Deadtown

creme, and a chocolate, and a cruller, and a buttermilk, ooh, and one of those pink-frosted ones with the sprinkles. No, make that two of those . . .”

After Tina had purchased a good part of their inventory, I ordered coffee and a pistachio muffin. “This is to go, right?” Gloria grumbled as she rang up the total.

“No, we’re eating here,” Tina said, wiping pink frosting off her face. Three boxes of donuts were tucked under her arm.

“It’s to go,” I said. “We need to get you home before sunrise.”

I paid. Tina waggled her fingers at our server. “Ta-ta, Gloria. See you soon.” She blew a kiss, then spun on her heel and flounced through the door.

In the parking lot, Tina dumped all three boxes into a trash can. Wordlessly, she got into the Jag.

“You okay?” I asked, buckling up.

“Fine. Just not hungry.”

I backed out of the parking space, then glanced at her. Zombies can’t cry. But if they could, Tina’s face would’ve been wet with tears.

“I wish I could shapeshift like you,” she said. “I’d have turned into a lion and torn that bitch’s head off!”

“She’s just a norm, Tina.” Norm was a paranormal nickname for human—especially the clueless ones like Gloria.

But I understood how Tina felt. When I was her age, there’d been times when I’d wanted to do the same thing. Different norms, different insults, but I knew that feeling. I’d had to learn to push it down before the anger took hold and I really did shift into a lion or something equally dangerous. For Tina, it was just a fantasy.

Tina pressed fists against her eyes, blotting tears that couldn’t fall. “Do you know that tonight’s the first time I’ve been outside Deadtown in over two months? Every time I ask my parents if I can visit, they’ve got some stupid excuse. They wish I was dead, really dead. I know it.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Everyone’s forgetting me.”

I wished I could say she was wrong, but I couldn’t—the same thing was happening to all the zombies. Three years ago, after the terror and confusion of the plague, the rising of the zombies had been cause for citywide celebration. Everyone treated the newly reanimated victims like heroes: loved ones snatched back from death’s craw. But the zombies were too different. Their skin was a funny shade of greenish gray, their movements stiff. They avoided sunlight and spent nights wide-awake. Their superhuman strength and insatiable hunger made them as terrifying as the zombies in any horror flick. And then there was the little problem of blood—the smell of fresh- spilt human blood sent them into a frenzy of hunger. You could calm them down with any kind of food, but the bloodlust did make things awkward sometimes.

Slowly, people like Tina’s parents began to realize that they hadn’t gotten their daughter back; instead, there was this creature, this monster, a mocking reminder of what they’d lost. Zombies couldn’t cry, but they could still hurt. It was easier for the norms not to see that.

“I don’t know why I even bother going to school,” Tina said. “I’ll never have a career. I’ll end up doing manual labor like everyone else. That’s all a zombie’s good for.”

“What about your teacher? She’s a zombie with a career.”

“That makes one.”

Her voice sounded so utterly without hope that I found myself saying words I knew I would regret. But I said them anyway. “You really want to learn how to exterminate demons?”

She stared at her hands, folded in her lap. Then she nodded.

“Okay, I can teach you, but—”

“Great!” She bounced in her seat like one of George Funderburk’s jack-in-the-boxes. “When’s our next job?”

I shook my head. “Uh-uh. I said no, and I meant it. You can start learning the way I did: by studying.”

She huffed and muttered studying in a tone more suited to a word like maggots or entrails. “Okay,” she finally said, flipping her hair back over her shoulder. “How do I start?”

“I’ll give you some textbooks. Once you’ve convinced me you know everything in them—and I mean everything—we’ll go over the different pieces of equipment. Then we’ll start practicing how to use each one. It’s a long apprenticeship, Tina. It’ll be years before you’re ready to face a real demon.” Suddenly, I felt like Aunt Mab. I’d just described the exact training program she’d used with me.

Tina chattered happily as we drove the last few miles back into town, but I tuned her out. I was busy wondering whether I was making the biggest mistake of my life. Probably. Well, so far, anyway—after all, I was still young.

3

WE WERE ABOUT THE TENTH CAR IN LINE AT THE TREMONT Street checkpoint, waiting to enter Deadtown, the roughly rectangular, several-block-long area that was home, by law, to all of Boston’s paranormals.

They’d opened the express lane for vampires, so it had to be nearly sunrise. As we sat there, customers stumbled out of the bars in the no-man’s-land between Deadtown and human-controlled Boston, a stretch everyone called the New Combat Zone. The buildings here had stood vacant for a couple of years; when bars began to open in the dusty storefronts, the owners made no attempt to spruce things up. The more derelict and dangerous a place looked, the bigger the thrill for the norms who ventured here to mingle with the monsters.

Tina nudged my arm. “Isn’t that your roommate?”

I followed her gaze to a short, curvy woman with long hair so black it had blue highlights. She stood in the doorway of our usual hangout, a bar called Creature Comforts, nuzzling a man I’d never seen before. “Yeah, that’s Juliet.”

“Call her over. She can get us through the express lane.”

Juliet wrapped one leg behind the guy’s knees as he threw back his head. “Does she look like she wants to be interrupted? Anyway, the Jag only has two seats.”

“She can share with me. We’ll fit.”

“I don’t think so. Watch. And don’t blink.”

Juliet released the human from her embrace. He staggered backward, leaning against the wall, one hand pressed to his throat. Juliet herself simply disappeared. One second she was there, surveying her conquest with heavy-lidded eyes. The next second, she was gone.

“Hey,” said Tina. “Where’d she go?”

“Home. She’s there by now.”

“Really? How?”

“Vampire trick. Juliet doesn’t like waiting in line, not even the express lane.” You’d think a six-hundred-fifty- year-old vampire would’ve developed patience, but not Juliet.

“Can’t she get in trouble for skipping the line?”

“Trouble?” I laughed. “Juliet’s been poisoned, burned at the stake, thrown off cliffs, and dumped in the ocean to drown. Trouble doesn’t faze her.”

“God, I wish I were a vampire. They’re, like, so much cooler than zombies—I mean, if you’ve gotta be undead. Check out that hot guy she was with.”

On the sidewalk, Juliet’s bedtime snack opened his eyes and blinked. He looked up the street, then down, then toward the Deadtown checkpoint. His shoulders slumped as he realized Juliet was gone. He pulled a scarf from his coat pocket, wrapped it twice around his neck, and walked toward the human checkpoint back into Boston. I couldn’t tell for sure because the Jag’s windows were rolled up, but he looked like he was whistling. Nothing like a vampire hickey to put a guy in a good mood.

“They should let zombies use the express lane,” Tina complained as we moved up one car length. “The sun’s not good for us, either.”

“Yeah, but zombies don’t go up in a puff of smoke.”

“We don’t heal, though. If I get sunburn, my skin will be all cratered and orange-splotched for life.”

She sighed, and I knew we were thinking the same thing: whatever “for life” means to a zombie.