Free Strange Trouble by Laken Cane Page B

attempts to shut off her thoughts, worry that
another of the crew would be infected stayed on her mind.
    What if Strad got bitten? He’d decapitate himself before she
had a chance to heal him.
    Her injured hand screamed with hot agony and the recent,
barely healing wound broke open and began to bleed. Not only could she not
afford to lose more blood, but the scent of it was sending the zombies into a frenzy .
    Their moans and eerie vocalizations were haunting and
horrifying. Even as she rid them of their heads she shuddered with a strange
empathy and something close to reluctance.
    It was like they were all trapped in an ancient insane
asylum.
    It was like the zombies were her children.
    She fought harder.
    Dark splashes of blood flew through the air to land in
unseen splats, converging with shadows neither the streetlights nor the moon
could illuminate.
    But the blood was less than it had been when the crew had
first fought the zombies. The zombies hadn’t eaten for a while—a little fact
they hoped to rectify as they went for Rune and her people.
    Still, there was blood—and she needed it. She opened her
mouth for it, drank it down, and sighed with delight at the potent mix of magic
and life.
    And because she drank, her monster woke up.
    Suddenly she was Rune the Invincible again.
    And that made her ecstatic.
    Nothing could touch her. She flung herself into the crowd of
zombies with screaming glee, slashing her way to the center. To
her men.
    She saw Strad thrust his spear into a zombie’s head. He
turned to get the one behind him and spotted her.
    She winked at him, acknowledging the beauty of his white
smile, then she annihilated three zombies in as many
seconds.
    She was fast, faster even than she’d been before. She didn’t
question it. She was somehow better, and she used that speed to thin the
zombies.
    Her hand was healed.
    She hadn’t noticed when all five claws regenerated, but
there they were, as strong as ever. Stronger.
    She threw her head back and screamed, daring fate, maybe, to
take her crew. You won’t get them. You won’t get any of them.
    And in that second, once again, something changed inside
her. Something big.
    “Z,” she cried. She sliced neatly through the neck of a
female zombie who possessed some of the longest teeth she’d ever seen, then
yelled his name again as she whirled around and took out two males. “Z!”
    She could feel him coming toward her, running like a dark,
unstoppable force, and she didn’t care that he might be a zombie, might be her
slave, might be pissed.
    She just didn’t give a fuck.
    He slung zombies out of his way as he came for her, came to her, his perfect green eyes bright with life and hate and knowledge.
    He might have hurt her then, if he’d been anyone but Z.
    But Z did not hurt women. And he especially did not hurt
Rune.
    His maker, his mistress.
    She grinned, could feel it stretching across her face like a
hideous mask. “Welcome back, baby.”
    He fought with his crew, his cuts as neat and quick and
amazing as they’d ever been.
    Z.
    As though drawn to him, Levi muscled his way through the
remaining zombies until he reached Z, and shot out a hand to clap him on the
shoulder.
    She would swear later she saw a spark fly from his touch.
Later, when she had time to recall the events of that moment,
that fight.
    She’d brought them both back. They were hers now, hers in
ways the others were not.
    Was she a god?
    Fuck no.
    She was a goddess .
    And as she threw herself back into the battle, she thought
she heard the mad master Llodra’s laughter, chilling her to her very bones.
     
     

  Chapter
Fifteen
    She couldn’t stay high forever, and when she came down, she
came down hard.
    The area was ominously quiet once the crowd of zombies had
been destroyed. The crew regrouped silently, waiting for Rune to tell them what
to do.
    Z stood off to himself, his back turned, and no one
approached him except Levi. Z had glowered at Levi, told him to get the