Times like this one, for example.
But instead of ripping me a new one, she smiled. “Megan, I think I know how to handle men-even men old enough to be my grandfather.” She pulled the ponytail holder from her hair, shaking her head until her glossy locks spilled over her shoulders in a sexy tangle.
How did she do that? Make it look so effortless?
“Okay, fine. I was just trying to help.”
“Well don’t. I don’t need…” She paused at the door and turned back to me with this little gleam in her eyes. I knew I was in trouble before she opened her mouth. “No, you know what? Helping is a good thing. We’re all sisters here, and we should help each other out.”
“Right! We must stand united against our common enemy,” I said, knowing Monica would get my insider reference.
We’d been forced to unite our powers before. Monica’s former BFF, Beth, and my BFF, Jess, had been special friends (um, okay girlfriends) and partners in a plan to kill me and Monica for causing Jess’s mom’s death when we were just kids. Which was a totally bogus charge. Jess’s mom had been raising the dead, and all Monica and I had done was work a reverto spell to send them back to their maker. We’d had no idea the zombies would munch on her until there was nothing left but bones.
But Jess and Beth didn’t care that we hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. They’d nearly killed me and Monica with a bunch of skeleton zombies. They’d even planned to film the event so they could enjoy the magic of our deaths again and again-the freaks. Sure, they were suffering for their evil now-Beth was in a mental institution in upstate New York and Jess was in SA prison and had been hospitalized twice for seizures brought on by working black magic-but the entire experience had still been pretty horrific.
You’d think that surviving something like that would have bonded me and Monica, but no such luck.
“Exactly. We have to unite.” Monica crossed the room to link her scrawny arm around my waist. She was definitely up to something. “So I think Megan should come with me to see Principal Watkins.” She grabbed the bottom of my T-shirt and tugged it up around my ribs.
I snatched the material from her hands and tugged it back down. “What are you doing?”
“Teaching you a thing or two about managing men.” She rolled her eyes at my scandalized look. “Your sports bra is black and covers everything you don’t have-what’s the big deal?”
“I don’t want to go talk to the principal with my stomach hanging out.”
“Come on, Megan. You have pants on, for God’s sake,” she said. “You’re dating a college guy and you’re too shy to show less skin than you do in a bathing suit? Are you sure things are okay with you and Ethan? I mean, I know he’s never been exactly what you call the innocent type.”
Ooooh, she knew just where to aim her evil poison darts.
“Everything is fine with me and Ethan. Better than fine. But it’s freezing outside. I don’t want either of us to catch a cold before the big game,” I said.
Monica glared and grabbed her T-shirt. “Fine.”
Ha! Score one for Megan!
But as I followed Monica out into the late-afternoon chill and raced up the hill to the main building, I still felt like I’d lost a battle. I couldn’t really put my finger on what that battle was any more than I could figure out what had been making me feel so restless the past few weeks. Was it just that I’d finally had the time for all the horribleness of Jess’s betrayal and my multiple near-death experiences to hit full force? Or was it something else?
I didn’t know, but that odd, unsettled feeling made me kind of glad the cheerleaders had stirred up a hornet’s nest. It was comforting to be able to concentrate on a normal problem instead of the seemingly groundless fear that my entire life was about to fall apart.
CHAPTER 3
“What the heck is this?” Dad hit the brakes hard enough to give Mom and me whiplash and glared at the banner under the Kroger sign late the next afternoon. “This is the fund-raiser?”
Oh God. I should have known this would happen. Why hadn’t I told my parents I would ride my bike? Sure, it was cold outside, but at least I would have been spared the embarrassment of having everyone stare while my dad malfunctioned in the grocery store parking lot.
“It’s not what it looks like, Dad. It’s just a joke and I’m already late so I’ll just-”
“Stay in the car, Megan,” he barked, his military background coming through loud and clear. He’d been retired from the air force for a couple of years, but his super-loud “obey me now or I’ll throw you in a military prison where you will rot for a thousand years” voice was still in prime working order. “No daughter of mine is working at a topless car wash.”
“Dad’s right, it’s barely forty-eight degrees,” Mom said, twisting to give me the concerned-mom look.
“Who gives a crap how cold it is? I don’t care if it was a hundred degrees, Jennifer, Megan is keeping her clothes on in public.” He shifted into reverse and glared at me as he prepared to turn around. “And in private!”
“Dad! Stop! We’re not going to be topless,” I said, knowing I was blushing. Geez, why did Monica have to put up the sign so early? “We’re going to wash everything except the tops of the cars. Get it?”
Dad stepped on the brake again, but didn’t shift back into drive. The anger drained from his face and I could see he was starting to feel kind of silly. He looked nearly as angry as Principal Watkins had when he’d walked into school this morning and seen our posters advertising the car wash in the hall. Once we’d explained our gimmick, he’d calmed down fairly quickly, however. No matter what the cheerleaders said, Watkins didn’t seem to care about taming the “Slut Squad” or what went on during halftime one way or the other.
He just wanted peace and had therefore gutlessly handed the decision of who did what at halftime over to the booster club. In a truly mercenary show of capitalism, the boosters then decided that whichever team could raise the most money by the end of the week would own halftime for the year. Hence, the last-minute borderline-scandalous Tuesday night car wash.
“Oh. Well, I still don’t like it.” Dad sighed in a way that made it clear raising a teenager was wearing him out. “But if your mother thinks it’s okay…”
“I don’t know.” Mom wrinkled her nose, which made her look really young even though she was all dressed up. The woman had good genes, including great skin and the ability to eat like a pig and not gain weight.
Still, she was a mom, no matter how young looking, as evidenced by her next words. “Actually, I think it’s pretty tacky.”
“Well, tacky sells.” I grabbed my backpack and mittens and prepared to evacuate.
“You mean sex sells,” Mom said.
“Whatever.”
“‘Whatever’? What happened to the girl-power/feminist thing you and Jess were always…”
The car got really quiet, like it d
id every time someone accidentally mentioned Jess, the girl who had been my best friend for nearly six years before she’d tried to kill me.
“Yeah, well, we’ve got to do whatever it takes to raise more money than the cheerleaders or we lose halftime rights for the entire basketball season. The team that makes the biggest contribution to the boosters by Friday night wins,” I said in a breezy voice, refusing to let Mom know how much thinking about Jess still bugged me.
She’d been after me to go “talk to someone” since last September, but I didn’t have the time for therapy. I had zombie stuff to learn and pom squad and school and would like to spend some time with my boyfriend at some point. Maybe after the car wash. He said he’d come by once he got off his Protocol shift. In addition to going to college part-time, Ethan was a Settler cop.
Is there anything hotter than a cute guy who is also armed and dangerous? I think not.
“Call us if you need a ride home,” Dad said.
“And don’t get wet! You’ll get hypothermia.” Mom called as I slammed out the door.
I thought I heard her mumbling something about the idiocy of a car wash in winter but didn’t respond. She was right, but what else were we supposed to do? We only had four days to make enough cash to win this stupid competition before Saturday’s game, and a car wash was the only thing we could get up and running fast.
We had other irons in the fire, but for now scrubbing dirt from cars and trucks wrecked by the mess they’d put on the streets after the snow was the best we could do. Not a fun way to spend a Tuesday night, but at least we wouldn’t have to wash the tops of the cars, and it wasn’t cold enough to make the water freeze.
And we already had one customer. The senior girls were hard at work scrubbing a Mustang while a couple of juniors held up signs near the road and the rest of the team stood around trying to look adorable and worthy of the ten dollars per vehicle we were charging-plus tip, of course.
“Was that your mom and dad? They’re cute.” Penny was one of the three other sophomores on the team, and a girl I thought I’d like to get to know better if I had the time. She was always very sweet, and her curly copper hair and nose freckles reminded me of Lindsay Lohan when she was still the cute little kid from the Parent Trap remake.
“Thanks. Yeah, they weren’t thrilled with the gimmick,” I said, rolling up my coat sleeves and scoping out a bucket to commandeer for my personal scrubbing use.
“Oh God, my mom wasn’t either. I thought she was going to have a stroke. And then she saw Monica and…” Our eyes drifted to where Monica was halfheartedly scrubbing the sides of the red Mustang. She had on a sweater and jeans, but both were so tight she looked like she’d been poured into a catsuit. And she was wearing stiletto boots. Who wore high heels to wash cars? “Well, after that I was lucky to get out of the car.”
I laughed and Penny did too, and for a second I thought I might enjoy this evening of slavery. Penny was cool and we have never had the chance to just hang out and talk at practice.
Then I smelled it-death wafting across the parking lot.
It wasn’t grave dirt or the sickeningly sweet odor of rotting flesh, but there was no doubt that whatever this was had been summoned from its grave with black magic. After months spent studying the various ingredients one could use to reanimate a corpse, I had the pungent odor of wormwood and gardenia memorized.
Still, I didn’t want to believe it. This couldn’t be happening again! Carol was a nice, sleepy small town, not a hotbed of black magic and mayhem. Or at least it hadn’t been until four months ago. Now, it seemed the rules had changed.
I heard the unmistakable groans of flesh-hungry zombies and was running toward the tree line at the edge of the parking lot a second later.
“Monica! I saw one of your friends.” I grabbed a handful of Monica’s sweater on my way by and tugged her along with me.
“What the heck, Megan? I swear to God I-”
“One of your special friends.” My eyes went wide and I prayed she got the message in the next ten seconds, because we were swiftly running out of time. If we didn’t haul ass, those black-magically raised zombies were going to make it out of the cover of the trees and we’d both be royally screwed.
We’d have no choice but to fight them in the open to keep our friends from getting turned into zombie chow. Then Settlers’ Affairs would have no choice but to send both us and our families far, far away. Being discovered by someone from the mortal world was just about the worst thing that could happen to a Settler. If SA even thought you’d been spotted by an average person, you were likely to find yourself in some seriously deep poo.
My parents had already been relocated once, from California to Sticksville, Arkansas, and I really didn’t want to find out where we’d be headed if I got caught kicking zombie tail on the Kroger parking lot.
“Oh shit,” Monica hissed under her breath. “You’re f-ing kidding me.”
“No. In the trees. Hurry!”
She threw down her sponge and raced after me, making pretty good time for a chick in stiletto boots. I was going to have to reevaluate my opinion that movie people were stupid for always dressing women crime fighters in heels.
“Monica, Megan, where are ya’ll-”
“We’ll be right back, don’t worry!” I called over my shoulder to London. And please don’t follow us, I silently prayed. If the other girls got close to the edge of the trees, they were going to see what Monica and I were up to. It was getting dark, but not that dark, and there were no leaves to hide us.
On the upside, that meant there was nothing to hide the RCs, either.
Seconds after we stumbled through the first of the soggy, snow-covered leaves, I spotted them-four of the Undead hustling it toward Monica and me with a speed that was unnerving. It wasn’t the full-on racing speed of a normal Unsettled, but neither was it the slow, horror-movie shuffle of a black-magically raised zombie.
These guys were different. They moved nearly as fast as the living and their eyes-though lacking that spark that said, “Yo, I’m not dead”-weren’t glowing red. RCs always had red eyes-it was one of the key things that let you know they were RCs. In addition to the supernatural strength and the trying-to-munch-on-your-nummyhuman-flesh stuff and all that.
And not only were their eyes not red, but their faces and clothes-which, oddly, looked like pajamas, not your average burial wear-weren’t dirty. There wasn’t a speck of grave dirt on them, and from the looks of their skin, they hadn’t been dead more than a few hours, tops. They weren’t decomposing and had a soft pink flush to their cheeks.
But thankfully, no matter how odd these guys were, there were only four of them. I should be able to work the reverto spell and get rid of them in no time. It was only if there were a bunch of Undead that Monica and
I would have to resort to trickier spells to get the job done. br />
“Reverto!” I held up both hands and willed my power out of my palms, already feeling the relief that comes with getting a Settler crisis under control.
Until I realized the zombies weren’t turning and heading back to their maker. Heck… they weren’t even slowing down.
“Reverto!” I repeated, throwing everything I had into the command. My hands buzzed with the force of my power until it felt like I’d grabbed hold of the wrong end of my flattening iron, but still the RCs didn’t stop. If anything, they seemed to move a little faster.
“Crap!” With a groan I reached down and grabbed a handful of snow, grateful for the relief of the cold against my burning skin.
“Jesus, Megan. What’s wrong with you tonight?” Monica shoved in front of me and raised her own hands. “Desino! Absisto!”
I didn’t know whether to be relieved or freaked that Monica’s freezing commands didn’t work either. On the one hand-good to know I wasn’t having some weird power outage. On the other hand-zombies, coming closer, clearly wanting taste of girl flesh, “nom nom nom…”
“We’re going to have to put them down the hard way.” I risked a quick glance over my shoulder, relieved to see we were still alone and none of the girls had risked cold, soggy feet by coming to see why we’d run off into the woods like a couple of lunatics. “Do you have-”
“Of course I have my knife.” Monica whipped her tiny blade from somewhere near her waist.