Not Dead Enough: Zombie Paranormal Romance (Project Rebellion: SARA Book 1) (11 page)

“Shhh, it’s okay. No one here,” he reassured her, wrapping an arm around her waist.

He was almost right. A woman’s body sprawled over the couch, her throat ripped open, and the ruined red mass of tissue was like a fancy silk scarf around her neck. Her dead eyes seemed to be fixed on them, the hard stare condemning them for not getting to her in time.

“Human.” Fredericks crouched by the body, his hand hovering over her chest. Not touching her, just…feeling. Of all of them, he could always sense how far away death was in a body. Said it was the echoes of the heart’s vibration or something, still lingering in the tissues. Brett had no clue; he wasn’t that sensitive. “Been dead a while. Too far gone.”

With the last three words, Brett relaxed. Dom caught his eye from across the room, and the two shared a smile. Too far gone meant they wouldn’t register the body as food, and wouldn’t feel the drive to eat. Julia might have accepted the truth of what he was, but he didn’t want her to see that side of him. Hell, even he didn’t want to think about that side.

“She was here,” Kelwood ranted, eyes wild as he looked around the little room. “Kathy was here. Where have they taken her?”

He turned in a circle, his gaze skittering past Julia, then doubling back.

“You!” His eyes narrowed and he stalked forward, menace in his every movement. “You led us around in circles, gave them time to escape. Didn’t you?”

The snarl slipped from Brett’s lips before he could stop it, the deep sound rolling around the small room. Too deep. Then Dom stepped up next to him, teeth bared and a deeper growl emanating from his big chest. But Kelwood wasn’t deterred.

“It’s her, I tell you!” he railed, gesturing at the woman behind Brett and Dom. “She was leading us in circles so her lover could escape. Tell me,” he spat. “How many of them did you fuck?”

One second Brett was looking at Kelwood’s snarling face, the next the guy staggered back, clutching at his nose as blood seeped from his nostril. Brett didn’t give him time to recover; instead, he shoved him into the wall and jammed his forearm into Kelwood’s throat.

Surprise filtered through the madness in the other man’s eyes, quickly followed by panic and fear. Emotions to be relearned. For months they’d been invincible, in the ring and out of it. In fact, there was only one creature that could kill a SARA.

Another SARA.

“Never. Ever. Talk to her that way again,” he said in a low voice full of threat. He didn’t growl. He didn’t need to. His body shook with the primal need to tear apart the threat to his woman. A need so great, so overwhelming that it almost obliterated everything else.

Dom’s arm snaked around him, under his arm to over his shoulder, to haul him off Kelwood. He fought, but Dom was stronger. Staggering backward, he reached for Julia only to realize the room had fallen silent and they were all looking at him.

“Shit, man….” Dom breathed. “What the fuck did you do to your eyes?”

Brett shook his head, wrapping an arm around Julia’s waist to tuck her into his side protectively. All he wanted to do was drag her off somewhere and keep her safe. “What’s wrong with my eyes?”

“They’re white,” said Dom. “Completely whited out. Like a cue ball in a blizzard type of white.”

Brett blinked, his anger receding. Julia touched his cheek and he looked down at her.

“The color is coming back, slowly. Look.” She hooked a delicate finger under his chin and turned his face so that Dom and Fredericks could see. Kelwood, sensibly, kept his distance. “Perhaps it’s emotion linked?”

Brett nodded. “Never felt anger like it. It was as if it crawled inside me and took over.”

Dom nodded, his lips pursed. “It sounds like the Red Mist the Bloods get. If we’re starting to exhibit the same thing, they must have put something similar in the serum used to make us.”

Brett blinked, then chuckled, but Fredericks beat him to the punch. “Shit Dom, you almost sounded intelligent then!”

The big man cracked a grin. “I know. Go me, eh?” He shrugged. “Working the Blood Section you pick up bits here and there. They often reused the base portion of the serum, just adding the extra bits to go for Blood, Lycan or Re-animate.”

“So far today, we’ve got walking on walls and weird eyeballs, so fuck knows what they shoved in ours.” Fredericks stepped forward, the humor fleeing his expression. “I think it’s safe to say that our birds have fled the coop. Let’s get topside and see if Jared or Julia can pick up a viable scent.”

*

A few minutes later they were on the move again. This time the men didn’t have to slow down for Julia. Thanks to Kelwood being unable to pick up the scent, his shock about his wife sending him into some kind of blackout-trance, she was leading them. The trail was easy to follow, for her anyway. The scent of the fleeing Bloods and their human captives lit up her olfactory landscape like a light stream. Energy flowed through her like she was directly connected to a live power cable. Running at high-speed endlessly presented no problem. Nor did leaping over fallen logs and the occasional boulder with one stride. She wanted to whoop with joy and howl at the moon overhead when it emerged from behind the clouds to show its face. If their situation hadn’t been so dire, if they hadn’t left a dead woman behind to burn in the ruins of the barn, or weren’t racing to stop others suffering the same fate, then she would have.

Apart from the darkness coiled deep inside her that she was ignoring, she didn’t see what the big deal about being ‘converted’ was. So, she had fangs and a new manicure? Big deal. She’d always loved vampire films and books when she was younger. Real horror stories, not the crappy gore films that Buddy preferred. Huh, he should have been there for the fight earlier. She’d have given him a front row seat to having his own throat torn out.

The smell of blood exploded on the air again and she frowned, slowing her steps. The others stopped around her as she crouched to check out a blood-splattered leaf.

“Problem?” Brett asked as Fredericks dropping to one knee next to them. She didn’t miss the fact that Dom was keeping Kelwood away from her. One of them always was.

“I’m not sure.” She rubbed at the blood and sniffed her fingertips. “The scent is weird. Like it’s changing somehow.”

Prompted by a drive she didn’t understand, she stuck her finger into her mouth and licked her finger. A little voice in the back of her head went bat-shit, screaming about infection. HIV. Hepatitis. Ebola. All manner of nastiness.

Her eyes widened as new instincts kicked in, her stomach rolling with hunger pangs.

“It’s not quite human. Not anymore,” she decided aloud. “It was earlier, but not now.”

Acting on a hunch, she dropped a fang into her mouth and used it to slash the fleshy part of her palm, near the thumb.

“Fucking hell!” Fredericks arched back as black blood rose on her pale skin. “Warn us if you’re going to do something like that!”

She arched her eyebrow and licked the wound. It tingled as her tongue swept over it, but her attention was on the taste of her own blood. Before, it had been coppery. Hot and metallic. Now it was more metallic, but cold and musky. Old. It reminded her of basements and things long buried in the earth.

“She’s like me. Or she will be soon.”

“A Blood? You mean they converted her on the move?”

She looked directly at Fredericks. “I’m not subscribing to that name. That’s what you call the assholes who took us. We’re not them, so don’t use that name.”

“Attagirl,” Dom chorused from the back. “You tell ’em!”

Fredericks half-turned from his crouch, hands loosely braced on his knees. “Just whose side are you on?”

Dom grinned, a sideward step keeping him between Kelwood and the rest of them. “Mine. But she’s got a point. She’s not like a Blood. No hunger-lust that I’ve seen, and have you ever see a Blood drop just one fang before?”

She grinned as Brett and Fredericks whipped their heads around to look at her. Peeling her lip back, she dropped the fang on one side, then the other. “Can make them dance if you like?”

The stunned looks on their faces when she did just that made her giggle. The sound was so carefree and happy, she forgot everything that had happened to her for a moment. When had she last made a sound like that?

“Yeah, yeah. We got another damned comedian. You and Dom should do a double act; we could charge,” Fredericks griped, pushing to his feet, but she caught the tiny curve at the corner of his lips as he tried not to laugh. “Come on, let’s try and track these fuckers down before sunup.”

They carried on, the pace just as bruising as before. The only conversation exchanged was from Julia, updating the others on the scent trail. One by one, the human scents disappeared, to be replaced by the dark, mustier scent that marked the changed women. The original ‘Blood’ scent remained the same. Dark and rich.… Too rich, as though it was on the verge of turning to rot.

An hour passed, then another, the sky growing lighter all the time. Energy started to seep from Julia’s limbs, and she stumbled. The first time it happened, she shrugged it off. A light shower had left the undergrowth slippery. It could have happened to any of them. As she went to leap over another boulder, she lost her footing. With a gasp, she crashed into the side of the boulder, sliding down it, scraping her knees and elbows on the way. Hitting the ground with a thump, she knocked all the wind out of her lungs and lay there. Stunned.

“Julia? Julia! Are you okay?” Brett was first at her side, his eyes filled with concern. Warmth flooded her chest as he didn’t wait to check whether she’d broken anything, just gathered her up into his arms. Alarm rolled off him in waves, the sharp smell pushing through his pores and easily detectable to her sensitive nose.

“Yeah, I don’t know what happened.” She lifted her head with a struggle to look at the boulder. She’d leapt bigger during the night, so what gave? She’d felt invincible earlier. Now she just wanted to curl up in a small ball and close her eyes. “Just…feel so tired.”

“Sun’s almost up.” Dom’s deep voice reached them, and she realized that it wasn’t her new nocturnal vision that allowed her to see him clearly. It had steadily been getting lighter, and now a thin line along the horizon revealed the sun’s arrival was imminent. “She’s gonna get really tired. We should go to ground.”

Chapter Ten

They might be the undead, zombies, but they weren’t the stereotypical walking dead from the average horror movie. They didn’t shuffle or moan, and to date none of them had any body parts drop off. All in all, as long as they made sure to eat, and were careful about the freaky head twitching, Brett and his brothers could blend in rather well.

Certainly enough for Fredericks to lift an unsuspecting diner’s wallet at a little place an hour down the road, a skill Brett was dying to ask him about. It was so out of character for their by-the-book, straight-as-an-arrow leader. Brett wasn’t complaining though. The wallet had contained enough ready cash to snag them a couple of rooms at a cheap roadside motel, and the day’s rest he’d argued Julia needed.

He sat by the window, watching the parking lot and the road beyond idly. Julia was behind him, lying on the bed while locked in the day-lethargy most Bloods were prone to. He flicked a concerned glance back at her. She’d crashed and burned quicker than he’d expected, especially after she didn’t seem to be having problems with the conversion. Which in itself was odd. Not that he wanted hysterics and drama, but he’d expected some kind of freaking out at the fact she had been human and now she wasn’t.

But nothing. Zip. Nada. Nothingdoingsville. What was with that?

He sat back in the lounge chair and studied the gentle curves of her figure under the light blanket. Either she was the most psychologically put together and laid back person he’d ever encountered or she hadn’t fully processed what had happened to her yet. He was betting on the latter.

He ran a hand over his head, ruffling the short fuzz. Fuck. She was in for a hell of a crash when it did. He’d seen it. Seen the denial, the belief this was all a dream…then the crash as the realization that this was it, that life had been irrecoverably changed, sank in. ‘Sank’ was the wrong word. ‘Plummeted like a lead balloon’ would be nearer the mark.

Tenderness swept through him, and before he processed the need to move he found himself standing by the bed. Crap. That shit freaked even him out sometimes. Despite it, he stayed where he was, looking down at her. Here he was, a dead thing, craving the touch of the living. Well, one living thing anyway. No matter that they called those infected with the BD strain vampires. They were not the undead.

They skirted the line, yes. Some of them, like Major Fielding, could stand on the very edge, shutting everything down so that nothing about them gave off a vibration that his kind could track. Not for long though. Intrinsically, they were alive, and everything that lived had a vibration.

Everything that lived could be tracked.

Everything that lived could be killed.

Eaten.

But he didn’t want to eat Julia. Not in that way. The desire to sink his teeth into her flesh, to tear through the delicate skin and feel her hot blood flowing down his throat was absent.

Shaking his head, he yanked his gaze away from the slow pulse at her throat. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel her heartbeat. It was different from any he’d heard before, with a tiny kick on the fourth beat. A variance, perhaps a defect, but one that was purely and uniquely hers. He’d know her anywhere because of it.

Gently, to avoid waking her, he sat on the edge of the bed and reached out to tuck a lock of hair that had fallen over her face behind her ear. Her eyes flickered, then opened. She smiled.

“Hey.” Her voice was soft and sleepy. She looked comfortable and warm, and for a second he had to fight the temptation to crawl in with her. Trouble was, if he did, he’d want to do more than sleep. Way more than sleep.

“Hey yourself, sweetpea. How you feeling?”

She swallowed and shifted to get more comfortable. The sight of her nestling closer in the covers almost did him in. She should be nestling against him. Hell, he’d even go out and find something to eat so he could get his blood circulating and raise his body heat to keep her warm.