Page 16 of A Very Armitage Christmas
“They can’t be back yet,” I said. I put a hand at my forehead to shade my eyes and squinted down the driveway. The zombies had mostly congregated at the back of the pack house. From where we stood off to the side of the large house, it looked like most of my candy canes had survived. I couldn’t see any cars, though.
Arik stared in the same direction and cocked his head. “That’s not them. That’s a way beefier engine.”
Gods, sometimes I got so sick of being the only person around without supernatural senses — or any knowledge of cars. “Who’d be coming to visit us? Oh, fuck, what now? Do zombies drive? If a zombie’s driving that car, you’re on your own, brother-in-law or not. I’m going to barricade myself in the kitchen with the kids and eat pie until the fucking new year.”
“You haven’t madeanypie yet, and I’m not convinced you know how,” Arik retorted.
My mouth opened and shut a couple of times as I tried to get a handle on the twenty different insulting responses to that running through my head — starting with wondering how someone who couldn’t take care of an herb garden without raising a whole cemetery full of the undead had the nerve to criticize my domestic skills, and ending with telling him I’d have made the fucking pie if I hadn’t been so busyraking body parts, thank you Arik’s necromancy. Before I could get my thoughts in order, a car came around the bend. A black convertible with the top down, something classic-looking, but I couldn’t see more than that at our distance.
“Two people,” Arik said, leaning forward a little. “An older guy driving, and a woman with really, really red hair in the passenger seat. Wow, nice. That’s the fucking Kennedy car!”
“I don’t fucking care about Kennedy or his car, as long as his reanimated corpse isn’t in the back seat,” I snapped. “Who are they?”
“They look sort of familiar,” Arik said slowly. “I’ve seen them before. In that photo —” Arik broke off, his voice cracking. He went white as a sheet and turned to look at me, his green eyes blown wide in something like panic. Panic? We’d had a plague of zombies, and whoever was in this car wasworse?
“What?” I demanded. “Where have you seen —” And then my tongue went all stiff in my mouth as I realized what Arik was talking about: the photo on the pack house mantelpiece.
“Matt’s parents,” Arik whispered, his face a picture of dread, at the same moment as I said, “Oh, fuck. It’s Ian’sparents.”
We’d never met them. Either of us, unless you counted my seeing them in passing when I was a kid and my father did some freelance warlock work for John. They stayed pretty isolated in their cabin in the mountains, with no phones and no internet. They went to the small town down the mountain to pick up mail and occasionally call Matt or Ian, but they hadn’t said anything about coming to visit, even though they knew their sons had acquired mates since the last time they’d been to the Armitage territory.
And now here we were, standing in a scattered pile of zombie bits, rakes in our hands, sweaty and dirty and literally cleaning up the scene of the crime.
And our mother-in-law and father-in-law, Janet and John Armitage, were merrily zipping down the driveway, expecting a wholesome holiday reunion.
Well, if anything could bring people together at Christmastime, it was family, right? And they’d brought me and Arik together. Together in fucking dumbstruck horror, at least.
“What the fuck do we do? Arik! What the fuck — should we run?”
“Run?”
“Yeah. Like, into the woods. Or maybe to Oregon. Or another continent.”
“Oh, gods,” Arik moaned. “Don’t tempt me. We could — we’re both pretty good at hiding trails with magic. We could be a hundred miles away before — shit, we can’t. Right? Can we?” he pleaded, his eyes wide.
I shot a glance back at the car, just pulling up in front of the house. “Too late. They’ve seen us.”
Ian and Matthew’s mom waved, her arm over her head, and flung her door open before the car even rumbled to a complete stop.
“Bobcats can outrun wolves when they’re being sneaky,” Arik said.
I grabbed his arm and hung on tight. “Don’t you fucking dare. You try that and I’ll turn you into a fucking throw rug!Humanscan’t outrun wolves!”
“That’s the definition of a you problem,” Arik muttered, but he didn’t try to pull away. Honestly, I was afraid I might keel over if I didn’t have him to hold onto, and maybe he felt the same way. I drew the line at holding hands, though. Also, Arik might break my arm if I tried.
“Hello, boys!” Janet called out as she started to walk our way. Bounce, really. Jesus, who had that much energy? Oh yeah. Anyone who hadn’t spent all morning getting rid of a metric fuckton of ancient, filthy corpses. “Nate? Arik? Is that you?”
John got out of the car more slowly, and as he stood up I saw he was the spitting image of Matthew, plus thirty years. Not bad. If Arik had that to look forward to, then he’d be a happy man. Janet looked a lot like Ian, and not just the hair. She had freckles too, and Ian’s long, straight nose.
She was also the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen, even in mom jeans and a puffy orange jacket that should’ve clashed with her hair, but instead somehow looked funky and cool.
“Yes,” I rasped. And then, “Yes, it is!” That came out too loudly, making me sound like a fucking idiot.
Her face split in a wide, familiar grin. Ian had gotten that too, it looked like. “I’m so glad to meet you boys at la—”
“Watch out!” Arik called out, and she stopped dead, so to speak, staring down at her feet — her feet, plus one extra on the ground next to her boots, that looked like it’d been rotting for a few decades.
She wrinkled her nose. “Oh my,” she said. “Oh. Well. You’ve had an interesting day.”
