pain hit again.
I dropped the knife and the shank and doubled over to clutch my upper abdomen, a crippling burn slicing through it and leaving me breathless. I dug my fingers into Warrick’s arm so hard that my nails broke his skin.
“Constance?” his hand smoothed over my back. Either he didn’t notice that I was hurting him, or he didn’t care. “What’s wrong?”
Before I could tell him that my body was burning from the inside out, Sephiel shouted in pain.
It caught all our attention. He almost always avoided injury in battle. With a few exceptions when the pain was too horrific for even us to comprehend, Sephiel almost never made any sound to suggest that he was in pain.
But that had been when he was an angel. Now he’s human.
I couldn’t see what was wrong until he turned around. That was when I noticed the blood spreading from the wound on his side. He’d been stabbed.
Warrick shouted something to Max. I was too stunned and in too much pain to hear what it was. Soon I was being moved into Max’s arms while Warrick ran for the fight to rescue Sephiel. I looked around frantically, seeing that the crowd had begun to grow. People had been hearing the fight from other areas of the city, and were being drawn to the commotion. The excitement of a fight was beginning to grow in their eyes. As they moved closer, they weren’t just staring at Warrick, who had managed to grab Sephiel and was dragging him back.
They were looking at me.
Warrick and Sephiel stopped beside us. Both men were breathing heavily, and Sephiel was grimacing in pain.
“Get us out of here Max,” Warrick commanded, reaching into his leather jacket to take out a handgun.
“I’m trying,” insisted the prophet. “It’s not working; we must have used the last of its power when we came back here.” He tightened his grip on me. “We’re trapped.”
He was right. Everywhere I looked, there were hungry eyes locked on us. Eventually all of the stares turned in my direction, and their brisk walk turned into a jog. There had to be at least forty people in this sudden flash-mob, and they were literally tripping over themselves to get to us.
There was no way we could escape. Not unless they had what they wanted.
The fragment lodged inside of me.
Just thinking about it sent another wave of pain through me. I choked on a scream and dropped to my knees, gasping for breath. Max fell with me, putting his hand on the back of my neck. He must have sensed something with his gift, because he suddenly recoiled.
“Oh my God,” he breathed.
I hunched over and grabbed my stomach, wishing I could drown out the roar of the crowd. Warrick’s arms curled around my back and pulled me into an embrace. I rested my head against his chest and breathed in his pine scent.
The pain worsened, and I nearly screamed again.
The footsteps were getting closer. I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t even fucking stand. I was going to be torn apart by this crowd, and my friends were going to die trying to save me. Even against the agony scorching through my veins, I could still feel my heart breaking at the thought.
That was when someone stepped forward, brushing past me and standing in front of the crowd.
“Please,” Dro begged them. “Don’t do this.”
For a single, perfect second, I thought the crowd was going to listen to her. They had all gone silent, all of them looking at Dro. I thought she had gotten through to them, that they’d heard the tender pleading of her voice, or seen the desperation on her eyes. I thought they had forgotten about me, and the horrible power I was carrying inside my body.
Then the fire surged through me in one violent burst. The pain covered my body in one savage rush, so hot I could feel it splintering my bones and melting over my heart. I clutched my chest and screamed.
The crowd broke into a run.
I didn’t see it all. I was fading in and out of consciousness, unable to take the torture the fragment was putting me through. But I heard Max shout in alarm. I felt heat outside of my body. I saw the blast of light coming from my sister. I smelled the scorched hair and burned flesh.
In seconds, it was over. The light faded and the heat dulled. The nex
t sounds were screams and moans of pain. The group surrounding me was silent.
I was burning, Warrick holding me as tightly as he could, as if it would shield me from pain, but I managed to turn my head just enough to see what had happened.
Blackened bodies lay on the ground in front of Dro, smoke still rising from their torched flesh. Some of them writhed and shivered. Others didn’t move at all. Dro stood above them all, dropping her hands to her side. I blinked, certain that I was imagining it. My little sister would never do this, not even pushed. Hurting people was involuntary for her. She never meant it, and would never initiate it.
