“Shut up. Don’t you dare say a word about my mother.”
“How does that feel, Jess? To know you dedicated your life to avenging some woman who couldn’t even be bothered to let you know she wasn’t dead?”
“Shut up! My mother loves me. She would be here if she could.” Jess in Aaron’s body took another step forward and gripped her machete even more tightly. “I know she’ll wish she was here to watch the person who sent her daughter to prison finally get what she deserves.”
“That’s what I don’t get,” I said, praying Cliff was working on that whole getting-into-the-circle-to-clear-the-altar thing. “Why do you still want to kill me when you know I didn’t kill your mother?”
“You ruined my life, and now you killed my fiancй!”
“I did not ruin your life, and I thought you were gay!”
“You killed him and trapped me in his dead body,” Jess yelled, ignoring my very logical arguments. “Have you noticed that, Megan? That my head is leaking brains?” Jess/Aaron swiped a hand across the back of Aaron’s head and hurled a bit of the sticky mess in my direction, getting close enough to make me flinch.
“Okay, fine!” I yelled, matching her volume. “Then what the heck is with the army of the dead and the zombie epidemic and-”
“The Settlers were never going to let me out of prison, so I figured I’d get rid of the Settlers.” Jess grinned as she traced a few runes in the air. I tried to back away, but it was like moving through molasses. It was suddenly impossible to force my muscles to function. Jess had evidently learned a few new tricks while she was supposed to be rotting in prison. “As soon as the borders close, I’ve got it on very good authority that no one is ever going to mess with me again. I’ll walk free and be princess of the very scary land of quarantined Arkansas.”
“Megan, don’t look at her hands!” Cliff yelled from somewhere behind me.
“Grab him, girls!” Jess ordered, not stopping her mesmerizing little finger dance for a second. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to look away. “You remember how we wanted to be princesses when we were little, Megs? How we’d dress up in all my old Halloween costumes and steal Clara’s jewelry from the safe in Dad’s room? Now I’m really going to be one. Isn’t that awesome?”
She was nuts. Completely nuts. I mean, she’d obviously never been all there, but now black magic had truly rotted what was left of her brain. There would be no reasoning with her. Which meant I was probably going to have to kill Aaron a second time.
The realization simultaneously turned my stomach and made the darkness within me do the happy dance. Which made me even sicker.
“What do we do with him?” Lee Chin asked from behind me, where I could hear her and several of the other girls grunting as they fought to hold on to a struggling Cliff.
“Throw him on the fire. Dead virgin blood will probably work as good as the living stuff. Did you know your little lover zombie was a virgin, Megan? That he died without-”
“Fight her, Megan!” Cliff cried, very real fear in his voice for the first time.
“No!” I screamed, fighting to move as my heart raced with fear. “Lee, Jessica can’t make you young and beautiful forever. She’s been lying to you just to-”
“They’ll never believe you, Megs,” Jess/Aaron said. “They’ve seen what I can do. They’re too afraid to doubt me. You should be afraid too.”
“Put him in the ground!” Cliff yelled. “Hurry, before-”
The machete flew at me before I could think to move. It was simply clenched in Aaron/Jess’s hands one second and hurtling toward me the next. If Cliff hadn’t twisted free from the cheerleaders and thrown himself between me and the knife at that exact second, I would have taken the blade right in the chest.
“Cliff!” I fell down beside him, the sight of the knife buried to the hilt in his neck finally breaking the hold Jess had on me.
“Don’t! Just watch yourself,” he said, his eyes pleading with me from his pale face. He was so badly hurt he could barely move his lips, but his first thought was still for my safety. He was just so good. Too good. “Put him in the ground, Megan. Put them both in the ground.”
I surged to my feet, facing Jess/Aaron across what was left of Cliff, my rage so thick I could feel it crawling across my skin.
She’d destroyed him. Even a dead guy couldn’t survive the kind of wound Cliff had sustained. The blade had almost completely severed his head from his body, and decapitation was one of the only ways to take down a zombie without magic.
That meant a wonderful person wasn’t going to be around anymore because of this evil freak. This wicked waste of flesh who was already responsible for the deaths of an innocent Settler, and a poor man whose only mistake had been being in a coma at a hospital with lousy security.
Jessica Thompson was a disease, a pestilence that deserved to be wiped off the face of the earth. And it looked like I was the one who was going to do the wiping.
“Drag the dead guy onto the altar, girls. We’ve got some zombies to raise,” Jess said.
“Move a muscle and I’ll make you bleed,” I said, freezing Lee Chin and Felicity where they stood.
“Get back in position or I’ll make sure that the river barge leaves without you. Then you can stay here with the dead people instead of being young and beautiful forever,” Jess countered, sending the girls scurrying to do her bidding. The smug look on her/Aaron’s face as she turned back to me sent my anger spiraling impossibly higher. “Looks like I win. Again.”
“You’ve never won shit, Jessica. And you’re not going to win now.”
“Oooo, cussing. Aren’t you a bad, bad girl?”
“You have no idea,” I said, and then I was running straight for her, dropping every wall I’d ever used to control my Settler power, hurling every ounce of rage in my body straight at the witch in front of me.
CHAPTER 23
I didn’t know any witch-type spells-I dealt with magic for the dead, not the living-and I didn’t want to call upon the darker power within me unless there was no other option. Settler power was what I knew, what I was best at. So I did the only thing I could think of in the ten seconds it took me to reach Aaron/Jess. I invoked the “return to earth” command, determined to put them in the ground just like Cliff had told me to.
“Reverto terra!” I hit Aaron’s chest with both fists, shoving with all my physical strength and every ounce of my power.
Still, I never expected him to fly ten feet into the air, or for the earth beneath him to open like some toothless mouth and suck him beneath the soil. It all happened so fast, I barely had time to recover my balance before Aaron/Jess had disappeared.
“Oh my God. She killed Aaron again.” Kimberly brilliantly stated the obvious while Dana ran to the place where Aaron had vanished.
“Good, let’s get out of here while we still can,” Felicity said. “I don’t care if I’m going to be fat anymore!”
“No
,” Dana shouted. “Get back in position.”
“But we-”
“Now!” Dana screamed, turning to run back to her place between Kimberly and Kate as the earth beneath us began to rumble.
Looked like Aaron/Jess wasn’t quite ready to lie down and die. Fine with me-I had plenty more kick-ass in my arsenal. I wasn’t feeling the least bit drained. In fact, I was practically itching to invoke the exuro command and give Jess a taste of what it was like to be burned alive.
“Megan, you’ve got to-” Cliff’s words ended in a groan of agony as the ground beneath him buckled and a very angry living-inhabited corpse burst from the earth.
“Tergum!” Before Aaron/Jess had even finished speaking the word, I was flying backwards on a collision course with the stone altar.
I cried out as my lower back connected with the rock, making what I guessed was my right kidney explode in a supernova of pain. The sensation was so intense, I was practically blinded by it for a few seconds. By the time I pulled myself together enough to even think about standing up, the circle had closed and Aaron/Jess was halfway through the spell to raise the dead. The cheerleaders didn’t seem to be helping much-most of them were bawling their eyes out, in fact-but it didn’t seem to matter.
“Thanks for the power, Megan,” Aaron/Jess said, yelling to be heard over the rumbling of the earth. “I appreciate the gift.”
Oh God, what had I done? Settler magic made a corpse channeling a living soul stronger. We’d only studied that particular phenomenon for about ten seconds in Enforcer training, but I should have remembered.
That was what was weird about this circle-that was what Cliff had felt from the start. There was a living person inside a dead body, which meant the only way to take down Aaron/Jess was with a mixture of magic for the living and the dead. A Settler with witch blood was Arkansas’s only hope. I was Arkansas’s only hope, and I’d gone and screwed it up and given Jess exactly what she needed.
Now all they needed was blood-the blood of an innocent, to be precise.
“Haustum,” Aaron/Jess gurgled, a smile stretching across Aaron’s ravaged lips as Jess watched realization dawn in my eyes.
The zombie bite on my shoulder suddenly broke open and blood gushed, hot and wet, across the altar behind me. I screamed, doing my best to pull away, but it was as if I’d been glued to the stone. The pain ripped through me with enough force to make my bones ache, and I could feel my power draining away even as the blood drained from my body.
Never had I wished so desperately that I was issue-free when it came to sex. If Ethan and I had just gone ahead and done it already, Jess wouldn’t have been able to use my blood to raise her army of the dead. Now it was too late. I could feel the dead coming, squirming through the ground below, yearning toward the surface and the blood they craved. I’d failed. Jess had won, and there was nothing to do but lie here and wait for-
No! My inner voice had never been so loud. It was so adamant, in fact, that it actually made me flinch. You’ve got the same power she does, and every word she says is a weapon.
The inner voice was right. I might not have spent years studying black magic, but I had ears and a mouth, and so far both were working just fine. I also had a great memory, at least good enough to recall the word she’d used to make me bleed, and I was suddenly having a lot fewer issues with dabbling in the dark arts.
“Haustum,” I yelled, summoning both my Settler power and the darker power lurking beneath it. I aimed my palms in Aaron/Jess’s direction just as skeletal hands thrust up from the ground all around me.
The obvious wounds on Aaron’s neck and head and what I was guessing were internal injuries began to gush blood. At first, Aaron/ Jess didn’t even seem to notice, since the dead can’t feel pain, but then Aaron’s knees buckled and his bloodshot eyes widened in alarm.
“No. No freaking… way… ” Jess’s words faded away, and, within a few seconds, the body that had been Aaron crumpled to the ground, finally as lifeless as it should have been an hour ago.
“Oh crap,” Dana said. “I don’t think that’s supposed to happen.”
“What do you mean you don’t think-Ah!” Felicity’s words ended in a scream as a rotted face burst from the ground and a zombie mouth latched around her ankle. “They’re going to eat us! Jess and Aaron were wrong!”
“Run, everyone! Get to the barge!” Dana and the other girls turned and ran for it while Felicity kicked at the zombie that had her in its jaws, making her escape in time to catch up with the others as they fled toward the river.
I jumped to my feet, wavering unsteadily. I’d lost a lot of blood and used up a lot of power. There was no way I’d be able to take down all the zombies bursting from the ground by myself. I needed help.
I turned toward the burning candles under the bridge, determined to find a way to free Ethan, Cruz, and Monica, when I tripped over Cliff and went down hard.
“Behind you,” he said, the open wound at his neck gurgling sickly. He’d managed to pull out the machete and was clutching it between his hands, but lacked the strength to put it to use-as evidenced by the fact that all he could do was lie there as the now-bloodless Aaron hurled himself on top of me.
“You suck! So hard!” he screamed, Jess’s voice coming through clearer than ever, hands clawing into my calves when I tried to scramble away.
I sucked? Really, that was what she came up with? After she’d killed and lied and pretty much doomed our state to zombie plague unless we stopped the RCs crawling out of the ground? I sucked?
“Let go!” I kicked Aaron’s body in the face, but Jess clung tight, holding me still as two zombies with glowing red eyes emerged from the earth right in front of me. “Pax frater corpus postestatum.” I smacked each of them in the head and they froze, which was a relief after the week of zombies who wouldn’t say die. These were just normal RCs, after all, just-
“Ahh!” I screamed as the two dudes I’d just pax frater-ed surged back to life and started snapping at my yummy flesh.
“They were raised partly with your power, you idiot. You can’t stop them!”
“Then you stop them, or I’ll-Absisto!” I froze the Munch Brothers in place, but knew the freezing command wouldn’t hold for long.
“I wouldn’t even if I could. No one here has the power to make them go back to their graves.” Aaron/Jess gouged cold, corpselike fingers even deeper into my leg. “You’re finally going to pay for everything you’ve done.”
I surged into a seated position away from zombie mouths, grabbed what was left of Aaron’s hair, and tugged-hard, distracting him/her just long enough to twist my leg free.
“Megan! Put out the fire!” Kitty screamed. I looked up to see Ethan, Monica, Cruz, and Kitty at the edge of the circle, which unfortunately looked like it hadn’t been broken when the cheerleaders made a mad dash for the river. Ethan, Cruz, and Monica were kicking the tails of the zombies who made it out of the circle, but
when they tried to get too close to the altar, they were repelled by the invisible walls of the spell. “Put out the fire so we can help you.”
I scrambled to my feet and lunged for the altar, willing to throw my body on there to smother the flames if that was what I had to do, but Aaron/Jess tripped me, flipping me onto my back. She leapt on top of me a second later, pinning me to the ground and sliding her large, Aaron hands around my neck for the second time that night.
Argh! No way was I blacking out again.
“Get off!” I tried to buck Jess off, but Aaron’s body was too heavy and his hands too strong. Spots danced in front of my eyes while zombies continued to pour from the earth.
Two dozen or more were out of the ground now, shuffling toward me and Aaron/Jess with eyes glowing red in the leathery remains of their faces. Scraps of weathered blue and gray uniforms hung on their bleached bones, blowing like miniature flags in the cold wind sweeping in from the river.
“They won’t stay down!” I heard someone scream from outside the circle.
“Stop them before they cross the street. Contain the area!” Kitty yelled.
God, no. Jess wasn‘t lying. Nothing could stop these things. We were fighting a losing battle, shoveling shit against the tide, as my grandmother would say. Cliff’s horrible vision was going to come to pass, despite all his efforts to stop it.
My eyes drifted to what remained of Cliff, and I was shocked to see his eyes were still open. Open and latched onto me.
“Habeo are transit,” he whispered, his voice so soft I could barely hear it over the groans of the Undead and the shouts of the Settlers.