“Mmmph yrrr rrre!” Monica grunted the words around the gag in her mouth, but even I could understand what she was saying. She was totally on the Megan bandwagon for once.
“You’re the one who’s nuts if you think running your mouth is going to change what’s going to happen tonight,” Beth said, not at all miffed by being called a psychopath. “You and Monica are going to be eaten alive. Then I’m going to lure our friends down to snack on the people at the homecoming dance with a little pig blood.”
“Pig blood?”
“We’ve been prepping the ground for weeks to form a trail straight to the gym,” Jess said.
The path by the track! It had to be part of their plan. Hopefully, Settlers’ Affairs had disabled it so the zombies wouldn’t be able to find their way to the gym, but I couldn’t be sure. I
had
to get out of here!
“I’m going to dump the blood and let the undead swarm all over the homecoming court. It’s going to be fabulous.”
“You’re kidding me. You’re helping Jess work black magic because you didn’t get voted onto the court?” I couldn’t believe it. In a way, I’d been right all along. Jess had her own motives, but for Beth this was all about some stupid high school stuff.
I suddenly realized exactly why Ethan and the Elders had been so reluctant to believe me when I’d first posed that theory. After being faced with the possibility of dying so many times the past week, I thought Beth’s motives were completely ridiculous. She’d lost a high school popularity contest. So. What.
Beth was willing to kill two people—well, more than two if you counted the attacks on Josh and Ethan and the plan to destroy the homecoming court—because she wasn’t a homecoming princess? WTF?!
My thoughts must have shown on my face, because Jess leapt to her psycho friend’s defense.
“It’s not just the court,” Jess said, coming to stand beside Beth, looping an arm around her waist. Standing there together, both of them so blond and delicate looking, it was hard to believe how completely evil they were. Just went to show that not every bad guy was ugly on the outside. “We’re going to douse the entire gym. We’ve got to make sure a lot of people die.”
“Why? Because the football team deserves to get theirs for using their votes for a prank?”
“Because we’ve got to make sure everyone believes we’re dead too,” Beth said. “Otherwise we’ll never be free.”
“Our parents will never accept us. We have to do this.” Jess turned her eyes to me, as though she expected me to understand what she was talking about. “We have to run away.”
“Run away? All this time, you’ve been planning to run away?” She nodded at me like
I
was the crazy one. “Then why were you so worked up about tryouts? You’re not even going to be here to—”
“Anything worth doing is worth doing right, Megan. How many times have I told you that?” Jess rolled her eyes and sighed. “I mean, I feel bad about killing all those people, but it’s the only way to do this right.”
“It’s okay, Jess. Most of those people are nothing but sheep anyway. Who cares if they’re dead?” Beth smiled before she gave Jess a kiss on the cheek. Jess sighed and turned to Beth, and suddenly their kiss became a lot more than friendly.
God! My best friend was not only secretly evil, she was also secretly a lesbian! Why had she never told me? I could have been cool with it. Well, with the lesbian part, not the evil part. Obviously.
“Mmph frkgg gwds,” Monica grumbled around her gag.
I was pretty sure Monica had called them gaywads, but I couldn’t get up to defending Jess and Beth at the moment. Sure, I felt awful for Jess. Her mother dabbling in black magic and then getting herself killed had obviously messed her up big-time. I also felt bad for the two of them. I could almost understand why they felt they had to stage their own deaths and run away.
Their families were two of the richest and oldest in Arkansas. If either the Thompsons or the Phillipses found out their little girls liked other little girls, they would flip out. They’d probably have Jess and Beth committed to the psych ward for electroshock therapy to cure their gayness and would be damned sure never to let the two girls see each other ever again.
But at the same time,
I
hadn’t done anything wrong. And neither had any of the people at the homecoming dance.
Jess’s mom was going to use those zombies as a murder weapon, to kill Clara. Any way you sliced it, that was just wrong. Monica and I had only been defending ourselves. I was just a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. But luckily, with the help of a friend—or sort of friend, anyway—I’d used my power to save my life.
I wasn’t going to feel bad about that or about using that same power to take down the girls in front of me, no matter what. They’d made that decision easy. I’d never been anything but a good friend to Jess, a loyal and loving friend whom she had betrayed as surely as her mother had betrayed her by dragging her to the graveyard that night five years ago.
So it was with very little regret that I invoked the
exuro
command, aiming it toward the black pot, knowing I would have to thank Kitty for the lesson in roasting turkeys.
CHAPTER 18
I’d done enough research on Reanimated Corpse spells to know there had to be something dead in that pot. Something dead that—thanks to Kitty—I knew how to make burn like a thousand white-hot suns.
Okay, maybe not
that
hot, but I could feel the flames scorching my face. Both Jess and Beth—who had been closer to the cauldron—were screaming bloody murder. Beth fell to the ground and Jess flung herself on top of her girlfriend, acting as a human shield, but I didn’t let myself feel sorry for them. Instead, I poured even more power into the spell, until the flames rose at least six feet in the air. My bones buzzed with the force of the magic I was working, but I didn’t tire out nearly as quickly as usual.
Guess fear of certain death had ramped up my personal mojo. Thank. God.
I turned to Monica, knowing this was our only chance. “Come on, follow me!” I stood up and began hopping toward the front door.
Just a few more hops and—
“Ahhh!” My screams replaced Monica and Beth’s as I fell through a rotten place in the floor and my fire abruptly went out.
Thankfully, I’d only fallen a few feet. I could still find a way to free myself if I could just—
“That’s it! Stuff the sock in her mouth,” Jess yelled.
Seconds later Beth had ahold of my nose and was cramming the sweat sock into my mouth, shoving it so deep I started to gag. It was only with a great degree of effort that I managed to stop myself from puking. Call me crazy, but I had a feeling Jess and Beth would let me choke on my own vomit before they gave me another chance to talk.
“I thought they couldn’t work spells on living people,” Beth said, turning back to Jess with an accusing glare, showing me the left side of her face, which looked painfully red. At least I’d left my mark. “It was the dead cat in the pot.” Jess cursed and stamped her foot on the ground, looking like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum. “Now I have no idea how many of them we’ll get out of their graves. The ingredients weren’t supposed to be set on fire until the moon was dark.”
“What if it’s not enough, Jess? This is the only lunar eclipse this year. I can’t wait until next year,” Beth said, her face scrunching as she prepared to have a come-apart. Man, these two were the whiniest couple ever. “We’ll never be able to stage something big enough, we’ll never get out of this town, we’ll never be together, and—”
“Don’t worry.” Jess pulled it together a little bit, pasting a smile on her face. “If worse comes to worst, we can book it over to Mount Hope and raise a few more.”
“No way, I don’t want any zombie bite marks on my skin. That could scar. And scars are like . . . forever.” Ah, Beth, vain as ever, her mind on the future of her flawless skin even in the midst of murder. “The Settlers could turn those zombies back on us since they’re not as old as the Indians.”
“The Indians can still be turned on us, but they won’t be,” Jess said, calmly explaining the situation to her partner of very little brain. “They’re corpses, after all, the same as any other zombie.”
“Jess! There are more than three hundred bodies under here. If the spell still raises them all, we’ll be—”
“We’ll be fine.”
“But the blood we stole from the blood drive is almost gone.” Beth wrung her hands.
Aha, so
that
was how they’d been getting their RCs back in the ground without a bunch of bite marks. They’d donated blood and then shoplifted it for their own nefarious purposes, letting the zombies take a sip whenever they came running back to their Makers. One small needle puncture versus a bunch of festering zombie bites—it made sense.
“We’re not going to need it. We don’t have to worry about Settlers anymore. These two are going to be dead, and there’s no way Ethan will be able to handle all those zombies by himself.”
So Jess didn’t know there were other Settlers in town besides me, Ethan, and Monica. Maybe there was still a chance to stop this craziness before anyone got hurt. Well, anyone except me and Monica. At this point, it looked like we were pretty much done for.
“We’ll be halfway to Louisiana by the time they figure out how to get rid of the corpses. We’ll be totally safe,” Jess said. “Their spell doesn’t work at that kind of distance.”
How did she know so much about Settlers? Someone other than me had been telling tales out of class. But who? Monica wouldn’t have told Jess or Beth anything. She wasn’t weak enough to need support from her non-supernatural friends in order to continue on her Settler path.
“So don’t worry. Okay?”
“Okay.” Beth sniffed and then grabbed Monica—who had hopped in the opposite direction from the one I’d indicated,
of course
—and pulled her back to where I was now sitting and heaving my legs back above the floor.
I tried to wiggle away, but Beth still managed to get Monica and me tied together in a less than a minute. Now we were bound together, back to back on the mouse turd-littered church floor, stuck here to wait for the zombies I’d unintentionally caused to rise a good thirty minutes early. Way to go, Megan.
“There, all ready to go.” Beth crossed back to give Jess a hug. “Speaking of going, I’d better jet down to the gym and get ready to spill some blood.”
“Awesome. I’ll call you to give you the cue when the zombies are done with these two,” Jess said, a smile on her face once more. “I’d better hurry and get in position too. I want to make sure I have time to turn the video camera on.”
“Take care of you,” Beth said.
“Take care of you.” Jess leaned up to give her a quick kiss before Beth ran for the other door—the one they’d been using because the floorboards near the front of the church were rotten, duh, Megan—and Jess made for a rope hanging near the cauldron.
In seconds, she had scrambled up to the ceiling and crawled out onto one of the rafters, where she began to arrange a tiny video camera. Not only was she going to watch us being eaten alive, she was going to
record
it so she could relive the magic again and again.
In that second, I realized I hated Jess. I couldn’t think of anyone I had loathed more in my entire life—even the evil minion presently shoving her back into mine.
“Whhmm?” I asked, hoping she understood gagged Megan as well as I understood gagged Monica.
“Pmm yrr fmm imnu frrr.”
“Whhm?”
“Yr fmm imnu m frr!” Her butt lifted an inch or two off the ground before dropping back to the floor.
Floor! Push my feet into the floor.
If we both pushed our feet into the floor and pressed our backs together, we might be able to stand up. Whether we’d be able to get out of here in time with both of our ankles tied together and our upper bodies connected by Beth’s rope was another question, but we had to try. Anything was better than sitting here waiting to be eaten.
“Yr rree?” Monica asked.
Hell, yes, I was ready.