Authors: Tracy St. John
Dan started to reach for me again and stopped himself. It’s tough remembering the restrictions a physical body puts on you when you’re used to being a ghost. He had to settle for giving me his most comforting yet concerned look. “If he’s a zombie, then his soul is gone. He can’t be fixed.”
“You mean … he’ll stay like that? Just an empty body?” I looked over Dan’s shoulder at the werehog, my stomach doing a slow, sick drop. Oh, this couldn’t be happening. Not to Eddie.
Dan spoke carefully, as if to a child. Normally I get ruffled if I’m condescended to, but in this case, I knew it was because I was not only clueless but ready to be upset. It turned out I had plenty more to get upset about.
“Zombies are dangerous creatures, sweetheart. If his soul is gone, he’ll have to be – his body will have to be destroyed.”
I tore my gaze from Eddie’s too-still form. Gerald was starting to shake as he stood next to his friend, and I was reminded of how good shifter hearing was. Though Gerald couldn’t hear my end of the conversation, he could probably hear Dan speaking through Jason.
“Destroyed? As in killed? What the heck, Dan?” My voice was rising.
Dan swallowed. “A zombie is like an automaton. All it knows is what its body tells it. If it’s tired, it stops where it is and goes to sleep. If it’s hungry, it grabs the closest thing and eats. And I’m not talking a cheeseburger and fries from the nearest drive thru, baby girl.”
A shudder ran through me and I went colder than cold. “People. You’re saying Eddie will eat people.”
“Zombies prefer fresh meat. So fresh that it’s still breathing.”
I felt ill. Again my mind insisted,
this can’t be happening
. But apparently, it was.
“I guess he’s not hungry then,” I said weakly.
“Not yet.”
“Who’s going to kill him if he’s a zombie?” My gaze went to Gerald. The werepanther was tough and bad to the bone, but no way the big man would be able to kill his best bud. I looked at Tristan and Patricia next, who stood to one side, their predator faces as sad as vampires could get. I really wanted to think my sweetie and his sister would find it too difficult to destroy someone who had stood ready to take a stake for them.
Dan said, “That’s a matter for the authorities. If Lana says Eddie’s gone, we’ll turn him over to the police, who will take him to the hospital. He’ll be sedated, his family called to say their goodbyes, then they’ll cremate him.”
I couldn’t stop shaking. “Cremate?”
“Much like a vampire, it’s the only way to make sure a zombie stays down. You have to turn it to ashes.”
Something occurred to me then, something that should have bothered me before this. But hey, Eddie was a sort of friend. I think in my shock I can be excused for overlooking the obvious right away. “How did Eddie become a zombie – if that’s what he is?”
A flicker of anger drove back the pain in Dan’s eyes. It was kind of good to see. I know from personal experience how much better being mad is to sorrow.
The dual expressions of controlled fury didn’t sit well on neither Dan nor Jason’s faces. “Somebody, a voodoo priest or priestess usually, separates the soul from the body in order to make the body their slave. No one’s quite sure what happens to the soul. It just disappears, kind of like when vampires suffer their final death. But somebody made this happen. If we find that person—”
He didn’t finish the statement. He was really mad, and the threat didn’t need to be spoken.
Getting revenge sounded pretty all right to me. But my own anger was tempered by a bigger, scarier worry. If someone had cast Eddie’s soul out to make a slave out of him, yet we had possession of his body, then that someone was potentially out there looking for another person to zombify to take his place.
This situation was only getting worse by the second.