How she hid the thing in those skintight clothes was anyone’s guess, but I was glad she had the metal required for the pax frater corpus spell. I had enough power that I didn’t need to pierce the flesh of a zombie with metal in order to immobilize it-I just had to whack it with my fist while I chanted-but the average Settler did.
“You get Shorty and Baldy, I’ll get the tall guy, and we’ll split the dude coming up from behind,” Monica said, taking the lead as usual.
I would have argued that I should take the tall football player guy since he looked a heck of a lot more threatening than the two smaller, thinner zombies on the left, but there wasn’t any time. We were about to be surrounded.
“Pax frater corpus, potestatum spirituum.” I chanted the first portion of the spell as I rushed forward, catching the shortest zombie with a sharp thrust of my palm to his face, then crouching down to sweep the legs out from under the bald guy. Two seconds later, I was on top of him, pounding him in the center of the chest. But for some reason, Baldy didn’t seem to be getting the message to lie down and die.
I poured even more strength into my punches and power into my spell. “Inmundorum ut eicerent eos et curarent omnem. languorem et omnem infirm-” I was nearly to the end of the chant when freakishly strong hands fisted in my hair and pulled me off the struggling corpse beneath me, dragging me through the snow.
At first I thought it was the fourth zombie who had snuck up behind me, but then I spotted that dude still a dozen feet away. It was the short guy I’d already put down! He should have been zonked out in the snow awaiting an SA retrieval team, not up and fighting for his pound of Megan meat.
The pax frater was long and tedious, but it was designed to put zombies down for the count permanently and was the strongest spell I knew that didn’t involve setting things on fire-which might have been an option if I didn’t think flaming pillars of zombie flesh weaving through the trees would attract the wrong kind of attention.
What the heck was up with these guys? I’d never heard of anything like them, not in four months of irritatingly constant lecturing. The Enforcers were so going to get an earful about withholding vital info.
I dug my heels into the cold ground and did my best to pull free from Mr. Short-and-Perky. But before I could twist around and break the dude’s hold, a hot, slobbery zombie mouth was at my throat.
Barely resisting the urge to scream-and no doubt bring the rest of the pom squad running-I slammed my closed fist into the guy’s face. He groaned and his teeth slid away without breaking the skin, but he still didn’t let go. And now Baldy was up and at ’em, crawling through the snow toward where I struggled in the frozen leaves.
“Monica! A little help,” I cried out, my words turning into a grunt as I contracted my abs, jackknifing my soggy tennis shoes into the face of the guy behind me. Thank God for flexibility and dancer muscles. Shorty groaned and released his hold on my hair just seconds before Baldy crawled on top of me.
“No one gets to do that but my boyfriend,” I grumbled into the zombie’s face as I slid one leg between the pair of his and shifted my weight. With a grunt, I flipped us over. Now I was on top, but I wouldn’t be for long.
Shorty was already lunging toward me, and the straggler dude was closing in from behind. I didn’t have time to pound Baldy’s face. I had to find a more easily defended position.
I dove to the right, rolling through the snow until I’d put a good six feet between me and the boys. Only then did I spring into a crouched position and take a quick survey of the situation… and immediately wished I hadn’t.
The news wasn’t good.
There were more of them. At least two more, staggering through the darkening shadows beneath the trees, and the four we were already fighting weren’t showing any sign of slowing down. The big guy had Monica pinned against a tree while she did her best to keep his teeth from her face, and all three of my guys were closing in with totally weird speed. Very soon we were either going to be discovered or dead, neither of which was a desirable state of being.
There was only one thing I could think of that might get rid of the zombies and get the two of us out of here in one piece. I hadn’t had to borrow power from another Settler since I was a kid, but back in the days when Ethan had been my tutor, not my boyfriend, he’d made sure I remembered how. If I could just get past the dudes in front of me, liberate Monica, and get the two of us linked up, there was a chance we’d have enough juice to get rid of these guys.
Of course, getting past these three was going to be easier said than done. They were freaking determined to get a mouthful of Megan, which made me pretty certain I was the one they’d come for. Black-magically raised zombies were raised to hunt a specific target. I was going to have to check for totems-dolls resembling me, items of clothing, etc.-on their graves once we got them safe and snug in the ground again.
Assuming we managed to get them back in the ground at all.
“Megan! Do something.” Monica’s legs churned wildly in the air, and her face was turning an unhealthy red. The linebacker was going to strangle her if I didn’t do something. Fast.
Praying that the pom squad had plenty of clients to keep their attention trained on washing cars, not burning zombies, I turned to Baldy and invoked the flame command. “Exuro!”
The good news was that Baldy’s pajamas went up in flames like they’d been soaked in vodka, drawing the attention of Shorty and friend long enough for me to cut to the left and skirt around them. The bad news was that Baldy started screaming bloody murder, very likely drawing the attention of the living people only fifty or sixty feet away.
“Opprimo.” I tossed the smothering command over my shoulder, trying not to freak out that the zombie I’d set on fire was acting so very un-zombie-ish. I’d heard zombies shriek before, but nothing that sounded so human.
And not only should he not have sounded so lifelike, the other two guys shouldn’t have noticed the fire or Baldy’s screams, let alone been so distracted by them that they let their prey escape. There was something horribly wrong, and I wasn’t sure even linking mine and Monica’s power would do any good.
“It’s going to work; it has to work,” I muttered beneath my breath as I grabbed a hefty fallen limb from the ground and raced toward the big zombie at top speed. If Baldy could be distressed by fire, maybe Butch here could be bothered by a log upside the head.
Wood collided with melon with a sickening thud, making the big guy release his hold on Monica’s scrawny neck. She sucked in a gasp of air and kneed the dude between the legs as hard as she could, triggering another non-zombie-ish reaction.
“What is wrong with these guys?” We both stared in shock as Butch’s knees hit the ground and he collapsed sideways in the snow, clutching his wounded cojones.
“I don’t know, but I suggest we get rid of them first and ask quest
ions later,” I said, grabbing Monica’s hand in mine. “Let down your shields, give me everything you’ve got.”
It was a testimony to how freaked the Monicster was that she didn’t argue or make a single smart comment. Her shields simply collapsed and her energy came rushing into me, faster and faster, until my entire body burned with the force of the combined power. But still I waited, knowing I’d only have one chance to cast before the boys were on us.
Closer. Closer. I forced myself to hold back until Shorty was close enough to touch and the newcomers were no more than six feet away before throwing up my free hand and giving the RCs everything I had. “Reverto!”
The air in front of me buckled, wavering like water in a pond. Time seemed to hold its breath, the entire world gone silent as the zombies reached for me and the bubble of power reached for them.
Luckily for me, the power got to them first.
The spell hit the RCs with an audible pop and my body hit a tree behind me a second later. I’d been bounced by my own spell, something I’d heard of but never experienced. But I sure was experiencing it now. My body hit with enough force to knock the wind from my lungs, and my head smashed into the wood, making little black spots explode in front of my eyes.
By the time I slid to my side in the snow, everything was spinning. Still, through the cartoon birds tweeting around my head, I thought I saw someone hiding in the trees, watching the weird RCs stumble back through the darkened woods. Someone with dark eyes who didn’t like what they were seeing. Didn’t like it at all.
CHAPTER 4
“Come on, you can’t stay there. Someone’s coming.” Hands tugged at my coat, and when that didn’t produce the desired reaction, moved to my hair and tugged even harder.
“Ouch. God, leave me alone… my head.”
“You won’t care about your head if Penny and Terra see those zombies.”
“Why? What?” What was she talking about? Nothing seemed to make sense. All I could think about were the eyes… and the sweater. Where had I seen that sweater before?
Monica’s face swam into focus only inches away from mine. “Why? Because I’m going to smash it in with a rock if we’re discovered. So. Get. Up. Now.”
My brain felt like it was slam-dancing inside my skull, but I grabbed the hand Monica put in mine and held on as she hauled me to my feet. Then I let her throw my arm around her shoulders and drag me back toward the parking lot while I did my best not to throw up.
“You could help a little,” she grumbled.
“I’m trying not to throw up.”
“You’re heavy.”
“So you want me to throw up?” I asked, turning to face her, relishing the idea of baptizing the Monicster in my partially digested lasagna. I mean, hadn’t a part of me wanted to barf on her since third grade?
“No, no,” she hurried to assure me. “Just keep moving and keep quiet.”
“Why do I have to keep quiet?”
Monica cursed, then added in an urgent whisper. “Just agree with whatever I say, okay?”
“What? I don’t-”
“Oh my God, thank God you guys are here! Megan has finally lost it.” Monica’s voice was as loud and supremely irritated as it usually was when discussing yours truly, which didn’t do my poor head any good.
“What happened?” Terra, another sophomore I should have known better than I did, asked. Penny wedged her shoulder under my other arm and helped me limp the last few feet to the edge of the parking lot where I collapsed onto the asphalt with a grunt.
Oh, earth, sweet unspinning earth. I wanted to lay my cheek down on the ground and go straight to sleep, but settled for bracing my elbows on my knees and propping my head in my hands. Monica was right. I had to pull myself together and play this off so that no one else went into the woods.
“These dogs chased this baby raccoon up into a tree. We ran them off, but then Megan decides she has to climb up and save the thing, and I was all like, ‘Hello, it’s a wild animal, just leave it there,’ but she wouldn’t listen.” She sighed, a sound so genuinely put-upon I nearly believed her story myself. “Two seconds later, the branch she’s on breaks and Jane Goodall here falls out of the tree.”
“Who’s Jane Goodall?” I asked, tentatively lifting my eyes to look at the three girls, grateful to see only one of each of them. I wasn’t seeing double. That was a good sign.
“I think she might have a concussion. Or brain damage,” Monica added.
“I don’t have brain damage. I’ve never heard of the woman.”
“Isn’t she the one who lived with apes?” Penny asked.
“It wasn’t apes, it was chimps,” Terra said. “I watched the special on PBS.”
“You watch PBS?” Monica asked, wrinkling her nose.
“Don’t judge,” Terra said in a surprising show of chutzpah for a sophomore talking to the queen bi-atch of CHS. “Chimps are interesting. Their DNA is only one percent different from a human’s.”
Wow. Terra was way smarter than I’d realized. And cooler. Maybe she and Penny would consent to be friends with me once I felt ready to do the whole friends thing again.
“Whatever.” Monica waved a hand breezily in the air. “The point is, Wonder Girl here is lucky she didn’t break her freaking neck. She probably needs to go to the hospital.”
“We could take you to the emergency room,” Penny said. “Terra has a hardship permit, so she can drive even though she’s only-”
“No, I should take her. I saw what happened and her mom will definitely want to know about it.” Monica whipped out her cell phone with a meaningful look.
She was right. My mom would want to know about what had gone down in the woods. Mom didn’t actively Settle the dead anymore-she was relieved of that duty when her offspring, me, started summoning-but she was doing her best to keep up with my training so she could help if I needed it. I hadn’t so far, but now help was sounding pretty darn good.
I sure as heck didn’t want to run into any more of those weird zombies without getting some help first. They were dangerous and could have even been deadly. If Monica and I hadn’t been together and able to share power, I didn’t know how well either of us would have fared.
“You two get back to washing cars. We’ve only got two hours before the supermarket shuts down and we need to raise at least two hundred dollars to be on our way to reaching our goal. We’re not going to kick cheer butt by standing around staring at the brain-damaged girl.” Monica shooed Penny and Terra away as she punched a number into her phone.
I watched them go with a grim smile. The other girls probably assumed it was my parents she was calling, but I knew better. Monica was a strict follower of protocol. She’d call Settlers’ Affairs before she called anyone else, and in a matter of minutes, we’d have undercover Protocol officers swarming all over the parking lot. Not such a big deal, you might think, since my own boyfriend is a member of the team
and was probably still on duty.
But for some reason, Protocol and I didn’t mix. When they showed up, I tended to get into trouble. Usually I got out of it just fine, but right now I didn’t feel up to the inevitable two hundred and twenty questions. So I pulled out my own cell and called Mom and Dad, interrupting their fancy dinner and thrilling them even further by announcing I needed to go to the SA hospital due to zombie-related injuries.
I hated to worry my parents, but I really did need to go the hospital-a fact made even clearer when I tried to stand up on my own and the world spun, my stomach lurched, and I ended up back on my butt losing my lasagna in the Kroger parking lot.
“Do you want me to run you a bath, sweetie?” Mom asked as we staggered into the house nearly three hours later.
It had taken over two and a half hours for the doctor to order a CAT scan and then to tell me that I had a mild concussion and I should go home and get some rest. (You’d think they’d do more for a head injury, right? Apparently not.)
But the SA infirmary had been unusually swamped. A six-year-old girl had summoned her first zombie, and her dad, the Settler in the family, hadn’t been home to help her learn the ropes. The Unsettled had gone Rogue and injured the mom and three kids before the girl’s mom could figure out what to do.
Rogues don’t crave flesh like black-magically raised zombies, but they can cause a lot of damage when they start to lose their cool. That’s why it’s so important for Settlers to attend to the needs of the Unsettled in a swift and efficient manner. Heck, that’s why it was so important to have Settlers period. If there’s no one around to listen, the dead vent their issues in a much more violent manner.