Page 12 of A Very Armitage Christmas
He laughed, wrapped his legs around my hips, and pulled me down to his mouth. “Give me your knot and we’ll call it even.”
He never got around to educating me before he passed out cold, but he did get my knot. I didn’t complain.
Chapter 4
Ian
Waking up to Nate nearly always made me happy.
Waking up to Nate shouting, “Oh, fucking shit, there’smoreof them,” after a night full of killing zombies in the woods?
Not so much.
I popped out of bed like I’d been electrocuted. Usually I woke up first, but apparently Nate had gotten up to piss or something; the sky outside the windows was still pitch-black. Nate had plastered himself to the bigger window near the front door, and he turned to me with his hair all ruffled from sleep, pillow creases on his cheek, and a look of abject horror on his face.
I peered out the window. The deep shadows of trees across the clearing, faint moonlight reflecting from snow…and four shambling bodies, in a state of advanced decay, leaving churned-up, messy snow trails in their wake.
One of them had left a skeletal hand too, it looked like.
Fuckinggross.
“Where the fuck are they coming from?” Nate hissed. “We killed them all, right?”
I shot him a glance. “We?”
Nate huffed and puffed for a second, and then grumbled, “Sounded likeMatthewgot most of the other ones, anyway, so I don’t know what you’re getting all self-righteous about.”
I chose to ignore that, thank you very much. “Speaking of.” I went over to the nightstand and found my phone, tapping in the second preset for my brother. As it rang, I asked Nate, “Your wards are going to keep them out of the pack house, right? For sure?”
For once, Nate didn’t bitch about his abilities being questioned. “Yeah,” he said seriously. “I really am sure. I promise.” God, I loved him. He could be such a little sharp-tongued, ornery bastard, especially when someone didn’t give him the professional respect he definitely deserved.
But he knew all the pack’s children were bunked down in the pack house for the night, and he didn’t take that lightly. I was so fucking lucky to have him.
I would’ve told him so, but Matt answered the phone. “What now?”
“Four zombies in front of my house,” I said succinctly. “Who the fuck knows how many more there are. And these ones are headed right for you, just like the others were. I thought we’d gotten them all, or I wouldn’t have come home and gone to bed!”
After we’d gotten back from killing the first batch of zombies, it’d taken a couple of hours for Nate to put the finishing touches on the wards. Jennifer and I, plus a few others, had shifted and done a run of the woods to check things out, and when we got back Matt had finally reappeared from upstairs with no explanation for his absence except that he’d been with Arik — not that he needed to explain. He reeked of sex, the bastard. We’d regrouped in the back yard and decided the threat had probably passed, since we hadn’t seen anything else. We’d still had all the vulnerable members of the pack spend the night in the pack house to be safe, but everyone able-bodied without any kids had gone to their own cottages and cabins, since the pack house was crowded enough already.
“Fuck,” Matt said. “Hang on.” He’d covered the phone with his hand or something, because what he said to Arik came through really muffled, but I heard Arik say something in reply before Matt came back. “You still there?”
“Yeah, what does he say we do about it? Because I’m not super crazy about chasing who the fuck knows how many more of these things through the woods at ass o’clock in the morning.”
“On Christmas Eve,” Nate piped up from beside me, where he’d been leaning in and eavesdropping. “Seriously. Tell Arik to get his shit together, or I won’t let him have any pie. Tell Arik to get his shit together or there won’tbeany pie, because I’ll be too busy trying not to get eaten myself to bake some.”
More muted argument came through the phone. “Jesus, Matt, fucking put the phone on speaker,” I said.
Some rustling, and then a beep, and then I heard them loud and clear. “…need to figure out where they’re coming from,” Arik was saying, sounding incredibly irritable for someone who was the source of the goddamn problem. What didhehave to be pissed about? “I can cast a general spell, but it’d help a lot if I had a directional target, at the very least. And it’d help to know how many there are. It’s something I can only do well if they’re all in one place, so I’ll be punting a little.”
Great.Punting a littleanddealing with zombiesdidn’t sound like a winning combo.
“You should come back to the house,” Matt said. “We can regroup, form a perimeter —”
The porch steps creaked, something thudded, and a low moaning sounded from out front. “Ian, I think we have company,” Nate said, edging further from the door and closer to me.
“What?” Matt demanded sharply. “I thought you said they were heading for the pack house!”
“Yeah, and one of them took a detour,” I snapped. “To my front door. We’ll get there when we can. Arik, these won’t, like, turn us into zombies too if they bite us, right?”
