Magic and Decay

by Rachel Higginson

  We turned at once to move through the Zombie horde. Ryder took my hand and held it tight, refusing to let go no matter how tight the space became.

  Before, when Eden and Kiran were both working the Magic, they could push apart the Zombies to make a path for us to move on. The most Kiran was able to create was a bubble of Magic that encompassed all of us. He had to push it into the pressing Zombies until they were forced out of the way.

  We moved much more slowly this way, and I started to feel the sharp pinpricks of fear as they stabbed at my spine.

  I didn’t want to go through that again. Especially if there wouldn’t be a cure this time. That had been the worst feeling of my life. I would do anything to avoid suffering through the horrible effects of the infection.

  Like making sure the Zombie finished the job and didn’t leave me to rot into a monster.

  The least a guy could do was finish the job. Even if that meant a very slow, painful, agonizing death.

  “I’m completely out of ammo,” Reagan told us.

  “And I don’t have much left,” Hendrix confirmed.

  Well, great.

  “What about the car?” I asked. “If you don’t have much Magic left, will you be able to get it running? Or keep it running?”

  Kiran walked behind me, but close enough that I felt how chilled Eden’s body was whenever he bumped her into me accidently. I knew she was an Immortal, no matter how weird that was. And I promised myself she would be okay if we could just get out of this dumb situation I’d caused, but I didn’t really know.

  “Did Eden know she would be out of commission after she used the, uh, smoke?” Hendrix asked as we pushed forward.

  “She did,” Kiran confirmed with that crisp accent of his.

  Hendrix made a disagreeable sound in the back of his throat. “Did she have to use so much of it?”

  Kiran didn’t say anything for a long time, and I wondered if he planned to ignore Hendrix completely. But then he finally said, “Eden has always been comfortable with taking big risks. They usually pay off for her.”

  I watched Hendrix shoot a look at Reagan. “Are all women like that?”

  I wanted to protest, but Ryder beat me to it. “Apparently. It must be a female thing to act first, think later.”

  “I resent that,” Reagan bit out.

  “Me too!”

  Ryder ignored me. “I guess it doesn’t matter what species they are, they all have the same tendencies.”

  “What about men?” Reagan scoffed. “Are you all overbearing cavemen?”

  The three men had shared a look before they nodded in unison.

  I would have laughed if our circumstances weren’t so dismal.

  “You’re supposed to find that sexy,” Ryder put in with the slightest hint of teasing in his voice.

  “And you’re supposed to respect our independence and ability to save ourselves,” I told him.

  The guys shared another look. “It would be a lot easier to respect your independence if it didn’t keep getting us into trouble.” I didn’t think I liked Kiran’s tone.

  “You too?” Ryder asked over his shoulder.

  “Since I was seventeen,” Kiran answered. “How about you, Hendrix?”

  “Every damn day,” he replied.

  Reagan made a growly sound that made me a little bit afraid for Hendrix’s safety.

  “It’s not our fault!” I said pointlessly.

  “You’re right,” Hendrix agreed. “It’s like it’s written into your DNA. You were born this way. Doesn’t mean we have to like it.”

  Kiran let out a gentle laugh. “Nope. Usually, it means we love it.”

  Ryder and Hendrix stayed silent. Apparently they hadn’t gotten to that part yet.

  Something told me Reagan and Hendrix were close. Maybe not in this season of their lives, but soon.

  The invisible bubble of Magic flickered.

  Which obviously didn’t make sense because it was invisible, but I swore I saw it. The protective bubble shimmered and stuttered.

  “Kiran?” Hendrix demanded.

  Apparently he’d seen it too.

  “We need to get there fast.” Kiran nudged Eden’s limp body into my back, urging me forward.

  Ryder’s hand gripped mine tightly, but we picked up our pace. The Zombies pushed back at us with more force than they ever had. It was as though they could feel our defenses weakening too.

  Their black nails scratched down the energy-field they couldn’t make out and their teeth chomped violently at us.

  Now our blood mingled with their fallen comrade’s blood which frenzied them even more.

  Kiran struggled to meet their strength with his waning energy. I could feel the tension radiating off him. Eden stirred in his arms, but he didn’t acknowledge her waking.

  We trudged through a quagmire of blood and broken bones, dead Zombies and whatever debris had been left behind from the former fleeing human population. Finally, the tan sedan came into view. I had never seen a more beautiful sight.

  It wouldn’t be perfectly safe, but surely a car could outrun a Feeder.

  At least I hoped so.

  With our destination so close, we picked up our pace and rushed to the vehicle. We dove in. Hendrix immediately went for the driver’s seat and Reagan rounded the car and climbed into the front passenger’s seat. Kiran slid into the backseat and kept Eden on his lap. I filed in next to him.

  As soon as Ryder sat down next to me, he slammed the door and waited for Kiran to work his Magic.

  Literally.

  Instead, he let out a curse and kicked the back of Reagan’s seat. She whirled around with her empty gun in hand.

  “Are you going to throw it at him?” Ryder asked with one raised eyebrow.

  She pointed it at him and pretended to pull the trigger.

  “This is so bloody frustrating!” Kiran broke the tension between us by adding his own. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. “Our Magic is nearly drained. Whatever kind of healing she performed took everything out of Eden. Only we’re connected, so it also took it out of me! We’re practically human.”

  I felt Ryder, Reagan and Hendrix bristle around me. The way he said the word “human” sounded vile. But I understood his anger. We were all dead without that Magic.

  We needed it as much as Kiran did.

  “What does that mean?” Hendrix demanded. “You can’t start the car? The force-field is dead? What’s going on?”

  Kiran grunted something R-rated before he explained, “I can do one or the other. The force-field or start the car. I can’t maintain both. Eventually, our strength will return to us, but until then we’re pretty well screwed.”

  “Start the car,” Reagan demanded.

  “What?” I felt the breath push from my lungs. Even the thought of getting bitten again made me panic. “Are you sure?”

  “We have to move, Ivy.” Reagan spun around in her seat and stared hard at me. “I can’t just sit here.”

  Ryder leaned forward and pointed a finger at her. “Because you’re afraid. You’re making this decision based on fear.”

  “And what are your decisions based on?” Reagan raised her brows at him and waited for his response.

  Ryder cracked a half-smile and said, “Greater fear.”

  My heart squeezed in my chest and emotion clogged in my throat. His fear was for me. He was making decisions based on me.

  And maybe that would have been obvious to someone else, but it wasn’t to me. I’d abandoned him. I’d left him. I’d promised him something and lied.

  And yet, he still put me ahead of everything else.

  His greater fear was still for me.

  I could feel it. I could feel it in the way his hand gripped my knee, in the way that he pressed his chest into my shoulder and hadn’t stopped touching me since I walked out of the smoke. I felt it when I started to turn, and he still held me in his arms and refused to let me go through it alone.

  Ryder cared about me.
>
  I didn’t know what that meant for us, but it felt like maybe our story wasn’t over yet.

  Maybe it hadn’t even been written.

  “So you want to just sit here?” Reagan challenged. “You want to wait it out? Hope their Magic holds up long enough that the Feeders stay back? Well, what happens when it fails? They’re already weakened. Their power is significantly less than it was an hour ago. What if it fails completely and we are just sitting here like assholes waiting for the Zombies to break through? Because then we’re dead, Ryder. All of us. And there isn’t enough dry ice in the world that can save us from this many Feeders!”

  “She has a point,” Hendrix put in.

  “Kiran?” My voice was small and desperate. “What do you think?”

  “My Magic won’t fail. But I’d rather my wife be out of the epicenter of Zombie focus.”

  Ryder slammed his back into the seat and let out a growl of frustration. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Reagan promised him.

  “You don’t believe that,” he shot back.

  “No, I don’t. But I tell myself that every single day anyway.”

  “Why?”

  Reagan glanced at Hendrix quickly before admitting, “Because even if I don’t, I want to believe it.”

  “Me, too,” I whispered.

  Ryder slid his arm around my shoulders and pulled me into the crook of his body. His hand rested heavily on my arm and I relished the feel of his heat and protection.

  I hated, loathed really that I was stuck in this awful place, with these creatures made from nightmares and zero chances for survival. But at the same time, it had managed to bring Ryder and me closer together. We’d been able to overlook the hurt in our pasts and what we’d done to each other and move forward.

  Maybe Hermes was right. Maybe all I needed was a little bit of perspective.

  “I just figured out why Hermes dropped us here,” I told Ryder.

  “Yeah?” he stared out the window, ever on alert.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  He nodded. “Here is probably not the best place.”

  “Right.”

  “So where is he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You figured out the great mystery, the moral lesson, the meaning behind his extreme measures, so shouldn’t he show up already? He promised to come back for us and you got it. So… where is he?”

  “Is there a time-delay?”

  Ryder snorted a surprised laugh. “I doubt it.”

  Our frustrated conversation got interrupted by the start of the engine. Suddenly the car was on and moving as Hendrix stomped on the gas and sent us flying.

  Ryder and I slammed into each other while Kiran sat perfectly still, not even jostling an unconscious Eden once.

  I slid into Ryder and he slammed against the door. Hendrix fishtailed all over the road.

  Right away he ran over several Zombies, but the car never slowed. I assumed that was a byproduct of having a vehicle run by Magic.

  I decided not to complain.

  Without the Magical force-field, the Zombies could invade all the space they wanted.

  Kiran tried to push out his energy field as far as possible so that we had a kind of runway to get the car moving. Then he let go of the energy field and turned on the car at almost the same time, just seconds apart.

  The car took off like a shot, but there were plenty of Zombies in our way.

  Hendrix ran over as many as he could and pretty soon the Zombies were in our rearview mirror while Hendrix stomped on the pedal. The highway leveled out once we cleared the town and for a while we felt safer than we had in a long time.

  Hendrix kept the car moving as fast as he could while traversing the dark, unpredictable road at night. The stars shone brightly and the full moon cast the landscape along our high-speed chase in a soft glow, but for someone driving the car, the road would feel especially dangerous.

  I held my breath the entire time, just waiting for Hendrix to accidentally lose control. He wasn’t anything but normal human, but there were times both he and Reagan seemed like they had more than normal going on.

  A little something-something.

  And maybe if we counted “Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse” as superhero powers, we could give them the credit they deserved.

  Normal? Yeah, right. They had more lives than a cat.

  But it wasn’t just their ability to survive against all odds.

  Reagan could kick some serious ass. I was thinking about having a poster made of her in all her Zombie-killing glory and tacking it up in my room so I had someone to aspire to be when I grew up.

  If I could take on the entire Greek Pantheon the way she tackled all her Zombie problems, the world might not look so bleak for me.

  What was that, Nix? You want me to do what? And then I smash his face in with a baseball bat.

  Okay, that was a little gross. Apparently the Zombie Apocalypse was rubbing off on me.

  Suddenly the car swerved to the left. We hit something that made a deep thumping noise. Hendrix put up a hand to wave our concern off when something else jumped out at us and smashed into the hood.

  He was driving fast enough that the thing, which I assumed was a Zombie, bounced onto the hood, crashed into the windshield and then rolled off the side of the car.

  Hendrix tensed and re-gripped the steering wheel. His knuckles gleamed white in the moonlight and the engine revved noisily in protest.

  “Push the bloody car as much as you need to,” Kiran instructed. “It will keep running no matter what. Even if it seems impossible to you.”

  “It does seem impossible to me,” Hendrix muttered. “All of this seems impossible to me.”

  “Only because your mind is finite,” Kiran responded.

  I pressed my lips together to keep from gaping at him. This guy had some guts.

  “Dude!” Hendrix tossed his hand at the cracked windshield. “Zombies! My mind is the farthest thing from finite!”

  “So what is so difficult about Magic? Why is that concept so hard to grasp?”

  “Because it’s weird.”

  “It’s not weird.”

  “It’s really weird,” Reagan confirmed. She turned in her seat and looked at me.

  “It’s a little weird,” I agreed.

  “Oh, really?” Kiran sniffed. “And Greek mythology come to life? That’s not weird? You’re both hypocrites.”

  “I think you’re all weird,” Ryder added. “Every last one of you.”

  I turned my head to argue with him, but something flashing over the ocean caught my attention. A faint, golden light hovered just over the water.

  “Ryder, look.” I pointed to the slowly flashing light and hoped he saw it too.

  His head turned and for a moment I was distracted by his perfect profile. I watched him drag his hand through his tussled hair and the way his jaw ticked when he finally saw what I did.

  “Is that our taxi?”

  “I have no idea. But what else could it be?”

  Kiran leaned forward to see for himself and Reagan leaned over Hendrix. Finally, even Hendrix’s attention moved to the spreading light as it opened up over the Gulf of Mexico.

  “Way out there?” Hendrix laughed. “That’s not very considerate of your ride.”

  I cleared my throat. “Yeah, gods aren’t exactly known for their good manners.”

  “They’re all douche bags,” Ryder confirmed.

  “How will you get out there?” Reagan asked.

  “Swim.” I ignored the stiffening of Ryder’s body next to mine. “You just have to get us to the water’s edge.”

  “The water’s edge? You mean you want us to go back the way we came? That sounds like a terrible idea!” And by the way Hendrix said it, it actually sounded like the worst idea ever.

  The engine sputtered for a second before revving again with purpose. Kiran seemed exhausted by the very idea.

  “Hey,” Ryder gr
owled. “Get us to the water’s edge and we’ll be out of your way for good. We’ve got our own shit to save. We’re done with Zombies.”

  Hendrix glanced over his shoulder with a mulish expression on his handsome face. “Yeah? I’ve got people to save too. You’re not the only one with a quest.”

  Kiran cleared his throat. “I’m in the middle of a war. Zombies are the least of my concerns.”

  “Better get us to the water then,” I said pleasantly, “so we can wrap this up and go our separate ways.”

  Eden stirred in Kiran’s lap when Hendrix whipped the car around in a fast U-turn. “Usually, when you drive off into the sunset, that’s the end of our program. I can’t remember ever willingly driving back into the mayhem.”

  “This will be good for you,” Ryder laughed. “Practice and what not for the future.”

  Hendrix grunted something noncommittal and gripped the steering wheel again.

  Soon enough we ran into the horde of Zombies chasing us. They spread out across the highway and to the sides of the road, sprinting as fast as their inhuman speed would take them.

  They moved so fast. I couldn’t reconcile their speed with how my body had felt during that short time of transition.

  My body had felt like mud. I felt trapped in useless skin and brittle bones. I couldn’t imagine making that slushy, uncooperative flesh move like this. But here they were, sprinting faster than anything I had ever seen.

  They veered toward the car in a funnel of determination.

  All for me.

  They would attack the rest of this group just because they were here and Zombies weren’t picky. They would sink their teeth into anything alive, or remotely alive since they ate each other.

  Apparently they would even eat themselves when they got extra hungry.

  Yuck.

  But I was the reason they were even more single-minded than usual. This damn Siren’s call.

  Usually a curse, tonight it was a death sentence. If this horde got to us, we were dead. It didn’t matter how Magical Eden and Kiran were; over a hundred Zombies were joining the ranks every second. They would get to us.

  Somehow they would get to us.

  Our only hope for survival was to get Ryder and me to the ocean. That was my turf. That was my playground. Those Zombies wouldn’t stand a chance against me out there.