Darklands (Deadtown #4)

As soon as the Harpy was dead, the class came back to life. Zombies blinked and coughed. They stretched and looked around. “Dude,” someone muttered. “I feel like I’ve been reanimated all over again.”

Feeling was creeping back into my leg, but I couldn’t yet get it under me to stand. Tina came forward and put out a hand. I reached out so she could help me up, but instead she plucked her dagger from my hand. She faced the class and brandished it.

“And that,” she declared, “is how you slay a demon.”

2

“WHERE,” I ASKED TINA AS I RUBBED ANTISEPTIC CREAM INTO my leg, “did you get the money to pay a sorcerer?” We stood at a row of sinks in the girls’ bathroom. I’d finished washing out the cuts and gouges left by the Harpy; Tina held the first-aid kit Mrs. McIntyre had given us. I peered at the cut I was treating. In a couple of days I’d be good as new. At least I wasn’t human. Any norm who tangled with that Harpy would land in the hospital for a week. The Cerddorion, my race of shapeshifters, don’t heal as fast as vampires and werewolves, but we do okay.

“What sorcerer?” Tina set the first-aid kit on the edge of a sink and leaned over to inspect her makeup in the mirror. She turned on the faucet, wet her finger, and rubbed at a smudge of mascara. “I didn’t pay anybody anything.”

Oh, no. “Don’t tell me you conjured that Harpy yourself.” Please don’t tell me that. “Sorcery is nothing to mess around with, Tina. You can’t just bring in a demon for show-and-tell. Someone could have been hurt, even killed.” Like me. I rubbed the spot, now slowly tingling back to life, where the snake had bitten my leg.

“What are you talking about?” She paused in reapplying her baby-pink lip gloss. “I thought you conjured that Harpy. You know, for a prop.”

“You mean the Harpy that was doing its best to kill me? Some prop.”

“It was an awesome prop—almost as good as those coupons for Munchies. I thought you did it to surprise me.” She smacked her lips at the mirror, then turned to me, frowning. “But you told Mrs. McIntyre that you didn’t.”

The teacher, as red-faced as it’s possible for a zombie to get, had stammered, “Did you bring that…that creature into this classroom?” while I sat on the floor, trying to get my paralyzed leg under me. The idea of conjuring a Harpy against myself—and in a room full of innocent bystanders, no less—knocked me flat. I’d stared at her and shook my head.

“You’re lucky your own ‘prop’ didn’t get you kicked out of school,” I said to Tina.

She shrugged. “Whatever.” Why do teenagers do that—go all surly right at the moment they might actually learn something? Had I been like that? My aunt, Mab, never would have put up with it. Okay, maybe once or twice I muttered something under my breath during the years I was her demon-fighting apprentice, but Tina made surliness an art form.

“No, not ‘whatever.’ So you don’t care about school. Fine. But what if Mrs. McIntyre had followed procedure and called the Goon Squad?”

The Goon Squad, officially known as the Joint Human-Paranormal Task Force, was tasked with keeping law and order in Deadtown. Because those of us who live here have few legal rights, the Goons have almost unlimited powers to detain whoever they feel like detaining. And some of those detainees never come back.

Tina’s reply was another shrug.

“You were lucky, Tina.” Zero tolerance was supposed to mean exactly that. No exceptions, no excuses. And that’s what it did mean in Boston’s other schools. But Deadtown’s one and only school operated under the radar, apparently. Most zombies are adults; the virus that had turned two thousand Bostonians into zombies swept through Downtown Crossing in the middle of a school day (guess who’d cut classes to go shopping). Soon after, the former quarantine zone became Deadtown. But it had taken more than two years for the kids who lived here to get their own school. It served all grades, with a student body made up of a few werewolves but mostly zombies—kids, like Tina, who’d gotten caught in the path of the plague. The school was understaffed and underfunded. The school board didn’t even bother to supply the standardized tests that all students were supposed to take.

Tonight, Mrs. McIntyre had snatched the dagger from Tina’s hand. I was sure she’d march Tina to the principal’s office to wait for the Goons. But she didn’t. She inspected the dagger, then handed it back. And why not? It wasn’t made of silver, so it was no threat to werewolves, and a dagger of any sort was about as dangerous to a zombie as the pencils the teacher kept in a mug on her desk. “Remove this from the building, and don’t bring it again,” she’d said in a tight voice. “Weapons are not allowed in school.” By that time, I’d made it to my feet. Mrs. McIntyre looked at my torn, bloody jeans and rummaged around in her desk until she found the first-aid kit.

For whatever reason—maybe she didn’t feel a need to enforce the policies of a school board that pretended her school didn’t exist—Mrs. McIntyre had given Tina a second chance.

“Lucky?” Tina snorted. She peeled open a Band-Aid and handed it to me. “That’s the first time anyone’s called me that since I got zombified.” The tip of her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth as she opened another Band-Aid. She focused on the task, not meeting my eyes. “So, um, what are you going to tell your aunt?”

For some reason, when Mab had visited Boston from her home in north Wales, she and Tina had really hit it off. If Mab sat at Mrs. McIntyre’s desk, Tina would be a front-and-center, straight-A student.

Holding the edges of a cut together, I stuck on a bandage. “I’ll tell her that I was attacked by a Harpy.” I looked at Tina, narrowing my eyes. “Origin unknown, right?”

She nodded, red eyes wide, the picture of zombified innocence. I decided to believe her.

“And that you helped me kill it,” I finished.

A grin stretched her face. A smiling zombie isn’t what you’d call pretty, but Tina looked pleased with herself. “What about my report, all that stuff I told the class about Harpies?”

“Tina, I was wrestling with a demon that was dead-set on killing me. You have to admit that’s a little distracting.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess you’re right.” She chewed her lip, then nodded. “That’s okay. Your aunt went over Harpies with me while she was here. I did good—she’ll remember that.”

Tina lifted my arm and draped it around her shoulders, letting me lean on her as I limped out of the girls’ room and down the hallway. As we went along, she chattered about the Harpy and how it compared to what she’d read in books. Maybe Tina wasn’t as indifferent to learning as I’d thought.

Good for her. But there was one thing I really wanted to learn: If Tina didn’t conjure that Harpy, who did?

NIGHTTIME IS DEADTOWN’S BUSIEST TIME. VAMPIRES AND zombies prefer to avoid direct sunlight (a zombie sunburn results in pitted, orange skin that doesn’t heal), so they’re out and about from dusk until dawn. Tina’s school “day” went from eight P.M. to two thirty A.M. By the time I was patched up and back on the street, it was nearly three in the morning.

The mid-April night was chilly. Boston had been having a cool spring, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the zombies who thronged the streets. Because they don’t feel heat or cold, they wear whatever they want, whatever the weather. Most zombies cling to their legal status as previously deceased humans, or PDHs—they’re definitely not norms, but they’re still human, and they want to look the part to whatever extent they can. Tonight I saw the full range of zombie fashion: most wore jeans and T-shirts, but there were business suits, uniforms, dresses, khakis, shorts and flipflops—you name it. And then, of course, there was Tina. When it came to zombie fashion, she was in a class by herself.

When I limped through the front door of my apartment, my roommate was watching TV. Juliet sat in the dark and stared at the giant flatscreen that took up an entire wall, its flickering light tingeing her pale skin with blue. I turned on the overhead light. She blinked rapidly, like someone coming out of a trance, and refocused on me.

At six hundred fifty (give or take a couple of decades), Juliet still looked like the twenty-two-year-old who was turned by an unscrupulous vampire posing as a friar. Her long raven hair, wide brown eyes, and shapely curves had been popping eyes and turning heads for more than six centuries.

I was glad to see it. A month ago, Juliet had nearly died in an attack by the Old Ones, shadowy, ancient super-vampires who wanted to move beyond undeath and into eternal life. The Old Ones were responsible for the zombie virus, which they’d unleashed on Boston as an experiment. That experiment had sent its human victims through death and back into life, but the Old Ones didn’t want to become zombies; they wanted to be gods. They kept working on their magically enhanced virus, using Juliet and other vampires as their lab rats. The other vampires had died, dissolving into piles of dust. Juliet had survived thanks to Aunt Mab, who’d used her personal talisman to restore Juliet’s life force. When Juliet’s comatose body started to disintegrate, Mab performed a life-giving ritual that didn’t just save Juliet; it restored her. She said she felt better than she had in centuries.

Mab’s bloodstone was her personal object of power. She didn’t know what its long-term effects might be on Juliet. But so far, so good.

Juliet cocked an eyebrow at me, taking in my torn, bloody clothes. “Rough night?”

“You might say that.” I hobbled over to the closet. When I tried to put my jacket on a hanger, I realized the garment hung in ribbons. Guess I wouldn’t be wearing that jacket again. I pulled it off the hanger and dumped it in the trash.

“I warned you.” She shook a deep-red-nailed finger at me. “High school students are more dangerous than any demon. I’ve had a few scrapes over the centuries, but I’d rather be chased off a cliff by an angry mob than set one foot across the threshold of an American high school. Those places are scary.”