I didn’t know my mom fought so well. Honestly, I’m not sure how I made it this far with what I learned from the internet. She’s a whole other beast. She says she’s rusty, but even with everything I’ve been through, I’m surprised I held my own against her. Maybe being Mindless, she was purely her primal instincts—her brain didn’t factor in anything she’d actually learned beforehand. Even then, I have to remember that, surprisingly, not many people know how to throw a punch.
Mikey’s a different story. When she wanted to spar with my mom, they both seemed about evenly matched. I could sense Mikey holding back from fighting dirty, a skill she learned when she had to brawl for entertainment to feed her siblings. It makes the mystery over how I overpowered her in the ring during our first encounter weigh even heavier on my shoulders. What could have been distracting her?
Between sparring sessions, I found myself either obsessively scouring the internet for any sign of a second zombie apocalypse. I doubt they’d put it in our faces, but there’s more stirring of past events to push either side of the fence against one another. There are times I wonder if I’d stuck with Mikey before the riots and helped calm her down, or even tried to help change her mind, that maybe we wouldn’t be in this predicament. Maybe I could have stopped the world from overturning. Then again, it could have been inevitable. If Mikey hadn’t stepped up, someone much worse might have.
I rest on the bench in the back of our sparring area. Maverick’s made several stealthy trips back to Ein’s skyscraper, emptying it of any and all weapons. I don’t know where Ein is, nor what went down between the two, but I do know Aurora is banished from the bunker. We’ve also talked about moving locations, but many have voted against it. This is our home base. Maverick mentioned in passing about splitting us all up, but he’s mostly quiet, letting Mikey and me do the talking. In fact, he’s been moping about a lot the past few days, and especially steering clear of Ari, who’s been walking around like a ghost. I’ve barely said three words to her since I last saw her.
“Zeke,” my mom calls from the makeshift boxing ring we created, its floor already splattered and stained with blood. “You’re up.”
Mikey’s bleeder form slowly shifts back to her normal self, leaning against the railing as she smiles down at me. She’s always excelled at controlling the morphing process, and now that we know about her dad being a changeling, I wonder if the talent is in her DNA. Although he hasn’t reached out to us in the past few days, I wonder if he’ll turn things around now that Mikey knows who he is. Atlas Zephyr, or better known as William Kent.
I duck under the lowest rung and into the ring right as my mom slips out. Confusion washes over my face. “I thought it was my turn.”
My mom beams as my dad enters the room, his face lighting up as they meet eyes. She turns back to me, her hazel irises glinting with impish tomfoolery.
And suddenly I understand what my dad said when Mikey reminded him of her.
“You’ll be going up against Mikaela.” She motions toward my counterpart as she gives a sheepish grin. “Seems like you two have a history of trading blows. I want to see if she’s holding back on you.”
She definitely wasn’t when she rose from the dead, I wanted to quip, but I hold my tongue. My mouth isn’t as bold around my parents as anyone else.
Mikey scoffs. “I never hold back.”
I cock an eyebrow, noting the air shifting with her half-truth.
“Go on,” my mom urges as she leans into my dad, to which I wrinkle my nose. I haven’t spoken much with my dad since my mom came back to us, but I know we need to. There’s a certain heaviness to the air that grows larger each time we cross paths. “Don’t kill each other.”
I watch as my mom leaves, putting my fists up, but once she’s out of sight, I drop them. Mikey tilts her head. What are you doing?
“I’m tired,” I say, leaning against the side and letting the rubber bear the full brunt of my weight.
“But she wanted us to fight each other,” Mikey pouts, her fists loosening.
I squint. “Did you go easy on me in the ring?”
She straightens, scanning every inch of me. Her thoughts swarm, but I can’t pick out any specific string of sentences. There are flashes of the moment from her eyes. The array of various weapons at her feet, caked with red dirt and gore. A flash of seeing me climb over the railing and into the ring. A surprising spurt of unadulterated fear as my pupils dilate and an ashen color threads across my usual tanned complexion. I notice a sudden drop to my heartrate as it barely beats inside my rib cage.
“Not on purpose,” she admits. “It’s rare the humans in the ring know how to fight, let alone a zombie, who’s supposed to be the easiest creature to render useless.”
“So you underestimated me.”
She wets her lips, purposely avoiding looking at me. “There was a lot more going through my head at the time. Mostly confusion, especially when you landed a blow, and then there was controlling my anger. My instincts. I was a Bleeder pretending to be human. The last thing I could afford was slipping up.”
There’s a flash of her bringing that bat around and breaking that plank of wood in two. I plunge it into her chest cavity, my eyes glinting red. I watch as I taste her blood and spit it out, disgusted. It tasted nothing like store-bought, and, since it’s a replica of it, I assume not like the real thing either. Thinking back now, it had to be because she was a Bleeder. I’ve accidentally tasted a few creatures’ blood, and they’re all varying shades of nasty.
“So do you want a real rematch or what?” she asks, growing uncomfortable as she clears her throat and widens her stance.
I don’t fight a smirk as I rise.
She clenches her fists.
“We’ve been fighting since we met.” I cross my arms over my chest as annoyance flashes through her eyes and she drops her hands again. “Why don’t we just…?” I struggle to keep from shifting as my nerves get the better of me. “The only time we’ve had downtime was on the Glub Sub.” I pause, the words strange on my lips. “And since then… and before that… we’ve been fighting for our lives and the people we love. What if we…?” I trail off, either not sure where the sentence was going, or not sure I wanted to commit to whatever came out of my mouth.
Mikey purses her lips with scrutiny before one side of her lips quirks. “What are you saying?”
I exhale, gripping the top elastic rung and stretching it, trying to figure out the same thing. “I don’t know. I… we… we’ve grown so close to one another, and you… we’ve kissed and all that, but I feel like the only things I know about you is you can kick my butt and you’d do anything for your family.”
She watches me for a long time, her thoughts murky. I swear she’s staring into my soul. A crease forms between her eyebrows as her focus switches to the ground, and the pressure of her swirling thoughts grows. “What would I do if you were in trouble?”
“What?”
Her eyes flick to me. “What would I do if you were in trouble?”
I flash to when police raided my house to take me captive. “You’d find a way to share a cell with me.”
For a moment, I’m looking up at myself, dirty, drenched, and disheveled inside a tiny warehouse.
When she was barely alive and I did my best to nurse her back to health.
She holds my gaze. “You’d never leave me behind, either.”
Memories. She’s sharing them with me. Can she see mine?
“What if you were overwhelmed? Where would you go?”
I mentally reel back, recalling moments I almost lost myself and the time I got stuck Raging Out on the Glub Sub. To you.
And I would go to you. She’s walked closer, the air warming. What would I do if it started raining?
I tilt my head. “Probably squeal and run out into it.”
“And you’d frown and act like you can’t hear me when I call your name to get your attention,” she says with a wistful but heavy expression. “And then reluctantly meet me halfway.”
She isn’t wrong.
I lock my canine in thought. “What’s the point of this interrogation?”
She grabs my hands and guides me to the center of the ring, my skin buzzing where she makes contact. “The point is,” she plants her feet, “we know each other. Maybe we don’t know what topping we’d get on our pizza—mine is plain cheese, thank you very much—but we know who we are. We know each other’s soul. And I feel like that’s way more important than being able to list off each other’s favorite movies.”
She glances down at our hands, tingles rushing through my bloodstream as she gives a sad smile. Her hair falls in the way of her vision as she glances back up at me.
“I also know… that you haven’t entirely come to terms with… this.” She lifts our hands and I swallow hard. “We’ve been really good at impersonating Atlas, lately.” She chuckles gently, her eyes distancing once more before reality comes crashing back in. “But it didn’t take a great strike of tragedy to figure out how I felt about you.”
My guts twist as she drops my hands, a surge of regret laced with sadness crashing into me as her irises grow frantic.
“I—I didn’t mean for that—” She chews on her nails, fighting to find words to undo what she said. “I mean, I—I know how I feel, but I can’t help but—”
Before the torrent of thoughts and emotions grows into a headache, I pull her in. She buries her face into my chest, apologies on the tip of her tongue, but I speak before she can manifest any words.
“I know.” She quiets at my words, but the air remains spiked with fear. Even with Cayla, I didn’t find the courage to ask her out until she found out I was a Bleeder. “I guess I err on the side of dramatic,” I breathe into her hair.
A laugh bubbles out of her throat as she looks up at me and wipes her nose. “You guess? Do you hear what comes out of your mouth sometimes?”
I huff through my nose as I reflect. I can’t help it. Besides. I’m not too good at…
“Vulnerability,” she completes in a whisper, wrapping her arms around me. It makes my heartrate spike, and suddenly I'm back in the Glub Sub, that night she calmed me down with a kiss. A kiss that turned into several…
I clear my brain. If she saw or heard my thoughts, she doesn’t react.
“I get it. Me neither. But I’ve gotten better at it.” She shifts far enough back to meet my eyes. “And so have you. You’ll get there.”
Before I can say anything else, she releases me and places a hesitant hand against my sternum. “But.” There’s a wall along her thoughts suddenly, like she’s debating on telling me something. “I don’t want you saying anything you don’t mean. Not until you know you mean it.” Water lines her lower lids as she stares at the ground. “You said you needed me. You said you’d always be here for me. And I don’t know if it was circumstance and the trauma that links us together, or…” she hesitates, taking a steadying breath. “If you truly meant it. And because of that, I’ve decid—”
Before I can comprehend what I’m doing, I wrap my fingers around the back of her neck and bring her in, crushing her lips with mine. No, that spark has been there since the moment I met her. I was too angry, too zombie to understand anything beyond one emotion at a time. And then when I became human, I couldn’t get her off my mind. A part of me missed her, and then she ticked me off again. But we’ve both grown, and we’ve grown together. This emotion, this need to be around her, to protect her, to love her… it's all-consuming. Even my tether to her is different than the pull I have to the other Bleeders we’ve recruited to our shroud. There’s something more intimate… stronger than the others. That has to mean something.
She mentioned the idea of fate and free will, and the point it intersects, and maybe she was right. Every inch of me resonates with the fact that this is exactly where we need to be. And even though my blood is electrified with the notion of what this all means, with the one word I thought I’d never say to her, my throat withholds it.
But I wonder if she can sense it there.
After what feels like an eternity, we step away, breathless. I swear the same emotions are rolling off her in waves, colliding and mixing with my own. I barely register the voices coming from down the hall.
Her fingertips brush my jaw, her touch so gentle, it sends another zap of electricity through my bones.
"I love you.”