“Un-hnn.” I bent my knees.
“Un, mmu, free,” Monica grunted, and on three we both dug our heels into the church floor. Slowly, inch by torturous inch, we made it to a squatting position before falling back to the ground.
“You two might as well give it up. The zombies are already on their way. The burial ground is right beneath us. A few hundred skeletons should be clawing their way to the surface as we speak,” Jess said, her voice echoing eerily through the rafters. “They’re nearly three hundred years old, so they’re going to be really hungry.”
God, no. We were too close; we didn’t have a chance.
“Whh rr uu rrng rs?” I screamed around my gag, tears of frustration in my eyes.
“I think we covered the ‘why’ pretty well, Megan.” Jess obviously understood gagged Megan too. “I actually figured you’d prefer this. I thought about killing your mom to really make the punishment fit the crime but then decided it would be more fair to take you out.”
Just when I thought I couldn’t hate her any more.
She’d thought about killing my mom? My mom! My mom, who had treated her like another daughter? Who had been there the day she started her period to give her hugs and take her to buy pads so Jess wouldn’t have to tell Clara? Who had brought us snacks and driven us to the mall and summer camp and a zillion other places over the years and even taken us for a spa day for Jess’s fifteenth birthday?
How
dare
Jess even
think
about hurting someone who had gone above and beyond to care about her, even love her?
Monica continued to shove against my back, frantically trying to stand up, but all I could think about was what an ungrateful, horrible, evil person I had once called my best friend. Talk about killing me all you want, but apparently, bringing my family into the picture was enough to make me completely lose it. Big-time.
“Mmmph!” Monica screamed as I leaned to the right, tipping us both over onto the ground.
I ignored her, staying totally concentrated on slamming my cheek into the floor. If I could just get the freaking sock out of my mouth, I’d torch whatever was left of that cat, make it burn so high Jess’s bleached blond hair would light up like straw drenched in gasoline. I had the power, and I was no longer afraid to use it.
“Give it up, Megan,” Jess said. “If you get the gag out of your mouth, I’ll work a spell to call more blood from the cut on your neck. Not enough to kill you, of course, just enough to make the zombies go crazy.”
Go ahead and try it, witch. We’ll see how strong your magic really is.
I moved faster, scraping my cheek along the floor until it stung even as I shoved my tongue against the sock from the inside. I wasn’t scared of Jess anymore.
The rage burning through my veins made me positive I could take out Jess and however many zombies she invited to the party if I could just—
slam, scrape
—get—
shove, shove
—the—freaking gag—
slam
—out—of—
scrape
—my—
shove, shove, shove
—mouth.
Yes!
“Exuro!”
I screamed the command at the same instant Jess screamed the words to a spell. I had just enough time to realize she’d been bluffing about her ability to summon blood before all hell broke loose.
Monica started thrashing, spinning us in a circle on the ground, while up in the rafters Jess screamed like her eyes were being gouged out. Not about to show my ex-best friend mercy, I poured even more power into the flame I could feel burning behind me, willing it to climb higher and higher, to rise and feed and destroy.
I was so concentrated on the
exuro
spell that I didn’t notice the crashing sounds at first. It was only when the floor started to vibrate and first one skeletal fist and then another burst through the rotted boards that I realized we had company. I heard them before I could see them. The unmistakable grunts and groans of the undead filled the room, making Monica scream around her gag as they closed in on where we lay.
“Exuro!”
I invoked the flame command on the first red-eyed zombies that crawled through the hole I’d made when I fell through the floor.
“
Reverto
!” I screamed the command into the face of the first zombie to fall on top of me with teeth bared. No matter that it had no internal organs and therefore no stomach to put my tasty human flesh inside; it was still going in for the kill.
The zombie spun away, searching for either Jess or Beth—I had no clue which it’d hunt down since they’d concocted the spell together—as I thanked God for Kitty
.
Without Kitty’s afternoon of coaching, I wouldn’t have lived this long.
Summers at Camp Junior Enforcer were looking like a better idea all the time. Like Dad said, I’d never be normal, but I
could
be properly prepared to fight for as much normalcy as possible. And to defend innocent people who deserved my protection.
“Reverto!”
I lashed out with my legs, kicking at the zombie headed for Monica, bringing it down to our level before invoking the command again. Soon both it and the two RCs behind it were reeling around and shuffling away. We were safe.
But not for long, I realized, as I got my first clear look across the room.
Looked like Jess shouldn’t have worried about lighting the ingredients on fire too early. There were at least sixty zombies already in the church, and more were still bursting through the floor and trudging in the door, relentlessly shambling toward me and Monica. There was no way I’d be able to get rid of them all, not without Monica’s help or my arms free at the very freaking least.
God! If I could just find a way out of the—
“Monica, I can’t believe—” As if summoned by my deep, persistent need, strong hands started tearing at the ropes binding me and Monica together. “Megan? What the hell are you doing here?”
Ethan! I’d never been so happy to see anyone in my entire life. Especially considering how horrified he sounded to see me here. Maybe he did feel the same way I felt about him after all! Maybe the thing with Monica had all been a horrible mistake, maybe—
“Untie us first, ask questions later,” Monica, whose mouth was apparently now sock free, snapped. “We’re all about to die, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Maybe Monica was right and I needed to maintain my focus on the undead.
“Exuro! Exuro!”
As Ethan finished untying us, he and I both cast, and more zombies burst into flames—which was the good news. The bad news was that I was forced to put out the flame burning in the cauldron to conserve energy, which gave Jess the psychotic another chance to cast her spell.
“Ohmygod!” Monica screamed as blood gushed from the wound at my jaw.
So much for bluffing. Looked like Jess had more power than I’d anticipated.
“Megan? What’s happening?” Ethan asked, pressing the sleeve of his sweatshirt against my face, applying pressure to the cut.
“Up there in the rafters. It’s Jess; she and Beth are witches—” Jess shouted again. Ethan pulled me close and spun us toward the corner of the room, dodging the spell. We got out of the way just in time. Unfortunately, Monica wasn’t so lucky.
“Ahh!” Monica screamed and clenched one hand around her shoulder. From the blood seeping through her fingers, it was obvious she’d been hit.
Though probably not too badly since she was running for the door seconds later.
“Parsons, don’t you dare—” Ethan cursed as Monica disappeared.
Of course
the floor held for that skinny little turd while I had fallen through. As if I needed further evidence that life wasn’t fair.
“Go, Megan. Run,” Ethan said, pulling me across the room, dodging zombies as we went. “I’ll stay and make sure Jess doesn’t—”
“No way, I’m not leaving you here.”
“Settlers’ Affairs are on the way,” he said. “I’ll use the
exuro
command until I run out of power. I only have to hold them off for ten, fifteen minutes until—”
“Reverto!”
I grand jeté kicked the first zombie to make it through the flaming corpses. It stumbled backward before turning around. “You only need ten minutes to get killed.”
“How did you do that? The
reverto
spell shouldn’t work unless—”
“I’ve been training with some Enforcement people,” I said, feeling pretty proud even though I did my best to make it sound like no big deal.
“When was this?”
“While you were busy making out with Monica.” Why did my mouth have to go there? This was
so
not the time or place.
“Reverto! Reverto!”
The zombie skeletons were getting creative, swarming across the floor on all fours, leaping over each other in their haste to get to our yummy flesh.
“Reverto!”
The command was still working, but I was feeling the drain on my power from working the
reverto
and
exuro
commands at the same time. The buzzing in my bones had turned into a full-body tremble. I couldn’t maintain this level of power much longer. If Settlers’ Affairs didn’t get here soon, Ethan and I might still end up zombie food.
Unless we risked getting zapped with some wicked magic and made a run for the door . . .
“Reverto! Reverto!”
Two more down and there was a little break in the RC action. “Maybe we should both make a run for it.”
“But Monica could be waiting outside.”
“Monica? But Monica isn’t in on this.”
“She definitely raised the corpse that attacked her at the cemetery that night,” he said, looking pissed. “It took a few days of searching, but I finally found the evidence in her room. She had the spell to raise the dead written in a journal and some extra dolls with long brown hair. I was on my way to headquarters to turn in the evidence when I got your text.”
Searching? Evidence? Suddenly, the pieces all fell into place. Ethan had been pretending to date Monica to get close enough to her to find out if she was the one who had it in for me! He must have thought her “attack” as suspicious as I did; hence the sudden shift in his behavior since that night. It wasn’t a confession of undying love, but it certainly meant he cared.
Too bad there wasn’t more time to celebrate.
“Exuro!”
Gathering my strength, I set a few new zombies aflame while relaxing the amount of power I was funneling toward the corpses already burning out on the floor. My breath was coming heavier by the time I turned back to Ethan, but I already felt a little better without so many zombies burning at the same time. “She might have raised that corpse, but I’m pretty sure she had nothing to do with the rest of this.” I quickly gave Ethan the lowdown on Jess and Beth and their motives and plans for the rest of the evening.
“And you’ve been using the
reverto
spell?” he asked, disbelief in his tone. “When you knew Beth was already headed down to the dance?”
“Well, yeah,” I said, stomach sinking. “I didn’t really have much of a choice, and I wasn’t sure which of them the RCs would go for. I was just trying—”
“Now we’ve
got
to get out of here. If we don’t get to those zombies in time, we’re going to have a Class Three Containment crisis—not to mention a bunch of dead high school kids.” He darted to the left, setting another zombie on fire as he moved, then stopped to scan the rafters. “Looks like your friend made a run for it.”
“Okay, but what—”
“Come on.” Ethan grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the door before I could finish my sentence. “Borrow my power and torch as many of them as you can. The fewer following us down to the school the better.”
We charged into the center of the swarming undead, groaning, hungry skeletons closing in all around us.
I let down the last of my shields and pulled Ethan’s power into my body, waiting until I felt like I was about to burst before I spoke the command.
“Exuro!”
Ethan caught me when the force of the backlash threatened to knock me off my feet, then pushed me down to the ground as everything around us exploded into flame. Soon I was facedown on floor, tucked under Ethan’s body while unearthly shrieks filled the air. Even with another person between me and the heat, I still felt like a lobster thrown into a pot of boiling water. I tried to will the flames to die down a bit without much effect. Somewhere along the line, I’d lost control of the blazes I’d started.