Hellforged Read Online Free Page A

cleaner, and then go out for pizza. Zombies didn’t feel pain, but neither did they heal. A burned or bullet-riddled zombie would survive, but the flesh would remain charred, the holes always open. A couple of things were known to kill zombies, like cutting off the head or using special exploding bullets available only to cops. Maybe setting off a nuclear bomb under the bed of a sleeping zombie would do it, but as far as I knew no one had tried that yet.
    “Okay,” I said. “Write a report on Glitches for your portfolio. We’re meeting tomorrow night at seven thirty before school, right?” She nodded. “Finish Russom’s chapter on water demons.” Russom’s Demoniacal Taxonomy was the textbook my aunt Mab had started me on. I’d trained with Mab every summer for seven years at her remote estate in north Wales. The book was every bit as dry as its title promised, but there was no better resource on demons.
    I was pulling on my jacket when the door to the lounge flew open, banging against the wall. Through it flew Jenna, Tina’s zombie BFF. With long, straight, straw-colored hair, Jenna was a little shorter and a little chubbier than her friend. She wore jeans and an oversized black T-shirt that read HUG A ZOMBIE in white letters.
    “Omigod! Turn on the TV—now. Now! ” Jenna didn’t wait for Tina to move; she snatched the remote from the coffee table and pressed the Power button. She flipped through the channels until she found PNN—the Paranormal News Network—then fell onto the sofa. The station showed a press conference with the Council of Three: the vampire, werewolf, and zombie who (in name, anyway) were Deadtown’s elected leaders. The Council was just a trio of figureheads, as anyone could tell by the topic of their press conference. Hadrian, the vampire councilor, was announcing a resolution declaring February 2 Paranormal Appreciation Day.
    Groundhog Day. How appropriate. Maybe we were supposed to step into the norm world, get scared by our own shadows, and run back to our burrows here in Deadtown.
    Tina snorted. “What, are you trying to bore me to death?”
    Jenna hit the Mute button and popped her gum. “It’ll be on again in a minute.”
    “What?”
    “Nuh-uh. I’m not telling. You’ll see.”
    “Jenna, aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I asked. It was three in the morning, half an hour before school let out.
    She shrugged, snapping her gum again. “I only cut last period.”
    Not my problem. I wasn’t about to start playing truant officer for Deadtown’s teenage zombies. I began to say good-bye, but before I got two words out Jenna shouted, “Here it is!” A blast of guitar chords assaulted my ears, and both girls leapt to their feet and screamed. I looked at the TV to see what had them so excited.
    The image switched from a stadium concert to the PNN newsroom. Rhoda Harris, a zombie newscaster, sat behind a desk, her stiff hairstyle and bright yellow suit contrasting with her zombified features. Behind her was a publicity photo of a man with wavy hair, big brown eyes, and a million-dollar smile. “He used to be known as Paul Montoya, singer of soulful love ballads such as ‘I’ll Give You My World’ and ‘Tomorrow Is for Us.’ Then, nearly three years ago, he was caught in Boston’s plague. As a previously deceased human, Montoya believed his career was over.”
    The screen showed Montoya in a recording studio, holding a guitar. He still had the wavy brown hair, but now his eyes were red and his death’s-head smile was more like a grimace. “After the plague,” he said, “I looked in a mirror and thought, ‘Well, Paul, that’s it. Nobody wants to hear a zombie sing love songs. Plus my fingers got too stiff to play the way I used to. But music was my life. I didn’t know how to do anything else.”
    The reporter’s voice came back, as the screen showed Montoya wearing headphones and screaming silently into a microphone. “So Montoya reinvented himself. In the