Page 8 of A Very Armitage Christmas
I’d help him. In a minute. I needed a minute.
It turned into a lot of minutes, while I hyperventilated and squeezed my eyes shut so tightly I saw spots.
Nate could manage without me. He probably wouldn’t even notice I hadn’t come to help.
Chapter 3
Matthew
Searching the woods for zombies shouldn’t have been a good time, but it beat the hell out of sitting in yet another fucking meeting. Just one more reminder of how Ian always got to have all the fun, the bastard. He was so lucky I’d been born first and groomed for this bullshit instead of him.
I shouldn’t have been thinking of it as fun, of course. Pack leaders didn’t get to have fun, and they didn’t think zombies were a nice change of pace from listening to ancient, cranky Stephen — who’d already been old as dirt when he sat on my dad’s council — drone on and on about how we needed to put more effort into making a profit off the junkyard we owned. And pack leaders definitely didn’t whoop with satisfaction as they swung a machete at exactly the right angle and speed to send a zombie’s head flying like the world’s grossest golf ball.
I might’ve grinned, though, since no one could see. If Ian had been there, maybe I’d have whooped alittle, since he wouldn’t have given me thatThis is beneath your dignity and it’s making me doubt your leadershiplook I always got from everyone else when I dared to let loose a little tiny bit.
But Ian had gone the other direction, leaving me with Jennifer, who was taking this so fucking seriously, and Mark and Andy, her nephews, who didn’t have a sense of humor to start with.
The head sailed through the air, nailing a giant tree trunk dead-on with a sound like a baseball bat demolishing a ripe watermelon.
Fuckingnice. I really wished Ian had seen that. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him.
“Hey Andy!” I called. “Clean this one up!”
A stifled groan from behind me made me grin again, safe in knowing I’d taken point and no one was looking. Okay, fair enough. Being the pack leader had a few definite upsides.
“That’s four we’ve killed now, plus the one back at the pack house,” Jennifer said, coming up to stand next to me while Andy jogged ahead to take care of the body. “Three more out there, unless Ian’s group took care of them already.”
A crunching in the underbrush and a low, ugly moan made that seem less likely. Jennifer and I got our machetes up and ready, and a moment later another zombie shoved its way through the low-hanging branches of a pine tree.
For a second, I froze. It was Taft. Parker Taft, the motherfucker who’d — I couldn’t even think about what he’d done to Arik without blinding, red-tinged rage obliterating the rest of the world from view. I’d killed him once, ripping out his spine with my bare hands. This time a more distant approach seemed best, since what was left of his flesh hung off what bones he still had, and the smell nearly bowled me over. I wasn’t even sure how he was ambulatory without his backbone, but somehow he’d managed to crawl out of his grave and shuffle and weave his way back to me.
Magic really fucking sucked sometimes.
My machete made a wet, disgusting sound as it slopped through his boneless neck and he slumped to the ground, lifeless. Again. I didn’t kick him, mainly because I didn’t want to have to clean my boots.
Fuck, what had Arik beenthinking? He hadn’t been thinking, and that was the problem. I’d tried not to be angry when he and Ian and Nate walked up to the pack house with a zombie and tossed it down right in front of the council, and the effort was ongoing, but it made the vein in my temple throb a little to think about how goddamn hard I worked to keep this pack on its feet — and then my own mate did shit like this. Thoughtless, destructive shit that made my life and my job, basically one and the same, so much fuckingharder.
“Have you noticed what direction they’ve been going in?” Jennifer asked, interrupting my spiral. “They’re not wandering randomly.”
I set the point of the machete down and leaned on it. “Yeah. I noticed.” They’d all been making for the pack house.
Or possibly for Arik, whom I’d left at the pack house. Neither option appealed to me.
“Are we sure there won’t be more?” Jennifer said thoughtfully. “I mean, we don’t know how far this spell reached. If it went past the territory boundary…” She trailed off into a shrug and a sigh, because she didn’t really need to spell it out. This forest had been under our control for at least a hundred and fifty years. Beyond that…well, there were plenty of humans, creatures, and assorted others who might’ve dumped bodies in the forest beyond our boundary. The local vampires hadn’t been quite so civilized before Charlie Fenwick came along and took over, just to start with.
“If there’s more, we’ll deal with it,” I said. “For now, six down, two possibly to go.”
We met up with Ian a few minutes later, and he confirmed he’d dealt with the other two. “Not fair,” he said cheerfully, apparently totally forgetting he’d been bitching about the smell before. He did reek, I had to admit. I tried to shift upwind of him a little without him noticing. “You got to do the fun part.”
“I knocked a head into a tree,” I told him, enjoying his scowl. “From like five yards away.”
“Pictures or it didn’t happen,” he grumbled, and bumped my shoulder with his, leaving a smudge of zombie juice on my jacket.
“Fucker.”
He grinned at me. “Asshole.”
We shouldered our machetes and headed back to the pack house, leaving Ian’s minions to clean up the mess.
