by Stacey Jay
“I’m going to Monica’s,” I said, surprising even myself. I’d clearly hit rock bottom if the Monicster’s was the safest place I could think of.
For a few minutes, the only sound was the purring of the engine and the scratch of something rustling around in the industrial Dumpster a few feet away. Normally that would have sent me racing back to the car, but even the threat of coming face-to-face with a bunch of swamp rats couldn’t persuade me to go a step closer to my mom. I didn’t know who she was anymore. With the rats, at least I’d know what to expect.
Finally, Mom sighed, a weary sound that let me know I’d won before she even spoke. “Won’t you need clothes, your makeup, other stuff for school?”
“I’ll just borrow some of hers and run in and grab my backpack on the way,” I said, my jaw tightening. She was giving up. That easily. My old mom would never have let me get away with telling her to butt out of my life or going over to a friend’s house unannounced in the middle of the night.
Despite the fact that I really didn’t want to go home, I suddenly wished she’d jump out of the car and tell me she wasn’t taking no for an answer. But she didn’t, which I supposed meant I’d won.
So why did I feel like I’d lost everything that mattered?
“All right.” Mom paused, and for a second I thought she was going to change her mind. But when I looked over at her, all I saw was a scared woman with the beginnings of a worry line between her eyebrows who didn’t know what to do. With me, or with herself. “Can I at least give you a ride?”
I swallowed, hard. “It’s only five blocks.”
“Megan, I-”
“See you later, Mom.” I ran again, as fast as I could, telling myself the cold wind was the reason for the wetness on my cheeks.
CHAPTER 13
“Get up, Berry.” A bony finger jabbed me between the ribs hard enough to make me twitch and seek shelter beneath the covers. “If I have to listen to you snore for another minute I’m going to lose it.”
With no small degree of effort I cracked open my eyes. According to the clock by Monica’s bed it was six o’clock. I’d only been asleep for about three hours. “Wake me in an hour.”
“No, you’re getting up now. Get. Up.” The last two words were accented by more finger jabs. Clearly, the sweet, vulnerable Monica from the night before had vanished and the real Monicster had returned to continue her reign of terror. Still, she had let me into her room and offered me clothes to sleep in at nearly three in the morning. I couldn’t afford to be too critical. “Now, freak, or I’m going to cut you with something sharp.”
“Why not something dull? It would hurt more,” I muttered as I forced myself into a seated position. The room spun dizzily for a moment, either a side effect of too much stress and not enough sleep, or of the shocking orange and pink paisley wallpaper.
No matter how tired I was, I was betting on the wallpaper.
“Here, get dressed.” Clothing smacked me in the face. “Those jeans should fit. They’re too big on me.”
Ah, an insult first thing in the morning. “I thought you said I was too skinny?”
“You are, for your body type. Not everyone can have delicate bone structure,” she said, then turned toward the source of the lovely smell filling the room. “You drink coffee, right?”
“You have a coffeemaker in your room?” I asked, my envy clear though my voice was muffled by the black sweater I was pulling over my head.
“Coffeemaker and espresso machine.” She poured a large cup from the pot sitting on top of the little refrigerator/microwave combo in the corner. There was also a sink, a few feet of counter space, and two cabinets above the mini kitchen. The Monicster’s room was even more tricked out than Ethan’s dorm. “But there’s no way I’m making you a latte, so don’t get any ideas. Cream or sugar?”
“Both.” I leaped from the bed and struggled into Monica’s jeans-which were still a little too tight, so there was hope my butt hadn’t fallen off completely.
“Here, drink. I need your brain functioning in the next ten minutes,” she said, handing me the coffee and tapping her booted foot.
For the first time, I noticed she was already dressed, complete with makeup and flatironed hair. What time had she gotten up? And why did the fact that Monica was a morning person make me suspect her of greater evil than ever before?
“What’s happening in ten minutes?” I gulped coffee, not caring that it burned the back of my throat. What was a little pain when there was such sweet, coffee-y goodness to be had?
“Ethan’s coming to get you to take you to school. He called last night looking for you. Good work forgetting your cell.”
“I didn’t forget it-I had reason to believe it was tapped.”
“What?” Monica’s brow wrinkled.
“The Enforcers are getting sketchy with their methods. Ethan’s phone was tapped too.”
“Wow. He was calling from a new number,” she said, then shrugged as if phone tapping were an everyday affair. “Still, it’s probably a good idea to bring your phone with you next time you sneak out of the house in the middle of the night. Better overheard than dead. And it will keep your parents from calling your boyfriend on the Settler dorm phone at one in the morning when they can’t reach you on your cell.”
Oh, crap. Why hadn’t Mom said she’d tried to call Ethan? Now I had to figure out what I was going to tell him, and quick. I took another deep pull on my coffee, praying the caffeine would dash straight to my weary synapses.
“He made me promise to call if I heard anything.” Monica straightened the orange bedspread with quick, efficient motions. Who would have thought Monicster had such a taste for pink and orange? I would have pegged her as a black-like-her-soul kind of decorator. “I waited to call him back until this morning since I thought you needed sleep. Otherwise, I’m sure Prince Charming would have been over here in the middle of the night, and my dad would have lost his shit if he’d seen another guy in here.”
“Another guy?” My eyebrows lifted above the rim of my cup.
“And I really didn’t want to deal with that fallout.” Monica ignored my question, and I resisted the urge to make a joke about the string of men she invited back to her lair, figuring I couldn’t afford to alienate one of the few people on my side. Besides, my curiosity about what she was pulling from under her bed was sufficiently intriguing to banish all thoughts of boy-themed interrogation.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a dry-erase board.” Her pointed “duh” look inspired another big gulp of coffee. Obviously she was serious about the whole brain-functioning thing. “I thought a visual aid would help organize the information.”
“Okay.” I perched on the edge of the bed, squinting at the chart Monica had drawn. “What exactly is this?”
“It’s everything I could find on Settler-specific forensic evidence down in t
he archives at the SA library in Little Rock. I was there until almost midnight last night, and believe me, my parents weren’t too happy,” she said, circling various sets of letters on the board. “If they hadn’t been so trashed on cheap wine from that fund-raiser thing, I never would have gotten out of the house. You so owe me one.”
“Or two or three,” I agreed, though I still had no idea what I was looking at.
“Yeah, well, if you’re grateful now, you’re totally going to offer me your firstborn in a few minutes.” She turned back to me with a satisfied smile.
“I didn’t think you liked kids.”
“I don’t, but you do,” she said, her pity for me and my breeder’s heart apparent. “I bet you and Ethan already talk about how many puppies you’re going to squeeze out by the time you’re thirty.”
“Ew. That’s a really gross way to put it.”
“Not as gross as researching the differences between Settler sperm and normal guy sperm. Do you know that Settler men have little hooks on the end of their sperms’ tails?” she asked, her lip curled in disgust, even though I could tell she was totally intrigued by weird Settler spooge. “It looks the same as sperm mutated by a fungus, so human doctors have never gotten suspicious but-”
“And the reason we’re talking about this is?” I asked, earning myself another “duh” look from Monica and an eye roll for good measure.
“Forensic evidence. You know, hair, DNA, spit, sperm, blood… ”
“Blood.” Even if she hadn’t emphasized the word, it made sense.
Blood was the only one of those things used to raise zombies. “You found out something about our blood?”
“Your blood in particular. I did a little reading about the other stuff, but I figured the forensic evidence the Enforcers had on you had to be blood.”
“Blood they found on the graves of the weird zombies or at the morgue or wherever.”
“Right. So I did a little digging, trying to find out how Settler blood is different from normal blood, and how super-Settler blood might be different from either.”
“Makes sense,” I said, starting to get excited. Monica was definitely on to something. There had to be a difference between my blood and normal Settler blood, and that was why SA was so positive I was the person raising these weird zombies. “So what did you find?”
“Nothing.” She smiled, and for a second I wondered if the evil Monica had made a reappearance. “There isn’t anything weird about Settler blood. Nothing you could see under a microscope or learn from a lab test, anyway. Whatever makes our blood special seems to be more magical than scientific.”
“But then why did Kitty want a blood sample last night?”
“What? You didn’t tell me that.” Monica glared down at me from where she stood at the end of the bed. “How am I supposed to help you if-”
“I couldn’t find you. I was going to tell you today. She said she wanted a fresh sample and that it might keep me out of jail for another twenty-four hours.”
“Hmm.” She narrowed her eyes. “And it might. Or longer.”
“How?”
“See all these letters?” Monica pointed to her chart. “They stand for different blood types found in people with paranormal powers. People who can move things with their mind, psychics, witches, fire starters, things like that.”
Psychics?
Cliff was psychic. I wondered if that meant he had weird blood, and if that might somehow be responsible for keeping him out of the ground for so long? It was almost enough to make me spill the beans to Monica, but I held my tongue. I didn’t know why, but I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about Cliff, at least not until I figured out whether it was somehow my fault that he couldn’t rest.
“Anyway, none of these blood types are found in normal people or Settlers, and they can’t be detected with human medicine, only with special tests, and only on fresh blood. And are you ready for the real kicker? Bad little Settlers and witches and people like that have a major jones for this stuff. Supernatural blood types mean big magical bang for your buck. So whoever is raising these super zombies has to be using some of it, whether they got it from you or someone else.”
Someone else. Someone like… Cliff? Oh God, I didn’t even want to think about that. Cliff would never betray me, I was sure of it. As sure as I could be of anything these days. Besides, I wasn’t psychic, so why would Cliff’s blood and my blood be at all similar? In fact, if my blood matched whatever the Enforcers had found, I didn’t see how any of this information was going to help. “I’m sorry, Monica. I really appreciate all your work, but I don’t see how any of this makes a difference.”
“Don’t you see? You must have one of these blood types.”
“But my mom’s just a Settler, she’s not-”
Monica sighed and let her chart drop to the bed. “So maybe your dad or somebody has one of these types of people in his family and you’re getting mojo from both sides. Maybe that’s why you’re so much more powerful than the rest of us.”
My dad was the least mojo-y person I knew, but I was willing to entertain the possibility, not that it really mattered. “Let’s say you’re right. But even if Kitty does her test and it shows something the first test didn’t-like that I’m part fire starter or whatever-how will that prove it isn’t my blood that was used to raise the weird zombies?”
“It would prove that it’s different!”
“Not really. If the test can only be performed on a fresh sample, then the stuff used to raise the zombies wouldn’t show the hidden blood type even if it was there. It won’t do any good.”
“But… I…” Monica sat down heavily in the orange computer chair behind her. “You’re right. I hate to say it, but you’re right.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing how much those words had cost the Monicster. “I wish I wasn’t.”
“Yeah, me too.” She sighed and ran a hand through her perfectly flatironed hair. “Bet you wish you hadn’t given Kitty that sample last night now, huh?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, earning my third “duh” look of the morning.
“If the test comes back positive for one of these supernatural blood types, you just handed her all the evidence she needs to prove you had the power to raise these freaks of zombie nature. And considering those blood types are only found in, like, point-two percent of the population…”
“She tricked me.” God! “Crap.”
“Now who feels stupid?”
I sighed. “I’ve felt plenty stupid since all this started,” I said, fighting the despair that threatened to shut off the tiny lightbulb our conversation had lit up in my mind. “But I think I might be rallying.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. If these blood types are only detected in fresh blood, then that means they did some other kind of test to see if my blood matched the blood used to raise the zombies. Probably a normal, human test.”
> “Probably.”
“They couldn’t have done a DNA test in such a short amount of time, so-”
“How do you know?”
“Haven’t you ever watched those ‘who’s my baby’s daddy’ Springer episodes?”
“Um, no. Somehow I managed to miss those.”
“Well, DNA tests take weeks, even when they put a rush on them,” I said, refusing to have my enthusiasm dampened by Monica’s sneer of Springer disapproval. “So that means they must have used a human blood type to decide I was their girl. I’m AB negative, which is super rare, and-” I smacked myself on the forehead with my palm, nearly causing coffee to splash out of my cup. “I’m so stupid. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before! When I was ten and l lost all that blood in the attack, my mom was the only Settler who could donate for my transfusion. They didn’t have any of my blood type in the bank in Little Rock.”
“That’s why the Enforcers were checking out your mom. She’s the only other Settler around here with your blood type.”
“Right. This also means we’re both going to be cleared. All we have to do is insist on a DNA test,” I said, torn between giving in to relief and the anxiety pressing in just as heavily from the other side of my brain.
What if that DNA test didn’t clear us for some reason? What if there was something I was overlooking?
“And in the meantime, we’ll try to find out if there are any other super Settlers around with AB negative blood and get ready to kick their ass. I knew SA was overlooking something blindingly obvious, as usual.” Monica clapped her hands together as if that were the end of the matter. “Now, you should brush your hair. Ethan will be here any second. Makeup would be a good idea too. I normally wouldn’t let you infect my brushes with your facial bacteria, but you need some cosmetic help. You heal fast, but there’s still a little black-eye action going on.”
