Page 37 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
They all wore identical looks of wide-eyed astonishment as they glanced at each other.
“Is thisanotherzombie movie?” Aerin asked.
A horrified Tierra shook her head. “This is the channel five evening news. That’s Kip Kipley and Sharon Trout, long-time local news anchors.”
Cue Sharon with her red suit and chunky gold jewelry.“We obtained some footage of the violence shot earlier today, and we have to warn you, this might be disturbing to some viewers. A local Tacoma man was brutally attacked at a coffee shop by someone he’d claimed was a childhood friend who’d drowned ten years ago when they were swimming together.”
A shaky video, obviously taken from a bystander phone, showed a bloated teenager with soggy clothes grab a man in a suit and chop the screaming guy’s hand off with a cleaver.
Coffee mingled with blood as chaos erupted, and the cup, hand still attached, exploded all over the floor.
“Holy shit on a shingle,” Moira breathed. She barely noticed as Tierra ripped the bag of pork rinds from her and heaved the contents of her stomach into it.
2
“So zombies, is that a thing?” The words rushed from Aerin’s mouth into her Bluetooth the moment the click sounded indicating someone had picked up the other line. Sitting on the white trunk at the foot of her bed, she worried one of her silk cuffs and studied the black and white arabesque wallpaper.
“Aerin de Moray.” Julian Roarke’s British inflection wrapped her name in blood-red velvet, even through the phone. His cultured voice evoked luxurious Jaguar commercials and indulgent, delectable sins that would be illegal where Moira came from. “How did you get this number?”
“Not important.” She tried to sound all clipped and business-like and shit. She’d swoon over the provocative surprise in his voice later. “Does this Apocalypse happen to be the zombiepocalypse?”
“You see,” he continued, undeterred, “we bought this phone at a ubiquitous marketplace that seems to be off of every freeway exit these days. There was an astounding number of people in elastic-waist trousers or sporting what Nicholas called a “muffin top.” He paused, and Aerin could almost hear him shudder. “Are you familiar with the term?”
“Yes, but I saw on the news—.”
“Please, don’t misunderstand me, I do so appreciate a voluptuous woman, but if ladies insist on wearing trousers in this century, then they should at least buy them in the correct size to avoid said phenomenon.”
She couldn’t agree with him more, truth-be-told, but she didn’t have time to commiserate at the moment. Julian wasn’t the sort of man who would be caught dead in sweatpants. He dressed exclusively in anachronistic suits that evoked Dracula movies and Brontë novels, complete with watch chains and cufflinks and buttoned vests.
Except for that once. When they’d enjoyed an evening ride through the forest on a black steed older than her last name. Where they’d kissed in the moonlight. He’d worn an open poet’s shirt and loose trousers.
More Highlander than Hawthorne. He’d taken her breath and left her wanting way more than just one kiss.
She intended to remedy that. Eventually. If they didn’t all die first.
“What does this have to do with zombies?” she demanded in that voice that always got her what she wanted.
He denied her. Again. “The point I was getting at is that I procured the phone from a gentleman, and I use that termveryloosely, who assured me that it was untraceable, that no one could get the number.”
Oh, now it made sense. “One thing you have to learn about the digital age, Julian, is that you can hide nothing. Especially from me. I own the clouds. All of them. Which means there is no information I can’t find if I look hard enough.”
“Indeed.” He sounded sufficiently impressed, and Aerin had to swallow satisfaction. “May I ask why you expended so much of your expertise to seek me out, Aerin de Moray?”
“Because you know stuff.” That was why. The only reason why. Pretty much half of the only couple of reasons why.
His voice became dry enough to blow away in a sandstorm. “Duly noted. You inquired about zombies?”
“Yes, what do you know about them?”
He was silent a moment before answering. “Well, the genesis of the word itself is contested. It either comes from the Haitian or Creole French termZonbi,which belongs to the Voodoo religion. They’re historically human corpses reanimated by magic. Specifically, Necromancy. Though in popular culture of these modern days the consensus seems to be that the undead are corpses infected with a virus, which I find rather ridiculous as there is and never will be a virus that brings the dead back to life.”
He should know. He was Pestilence, after all.
“Do zombies have anything to do with the prophecy?” she pressed. “If the dead start to come back to life, what does that mean?”
“Aerin…” A pregnant pause yawned in the chasm between them. “We shouldn’t be talking about this. We’re on other sides of this battle and—.”
“Listen, bub, every last one of us is going tobeon the ‘other side’ if we don’t figure out how to stop this shit,” Aerin interrupted. “I don’t understand why we have to be in opposition. It’s not like any of uswantthe end of the world to come about.”
