How did you—I thought you—” I stammered, not sure what I could or couldn’t say anymore. “But I—”
“Is she always this stupid, Jess?” Beth asked as she came toward me with more rope. “I mean, seriously, how did you fake being her friend for five years? I would have killed her year one and gotten it over with.”
“Hold out your hands, Megan,” Jess said.
For a second I thought about making a run for it, but then her knife was pressed against my back again. She
would
kill me. I had no doubt about that. So I held out my arms to Beth, silently vowing to wait for another opportunity to haul ass. I was going to have to find a way to escape. Otherwise, it was over. Jess wasn’t going to let me out of here alive.
“She just got a text from Ethan. Looks like he was trying to warn her that you had busted out of Settler prison.”
“Honestly, it was easier than sneaking out of my bedroom,” Beth said. Jess laughed as Beth tied my wrists together and then shoved me down to sit on a rickety bench beside Monica before going to work tying my ankles.
“Oh, and get this,” Jess said, scrolling further down the message on my phone. “They think you ‘may have an accomplice.’ It took them this long to figure out one artist couldn’t raise all those corpses on their own?”
Beth rolled her eyes in agreement. “Yeah, you can’t even work the clone spell without a partner. Stupid zombie freaks.”
I’d
known
those clones weren’t my fault. In your face, Settlers’ Affairs! Not that the information was going to do me a lot of good now.
“They shouldn’t be allowed to live in the same world as normal people,” Jess said, her eyes shining in the dim light with a rage too scary to be for me and me alone. She must have been one of those fundamentalist terrorist-type people who wanted to annihilate things that violated their beliefs. It was totally weird to think about Jess that way, but at least it gave me something to work with.
“Please, Jess, I can understand that what Monica and I are might seem weird or wrong,” I said in my most reasonable voice. “But I swear to you, we don’t hurt people. We’re not—”
“Liar! You’re such a freaking liar, Megan!” She screamed the words loudly enough to make me flinch. “You’re a murderer. You have been since you were a kid.”
She was
totally
nuts. Still, I had to keep trying. “No, I swear, Jess, I—”
“I was there—I
saw
you do it. You and Monica,” Jess said, looking like she was about to cry. “You turned the zombies on her, and they chased her into the woods. She didn’t know the spell to make them stop after just a taste of her blood.” She sucked in a breath and the tears standing in her eyes rolled silently down her cheeks. “So they ate her alive before they went back to their graves.”
Whatever she was talking about, she had the last part dead wrong. “But Jess, you don’t need a spell. Once a Reanimated Corpse gets a taste of the blood of the one who raised them, they go back to their graves. I swear, that’s—”
“Bullshit! By the time I found her, the only things left were bones and . . . her hair.”
Jess reached into her front pocket and pulled out a tiny braid of blond hair. “I kept it all these years, waiting until I was strong enough to work the spell I wanted to use for you and Monica. That way, it wouldn’t just be my revenge—it would be Mom’s too.”
Mom. Her mom. Oh my God. It couldn’t be. . .
I suddenly felt as if my entire world had been turned inside out, like I’d stepped through the looking glass and was living in an alternate reality. Jess’s
mom
was the woman who’d run away when we were ten years old after I was attacked in the cemetery. Right after Monica and I had joined power to work the
reverto
spell. That had to be the answer. It was the only time Monica and I had ever combined forces to do anything.
“Your mom was the one who raised the corpses the night I almost died,” I said, my lips feeling weirdly numb as I forced the words out. I sort of suspected I might be going into shock or something but didn’t have time to worry about it since Jess was stalking slowly toward me with her knife.
“See, Beth, she’s not stupid. Slow on the uptake, but not stupid.”
“Please, Jess, we didn’t mean to hurt your mom. I’ve never heard of someone who raised zombies being eaten alive. But even if we’d known that would happen, she was the one raising the dead when she shouldn’t have been,” I said, thinking fast. “And she was using your blood to do it, right? The blood of the innocent needed for the spell? I mean, that’s not something she should have been doing. You were her kid; she should have—”
“Shut up! Mom was doing what she had to do to get rid of Clara. My dad was cheating on her, getting ready to ruin our lives. She was acting out of love for our family. We all would have been fine if you hadn’t
killed
my mother!”
“No, please, I—” My words ended in a gurgle as Jess fisted her hand in my hair and wrenched my head back. I sucked in a breath and closed my eyes, waiting for her to slit my throat.
I was going to die. I was really going to die, right here, right—
“I’m not going to kill you yet,” Jess whispered in my ear as she ran the knife across my jawline with enough force to pierce the skin. It stung like nobody’s business but wasn’t nearly as bad as a zombie bite and not deep enough to scar, let alone kill. “I just need a bit of your blood, Meggy. Monica’s won’t do. Everyone knows she hasn’t been innocent since eighth grade.”
The blood of the innocent. She was going to use my blood for the spell.
“Now, you’re sure she and Josh didn’t do anything?” Beth asked as Jess released my hair and carried the knife with my blood on it to a big black pot sitting where the pulpit would have been. “He told me the other night that they . . .
you know
.”
What! Josh was such a freaking pig! I couldn’t believe he was spreading lies like that. Maybe
that
was why all the girls had been giving me the cold shoulder last week. They thought I had . . . that I’d—ugh, I didn’t even want to think about it. And on the
first date
, no less. I was so going to kill Josh Pickle. If I didn’t get killed first.
“She’s never even let a guy get to second base. Trust me. Josh is a liar,” Jess said.
“Josh is a liar, but Ethan’s not,” I said, going with my first instinct. If Beth and Jess thought they didn’t have the blood of an innocent, they’d have to go looking for one. It might buy Monica and me just enough time to escape. “He was my first time, Jess. That’s why I was so upset when he went after Monica.”
“Oh yeah? When was this?”
“The other night, after he kidnapped me from the corn maze.” The lie came quickly and easily. I was apparently much better with falsehoods when in life-or-death situations.
“You’re lying,” Jess said, though she hesitated before putting the knife in the pot. “You would have told me.”
“I’m not lying. Ethan and I did it. And I can prove it,” I said, a brilliant plan forming. “Let me text him about it, and—”
“How stupid do you think I am?” Jess laughed and dipped the knife into the pot. Whatever was inside glowed faintly green for a second, which apparently satisfied Jess that she had been right to call my bluff.
“Jess, you could have ruined the entire spell!” Beth sounded pissed. “For the summoning of the corpses to work, the ingredients have to be perfect. Right?”
“I knew she was lying. She always looks to the left when she’s lying.”
Argh! Having an enemy who used to be your best friend sucked! She knew me entirely too well. But then . . . I knew her pretty well too.
“So you’ve planned to kill me for five years,” I said in my most disdainful voice. “Seems like you would have gotten it right the first time in the corn maze instead of screwing up so badly Beth ended up in SA custody.”
Jess spun away from the pot, which I guessed was their makeshift cauldron for the ritual they were getting ready to perform. “We
did
get it right. We weren’t trying to kill you. I just wanted to play with you for a while, scare you a little before we got down to business.”
“Right,” I said, rolling my eyes like I didn’t believe her, even though I knew Josh and Ethan had been the targets of the first attacks. Jess was a total freak about being right and doing things perfectly. If I could get her talking, trying to justify her mistakes, I might be able to find out what she had planned for tonight in time to do something to stop it.
“We just wanted to make sure neither of you had a date to the dance so there would be no obstacle to getting you out here for the eclipse. No boyfriends wondering where their dates had gone and getting a bunch of parents on the warpath. This was the plan all along.”
So the eclipse
definitely
had something to do with this. That meant they weren’t going to kill us until nearly ten! That gave me at least forty-five minutes to figure a way out of here. “Okay, so the clones and the attack in Perkins Park weren’t meant to kill me. Whatever.”
“No, they were. And they
would
have killed you if you hadn’t gotten lucky,” Jess said, practically spitting the words. “Ethan kept hanging around, asking one of you to the dance and then the other. It looked like we were going to have to kill him too, so we knew we had to get rid of either you or Monica beforehand just to even the odds.”
“Two of us versus two of you; anything else wouldn’t really have been fair,” Beth said.
Jess nodded as if we were picking teams for beach volleyball, not some weird life-or-death game she and Beth were playing by their own rules. “We decided to go for you since you were the younger and most likely weaker one and we didn’t have the power of the eclipse until tonight.”
“Jess wanted to change the plans and try to get Monica that night at the bonfire,” Beth added. “But I told her it was too late. I already had all the graves prepped and there wasn’t time to switch out the totems.”
“Yeah, I really wanted to save you for tonight,” Jess said.
“She’s been looking forward to watching you die up close and personal,” Beth added from where she sat on the floor, stretching out like we were getting ready for dance practice, not discussing killer zombies.
Up close and personal. Whatever they were planning, it was probably going to go down here, in this church, where they would be guaranteed a good view. “So it was you on the phone the night the clones attacked,” I said to Jess.
“It was, and I meant every word. I really didn’t want to take you out before tonight. I’m glad that you survived the other attacks and that Ethan broke it off with Monica this afternoon.”
Ethan broke up with Monica! I
knew
he would come to his senses. Too bad he had to do it right before the dance, thus ensuring that Monica and I were both free for Jess and Beth’s little party.
“Everything is working out perfectly.” Jess smiled and turned back to the pot, giving it a peaceful little stir. “It just goes to show that my mom is out there looking out for me, making sure you two get what you deserve.”
“You think your mom is helping you from beyond the grave?” I asked, unable to hold back my outrage. “She was a black artist, Jess; her soul is dead and gone. Forever. And that’s exactly what will happen to you if—”
“Oh, shut up, I’m tired of hearing you whine. Can I gag her now, Jess?” Beth asked, already on her feet and headed toward me.
“Might as well—we don’t want either of them to be able to talk when the zombies get here. Just in case they can cast spells without using their hands.”
“Why not? You said two against three wouldn’t be fair; how is it fair to make sure Monica and I can’t command the dead if you and Beth—”
“Oh, shut up, Megan.” Beth tried to stuff the sock in her hand in my mouth. I dodged it by flipping my braid around to hit her hand and kept talking.
“Screw you, Beth. Why are you even here? Jess at least has a good reason for being a nutcase. What’s your excuse?”
“I am not a nutcase!” Jess screamed.
Oh yeah. I was getting them riled up now. I should have started calling names sooner. The more upset they got, the more likely one of them was to make a mistake.