Free Dearly, Beloved by Lia Habel Page A

to his illness, lost his self-control,and so three had become a mantra of mine, my lucky number.
    I didn’t want to think about the fact that he’d quoted that figure four months ago. So two and two-thirds left. Or less than that?
    “You’re the only thing around here that makes sense sometimes,” he whispered against my temple. “You remind me of what’s important. What I have to lose. I feel safest when I’m protecting you, caring for you—I feel at peace. So whatever you need me to do, tell me. I’d put a bullet in my own head for you.”
    I clutched him with renewed intensity, another tear escaping my eye. This was never going to end. Even if we did leave New London.
    Behind Bram the window of the carriage exploded with a suddenness that threatened to stop my heart. A pistol—though to my panicked mind it resembled a cannon—was thrust through it, and for a moment I thought I’d been shot, my cheek stinging. As Bram turned, roaring, I saw the air glittering and realized I’d been hit by broken glass. The gun hadn’t been fired.
    “Bram!” I screamed.
    Behind the gun—seemingly miles behind it—stood a figure wearing a mask crafted of some sleek black material. It looked as if it’d been modeled after a crow or raven, with an enormous downward-curving beak and eyeholes filled with smoked glass. It would have been comical if whoever wore it hadn’t had a weapon trained on me.
    “Careful, Brother!” I heard someone else shout, the voice electronic and ghostly. “They’re insane!”
    Terrified, caught off guard, it took my brain a moment to make sense out of what the gunman yelled. His voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, warped, distorted—like Chas’s. “Get out of the carriage, necroslut! Do it now! Take your dead man and get out of the goddamn carriage!”

Watching the Delgados from my bedroom window had become something of a bad habit of mine.
    Emanuel Delgado was no longer a fishmonger. No living person would willingly buy food from a zombie—truthfully, you couldn’t blame them. I don’t think even Mr. Delgado blamed them. But to make ends meet his wife had been forced to resume her job as a charwoman, and he had to take whatever work he could get, at whatever hour it happened to come. My brother, Isambard, helped his fellow zombies deal with their unpredictable schedules by looking after their dead five-year-old daughter, Jenny.
    He was picking her up now. I watched him speaking with her father in the shadowy courtyard between our buildings, the little girl clinging to his pants leg, ecstatic to be reunited with her babysitter. As I worked on braiding half of my straight brown hair into a bun, I wondered what they were saying. Someone in a nearby building was listening to the wireless, and I couldn’t hear over the sound of it.
“Come to me, or my dream of love is ov’r!
I love you, as I lov’d you when you were sweet ,
When you were sweet sixteen.”
    Now that my little brother was undead, I treasured him in a way I hadn’t been fully capable of before. I wanted to know what he was up to every moment of the day—and when I didn’t know, I started to imagine the worst. I longed to protect him, to shield him.
    Until the bitter end. Until he finally—
    Stop it , I told myself. You can’t change anything. Stop it. You’re safe. You’re safe .
    Hurriedly, I turned back to my schoolwork. St. Cyprian’s was still closed, but our teachers had been doing their best to keep after us via email and Aethernet conferences. To hear them gripe, I was one of the few students who routinely responded. A lot of the girls were apparently blowing their studies off, but I was a scholarship student; I couldn’t afford to slack, even in the face of the Apocalypse. So I’d spent the afternoon studying geography, doing my best to distract myself from news of the emergent Laz strain. I willed myself not to worry about it too deeply, especially after talking with Nora.
    Worry was something I