Zombies vs. Unicorns by Holly & Larbalestier Black Read Free Book Online Page B

from stitches running across his collarbone. You swallow back bile and rip his shirt some more. Hopefully that will be enough.
    Ice man is standing in the doorway when you turn around.
    “So that’s what this is about?” he says. Of course you couldn’t fool him.
    “You wondered?”
    “No. Not really. I guess I never … I don’t know what they’ll do to him. Not if they think you two …”
    “You stopped me from feeding,” you say.
    “That didn’t look like feeding.”
    “What would you know about it?”
    He cocks his head. Then nods. “Okay. I stopped you from feeding.”
    You don’t think you’re imagining the hint of relief in his voice, the subtle loosening of tension in his arms.
    Then he shoots you in the shoulder. You just want thisover with, but Jack is moaning on the bed, and you went through way too much trouble for him to ruin this now. You rush the ice man, which surprises him enough that he falls onto the concrete outside. You run past him, feeling the blood dripping down your arm, but not much else. The prions are good about pain. A few other guests have opened their doors at the noise. The ice man lets off another shot. It misses you.
    You rush to a large, empty space at the edge of the lot. You don’t want to make this too obvious. It shouldn’t be much work for him to hit your head from this distance. But the next shots are so wide that you can’t even smell the lead.
    “Come on,” you mutter when the ice man just stands there.
    Then he falls down.
    Jack stands behind him, jaw bruised, gun smoking. There’s a hole in the back of his dad’s head, and you can smell it from here.
    “You okay?” Jack asks, after you jog up to him. But he’s the one who’s shaking.
    Someone shrieks. The night clerk talks rapidly into his cell phone. “I think the cops are coming,” you say.
    “Yeah. It’ll probably take them a while.”
    You both look down at the corpse. Jack hauls him inside the room. “Hurry up,” he says.
    You only have time for the brains, but that’s okay. They’re the best part.
    10. Shoot Out the Lights
    We live in a little cottage in Mexico now, in a village so tiny that only the residents have heard of it. There’s a beach with goodfishing, and a market once a month an hour away. Jack spoke some Spanish before, and we’re picking it up well enough. We go into town for the Internet, where Jack sells Mexican handicrafts on eBay.
    I bought him a guitar for his birthday, but I ended up playing it. When I practice, he jokes about how good he’s getting. I wrote him one song, and sometimes I like it. I haven’t played it for him yet. Even now, it’s hard for me to guess what will make him go still and icy. Sometimes I think a part of him hates me.
    I know Jack will kill me if I eat again. I imagine it sometimes, when I stare too long at some plump girl in a bikini and her smell reaches back into that prion part of my brain and I can feel the old hunger tearing at my skin. I imagine him playing Joy Division, Ian Curtis’s mournful voice almost scraping against the speakers, “Do you cry out in your sleep / all my failings exposed,” and Jack’s tears smear my lips, and I get just that last, ecstatic taste of him before the blade goes snicker-snack.

“Purity Test”

    Holly : The association of the unicorn with virtue is of long origin. According to legend, a young girl would be sent ahead of unicorn-hunting parties—as shown in the famous unicorn tapestries—to lure the creature with her innocence and purity. Once the unicorn rested its head in the girl’s lap, hunters would surprise the unicorn and, well, that would be that.
    Some scholars have creepily suggested that unicorns are able to detect chastity, although, according to the literature, unicorns have been lured not only by women who weren’t maidens, but in at least one case, by a perfumed boy dressed in women’s clothes. Now, I don’t think, as my coeditor will no doubt suggest, that this means