Magic and Decay (9 page)

“Since I was seventeen,”
Kiran
answered.
“How about you, Hendrix?”

“Every damn day,” he replied.

Reagan made a growly sound that made me a little bit
afraid for Hendrix’s safety.

“It’s not our fault!” I said pointlessly.

“You’re right,” Hendrix agreed. “It’s like it’s
written into your DNA. You were born this way.
Doesn’t mean
we have to like it.”

Kiran
let out a gentle
laugh.
“Nope.
Usually, it means we love it.”

Ryder and Hendrix stayed silent. Apparently they
hadn’t gotten to that part yet.

Something told me Reagan and Hendrix
were
close.
Maybe not in this season of
their lives, but soon.

The invisible bubble of Magic flickered.

Which obviously didn’t make sense
because it was invisible, but I swore I saw it.
The protective bubble
shimmered and stuttered.

“
Kiran
?”
Hendrix demanded.

Apparently he’d seen it too.

“We need to get there fast.”
Kiran
nudged Eden’s limp body into my back, urging me forward.

Ryder’s hand gripped mine tightly, but we picked up
our pace. The Zombies pushed back at us with more force than they ever had. It
was as though they could feel our defenses weakening too.

Their black nails scratched down the energy-field they
couldn’t make out and their teeth chomped violently at us.

Now our blood mingled with their fallen comrade’s
blood which frenzied them even more.

Kiran
struggled to meet
their strength with his waning energy. I could feel the tension radiating off
him. Eden stirred in his arms, but he didn’t acknowledge her waking.

We trudged through a quagmire of blood and broken
bones, dead Zombies and whatever debris had been left behind from the former
fleeing human population. Finally, the tan sedan came into view. I had never
seen a more beautiful sight.

It wouldn’t be perfectly safe, but surely a car could
outrun a Feeder.

At least I hoped so.

With our destination so close, we picked up our pace
and rushed to the vehicle. We dove in. Hendrix immediately went for the
driver’s seat and Reagan rounded the car and climbed into the front passenger’s
seat.
Kiran
slid into the backseat and kept Eden on
his lap. I filed in next to him.

As soon as Ryder sat down next to me, he slammed the
door and waited for
Kiran
to work his Magic.

Literally.

Instead, he let out a curse and kicked the back of
Reagan’s seat. She whirled around with her empty gun in hand.

“Are you going to throw it at him?” Ryder asked with
one raised eyebrow.

She pointed it at him and pretended to pull the
trigger.

“This is so bloody frustrating!”
Kiran
broke the tension between us by adding his own. It shouldn’t have worked, but
it did. “Our Magic is nearly drained. Whatever kind of healing she performed
took everything out of Eden. Only we’re connected, so it also took it out of
me! We’re practically
human
.”

I felt Ryder, Reagan and Hendrix bristle around me.
The way he said the word “human” sounded vile. But I understood his anger. We
were all dead without that Magic.

We needed it as much as
Kiran
did.

“What does that mean?” Hendrix demanded. “You can’t
start the car? The force-field is dead? What’s going on?”

Kiran
grunted something
R-rated before he explained, “I can do one or the other. The force-field or
start the car. I can’t maintain both. Eventually, our strength will return to
us, but until then we’re pretty well screwed.”

“Start the car,” Reagan demanded.

“What?” I felt the breath push from my lungs. Even the
thought of getting bitten again made me panic. “Are you sure?”

“We have to move, Ivy.” Reagan spun around in her seat
and stared hard at me. “I can’t just sit here.”

Ryder leaned forward and pointed a finger at her.
“Because you’re afraid.
You’re making this decision based on
fear.”

“And what are your decisions based on?” Reagan raised
her brows at him and waited for his response.

Ryder cracked a half-smile and said, “Greater fear.”

My heart squeezed in my chest and emotion clogged in
my throat. His fear was for me. He was making decisions based on me.

And maybe that would have been obvious to someone
else, but it wasn’t to me. I’d abandoned him. I’d left him. I’d promised him
something and lied.

And yet, he still put me ahead of everything else.

His greater fear was still for me.

I could feel it. I could feel it in the way his hand
gripped my knee, in the way that he pressed his chest into my shoulder and
hadn’t stopped touching me since I walked out of the smoke. I felt it when I
started to turn, and he still held me in his arms and refused to let me go
through it alone.

Ryder cared about me.

I didn’t know what that meant for us, but it felt like
maybe our story wasn’t over yet.

Maybe it hadn’t even been written.

“So you want to just sit here?” Reagan challenged.
“You want to wait it out? Hope their
Magic
holds up long enough that the Feeders stay back? Well, what happens when it fails?
They’re already weakened. Their power is significantly less than it was an hour
ago. What if it fails completely and we are just sitting here like assholes
waiting for the Zombies to break through? Because then we’re dead, Ryder.
All of us.
And there isn’t enough dry ice in the world that
can save us
from this many
Feeders!”

“She has a point,” Hendrix put in.

“
Kiran
?”
My voice was small and desperate. “What do you think?”

“My Magic won’t fail. But I’d rather my wife be out of
the epicenter of Zombie focus.”

Ryder slammed his back into the seat and let out a
growl of frustration.
“Fine.
Let’s go.”

“We’ll be fine,” Reagan promised him.

“You don’t believe that,” he shot back.

“No, I don’t. But I tell myself that every single day
anyway.”

“Why?”

Reagan glanced at Hendrix quickly before admitting,
“Because even if I don’t, I
want
to
believe it.”

“Me, too,” I whispered.

 
Ryder slid his
arm around my shoulders and pulled me into the crook of his body. His hand
rested heavily on my arm and I relished the feel of his heat and protection.

I hated, loathed really that I was stuck in this awful
place, with these creatures made from nightmares and zero chances for survival.
But at the same time, it had managed to bring Ryder and me closer together.
We’d been able to overlook the hurt in our pasts and what we’d done to each
other and move forward.

Maybe Hermes was right. Maybe all I needed was a
little bit of perspective.

“I just figured out why Hermes dropped us here,” I
told Ryder.

“Yeah?” he stared out the window, ever on alert.

“I’ll tell you later.”

He nodded. “Here is probably not the best place.”

“Right.”

“So where is he?”

“What do you mean?”

“You figured out the great mystery, the moral lesson,
the meaning behind his extreme measures, so shouldn’t he show up already? He
promised to come back for us and you got it. So… where is he?”

“Is there a time-delay?”

Ryder snorted a surprised laugh. “I doubt it.”

Our frustrated conversation got interrupted by the
start of the engine. Suddenly the car was on and moving as Hendrix stomped on
the gas and sent us flying.

Ryder and I slammed into each other while
Kiran
sat perfectly still, not even jostling an unconscious
Eden once.

I slid into Ryder and he slammed against the door.
Hendrix fishtailed all over the road.

Right away he ran over several Zombies, but the car
never slowed. I assumed that was a byproduct of having a vehicle run by Magic.

I decided not to complain.

Without the Magical force-field, the Zombies could invade
all the space they wanted.

Kiran
tried to push out his
energy field as far as possible so that we had a kind of runway to get the car
moving. Then he let go of the energy field and turned on the car at almost the
same time, just seconds apart.

The car took off like a shot, but there were plenty of
Zombies in our way.

Hendrix ran over as many as he could and pretty soon
the Zombies were in our rearview mirror while Hendrix stomped on the pedal. The
highway leveled out once we cleared the town and for a while we felt safer than
we had in a long time.

Hendrix kept the car moving as fast as he could while
traversing the dark, unpredictable road at night. The stars shone brightly and
the full moon cast the landscape along our high-speed chase in a soft glow, but
for someone driving the car, the road would feel especially dangerous.

I held my breath the entire time, just waiting for
Hendrix to accidentally lose control. He wasn’t anything but normal human, but
there were times both he and Reagan seemed like they had more than normal going
on.

A little something-something.

And maybe if we counted “Surviving the Zombie
Apocalypse” as superhero powers, we could give them the credit they deserved.

Normal? Yeah, right. They had more lives than a cat.

But it wasn’t just their ability to survive against
all odds.

Reagan could kick some serious ass. I was thinking
about having a poster made of her in all her Zombie-killing glory and tacking
it up in my room so I had someone to aspire to be when I grew up.

If I could take on the entire Greek Pantheon the way
she tackled all her Zombie problems, the world might not look so bleak for me.

What was that,
Nix? You want me to do what?
And then I smash his face in with a baseball
bat.

Okay, that was a little gross. Apparently the Zombie
Apocalypse was rubbing off on me.

Suddenly the car swerved to the left. We hit something
that made a deep thumping noise. Hendrix put up a hand to wave our concern off
when something else jumped out at us and smashed into the hood.

He was driving fast enough that the thing, which I
assumed was a Zombie, bounced onto the hood, crashed into the windshield and
then rolled off the side of the car.

Hendrix tensed and re-gripped the steering wheel. His
knuckles gleamed white in the moonlight and the engine revved noisily in
protest.

“Push the bloody car as much as you need to,”
Kiran
instructed. “It will keep running no matter what.
Even if it seems impossible to you.”

“It does seem impossible to me,” Hendrix muttered.
“All of this seems impossible to me.”

“Only because your mind is finite,”
Kiran
responded.

I pressed my lips together to keep from gaping at him.
This guy had some guts.

“Dude!”
Hendrix tossed his
hand at the cracked windshield.
“Zombies!
My mind is
the farthest thing from finite!”

“So what is so difficult about Magic? Why is that
concept so hard to grasp?”

“Because it’s weird.”

“It’s not weird.”

“It’s really weird,” Reagan confirmed. She turned in
her seat and looked at me.

“It’s a little weird,” I agreed.

“Oh, really?”
Kiran
sniffed. “And Greek
mythology come
to life? That’s not weird? You’re both hypocrites.”

“I think you’re all weird,” Ryder added.
“Every last one of you.”

I turned my head to argue with him, but something
flashing over the ocean caught my attention. A faint, golden light hovered just
over the water.

“Ryder, look.” I pointed to the slowly flashing light
and hoped he saw it too.

His head turned and for a moment I was distracted by
his perfect profile. I watched him drag his hand through his tussled hair and
the way his jaw ticked when he finally saw what I did.

“Is that our taxi?”

“I have no idea. But what else could it be?”

Kiran
leaned forward to see
for himself and Reagan leaned over Hendrix. Finally, even Hendrix’s attention
moved to the spreading light as it opened up over the Gulf of Mexico.

“Way out there?” Hendrix laughed. “That’s not very
considerate of your ride.”

I cleared my throat. “Yeah, gods aren’t exactly known
for their good manners.”

“They’re all douche bags,” Ryder confirmed.

“How will you get out there?” Reagan asked.

“Swim.” I ignored the stiffening of Ryder’s body next
to mine. “You just have to get us to the water’s edge.”

“The water’s edge?
You mean
you want us to go back the way we came? That sounds like a terrible idea!” And
by the way Hendrix said it, it actually sounded like the worst idea ever.

The engine sputtered for a second before revving again
with purpose.
Kiran
seemed exhausted by the very
idea.

“Hey,” Ryder growled. “Get us to the water’s edge and
we’ll be out of your way for good. We’ve got our own shit to save. We’re done
with Zombies.”

Hendrix glanced over his shoulder with a mulish
expression on his handsome face.
“Yeah?
I’ve got
people to save too. You’re not the only one with a quest.”

Kiran
cleared his throat.
“I’m in the middle of a war. Zombies are the least of my concerns.”

“Better get us to the water then,” I said pleasantly,
“so we can wrap this up and go our separate ways.”

Eden stirred in
Kiran’s
lap
when Hendrix whipped the car around in a fast U-turn.
“Usually,
when you drive off into the sunset, that’s the end of our program.
I
can’t remember ever willingly driving back into the mayhem.”