Dead Sexy (2 page)

Okay, so political correctness isn’t exactly my thing. “This one was a zombie. Completely feral. Skin falling off. He was a missing a freaking eye.”

“Did you turn it into the police?” Mom demanded. “Was there a reward?”

“He got dead. More dead. Another Biter shot him in the head. With a gun.”

Biters might be officially ‘Undead Americans’ according to Congress, but that doesn’t mean they’re full citizens. They can’t vote or carry guns. The Second Amendment Rights group protest the restriction on a regular basis, but most of the Biters don’t seem to care one way or the other. When you can pull a man’s arm out of the socket, who the heck needs a gun?

My mother didn’t say a word. Typical. If I stuck around, she’d probably ask if I got a reward for turning in the gun toting dead thing.

“Way to show some concern for your only child.” I pushed past her into my office. The small room isn’t much, but it’s the closest thing I have to private space. At home, Mom doesn’t think twice about barging into my room or going through my things. At work, she tries to maintain some level of professionalism.

The first thing people notice when they walk into my office is the books. They’re hard to miss. Bookshelves line every wall. The fantasy novels I inherited from my Dad and the textbooks for my college classes. There’s a metal desk in the middle of the room and a steamer chest full of weapons near the back. I only have one chair. Mom would have a heart attack if any clients saw the messy pile of paperwork on top of my desk.

I do have a couch that I liberated from the waiting room the last time Mom bought new furniture. It’s more of a settee, but at five foot two I can curl up on it a few nights a week when I’m working late—or trying to avoid Mom. I covered the boring, floral print with a blood red sheet that matches the ornate Oriental rug on the cement floor.

Closing the door, I skirted the rug carefully to avoid getting any muck on the scarlet and gold threads. I pulled my shirt off over my head and tossed it into a corner. My tennis shoes were the next to go. I shimmied my pants down and kicked them off. Dancing in my underwear, I turned, popped open my laptop, and hit play on my favorite album. Dying for Love. An acoustic rock group made out of Biters and humans.

My desk drawer is fully decked out with an industrial strength first-aid kit and plenty of wet-wipes. I cleaned up as best as I could then slipped on an oversized t-shirt, bundled up my ruined clothes, and padded over to the incinerator. Most of the building is kept at a cool sixty-two degrees—perfect for our undead clients—but the crematorium can get pretty hot when the furnaces are on. Close to a thousand degrees.

These days they’re going nearly constantly: grieving relations pay extra to make sure their dead relations don’t come back… even if Grandma kicked it from a heart attack.

I chucked my clothes in through the safety valve near the back and—

Arms like iron bars wrapped around my waist, hauling me backwards. I kicked out hard, connecting with my attacker’s leg. No response. Not even a groan.

A Biter. How had one of them gotten past Uncle Donny?

I kicked again, this time aiming for the thing’s vulnerable spots. The best weapon for taking out a Biter is a stun gun—or a shovel to the brainpan—but it's still possible to incapacitate one barehanded if you take out their major joints. Knees. Ankles. Elbows. Wrists. Break any one of their major joints, and even the most nerve deadened Biter will be screaming in agony. More importantly, it’s hard to stand upright without knees.

I kicked him in the shin, using the force of the motion to propel my shoulders forward and twist at his arm.

The force of the move sent us rocking forward. My knees slammed into the crematorium’s cement floor. My head connected with the side of the incinerator. The Biter was heavy on top of me. Dead meat. His grip tightened. Muscles surged. I could feel him try to lift me again, using his height to his advantage.

Smart move for a dead man.

I elbowed him in the knee. Hard. There wasn’t enough force to break a bone, but the thing was definitely surprised. His grip loosened for half a second.

That was all the time I needed. I darted forward, scrambling across the hot room. If I could get some room then, I might be able to come up with a plan. Hopefully, something that involved putting the Biter head first into the top-heavy incinerator. No muss, no fuss, no clean up.

A hand wrapped around my ankle, pulling me backwards. This time the dead man wasn’t taking any chances. He slammed me up against the nearest wall, forcing my arms straight out. Strong arms gripped my wrists and his muscular torso pinned me in place. There was no going anywhere.

“Violent little thing.”

I gaped in amazement at his emerald green eyes, high cheekbones, and bowed caramel lips. “I gave you to the cops.”

“Thanks for that, by the way,” he snarled. His voice was surprisingly smooth for a dead man, one word following the other almost like he was a real person. “You know how many strings I had to pull to get out of lock up? I thought the cop who brought me in was going to vomit on the counter when he gave back my gun.”

Shit. My cousin Brody was going to be pissed. Collaring a dead man with a deadly weapon should have put him on the fast track to a promotion. I should have figured out the man had connections to risk carrying a gun openly. “You didn’t hurt him?”

“Just his pride. Why? He a friend of yours?” His gaze darted in, taking in my state of relative undress. “A boyfriend?”

“That’s disgusting.” I nearly threw up myself at the thought. “Brody’s my cousin. Besides, he’s like thirty.”

Green eyes darkened slightly. “If thirty’s off limits, then I guess I don’t have a shot.”

Eye roll. “You’re what, twenty-five?”

“I’m older than I look.”

Right, Biters didn’t age after their hearts stopped beating. If he’d been among the first killed, then he was probably closer to thirty-seven.

Not that it mattered.

Biters and live humans don’t mix. Not that way. Once a person’s dead, certain bodily functions just stop functioning. Hearts stop beating. Lungs stop drawing in air. Blood doesn’t flow… to certain vital parts.

Of course, the longer a Biter’s been dead, the more functions they regain. Who knows what will be possible in ten years, but for now sex is a definite no-no.

That didn’t stop my body from going ‘Hello, sailor.’ He might be dead, but I’m only human. Having his super sexy body pressed up against mine was making things buzz in all the right places.

“You want to let me go?” I demanded.

“And have you attack me again? No, thanks.”

His gaze dropped down slightly, taking in the loose cotton T-shirt that cupped my barely there b-cups and skimmed my muscular thighs. Nothing like an hour of yoga a day to keep a girl toned and taut.

His lips twitched up into a smile, the action subtle and almost human. “You’re not wearing any pants.”

“You don’t have a pulse.” 

“Rude to point out.”

“I thought we were stating the obvious.” I attempted a quick shimmy away. No joy. “You got a name? Or, should I just call you D.O.A.?”

“More zombie jokes. Cute.”

My eyes widened in surprise. My hands went limp. I’m not exactly Miss Manners, with a stun gun, but Mom’s right. No one uses the ‘z word’ anymore.

Especially not Biters.

His grip released slightly in response to my surprise. “You can call me, D.S.”

“Dead Sexy?”

“Something like that.” He let me down off the wall. “You got somewhere we can talk?”

3.

My office isn’t exactly Tiger’s stadium on the best of days. With D.S. in it, the place felt tiny. Like all the air had left the room.

Not like he noticed. 

He didn’t breathe.

I grabbed a pair of yoga pants from my desk drawer and pulled them on over my panties. There was no way I’d be able to get a clean bra on without serious contortions, so I pulled a thick wool sweater over my head. A quick glance in the mirror told me that I looked like hell.

I’ve got my mom’s pale skin and white blonde hair. I also have my dad’s spooky gray eyes. I look washed out on a good day. This wasn’t a good day. There were dark circles under my eyes and a line of smudges up the side of my neck where I’d landed in the mud.

Frankly, any person meeting us for the first time would assume that D.S. Was the human and I was the thing.

Too freaking bad.

I wrapped the sweater tight around my middle. “You want to sit down?”

“On that?” D.S. eyed my couch suspiciously for a moment before sinking into the red covered cushions. He was wearing the same outfit he’d been in earlier—black on black on black—and the scarlet sheet provided a sinful backdrop to his monochromatic appearance.

His arms spread expansively over the back of the couch. His legs opened wide. His black jeans fit him like a glove.

Damn. I felt another sizzle running across my skin.

The Biter grinned. He knew exactly the image he’d created, and he wasn’t about to move anytime soon.

In a show of iron self-control, I didn’t throw a pencil at his head.

I opened my bag and pulled out my stun gun. The same one I’d used to fry his behind a few hours earlier. I put the stun gun down flat on my desk—nice and visible—and perched on the edge beside it.

“Kinky,” the Biter said. “I like it.”

I rolled my eyes. “What do you want?”

“There aren’t enough dead people in Detroit.”

“Excuse me?” I frowned. There were dead people all over the city. I dealt with them every day. “Dead. Undead. Biters. Zombies. We’ve got all fifty shades. Want to see my work logs?”

“I’m sure they die here. They just don’t stay here. I should explain—” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin leather envelope. The kind cops use to keep their badges. “I’m from the DUA.”

The air left my lungs. Hell. I’d heard a rumor that the Department of Undead Americans was hiring Biters—some kind of equal opportunity thing—but I hadn’t seen one before. The DUA didn’t have an official Detroit office. Just a snub-nosed clerk named Harry, who showed up every once in a while from Toledo to check on our paperwork and hit on my mom.

I snagged his badge and took a quick look. It certainly looked like government issue, right down to the grainy picture in the corner. According to the text, his name was Thomas Conroy. D.S. Thomas Conroy. “What does the D.S. stand for?”

“Doesn’t Signify.”

Uh huh. That’s why it was printed in fat red letters. I flipped the badge shut and passed it back to him. “You were saying something about the dead?”

“We’ve been conducting a quiet head count—kind of like a census—proportionately, the dead just aren’t here.”

“Maybe they moved.”

“The dead don’t tend to move. Keeping their sanity—keeping themselves together—for the lesser dead, it’s all about recreating the patterns they had in life. You might have a few wandering, but not the kind of numbers we’ve found here.” There was a slight pause. Like he was making some kind of grand pronouncement. “The dead aren’t wandering in Detroit. They’re being systematically hunted. They’re being taken.”

“And I was your first suspect?” I pursed my lips. “Seems a little harsh, just because I put a stun gun in your ass.”

“You’re not a suspect,” the dead man growled. “I thought I could handle the investigation myself… I’m not without my resources… But I’m finding the city a little more difficult to navigate than I’d remembered.”

I bit back a laugh. Detroit hadn’t exactly been an easy city before the rising. These days, a slick looking dead man driving around the place was asking to get his ass kicked and his car stolen. “You need a partner.”

“I need an employee,” he corrected. “Someone with the necessary skills and contacts. Someone who can handle working with the dead.”

“You think that’s me?” I crossed my legs and considered kicking him out of my office. Just on principle. The man might be from the Department of Undead Americans, but he was still a Biter: one of the things that went bump in the night. “You’re kidding, right?”

“You handled yourself pretty well out there today. You had a full-blown zombie heading straight for you, and you kept cool. Not many people can say the same thing. You’ve got the necessary contacts—.”

“You don’t know that.”

You work at a funeral home. I assume you know someone at the morgue.”

He wasn’t wrong. Still, there was a major problem with what he’d proposed.

“I don’t work with dead people. They give me the creeps.”

His head cocked to the side. His lips twitched up into a grin. “The sign on the door says you do government registration, career counseling, and behavioral training.”

“That’s my mom.” The woman might by a hyper-organized freak, but when it came to turning monsters into men she had a definite gift.

“Uh huh, and the secretary who showed me in?”

“Uncle Donny. He’s family.”

“He’s a first waver. Twelve years dead.” D.S. waved a hand dismissively. “He’s in pretty good shape, considering how little the general population knew about care and feeding of zombies back then. Not many first wavers made it past the first year. It must have taken some work to keep him in that condition.”

Feedings, every two hours, paying through the nose for raw beef. Yeah, it had taken some effort. Especially, back before government procedures about Biter victims had gone into effect.

In the early days, every new body that came through the door had to be watched in case it rose again.

Still, there’d never been any question about Donny. Sinclairs take care of their own. “Like I said, he’s family. You’re not. How do I know you’re not going to bite me?”

“Sweetheart, if I wanted to bite you then I’d have done it already. It’s not going to happen.” His cocoa eyes grew dark. Hungry. “Not unless you’re begging for it. On your knees. You want to get on your knees for me, sweetheart?”

Something melted inside me.

Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to work with him after all. His undead status might mean he had Zippity-Doo-dah when for follow through, but the man could flirt like nobody’s business.