He led me into the living room, where Frosty, Mackenzie, Bronx and two people I’d never met waited. They all stopped what they were doing and got real quiet the moment they spotted me. When their gazes moved to my hand, still joined with Cole’s, they donned rabid-mean expressions.
I tried to extract myself but Cole held tight. He lifted his chin in a sign of pure stubbornness, kinda reminding me of, well, me. “You got something to say?” he demanded of the group.
They sure did. A rapid-fire conversation ensued.
Frosty: “She shouldn’t be here.”
Cole: “Maybe not, but she is.”
Unknown boy number two: “We know nothing about her.”
I’d call him Spike. His dark brown hair stuck out all over his head, as if he’d come into contact with a very mean light socket.
Cole: “We’ll learn.”
Mackenzie: “She’s a liability. She’ll tattle.”
Cole: “Please. I practically had to torture the information I do have from her.”
Unknown boy number one: “What about the mind-screw she was doing on you?”
I’d call him Turd. No explanation needed.
Cole: “Apparently I was doing the same to her. We don’t know what’s causing those visions or why, but they’re happening to both of us.”
Spike: “And you trust everything she says?”
Cole: “Look, she stays and that’s final.”
Everyone else: grumbling and muttering.
I noticed Cole had ignored the question about trusting me. “Thanks for the welcome, everyone,” I said. “Really. Means a lot to me.”
That earned me several (more) glares. Cole squeezed my hand, but whether it was in comfort or in warning, I could only guess—and I guessed warning. His friends were important to him, and he wouldn’t want me to smart-aleck.
I once again tried to pull from his grip, and he once again held on with vise-tightness.
“Try to get away now,” he muttered. “Dare you.”
“I wasn’t trying to get away,” I muttered back. “I just wanted a free hand to slap you with.”
He tried not to grin as he pointed out, “You have a free hand.”
“Well, the urge to hurt you has passed.”
“Lucky me.”
“You have no idea.”
“Well, I just figured out the problem,” Turd said drily.
The problem with me? Oh, that burned. “This doesn’t have to be about me,” I said, doing my best to sound calm. “Either you trust him or you don’t.” These people were his friends, but they’d put him in the leadership role. That meant his judgment ruled, and they could suck it. “Besides, what is it, exactly, that you think I’m going to do?”
“Tell people what we can do,” Mackenzie said.
At the same time, Frosty said, “Show the wrong people where we keep our weapons, and turn this into another JS situation.”
JS?
Spike said, “All that, plus she’ll get us into a whole lot of legal trouble.”
That was followed by “She’ll make us look crazier than crazy and get us locked away for good.” Which was followed by “Turn us into a joke.” And finally “Mess up and bring a nest of zombies right to our door.”
O-kay. Clearly nothing I said would soothe their doubts. No need to even try.
“She can be trained,” Cole announced. “And really, she’s a halfway decent fighter already. We can use her.”
Halfway decent? Use? Nice. He knew how to make a girl feel special, didn’t he? “Soon I’ll be even better. You’ll see. I learn fast, and I’m dedicated. Just give me a chance.”
Uh, what had I just said? I wondered, shocked.
On the drive to the cabin, I’d wanted to forever hide and never have to face the zombies again. But, as my shock began to thin, I realized I’d meant what I’d just said. Seeing these kids, knowing they made a difference and that I could make a difference, too, I wanted in. I owed it to my family.
Murmurs of doubt surfaced.
“You’re not slayer material,” Mackenzie said.
“I am.” Maybe. “You just haven’t seen me in action.” The entire group needed time to think about this, otherwise one—or all—would say something that could never be taken back. Same for me. I hurried to change the subject. “Before I forget, Kat told me to tell you she hates you,” I said to Frosty.
Those dark eyes pinned me in place. Gone was the affable personality I’d come to expect at school. “What are you going to tell her about tonight?”
Great. I’d just opened a bag of vipers.
“She’s not planning to tell Kat anything about the zombies, and that’s all you need to know.” Amid Frosty’s protests, Cole added, “If it makes you feel any better, I’ll take full responsibility for Ali. Now give us some space. I need to talk to her alone.”
“Alone? Don’t be stupid,” Mackenzie snapped.
Ignoring her, Cole tugged me through the group, forcing everyone to jump out of the way or be mowed down. At the couch, he positioned me where he wanted me. Gently, of course, but with enough force to ensure I wouldn’t be going anywhere until he was ready for me to go.
He tugged the coffee table closer to me, then used it as a chair so that he was directly in front of me, caging my legs between his. That purple gaze bored into me. “What do you want to know first?”
I waited for a moment as Frosty and Mackenzie stomped to one of the back rooms together and Bronx and the other two boys marched outside. The door banged shut behind them.
I’ll prove my worth, I told myself. They won’t always feel this way about me.
“Ali.”
Questions. Right. “Why can’t anyone but us see the zombies? Why didn’t the zombies see anyone but us?” There’d been a lot of people coming and going in that parking lot, and yet, the zombies had wanted only Cole and me.
Except…wait. They’d seen my mother. She’d once told me that she’d never seen them, only the end results of their evil, yet still they’d spotted her and dragged her out of our car.
“Zombies are evil,” Cole said. “Flat-out, full-on evil. There’s no longer any goodness to them, and they want all goodness destroyed. I guess because it’s a reminder of what they’ve lost.”
My brow crinkled. “So we’re good?”
“Well, we’re certainly capable of being good.”
“But I can think of a thousand different people gooder—” Please tell me I had not just said that “—I mean, a thousand different people better on the potential-for-goodness scale than us, yet we’re the ones they come after.”
“People like us, who can see them, are like magnets to them. They scent us, instinct kicks in, and they track us.”
“But they do go after regular people,” I said.
“Yes. They scent fear just as easily as they scent us, no matter who is feeling it. They sense other negative things, too, though not quite as potently as fear.”
“But fear isn’t a good thing, and you said the zombies only want to destroy good things.”
He shook his head, as though pitying me for my ignorance. “They want to destroy good, but they’re attracted to bad. That doesn’t mean they won’t attack what attracts them. Make sense? More than that, the good are not always easy to destroy, as we proved tonight. How do you think the zombies maintain their strength in the meantime? By eating anyone they can, good or bad, seers or nonseers, slayers or nonslayers.”
Every time he answered me, a new question popped up. “But they can’t get to our flesh, so what is it exactly that they eat?”
“They are spirits, and so they eat of the spirit. And then, whatever they do to the spirit manifests in the flesh, causing an infection to spread from there.”
The bites I’d endured began to ache all over again, as if to remind me they were there and I’d come close to dying. “Is that how other zombies are made? And where do they live? Why can they only come out at night?”
He thought for a moment, then nodded as though he’d just made a decision. “Let’s tackle this one part at a time. First question, first answer. Yes, that’s how other zombies are made. The infection spreads faster in some, slower in others. Some people can fight that infection on their own and survive. Most die. If they die, their spirit will rise and night by night they will more fully embrace their new afterlife.”
“Nothing can be done to save them?”
“Not after a certain point, no.”
“But what about the antidote you mentioned?” I said.
“It won’t do anything to a full-on zombie, but if it’s administered fast enough to a human spirit, the infection never has a chance to spread and it will die.”
“And you’re sure it was administered to me in time?”
“We’ve already gone over this.”
“And we’ll probably have to go over it a bazillion more times! Deal with it.”
He chuckled, the humor lighting his entire face. “Near-death experiences make you cranky. Good to know.”
“Cole! Be serious.”
Still smiling, he said, “Yes. I’m sure it was administered in time. I never do anything half-measure, and I never fail.”
Yeah, I really had to get me some of that confidence. One by one I plucked my nails out of my thighs. “Okay, so how does a natural medicine get into our spirits, where the infection starts?”
“It’s not a natural medicine, it’s a spiritual medicine and it was administered to your spirit. Only after I’d shot you up did I put you back into your body. And before you go on another question spree about what would happen if you were given the medicine after your spirit was put back into your body, let me just say that there is a way. That’s all you need to know right now.”