Storykiller (39 page)

When the trees began to thin a bit and Tessa saw the edge of her house’s gabled roof poking through, she had never been more relieved in her life. Tessa and Robin jumped her back fence and ran across the yard.

“The damn window!” Tessa shouted as she heard the first of the zombies collide with the fence behind them. The fence wouldn’t hold against the stampede for long.

Robin and Tessa broke through the plastic sheeting over the broken dining room window. Robin tossed his bow and arrows to the ground. “The table,” he said, pointing to the dining room table. They lifted it and pushed it up over the window. It was big enough to cover the hole, but not heavy enough to keep a wave of zombies from pushing through. Robin pointed to a massive hutch. Tessa winced. It was full of expensive china. But he was right, it was the best, closest, heaviest thing. She helped him shove it across the floor and up against the table. Tessa grimaced, thinking it wouldn’t be enough.

And as the first zombie hit the flat side of the table in the yard she knew she was right as the china shuddered inside the hutch, clinking softly. Tessa and Robin looked around and finally dragged the living room couch into the dining room. It was just long enough that they could wedge it between the far wall and the hutch, a fulcrum of some sort, which seemed like it might actually work. Tessa peeked out the window above the back kitchen door and watched the zombies stream across the lawn, piling through a section of the fence already flattened. Most of them collected against the ‘table as window,’ not entirely mindless, but seemingly out of ideas. Or at least that’s what s
he hoped.

Tessa had no idea how long it would hold.

In the Nightshade parking lot, Brand, Micah, Snow, Grey, and Jeff, again looking like a dragon, watched the patrons coming in and out for five solid minutes from Grey’s car before anyone said anything.

“So what do we do?” Grey asked.

“We go in and, uh, look around,” Micah said and Jeff tittered nervously next to her.

“Okay, what are we looking for?” Grey asked.

Everyone kind of shrugged.

“Clues,” Brand said, uncertainly, and then more definitively, “Let’s go. Now,” he said, as if urging them all to action. By some miracle, they all listened to him and opened their car doors. He couldn’t have been more shocked if he tried. Was he in charge?

The thought terrified him.

“If we end up pigs, I am going to kill
everyone
,” Snow hissed as they neared the entrance.

Once inside Brand stepped forward and opened his arms wide to embrace the host, a mountain of a man, “
Αχ
!
Φίλος
μου
!
Έχει
τόσο
καιρό
!
”

Micah gave Grey the side-eye, which he returned. Brand continued chattering in Greek, and the rest of them looked around the restaurant trying to be casual, trying to look like they belonged. An impossible task.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Snow breathed icily and slid away from the group.

“Snow!” Micah hissed, clutching Grey’s arm, watching her go, Jeff shifting into a slightly larger animal inside her sweatshirt pocket. Snow moved gracefully across the long room and rolled up to a table filled to overflowing with delicacies.

Snow reached out to a tall blonde woman clad in green, standing next to the table, and tapped her on the shoulder. The woman turned around, and there was a momentary flash of recognition across her face
as Snow said, “Circe.”

Tessa slumped against the floor and covered her ears, her back against the couch-as-fulcrum. She was suddenly very sure she was going to die. Here, in her house, at the hands of relentless Story zombies. Her adrenaline was pumping like mad, and her mind raced.

She reached suddenly for Robin and kissed him. A serious kiss that made its intentions clear.

Last kisses.

Kisses that come at the climax, before people died horribly.

Tessa put thousands of unspoken words into it. It was amazing how the brink of death could make you forget everything else. Her brain was so swelled with lust and desire she couldn’t even remember why she’d been angry with him this morning.

Everything was meaningless. Everything except
this
.

Robin answered in kind, pulling her tightly to him, his hand on her neck, his thumb roughly against her jaw and then moving into her hair, holding her mouth firmly to his. He kissed her deeply, powerfully, differently than before. There was more persistence than there had been before, more urgency, as if he understood every silent declaration in her kiss. It probably should have scared her, but she liked it, wanted it, needed it.

Tessa grabbed the edge of his jacket and pulled it off him. His hand slid up under her tank top, warm and electric, and Tessa sighed into him. She ran her hand up into his hair and drew him down lower with her, so he was on top of her, pressing on her in startling ways that made her mind race. She reached underneath his shirt and edged it up, her hands drifting across his hot skin. Robin paused in kissing her just long enough to strip his t-shirt off and then returned to her mouth, insistent. He kissed her neck, and Tessa groaned. She pulled off her tank top with his help and then he returned to her mouth, the intensity of it leaving them both breathless. She wanted him, and it was stirring something primal in her that she feared she wouldn’t be able to turn off. But if she was going to die, what would it matter if she couldn’t turn it off? She reached for the belt on his pants and unbuckled it, and then, as she unbuttoned his pants, passing some invisible line in the sand and not caring, something slammed against the front door with far more force than one of the zombies.

Robin shot up off of her, and Tessa instinctively reached for her tank. They edged around the corner of the dining room, staying low, watching the door as something repeatedly smashed into it. Tessa slid her shirt on and winced as she heard the frame splintering. Robin buckled his belt and reached for his T-shirt. He looked at Tessa.

“What do you think?”

Tessa was about to shrug helplessly when the door gave inward, and Fenris crashed through it, hurtling into the foyer.

“Fenris,” Tessa said, equal parts relieved and irritated.

“Scion. You’re alive,” Fenris breathed, still more out of control than Tessa had ever seen him. She walked toward him while Robin put on his shirt.

“Look what you did to my damn door, Fenris.”

“I’ll replace it,” he said, breathlessly without missing a beat. Tessa tried to shut the splinted door and as she did so, she saw Robin’s jeep, windows all broken, generally torn up, and covered in mud, parked haphazardly in front of the house, one wheel on the sidewalk. She looked at Fenris, surprised. Had he really been concerned? Or maybe just afraid he’d miss out on the show. He
had
taken them out into the woods and abandoned them just prior to being attacked. But there would be time for that later. Right now one of the zombies had figured out how to get out of the back yard and was heading for a front door that wouldn’t shut.

“Help me,” she said, trying to push the door shut. Fenris saw the zombie and put his shoulder against the door with her. They got it closed, but there was nothing to lock it and the door shuddered against them as the first zombie slammed into the splintered wood.

“Robin!” Tessa shouted, as one started to climb through the door falling apart under their hands. Another put its arm through the glass window next to the door.

They would be inside in moments.

Circe smiled at Snow and opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, Snow’s fist came flying at the woman’s face and knocked her out in one punch.

Circe fell backward into the table of food, sending much of it clattering to the ground. Patrons looked on, shocked, and several waiters and busboys headed over. Snow turned, and glowing brightly with her bluish-white light, cast a hand widely over the restaurant. It was as if everyone paused mid-thought. She then looked at Brand, Micah, and Grey, dumfounded near the door, while she massaged her punching hand. “I’m not going to carry her too, make yourselves
useful, minions.”

Brand, Micah, and Grey rushed over dutifully, and Grey and Brand tried to untangle Circe from the table and food. Micah gaped at the frozen restaurant patrons.

“Will they…will they be okay?”

“Yes, it won’t last long. It’s a soft freeze, there’s too many to do anything more elaborate or longer lasting. We should get out of here, now.”

Micah nodded and reached absentmindedly for an olive from Circe’s table but Jeff, back to his cat form, leapt forward and knocked it from her hand. Micah looked at him, confused. Brand looked at her as he draped one of Circe’s limp arms over his shoulder.

“Don’t ever eat anything from Circe’s table, Mike,” he said. Snow nodded in agreement. And then, seeing a busboy near her moving a little as if the frost was already fading, nudged the both of them.

“We need to go.”

The group hustled to the car, inelegantly dragging the unconscious Circe with them.

Two more had started to come through the kitchen window, and three more pounded on the front door, a relentless thudding sound that made Tessa’s head hurt.

T
hen all of a sudden it stopped.

They didn’t disappear, but it was as if they turned into mindless husks and a moment later they slumped to the ground together, a hive mind with the plug pulled. Tessa nodded to Robin and Fenris and they all moved away from the door (which was now barely a door and more just some slats of wood that looked as if they might have once been bound together). As they did so, one of the zombies fell face first into the house.

Tessa reached toward the figure, aware it was a classic mistake, but unable to resist. Just as she was about to touch it, her phone rang shrilly in her pocket and she fell backward onto her butt. Robin and even Fenris leapt backward and then held their chests as if holding their racing hearts inside their ribcages. Tessa breathed a relieved sigh, dug into the pocket of her jeans,
and picked up on the third ring.