Shifting Shadows

“Your kind of thing?” Kyle asked obliquely. Something supernatural, he meant.

“That’s right.” I ducked out of his office and ran back to the conference room.

“One minute seventeen,” the beautiful woman was saying when I rejoined her.

She stopped counting when the door opened, her body tense. When she saw me, she frowned. “I need Kyle,” she said.

“I know you do,” I told her. “He’ll be right here.” Hopefully not until after he got his client out safely and called Elizaveta Arkadyevna, my wolf pack’s contractual witch.

I heard the front door of the office close and thought that I should have done something to make Kyle leave, too. But I hadn’t known how long our guest would have stayed put—probably exactly “a couple of minutes” from the sounds of it. Not enough time to get Kyle to do anything except call Elizaveta—which he’d done because I heard Elizaveta’s cranky voice; my cell phone distorted it just enough that with the door between us, I couldn’t tell what she was saying.

I wasn’t the only one who heard it. The zombie turned its head to the door.

My first clue about what the woman was had been that her breath had come out smelling fresh and oxygen-rich instead of dulled like someone’s who was really breathing would have. A vampire’s did the same thing, but she didn’t smell like a vampire, not even under the rich scent of the Chanel. The second was the way she’d obeyed what I’d told her. Zombies are supposed to be really cooperative as long as what you tell them doesn’t contradict what their master tells them to do.

“Yes,” Kyle said from the hallway, closing in on the conference room. “This is Kyle Brooks. We’re at my offices. Fine, thank you.” The door popped open. “What’s—”

The zombie launched itself at him.

I knew it was going to do it as soon as Kyle named himself. I was ready when he opened the door. I’m damned fast and I thought I had a handle on it, but that thing was faster than I’d thought it would be. I grabbed its shoulders and yanked it back, so it missed its target. Instead of nailing Kyle’s throat, it latched onto his collarbone.

“Sh—” he cried out, jerking back.

“Stay still,” I told him sharply, and he froze, his eyes on me and not on the zombie gnawing on him.

I don’t often use that tone of voice on anyone, and I hadn’t been sure it would work on a human. But if he tried to pull himself away, he was just going to do more damage to himself.

I tried not to think about the blood staining his shirt because I didn’t know if the witch needed the zombie still up and moving to tell who sent it after Kyle.

And I was damned sure going to get whoever had sent it after Kyle.

If I couldn’t tear the zombie apart, I had to avoid looking at Kyle’s blood. He helped. He didn’t look like a man in pain; he looked thoroughly ticked.

“Get her off,” he gritted, while trying to do it himself. He may be slightly built, but he’s tough, is Kyle. But it had locked its jaw good and tight, and Kyle couldn’t budge it.

I’d always assumed that taking on a zombie would pretty much be like fighting a human—one that was relentless and didn’t react to pain—but basically a human. When it moved on Kyle, it was moving a lot faster than I’d seen any mundane human move and now it was proving stronger, too.

It didn’t so much try to get away from me as it did to get to Kyle. I’d have thought that would make it easier to subdue. Finally I got an arm wrapped all the way around its shoulders, pulling it tight against me. Then I could put my other hand to work on prying her teeth apart. Its teeth. Its jaw broke in the process—and I got my thumb gnawed on a little.

Kyle staggered back, white to the bone, but he stripped off his shirt and wadded it against the hole she’d dug in him. “What is she?” he asked. “Why isn’t she bleeding more?”

He was looking at it in quick glances. I understood. It wasn’t pretty anymore with its jaw hanging half off.

“Zombie,” I told him a little breathlessly. It was now trying to get away from me, and that did make things a bit more difficult, but at least I wasn’t trying to pry it off Kyle.

“Your business, then?” he said.

Usually I’d agree; not even shark-sharp lawyers like Kyle were so exotic as to call for assassination by zombie—it was too flamboyant, too blatant. The witches and supernatural-priest types who could create zombies had never been hidden the way the werewolves used to be, but they lived among the psychics, Wiccans, and New Agers where the con artists and the self-deluded provided ample cover for a few real magic practitioners. They didn’t give up that cover lightly. Somebody would have had to have paid a lot for a zombie assassination.

I shook my head. “Don’t know. Seems awfully set on you, either way.” The zombie hadn’t managed to get a limb free for the past few seconds, so I chanced turning my attention to Kyle. His wound worried me.

“You get out Howard’s good malt,” I told him. “He keeps the key behind the third book on the top left shelf. Clean that wound out with it. It’s liable to have all sorts of stuff in its mouth.” I didn’t know much about zombies, but I knew about the Komodo dragon, which doesn’t need poison to kill its prey because the bacteria in its mouth do the job just fine.

Kyle didn’t argue, and took himself out of the conference room. As soon as he was out of sight, the zombie started crying out something. Might have been Kyle’s name, but it was hard to tell, what with its jaw so badly mangled.

I held on to it—by now I’d gotten a hold that prevented it from hitting me effectively or wiggling loose. That gave me the leisure to be concerned with other things. Kyle had shut the door gently behind him. I tried not to speculate about Kyle’s reaction, tried to wrap up the panic and bury it where it could do no harm. He’d seen weird things before, even if none of them had drawn blood.

I could have destroyed the zombie and left it in the conference room for later retrieval with no one the wiser; could have hidden all of this from my lover as I used to do. But it had been different with Kyle from the beginning. The lies I’d told to him about who and what I was, lies that necessity dictated and time had made familiar, had tasted foul on my tongue when spoken to him. Now he knew my truths and I wouldn’t hide from him again. If he couldn’t live with who and what I was, so be it.