A strange smell of sweet baby powder and tangy copper filled my nose as a cold breeze blew past, making the flames dance. I looked up and saw row upon row of bleeding chicken feet suspended from the arched ceiling by delicate wires, the drops of blood scattering on the floor.
I didn’t know what to think or say or do. I wanted to yell and scream and tell Perry and Maximus to come up here, to see what I was seeing, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do a single thing because things were happening beyond my control, without pause, without consent. I was f**king losing my mind, that’s exactly what was happening.
Because at the very end of the room, beyond the dying snake and where the hundreds of black, greasy candles were burning, there was a mirror. A full-length mirror. A mirror that was aimed right at me but didn’t even hold my reflection. But what it did hold, what all the mirrors held lately, was my mother.
She waved at me from inside that silver, the way she looked in my dreams, the way I remembered her in life. She waved at me. She blew me a kiss. And then she disappeared.
I blinked, trying to regain control of myself, of my soul, of my goddamn bladder, when my attention was ripped from the empty mirror—the mirror that still wouldn’t hold my reflection—to the space just beyond it.
A tall, hulking black man stepped out from behind the mirror. A familiar face, if not for the dead glazed eyes and drooling lips that curled up in rage as soon as he saw me. It was Tuffy G. It couldn’t have been anyone else. Tuffy G, the man we all saw die in the bar, was standing in this attic with me, looking like I was next on his hit list. I didn’t know what to think, but luckily my instincts were quicker than that.
I turned and ran and ran hard. I went for the stairs, feeling the floor beneath me shake and rumble as the giant undead thing came toward me. I kept running, taking the stairs two at a time until I was on the landing of the third floor. Perry was by the wall trying to get readings from her thingamabob and Maximus was filming an inanimate couch.
I screamed. I ran. I tried to warn them.
But Tuffy G already had a plan.
He lurched forward after me, and just when I felt his hand grazing the back of my shirt, I knew he went off to the side.
Toward Perry.
My Perry.
She screamed once she saw him, his arms outstretched, his mouth open, teeth bared. He grabbed her by the neck and shoulders, his fat, dead hands about to dig into her and break her to pieces. His jaw snapped violently, wanting to eat her alive.
I didn’t have much time. No time to think about what was really happening, whether this was a ghost, a zombie, or a sick f**king prank. I dropped my camera to the floor, making sure the lens was pointed in the general direction and grabbed the nearest sharp blunt object, a floor lamp without the bulb. I swung it up like I was in the Little Leagues and cracked it against Tuffy G’s back. When that only made him pause in mid-attack, I quickly did it again, dropping low to a crouch and swinging at the back of his knees. I swung hard enough to break any man’s legs. Only this wasn’t any man. The lamp post broke instead, splitting in half, and Tuffy G turned around, enraged and ready to fight. His dead eyes focused on me, and even with all my super strength, I was pretty sure I was a goner.
“Hey, f**ker!” Maximus’s voice rang out across the room. I looked over at him at the same time that Zombie G did. He was by a window, aiming his camera at us and waving obnoxiously. Even if I wasn’t the undead, I’d want to tackle him.
Tuffy G fell for it. He lurched forward, the floorboards creaking beneath him, closing in on the space between him and Maximus, the living and the dead. He was almost at Maximus, almost to the point where I wanted to say something, anything, just in case I never saw the ginger alive again.
But he was a man with a plan. He tossed aside his camera at the last minute and dropped flat to the floor. The zombie kept running, too stupid and enraged to gauge what had happened until it was too late. He went straight through the window with a crash, glass fragments flying everywhere, then dropped to the ground far below. I ran to the window just as Maximus was getting to his feet and we both looked out together.
Three stories down, on the circular stone patio in the courtyard, his body lay, rivulets of blood flowing from him.
Tuffy G had died for the second time.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I stared at the body for a few moments, having a hard time soaking it all in, what just happened, when I heard Perry whimper from behind me.
I snapped out of it, ignoring the implausibility of what happened, and went to her. She was huddled against the wall where Tuffy G—or Tuffy G A.D.—had pinned her, ready to take a bite out of her, and she was shaking and crying. I put my hands on both sides of her shoulders and looked at her as closely as possible in the glow of the streetlights. Her eyes were wet with tears but she looked okay otherwise. Her beautiful neck was fine.
“You’re okay, baby,” I told her. “He didn’t get you.”
She shook her head, tears running down her face. “I don’t understand. He was dead. I saw him die.”
“We all saw him die. And now we saw him die again.”
“But why was he trying to hurt me? God, Dex, he was trying to bite me! I thought these weren’t the real undead!”
“I don’t know, but there’s something upstairs you need to see.”
“Does it involve candles?” Maximus asked.
I turned my head to look at him, keeping Perry firmly in my grasp. “Yes, why?”
He was looking toward the attic door. Smoke was beginning to filter out of it.
“Shit!” I yelled. Tuffy must have knocked them over on his way after me. “What do we do?”
“We get the f**k out of here, right now,” he said, picking up his camera from the ground and giving it a quick once over. He’d thrown it pretty hard, but from what I saw, only the lens looked cracked.
“Shouldn’t we wait for the police or fire trucks?” Perry sniveled.
“No,” Maximus and I both said in unison. She nodded, understanding, and wiped her nose. Maximus wanted the NOPD as far away from us as possible and I wasn’t about to get our footage taken away from us again. Besides, between the three of us, we’d actually gotten something, I knew it.
Now the smoke was getting thicker and flames crackled at the top of the stairs, illuminating a slice of floor in the flickering light. If we stood around much longer, we’d be swallowed up fast.